Enterprise 2.0 Research

There's not too much fundamental research on Enterprise 2.0. Deloitte recently published interesting research done on enterprise 2.0 implementations and their return-on-investment. In the EU research has also done as well. Study is being done for the European Commission and it was carried out by Tech4i2, IDC and Headshift. What was the goal of the study?

Goals of the study

• To provide a clear definition of Enterprise 2.0 is, describe the market and the positioning of EU industry, also in comparison with US and Asia;

• To analyze the take-up of Enterprise 2.0, the organizational requirements, and the role on the transition to a knowledge based low-carbon economy;

• To collect evidence on its macro-economic impact, as a market opportunity for the European Software industry and as a productivity tool for European business;

• To identify and analyse both the direct and contextual challenges, including the need for Next Generation Access and the legal barriers;

• To analyse and propose possible policy actions to overcome the challenges and grasp the opportunities.

The first part of their study has been published (a while ago). I didn't read the whole (lengthy!) report, but read parts of it. There's lots of interesting stuff in there.

Part of the research was about defining the difference between traditional enterprise software and the new social software. The research says the "openness by default" approach is the real new part.

They also write about the size of the e2.0 market, comparing the US with the EU. The market is considerably bigger in the US. And Europe is 2/3 years behind the US market. Europe is ahead of Asia though.

In Europe, the e2.0 deployments are much slower, through pilot initiatives, compared to the US.

Privacy is a key issue when rolling out e2.0 solutions. As is lack of understanding and cultural resistance by employees and management.

Some time ago I blogged about social media and cultural. In short I said: social media deployment can change culture, culture change doesn't always have to precede social media deployment. This study gives interesting results in this context. It proves that my statement was correct. It says:

Prerequisites to a successful adoption of E20 solutions is the existence of a collaborative and collegiate culture, where innovation is rewarded. It is difficult to reap the rewards from investment if the culture is not there and there is no top management endorsement. However, there is also evidence that the adoption of E20 tools generate cultural change by encouraging  collaboration and reducing silos effect: for example, the Intellipedia case showed how wiki were able to foster a more open and collaborative approach by the US intelligence agencies  (McAfee, 2009).

The research also stressed the value of e2.0 tools in organizations is not always easy to measure. This does not imply that there's no value in using them.

To close off the insights from the report, it also underlines the importance of understanding community dynamics and network effects that guarantee the success of e2.0 initiatives. Students and employees should be trained in these aspects of modern work.

The report closes by saying "next steps" will revolve around "the definition of policy options with regard to E20, based on the findings here presented." These results have also been published (and are open to revision and discussion).

Where imaginations play, learning happens - A Great Interview

I've always been intrigued by the concept of learning. It's one of the reason I like blogging so much and social media in general. It's a great way to learn!

Every now and then I bump into a great post or interview about this topic. Just recently I read a great interview with John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas about their new book 'A New Culture of Learning' (part 1 and part 2). I was planning to read the book. After reading this interview I'm going to push it up on my to-read list. Thanks Henry Jenkins for sharing this interview with us.

I'll share some interesting statements from the interview with you here:

