Intelligence Among Us

As those of you who read this blog periodically know, I work for a large, global manufacturing company.  As part of the rebranding effort of our MOSS 2007 implementation many of our senior executives have started blogging.  This provides another medium for them to converse with the peeps as it were. At the outset their intention was to create a two way dialog with our employees and take some intial steps to embrace the world of Enterprise 2.0.  I would say that while it has been somewhat successful, but it has not met expectations.  I have some ideas as to why and some solutions but am very interested in the feedback of those who have enjoyed a successful blogging initiative.

This great article by Joel Olsen triggered gave me some excellent food for thought to ponder this situation: http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=0cd1a63d%2D183c%2D4fc2%2D8320%2Dba5369008acb&ID=253

Here are some of the issues that I see as an obstacle to success.

1. Corporate Culture – ours is an organizationally decentralized company.  While we have made great strides in improving communication and collaboration over the past 1o years some of that institutional memory lingers.
2. Lack of Governance – clear governance needs to be defined on acceptable blogging and commenting policies.  This will provide clarity to people about expectations and give them some certainty on how to ensure their comment is published.
3. User Profile Data – While this isn’t necessarily related to blogging it is critical in order to extend MOSS from a communication and collaboration tool to a platform for connecting people.  This shift in my view will drive people to the portal as part of their day to day activities and increase the opportunity for users to read and interact with blogs.  This is difficult in a decentralized organization like ours because the responsibility for populating AD with accurate information lies with the individual manufacturing facilities.
4. Latency – I see this as a major issue.  When people take the time to post a comment it needs to be reviewed and approved within a reasonable period of time.   Currently when they post it “disappears” into the ether and will only show up once approved.  There then is a further delay in waiting for a response.  We are looking at implementing a simple “Thumbs Up” mechanism so people can immediately give feedback on content.  We discussed a ranking system or even having a Thumbs Down option but have decided at this point in the evolution of our Enterprise 2.0 initiative that we want to encourage positive feedback and leave more comprehensive and potentially negative feedback for the comment mechanism.
5. Metrics – the only way you can know if any initiative is successful is to define measurements and success criteria and then….wait for it…measure them.  The problem with OTB SharePoint usage statistics is that they absolutely do not provide you with enough information to make informed judgments about whether what you are doing is working.  In our situation our executives typically post new blogs on Mondays. 
   1. We initially created a graph for each blog showing number of hits and distinct users for the last 30 days.  This was helpful in the sense that it showed us both usage trends over time and confirmed that there was a spike in traffic 1-2 days after the blog was posted.
   2. We then linked the SharePoint usage data to our main application database to show how many distinct users per month from each manufacturing facility  were visiting the blogs.  Interesting, but not overly useful.
   3. We are now looking at metrics that will require some proactivity on the part of the blog admins but should prove more useful.  Breaking down the metrics by week to coincide more closely with the posting cycle.  And then doing some research to understand the effectiveness of the blog?  If a blogger highlights a certain facility for great work they did, the traffic from that facility should increase if the message is getting across.  Or if a blog is posted focused on a specific major customer of ours the ideal outcome would be that all facilities dealing with or hoping to win business from that customer would be drawn to the blog post.  If not, there is a problem.  But you can’t know if you don’t measure it.
   4. Average length of time to approve and respond to a blog comment.  In my view there should be an SLA around this.  I personally would not want to have a conversation with someone that took a week to respond.
   5. As I highlighted in a previous blog entry we have wired up a DVWP to a SQL query to highlight blog comments and their current status to make it easier for approvers to see if there are any new entries that need review.  We have also encouraged them to set up alerts on their Comments lists.
   6. A quick tip that many people don’t know is that by appending “_layouts/usagedetails.aspx” to the end of your site URL you are able to see different usage metrics.  You wil be able to see for example a list of users by day that have accessed your site.  This can be helpful in understanding who is accessing your blogs and when and will allow you to get a sense of who is reading each post.  Again – it’s not perfectly accurate but tied with the other metrics you can start to get a good picture of who is conuming the content.
   7. SharePoint Designer also has some usage reporting that you can use.  If you open a site and select the Site > Reports >Usage option you can see the reports that you can take a look at.
6. Exposing Content – we have a site called Blog Central and each blog is a subsite of that.  We currently roll up the latest blog entries using the CQWP.  The issue with that is the fact that the Blog Central site is still a click away from the home page.  We are looking at a revamp of our homepage to leverage the CQWP and JQuery to in order to maximize the use of space and allow users to more easily see what is new.  We are also looking at rolling up the comments to a more prominent central location in order to highlight the fact that there is dialogue taking place.  Currently comments are only accessible by looking at the bottom of specific blog posts which makes it cumbersome for the users.

