My Highlights from The Digital Workplace Trends Report 2012 by @netjmc - part 2

In my last post  I shared some of my highlights from Jane McConnell's Global Digital Workplace Trends 2012 report. We left off describing how some organizations used their intranet to support employees in the field. This brings us to the mobile intranet.

Mobiel intranet

Delivering the intranet and digital workplace to mobile was seen as important by 7% of the respondents in 2011. In 2012 30% thinks mobile is important and is investing. I'm disappointed to see that IT is defining the strategy in this area, according to the report. The goal of mobile is to improve communication and productivity. Corporate news and the people finder are the most important mobile intranet features. I would hope mobile is a business initiative with business in the lead and that the mobile features would be more closely related to the core business processes. I'm curious what we'll see in next year's report with respect to mobile.
A special finding from the report was that organizations with many employees without direct access to the intranet, are able to define clear goals for mobile intranet. And most mobile intranets are based on the existing platform of the intranet.
Location-based services are still in an early phase (45% has plans in this direction). In most organizations mobile services via intranet don't have a high priority. On the other hand 35% already have mobile services for their external customers (internet). Security and costs are the biggest barriers to work on mobiel intranet.

Intranet leadership
When can you say your organization is in the leading league of intranets? The report shows one of the following categories have to apply:

1. The digital workplace is the primary workspace
2. Internal social tools are well-integrated in the organization
3. A fully-functioning digital steering committee makes strategic decisions over the internal and external development of digital channels.

Only six of the respondents have reached this level!

Intranet governance

The ownership and management of the intranet is mostly the responsibility of Communications and IT. Sometimes HR also joins the group. Business functions hardly ever have a role in governance and management. An interest fact is that organizations reported when they moved ownership of the intranet to Knowledge Management and HR this was very beneficial to them.
Only 17% of the organizations have a digital steering committee, strategically directing the internal and external digital information and communication streams. The primary business functions are part of this committee.
Ownership and governance still don't receive the attention they need in most organizations. The leading intranet organizations do spend a lot of time and money in this area. Most other respondents say they are working on improving the intranet organization.
I like the way the report distinguishes between companies with lots of operational employees without a computer and companies in which almost all have a computer. The report mentioned an intriguing fact in this context: Companies that have a deep integration of their intranet with the primary processes, are mostly companies with many operational employees. The report shows that many companies are working on this deeper integration.
Related to governance is also measurement. 75% of the respondents don't measure at all. The most mentioned metrics on the collaborative side of the intranet are 'satisfaction' and 'activity' of users. In other parts of the intranet 'activity' is swapped by 'reach within the company’. 

That's my summary of this year's report! I want to congratulate Jane with her newest report. Lots of work has been put into it. And now we get to reap from the results! Thanks, Jane.

Of course the 160 page report contains more than I can describe here. You can order the full Digital Workplace report here. By the way, if you fill out the survey, you get the report for free!

And again, I'm wondering: Do you recognize the above-mentioned trends? What do you think are the most important Digital Workplace trends? And, what are the biggest challenges for organizations with respect to their (future) intranet?

My Highlights from the Digital Workplace Trends Report 2012 by @netjmc - part 1

There's one great place to go if you want an overall update on the intranet and digital workplace state-of-the-art and that's Jane McConnell's yearly Digital Workplace Trends Report.

Just like in previous years I read the report and would like to highlight parts of the report for you in two posts. In another post I'll reflect a bit on this year's findings. I hope this will trigger you to buy and read the report for yourself. There's much more in the report than I can write about here.

From intranet to digital workplace

This year more than 400 organizations participated in Jane's 6th survey. The title of the report shows how much development there is in the intranet landscape. We are moving from intranet to digital workplace.

And Jane has been documenting this trend for several years. I think this year is the first year I hear more people talk about the digital workplace than intranet. Of course this broadening of the scope of Jane's survey and report also brings along some difficulties (for Jane...). The digital workplace is a much bigger topic than intranet.

