Enterprise 2.0 summary

 

   I still need to catch up on quite a few posts from the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston.  I captured them live in draft but didn’t get time at or since the conference to publish.  They will out before the end of the month!

Of course, you will find commentaries on all the sessions elsewhere, but I hope you’ll value my additional insight built into the posts as well.

And I thought I’d give you a summary of some of these insights, in terms of my major overall reflections on some of the key themes and debates at the conference.

 

Culture and tools

There seemed to be a significant split in attendees / perspectives between a focus on on culture, and a focus on technology.  I’m not saying anyone thought culture was unimportant – that certainly wasn’t the case, but it’s about prioritisation.  Some people clearly understood that culture (the way people work together, collaborate etc) is the most important element in e 2.0.  At the other end of the scale, there was a view that we’ve reached the end of the ‘culture 2.0 crusade’.  I believe this focus is important, and suggest it does need to be on culture.

I’ve got another draft post on this which I’ll be posting here shortly as well.

And I’m proposing to speak on this subject at the next e 2.0 conference in Santa Clara in November.

 

Creating and adding value

A further issue was around the role of e 2.0 in bringing around changes.  The prevailing train of thinking suggested that e 2.0 technologies need to be embedded in business processes, and what people do within their jobs.  Ie that 2.0 adds value to existing processes to help them and the people performing them work effectively.  Or maybe that 2.0 can create value, ie help people and organisations do new things by applying appropriate innovations faster than elsewhere (as a solution in search of a problem).

To me, its people, and their relationships, that create value.  2.0 technologies play a role in helping them do this.  And most of what people do happens on top of and around business processes.  So if we want 2.0 to create value, to lead change, we need to extend its use beyond the workflow.  We need to focus on peoples’ working-lives rather than just work-flows.

The challenge in doing this is in getting people to do something that goes beyond their narrowly defined jobs.  But this is where the benefit lies as well.

Again, I aim to post on this in more detail.

 

HR and IT

E 2.0 is not an IT conference, but there were certainly more CIOs and IT Directors than there were people from any other function.  A couple of people and tweets commented on the lack of HR people.

Actually, there were about 15 of us there.  Not a huge number perhaps but the conference agenda is going to have to change to encourage more, eg less headache inducing product demos dressed up as keynotes, and just a broader agenda too – choosing between various social technologies that all do pretty much the same job isn’t to me what 2.0 needs to be about.

But HR is increasingly interested in this.  Or at least in the benefits 2.0 can provide.  To me, it’s just that IT and HR aren’t talking to each other sufficiently.

And we need HR to be part of the conversation.  I try to wear a business rather than an HR had on this blog (my HR blog is Strategic HCM).  But I can’t get away from the fact that if culture vs tools is what’s important, HR should really be the key owner and driver of 2.0 oriented (social) change.

So I’ve got another proposal in for Santa Clara to help IT understand the ping points for HR, and develop a closer conversation between the two functions (and I’d like to do one focusing in reverse for the CIPD or SHRM).

 

Best and emerging practices

I felt there also seemed to be growing body of opinion that we all know and share a reasonably similar view about what e 2.0 needs to involve, how best to do it etc.  We don’t (or at least I don’t – see above).

I’d like to see the conference hang back from trying to focus on ‘the solution’ and encourage more diversity in thought (I’d have liked to have seen a few more rather more divergent thinkers like Stowe Boyd and Paula Thornton on the agenda too).

Oh, and a diversity in case studies too.  I’ve already posted on EMC, Cisco, CSC and IDEO and my draft folder includes posts on AXA, IBM, Microsoft, Sony, UBM and Vanguard.  Notice any similarities?  I’d like to see the conference help push interest and usage out beyond the IT sector, even if this means focusing more on current attempts vs successful case studies (actually, I think I’d prefer this anyway).

However, I don’t think getting this diversity is likely.  We all understand enough about ‘culture 2.0’ to know that people link with (and vote for) people like themselves.

So I somehow can’t see myself presenting in Santa Clara!?

