by Joe McKendrick
July 7, 2010 at 11:31 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, Web 2.0
Everybody is getting into the social media act, but few are actually capturing information that can be shared more deeply with — and acted upon by — the enterprise.
Forrester analyst Doug Williams points to a recently published survey of 181 consumer product strategy professionals that finds the use of social technologies by product strategy professionals is strong but not pervasive, and “there are lots of unanswered questions out there.”
For one, the use of social media as a marketing channel is quite pervasive. Forrester finds that 83 percent of respondents indicate that their company uses social media to engage with consumers in some way, Williams reports. However, “fewer than half indicate that their product teams are currently using social media to influence product design, creation, or strategy.”
So we can conclude that in many instances, the use of social media for marketing purposes is still informal, ad hoc, and perhaps driven by an enthusiast, rather than being baked into corporate processes. The challenge as we move into the next phase of social media is to enhance internal operations.
Williams also observes from his study that although more than two-thirds of product strategists have dedicated social managers or teams, “fewer than one-fifth have formal policies in place for sharing data from social technologies with product teams.”
Again, there seem to be individuals working the front lines, engaging one-to-one (or many-to-many) with customers and prospective customers, but the information they are gathering has still not reached back into the rest of the organization. Therein lies the next great challenge for social media efforts.
“The data indicates that for many product strategy professionals, it is still early days — they don’t yet know how to leverage those technologies in their job,” Williams points out. He urges social networking advocates to focus on helping these individuals understand the opportunities that social media-generated information provides.
by Bill Ives
July 7, 2010 at 4:48 am · Filed under
Adoption, Enterprise 2.0
Here is a very timely book from several thoughtful people at The Forum Corporation. Strategic Speed: Mobilize People, Accelerate Execution (Harvard Business Press) was written by Jocelyn Davis, Henry Frechette, and Edwin Boswell and recently released. Forum has shown great longevity. It was founded in 1971 and I competed against it in the 1980s when I was with a long since gone learning firm.
I could not agree more with their basic orientation. It is time to engage and empower employees rather than simply fine tune processes and continue to do things to people in the outdated mode of Fred Taylor. The authors use a nice image of the college campus with paved walkways and barren short cuts across the lawns. You can try to regulate what people do but they will go against the grain if it makes sense to them.
Enterprise 2.0 provides us with better tools to empower and engage employees and enable them to set the proper pathways that better align with actual business processes. Technology is not the focus of this book but it offers an approach that will work very well to guide enterprise 2.0 adoptions.
The authors did extensive research in creating this book. They looked at hundreds of examples of accelerated and sluggish businesses, created 18 in-depth cases examples, and surveyed 343 senior business leaders in both fast and slow companies. From this work they abstracted four critical leadership practices than enable strategic speed and conceived of two key metrics: reduced time to value and increased value over time. I like the value part as too often ROI has focused on speed issues without tying them back to the bottom line.
The book begins with a useful chart of ten differences between fast and slow companies. The underlying themes for fast firms include collaboration, reflection, transparency, flexibility, coordination, innovation, and alignment. These are all issues that are better enabled through proper use of enterprise 2.0 technologies. Consistent with these themes are three basic principals the authors found in fast firms: clarity, unity, and agility.
They note a bit later that business collaboration is the main driver of unity. In contrast, when there is a culture of internal competition projects and strategies get derailed. I have certainly seen this latter problem first hand. For example, I noticed that when managers are asked to rank order their teams in performance reviews that is an invitation for counterproductive competition. This approach can put individual goals above team and company goals. The authors offer a number of examples where learning activities went across divisional and, even company, boundaries to create greater collaboration and unity.
They also introduce a strategic speedometer to enable you to better measure your company’s efforts on the three fronts of clarity, unity, and agility. Again, this score card can be a very useful metric in evaluating enterprise 2.0 adoption with such measures as the translation of strategy into clear and measureable goals, presence of cross- boundary collaboration, and evidence that people capture and communicate what they learn from initiatives.
I certainly recommend this book for anyone undertaking an enterprise 2.0 adoption, as well as those who simply what to effectively speed up the efforts of their company. There are many useful examples and practices to achieve these goals.
by Bill Ives
July 6, 2010 at 3:05 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
As enterprise 2.0 matures, its uses are getting more focused. I have been hearing more about it use in product development. Here is a timely Forrester report on the topic, Use Social Computing To Build Differentiated Product Development Processes by Roy C. Wildeman. As the summary states, “in recent years, leading product development organizations have proven the value of greater cross- functional collaboration to harness contributions from across the business and bring great products to market. With the rise in Social Computing among consumers and enterprises alike, development teams are further seeking to transform how they collaborate both internally and externally in key processes like ideation, requirements management, detailed development, and aftermarket support.”
It makes the claim that “succeed in the future, business process professionals must expand their thinking beyond traditional product development solutions and start experimenting with new social technologies.” I certainly agree. As another Forrester report (The HERO Index: Finding Empowered Employees by Ted Schadler and Josh Bernoff) notes, the more extensive and creative uses of social computing within the enterprise have often come from marketing. To be really competitive, companies need to embed social media and enterprise 2.0 throughout the organization and certainly in the product development area.
