by Bill Ives
June 30, 2010 at 3:12 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Remember portals? I have heard about a number of cases where enterprise 2.0 collaboration systems have replaced portals. One firm even replaced their portal with Facebook and got a lot of PR for it. Is this a trend? I do not mean the Facbook part, just the E20 part.
Perhaps but a recent Forrester report, Portal Servers Refuse To Go Quietly, by Tim Waters found that portals are still popular in many circles. As the report summary cited, “portal server technologies continue to be widely deployed by enterprises. Although leading vendors are evolving portal servers into broad content and collaboration platforms, the core portal services — aggregation “on the glass” and user authorization for access control and personalization — remain the leading use cases. Newer alternatives, including open source platforms and mashups, are gaining ground.”
So portals may remain popular but they need to look over their c shoulders as the report also recommended that, “knowledge management teams should carefully evaluate their needs to determine if a portal server layer is appropriate.”
Drawing for a survey taken in North America and Europe, Q4 2009, they found that 20% of the firms surveyed planned to expand or upgrade existing portal server implementations, 26% had already implemented and were not expanding while 15% planned to implement over the next year or longer.
There were some concerns. Many users suffered from the complexity and the extensive customization effort. I have seen many of these drawn out portal implementations first hand. They can be the darling of the solutions integrators looking for big time projects with ever expanding budgets. The report offers a number of instances of similar outcomes. It also said that the majority of the users they interviewed were surprised by the amount of customization required. I am not surprised at this finding as I have rarely seen a portal project come in on budget or time.
Downsized budgets can be an obstacle for new portal efforts. The report found that many firms indicated that the move toward Lean and Agile development practices has encouraged them to reevaluate the rule of heavy handed portal servers. The report encourages knowledge management and IT people to be aware of the other options available.
by Joe McKendrick
June 26, 2010 at 10:23 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Social Computing, Social Media, User Revolution, Web 2.0
Business process management has always been kind of a staid, scientific approach to organizational development. So it hasn’t had a lot in common with social media and Enterprise 2.0, which has been more a free-form, unstructured world.
However, a new discipline is emerging that fuses the openness and transparency of social with the process-oriented sensibilities of BPM.
I just had the opportunity to moderate an online session with Clay Richardson, analyst with Forrester Research and highly regarded expert in this new field, and Kieth Swenson, vice president of research and development for Fujitsu.
Richardson points out that the Achilles’ Heel of many BPM projects has been the lack of communication and coordination between various teams in the organization. In the process, such efforts end up taking months. “How do we eliminate these consensus logjams?” he asks. “The biggest challenge they face is they’re bring teams together from multiple functional areas. It could take months.”
BPM’s heritage goes back to the “legacy ‘[Michael] Hammer and [James] Champy‘ style business process re-engineering; focusing on idea of re-engineering opportunities being identified by management. So management is coming in and saying ‘this is the way we can improve those specific processes — and then having those processes changed and automated by technologists before pushing it down on front-line workers. We saw the results of that. The front-line workers did not accept the final process.”
Social BPM may change this short-circuited process, Richardson says. As a result, a revolution is underway. “What were seeing in the process world is this idea of process populism,” he explains. “Last year, when I would speak with process pros or business stakeholders, they almost sounded frustrated, almost sounded like they had pitchforks in their hands. They’re going to IT and saying ‘we want more control. we’re starting to see more demand from business, instead of relying on IT.”
Richardson cited the example of a financial services firm that has had extensive BPM efforts underway for a number of years. “They’re very sophisticated with BPM; they are pretty advanced, and have multiple BPM tools in-house.” However, he adds, they were having issues with employee acceptance of BPM-driven initiatives. “They were really trying to increase end-user involvement, to get the end users to provide feedback, so when they rolled out business processes, they didn’t have this slow or low adoption of business processes.”
The solution was a relatively low-tech one, Richardson explains. “They used wikis, combined with the BPM suite. It allows users to tag and also provide feedback. In this case, they were setting up an electronic watercooler, which is a very simple thing to do. But it definitely brings more voices in.” The company improved their adoption rate across processes.”
Richardson offers the follow recommendations for moving to social BPM:
Understand what capabilities you need: “Provide a scorecard… look at the interaction that need to be supported… Look at the types of processes supported… Review personalities in your organization.”
Assess what capabilities you already have: “Look at the skills in your organization… Make sure you put governance around BPM. You want to provide the framework, best practices and guidance.”
Identify the steps to get started with social BPM: “Don’t try to roll out social everybody, but look at where to start…. Look at your first project, look at the results, and expand social throughout the enterprise.
Look at your environment and how you can embrace social: “It may not be all of the patterns, but look at the pattern and identify the one that makes sense for you.”
Educate the business: “The biggest challenge we see with social BPM, is the term social isn’t necessarily a business process-oriented term. At the end of the day, all of your processes will be impacted buy some way by social. We need to start looking at how the two worlds come together.”
by Jim McGee
June 23, 2010 at 3:10 pm · Filed under
Adoption, Enterprise 2.0
Debates over whether the Internet is making us smart or stupid are entertaining in the bar and can serve as a pleasant background noise for ruminating during a keynote address in a dimly lit hotel ballroom. When I get back to work on Monday (or more likely on Sunday night) I return to the reality of working in a fundamentally digital environment. My files are digital, my tools are digital, and most of my interactions are digital.
As a knowledge worker, much of what I get paid for happens inside my own head. Before the advent of a more or less ubiquitous digital environment, however, that head work used to generate a variety of markers and visible manifestations. That visibility was important in several ways that weren’t evident until they disappeared:
- Seeing work in progress in front of me made it possible to gauge my progress and make connections between disparate elements of my work.
- Different physical representations helped to quickly establish how baked a particular idea was.