 

Picture credit: JoJan

 

Previous posts:

• HR and Communities (Talking HR 029)
• Enterprise 2.0: Social Media and Community
• Enterprise 2.0: Communities aren’t sites, they’re ...
• Enterprise 2.0: Sharepoint – an all-or-nothing dec...
• Enterprise 2.0 tweet-up
• Enterprise 2.0: IDEO and Innovation
• Enterprise 2.0: CSC and Social Collaboration
• Enterprise 2.0: Cisco and the Human Network @ Work...
• Enterprise 2.0: Culture and the islands of Me and ...
• Enterprise 2.0 conference: EMC’s business case

 

and on Strategic HCM:

• Social Learning at the Enterprise 2.0 conference
• HR 2.0 at the Enterprise 2.0 conference: Human Resources and Workforce Collaboration

 

Technorati Tags: Enterprise 2.0,Boston Consulting Group,Santa Clara,culture,tools,technology,HR,workflow

 

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HR and Communities (Talking HR 029)

   Yes there was a reason why I suddenly did those two posts on communities (1, 2): so that I could refer to them in tonight’s podcast on the role of communities, their importance, their management (or facilitation!), and also on the HR function’s role in supporting them (see this post at Strategic HCM).

For this show, Krishna and I were joined by Claire Boyles from Management Matters.  Thanks a lot, Claire, it was great speaking with you.

You can listen to the archive here.

 

Picture: Community Maturity Model from the Community Roundtable

Technorati Tags: Communityship,Enterprise,2.0,Talking,HR,podcasts,Krishna De,Claire Boyles

 

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Enterprise 2.0: Social Media and Community

 

   The second session on communities was a panel led by Rachel Happe, Principal at the Community Roundtable and featuring:

• Eran Barak, SVP, Global Head of Community Strategy, Thomson Reuters
• Matt Johnston, VP of Marketing and Community, uTest
• Michael Petillo, Enterprise Sales & Marketing Systems Leader, W.L. Gore
• Megan Murray, Community Manager/Project Coordinator, Booz Allen Hamilton

 

The terms social media and community are often used interchangeably but they are not the same thing. One has a heavy emphasis on social content and the other is focused on building a tight network of relationships. So which approach is the most appropriate? It depends a lot of the type of relationships desired with the targeted constituent group. It also has a huge impact on operations -- tools, integration needs, policies, processes, and the management techniques employed. Come find out why this distinction matters and learn how three different types of companies are approaching the challenge of socializing their organizations.

 

Supporting the earlier workshop, the panel agreed that the word Community tends to be used too freely.  Communities aren’t just loosely affiliated groups.  There’s a difference between a crowd and a community – communities have deeper levels of connection and trust.

However, the key focus of this session, for me at least, was that choices re community depend on the context – whether the situation is B2B. B2C etc.  There are lots of choices but no right answers.

 

Eran Barak discussed Thomson Reuters support for tons of microcommunities (300k members in 6000 companies) all with different needs that the company is bringing together for content and expertise, forming an ecosystem

Matt Johnston talked about his community of 30,000 software testers that basically form the uTest business.  Community management is critical but they only have 2 people to manage it.

Michael Petillo explained that Gore has a social organisation the introduction of technology. It has a unique culture which influences all of their interactions internally with other associates and externally with partners and customers. It governs how they work together and collaborate.

Megan Murray talked about Booz’ hellobh.com which includes 495 internal communities, 25k people, most outside the building, working in a partnership model (also see my conversation with Thomas Stewart about this).  Booz consultants have different areas of focus but overlapping skills.  However the firm found finding people difficult so it created social spaces to make this happen.  People also come together around a passion or a problem – things they are interested in the most.  You put together new person x and new person y and this may result in a new capability all together.

 

Some of the key points made by the panelists include:

• The distance between nodes - how connected and how tight it is - influences how fast the community can move.
• There is value in lexiconical analysis of what community members are saying – it provides context of what you want to achieve.
• Managers often worry about people engaging in chit chat.  But often this is part of something else, eg the post mortem of a business transaction  And the chit chat is what leads to trust – not the transaction.
• You can identify the NPV of a network by how many connection there are, how often people tweet, and by identifying the people who connect one part to another – structural holes, weak ties etc.
• It’s useful to identify the influencers of broadcasters – the broadcasters don’t have time but the influencers probably do.
• You can’t be prescriptive - forcing people into groups is a recipe for disaster.  When you’re setting up space you can be specific about what needs to get done but allow room for emergence.

 

You might like to check out the Rountable’s own link to the session – which includes a pic from my own conference proposal (not sure why!): http://community-roundtable.com/2010/06/enteprise-20-conference-2010/.

 

See my other reviews from the conference at bit.ly/e20conf.

