The disruptive life cycle

Every new disruptive medium or technology goes through a life cycle. Open / social business tools such as Yammer or Jive will be no different. The five phases of this disruptive technology life cycle are:

Phase 1: Eager early adopters. Users eagerly experimented in the newness of the medium. Early adopters attempt to apply the medium to everything.
Phase 2: Ubiquitous usage. Rapid adoption put the medium in the hands of the masses. Adoption exceeds expectation.
Phase 3: Relevant rationalization. Enterprises apply the medium to the right business use cases and processes.
Phase 4: Fatal fatigue. Inundated with communications, bombarded with irrelevant content, and tired of the newness of the medium, employees begin tuning out.
Phase 5: Revival and Rejuvenation. Maturation of the medium ushers an improved era of engagement

Where many of the Yammer type tools stall within organisations is the belief they can avoid some of the fundamentals processes within a business. ‘Just deploy it and let it grow’ or viral / organic adoption (or adaption) to work processes only go so far. Engagement plans are good but you need some basis steps such as:

1 – Review the organisations business strategy

2 – Look how the tool can assist the business strategy and create your own ‘collaboration / KM’ (or whatever you wish to call it) strategy and get it validated by the appropriate body

3 – Develop your content strategy (what goes where) which is clear and understood by the business

4 – Clearly articulate your roadmap for adoption (plan this – don’t just let it ‘happen’ although organic growth will be part of it

5 – Get use cases that support the overall business strategy and work with those groups on how to get best use of the tool

6 – Build the case studies and use them as collateral as you move into areas of the business, in a controlled phased approach to adoption / adaption throughout the business, building champion and advocates as you develop.

7- Develop your KPI / metrics dashboard that ties in with key sponsors / stakeholder initiatives

Employees don’t like their social intranet, study says

http://www.ragan.com/InternalCommunications/Articles/Employees_dont_like_their_social_intranets_study_s_46552.aspx

I think we are now starting to see the issues companies have faced with ‘The rush to social’ or the social silo.

Every new medium or technology goes through a life cycle. Social intranets (however one defines these) will be no different. It’s part of the phases of this disruptive technology life cycle.

I suspect many of the social intranet are at an early stage of the cycle. One of the main issues I have found is to few companies have enough evidence why they should replace some core needs which I suspect the current intranet has not addressed. For many in the workforce, collaboration often means more work, not less work. Connectivity results in more interactions, some less meaningful than others. Increase in effort often shifts the status quo resulting in internal resistance.

There must also be some choice in the user experience.
Time and time, people want to use the tool they are most comfortable with. For example, activity streams make sense for some employees who are used to high frequency, always on, information flows. However, those accustomed to using email as a task list and structured approach to filing information will find discomfort with activity streams.

Companies that were early adopters of social tools have already begun to see signs of duplication of effort and worries over the governance model. Some of the issues being raised are familiar concerns with early intranet developments of the 90s.

The social intranets that receive harsh criticism from many users will look to blame intranet maangers or IT. But if you don’t have sound governance, you are going nowhere fast. The most important element for an effective governance model – nay the intranet as a whole – is the strength and level of engagement of the end owners. People are the primary catalyst of intranet success.

If the governance is in place, then valued, relevant content can’t help but flow from it. It won’t happen overnight, and does require oversight and enforcement, and an effective user experience to support it, but strong content will surge from the right team (and governance model).

A realistic perspective on enterprise activity streams

From ‘Snippets’

The multiple personality of enterprise activity streams

Why do we follow people on activity stream sites like Facebook…cause we like hearing what they are up to…further to this we can converse with them…and even ask questions and share with people.

Most of the time we know what we are in for…we get updates about their life: experiences, they share articles, pictures, etc…

So what about enterprise activity streams?

I don’t quite think we know what we are in for

ie. we are gonna get updates about their daily work that may pollute our streams

Let me explain…

I’m John (Collaboration Lead)

I follow Jason (Project Manager)

I follow Jason as he shares great articles on managing complex projects, and I also follow him to hear about his experiences.

