systematic viewpoints

2 years ago I was working at one of the world’s largest companies. At that time the CEO had been holding town halls around the world. Corporate Communications had put together an intranet site to support the message, including a section that was positioned as being the CEO’s commentary.

One day I was chatting with the head of communications, and he asked me if I’d read the latest installment. Of course I had, and I always found this section to be too scripted. I said that I thought it would help employees establish a sense of connection with the CEO if he were to keep a simple blog, and take a few minutes to type (or dictate) his own, honest impressions after the events, like “What a great reception I got when I arrived” or “A young man in a yellow shirt asked a really great question”, or anything that honestly sounded like his own thoughts.

The head of communications’ eyes went wide. He said (I paraphrase) “Blogs? Blogs are diarrhea. I despise blogs. That’s not an appropriate vehicle for our CEO to communicate.” I understood his position - his career was built by carefully crafting and polishing words and paying great attention to nuance. Yet I could see that he wasn’t seeing the potential so I held firm, suggesting that people were more likely to react positively to a more personal voice. Eventually we agreed to disagree.

A year later, he called me to ask for help. It seems the CEO’s Gen-Y son had convinced him that he should be using a blog to effectively communicate with his employees, and he wanted to start right away. I’d hate to be a senior corporate communications professional whose executives were getting direction from their kids before they got it from me.

If, in your professional capacity you may be impacted in any way by social media, don’t be dismissive. Pay attention to the changing landscape before it passes you by.

Best practice #5 - Remain neutral! Social media in the enterprise elicits emotional responses in some. Don’t let personal biases impair your ability to perceive the opportunity related to social media, even if you can’t fathom why people would use IM, blogs, wikis, Twitter…or whatever comes next. Something will and it deserves your objective attention.

Many of the portals I’ve worked on have had a complete lack of attention to the HR practitioner. The generic scenario is an enterprise intranet, often driven by an underlying portal technology, with a static and outdated HR presence oriented towards policy and benefit information and links.  These organizations are motivated to improve their HR offering and there’s no lack of energy around ESS and MSS integration, and plenty of thinking around how to balance centralized vs. decentralized employee programs.

When I recommend optimizing the experience for the HR professionals I find this has been given little to no thought, and that’s reflected in the environments I have seen for HRs, typically a password-protected sub-site with some stale documents and an unused discussion forum (”Test Message” and “Hello World” seem to be the common subjects) created to share a handful of sensitive documents, with little thought to making it easier for HRs to work together.

A couple of things - first,  it’s generally acknowledged that the ERP user experience is sufficiently difficult to require supplemental front end work at a portal interface layer, yet the expectation is that HR professionals ought to be able to deal with it. Why is that? Frequent/’power’ users of an application stand to gain a lot from optimization, and I frequently interview folks who demonstrate tasks that require high numbers of clicks, screen changes, data fetching from other sources, etc. Training doesn’t make awkward processes efficient.

Second, the value proposition of leveraging collaborative technology in the HR space hasn’t been connected to the ongoing transformation programs in place at most large enterprises. I commonly hear from professionals out in the businesses and regions that don’t have a good sense of what’s going on in Corporate, and they often feel that their local dynamics are either unknown of ignored. Corporate people often expresses that they feel disconnected from the field and have little visibility into who does what, where. Often HR operations is under pressure to reduce operating costs, making it appear counter-indicative to provide practitioners additional IT effort on top of the ERP systems that are already in place.

Contrast this with sales.  Here’s a function with similar needs: to rely on ERP but in this case a recognition that there is also a supporting data, historical information and a need for awareness of ongoing work efforts among their teams. Sales has always had a tacit social knowledge network supporting a set of individual practitioners performing against personal and group goals.  The big difference is that sales generates revenue and HR is an expense, and as such it’s managed quite differently.

The HR Professional portal should provide a functional workspace with information and tools that can be managed by a distributed workforce, centered around the areas that align to the business and corporate HR strategies and moves the value proposition away from the administrative formula. I’ve yet to see an organization that doesn’t get an ‘ah-ha’ moment when we talk about it but I have seen those that just can’t get it either funded of adequately staffed and developed. Where we are building them, they are in their infancy but I feel they will have high value as HR emerges as a strategic business partner over the next decade.

Let it be!

