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!

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!