Archive for December, 2009
by Joe McKendrick
December 9, 2009 at 12:38 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Social Computing, Social Media, Web 2.0
Enterprises are working with a lot of new promising technologies and methodologies, everything from cloud computing to user-driven mashups to social networking and service oriented architecture. The question is, how can managers effectively measure the benefits they’re getting from new deployments?
Measurement can be straightforward in many cases — however, in a complex enterprise, it’s anything but straightforward. The problem is getting various groups across the enterprise to agree on common goals and metrics that will provide the big picture. How can organizations see this big picture when everyone has their own take on what’s important to their domain? In any organization, everyone has their own ideas of what should be measured; everyone has their own take on project “success.”
This was the topic of discussion in Dana Gardner’s latest BriefingsDirect analyst panel, which I had the opportunity to join, that explored return on investment (ROI) aspects of services. (Audio available here, transcript available here.)
Joining the panel were Michael Krigsman, president and CEO of Asuret, as well as Dion Hinchcliffe, founder and chief technology officer at Hinchcliffe & Co. to explain how their methodology to measuring the ROI and business value of enterprise services, Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0, works.
We talked about the requirement for collaborative project management to move new technologies and methodologies on the road to business value. Enterprise 2.0 itself, which emphasizes collaboration, may help in this process. But by not being able to effectively measure a technology’s benefits in a collaborative way, we’re missing out on many of the potential benefits, Dion said. “This is the classic technology problem. Technology improves and gets better exponentially, but we, as organizations and as people, improve incrementally. So, there is a growing gap between what’s possible and what the technology can do, and what we are ready to do as organizations.”
Mismatched expectations are another challenge. People tend to blame software and IT for project failures, but the real failure may be in communications, Michael added. “If we look a little bit deeper, we often find the underlying drivers of the project that is not achieving its results,” he explained. “The underlying drivers tend to be things like mismatched expectations between different groups or organizations. For example, the IT organization has a particular set of goals, objectives, restrictions, and so forth, through which they view the project. The line of business, on the other hand, has its own set of business objectives. Very often, even the language between these two groups is simply not the same.”
How do you measure this human element? That’s the challenge. “The difficulty is how you measure, examine, and pull out of a project these expectations around the table,” Michael said. “Different groups have different key performance indicators (KPIs), different measures of success, and so forth, which create these various expectations.” The challenge is to surface this information so that it can be shared between decision makers in various parts of the enterprise.
This certainly can have a huge impact on the way large enterprise systems — such as ERP or financial applications — get deployed and are used. But Enterprise 2.0 efforts also fall into this category as well. A lot of people are passionate about Enterprise 2.0, but, as Dion pointed out, there needs to be a “dispassionate measurement process up front to understand what people’s expectations are, what their needs are, and what their concerns are.”
Enterprise 2.0 methodologies — be it wikis, blogs, or social network sites — provide a way for various groups to better align their expectations for the results of new deployments. And, signifcantly, it makes it easy for members of these groups to do something they usually haven’t done before — to actually communicate with one another.
by Bill Ives
December 8, 2009 at 3:00 pm · Filed under
Event Announcements
This is the first in a six part series on Booz Allen’s award winning implementation of Enterprise 2.0. In June 2009, Booz Allen was honored with the Open Enterprise 2009 Innovation Award so it is a good example to explore in depth. The award honors work done to embrace collaborative and transformative enterprise 2.0 tools. In this first post we will look at the business drivers that led to this implementation and overview its major components. In future posts we will look at the change management efforts, the operational and financial impact, the lessons learned, and plans for enhancements. Walton Smith, Program Manager for Booz Allen’s information sharing efforts and the lead for the Government 2.0 client practice, has agreed to be interviewed for this series and his time is appreciated.
Walton said that in 2007 a perfect storm of events converged to prompt the creation of Hello.bah.com (Hello) as Booz Allen’s enterprise 2.0 knowledge sharing program. Like most consulting firms, Booz Allen’s strength lies in its people and intellectual capital thus Hello was designed to feature and foster these two strengths. The firm had grown in recent years to 18,000 staff and there were plans, now realized, to grow the firm to around 23,000 staff. A 2007 staff survey found that while people still felt affinity to the firm, the strength of this affinity was slipping for the first time. More than 55% of professional staff were located at client sites and some felt closer to their clients. These results concerned senior leadership and they wanted to take action to strengthen the sense of community and connection within the firm.
To meet these challenges, Booz Allen developed and implemented Hello, a suite of web-based enterprise tools designed to strengthen collaboration, connectivity, and communication across geographical and cultural barriers. It was created from vision to launch in under 6 months leveraging a blend of Open Source, COTS, and custom-developed products. Since August 2008, more than 80% of the firm has logged into Hello and more than 53% of the firm has contributed original content. There are more than 4,000 individual searches a day.
