Nice piece from the RSA
Totally agree we need places where we can disconnect. It’s becoming a common problem inside the workplace as the increasing use of social buisness tools distract and deflect on a constant basis. Similar to email, what was once seen as a liberator can now be holding us hostage to a screen or activity feed. Not sure there is an answr yet other than some training and education on the context these tools should be used in.
New roles are emerging as companies begin to bridge the digital divide. Is this an aspiration for intranet managers? Your thoughts please.
http://blogs.gartner.com/dave-aron/2012/11/10/chief-digital-officer-from-oh-no-to-of-course/With potential changes to the scope and role of the intranet it means an opportunity to redefine what the intranet editors do and how they work. Intranet teams have traditionally been rigidly built around the organizational structure and technology, with the intranet team often emerging as an afterthought. The emergence of a social platform and a change in the way people are engaging with content represents the possibility for some radical re-shaping of the intranet team in order to prepare for these shifts as well as open up new career opportunities.
Where content has been a central focus, this evolution will also mean putting people at the centre of the intranets. And as this starts to happen, the intranet team’s role moves beyond design and communication towards that of a facilitating collaboration and knowledge sharing.
While IT and the intranet teams control, the wave of employees using a social platform are looking to innovate, share, collaborate, learn and engage not inside the physical boundaries of an office nor the virtual boundaries of a network but a social business platform that spans the globe.
These changes in the workplace do not mean that the fundamental skills of the intranet team are no longer needed, but they do mean that the intranet team need to respond by developing new key characteristics:
· Becoming more agile and fluid – able to adapt quickly to new technologies and ways of working. This may mean learning new skills quickly, or bringing in these skills from other parts of the organization, or outside.
· Becoming more user-centric – focused on fostering communities, and facilitating interaction and knowledge sharing. Nurturing the capabilities to make best use of the digital platforms available.
· Leading by example – as the intranet team increasingly takes on the role of facilitator/ enabler, it is key that they demonstrate new ways of working in the digital workplace in their own behaviours. This is further emphasized by the fact that as the workforce becomes more technologically savvy (anyone can set up a blog, start microblogging, or find what they need on the web) everyone is becoming an “expert”.
· Being the innovators – as traditional boundaries and ways of working are challenged the intranet team need to become ever more creative in understanding the opportunities for the organizations online channels to develop and merge in new ways. To do so it is essential that the intranet team understand emerging technologies on the web and the user behaviours associated with them.
As we move towards the end of 2012 I’m in a musing mood, reflecting on my many conversations over the past 12 months. From my conversations in 2012 I am reminded we are still on the learning curve on how to build and sustain a truly collaborative organisation and must be continually reminded that technology is an enabler and not the solution. Most collaboration projects are still IT led and using heavy duty project management methodology to what is essentially a people issue.
Social business technologies are helping to make the task of collaborating and sharing easier and more in tune with how we run our personal lives but that does not mean that people will automatically start to share what they know or information they possess with other people who might need it. To improve collaboration using social business we still need 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.
I hope in 2013 we start to move away from the IT led deployment approach and look at how we instigate change in organisations, primarily through the people centric approach – in essence spending time in building and developing champions, advocates and communities, both physical and virtual, to support change initiatives that collaborative tools bring. The development of champions, advocates and community managers, tied with a strong emphasis on communication planning, allows local adoption of many enterprise wide initiatives.
The focus on people and communities at a local level may start to bring real value from adoption of collaborative technologies. The nurturing of these communities will be where the real value is for enablers in 2013.
I’ve heard lots of talk recently around metrics and ROI on social business tools. Many of the Intranet, IT, HR and Marketing people I speak to are looking for metric packages that will provide some of the traditional measurements around online sites.
In terms of ‘measurement’ here are some of the criteria I use to generally benchmark knowledge and collaboration communities and programmes. There are some basic metrics to measure participation and activity within the communities.
• Total number of users
• Number of new users per week
• Number of new posts, threads (plus response), ideas, blog and other content
• What are members doing in the community?
• What are the popular trends in posts? Blogs? Forums?
• What resources are being used?
