by Bill Ives
January 7, 2010 at 3:21 am · Filed under
Collaboration, Content
I think the headline from the Forrester report on 2010 ECM investment projections is that collaboration is seen as the top driver of ECM investments for 2010. Stephen Powers and his team surveyed 170 knowledge managers with decision-making roles in enterprise content management about their plans for the coming year. The team found that 72% of respondents said their organizations plan to increase ECM use or the number of ECM deployments in the next 12 months, while only 4% of organizations plan to scale back ECM use or number of deployments. I appreciate receiving a review copy of the report.
It is good to see that organizations will continue a steady investment in ECM. More interesting from the enterprise 2.0 perspective, 61% cited content sharing as the most important driver for investment in ECM. Other top drivers include compliance (51%), improved search (45%). This makes sense and fits the enterprise 2.0 paradigm of transparency and collaboration. It also reflects the continued concern over regulation and associated compliance and search certainly plays a large role in compliance. I have seen much progress made in the search space and the enhancement of enterprise collaboration suites so these investments are becoming more attractive. The report suggested than the role of collaboration will only increase.
The report when on to say that while enterprises desire an end-to-end ECM suite that covers all content needs, in actuality they continue to have multiple ECM point products and/or suites in place. More than half have over 3 vendors in place. The report predicted than there will be more ECM integrations to compensate for the hybrid environments.
Return on investment (ROI) remains an issue as a majority of firms can’t prove ROI. This may make approval for ECM investments more difficult. However, these investments continue to improve knowledge worker productivity, at least in terms of output, as the amount of content enterprises produce continues to increase.
There is much more in the report and you can find it at the Forrester site.
by Jon Husband
January 5, 2010 at 12:05 pm · Filed under
Event Announcements
Following up on my recent post about employee engagement being a core goal for the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities, here’s a snippet from an email I got this morning.
As an aside, one of the vexing issues of writing occasionally for an industry blog like FASTForward is that you get pitched (spammed) by email from every PR dog and her or his master on the off-chance you might decide to write a few words. This is the first time that bait has ever worked on me 
Should I be ashamed ?
The excerpt below is from an email promo about a new book titled The New How. It looks interesting, and from what’s written in the excerpt it sounds like pretty much the same core message as the concept and methods of Participative Work Design offer.
No ?
UPDATE: Speaking of engagement, here’s a brilliant post by one of the best-known practical champions of Enterprise 2.0 / collaboration practices, JP Rangaswami
The Facebookisation of the Enterprise
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Many management gurus claim “people matter,” but still relegate strategy to an elite set of executives who focus on frameworks, long presentations, and hierarchical approaches. Business strategy typically has been planned by corporate chiefs and then dictated to managers to carry out. The New How turns that notion on its head.
“Too often business executives, managers and strategists talk down to or ignore the very people who can help achieve results and positively impact the bottom line,” Nilofer explains. “Yet, organizations collaborate best when rewards are based on organizational success and less on individual accomplishments.
And after many years of working with Apple, Adobe, HP, and many other companies, Nilofer discovered the secret sauce: the best way to create a winning strategy is to create connections among employees at all levels across the enterprise, enlisting their participation in creating strategy they not only believe in, but are also equipped to implement.
[Me .. D'oh. This is what the OD field has been saying for decades. Why do we not pay more attention ?]
In The New How, Nilofer provides a roadmap for today’s corporate directors, executives, and managers, showing how they can transform their traditional, top-down approach to strategy planning and execution into a collaborative process that has proven to be significantly more effective.
- Enhance performance and outcomes by deflating the “air sandwich” between the execs in the boardroom and their employees
- Acquire practical knowledge about how to encourage and enhance collaborative processes across your enterprise
- Discover that successful strategy is founded in effective idea selection–a pile of good ideas doesn’t necessarily build good strategy
- Create company strategy and link it to targeted execution, using the practical models and techniques provided
- Work together with a shared understanding of the most effective ways to achieve true collaboration
by Jon Husband
January 4, 2010 at 7:17 pm · Filed under
Event Announcements
By now, reams have been written about the possibilities offered by the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities. The interest continues to grow as the daily use of the Web at work approaches ubiquity.
Also, reams have been written about why the engagement of knowledge-work employees is a central means of increasing productivity, effectiveness and the achievement of sustained high performance.
The greater engagement of employees has been a central aim of the work of organizational development (OD) professionals for at least the last two decades (and much further back if we are striving for precision).
In a recent Wall Street Journal blog post titled “Management’s Dirty Little Secret”, Gary Hamel brings us face-to-face with this fundamental issue:
How would you feel about a physician who killed more patients than he helped? What about a police detective who committed more murders than he solved? Or a teacher whose students were more likely to get dumber than smarter as the school year progressed? And what if you discovered that these perverse outcomes were more the rule than the exception—that they were characteristic of most doctors, policemen and professors? You’d be more than perplexed. You’d be incensed, outraged. You’d demand that something must be done!