• One of the key arguments we are making is that the role of educators needs to shift away from being expert in a particular area of knowledge, to becoming expert in the ability to create and shape new learning environments.
• Our argument brings to the fore the old aphorism "imagination is more important than knowledge." In a networked world, information is always available and getting easier and easier to access. Imagination, what you actually do with that information, is the new challenge.
• The force that seems to be pushing the knowledge curve forward at an exponential rate is two fold. First, it is the generation of new content and knowledge that is the result of simply participating in any knowledge economy. This leads to a second related dimension: while content may remain stable at some abstract level, the context in which it has meaning (and therefore its meaning) is open to near constant change.
• Learning is not a binary construction which pits how against what. In fact, throughout the book, we stress that knowledge, now more than ever, is becoming a where rather than a what or how.
• In our framework, we stress that every piece of knowledge has both an explicit and a tacit dimension. The explicit is only one kind of content, which tells you what something means. The tacit has its own layer of meaning. It tells why something is important to you, how it relates to your life and social practices. It is the dimension where the context and content interact. Our teaching institutions have paid almost no attention to the tacit and we believe that it is the tacit dimension that allows us to navigate meaning in a changing world.
• The key difference for us is that in the new culture of learning mentors are very likely to be peers who may have picked up something a little ahead of the curve or who may have more experience in something than their peers. Mentorship is a much more flexible concept and one which is tied less tightly to authority. Since so much of what we see as the key to future learning is passion-based, we think it makes more sense to understand the process of learning as something that can be guided by a mentor, as opposed to being taught by a teacher. No one can teach you to follow your passions, but they can help guide you once you discover what motivates you.
• What we were able to identify were two radically different learning environments, one which was overly structured (such as the contemporary classroom) where boundaries are put in place to actually discourage play, experimentation and real inquiry based learning. The other environment is completely unbounded and unlimited, best represented by the information explosion on the Internet. Absent some sort of structure or boundaries, learning is not any more likely to happen in an unrestricted space than it is in a tightly controlled one.
• Where imaginations play, learning happens.
• What no one seems to pick up on is that innovation by its very nature runs counter to the idea of standardization.
• Another key distinction we are trying to make is to understand the difference between creativity and imagination, two terms that are often used interchangeably. Creativity is a much later stage and something that can not be taught. It is the product of a fertile imagination.
• Inquiry as a core principle of the new culture of learning
• In large part, the role of the teacher needs to shift from transferring information to shaping, constructing, and overseeing learning environments.
• You don't teach imagination; you create an environment in which it can take root, grow and flourish.
• This new culture of learning only works if it can be fed by an enormous influx of constantly updated information.
• We talk repeatedly about the questions being more important than the answers and the idea that solutions to one problem are gateways to dealing with increasingly more sophisticated problems and deeper questions.
• First, play is not trivial, frivolous or non-serious, in fact, quite the opposite. Play can be the place where we do our most serious learning. And second, it is something we do all the time. When we explore, we play. When we experiment, we play. When we tinker or fiddle, we play. Science is play. Art is play. Life, to a great extent, is play.

Good stuff eh?! There's much more in the interviews. And surely even more in the book.

Culture <> Social Media

Jane McConnell raised an interesting question about the relationship between social media and culture. She asked:

Will cultural differences impact adoption of social media? Will culture “eat” social media for breakfast? or will social media “eat” culture?

I find social media interesting because I see the relationship between social media and culture as bi-directional. The (company) culture has to fit social media (culture) for successful adoption. But I also see culture change due to social media use. I think this has to do with the underlying concepts of social media, like relational networks, information is social and humans as social beings. These concepts fit us people very well, because they are deeply human. Tapping into these concepts when rolling out social media is a key to success (and positive cultural change). Rolling it out as technology (non-human focus) is a key to failure (and negative cultural change).


Also refer to this interesting post about cultural differences. (HT, Ana Silva for pointer!)

Overcoming Cultural Boundaries #e20s

Next talk by Bertrand Duperrin, Ellen Trude, Emanuele Quintarelli and Mike Thompson (Headshift).

Bertrand kicks off by focusing on Cultural issues in general, between Europe and the US and it's implications for Enterprise 2.0:

• self protection: culture as an excuse
• local identity protection vs globalization and mergers
• different attitudes towards autonomy, rules, hierarchy...
• philosophy of work
• trust/mistrust vs companies, colleagues...
• will engage with colleagues
• organization boundaries that reinforce cultural ones
• who said legal?

Bertrand says this is a major issue and it's a good thing we are discussing it here. Every country with its own culture has to find it's own approach wrt e2.0.