But that’s just one dimension of what Jason posts about…

Jason’s posts are not just sharing and reflective, he also posts about the here and now of his work. He is a member of many online groups where they communicate about their tasks, and all these posts land in my activity stream. He @mentions alot with other people about things that are very detailed to his task at hand…he is, as we say “working out loud”.

Now I know this is what it’s meant to be about ie. ambient awareness (I know what Jason is up to)…but after a while the intricacies of his work don’t interest me, and become noise in my activity stream.

So I want to follow Jason, the guy who shares research and writes reflective posts on experiences…but I don’t want to follow Jason, the guy who does his “to and fro” work in the activity stream.

What do you think?

How do you share yours?

Saw this on tembosocial which again poses the question why people within organisations don’t share.
http://blog.tembosocial.com/blog/bid/275915/Social-Business-Why-Aren-t-People-Sharing?goback=%2Egde_2225440_member_222774240
Sharing is a fundamental mechanism in any kind of enterprise. From the development of the canteen discussions, water cooler moments, information management systems, knowledge management processes and now enterprise social networking platforms, sharing can bring immense value in the form of new innovations, improved decision-making, shorter time to market for new products, faster introduction of new hires, and so forth.
KM and social technologies make sharing of information, expertise and connections across the enterprise and beyond easier than ever before, but whether or not information is shared in a certain environment or situation always comes down to such things as people’s attitudes and behaviors (dare I use the word “culture”) in a group of people.
Despite the influx of KM and social tools into companies it does mean that people will automatically start to share what they know or information they possess with other people who might need it. The introduction of tools and processes are treated like many other IT projects, such as CRM and ERP systems, with fact finding, project management and configuration. But very few projects ever look to understand the psychology of sharing. We also need to understand the context in which we want people to start sharing with each other. When we have that understanding, we should have some idea of what buttons to push to make it happen, such as what technologies to use and how to design, implement and introduce them to the intended users.
One of the often neglected is to train people how to network. This doesn’t involve teaching people to hold regular coffee meetings or hand out business cards but show them the benefits of having a connected life within an organisation and the benefits this can achieve (or the cost if this is not achieved). In essence we are looking at building communities and the principles and benefits really haven’t changed since the Etienne Wenger days. In enterprises there is still little importance or regard paid to the development of communities, both physical and virtual. In communities individuals can build reputation, which is one of the key motivating factors for people to begin sharing.
Peer recognition is another key important factor that encourages sharing within an enterprise. Recognition means the most to us when it comes from those who really know the subject – who know what they’re talking about. It’s great to have your boss think you’re a top performer, but chances are your boss doesn’t know enough about the technical part of your work to know how good you really are – but your peers do.
Relationships are another key element to encourage knowledge sharing. An organisation can foster relationships many ways, but nearly all of them involve people being in conversation with each other. It is through conversation that we learn enough about the other to know the depth of their knowledge, where their strengths lay, what interests they have, and what they are passionate about.
By nature we generally want to share. But in most organisations we are faced with an environment that is not conducive to sharing. I have seen countless policies introduced by companies that appear hell bent on defeating the human tendency to share knowledge. One sure way is to create a situation where in order for one person to succeed the other has to lose. Too many organizations create those conditions with performance management systems that rank order or pit one person against another.
And fundamentally companies ask the wrong question. Rather than look to introducing tools and incentive schemes to share they should be looking at how do they develop relationships, communities, reputations and recognition that will set the wheels in motion for greater knowledge sharing?
PS – it you want to begin developing a knowledge sharing strategy in your organization start with watching ‘Pay it Forward’
http://uk.movies.yahoo.com/movie/pay-it-forward/

Making the same mistake

Every day I see a greater digital divide within companies. I recently worked on a collaboration project that involved both groups of apprentices / graduates and those that are more used to faxes than Facebook. It made me realise we are making the same mistakes with collaboration tools (open, social, transparent working etc.) as we did with email and Knowledge Management tools of the 1990s.

