by Rod Boothby
December 27, 2006 at 2:17 pm
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0
Maggie Fox writes one of my favourite new blogs. Social Media Group.
Recently, she asked “how long before social media is recognized as the new email”?
Part of the reason why Blogging and Wikis have not gone mainstream within the enterprise is that people keep talking about them as a market conversation or as “social software”, rather than as solutions to basic business problems.
What if we call them “Worksites?”. A Worksite makes your Intranet both readable and writable. Worksites are designed to do at least 6 things:
1 - Increase profits by improving lateral communication within the organization. As people within silos start to communicate, many benefits follow. Banks, for example, will see increased cross-sell of products to their corporate clients and wealthy clients. Consulting firms with multiple teams will use the Worksites make sure they provide integrated and coordinated solutions for clients. Any company that builds anything (cars, software, couches) will use Worksites to make sure marketing, design, sales and manufacturing / development communicate those critical issues that differentiate an iPod from all the other mp3 players.
2 - Reduce risk by improving control through audit trails and access control. There is no real audit trails with MS Office files flying back and forth using email, IM and jump-drives. And there is no real, centralized, single sign on access control. Intranet Worksites fix those problems. You can see who wrote what when, who read it, what comments they left and there is an audit trail for every single change made in the system.
3 - Radically reduce email. Read/write intranet tools have been shown to reduce internal email on projects by 75%. What more do you want?
4 - Increase the pace of innovation. I wrote a paper on this back in late 2005 called Turning Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators. The summary is as follows:
- Constant innovation is required to succeed into today’s hyper competitive environment.
- Successful innovation is not about the ideas or inventions; it’s about the people.
- If you want innovation, you have to enable your innovation creators.
The paper discusses new approaches to managing for constant innovation and new tools for fostering innovation.
5 - Highlight the deadwood within your organization. Today, some mid level managers maintain their power within an organization not by contributing, but instead by limiting access to information, and obfuscation. There is less room to hide for these types of people to hide as Intranet Worksites increase internal transparency and thus highlight who adds value.
6 - Reduce costs by reducing repeated effort. Today, employees of large organizations spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. They are forced to do this because they have no efficient way to tap into the organization’s collective know how. This was the holy grail of “knowledge management”, but knowledge management focused on the wrong thing. It focused on “knowledge”, which meant that it was implemented as a tax on the organization. After people completed work, they had to go back and document what they had learned. The concept of Worksites are based on communication tools that have proven successful on the Internet. People use them to get work done and to communicate. “Knowledge capture” falls out as a positive externality. Further, there is no need to “manage” the knowledge as these Internet tools are self organizing. There is no hierarchy that organizes the Internet, yet Google followed by Wikipedia are the two most efficient knowledge discovery tools in the world.
Note, however, that this does not mean you should fire your Chief Knowledge Officer. Instead, change her title to Chief Internal Communications Officer. As Harvard’s Dr. Andrew McAfee has said many times, to get the full benefit of a Read/Write Intranet, you need support from management. The CICO’s job is to get the right communication tools in place and then foster the right management environment to encourage the use of those tools.
Nothing in the list above is about blogs, wikis, RSS. Nor is it about external blogging for marketing purposes. Banks, Hospitals, and Hedge Funds do not need or want their employees to be blogging about work on the open Internet. “Mr. Boothby deposited $478.23 today” is not useful. In a Bank with 100,000 employees there might be room for only a few external blogs. However, there are plenty of reasons why the Bank would want to have far more than 100,000 internal blogs. To begin with, the Bank might want to have each employee create a People Page about what they do and what skills they bring to the table. The Bank might then want to create a Project Worksite for each of the major internal projects going on, including new product roll-outs, new system development, new marketing campaigns, etc. For major commercial clients, internal Client Worksites could help internal teams that are spread across geographies and departmental silos to improve coordination, better serve the client’s needs and sell the client more products. Finally, Product Worksites could help the bank keep its own employees up to date on the latest developments with each of the complex financial products they sell.
100,000 people + 10,000 projects + 30,000 major clients + 1,000 products.
It is only when companies start to realize how they can use these tools that we will see social media as the new email.
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Rod - I’m blushing AND I have another piece for the business case for internal “worksites”: The Enterprise Strategy Group recently released some research that estimated “as much as 75 percent of most companies’ intellectual property is contained in the messages and attachments they send through their e-mail systems.”
Executive teams everywhere should be terrified - and thinking social media.
Rod,
You are thinking about things I’m very interested in. Here’s some of my comments and current thinking.
Re #1 … what evidence do you have that improved communication results in increased profits? Supranormal profits flow to organizations that can build barriers to market entry (as per Porter) … if such technical capabilities are available to all, how can that lead to barriers?
Re #2 … it’s called a “document management system”.
