Tag: adoption

The sound of social

The sound of social

Summer is upon us and I’ve been spending time reading through some of my notes of the various interviews I have conducted over the last 12 months in relation to collaboration tools and enterprise social networks.

I have interviewed over 250 ‘non-IT’ business users / advocates / leaders / stakeholders that have been introduced to new or upgraded collaboration platforms (O365, Jive, Chatter, Fuse, Yammer – the platform doesn’t really matter in relation to this article) and have found many of the comments follow a familiar pattern on the main issues which I believe companies still face in making a success of collaborative tools.

I should stress the issues may not be with the technology but a company’s ability to provide the appropriate implementation and change management support to assist participants in the adoption and utilisation of these tools.

I loved the work of Studs Terkel (just let the interviewee tell the story and don’t try to over complicate the message) so in the style of his oral histories here is the current story of 2015 directly from the mouth of a few participants faced with new technologies:

Making users feel safe

 “People wouldn’t have felt safe putting certain information on the site. Few understood the privacy settings and people are generally worried who can see what within the company. Leadership need to support and validate it before it gets used.”

“There is a hierarchy within the company and people generally would not follow or respond to comments by someone who is senior. It may be shyness or maybe culturally the way we have done things but we have to face this fact.”

“The most obvious element that is missing is the ability to make people feel safe. Networking with people in this company means putting your head above the water margin. It’s not something we do and we need a heavy support programme to show us how it’s done.”

Integrate into how people work

 “The problem is that this isn’t “how we work” currently, it isn’t natural for people to use the tool and so the potential couldn’t be realized in this short time period. I think that if everyone was signed into the tool and they were encouraged to use it, it would be incredibly valuable.”

“I found the tool somewhat complicated if I’m being totally honest. Not being immediately able to find what I wanted or know how to do something made me slightly reluctant to use the tool regularly and left me frustrated.”

“It does feel a little bit like you are bombarded with reminders that someone has posted.”

“I did feel that some of the posts from individuals were not entirely appropriate for a company website and were more suited to Facebook. For example when someone is having a bad day and venting via their updates. I personally feel this is not something that you necessarily should be sharing with work colleagues and is best saved for a private social media page.”

“This tool will be useful only if it replaces other tools. We get too much information and there’s not enough time in the day to process it all.”

“Just more clutter which distracts me from my busy day.”

“During busy periods when colleagues are required to pull together and resolve issues against a deadline, I do not appreciate updates and activity streams bombarding my screen – which does not directly help with the matter in hand. Filter failure or not it is distracting.”

“The mobile app is just a tool for viewing the chit chat or direct messages so its functions are useless for me.”

“Unfortunately for me personally this is just another tool in an already overcrowded environment.”

 Governance and linkage with other channels

“If corporate messages were put on the collaboration platform it may devalue the message. People see the intranet as the official source of information.”

“Go where the people want to go. Don’t force people to choose between one and another. Intranet and ‘social’ need to be integrated.”

“I believe a ‘technology first’ approach has been taken by the tool. There has been poor implementation and communication planning. I just don’t know what to do with it.”

” The intranet is the backbone of the organisation structure. The social channel is the living parts of the organisation. Like skeleton and flesh. We need integration but not replacement. We also have other communication channels. I need easy to follow and seamless integration of content across the platforms.”

“It lacks the credibility of an official channel like the intranet.”

“We need to build trust on the channel. Some people trust it, others don’t.”

“On the platform everyone is an amateur. The intranet site is professional. If the social channel had more professional news and articles it may add more value.”

“There is concern over governance – my department on the social site has a page with outdated documents and people are discussing content within the document. I spoke to the intranet team and they didn’t have time to deal with content on the social platform as its run by a different team.”

“If management make an announcement and it is not on the intranet people may have issues. The expectation is it should be on there and not a social platform. It just doesn’t have that credibility.”

“I’ve not been on the social tool much. I wasted time looking at groups and communities of no relevance. It needs more governance. Too many groups now have details out of date – it’s getting worse than the intranet.”

“I’m frustrated by governance, or a lack of it. Imagery doesn’t look like the official brand. Too many sites are being setup and it’s becoming a mess.”

“I’m now seeing duplication with the intranet.”

“It’s not an official channel and it’s painful to find information.”

 Lessons learnt

 There are simply lessons that companies still fail to understand. To make these platforms a success you need to:

  • Have a strategy (business, content and knowledge)
  • Understand how the platform needs to integrate with intranet, document management, metadata, enterprise search and other channels
  • You need to do the ground work of business analysis, use cases and understand how people work. Ensure you understand what success is – and it can’t just be adoption.
  • Start small with good use cases that provide quick wins and have a supported phased approach to implementation. Volume brings value.
  • Provide the physical support – community management, advocacy, coaching and leadership support.

In essence enable the organisation, enable the technology and most importantly enable the people.

Avoid the usual suspects

Transformation programmes are changing dramatically in the digital age.

The main theme of traditional deployments of tools was that change programmes were slow (cascaded from the top, filtering slowly down), soloed (by geographies, levels and departments) and exclusive (owned by leaders and nominated change agents).

