Cathexis

Merced Group welcomes Bill Ives

Social business is growing in impact and potential so it's with great pleasure that I announce today that Merced Group is growing too, with Bill Ives now partnering with me.  

Merced Group provides business strategy, program design, and implementation services to companies and organizations on social business efforts.  We offer a range of services including online community strategy and operations, enterprise collaboration, social media marketing, as well as product marketing and management.

Bill and I have been colleagues for a number of years now, and in joining Merced Group he brings over 25 years of experience as a consultant in business uses of emerging technologies, including knowledge management and learning, and over five years' experience in business uses in the new social media, both inside the enterprise and on the Web.

Widely published, Bill has also been blogging at Portals and KM since May 2004, and his blog is syndicated through a variety of sources - Social Enterprise Today, Lexus Nexus and Social Media Today and he does social software reviews at the AppGap blog.

Bill is found on a number of industry lists of top influencers in enterprise collaboration and a frequent speaker at conferences and webinars, creates white papers and guest blog posts covering enterprise 2.0 and related topics. This week, you'll find him at Lotusphere, covering that event.

Bill has sold and led both large and small-scale consulting engagements in a variety of industries and locations within the US and across Europe. He currently provides enterprise collaboration and social media consulting. He led the Accenture Knowledge Management and Enterprise Portals Client Practice within the Human Performance Service Line, developing many large-scale projects including industry award-winning implementations for innovation and effective knowledge sharing.

At the Renaissance Strategy Group and Spectrum Interactive, he developed knowledge management, performance support and multi-media learning systems. At both Accenture and Renaissance he developed methodologies for firm-wide use in knowledge management engagements.

The Merced Group team is looking forward to new opportunities to help business and organizations advance their social business practices and use collaborative technologies more effectively to drive product and service innovation, deepen customer insight and relationships and optimize workforce capacity.  

 

The City is Experienced on Our Feet - Social Business as the Urban Planning of Enterprise 2.0

If you're lucky, there's sometimes a moment of clarity and fresh thinking to be had in the sweep of the typical business conference, and the panel "What Urban Planning Can Teach Us About Social Business Design"  on Wednesday morning at Enterprise 2.0 was a hidden gem.

Gordon Ross and Thomas Vander Wal brought thoughtful insight to a conversation about the metaphors and mindsets of urban planning and what the discipline has to offer when considering the lives that are led inside the social enterprise.

The language and images used to evoke organizations since the industrial age are often mechanical metaphors -- linear, constructed, evoking physical movement and closed systems.

Ross offered that the nature of cities, considered as complex, organic, emergent systems are richer in concept and metaphor than those we've inherited from the industrial revolution.  

Some urban planners have sought to impose mechanistic notions on the life of cities - the over-engineered vision of Robert Moses in the 1950s NYC is a good example.   But urban geographer Jane Jacobs, in her pioneering work, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," showed how cities thrive, in fact, because of their messiness, complexity and disorder.  

From Ross' perspective the the lack of this model of planning in social business is a significant blind spot in the industry.  That planning mindset is about designing a social organization that fosters collaboration and communicative and exploratory actions -- afforded by the technology.

Vander Wal took the notion of social scaling in a complex ecosystem a little further and brought in the thinking of David Snowdon and his Cynefin Framework - a model initially developed for the field of knowledge management and organizational strategy.   It's a construct that can support an understanding complex human systems.  

The seminal article on the framework, The new dynamics of strategy:  Sense-making in a complex and complicated world, "challenges the universality of three basic assumptions prevalent in organization decision support and strategy:  assumptions of order, of rational choice, and of intent."  

As a model, Cynefin can provide guideposts for organizing, sense-making and interpreting types of interactions.  For instance, in the complex domain, as Vander Wal pointed out, small interactions work best, while in the simple domain, best practices are relevant.

Which brings us back to urban planning and thinking about social business - it's the difference between architecting the sanitized and artificial coziness of Santana Row in San Jose, and relishing the real-life richness of the Haight district in San Francisco - with its own 'micro districts' of unique character  - the Lower Haight, Upper Haight, Twin Peaks and Panhandle neighborhoods.

As Vander Wal said, social communities need to be designed for different social roles - roles that people adopt and experiential places that people inhabit, given the context -- the sharer, lurker, writer, creator, editor, connecter, synthesizer, theorizer, mitigator, negotiator, contextualizer, interloper, infovore, monitor, learner, counselor, gossip, critic, expert, broadcaster, re-broadcaster.