 

Technorati Tags: Rachel Happe,The Community Roundtable,Eran Barak,Community Strategy,Thomson Reuters,Matt Johnston,uTest,Michael Petillo,W.L. Gore,Booz Allen Hamilton Megan Murray,Enterprise 2.0,Boston

 

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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 tweet-up

 

   I’ve still got to catch up on my blog posts from the last two days, but I will post now on what’s been, as usual for me, the most important event: the tweet-up (I’ll get on photoshop when I get home):

 

Here’s:

• Me
• @bduperrin - Bertrand Duperrinn of Notepad fame (the HR 2.0 blog as far as I’m concerned)
• @panklam - Patti Ankla, author of Net Work
• @elsua - Luis Suarez, serial microblogger and IBM community builder
• @matthew_hanwell – HR and social technologist at Nokia

 

 

I could say this is anyone, I know, but trust me, this is:

• @dankeldsen – information architect
• @marciamarcia – Marcia Conner, author of the forthcoming book Social Learning
• Me

 

 

• Matthew and me at the Barking Crab.

 

Thanks to Rachel @rhappe and the Community Roundtable for the inivite.

 

Coming up:

• More posts from the conference on Social Advantage: http://bit.ly/e20conf
• A live blog on the HR 2.0 session (we should really just play a recording of mine and Matthew’s conversation last night) at Strategic HCM: http://bit.ly/hr20posts

 

Technorati Tags: Rachel Happe,Enterprise 2.0,Community Roundtable,conference,Boston,2010,tweet-up,#BVBoston

 

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Enterprise 2.0: IDEO and Innovation

 

   Andrew McAfee’s been talking about enterprise 2.0 and innovation, and the need to move from the centre towards the outer rings of his E2.0 target model to stimulate innovation.

He’s just introduced Gentry Underwood, Head of Knowledge Sharing at IDEO who is talking about design thinking which mixes business, human and technology factors effectively to just about any problem we can imagine –including how technology can be used to make organisations more innovative.

“As organizations look to stay competitive in an increasingly volatile marketplace, technology can play a part in becoming more innovative and collaborative. But where and when should these tools be used, and how do you get real value out of them? Gentry Underwood, head of Knowledge Sharing at IDEO, will share examples, strategies, and lessons learned from the employment of technology to facilitate broad-scale innovation.”

 

There are three key principles:

• Focus on people not the ideas themselves.  There’s value in process but at the heart of innovation is something messy that can’t be managed.  At the end of a process at IDEO they’ll have lots of ideas they’ll just throw away.  To an extent, ideas are cheap.  Empower people, not ideas.
• How do we enable more people to work together with each other?  Create platforms for coalescence.  Innovation happens when collaborative people come together with a shared vision.  IDEO have physical spaces for people to innovate and can do this online as well (eg My Starbucks Ideas, Netflix Prize etc).  IDEO have well used blogging, networking systems and a wiki (IDEO Spaces).
• Facilitate and reward participation.  Friction in the system stops people using it and the less people on it the less valuable it is.  The last system has been successful because they didn’t need to do anything special – have a password, attend training etc to use it).  Two key things have been a RSS type feed system.  And screen savers in their locations which cycle through the 20 latest status updates and has encouraged people to maintain their profiles.  This has led to a 97% take-up of their People Pages.

 

 

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

Technorati Tags: Gentry Underwood,Head of Knowledge Sharing,IDEO,Andre McAfee,Enterprise 2.0,conference,Boston

 

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Enterprise 2.0: CSC and Social Collaboration

 

   Next up Lemuel Lasher, President, Global Business Solutions Group & Chief Innovation Officer at CSC talking about setting up their Innovation unit:

“CSC has had remarkable success with social business software through a strategic, award-winning initiative called C3 to connect people to people, connect people to content, and connect people to communities. This global social collaboration platform enjoyed early success during its pilot phase collapsing time zones, distance and organizational barriers, reducing business development time and driving revenue and innovation.”

 

One of the difficulties getting this unit started was agreeing what innovation is.  For CSC it had to be a balance between creativity and discipline, leveraging the company’s intellectual capital.  It’s not just about great ideas, it’s about the business problems we all have.

In CSC, these different elements were coming together like brownian motion, with no direction.  So Lasher focused on leadership, governance, process and enablement – and finally, the tools to support all of this.  And all of this needed to be looked at from a systems perspective (Senge).  Innovation needs to be socialised, externalised, internalised and combined (Nonaka and Takeuchi).

Doing this required the next vs the best practices.  One of the key strategies was to get off Lotus Notes.  So CSC implemented Jive last year, renamed it C3: Connect, Communicate, Collaborate, led by Claire Flanagan, who has just ben promoted live on stage.

This has become the defacto standard for the way they commnicate – they now have 48,000 people on the system one year after implementation.