- Physically shared work spaces supported rich social interactions that enriched the final deliverables and contributed to the learning of multiple individuals connected to the effort.
For all the productivity gains that accrue to the digitization of knowledge work, one unintended consequence has been to make the execution of knowledge work essentially invisible, making it harder to manage and improve such work. The benefits of visibility are now something that we need to seek mindfully instead of getting them for free from the work environment.
Knowledge work is better understood as craft work; its products are valuable because they are creative and original. Delivering identical consulting reports to different clients is grounds for a lawsuit, not an example of good knowledge management practice.
From a craft perspective, examining and understanding what constitutes a quality client report, for example, is an important part of the apprenticeship that transforms a recently minted MBA into a seasoned advisor. The visibility or invisibility of knowledge work products can make this process more or less difficult.
Before PowerPoint, crafted presentations began with a pad of paper and a pencil. You knew by looking at a roughed-out set of slides that it was a draft; erasures, cross outs, and arrows made that more obvious. You then took your draft to the graphics department, where you were yelled at for how little lead time you provided. A commercial artist tackled your incomprehensible draft spending several days hand-lettering text and building your graphs and charts.
From there you started an iterative process, correcting and amending your presentation. Copies were circulated and marked up by your manager and hers. Eventually, the client got to see it and you hoped you’d gotten things right.
Work was visible throughout this old-style process. Moreover, that visibility was a side effect of the work’s physicality. Junior members of the team could see how the process unfolded and the product evolved. You could see how editors and commenters reacted to different parts of the product. Knowledge sharing was a free and valuable side effect of processes that were naturally visible.
With e-mail, word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation tools, maintaining visibility of your knowledge work (at both the individual and workgroup level) requires mindful effort. An office full of papers and books provided clues about the knowledge work process; a laptop offers few such clues. A file directory listing is pretty thin in terms of useful knowledge sharing content. In an analog process, it’s easy to discern the history and flow of work. When an executive takes a set of paper slides and rearranges them on a conference room floor, a hidden and compelling story line may be revealed. You can see, and learn from, this fresh point of experience. That’s lost when the same process occurs at a laptop keyboard at 35,000 feet. The gain in personal productivity occurs at the expense of organizational learning.
In the digital process, who creates and what they contribute risks becoming more an exercise in political posturing and interpretation than simple observation. The abstracts in a document management system reveal little about what work is exemplary, new, or innovative, and obscures emerging patterns.
Invisibility is an accidental and little-recognized characteristic of digital knowledge work. Seeing the problem is the first step to a solution. While better technology tools will play an important role, the next steps are changes in attitude and behavior at the individual and work group level. For example, organizing your own digital files into project-related directories might help, but not if you continue to name files "FinalPresentationNN.doc" where NN is some number between 1 and 15 representing a crude effort at version control. Embed more information in the file name where you know it will be visible even as you e-mail it around the organization. Use more informative subject lines on your email. Those file names and subject lines should provide the best clues possible as to what will be found inside.
Systems developers have learned that time invested in naming standards and conventions pays off. Teams crafting knowledge-work products should make the same investments. Better yet, spend time with good development teams and look for ways to adapt their practices to more general-knowledge work.
New disciplines take time to become habits. Fortunately, they also eventually become "the way we do work here." As the disciplines take root, taking a more aggressive look at technology tools becomes appropriate. Many of the office suite tools offer some form of internal revision tracking or auditing tools. What’s missing is any systematic way to integrate these tools into a disciplined practice. The capabilities are there but they are irrelevant if they aren’t used intelligently. A version control system doesn’t do anything until you incorporate it into the routine practice of creating a new document.
The right starting point is to simply make the flow of work more visible. I suspect that this is one of the underlying attractions of social networking and micro-blogging. They promise to restore some visibility to digital team work that we lost in the first generation of tools.
If visibility is, indeed, important to effective knowledge work what else would you recommend as ways to manage and increase the visibility of the intermediate and end products of knowledge work and the people-to-people interactions that take place in cerating those products?
by Bill Ives
June 22, 2010 at 8:18 pm · Filed under
Social Media
IT is sometimes portrayed as the bad guy or an obstacle in the enterprise 2.0 space as some times they attempt to block or curtail social media activities. Forrester’s Nigel Fenwick presents a nice twist to this view by offering research on how social computing can boost IT productivity. I saw Nigel at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston so it is nice to get a review copy of this report.
I really liked the report’s summary. It concluded that their “survey of social media users indicates that IT staff increase productivity by adapting Social Computing to their role. CIOs should enthusiastically embrace social media as a means for boosting IT productivity while also giving IT staff the experience needed to support Social Computing initiatives across the enterprise.”
Drilling down they found that 70% of IT staff respondents were positive about the productivity gains from social media while the rest were mostly neutral. I think that IT has a great opportunity to get out in front of the enterprise 2.0 wave and play a leadership role rather than being overrun. Nigel seem to agree with this as the report suggested that IT leaders can tap the early social media adopters in their ranks to help educate the IT team on fitting social media into work.
The survey also found that 80% of respondents believe social media has a positive impact on innovation, and 78% believe it will also have a positive impact on customer service. There are many use cases already out there on both counts. Social media can support c increased collaboration that fuels innovation. The report suggested that CIOs should actively encourage IT staff to participate in internal communities to both ask questions and provide answers.
A recent IBM study found that employees were more likely to ask questions on internal social media and use these channels to promote their expertise by answering questions in a public manner. The Forrester reports backs this up as 92% percent of IT employees cite social media as helpful in getting answers to their questions, and 85% reported that social media is helpful for letting others know how they can help them.
There is much more detail in the report and I found it helpful. Amongst the conclusions is the suggestion that CIOs should encourage their staff to experiment and share their findings with others.
