This is from Jordan Frank, Vice President Sales & Business Development at Traction Software. I’m in Providence, RI to deliver the closing keynote this afternoon at Traction User Group 2009.

Awhile back, Stewart Mader was involved in a discussion about the role  of professional services in emergent systems like wikis. In the many pilots I’ve seen its become increasingly clear that adoption doesn’t just happen on its own, there are a variety of factors ranging from technology to timing to training and even taxonomy (or folksonomy, if you will) which all play a role.

The role of professional services, in my words, is to bring forward best practices and to accelerate the process of identifying the emergent patterns that may be specific to any one organization.

In Structuring for Emergence, I’ve discussed how those patterns are a part of organizational grain and are best exposed when in context of a facilitating structure. The facilitating structure is defined by the technology deployed, the organization of the content in that technology (including space names, permissions, tags, and the way information is visually displayed) as well as the behavioral, organizational orientation to the technology (including whether there is training, whether contribution is compulsive or voluntary, and how communication in such a system aligns, or doesn’t, with job role and position).

These two cases explain how services facilitate better outcomes, faster:

• Fixture Manufacturing Company: A customer installed TeamPage and started establishing workspaces with no problem. His first few steps were to make a workspace for each competitor. In just a few moments of discussion, we agreed he would be better off with a Market Research workspace containing a tag for each competitor. He engineered his workspaces accordingly and is thriving as he joins the 12-Month club in November 2009.
• Pharmaceutical Marketing Division: Pharmaceutical firms are required to err on the side of caution when sharing information, but have high value for information sharing and relish the opportunity reduce barriers as much as possible. A customer needed two layers of review and started off with a process that involved information content approval by a product specific marketing manager and review of tag usage by a content administrator. I showed them how timing effects could delay the publishing process by days if not a week or more in such a two tier process.

  Instead, we decided on a parallel process where the product marketing manager approved content for publishing while in a separate and independent process, a content administrator was sure to review the use of tags on the content. The latter step is important for wiki gardening, but not a necessary barrier between contribution of draft content and approval for publishing to the enterprise.

Despite anyone’s judgement as to what % of collaboration success is attributed to Technology vs. People, getting the technology right and configuring it in a way that meets rather than defeats a need is a Door 1 pre-requisite.