Enterprise 2.0 Black Belt Workshop - Afternoon Part One - Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes

This is the second in a series of my notes on the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, June 14- 17. This post covers the first half of afternoon portion of the workshop, Enterprise 2.0 Black Belt Workshop. Here is the description. My notes follow.

“Planning and executing a comprehensive Enterprise 2.0 program requires an honest assessment of your organization and strong strategic planning. In this full-day workshop meet the vanguard of those who are currently engaged in implementing Enterprise 2.0 within large organizations. Learn firsthand from practitioners who have tackled adoption, architecture, change management, community management, education, governance, and the realities of living an Enterprise 2.0 transformative experience.”

The afternoon began with Luis Suarez, IBM and Stan Garfield, Deloitte, discussing Community Roles and Adoption Planning inside of the corporation. I spoke with Luis and Stan before the session. Stan said he was going to take the position of the need for some monitoring and Luis sad he was going to take the more open ended rebellious approach.  In that spirit Stan was on the stage and Luis was wondering around the audience keeping us awake after lunch.

Luis explained that they are talking about internal community management. In the session they went back and forth rather than operating in a tag team mode.  Luis also said that while community is a hot topic, not everything is a community. A community is a group of people who are passionate about a topic.  A community is not like a project team. You cannot manage a community in the same way. There is much less control in communities.

Stan discussed ten principles of a community manifesto. First, communities should be independent, not part of an org structure. It should be voluntary even if it is aligned with an organization’s main issues or even structure. Communities are also not the same as organizational sites or teams. They may use the same tools but teams are usually assigned and with a fixed closure date. Teams are  often closed, not open. 

Luis said that communities have always been in organizations and they have gone across official boundaries. It is more about facilitating communities rather than managing them. At the same time they need to be constantly nurtured to succeed. Implement and manage proper tools – site, calendar, events, news, threads (SCENT).

Stan showed ten targets for managing communities. The slides are available and he did not go over everything. The same applies to the ten principles mentioned earlier.

Luis mentioned the need to nurture the connections between people in the community.  You need to promote learning and trust between members. In good knowledge management it is not just about collecting content but establishing connections between people. One financial benefit is that communities often help people stay within the company as they are more engaged

Stan covered the steps used within Deloitte to support communities.  The launch is just the beginning, Building and sustaining a community is the hard part. You need to refine topics and define long-term goals.  There needs to be quality useful content from the start. There need to be a site where members can engage each other.  Metrics are useful for sustaining the effort.  Stan said that when he took over KM at HP, there were too many communities and this frustrated potential users so he refined and narrowed down the topics to make it more accessible.

Luis said at IBM there is a very different experience as it is totally open ended.  Anyone can start any community. Similar communities tend to merge over time. In IBM there are now over 18,000 communities.  It is important to fit within the culture.  At IBM, communities help each other rather than having the organization impose top down guidelines.  They are also looking for similar communities and suggesting a merger. 

Luis went on the discuss community roles: executive sponsor, community leader, community council, and community members.  Get the sponsor as high up as possible who also leads by example. The leader is the most passionate member and gets everyone excited.  The council advises the leader.  Luis added that having lurkers in a community is okay as they get exposed to the content but the leader should encourage them to become more active.

Stan said to be sure to define the role for each tool. Having too many tools can be confusing. Only have what is necessary.  The same holds with communities. Keep the number to a minimum while covering all interests. If someone wants to start a community on a topic already covered, suggest that they co-lead the existing one.

Luis said to look for interactions within the community to see who is most active to find the leader. Social software tools help document this activity so the natural leader can emerge.  The key thing for a leader is passion.  But they cannot be too aggressive in a negative way.  If this happens the community may seek a new leader.  Communities are more self-regulating than other groups.  This self-regulating also applies to inappropriate content.

Luis said you can never communicate too much to the community. Here is where social software can be powerful with multiple channels.  The transparency in social software also helps sharing between communities.

Next Ted Hopton, United Business Media, and Donna Cuomo, MITRE discussed metrics and analytics.  Ted covered different types of metrics. Quantitative metrics at a minimal level can look at log-ins and contributors.  Then page views and unique visitors.  Active members, contributors and consumers provide the ratio of these types of participants.  Page views per employee and per division help understand usage across the enterprise and can drive some healthy competition. 

How do the metrics tie back to objectives and all of the quantitative metrics? Ted said there is not always a direct match so they have used surveys.  For example, does the system provide a better understanding of the company’s goals. Of course, now we are moving from actions to perceptions and these do not always match.  They also asked about how to make it better. The number one issue was the ability to find things so that is now a priority for improvement.

Ted mentioned a Net Promoter score. Those who rate the system on a 9-10 scale are promoters, 7-8 are passive positives, 0-6 are detractors.  Divide supporters by detractors and you want a positive ratio.  Ted is hoping others will use this metric.

The third set of metrics is success stories. A favorite example is new employee who was locked out.  She used the community system to ask for help and got immediate responses. Ted said to be careful of benchmarks as contexts are very different. Better to benchmark against yourself to look for progress

Donna now talked about what they are doing at MITRE.  MITRE has been doing collaboration and related metrics for some time.  For example, they created managing crowd sourcing innovation using Spigit, an innovation management software product I have written about on the AppGap blog several times. They wanted to make things more open and not have early weeding out of ideas by middle management as they made their way up the chain of command.  They also wanted broader participation. They created an Idea Market.

For metrics around the Idea Market, they looked at a number of metrics: ideas submitted, the visitors, idea owners, voters, and commentors. They found much greater participation using the open idea management system than the old bottom up submission process.  A survey also felt the process was improved.

A second example involved a social bookmarking tool.  They looked at what people were doing in the system. There was a lot of viewing of other’s bookmarks. Contributors were 14% of the people, which Donna felt was quite good. I would agree. We often feel that every one needs to contribute. That could be chaos but the contributions do need to be useful so I think the presence of active lurkers is a good thing as long as they are active. 

Comments

[Ana Neves]

Thank you very much for your notes. Great to enlighten those who, like me, could not take part of the workshop.

I see my opinions and experience reflected in pretty much all that was said but there are a couple of points I am not totally sure about. I wrote a post about those and I invite you to take a look:
http://kmol.online.pt/en/2010/06/16/scent-and-lurkers

What do you think?

[bill Ives]

Ana

I agree with your points about lurkers - badly named as they are often both making use of the knowledge and sharing it with others. Thanks.