Re #3 … yes, I’m sure email is reduced … but is it merely a replacement of one form of textual communication for another? One goes down, another goes up. Is there a net reduction in the amount of text that has to be created for communication, or is it merely a migration between tools? And if it is merely a migration, do we have any evidence that it is more effective?
M.
Michael,
Re your comments
#1 - Let’s take the other extreme. What if we prevented all the people in your company from communicating within each other. Profits would collapse. If shipping couldn’t talk to sales and sales couldn’t talk to marketing or product design. Of course improved internal communication would increase profits.
#2 - Document management systems do not solve this problem, instead they act as a tax on a company, adding extra work steps. This blog and the associated comments keeps a complete record of every step in our conversation. We did not have to do anything extra to submit my original post or your comments into a document management system. If we had been working inside a bank, and we were discussing a potential customer loan on an access controlled internal blog, we would have a full record of everything for regulators and internal auditors, and again, we would not have had to do any additional work.
#3 - Of course information within blogs is more effective than information buried in email. How did you find this page? Would you have found it if I had only emailed it to a limited group? Emails do not have comment systems that are viewable by a large audience (internal or external). Emails do not allow tagging, bookmarking. You can’t include a hyperlink to Bob’s email from last week in an article.
Bill Ives wrote @ December 28th, 2006 at 5:34 pm
I like your idea about worksites. Blogs et al have a lot of baggage for some people inside the enterprise, just as knowledge management did in its day. When implementing KM, we usually tried to name the KM system something besides knowledge management and I think this is a good suggestion for Enterprise 2.0 implementations. In those KM efforts we generaly tried to give it a name related to the business function that was supported. One of the first blog internal communication systems I had some intial exposure to took this approach, It was decided to not even tell the executive team that they were using a blog platform to document their meetings. This was a few years ago in the early days of blogging. The blog platform was just introduced as a better way to cover the sessions than email and Word. It worked really well and generated a lot of excitement as it provided a means to share information outside meetings and offered a searchable
archive of their proceddings. Calling it a blog platform might have side tracked the adoption.
Rod,
Thanks for your reply.
Re #1 … I asked for evidence for your original assertion, not a restatement of such with an extreme example. I know you are asserting this to be true, and believe it passionately, but that doesn’t make it so. Once again, what is your evidence? Or is it merely an assertion?
Put another way, can you cite examples of actual firms that use “worksites” as you conceive they should be used and get the incremental profit result you are asserting to be true?
Re #2 … I do agree that DMSs add extra steps, but to call those a “tax” denotes great negativity. One could equally say that being forced to use a worksite blog, rather than email and Word, was a “process tax”. It depends on your perspective, what you are used to, what you are “selling/advocating”, etc. My point was mainly to say that there are offerings on the market to address the issue you raised … blogs and wikis are merely the latest cool thing in technology to address this. Be careful that *you* don’t cross the line from being an “innovation creator advocate” to a “blogging bigot”.
Re #3 … You are citing an example of where a blog is better suited than email, but that doesn’t prove your point. You wanted the world to find this post and thus think that you are intelligent and well-reasoned guy … hence you posted it to a public blog. If you wanted to discuss a private matter with a person, you would be likely to use email.
Email is designed for one-to-one and one-to-many *private* communications; a blog is designed for *more public* readership. You have to choose the tool that’s right for the job given what “effectiveness” means in the instance. And anyway, if you use appropriate add-on software products, like Quest Archive Manager (formerly Aftermail), you can have many of the things you want (tagging, hyperlinking, accessibility beyond the original distribution list, etc).
Finally, “WorkSite” is actually a product name of Interwoven (http://www.interwoven.com/products/worksite/), originally from iManage. Given that they had the foresight to embrace that word many years in advance of you, shouldn’t you equally recommend that customers embrace their products? 
M.
Michael,
We are going to have to agree to disagree on this.
I have logically proven that worksite style blogs will add value within an organization by improving communication. Any decent CEO can recognize that improved internal communication will lead to both cost savings and improved ability to take advantage of all sales opportunities. The result of that is increased profits.
The risk of deploying this technology is minimal from a business perspective and the business rewards make it easily worth it.
Smart CEOs understand what many narrow minded IT organizations do not get. There is a risk to staying the course with old-school technology, such as Lotus Notes or Document Management Systems. The risk is that competitors will gain market share and competitive advantage by leveraging the power of technology that created over $2 Billion in value for consumer sites such as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook.
Wordpress has over 20 million blog users. Technorati tracks over 57 million blogs.
Why wouldn’t a company want to add Enterprise class business focused worksite blogs and wikis to their current tool set?
Rod
Nomi wrote @ August 12th, 2007 at 12:49 am
I like your point of Worksites and i completely agree on it the best point in this post is
2 - Reduce risk by improving control through audit trails and access control
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