I’ll ‘Co-Pilot that’

Yesterday I witnessed the first behavioural example of the power of how AI is transforming new ways of working.

In a conversation to fact check some information a colleague told me they would “co-pilot that” rather than physical browse or use the corporate search.

I have been involved in various virtual agent projects where users are directed to engage with chatbots and similar functionality but here was an example of someone’s natural behaviour now using Co-Pilot (other chatbots are available) rather than, what was traditional methods.

It got me thinking that an internal communications or people director’s new best friend needs to be those that are beginning to write the internal code and programming for these language models.

I’ve always been amazed at the lack of interest senior leaders show in the entire process of searching for and sourcing information. The old hierarchy seemed to suffice for trickling down information, but I wonder if this will hold true in the future.

With so much information and data available it’s getting harder to nail down the truth. Our defence against misinformation is steadily weakening. A generation of social media we have emerged with less resilience against deceit and untrustworthy information.

Way back in the early days of Yammer (and other internal social media platforms) organisations were caught on the hop by the power and influence of social media, both internally and externally. Big technology leaps have a massive effect on the information supply and the development of AI within organisations is no different. Those responsible for determining the algorithm for the organisation holds great power.

Who decides to write and validate this. Who holds the pen controls the access to information to an organisation’s corporate voice and memory.

For me it is fascinating not only how we deal with this from a technology perspective, from strategy, governance and implementation, but also how we deal with the new behaviours this develops.

By its nature the programming behind these features will try to understand your goals, needs, beliefs etc (dependent upon various regulations). All the current Chatbots mainly use the language of the calm oracle, being patient and understanding. Cast forward to the future are we going to see these virtual agents develop personalities based on your temperament! Will they understand your resilience or trusting nature. And how do our behaviours then change to deal with the personality types of the chatbots we are developing. It presents a fundamental difference to the ways we approach behaviours in an organisation.

It’s not about the like?

I’ve heard lots of talk recently around metrics and ROI on knowledge and collaboration tools. Many of the intranet, social media, IT, HR and marketing people I speak to are still looking for metrics that will provide some of the traditional measurements around attraction, attention and adoption, such as downloads, unique users, popular pages etc. In the new world of social, open and collaborative business should we be looking at ‘likes’, ‘favourites’ or user comments?

For me it has to be more than just a ‘like’ or thumbs up but something deeper about exploring the depth of connection to people and content that has been developed.

In many ways the measurement still produced for various stakeholder dashboards has not changed for many years. We still see the benchmark of activity as something which should be measured. The value of the activity is something which stakeholders rarely asked for.To measure the value of the relationships and transparency created by the individuals, groups and communities residing on collaborative or social platforms we still need to conduct a lot of manual digging to find measurement around such artifacts as:

• 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

• Number of relationships created by individuals and their depth – look at followers and participation in threads

• Discovery of communities – have members joined communities outside their ‘physical’ or existing network

• What collaborative activities are emerging

• What threads, replies, comments or connections contain referrers to potential collaborators

• What threads contain creative or innovative ideas

• Are members sharing personal stories and how much emotional support is provided

The various web metric packages and social business tool reports do 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 I’ve reported on numerous ROI and metrics to various groups of stakeholders. My top 3 in no particular order are:

Creating an online community platform saw a 25% increase in the production of material for clients – by providing a collaboration platform for an existing professional service group their monthly ‘physical’ were supported by an online community platform. It enabled the sourcing of wider expertise (from across the country) that resulted in a 25% increase in the production of thought leadership material to be issues to clients (you could argue if that was a good thing but that is missing the point).
IA change resulted in senior managers saving an hour per month searching for documents – by conducting user research into how audit managers worked a change of IA and navigation within their community site saw, on average, senior managers save 1 hour per month in sourcing the relevant methodology documentation required, enabling greater time to be spent on finding and minding clients
Developing the online community sees a rise in employee satisfaction scores – a large customer service group within a global organisation were given access to form their own online community. With good strategy, governance and stewardship the community thrived. In annual employee satisfaction surveys the groups average % score increased significantly (I’m sure there were many other factors involved by why spoil a good tale) and was over 20% higher than other similar customer service groups. In some areas a 1% rise in employee satisfaction equates to £2m extra revenue – so you can work out the potential benefit!