If you're an enterprise community manager, therefore, the work is about embracing a complex systems view and, as Christopher Alexander has said, working to  'pave emergent paths' rather than engineer a uniform 'place' that is hard for humans to inhabit.

 

 

Thanks to Gordon and Thomas for a putting together this rich and insightful conversation*.

 

 

*Off the radar readings to stimulate urban planning thinking

•  The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs - Roberta Brandes, Gratz
• A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Constructions - Christopher Alexander
• Wicked Problems in Design Thinking - R. Buchanan
• Fourth Order of Design

 

 

Enterprise 2.0 - Social Business Focus

Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara opened today and the conference focus has moved from 'collaboration' a couple of years ago to now 'building social business.'

Here's some important perspectives on productivity and business leverage from social that will be highlighted in exhibits and sessions. 

Gaming - Embedding game mechanics into the social stream to drive focus, motivation and engagement.  This is an emerging thread, with vendors offering featured presentations -  Badgeville on Gamification for the Enterprise and DoubleDutch on Game Mechanics in the Workplace.   A few years ago Seriosity brought out their Attent product to help with information focus, but this was before social media prominence.   

Social within Workflow - Sure it's great to connect with peers, and to share knowledge and information - but within organizations and enterprises that needs to happen within the flow of work.   A SocialText and NewsGator panel on Thursday takes on that idea.  

Social Channels - yes, it's a better way to reach and sustain authentic engagement with your customers - but social means those customer don't want to see those social channels structured into business silos - a thought echoed in an article this week in Forbes on the pressures of functional convergence.   So I'm going to pay attention to Samir Patel's Tuesday panel on Social Channels: Engagement, Integration and Response.  

 

 

How do we understand community and collaboration value?

In trying to assess the impact of social and collaborative engagement it's easy to get lost in the minutae of analytics without stepping back and thinking about the context for value assessment.

Having that value context is important to be able to tune strategies to support community effectiveness and relevance.  A consistent framework is also vital to creating an understanding of collaboration impact among stakeholders (executive management, for instance).

There's an ecosystem of various tools that measure activity and performance along a spectrum of online experience - web traffic analytics, social media assessment, email marketing metrics --  but it's difficult to get a holistic sense of the value and outcomes of collaborative engagement.

Looking at the value of social media-one part of the whole

Last year the Altimeter Group published Social Marketing Analytics: A New Framework for Measuring Results in Social Media.   Written by Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter and John Lovett of Web Analytics Demystified, the report provides concrete, useful models for evaluating performance of social media against business objectives.

The model focuses on four key business objectives - fostering dialogue, promoting advocacy, facilitating support and spurring innovation.  Within each objective one can then evaluate specific key performance indicators.  

On fostering dialogue, for instance, one would look at share of voice, audience engagement and conversation reach.   The Altimeter model is adaptable and flexible - I've used it to assess performance of engagement for an online community for education leaders and innovators.  

 

Value creation and assessment - a holistic framework

Yet there's more to assessing community and collaboration value, and a new paper by noted social theorist and community of practice expert, Etienne Wenger offers new clarity in considering value within networks and communities.

Promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks: a conceptual framework was co-written with Beverly Trayner and Maarten de Laat. 

This framework takes as its focus the value creation garnered through the "the learning enabled by community involvement and networking."   While Wenger et al. draws useful categorical distinctions between a community and network, each are viewed along a continuum of social structures in which learning takes place.

The framework outlines five cycles of value creation and articulates various forms of value:  

• immediate value  - from activities and interaction;
• potential value  - knowledge capital arising from personal assets (human capital), relationships and connections(social capital), resources (tangible capital), collective intangible assets (reputational capital), and transformed ability to learn (learning capital);
• applied value - changes in practice;
• realized value - performance improvement;
• reframing value - redefining success.

Wenger, Trayner and Maarten not only provide a foundational conceptual framework, the paper includes a set of useful tools for assessing each cycle of value creation.    

 

Information Overload – Costly to You, to Your Organization, and to the Economy

As Jonathan Spira pointed out at a Churchill Club panel yesterday, a knowledge workers’ value in the marketplace is their ability to think and reflect.  Spira is the author of the new book, Overload: How Too Much Information is Hazardous to your Organization.   In the current climate of information overload and hyper-interactivity, knowledge professionals now have only 5% of their day available for thoughtful work and critical thinking.

