Freitag, 20. November 2009, 18:05:43 | amcafee

 I’ve been thinking about what to write in the wake of the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference. One more summary seems unnecessary, since there have been so many good ones already. And the debates are starting to feel a little trumped up and warmed over, and so less fun to wade back into. And then I got inspiration from Greg Lloyd, President and co-founder of Traction Software and longtime technologist. In addition to running his company Greg finds time to write a great blog, and his post after the conference was called “Enterprise 2.0 Schism.” In it, he likens the current E2.0 controversies to a religious schism, and divides the community into three sects: Strict Proletarians, who believe it’s all about the people, Strict Technarians, who believe it’s all about the technologies, and Strict Druckerians, who “believe that “2.0″ should be considered a modifier of Enterprise rather than an allusion to mere Web 2.0 technology…”

Lloyd writes with a light touch and is clearly being a bit tongue in cheek, but he’s also making a smart and serious point. Two of them, in fact. The first is that advocates of Enterprise 2.0 really do believe different things about the phenomenon, and these differences matter. His second point is an argument for the Druckerian point of view: that the use of emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) is going to change organizations so much that a new version number is warranted. This got me thinking about what I believed. I’ve been using “Enterprise 2.0” in Lloyd’s Technarian sense — as a reference to the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and approaches by enterprises. And do I also believe that such adoption is going to change companies? Sure – virtually all technology adoptions do, to some extent. Do I believe that it’s going to change them enough to require a new version number? Nope. I just think that’s too strong a claim. Let me try to explain why. I yield to almost no one in my belief about the power and utility of ESSPs, but I just don’t think they’re going to transform the structure or purpose of the enterprise. As I wrote earlier, I don’t see E2.0’s tools, approaches, and philosophies making obsolete managers, hierarchies, org charts, and formal cross functional business processes. It’s a rainy fall day in Boston, and after a wet walk into work I’m sitting here realizing that I need new boots. So maybe later today I’ll call up L.L. Bean and order a pair of Maine Hunting Shoes (Suave? No. Dry? Yes.). I’ll talk to a customer service rep who will enter my order into an enterprise system. This system spans the call center, the warehouse, the credit card company and, in all likelihood, the marketing department. The people working in each of these areas have relatively stable job titles and descriptions that are tied to pay and benefits. And they all have bosses who manage and develop people, put together plans and budgets, and take responsibility for performance and improvement. None of this is going to be swept away or rendered obsolete by the advent of ESSPs, even after they’re fully deployed and embraced. We can tell stories about how the new tools enable amorphous / gestalt / collectivist forms of organization that have no set structures and make their way through the environment much like slime molds do, but these stories are pure speculation, grounded in hope rather than reality or experience. They’re a type of cyberpunk science fiction (as an aside, I find it really interesting and telling that the best cyberpunk, like Neuromancer and Snow Crash, conjures up worlds where big formal organizations are more dominant, not less.). I want to be clear: Lloyd’s post is fantastic: grounded and very thoughtful. He’s not in the enterprise-as-slime-mold camp. And I definitely agree with him that Enterprise 2.0 is a big deal. So what’s the right way to describe its impact? Here’s my take: ESSPs will have about as big an impact on the informal processes of the organization as large-scale commercial enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, Supply Chain, etc.) have had on the formal processes. This is not a conservative statement. Enterprise systems have been a huge deal for organizations. They’ve turned reengineering from a whiteboard exercise into an unignorable reality for many, many companies. And Drucker was right when he said that “Reengineering is new, and it has to be done.” It’s not a coincidence that productivity in the US really accelerated starting in the mid 1990s, just as enterprise systems started spreading, and accelerated most in the industries that spent the most on IT. And a great study by Erik Brynjolfsson, DJ Wu, and Sinan Aral which I wrote about here, found strong evidence that ERP adoption leads to performance improvement. I believe that Enterprise 2.0 will be as big a deal for corporate performance and productivity. I believe this because I believe that the informal organization is as important as the formal one for getting work done (do you agree?) and that we have historically had lousy technologies for supporting the work of the informal organization (especially outside our immediate circle of strong ties). With the arrival of ESSPs, the tools available to the informal / emergent organization have gone from lousy to excellent, just like commercial enterprise systems advanced the formal organization’s toolkit from lousy to excellent. So while I don’t think that the impact of ESSP’s is profound enough to warrant a new version number for the enterprise, I do think that we’re on the brink of a sustained period of corporate innovation, improvement, and productivity growth enabled by these new tools. I take some comfort from the fact that some very sharp and experienced corporate leaders like Cisco’s John Chambers seem to feel the same. Do you? In your opinion, what’s the right way to think about the broad impact of ESSPs? Will they lead to Enterprise, version 2.0, or just to Enterprise 2.0? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

I don’t think “mega-blogging” is actually a thing, I just made it up to make the title sound more dramatic. But if mega-blogging were a thing, you would do it with WordPress. Micro-blogging is a thing, ash a lot of people do it with Twitter.

TechCrunch drops in this fray with an article comparing the comScore numbers of WordPress.com and Twitter.com, which show an accelerating growth for WP.com and flattening for Twitter. I’ll talk about the data itself later, but first wanted to point out a point many overlook when trying to create a battle between the mediums.

New forms of social media, including micro-blogging, are complementary to blogging.

One of the many uses of Twitter is to link to and promote your blog posts. (And other people’s blog posts.) As we grow, so do they, and vice versa. I blog when I have something longer to say, like this. I tweet when it’s the lowest friction way to talk to my friends, or get distribution for something longer I did somewhere else.

It’s not really a “versus,” it’s an “and.”

Whether the Twitter team intended it or not, they’ve built a killer and highly addictive reader platform with dozens of interesting UIs on top of it.

Features like WP.me, post by email, Twitter publicize, RSS Cloud, P2, email subscriptions, and more stuff in the cooker is trying to tie these things together more because people who do one are highly likely to do another.

