Portals and KM

Painting of View from the West Coast of Samos Island, Greece

It is the weekend so back to Greece. There will be more E20 notes on Monday. Here is a 16' x 20" arcylic of the coast of the west side of Samos Island in Greece. 

 

Boston E 20 Notes: Interview with IBM’s Jeff Schick

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. During the event I interviewed Jeff Schick, VP, Social Software at IBM. Jeff and I have spoken before and he updated me on some of their recent moves. I also attended his keynote the next day.

Jeff started by discussing some of the issues with social business. Social software is generally intuitive so people of all generations can use the tools. The challenge is building a thriving and engaged community that takes advantage of these new tools. At IBM they are looking at how to get value quickly from the new tools to encourage the success of these communities. Social business is not just about small incremental improvements but it holds the potential for transformational improvements in the business. IBM can provide skilled people to help with social business implementations and gaining engagement.

I asked about use cases and Jeff said to start with a business process. I could not agree more. Look at what people do and what you want to change. He gave an example through the work they are doing at TD Bank Group. TD is using IBM enterprise social networking software to improve employee collaboration, information discovery and sharing. With a global team of 85,000, TD employees across North America can now easily find experts, get answers to questions, recognize accomplishments, share ideas, and communicate and collaborate across geographies.

More than 4,500 blogs are spreading across the bank, and almost 4,000 Communities have been formed. Those numbers keep growing daily at TD. 

It’s still early since TD launched Connections (November 2011 in Canada and January 2012 in US), but the bank is starting to see a number of positive outcomes to drive business value across the organization.  Connections is helping to: build stronger, more connected teams, increase collaboration, improve communication – they’ve already seen a reduction in meetings and email volume, all of which ultimately impacts TD’s bottom line and employee experience.

Here are a few specific examples of ROI that TD is realizing: 

Better Communication, Time Saved: Senior district leaders need to continuously coach, motivate and lead their sales and customer service teams across each of their 10-15 branches. Connections is being used by some district leaders to provide recognition and business updates. Previously recognition and business updates were filtered through branch managers in email, meetings or conference calls. Now through direct communication in IBM Connections, one hour per week is saved on the process of providing recognition and business updates. Instead of going through the extra step of communicating through the branch managers, information can be sent directly to the teams via Status Updates, Board Posts and Community engagement.

Productivity Increased: Field Marketing Managers (FMMs) plan community or market specific events to drive business to TD branches/stores. In most cases market or community events such as branch/store openings can easily be replicated in a different region through minor local adjustments. There was a reduction in duplication of efforts by FMMs from Maine to Florida through sharing information such as event plans, promotional materials and lessons learned within their team Community.

Better Communication: Colleen Johnston, TD’s Chief Financial Officer, needs a direct line not only to her organization but also to the Women in Leadership initiative she leads. Through using a forum on Connections, Colleen was able to hold a live conversation with employees across TD on the topic of ‘Women in Leadership’ on International Women’s Day. There were 181 questions, answers and comments during the one-hour interactive conversation. These employees gained insight and advice directly from one of TD’s most respected leaders. The conversation continues to be available for others to benefit from.

Jeff went on to discuss the need to align internal processes such those described above with external efforts with customers and business partners. This is one of the reasons I like the term social business rather than enterprise 2.0. For example, IBM looks at relevant content on Facebook and LinkedIn and brings it inside the enterprise to analyze it and develop responses. They also look to leverage social content with their business partners.

Jeff mentioned the TD Bank Group social application in his keynote the next day.  He also introduced a manager from LeasePlan who talked about how they are building the “corporate brain” through IBM Connections. They did a pilot with 3 business units to  test cultural differences and engagement among their global employees.  There was so much demand and buzz around Connections, they had a waiting list to join the program and senior management was encouraged to move ahead with a full deployment Using English was an option to encourage people to contribute in their own language to encourage participation. 

Adoption was a main focus at LeasePlan. They made participation optional and created a promotional video. They called the program LinkedPeople. They had testimonials from a variety of employees in different roles and different countries.  They respected cultural differences. They intentionally used people who were not native English speakers. Everyone has a profile to let each person find the right colleague for their own question.  He showed an example of question and response. One goal is to socially enable business processes. He noted that the corporate brain has grown while he was talking.

Jeff came back and talked about integrating social technology with IBM Watson.  He demoed a community focused on healthcare that was connected to Watson. People could ask healthcare questions to Watson that are either simple or complex. This is a great application for Watson. 

 

Boston E20 Notes: Building a Unified Communications and Collaboration Roadmap

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes - This is another of my notes. There will be more to follow. I attended Irwin Lazar’s workshop - Building a Unified Communications and Collaboration Roadmap".  Irwin is Vice President, Communications Research, Nemertes Research. Here is the session description for the workshop:

“During this interactive workshop we'll walk through the components of a successful unified communications and collaboration workshop. Using benchmark data gathered from hundreds of companies we'll show you what works, what doesn't work, and what are the key criteria for evaluating success. We'll discuss how to address organizational and management strategies, how to extend collaboration services to remote and mobile workers, how to cross company boundaries, and how to implement new collaboration methods with respect to budgets and the installed base of platforms.”

Irwin’s firm does a lot of research and he provided results of this work through out the session. They did interviews with 240 organizations and conduct in-depth conversations with senior IT professionals. They looked at 16 verticals and the participating companies ranged from fewer than 250 employees (13%), 250 – 2500 employees (29%, and over 2500 employees (58%).

He defines a road map as a statement of technology direction for the next 3 – 5 years. Then you turn it over to the architect to design and build it.  He showed a sample road map covering 60 months. It included technologies, funding sources, and other necessary requirements. He showed several samples with different visualizations and areas of focus. Then tend to be complex to read in a single slide.  Below is a sample chronological road map.

Their research finds that the more business involvement in IT projects, the higher the success. This has been my experience also. It is good to have someone deeply involved in the business going back to IT with the functional problems.  Having multi-disciplinary teams are essential. If work is done in silos it will create problems and overlap. About 60% of companies they surveyed have a business IT liaison role.

What is collaboration? – Anyway you work with someone else: video, voice, messaging, social computing, document sharing. The latter is often forgotten. About 50% of firms said Sharepoint is their social platform, their document sharing system.

In one case study the primary tools for collaboration: 100% email, in person next, video conferencing, and at the bottom – social media. Social networking was still low on the priority list.

Unified communications is often defined differently. Now it is the integration of all collaboration tools through any device.  He provided an UC reference architecture (see below). Deployment now: voice – 100%, IM – 79%, 75% web conferencing, cell phone integration 65%, on demand video 57%.

Organizational challenges are much bigger than the technical ones, especially with the lack of cross-functional communication.  So many different groups are looking at different tools raising many issues. Integration of tools remains a big issue despite what the vendors claim. Firms picked this as the biggest challenge – 58%.

UC&C Road map – Voice: Issues, own or outsource, who is right vendor, dedicated servers or virtualized, soft phone or desktop phones, how to support analog, SIP trunking, and how to support voice messaging.  Most firms that take out desktop phones put them back quickly.  But some have successfully done this. There is a shrinking of VOIP deployments. It is very expensive to rip out a working phone system. There are infrastructure costs. Also, BYOD has affected the issue, as people are less interested beyond their device.

Hosted IPT has increased a bit from 12% to 18% are using it and more are evaluating but a large number have no plans.  Many traditional VOIP vendors are hardware centric and expensive so there are challengers. Some (25%) are evaluating MS Lync to replace traditional phone system.  Microsoft said you can do it with what you have and it was 5% last year and now up to 12%. However, the results are mixed.  Some users do not like replacing a phone with a headset. If you are ahappy Microsoft user across other apps then you are more likely to try it.

When asked when you plan to switch to a new phone system. 52% had no plans, 18% planning for 2011, 10% evaluating, 7% planning for 2012, 6% planning for 2013. Question: Are you virtualizing UC application servers? 37% no plans, 20% evaluating, 16% using now, 20% planning for 2011, 5% planning for 2012. The key challenge with UC and virtualization is that the processing power is not there locally and some stuff has to go back to the data center. 

Big issues in unified messaging are the legal issues. The lawyers want voice mail and email separate for archiving and compliance simplicity. These issues often arise after deployment.  They do not want executive status to be transparent. They do not want voice mail stored. There are also Federal rules on electronic communication that need to be interpreted. 

UCC Video roadmap: Percent of employees using desktop: 80% of firms have 0 – 10% with video capability while 15% have greater than 50%. Users do not seem to want it and network administrators fear the bandwidth issues.  However, about 50% of firms support extranet video and 40% hare planning on it and only 4% have no plans.

About 35% are using streaming video,15% are planning on it. The integration of consumer devices with enterprise video is on the rise as 41% said it is very important 17% say it is important. One trick is getting users to use it correctly.

Some integration issues: who owns the desktop? How do you manage a multi-vendor solution?  Big vendors are Cisco, Microsoft, Google, and IBM.  There is a lot of competition between Cisco and Microsoft. Google is ramping its enterprise offerings but there is still concern about Google as an enterprise SaaS vendor.  Concerns about Google are highest amongst conservative IT cultures. About 50% of companies are evaluating desktop office apps as a service.

Issues for IM/presence integration: vendor selection, integration, extranet, and mobile.

Most companies (88%) are using web conferencing. However, while it started as an ideal SaaS app, many firms are bring it inside to bring costs down. Some have saved as much 90% of costs.  If you have over 2500 employees it can pay to bring it inside. You do need to create ways to bring in outside users.