I hope you find this information helpful and most importantly I am interested in any feedback on your own experiences.

I wanted to talk briefly about a specific project and how it might be implemented while keeping the governance considerations mentioned in the last 2 posts top of mind.

In my view, if we had an engaged Business Strategy team the strategic instructions would look something like this.  Developing people is a critical activity to ensure the future success of our company.  Training is a crucial component of developing people and it’s imperative that we find a more cost effective way to deliver this training.  We must also continue to leverage our investment in SharePoint and continue to work towards making it our primary platform for delivering rich media and interactivity.

However, really how it went was more like:  It would be cool if we could have streaming video for stuff like eLearning.   These comments and conversations were casual but repeated and were initiated prior to the kick-off of the governance project.

We were keenly aware of a few things:

1. People Development and Training is a strategically important area for our company
2. Costs of delivering training must be reduced – especially considering the current economic climate
3. We have invested heavily in SharePoint as both a communication,collaboration and application platform and need to continue exploit that investment
4. There has been an expressed desire to slowly start introducing Enterprise 2.0 ideas and capabilities to the organization.
   1. Our executives have been blogging and slowly introducing more supporting media to their posts
   2. The next step will almost certainly be executive podcasting
   3. Allowing for ranking and commenting on content is a simple way to increase the interactivity of the portal and generate more feedback.

As the Manager of Global Business Solutions I had my team download and install the SharePoint PKS on our SharePoint development environment.  Configuration and testing took a few weeks and as soon as it got to a reasonably demonstratable state we assembled our Technology team and a SharePoint Business Analyst from the People Development and Training department (the functional owners of the portal).

We spent a few days putting detailed documentation together on what it would take to implement the PKS in production based on the information we had (which was very little).  Our objective at this point was to think through the possible implications but to also stress to the Business Strategy team that this was a significant undertaking.  The documentation covered the following main areas:

1. Business Opportunity and Objectives
2. Prerequisites
3. Infrastructure Requirements
4. Policy and Guideline Requirements
5. Estimated Project Costs (this was a WAG)
6. Ongoing Costs
7. Resource Requirements
8. Risks
9. Potential Success Criteria and KPIs

Point 2 relating to prerequisites are where the governance piece comes into play.  Whilst the governance development is well underway, the teams are currently working on their action items – some of which are related to training, acceptable use, SLAs, disaster recovery etc.  We stridently insisted that these must be approved and in place before introducing more complexity to our SharePoint implementation.

We demonstrated the software to the Business Strategy team members and reviewed the documentation with them.  It is currently in their hands and we’ll see in the near future what the decision is.  As I have stated previously, this is the approach we have decided to take.  Proactivity on the part of the Technical Strategy team to look forward and initiate projects that we believe have business merit and bring those to the BST for approval.

As stated previously I want to post about SharePoint governance and what we are learning as we go through the process.  We’ve had SharePoint (2003 and then MOSS 2007) at our organization for about 4 years now and it, along with our organization, has been consistently evolving to reach the current state.   In order to illustrate my point I want to talk about governance and also about how the potential implementation of the SharePoint Podcasting Kit will work vis-a-vis this model.

To provide some context here’s a quick overview of where things currently stand.

1. Approximately 8000 users globally and being implemented as the mandatory home page for all Active Directory members in the organization
2. Approximately 18,000 home page hits per day with 500,000+ for the entire portal per month
3. A public area and a secure area.  The public area is primarily used for communication purposes while the secure area is more collaborative.
4. 500+ sites, with a legacy mess of site collections and sites with a fairly incoherent taxonomy.
5. More SharePoint groups than I can even begin to count.
6. Divisions (manufacturing facilities) are beginning to come on board and replacing their divisional intranets with site collections on our central implementation.
7. A very poor level of overall user training.
8. Exectives are blogging reguarly
9. Integration with some LOB systems through the BDC
10. One farm, located in Toronto with:
    1. 2 load balanced front end web servers
    2. 1 application server
    3. 2 clustered SQL servers
    4. SAN
11. A very, very lean IT organization to support the platform.