On the downside my most disappointing metrics was reporting the drop in homepage visit after an expensive rebranding exercise on our intranet homepage but that did reflect an increasing trend in the value of the homepage becoming diminished

My favourite ‘metric’ as such involves a community set up to bring two very diverse groups together, to collaborate in reporting common faults and reporting back workarounds and fixes. I am hard pressed to call it a community as neither group had any previous interaction (which was part of the issue) and I do preach that unless a conversation is already taking place in the physical world it is hard to develop this online.

One group was a skilled manual workforce based across the UK. The other group dealt with customer service and could be located across the global. With governance and steward in place the volume of activity began to increase.

When it came to the assessment report the ‘metric’ I took most pride in was not the volume of activity nor the number of cases solved but the anecdotal evidence from both sides of the fence that the visibility and transparency created through the forum had begun to create a greater appreciation from each group, an understanding of the issues each face and how to work with them.

You could then spend months evaluating how much benefit this continuing of connections could save the organisation but sometimes the user comments mean so much more than a hard metric.

Pandaemonium

I’m currently reading ‘Pandaemonium 1660-1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers’ (by Humphrey Jennings, co-founder of the Mass Observation movement of the 1930s)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pandaemonium-1660-1886-Machine-Contemporary-Observers…

It fascinates me to compare the benefits and dangers of the industrial revolution with today’s digital revolution.

Pandaemonium collects texts taken from letters, diaries, literature, scientific journals and reports of the time, and traces the development of the machine age in Britain. Covering the years between 1660 and 1886, it offers a rich tapestry of human experience, from eyewitness reports of the Luddite Riots and the Peterloo Massacre to more intimate accounts of child labour, Utopian communities, the desecration of the natural world, ground-breaking scientific experiments, and the coming of the railways. Pandomonium was originally published in 1985, and in 2012 it was the inspiration behind Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony for the London Olympic Games.

Interestingly (for me anyway) is the book is divided into 4 sections:

Observations and reports

Exploitation
Revolution
Confusion

I spend much of my time looking at how organisations introduce and sustain knowledge sharing, collaboration and communication technology and associated behaviours.

If we get adoption and adaption right these are disruptive technologies that can assist in changing the nature of the way colleagues engage, communicate, share, learn, nurture and collaborate with each other.

If we get adoption and adaption wrong organisations, and the people / networks within them, go through the trials and pains articulated in the chapter titles above (quick reality check – I’m not comparing the suffering of the industrial revolution with that of an employee who can’t work out the # function on their enterprise social network).

We have seen the observations and reports of how a more open and transparent environment can enhance both employees and organisations.

We are at the exploitation stage where there is a mad rush to social without the analysis or change management processes needed to create the value.

We will soon have the revolution as organisations and employees fight, struggle, resist or forge ahead in the use and value of this new way of working. Many organisations will embrace, while many will fail to get value and asset it’s the technology and / or culture that is the issue.

For those that forge ahead confusion will be created if we lose interest in the on-going stewardship of these tools and behaviours and at worst we see employees burdened with another deafening channel in an already noisy eco-system or technology.

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.

Why do so many change management initiatives fail?

Came across this piece from Forrester looking at why so many change management initiatives fail.

http://blogs.forrester.com/claire_schooley/12-12-30-why_do_so_many_change_management_initiatives_fail

I would highly recommend reading the Managing Transition essay by William Bridges. If a business transformation or change project was on the agenda I sense Bridges 3 phases of transition (Ending, Neutral Zone and the New Beginning) would well within most organisations, particularly some of the proposed early adopters. .

3 phases of Transition

Transition is split in three phases, which overlap. Ending, Neutral Zone, and the New Beginning.

These 3 phases are not sequential and at one given time, departments (generally this wouldn’t work well with communities) may be in more than one phase. This depends on how advanced different teams are in the process of transition. Some may already starting the new beginning while others are in the Neutral Zone for instance.

It is not a problem for the department to be in a mix state in terms of transition phases just as long as leaders have a clear understanding of who is at what stage.

Ending

· Understand and accept with empathy that teams will lose many things

· Give people didn’t have the chance to express their loss

· Identify what people will lose according to their role, team position etc …

· Understand what it means for the people and clearly communicate this understanding

· Identify ways to compensate for people loss

· Communicate on a regular basis.

