Archive for August, 2009
by Paula Thornton
August 7, 2009 at 5:41 pm · Filed under
2.0 Business Model, 2.0 Design Thinking
While a recent post on intent was successful in the dialog that ensued, I’m still trying to fully appreciate (there’s a lot to appreciate) the significance of Roger Martin’s explanation of the tension between Reliability and Validity (June 2007, IIT-ID conference). It makes me consider if the pursuit of intent and all the design research that goes with it, is effectively a means to strike a balance between the two.
I’ve been listening to this piece over and over again — each time additional depth is gained (including evaluating Martin’s style as to ‘how’ he tells the stories to his audience, and where he chooses to focus). It’s a topic he’d written about previously for Business Week, but his talk makes it a lot more meaningful and significant. He illustrates the significance of the tension by differentiating them:
Reliability
- Consistent, Repeatable, Predictable
- Certainteed Outcomes
- Validated on Past Data
- Measurable, Avoids Bias
- Limited Variables
Validity
- Diverse Variables (possibilities)
- Embraces Bias
- Validated by Future Events
- Outcomes Vary by Context
- Relies on Heuristics and Analogies
The challenge is that they’re inverse concepts. Moving toward one, requires minimizing the other. Does it mean that there’s not a middle? Not at all — indeed that’s the real goal. While Roger (probably for great ‘making a point’ purposes) puts business on one side and designers on another, I fundamentally believe that optimal design is actually in the middle (middle, not being a spacial thing, but somewhere other than one of the ends). Design is simply asking business to shift away from the thing that it’s intent on driving toward: science. But reality suggests that there is no ‘ideal’: there are too many extenuating circumstances (context). Therefore, the only way to optimize is to add a good dose of art. Design is what happens when you successfully find the optimal blend between science (the observable facts) from the art (celebrating the ‘unseen’).
Martin notes in his Business Week piece:
If a corporation wants to enjoy the benefits of design in its products, services, processes, or business models, it must go considerably beyond simply hiring designers or declaring itself design-oriented. The CEO must take responsibility for safeguarding validity. If the CEO doesn’t, the corporation’s natural inclination toward reliability will win out.
…certain corporate divisions — including powerful ones like finance — are more insulated from direct market pressures and can more easily slide into deep reliability.
Every CEO needs…to understand that he can’t let finance or any other division run roughshod over validity, or he’ll unknowingly drive design thinking completely out of his corporation. That’s why an additional task for the CEO is to act as the CVO — chief validity officer — in order to protect and nurture a design culture.
P&G’s CEO A.G. Lafley in a discussion with Roger Martin in 2008 is a living testament of this vigilence. He shares the tremendous effort it took to shift their business to a design culture. Between the many insightful examples of ‘how’ P&G shifted their business, by Claudia Kotchka, you can hear her repeatedly give credit to Lafley for being responsible for initiating and supporting the shift to design thinking at P&G.
Enterprise 2.0 is a shift to validity over reliability — not to replace one over the other, but to move toward a balance — bringing the yin to balance the yang, while celebrating the significance of both. Trying to implement a shift to validity while trying to hang onto the ways of reliability (without changing them radically) will lead to continued failure. As well, abandoning reliability will also fail.
Enterprise 2.0 is specifically set up to fail faster — make the future turn into the past sooner, but do so with smaller risk, smaller investments, smaller bits of focus. Or to use another 2.0 term — it’s the mashup between the two, making it fundamentally different than either one.
Circling back to the opening statement, I truly do belived that one means by which to bridge this gap is to bring the reliability artifacts of validity to the table — create the corresponding collection that was described as design research or customer insight, in the former piece.
by Bill Ives
August 7, 2009 at 8:05 am · Filed under
FASTforward'09
Jakob Nielsen’s recently posted an extensive piece on Social Networking on Intranets that addressed adoption issues for enterprise 2.0. It is a summary of the key findings from a study of 14 companies in a much larger 168 page report. It begins with the subtitle, Ready or Not, Here Comes Enterprise 2.0, which sort of captures his approach. Jakob portrays enterprise 2.0 as something that younger workers are pushing on enterprises. If you go to0 slow you will lose good younger workers and if you go too fast you will run risks to overall corporate culture.
While I think there are many more reasons to implementing enterprise 2.0 than appeasing younger workers, Jakob provides some very useful findings and suggestions. For starters, he says that companies must cede power to the people. Actually that was my paraphrase of what he said but he did say that command and control no longer works for corporate messaging. He added that, “enterprise 2.0’s power is not about tools, it’s about the communication shift that those tools enable.” I would agree.
Jakob also found that frontline workers are driving the vision in the companies he studied. While I think a bottom up approach is quite good and aligns with the power to the people philosophy, companies should be more proactive to combine bottom up with some strategic top down direction. A thousand points of light might be going in diverse directions. To back this up, Jakob said, “a uniform finding across all of our case studies is that organizations are successful with social media and collaboration technologies only when the tools are designed to solve an identified business need.” Some top down strategic direction might provide a focus on the critical business needs. Having said that, I would not suppress the bottom up guidance, just blend the two.
