chieftech’s blog

Through some serendipity, I came across Zaana Howard's CPA Australia case study on enterprise microblogging. In these three parts, we again see a very familiar viral and low friction adoption pattern.

From this experience, Zaana highlights the benefits (knowledge sharing, better communication and expertise location) but also a number lessons learnt, that hinge particularly on the point that "viral success is not enough".

This reminded me that a couple of years ago I came across an organisation that was awash with enterprise social computing tools - wikis, blogs, video, rss, dashboard etc - but each tool was lost within a sea of legacy and traditional intranet and information management tools. The average user in that organisation could barely find anything on the intranet that was already there, let alone the new wave of tools.

It was a shame because the earlier adopters had embraced them and could see the future benefits, but they were actually talking about removing all the social computing tools from their systems because mixing the old and new world was completely unplanned.

BTW Have a look through my blog archives to find more case studies and examples of enterprise microblogging at work.

My blog friend, Samuel Driessen, was quoted in this Economist piece looking at the value of enterprise social networking, particularly enterprise microblogging. He talks about the practical benefits of enterprise microblogging to his company:

"the messaging system has helped the firm spot where work is in danger of being duplicated and share information about sales prospects."

The rest of the article is well worth reading, before you forward it to your boss :-)

This reminds me of another great case study I came across recently, this time from Social Text (who are also quoted in the Economist) - it describes the value a manufacturing company gets from using Social Text's integrated enterprise wiki and microblogging system:

"Signals allows all that communication to be searchable and discoverable later," [the company's Knowledge and Information Manager] says. "The more stuff we've normally done in e-mail that we can pull into a Signals is a victory as far I'm concerned."

As these examples demonstrate, enterprise microblogging is more than mindless chatter.

Q. What are your thoughts on collaborative versus top-down management?

A. Collaboration is one of the most difficult challenges in management. I think top-down organizations got started because the bosses either knew more or they had access to more information. None of that applies now. Everybody has access to identical amounts of information.

Q. Why did that shift occur?

A. I would say two things. One is just the massive information revolution. But equally important is the fact that before, while there were global companies, they were really just a collection of very local businesses operating independently from each other. Now a global company means a company composed of teams that are themselves dispersed. So every team can be global in many senses, not just the company.

But with the explosion of information, and flattening technologies starting with e-mail, I think that a C.E.O. needs to focus more on the platform that enables collaboration, because employees already have all the data. They have access to everything.

You have to work on the structure of collaboration. How do people get recognized? How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment?

The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart. And it actually is not a question about monetary incentives. They do it because recognition from their peers is, I think, an extremely strong motivating factor, and something that is broadly unused in modern management.

Q. How do you create that culture?

A. One thing we use is a Twitter-like system on our intranet called Yammer.

Timely interview considering my comments about virtual teams just now, although there is more to this that just enterprise microblogging!

Hat tip to Andrew McAfee, who also highlights some key points if you want the abridged version of this interview.

Working in virtual teams is a growing phenomenon and most business executives are positive about the benefits of working this way. Respondents to our survey agree that virtual working allows them to collaborate with colleagues across the organisation, it gives them access to a global talent pool and it improves their organisation’s competitiveness.

As more tools have become available (often at low, or no, cost), virtual working has evolved as the natural way for organisations to carry out tasks and business processes. However, little planning has gone into how these tools should be used and how they will be used by different cultures or even across the gender divide.

But as these technologies become more prevalent, more thought will be needed on how best to adapt an organisation to work more effectively using these technologies. Historically, meeting in person at the launch of a project or when a conflict arises has been an important means of resolving issues. But face-to-face meetings are not always practical or cost-effective. It is therefore imperative that teams agree on clear rules for communication from the start. Managers then need to “hyper-communicate” with the team, constantly verifying what has been understood and carefully monitoring the entire communications process. Doing so will dispel many misunderstandings—many, but not all.

There has been so more thought, researched and written about virtual teams (and related topics, like collaboration, knowledge management, etc) of the years but according to this research report from The Economist Intelligence Unit, virtual teams have emerged with very little thought or support.