I’m sure our implementation and the current state with its strengths and weaknesses is not uncommon for many organizations.  One of the areas we currently are lacking in is a governance model that works for our organization.  A lot of research has been done on the various approaches to tackling this monster and there is a lot of conflicting information.   We have decided to create 5 times, each with their own specific areas of responsibility.  Somehow I got stuck on most of these teams but that’s a story for another day.

1. Business Strategy Team
   1. This team consists of appropriate business owners willing to provide strategic insight and direction for the portal, and able to drive strategic initiatives into their respective organizations. Resources represent a good balance between business and IT, and also centralized control vs. decentralized empowerment. This team is a small, living team and can be reconstructed on a quarterly basis with new volunteers to maintain a fresh perspective on the business and exploit the collective wisdom of the company.
2. Technical Strategy Team
   1. This team consists of knowledgeable technical leaders to provide technical direction on the portal. It is important that key relational systems experts should be involved in this team. If a business direction requires new integration or effort with other technologies then a technical representative for that technology will be necessary to ensure the planning, architecture, and implementation stages are more effective. This team is small and can be reconstructed on a quarterly basis with new volunteers to maintain a fresh perspective on the business and exploit the collective wisdom of the company.
3. Tactical Support Team
   1. SharePoint site owners, plant system administrators, help desk personnel, and other various support resources create an effective support system with proper channels of escalation for end users of the SharePoint environments. This team handles application questions, bugs, and other problems requiring issue resolution.
4. Tactical Operations Team
   1. Infrastructure (IT) resources provide operational support for the system as they help to ensure the enforcement of the governance plan and manage the more routine maintenance of the system by performing nightly backups, usage monitoring and analysis, scheduled task validation, and keeping the system current with security releases and system upgrades.
5. Tactical Development Team
   1. Technically talented people both willing and able to customize, personalize, and use SharePoint in a manner that fulfils the business opportunities as identified by the strategy team. This team is a loosely-knit community of developers with varying degrees of proficiency in software development. Members can range from highly skilled programmers to technically savvy end users in charge of personalizing departmental team sites. Skilled developers will handle large change requests, new features, and program management while ensuring adherence to standards.

I’ll wrap this post up and focus on organizational context and a case study of the SharePoint Podcasting Kit during the next post.

For part 1 of these article please go here.

I want to take a moment to finish part 2 of this article.  It’s a simple concept but often overlooked for a variety of reasons.  The main idea is that whatever value you are trying to deliver through SharePoint will be so much more successful if it is part of an effective business process.  Wikipedia defines a business process as: “A business process or business method collection of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product (serve a particular goal) for a particular customer or customers.”

In our organization, defining and improving business processes is often taken as, “These geeks in IT are just trying to give us a bunch of homework to do so they don’t have to do anything themselves.”

An example came up the other day regarding Cost Savings.  In these turbulent economic times it goes without saying that most organizations are focused heavily on finding efficiencies throughout their company.  So, in my world that means – “We need a SharePoint site to track cost savings.”  Let’s not even delve into the idea of whether SharePoint is the right solution upon which to build this solution at the moment.  After discussion with a non-IT SharePoint “expert” it was boiled down to the fact they didn’t need a site, they needed a list.

The users were sold that this was the ticket to successfully tracking cost savings and off they went.  To date their have been 4 cost savings ideas entered – all by the guy that owns the list and all over a month ago.  About the level of “success” that could be expected.

I got involved shortly before they went live in order to have a fresh set of eyes look at the situation.  The idea was that this was going to be a spot that people would flock to over time to share their cost savings ideas for the benefit of the company.  I told them flat out that as it stood this was guaranteed to fail and they hadn’t given it near enough thought.  They took it like champs.

Click here for Part 2.

One of the insights I share with people that are implementing SharePoint and/or an Enterprise Social Computing strategy is that just because you build it does not mean that they are coming. Your people are used to working, communicating and collaborating in specific ways and there needs to be a compelling reason for them to change. In my experience, an important aspect of the human condition is that to varying degrees people are motivated by naked self-interest. Myself? Guilty as charged. How does an organization overcome the “So What” factor when launching their new portal platform that will have a “transformative impact on how we do business?” I will now pause so you can collectively yawn.

