This is the first in a series of my notes
on the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, June 14- 17. This post covers the
workshop, Selling the
Case for Accelerating Business Performance with Enterprise Collaboration
Technologies. It was led by Oliver Marks, Partner, Sovos Group and blogger, ZDNet Collaboration 2.0,
and Sameer Patel, Partner, Sovos Group and blogger, PretzelLogic.or. Oliver and
Sameer are some of my favorite tweeters and bloggers so I was pleased to attend
the session. Here is the description. My notes follow. They are done real times
so please excuse typos.
“This series of sessions and associated
discussions is tightly focused on defining and selling business value and use
case inside your business. The program offers an abundance of high level debate
and information about adoption issues and maturation timelines of enterprise
2.0 technologies.
We aim to cover ‘Monday morning 9am at your desk’ – real
world problem solving.
Typically there are urgent tasks that cannot currently
be accomplished well with existing infrastructure: how do you practically
leverage the promise on modern 2.0 technologies to achieve success?” The
session looked at looked at relevance, politics, scales, road maps, and
budgeting.”
Sameer began and said they are going to
work with us to help frame the business case for new collaboration in the
enterprise. How can the new technologies meet real business needs? His firm,
Sovos, helps enterprises with workforce and process performance using the new
technologies. They are also
bringing into the session a panel of vendors who deal with the ROI issues all
the time.
Oliver said that there has been a lot of
pontification and they want to bring the conversation to business issues. You need to design an executive pitch
for support and budget. All the stakeholders need to be engaged for the
duration to have a sustaining effort.
Sameer next addressed the big idea with a
blank slide since there is often a gap between the talk and what you address at
the workplace. You hear about
great cases at conferences and then you get back to your work and see that it
might not fit. The enterprise 2.0 business case is different than past large
applications that did not replace anything. Now you are usually replacing
something so there are different and more difficult issues. However, there often needs to be a
co-existence, at least during the transition.
Sameer said you need to begin with the
culture of your firm around making new initiatives, as well as the pain points
that are being felt right now. Oliver added that you need to ride the current
waves rather than fighting the tide. Do not be a solution looking for a
problem, not matter how exciting the solution may be. Fitting into the firm’s culture is essential and every firm
has its unique culture. Culture is represented through people and building a
collaboration system for these people needs to work within it. At the same time
culture is often blamed for lack of progress. However, it is more likely a lack
of fit with real business needs. People often blame culture as scapegoat.
The new tools have an impact on
governance. The old ways were based on top -down information flow that was
often closed. Now you have a two-way information flow that is more open. There
is new power and new risk. Here is another way that culture comes into play.
How open or closed is the communication?
You need to make the rules of engagement clear to employees to reduce
risk and allow for effective use.
Be careful not to position the new tools
as a cure all. Executives have heard this pitch before and been disappointed.
Acknowledge where it will not help to make the places where it will help more
credible. Pick discrete business
problems and move from one to another.
Before you pitch to senior execs be sure
to understand the high level technology landscape in the market so you can
address questions by them or by any IT people that they bring into the
conversation. Be sure to define the transition costs beyond the implementation
costs. These issues will be
brought up, often by someone who was burned by them in the past. Having these facts together will also give
you more credibility. Be sure to expect the unexpected no matter how much you
anticipate.
Now they brought in the vendor panel to
continue the conversation. They include Jordan Franks, Traction, Brian Stern,
NewsGator, Omar Divina,
Socialtext. Sameer asked how do
sum up the social software picture in a few minutes. Omar started with the fact
that most employees are already using social tools on the Web. But then move
toward business issues away from starting with the features of the software.
Sameer said but what if you do not have
time to discuss their needs. How do you attract attention quickly? Jordan said it is hard to do elevator
speeches with these tools. They have tried cold calling but the return is very
low. You do need to know the business needs. Having said that he said that
social software is designed to build human process systems to deal with things
that do not go right and also to plan for new efforts. How do you support
collaboration to address the unexpected?
Brian asks execs if they have nailed
their collaboration needs within the firm. They usually feel that this is a problem. Oliver asked that
once you know the pain points how do you address senior execs. Omar usually
tries to get the internal business champion address the senior execs. He
related an instance of how Socialtext pointed on an issue inside the firm that
was not picked up otherwise.
Jordan related a situation where a client
asked what to call the social software system. He said that you should describe
it by the function and not by the market name. People will better understand
this. I certainly agree here. We tried to never call a knowledge management
system by that name but rather the function it served such as the underwriter’s
desktop or the call center support system. Speak the company’s language and not
jargon.