 

View today’s keynotes from#e2conf at tv.e2conf.com/ and see my reviews at bit.ly/e20conf (including a presentation from Claire Flanagan!).

Technorati Tags: R. Lemuel Lasher,CSC,Enterprise 2.0,Social,Collaboration,Innovation

 

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Enterprise 2.0: Cisco and the Human Network @ Work

 

   We’ve just had a great session from JP Rangaswami from DT Design.  Next up Murali Sitaram, VP/GM Enterprise Collaboration Platform, and Jim Grubb, VP Corporate Communications from Cisco.

For 25 years Cisco has been creating technologies that help them connect.  The latest development is Cisco Quad. 

“Through compelling software solutions, we're establishing secure and meaningful connections between people, communities, and information, enriched by video, real time communications and enterprise-class social collaboration.”

 

Bringing people together on these technology platforms creates the human network at work.  A dynamic network organisation.  Connected, constantly changing, powered by people and teams.

This helps create products and services faster than ever before.  It’s also fundamentally enterprise-wide, and beyond boundaries of organisation – you can’t restrict innovation within boundaries.

 

I think Cisco’s a great case study of the social business, but I’m not sure whether this is a keynote or a product demonstration (Quad, flip etc).  So, if you want to know more about the case study, see these previous posts:

• Cisco’s management experiment
• Cisco’s collaboration framework
• Cisco leading from the middle.

 

I’ll also be posting on Cisco’s other session at 2.15pm today.

 

Although I wasn’t expecting a product demo in a keynote (I guess this is an IT conference, but even so…) I will say that Quad looks very compelling technology – a system that really puts people and relationships at the centre of business.

It also saves me from having to go to the product demo over lunch!

 

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

Technorati Tags: Murali Sitaram,Jim Grubb,Enterprise 2.0,conference,Cisco,Human Network @ Work

 

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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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Enterprise 2.0 conference: EMC’s business case

 

   I’m at the Enterprise 2.0 black belt workshop at the Enterprise 2.0 conference today.

We started with a session from Jamie Pappas, E2.0 and social media strategist at EMC who took us through a process to develop a business case and get E2.0 sold in an organisation.

Jamie’s advice included:

* Define the goals – remember different groups care about different things (marketing, IT etc). Think about how these tie back to business processes and people – this will provide an answer to the dreaded ROI question as well (yes!, one of the points I’ve made frequently on this and my other blog is that measurement isn’t hard – once you’re clear about your objectives).

* Sponsorship helps (although this doesn’t need to be from an Executive). EMC’s sponsor was Chuck Hollis, VP, CTO of Global Marketing and a well known who helped explain E2.0 to the company’s executives. They didn’t go to their CEO until they had use cases of things that would appeal to him, ie:

• Positive financial results
• Happy employees
• Getting work done as effectively and as efficiently as possible.

 

* Choose the tool – 80% of the ideal may be enough. EMC chose Jive because it’s

• Easy to use
• Ready to go out of the box
• Not a huge learning – important in their culture.

 

* Don’t underestimate the importance of education.  Not everyone is as interested in exploring these tools as the people in this room.  At EMC, people were upset while using wiki when people started editing their inputs!  Some suggestions:

• Online and in person
• Lunch n learn sessions, podcasts
• Written and video tutorials
• Train the trainer.

 

EMC also include in their existing training programmes eg EMCU new hire and sales training programmes etc.  They include how to do it, but also EMC’s philosophy etc (why to do it).

 

* Anticipate objections.  EMC still gets objections 3 years later (it’s not for business / won’t work / we don’ t have time / you don’t expect pay employees to socialise! etc)

 

* Think about how to launch.  EMC went for the soft, WOM, viral approach – a pilot with a couple of hundred people.  Jamie says she told people not to tell everyone about E2.0 so of course they did – and as a result they had a few thousand users within just a couple of months.

3 years later, 65% of the company are visiting the site.

 

* Seed with great content.  People will make decisions within 3-5 seconds about whether it is worth going back to a community.  If there’s nothing going on then they won’t return.  Ensure there’s something interesting there from the outset.

 

The technology infrastructure is less important – EMC’s community takes up just 60GB - less than the average laptop.

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

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

Technorati Tags: Jamie Pappas,EMC,Enterprise 2.0,E 2.0,conference,Boston,2010,e2conf

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Enterprise 2.0 Boston 2010

 

   Later this month, I’ll be attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston.  This is ‘the leading conference and expo for organizations using collaborative technologies to accelerate information flow and drive revenue’.