· Clearly communicate on what is over and why it is necessary for the organisation strategy

· Do not denigrate the previous situation

Neutral Zone

· Productivity might go down

· People may feel overwhelmed and anxious

· People may get polarized

· Recommendations during that phase :

· Openly communicate around the unstable nature of this phase

· Build a Transition Monitoring Team.

· Encourage experimentation

· Ensure failures are not punished

· Train the teams so they can feel more comfortable with the change.

Beginning

· 4 P : Purpose, Picture, Plan et Part.

o The Purpose is the answer to the question of the departments justification.

o The Picture is critical to illustrate in a clear and straight-forward way the vision behind the change. It contributes to a much faster acceptation and change ownership process of by the teams.

o The Plan shows that leaders have been thing about the transition process

o The Part : involve as many people as possible to that they engage with the change process. Communication must concentrate on selling the problem.

· Be consistent. Sending conflicting messages during the Beginning phase is the best way to foster confusion and to stay in Neutral Zone.

· Look for quick wins : it is very important for the change initiative to get early in the project some quick wins, from small tasks..

· Symbolize the new cultural identity. With methods, processes, visuals etc … that gives a physical and visible aspect to the change.

· Celebrate success. Just like we need to spend time and acknowledge the loss (Endings) it is critical to celebrate results of what’s starting

Intranet Professionals

Been following this LinkedIn discussion on Intranet Professionals with interest as it’s something I and other intranet focused people have been talking about (with little action on my part) for some time.

http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Why-arent-there-more-Intranet-113656.S.206734508?view=&srchtype=discussedNews&gid=113656&item=206734508&type=member&trk=eml-anet_dig-b-pop_ttl-hdp&ut=3yZGP7ilLlJ5A1

I believe there are two major issues that are barriers to seeing greater number of ‘intranet professionals’ or defining this as a skill set.

Firstly the lack of a recognised qualification still hinders the role. HR, Marketing, Communications and these types of roles have all formed, for want of a better word, institutes that begin to define qualifications. It’s something I have pondered upon for many years (in 2010 we held the Intranet Career Path discussion at IBF 24) but I still struggle to define what we would include within this type of qualification. The demands of linking ‘people to people’ and ‘people to content’ internally changes so rapidly that developing modules would be hard. I also sense that intranet professionals are more ‘artisans’ than ‘workers’ as they are on the innovative edge of changing the way organisations work. It’s true that many intranet managers need to conduct many roles not just within the intranet field, but even in large organisations that have dedicated intranet teams it would be brave to suggest they are not innovative or creative in the practice of changing the way organisations work. Unfortunately I sense this may be to the detriment of the profession as many organisations still struggle in how they organise and departmentalise innovation.

Secondly the career path is still not mapped out. If someone was looking to become a CKO, CIO, CTO (even CDO – Chief Digital Officer) they would need a lot more on their CV than just ‘intranet’. For other areas this may not be the case. While it’s not a burden it certainly would struggle to get you a seat at the top table by just running successful intranet programmes.

No plan and no chance

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.

If you need to choose between email or ‘activity streams’ email still wins

Nice to see one of the social networking vendors looking at some filtering or context capabilities within ‘activity streams’

http://www.gofuzed.com/blog/enterprise-social-networking-collaboration-evolution-of-activity-streams-into-context-streams/

Working with organisations one of the biggest barriers to the acceptance of social networking tools is the unfiltered activity stream. Once thought of as a key function (and for many it still is) the constant stream of unrelated updates, activities and content is totally unsuitable for the way many people work. In the current market given a choice between email or an activity stream employees will still prefer email.

I recently worked with a global travel organisation and spend time with many of their remote workforce in observing their daily tasks. Unless you are regularly tied to a screen (whether desktop, tablet or mobile) the ability to follow and make sense of unfiltered activity streams becomes an increasing burden. You could argue that withg appropriate training we can guide people to use these streams more effectively but few companies will provide that training – similar to few companies providing training on how to use email effectively. Users then result in use many of the ‘inbox’ features within the social tool, however, we begin to lose initiative once the ‘inbox’ starts to become less effective tool than their enterprise application email client.

Until more content, filtering and understanding is provided the reliance on email will still prevail despite the presence of social business and networking tools within many companies.

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

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.

Mark Tilbury – digital workplace specialist

Working smarter in the digital workplace

Tag: intranetmanagement