Now Mike Thompson (Headshift) who collaborated in a large research project on Enterprise 2.0. This research is still going on. First results can be found here. He says the research shows that it's more related to company culture than country culture if and how enterprise 2.0 concepts and tools fit. Ellen doesn't agree with this and does see country difference. On the other hand, Emanuelle agrees with Mike relating to the situation in Italian companies. Emanuelle says these cultural issues were there way before E2.0. And to him the biggest challenge is to demonstrate what's in it for them when rolling out new tools in general.

Agreement between the speakers is that culture is important. If it's a country or company issue is still open for debate/research.

Building a Company on Happiness

Zappos is a bit far away from a Dutchman. We don't have it here, yet. But of course you hear a lot about them. Zappos is praised for its culture, very engaged workforce, use of social media in business, great profit, etc.

Recently I wrote a post about 'Organizing on Passion'. Frederik Vieten, a student doing research at Océ, pointed me to Tony Hsieh's new book, Delivering Happiness. I hadn't heard of it yet, so that was a great pointer. I'm going to order and read it. But I also browsed the site and found a recent talk by Hsieh at Google.

Man, I watched it this talk this evening. And it's absolutely great. If you have an hour, just sit down, watch it and be inspired. What a great company and what a great leader Tony is. Here's the video:

I really liked the way the importance of company culture is stressed and how it can be crafted. I also love the way they select new employees based on questions linked to their core values. One of the most important Zappos values is 'be humble'. Wow! Tony says a company doesn't have to have the same values as Zappos, but if you have them it is key to really commit to them. To prove they are committed to their values they offer $2.000 to every new employee who wants to leave the company.

A neat thing is Zappos trains their employees to use Twitter (to express themselves, for customer contact, colleague connections, etc)

Another wow-moment was about their library. They have an open and free library for their employees and guest. Two key book in their to which Zappos relates deeply are: Jim Collins, Good to great and Dave Logan a.o., Tribal Leadership. Both books are great. And I've always wondered which high-level managers would take G2G and use it as a mirror for themselves as a leader and for the company. Hsieh is doing just that.

Thanks a lot Frederik for pointing to the book, that led to me finding this video!

Endurance

If you're not from Holland, you probably don't know the largest walking event in the world is currently going on in Nijmegen, my home town. It's called the 'Vierdaagse' (in Dutch. Literally: the 4 day one) or 'the Walk of the World'. It's a great event for participants and spectators. The whole city of Nijmegen is flooded with people from all over the world (people from 67 countries participated this year!). Men and woman of 65 years and older have to walk 30 kilometers for four days to get a medal. Men younger between 16-65 have to walk 4x50 kilometers. And ladies walk 4x40 k's. Very long walks, that require lots of training, focus and determination!

Yesterday I volunteered to give water to the walkers (- you may have noticed my tweets/here are some pictures). I love doing that. It brings back lots of memories of the hardship and joy I experience walking 4x50 two years ago. It's great to see about 45.000 people walking by focused on reaching the finish, which is today.

Standing there yesterday, a question popped up, that I also had during my course about 'realistic influencing'. In our work a lot of time is spent on convincing others and influencing employees, managers and groups. I love doing that. Just like the walkers you have an end goal in mind, you are determined to reach the finish. And many reach their goals. But some don't. During this year's Walk of the World about 3.000 walkers had to stop due to blisters, fatigue, etc. They had to make the hard decision to stop.

And here's my question: When do you decide to stop influencing and convincing people that e.g. social media/KM/information management is a good thing for business? When do you decide that convincing an employee, a decision maker or a company is wasting your time and energy?

