By Lane F. Cooper

For CIOs and CEOs who need to innovate more quickly and effectively, yet still hold the line on costs, collaboration is at the heart of a new model that’s emerging to evaluate potentially disruptive technologies.

Companies with a serious stake in technology — whether they’re solution providers or enterprise users—are looking to collaborative Web 2.0 technologies for help. These new, Internet-based technologies can help CIOs track and deepen their understanding of IT developments. They also help CIOs get input from more people in the organization. This information, in turn, can be used to assess the impact of these new technologies on business operations.

To smooth the way for introducing Web 2.0 approaches to the enterprise, a growing number of CIOs are creating collaborative technology-assessment groups. These groups aim to tap a broader enterprise community that engages in a continuous and ever-deepening discussion of technologies that can help organizations.

Wiki technology, in particular, has created a platform for ongoing discussion on many issues important to an organization, including the potential effects of emerging technologies. A wiki is essentially a public database that’s accessible through a Web interface. More specifically, a wiki is a software application residing on public or private servers that allows users to create, organize, edit, link and track content. Wiki software can be used to create a public or — with password protection — private Web site that can be viewed and updated by its visitors.

Wikis were originally designed to address many of the tough challenges faced by workers collaborating from locations scattered around the world, says Mike Gotta, an analyst with The Burton Group, an IT research and advisory firm. That makes wikis ideal for work teams made up of people working from different locations and time zones. What’s more, wikis are mainly free of the problems inherent in e-mail and word-processing programs. “Most people are familiar with the frustrations associated with version control and says. “By contrast, wikis do a good job of getting content onto a work space.”

Also, some organizations are combining wikis with another Web 2.0 service, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, which use XML technology to aggregate online content. In this way, companies can develop a rich combination of content generated by internal subject matter experts and additional information from outside the organization. This, in turn, creates a space for exchanging views and encourages an ongoing dialogue among collaborative technology-assessment communities made up of interdisciplinary groups that represent, for example, IT developers, implementers and users.

Until recently, the job of assessing and understanding the business impact of new technologies was handled by a relatively few elite technologists. These experts would periodically — typically, once or twice a year — advise key decision makers on technology developments to pursue or avoid. But for several reasons, this approach is no longer tenable.

For one, this traditional approach has built-in time, resource and space limitations. Basically, the sheer volume and pace of disruptive new technology developments have outstripped the ability of small teams to effectively track and analyze them. The impact of disruptive technologies on business is greater than ever, and the introduction of new technologies into the enterprise is occurring with greater frequency. Depending on a highly concentrated, even overly centralized, approach to assessing emerging technologies raises the risk that important new technologies will be left unexplored and opportunities will be missed.

A collaborative approach to evaluating new technologies makes sense, given that many technologies were created in the very same way—and for much the same reasons. “Many people still believe in this strong mythology that major technology firms are go-it-alone innovators,” says Jason Davis, Assistant Professor of Strategy at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “In reality, many of the technology blockbusters of the last five years are the result of firms locking themselves into intense collaborative processes that can last up to three years.”

CIOs seeking concrete examples of a collaborative approach to evaluating new technologies can look to efforts being taken by solution providers. For example, in mid- 2006,CAestablished a Council for Technical Excellence (CTE) to identify key technologies and determine their potential impact on current operations and customers. “The council is creating a new process that provides a different combination of perspectives,” says Debra Danielson, President of the council and a 19-year veteran of CA. “It helps us identify opportunities that might otherwise slip through the cracks.”

Agent of Change
The CTE acts as an agent of change and advisory body to the company’s executives on technical topics of strategic importance to the business. The CTE also promotes innovation, communication, collaboration and synergy among the company’s global technical community. Self-directing and self-organized, the council is made up of subject-matter experts and thought leaders from within CA’s technical community. And by using wiki technology and other social-networking tools, the CTE is essentially always in session.

The CTE was designed to identify areas of opportunity from a technology and process perspective. Its centralized approach to managing emerging technologies was a recommendation of the CTE itself; this was implemented by the CTE’s Emerging Technologies Committee. “In the past, assessing emerging technologies often took a top-down approach,” Danielson says. “The result was that you often got a limited number of perspectives on issues that were potentially very important to the organization.” So the strategy behind the CTE was to support a collaborative approach to evaluating emerging technologies that were important to both the organization and CA’s customers — and to do so on a consistent and more frequent basis.

The CTE operates as a community-based initiative, following several best practices:

• Intellectual property is protected and respected. No CTE member may add copyrighted material to the compendium without obtaining appropriate permissions and providing proper citations and links to the original source. The same applies to application code that may be presented in the wiki.
• Every member of the community is treated with respect, even when his or her views are being challenged in discussion. This is the only way that contrarian positions and lines of thinking can be exposed and considered.
• The group strives to focus on the topic at hand. If people want to open a new area of inquiry, they can initiate a new discussion initiative in the wiki with a defined team identified to provide the content.

While the CTE is open to the larger CA community, Danielson says a community of this sort needs a minimum core group of individuals who are willing to actively participate as authors and subject matter experts. These members—even as they also work on their “day jobs” — should have a personal and professional stake in the project. This core group should be large enough to create interaction and provide depth, yet small enough so that each individual knows that individual contributions are critical to the initiative’s success, she adds.

To elevate and maintain a high level of faith in the technology assessment process, Danielson and her teammates keep an eagle eye on the integrity of the content that’s posted on the CTE wiki. Both readers and contributors must work to ensure that existing information is current. Any out-of-date content needs to be flagged for review and possible updating.

One of the main advantages of using a community-based approach to technology assessment is that the process is ongoing. That means the approach can accommodate a large and broad range of people — and perspectives. “You never know what will happen when you enable the collision of ideas from people who would not normally come into contact with one another,” Danielson says. “We think this is critical to innovation, which, in the long run, drives the success of the organization.”

Lane F. Cooper covers the impact of technology on business operations.