Enterprise 2.0: Communities aren’t sites, they’re people

 

    The first session on communities at the Boston E 2.0 conference was part of the Black Belt Practitioners workshop on the first day:

 

Community Roles and Adoption Planning (Stan Garfield – Deloitte, Luis Suarez – IBM)

• Stan is community evangelist for Consulting at Deloitte Touche where he leads the SIKM Leaders Community with over 400 members globally and Luis is Knowledge Manager, Community Builder and Social Computing Evangelist at IBM
• Communities behind the firewall are groups of people who share specialty, passion, interest, roles, concern, set of problems. Communities are living organisms so very difficult to manage
• Community members deepen their understanding of the topics by interacting, asking questions, sharing knowledge, reusing ideas, solving problems together, developing better ways to do things
• People join a community to share, innovate, reuse solutions, collaborate, learn from others

 

Luis Suarez started the session by explaining that whereas some people feel every group is a community, this isn’t the case.  Communities need a shared passion about a common interest.

Most of the session was the taken up focusing on Stan Garfield’s Communities Manifesto and some of the key points from this, eg that communities should be independent of organisation structure – people shouldn’t be forced to join, so that members want to be part of the community.

I particularly liked this slide examining the differences between communities, organisation sites and teams:

 

 

Luis and Stan also provided suggestions for community building programmes.

Firstly, you need to find a compelling topic.  This needs to be made interesting.

 

Most importantly, communities need to be facilitated, actively nurtured – they won’t necessarily expand naturally.  People set up communities and 2-3 weeks later find them dead - people wonder why.

We need to ask them have you engaged people?  Have you provided the opportunity for the community to have community activities?

Communities need to be nurtured ever day, every hour of the day, by engaging with them and providing a plethora of activities - including physical activities.  Web 2.0 tools aren’t enough.

They need good content to ensure good health but this is only part of the solution.  You need to focus on connections, and help people connect with each other.  Connecting people with content and other people.  Focus on the interactions between people.

 

One key question is who is going to lead the community – and this could be several people  - these need to have passion for topic and time to build and sustain it.

When selecting a leader it’s useful to watch peoples’ communications.  Who are the hubs / connectors / mavens?  Who do people trust? – go to for advice?

But note, the best conversation leader may not be best facilitator.  So they’ll need coaching and up-front training.  And you can then have a community of community leaders.

 

Another interesting point was that lurkers are valuable.  Without them, we often wouldn’t have a community.  And they may eventually move from being passive consumers to active producers.

 

Communities generally manage themselves, ie the “we” eg if people post inappropriate content.  It’s not something the community manager needs to get involved in.

 

You can never communicate enough about a community, eg communicate to the community what is happening in the community.

And cross-pollinate across communities.

 

Note, because of the differences on the slide above, particularly I guess the lack of a clear purpose, managing a community takes more effort than managing a team.

However, it is potentially more valuable as well.  Communities provides a reason to stay in the company – they reduce attrition rates.

 

Of course, as Luis and Stan noted, communities have always been there - for decades.  We all have a very natural need to participate in communities – we want to bond with people.

But I’m not sure they’re often that actively created or managed in most organisations…

 

I thought this was a really engaging and interesting session.  While the presenters were talking I was thinking about a community that I’ve been ‘managing’ recently – called ‘Moon Shots’ this is a ‘community’ of 250 management regades bought together by an interest in Gary Hamel’s writings on management innovation.

Only it’s not really a community – a result of me not really managing it.  So I’m probably not going to continue it when ning changes its conditions next month. 

Yes, I’ve got the passion, but I’ve been a bit short of time.  And I’ve never really thought that much about my role - so these guidelines from Luis and Stan would have really helped as well.

 

 

Slides are available at http://www.slideshare.net/20adoption

Follow my posts from the conference at bit.ly/e20conf.

 

Technorati Tags: Stan Garfield,Deloitte,Luis Suarez,IBM,community evangelist,SIKM,Knowledge Manager,Community Builder,Social Computing Evangelist,manifesto

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Enterprise 2.0: Sharepoint – an all-or-nothing decision?

 

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There’s been a lot of focus on vendors at the E2.0 conference.  From my point of view, too much focus (particularly the product demo ‘keynotes’), although actually still less than I thought there’d be.

One of the things that has come through very clearly to me has been the degree of overlap between systems.  Walking through the exhibition, I found it fairly difficult to distinguish most of the systems from each other (although if I’d come armed with some specific requirements, I’m sure I would have been able to use these to create a quick shortlist).

