Jinfo: CI: Collaborative Intelligence

CI: Collaborative Intelligence
Jinfo Blog

31st May 2007

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Like most CI practitioners and academics, I always took the term CI to stand for 'competitive intelligence'. I taught a class on the subject in the MBA program at the University of Haifa, and through discussions with students I learned the term CI might better stand for 'collaborative intelligence'.

My students and I used this class at the Graduate School of Management <http://gsb.haifa.ac.il> and the Center for the Study of the Information Society <http://infosoc.haifa.ac.il> to launch an experiment that fulfilled a need for a customised textbook, an interactive lesson and a collaborative model that can easily be replicated in academic and corporate environments to great success.

CI (collaborative intelligence, that is) means pooling knowledge from a variety of people to produce unique sources of information co- authored by many. CI is part of the solution to the paradoxical nature of today's information environment. What's the paradox? On the one hand, for a number of years we have seen the rise of user-generated content (UGC); on the other hand we have yet to create effective and efficient organisational knowledge sharing. It seems that people are much keener on sharing tags, photos, videos and knowledge in public spaces such as Del.ici.ous, Flickr, YouTube and Wikipedia than they are on logging into elaborate platforms for knowledge sharing. This paradox calls for managerial as well as academic attention. In this article I will provide an account of how CI was applied in an academic setting and I will show its high relevance to managers in industry as well.

Why CI?

Why should CI interest managers? There are a number of reasons, including:

One of the biggest obstacles to good competitive intelligence is managerial blind spots that characterise hierarchies and long-time managers, according to CS Fleisher and BE Bensoussan in the chapter "Blindspot Analysis" in the book "Strategic and Competitive Analysis". Collaborative intelligence decentralises knowledge and may attenuate some common blindspots.
CI is an easy, fast and effective way of building a knowledge-based community as part of an organisation-wide plan to manage knowledge
CI crosses internal organisational boundaries and brings together experts that share common knowledge but do not belong to the same organisational units
CI reduces the power of specific 'indispensable' individuals by pooling knowledge and documenting it. This may reduce the barriers for occupational mobility and increase flexibility in the process of hiring
CI is achieved by amassing fairly small contributions by many participants. A small effort by many generates unique sources of knowledge not available outside the organisation. The cost or effort of participation is low and the benefit is high to the individual and to the organisation
CI is a platform that allows managers and employees who are not necessarily known by many in their organisation to express their expertise and get respect for it. CI is empowering!
CI can also be used to open the organisation to external sources of knowledge and innovation, for example, one can think of joint projects for companies and their suppliers or customers. Microsoft uses a collaborative platform for customer support where customers help customers sort out their difficulties with MS applications.

Why should CI interest academics?

CI makes academic teaching more engaging and interactive
CI offers opportunities to custom-design learning materials
CI has the potential for improving learning by the students. CI is empowering!
CI offers a new dimension for student assignments and since it is done in an online network, measurement is inherent
Speaking of measurement, CI is fertile ground for academic research on collaboration, learning and social phenomena in these projects.

A case in point: CI in academia

Since the year 2000 I have taught a course entitled "Online Competitive Intelligence" as part of the MBA program in the School of Management, University of Haifa. The course was always accompanied by a website and an e-learning system. The website contained links to databases and other valuable sources of business information. The e-learning system consisted of the class presentations, assignments, readings and discussion groups. All information in both online environments was supplied by me as the course instructor.

The job of updating it became harder every year as the number of sources increased together with a rise in Internet business dynamics, with sources disappearing and reincarnating in other locations. In this 'broadcast' mode, the students' involvement was limited to participation in discussions.

Another difficulty was the absence of a good academic textbook in Hebrew. While our students are proficient in English, it is desirable to have a textbook in our native language with local examples. In addition, one of our classes includes students who are managers in the non-profit sector. The course was tailored for their special needs, and, again, I felt the lack of a solid textbook for this sector.

Obviously, one solution could be that I, as the course instructor, would embark on the daunting task of writing a textbook. There had to be a more practical and faster solution! Then I remembered the book I read about two years ago: "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki. The solution seemed simple: Harness the knowledge and ability of MBA students to write a textbook in a collaborative effort. Within three months 130 students and I have built a rich and unique textbook which is available to anyone with an Internet connection and who can read Hebrew <http://ci.haifa.ac.il>. How did we go about achieving this wonderful feat?

