Leveraging collective intelligence

Corporate users in the average enjoy a wide and dynamic range of favourite Web sources to buy online, to get information on products, hobbies, travel destinations, restaurants, to play and interact with buddies and relatives. They are often members of public social networks, and sometimes participate in forums or hobby/professional practice communities. We could say people on the Web interact, play, get informed, make purchase in an ever changing environment reflecting interests and needs.

The corporate IT environment has not captured fast enough the needs underneath the "personal" use of the web, and the value these patterns may offer to organizations. Interaction and play, as specialists in management education well know, are the best way for team mates to engage each other and to start and refine new ideas, improve business processes, let emerge the most creative and dynamic side from individuals.

Fears of introducing "destructured interaction" in a structured corporate world are fading away in recession times. Enterprises collectively realize that the Human Capital, interwoven and hidden in the organization's nodes, is the key factor to leverage to be more dynamic, more flexible and adaptive and more cost effective. All in all, the knowledge that can be shared and the knowledge that "collective intelligence" filter out as the most relevant one might be the key for survival; bringing to surface trough interaction and integrating knowledge in low-cost assembly pages (mash-up pages) is one of the key challenges for Corporate IT in the next few years.

From employees perspective emerging collaboration models should reflect five personal needs:

1. Connection: connect to people and knowledge and give access to the "company lifeblood" through a less structured and more dynamic platform.
2. Communication: exchange all company communications in a smart and informal way, assuring company internal alignment on two-ways communication channels, regardless of hierarchical levels.
3. Community: contribute to the company communities based on practice and interests, encourage the exchange of ideas and create horizontal collaboration.
4. Collaboration: join a social digital media environment to capture capabilities and energies of every single user; improve collaboration and knowledge sharing on relevant topics for the enterprise.
5. Consideration: unleash the potential beyond company's expectations and information. There's much more in employees' resumes that's not known and capitalized.

Collective Brain: interact, participate, collaborate and emerge.

TamTamy "Collective Brain" has been designed to leverage the "network effects" in corporate environments (including business partners and distribution networks) to enable the collective intelligence of the community and maximize its value:

• Emerging Collaboration: set of collaborative tools designed to facilitate the communication and support the spontaneous creation of interest groups and work teams. Content-centric communities and connection-centric communities are engaged in discussions to let the best ideas or best practice emerge; wiki enables users to contribute or modify content written by someone else in the network; chat encourages quick communications between colleagues.

• Presence and Expertise Location: to boost collective intelligence, TamTamy offers room to publish a personal profile, personal pages and a "people tagging" logic to build a reputation system and a skill locator within the organization.

• Corporate Culture: through a weighted measurement TamTamy enables automatic highlight of talents and contents of value, according to common values. Corporate culture can be spread directly with both bottom-up and editorial multimedia contents. Moreover company blogs, managed and edited by the top management, can outline strategies, reinforce values and spread corporate culture.

• Change Management: executives who provide insufficient attention to the cultural integration of a post-merger organization may lose business momentum. TamTamy supports transition, innovation and M&A processes with speed and flexibility, offering a shared vision, clear values and the collective value of the community so sort out the relevant common knowledge and best practice.