Given this, why are we complacent when confronted with data that suggest most managers are more likely to douse the flames of employee enthusiasm than fan them, and are more likely to frustrate extraordinary accomplishment than to foster it?
Consider the recent “Global Workforce Survey” conducted by Towers Perrin, an HR consultancy. In an attempt to measure the extent of employee engagement around the world, the company polled more than 90,000 workers in 18 countries. The survey covered many of the key factors that determine workplace engagement, including: the ability to participate in decision-making, the encouragement given for innovative thinking, the availability of skill-enhancing job assignments and the interest shown by senior executives in employee well-being.
Here’s what the researchers discovered: barely one-fifth (21%) of employees are truly engaged in their work, in the sense that they would “go the extra mile” for their employer. Nearly four out of ten (38%) are mostly or entirely disengaged, while the rest are in the tepid middle. There’s no way to sugarcoat it—this data represents a stinging indictment of the legacy management practices found in most companies.
So why aren’t we scandalized by this data?
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Effective (and/or increased) engagement of employees engenders leadership, organizational culture and the core requirement for management effectiveness at motivating, guiding and coaching employees. These issues are NOT new. However, they are all central elements to the whys, whats and hows of the productive adoption of social computing, aka Enterprise 2.0.
In a world of commoditized knowledge, the returns go to the companies who can produce non-standard knowledge. Success here is measured by profit per employee, adjusted for capital intensity. Apple’s profit per head is significantly higher than its major competitors, as is the company’s ratio of profits to net fixed assets.
[ Snip ... ]
So what does all this have to do with engagement?
Just this: in a world where customers wake up every morning asking, “what’s new, what’s different and what’s amazing?” success depends on a company’s ability to unleash the initiative, imagination and passion of employees at all levels—and this can only happen if all those folks are connected heart and soul with their work, their company and its mission.
Let me break it down:
– In every industry, there are huge swathes of critical knowledge that have been commoditized—and what hasn’t yet been commoditized soon will be.
– Given that, we have to wave goodbye to the “knowledge economy” and say hello to the “creative economy.”
– What matters today is how fast a company can generate new insights and build new knowledge—of the sort that enhances customer value.
– To escape the curse of commoditization, a company has to be a game-changer, and that requires employees who are proactive, inventive and zealous.
– Problem is, you can’t command people to be enthusiastic, creative and passionate.
– These critical ingredients for success in the creative economy are gifts that people will bring to work each day only if they’re truly engaged. (Eric Raymond made this point way back in 2001 when he argued that in the new economy, “enjoyment predicts productivity.”)
Today, no leader can afford to be indifferent to the challenge of engaging employees in the work of creating the future. Engagement may have been optional in the past, but it’s pretty much the whole game today.
[Snip ... ]
My conclusion from all of this: first, engagement is essential to the competitiveness of every company and every economy—and we need to be doing a whole lot better than we are.
We’ve got to get management’s dirty little secret out of the HR closet and into the boardroom. And second, if we’re going to improve engagement, we have to start by admitting that the real problem isn’t irksome, monotonous work, but stony-hearted, spirit-deflating managers.
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Here’s my opinion about Hamel’s premise and how to address the issues he has raised :
As a generality, what companies (and managers) have not done well is acknowledge or understand that the fundamental responsiveness to customer or employee feedback comes from what people have always done well … what they, arguably, are designed to do or what is in their nature to do .. which is:
- ask questions, and seek to understand
- suggest alternatives, and watch or listen as they are *tried on for size*
- clarify needs or desires, and find ways to deal with exceptions or delight the customer or colleague with a response that makes sense
- fiddle with things to find out what works best
- invent new ways, come up with good ideas, point out another possibility, etc.
- decide together why and how to do something
In effect, these *social processes* have been suppressed or limited by the structures of most sizeable companies, with the attendant rules underpinning reporting relationships, spans of control, delegations of authority. This is, colloquially, why so many people like to complain about *hierarchy* … there are often better ways available, or conditions which no longer suit yesterday’s (and today’s) bureaucracy, but all too often they are not permitted to enter into play.
These ruminations bring to mind the approach known as Participative Work Design (about which I have written before on this blog), known mainly to organizational development theorists and practitioners.
Participative Design was developed in 1971 by Fred and Merrelyn Emery. They developed the method as a faster and more acceptable alternative to the Socio-Technical Systems (STS) approach, where a multi-functional task force redesigns the organisation, usually taking a whole year to do so. A design created and then implemented in this way tends to be flawed, because it is based on an incomplete assessment of reality. Also, workers do not have ownership of the design, and this generates resistance to change. And, perhaps most significantly, the organisation’s underlying power structure remains intact.