In the digital era change is now fast-paced (focused on habit-forming to kick-start new behaviours), focused around behaviours not technology and inclusive (allows everyone’s input to be seen and for social learning to happen).

One of the key changes is the advocacy network that can be built. Forget reaching out to management and asking for the ‘usual suspects’ – the same folk that get volunteered for most change programmes. Use digital and networking technologies to create a broad number of advocates.

It doesn’t matter about the time commitment. Ask then to do what they can when they can. In the digital age getting volume at the ground level is important. Avoid traditional messages on the intranet and focus on getting role models, word of mouth and great use cases. This will spread the transformation far quicker than going through traditional and failing channels.

Making the same mistake

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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.

No plan and no chance

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2013 appears to present the same issues as 2012 with organisations unable to get value from their collaboration platform. Yesterday I attended a session with a global fashion brand to discuss why they have failed to get any value from a collaboration / social business platform deployed over a year ago. Yet again the same issue emerge.

1 – Platform determined before any requirements were gathered (in fact there were no initial business requirements gathered after the technology was chosen!

2 – Only customisation is around brand and not the features or functions (in no small part due to no requirement gathering, use cases or user testing)

2 – The ‘IT project’ has deployed and everyone has a user ID but no-one has told employees what the business needs them to discuss and share (it doesn’t come without direction).

3 – After an initial burst of activity the platform now has some idle chat completely unrelated to business strategy

4 – There has been a complete failure in integrating the platform into the ways of working within the business.

The deployment of the technology is the simple piece. What is lacking to make any social business tool an effective collaboration and knowledge sharing tool are the elements that tie all these pieces together, namely the content (both in terms of structured and unstructured content and the relationships and networks that form around this content) and the ‘stewardship’ (I would sheepishly use the word ‘management’ but that wouldn’t be appropriate in the context of a social business tool). Any future deployment will soon hit a number of hurdles unless the following elements are developed.

1 – Develop a content strategy that covers social, intranet and other relevant applications – both organisational wide and within each group or community. Once you have an understanding of the type of content you need to mine, create, discuss and refine you may then want to create a group to look at categorising this.

2 – Develop a governance process to provide stewardship around the content – not the channel.

3 – Once the governance is establish you will ideally have work streams to enabling integration of content throughout the available channels (Social, Document Management, Intranet, ‘People directory’?). These may focus around:

·         Metadata – this will be needed to tie any social, document management and intranet content together to enable real enterprise value to be gained

·         Search – define a strategy to ensure the surfacing of content is possible

·         Content – maintaining the developed strategy and aligning all departments

·         Usability – ensuring all the channels develop a common standard (not just look and feel)

·         Connectivity – this relates to how we ‘connect’ all the common elements. This maybe be employee directory and social business tool bio or documents and users profile.

4 – Do the ‘boring’ ground work of requirement gathering, building personas, develop use cases that are integrated into the way people are working.

 5 – Start small with some simple use cases that can be supported. Have a phased approach to adoption that can be supported, building case studies as you go to support the business case. 

6 – Don’t sell the benefit of ‘removing email’ because until the various platform vendors solve issues around filtering activity streams people will still reply on email as there ‘go to’ application.

Future Conversation: ???Do you have wireless???? ???No???? ???Good.???

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Nice piece from the RSA

http://www.rsablogs.org.uk/2013/socialbrain/escaping-the-woes-of-the-wireless-world/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rsaprojects+%28RSA+blogs%29

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 emerging as we bridge the digital divide

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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.

 

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

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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.

Coffee and content on the move

Been working in a number of clients offices over the last few weeks and it dawned on me, not sure why – it just did, that nearly everyone was carrying around cups of coffee with them. It’s one of those behavioural shifts that creeps up on you and must have been part of the corporate culture now for quite a few years. It has replaced the notepad or the corporate brochure as that ‘comfort blanket’ that we carry around to us between meetings and offices (the iPad will soon replace this so maybe a coffee holder fitted into the iPad or tablet will be the next round of innovation!).

Anyway, the point of my musing is that it also dawned on me that we treat coffee the way we now treat content (or ‘big data’ – not sure what that is about but didn’t we always deal with structured and unstructured data or content from many sources?).  Many years ago (sounds like a nursery rhyme) coffee shops would be few and far between on the high street and squeezed in between the purpose of the visit to the high street, shopping (or browsing). We sat down in the coffee shop, consumed the drink in crockery provided, with spoons, napkins etc. Once finished these were then removed, washed and ready for the next customer. We left the shop with our business conducted and there was finality to the ‘event’ with no residue effecting the environment.

Now coffee shops are everywhere. In many cases they mask the reason for a visit to the high street. We have coffee on the move; it’s a mobile experience that requires more accessories that are thrown-away items. We leave litter and rush taking slurps that leave a bad feeling at the end of the day.

Content is providing a similar experience. It becomes more easily available and consumable everywhere; it’s rushed and starts to create more noise; it leaves us with litter and residue that someone eventually we need to clear up; and I sense it provides a far less rewarding experience.

