Social business adoption best practices #e20s #socbiz

Back after a nice French lunch, Claire Flanagan and Rachel Happe talk about adoption/change and community management.

Claire simply had too much slides and information to give you a good summary. Which is great (to be clear)! I'll share a couple of notes from the talk below.

A nice overview of research Jive did on the value companies are getting was shared by Claire (and is inserted in this blogpost).

Business value of internal social was only realized when organizations did the following:

• senior leaders role-modelling
• integrate social into day-to-day activities
• removal of other tools

So, how to change your organization and get them ready for internal social? Claire shares the following steps:

• process (define what the new way of working looks like, definitely for executives - use cases, which is not persona-focused, focus on processes)
• incentives (reward open leadership, bonus tied to 'open' objectives)
• comms/marketing (executive 'launch' message, success stories)
• training/support (executive training, reverse mentoring)
• role models (recruit execs as 'advocates', use 'external' benchmarks)

Next up, Rachel Happe about driving engagement in (online) communities. Community management is the new management, according to Rachel.

Rachel starts by relating to the different communities out there: drama central, ghost town, a clique, etc.

Recommendations for engagement:

1. define the engagement you need
2. build effective engagement recipes
3. community management (I think...)

So, what is engagement? Valuable engagement advances something, like ideas, relationships, solutions, trust & reputation, and expertise or skill.

Engagement can look very different depending on the goal you have. It also depends are where you are in the relationship with the people you engage with. When you first run into someone, you engage differently than when it's your family.

I liked how Rachel recommended us to use different audiences and platforms to build community and engage with them. Different phases in work ask for different audiences and tools/platforms.

Social as Enabler for Strategic Business Excellence #e20s #socbiz

The first practice panel about 'Social as Enabler for Strategic Business Excellence' by Joachim Heinz and Martial Tardy.

First Tardy of Solvay about the Solvay and Rhodia merger facilitated by means of an Enterprise Social Network. Learnings:

• don't fear misconduct, fear a ghost town
• reverse the communication streams
• get in gear with a new editorial tempo
• get on top of social technologies

Next Heinz about Bosch's social business initiatives. Bosch has 300.000 employees. Why social business at Bosch? Because of the network society and to tap into the potential of the huge number of employees. They want to develop to an agile, open and transparent business system in a highly connected environment. Steps they distinguish are ( top-down approach):

1. guidelines and principle (e.g. only 20% closed communities, open/transparent by default)
2. technology and processes (developed an entirely new onboarding wizard developed jointly by Bosch and IBM - helps newcomers understand why, their platform is IBM Connections; built small use cases for daily work... also relating to core business processes)
3. leadership and enabling (reverse mentoring, community manager development program; they developed a kpi model for social business. The idea is: capability lead to a result, results depend on maturity)
4. organization (from hierarchy to network)

Very interesting talks. If you're not hear, I recommend you to check the slidedecks!

When new technologies become productive

Wired is my favorite work-related magazine by far. I read all editions from cover to cover (almost). Recently Wired celebrated its 20th anniversary with a special edition. Reading through that edition is a fascinating trip through history. And it's only been 20 years!

For their anniversary Wired also collected some of their most popular articles and bundled them into an ebook. One of the articles struck me. The article is titled: The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980 - 2020 and is written by Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden. I'm a sucker for these kind of articles. But I found this one intriguing because it was written some time ago. I was curious how well they predicted what was going to happen in the time we are living in now. Of course they got things wrong, but many predictions are quite correct. Go ahead, read the article and see for yourself.

But there's one part in this article that I wanted to share with you. It relates to all the posts that have been written about adoption of new (social) technologies and concepts. And whether social business has or hasn't caught in. The authors of this article point to some interesting research. They say:

Productivity, as it happens, becomes one of the great quandaries stumping economists throughout the 1990s. Despite billions invested in new technologies, traditional government economic statistics reflect little impact on productivity or growth. This is not an academic point - it drives to the heart of the new economy. Businesses invest in new technology to boost the productivity of their workers. That increased productivity is what adds value to the economy - it is the key to sustained economic growth.
Research by a few economists, like Stanford University's Paul Romer, suggests that fundamentally new technologies generally don't become productive until a generation after their introduction, the time it takes for people to really learn how to use them in new ways. Sure enough, about a generation after the introduction of personal computers in the workplace, work processes begin mutating enough to take full advantage of the tool. Soon after, economists figure out how to accurately measure the true gains in productivity - and take into account the nebulous concept of improvement in quality rather than just quantity.