The panel, moderated by David Needle of the TabTimes, included Derek Dean, of the Exetor Group and author of the recent McKinsey paper Recovering from Information Overload, and Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product Management at Google who leads the Google+ product program.

Executives and knowledge workers struggle to multi-task in an increasingly interrupt-driven work environment.   Actually, humans can only time-slice, not multi-task.   According to Spira, if you are focused on a task, receive an interrupt (email, phone call, text message) that takes you away from your task for say 30 seconds, it takes you ten–to-twenty times the length of the distraction to recover the focused attention to the original task.  

Multiply that scenario many times throughout a workday, and you have a costly productivity sink so profound that Spira says it cost the U.S. economy $997B in 2010.

Attention Fragmentation = Longer Hours

As Derek Dean noted most executives and many knowledge professionals have personally addressed this attention fragmentation issue by creating two workdays --  the ‘9-5’ timeframe when it’s understood that one is available for contact, and now, a second work-day of early mornings, evenings and weekends (and vacations!), as knowledge professionals try to carve out time for that thoughtful, reflective, critical thinking work.     This kind of extended workday practice now inherent in current work life often leads to physical burnout and exacts a heavy social and emotional toll on personal lives.

As individuals compensate with this ‘always-on’ behavior, what’s often missing is a conscious corporate culture that supports the inherent need of freedom from distraction to enable knowledge professionals to engage with focused attention on their work.

Bradley Horowitz, whose background includes a stint at the MIT Media Lab and founding Virage, said that considerations regarding attention are significant factors in the design of Google+ and other products.    

Online systems haven’t modeled real relationships, and we all lead ‘faceted’ lives – family, friends, colleagues, bowling buddies, café cohorts.   The design of Google+, he says, is meant to provide relevant ‘destinations’ for content that an individual produces, as well as focused filters for consuming information coming in.   Innovations in Gmail, for instance allows for a different kind of filtering – the priority inbox allows for mail to be delivered to you based on your priorities, and not always the last-in-gets-your-attention approach.

So software design and a carefully crafted user experience can help with the challenges of information and interrupt overload.    But human priorities have to take shape as well.

Create some personal practice - time and distraction shelters

• Turn devices off  - leave them behind and engage in other activities without them.

• Create sacrosanct private time for thoughtful work (and a private life!)

Lead change in corporate culture

It’s not enough for an individual knowledge professional or executive to create their own island of focused work time, but has to be supported by a cultural change in an organizational environment.    Here’s some ideas that may guide the way.

Meeting discipline

• Turn meetings into focused collaborative events, sans electronic devices or at least no multi-tasking during meetings, -- keep meetings shorter, more focused, tighter agendas, and only most necessary individuals.   Many meetings often include too many people, lack a clear agenda published ahead of time so people can be prepared, and rarely start on time. 

Horowitz indicated that the Google culture possesses a strong ‘meeting hygiene’ recognizing that meetings are a huge imposition on people’s time, and therefore needs to be a crisp business practice.

Lead by example - executives and managers exhibit and promote practices

I’ve written elsewhere that senior managers need to lead when it comes to good collaboration practice, but they also need to lead in managing attention fragmentation behavior

• Set an ‘out of office’ agent to your email to a ‘do not disturb' message letting people know that you're working creatively and thoughtfully on major deliverables and you'l respond by later in the day or the next day.
• Mute alert tones from incoming emails, text messages, phone rings and turn over your device so you don’t receive any visual cues either.
• Really go on vacation – don’t engage in corporate email when you’re supposed to be recharging your batteries and taking care of your family or personal relationships. – If it’s really an emergency leave your cell phone number with a trusted colleague to get in touch with you.

Information overload  -- it’s not going to go away, and will only get more challenging  – but as much as it’s understood at a cultural  or personal level, Spira noted that business leaders aren’t really taking in the business costs and factoring it into changing management practice.    At a documented $997B cost to the economy in 2010, it might be time.

Leadership Collaboration-Fostering Sustained Dialogue and Connectivity

Leaders and executives in organizations, business or expertise domains often face common issues around innovation, global competiveness, unanticipated market disruptors, or policy and regulatory concerns.