The conference defines Enterprise 2.0 as:

“The term for the technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. It provides business managers with access to the right information at the right time through a web of inter-connected applications, services and devices. Enterprise 2.0 makes accessible the collective intelligence of many, translating to a huge competitive advantage in the form of increased innovation, productivity and agility.”

 

And suggests the following differences between most organisations today and those in the 2.0 world:

 

Enterprise 1.0	Enterprise 2.0
Hierarchy Friction Bureaucracy Inflexibility IT-driven technology / Lack of user control Top down Centralized Teams are in one building / one time zone Silos and boundaries Need to know Information systems are structured and dictated Taxonomies Overly complex Closed/ proprietary standards Scheduled Long time-to-market cycles	Flat Organization Ease of Organization Flow Agility Flexibility User-driven technology Bottom up Distributed Teams are global Fuzzy boundaries, open borders Transparency Information systems are emergent Folksonomies Simple Open On Demand Short time-to-market cycle

 

Regular readers of this blog will already know some of my concerns about Enterprise 2.0, but I still think it is this area that is currently leading the way towards Social Advantage.

See for example:

• Enterprise 2.0 conference: why Collaboration & ‘being’ social ARE outcomes
• Andrew McAfee: Enterprise 2.0 (beta)
• Enterprise 2.0 conference: Connecting the Dots
• My definition of Social Business
• My further thoughts on the Social Business
• My thoughts on 2.0
• Enterprise 2.0 crock? Depends how you define it…
• Implementing Enterprise 2.0
• Andrew McAfee, Enterprise 2.0
• Enterprise 2.0 / the Kumbaya Zone

 

Come back between 14 and 17 June to see my blog posts from the conference.

 

Technorati Tags: Enterprise 2.0,conference,Boston,2010

 

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Enterprise 2.0 conference: why Collaboration & ‘being’ social ARE outcomes

 

   This evening, I attended a couple of sessions at a virtual event linked to this Summer’s Enterprise 2.0 conference (where I’m still hoping to present).

I really enjoyed the presentations, particularly Morten Hansen’s session on Collaboration.  And I agreed with most of the points made.  However, I do disagree, quite strongly, with a point made by Oliver Marks and Sameer Patel in their session, that the objectives for E2.0 projects should always be financial ie increasing revenues or reducing costs.

I seem to have a minority viewpoint here – certainly Marks’ and Patel’s point rippled through the Twitter stream at #e2conf (“Collaboration & ‘being’ social are not outcomes. business objectives are outcomes”) for a quite a while afterwards.

So why do I consider the point to be wrong (and substantially limiting):

• Firstly, another good point on the Twitter stream was that we shouldn’t start with Enterprise 2.0 at all (a potential solution in search of a problem).  We should start with the business, and look at how its objectives can be realised, which may include Enterprise 2.0.  These objectives don’t always have to be financial.
• In fact, surely one major learning over the last decade and beyond, through inputs like the balanced business scorecard, is that focusing purely on financial objectives limits what’s possible.
• The main reason for this is that capabilities like collaboration, especially those which are vitally important, and under-developed, like ‘being’ social, can have a dramatic and transformational impact on end business results further down the value chain (they can create as well as add value).

 

It’s by focusing on the social aspect of organisations that we stand the best chance of enabling the deepest change.  I don’t think focusing on the technology, or non-technological activities, is going to do it on their own, as unless there’s a desire and an understanding of what social is, the full benefit of a more social approach isn’t going to be gained.  But focusing on business results isn’t going to achieve much more.

‘Being’ social is an outcome, and it’s the key leverage point to change this system too.

 

For a deeper explanation, see my recent post, 3 modes of web 2.0 implementation.

 

Technorati Tags: Enterprise 2.0,web 2.0,Oliver Marks,Samer Patel,businss,results,objectives,social capital,capability,#e2conf

 

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I need your spigs

 

  You may have read my earlier posts on HR’s role (or non-role) in Enterprise 2.0 and the Social Business (eg these posts on Next Generation HR, and my review of Andrew McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 book).

The reason for writing these posts is that I do believe HR has a useful role to play – not just in terms of organisation design (including social networks and organisational hierarchies), but in selecting the right people, developing them, creating the right environment and culture and so on.  And probably even more important than this, in facilitating the right sort of strategic conversation that focuses on social outcomes / social capital (collaboration, innovation etc) rather than just social activities – which is where I think IT is getting it wrong.