It is hard to quantify the social computing investment. There have been some mistakes made in usage of consumer tools such as Facebook. He showed a social computing architecture (see below).

Many companies are using social computing but very few have an enterprise wide strategy. This makes integration very difficult.  The Cisco Quad (now WebEx Social) strategy with integration their communication tools makes this easier.  IBM Connections has capabilities here also. Over 90% measure soft metrics on social and 3% measure quantified metrics. When marketing is the driver of social more firms see social as a success as people are still thinking of social more in external facing terms.

Another big issues is private vs. public access. Can people use Facebook?  Some companies are very open on this and others are against it as a distraction. One company found that Facebook was the highest used application in the enterprise. However, if you block it people can take out their smart phone. The use of guidelines is a better strategy than blocking. There are privacy issues, financial regulations, and e-Discovery (SEC). There have not been test cases on the financial issues but they will be coming.

Their research is consistent with others that only 10% are user and 90% are lurkers. Most companies do find social to be useful.

Ten steps: take ownership, establish policy, engage compliance function early, formal education program, strong password management, content monitoring and logging, education, selective blocking of content, routine audits and review of logs, and regular policy review.  

 

Boston E20 Notes: Inventing Management 2.0

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. This is another of my notes for this year. There will be more to follow. I attended panel session - Inventing Management 2.0: Radical Yet Practical Insights to Becoming a True "Social Enterprise" led by The Management Innovation eXchange (MIX). Here is the session description:

“The Social Web holds clues for how to improve our organizations, making them more resilient, inventive, and engaging. Imagine overcoming the limits of "Management 1.0" to create organizations that are large but not bureaucratic, focused but not myopic, specialized but not balkanized, efficient but not inflexible and, best of all, disciplined but not disempowering.

"Management 2.0" is the focus of a "hackathon" run by The Management Innovation eXchange (MIX) in partnership with Saba and the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. Since its launch at E2 Santa Clara, the Management 2.0 Hackathon has grown into a far-flung collaboration project involving over 850 progressive management practitioners, technologists, and thinkers from around the globe to explore ways in which the principles of Web 2.0 can serve as inspiration for transforming how all organizations will be run and managed over the next decade. The best of their thinking is now ready to share, consolidated into a few management "hacks" — blueprints for organizations of the future.”

The concept was to rethink what management looks like. It is a continuation of the conversation started last November.  The panel was led by Chris Grams. Mary Woolf is part of an organization that is using some of the hacks that have come out of MIX.  Nyla Reed works for the Educe Group and Dave Mason is from Mozilla.  

MIX is the Management Exchange was started by Gary Hammel and others who feel management is broken because traditional management was created in the machine age when people were treated as parts of machines. A management hackathon is a collaborative effort to re-think management.  They began in November and had over 900 participants from around the world. They developed 60 mini-hacks. These were narrowed down to 20 management hacks.

They started by discussing what is wrong about management. Then they moved to what is right about the internet that could be applied to management. They had 12 principles: trust, speed, serendipity, and others.

They did five sample hacks.  Dave described how he worked with the company that made Girl Scout cookies which was very different from his past experience in Open Source IT.  He wondered how a group can brainstorm ideas and then give them to a completely different group to see what new things come out. They converge the two groups so the two groups can learn from each other.

Nyla worked on a hack, embracing skills 2.0. She said there is a real need to have a specific organizational mindset and culture. They looked at how you move toward this culture. So they redefined the skills needed in the workplace. They started with five skills with a 20 question assessment. Then you take the skill that you already excel at and do something with it in your organization.

Chris talked about stealth hacks where you just do it and do not seek approval. They look at within the organization where they have too much freedom and places where the do not have enough freedom. They looked at the balance of freedom and accountability. Then they had employees and managers exchange freedom and accountability.

The next hack was to look at processes and open them up. They begin with little and less critical things and then they worked up the importance level.

The next hack was to say that all rewards are based only on what you have done in the past year to see who is contributing now and not just riding on past efforts.

Mary talked about finding natural leaders and seeing who are the most connected people in the organization but are not recognized for this. They created a leader meter to gauge this. Another hack was open contributions by the hidden hero. This helps to focus on the idea and not the person who came up with the idea. The third was a tweet store to share ideas. It is a simple idea that is powerful at the same time. Gary Hammel says that hacks need to be both radical and practical.  

 

Boston E20 Notes: An Expert Look Into the Technology Behind Social Business

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. This is another of my notes for this year. There will be more to follow. I attended session - On the Back-End: An Expert Look Into the Technology Behind Social Business led by Patrick Stokes, Chief Product Officer, Buddy Media Here is the session description:

“These days, social media means big business. All of the world’s leading brands are producing powerful programs through social marketing, and are connecting with millions of consumers on a daily basis. When one thinks of social marketing, they often think about what they see on their home feeds: engaging wall posts, campaigns and promotions, interactive games and more. But what powers all of that to work?

In this presentation, Patrick Stokes, Chief Product Officer at Buddy Media, will share expert insight into the back end of how to power enterprise social marketing that works. Patrick will share the power of the NoSQL movement, how to choose a database system that works, and why modern technologies are the way of the future. Don’t speak tech? No problem! Patrick will provide an exclusive view into the back-end of social media technology, with simplified language that even non-engineers can understand. Specifically, attendees will learn.”

Patrick introduced Buddy Media as a collection of products that drive social marketing. It was started in 2007, the same time as Facebook. They started building app connected with it. They realized that brands wanted to be on Facebook but there was not a good way to do this. The early efforts were not that successful or scalable. Salesforce has acquired them recently. They are going to build a social marketing cloud and aligned it with Salesforce.

ConversationBuddy is a publication tool that allows brands to publish content to social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. They aggregate good and bad responses so that companies can react to them. The apps includes approval queues, seeded content, filtering.

ProfileBuddy is for micro-sites to work with Facebook and YouTube. Conversion Buddy was built to track results. All “shares” are tracked to individuals and want happens as a result of their activities. They can see the “shares” and the sales. They can see the ROI of shares and what products to showcase based on what is generating shares.

Dashboard provides analytics and insights. It is built for individuals rather enterprises such as agencies. BuyBuddy manages the ads on Facebook. It allows for very focused targeting.

Patrick next went into the underlying technologies. They are powerful but there are technical and legal limitations. You need to understand your goal and tailor it to the individual network as people act on Facebook different that Twitter. There are also so many legal issues to consider.

Most people do social poorly and it leads to short term lifts. You need to focus on your product and focus on your goal: more users, sales, impress your boss?  Facebook promotes passive sharing but that may not help the individual and stuff gets on your time line and you may not want it there.  Socialcam gets a lot of hits as a result but they do not last. People figure this out so they uninstall it or do not click on the content. The Washington Post saw a great rise in clicks with a Socialcam app but then they was a big drop off as people saw what happen.

Patrick said before you do social make sure your product does not suck like Socialcam that annoys users. Ask if adding social will improve the user’s experience. Ask if adding social is going to take advantage of your users.  Spotify works because it enhances the user’s experience to discover music although some people do not like the sharing part.

Technology behind this: authentication. First, you need to create an app that can make requests to an API with a key and secret password.  There are several apps that support this. You need standard schema and a consistent implementation for client libraries. If you opt in and get “valet” keys, this can be one way but there are limitations. Oauth is the tool that does this but Patrick feels it is rubbish. 

Another technology: REST – Representational State Transfer, This is how data is communicated between server and client. It is built on top of HTTP which makes it an architectural style like SOAP.

Streams are the best technology. Twitter uses it and as it the only one doing it now. You do not have to make calls to the network. There is high throughput and near real-time access to underlying data layer on social networks.

Facebook tracks you through their social plugins and can see whatever you do on the internet unless you turn off your cookies but this causes other problems. You can see everything about any Facebook users. But then this is what people are putting on their pages so it is public already.

Remember to build what your users will let you get away and not more. Be careful not to violate the Facebook terms of service and other legal issues. 

 

Boston E20 Notes: Designing Social Applications

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. This is another of my notes for this year. There will be more to follow. I attended session - Designing Social Applications " a panel session led by David F. Carr, Editor, The BrainYard.  The panel included: Ellen Feaheny, CEO, AppFusions, Mark Weitzel, Director, Platform & Ecosystem; President, OpenSocial Foundation, Jive Software, and Michael Weir, CEO, Sparqlight. Here is the session description:

“Part of becoming a social enterprise is understanding what makes social applications work, both for purposes of selecting commercial applications and for designing their own. Most organizations will adopt a commercial or open source enterprise social platform rather than trying to create their own, but they still will face the challenge of adapting it to their environment and integrating applications that predate the social software era.”

David started the panel and set the vocabulary for the conversation. They talked about applications beyond marketing and inside the enterprise.  They also talked about apps embedded in the enterprise or apps embedded in a public social network. They discussed what makes app social? Embedding an app in an iFrame doesn’t make it social. What business apps are the best situations that can work in a social context?

Ellen discussed a chart on common need use case integrations driving platform E2.0 adoption.  There are many system platform types, many E20 system flavors, and common needs/use case integrations.  Ellen started AppFusions from the business use case perspective. They have been building integrations for common use cases that can be reused to cut costs.

Brian said Sparqlight wraps social software around workflows. He is the principal author and the CEO.  It brings in Yammer, Google apps and other tools. His tool allows you to understand a person’s work behavior and what they excel at, etc.