Companies or institutions wanting to engage and hear from their executive customers or leadership constituency, often utilize formal, in-person forums and gatherings.  These gatherings are structured with a topical agenda, and include a set featured speakers to catalyze conversation at the event. Often a written, but lifeless summary of the proceedings is developed and distributed to the participants sometime afterward, but the energy and enthusiasm of the event has long-subsided.

Attendees may be stimulated for a day, make an interesting connection or two, but have no way to sustain the collective interest and dialogue on the topics and areas of interest as a result of their participating in the event.   Nor is it easily possible to generate more organic, sustained group dynamics of idea exchange.     Once the event has disbanded, companies sponsoring these executive forums also then find that they, themselves, don’t have a way to continue to actively listen to these important voices in their customer or constituency group.

Collaboration for Leaders

Many companies or organizations would benefit from developing an executive engagement program that includes a strong online community component - with a model that is importantly differentiated from the typical company-to-customer dynamic.    

Supporting the collaboration of leaders amongst themselves can lend real value to a company’s executive customer relationships or help an institution evolve with and more deeply engage its constituency base.

 
Partnering Strategically with Leaders

By providing online community resources to foster and support peer-to-peer online engagement of leaders in dialogue and collaboration on the important issues of the day, a company offers several areas of real external and internal value.  An online community can:

• Support access to the power of online collaboration in a professionally relevant way – by offering  this experience, one is providing an opportunity for leaders to learn and engage in ways that a younger, millennial generation understands intuitively.
• Build credibility  - the community effort is an expression of a commitment to relate as a strategic partner, authentically invested in the aspirations and concerns of a leadership community
• Support extended conversations - an online community, especially coupled with in-person forums allows the attendees to more deeply engage with one another in a sustained fashion.  
• Become a valuable shared resource -- As the community dialogue grows, as information and best practices might be shared, the community itself becomes an increasingly valuable resource to its members.  And very importantly, allows the sponsoring company or institution an opportunity for active listening and learning.

An online community approach, integrated effectively with one-time forums or a cadenced sequence of live events, can help develop and sustain authentic relationships with that leadership constituency and generate a deeper sense of loyalty and trust.

Next week I’ll explore some key elements of developing and supporting leadership collaboration.

Gen Y and Boomers – Decoding the Generations for Leaders and Managers

There’s lots of common folklore about Gen Y – some of it less than positive – i.e., that they have a highly cultivated sense of entitlement and need too much attention.  In a knowledge-based workforce relying on effective collaboration, decoding and understanding generational types are vital to productive work environments.

Boomers, and even Gen X members came of age in an era where researching and finding information was an important component of competence, and required patience and focus. Despite 'hippie' stereotypes, fortitude and a strong work ethic characterize this generation.

But what are the characteristics of Gen Y in contrast, and what needs to be understood as they move into the workforce, and as they exert their consumer power? 

At a Stanford Executive briefing today, Dr. Kit Yarrow, Professor of Psychology and Marketing at Golden Gate University offered tangible insight, based on her research, into how Gen Y is psychologically different from older generations, and laid out helpful tactics for managers and leaders to use to effectively manage and engage members of this 83 million strong population.

Gen Y – Who Are They?
 

The members of Gen Y are not just young, according to Yarrow, but different – raised in a child-centered culture of flattened family hierarchies, with abundant, pervasive access to technology since their early years.    With 83% of them sleeping with their cellphones, and spending 11 hours a day consuming media, this generation of 13-33 year olds have different perspectives on the world.  In fact, there’s even an intra-generational ‘gaplet’, according to Yarrow between the 13-19 year olds and 20+ members in terms of technology and internet engagement.

This Y generation is team-oriented, confident and proud, embraces diversity.  They are daring and less fearful of change, and are innovative and open-minded.    

Technology-The Third Hand and Second Brain

 Technology, as Yarrow says, is this generation’s third hand and second brain, altering, through extended, daily use, their cognitive functioning, impacting their relationships, (for them attention, not money is a primary status factor) and facilitating their sense of personal power.  The steady, constant engagement with technology influences and elevates the importance of innovation, and very importantly, drives them to active engagement, not passive learning.

Overload and Anxiety

The challenges for Gen Y is that they are often overloaded with options, uncomfortable with ambiguity, and expect frequent attention and feedback, personalized solutions and relevance.   With a childhood that was high on attention by adults,  and the concomitant stream of steady affirmations and awards for everyday behavior, this generation is the most anxious generation ever.