Realistic Influencing (part two)

Some time ago I blogged about a course I followed: Realistic Influencing. I promised I would write about day three as well. Here's my list of learning points:

1. When in a discussion you have opposite conclusions look for facts and criteria (refer to previous post) you agree upon and/or have in common and starting talking from there.
2. Remember to summarize someone's criteria when you think you see one and ask for feedback to see if you're correct.
3. We all have several different voices in our head. You can give them names. Like my Einstein voice telling me to be creative, think out-of-the-box, etc. But this voice can have contradictory voice telling me to be pragmatic for instance. Talk about these voices out loud in a conversation, it helps people understand what going on in your head. It also buys you time.
4. During the course we also looked at Hersey & Blanchard's situational leadership matrix. I really like that model. It's a great model to use to talk with your manager about how you want to be managed or how you experience his/her management. Striking is the fact that if you e.g. think you are delegated a task but your manager coaches you, you fall back one or two development levels. I've had the experience several times in my career.
5. Finally we went through the 'point of view flow'. This gives some context and flow to the influencing model I wrote about in the previous blogpost. I found the two different phases, pacing and leading, interesting. Because usually people are good one or the other: pacing is easier for softer people, leading for macho's. This flow says, you have to try to do both. And during the whole process 'rapport' is important: being in sync with the other (watching his body language, truly listening, etc.)

I really enjoyed this course, not just because of the interesting theory, models and flows. But also because of all the assignments we had to do to translate theory into practice and learn!

Creating Cultural Change, But How?

Really nice talk about how to create cultural change. The answer is not by mocking, groaning, etc. But...

• with humor
• with social cover
• by changing perception

Or:

• try something new
• create a group identity
• welcome newcomers
• be relentless
• be relentlessly happy

Enjoy!

More Interviews about Enterprise 2.0 and Océ

Recently Jan van Veen and I had the privilege to talk with Jacob Morgan about the work we (and other colleagues) are doing in social media. You can find transcripts of the interviews here:

• Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Océ, Part One: Business Drivers
• Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Océ, Part Two: Making the Push
• Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Océ, Part Three: Change Management
• Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Océ, Part Four: Operational and Financial Impact
  
• [... more will follow soon! ...]

Others interviews about our work can be found here. You can compare them and see if we're making progress! ;-)

Building on Ideas: The Wishing Well Wiki

Note: This post was written with my friend and colleague Rob Veltman (@robveltman). We carpool together and regularly talk about innovation and culture. Rob is an innovative product developer always challenging himself and his colleagues to ask the right questions to solve problems and make wishes come true. Rob is deeply interested in new product development, processes for (breakthrough) innovation and sustainability.

Introduction
How could we contribute to a more innovative organization? We ask ourselves this question regularly, help each other to come up with new ideas in this area and try to lead by example.
We would like to share with you an aspect of our daily practice, which is the observation that our colleagues can experience hesitance in being innovative. We will propose a solution to overcome this hesitance.

Situation
Knowledge companies consist of very smart people, educated in different disciplines. Their knowledge workers are confronted with all kinds of interesting issues, problems and challenges. Sometimes the assignments even seem impossible.
Generally speaking, we find most ideas for solutions and breakthrough innovations are done individually (mono-disciplinary). Furthermore we perceive that quite a number of employees are hesitant to share their drafty ideas, needs, desires, and wishes. We are convinced this can be attributed to at least three things:

• employees can feel reluctance “to put their cards on the table” because they feel their half, draft, non-100%, “unfinished” idea will be heavily scrutinized. Too often we hear: “This has already been investigated”, “This can’t be done”, “This is not your task, it’s mine”, “Unrealistic”, etc.
• employees can also experience reluctance because they feel their unfinished idea will be “stolen” and completed without getting credits for providing the seed of the innovation
• employees often speak of ‘problems’ and ‘issues’ in a way that is too restricting, almost assuming beforehand that an optimal solution will never be found. The presupposition: “a perfect solution doesn’t exist” tends to block the creative process before it has even started.

For these reasons employees tend to keep their ideas, ideals, wishes and problems to themselves. At the most, they discuss their ideas with people from their inner circle, people they trust.

