Selling the Case for Accelerating Business Performance with Enterprise Collaboration Technologies: Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes

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.

 

Comments

[Jordan]

Thanks Bill for the great writeup. I enjoyed the opportunity to share thoughts with the panel and the participants in the audience.

The pilot discussion was, perhaps, one of the most critical for consideration by enterprise practitioners trying to get support for a new E2.0 deployment, or to extend one they already have (yes, sell and sell again - its a pattern I see happen all the time).

There are all kinds of problems with pilots, in the traditional sense, which are usually considered to be evaluation periods.

(note: I am NOT talking about pre-production pilots where the IT simply calls something a pilot to convey that they are not yet ready for production level systems and user support. I am 100% in favor of this kind of pilot which also allows the initial cadre of users to set some good examples and infuse the organization with E2.0 literacy before everyone is splashed into the platform).

Most evaluation pilots are too non-committal and place too high an expectation on the users. Why would you learn and work in a system for 3 months when you know it may be trashed at the end? I emphasized that any enterprise doing an "evaluation" pilot ought to make a simple commitment: At the end of the pilot, if as many as one person want to continue with the platform, they can. This is the dedication you need to give people for them to take the time and attention risk in order to give a platform a fighting chance.

The better use of a pilot or evaluation period is for modeling. Here's the problem. As a sales person or marketer, I can't build the perfect demo. A demo scenario built around a shoe company wont seem relevant or even understandable to a consulting company. The best way to build the case for a new platform and show people a way forward is to deploy a pilot and build out a model based on your own organization's structure (or anti-structure if that's the goal), use case and business pain.

If the goal of the session was to help teach practitioners how to sell, that's the best advice I can offer: Focus your efforts on building a model that will help your stakeholders imagine the benefits of a new E2.0 platform and begin to plan the resources, management objectives and other aligning features required in a good emergineering process (see http://traction.tractionsoftware.com/traction/permalink/Blog1326).

[bill Ives]

Jordan

Thanks for your comment and i like your idea of the pilot as a learning activity. I have engaged in many of these and they are the best way to reach relevance in the full scale productuon system. The commitment is that we are going to do this and we want you the pilot users to help use shape the final version.