Mark works for Jive and is President of Open Social Foundation. One of the key things they recognized early on is the need for a real component model for the delivery of SaaS based apps. He feels that Open Social is the best thing out there for this purpose. It is standards based.  They put a market infrastructure around this so you can pick an app and get it installed right away like an iPhone app. But it also allows for IT controls in case you need to take out an app that is a problem. Mark said they wanted to invoke apps within Jive in an easy way wherever you are and put it into the flow within the activity stream.  Open Social is now in the cloud version of Jive and will be coming to the on premise version by the end of the year.

Brian said that enterprise apps used to be isolated compared to social apps.  Ellen said that want makes an app social is the notifications and things that bring your attention. She is working with Atlassian and IBM on social integration.  She found common use cases so decided to build reusable integrations to cover these cases.  This is good idea and should save a lot of time and money in implementations.

Mark said a good social app connects people and supports collaboration. You can understand the details within workflow so disconnected people can connect around common issues. It brings a new level of agility. You get dynamic realignments based on the transparency within the social apps. You need backend intelligence to leverage an understanding of what is happening within an organization. 

Ellen said the old world contained file servers and documents that were passed around. This is still the case for many organizations. To have the documents embedded in the workflow and activity stream puts them in your face. Things are done much faster and no one can hide and documents do not get hidden.

David asked how many in the audience are in IT. The answer was around 50%. The rest were in scattered areas. Ellen mentioned how Jive can use LinkedIn for directory updates and that is a good use case for public and enterprise apps.  Mark said you want transparency so setting up private groups in Facebook does not solve this issue. Ellen added that Facebook is minimal in collaboration versus an enterprise app.

Mark said Open Social was started in 2008 for the consumer world by Google, MySpace and others. At the same time enterprise vendors like Jive looked at this effort and adopted it as a means for delivery. They added capability for enterprise use.  Since it evolved in the consumer space it is more like an open source effort.  This was an interesting panel that discussed a critical issue. 

 

Images from Ancient Ephesus

Tomorrow there will be more Enterprise 2.0 session notes but it is the weekend now.

Before we went to Ephesus we went to house where St. John and the Virgin Mary lived when St. John came to preach here. There was a wishing wall and of course I had to put a wish on. You can see the wall and the close up is of my wish. Thses are the first three small pictures below after the large one from Ephesus. You can click on any picture to enlarge it. 

Ephesus was amazing. It was a large Greek and then Roman city that had 250,000 people at one time. Only about 20 % has been excavated but that includes the city core. It was buried by an earthquake that that is why is was preserved. These are just a few of the many photos. These is one of a badgamon game that the Romans played like the current one in the seventh picture. Much was recontructed. Th eorginla parts are in marble and the reconstructed parts in concrete or stones. The marble streets are mostly intact. It had many the features of our cities today with healthcare, a public WC, a library, and a "love" house. In one photo you can see the symbol fo rmedicine today withthe snake to symbolize the the healthcare facility. 

We also went to house of Virgin Mary and John, as Ephesus museum and site of a large temple. Nizamettin Adsiz was our guide and did a great job (www.apasatravel.com). I usually do not do guided tours but this was mush more convient, included a good lunch, all admissions, and much transporation. 

      

                                   

                                                    

 

Images from Kusidari Trukey

It is the weekend so I take a break from Enterprise 2.0 session posts but there will be more next starting Monday.

I went here from Samos (so including it with Greek pictures) to see Ephesus but also to get a taste of Turkey.  It was an upscale resort that catered to the tour boats who come to see Ephesus and there are also water parks for families and other side attractions like in Orlando.  I got culture shock when I the s first things I saw were a Starbucks and Diesel outlet.  But then I found the less upscale tourist side and had fun the two nights I was there. I stayed at the Limon Hotel and recommend it as they were very friendly and made good suggestions for food and music. I went to a seafood place right over the water and watched the sunset while having a whole snapper (you paid by the weight) and two sides: an eggplant tomato dish and some garlic shrimp. After watching the street celebration of local football victory I heard music at the Orient Bar, a quiet pub.

The next two mornings I had a great breakfast from the rooftop of the hotel with view of the harbor. There was fresh fruit and omelets. After Ephesus (see separate post) I walked out to the old fort in the harbor and watched the sunset.

I went to dinner at the Avlu that the hotel guy recommended and a fine lamb kabob. After dinner I found much better music club than the night before great one. It was a type of traditional Turkish music that was very danceable and there were a lot of young people, no tourists. I was a place for locals. I watched and figured out you could do a fast sort of rock dancing to it. I want to find some of the music on the Web. It is called Turku music. There were two guys playing electric version of Turkish guitars and singing and then a guy with a big bass drum on was on the dance floor and everyone danced around him. Unfortunately I have no pictures. 

          

                                  

 

Boston E20 Notes: Design Considerations For Enterprise Social Networks: Identity, Graphs, Streams & Social Objects

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. This is another of my notes for this year. There will be more to follow. I attended session - Design Considerations For Enterprise Social Networks: Identity, Graphs, Streams & Social Objects led by Mike Gotta, Senior Technical Solution Marketing Manager for Social Software, Cisco. Here is the session description:

“Organizations can improve how employees connect to co-workers by understanding the influence design has on participation within social platforms. This session examines key social networking building blocks and how design practices should accommodate multiple networking strategies as employees seek to mobilize their connections to satisfy different work and professional needs. Attendees will gain a better understanding of social networking technology found within social platforms; insight to the cultural aspects of social networks, and how social networking strategies help people cultivate relationships and build social capital they can later leverage to achieve work and professional goals.”

Mike provided a vendor neutral view of design considerations. Social networking has been around since the 1600s but now the new tools allow you to see the social networks. There is a lot of business value and benefits to the organization.  The trick is getting beyond the high-level benefit possibilities to realize them. He showed some of the architectural capabilities that relate to social networking.  You want to integrate the existing enterprise apps and the data and content within them.  You also want to link with business processes, as well as deal with compliance and other issues. Then you want to play this capability over any device.

The traditional way projects were run were: plan, build, run; and resources were released so that modifications based on use after deployment were not made.  The resources committed to the ongoing program should include design to avoid this problem. All work interactions should occur in a social network context. Now social in the context of my work is a big theme. The issue has been around a while but is getting more recognition.

It is important to think about the cultural aspects as cultural productivity is intersecting with work productivity. People are not aligned or engaged with their work. How do you get engagement? One way is to delegate authority. (McKinsey data supports that the lower the decision lever is in an organization the higher the operating margin). So you cannot just focus on the task but keep the broader cultural issues in mind. You need to not just design for the screen but beyond that to the person and the work and the culture. No reason people feel disengaged is that they feel that they do not belong. If you do not make culture involved do not be surprised if the app is not used. We need to design for the user and for the network effects.

One issue is identify. You need to let people construct their own identity. We have moved from assigned identity to claimed identity. In some organizations this goes well but in others people do not want to be found because they might get laid off or they do not see the reason for it.

Another issue is recognition and reputation.  This helps to identify expertise. Determine what ties you want to support within a network. Is it a project? Is it an interest? How long will the context be around?

Another issue is social objects. You take work items from a decision process and put it into an activity stream. How do deal with this? Ask a question or do a poll or something else?  What do you want to do with it? You need to create mechanisms and context for connecting. Who should provide input and where should it go? What relationships do you want to build and grow?

Another issue is activity streams. It will be as bad as the inbox if you do not provide filters or other ways to focus it and not let employees get fire hosed.  Activity streams are places to get information and a place to connect with others. It is not simply an information source. Think about the networking aspects.  You also want to see trends over time and be able to archive and access events over time. After activity streams have been used they could provide a greater history of how work is done. Activity streams are a new form of presence.

Another issue is social analytics.  You need to ensure algorithms are transparent and adjustable. You want the systems to make recommendations and allow people to understand what is happening so they can make recommendations. You need to be able to figure out how the algorithms work so you understand what is being generated.

What is next? How to integrate social into the work life of the employee? Neighborhood networks of people doing similar things can help. It provides context that is related to what you are doing.  Making networks mobile is another issue coming up. In summary, the project starts after deployment. It does not end there.  Platforms are not the end of the journey. Do not think “social everything.”  The four building blocks: identity, social graph, activity streams, and social objects. Great session. 

 

Boston E20 Notes: The Post-2.0 Era: Social in the Context of My Work

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. This is another of my notes for this year. There will be more to follow. I attended session - The Post-2.0 Era: Social in the Context of My Work led by Larry Cannell, Research Director, Gartner Inc.. Here is the session description:

“The widespread adoption of Facebook, the embrace of activity streams by business applications, and the success of smartphone applications have significantly changed information worker expectations since Enterprise 2.0 was introduced in 2006. Post-2.0 technologies are enabling the Social Online Workplace, a worker-centric yet social environment facilitating ongoing discussions that are seeded by messages coming from individuals, business applications, and collaborative tools.

This is an opportunity for the IT organization to get out in front of this change and start planning how to provide social infrastructure within an enterprise architecture. While the initial application of these new architectural components should be on improving worker effectiveness by enabling ambient awareness of activities within a sphere of responsibilities, the social online workplace can also become a powerful new knowledgebase.”