While they won’t necessarily automatically respect the authority or accomplishments of boomer or Gen X managers,  they are unlike the boomers,  who in their youth expressed the mantra of  ‘don’t trust anyone over 30’.   Gen Y’s members, in fact, tend to appreciate boomer managers.   

Empathy and Boundaries

For boomer or Gen X managers, Yarrow offer keys to connecting well with Gen Y workers; show empathy (not anger) at their behaviors, engaging with a sense of humor.    As they are a psychologically anxious generation, the antidote to their anxiety is clear boundary setting - clarifying responsibility, accountability the ‘club’ rules and clearly outlining the perimeters of the work community.

Relevance and Visibility

As Yarrow indicated, in surveying Gen Y members, 51% would take lower pay for more meaningful work, but no matter what the work environment, they value knowing the impact their work has on society, and how their work helps someone – whether it be their boss, peers, clients or customers.

For  Gen Y, ‘being seen’ or noticed is a primary value for them, so successful managers and leaders would make sure they feel included (within boundaries) receive frequent feedback, more personal feedback and awards, and visible praise.

And what about Gen Y managing Gen X and boomers?   That would be a topic for another hour-long discussion with Dr. Yarrow.

As she pointed out, successful boomer and Gen X leaders need to adapt and include an understanding of Gen Y, incorporating generationally relevant tactics in their management practice. 

 

 

Getting to Collaboration: The Executive and the Evangalist

This afternoon's Enterprise 2.0 sessions in the main hall were two good bookends to success in collaboration.

First, Andrew McAfee moderated a panel, querying Art Fritzson, VP and Walton Smith, Senior Associate at Booz Allen in a terrific session on "The Secret Sauce of Enterprise 2.0 Success at Booz Allen Hamilton."

Walt presented the details of the Booz Allen Hamilton "Hello" community at the Boston E 2.0 conference in June.  Walt and his community team have created a dynamic, engaged community that is widely adopted, actively used, and  not only connects people day to day, but also functions as a rapid on-boarding platform for new employees.

But it was Art Fritzson that was especially impressive as a senior executive with exceptional insight into the value of collaboration.  His daily remit is not Enterprise 2.0 per se (he runs the defense IT arm of their business), but he championed, participated, protected and engaged in this process.   

As he stated, "this transformation has been about moving the conversations to an online environment," instead of keeping them fractured and siloed in email, document management and business process applications.

The success of adoption, according to Art, is not about generational issues, but about relevance and learned behaviour.   While a younger generation of worker may be initially more fluent in the use of collaborative tools, any employee grasps the experience and the tools as soon as the relevance and usefulness is understood.

"Hello" , the collaborative environment at Booz Allen Hamilton, now exposes, captures, links, and fosters faster, more meaningful contributions and expertise into projects and relationships.   And Walton pointed out, that their 360 interview process doesn't just include feedback from co-workers, clients and managers, but an assessment of what intellectual capital they are contributing back to the organization by their participation in the community.

But all good success stories also require that "bottom's up" champion; that E 2.0 pioneer that enlists, cajoles, pushes, inspires, reassures, in short does 120 laps around the company to get everyone on board with the project of changing a company to a community.   

Three years ago, I was at Enterprise 2.0 when Andrew McAfee call for more user experiences and case studies.   There were lots of technologies to talk about and companies to present them, but only a smattering of real users.

Today's Evangelist of the Year award was a wonderful step forward, acknowledging the tremendous efforts it takes not only to implement new technologies, but the unique qualities it takes to change a culture.   The inaugural winner of this year is Claire Flanagan of CSC, who championed and led a successful company wide effort that yielded broad adoption across the entire company.
 

Moving to collaboration - moving the culture at Penn State

Sometimes the seemingly small story that has the biggest impact.   Bevin Hernandez story of Penn State's outreach organization let us in on some important perspectives about moving an organization to collaboration.  Bevin presented today at the end of a morning tutorial session at the first San Francisco Enterprise 2.0 conference.

The first part of the session, co-chaired by the capable Oliver Marks and his colleague Sameer Patel (now new business partners) was focused on identifying key elements to the process of "selling" Enterprise 2.0 to executives.   These were classic strategic business project selling and proposal techniques adapted for Enterprise 2.0; helpful, but not, perhaps, groundbreaking.

The Penn State story, however, was compelling.  Bevin and her colleagues were tasked with not only implementing a collaboration platform, but breaking through a culture that was fractured, protective of turf, deeply compartmentalized and unengaged.   (not so unusual, no?).     

