Enterprise Collaboration at Scale

Ideo is presenting their learnings from operating in a collaborative manner at scale.

Common Enterprise Collaboration Issues:

• Sharing between multiple locations is difficult.
• Communications get locked in silos in hierarchical organizations

Most organizations think about technology first:

• Blogs
• Wikis
• Crowdsourcing
• Social Networking
• Telepresence
• Real-Time Collaboration software

The issue is that ROI does not appear because of other factors:

• Rewards
• Culture
• Organization Design
• Knowledge Sharing
• Content
• Achieving Adoption
• Abilities
• Systems Design

Design Thinking: Starts and ends with individuals

• Culture
• Behaviors
• Motivations
• Social Interactions

Human Factors link with technology Factors and Business Factors.

Understand these factors, then brainstorm and prototype then develop:

i.e. Understand, Explore and Develop.

Ideo experimented with Video conferencing by leaving it on all the time. eg. in team rooms and in public places.

Telepresence hasn't worked out effectively. Eye contact doesn't work.

Instead they experimented with adding an iMac on the table in the and a videographer.

May be they should look at Microsoft Roundtable which rpovides a 360 degree panoramic view.

It is hard to get data out of peoples heads and in to Databases. It looses the context that makes it valuable.

Instead connect brains by creating:

• Intuitive interfaces
• Reward individual participation
• Automatic navigation
• No training setup

iPhone - 6.5% market share for smartphones yet 63% of all mobile browsing.

• Go where people already are
• Build Adaptive systems

You can't just deploy a system and be done.

Prototype early and prototype in context. Then iterate quickly.

Create Adaptive Intuitive People Centric systems that reward individual participation and integrate in to their daily workflow.

After five successive attempts at implementation they have implemented ThoughtFarmer

They wrote their own wrapper using Ruby on Linux. The blogging is built on SixApart's MoveableType's platform.

IDEO implements security based upon Trust and a 3 category qualification: Green = Open, Red = Internal only, Black = partitioned due to sensitivity eg. Customer anonymity or conflicts of interest across teams. The Wiki is for Green and Red projects.

Getting people to write valuable people and project pages:

To address this utilize:

• Recognition
• Project Staffing
• Career Development

This is leading to input to organizational design.

The Tools are a natural part of the workflow. eg. a digest of project status rather than dealing with email.

People are bad at describing tacit knowledge. This is what led to a focus on connecting people. People leave so they are working on extending tools through to Ideo affiliates (ie. clients, partners and alumni)

Tiers of knowledge Management (from McKinsey)

• Friction points (new infrastructure to address)
• Behavior change (harder to do but builds on new infrastructure)

Social Software in the Enterprise

Ross Mayfield (@Ross) presented a fascinating insight in to Enterprise 2.0 and the role of Social Intranets and Social Media.

Enterprise 2.0 was defined by Andrew McAfee as having 5 elements:

SLATES:

• Search
• Link
• Tag
• Extensions
• Signals

People play email volleyball with attachments.

The average person in a company spends 1 day/week looking for people and information

Search provides results and not answers.

Discovery provides answers sometimes from people and context.

Social Messaging is an ability to ask questions and get answers without interrupting people.

Social Discovery enables a different way to work.

In call centers 50% of CSR's turn to Google to find answers they can't find find inside.

Even Sharepoint doesn't help because search in sharepoint disconnects the document from the context in which it was created.

How do employees focus on the important things?

How do people discover connections to get work done?

Online documents solve the problem of sharing.

Social Messaging is new and close to real time.

Enterprise 2.0 Anti-Patterns

Aaron Kim, IBM Senior Managing Consultant, Emerging Technologies - IBM Canada presenting on Anti-Patterns, ROI and Metrics.

Twitter tags: #w2e #antip

• How to go from Hype to productivity
• Enterprise 2.0 Anti-patterns

Anti-pattern is a pattern that tells you how to go from a problem to a bad solution.

Fear 2.0: Fear is not a bad thing but action paralysis is bad. Failure comes with a name tag.

Is innovating less risky than not innovating.

Full control is no longer in your hands.

"Fail often, fail quickly, fail gracefully and learn from it." - Mike Moran

Hype 2.0: I want it because it's cool. I want it because Gartner et al said I need it.

New World, Old Patterns:Knowledge is in people's heads. People are portable.

Email is the knowledge repository. It is hidden to everyone - except you.

Personal Hard Drives hold data but is not typically shared.

