Intelligence Among Us

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.

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.

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/

The democratization of an organization is a change frought with uncertainty and fear.  We might now we need to do this “social networking” thing because we thing that’s what others are doing but we don’t have a clue to how to go about it.  If the perception of control is given up overwho can post what information the notion of dramatically increased risk is a hard one to stomach.

We keep hearing about the profound demographic shift that will soon be upon us couple with the fact that the generation coming up to replace them is “wired” and work in a completely new, unstructured, unbounded way.  How can we find the balance between mitigating the risk of these people retiring while creating a work environment that the best and brightest want to be a part of?

Tough question.

First of all I’m not that convinced that this new generation of non-conformists will lead an overnight shift that breaks down organizational hierarchies and turns top down organizations into bottom up democracies.  This is partially due to my experience in a large global manufacturing company that prides itself on being progressive and an excellent place to work…which it is.  I’ve been pushing the power of the idea of social networking for a few years and while there is some traction there is a long way to go.  I’m not convinced people have the same social networking expectations inside the firewall as outside.  Personal life is typically more unstructured than professional life and people know and expect the difference.

Also – if we unleash power of social networking what do we do with the information?  Tags, communities, meta-data – how do we mine it for our competitive advantage?  More thoughts on this in an upcoming post.

We must remember that the tools of social networking are based on technology.  The culture and rate of change of an organization is driven primarily from the top.  These are the same people that will be retiring in a few years and either don’t understand or don’t give a hoot about social networking.   In order to be effective at articulating the value of this change its imperative that we first deeply understand our core business and secondly are coherent enough to develop a strategy around tying the benefits of social networking to the achievement of business objectives. 

Which means the first step is hiring smart, articulate, technology-savvy, enthusiastic people to help your business succeed over time.  But I guess we have always known that…

Day 2 of the Expo has wrapped up.  Honestly I’m finding the content a bit light and I think it would be more effective if the sessions were longer that 50 minutes.

Dion Hinchliffe gave an outstanding presentation on day 1 about building the next generation of web applications.  It was an excellent Web 2.0 primer and really made clear that there is a bold new world out there. Read it here:  Building Next Gen Web 2. Applications

I’ll be doing a full summary at the conclusion of the expo tomorrow.  In the meantime you can follow my tweets,

I arrived in New York yesterday. As I’ve mentionedt this is my first time here.  I’ve been walking around most of the day and took in the sights.  I visited the World Trade Center site which was a very humbling experience.  It’s so interesting to see the sights that I’ve seen on TV and get understanding of how they are related to each other. 

Conference starts tomorrow.  I’ll be blogging daily and Tweeting throughout the day as well.

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.

The conference has just created their social network which will allow the attendees to connect with each other beforehand.  It’s a great idea although definitely a minimum requirement for this type of event.  I’ve picked my schedule with their simple to use tool. I’m primarily interested in the Landscape and Strategy track along with Web 2.0 @ work.

You can take a look at my profile here: http://webexny2008.crowdvine.com/profiles/25391