Archive for FASTforward'09
by Bill Ives
August 9, 2009 at 3:17 am · Filed under
FASTforward'09
AIIM has recently published a study on Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0. It provides more encouraging news for enterprise 2.0. It finds that business take up of enterprise 2.0 has doubled in the last year. This supports the study from Toby Ward I recently posted on (see New Study Finds Social Media Becoming Mainstream on Corporate Intranet). According to this AIIM report, there has been a significant increase in the understanding of how Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs, forums, and social networks can be used to improve business collaboration and knowledge sharing.
The survey was taken by 789 AIIM members between May 11 and May 26, 2009. Over half of organizations studied are now considering enterprise 2.0 to be “important” or “very important” to their business goals and success. Only 17% admitted that they have no idea what it is, compared to 40% at the start of 2008. However, only 25% of organizations are actually doing anything about it – but that is up from 12% in the previous survey. The numbers are lower than the Toby Ward study but the trend is the same.
This study found that Knowledge-sharing, collaboration and responsiveness are considered the biggest drivers. Lack of understanding, corporate culture and cost are the biggest impediments. IT departments are by far the strongest users, with 68% using Enterprise 2.0. In contrast, only 6% of organizations are using it throughout the business. This is interesting as the Toby Ward study that IT was one of the biggest obstacles. It might reflect a different audience mix with the organization in the two studies.
I was interested to find that 71% agree that it’s easier to locate “knowledge” on the Web than it is to find it on internal systems. This is actually a big improvement over what I found in the past few years. Taking a cue from Andrew McAfee I would ask every audience that I presented to on enterprise 2.0 this question. Would all those who find it easier to find information on their corporate intranet than the Web raise their hand. No one every did this for me and Andy reported the same results at the time.
More work needs to be done in the governance area as only 30% of companies have policies on blogs, forums and social networks, compared to 88% who have policies for email. I think that such policies are useful. On the other hand, the study found that while almost all companies would not dream of sending out un-approved press releases or web pages, less than 1 in 5 have any sign-off procedures for blogs and forums. I think these sign-off policies are counter-productive and good general policy guidelines reduce the need for any sign-offs.
There is much more including a lot of detail on personal use of social media by the participants. I recommend looking at the complete study. It adds to the growing body of research supporting the emergence of enterprise 2.0, at least in terms of tool adoption.
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 Bill Ives
July 17, 2009 at 2:22 am · Filed under
FASTforward'09
Here is a recent classic from Dion Hinchcliffe, 12 Rules For Bringing ‘Social’ To Your Business, that applies to enterprise 2.0 as much as Web 2.0. He set the stages for his twelve points by defining what this transition to social business is about, “It’s how those companies are going to make the transition from traditional 1-to-1 relationships with their partners and customers to a one-to-many community relationship where the company is only another member of an endless ongoing conversation. This conversation will be the very lifeblood of companies in the future and consist of all the ideas, concerns, solutions, news, learning, product development, sales, marketing, customer service (i.e. the fundamental fabric of the organization) taking place between anyone, anywhere who feels they have a stake. He adds that we have a long way to go to get there but there have been some starts.
I am not going to repeat all twelve points here as you should read Dion’s original work. I will just cherry pick a few for additional comments. He states that while he does like to talk about technology too early, the new technologies have been helped enable this transformation. I agree on both points. Many of the ideas of enterprise 2.0 were around in the early days of knowledge management but the right tools were not there to enable the full vision. To compound this the some of the software vendors high jacked the movement and led it astray.
We need to avoid the same things happening with enterprise 2.0. This should not be a vendor led movement. A panel member at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference Session on Does Social Media in Matter in Marketing advised us to not focus on one tool as another will come along and replace it or go in a new direction. Used to be how to use technology. Now you can build your own technology. The greatest technology does not seem like technology. A good example is the iPhone.
I would add that Twitter is another but I think within the enterprise it works best as feature in suite rather than as a standalone tool. In the same vein, some of the best features of enterprise 2.0 tools is their behind the scenes activity to create a searchable archive of social interactions as a byproduct of their use. We need to keep this simplicity in the tools. Many enterprise 2.0 tools allow you to fit them around the work process rather than the reverse, another way the technology is less oppressive as in the past. So take advantage of this and pick the business process then choose what tool to wrap around it. If the tool does not fit, change the tool and not the process.
In another step, Dion writes that censorship kills participation. This is actually why you need guidelines to make the rules explicit (see recent post on Social Media Policy Guidelines Can Encourage Use Outside Enterprise and Adoption Within). The rules need to be open ended and enable and encourage people to participate. Without clear policy people may be reluctant and think that the old ways on top down enforcement still apply. However, if your rules enforce the old ways, do not bother with social media tools. It is a waste of time.
I will pick one more. Dion writes that you should add a social dimension to your business processes. Enterprise 2.0 increasing productivity by increasing accountability. This was one of the concepts that first got me excited about it (long with the creation of searchable knowledge as part of using the tools I mentioned earlier). I have seen many examples of this such as Al; Essa 2004 work at MIT (An Enterprise 2.0 Poster Child in the IT Department) where Al, the CIO, got 60% of his day back by having all project use a blog dashboard for transparency. Another is Changing Organization Behavior at XM Radio through Enterprise 2.0 and QuickBase where XM Radio had its first profitable project because of the new transparency of the work processes.
This is enough for now. Go read the rest of what Dion wrote.
by Bill Ives
July 12, 2009 at 2:08 am · Filed under
FASTforward'09
As the use of social media grows within the enterprise and on the Web, the need for policies and guidelines to govern employee behavior becomes more essential. Effective use of social media requires that employees can act on their own to produce content without review by Corporate Communications or other groups. I remember in my past life with a large consulting firm and prior to the rise of social media every time I talked with the media, a PR person had to be on the call. Now customer and market communication is more and more handed over to individual employees.