Larry had a great crowd for Thursday morning. He has been involved in collaboration for over 20 years, officially for the past 14 years. He feels that IT is needed more than ever and I certainly agree (see Maybe Enterprise 2.0 Is About the Technology). Innovations since 2006 since the E20 term came out: social network sites, smart phone and tablet apps, business apps using activity streams. I agree as activity streams are a core breakthrough in enterprise capability building on top of Twitter but going way beyond it. Larry said we are now longer copying consumer web social behavior. We are moving beyond collaboration for its own sake.

Enterprise social is moving into a primary IT environment and needs all the support IT can bring. Now the move is from app centered and now we can move to a people centered experience. Instead of going from one app to another now that the apps can be transparent in the context of the user rather the reverse. The real value of mobility is that it provides a user centered experience. This is a big change for IT.

What does the enterprise social experience want? Focus on the individual, leverage familiarity, acknowledge constraints such as security, policy, budget.

What is the new IT environment? Enterprise activity streams are pervasive. They provide a unifying experience for enterprise social suites like IBM Connections.  Business apps are starting to use the activity streams like Salesforce Chatter and tibbr. Now Oracle provides social network services. There are event notifications and exception handling and these can stimulate conversations.  The vendors see this as the potential to provide a consolidated activity stream across the enterprise (such as Microsoft’s interest in Yammer).

Larry offered a vision of the social online workplace with ongoing discussions.  It includes social messaging, collaborative content, and business apps, all connected.  This gives the person much more control over what is happening. The activity stream needs to be where you want to work and the device you want to use. It could be in a workspace, business app, or email. It needs to contextual.

The social graph offers new opportunities. This social activity is rich in metadata. The resulting social graph becomes a rich data set that is available through search or other means. Larry showed an example. Where suggestions for people to connect who are not yet connected or relevant content to someone’s current activity. The connections become a map of the social activity within an enterprise.

He showed an architecture where business apps that provide context in which people work. They are also sources of social data. Then aggregation services can collect the social data either passively or proactively. IT needs to help this to get this to work. Data needs to be cleaned up so it can be aligned. This is not always easy. APIs are not the total answer. There is much more to do and some heavy lifting by IT needs to step in for the long-term capability.

There is impact on other iT services including: email and IM, documents, portals, search, and business applications.  People lists need to be consolidated.  Files tend to be black holes for content. The movement from files to more group enabled and transparent space will be helpful to get content accessible.

There is also impact on search. The metadata creates facets that can enable filtering of activity streams. You can search on different dimensions such as people, communities, as well as content.

The impact on business apps includes contextual exposure through the activity stream and social graph. Security becomes an issue as who has access to the activity stream content is an issue. In whose activity stream will it appear?  

So what should IT do? Focusing on providing people-centered experienced. Move away from an application focus.  Look at how work is being done so you can help it and perhaps change it to be more productive.  You need to make people more efficient not apps more efficient, which has been the main focus for the past 40 years. Also IT needs to rethink priorities to make sure simplicity is personal and contextual. Make data available and reconsider the “need to know” security policies. It gets in the way of sharing and discovery.  

Make sure the user experience comes first. And see social as extensions of business processes and have line of business ownership. IT needs to provide leadership in the social software space and educate the business units on possibilities.  It is needed more than ever to enable people-centered experiences despite what Nick Carr wrote.  But it requires a different IT. Great session. 

 

Boston E20 Notes: Social as a Layer, Not a Place: Are We There Yet?

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. This is another of my notes for this year. There will be more to follow. I attended session - Social as a Layer, Not a Place: Are We There Yet? " led by The Kashyap Kompella, Analyst, Real Story Group. Here is the session description:

“As enterprise social collaboration efforts mature, enterprises increasingly seek to put these new capabilities "in the flow" of colleagues' daily work. Yet, most tools assume that social networking and collaboration will reside in a separate "place," often a siloed application that notifies you of new activity via yet another set of e-mail alerts.

 A growing number of vendors are seeking to address a new architecture that posits social and collaboration services as a "layer" that can be applied to diverse workstreams within the enterprise. Of course, social-as-a-service is much easier said than done. This session, led by a noted industry analyst, will offer a practical review of vision versus reality in this important area.”

Kashyap said that we are not at the social layer level yet but we are making progress.  He said his group covers content technology space as independent advisors.  He showed a large map of vendors based on a subway map. So far most enterprises have some social or collaborative efforts underway. However, the results have been mixed. The problem is that social software is treated as another box in the enterprise tech stack.

He asked how many in the audience have social software efforts underway. Almost everyone raised their hands. He asked how many have unqualified success and very few raised their hands.  One of the reasons is the clear objectives are often not in place. He showed an IT architecture with social in the mix like other capabilities such as ERP, CRM, etc. He said this puts social in a box where it is not effective

Social is supposed to help discover expertise across the organization and should not be put in a box in an architecture. Now social is one more system to check like email. When you have social as a separate island the transformative power of social is not realized. It needs to be part of everyday work.

Social as a layer in the enterprise: It should be a service, not a place in an architecture. Social needs to be integrated into the course of everyday work and not a separate thing to check. He showed the McKinsey data on the benefits of the connected enterprise. See 2010 report and 2011 report.  He said that some companies are falling back in their social implementations after the initial excitement.  Social drives more value when integrated well. I would agree. (see also - Integrating the Interactions with the Transactions and Maybe Enterprise 2.0 Is About the Technology).

He said you have enterprise platforms like IBM Microsoft, Oracle; social platforms like Jive, Telligent; social layers like Newsgator, Yammer.  The problem is that each new software thinks it is the center of the universe.  The social platforms are often siloed. How do we make social become a service or a layer?  You can use APIs and custom connectors. You can put system notifications and user conversation into the activity stream. But do not let users drown in the stream so add some structure. You need filters, rules, groups, and search.

He showed an example of Socialcast and Sharepoint. You can see activity streams within Sharepoint. There needs to be context. He showed Jira with custom connector that goes into Socialcast (see - AppFusions Speeds Software Development Through Integration of iRise® Visualization with Atlassian JIRA, Confluence). You can see conversations and act on them.  He showed tibbr integrated with Oracle Expense management as a social layer. I have written about this (see - TIBCO Enhances tibbr with GEO and Other New Capabilities).  He said that innovation is happening on the edges with the smaller vendors.

You want to add a “do’ button to the “like” button. For this to happen legacy systems need to be connected to social apps. 

 

Boston E20 Notes: Got Numbers? Community Metrics and Analysis

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. This is another of my notes for this year. There will be more to follow. I attended session - Got Numbers? Community Metrics and Analysis led by Jillian Bejtlich, Community Manager, Autodesk. Here is the session description for the workshop:

“For anyone working in community management, you’re well aware it’s not all about sitting on social networks all day chatting it up. Users and sometimes even our own co-workers are shocked to find out we are the ones pulling massive reports and trying to make sense of millions of data points. Who knew community management was so focused on mathematics?

As a member of marketing, communications, support, or whoever the community is run by, you’re probably accustom to being asked for a variety of metrics and ways to prove success, profitability, and efficiency. But where in the world do you start? This session will help guide you through some of the actual practices of putting numbers to work. We’ll go through some simple ways of creating valuable and easy to understand analyses, how to find something worthwhile in the massive data files, and ways of sharing your mathematical discoveries with others in easy and comprehensive manners.”

Jillian said numbers are your friends, but data analysts are needed. There will be 190,000 data analysts needed by 2018. Community managers need to have analytical skills. Jillian realized she needed to develop her analytical skills as a community manager. She said that many questions that managers are asked are actually numbers questions. You need to know where to start.

Jillian said she came from an engineering background where you are taught to think. She asked how you solve a community problem using techniques from a physics problem. There is known and unknown information and formulas to help us get from start to finish.  For example, what if you are asked is the community is fast enough in its responsiveness.  You need to ask a few more questions to clarify the question.  Who is the result for? Who is the question about? Who are the players in the formula? Who can help me find the answers I need?  Answer these questions first before you start to create the required report.

Then ask when is the answer due? Is there a relevant date range? Will this report be recurring?  Is this a one off the situation is quite different. If it is recurring be sure to notice lessons learned for the next iteration.

Then ask “how” questions. How will I get my data? How will I share my data? How will I verify my results?  Look to see how accessible the data is and will it be available on an ongoing basis.  Be sure to be able to share the raw data.

Then ask the “what” questions. What are my constants? What don’t I know? What is the end goal? What could go wrong and slow me down? What is the best possible outcome?

After asking the questions fill in the knowns, determine the assumptions, and determine the unknowns. So after the data collection what do you do next? You want to consolidate it. Narrow down the essential data and ignore the rest for the moment if related questions show up.  Then solve the assigned question. Be sure to double check for mistakes and consistency. They do happen.

Now create the report. Use visualizations and graphics. Then think before you share. Keep in mind who you are sharing the data with. Is there sensitive data? Will someone be doing further analysis? Is it a written report or a presentation? Will you get follow up calls on additional questions? Anticipate possible questions.

Four major take ways: First, before you start, make sure you know what your goals are. This will save a lot of time, effort, and embarrassment. Second, listen to your brain. If something catches your eye note it. It may be important. It may be useful later. Remember nine out of ten times your first guess is your right answer. Third, chill out when chaos breaks out. Be focused on the big picture and do not freak out over little stuff. There will be anticipated things. Fourth, focus on one metric at a time.

This was a really clear and useful presentation.