I’m sensing that as we start to look at the consequences to the environment of millions of coffee cups and accessories that litter our high streets we will see the demand that we change our behaviour for the benefit of the environment. Indeed we may even start to savour it more.  The same with content. As organisations move towards enabling the workforce to contribute and generate content and data we will be looking at how we introduce behavioural change to ensure we don’t become lost in the noise, clutter and litter of content everywhere.

Generation Desk

Been lots of traffic recently on what the workplace will look like over the next few years and even if offices, desks and workspaces will exist. I agree with Ross Dawson’s articulation around the need for common spaces to exist.

http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2012/06/will-offices-still-exist-in…

I also wonder if the drive towards migration from the office environment is a generational aspiration and / or defined by the stages of our life? I was speaking with my nine-year old son during the last half-term holiday, talking about what we are looking forward to over the next few weeks and months. We talked about the Euros (not the currency but the football tournament), the school trips planned, our holiday and then he mentioned that he is really looking forward to starting Year 5 as he will get his own desk! In the early years his class would sit on floor mats, then upgraded to chairs with a shared desk for each group but now, finally in Year 5 he gets his own desk. There was a sense of arrival, being a senior part of the school – one of the big boys.

Thinking about my own career journey I had been working virtually for nearly 7 years when I joined a new employer. The first minute in the office my boss walked me over to a corner of the office and told me “here is your desk”. Immediately I wondered what I actually did with it! I had been working so long virtually, in various office spaces, hot desking or as a ‘coffice worker’ that I had to remember what it was for. Needless to say after a few weeks the drawers were still empty as I sought to work not at a desk but where the ‘action’ happens within an organisation. I was at a stage of my life where a desk became irrelevant, part of a legacy that I was once held hostage to.

I started working ‘virtually’ when my son was born. I wanted to ensure I spent more time with him rather than catch the odd bath time at the end of the working day. So, having a forward thinking boss, I endeavoured to find ways that enabled me to achieve true work-life balance. Working in a global role helped so I wasn’t confined to the 9-5 routine, but through enabling technology I could complete tasks, innovate, create and add value in an environment I created, without the need of a branded office building. The common spaces were important but these were virtual rather than physical spaces.

Over the last few months I have been interviewing graduates and apprentices (generation X?) as part of some user requirement gathering projects I have been working on. One of the interesting aspects I found from the sessions, other than their flexibility around when they receive and deal with work tasks and the technology used to complete these, was the desire to go to a physical office, or common space. They wanted to meet co-workers, people of the opposite sex, people from diverse backgrounds, not to collaborate on work tasks (they can easily do this with their social technologies) but for their own development as individuals.

It got me thinking is the ‘digital workspace’ primarily for the ‘working parent’ generation that have matured to an extent that work-life balance means the mixture of quality time with family (both young and old) whilst continuing a career.  We always talk about social and enabling tools being something generation X demand but in fact do the ‘more mature’ workers that demand these tools to create more fulfilment within their working lives. Generation X may become ‘Generation Desk’ as they enter into the office and look for some traditional symbols that give them the sense of belonging. Will this generation be bragging to friends not about the ability to bring your own device to work but they actually have a floor, a desk, a desktop (ok – maybe not that far) to show they have arrived.

The digital workplace is more than technology

I’m a keen reader of the Chieftech blog and saw this interesting take on the digital workplace

http://chieftech.com.au/what-is-the-digital-workplace-mostly-harmless#comment

The ‘digital workplace’ (or whatever people call it) is far more than grouping some technology as a response. For me it’s an enabling cultural change to the way we work, manage, lead and combine work with the changing needs of our life.

If you shepherd some technology products under a banner for employees who still spend hours travelling to an office to plug into a network extension and spend one day ‘working at home’ where they complete their standard weekly powerpoint presentations, then this fails to understand what can be achived.

The digital workplace is a mindset and technolgy toolkit that enables organisations and employees to truely shape the environment where they can innovate, create and begin to gain some work / life balance that reflects the growing change of the society we live in. It will provide us the ability to be flexible and agile, enabling us to combine work with true quality of life – raising our children (rather than atching 30 minutes before bedtime) and caring for elderly relatives, having freedom to think and create in an environment create by the you rather than sat at a white desk, in a white office. 

Organisations that have the tools but still expect powerpoints, use the term ‘working at home’ and continue with the statics processes around people development and innovation (just look at the standard yearly appraisal systems) will be on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Leaders need to understand where best employees can innovate and create, employees need to develop disciplines and behaviours that understands that the physical office is perhaps the worst place to get their work complete and Intranet Managers, or whoever is respoonsible for stewardship of this toolkit need tolearn more nuturing and relationship skills rather than managing a database behind a firewall.

It’s a ‘must happen’ for organisations (particularly in the West) that will enable us to complete in a new economy. The alternative of more of the ‘corporate shoulder pads’ of the 1980s is something that will ensure organisations fail to atract the best talent and the best responses to changing markets.