Totally And Completly Wide Open

Something is happening right now, and that something is a big deal that I want you to know about.

Peter Kim recently wrote about the Dachis Group opening up all of their internal communications into a feed called the Dachis Collaboratory. You can subscribe to it here. He talks about it in this post called, How open are you?

So what?

Let Me Tell You

After participating in opening up our board room at my day job, I know that this is a really big deal and another step toward true social business design. Here’s what being totally open gets you:

more communication I read a quote somewhere along the way, that I can’t find now, warning to never put in writing what can be said over the phone, and to never say something over the phone that can be said in person… I think the point of the quote was misaligned with openness, but it can be applied openness. Making everything public will more than likely force some people to pick up the phone and talk to one another, or get out of their cube and talk to one another and that is a good thing for any business.

less junk-mail Think of all the pointless E-mails you get on a daily basis at work. When everything is public, people will begin to scrutinize before they hit send. It won’t happen right away, and there will be embarrassments along the way but we will get there eventually and collectively. If you recall, over time, people learned that it was faux pas to reply all to E-mail chains. We will learn the intricacies of this new convention as well, and we will all be better for it.

more time I had the fortune of sitting across from Rick Klau, Google’s Product Manager for Blogger, during a dinner last week at BlogWorld Expo and he mentioned that every Google employee has real time access to every metric for every Google product available. The idea of this is both a dream come true and unimaginable to me, so I asked him what having all of that access is like… And he responded that it’s a big time saver. He doesn’t have to wait for somebody to answer any of his questions. He can find them himself, and save time. I can imagine searchable public streams of consciousness providing similar benefits.

reporting Who’s working on the company’s biggest project for fiscal year 2009, and what’s going on with it? You won’t have to wonder anymore, because that information will be at your fingertips. I don’t know that there are any huge disadvantages to open reporting, either, by the way. Let’s take sports for example. Scouts watch and report on the opposing team’s offensive and defensive strategies, they even film it, but the two teams still have to play the game. Is it really that big of a deal for a competitor to know that your company is: remapping it’s sales territories, upgrading internal systems, or promoting somebody to the executive team? If that information becomes public anyway, does it matter when it is released?

What Do You Think?

So that’s my take… what do you think about it? Is it the worst idea since American Idol, or are you on board the open digital work environment train with me? Have I hit on all the pluses with rose colored glasses? Is there anything I missed? Let me know in the comments below.