As for the accuracy of underlying comScore data I would say they probably are precise but not accurate, meaning that whatever flaws they have in collection now, for example for WP.com they don’t count the custom domains or RSS readers and for Twitter they don’t count API usage or desktop clients, they’re at least self-consistent in how they do things over time. Some months they show us flat our internal stats showed growth, and vice versa. Ultimately it’s not worth anyone outside of comScore arguing how they collect their data, it’s better just to use it as one reference point alongside Quantcast (my fav), Alexa, Google Trends, Nielsen…

How tweets get imported into a blog is still an open question for me. I’ve seen lots of ways people have attempted it but when a blog becomes an activity stream it becomes a weak version of all the things it aggregates, less than the sum of its parts, because of the loss of context.

via Micro-blogging vs Mega-blogging — Matt Mullenweg.

Summary:
Agile projects aren’t yet fully user-driven, but new research shows that developers are actually more bullish on key user experience issues than UX people themselves.

Last year, we conducted a study of best practices in integrating usability methods with Agile development projects.

Usually, it’s not worth studying the same problem again just a year later since user behavior doesn’t change much. But this particular project didn’t concern user behaviors, but rather the best way to run Agile projects to ensure usability.

Because this is still a new field, we decided to supplement last year’s research with a new round of more detailed studies focused on additional organizations that have had more time to discover better ways to manage Agile user experience (UX).

UX: The Gatekeeper Role

The two main recommendations for ensuring good usability in Agile projects remain the same as in our original research:

• Separate design and development, and have the user interface team progress one step ahead of the implementation team. That way, when it comes time to build something, it’s already been designed and tested. (And yes, you can do both in a week or two by using paper prototypes and discount user testing.)
• Maintain a coherent vision of the user interface architecture. Create the initial vision during a “sprint zero” period — before any implementation has started — and maintain it through annual (or semi-annual) design vision sprints. You can’t just design individual features; they have to fit together into a coherent whole — a whole that must be designed as well. Bottom-up user interface design equals a confused total user experience (the Linux syndrome).

In both rounds of research, these two ideas proved useful across many of the different companies we studied. One modification became clear in the second round, prompted by the PayPal case study: it’s important to designate a gatekeeper to track requirements and communications between the UX team and the other project teams to keep everybody on track (even though those tracks are parallel).

Circle D Design used a variation on this, designating an “anchor person” for each project’s UX communication. As new UX specialists are needed on a project, they’re paired with the anchor. The anchor principle also supports long-term cross-communication among teams as anchor people are periodically rotated.

Decline of the Centralized UX Department

The debate over how usability, interaction design, technical writing, and any other specialized discipline should be positioned on the org chart is endless. There are two main options:

• Centralized structures create a single team that “owns” its discipline and supplies it to development teams on projects across the organization. A centralized usability group, for example, would conduct all user testing and other user research; a centralized design team would supply all interaction design and visual design; while a centralized user experience team would supply all design and research. Individual project teams would then take the centralized team’s design and/or research and turn it into an actual product.
• Distributed structures forgo centralization and instead assign specialized staff members to work directly on individual project teams. In this structure, each project team has its own usability specialist, interaction designer, visual designer, information architect, technical writer, and so on for all user experience disciplines. In fact, big projects might include several such specialists on the team.

An obvious disadvantage of a distributed structure is that companies might not have enough user experience specialists to assign one or more from each discipline to each project team. Thus, teams would either share specialists or some would go without.

The centralized structure provides a “home” for specialized staff members, who often appreciate having close colleagues within their own discipline. This makes it easier to manage and promote specialized staff. For example, the manager of a centralized usability group is typically a senior usability specialist, while the manager of a centralized design group is a senior designer, and the director of UX is an even more senior designer or usability person. Such managers understand their staff members’ tasks and needs. (In contrast, a usability specialist who reports to a development manager will often find that the manager has no idea whether a study was run well or poorly.)

A centralized department can also support strategic initiatives that cut across individual development projects. Examples include writing and maintaining user interface standards or guidelines, building a usability lab, collecting longitudinal or comparative UX metrics, and advancing organizational maturity — for example, by communicating strategic UX issues to upper management and hopefully convincing them to invest more in usability.

All this is very well, but is problematic when it comes to integrating usability and good UX with Agile development teams. All experiences from our case studies indicate that UX people must be co-located with developers and other project team members. Indeed, UX should be considered a part of the project team, not an outside department.

Distributing your UX personnel doesn’t mean you have to abandon all the benefits of having a centralized, specialized group. Often, a matrix structure provides a good compromise, making UX professionals part of individual projects on a day-to-day basis, but still offering some company-wide coordination.

Agile UX is Good, But Can Get Better

This year, we asked study participants how extensively UX was integrated into their projects and how satisfied they were working on projects with a particular development methodology. They indicated their answers on a 1–5 scale, with 5 indicating the highest level of integration or satisfaction:

Clearly, Agile is considerably better than the old Waterfall method. Good riddance to that one. However, the professionals in our new study still felt that Iterative Design was marginally better than Agile; there’s still work to be done to make Agile projects more user-driven.

In better news, the latest data provides some evidence that we’re moving beyond “them and us” — overall, developers were more bullish than UX people on a couple of key UX opinion metrics.

Developers rated the user experience impact on the deliverable’s quality at 4.3, whereas UX people rated it at 4.0 (again on a 1–5 scale, with 5 best). Developers said productivity increased somewhat with UX involvement (3.3), whereas UX rated this only slightly higher at 3.4. Both developers and UX professionals expressed a strong desire for more UX involvement in the project. In those companies that bother to integrate usability and Agile, things are not yet perfect, but they’re already pretty good.

Learn More

119-page research report on Best Practices for User Experience on Agile Development Projects is available for download.

Full-day course on Agile Development and Usability at the annual Usability Week conference in Berlin (in 2 weeks) and San Francisco (December).

via Agile User Experience Projects (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).

I had chance to read about adoption of Enterprise 2.0. You can take a look on RearWriteEnterprise blog post here. To see high-tech, manufacturing, aerospace and defense on the leading places was a very interesting and positive surprise.