Forrester found three main opportunities exist for development teams to further innovate with enterprise 2.0. Note that Forrester uses the term social computing technologies and I am converting this to enterprise 2.0 to go beyond technology. The first one is to enable teams to better collaborate across distance or silos. The second is to bring in outside communities for product ideas, answers, and feedback. The third is integrate new services through social computing into traditional product offerings.
These all make sense. The second (aka crowdsourcing) as certainly got a big play in the press. I have a seen a number of R&D teams move from traditional reporting through email and attachments to blogs and wikis with great productivity increases. One satellite radio firm had its first on-time and on-budget development effort when it switched to a social computing platform for project reporting. One of the reasons attributed to this success was the increased transparency and its effect on individual and team attention to quality. The MIT Sloan CIO found that using blogs for project reporting greatly increased his efficiency in program monitoring and team mentoring. The Forrester report has a great chart on how social networking expands knowledge capacity beyond the usual “Go-to” resources for project development teams that makes explicit some of the possibilities for improvement.
The report also points out some of the potential obstacles to achieving success in these three areas including concerns over intellectual property and security, as well as the potential chaos from too much unstructured information and the need for clear governance. It also suggests some useful ways to address these issues. The report concludes with a set of recommendations for taking advantage of the opportunities within social computing.
by Paula Thornton
July 3, 2010 at 8:40 pm · Filed under
Business 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Work 2.0
“It has been asserted that Jung’s analytical psychological theory of synchronicity is equal to intellectual intuition.” Wikipedia
Let’s follow this logic: if synchronicity is equal to intellectual intuition, and intuition “is the apparent ability to acquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason” [not suggesting I totally agree with this definition] then isn’t this something that would be relevant in a new business era where reason seems to fail? Moreso, “Some scientists have contended that intuition is associated with innovation in scientific discovery.” Isn’t everyone suggesting that business now needs to focus on more innovation — thus requiring a higher reliance on intuition? Could it be that Knowledge Management has failed because it lacked support of synchronicity?
Synchronicity is a natural byproduct of Enterprise 2.0 done well.
Do we not want to bring together disconnected, yet common efforts and leverage their commonalities? If we are about to embark on a major endeavor, do we not want to know before we invest a lot of time on a proposal that someone else in the organization is doing the same thing and is further along than we are?
Coined by Carl Jung, he believed synchronicity was the means to glimpse of the underlying order of the universe. It was a term that could help…
…describe what he called the “acausal connecting principle” that links mind and matter. He said this underlying connectedness manifests itself through meaningful coincidences that cannot be explained by cause and effect. [source]
One of the challenges with modern enterprises of any scale is the ability to connect resources and their corresponding activities. We try to approximate activity through defined processes and status of said processes. The problem is that these approximations (algorithms) for what’s really going on and why are often grossly insufficient (depending on how repeatable and non-varying the activity might be). For activities related to manufacturing, where inanimate objects are the primary resources involved, process-as-algorithm is reasonable. For activities related to services where people and knowledge work are the primary resources involved, more variability is introduced and algorithms in the form of constrained processes often fail to meet the need.
Cause and effect are meaningful for linear process. They are nearly meaningless in living systems. While there may be perceived causes and effects, the reality is far more complex, and involves things unseen (esp. thought). We must give place for thought to be made manifest. Work products are often prescribed in ways that do not allow for the sharing of thought.
Indeed, as Patrice Livingston so passionately describes [at min 11:20] the need for sharing often transcends time and place when past problems are often lying dormant still waiting for a solution:
Along comes me, I’m here. I would not ever know about Person A or B or that they had a conversation, but I can exhume a dialog that took place two years ago between these two individuals that lays out the problem and the solution. I can say…the following technology is now available. Problem solved.
This, she was only able to accomplish in a true Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure that supported what she knew was needed:
I knew at an instinctive level that what we were doing — all the unstructured communication, all the relationship building and stuff that our team was doing — was much more valuable than the work we were doing in written reports and meetings and minutes, which is what consumed the body of our time.
And yet, in most storage mechanism the work products themselves are stripped of the reality in which they were created. All the context as to why certain decisions were made at that time are all missing from the painfully-scrubbed collections of results and conclusions. The painful truth is, knowledge work products are not accurate representations of the work. The real work is on the cutting room floor and/or still in the minds of (or faded from) those that did the work and who may be gone. While there will always be ‘waste’ in any process, might the cuts from one project be relevant for another? Work products by themselves are often meaningless as they reflect what made it through the cuts. They lack the context of the work itself. When time and resources have past, how does one reconstruct the context for which the work product was created and you can no longer ask the workers questions about their work?
While I’m not going to delve into it here, a related topic that has been coalescing common energies recently is observable work. Whereas process-as-algorithm typically specifies certain work products, observable work is a term that casts a net wide enough to include the stuff on the cutting room floor.
For as much as people want to make Enterprise 2.0 about technologies, then I’m willing to concede this: Enterprise 2.0 is the means by which to achieve Work 2.0 to deliver Business 2.0.
There are many technologies to help support an Enterprise 2.0 reality, but often only for a piece of the total infrastructure needed. A blog provides a mechanism for broadcast and some conversation but doesn’t provide the continuity of a project and related work products. If multiple technologies are used, is there a common layer by which synchronicity can operate, or is blog content separate from wiki content, separate from discussions, separate from the work products themselves?
Synchronicity is the perfect test for certifying a true Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure. And the reverse is true, as well — a true Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure will support the natural emergence of synchronicity.