I highlighted the core statement I wanted to share with you. One generation. That's a long time... And we've just started understanding, adopting and applying social concepts and tools to the enterprise, internally and externally. We all want change fast and in our lifetime. I can relate to that... But is it realistic? Does is really connect to the way the world, organizations and people work?

This statement, based on research by Paul Romer, makes me more modest about the things I would like to see happen and motivates me to continue to push on, evangelize, experiment, learn, etc. And I'm hoping it helps you too. Does it?

Notes and learnings from the SocialNow conference 2013 #socialnow

The 2nd edition of the SocialNow conference was held in the beautiful city of Lisbon. As you may remember SocialNow is a unique conference. The conference is organized by Ana Neves of KnowMan. The conference is about helping organizations compare and choose internal social tools. Several Enterprise 2.0 tool vendors have to present their tool relating to the situation of a fictitious company and its issues with collaborative project work and topic-based knowledge sharing. The program is complemented with keynotes from leading experts in the field. I really enjoyed this edition of SocialNow and thought it was even better than last year. I’ll share my notes and learnings from the conference in several posts. This is post nr 1. BTW: You can find a Storify by Paul Corney of day 1 and day 2 here.

Challenges

Emanuele Quintarelli kicked off the conference with a talk about the challenges of the social enterprise. As with many experts in the fields his talk was not "happy clappy". Internal social media and enterprise 2.0 has been around for some time now and the results are not all that positive. Even though several extensive reports by for instance McKinsey and Gartner show internal social can offer considerable affordances for organizations, Emanuele wonders what this really means for organizations trying to move forward with internal social. Do these studies really help them make their first or next steps?

Emanuele shares some facts and figures of what is really happening in organizations. Like:

• 28% of the knowledge workers actually use collaborative tools monthly.
• Gen x is the largest group of users not Gen Y.
• 64% of the organizations are not measuring anything w.r.t. internal social.

So, it looks more like a ghost city than a lively community. 50% of the social initiatives fail… By why do they fail?

Emanuele goes on to list several reasons why Enterprise 2.0 implementations fail. Primary reason is lack of purpose and support of the implementation with community management. Another reason is a lack of focus on people and the way they work. Emanuele stresses we should also pay attention to the negative things humans do like hoarding knowledge.

OK, but how should we start or proceed? (I bundled some of the points Emanuele listed separately.)

• Focus on people and communities. Connect to communities as living organisms. Community management is very important. It’s like an iceberg: not much is visible, lots is behind the scenes. It’s building relationships, back-channeling, planning, etc. Co-design is the single most critical factor to success. And respect fear people (can) have. “Change is not death, fear of change is death.”
• Focus on change (management), helping people to work better. ‘Technology changes, humans don’t’. But is this is really true? Adoption is not the end goal, but important. Success is about the majority, not the early adopters.
• Start from the business. Embed social in the flow. How do the social enterprise initiatives relate to business? Define goals.
• Try, fail, evolve. Work in pilots!
• The social enterprise is more about meaning than money. Think about how you reward employee for participating.

One last thing, says Emanuele: be human and have fun!

Building Your Social Intranet – Step 3 Top-down vs. bottom-up roll-out

OK, we defined the goal(s) of our social intranet. Now we have to get commitment from high-level management, right? It depends. I don’t think this is the only way to go, although we have learned to do it this way: write a plan, get budget by getting commitment from management, get IT on board and start rolling out. This type of planning always lead to long projects.