One that stands out is Microsoft’s Sharepoint, particularly the new 2010 release that’s on show here.  The session I’m currently in has concluded that Sharepoint is usually going to be there, for information storing and sharing, but that it’s social features are still quite weak and that there’s little in it to spark conversations (without extensive customisation such as in Microsoft’s own Academy Mobile).

It’s why Newgator won the Vendor Idol session – given its deep integration with Sharepoint, at least companies can use this and have something decent for users vs IT to use (although all vendors seem to integrate with it to a greater or lesser extent).

Note, my own experience contrasts with this view.  As an example, I’ve been talking to Unilever who have just implemented Sharepoint gloablly (and only 2007) as a enabler for social change.

Anyway, it’s clear some of the systems do offer better social features, and are also much more attractive from a user perspective.  Given the fascination over peoples’ ipads here, it’s clear this is the new battleground.

So my own vote goes to NGenera, a new entrant into the marketplace, with its Space system which was demoed earlier by IDEO who also inputted into its design, which shows.

Cisco’s new QUAD system looked OK as well and I’m sure will be another powerful new entrant in this space.

 

Other than sociability and usability, the other aspect of these systems I thought vendors would have been emphasising, particularly at this conference, would have been their use in socialising the business.

This is something I’ve thought Jive has done well over the last couple of years, and came over fairly well in the keynote yesterday, although the sales push and loud music detracted significantly from this.  But Jive seems to have outsourced this creative piece to Dachis Group now which I think' is a mistake.

The two companies that seems to be coming into this space from an earlier focus on HR are Saba and Success Factors.  Saba are rebranding their systems under the banner of Collaborative People Management.  And Success Factors are starting to integrate with their new acquisition Cube Tree – developing what looks like it will be a very comprehensive offer (my only worry is that it will end up being a ‘social ERP’ ie just too big and complicated).

Anyway, ‘collaborative people management’: that’s what I think these vendors need to be about.

 

See more of my posts from the conference at bit.ly/e20conf.

 

Technorati Tags: Enterprise 2.0,Microsoft Sharepoint,Newsgator,SAP,NGenera,Space,Jive

 

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Enterprise 2.0: Culture and the islands of Me and We

 

   Day 2 starts with a session on knowledge management, enterprise 2.0 and the cultural barrier by Carl Frappaolo.

I had high hopes for this session because I think it’s the only one on culture, and I think this is one of the most important and least well understood subjects within E2.0.  As Frappaolo notes, lack of adequate culture and high barriers to adoption, are the root cause of many failures in knowledge management and related fields:

“Enterprise 2.0 on the other hand promises to provide low barrier and organic approaches to knowledge capture, and embraces the open and transparent culture of Web 2.0. Is Enterprise 2.0 the salvation of KM or do cultural and adoption issues still loom? More importantly, is the functionality provided by these tools mature and robust enough to qualify as knowledge management, or only simple collaboration. This talk looks at the critical intersection of Enterprise 2.0 and KM, and asks the critical question – can E20 crack the KM culture and adoption barrier.”

 

Frappaolo notes that culture is a slippery topic and means different things to different people.  He defines it as the sum total of attitudes, opinions, morals and ethics etc – the different going ons within a community, eg an enterprise. It’s separate to but influenced by process, technology etc.  It can drive processes or totally circumvent them.

In Frappaolo’s view, technology isn’t going to change culture but cultures can act as a pull for technology (* I have a slightly different view).  So it’s important to understand the culture of the organisation that you’re starting with.  In some, E 2.0 isn’t going to work.  So Frappaolo identifies seven cultural types:

• Islands of me: personal and organisational silos.  Siloed databases work well (not E2.0)
• One-way me: I am collaborative but in a one-to-many approach. Shared silod repositories, email works well.
• Team me.  Starting to accept the idea of we.  Shared repositories start to work.
• Proactive me.  I consider a major part of what I do to be a team player.  Agents, portals, executive dashboards to push knowledge to people are readily accepted.
• Two-way me.  I’m proactive about building communities.  Social networking is embraced.
• Islands of we.  Cutting edge of culture.  Senior management buys into the idea of socialness.  A core competency.  Understand emergence.  Think modular and integrated ito IT.
• Extended me.  Full transparency internally and externally.  Emergence, wisdom of crowds a key part of what they do. 

 

* A personal view:

Frappaolo’s presentation related to a question that’s often asked on E2.0 blogs: whether you need to change culture first, in order to set the ground for E2.0; or whether you can use E2.0 implementation to change the culture.