Brian said you need an executive
champion. The best meetings are when this champion does most of the
talking. As a vendor they want to
be coached from the inside.
Sameer asked about what the questions you
usually are always asked. Omar responded by going to the culture issues. Are
our people ready to use these tools? How will you help us with the adoption?
The IT people ask about security. Where will the data sit and who owns it? How
will it integrate with our other systems? Will I need to hire new people to
maintain it?
Jordan said he was a little surprised
when he first started dealing with IT people. Their job is to keep up systems
working and fighting fires. They will be concerned about liabilities and
risks. They will not be concerned
with benefits for the users. What platforms do you run on? How will your
software impact the rest of the systems? What are the support requirements?
Oliver pointed out that he often sees
turf wars between business and IT. As a vendor you do not want to get caught in
the cross fires. Omar said that they often get pulled into these issues. Jordan said he found the best selling
point is to start with IT and have them bring you into the enterprise. Then you have won the IT battle up
front. At the same time, the trap to avoid is a feature list of requirements
divorced from need. Also, avoid IT’s love of tools and lack of understanding of
the user requirements and capabilities.
Brian also said they like IT. They are a
Sharepoint product so they fit with those who have Sharepoint and do not fit
otherwise so it is more clear cut. He agrees with Jordan to avoid RFPs based on
features.
Sameer asked about pilots. Jordan said it
is better to avoid pilots. They often fail and there is not the same sense of
commitment. People will not want to spend time with a system that might not
last. He said that is hard to get
engagement. Instead let everyone try the tool in a one day session and
brainstorm use cases. Social software often does not achieve real value without
many users and not a small subset of users.
Omar said that they take a more
optimistic view on pilots. They offer free trials. At the same time, they look for proper scale and time to
demonstrate real value. Three months is usually too short. Brian also said they like pilots. They
have a 95% close rate after pilots. However, they do not do free pilots. At the
same time they only start with clients who have expressed and understand their
business needs.
Sameer asked about what difficult
questions the panel has experienced. Omar said that legal can pose a challenge
as they want to lock things down to avoid risk. The transparency of enterprise
2.0 can scare them. They also think of Facebook and Twitter. You need to show
how enterprise 2.0 tools are very different. Brian said they get asked about how to limit or control who
uses the system. This question can
make sense when you are supporting a small group within a larger one. Most of the time it misses the point.
Some one in the audience asked about the
main uses cases or interests they are seeing. Brian said it was communities.
Now micro-blogging and mobile are big aspects. Omar said they are seeing
interest in achieving broad competence on issues. Also, how to make the
intranet more collaborative?
Next, Sameer and Oliver carried on to
cover how to get the executives onboard.
Sameer said that doing requirements gathering is different than
traditional software with set features.
You need to ask more open ended questions and focus on outcomes. At the
same time, vague concepts like time saved will not work.
It is important to get the stakeholders
on board, especially the people who will be called by the execs right after the
big meeting if you are successful. You want them to anticipate the call and
understand things from your perspective. Often most of the work is done before
the big meetings. Oliver said this is especially the case in Japan. If the big
cheese in the back of the room is asleep you are golden. I have found the need
to do the work before the big meeting by having one on one prior meetings with
everyone is the case everywhere.
Next Bevin Hernandez from Penn State
University spoke on the me we culture shift in her organization and how you launch
an enterprise 2.0 environment. She is part of the outreach department that is
bridge between the school and the business world.
To begin the implementation process for
the new collaboration tools, they went around asking people about their pain
points about their existing intranet. The original intranet simply had a
weather report and a link to email.
They also wanted to move from a me culture to a we culture. Their
Outreach group was a collection of silos that occasionally talked. The new interface was titled
our.outreach. They used a variety
of methods and channels to support the launch. They begin with post cards
asking people to save the launch day to play with the new tools. Then they choose a small group of
people to become evangelists.
Next they put up posters on fun facts on
employees derived from the new system such as who taught Carlos Santana? They also created welcome kits. They created an entertaining
indoctrination video for new employees that she showed. The common thread here was fun.
I found this to be a very useful session.
My Darwin partner, Thierry Hubert, and I are presenting on Wednesday at 1 PM at
this conference in the Search track.
Our session is Using
Chaos Theory Principals to Overcome Information Overload within the Enterprise
and on the Web #e2conf-31. We hope to see you there.