To drive the success of an initiative or initiatives like this an organization needs to ask themselves a few very important questions:

1. What are the problems we are trying to solve.  Sounds simple but losing focus on that simple questions will lead you down a path of misery and that flushing sound is your EBIT going down the toilet.
2. What are the business processes, across functional areas, that will support this initiative?
3. What are the motivators that will get people to change their behaviour?

Today I’ll focus on “The Problem” and will cover the others in future posts.

What is the problem?

Let’s first discuss some examples of what are NOT problems

• “We need an intranet” is not a problem.
• “We need a spot where people can collaborate” is not a problem
• “We should do this because our competitors are probably doing it” is not a problem
• “Those geeks in IT installed this stupid thing 2 years ago and since we’re stuck with it now we might as well do something with it”  is a problem but is unrelated to the topic at hand.
• “We just signed an EA with Microsoft which will allow us to legitimately use the functionality we’ve been using illegally up until now” is also an unrelated problem.

Here are some problems (obviously simplified in the interest of dealing with my short attention span)

• We have lost 10 million dollars in new business to our competitors by not having a standardized quoting process.
• We are getting sued 4 times a month because different versions of our ice cream subsidization policy are floating around throughout the enterprise.
• Our Active Directory contains 1500 unique roles throughout the organization.  We need a standardized list in order to support our Succession Planning strategy.
• Training a new hire in the Purchasing department currently takes 2 months and 60 hours of mentoring by a current employee

Problems and the resultant objectives have to be measurable or else you’ll never have any idea if you have achieved success.   There are a lot of examples on-line about creating effective problem statements so I won’t delve into it any further.

The main point I want to make is spend time upfront defining what the problem you are actually trying to solve is – and do not lose focus on it.  Do NOT let consultants sell you on how great things could be if you just also did X, Y and Z.  Base your requirements and objectives on the problem you are trying to solve.

Being a part of a large, global manufacturing company that is at the cusp of embracing the wonderful world of Enterprise 2.0 is an interesting place to be.  There is a strong desire by a few top executives to jump on the bandwagon – although they are not exactly clear why at this point. I am a believer in the potential of ESC but also wary about how and why to implement some of these technologies and potentially radical changes to an organizations culture. I’ve taken a few minutes and identified some of the focus areas that make sense if you are going to take a stab at this whole ESC thing.

One thing I highly recommend is to not overpromise about the transformative effects of ESC and how it will do everything from mitigating the risk of retiring boomers to providing a culture that Generation Z (or whatever the hell they are called at the moment) will feel instantly at home in. Start a pilot with a narrow focus, a defined timeline and measurable objectives – and take it from there.

Below I’ve listed some of the ideas that an organization might want to consider when embarking on the ESC journey. I’ve detailed some approaches to increasing and managing the level of user involvement in your network.

1. Governance
a. Clearly published codes of content, IT acceptable use policies etc.  If you are going to throw the doors wide-open people need to be very clear on what they can and can’t do. Things that would get you canned will get you canned if you do them on the companies social network.

2. Profiles
a. Encourage everyone to update their profiles including their picture.
b. Figure out what data you have available in your corporate Active Directory (or whatever you use) and define standards throughout the organization. I won’t even bother telling you how many distinct roles and departments are defined in ours.

3. Enterprise Search
a. Be very cautious of encouraging the generation of unstructured content when no plan is in place for managing our structured content.
b. Consistently working together to identify the language of your company across all functional areas – in SharePoint terms this is related to Content Typing but for it to really work we need to review it portal-wide.  From a Robot to an HR policy, it’s important that they are defined as consistently as possible across the organization
c. Tune the search on an ongoing basis by :
i. Reviewing the most commonly used search terms
ii. Tuning the relevancy of search results
iii. Grouping like terms.  If someone types in training then they are likely looking for content on the PDT site.
iv. Semantic search tuning.  If someone types in “Die” they are more likely looking for Die Standards then someone’s blog post about his goldfish dying.

4. Tagging
User generated tagging for content uploaded into the system.  This facilitates search in a very organic way.  Allowing tagging is a simple way to allow users to interact with your system in a way that can enhance the experience for all users

5. Content Rating
A mechanism for users to rate content on the system.  Another simple way to encourage user participation and weed out what content really sucks on your social network.