I think internal social media concepts and tools challenge us to think differently. Mostly the tools are really cheap and everybody can set them up and configure them. A Yammer network for instance is up and running in 30 seconds. So, why don’t you go ahead and do this? Not because setting up the tool is the only thing that much be done for a successful roll out of social tools. I’ll get back to that in a bit. But you can do this because you can. The big question is: Are you dare-devil enough to do it? Or is this impossible in your organization? In many Dutch organizations this way of working is allowed and even encouraged. So take your chances! 

Of course, eventually you will need support from management. There will be a time in which you will need to invest in people and technology and you will need money for that. But if things are the ways they should be, you can prove the organization should move in your direction based on great cases coming from your bottom-up deployment. Right?

A trick to get high-level management on board is to show them your successes. And also by asking commitment for a policy document on internal social media use. My experience is management love this kind of document and it could be their first step towards actually understanding and using social platforms. 

How are you planning to deploy your social intranet? Bottom-up or top-down? And if you already have rolled out one, what are your experiences with these two ways social intranet adoption?

[Photo credit]

User adoption strategies for Sharepoint - part 2 #intra12

Part 2 of my notes from the workshop about User Adoption strategies for Sharepoint by Michael Sampson. (Part 1 can be found here.)

We're at stage 3: Enlivening Applicability. Ways to do this:

1. Over the shoulder watching: show how people use the tool in practice and learn from them
2. Group re-imagining: help a group see beyond current work practices
3. Embedded champions: one participant mentioned she connected to secretaries to speed up and encourage technology adoption. (I agree!)
4. Sandbox for experimentation: don't go live right away, but start small, let people play with the technology and use the technology for the roll out itself.
5. Easy first steps: closing down the options, focus on some affordances of the technology not all.
6. Built it and they will come: set up the tech and see if users will adopt it by themselves

Next phase (4): Making it real. How do you make it real?

1. Provide zero other options. E.g. take away all other platforms but one. Experience from the participants is this works very well.
2. Offer start doing, stop doing patterns
3. Bulk loading party. Use when lots of content has to be migrated, for instance. This strategy is hardly used.
4. Internal User groups

OK, but how do we measure user adoption? Drucker says: You cannot manage what you cannot measure. Sampson shows how a company built a business case for a collaboration platform, focusing on hard numbers (savings, productivity, etc.). Focus on the affordances on the tool, process and organization level.

What to do if nothing works? Change jobs or go back to the user adoption phases and find out what you're doing wrong.

And that rounds up the pre-conference workshop!

User adoption strategies for Sharepoint - part 1 #intra12

My notes from the pre-conference workshop with Michael Sampson about User Adoption strategies for Sharepoint. (This workshop is part of the Intranet Conference.)

Technology is easy compared to getting people to use the technology. Most people aren't first wave users. They don't say: Give the new tech to me. They ask: "Why should I use it? What is the reason for the new technology? My work has to be improved by the new technology." They basically tolerate the tools. If something is easier it's better for them than that it is perfect.
Most organizations assume adoption will be 100%. So, there's a problem. The objective is not user adoption. It's the overal effectiveness of the organization for instance. Or, improve work.
The overal approach to user adoption is very important. (Refer to the Collaboration Roadmap.)
Research shows that people are least satisfied when IT rolls out and the most dissatisfied....

Sharepoint is a platform. This means there are loads of ways you can use it. "Users need to know to much to use Sharepoint." Sharepoint roll outs are mostly too IT focused.

Roadblocks to adoption:

1. Roadblocks from individuals, like bad previous experiences, the system is terrible, gives transparency, etc.
2. Roadblocks from groups, like group habits, irrevocable change, work practice and technology are inseparable, etc.
3. Roadblocks from organizations, like organizational culture, inconsistency (vision, direction), time, playing politics and other systems.
4. Roadblocks from nations, like strict privacy laws (Germany and France).

Five models of change:

1. Stages of change: change is a process, not an event.
2. Diffusion of ideas: people follow 'opinion leaders' and that becomes the new 'social norm'
3. Culture and work practice: work practice is part of culture. Culture is not the first and only issue. It's the start of the conversation not the end.
4. Sticks and carrots: incentives, beat people...