People are your competitive advantage:

When you use wikis, blogs, podcasts and other broadcast tools you extend your reach and passively expand your network.

New World, Old Habits: There can be subtle differences between tools. A fool with a tool is still a fool.

Business Week - Taking full advantage of Web 2.0 may require Management 2.0.

Build it and they will come: If Wikipedia works so will mine.

People have limited bandwidth.

Clay Shirky's: Plausible promise, effective tool and acceptable bargain (HCE).

User Adoption Plan + Balanced Incentives.

The World is Flat: Everyone is not the same. Differences will always exist.

Geekness 2.0: Anybody can do it. Laziness 2.0 comes in to play. It has to be easy. Enable gradual adoptin.

Best of Breed: Proven solutions work well but in isolation.

Wikis are good for somethings - but not everything.

Adopt an integrated solution that meets core needs, augmented by best of breed and has enterprise grade support.

Integration is your competitive advantage and may be the innovators edge.

Search and you will not find:

You get a lot of bad with the good. We need filters to surface the good. We need to make sure good content floats to the top.

Data as your competitive Advantage:

Intangible means unmeasurable: Nobody asks what is the ROI for phone and email.

Business Value must discount costs.

Value Creation v. Value Capture

Easy to understand business case

Easy to calculate ROI models.

Measure Supply , not Demand: Bloggers, posts, wiki spaces, authors are measures of supply.

Not all User Generated Content has business value.

ROI and Metrics

If there is not "R" then it is just "C" - Cost.

63% of companies use ROI, TCO and IRR as measures of investment in Web 2.0.

Limited resources means you need to be able to make a case against competing projects.

The Right Metrics

1. What is the business objective
2. Is the metric stable
3. Can a benchmark be established
4. What are the levers to influence the metric

Returns need to be broadly defined:

Revenues, conversions, social capital, cost avoidance

You may need multiple Web 2.0 ROI models.

Control in Social Media is like grabbing water - Pauline Ores, IBM

In the Social Media World the most powerful person is the one who shares the most.

Sharing has more power than holding knowledge.

Get With The Connected Enterprise

This Thursday November 6th, 2008 at 11:00am Eastern Time I am participating in a one hour free Webinar on the Connected Enterprise. Join Lee White (EQuint Consulting), Michael Lee Stallard (E Pluribus Partners), Lee Bryant (Headshift) and myself for what should be a fascinating discussion about the adoption of collaborative tools in the enterprise. We should each be bringing a different perspective so it should make for a great discussion.

Here is the key bit of information, https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/999220840 the registration link

What we aim to address is how social tools can be used within companies to improve organizational productivity.

Join me for the Webinar.

If you have questions before the event you can always message @ekivemark on Twitter. Include #connected in your message so it is easy to pull the questions together.

I wish I Had SocialCalc

Last week I wrote about SocialText's new SocialCalc functionality. This week I have had a real life example hit me like a hammer to the side of the head that just proves the desperate need for a Social Spreadsheet. I got thrown in to the middle of an exercise to compile a budget estimate for some major development. The problem is that there are hundreds of moving parts and what ifs. As usual there is a spreadsheet template. Its just that it doesn't fit for the group I have been asked to help with.

As with most budget spreadsheets it is fairly simple. Lists are summed in to totals, which get transfered to a summary page. No complex math to deal with just contingency percentages and a few standard rates.

What has been fascinating is the process of compiling the spreadsheet. It required people sitting in a room to discuss approaches which led to a quick back of the napkin style estimate. Once the first iteration was completed it was necessary to circulate it to be sanity checked. Then the merry go round began in earnest.

"What was this number based on?", "Where did this number come from?", "That numbers included elsewhere - we don't need it" (Where elsewhere is another spreadsheet we are not privy to).

Getting the spreadsheet completed is not a math exercise. It is a social discussion exercise and in this instance many of the clarifying conversations happen as sidebars that may not get captured.

This is frustrating old style collaboration that is being driven to a new style collaboration timeline. The process is time consuming, error prone and combined knowledge is filtered away rather than amassed during the process. The whole exercise just confirms the compelling need for shared spreadsheets. One's that are editable in real-time by multiple people and comments can be easily captured and referenced.

This all just serves to convince me that a SocialCalc-style spreadsheet solution coupled with a JackBe-Presto-style enterprise mashup tool could prove to be the killer enterprise productivity platform of the imminent future.

Think about it.

As knowledge workers we typically pull information from multiple sources. We need to normalize that information in some way, filter it and then perform an analysis on it. More often than not this exercise is a collaborative one where we work in teams to create an end product.

So SocialText and JackBe - How can we enhance the integration between SocialCalc and Presto? These are two great companies with some brilliant development talent. I believe there is a powerful solution here that is greater than the sum of the two parts.

Social Networking for Security

Ross Mayfield connects some fascinating threads on his blog where he is discussing "Secure what people do, because information doesn't do." Ross' thoughts leverage off some comments by JP Rangaswami and Andrew McAfee. In turn Ross has triggered me to connect a different set of dots....

Ross makes the connection that it is not the information per se, it is what someone does with the information. When you couple this with JP's idea that "Information is changing. And it is becoming more valuable to us all by becoming less valuable to any one of us."

If we are to re-think Information Security then this could turn some organization's security posture completely upside down. What do I mean by this? Let me explain.

In many organizations filtering and a need to know approach is taken to information control. This attempts to keep information under control. However, increasingly an organization needs to spread the information widely in order to function effectively. The complexity of managing security grows exponentially with the number of connections.

It strikes me that making information less controlled could lead to a reduction in the cost of  managing information security. However, this can only be done with a re-thinking of traffic filtering. If an organization wants to simplify information management then they should at the same time lower the barriers to the outside world and let their employees have access to all of the social tools that they use to be an effective knowledge worker. By doing this I am not encouraging anarchy. What an organization should do, to Ross' point, is mine the social network connections of their employees and understand the web of connections that exist. This knowledge can be used to map how information is used. Employees would have to understand that they have a greater responsibility in the management and use of information.

Knowledge workers are employed for what and who they know. Forward thinking organizations should recognize this and seek to leverage those connections for greater insight. The social web of connections can provide a valuable insight in to the use of an organization's information. 

If information wants to be free it will find a way to be free. So why don't we adopt a security posture that maps the Social Network in order to understand and track the flow of information through what people do with the information. 

Open Source lessons for organizational knowledge management

The following notes were from a fascinating insight in to the Open Source development process used by Mozilla Corporation in the development of FireFox. This might not seem relevant to Knowledge Management in large organizations but there are some interesting parallels. Effective Knowledge Management depends upon embracing the community that has the knowledge and encouraging the community members to participate. So just keep that in mind while reading about the development voyage for Firefox.

Embrace the chaos!

A session presented by Mike Bletzner of Mozilla Corporation. I am looking round the fast filling room and seeing all the laptops in use. This is interesting. The Mac is a predominant force in the Web 2.0 world. It appears to be the laptop of choice for the majority of developers. I have even seen some developers running Windows on their Macbook Pro's. Web 2.0 is going mainstream. The split between Mac and Windows machines at this conference is about 40% Mac 60% Windows. But most of those Windows users look longingly at the Mac users.

The community is smarter than you. So listen! You don't necessarily have to follow what they say. Leadership is the key. Filter signal from noise. A Commanders Intent is critical. It is the core of leadership. The intent survives daily interaction with events.

• Listen
• Lead
• Play

What do we mean by community?

1 phenomenologist 40 Development team 1,000 contributors 10,000 Nightly Testers 100,000 Beta Testers 37% of Firefox code has been contributed by the community

Open source lessons learned

Chaos. Anyone can propose a change. Anyone can join. Vandalism is negligible. But you do get duplicates. Anyone can comment on a change. So there is some noise. Anyone can submit a change to the code. Not everyone can approve a change. This gives some level of control. Mozilla have 400 people that can check code in to the tree.

Managing the process

Respect has to be earned. WOOFI - Social Capital in the Magic Kingdom. Positive comments carry weight. This respect brings order. A strong leadership structure is essential. Module owners can grant rights to peers to allow them to enable change. Leadership helps to filter the noise.

Lessons aplied from Opensource design

Provide a path of least resistance to channel input to where you want it. Easier to comment on design than to code. Camps form quickly - "I like the button on the left" v. "I like the button on the right" - So identify and elevate smart contributors. The solution is to ask for evidence to support assertions. Remember to educate. The community wants to listen. Lay out a path for contributors. Give a clear statement of intent. When Firefox asked for comments they had 3,000 contributions in one week and only 2 incidents of vandalism. Create small teams with specific responsibilities. Each has a clear commanders intent. Elevate discussions with data and research whenever possible. It enables decisions to be made. BATNA - Best Alternative T a Negotiated Agreement. Treat disagreements as negotiations.

Let your community play and experiment.

eg. create an add-on. Popular ones get incorporated in to the core product.