Fragmented digital workplace

The intranet was mostly about the traditional internal digital publishing platform with static content. The digital workplace collects all the online, internal content and applications a knowledge worker needs to get things done. The report shows only a small number of organizations has a central, uniform digital workplace. Most have a fragmented landscape, consisting of separate tools.

Still can't find anything

Search is still horrible. Hardly any organizations are happy with their intranet search. Leading organizations pay much more attention to improving search. Users are frequently polled to test search results, search patterns and data are analyzed, and functionality, like tagging, is added to improve search.

Concerns

Information security is a concern for many companies with respect to the digital workplace. As is the quality of information. Other concerns are the influence of the social platforms on the company's structure and culture, and multi-linguality.

Enterprise 2.0

More and more companies are rolling out internal social media. Usually this is set up next to the existing intranet and is integrated into it over time. On the other hand only 8 % is working on organization-wide deployment of internal social media. The data seems to show that bottom-up roll outs are stagnating. But still 50% of the respondents is investing in this area. As you would expect podcasting and social bookmarking are used the least internally. And ‘prediction markets’ (although they were popular some time ago) and ‘gamification’ (now very trending, for sure on the Web) are not mentioned at all.

Internal social media ROI

What most organizations get from internal social media is well known. Improved knowledge sharing, recognition and location of experts, etc. Cost reduction and faster market penetration is not mentioned a lot. As is improvement of and integration with business processes. The report does show that successful internal and external adoption of social media are related.

Intranet in the field

I really enjoyed the section in the report about 'intranet in the field'. Some organizations shared how they use their intranet to support employees in the field, working directly with customers. Those employees could connect to the internal company and ask questions, consult the internal procedures, etc. This topic relates to mobile intranet. I'll share the mobile trends in the next post.

So, do you recognize the above-mentioned trends? What do you think are the most important Digital Workplace trends? And, what are the biggest challenges for organizations with respect to their (future) intranet?

I'll post part 2 of my highlights in a couple of days.

Have a nice weekend! :-)

Next Generation Ecosystems by @dhinchcliffe #e20s

As promised I would blog about the final keynote of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit soon. Now's the time! Dion Hinchcliffe wrapped up the Summit with a good keynote about 'Next Generation Ecosystems'. I'll share my notes with you. His slides can be found here.

Dion's presentation started out with a whole list of trends in the social business/enterprise 2.0 space. Like:

• Implementations of e2.0 tools have become bigger and faster
• All data show sustained benefits after rolling out e2.0 tools
• Everything is becoming social inside company (people-focus)
• Ownership of social is not clear
• The predicted social data explosion happened
• Mining social data has become a major industry (lots of different vendors)
• Internal and external is blurring, but it has not gone as far as most thought it would go
• There's some talk about social business standards
• Social is becoming more integrated in work (was isolated before)

Dion also relates to the Alcatel-Lucent (slides about the case can be found here) and Cenex case. What I found interesting is that Dion said 25% of the participants is active and 6% are seen as contributors. Compared to other cases, Dion calls this a high-level of adoption.

When relating to the gains of social in the enterprise, Dion pointed to the recent McKinsey study. This study showed that companies using social technology can quantify the benefits and that "fully networked companies" benefit the most from social.

I really liked how Dion showed that social business and enterprise 2.0 is not happening in isolation. There are greater trends, like the high productivity levels, the consumerization of IT and the changing technology landscape that shape social. These greater trends require companies to organize for radical change.

So, what should the social business flow be like: listen/analyze > guide (strategy) > engage (and then listen again).

Dion closed his presentation with a list of key success factors:

• Everyone must be able to participate (use the social tools)
• Turn on network effects by default
• Cultivate the right communities
• Plan for change and the unexpected (take advantage of them)
• Remove barriers to participation
• Listen, analyze and engage continuously
• Integrate social into the flow of work

This wraps up my live-blogging of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit. I hope you enjoyed the posts. Shortly I'll blog about my insights and learnings from this year's Summit.