I put it in the context together with DS Social Innovation, PTC Social Product Development and newcomers like Vuuch Business Communities . I think, Web 2.0 and coming together Enterprise 2.0 is getting stronger. In parallel, I see growing interest of enterprises to organize their system differently. Less interest in big and expensive programs and more interest in lean enterprise 2.0 initiatives. This is a main trend, that will define how PLM 2.0 will look like in 2010-12 years.

This is just my opinion. What do you think? Do you have any plan for Enterprise 2.0 tools adoption?

Best, Oleg

Wie Fabian in seinem Blog in seinem neuesten Artikel “SharePoint Magazin goes 2010” schon angekündigt hat wird das SharePoint Magazin nach dem Erfolg der Erstausgabe (in der ich zwei Artikel beigesteuert hatte) fortgesetzt.

Auch ich werde mich wieder mit zwei Artikeln zum Thema Self Service BI und Taxonomies / Findability beteiligen.

Gerade im Hinblick auf den offiziellen Release von SharePoint 2010 im Frühjahr denke ich das ein Print Magazin eine gute Möglichkeit ist, einer breiten Masse die neuen Features vorzustellen.

Interesting post here from Jon Ingham on the CIPD conference in terms of a key value-adding activity of HR is in developing social capital – people interacting, talking, collaborating.

Sto facendo le prime prove con la versione beta di Google Wave, questi i miei riferimenti:

This post picks up on Parts 1 to 8 and examines the eighth  of Deming’s 14 Management Points, which urges:

Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.

Fear and Social Networking

From my consulting experience (and, I regret to say, from some of my experience as an employee) fear can be a very real issue in organizations – inhibiting people’s willingness to try new things, to speak out when they see inefficient practices or broken processes, to challenge dumb decisions by management, and so on.  Fear also limits people’s engagement in their work (their willingness to give their discretionary effort).  And, in an age of emerging Enterprise 2.0 – with its dependence upon internal and external social networking, fear can be a major impediment to progress in learning and developing new ways of working, innovating products and services, and better connecting stakeholders.

Today’s climate of high unemployment and the threat of “downsizing” on the horizon, fear in many organizations is on the uptick.  Fear mobilizes the body’s “fight or flight” mechanism, leading to either defensive behavior (hiding, submissive, low engagement) or aggressive (even destructive) behavior.  I sometimes see the variant of passive-aggressive behavior, where, for example, people agree to a decision, then work the back channels to sabotage it!

So, to what degree is fear inhibiting your organization’s efficiency and effectiveness?  What is the source of that fear?  What can be done to eliminate or at least, reduce fear in the workplace?

Fear and Trust

Fear is the opposite of trust. Trust is important for high performing organizations because it leads to synergy and performance. As organizations begin to enter the Enterprise 2.0 realm, fear and trust become even more important.

Author and management consultant Charles Handy, notes that, “If we are to enjoy the efficiencies and other benefits of the virtual organization, we will have to rediscover how to run organizations based more on trust than on control. Virtuality requires trust to make it work: Technology on its own is not enough”.

Driving Out Fear

Corporate coach Jan Austin in her excellent blog post FEAR IN THE WORKPLACE: SYMPTOMS, SOURCES, SOLUTIONS, suggests that:

Eliminating fear begins with leaders acknowledging their own responsibility for creating and/or participating in a fear-driven organizational culture. By examining their assumptions and behaviors which have either triggered or perpetuated defensive, fearful responses in others, and consciously choosing to communicate in a more positive, proactive manner, they can interrupt the patterns of fear and the associated defensive routines in the organization. Leaders can take a number of steps to engage organizational constituents in more open, collaborative conversations and encourage greater positive participation in the work of the organization. Leaders can do this by employing simple but powerful facilitation skills.

Jan goes on to suggest techniques four key strategies for leaders, comprising:

1. Establishing Rapport
2. Improving Listening Skills
3. Asking Questions Which Increase Trust and Reduce Fear
4. Promoting Dialogue

Check out Jan’s post.  How many of these strategies and the techniques she suggests might help your organization become a less fearful and more collaborative place?

Image courtesy of The Vancouver Sun

From the home office in the restarted Cern Large Hadron Collider along the French-Swiss border…

#1: What Shaun White & Snowboarding Can Teach You About #Innovation http://ow.ly/E8h7 Get exposure for ideas early, so others can digest impact

#2: Managing Employee Innovation Communities (via Spigit blog) http://bit.ly/3SREBr #innovation #e20

#3: City of Manor’s “citizens’ innovation” project (using Spigit) is featured on WhiteHouse.gov blog: http://ow.ly/DURl #gov20

#4: RT @CarolineDangson #IDC Social Survey: workers say they use IM for ‘collaboration’ & social networks for ’sharing’ – thinking about diff

#5: RT @rotkapchen: RT @wimrampen Social Media Disrupts Decision-Making Process http://bit.ly/2KTUIz (via @GrahamHill)

#6:  RT @tjkeitt Starting the process of researching #e2.0 technology pushed into business processes (CRM, ERP, project management, etc.). This is the future.

#7: RT @kevinmarks says @Caterina “Google never got social software – Knol means you have to write a whole article; wikipedia combines tiny contributions” #w2e

#8: Pitching Sequoia? They want to know which deadly sin your company lets customers indulge in http://ow.ly/DGn1 by @glennkelman

#9: Checking out: The Awesomeness Manifesto http://ow.ly/DmID by @umairh Much to love in that one #innovation

The Interactive Intranet is an Enterprise-wide web application which provides the underlying web based support to employees across the organisation. It is the digital manifestation of the business and should form the strategic backbone of everything the organisation does.

In order to ensure that the Interactive Intranet delivers on the organisation’s key business goals and strategies, there are some considerations for the business scoping of the Intranet.

Organisational Design

The Interactive Intranet should be configured in the same way as the organisation in order to deliver on the same business objectives.

Interactive Intranets extend beyond the boundaries of the traditional Internet with its content around the organisation, policies and procedures, employee ordering, general communication forums.

