Social Behavior, Usage Patterns, and Adoption: My Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes

This is the seventh in a series of my notes on the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, June 14- 17. This post covers the session, Social Behavior, Usage Patterns, and Adoption. It was led by Nahum Gershon, Senior Principal Scientist, MITRE. Panelists include: Walton Smith, Senior Associate, Booz Allen Hamilton, David Millen, Research Scientist, IBM Watson Research Center, and Sean Power, Consultant and Analyst, Co-Founder, Watching Websites. I have interviewed both David and Walton about their organizations and looked forward to this session.  Here is the description. My notes follow.

“Regardless of how useful an application might be, its success is as much a factor of anthropology and sociology as it is of features and cost. To maximize the chances of success within any application initiative, you need an adoption strategy. Should you roll out the tool company-wide, or create false scarcity by limiting deployment? Should you have an extensive testing cycle, or instead plan for frequent upgrades and invest in feedback tools?



Internet giants like Twitter, Facebook, Skype, Basecamp, and Gmail all succeeded where others had failed because of their unique adoption strategies. In this session we’ll examine successful application deployments—including those of some of the largest and most popular sites on the web—and see how to apply the lessons they learned to our own delivery strategy.”

Nahum asked the panelists to introduce themselves in 140 char or less. Then he asked about where does social media work? Walton began by noting the large numbers of people they are hiring and added that social media can help onboard them. The Federal government is projected to hire over 500,000 people.  How can they be on-boarded?  Social media can help here also. I have written about the Booz Allen effort called Hello. Here the latest (Booz Allen Extends its Collaborative Platform) and here is a summary of the prior ones (Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: The Series).

David pointed out that within IBM the average employees tenure is under 5 years. Their collective knowledge needs to be shared. Here is a post I did in 2005 of their efforts then (IBM’s Social Software Initiatives: Blogs, Wikis, Tagging, and More – Part Three- Internal Applications).  They were pushing innovation in this space then and still do.

Walton said that traditional KM only captures a small amount of the collective wisdom. He noted that Andy McAfee yesterday said you need to have it in the workflow and this can capture much more of the collective knowledge.

Nahum mentioned seeing a demo of the Booz Allen collaboration system. Walton said at the time that most of the conversations within the firm are now online and accessible fro sharing.

Walton said that in Hello you can get feeds based attributes and people. This provided great benefits for the individual so it drove adoption.  Nahum asked how do you get people to use e20? How do you drive passion? What about people who say this is just for teenagers?

Sean responded that there are two different worlds of social media. There is the external facing conversation and communities.   You will have 90% lurkers and 10% contributors.  The other is very different when you deal with communities around business processes.  The adoption is much higher for use around processes.

Walton said that 50% of his budget is for change management to get people to use it. He asked for getting the best people from the client practice to staff the change management. They start with business problems. It is not like rolling out a tool like Outlook that is a utility.   Tool selection needs to wait until after business issues have been defined.

David said there is a complementary use that is not always anticipated. When they did social bookmarking at IBM though Dogear it contributed to the enterprise search that everyone uses, not just the Dogear users. (Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise – IBM’s Internal Tagging Tool – Dogear)

Sean said that people always say it is the business issues and not the tools but people still look at tools first. This is especially when the tools have been paid for. Now the people who paid for them want them to be used.

Nahum said he has a corporate blackberry and a person iPhone.  He tends to use Twitter for personal but he asks tech questions on it and gets good responses that he can share that within the organization

Walton said the e20 tools really benefit large organizations.  They are building a first responders community of practice to link these people who are spread across the country to get answers to questions.

Someone asked about pilot vs broad adoption. Walton said that you need to make a commitment that you are not going to stop. People are not going to participate if they do not know if it will continue.  Walton looks at the issue of return on engagement for the participants. People need to find value when they come to the system or they will not come back. Time or engagement is more the cost than actually money for tools. Walton has told me that many of the Hello tools are open source.

David said start with a pilot and be prepared to change and scale quickly.  He told a story about a pilot tool they were deploying. There is some risk in getting involved in tools. He got an email from a user saying that he put all his eggs in the basket of the new tools and hopes it was not dropped.

It was also asked about structure and unstructured data. Shawn said he is a big believer in unstructured data. There are many social media startups. He treats social media initiatives as a startup and they should be lean. He referenced lean methodology.  Most implementations will not be right the first time. You need to be nimble and treat them in a startup fashion.

Walton agrees 1000 percent but with the caveat that you need to listen to users carefully. You need to go beyond the power users and get the reluctant people involved.

An audience member said you need to get to scale quickly to get the benefit. They more people involved the more the chatter.  How can do a managed viral campaign and not be overwhelmed.  Walton said you have to be transparent that it is pilot but invite anyone to participate.  You can be nimble. Walton gave an example of when the Southern command in Miami was seeing a demo of a collaboration system that Bozz Allen developed for the US Pacific Command. When the Haiti earthquake happen they switched form demo to fill system right away.  Walton saw that the conspiracy theorists said that this proved that the US military caused the earthquake as they never could have implemented the system that quickly unless they anticipated the earthquake.

An audience mamber asked how to get middle managers to participate. Walton saoid most of his change managemtn effort is targeted at middle managers. They reach out on how to solve business problems.  Not how to use tools.

Walton said do not pilot by org chart. People do not passion about e where they are on the org chart. Look for issues that people are passionate about that cut across the org chart.  Going across the org chart also helps with viral; message and growth. Also integrate with other systems to get content already entered.

Walton said you need to keep adding better tools. People will not agree to go backward.  Nehum said you need community practioners to monitor and support the community to get what the group wants and to get people to try the system.

Walton related a use case as social can serve as an ambient alert system that tracks events within the enterprise.  There was an issue around a new smart phone roll out.  The IT people responsible for this began to see concerns on the microsharing system long before the volume of help tickets rose to alert status.  They were able to quickly address the issue through the microsharing system and other channels, indicate they were aware of it, and add that a fix was on its way. The speed of detection that microsharing offered turned what could have been a black eye for the IT people.

Walton said sunlight is best disinfectant for bad behavior.  Do not put anything that you do not want your boss or mom to see.

David said some conversations are not just inappropriate but illegal so you need to be able to monitor.  Walton said that getting senior leaders to participate helps because that sets the tone for what is expected and making it known that senior people are listening.

An audience member asked about social media bing seen as waste of time. Walton said that the water cooler has been around a long time. The social tech just makes it more powerful. 

David said that if people are simply reading blogs you have won. You do not have to have everyone writing the blogs.   He also addressed the issue of official vs informal content.  He gave the example of a medical advice system. How do you deal with bad content when it can affect people’s health. They are still working on this issue and medical advice can have big impact.

Nahum said they hope to continue to conversation using the Twitter hashtag – #e2conf-37 for the session. This was the only session I attended that suggested a continuation of the conversation. It is a good idea, especially for this useful session.