In best practice #3 I say that without governance, social media risks failure. Now I’m going to speak out of the other side of my mouth and say that too much governance will also lead to failure.

Like raising a child, there’s a responsibility to set a foundation that supports positive and healthy growth but one must step back and not interfere - most of the time. Groups will ultimately define their own priorities and tone, and to be valuable to itself and ultimately to the enterprise they shouldn’t be meddled with.

Overly visible ‘management’ will almost certainly stifle open discourse, and that is the opposite of the exact value proposition that social media holds. With all the thought, care and consideration given to establishing an appropriate medium for collaboration and discourse it will be hard to step back and let this nascent environment develop according to it’s own needs. The fact that the intranet environment is by definition controlled by a relative (and often somewhat disconnected) few within the organization makes this even harder.

Find the balance and resist the urge to steer conversations. Let people bump into things and make mistakes, just keep an eye out so things stay civil. In time, the community will be on it’s own feet and in the best case will become self-maintaining.

Best practice #4: Don’t interfere with the community-building process.

Yesterday I was speaking with a client about collaboration opportunities for a certain community. They described a common scenario - employees had been given broad access to Sharepoint. Folks rushed out and set up their own spaces, and now nobody collaborates across them. As a result information and knowledge is more hidden than it was before ‘collaboration’ became broadly available.

As true with collaboration than many other areas, lack of governance is a sure way to failure.  There’s a common perception in the general public that a site like Wikipedia is a wild west, with anyone and everyone invited to say whatever the heck they want about anything under the sun. While a bit of that may be so, there is in fact a shadow army working within a rules set that generally rights egregious wrongs, often in near real time. Rules are indeed in place and they’re both explicit and tacit.

A rules set, structure and governance is necessary to ensure the context and health of  of a collaboration platform. Volumes have been written about supporting a community, and the subject can run quite deep.  For a pragmatic approach to the common problem described above I recommend reading what James Robertson of Step Two Designs posted today,  a tidy summary of four stages that move the adoption of collaborative tools from fragmentation to coherence.

Best practice #3: Collaboration requires a balance of freedom and governance to thrive.

I’ve heard that email spam got it’s nickname based on the physical behavior of its namesake processed meat product. Apparently you take a large quantity, throw it against a wall and see what sticks…I’ve lived in rural America, sometimes this is what passes for fun.

Unfortunately the scatter-shot approach is sometimes used in early stages of emerging technology deployments. Blogs, Wikis and IM have been no exception. You’ll see skunkworks driven by a well-meaning enthusiast pushing a technology out and justifying it by essentially declaring that ‘if we deploy it, they will come’. More often than not, very few people come. Resources are wasted, management finds out and the entire effort gets a bad name. When the subject is raised again, the resistance is high.

If you’re thinking of deploying a form of social media, it must have a defined value proposition, be aligned to a business process and demonstrably improve or enhance that process: eliminating friction, reducing errors, capturing undocumented data or knowledge and making it easily findable…you get the point.

If you crave a Sharepoint or other collaboration instance, find a project that is broadly distributed. Chances are high that too much of the process and communications is happening between a small number of participants via email and attachments. The rest of the team wonders what’s happening and the lack of visibility leads to a lack of engagement.

Show how document sharing and simple versioning reduces the problem of multiple unsynchronized documents driving people to actions based on the wrong version. Show how a discussion forum can help a person in a regional office stay aligned with a corporate framework, and how a person the the corporate office can learn who does what in the regions, and how they’ve needed to modify that framework to work better in their business environment. In short, show how these tools help people work more efficiently.

Best Practice #2: Show direct business value by aligning social computing to real-world work.

JP Rangaswami speaks of what people really do in the enterprise and how technology can and should assist those human needs. Some sound bites:

“…it is only a matter of time before enterprise software consists of only four types of application: publishing, search, fulfillment and conversation.”

“In an enterprise these relationships are usually to do with the department the person belongs to, and the reporting line. What utter tosh. Those are not relationships. They are irritants. Irritants apparently required in order for people to allocate costs and profits accurately….I am prepared to change my mind on this, the day I meet a customer who cares about what department I work in or whom I report to.”