So, change is a process, people follow people they respect, it's a non-lineair process, cultural change takes more than technology change and increased utility is a big motivator.

Four stages model of user adoption:

1. Winning attention: what are others doing?, how we get them interested?
2. Cultivating basic concepts: explain how stuff works (e.g. the Sharepoint in plain English video), train
3. Enlivening Applicability: explore reasons and value
4. Making it real: make is personally relevant

When you roll out a new technology, like Sharepoint, make sure you focus on 5-7 key affordances people will have when using the new platform. W.r.t. Sharepoint this can be lists and document versioning for instance.
Classroom training and web-based training is a way to support the successful adoption of new technology. But, again, make the training focused on a couple of points and relevant to their work. Also, pages on the intranet can be used to train people. Example for Sharepoint can be found here.

This is part 1 of my pre-conference workshop notes. Part 2 will be published in a bit!

4 Big Intranet Questions

Jane McConnell recently shared 4 questions about intranet (aka the web workplace) that she is going to ask several panelist at an upcoming conference. Big and good questions, in my opinion. Her questions are:

1. Are we reaching the end of the intranet as we know it? How do you imagine intranets to be in the future?
2. Enterprise search seems to be essential in today’s world of masses of content in the managed intranet, in collaborative spaces and in enterprise social networks. Some people see “search’ as the logical point of convergence and the ideal user interface for the “digital workplace”. What is your vision of search and its role in the digital enterprise?
3. How do you see the evolution of “governance’ in a world where managed content and user-generated, spontaneous content are blended?
4. If you were to give one piece of advice to organizations just starting the social (or 2.0) journey, what would it be?

Jane wondered what her blog readers would answer. Here are my answers (also posted as a comment to the blogpost):

1. The traditional intranet will become much smaller, more focus will be on social tools and mobile access. I think stuff like location and gamification will also have influence on the intranet (or digital workplace…).
2. Search is important, but social search can compensate bad intranet search. I see tools like Yammer being used to help colleagues find internal info and apps more quickly. Just ask the question and others will point you to the location on the intranet/digital workplace.
3. Governance will be more important than ever. You don’t need to much governance around an intranet with 100s of static pages. You do need facilitation, community management around 100s of colleagues sharing and connecting within the organisation. Governance will focus on creating the playing field, facilitation and encouragement, less on control and enforcing.
4. Try, experiment, go for it. Try internal social media on the edges of the company if you’re not allowed to roll it out centrally. And try to connect internal social tools to the core business processes and goals. Show value there and managers and decision makers will love you!

Do my answers make sense? Do you agree/disagree with them?

Internet Trends 2011 and on

There is one presentation I love watching every year. It's loaded with data and just sets the agenda for the coming year. It's Mary Meeker's talk at the Web 2.0 Summit. You can watch it here:


 And find the slides here.

As I said, it loaded with data and insights. I'll highlight just a few. Striking is the international growth of the internet. It's definitely not the US-only in the internet. And Africa and South-America are continents to pay attention to.
Another thing is the speed of adoption of new communication technology is increasing, even in recession.
The speed of adoption of the iPhone was fast compared to the iPod, but just look at how quickly the iPad took over the market.
The next big thing according to Meeker? Everything that has to do with our ears; Sound/audio. And, of course, the continuing growth of mobile.

Why is Intranet so Hard?

Why is intranet so hard to get right? It's one of the things I keep wondering about. Especially after reading the Global Intranet Trend reports, following discussions on LinkedIn groups and listening to talks at conferences. There definitely is progress in intranet deployment, but the steps are small.
I'd like to share my thoughts on why intranet is hard. As in all (my) blogposts I don't not claim to have all the answers and reasons. I'd love to hear from you why you think intranet is hard (or maybe I'm getting it all wrong: intranet is easy).

Right
With 'get right' I mean having an intranet that really fits the needs and processes of a company, truly supports employee in their daily work, etc. It's an intranet with which the company is happy. It's a business critical 'tool'.