First, I decided that the wiki platform is the most appropriate way to create UGC for long-term use. The University's computer support personnel constructed a MediaWiki platform within a day, and I started filling it. After writing a brief homepage describing the project, I created an elaborate table of contents that included all the chapters that I thought were essential in such a book.

Students were also invited to suggest topics that were not yet mentioned in the initial TOC. The student assignment specified writing according to acceptable academic standards. Each pair of students had to write a complete chapter from scratch. In addition, each individual student was charged with reviewing two chapters written by others and improving them. Improvements could be anything from semantic or grammar corrections to the introduction of new content and additional references.

Addressing concerns

I am sure some of the readers of this article are nodding their heads saying: 'How good can student papers be?' Our MBA students are all mid- or upper-level managers, they are mature and intelligent. They are highly motivated to succeed and usually learn out of deep interest and commitment. Their contributions are usually of very high quality. The papers, in our case chapters, are mostly very good, although some are better than others. The book is by no means finished, and that's part of its beauty. This book will never be finished. It will always be subject to improvements, expansions and updates; unlike 'stale' textbooks, this is a living project.

Moreover, the writing process demanded that the students apply some of the practices required by competitive intelligence work: analyse information needs, identify sources of information, run searches, evaluate the information obtained, synthesise it into a coherent report, and provide pertinent examples. The assignment expresses the students' ability as independent learners, their critical thinking, and it even gives some of them the satisfaction of doing original work.

Some impediments to the successful application of CI projects include:

Technophobia - people not understanding what they should do and how to do it, preferring to stick to familiar document forms. This impediment can be easily overcome by brief training and preparation of light support tools such as 'cheat sheets'. In fact, I encountered this difficulty only after the course was over. Students came to me and said that learning the technicalities of the wiki platform was very demanding for some of them. This took me by surprise and I learned a lesson in this regard
Vulnerability to attack since the system is open. This requires the attention of capable computer support people who will preserve backups and apply the necessary level of security. Several months after the completion of the first phase of the wiki the project disappeared from the server and an error message replaced it. I was horrified! A quick call to the computer support staff revealed that they didn't have the technical knowledge to retrieve the information from the backup files in its original form with a division to chapters, inclusion of links etc. After a day of panic I found out that one of the students who participated in my class was an expert on open-source applications. Thanks to him the project was completely recovered and returned to its natural state following two days of intensive work
Lack of support for a variety of file formats. The wiki platform does not currently accommodate most common file types such as pdf, xls, doc, ppt and others. In other words, a wiki won't be a good host for information which was previously stored in these formats. It is a good host for original information that is written directly for the wiki and when no need for the other formats is anticipated.

This CI project has huge potential for future development. First, it can serve as a bridge between academia and industry. Any Hebrew- speaking practitioner is invited to read, and better yet, to contribute to the wiki-CI book. The book must be improved by future generations of students who can find and correct errors, expand chapters, add new ones, add references to academic research and to magazine articles. The biggest potential lies in making this project international by creating similar books in many languages. Any takers?

Beside the possible cooperation between academia and industry in further developing this particular project, this type of CI has a variety of applications: IBM uses it for customer support <http://www-941.ibm.com/collaboration/wiki/dashboard.action>. Microsoft uses it for supporting its community of developers <http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/default.aspx>. Ebay is developing a user's guide with tips from users <http://www.ebaywiki.com/>. Other application ideas include brainstorming, conference preparation, project development and documentation of 'lessons learned'. In short, any kind of information that may generate lasting interest can be preserved in a wiki CI platform quickly and easily.

The future is in CI. Let's face it now.

Related FreePint links:

"Embracing the Wiki Way: Deploying a Corporate Wiki" By Leigh Dodds <http://www.freepint.com/issues/270706.htm#tips>
"Wikis: The Tools for Information Work and Collaboration" Written by Jane Kolbas Reviewed by Leigh Dodds <http://www.freepint.com/bookshelf/wiki.htm>
"Using a wiki as a knowledge base?" FreePint Bar Discussion <http://www.freepint.com/go/b73583>
"Wikipedia: To Use or Not To Use" By Caryn Wesner-Early <http://www.freepint.com/issues/071206.htm#tips>

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