“…people appear to “work” by doing four things:

They look proactively for information. They search for things.
They receive information because they said they were interested in receiving that information. They subscribe to things.
They talk to each other using various forms of communication: letter, e-mail, audio, video, text, IM, blog, wiki, twitter, whatever. They are even known occasionally to talk to each other face to face without use of technology.
And they transact business as a result. Within the enterprise. In the extended enterprise and partners and supply chain. With customers.

People do all this now. But we do not have the tools to do the job well.”

Thank you, JP for addressing what’s been missing in much the Enterprise 2.o talk of late, that being the question of “why?”. For a long time it seemed like there were two vectors driving the conversation:

a) Pro: “Look at all this AJAX-y goodness! We must bolt this on to our ERP so it doesn’t appear to be so hard to use!”

b) Con: “People are cats, they are unloyal and must be herded. Do not give them freedom to go outside the box (pun intended) or we shall introduce Risk.”

JP highlights the reason social computing has taken off - people are social and desire community. In the enterprise that means we want to work together in a fluid, on-demand manner. Nothing provided in of standard office productivity tool suite does that. They’re fine for turning concepts into artifacts, like insects in amber, but interchange is asynchronous and awkward at best. We fought for IM behind the firewall ten years ago and it’s still unusual to find widespread use.

In my workplace people form virtual teams around projects. Organizationally we’re pretty flat except for natural team groupings around core competencies like graphics, usability, technology, etc. A natural pattern has emerged where folks on a project tend to take over an available space - usually conference rooms - and cluster together so they have proximity to share ideas while their heads are stuck in their laptops creating the artifacts that emerge from their interaction. The fellow whose office is next to mine hasn’t been in it in 6 weeks. They sometimes bring graphics, products and designs into the room that reflect the project that end up being the cave paintings representing their new environment and their recent hunts as they share stories around the virtual fire.

OK - maybe that’s kind of stretching it to the poetic, the point is people require freedom to congregate and bounce off each other if they are going to produce excellentce. Malcolm Gladwell holds that modern genius emerges more from collaboration than from the lone insightful person (video here).

I’ve know of an organization whose 3-year plan includes a key feature - Employee Development. Yet they have no training and development resources at the corporate level, and precious few in the businesses. This disconnect is where we find the enterprise; they truly want employees to collaborate. Yet the best tools: audio, video, text, IM, blog, wiki, twitter…are often unavailable or even banned for fear that the cats will be distracted into mere chit-chat.

As I write I see that Michael has asked for thoughts about how social computing tools can play inside the firewall. Consider this a start. I’ll say that the first critical aspect for social computing success in the enterprise would be to ‘trust…but verify’.

More later.

My ‘conference friend’ Rich has a cool new job - good stuff, Rich! I started to reply to something he wrote but it got so long I figured I’d better put it here instead.

Read Our Future Colleagues Have MySpace Accounts for the context first.

Rich, If you’re a dinosaur I must be petrified. New grads coming into the workplace are closer in age to my children than to myself. My kids (13 and 11) are growing up wifi; not just laptops but PSPs, Sidekicks and Nintendo DS and the observations about handwriting, spelling, jargon - are on point, but in my opinion it’s more reflective of our struggle to adapt, just like the dinosaurs.

Younger folks have always integrated technology and information pipelines better than older generations. Further, If I can use my kid’s educations are any kind of benchmark, they’re getting a lot more knowledge and academic challenges thrown at them at an earlier age than we did.

The ability of any given youth to function socially still boils down to the individual level. My daughter would appear to be a poster child for ADD-style overload. She’ll be texting in her room with the TV, laptop and sometimes video iPod (with one earbud inserted) going. Yet she got amazing grades last quarter and is a social butterfly with a large circle of friends. My son is a different archetype - he’s much more of a loner, with few friends but deep passions that he explores fully offline and online. One day he casually told me he corrected the Wikipedia entry on a book series he was reading - he’s the 11 year old. He couldn’t understand why I was amazed at that.

I do see one commonality that worries me, it’s less about social engagement and getting out than it is about our increasing inability to be alone with ourselves. I see people filling up time that was formerly contemplative with some other form of connection - cell phones. Better than 50% of people I see driving, walking dogs, out for a stroll are on their phones. I don’t fear a future where life is experienced from behind a screen but one where nobody is comfortable being alone with their thoughts.