 

 

 

Boston E20 Notes: Building an Online Community from Strategy, Planning, and Launch to Effective Engagement and Adoption

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. This is another of my notes from this year. There will be more to follow. I attended Catherine Shinner’s session - Building an Online Community from Strategy, Planning, and Launch to Effective Engagement and Adoption.  Catherine is a Partner with me at the Merced Group. Here is the session description:

“Building and supporting community is a powerful way to build leadership relationships, connect with customers to improve service and accelerate innovation or transform internal organizational productivity. Yet sometimes organizations grab a packaged-off-the-shelf community offering and launch a site and find that it is not gaining the engagement and adoption that was hoped for. If you’re thinking of building an online community or have started on the path, but are not sure you have all the elements in place, this session will provide you with a roadmap to community strategy, planning, launch and early stage adoption, and engagement practices.

The session will guide you through a community strategy process that is aligned with the business strategy, identifying and surveying stakeholders, accurately assessing and clarifying the unmet needs of the community stakeholders to drive the user experience, content and programming plans. Using a case example of an online community for education leaders, the session speaker will outline considerations for staffing and resourcing a community, engaging constituencies through social media, marketing and communications efforts for adoption engagement, analytics and Key Performance Indicator development to assess health of the community.”

Catherine pointed out the changes in the conference that reflect changes in the importance of online communities. In 2007 there was only one session on communities and now it is a major theme.  She began with why communities matter from a strategic perspective. She showed some research that shows the change in relative asset base of S&P companies shifted from tangible assets to intangible assets. In 1982 38% of assets were intangible. In 1999 84% of assets were intangible and I am sure it is higher now. This is a major transformation. However, companies still relate to their workforce as though it was 1950 and focus on top down management build on running a company based on tangible assets. Now the value in companies lies in the ability to connect people to optimize their intangible assets but this is largely untapped. Communities are a major way to do this.

Now we have the networked enterprise, using McKinsey term. They found quantified margins gains in companies that were networked. There are many quantified benefits. There are many quantified benefits. First 77% said the tools increased the speed of access to knowledge, 60% said they reduced communication coats, 52% said they increased speed of access to internal experts, 44% found a reduction in travel costs, and 40% found increased employee satisfaction. For more detail see - Enterprise 2.0 Finds Its Pay Day – McKinsey and How social technologies are extending the organization.  

In last few years some companies have embraced external facing communities to extend their relationships with their partners and customers. She gave an example of a 21-year-old neighbor who learns everything to work on his car through an online community. Also, companies that use communities inside the enterprise can benefit. Companies often focus on solely on major efforts. Communities can help pick up the smaller, more incremental improvements to complement the major efforts.  Communities can be a low cost way to improve your business results on an ongoing basis.

Next she went over some community principles. First you need to bring your stakeholders into lifecycle of a community. Communities have a unique set of dynamics: These include: Participation, Collective Transparency, Independence, Persistence, and Emergence. 

Catherine quoted Philip Evans and Bob Wolf in the Harvard Busienss Review article, Collaboration Rules, “where trust is the currency, reputation is the source of power.”

Catherine offered a research-based community lifecycle: inception, establishment, growth, and maturity.  Each stage has considerations for growth stewardship and growth. You need active community management and executive leadership at each stage.

In stage one you need to engage and education your stakeholders: identify strategic business alignment: plan for inception & establishment; determine critical success factors and KPIs for early phases; and lay groundwork & infrastructure for growth and maturity phases

A key first step is to identify your business strategy and create alignment with community. Internal and external facing communities have different sets of goals. For example external; communities often look at customer engagement and revenue and internal communities look at productivity increases.

She next offered a community business model. Then she provided a sample community architecture. The main sections include: Community Management; Content and Events Programming; Social Media, Marketing, Communications; Platform UX, Analytics; Operations, and Governance.

Community management is a key component and this is a new breed of business management. This role remains vital throughout the four life cycles. Another role is expert curation. When you are creating a community you need to bring relevant content to offer value to the members to provide value and give them something to discuss and expand on.

The crucial success factors include: effective education of stakeholders, active executive sponsorship, proper resources for the entire lifecycle, metrics relevant to your business purpose, comprehensive governance, technology, and user experience needs to be attuned to your audience.

In stage two – establishment, you need to cultivate and facilitate along a spectrum of engagement, the active contributors, the passive contributors, and lurkers. You need to establish recognition to encourage volunteer engagement. There needs to be a regular cadence of events, programs, and communications. You need to refine resource requirements for growth. You need internal and eternal; advocacy, partnerships in place, and active cycle of engagement, analytics aligned with business purpose, and benchmarking along with active listening.  

She next offered a cycle of engagement where content is feed into the community; it is refreshed through conversations; social media is used for additional relevant content discovery, and the cycle is repeated.

Then Catherine covered the growth stage. Now the community needs to have a shared sense of ownership. There needs to volunteer programs and empowered leaders, and the UX and analytic evolves with sophistication of community engagement.

 

 

 

Boston E20 Notes: The Iceberg Effect of Community Management

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. This is another of my notes for this year. There will be more to follow. I attended session - The Iceberg Effect of Community Management led by Rachel Happe, Principal, The Community Roundtable and Jason Quesada, Digital Media Marketing Manager, UBM TechWeb. Here is the session description:

“Do you know what community managers really do? You may think they sit at their desks and chat online all day, and while that is definitely a part of it, community management is more than just tweets, likes, and pings. In many ways, what people see the community manager doing is just the tip of the iceberg. A big part of the job includes back channeling, internal evangelism, making connections, researching, tool management, measurement, collaborating with colleagues and conflict resolution. In this session, Rachel Happe of The Community Roundtable and Jason Quesada of UBM TechWeb will take you through the discipline of community management - sharing how to think about a community, why community management is important and why communities just don't manage themselves.”

Rachel began by discussing the iceberg effect of community management as much of the work of community managers is not visible. She defined a  community as a group of people with unique shared values, behaviors, and artifacts.  Jason manages a community that is focused on innovation revenue about their business of managing events. Community management is a different way of working. It requires people to opt into to their participation. Rachel asked for a show of hands and about half of the audience are community managers, equally balanced between internal and external communities.

Community management is a tighter interlinking of people with a shared purpose. Social media is more hub and spoke while community management is more like an interlinking web. Communities take a while to form and thus provide a benefit. Other initiatives usually show benefits sooner than communities because the effects take a while to appear. So sometimes they seem a failure before they seem a success.

Communities mature and change. There is a lot of unfinished work but once you get the behavior change, a lot of energy can be developed. So growth and benefits can lag and then spike.  She showed the Community Roundtable community maturity model (see State of Community Management 2011).

Community Management is the task of managing successful communities. Jason said the online community management involves a lot of content curation and being a connector between participants. People participate in communities if they get more value than they give. So you have to work hard to provide this value. This leads to the iceberg effect. So much of the initial work is evangelizing the community and this involves a lot of back channel work. Peer influence is much greater that authority management. So you are trying to organize peer pressure to get what you want. If you can effectively do this you get people on your side. 

Some community managers create content and others elicit it. Be careful to not shut down conversation by being too present. Jason said he does many things all day. He curates content. He checks industry related news for things of interest to his community to generate conversations. He checks to see if there are any unanswered questions. He does a lot of promotion and giving recognition to encourage participation. Also, he tries to meet face to face where possible to establish a connection.  Jason said when setting up a meeting, always include free donuts.

Rachel discussed the biggest risks of not having community management. One is a ghost town where no is talking. Once Jason started managing the community there was a huge spike in engagement and contribution. Another risk is too much disconnected content and conversation. Jason created a directory where people can find other colleagues with similar interests. This can focus conversations more along common interests. Jason also said to delete stuff that is to being used and it will clear clutter.

Also you can get drama central where some people just talk for the sake of it. There is also the circling storm where a potential problem is not attended to and it can become a crisis. Listen and respond to potential issues before they can become a storm. There so can be a situation where cliques form that creates a social barrier to others to contribute.

So what makes a good community manager? Skills needed include: good communication, ability to match brand’s personality, understanding of human motivation and use this understanding for constructive purposes. You also need to be able to resolve conflicts.  You need to have good judgment, empathy, adaptability, and self-awareness. Jason added that you need to have a sense of humor and love what you do.

Rachel discussed how to build a thriving community. Communities change and grow and you need to adapt to this and experiment. Sometimes ideas do not work at first but later work. You need to understand your community members. Jason looks at the usage reports and sees which people are contributing and thanks them and looks at those that are not and asks how can I help you get involved.

There needs to be good new content daily if you want people to come on a daily basis. A regular weekly reports or tips can cause anticipation and engagement. Be sure to be welcoming to get people engaged in the first week.  Then they are more likely to stay involved. Jason said that his firm does a weekly welcome of new employees, who they are, what they like. Rachel added: give new people things to do right away. Provide a guide. Be a connector. Foster conversation Jason mentioned a conversation he helped start in the community and innovation that spread globally.  Rachel said the manager can post things for other members that might be shy.

Be sure to teach the communities. Communities are about learning at their core. Jason said to do not call them training sessions because people will be passive.  Offer rewards and these rewards can come in a variety of ways. Jason said you get points for creating content and answering questions in his systems. They have levels of participation and encourage people to rise up the levels.  

Be sure to have rules. Encourage people who are passionate. Jason creates a task force for these people and even lets them run the community for a short period.  Be sure to stay on the topics of interest and expand on them rather than introducing off-topic content. Be sure content is related to the hot topics. Be sure to not ignore concerns. You need to at least acknowledge concerns.