Great Interactive Intranets are also structured in a portal format that supports the unique organisational design of the enterprise, whether it is functional teams, matrixed reporting, teams, divisional structures etc. The related information, documentation, tools and applications for each function, reporting team, division related information and workflow are incorporated within these portals. For example, booking IT training in the IT portal, leave management on the HR Portal, cross divisional product development tools in the product teams.

Organisational Communication

It used to be that internal communication was centralised and hierarchical and from the desk of the CEO.

Modern web based communication is highly customised in order to ensure that it is relevant to each audience and doesn’t result in communication fatigue. This is achieved through audience segmentation.

The employees can be segmented in a variety of different ways, by role, EXCO, Frontline, or by seniority, manager, supervisor, labourer or by function, marketing, HR IT, or by focus, product development, debt collection etc. The optimal segmentation is determined by the organisational requirements.

Each portal manager is responsible for his communication across the organisation. This can be managed using a series of wiki’s, blogs and instant messaging, for example when communicating software upgrades or changes in policies, or sharing the new corporate image guidelines.

Environmental Scanning as a function of creating competitive advantage

Employees need to be able to find sector specific news through RSS feeds, company news as well as industry trends and other useful information on the relevant Intranet portal. The employee needs to be able to “share” and comment on all relevant information with the right individuals on the Intranet. For example, if an industry trend is identified in employee wellness, the HR team should be able to “share” this and their views on it with the Line of Business managers and other HR teams across the organisation.

Collaboration and Knowledge Management

Interactive Intranets are more than “Facebook for Business”, they can be used to manage projects on wiki’s, collaborate on client service and capture the implicit knowledge of the employees through the conversations they have on-line.

Collaboration hinges on an environment that is motivating and inspiring and where people work together to help one another succeed. A key trait of high performing organisations is shared power and high involvement where participation, collaboration, and teamwork are the way of life. This is facilitated through open dialogue and project collaboration using wiki’s RSS feeds and blogs on the Intranet.

Employees must be encouraged to join collaboration forums where they share ideas, documents and knowledge around each project.

Employee Profiles

As far as the employees go, they each need an individual personalised profile, with both public and private sections.

On the public portion of the employee’s profile, the organisation should be able to see the employee’s contact details, skills, experience, projects, awards, education etc. This will help source internal skills more easily throughout the organisation, and enable employees to build their personal brand within the organisation.

On the private portion of the profile, personalised dashboards can be used to link the work that employees are doing to the macro-strategic position of the organisation in a very visual way. The vision of the organisation should be made explicit using tools such as the Balanced Scorecard, and the individual’s key performance areas linked to the organisational scorecard and visualised on the employees’ personal profiles.

Employees should also be able to manage their leave, pension and medical aid options through shared spaces with the HR or Finance division, depending how the organisation is configured.

A word of Caution

When building Enterprisewide Interactive Intranets, it is wise to question both the existing organisational design and the existing processes and workflow. If these are not conducive to delivering on the organisational strategy, then an Interactive Intranet will exacerbate the problem. At Digital Bridges we recommend that the Intranet form part of a larger strategic initiative which reviews the organisation’s direction, destination and how it is going to get there.

The opportunity

The Interactive Intranet is the perfect opportunity to connect with the job, the organisation and the employees, to gain commitment and grow the organisation. It needs to become a strategic asset to the organisation, because it is a key component to the modern organisation’s success.

Kate Elphick Digital Bridges www.digitalbridges.co.za

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston Call for Papers has been open for a little over a week now. While the final number of speaker proposals will number in the hundreds (450+ for SF 2009), the initial 29 submissions are a rich vein of current thinking about Enterprise 2.0.

As you can see in the tag cloud from the site, the top tags so far for the proposed sessions are:

1. technology adoption
2. social media
3. best practices
4. knowledge management
5. getting started
6. learning
7. business case

Technology is the top tag. There’s no denying that technology enables Enterprise 2.0. Adoption is running strong so far. Which is a pretty fair characterization of a key issue in the field. Social media comes on strong. There are plenty of conferences devoted to that topic, and here even a conference primarily addressing to internal collaboration has its share.

A Few of the Proposals

Based on page views, here are the five most popular submissions early on:

Three Keys to a Successful SharePoint Deployment (Rich Blank):

There are 3 keys to deploying SharePoint successfully for a large enterprise: Platform, Governance, and Marketing. The first part involves a stable, available, easily accessible, secure, well performing global technology platform. If users can’t access the environment, they won’t trust it or won’t use it. Next is governance – all things related to the overall project as well as the operational and support involved. Finally there is marketing — you need to market the application to end users, provide quick introductions to get them started, best practices, conduct demos that demonstrate business value, create proof of concepts, and show people what’s possible. You shouldn’t have to provide formal training if you market the application right. Each of these 3 are not mutually exclusive — you can’t have marketing without the platform and good governance.

Driving Adoption is anti-2.0 (Paula Thornton):

There’s way too much 1.0-thinking being applied to the 2.0 era. “Driving adoption” is the antithesis of the fundamental premises of 2.0. Starting with 2.0 axioms is critical to guide any 2.0 initiative.

Connecting the Dots to Competitive Advantage (Jon Ingham):

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.

Lessons from Religion about Evangelizing Enterprise 2.0 (Gil Yehuda):

The E2.0 marketplace has evangelists, non-believers, and faith-based ROI models. But the workplace is modeled after the hierarchy of government and the meritocracy of the marketplace. Wherein lies community? As it turns out, religion can teach us about the nature of community in context of preparing the workplace for E2.0.

Moving Beyond Email — Barriers to Knowledge Management (James Rosen):

Email is fast, free, and easy to use, but it has many limitations, especially in an enterprise context. Yet many employees, especially baby-boomers, rely on it nearly exclusively. This talk examines the use cases for which email is the wrong tool, and how to move to better ones.

That’s just a few of them, check ‘em all out. And be ready to vote come January 2010.