6. Hall of Fame
a. I love this idea as it helps personalize the participants in your network and publicizes the local heroes. A publicly visible page that shows:
i. The user with the most page hits across the portal
ii. The user who has uploaded the most content (although this may or may not be a good thing)
iii. The user with the most blog comments
iv. The user with the highest rated content
v. Most “-pedia” entries

7. “Insert Company Here” – pedia. This is simple in concept and potentially simple in execution. The value of this is that it brings together the key information that might normally be dispersed all over the place, into one location. Feel free to name is something other than a name ending in “pedia” which is getting about as tired as attaching “gate” to the end of every scandal.

8. Expert Search
a. Create a profile property called Area of Expertise
b. Create a custom search called Expert Search that will search that profile information to find the right person.
c. This will encourage the non-deadbeats to step up and identify themselves, thereby making their talents more accessible to the organization.

9. Reward System for encouraging participation
a. Of course we all know that money talks but so does public recognition of a job well done

This is an update to the compelling Shift Happens video.  Everyone I show it to is both awed and overwhelmed about the potential implications. 

I see this as not only our reality but a huge opportunity.  More to follow but take a look at the video.  I’m interested in your thoughts.

I find once a few key people get the Enterprise 2.0 bug and read all the content on the web about changing demographics, retaining new and younger talent they lose clarity on where a more immediate impact can be had.  I have been guilty of this myself and want to share some thoughts on the subject.

First of all, I am a huge proponent of bringing Web 2.0 behind the firewall.  I think it has a trememdous amount of potential to democratize an organization and give people a way to have a voice and contribute to a unified effort.  Blogs, wikis, tags, folksonomies etc. are all great ideas and definitely have their place.  But attempting to implement them without first understanding the language of your organization is a mistake.

Firstly a discussion of structured vs unstructured data is in order.  I like this excerpt:

“We all know that structured data is boring and useless; while unstructured data is sexy and chock full of value. Well, only up to a point, Lord Copper. Genuinely unstructured data can be a real nuisance – imagine extracting the return address from an unstructured letter, without letterhead and any of the formatting usually applied to letters. A letter may be thought of as unstructured data, but most business letters are, in fact, highly-structured.”

I consider structured data to be information that can be easily described, has a defined container to store it and is easily searchable.  The problem is that the vast majority of business interactions take place in an unstructured environment: email, IM, RSS etc.

I saw an excellent example somewhere where someone used the example of New York City.   In a structured scenario New York could be described with a latitude and longitude, a type of City, possibly a parent State and Country attribute etc.  In an unstructured scenario New York could be referring to the city or state, the Yankees, Rangers, Jets, New York Stock Exchange etc.  Gleaning the context and intent from unstructured data is much more difficult.

I’m going to analogize in the context of MOSS 2007 but the same principles apply regardless of the technology platform.  I’ll use the example of an HR department who finds out the IT has implemented SharePoint (I’ll discuss why this is a mistake in a later post) and believes that this is the silver bullet for getting people to collaborate and share documents with each other.  The HR lead sits with IT and runs through a vague set of requirements which ends up with a few document libraries in SharePoint that grow over time to become complex enough that internal customers find it too tedious and over time revert to the previous ways of doing things.

Unfortunately the question that is usually asked is, “What content would you like to share?”.   The questions that should be asked are:

1. Who are your target audience(s)?
2. What business processes support the interactions with those audiences?
3. What is the language of HR?  In other words – what is a policy, an employment standard, leave of absence , vacation etc. 

This then leads to going through the process of identifying metadata for each type of content.  It also will allow for the idendification of standard templates and workflows.  Having this data well-thought through is the foundation of an effective enterprise search strategy.

So, instead of a customer meadering aimlessly through a semi-structured repository they are able to interact and search based on the language of the business. Without going through this process you will exacerbate the problems you currently have with your enterprise data.  In fact, if the adoption rate of the portal is near expectations it will accelerate the mayhem.  

There is a growing suite of vendors that have offerings on the market for integrating unstructured data into your business intelligence and analytics landscape.  I submit again, that if you can’t manage structured data and your business intelligence capabilities are limited you will be striking a Faustian bargain by attempting to engage a partner or implement a solution that focuses on unstructured data.

Here are some of the Enterprise 2.0 Blogs I enjoy reading:

http://enterprise2blog.com/
http://www.enterprise2dot0.com/blog/
http://www.enterpriseweb2.com/
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/

I’ll be heading to NYC for the Web 2.0 Expo on Sunday.  To say I’m excited about this opportunity is an understatement.  Check my Twitter RSS feed for updates throughout the week.