Some notes from the breakout about the Future of the Enterprise 2.0 Manager Role #e20s

Breakout participants: Bart Schutte, Cordelia Krooss, Jean-Yves Huwart and myself.

I thought I'd share some of my notes about the breakout and continued discussion we had about the role of the Enterprise 2.0 Manager, now and in the future. The discussion started where we left off after Cordelia presented her vision on this role. One of the main discussion points was whether we will need a e2.0 manager in the future organization (organization 2.0, as Cordelia called it).

The notes and statements are not my own, but are a collection of what we shared in our breakout.

• When 2.0 principles are pervasive in the organization we don’t need the e2.0 champion. But doesn’t it depend on the type of organization? Does it change all organizations fundamentally? Does it apply to all businesses?
• Transparency and externalization are business trends. E2.0 tools give the company a means to relate to these trends.
• Organizational levels and structures will continue to exist, but there importance will change. 
• There will always be a tension between the human side and the capital market side of organizations (leading to hierarchy, control, shareholder importance).
• E2.0 brings us back to what organizations used to be: a collections of humans with a certain goal. So humans are important (again).
• A survey says employees leave the company because of their boss in 70% of the cases.
• Do people do what is good by themselves, can the organization always organize themselves?
• E.g. not all people blog or tweet about their work. Why not? Do we really all want to be an intrapeneur?
• We are coming to except a human as a human. Both is true: there are entrepeneurs/automonous thinking people and people that are not geared this way and are happy as it is.
• We lost some of the humanity of business (more and more pressure, also at school). But we’re learning the importance of humans for the company. There will be more and more focus on the human. Collaboration will become integral, but the focus on the human will need to be paid attention to.
• E2.0 leads to a people-centric organization (Org. 2.0). The e2.0 manager should lead to the Org. 2.0.
• When we talk about people-centric, as HR, we mean the company maintains the talent pool so we achieve goals as a company. So, getting the best out of people. 
• Give people passion back, is that the core of e2.0? 
• For the jump from the Introduction to the more Professional set up (refer to Cordelia's slides) we need a longer-term vision (BASF). Which is the chart leading to Org. 2.0. Other change in corporate culture is addressed.

In sum: 

1. There clearly is a movement towards a new type of organization: people focus. Social tools are one of the things contributing to it.
2. These tools allow the company to become more collaborative, contribute more. This will become more primary. 
3. The e2.0 manager facilitates this movement. The more collaborative an organization is the less need there is for champions. In any case the role will be a more consulting than management or champion role.

Regaining Business Agility #e20s

At Track 2 of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit about 'Regaining Business Agility'. Track speakers are Bart Schutte (Saint-Gobain) and Flavie (Pernod-Ricard).

Saint-Gobain is built up out of lots of smaller companies. They started with Jive to support business collaboration for all businesses, all functions, all people.
They started with one business segment. The business objectives are:

1. Enable global teams to form and work effectively (was not possible before, can't be done via email)
2. Enable people to connect and build new relationships
3. Enable greater sharing of information (more innovative, faster to market, more customer oriented)

The tool can meet many types of needs, from process, projects to functions and communities of practice (structured to unstructured).

So, people will be in many groups, it will be there workplace, and Jive should replace email. 

What did it bring them?

1. New markets for existing products were found
2. Faster time to market
3. Improved R&D designs
4. Increased employee satisfaction

Problem for them: 70% of the groups are closed. Will help them open up slowly.

How are they rolling Jive out? They use structured adoption.

1. Adoption is lead by the business
2. Adopt quickly
3. Focus on structured groups for launch (3-10)
4. Train users. And train again.

Currently 6000 people use Jive (of the 100.000 employees total), but they have touched every business.

Lessons learned:

• Every company needs to find their own path and way
• This is about changing user behavior (change is hard, even if you want to change)
• It's about developing a new competitive advantage

Next up is Flavie of Pernod. The moved to a digital strategy. Four steps:

1. Start of group of experts
2. Use a group of evangelists to spread the word.
3. Sponsor by CEO

They are heavily using iPhone and equipped their sales people with them (also use SalesForce). They also have a customer platform.