The first part of the process, according to Bevin, was moving solidly into the Web 2.0 realm...no small incremental steps, or as Bevin quoted Nicholas Negroponte - "Incrementalism is the enemy of innovation."

To this end, the Penn State team chose ThoughtFarmer as their platform.   In a way, that was the easy part; its' ease of use and ease of deployment was apparently a factor. 

Here's some things they did to move the culture as well.

Building from a small team to a network effect:  Bevin and two other colleagues focused their communications and outreach effort from a tight team of three people and built their "network effect" towards change from that point.   

Tantalizing and engaging communications:  As the launch of the collaboration solution approached, they created intriguing communications pieces that focused on emphasizing the people, talents and background of the collaboration community.

Barn-raisings and volunteer recruitments:  The Penn State collaboration team reached out to the entire organization recruiting for needed skills and resources that could be allocated on a spot basis to help load content and expand outreach efforts.   This created buy-in and commitment early on, and established a second level of a core group that could help facilitate participation as the community evolved.

Let it Be:  For Bevin and the Penn State team it was as much about the technical solution as moving the culture from "Me to We" and allowing the collaboration environment to develop more organically than the typical business process application rollout.  They encouraged and supported a sense of trust, openness, ease of participation. 

Low Tech But Effective:  The collaboration implementation team created a professional development series of printed briefings about effective ways to use and become comfortable with collaboration and Web 2.0 technologies.  

In the early days of Enterprise 2.0, (a mere two years ago), stories of engagement centered around cowboy tales of a cadre of bleeding edge technology movers and shakers implementing at the outer rims of the organization.  Now, as Enterprise 2.0 moves across the chasm, there's more discussion about deploying Enterprise 2.0 solutions as another enterprise application, with all the attendant issues of integration, interoperability, switching costs, etc.    What's often missing is recommendations on how to move the culture into collaboration.

Bevin Hernandez' Penn State story was a refreshing tale of engaging people directly with a gentle but focused approach at transforming behaviour and practices as a key part of implementing E 2.0 in their organizations.

Context is Crucial - Team Workspaces and the next "Wave"

Oliver Marks wrote a thoughtful piece in his Collaboration 2.0 blog last week.    He highlights the dangers of the burnout isolated remote workers experience, and his piece validates some key points about the need for online business practice to incorporate a sense of context and connectedness.

While the percentage of knowledge workers not physically present on site in company offices has increased, the assumption is often that the VPN connection to the corporate Intranet email system is sufficient to enable the individual to participate fully in a work setting.  What is missing, however, is the sense of immediacy, interactivity and, most importantly context visibility.     

It's not just the dis-location, psychologically speaking of the individual knowledge worker, but team productivity and management effectiveness that is impaired.   Without a sense that one can assess quickly the adapting and changing context of a group working on a project, countless hours are spent trying to catch up to the current flow of conversation and important action items amongst a working group.

Online team workspaces are too often simply used as repositories for file sharing, but not used to embed a continuous sense flow of work nor of group interactivity to support that work.

Collaborative team solutions have evolved recently to move beyond the co-authoring, shared work product capabilities of wikis or online project solutions by adding the interactivity of social networking in order to bring that sense of group context into the workflow.   From MS Sharepoint to Socialtext one can see the evolution to include more participatory capabilities.     

The limitations of relying relying on an asynchronous communication mechanism such as email for communication immediacy, light workflow, and team collaboration for many years was offset by the ability of physically co-located workers to "smooth the edges" and "reinforce the context," by dropping by their co-workers cubicles, or huddling at the water cooler.   Selective use of distribution lists and forwarding in email is also a great tool for command and control management styles and information hoarders.   

What knowledge workers need, whether on-site or remote, is consistency of visibility and interactivity with their co-workers or team members.  It is in that context that they can make decisions and judgements that are relevant to the currents of the project, so that they can contribute optimally to a projects assets.

Much is often made of a generational gap between an older generation of worker hidebound by email and younger generation who is fully versed in the online participatory behaviours.   This generational gap, however, is an obfuscation.  The real issue is that the old tools often bog down everybody.    

Google Wave, for instance is an attempt drive past the email model of group interaction and move straight into a completely contextual and interactive model of accomplishing group work.    In this context there is no such thing as a "remote worker."