Be multi-modal in your content to address they different ways people learn. Experiment here. Jason uses a lot of video, as his community likes the visuals. Pictures are also used a lot. Protect the community from disruption from people who want to take advantage of the community. Lastly, be human and have some fun and try new things. 

 

Boston E20 Notes: Organization Next Workshop: Bridging the Participation Gap – Networks, Learning, and "Play"

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes - This is the first set of notes. There will be many more to follow. I attended workshop hosted by Mike Gotta - Organization Next: Bridging the Participation Gap – Networks, Learning, and "Play".  Mike is now Senior Technical Solution Manager for Enterprise Social Software, Cisco. I attended another workshop he did in 2009 - Reality 2.0: Getting Started with Enterprise Social Networking - and found it very worthwhile. Here is the session description for this year’s workshop:

“Companies are becoming more reliant on their employee’s ability to thrive in a complex work environment where relationships, projects, processes, and business priorities are in a constant state of flux. Employees need to expect the unexpected – to “figure out” the best way to handle exceptions – to self-synchronize their work with the activities of their colleagues – to make decisions collectively rather than waiting on top-down direction from management. In this Organization Next environment, we are also operating in a economic period where the “social contract” between employer and “employee” is being transformed. Employees (whatever that term means in the future) must continually build and refine individual competencies, team work practices, and community relationships while becoming skillful at cultivating and mobilizing their professional and personal networks to meet the needs of their employer – as well as their own.”

Mike started by doing a overview of the conference and then introduced Josh Greenbaum, who said he is an industry analyst and his job is to be skeptical of new technology.  Engagement is one of the fundamental issues facing enterprise today. It will always be hard but it is even more important today. People are more and more looking at people as strategic assets.  

Talent management is a starting point for a discussion for how we work with people. Technology is not the answer and can be a barrier. However, we usually start with the latest technology and this approach does not work. So what do we do with people? Drew Rabin, Booz Allen and Phil Jackson, CIGNA came up next to join Josh. CIGNA is rebranding itself from a health insurance company to be a health services company and Phil is learning specialist. Drew is a Senior Learning Consultant at Deloitte.  

Drew said that employee engagement is often referred to having employees do more than is required. But there are many different definitions. Phil mentioned the generational diversity issues in engagement. Josh said engagement is often either what is done to or for employees. The right question is how do we make it a win-win situation? Drew said what is the difference between engagement and satisfaction. How do you get employees to adopt a business owner mentality that leads more to engagement than satisfaction. To get it to work it has to be mutually beneficial so the company and employee both feel rewarded.

Drew said that engaged employees are 20% - 30% more productivity so that is a win for the company. So what is the win for the employee? He referred to Daniel Pink’s ideas on this and the new construct of motivation for the employee. Josh asked should the engaged employee be more rewarded? Phil said it is not magical. Phil said he is in learning and studied it but most people in learning just fell into on the job. He tries to look at things holistically and not in simple behavioristic ways of stimulus and reward.  I would certainly agree with this.

Drew said he studied school systems on engagement.  The keys are recruitment, recognition, and retention. In a gamification system you can give people status and incentives through rewards.  In one IT company gamification increased engagement by ten fold but the engaged activity was done by one third of the people. Studies shown that about two thirds of employees are not engaged so the effort just got to the already engaged to be more engaged in through game stuff.

Phil said in most online communities 90% will be passive onlookers, 9% will be takers, and 1% will be actively engaged. So you need to work on the 1% to get them effective. Are the senior management involved is a key question here?  Drew asked how to do create fans, people who are actively involved and who are fanatical in a positive way.  Conflict creates engagement. You can get strangers involved in something they are passionate about. This is the goal in gamification but it is not the tool that drives success but finding these types of people.

Phil mentioned that peer learning has been around for a long time. The idea of competition is also an old one. What is different now is the relationship with your employer. People move around from company to company and have much looser relationships with their employer so engagement takes a different form.  He liked it when they introduced people profiles at Deloitte. (see my series on their implementation when I interviewed Walton Smith who led the effort - Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: The Series). Phil worked at home and got to know so many more people with similar issues and concerns. The technology made the connections but it only worked because it enabled what people wanted to do anyway.

Josh asked about the “big brother” issues in engagement. Drew said that first no one is anonymous.  He gave an example of GPS enabled ads that make use of personal data for personalized marketing. Phil said sometimes data security concerns for the company gets in the way of doing things.

Drew said they are looking a BYOD policy but the Federal government is their main client where security is a big issue. Employees have to give up some privacy rights when they get involved with BYOD. How can you protect security breaches?

Mike Gotta said we are used to designing IT systems for business process. How do IT people design for games? This is a new area. How can you develop specs to build these games. Josh said you have to build ROI into the process. Phil said the idea of ROI is difficult in the world of learning. Drew talked about ROE – return on expectations (of senior leadership). The front line manager is the biggest driver of engagement. People often do not leave their companies, they leave their bosses.  Josh said that in consumer marketing there is strong ROI data. This is the one area.

Julie LeMonie and Jim Kendall came up next. Julie has been involved in social computing and augmented realities for several decades. She said topics now trending are: more mobile, avatars getting more real, more interactive social, and co-location of teams going away. The majority of teams are now not co-located. There is now embedded video so you can be virtually co-located.

She has picked five uses cases: Using micro-blogging for ideation was the first. People tweet at conferences for idea sharing. You can use it within the enterprise also. Give people permission to type while you talk. Make sure people have access to their devices. Make sure you have micro-blogging available. Have trusted reviewers. Get the most senior speakers and let people comment on what they are saying.  Have a screen with slides and one screen with the live feed. Understand the culture issues. Use the “correction trick” by having people planted to say things that are left out on purpose.  Have people who already know the message reading the stream of comments on the message and picking out the good stuff. This seems to me like the old discussion treads.

The next two use cases were social gaming.  Gaming with crowdsourcing applied to hard stuff to solve problems. Microsoft did this for Windows7 release. They took a snap shoot of the screen in every language of the testers for their game. They allowed people for whom English is a second language to see a screen and use their first language and see English also. It became a global team building and saved millions in the release.

The second use case was to improve search relevance, another hard issue. They gave people a task and watched people doing relevant search and made adjustments based on their observations. It had all the game issues with leader boards, etc but no money. People got very involved.

Issues to consider when creating game situations: address real problems, require no specialty training, have no overlap with real job, ask for limited effort to contribute, and elicit engagement through good citizenship In the Windows 7 case, pride of country.

Jim talked about another use case. Jim said he was a skeptic on gaming. His company performs clinical trials for biotech firms. They do a lot of partnering in this process including independent investigators that they have to motivate. They are in a very regulated industry. They need to make sure investigators follow the right processes and regulations. They also need to make sure there is informed consent by patients.  The gaming had to contend with these issues.

They had clear goals. The first was to improve quality. The existing training does not work for most people. The game was to make compliance better. They wanted collaborative training for more engagement.  They simplified the experience after experimenting with it. They put context into the game, as many investigators would skip training thinking they know the content but often they do not. So these issues were put into the game. The cost of a clinical trial is about $1miilion a day so making them more efficient can make for big cost savings and also get the benefits of the drug quicker to market.

Julie said that recreational gaming is different than enterprise gaming. You want the enterprise game to be simple and not addictive so they do not spend too much time away from work but solve a problem and get engagement in solving this problem. You need an issue that the employees care about.  You also need to decide who should play and who should not involve. Some people are too busy or not relevant.

Another game was used to prune knowledge from a knowledge management system and the sunset issue in knowledge management can be a difficult one.

Next, Ben Brooks spoke. He runs the Human Care Performance group for Marsh. His company is a very conservative 140-year-old insurance firm.  The last decade was difficult for Marsh. He joined two years ago after this dark period and they were very risk adverse, even more than in the past. They needed to change to conversation from survive to growth and success.  The CEO declared the company was fixed so now let’s talk about growth. Focus on the best rather than the rotten apples.

They wanted to expand recognition. They did an inventory and found 56 recognition programs already in place but they were inconsistent. So another was not the answer but changing the culture was the requirement. The situation was that people only wanted to work with people they knew. In this case they were very collaborative but that they needed to expand this collaboration beyond known people.

They created March University. They found that only 10% of learning came from formal learning. Informal learning counts for 70% of learning. They wanted to focus on informal learning to burn off the organizational fog to make connections easier to find. They have a lot of deep knowledge but it is often not accessible. They also want it to be fun. They want people to get to know each other. They needed to deal with change management on tool use. Their motto was everyone Is a teacher. The question was what will you teach? They got a huge response. They wanted learning to be informal and atomized so your best performers will take the time to do it. They wanted learning to embedded in the work process. They also wanted learning to be social.

They wanted to source photos internally rather than paying a stock image firm. They got a huge response. It became a photo contest than got very high engagement.

They also launched a certified blogger program to teach people who to do it right and not simply develop policies and hope people will follow them. Good idea. They also found ways to get non-sales people involved in sales as experts by making to process more open. They focused on the 1% of active contributors, and also provide some focus on the 9% of passive contributors so they would give reinforcement to the 1%. They have raised the active contributors level from 1% to 4%. Visibility and recognition were the drivers. They found that people age 45 – 60 are most likely to be bloggers. They wanted to share their experiences.

Top ten takeaways:

Find a problem

Make learning covert

Go where there is energy

Create an engagement aligned with strategy.