The keys to success:

• Proper tools (computers and network, sales and iPhones, Managers and iPad)
• We need time and change management (promote and seduce, explain, demonstrate, listen and adapt

Models for the Social Business Transformation #e20s

The 2nd day at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit starts with a panel discussion about 'Models for the Social Business Transformation' (track 1). Panelists are Luis Suarez (IBM), Jerome Colombe (Alcatel-Lucent) and Nicolas Rolland (Danone).

Jerome starts with a presentation about his experiences at Alcatel-Lucent. This company is in a huge transformation. The transformation was done in less than 2 years, and started just after Ben Verwaayen started at Alcatel. Engage has become part of their DNA.
They set up a platform called Engage. Now with 60.000 profiles (80% of the org.) and 4.000 groups. There are two official community managers, but the rest is managed by the employees themselves. People decide for themselves what they do with the platform.
They analyze what's happening in the platform with social network analysis.

Benefits for Alcatel were:

1. It restructured the internal communications
2. Commitment to convince and help colleagues (engagement of whole of larger part of organization)
3. Emergence of crowdsourcing principles

Risks and pitfalls (the dark side) are:

1. Copycat of bad hits (copying the existing the existing silos, official vs UGC for comms)
2. Bypass organizational decisions (challenge all decisions made before, sensitve topics, question re-organizations)
3. Questioning impacts for social networting (overload of info, anonymous comments, outdated threads)

Alcatel learned as they went along.

Nicolas also tells about the social business steps Danone is taking. Collaborate, innovation and acceleration were drivers for the roll out of social networking tools in 2009. Opened it for everybody (100.000 work at Danone, 40.000 have a computer). In the 1st year 10.000 people joined. The system allows you to fill in a profile with skills and create communities.

After the 1st year they wondered how they would reach everybody. The network was not the intranet (and it should be they found). So they worked on connecting to mobile devices (with wifi access everywhere within Danone) and video. They are also trying to move towards integrating learning and gaming in the network.

Danone does not find that English should be the main language in the network. English is not used the most in Danone anyway (more Spanish, Indonesian).

The Road to New Models of the Social Enterprise by @richardcollin and JC Kugler #e20s

Final keynote of day 1 of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit. Richard Collin and Jean-Christophe Kugler of Renault will talk about New Models for the Social Enterprise.

Just refer to Emanuele Quintarelli's post (scroll down to part of the post about this keynote). ;-)

Thoughts on the Maturing of the Enterprise 2.0 Manager #e20s

Last breakout of this day at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit about 'The Maturing of the Enterprise 2.0 Management'. Breakout speakers are Cordelia Krooss, Luis Suarez and Jamil Ouaj.

Cordelia kicks off with her thought on the maturing of Enterprise 2.0 management. She gives an overview of how BASF organizes Enterprise 2.0, specifically the community manager roles and the relatedness to high-level management.
Their maturity model distinguishes between pioneering, piloting, introduction, professionalization (where they are now), business organization (opening up more to the outside world) and organization 2.0 (e2.0 is the way we do business).
The role of the e2.0 manager will co-evolve with these steps project manager, adoption manager, business consultant, strategic consultant and no e2.0 manager anymore.

First question: will there really be no need for management when we reach the Organization 2.0 phase? Luis replies by saying: Do you measure how many emails people are sending and how much they are calling?

The maturity model shows this is an evolution. Once you get started, it's a life time journey, says Luis. Content is not king, people are. Focus on people, then content. People (and the links between them) are king, not content.

We should remember that we did business before we had tools. It's not (only) about the tools, but connecting with people and talking and listening to them.

Mastering the Social Work Mindset - HR and Enterprise 2.0 #e20s

This breakout (track 3) at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit is about 'Mastering the social work mindset'. Breakout speakers are Anthony Poncier and Ellen Trude.