I’ve proposed to take this argument to a number of HR events this year, and to some IT-led ones as well, like the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston.  I think some HR (or at least human / social capital) input at these events would inject some much needed insight:

“Over the last couple of month’s there have been a couple of conferences on Enterprise 2.0, in US and Europe.  And because IT people tend to blog and tweet more extensively than HR people do, it’s been quite easy to follow these conferences from afar.  And the sense I’ve got of these conferences is of a couple of hundred IT people talking together about culture change!  And there’s been little to no HR contribution to this.  I’ve submitted a proposal to present at the next E2.0 conference in Boston, but as it’ll be mainly IT people voting on this, I’m not that hopeful of being chosen.”

From my post on Next Generation HR

 

The conference’s call for papers received 466 submissions which are now undergoing a community vote:

“We encourage all who submitted, all who plan on attending Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston, and anyone interested in Enterprise 2.0, to review the submissions, and vote for their favorites. Submissions are searchable by category, speaker or keyword, and votes received by each session will be viewable by all participants. Sessions advance to the final ‘Selected’ stage based on community votes and final approval by our Advisory Board, and will be announced upon completion of the vote.”

 

My proposal is languishing about half-way down the voting league, and some proposals are being heavily gamed ie are being voted for by friends and colleagues who I guess have little interest in E2.0 or attending the conference etc.  So I guess if I’m going to have any chance of presenting there, I’m going to need you to help me play the game. I need your vote (which for some reason is called a spig).

If you’d like to see HR having an input to the E2.0 agenda, and have me show IT how HR can help Connect the Dots in the social business, please visit the ‘spigit’ site, register, and vote for my proposal (please!).

We’ve got till next Wednesday January 20th.

 

 

Technorati Tags: Entrerprise 2.0,conference,Boston,HR,strategy,adoption,connecting the dots,voting,spig,spigit

 

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Enterprise 2.0 conference: Connecting the Dots

 

   In his comment to my last but one post, reviewing Andrew McAfee’s book and his presentation at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Mike Ricard, Enterprise 2.0 Community Manager at Reed Elsevier responds to my view that Enterprise 2.0 needs to be much broader than IT by stating:

“Those tools are social enablers. The alternative I have seen HR suggest are people networking 'get togethers'. That's OK if you are in the same country and you can manage to coordinate your schedules, but what if you are not and you can't? And often it is the same A-types who dominate the proceedings.”

 

I have responded that:

“I don't mean to trash web 2.0. I agree it an absolutely key social enabler. But I think there are more... and that HR can do much more than organise get-togethers too.”

 

I hope to take this argument to the next Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston next Summer.  I’ve submitted my proposal (the first one on the site) and you’ll have the opportunity to vote for it from early next year.

Here’s the text:

 

Connecting the Dots to Competitive Advantage

Session Description

Enterprise 2.0 can increase efficiencies and help meet business objectives but it can also generate competitive advantage. To create higher levels of value, the use of social technologies needs to be linked to other organizational enablers, eg HR practices, OD interventions, facilities design etc. This session will show how.

 

Professional Biography

Jon Ingham consults with organizations to help them develop human and social capital as a key source of competitive advantage.

He generally works with employers that already have sound management approaches and helps them extend their agendas to gain further improvements in the capabilities and engagement of their people, and the effectiveness of their organizations. He is based in the UK but works on a global basis.

Jon also works as a researcher, speaker, trainer and writer. He has recently spoken in the US, Europe,Africa, the Middle East and Asia. He has also lectured in strategic management, change management and human resources on executive MBA courses in both West and East Europe.

Jon started his career in Engineering, then spent six years working in IT before moving into Change Management where he has spent most of his career. He has also worked internationally as an HR Director.

Jon has a BA in Psychology, a Masters in Engineering and an MBA. He is a Certified Management Consultant, a member of the British Psychological Society (BPS) and its occupational psychology division, a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA).

 

Company Background

Strategic Dynamics Consultancy Services Ltd is a human capital and change management consultancy with a difference. What makes us unique are our beliefs that:

• People are a key source of innovation and competitive advantage - we use this insight to help transform people and organisational capability
• People are the focus of effective change – we work with, not against, the quirks of human spirit and the dynamics of human behaviour
• People work best in open, challenging, collaborative relationships – our consultancy services are based on this approach.

 

The consultancy is led by Jon Ingham, an experienced business manager and consultant, and is supported by a small team of employed and associate consultants.

 

Technorati Tags: Enterprise 2.0,conference,Boston Consulting Group,2010

 

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