Yesterday’s post pertained to Salesforce.com and why I am driving Zayo to fully embrace it. I suggested that getting ahead at Zayo is linked to mastery of Salesforce.com. While I am on the topic, Google Groups is another tool that I want to see Zayo employees master. Why?
- It is a powerful tool for organizing work, collaborating with others, and sharing information.
- Anyone who can build and maintain a great Google Groups site is demonstrating mastery of Internet that is advanced relative to most of their peers. This is pathetically untrue if you are in a Web 2.0 company, but is unfortunately true if you are in an average telecom company. Since I don’t want Zayo to be average, I expect that our people will develop this skill set.
- It gives me visibility into how people are organizing and pursuing their work. people who want to get ahead should use Google Groups to gain visibility and support for what they are doing.
Are you a Zayo employee? Do you want to get ahead? Are you able and willing to learn Google Groups? If you haven’t used it, the hardest part will be figuring out what it even is. Until you play around with it, you probably will not be able to understand how it can help you do your job. If you want to learn it but aren’t sure how to get started, send me a note and I will get someone to help you get started.
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Hi Dan,
Long time reader, first time poster. I am not a Zayo employee, so I don’t have a “dog in this fight” so to speak. However, I am curious if you have completely considered the Google Group’s terms of services, ownership of data, data retention policies, etc. I understand GG can a powerful collaborative tool, but why wouldn’t you want to host (and own) the intellectual property your employees post? There are many enterprise-class collaborative tools that allow you to own and retain the data.
Color,
It’s a balance between supporting the costs of internal hosting and management as well as speed of implementation versus potential loss of intellectual property and actual impact on company performance. Some are arguing that IP is actually a declining asset model as execution matters more. Plus, there is a real risk that IP legislation is coming down the pike to deal with the current inadequacies which could also lower the return on corporate expenditures on defending IP.
Hi Dan,
As am employee, recent attendee to salesforce.com, and reader of your recent posts regarding salesforce.com’s extendability into all aspects of business operations, the Winter ‘09 release contains a new feature called Force.com Sites.
http://www.salesforce.com/platform/sites/
It is an interesting solution for internal documents (and external websites for that matter), can replace Sharepoint to eliminate the support (hardware, software and people) requirements and should handle all the issues “Color me surprised” brought up regarding intellectual property and security.
Just a thought…
Hi Thomas,
You make a good point about expediency. However, do enterprise folks usually realize that they are giving Google ownership *IN PERPETUITY* ? When you give the reins to GG they want to own the data FOREVER.
I am not here to be an anti-GG fascist; Indeed, I in fact embrace the collaborative nature of Web 2.0, GG included. There is no doubt that GG can be a powerful tool, as can be Salesforce.com or any other collaborative environment that allows all participants and stakeholders to thrive.
I am just asking you to consider the long-term implications of giving a precious asset to someone else. Namely, your employees and their thoughts are ultimately one of your best assets; If you can keep those ideas “in-house” so to speak you could recoup your own investment in asking them to participate in what is ultimately a dialog worth having.
Respectfully,
Color Me Surprised
Color Me: this is an issue we have been aware of. To date, I have chosen to use Google Groups despite this potential issue. The ability to share information across organizational lines has proven immensely valuable. I love the free-ness and freedom of using Google Groups. My guess is that they will respect the privacy of the information and, if not, the sky will not fall. B
Thanks Eileen. I will take a look. I’m glad you you attended the saleforce.com conference (btw, that was me asking you how your vacation was in the conf call last night). We are going to do a ton to exploit salesforce and its accessories.
I am a Zayo employee, and most certainly I do want to get ahead, I am a daily user of Google Sites/Groups – But only for collaboration and information exchange with our external customers and vendors. I’m also a avid user of Zayo’s internal collaboration and storage tools, Microsoft SharePoint (which BTW, also allows for Blogs and Wiki’s).
So, I wonder why most of the prodding, with the selling point of getting ahead, wouldn’t first be towards a very robust internal tool. The benefits to companywide visibility and participation seem far greater than trying to utilize external sites that Zayo folks may or may not know exist – not to mention the potential future headaches of bringing all this good information back onto the Zayo protected network environment.
Joe, thanks for commenting. More times than not, my use of Google Groups involve people both inside and outside Zayo. Each specific group has its own unique set of members. Quite often, a particular document might be linked to multiple groups. None of these groups have company wide visibility, as they each serve a purpose for a defined group of members. Whenever I have something I want to share with the entire company, I post on the blog. This creates a challenge at times–how do you share info with employees while exposing it to whoever wants to see it? I try to walk the fine line because much of what I want to say is pertinent to audiences both within and outside of Zayo.
It is hard to put into words why I find Google Groups incredibly powerful. Basically, it brings the power of Google itself–quite literally–to your information, allowing it to be searching, shared, and and organized in ways that otherwise would be problematic. And this is done without training manuals or IT professionals. Perhaps other sharing tools do this. I guess I think of it like this–there are multiple search engines but only one Google.