Reason 1: People and technology
To me the most important reason why it's hard to get intranet right is: people and technology don't fit. An organization is made up of people, hopefully focused on working towards shared goals. In human interaction all kinds of important and subtle things count. They're hard to grasp and fit into rules and processes, but they're there. More and more we try to support people with technology. This is great. But people are not electronic and/or digital, they're human. Technology isn't. Connecting people to technology is hard (if not impossible). Although the 'social space' has moved technology in the right (human) direction. Intranet is technology (for the larger part). For that reason I think it never fits the organization (people) perfectly, making it hard for people to be happy with it.

Reason 2: Business and intranet
Another reason is that many intranets seem to have no relation with the core of the business. 'We need a space to share news, information and communicate.' Great. But what does that have to do with the core of the business? Relating news, information and communication to the core of the business is hard. To me it's obvious. The importance of information and communications flows is crucial to all successful companies. However, lots of decision makers don't see this. They say: making products/services and delivering them is our core. Relating this statement to the intranet is essential for a successful intranet. And it's hard for many to actually do it. Most intranets are out there in splendid isolation. It doesn't relate to or impact the core of the business.

Reason 3: Information and 'information'
Informing and communicating are often reasons to set up an intranet. One thing I think we tend to overlook is the difference between the concept of 'information' that IT is selling and the real concept of 'information'. This difference also makes it hard for an intranet to get it right. On most intranets information is published by an owner, has little relation to other information or people, has no context and doesn't evolve in meaning over time. Real information comes from a person with time (history) and location, it has meaning because there is context, it changes over time, etc. Intranet usually doesn't take the real concept of 'information' into account.

Reason 4: Intranet context
'We need a central place to share news and information.' This is a top reason for an intranet. This statement is almost always done by a central organization, like the Communications department. So they set up and roll out an intranet (after doing some user research). But if we didn't have an intranet, would employees still get there news and information? And how would they do that? They would and mostly via email.
The context of the intranet, the tools that are already there or are popping up for news and information sharing give the intranet a hard time. 'Why is a central space better than my own toolset? I get work done anyway.'

Reason 5: Intranet evolution
Relating to Reason 1, people and companies change all the time. New markets are targeted, new people join the company, others leave, etc. But most intranets stay the same as when they were released. As if the company hasn't changed over the years. Most intranets can't change, because they are digital and don't support real stuff going on in the organization. And they don't need to change because they don't relate to the core of the business.

Reason 6: Intranet itself
Relating to Reason 4: the intranet is conceived centrally, so it's also designed centrally. 'They' decide what information you need to get your work done. 'They' decide what navigation is best. Etc. Furthermore, because it's the central information and communication hub, everything gets stuffed into the intranet even if it doesn't fit well. E.g. process descriptions are published on the intranet, while everyone know they're outdated as soon as they've been published.

Comments welcomed
I'm curious what you think of this list. Do you (dis)agree with my list? Are there elements you'd add? Please feel free to comment on this post. Let's see if we can come up with a complete list!

Shortly, I'll also write a blogpost why intranet easy. Keep in touch! (UPDATE: Here's the link to that post.)

Using is Believing

Yep, using is believing. Most of the time at least. Try to explain someone why he/she should buy an iPad. Or should use Twitter. Or Google+. It's not very easy (but some are really good at it). Sometimes it's even frustrating, when your audience scrutinizes every sentence trying to describe the affordance of a tool. It's even one of the things I catch myself thinking when I give social media strategy workshops. 'They should just start doing it (in a smart way)'.
In the meantime, this doesn't keep me from talking, blogging, demoing to trigger people. Just like the first link in this post triggered me to write this post!

Insights from Social Media Workshops

I enjoy  leading workshops. Sharing my knowledge and experiences with others and learning from participant's knowledge and experience is truly inspiring.
I wanted to share some of my insights from the social media workshops I've been giving. The workshop focuses on social media as a hype or trend, social media strategy, social media concepts and tools, etc.