Walton said they began with the Profiles function, as they wanted the system to be people-centric rather than document-centric. To support this goal, they also made it easy for individuals to start communities. The vision was to have both the system’s organization and content co-developed by the people it serves. Walton said they wanted the organization to reflect the needs of people in the field with minimal governance versus a top-down organization chart. Any two people can start a community covering either business or social issues, and there are now 480 active communities within the system. I think this is a critical success factor. Every successful knowledge management system I have seen in the past 15 years was co-developed by the users and with enterprise 2.0 this is even more important.
When Walton received approval to start Hello he asked to recruit his staff from client serving professionals within Booz Allen. He felt that these individuals would have both the skills and the knowledge of the firm to be successful. He made sure they had a charge code to cover themselves so they could focus on the effort. He also asked for as many change management people as technical people. This is another critical success factor. I will go into more depth on the change management efforts in the second post in this series.
Hello is not a mandated system and I think this is a good move. We will see more on how it spread virally in my next post. Hello enables and encourages the broad adoption of social media tools to improve staff relationships, increase connections within the firm, enhance staff affinity for the firm, support the emergence of intellectual capital, and build client service capabilities. It is completely browser based as many client sites do allow the downloading of applications. Hello is integrated with other firm applications such as HR, security, email, and document management systems.
Hello’s technical development used an Agile process, rolling out new functionality every two weeks. The “perpetual beta” biweekly development sprints generated opportunistic and targeted features increasing Hello’s value to users and influencing adoption. There are a number of components, some created as a result of user input, and Walton gave me some background on each.
Profiles are one of the central focuses of the system. The Hello team made use of existing authoritative staff data and allowed each person to augment their Profile with a photo, short bio, and expertise or personal tags. A guiding concept was that no one would have to re-enter data already on another Booz Allen system. There are links to all content and communities that the person is connected with. You can add connections to people in a manner similar to Linked In or Twitter and tag your connection in the way you know them. In the first seven days of this feature they had over 10,000 new connections. You can sort profiles by the tags to see who has what skills, experience, and interests. This is a significant help in staffing projects and finding people for project and firm efforts.
Wikis were already in place to allow people to co-develop content. Hello integrated the standalone wiki application with the rest of the platform’s tools, including a link to profiles. This exploded the usage and helped with the viral promotion of Hello. Now wiki content became transparent to everyone. Walton gave the example of a key white paper development effort that picked up contributions outside the original team.
Blogs are used as the broadcast medium. Anyone can create a blog and anyone can subscribe to it. Again, it is linked to a person’s profile. Subscribers get email alerts on new posts with the ability to link to the post for comments. Walton was able to encourage senior Partners to start blogs. Employees appreciated the honesty with which these first time bloggers approached issues. For example, one senior partner raised an important issue through his blog and got 32 comments on the blog and many more informal references as he walked the halls. He invited the 32 commenters to lunch and together they worked through the issue. The results were placed on his blog.
Social Bookmarking provided a less time consuming way to get involved. Bookmarks on the Hello get tagged and linked to both people and communities. You can follow a tagged topic and/or a person’s bookmarks.
Forums were not part of the original plan but people wanted the ability to go deeper to a dialog over issues than the blog format provided. They also wanted to get rid of emails asking such questions as “who do you know that knows X” or “who do you know that has certain skills.” I remember getting many of these in my inbox during my days at a large consulting firm. Now these questions can be raised in a forum and people go there to find and contribute answers.
Communities provide one of the most valuable components of Hello yielding new knowledge and intellectual capital for the firm. Any one can go to a community to find all related content aggregated in one place, regardless of what format it entered Hello (blog, wiki, etc.). As I mentioned there are over 480 communities now and they act as the glue for the system.
Hello is a great resource with clear usage guidance for each tool. The definition and differentiation of each component was one of the success factors I found in the Océ enterprise 2.0 suite I reported on earlier (see Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Océ). The learning group at Booz Allen has gone a step further and requested that the proper use of Hello be included in new employee orientation and this is certainly a good move. It should significantly reduce the on-boarding time and decrease the connection curve for new employees.
In my next post I will discuss with Walton the change management efforts that have been undertaken to ensure adoption. For Twitter comment son this series please use the hashtag #bahe20. Thanks.
by Jon Husband
December 8, 2009 at 12:51 pm · Filed under
2.0 Business Model, 2.0 Design Thinking, Collaboration, Connected Enterprise, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Innovation, Jevon MacDonald, Measurement, Organizational Design, Social Computing
Ever since hearing of "Social Business Design" – a term associated with the Dachis Group’s positioning as a blue-chip expertise-and-experience based consulting firm focusing on helping enterprises operate more effectively in an interconnected business environment, I have been struggling to clarify for myself what is meant by the term ’socially calibrated’ as used in the Group’s tag line.