To me, it’s the wrong question.  Firstly, because the objective shouldn’t be to implement E2.0.  The objective needs to be to do something valuable, whether this is to achieve business goals or to develop social or knowledge capital.  This will determine whether culture needs to change.

Secondly, I have a slightly different definition of culture to Frappaolo.  To me, culture is about conversation.  So anything that changes the conversations taking place in an organisation changes the culture.  E2.0 is part of this shift.

 

So I completely agree with Frappaolo’s conclusion: don’t try to change culture just through technology.  And don’t throw technology at groups who don’t want to be collaborative.

A great session!

 

View today’s keynotes from#e2conf at tv.e2conf.com/ and see my reviews at bit.ly/e20conf

Technorati Tags: Carl Frappaolo,Information Architected,Enterprise 2.0,conference,Boston,culture,knowledge management

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More on gaining social capital by losing good people

I posted last month on April's Harvard Business Review article explaining that an old employer's social capital may go up after an employer leaves.

This dealt specifically with the increase in patents a firm might experience after the departure of an inventor to another company. The point is that the old firm tends to gain knowledge from the new company (through an increase in social / relationship capital) as well as the new company gaining knowledge (in the form of human capital) from the old firm.

Well there is also some research reaching very similar conclusions in this Summer's MIT Sloan Management Review.

This research suggests that although it is appropriate to take defensive manoeuvres (such as improving employee benefits in order top retain existing workers) when employees join competitors, relational actions (such as setting up alumni programmes to maintain positive relationships with former employees) may be more appropriate when they join 'cooperators': such as customer companies, suppliers and partners.

So instead of focusing on suppressing employee mobility, companies may be better actively seeking to exploit the potential opportunities it creates.

These potential opportunities are created by the social capital embedded in the companies' relationships with the departing employees.

Social capital is defined as the sum of the actual and potential resources embedded within, available through and derived from relationships.

The article explains:

"When employees move between companies they often maintain contact with former colleagues. Because of the trust and comfort embedded in these ties, employee mobility can create a conduit for information, allowing knowledge to flow between organisations. There relationships can also serve as the basis for future business dealings between companies. In addition, because mobile individuals possess knowledge about the capabilities, work practices and processes of their former employers, they can make interorganisational endeavours more efficient. Thus, the social capital created by the movement of employees across companies can be a key source of competitive advantage."

And they provide the following example:

"Not surprisingly, we found that the business a law firm received from existing clients typically decreased when key attorneys left to join competitor firms. But other results were at odds with the traditional "war for talent" perspective. When lawyers left to join a prospective client, the likelihood that their former employer would receive new business from that company increased. In addition, we found that hiring employees can have important social-capital implications depending on where those individuals are hired from."

Knowledge management 2.0

Knowledge management 2.0 is expressed well by David Gurteen:

“Another label for KM 2.0 might be “Social KM”. It is an emerging social model of KM. To my mind it is a very powerful model as it clearly places responsibility for knowledge sharing and making knowledge productive in the hands of the individual.

And so in the world of KM 2.0 we have two categories of social tool – soft-tools such as after action reviews and knowledge cafes and techno-tools such as wikis and blogs – an incredibly powerful combination.

So if the central question asked by managers in the KM 1.0 world was “How do we make people share?” the question of the KM 2.0 era is “How do we better share, learn and work together?” And is asked by everyone!

KM is becoming social.”

Again, very much linked to my other comments on enterprise 2.0 and management 2.0.

Knowledge 2.0

Sorry I've been a bit quiet here, there will be lots more soon.

Anyway, I've just picked up David Gurteen's Knowledge Newsletter for January and viewed David's latest Knowledge 2.0 presentation, IBM Knowledge Management goes Social presentation on slideshare. It's a great slideset, well, worth a look.

And I absolutely love Sibylle's comments on metrics in Knowledge 2.0:

"Most of us agree KM is about the SOCIAL so if we want a picture of what is happening in our SOCIAL environment we have to use SOCIAL tools, ie/ interviews, stories, theme analysis, anthropoligical observations - all tools researchers in the humanities like history and sociology have been using for years. Let's not take the easy way and give in to the bean counters in organisations with their need for meaningless number but rather educate them on how these techniques will give us understanding of what is really going on. Its only when we have an understanding of things like relationships, human networks, people' own perceptions of what knowledge they need/have etc, as well as the lack or flow of knowledge in their groups that we can create a path of action to improve that which we are trying to improve. Otherwise you'll just have one more KM metric presentation that bores the pants off everyone and contributes nothing to our intended path."

See my HCM blog for much more on this.