The success of organisations depends as much on their ability to manage knowledge as it does on the other competitive differentiators such as the strength of its brand, the skills of its employees and depth of customer relationships.

When a knowledge management strategy that delivers on specific business objectives is built into the Intranet, it makes an important contribution to realising organisational value.

Knowledge Management is more than the classification of all the documentation that resides on hard drives, Outlook inboxes and filing cabinets. It includes the strategies and processes of identifying, capturing, creating, surfacing and leveraging knowledge. Knowledge management also includes strategies to foster a culture of information sharing, collaboration and the implementation of tools that make it easier for employees to share what they learn and, in turn, to learn from each other.

In the past, Intranets have been information repositories, that were not appreciated nor used effectively by employees. Corporate Intranets are gaining new prominence in many organisations, and many companies are revisiting the opportunities provided by knowledge management.

As organisations recover from the economic downturn by consolidating their operations, revisiting their product roadmaps and positioning themselves as being more customer-centric, they will start looking to their company Intranets as the backbone for delivery on their business objectives and operational strategies.

Organisations are also discovering that investing in a robust, functioning Intranet is a resource intensive endeavour and that they must look for other benefits when making the business case for an enterprise-wide intranet.

KM initiatives are intellectual capital investments and should be aligned with specific, long-term business goals, as part of the Intranet Strategy.

Communities of interest are groups of people within the organisation who have common interests, work functions or strategic objectives. They share their insights, experiences, learning and knowledge amongst each other for mutual benefit. They are typically loosely structured, decentralised, fluid and built on personal relationships. Communities of Interest are perfectly positioned to support knowledge management projects.

Collaborative environments such as enterprise Intranets force employees to be focused, thoughtful and careful in their contributions. Knowing that what is published may potentially be viewed by the whole organisation, or that other users may have the ability to rate the article, forces the participants to be more disciplined in their contributions. The collaborative, real-time feedback environments of a company Intranet encourage self-policing and more strategic information sharing. The downside is that it can also discourage participants from sharing any information whatsoever.

Well-planned Intranets make perfect platforms for knowledge management initiatives. But most Intranets aren’t deliberately planned; they start out as divisional efforts that are leveraged across the whole organisation. Many of these Intranets hold valuable information but are so decentralised and unstructured that they do not support the organisational requirements.

Knowledge management is becoming immensely important in today’s business environment. Teams that share knowledge perform better. By approaching knowledge management in a simple, tactical fashion where the emphasis is placed on the application of knowledge is the key. Identifying the organisation’s priorities, focussing the communities of Interest on these priorities and upgrading the Intranet to be a more of a knowledge platform will help develop a relevant, meaningful and beneficial knowledge management initiatives.

Kate Elphick Digital Bridges

This post picks up on Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 and examines the seventh of Deming’s 14 Management Points, which urges:

Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.”

Leadership – The Context for Improvement

In his seventh point, Deming connects the idea of leadership with the role of supervision to create a context for continuous improvement.  “Help people and machines and gadgets (dare we say, information technology?) to do a better job.”  This really represented a break from the thinking of Frederick Winslow Taylor who believed that management’s role (as the “educated ones”) was to define best practice, the supervisor’s role was to make sure the workers followed that process.  I guess Taylor’s thinking was appropriate during the early industrial revolution, but was clearly not the way to really empower those closest to the job to improve the ways that processes worked.

Note also that Deming distinguishes between “supervision of management” and “supervision of workers” with both needing “overhaul” as he says with characteristically understatement.

Here Comes Everybody – Improving Everything!

Translated into today’s Enterprise 2.0 world, with the words of Clay Shirky – “Here comes everybody” ringing in our collective web-enabled heads, we all have the opportunity (responsibility, even?) to figure out how “gadgets” as well as people and machines can continuously improve the way products and services are conceived, designed, created and brought to market.

Image courtesy of Women PR Wire

Michael Affronti hat auf dem Outlook Blog den Outlook Social Connector angekündigt. Er erweitert Outlook um Threads und Personen aus Social Networks, sowohl aus dem Unternehmen (MySite) als auch externen (LinkedIn). Dadurch besteht die Möglichkeit viele weitere Informationen rund um den Kontakt zur Verfügung zu stellen.

Kern Features werden laut Michale Affronti folgende sein:

• The People Pane A name, picture, and title for your colleagues whenever reading a message from them.
• Rich history See a rich communications history for each person that sends you messages with one-click access to the most recent messages and attachments.
• Activities Download and see real-time activity for your colleagues from business and social networks.
• Get friendly Request someone as a colleague or friend with one click. Synchronize those colleagues with Outlook and keep them up-to-date as their information changes.
• SharePoint 2010 Connect to the new MySite social networking experience right out of the box with the OSC & SharePoint 2010.
• Extensible A public SDK allows anyone to build a connection to business or consumer social networks.

Ich find das super und kann mich Eric Legault nur ansckließen: Well Done! Ich warte noch auf die Xing Integration, aber das sollte über das SDK schon irgendwann machbar sein, denke ich…

Salesforce.com today announced “a new secure enterprise collaboration application and social development platform”, called Chatter. While it will not be available until an unspecified date in 2010, Chatter will likely raise the bar for Enterprise 2.0 software, because of the promised ability to embed its functionality into other enterprise applications.

Chatter includes many of the social components that are the core of existing Enterprise 2.0 software offerings: Profiles, Status Updates, Feeds, Groups (Communities), etc. What is different — and significant — about Chatter is that any of those components can be integrated inside any existing enterprise application, including Salesforce CRM and the 135,000 custom applications built on the Force.com platform. In short, Salesforce.com will not make users collaborate through the Chatter interface; they will be able to leverage Chatter’s social functionality in the context of work that they are doing inside a CRM, ERP, or other enterprise system.

The ability to deploy social functionality as a service within an existing (or new) enterprise application is a game changer. To-date, only one other E2.0 software vendor that I am aware of (MindTouch) has been able to make that claim. Salesforce.com is the first proprietary software provider with a very large set of enterprise customers and third-party developers to offer social functionality as building blocks (services) that can be consumed in other, independent applications.