"Social business design helps companies reinvent themselves into dynamic, socially calibrated organizations that gain constant value from their ecosystem of connections"
Please do not get me wrong … when I say I am struggling, I am not seeking to criticize. I think the firm is on the right track, and I think parsing the syntax and vocabulary we are all bringing to this new party is an important exercise … mission-critical, in fact.
Here’s what I find on the Dachis Group’s web site that addresses ’social calibration’:
Hivemind
A primary social calibration
As social tools and functionality are adopted more widely, it becomes less important for businesses to use traditional methods to force collaboration in the workplace, e.g. panoptic cubicle arrangements. Employees are entering the workforce socially engaged and used to collaborating. The social business hivemind is a new kind of corporate culture whereby all participants move together towards common goals. Physicists refer to this as “synchronous lateral excitation.”
Distributed governance
The social business hivemind makes decisions and receives continuous reinforcement through business interactions: a social inclination resides within a company’s culture and tempers planning, decision-making, and work output. Employees approach work with a social and collaborative mindset; customers expect participation and engagement; suppliers anticipate optimized and efficient process towards common goals.
Measurement and cultivation
Hivemindedness can be measured by assessing levels of collective awareness, engagement, and participation. Measurement here focuses on subjective perceptions – analytics can include surveys, interviews, text analysis, and so on. The goal is always to gain insight into constituents’ attitudes towards the value they get from participating versus the potential for trust issues and conflicts that they perceive. Once perceptions are measured, they can be constantly cultivated and remeasured to move the dial.
The explanations on the site continue, explaining the importance of Dynamic Signals and Metafiltering, and culminate in analyzing the various elements of a connected enterprise-customer-employee ecosystem for meaning, and thus the co-creation of economic value for all parties in the ecosystem.
I like this. I think that it’s becoming clear to many that we are into a world of increased and dynamic complexity, and that we need design principles and implementable practices that are based on the constant presence of flows of information and feedback loops within connected eco-systems of purpose and value.
This new environent has been building in scope, reach and intensity for years now. I think that the Dachis Group has thought this through quite well. But … I am still wondering about ’social calibration’.
As I read the site’s explanation of the Dachis Group approach, it brought to mind the "sense-making" approach that is being promoted and taught by Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge Network, and other leading-edge thinkers and practitioners (and I have opined previously on the similarities to socio-technical systems theory and leading-edge OD (organizational development) principles and practices).
It was about three weeks ago that I started noodling on this. Back then I made a few notes to myself regarding what I thought ’social calibration’ might mean. Here are those notes:
Social Calibration ?
I think it means that you look at the social ‘architecture’ of an enterprise, including its markets, customers and employees and how they interact with the organization’s business processes.
I think it means that (initially) based on observation and some knowledge of current patterns of behaviour in networks of people operating ‘on purpose’, you experiment with and implement
- new work designs
- hyperlinked productivity platforms for exchange and collaboration
- the aggregation and use of collective intelligence using tagging, enterprise search and other collaborative processes.
Before this, however, you set baselines or thresholds of organizational performance and productivity from which to measure forward performance,
And then you work at understanding what works, why it works and in what conditions it works really well or may not work.
From there you clarify where changes need to be made in leadership style, management practices, work design and organizational structure(s), internal and external communications and engagement, and performance measurement and support.
With an initial framework in place for watching and ‘nudging’ the ecosystem, you begin to show and publicize in realistic ways why these ways of working are important for both future organizational success and personal work satisfaction and enrichment.
How’s that for consultant-speak ?
I think that’s what I inferred, off the cuff, from the term ’socially calibrated’.
.
Please bear in mind that the above points were just rough notes I made to myself before I went looking at the Group’s web site.
I am left with my struggles with the term ’social calibration’, which I do not doubt the Dachis Group has chosen carefully and wisely.
I think my struggle is with the question of "calibrate against what?", given that there are no real models of success against which to calibrate (which in my opinion is a large part of the ongoing frustration with the difficulty of calculating the ROI of implementing social computing in organizations).
Anyway … I don’t have any real answers to my questions, other than I think that if you compare my notes to the Dachis Group’s more complete explanation (on their web site) there are parallels and the general direction of thinking is aligned.
That said, I am sure we are all going to learn a lot about what works and what does not work in the coming decade.
..
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by Joe McKendrick
December 4, 2009 at 6:49 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Event Announcements, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, User Revolution
An issue that social networking is bringing to the fore — and has enormous legal implications for organizations — is where the social networking for an employer stops and personal social networking begins. This boundary keeps getting fuzzier and fuzzier all the time.
At the recent Supernova event, held by the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, legal commentator Denise Howell convened a panel to discuss the legal ramifications of social networking in the workplace. She was joined by Alex Macgillivary, Kerry Krzynowek, and Gabe Ramsey in a rousing discussion of this new legal frontier.