However, these basic metrics won’t provide a true understanding of the value around the collaboration that a platform could provide to individuals and the community as a whole. For the measurement of value around collaborative communities I would generally look at analytics that articulate:
• Attraction
• Attention
• Adoption
• Social Knowledge – this can be defined in many ways such as assets being shared around a community (and beyond) and related practices emerge.
• Relationship development – the ability to create new relationships and networks that previously didn’t exists
Some of the questions I ask to evaluate these items would include:
• % of members / users which make a contribution
• Members active within the past 30 days
• Contributions per active member and the value of these contributions related to the purpose of the community
• Content popularity
• Number of relationships created by individuals – look at followers and participation in threads
• Discovery of communities – have members joined communities outside their ‘physical’ or existing network
The various social business tool reports (i.e. Community Manager Reports in Jive) will not provide this type of information and much of it will be antidotal evidence. Social analytics are poor within most social tools (it will be a major revenue stream for a vendor that can start to provide some of the softer metrics that articulate quality and not just quantity).
Over the years of working within communities I’ve compiled a list from various sources that are useful in articulating some measure of value or return on the community. Top 30 are:
1. What % of newcomers remain members for more than a month.
2. Speed of replies to discussions. How quickly are discussions receiving a reply? The faster the responses, the higher the level of social presence within the community and the greater the level of participation.
3. The % of newcomers which initiate a discussion. This highlights whether newcomers may be unmotivated or intimidated to start discussions.
4. Language and tone of voice. What language do members adopt when they address each other? Is it formal and polite? Is there friendly banter? Is there a sense of familiarity? This will let you know what stage the community is in.
5. Do members’ interactions have continuity and depth? (Are members engaged in productive, on-going, interactions?)
6. What collaborative activities are emerging?
7. What documents, tools, resources, or other artefacts are created and utilized. (How are these useful to the members?)
8. Is the community providing value for its sponsors
9. Is participants’ involvement in the community affecting their professional practices and learning.
10. What are the on-going practices and processes that contribute to the “life” of the community and keep members engaged?
11. How is knowledge being shared within the community? Beyond the community?
12. Are leaders or roles emerging in the community? In what ways? How are they being cultivated?
13. How are members being supported in the community?
14. How are members contributing? Posting? Replying? (When? How often?)
15. What are the prevalent patterns of interactions?
16. What is the proportion of new topics that get 5+ replies? The percentage of new blogs that get 5+ comments? The percentage of (video, audio, lesson plan, etc.) uploads that get 50+ downloads or 5+ comments?
17. What proportions of new topics or new blog posts are un-responded to or uncommented on (an important measure of the responsiveness of the community, which in turn affects key factors like trust)?
18. What is the average new (topics, replies, blog posts) created per member?
19. What are the emerging benefits of the community for members?
20. What is the average number of “followers” that community members list or have collected in/on their member profile pages?
21. What are the proportions of topics or replies that specifically relate to your practice?
22. The proportion of replies where links to potentially helpful resources or other referrals are provided
23. The proportion of replies to a post in which helpful or constructive advice is directly provided
24. The proportion of replies that build on previous posts (as opposed to just responding to the original poster)
25. The proportion of replies that contain offers of collaboration or introductions to potential collaborators
26. The proportion of replies that contain creative, novel, or innovative ideas
27. The proportions of replies that summarize, distil, or synthesize prior posts/replies
28. The proportion of posts in which community members show or express vulnerability, such as a lack of domain knowledge
29. The proportion of posts in which community members share personal stories
30. The proportion of posts in which community members are (emotionally) supportive or helpful to other members
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.
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-streamssometi…
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.
Love this piece from RSA.
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.
A look at some potential offices of the future:
Do you need assistance with:
Understanding if social business tools can help your organisation? Deciding if you need to replace or integrate your intranet with social tools? Determining how social tools integrate with your knowledge, collaboration and communication strategies? Improve usage and adoption of your intranet and social business environment? Developing communities and networks to use social tools?
Then we should talk and see what how the Social Business Union can help you. See ‘Contact Me’ for details.
Mark Tilbury - digital workplace specialist 