Anthony kicks off with a sort presentation about HR and Enterprise 2.0. (Last year there was only one participant from the HR department at this Summit. This year there are many more.) HR should be on the wagon because people are the core of organizations. McKinsey recently stressed that the role of HR in E2.0 is essential. Why? Because of the inter-generational cultures (millenials, etc.), new job descriptions (like the community manager), talent management, impact on visibility and mobility (career development, L&D), etc.
It's important to look at and change the tradition HR processes for E2.0 success.

Ellen doesn't like the word training relating to social media and enterprise 2.0. Training is too much a one-way lecture. At Ellen's company they developed a social learning environment. The courses are designed for the people and not the other way around. In the environment they start with suggestions for tasks not a prescriptive tasks. The trainers are facilitators and the participants train each other. The results surprised Ellen. There was huge amount of feedback between participants. It relates to workplace learning, instead of formal learning. Learning is more integrated into work. There was an immediate translation to their work.
Another interesting thing Ellen tells about is how the HR department goes out and listens to the organizational social networks to find out what is working well and how to improve social learning.
Ellen is convinced the Training department has to change their mindset. The Training department will not be needed in the future. It will have in the networks.

Community and Engagement Management #e20s

Next breakout (track 1) at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit is about 'Community and Engagement Management'. Breakout speakers are Joanna Walczak (Lecko), Jerome Colombe (Alcatel-Lucent) and Jon Mell (IBM).

Joanna kicks off with a presentation about what should be understood by engagement in enterprise 2.0. Engagement is the Leitmotiv of community management. Engagement is linked to the employees' awareness of being part of a systemic organization.
A first step of building a successful community is that to acknowledge that the community already exists. The community should be more than sharing ideas. And it should be related to the corporate strategy.

How do you prove the value of the community for the organization? Prove that these new kinds of interactions are genuinely productive, help transform fruitful interactions into capitalizable assets, make individualism and collaborative behavior compatible through 'gamification', and, give some feedback  about the Return on Engagement.

Also provide moderation guidelines for the community. Resist the urge to control the community, bridge between those that express themselves easily and those that don't and deal with conflict quickly and openly. (Although conflict is not seen too much because employees mostly engage in communities with their full name.)

Jon Mell shares an interesting example of a company that allows communities to be set up (using a tech platform), sets up metrics to measure the engagement in the community and if it doesn't live up to the engagement metics, they'll kill the community.

Jerome shares the Alcatal approach. He mentions that they have about 500 (official) community managers in place. They are an important part of the corporate strategy and change the strategy of the company regularly. 60k employees are in the social platform.

The discussion was mainly about if structure and/or management is needed for community (tools).

I asked a question, based on the above: Would you say a vibrant community is one that a company can try to kill but lives on anyway?
Another question was about the business case for a community.

Designing the Social Workplace #e20s

This track (nr 3) at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit is about ‘Designing the Social Workplace’ with Miguel Membrado (Kimind), Marie Khayet (Essec Business school), Frederic Williquet (SD Worx) and Jane McConnell (NetStrategy/JMC). This breakout was prepared before the Summit in Meet-ups. The insights from the meet-ups are shared first.

What is a social workplace? What is the digital workplace and how is it becoming social? There are four enablers of the digital workplace, according to Marie?

1. Flexible work hours
2. Technology
3. Social media platform
4. Cloud-based services 

How can this be integrated in the corporate tools? The social workplace is not an IT system but an ecosystem with work in context.

Miguel goes into the company cultural issues with respect to Social Business. Not in all cultures openly sharing insights is normal. In companies like Google and IBM this is mainstream, but not in all companies.

They also looked at objectives and metrics. How do you measure adoption and metrics? Good tools have the potential to easily provide analytic information.

Finally they also talked about rewards. If you have the data, how do you reward employees? Do you reward employees or should their motivation come from within? In France explicit rewards is stranger than in the US, for instance.

The breakout speakers see most of the adoption problems coming from (middle) management, not employees. The most-heard reason to thwart adoption is information security. Adoption is most efficient when top-management is on board. It is important to give management good reasons and objectives to move in this space.