Apprentices and graduates ‘just get it’ in terms of understanding how to use technology to connect them to people and content, regardless of interface. Forget about corporate emails – they just don’t want to bother about desktops or email clients. But reach out to them on mobile day or night and they will respond. They see the value of making connections online and how to use the open and social tools to network within organisations. They expect good technology and connectivity and if the company can’t provide it they will use their own. If they can’t be provided with spaces to connect and network they will develop their own.

Other groups within the company needed far greater training, floor walking and hand holding to understand the potential and possibilities of the value of connecting and collaborating. With good content strategies, knowledge and people management, stewardship and governance many of these issues are overcome but what struck me was the change in approach needed by those responsible for implementation and success of collaborative working.

I’m old enough to remember the only ‘IT’ training you received was how to use the fax machine, the photocopy and the phone handset. When email arrived it was similar with one approach to training and ‘after school’ extra training for those that were slow on the uptake. The training provided showed us how to use the new tool. When you asked the trainer what to use it for that was a very different matter.

As we move towards more open, transparent and social ways of working within organisations I do fear we are making the same mistakes we made with email and Knowledge Management. We can introduce the tools and technology, show them how to use it but not guide people on what to share.

Too many times I have seen organisations deploy the technology, train people how to use it but give them no further guidance on how to work more transparently, open and socially. Hence we get the situation that the tools are not used, or maybe worst they are used to create additional noise but no value. If we thing email and various KM document coffins are bad enough imagine a screen full of irrelevant activity streams, notifications, thousands of 2 people communities (if you can have a community of 2) and invites to connect and follow with thousands of people you have never heard of and frankly don’t need to connect to every within your organisation.

To bridge this digital divide within organisations we need to ensure that these collaborative, open, social tools have sufficient strategy, governance and stewardship around them, aligned with a good content or knowledge strategy for the user groups so they have an understanding of what will provide value to themselves, their communities and their company. Once this is in place we can then worry about the floor walking and handholding from a technology level.

Socially redundant

I’ve been following with interest the situation with HMV and the job losses announced live on Twitter. It highlights some of the issues companies and employees face when becoming more of an open, transparent or social organisation.

The press is filled with stories of industrial relation being conducted via social media channels. As organisations begin to ask more of employees to collaborate, share knowledge and generally become a louder voice within the workplace it also requires the organisation to accept that the channels used for collaboration and knowledge sharing can also be used for employees to discuss the decisions and actions that effect their family and livelihood.

How companies, or maybe that should be individuals within companies, handle the situation reflects a great deal on how much they understand or fear the power of technology that enables employees becoming more engaged or vocal within open, transparent and social businesses. In some ways it shows how far an organisation has come in bridging the digital divide that exists within many companies.

A few years ago I worked for an organisation that trumpeted to clients the value and expertise of its staff. We had developed an active knowledge and collaboration programme, based around communities and the value of collectively working towards solutions for our clients. Our intranet platform was full of articles of people related initiatives involving collective innovation. The firm then announced there were to be redundancies. It happens and this article is not discussing the merits or dilemma of redundancies but how digital savvy companies deal with it. Rather than continue the open, community based approached being developed the response from leadership was to remove ‘people related’ and ‘success’ stories from the intranet and close down any form of online discussion around the events. I appreciate there are certain legal requirements and obligations that need to be met but to completely ignore this channel was paramount to dismissing this as an essential source of news and discussion. So we had the situation where staff could read about events on external news and social sites but could find nothing within the intranet environment. For a channel that was being promoted as a source for company news, collaboration and knowledge sharing the effect was dramatic. Over the next few months we saw contributions and engagement on our communities drop dramatically. I fear it will be many years before this organisation understands the possibility that these types of collaborative workplace technologies can provide in changing the way people work.

Moving this on a few years I had the fortune to work for a global organisation that is really trying to change the way they work. They had suffered from poor industrial relations but are determine to build relationships, engagement and communities within their workforce by using collaborative technologies, realising that embracing the open nature that technologies provide is one of the ways to prosper in the changing work of work. Rather than bury their head in the sand they are actively building and supporting internal communities, putting in place appropriate stewardship, governance, advocates and nurturing collateral to make sure this works. It won’t happen overnight and there will be hurdles along the way. But being open and transparent will ensure they have a greater chance of bridging the digital divide.