The latter points … an incomplete assessment of reality, no or little ownership on the part of workers and an unchanged power structure … have only been exacerbated by the near-real-time (and accelerating) conditions of the interconnected environment in which we now work.
Whereas STS is based on what the Emerys call the ‘bureaucratic design principle’, Participative Design reflects the ‘democratic design principle’. This design principle asserts that:
- those who have to do the work are in the best position to design the way in which it is structured,
- effectiveness is greatly improved when teams take responsibility for controlling their own work, and
- the organisation increases its flexibility and responsiveness when people are capable of performing multiple functions and tasks.
The Emerys have also identified six basic conditions that need to be met if people’s work is to be productive and satisfying. There must be:
- Elbow room for decision making
- Opportunities for continuous on-the-job learning
- Sufficient variety
- Mutual support and respect
- Meaningfulness
- A desirable future, not a dead end
The examples of human interactive behaviour while doing *work* are characteristics of the give-and-take of purposeful interaction. Working interactively using wikis, or purpose-designed blogs is a social process, and helps support, and make visible, engagement with an organization’s objectives
The lightweight, inexpensive, user-friendly tools are now available to let people interact, both with each other and with larger, integrated systems, and to integrate social processes into (existing) more static and more clearly defined work processes.
In my opinion, managers everywhere should look at using participative social technologies and processes to help them …
1) learn about, encourage and support on-purpose engagement, and
2) adapt the ways they ‘manage’ to achieve results when engagement, responsiveness, creativity and innovation are the characteristics that support an organization’s sustained performance.
What do you think ?
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by Bill Ives
January 4, 2010 at 3:21 am · Filed under
Adoption, Enterprise 2.0
This is the last in a six part series on Booz Allen’s award winning implementation of Enterprise 2.0, termed the Hello system. In June 2009, Booz Allen was honored with the Open Enterprise 2009 Innovation Award so it is a good example to explore in depth. In this final post we will look at the plans for enhancements. Walton Smith, has agreed to be interviewed for this series and his time is appreciated.
Walton feels that they have done a good job with the unstructured content generated by the firm and I would agree. Now he sees that the next task is to integrate the more explicit structured content found in the existing document repositories. There are several issues here. First, the more formal content tends to be organized to align with existing formal organization structure. However, this structure is always evolving so the organization of data gets out of date easily.
In contrast, the Hello system is organized around communities that reflect the capabilities of the firm. They tend to evolve in a more organic manner to keep up with market needs. This structure is more flexible, and, at the same time, existing communities tend to grow and not simply change and get out of date. Walton said they needed to change the organization of more formal content to reflect this more flexible approach. The key is making sure that all relevant content and people can be found.
At times more formal content might be restricted in access because of client concerns and/or “scrubbed” of some of its content. However, it is often the people who created the content that others need to access rather than the details which might get out of date quickly. Partners looking to staff efforts need the right expertise that can create new content specific to the needs of their client. The content needs to be structured so access to the content creators is facilitated even when the content itself is restricted. The Hello team also wants to encourage content contribution through the communities so it becomes a normal part of the work process.
Additional upcoming planned functionality includes a rating system to permit users to rate the perceived value of content. Walton said that a rating system can be dangerous when there are small numbers. He did not want someone to get a bad rating right at the start and not contribute again. So they delayed the implementation of the rating system until Hello was mature and had significant participation.
They are also creating a user dashboard to enable users to aggregate and track information important to them. It will work like an iGoogle interface as you can customize what appears on your own dashboard. Walton feels that this will drive greater usage as people can better fit Hello to their needs. This is especially important for people on restricted sites where they cannot use their own laptops and cannot download anything on the government computers. Having the dashboard combined with a cloud system will provide easier access to what individuals need.
Hello also plans to provide video integration. Walton said there are many good tools available and video will provide a richer format for collaboration. He also wants to have a video production capability that works like an internal YouTube. This will allow staff to create a short video on lessons learned and other issues when they do not have time to make written contributions. In addition, Booz Allen has an existing rich library of video content that Walton wants to be made more widely available. All of this makes sense. I wish I had these features when I worked for a large consulting firm a few years back.
This is the final installment in our look at Booz Allen’s enterprise 2.0 implementation. I hope you find it useful in your efforts. Please let us know what you are doing. If you use Twitter to comment on this series please use the hashtag #bahe20 so it will be easier to find what others are saying.
Here the prior five posts in the series with links.
Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Components
Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part Two – Change Management Efforts and Results
Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part Three – Operational Impact
Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part Four – Financial Impact
Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part Five – Lessons Learned
I hope to return after a bit to see how they are doing and report back to this blog.
