To learn how Atlassian is using Confluence and Zen Foundation to rebrand its public-facing sites, check out my presentation to the San Francisco Atlassian Users Group meeting on February 9, 2012:

In the hyper-agile software development world, knowledge sharing and collaboration are basic life functions, right up there with breathing. This didn't happen overnight – it took decades for the software industry to claw its way from the waterfall process swamp onto the agile savannah. The challenge now is: how to evolve the rest of your organization into the agile world of collaborative enterprise (a.k.a. "Social Business" or "Enterprise 2.0")? Sadly, most advice is in the form of solemn and highly theoretical tomes – light on practical advice, and requiring a three-month reading sabbatical to digest.

One antidote is the APQC's fresh-off-the-press The New Edge in Knowledge. True to its subject matter, The New Edge dishes up a menu of agile approaches to knowledge management (KM) and building a collabortive culture. Some refreshingly pragmatic suggestions:

• Start with evangelists: forget top down, start with a core group that "gets" it and lives it
• Foster "borderless" communities – these self-motivating groups lead by example and create subject matter repositories
• Tools are only tools – they can help, but they can't create a "knowledge sharing" culture; flipside: if motivation exists, the tools needn't be perfect!
• Keep it agile: start small, iterate on your pilot projects, and scale the successes 
• Create a Knowledge Sharing culture: Brand aggressively, and Make it fun

Question: would you rather hang out in a dentist's office, or a swanky lounge? That's where branding and fun enter the picture. When evaluating a KM system, don't underestimate the look and feel, because that's the first (and possibly the only) feature users are going to notice. Branding is not about slapping a logo on your KM tool – it's about creating an inviting virtual environment.

Did you know that Facebook boasts over 600 million subscribers? That if it were a country, it would be third in population size behind only China and India? With this quotable factoid, the authors make an interesting point about tools – relatively inexpensive, open-source products are better suited to boostrapping a collaborative culture than high-investment, slow-rollout enterprise systems. They're more intuitive and fun for employees to use – are closer in "feel" to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and other social applications that employees are already using. In contrast, heavyweight enterprise knowledge management platforms tend to mimic the cumbersome document management systems of the 90s.

The New Knowledge is peppered with case studies from brand name organizations: Boeing, Rockwell Collins, the US State Department and CIA, and our own State of Washington. The Appendix contains extended case studies from ConocoPhillips, Fluor, IBM, and MITRE, just the inspiration you may need to evolve toward agile.

APQC (the American Productivity and Quality Center) is a membership-driven organization providing benchmarking, best practices, and emerging trends research to leaders in industry, service, government, and education.

We love using Zen Foundation to make Confluence beautiful and easy-to-use. So we created a special Valentine Zen Brand for a touch of romantic ambiance. Download it for your Zen site, but be warned: it might just inspire a surge of hanky panky around the office on Monday.