That emergence may or may not be a good thing in itself, but the net effect is that virtual teams probably aren't as effective as they could be. Looking at the tools being used - primarily email, voice and Webconferencing - the newer social tools rank poorly. Based on my own experiences of being part of different virtual teams over the years and more recently working with Headshift, I can tell you that there is huge potential to improve how virtual teams function using enterprise social computing.

But when we look at this from the perspective of the debate about the value of Enterprise 2.0, I think there is an even more important lesson here: these technologies will be used, but you have a choice - plan to use them well, or keep your fingers crossed that people will work it out for themselves.

BTW Being part of a virtual team doesn't mean you never meet people face-to-face. If you are in Sydney this Thursday morning, come and join us for an early coffee to discuss Enterprise 2.0, virtual teams and more.

"Even though we have a small staff--around 33 employees--there were many silos built up across the department," he says. Microblogging, he hoped, would help get his staff talking and collaborating.

After evaluating several microblogging tools, Eby and his team decided on Socialtext's Signals, a microblogging tool that is accessed via a browser, mobile device or an Adobe AIR desktop application and is integrated with a wiki, social networking profiles and "activity streams" (which are similar to the Facebook News Feed).

This CIO article highlights 3 enterprise microblogging case studies - two of the case studies are about large technology companies (still interesting, but not necessarily reflective of everyone's experience). However, the other example describes the experiences of St. Louis Public Radio in the US, which only employees around 33 staff.

For me this reflects my own personal rule of thumb that its not just the size of an organisation that makes enterprise social computing useful, but the structure of the organisation and how these different roles relate to each other.

The debate about personalization vs. segmentation on the intranet has been much discussed and researched by many pioneering intranet designers and consultants. As keen observers of user behaviour in the real world, we believe that well chosen default options are a sound design strategy. Adoption rates of personalization features are low, driven by a lack of understanding of the business benefit from the user and the inertia of human nature to simply be lazy and accept defaults. By placing the user at the centre of the information universe and using their relationships to information and each other as the default filter, we can provide them with an intuitive view of their world, making significant progress towards our goal of a more relevant and valuable intranet.

The team at ThoughtFarmer often have interesting things to say about intranets - in this case, Gordon Ross' guest post on the Dachis Collaboratory describes the benefits of implicit personlisation on intranets. This is an important idea that is reflected conceptually in both McAfee's Enterprise 2.0 SLATES model and Dachis/Headshift's Social Business Design archetypes.

Personally I wouldn't say users are lazy as such, but it is true that people take the path of least resistance. Until relatively recently we also didn't have mainstream access to the technologies that support implicit personalisation plus we lacked the organisational maturity to actually place the user at the centre. However, this is now changing.

The Tube is IDEO’s intranet, a stylised, innovative online space designed purely around IDEO employees.

Every employee has a personal page that’s linked dynamically to their location, projects, project team members, skills, personal blogs and more. It’s a perfect intranet, directory, skill finder, blogging platform and social network, all wrapped up into one, seamless user experience.

Alex kindly shared a review copy of Step Two's 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards report with me. We've been talking on and off about it in advance of its publication and he assured me I would be very interested in some of the winners this year. Its a long report (nearly 200 pages) so I haven't had a chance read it in full! However, some highlights for me so far:

• IDEO's 'The Tube' people-centred intranet.
• Sabre Town - an in-house-developed internal social networking site.
• NYK News Room - while it could look better, this is a good example of using an enterprise wiki (in this case Confluence) as a platform to develop a solution.

Sabre Town in particular offers a great success story because their social networking site has apparently reported "Demonstrable saving of up to $500,000 in 2008 alone". So much for the Enterprise 2.0 doubters? Well, yes and no - these appear to be savings achieved through reduced wastage or significant time saving. Of course, unless you implement something like Sabre Town you aren't going to know what you are missing out on until you do.

While I don't think they were particularly strong winners, it was interesting to see the inclusion of companies that were looking beyond the browser screen and integrating toolbar gadgets and SMS as part of their intranet solution. These are all good signs, although I'm hopefully of more innovation in this space in coming years.

I'll try to post up some more thoughts about these examples in the next week or so. In the meantime, Step Two are publishing more excepts, further insights and screenshots on their blog - or just buy the full report for yourself.