Tag: Collaboration

Nuture the community

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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.

Made to measure

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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

 

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.

Stopping the stream from flooding

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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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

Resurrection of Alchemists

Love this piece by Braco Dimitrijevic from 2006 (currently showing at the Tate Modern – London) which expresses the dangers of crushing the innovation and creativity of ‘artist’s (we can replace artists with knowledge workers in the corporate environment).

The great gold rush to a social organisation should be tempered with a vision of what the future could look like. If everyone within an organisation becomes ‘social’ are we running a risk of conversation and sharing overload or do we just need to adjust the way we work to learn how to consume what’s relevant? Ideas welcome.

A more visual digital world

Is it me or are larger graphics making a comeback and is Pinterest leading the way?

Pinterest is a step in an ever growing visual direction. There is definitely a need to step away from heavy text laden social and knowledge platforms in the age of smartphones and tablets. People want to be captivated by images and I think Pinterest fills the niche.

Even top news sites like the BBC have moved towards a more graphical display to signpost content.  Strangely enough Facebook have started to limit image size (more memory size than pixel size – is this a sign that Facebook is no longer ahead of the curve!).

At the moment I am working with some young artists and they love what Pinterest offers. Whether large organisations can derive benefit from it is another matter.

Much of my work is with organisations internal applications and there is a shift toward imagery across some areas such as intranet homepages. When intranets and external websites first entered the arena we saw large graphics used to make impacts on news items or links to key content. As more and more content piled onto sites the  trend then went to reduction of graphics and more links. Maybe we are all looking for a simpler doorway to content and relationships. Rather than bombard users with links, text and documents  the trend may be back to’ less is more’ but more relevant content with large, bold graphics as a signpost for them?

I must confess I always thought something like audioboo would take off as people became fed up with text and documents. Maybe Pinterest is the visual answer as we enter a more colourful and visually pleasing digital world.