Burn off organizational fog- create a hub for spokes

Cut the IT/HR/Social media crap – talk business

Make it easy and fun

Design a game and keep score – keep it simple

Treat colleagues like customers

Make everyone a teacher

 

 

 

Talking About Social Business with IBM at SXSW

Here is an interview that I did with IBM at the recent SXSW Interactive in Austin, IBM @ SXSW 2012: Interview with Bill Ives, a partner with the Merced Group. It was my first time there. Here is a link to a summary of my posts on the event.  I was asked about success factors in making social business work within the enterprise. I talked about the need for integration of both the tools and the people with business processes and added:

“And part of that is cultural and part of that is the thought process. And one of the reasons why I like the term social business rather than enterprise 2.0 is that it's both sides of the equation. And I've presented at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference several years. I did a panel on Twitter, I did a panel on blogs. And I had people in the audience saying, well, what does this have to do with the enterprise? And I was thinking to myself, and I think even said out loud, this is the problem with our mindset. You need to align what's inside with what's outside. And that's what social business does.”

I later added:

“Which gets to the one other point that I wanted to make about integration. And I've written some sort of intentionally iconoclastic blog posts about, maybe enterprise 2.0 is about the technology, because you go to these conferences and everybody says, oh, it's not about the technology. I was even on the panel where it says, you know, it's 90 percent people, 10 percent technology except people use the budgets in the inverse relationship. But what's key is you've got to get the systems of engagement, the social business, talking to the systems of record, the enterprise applications. And so you have to have that integration, and otherwise all you're doing is recording water cooler chat.”

I concluded:

“I think you have to be aligned with a business problem. I never saw a knowledge management system that was not business process aligned succeed. And when the social tools came out, I thought, well maybe this is the thing like, okay, you throw out at a wiki see what people do, so, maybe this is the case. And I've completely reversed that thinking. You've got to be able to align the enterprise social business tools with a business process and business process tools. And all that works together. So you have to be able to solve a business problem.”

Thanks to IBM for the chance to talk about these issues. 

 

Painting of Fresh Eggplants from Samos Island Greece

Here is a 16" x 20" acrcyic painting of rgreek eggplants from Samnos Island. 

Images of West Coast of Samos Island, Greece

On the mountainous west coast of Samos, there is a nature preserve and less development. I drove to the end of the road at Dhrakei and turned around. The road goes up high so there are endless vistas and benches placed along with way. I sat on one for quite some time. 

                                                    

 

The New Capitalism – People and the Need for New of Value Metrics

I have seen what happens where start-ups do not invest in employee development or large organizations cut back on it with damaging consequences. As Charles Handy, the economist observes in a post-industrial economy, it is people that have knowledge who now own the new means of production, not their bosses. He points out that this change from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy requires a new approach to management.

Managers now must understand and operate under the principal that the unique knowledge and skills that employees bring to work is the key competitive differentiator. People also have to be able to bring out their unique role–based knowledge and skill together in harmonious ways whether it is on a sports team or any other business.

We do not have a way to properly measure this new capitalism. Ironically it is partially covered under the concept of intangible assets as through people were intangibles. The rise of intangible assets as a percentage of enterprise value is partially, but not completely a part of the rise of the recognition of the value of people.

As my Merced Group Partner, Catherine Shinners, shared with me, Juergen Daum provided evidence in this direction in his book, Intangible Assets and Value Creation. In 1982 62% of enterprise value was in tangible assets and 38% in intangible assets. In 1999 only 16% of enterprise value was in tangible assets and 84% in intangible assets.

I am sure this spread has gotten even larger in the last dozen years. Now we need news ways to segment the measurement of intangible assets since they are no longer this bucket of “other stuff” but where the real value of an enterprise is located. 

Post script: If you are at next week's Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston be sure to attend Catherine's session on " Building an Online Community from Strategy, Planning, and Launch to Effective Engagement and Adoption.”  Her session is at 11:15 – 12 on Tuesday June 19 in Room 312. 

 

The Rise of the Social CEO within Enterprise 2.0

So here we are almost at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston. I will be reporting on it on this blog next week. I recently found an interesting related study. As reported in AdWeek, the current order of customer interaction methods starts with face-to-face, followed by websites, channel partners, call centers, traditional media, advisory groups and finally, social media. However, this order may flip in a few years. During this time, according to an IBM survey of 1,709 CEOS from 64 countries and 18 industries, social media will leap to the number-two spot while traditional media plunges to the bottom.

Saul Berman, a partner in IBM’s global business services organization is quoted as saying, “It’s all part of this move towards openness, both with your customers, with your employees, your business partners, and engaging them all together in what I call this redefinition of the organization—more broadly defined.” It is social business of which enterprise 2.0 is a subset.

The study also found that many CEOs plan to create a more social workplace and, more importantly, the best ones already have. Social media is a major source of data on customers, partners, and markets, in general. Here is where the study gets really interesting from my perspective. “While 54% of the outperformers said they have access to and can draw insights from data, only 26% of the underperformers said as much. And 57% of the outperformers said they could translate those insights into action, but 31% of the underperformers said they are able to do so.”

This rise in social business and the need for more and better data is causing a shift in metrics. For example, one participant in the IBM study said they had previously measured call center productivity by brevity but has since shifted focus to allow for longer calls that can gather more customer data.

This is part of the general trend away from simply trying to strip out costs to adding value and the rise of intangible assets such as knowledge and the people who know how to collect, interpret, and act on it as I wrote about last Friday (see:The Rise of Mass Collaborative Decision Making vs. Top Down Direction. I am sure we will be learning a lot about this over the next few days. 

 

Does There Need to be a Social Business C-Level Role?

Dion Hitchcliffe asks the question: Is it time for a C-level social media executive? The summary includes the statement,” Does centralizing make sense, or should responsibility for it be spread across the business? I think this is the key question.  He then goes through a number of options as to who should own social media. First there is IT but they have never been good at social media.

He then looks at the business side and points out that the scope of social media cover customers (CRM), workers HRM, and partners ERP. So you could make the case that the person in charge of each of these three functions has a legit shot at the job. But then you are missing out the other two

Dion concludes — “even though I think it will take a while for most companies to create it — I think a C-level social media role will be profoundly useful, particularly because it would be focused on business and not technology.” I agree completely.

I wrote about this a while back (see - Does a Senior Exec Need to be in Charge of Enterprise Collaboration?) based on an excellent post by Jacob Morgan, Do Organizations Need a Chief Collaboration Officer? I wrote at the time, whatever you decide to call this person, I think that there is a compelling argument that someone at a senior level needs to have his or her sole responsibility be to support collaboration across the enterprise.

McKinsey has well documented the financial benefits of the connected enterprise and Jacob offering some strong arguments to support this role. His best one was, “the need to look at “collaboration from a holistic big picture of how it impacts everyone.” I concluded, whether you call the person a CCO or some other title, the organizations that put someone in charge of collaboration and give this person the budget and staff to do their job will be the winners in our ever connected markets. 

Here is another take on the topic I just saw from fast Company, Why Your Company Needs A Chief Collaboration Officer.

 

 

Catherine Shinners on Building an Online Community at Enterprise 2.0

My Merced Group partner, Catherine Shinners will present at next week’s Enterprise 2.0 on " Building an Online Community from Strategy, Planning, and Launch to Effective Engagement and Adoption.”  Her session is at 11:15 – 12 on Tuesday June 19 in Room 312.  Here is the description.

“Building and supporting community is a powerful way to build leadership relationships, connect with customers to improve service and accelerate innovation or transform internal organizational productivity. Yet sometimes organizations grab a packaged-off-the-shelf community offering and launch a site and find that it is not gaining the engagement and adoption that was hoped for. If you’re thinking of building an online community or have started on the path, but are not sure you have all the elements in place, this session will provide you with a roadmap to community strategy, planning, launch and early stage adoption, and engagement practices.

The session will guide you through a community strategy process that is aligned with the business strategy, identifying and surveying stakeholders, accurately assessing and clarifying the unmet needs of the community stakeholders to drive the user experience, content and programming plans. Using a case example of an online community for education leaders, the session speaker will outline considerations for staffing and resourcing a community, engaging constituencies through social media, marketing and communications efforts for adoption engagement, analytics and Key Performance Indicator development to assess health of the community.”

It is part of a great community management track created by Rachel Happe. Hope to see you there. I will be blogging the conference.

 

 

 

What Makes a Tweet Popular?

I learned through my Twitter friend @eric_andersen, about an interesting article from the Atlantic, What Fuels the Most Influential Tweets? By Jared Keller. It reported on research by a team of investigators at Indiana University researchers Lillian Weng, Alessando Flammini, Alessando Vespignani, and Filippo Menczer who recently published the paper, Competition Among Memes in a World With Limited Attention. They looked at 120 million retweets connected to 12.5 million users and 1.3 million hashtags to model how information disperses on the social network.

To jump to their conclusion, “The research suggests that it doesn't fully matter who you are or how many connections you have, but what you're saying relative to the existing conversation is what really matters in spreading knowledge online.”  A celebrity with millions of followers cannot gather more RTs a breaking story than many with far fewer followers are mass reporting on.  So the medium is fueled by the message, to twist a phrase by Marshall McLuhan.  So if you want to reach a lot of people write about what they are interested in at the moment. You can add your twist but you need to need to be riding the tide of the day.