In an online podcast interview right before the event, Howell talked about the challenges social media brings to the table. On one hand, there’s really nothing new about them. “Organizations had to adopt email a decade ago,” she pointed out. Before that, there were telephones, and so forth. Every generation has a new challenge, but the same common-sense rules need to apply. “Our online communications tools are just sort of a progression. They don’t involve a whole lot more issues, but they seem like they do. They may be amplifying or blowing out of control what was originally done with pen and ink and paper.”
The common-sense rules that should already be in place for earlier forms of communication or face-to-face interaction should apply to social media as well, Howell explained. Rules around harassment and discrimination apply equally to social media. The difference is that the line between worktime and personal time has blurred.
If an employee has friended his boss online, and issues arise in communications that occur after hours, is the organization still responsible? Yes, Howell says. “Companies are having to think about having policies in plkace that govern what people do whilke on the clock while off the clock. So it makes sense to have guidelines in place to let people know what is expected of them. It’s gettimg increasingly hard to draw that line. That’s another consideration for human resources departments.”
Mary Trigiani live-blogged the panel discussion and provided a working summary of the most salient points of advice from the panel session:
Extend traditional boundaries of etiquette and propriety: “Over time, we have seen all types of new technological tools get incorporated and integrated into existing communications…. Most traditional policies work just as well in the social element, but there are differences in social communication that are driving a new look at policy: the informality and immediacy of social media mean that review of advance drafts is pretty much out the window; the blurred lines between personal and professional mean that each persona reflects on the other; and user generated content, while a staple of social communication, has always been vetted in the traditional corporate structure. …The important thing to remember is that social media enables traditional communication while it creates new opportunities to build trust between people and companies, whatever the relationship.”
Teach people the boundaries from a good place: “The simpler the policy, the better; focus on the substantive issues. Just because an individual can communicate anything, anytime via social networks doesn’t mean that the company can or should. Any training should be developed from the mindset of what the company is trying to do, not what it’s trying to avoid.”
Think about whether an employee is a company rep 24/7: “Separation of church and state, in social media at least, is still an experiment.”
What is secret needs to say secret, but let’s not obsess about it: “The reality is that if something is a secret, the company and its people need to keep it that way — otherwise you can’t protect the content. Yet the focus should be on how we engage with employees and customers in a way that builds allegiance — so that confidentiality is organic among all parties.”
Risk has always been part of doing business: “Launching products and talking about what you do is risky, whether it’s coming from a member of the executive team or an employee. The onus is on everyone to be smart about what is said.”
Social media and Enterprise 2.0 have torn down the wall between worklife and personal life. The benefit is a more flexible work environment in which employees can deliver their more productive work without being hamstrung by the 9-to-5 cage. The risk is actions and words that can affect company business occur beyond the direct control of the organization. This is a balancing act companies will need to address as Enterprise 2.0 becomes a greater part of the organizational culture. But let’s hope the innovation and collaborative spirit that Enterprise 2.0 brings into organizations will not be gummed up by legal liability fears.
by Jim McGee
December 1, 2009 at 11:01 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Just before Thanksgiving I was at the KM World 2009 conference in San Jose listening to a keynote presentation by Charlene Li. Like many others, I was tweeting during her presentation and posted the following:
At just about the same time, on the right coast, danah boyd of Microsoft was delivering a keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City that didn’t go as well. Her experience and the subsequent conversation around it represent the latest installment in the evolving relationship between audience and presenter. It also contains comparable lessons for the successful adoption of social media within the enterprise.
If you ever expect to stand and deliver in front of a group, these are issues you need to think about beforehand. That can be as adrenaline inducing as boyd’s keynote or as seemingly innocuous as running a status meeting while the team focuses on their laptops, Blackberrys, and iphones.
I’ve been gathering and organizing links to some of the more useful and informative material I’ve found on this topic. For starters, here are some key pointers specific to boyd’s experience, including her own reflections and assessment:
danah body isn’t the only one dealing with this new relationship between audience and speaker. Here are some other accounts and overviews of other less than successful encounters, both recent and not-so-recent:
Fortunately, we’re also starting to see some good advice emerging on how to cope:
These examples are highly visible. They also take place in settings where you have the additional problems of a degree of anonymity that seems to encourage a level of boorishness more reminiscent of middle school than anything else. At the same time, they are also leading indicators of a default working environment that will be more public and transparent than we are accustomed to or comfortable with. Paying attention here and thinking through what lessons are available and how they translate into other settings is time well spent. Some of the questions on my mind include:
- Where and when can you influence the tenor of the backchannel? As a presenter? As a conference organizer? As a member of the audience?
- What can you do before the fact to set useful expectations or standards of interaction?
- What can you do in the moment?
- What can you do after the fact?
- What’s likely to differ in more private venues? What will differ for the better? For worse?
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