For many organizations today, there is no physical way for people to run into each other during the course of a day.  We work from home, we work at locations around the world, and we may not be working at the same time.  The opportunities do not exist for chance encounters at the proverbial water-cooler.  Thus we are left to devise ways to create an enterprise environment abounding in opportunities for chance encounters for the distributed workforce of the 21^st century.

One of the means employed to do this is deploying Enterprise Social Software (ESS) to create intentional collaboration and encourage chance encounters and discoveries – thus the analogy to the proverbial water-cooler.

This makes a lot of sense.

ESS enables people to collaborate intentionally – communities and groups form around specific projects, product & service offerings, common interests, organizations, etc.  The people in these communities, the work they produce, and ESS conversations they have are searchable and discoverable: they are the water in this 21^st century water-cooler.   People can ‘over hear’ conversations that pique their interests and become engaged.  Chance encounters occur because ESS – by intention – is a very open means of working and collaborating.  Because of all this activity and information and collaboration more people thirst (pun intended) to be part of this enterprise collaboration space.

All this activity, all this information, and all the people using ESS to work together and get the job done assumes the existence of a critical mass of participation and content.  How does one make sure this virtuous cycle of participation, content, and discovery develops? – or – How do we make sure there is water in the 21^st century water cooler?  Without the water, people would never have gone to the water cooler more than once.  No water means no reason to return and the chance meetings, serendipitous discoveries, and the collaborations that followed would not have occurred.

We also need to assure fresh work, ideas, and conversations - our water in this 21^st century water cooler – keep flowing; otherwise, people will slowly drift away when there is nothing new for them to drink.

Some ways to assure there is water and people to provide more:

• Add The Water (aka Prime the Pump) – With little content available in a new ESS solution, it would take months and perhaps several quarters for enough critical mass of information and people to really start seeing exponential growth of usage and realizing tangible business benefits.  To add water, find the disparate sources of information in your enterprise – Document Management systems, blogs, wikis, web-sites, etc. - identify those providing the most benefit and as a minimum make them accessible through the ESS platform.  Ideally, as much as practicable, we should move the content to the unified ESS platform so all this rich information is available for discovery through a single platform.

• Identify the Thirstiest Groups – Work with the business organizations to identify those areas that will benefit most from collaboration.  This is not an easy task to do; however, it is critical to the ongoing success of the collaboration endeavor.  These organizations and their people will establish the reputation for the collaboration effort in the enterprise: choosing those benefitting the most will provide the willing and enthusiastic allies needed for collaboration to succeed.

• Keep Adding Water - Within the Thirsty Groups, recruit stellar Collaboration Champions.  They will be the enterprise’s first wave of users.  Find people who are already well connected in the enterprise.   Find those who make use of available collaboration tools inside and outside the enterprise.  Do they work with lots of people across multiple organizations?  Are they respected within their organization?  Do they use public social media like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.?  Do they participate in collaboration emails (these are those emails seeking answers to questions that wind their way through an organization’s email system).

• Find New Sources of Water – Within the enterprise we have established ways of working together that can be tapped (and altered) for new sources of information.  Key enterprise collaboration tools are the one-on-one phone call, e-mail, instant messaging, and conference calls; however, as important as they are, they are mostly closed to discovery by others in the enterprise.  It is not appropriate for all of this information to be shared across the enterprise, but we can change behaviors to keep adding water.  Two examples:  Record, tag, and share education and department meetings done via conference calls in the collaboration platform - those who missed a call need not miss the content; Use the collaboration platform to replace the collaboration email - answers are then available for everyone everywhere and not just for those who were on the collaboration email chain. 

The successful companies of the 21^st century will embrace the idea of enterprise collaboration and understand the intrinsic value of recruiting the best people and partners from around the globe and leaving them around the globe.  We will work from home.  We will work from different cities and countries.  We will work when it is the best time for us to work.  Through it all we will still need to work together and we will want to be participants in our organization's and corporate communities.  This requires us to create new ways of working together and creating opportunities for chance encounters at a proverbial water-cooler.

An ESS collaboration solution is a key component of our 21^st century water cooler – we just have to remember the water.