chieftech’s blog

Following on from Mark Jones's podcast about enterprise social media, this week's The Scoop vodcast looks at the related but broader topic of collaboration.

Mark examines the concept of collaboration from the perspective of both a technologist (a CIO) and a non-technologist (a research psychologist) - its quite interesting to see how they both approach this idea.

The technologist in this case is Ken Gallacher, CIO at the ABC. In the last half of the interview, he also has some interesting things to say about the use microblogging at the ABC and the importance of both talking and listening.

An article I wrote for IDM magazine earlier in the year about managing email in the enterprise is now available to read in full on the Headshift Australasia blog. This was intended to be a counterpoint to technology-centric approaches to dealing with email overload, so let me know what you think.

Also cross posted to the Dachis Group's Collaboratory blog.

James Dellow aka Chieftech (from Headshift/Dachis Group) and Alex Manchester (from Step Two Designs) invite you to join them for breakfast to chat informally about Enterprise 2.0 and related topics like Corporate Social Networks, Knowledge Management, Intranet 2.0 and Workforce Collaboration.

Come along to ask questions and share your experiences of introducing social computing to the enterprise!

Ok. This isn't quite to the same scale of the The 2.0 Adoption (who recently joined the Dachis Group family of companies, along with Headshift). However, its still a chance to come along and take part in an informal peer forum to discuss anything related to Enterprise 2.0.

Please RSVP on upcoming or simple add a comment below. And of course, feel free to spread the word.

Ben - the reality is that many federal government agencies were already making use of social media before the Taskforce was announced. In this respect it is not surprising that many have started to pro-actively address the issue of providing staff with guidelines, but still remaining consistent with current APS policy. Don't forget that the APS policy addressing this area was also updated last year. While it would be good to see a formal response to the Taskforce's report, I don't think this should stop agencies moving ahead. The outcome of the Taskforce will be a decision about a whole of government mandate and supporting infrastructure for engaging online, not determining if agencies should engage at all. That, as we are seeing, is going to happen anyway.

I thought I would share my comment to a report by Ben Grubb in ZDNet.com.au about various Australian federal agencies moving ahead with developing social media guidelines. To be honest, I wasn't sure if I was reading Ben Grubb's opening point correctly:

Federal Government departments have revealed they are moving ahead to implement social media policies, despite the government having not yet responded to recommendations in the Government 2.0 Taskforce report.

You can read this as both a criticism and also as a matter of fact.

Actually, and as I was involved in writing a guide for government agencies that was commissioned by the Taskforce, I'm more concerned that:

• Agency staff aren't actually being engaged internally about social media - simply publishing a policy isn't enough; and
• Agency staff don't have access to the right tools internally to support the level of online engagement that is emerging.

Personally its these issues I worry about and this is where a mandate is needed because words in a policy are cheap, but changing how government and how people within government actually work is another story ("Enterprise 2.0 for Government", if you like).

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.

Following along the lines of my own post and also Mike Gotta's comment, SAP's Nenshad Bardoliwalla makes some great points here about placing enterprise social computing in the context of organisational processes, which might already be supported by a transactional system. From this he concludes:

my advice to both the zealots and naysayers of Enterprise 2.0 would be to take an existing, legitimate pain point, like offer creation, or product development, or customer service, and start by benchmarking your current metrics. If an Enterprise 2.0 tool can move those metrics in the right direction in a provable way, you will have real, hard ROI. If the tool doesn't contribute to moving those process metrics in the way you hoped, then you might have a problem with your executive sponsor.

However, I think this is one approach, but not the only approach.

Moving from theory to actual implementation, we have to be careful about deploying social computing tools in a way that constrains them to a single process. This has implications for users, but might also be affected by assumptions about the systems and actors invol ved in that process.

I also think for some people that this approach still won't be acceptable, as it points to demonstrating value after the fact. We may also still have trouble arguing the causal relationship between social software and improvements to the process in absolute hard undeniable fact (although not impossible, it will require rigour). Considering that challenge from a cost-benefit point of view, this is where the emergent properties of social computing kicks in - like water, provide the tools and let the users work out the optimal level for themselves.

The other thing I think this misses out on is the use of social software in the enterprise to change the transactional process into something that is inherently leaner. I agree with Bardoliwalla on the point that we don't want to replace transactional systems, but on the other hand we can't assume that the transactional system reflects the optimal process (either the process mapping has created an inefficient model or a social computing solution would manage some requirements more effectively). In some circumstances the cost and risk of implementing a formal transactional system are so high that some processes are never systematised anyway.

Finally, not every kind of organisational activity is a process. Some of it is loose and messy - decision making, planning, innovation, etc.

Hat tip to my colleagues at Headshift for this one.

Well, who would have guessed this would have come out of Novell?

I think Pulse actually makes Wave a lot more interesting, if they can interoperate as well as Novell claims.

Hopefully we'll see more Pulses and Waves coming down the line too.