The Enterprise 2.0 crowd has been focused on adoption in 2009 and has recently begun to realize that integration of social functionality into existing and new enterprise applications and platforms will be key to increasing adoption (see my previous posts on this topic: Thought of the Day: September 17, 2009 and The Impending Enterprise 2.0 Software Market Consolidation). Salesforce.com’s announcement of Chatter begins to make that vision a reality, and at scale.

Two other aspects of Chatter demand attention. First, at a time when established Enterprise 2.0 software vendors are touting their ability to integrate with Microsoft SharePoint (see my previous post, Integration of Social Software and Content Management Systems: The Big Picture), Salesforce.com has chosen to provide integration with Google Apps instead. Salesforce.com will use the Google Data APIs to enable data communication between Chatter and Google Apps. This is hardly a surprise, given that cloud computing is core to both companies.

The other striking aspect of Chatter is its embrace of popular consumer social networking applications such as Facebook and Twitter. This occurs at a time when many organizations are blocking employee access to those tools for security, privacy, and productivity reasons. Salesforce.com already features bi-directional communication between its Force.com platform and Facebook, having launched the Force.com for Facebook developer toolkit a year ago. Now Salesforce.com is providing a similar developer toolkit for Twitter.

Chatter is an announced offering, not a shipping product. As such, it is already being compared to Google Wave in the collaboration market. However, Chatter is much more likely to make a significant impact in the E2.0 space, because Salesforce.com has always been focused on enterprise customers, while Google’s offerings started as consumer products and have only recently begun to slowly gain traction within enterprises. Google may bring Wave out of beta before Salesforce.com launches Chatter, but I expect that will make little difference as to which one sees better enterprise adoption in 2010. It is very likely that more organizations will understand Chatter’s value proposition of easily integrated social functionality.

In the beginning, there were forums, blogs and wikis. And it was good.

In talking with people about the Enterprise 2.0 industry, I like to insert yet another versioning number scheme:

• Social Software 1.0
• Social Software 2.0

Social Software 1.0 was the era of actually creating these open, collaborative applications. The approach of these tools was groundbreaking. Apps for managing knowledge that are open, persistent, easy to create and accepting  contributions from many? This was groundbreaking. The tools of Social Software 1.0 are: blogs, wikis, forums, microblogging, activity streams, tags, social connections.

Social Software 1.0 is the “Tools Era”. Put these collaboration and information sharing tools in place, then let the benefits flow. And the benefits do flow.

But are they flowing fast enough? Will they assume core operational infrastructure status within enterprises? This is the crux of Dennis Howlett’s post, Enterprise 2.0 – the non-debate. It’s a fair question. Dennis notes this in his post:

I’ve also argued that I’ve never heard anyone ask for some Enterprise 2.0 though I’ve heard plenty ask for ERP, CRM etc.

Let’s examine that particular quote for a moment, on two fronts. First is the important point that CRM, ERP and other existing enterprise software address core company activities. Sales? No sales, no company. ERP? You can apply a thousand clerical workers for all the little things needed to manage resources, or organize information systematically to great benefit.

Second is the fact that markets demand these apps. Let’s take a ride in the time machine back to 2001. In the article, CRM Adoption Continues at an Aggressive Pace, this market growth was noted:

Spending on customer relationship management (CRM) applications will grow to $10.4 billion by the end of 2001, a 167 percent increase from the $3.9 billion spent in 2000, according to a report by eMarketer.

An industry on fire, with sales in the billions, that was started sometime in the mid-1990s, and Siebel Systems was started in 1993. So in the course of just a few years, CRM was a bona fide hit inside businesses. Enterprise 2.0 is at an earlier stage in its industry life cycle, but isn’t currently on track to be the size of the CRM market in the next few years.

This isn’t to say Enterprise 2.0 isn’t finding its footing with its tools focus. As Dion Hinchcliffe writes, there has been a significant pickup in corporations’ implementation of these applications: “Just as importantly, we are also starting to see customers implementing Enterprise 2.0 in scale. These typically include enterprise social networking, wikis, and social CRM.”

Look closely at the three types of implementations: wikis, social networking, and social CRM.

Social CRM?

That’s not part of the Social Software 1.0 canon. Rather social CRM is an example of the next generation of social software. Social Software 2.0.

Social Software 2.0: Addressing Existing Enterprise Workflows

Here’s how I define Social Software 2.0:

The integration of collaboration, increased findability, social networking and crowdsourcing into core enterprise activities requiring defined workflows, specific user sign-offs, results measurement and role-based access.

I’ll admit that comes across as a tall order. But it’s a worthy goal. Check out Ray Wang’s ten elements that define the next generation of enterprise business software solutions for a deeper look at these requirements.

The challenge is figuring out where social benefits traditional processes and systems. In Susan Scrupski’s great presentation, Enterprise 2.0 Demystified, there’s this slide:

Credit: Susan Scrupski, SoCo Partners

There’s an aspirational component to the graphic. “Social ERP” includes a number of nuts-n-bolts activities that all of us can understand: order tracking, purchase orders, inventory management.

What we don’t yet understand is how social gets in there and improves these processes. But Nenshad Bardoliwalla starts us down that path in his post, Is Enterprise 2.0 a Savior or a Charlatan? In the graphic below, he fills in the white spaces of process flows with instances of social software applications (+ email/IM):

The graphic starts to describe the way social software could integrate into existing activities of organizations. But it still leaves some questions. For instance, see that wiki in the Contact Center row, to the right of Campaign Management? It’s linked below to the Sales and Quotation Analysis process.

In Social Software 1.0, that’s a standalone wiki. I’m a fan of the notion that collaboration needs to occur in-the-flow of work. And having a separate wiki for collaborating on a customer quotation analysis makes it tougher to get usage.

In Social Software 2.0, that’s a collaborative space integrated into a sales force automation application. The customer quotation analysis occurs right where all the “action” occurs in the effort to win new business.

