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).
Reason to Go Google is costs and the range of services. It’s a platform to build on.
Where's Enterprise 2.0 headed next? It's in the direction of providing real business value.
Enterprise 2.0 has been adopted at least a bit by most organizations. There's a nice spread of use cases, showed by research supported by Headshift.
Lee sees Enterprise 2.0 as a Trojan mice for organizational change. Small but impressive changes to the organization.
Enterprise 2.0 is still in the early phase, patchy and tool-centric (like the KM wave was in the beginning).
We're looking for quantifiable business improvements, like:
Where is business practice going wrong?
What have we learned that can help here?
Moving beyond e2.0 adoption:
Now he moves over to sharing open data to change behavior. Now the processes to send data up and down the organization is not real-time and not open. If it would be, every employee could change their behavior in increments.
Another future trends is social experience design: energizing networks. Lots of measuring and monitoring and changing on the fly. This could give you loads of information about the amount of engagement there is.
Finally, there are new opportunities for leadership. Leadership is not obsolete, but it will change. Or E2.0 helps business leaders to reach out. Intimacy at scale.
This can create meaningful change in organizations. It's not a full-frontal battle, or it shouldn't be. But it should weave in with the existing networks and structures. From biology we know we only need 5% to create flock!
Great end to the Enterprise 2.0 Summit!
If you don't impact the business process with Enterprise 2.0 you won't unlock value.
If you introduce a new tool, you can't make them use it. Tools should fit in their daily routine. If not, users will easily reject it.
There were differences about using force to get people to adopt Enterprise 2.0 tooling. Most said, Don't use force, make it voluntary. But it does depend on the type of e2.0 project. For instance, an example was given about social project management. In this case you agree to do project management in this way. But with communities using (a bit of) force is restrictive.
Helping people use e2.0 tools and integrating them in their work processes requires patience and lots of training. Sometimes you even have to start by explaining what a webbrowser is. Focus on the e2.0 concepts not on the tools. Most people understand the concepts better than the tools... Enterprise 2.0 projects almost always start as push, not pull. Start by solving daily problems. Because most people don't ask for e2.0 concepts and tools.
Context is a key word in this area. Linking people (expertise), information, processes and tools. Formal processes, information need context to understand them.
We also see a role for e2.0 in the definition of new formal processes and improve them continuously. Basically most of us are unconsciously looking for improvements to business processes.
Social tools and formal business tools are not or hardly integrated. (At least we don't have examples... We do see vendors moving into that space, like SAP.) People are not middleware. Extra tools are see as a barrier for knowledge workers. E.g. they live in their email. Every extra tool for sharing, storing, etc is seen as a hassle.
Also see Emanuelle Quintarelli's notes here.
JP Rangaswami couldn't make it... Too bad. So his talk has been turned into a discussion between Frank La Pinta, prof. Joachim Niemeier, Jamil Ouaj and Christian Wuerdemann.
Don't have much to blog about this discussion. Not that it wasn't interesting for sure. One important thing to pass on is that the European companies in the panel have not changed their organizational structure based on their e2.0 implementations. The middle management does not have a new role, according to the panel.
There was lots of discussion in the audience about this topic via Twitter.
Knowledge work, ideas and the like are like black boxes. We can't look into them. We are finding ways to open up these black boxes.
Increasing transparency in organizations and between organizations decreases risks and enables value-creation.
Oscar points to two cases in which they tried to increase workplace awareness using blogs and microblogs.
Oscar remarks that many of the legal issues we are now concerned with are the same as when email was introduced.
Usability issues leads to workarounds. Employees start to email everything, label everything as Confidential, copy (locally) to ensure access, share with USB sticks.
Lesson 1: There's a real challenge in finding the right balance between security and privacy.
Lesson 2: We need a balance between control and empowerment. Governance is good, but it should not tip over in such a way that employees don't feel empowered. Control and empowerment should walk hand in hand: policies vs. training, restrictions vs. tools, control vs. trust. If there are too many restrictions people will refrain from sharing.
Lesson 3: Transparency must go both ways. Transparency is good, but users should be explained clearly what happens to their information. Facebook e.g. is not transparent both ways.
A culture of trust is more secure than a culture of control.
Interesting how CheeChin compares the development cycles in the organization with the development of communication tools. The increasing speed in product development cycles at BASF requires different communication skills and tools.
Connect.BASF consists of three pillars:
It is a global platform.