However, to avoid violations of company security and such things as government regulations for publically traded companies, some guidance is necessary. I remember in the early days of blogging IBM relied on its standard rules of business conduct. Then in the spring of 2005, IBM used a wiki to create a set of blogging guidelines. Here is the latest version: IBM Social Computing Guidelines. It begins with the following.
“These guidelines aimed to provide helpful, practical advice, and also to protect both IBM bloggers and IBM itself, as the company sought to embrace the blogosphere. Since then, many new forms of social media have emerged. So we turned to IBMers again to re-examine our guidelines and determine what needed to be modified. The effort has broadened the scope of the existing guidelines to include all forms of social computing.”
You can find the details at the IBM site. Other companies have embraced this concept. Sun was another of the early adopters. Sun’s policy begins with this statement, “Many of us at Sun are doing work that could change the world. Contributing to online communities by blogging, wiki posting, participating in forums, etc., is a good way to do this. You are encouraged to tell the world about your work, without asking permission first, but we expect you to read and follow the advice in this note.” I think this captures the right spirit for these efforts.
Intel has released new social media guidelines. It has also created a Social Media department and offers training for employees who are interested in blogging and participating in online forums and other social media venues where they represent Intel (see Intel publishes social media guidelines for its employees). I like the addition of training.
These guidelines are not limited to the large players. RightNow provides a suite of CRM tools that I have covered on a number of occasions. The RightNow guidelines state that, “RightNow has an open participation policy for all employees. The choice to participate in social media is yours. If you decide to participate, you are making a commitment to following these guidelines.” I was told that RightNow’s guidelines were influenced by the work of Intel, IBM and Sun.
Social media guidelines should not be limited to market facing channels. Use inside the enterprise raises many adoption issues and they are no less important here. Some employee concerns can be clarified by a good set of guidelines. If done right these policies can actually encourage participation as employees are likely to feel more comfortable that their actions are sanctioned. They will also feel like they know the rules. I would be very interested in any other social media guidelines that you think are useful, especially those for activity within the enterprise.
by Bill Ives
July 7, 2009 at 2:35 am · Filed under
FASTforward'09
As I have written here on several occasions the US Federal Government is providing leadership in moving to the cloud (e.g., What will be the Business Model for the Cloud as Data and Content Storage Becomes a Utility? and MIT Sloan CIO Symposium: Part Two: CIO Leadership and the Bottom Line). Recently, I spoke with Kevin Paschuck, VP Public Sector for RightNow and their CIO, Laef Olson.
RightNow provides a cloud-based CRM solution that I have covered before (see for example, RightNow Nov 08 Release Focuses on Call Center Agent Support and Barack Obama’s Answer Center – Campaign CRM from RightNow). They do a lot of work for a number of US Government agencies, with over 155 public sector clients.
In April they released a new, highly secure, defense-ready hosting solution designed to support both the Department of Defense (DoD) and other civilian government and intelligence agencies that require stringent, evolving levels of compliance and security. Because the DoD requires a strict level of security, RightNow’s new hosting capabilities use DITSCAP/DIACAP to ensure compliance with DoD Instruction 8500.2, meet US Federal security standard FISMA (NIST 800-53) and include a 24×7 dedicated security and information assurance team.
We spoke on how they are helping the government move further into the cloud with this offering. Kevin said that 70 percent of their government clients are using a cloud solution and this percentage is increasing. In contrast, all of their private sector clients are using a cloud solution. Now RightNow is working with their government clients to take the remaining 30 percent into the cloud.
There are several obstacles to overcome. First, a number of their government clients are military agencies and sensitive military data needs to run on the military network with a .mil extension. To do this the data must be hosted on a military base or you need to get a waiver. Second, there is the general government reluctance to go to the cloud for security reasons.
I asked Kevin how the current 70 percent of government clients are able to use the cloud. He said that many of these are for less sensitive data such as HR self-service of pubic information systems such as the AKO Army Knowledge Online site shown below.
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Many federal CIOs are anxious to get to the cloud to save money and get more flexibility. I observed this myself at the MIT Sloan where Elizabeth Hight, Rear Admiral, Vice Director Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), said she was a supporter of the cloud and virtualization to save both time and money. Kevin mentioned that RightNow is teaming with Elizabeth and DISA to host RightNow applications in their hosting center so they meet government regulations. This is one way they can meet the .mil requirement. Here is another RightNow application for the US Army Human Resources Command.
They have also covered 90 to 95 percent of the certification requirements that run across agencies so it takes less time to customize the application to meet the specifics of each agencies certification requirements. The government is also trying to standardize cloud issues. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a non-regulatory arm of the US Commerce Department, has helped by developing a draft definition for federal use of cloud computing. They may be a bit ahead of the private sector here. Here is a non-military RightNow application for the Social Security Agency.
In another example, the U.S. Air Force Personnel Center (AFPC) is moving its on premise RightNow solution to the new highly-secure, Department of Defense (DoD) SaaS solution. With the new RightNow cloud-based application, more than 100 AFPC agents can provide accurate, up-to-date information across multiple touchpoints to military and civilian employees of the U.S. Air Force.
The system also provides the AFPC website with a self-learning knowledge foundation. In addition, it monitors constituent feedback, disseminates consistent information, and easily updates content to ensure relevancy. The application has reduced inbound email by guiding constituents to submit questions via the web, where it is converted into an incident that AFPC can track and respond to.
I am pleased to see greater government uptake on the opportunities the cloud brings. There seems to be a genuine drive to balance security requirements with flexibility, cost savings and reduce unnecessary red tape with standardization.
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