We're just getting started
One of the things that really strikes me is that we are only just starting to understand social media and experiment with it in practice insides companies and on the internet. I know there are examples of companies being successful in this space. But more than 90% of the people I get in my workshop haven't experimented with social media personally and in a corporate context, are often afraid to dip their toe into social media, find it hard to define next steps, etc.

Concepts and Tools
I usually start my workshop by talking about underlying concepts of social media. Understanding the concepts  is crucial to social media succes, in my experience. But most of the time I see people thinking: OK, great, let's get over to the tools please. I understand this and it's OK. Talking about specific thinks, like tools is just easier than talking about conceptual, even philosophical stuff. But this also tells me we have a way to go in social media. I have to constantly tell myself I belong to a group of people that is not the large majority.
Relating to tools, blogging is not too popular. And nobody knows social bookmarking. Microblogging and social networking are most popular.

Cases
The participants love social media cases. Talking about (the details of) cases could easily captivate a group all day long. And the cases don't have to end with: And they earned a lot of money with this campaign.

Strategy
Listening as the key to social media strategy is a huge eye-opener for most people. Most think you start with a goal and carry on from there. No, in this networked, complex world we start with listening. Deeply trying to understand what markets, customers and peers are saying.
Translating the strategy to practice is hard for most participants. Just doing social media is not common. Most wait and see and/or need help to take their first steps.

Sharing experiences
Sharing experiences is appreciated greatly. This doesn't only go for workshops about social media, I'd say. But I do think sharing in my social media workshop is valued also because social media touches very human spots. Like: how open are you about your deepest questions? Is it OK to say you don't know something? How open must you (or do you dare to) be in social media? Etc. Addressing these questions is important. It helps you move into social media and be more productive there.

To be clear, I'm not saying the above is weird. It's reality, it's the world we/I live in. And I just wanted to share that with you. Maybe you (don't) recognize my points. Please leave a comment to continue the conversation.
This is what I run into and deal with. And I love it. Have a great weekend!

The connected company by Dave Gray @davegray #sbs2011

What is social business? What does it look like? Dave Gray shares his view in napkin sketches.

Life expectancy of a S&P 500 company is getting shorter. It's 15 years now.

Companies are complex systems (shown by complex hierarchies). There are companies that make sense of other companies because they are so complex. Think Microsoft and government.

For every extra employee your profit goes down. For every 3 employees your profit per employee goes down. It is increasing, but by less and less. Or: diminishing returns.

However productivity goes up in cities when population grows. Why?

We think about companies as machines (stable, little relation to environment), but should start to think about them as organisms. That adapt to the environment.

Companies are made out of people. But they don't live long and can be less productive the larger they get.
Dave refers to Arie de Geus' book The Living Company. His findings are long-living companies are:

• decentralized. Porous boudaries, eccentric edges
• strong identity. Values, culture, beliefs
• active listening. Identify and jump on opportunities

Shouldn't we design the organization for connection (flocking) instead of division of labor (territory)? We should connect the core with the periphery.
It's the same in work. We split work into separate tasks in processes (dogma). We should design for learning by defining standard protocols and shared services.

Lessons from urban design for social business:

• think at the level of the street & start small, spaces need owners (think community manager), every person needs a place (public/private), jumping off points
• design for emergence & watch, listen, adjust, adapt (lots of small changes)
• manage growth

UPDATE April 6, 2011: Added links and picture, corrected text.

My Slides for the Web24Business Brainstorm #w24brainstorm

A couple of days ago I gave a talk about (some of) my Enterprise 2.0 experiences at the Web24Business Brainstorm. Saskia Lammers of the Temporary Art Center Eindhoven (TAC) was also invited to speak. She told about her work in developping a new social website that would support the community of artists. It was interesting to see the idea of the website consisting mostly of content from elsewhere, like Facebook, Youtube, etc.

My 20-minute presentation gave a short overview of the work that was done in Océ in the Enterprise 2.0 space. And some of my insights. Here are my slides:

Enterprise 2.0 Experiences

View more presentations from Samuel Driessen

And, as always, comments are more than welcome!