I really liked this suggestion, “While some users will eagerly adopt community features for their own sake, others will be skeptical and need guidance. One successful approach is to avoid advertising the new tools as new tools. Instead, simply integrate them into the existing intranet, so that users encounter them naturally.” This exactly what we did in 2004 when we swapped Word docs attached to emails for a blog to support an executive task force at a large hospital. The docs were not told it was a blog, but rather simply a new tool to support their sessions. This stealth approach was especially important in 2004 when blogs were seen as the domain of teenagers and geeks. The docs were won over by the increased functionality the blog offered (see Collaborate for Success: Great Resource for Physician-Hospital Collaboration).
Another useful suggestion is to “avoid burdening users with double work. Don’t, for example, force users to update their profile or photo in both the traditional employee directory and a Facebook-like social connection tool.” This should not be hard to do with most tools but it can be overlooked. He also said it is “important to budget something for community management — not to control the conversation, but rather to guide it. Designated community managers should serve as facilitators and moderators.” This is an old knowledge management best practice that is even more important today (see KM Stories: Part Four – Gaining Support at All Levels).
Jakob concludes with the caution, “when you consider that successful adaptation of Enterprise 2.0 tools requires the organization to change its ways, it becomes clear why these projects don’t happen overnight.” He adds that it seems to take three to five years for “social intranet projects” to take hold. There is much more in the summary. I am sure the 168 page version offers even more insight. Thanks to J.B.Holston at Newsgator for pointing out this post to me.
by Rob Paterson
August 7, 2009 at 5:48 am · Filed under
Culture
I find that ultimately the discussion of social media and its tools is irrelevant without the discussion of what their effective use is driven by – an enterprise’s operational culture.
An organization that will adopt and use the power of the energy and intellect of the whole will find social media ideal. Organizations that are over concerned with control will not.
Few organizations are more able to access the power of the collective than Netflix.
But how do they do this? How do they have an Open Culture and not go off the rails?
Here in 128 enthralling slides is their answer. In a lifetime of studying organizational culture, I have seen nothing this clear or brilliant. Brilliant in that they have articulated a complex world and an effective response to this complexity so clearly. This is the MBA of our time – all in one deck.
by Joe McKendrick
August 5, 2009 at 9:34 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, Social Networking
In a new study released this week found that many of the most successful social media initiatives on company intranets start as underground, grassroots efforts led by front-line workers, and which later are officially sanctioned by the enterprise.
The study, published by Nielsen Norman Group, concludes that “social software technologies are exposing the holes in corporate communication and collaboration and at times filling them before the enterprise can fully grasp and control the flow.”
It’s clear the tide has turned in favor of social media in the enterprise. My colleague Bill Ives just posted details of a study conducted by Prescient Digital Media, based on 561 organizations, which finds rapid adoption of social media on the corporate intranet in the past year.
The Nielsen Norman Group study was more qualitative than quantitative, based on interviews and analyses of the experiences of 14 companies, including Agilent Technologies, Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development, IBM, Telecom New Zealand Limited and Sun Microsystems.
What’s especially notable about these companies is that they are perhaps among the tech-savviest anywhere. Yet, social media adoption still emerged from the ranks in an informal fashion — not as an enterprise initiative.
Key findings in the study include the following:
Underground efforts yield big results: “Companies are turning a blind eye to underground social software efforts until they prove their worth, after which they integrate them more thoroughly.”
Front-line employees are driving the vision: “Many senior managers still consider social tools something their teenagers use. Young workers, who do not need to be taught or convinced to use these tools, expect them in the workplace.”
The business need is the big driver: “Social software is not about the tools, it is about what the tools enable the users to do and about the business problems the tools address.”
Communities are self-policing: “When left to their own devices, communities within enterprise intranets police themselves. Workers tend to retain their professional identities, leaving little need for the organization to institute controls.”
Organizations must cede power: “As companies have been learning from using Web 2.0 technologies to communicate with their customers, they can no longer fully control their message. This is true, too, when Web 2.0 tools are used in internal communications.”
The last point, that organizations must give up control of their communications and messaging, is going to be the hardest pill to swallow. Perhaps that may help to explain why social media tends not to be “officially” sanctioned so quickly, even among the tech-savviest of the tech-savviest.
by Joe McKendrick
August 5, 2009 at 9:16 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Networking
There’s no doubt that Fair Isaac Corporation, the folks that developed the FICO scores that set the standards for consumer and business creditworthiness, is in a highly information-sensitive business.
However, a social networking approach is helping to cut customer service costs, while getting information to customers in a more efficient manner. My colleague at the SmartPlanet “Business Brains” site, Heather Clancy, recently posted an account of FICO’s foray into social networking. The company’s MyFico.com site is managed by 10 volunteer moderators at any given time, to help educate consumers about topics such as how to influence their credit scores, automobile financing, and student loans. The site handles an average of 15,000 posts per month.
The ability to turn customer service over to committed volunteers is a major component of the value-add and cost savings associated with social networking, as calculated in a recent Forrester study, described here in a recent post.
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