Changing terms
Wouldn’t it be great if we could overcome this reluctance? We believe this is possible by helping colleagues to be more open and transparent about their (and our) profound wishes. All smart employees can formulate what they would wish for with respect to products. If this is facilitated, supported and encouraged, we believe organizations will change in the following ways:

• they will become more innovative and innovate in a more open, controlled and quick way,
• no challenge will be too big; they will truly do, and be part of, ‘beyond the ordinary’ things,
• they will build upon each other’s ideas and wishes

Proposal
We are convinced technology alone cannot be the solution. However, we do think technology can support us and help us open up and move towards the evermore-innovative organization described above.
We would like to propose the following:

• Set up a wiki called ‘Wishing-Well-Wiki’.
• This wiki is clearly supported by high-level management.
• It is fostered by a group of moderators, connecting wishes to people, and people to people, to make wishes reality.
• This wiki is open for all employees (from all disciplines and all levels). Everyone is invited and encouraged to make a contribution.
• This wiki has a clear format. All employees can describe their (product-related) wishes there. Typically these wishes are far-fetched, way-out. They are hard to realize alone, they need input from other smart people to evolve into an implementation.
• The wiki supports sudden and emerging breakthroughs.
• The wiki has built-in history. So, every input is recorded (versioned).
• When wishes become reality the contributors get support from management (in time, money and resources) to realize their joint dream. (Of course, employees may be requested for a business case.) The results of the wishing well wiki can also be used as input for the strategy.
• Regularly advertise wishes via intranet (e.g. ‘Wish of the Week’) and other channels to attract attention to them and stress their importance.

There are no costs in setting up this wiki.

What has to be clear is that:

• Few ideas can be qualified as bad. In most cases a proposed embodiment, to realize the idea, can be bad/impractical/insufficient, but an idea/concept in itself is without form and mass and thus cannot be judged by arguments that relate to physical characteristics.
• If someone qualifies an idea as “bad” or “not viable”, this person actually disqualifies his own proposal for an embodiment that first came up when he/she heard of the new idea.
• We all know that “first time right” is an utopia, especially with something like innovation. It is generally accepted that the innovating process is a painstaking process that requires the input from many different sources.
• In our view the real innovation process focuses on the process in which an embodiment is reshaped and transformed up until the moment that it is generally accepted that the end result is achieved or at least nearly met. Innovation, in our view, should not be aimed at the optimization of an idea itself.

These concepts fit perfectly on the concept of a wiki.

Concluding
This idea, which is also called ‘inbound open innovation’, can easily be extended to the whole organization. Other employees in the organization can also have (product-related) wishes. Sharing them and building upon them, leading to innovations could be done on a global scale too. (Refer to Dell’s Ideastorm, Innocentive and IBM’s Innovation Jam for inspiring examples.) A more sophisticated platform than the wiki could be needed to manage this global process.

References
[1] Phil McKinney, “The Fear of Innovation”.
[2] Ed Catmull, “How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity”, in: HBR, Sept. 2008.
[3] Teresa Amabile and Mukti Khaire, “Creativity and the Role of the Leader”, in: HBR, Oct. 2008.
[4] Osvald Bjelland and Robert Wood, “An Inside View of IBM’s ‘Innovation Jam’”, in: MIT Sloan Management Review, Fall 2008.
[5] Allan Scherr, “Managing for Breakthroughs in Productivity”, Jan. 2005.
[6] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity. Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention.
[7] G.S. Altshuller, Triz.
[8] James Cash et al., “Enterprise Integration. Teaming Up to Crack Innovation”, in: HBR, Nov. 2008.
[9] Jim Collins, Good to Great. Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, New York 2001.
[10] Meeting More Minds

Pay It Forward

Have you seen the movie 'Pay it forward'? You probably all have and I'm the last one to catch up! ;-) But if you haven't seen the movie, go and rent or buy it. It's worth your time and money. Pay it Forward is an intriguing movie with a powerful message. It's about leadership, small decisions make a big difference, change can happen, social networks, etc. Here's a very interesting part to get you to watch the whole thing. Enjoy!