Ho did they start? It started in Communications (by Cordelia Krooß). They convinced to start a steering committee around this topic (@shake ) with a board member as sponsor. CheeChin was in R&D. He had launched wiki's there. E2.0 was not started by IT. IT came in later. This project is now permanent.
In the launch phase they focused on IT implementation a lot. They have connect.BASF days with external, inspiring speakers. They do a lot of demo-ing and presenting. Consulting is also part of the job, helping departments/groups understand e2.0 and use tools.
Up to the pilot phase BASF had 1000 users. Lots of communications up till then after that they stopped communications.
CheeChin shows in numbers how Connect.BASF went viral: 15000 users! But signing up is not the whole game, he warns. Growth has been nicely spread out over the regions.
BASF's communities grew emergently. "Don't coach them from the beginning." They have 4 types: experts and professions (U4O), projects and working teams (O4O), social networking (U4U), initiatives and services (O4U). (U=users, O=organization)
Best practices for adoption:
Luis Suarez, Lee Bryant, Alexander Richter and Alexander Stocker will discuss adoption archetypes.
The Alexander's kick off with an overview of their research. They point back to the research that was done on Groupware in the past. This is a basis for the research on Enterprise 2.0.
Archetype nr. 1: Exploration. Continuously identifying feasible usage scenarios for IT-services which are suitable for any use.
Archetype nr 2: Promotion. Coordinated communication and targeted training of IT-services with focus on certain modes of use.
Their research shows: Wikis and weblogs have gained maturity, making promotion the dominant strategy in corporate settings.
Microblogging has the explanation strategy. Research will continue to see if that changes.
Luis takes the stage. Talks about BlueIQ - driving social software adoption at IBM. IBM started with social stuff 40 years ago with their forums. But in the modern sense of social software they started in 2001. Points to the whitepaper about BlueIQ.
Evangelism of social software is done bottom-up at IBM, with 1600 IBM volunteering ambassadors. This relates to a community building program with a teach the teacher program. And their execs are on board!
Stages:
IBM is between 3 and 4. But in some parts of the business not even in 1.
But along all the stage levels make sure you have governance and guidelines, focus on adoption, focus on measurement and work on the infrastructure. End goal: the social business.
The future for IBM is to focus on Enterprise Workflows, even outside of the organization.
Discussion:
Next talk/discussion with Rob Howard, Luis Suarez and Frank Schoenefeld.
Frank gives a list of 7 pitfalls of Enterprise 2.0.
Discussion:
Bertrand kicks off by focusing on Cultural issues in general, between Europe and the US and it's implications for Enterprise 2.0:
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.
The first talk is about "Manager 2.0" by prof. Richard Collin (Grenoble Ecole de Management) and Rolf Schmidt-Holtz (CEO Sony).
Collin wonders if 2.0 is a good extension in Enterprise 2.0. 'It's just a version number'. It doesn't stress enough the future enterprise will be totally different.
A new space is emerging. Not in the economy of good anymore, but in the economy of information. (Before the economy of good there was the economy of territory.) The north point is not north, Dow Jones, but 'you'.
Information is the new steam. The industrial age is passe. And it's moving fast. He tells about how long it took the book and the pc to move into our world. And relates that to the speed in which the Internet moved into our world. This has implications for leadership!
How should be define leadership in this new information era? Here's one: a leader can be defined by an ability to get others to be connected willingly.
Leader for the Enterprise 2.0 era:
He's the farmer of trust and a skills harvester.
Trust, walk the talk (is critical), you have to be what you see, be transparent, imagine, recognize and give (say merci!), to update and be update, to dare, focus on IT usage and not on the tools, to stimulate, to coach, solidarity and humility.
What defines a great leader? asks Rolf Schmidt, CEO Sony. They are good communicators, good colleagues.
Listening is important. The CEO don't know anything anymore. The distance between them and employees is too big.
You have the power, but don't have a knowledge, this goes for most CEO's. You have to be engaged, says Rolf Schmidt.
Great leaders rarely come out of big companies. Great innovations come from others, smaller companies usually, with constant dialogue.
Hardly any can come up with a great idea on their own. Points to the book and research by Steven Johnson, 'Where do good ideas come from?' Great ideas come to being by sharing.
Social networks (esp. Facebook) are key. The company is a social network. They developed an internal tool, Just Connect.
Discussion:
