Some attempts to limit email haven't gone as planned. One client of Christina Randle, a workplace productivity expert with the Effectiveness Edge in Austin, tried remedying employees' email overload by banning staff from sending messages on Fridays. It backfired. Employees just stored outbound messages and sent them all Monday morning. "Instead of getting 100 messages on Friday, [people] got 200 in their inbox on Monday morning," she says.

If you want to fix email in the workplace, you've got to treat it as a systemic problem.

According to Jeff Dachis, CEO of Dachis Group, social is the currency of engagement.  While social technology has introduced a seemingly endless array of new interaction methods, in the end it is all about solving real business problems.  Companies do not become social businesses for the heck of it. They embrace social to solve specific business problems because it offers a more effective way of doing talent management, supply chain collaboration, business agility, risk management, and more successful products to driving revenue.  Social drives adaptation.

The state of social is not what you might expect.  Sandy Carter of IBM shared that governments and regulated industries have the highest adoption rate of social.  Eighty four percent of the top thirty five banks have a social media strategy and all G7 governments have embedded social in their Government 2.0 initiatives.  At a country level, German companies are the leading adopters of social business practices and are the most successful at it.  These companies embedded social first internally by folding it into their processes and getting that to work before extending social externally to engage with customers.

Through the lens that social is about solving real business problems, the question becomes just how to wade through all the hype, myths and hubris to realize (and prove) its potential.   Embracing the organizing principles of social business comes down to change management.  You know the drill, you’ve been through it before - it starts with people, process and ends with technology.  The exact opposite of what is being advocated by the thousands of technology vendors and consultants shouting from the social bandwagon.

Dachis Group's 2012 Social Business Summit seven city global tour kicked off in Austin this week (the Summit in Singapore takes place on the 26th July). Writing in Forbes magazine, Christine Crandell provides an excellent review of the Austin event and outlines some key points about what Social Business is and isn't. Its a great overview on the state of Social Business if you are still trying to get your head around the idea or maybe you are just little skeptical.

The short answer is yes, viral adoption can work BUT only in certain situations. This is my attempt to pin down some of the factors I’ve observed out in the field...

...these are the anti-patterns I’ve actually seen:

Posted over on the Headshift | Dachis Group Asia Pacific blog.

For a successful SharePoint implementation, you can’t forget the most important ingredient — getting the platform used.

If you are reading this article, it is likely because you’ve heard whining in your office or you’re tired of repeating the same message over and over to improve user adoption of your SharePoint implementation.

You may be a frustrated project manager or business champion who spent countless hours on budgeting, planning, governance, information architecture, training and timelines, only to find that the last task in your SharePoint project plan that has no due date is USER ADOPTION. And to your horror, no one is taking your words seriously and people don’t care. The bottom line is this: for you to get people to take advantage of your hard work, you have to add one more task assigned to yourself — don’t give up.

Unfortunately if thinking about "user adoption" is the last step, then you've already failed. Written by a software vendor, this article - underpinned by an assumption that the software is perfect - advises people to Break Down the Resistance, Stop the Whining and then Babysit, aka Enforce change. This approach is more than overtly paternalistic and I'm surprised they don't just recommend getting rid of the users who are blemishing the hard work of the technocrats. Part of me wonders if this attitude is just symptomatic of the Microsoft SharePoint ecosystem being geared towards software development and implementation, rather than a well rounded mix of people, process, technology and content (like we do at Headshift | Dachis Group). What do you think?

At last week’s E2.0 conference in Boston, I was surprised and pleased by the way my “in-the-flow” phrase has gained common currency.

I was also surprised, but less pleased, by some of the “best practices” I heard flying around. Whether in keynotes, sessions, or just hallway conversations, I heard a lot of claims of dubious merit, claims like:

• Start with a small pilot and let it grow virally
• Invest heavily in community management, because a community is only as successful as its managers
• Workers won’t use social software without personal incentives
• Workers who don’t belong to the Facebook Generation don’t “get” social software.
• Social software adoption requires a culture of collaboration
• You shouldn’t launch collaborative tools without a collaboration strategy

There’s a common theme behind all this advice: You should be scared of launching enterprise social software, because achieving adoption is really hard, really time-consuming, and really expensive.

Sorry friends, but I’m calling Bullshit.

I had to read Michael Idinopulos' post a couple of times to make sure I understood it.

Basically - in a round about way - he is describing two things:

• The complex nature of organisations. 
• That social business tools work, because they help people get work done 'in-the-flow'.

I agree entirely - and this makes the AHA case study a great example.

But lets address this issue of organisational complexity.

Sometimes a simple intervention - like introducing a new technology - can make an immediate impact. But we don't actually know why, although we can observe the benefits when it works. Do the same again in a different situation and you take a gamble on the outcome. For systems of engagement, this is the problem of copying macro level case studies when change actually happens at the micro level of individual groups and individuals. Sometimes it only takes an influential blocker, a critical system that doesn't integrate well, a policy that can't be side stepped or a group that has already picked their own solution - suddenly the dynamic changes.

I use those words deliberately, because the character of some organisations is to be conservative, others are prepared to to be more reckless. Smart organisations take a design-led middle ground. They don't follow knee jerk reactions to new technology, but they don't fall for shallow thinking either.

To help make that point, here are some different case studies (I'm focusing on enterprise microblogging, as there is a level of commonality between them - but this also follows on from some earlier posts):

• Yammer at Suncorp - the viral adoption pattern.
• tibbr at CIBER - tried a couple of solutions, before finding what worked for them.
• Yammer at a small medical practice - hit a technology challenge.
• Chatter at Den-Mat - ran into people and skills issues. 

Each of these examples had a different journey (Micro), but each had a positive story to tell (Macro).

Incidentally, the CIO behind the case study that Idinopulos described has written a detailed post describing the "15 Key Steps for Successful Implementation". This isn't simple, but the steps make it less complex; and its all about finding that fit so that users can get into the flow easily.

Don’t ‘deploy and run’: You can’t just roll-out a new technology and expect all employees to pick it up instantly. Yes, a lot of social business software is intuitive and easy-to-use, but you should ensure that people know where to start. Hold training sessions across the company and provide them with best practice tips. Too make the technology feel more familiar, upload logos or branding and get people to populate their user profiles

There is a lot of motherhood statement-like advise out there, but I think this point is worth highlighting. Unless you work in a small company filled with early adopters and no staff turn over, you should never, ever deploy and run.

So called 'motivational speakers' don't motivate people to change behaviour.

Throughout my career I have been involved in organising, planning and developing a huge number of away days, events, conferences and the like. When you start working on ideas for the agenda, more often than not someone will suggest getting a 'motivational speaker' along. This suggestion is normally met with everyone getting very excited, throwing in ideas of who they could get and checking budget to see if it is possible. Everyone that is, except me.

Why am I so resistant to this idea? What it is about the whole concept of 'motivational speakers', whoever they may be, that I just don't seem to get or be enthused by?

Simply put I don't think they do what they say - motivate, and especially motivate people to change.

You don't motivate people to change; you just need to involve them as participants instead.

Nice video, posted to YouTube, to promote the Victorian Department of Justice's Social Media Policy. In truth, if you removed a couple of the specific departmental and Victorian references, this is pretty much a generic introduction to the common sense stance towards social media in any large organisation.

It would be nice too if the source of this video was made available under a CC remixable non-commercial license, so that other organisations (particularly across government and the non-profit sector) could reuse it.

Ironically, "Adding comments has been disabled for this video."

This of course highlights the fact that the video is good, but proof of its effectiveness will be in what I assume is a bigger package of training and capability development within DoJ.