All organisations will go through good and bad times. But the consistency of relationships with their employees will ensure the continued development of collaboration and knowledge sharing. This is a significant step in creating a more open and democratic working organisation that the digital age is delivering.

We need to learn how to use technology to be better human professionals

Caught this comment from Dr Paul C Tang, chief innovation and technology officer at Palo Alto Medical Foundation in California, which emphasises why breeching the digital divide is only possible if we see deployment of tools and apps as a way to improve human interaction, not replace it.

“Just adding an app won’t necessarily make people better doctors or more caring clinicians. What we need to learn is how to use technology to be better, more human professionals.”

The proliferation of gadgets, apps and web-based information has given doctors a black bag of new tools, but also created something of a generational divide.

Older doctors admire, even envy, their young colleagues’ ease with new technology. But they wory that the human connections that lie at the core of medical practices are at risk of being lost.

Far too often we look at deployment of collaboration and knowledge sharing tools as a technology project with the hiring of IT project managers and business analysts. Why, after all these years of collaboration tools being avaialble, do we still have less than 10% adoption in many organisations, and in many cases only 1% of actual valued usage? Part of it is due to the cultural and business change elements not being factored into any IT programme. How do we deal with nuturing people into these technologies? How do we look how it improves the human interaction and relationships? In many cases we reach for the easy targets of cosy office based workers who have desktops and an understanding of why these tools help. The real challenge is dealing with front-line and hard to reach workers that need to be guided on the benefits and how the trust relationship is changing. This nuturing and in mnay cases ‘hand-holding’ will be essential to enable collaboration tools to be seen as an key tool in changing the way we work and our relationship with organisations, customers, colleagues and others.

stopping the stream from flooding

With all the wet weather around in the UK it was timely to revisit these articles regarding managing the stream from social business tools.

http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2012/03/26/enterprise-activity-streamssometimes-it-is-about-the-technology/

http://www.alanlepofsky.net/alepofsky/alanblog.nsf/dx/three-areas-id-like-to-see-improved-in-social-business-software

In all my work within organisations I have yet to see a solution to the management of the activity stream. It’s one of the reasons that email will be with us for a long time. People can organise their own stream of content through their inbox. With current social tools it’s similar to packing up the sandbags in a flood zone as the torrent of content, updates and communications is impossible to keep up with after being in meetings, telephone calls and catch-ups for much of the day. Yes it is a case of filter failure but the filter needs to come from a gatekeeper otherwise the stream will burst its banks and drown us with content.

The digital must support the physical

Love this piece from RSA.

http://www.rsablogs.org.uk/2012/social-economy/web-20-rise-partisan/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rsaconnectedcommunities+%28Connected+Communities%29

It shows how we can isolate ourselves within digital networks and increase the silo mentality rather than try to increase the transparency. The same dangers may prevent themselves when implementing social technologies and without strong ‘human engagement’ to support the digital engagement many deployments will fail.

I strongly believe the digital world is here to support the physical world that we occupy. We must resist the temptation just to confine ourselves away in the digital social networks but use them to support our real physical world and the relationships and beliefs we develop. In many areas of life digital interaction would not succeed without some physical, real-life human contact.

The 2012 Obama For America (OFA) campaign was the culmination of the president’s belief in the power of neighbourhood action that he acquired as a community organiser in poor areas of Chicago in the 1980s. That faith in bottom-up organising was combined with a massive digital database to produce a campaign that was simultaneously hyper localised and rigorously centralised.

He created a matrix of field officers that were concentrated in the swing states. The Obama camp believed a strong missionary fervour that friendship, contact and the personal touch are how you win elections.

The deployment of adoption of social tools is not about technology. It is about building the right conditions; champions, advocates, support networks and contact points that ensure the purpose of the deployment (generally breaking down silos or barriers, increasingly transparency and knowledge sharing) are successful.

Mark Tilbury – digital workplace specialist

Working smarter in the digital workplace

Category: Adoption

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