 

 

Painting of Fresh Tomatoes from Samos Island Greece

Here is a 16" x 20" axcrylic painting of freash tomatoes from Samos Island Greece given to me by a neighbor.

Fried Potatoes from Samos Island Greece - Painting

Here is a 16# x 20# acrylic painting of froed potatoes from Samos Island Greece. They have the best potatoes I have ever eaten so I had to paint them. The Greeks say it is the potatoes because of the soil and they do a small production. So I bought some at the market and they were indeed the best fried potatoes I ever made. These are from a restaurant as a side dish for chicken with honey carrot sauce. 

The Rise of Mass Collaborative Decision Making vs. Top Down Direction

Deb Gallagher has an interesting article, in the MIT Sloan Review, The Decline of the HPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion). She refers to the work to Andrew McAfee of the MIT Center for Digital Business. He said that the next wave of Enterprise 2.0 will see companies managing decision making and knowledge in very different new ways. This is similar to a post I did a few weeks ago (see Standing Old School Management on its Head). That post reported a study by Bill McCleave that found three characteristics kept appearing as critical to good management: communication, listening and the ability to delegate (aka macro-managing vs. micro-managing).

Deb quotes McAfee, ““The central change with Enterprise 2.0 and ideas of managing knowledge [is] not managing knowledge anymore — get out of the way, let people do what they want to do, and harvest the stuff that emerges from it because good stuff will emerge. So, it’s been a fairly deep shift in thinking about how to capture and organize and manage knowledge in an organization.”

This means looking for good ideas within the ranks of the organization as well as outside the organization. Communities has a great way to provide this innovate, as Catherine shiners writes in Social Business for Executives, “Understanding how to derive repeatable business value from collaborative community is an important senior management skill to master.” This seems to be an increasing trend.

Jon Husband has long talked about this with concept of wirearchy. As he writes, “The new interconnected environment demands new principles for organizing collaborative activity. Traditional hierarchy does not lead and support networked activity as well as newer forms and principles.” Communities become a way to make this new form of decision making concrete.

Deb writes that McAfee adds that the concept that the best minds and the best solutions are often outside our organizations is central to this new mindset. Companies must be willing to seek out those experts wherever they may be.

She offers a great example form Allstate. They offered a competition to see who could beat their current best prediction for which of these cars is going to get into an accident somewhere down the road. Of course the contestants improved on their data. This likely led to better underwriting and higher profits. I am sure we will see more and more of these examples. 

 

The Evolution of Social Business (and the rise of communities)

Here is a really insightful post, Social Business: Where It's Been & Where It's Going, by David Armano is EVP, Global Innovation & Integration at Edelman Digital. Being a student of trends in communication channels for years I really like the historical nature of his thoughts and the parallels be sees in the evolution of digital and social trends.

First there was digital (capabilities), then digital media, then digital business, then social, and social media (where we are now) and social business where we are going. I would only add that social business is beginning to move more into the present. David gives a detailed summary each of these six stages that I will not repeat here. He subtitles the social business stage as: Connected, Adaptive & Intelligent.

While I do see signs of social business, at least at the conceptual and strategic level, I would agree with David’s statement, “the reality is that most organizations are currently dealing with the realities of social media and only a few truly recognize the potential of social business.” This will change. Part of the change will be the breakdown of the traditional walls between enterprises, partners, and customers.

David also states that we are just scratching the surface of the potential here. I think the rise of online communities will be one trend that makes social media into social business if the community is set up to achieve a specific business objective. A community is a concrete manifestation of the social concept and a way to get it generating benefit. I think this is why we are seeing more communities now. 

 

Have We Moved Past Intranets to Networks?

Tad Staley raises some interesting issues in his post, Social Intranets and Organizational Collaboration. He begins by rightly noting that the concept and term of “Intranet” is outdated and wonders it be rehabilitated with “Social” as its first name. My initial reaction is that this falls into the common trend of using a new technology like the prior one until the unique characteristics of the new one can be fully understood.

Intranets were about making content more accessible. But, as Tad writes at the, “heart of the trend toward Social Intranets is the interest in making collaborative capabilities more available throughout the enterprise.” To me this means dropping the term intranet as we are moving way beyond content accessibility. The focus is no longer on the document but on the person. As Tad rightly notes simply running an activity stream down a content focused tool does not make it really social.

Consistent with this thought Tad offers five forms of collaboration to consider with content collaboration being only one of them. There is also project and process collaboration, as well as communities of practice/interest and communication and coordination.

To take the next step in social business the term intranet needs to be dropped.  

 

Communities and the Nature of Trust – Georg Simmel

I have been looking at bit at the work of Georg Simmel, a German sociologist I read in my student days. Georg saw the development of trust as a mental process that has three components: expectation, interpretation, suspension.

Expectation is the anticipated state or outcome at the end of a process. It is preceded by the combination of interpretation and suspension. Interpretation concerns our experience of reality that provides ‘good reason. Suspension is the mechanism of bracketing the unknowable, thus making interpretative knowledge momentarily certain. Suspension enables the leap of faith required for trust.

Collaboration requires a bit of trust, as does participation in the blogosphere. We have an expectation of benefit from our efforts. This expectation takes many forms and it is best that the expectations of the participants align, but it is not necessary, or even desirable that they are identical, just complimentary. Then we interpret our communication through the lens of our expectations. The first two components are necessary, but not sufficient. Suspension enables us to bridge the gaps and, through it, achieve trust. But that suspension is based on our prior experience and enabled by our own perspective on life.

I tend to err on the side of trust. That is my going in position, unless I see a warning sign from my past experience. For collaboration and communities to exist we need to set the right conditions so that expectation and interpretation can enable suspension. 

 

My App Gap Posts for May 2012

The AppGap posts began toward the end of January 2008.  Here, I am primarily doing product commentaries with a few other things thrown in. Below are the ones for May. There will be more in June.

Convo Moves to the Web and Enhances Features

TIBCO Enhances tibbr with GEO and Other New Capabilities

State of CRM Customer Data Integration in 2012

Adobe Provides a New Set of Digital Marketing Capabilities

Are We Measuring the Right Stuff for Social Media’s Marketing Impact?

Understanding and Leveraging Social Capital

 

 

 

Images from Posidhonia. Samos Island Greece

On the eastern end of Samos Island is a small fishing village, Posidhonia, where you can easily see Turkey less than a mile away. I had a nice lunch there of small fried fish, fried potatoes, and a carrot and cabbage salad. Thye seem to have salad with every meal so I feel I am eating healthy. Many cats eyed my mealas yu can see below. After I was done the cafe owner feed them the scraps - see last picture - no wonder the cats stayed around. 

                                             

 

Images from Aghina Pavlos Monastery and Mourtia, Samos Island Greece

I went to the Aghina Pavlos Monastery on Samos Island as I heard there were good views and wa snot disappointed. While up ther I spoted to small harbor of Mourtia and drive down. It was full of boats but noe people and very peaceful I spent a good bit of time there hanging out. 

                                       

The Postdigital Enterprise Needs to Shift Attention from the Cost Side to the Value Side

These are not my words of wisdom but ones I have long agreed with. It is a quote from an excellent article and comprehensive article in Forbes by John Hagel, Suketu Gandhi and Giovanni Rodriguez, The Empowered Employee is Coming; Is The World Ready? John Hagel is co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge. Suketu Gandhi is a principal with Deloitte Consulting. Giovanni Rodriguez is a senior member of the Deloitte social-technology team, and a blogger for Forbes.

As they write, if you focus on the cost side there is only so much you can squeeze out.  If you focus on the value side there are no limits. You can also focus on both if you do the value side right. In my career with both small and large consulting firms, I was pleased to be able to always focus on value by enabling employees to become more effective through learning, knowledge management, collaboration or social business. It was adding value rather than figuring out how to lay off more people or outsource. When done right it did also result in cost savings or increased revenue or both. I am not trying to claim credit for anything here. It just gave me more satisfaction with my job and I also thought it was the right thing for the client in the long run. That is what this article articulates quite well.

The authors note that, “while the ranks of the unemployed continue to swell globally, the number of unfilled jobs for skilled labor are also on the rise.” This is exactly why we need more education, organizational learning, and enterprise collaboration (aka knowledge management.)  They discuss the need for the empowered employee that was one of the original goals of knowledge management and a theme that runs through all the social business efforts that are worthwhile.

They note that marketers were one of the first groups to dominate the conversation about social media in its infancy.  They note that this is because customers are where the pressure is typically coming from. As customers harness the tools of the Web to gain more information about products and vendors, they are putting increasing pressure on these vendors to deliver more value at lower cost.

They are also requiring the vendors to have knowledgeable and empowered employees to talk to these empowered customers. This is not a new issue. It has just gotten magnified. I remember in 90s when call center reps would tell me that they often learned about the company’s new offers from customers calling in who had just seen them on TV or the paper.

They next offer a profound statement I will quote in its completely as I could not say it better. “Rather than treating employees as cost items that need to be managed wherever possible, why not view them as assets capable of delivering ever increasing value to the marketplace? This is a profound shift in focus. For one thing, it moves us from a game of diminishing returns to an opportunity for increasing returns. There is little, if any, limit to the additional value that people can deliver if given the appropriate tools and skill development.”

They then note that this requires a people centered enterprise than needs to adjust to meet the needs to employees rather than the reverse. This is flipping the old industrial revolution on its head and marks what is needed for the 21^st century. There is much more and I recommend reading the whole piece.