Tags van Technorati: social networking,change,sharing

Trust in a Smart Way

A couple of days ago I posted about 'candor'. In that same issue of HBR another article was written about 'trust'. Roderick Kramer wrote "Rethinking Trust" (June 2009) - summary pdf here.

The open source, web 2.0 and knowledge management domain talks about trust a lot. We should be opener as people and as companies. We should trust our customers more. Etc.

However the economic turmoil we're in and how we got there puts a question mark behind 'trust'. Isn't it naive to trust? And to be open? If you don't watch out people will run off with your product ideas and, even worse, your money.

Kramer wants to 'rethink trust'. We can learn who to trust and how to trust in a more disciplined and sustained way. Even though "human beings are naturally predisposed to trust. (...) We're born to be engaged and to engage with others, which is what trust is largely about."

Kramer defines several rules to help us trust in the 'right' way:

1. Know yourself
2. Start small
3. Write an escape clause
4. Send strong signals
5. Recognize the other person's dilemma
6. Look at roles as well as people
7. Remain vigilant and always question

Of course he elaborates on these rules. I thought number 3 is interesting. Research says when "people have a clearly articulated plan for disengagement, they can engage more fully and with more commitment." Never thought of that. Is this true to you? I'm not sure it is to. But maybe I don't "know myself" (number 1) well enough... ;-)

Tags van Technorati: trust,transparency,business,culture

Creating a Culture of Candor

I recently learned an important new word: candor. "Candor" is honesty, openness, sincerity. HBR ran an interesting article about this term and what it means for business some time ago: "What's needed next: A Culture of Candor" (June 2009) by James O'Toole and Warren Bennis.

When talking about 'enterprise 2.0' and openness and transparency, words like 'trust' and 'authenticity' are often also discussed. Another important aspect is 'candor'. The authors stress its importance due to the context we live and work in:

Now the forces of globalization and technology have conspired to complicate the competitive arena, creating a need for leaders who can manage rapid innovation. Expectations about the corporation's role in social issues such as environmental degradation, domestic job creation, and even poverty in the developing world have risen sharply as well.

According to the authors this context asks for a specific type of leadership. The metric of corporate leadership will be: "the extent to which executives create organizations that are economically, ethically, and socially sustainable."

For leaders 'transparency' is one of the ways to go, although it seems to be contradictory to most leaders:

Organizational transparency makes sense rationally and ethically, and it makes businesses run more efficiently and effectively. But leaders resist it even so, because it goes against the grain of group behavior and, in some way, even against human nature.

Even though they know and are learning - as we all are! - that the "ability to keep secrets is vanishing - in large part because of the internet."

What leaders - and we all do - forget is this culture of transparency, of candor, does not come automatically. It's hard. It has lots to do with the way we see information and knowledge. And do we accept that knowledge is no longer power?

A culture of candor doesn't just develop on its own - the hoarding of information is far too persistent in organizations of all kinds. That said, leaders can take steps to create and nurture transparency. The bottom line with each of these recommendations it that leaders need to be role models: They must share more information, look for counterarguments, admit their own errors, and behave as they want others to behave.

So, what's the first step towards a culture of candor?

... create an unimpeded flow of information and an organizational climate in which no one fears the consequences of speaking up. ...extensive share of information is critical to both organizational effectiveness and ethics.

Because "...better information helps them make better decisions."

Now, let's get to work and create this culture!

Tags van Technorati: openness,culture,knowledge management,sharing,transparency,leadership

Too Many Ideas?

Can you have too many ideas? I've been musing about this question lately. And can the amount of ideas you have be stalled by the context you work in? With 'context' I mean: your colleagues, your work tools, the culture of the company, etc.

I'm curious what your answer would be to these questions. I'll share my experience after you share yours!

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Too many ideas? http://twurl.nl/jr7eov

Tags van Technorati: ideas,innovation,culture