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!)

A Holistic Approach to Enabling the Collaborative Enterprise #e20s

Lee Bryant closed the Enterprise 2.0 Summit with a talk about Social Business.

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:

• lower operational costs
• networked productivity
• business agility
• effective management (move away from information hostages: businesses run by writing and moving report up and down the ladder)
• customer centricity (Listen! But many companies lack a structure to socialize what you're learned by listening)

Where is business practice going wrong?

1. people, outdated view of motivation, behavior. Do we trust them. Trust is cheaper than control. We still have no real understanding of viral behavior inside organizations.
2. process, an expensive way to orchestrate activity
3. technology, a critique of the IT function. Businesses are spending lots of time on very basic stuff, like ERP/CRM. Light-weight processes with tools so employees can get things done. We used to believe that huge automation would lead to huge productivity improvements, which it did not.

What have we learned that can help here?

• human behavior, spread of influence in networks
• aggregation, flow, network effects, force multipliers
• open, collaborative working contexts
• designing for emergence and evolution

Moving beyond e2.0 adoption:

• social business program
• platform thinking for underlying capabilities (shows a really interesting picture of how this platform adds up technically)
• this will lead to an app store for every enterprise
• use cases and local, situated software
• e.g. better coping tools for information overload

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!

Best Practices for Regaining Business Agility #e20s

CheeChin Liew (BASF) is up on the stage.

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:

1. networking. Employees can be visible, profiles, in communities.
2. knowledge sharing. Communities (there is overlap with point 1), tags and search etc.
3. collaboration. Blogs, wiki's etc.

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:

• people-oriented and voluntary character
• visible commitment from top management
• leadership by advocates and community builders
• transfer of communities and workflows
• sharing of benefits and success stories

Exploring the Adoption Archetypes #e20s

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:

1. see value
2. recognize business use
3. all together now
4. integrate workflows
5. shift perspective

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:

• Lee Bryant chips in. Large number of companies have reached first base. They have a blog or a wiki. But we're still in the realm of adoption of tools. Lee sees the two adoption archetypes. There's no prescriptive way to go. Evolutionary improvement is what we need. We need more self-propelling growth. We should keep the difference between the web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 landscape. Open data is important. Orchestrate real-time data in companies to lead to behavior change. Also study user interaction to influence systems and change. Think deeply about individual and collective behaviors. These will be the source of future techniques.

Avoiding Enterprise 2.0 Pitfalls #e20s

Next talk/discussion with Rob Howard, Luis Suarez and Frank Schoenefeld.

Frank gives a list of 7 pitfalls of Enterprise 2.0.

1. Don't care at all. Frank says: You are obliged to care.
2. Since Enterprise 2.0 is freeform, emergent and easy to use - just let it happen. Frank says: in a closed system entropy/disorder always increases (2nd law of thermodynamics)
3. It's not about technology... Frank says: It is.
4. It's about culture... Frank says: It is not.
5. You can not measure the ROI of it. Frank says: You can if you want to and have to.
6. Information overload kills. Frank says: It does indeed. Shield yourself.
7. With Enterprise 2.0 we've found the holy grail for everything (in the organization).

Discussion:

• Rob disagrees fundamentally with the thesis that it is about technology. The big successful companies have a business objective and then select tools to be successful. Analytics is important (they should map to a strategy). Rob missed 'resources' in the pitfall list. You need to assign resources to achieve your business goals with technology.
• Rob points to Texas Instruments to give an example that has 'community' in their strategic goals.
• Luis adds 'education' to the list of pitfalls. Train people to use the tools. And 'governance' is a topic as well. Bottom-up, top-down. Not everything goes bottom-up. Make sure you have some guidelines in place (- this is not the same as mandating, says Luis). Luis also disagree with the fact that the tools are the problem. Fear is also a big pitfall. Are you experimenting?
• Rob comments that Enterprise 2.0 is still a young industry. Luis says a recent study showed that in Spain only 3% of the companies used social media.

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.