Some Examples of Social Software 2.0

With the luxury of a blank blog page, I’ve got the freedom to suggest a few examples where collaboration and crowdsourcing can be more integrated directly into corporate activities.

B2B Sales: The process of pulling together a proposal in the B2B market generally requires involvement of several parties. This is a process screaming for collaboration, visibility, searchability and persistence. It also has deadlines, and sign-offs by executives. Generally, tapping an existing database of customer information is required too. Embedding a wiki-like experience in CRM, along with the deep database access and project dimensions would be valuable.

Procurement: Enterprises buy mountains of things. Inevitably, some of it doesn’t work out as well as expected. As employees order and request items, allow them to rate and comment on existing contracts. By sharing their experiences, employees provide procurement managers with insight into the quality of suppliers. And employees can describe evolving needs. The workflow aspect of this occurs when the crowdsourced rating falls below some threshold, triggering a required review by the procurement manager.

Product Management: If you’ve ever done product management, you know that you’ll receive plenty of individual ideas on what’s needed. Business units, sales, marketing, engineering, customer service…all have strong opinions on what should be included. Putting all these internal constituencies together on a common platform to identify ideas and get crowdsourced input on the most pressing features would be a tremendously helpful. The process would need to include analytics to filter through them, and workflow to flesh out features and get sign-offs. Example: Spigit innovation management.

There are myriad corporate systems and processes where some elements of social can be leveraged to improve operations.

Sameer Patel, in his post Why Process Barfs on Social, includes this tweet by (now former) SAP EVP Zia Yusuf:

@dahowlett blog and wikis will not drive value alone, I think the trick here is to connect “crowd insight” directly into specific bizprocess

And Helpstream CEO Bob Warfield adds this thought:

What we’re lacking is simply a harmonious marriage of these two.  Social should be integrated into specific business processes, perhaps many if not most specific business processes.

What we’re seeing is the natural maturation of an industry. Tools were needed to establish the Enterprise 2.0 field in the first place. Now it’s time to apply these tools, and social computing concepts, to the mainstay activities that drive businesses.

What Form Will Social Software 2.0 Take?

The maturation of the social software industry beyond tools to deeper integration into existing business processes will have parallel development paths:

• Established enterprise applications will add social elements to their offerings
• General purpose collaboration and social network providers will develop features addressing specific types of traditional activities
• Social software platforms focused on delivering value in a specific core business activity

Like most enterprise software markets, there will be room for all three types of offerings. I think it will be hard to dislodge best-of-breed for the biggest systems: ERP and CRM. Those vendors will add social elements as time allows, and nimble small companies will offer plug-ins that supplement their offerings. Most other systems in the enterprise will be up for grabs if there’s a better way.

I’ll close with another quote from Bob Warfield with regard to how the Social Software 2.0 landscape will play out:

No touchy feely stuff allowed.  You can’t just be about making things “better” or “empowering people.”  Passion is great, but call your shot, and if the ball doesn’t go into that pocket, you’ve scratched and forfeit the game.

From the home office in my watery swimming pool on the moon…

#1: RT @innovate: The 50 Best Inventions of 2009 http://ow.ly/BVB0 #innovation I like #40 Edible Race Car. #9 Tweeting by thinking?

#2: RT @lindegaard: Tough Questions and Great Answers: General Mills Steps Up to the Open Innovation Plate: http://bit.ly/2nEXSv

#3: Microsoft Bing team gets kudos for #innovation. First tweet search, now Wolfram|Alpha integration http://ow.ly/BrHC

#4: Is Twitter Trying to Lure You Back to Twitter.com? http://ow.ly/AfcU by @robdiana > Maybe a way to drive page views for ads?

#5: Regarding new Twitter retweet function, @stoweboyd has some good points about it http://ow.ly/AIl7 Inability to add text is a miss

#6: October was a slow traffic month for the social networks, in a detailed look by @louisgray http://ow.ly/BCgU Facebook still growing

#7: UK Guardian discusses how to deal when your boss is on Twitter (& links to my #cisco fatty blog post f/ March) http://ow.ly/Bkrf

#8: Check out: Driving Adoption is anti-2.0 http://bit.ly/1ksZAr #e2conf > Leave it to @rotkapchen!

#9: Do we create the world just by looking at it? http://bit.ly/1kdTOs “Human body is a just barely adequate measuring device” #quantumphysics

#10: Commentator on NPR this AM criticizes Californians for social liberal/fiscal conservative & not wanting taxes. Western libertarian strain!

The financial crisis of 2008 spawned not just a deep recession but a structurally different business environment globally. This restructured economic order, requires some new thinking, particularly for retail banks.

Many retail banks responded instinctively to the recession, without giving any thought to the aftermath of their actions, and there is a growing perception they have violated their ’social’ contract with their customers.

In the heady days of courtship, when banks are acquiring customers, they make promises of service and understanding to clients. They position themselves as suitable partners for the long term, especially when it came to buying the major assets in peoples’ lives, houses and cars. Customers commit themselves to the relationship by signing up for twenty year bonds.

Up until mid 2008 it was rational to assume that a customer who didn’t pay back a loan was unwilling to, or incapable of doing so in the very short term, through incompetence or poor planning. It was also perfectly reasonable for a bank to divorce a client that wasn’t committed to the mutually beneficial aspects of the relationship.

When the crisis loomed, many people were retrenched and entrepreneurs, who had been successfully trading for years, suddenly hit a brick wall, where money just stopped coming in regardless of what they did.

Banks responded in a pre-crisis manner, based on the  economic assumptions that non payers were the bad guys. They came down harshly on offenders, foreclosing, handing over to debt collection agencies who are used to dealing with recalcitrant bad guys, harassed and heckled already devastated clients, who’s only fault was not to have foreseen a recession when even the economists didn’t see it coming. Their way of helping customers was to offer quick sells of customer’s homes before handing them over to the courts. They reported gleefully of moving more inventory through the system.

What they effectively did was to kick their customers while they were down, and then grind them into the ground. Banks should have looked at this as a relationship-building opportunity and demonstrated that customer loyalty was not misplaced. Instead they alienated a captive audience, who though they might not have been happy, were unlikely to have migrated in droves away from their respective banks.