On the other hand, Jane thinks it’s more complex. It’s not just management and/or employees. It’s also legislation (for instance in the pharmaceutical industry). There, management would like to move, but also has to reckon with rules and laws in countries.

Frederic wonders: Is it really middle managers? Don’t they have to fill in the same processes? Is it middle management or is it the processes that should be reengineered? For this reason he thinks change has to come from the CEO.

As an intermezzo Jane gives a short presentation about her findings from the Digital Workplace Survey she conducts yearly (high recommended, by the way!). The leadership class of the Digital Workplace have: 

1. A digital board: strategic decision-making body for all digital channels: internal and external (17% have this). Interesting fact: business is involved more in leading organization.
2. Internal social collaboration: well-established in all or parts of the organization (all in 5% and 17% in parts)
3. Intranet or digital workplace: the way of working for the organization (10%) 

The key challenges for organizations can easily be derived from them.

Social Business Excellence by Yves Caseau #e20s

Yves Caseau of Bouyeau Telecom is the second keynote at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit. His talk is about Social Business Excellence.

Caseau starts out by giving an overview of the changing landscape and the need for social business. But also shows that elements of Enterprise 2.0 are very old (e.g. lean and 2.0 are closer than you think). His slides give a nice overview of the elements of social business found in lots of older management books. It shows that social business is an integration of many (older) insights.
There is a need for more business agility, because environments are changing faster and are more complex.

Enterprise 2.0 is a cure for "common congestion". Enterprise 2.0 solves 1.0 problems. For instance, how do we reach the right people. E2.0 tools help to do this faster and easier. And, another example, slow convergence of multi-author editing.

Recommendations:

• Integrate 2.0 in (decision and business) processes, not next to it
• Laissez-faire & faire-savoir (bottom-up, but top-down consolidation)
• Fractal deployment
• Lean philosophy: information producer is at the service of the info consumer

Caseau says we need business processes in this new world. They are (still) the backbone of the organization. He points to "lean" and shows how process oriented it is, but still very agile. This kind of process and structure is not that strict as we have come to know.

Conclusions:

• Scientific management (Taylor) needs an overhaul
• Enterprise 2.0 and lean management, approaches differ, but share a common ground
• These common grounds are an answer to the ever-increasing complexity of the enterprise and its environment

Understanding the Social Business Excellence by @rawn #e20s

I'll be live blogging the Enterprise 2.0 Summit. So my posts will contain typo's etc. Hope you don't mind!

First keynote of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit is about 'Understanding the Social Business Excellence' by Rawn Shah, Social Business Tranformation Expert at IBM.

We all know the core elements of Business Value Creation like Customer Value, Operating Efficiency, Quality in Operations, and Organization Culture. What is happening to this, is it changing? Is it still necessary?

Rawn starts out with a research fact: 65% of line of business buyers will buy without IT (Forrester).
Many of our organizations today have invisible walls. We would like to have fewer walls, or one wall between external and internal. Really is conversations are starting out everywhere and they´re scaling. This creates a bit of chaos. How do you make sense of this?
This does not imply the line of business is going away? Line of business is still important. So, how do we harness the power of these conversation. Start by adding structure. This does not imply control, but relates to places (where), people (who) and purpose (why).
We have to find out what insights from the conversations are most relevant (add value) to the elements of the business value creation. For HR they are different, than for IT, for instance.

How does Social actually create value?

1. Capture Unstructured Data (one of the old goals of KM)
2. Collaboration and Discovery (accelerating ideation and innovation, building engagement and strenghtening relationships, etc.)
3. Analytical Insight (attention management, pattern analysis, sentiment analysis, accelerating decisions based on data).
4. Transformation (integrating, process resiliency, handling process exceptions, alleviating process frustration)

And how does it apply to the business? Rawn applies the above-mentioned steps to Product and Service Innovation based on goals that this part of the business can have.

So, value creation = structured social experiences + line of business goals, challenges and processes + mappings goals to strategy to execution.