Had the banks taken a long term view on their client relationships and their financial position, they could have operationalised a single view of customer strategy and considered the customer as the complex entity he or she really is. This would have enabled them to rationalise their exposure to the customer’s risk and facilitated the renegotiation of the terms of their relationships so that the customer would retain their lifetime value to the bank, instead of squeezing them for the present value in a recession.

Take for example, a regularly paying bondholder who has been with the bank for ten years, he hits a problem in the global recession. Judging by his history and paying behaviour, he is likely to get back on his feet in the next twelve months and resume repaying any loans regularly. His house is still worth more than the bond, mitigating the risk that the bank will not be able to recoup its money in future. Surely it makes sense to arrange for a 12 month payment holiday and raise his interest rates by 2%, for the rest of the bond period, thus retaining his Life Time Value to the bank, rather than selling his house off at auction at 50% of its value, alienating the customer, even when he has been rehabilitated and incurring the cost of acquiring an unknown customer from another bank which has similarly disenfranchised their relationship?

The banks add insult to injury by managing their collection processes so badly, that once they have collected their debts in full (and some blood, just for good measure), their alienated and bruised customer keeps receiving SMS’s from the lawyers threatening judgements if they don’t pay up.

Many banks do not understand their customer’s footprint across their financial institutions. In fact some banks are set up on the Owner-Entrepreneur model, because in good times this facilitates the accountability and entrepreneurial behaviour that agile companies need to succeed.

In the past this was a risky practise because it meant that the bank would miss out of cross and up-sell opportunities. Today the risk is much higher. Many banks who noticed a change in consumer behaviour when the economy turned, panicked. They exacerbated the problem at every client interface, by freezing overdrafts and making them due immediately, or by freezing access bonds, so that the customers who could have made payments on most of the accounts or were at risk of falling marginally short on payments, (for example meeting 90% of their commitments to the bank) were tipped into the emotional and financial abyss of bankruptcy. Where they could have had the car repossessed and saved the house, they lost everything.

The banks did not consider that the inventory that they were “flushing” through their system, was the life and heart of their customer, their home, the place where they loved and celebrated, brought up children and created a lifetime of memories. Customers are not going to be so quick to forgive banks, the cost of acquisition and creating loyalty amongst customers has just escalated through the roof.

The breadth and depth of today’s reputational challenge is a consequence not just of the retail bank’s instinctive responses to the speed, severity and unexpectedness of recent economic events but also of underlying shifts in the importance of Web-based participatory media, or web 2.0.

The Modern Internet and the era of Social Media are promoting wider, faster scrutiny of banks and rendering traditional public-relations tools less effective in addressing reputational challenges.

It will be transparent, decisive action that builds strong reputations in the future. Doing so effectively means stepping up both the sophistication and the internal coordination of reputation efforts. Some companies, for example, not only use cutting-edge attitudinal-segmentation techniques to understand the concerns of customers better but also mobilise cross-functional teams to gather intelligence and respond quickly to far-flung reputational threats.

One key is to cut through organisational barriers that impede such efforts through committed senior leadership who have an opportunity to differentiate their companies by demonstrating real statesmanship. An energised, enlightened and empowered public will expect nothing else.

The proliferation of Web-based platforms, has given individuals and organisations new tools they use to subject banks to greater and faster scrutiny. This communication revolution also means that certain issues (such as poor customer service) can be picked up by “citizen journalists” or bloggers and generate outrage on a much larger scale.

As a result, what formerly were operational risks resulting from failed or inadequate processes, people, or systems now often manifest themselves as reputational risks whose costs far exceed those of the original missteps.

In this dispersed and multifaceted environment, banks must collect information about reputational threats across the organisation, analyse that information in sophisticated ways, and address problems by taking action to mitigate them. This requires significant collaboration, coordination, commitment and an ability to act quickly.

Many retail banks are structured around centralised corporate-affairs departments that can’t monitor or examine diverse reputational threats with sufficient sophistication. Moreover, traditional PR can’t deal with many concerns, which must often be addressed by changing business operations and conducting two-way conversations. Managers of business units such as home loans or credit cards, have a better position for spotting potential challenges but often fail to recognise their reputational significance. This is often an unintentioned consequence of remuneration systems designed by financial managers, not being aligned to marketing strategies. Internal communication about reputational risks may be inhibited by the absence of consistent methodologies for tracking and quantifying those risks. Accountability for managing problems is often blurred.

As a result, responses to reputational issues can be short term, ad hoc, and defensive, and therein lies a problem that companies must solve quickly: even as reputational challenges boost the importance of good PR, companies will struggle if they rely on PR alone, with little insight into the thinking and operational root causes of their reputational problems.

A logical starting point for companies seeking to raise their game is to put in place an effective early-warning system to make executives aware of reputational problems quickly. Most companies are quite good at tracking press mentions, and many are beginning to monitor the multitude of Web-based voices whose power is beginning to rival the mainstream media’s. However, doing these things effectively, while an important prerequisite for stepping up engagement with stakeholders, isn’t the toughest task facing organisations.

To prepare for and respond to reputational threats, we suggest that retail banks should emphasise these priorities.

• First, they need to assemble enough facts to gain a rich understanding of their customer base as it manifests itself across the entire organisation, not only their product preferences but also the psychographic profiles of segments of customers including propensity for risk, social media adoption and behaviours etc.

• Secondly, they must conduct a two way dialogue with their customer (segments).

Banks are still the heart of the South African economy. They pump the funds on which productive human enterprise depends. Banks must perform this role well, with all the diligence we would expect of any expert or custodian of an essential task.

They must refocus on those fundamentals that are unchanged by the financial crisis — their core purpose, customer needs, and capabilities — while recognising that profound market changes have occurred and will affect how these capabilities need to be delivered. Those leaders whose banks can respond to the times and enhance their capabilities will be to­morrow’s winners.

Kate Elphick – Digital Bridges