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.

Facebook at Work or O365

Anyone who is involved in discussions with colleagues over Facebook at Work (I imagine many of you are the same ones that deal with the Slack discussions) here is an informative article around progress on the product.

http://www.cmswire.com/digital-workplace/a-facebook-at-work-progress-report-whats-changed-and-where-it-fits/?utm_source=cmswire.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cm&utm_content=MW-160914-1000&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT0dObU9UTmxOakF6WW1aayIsInQiOiJ5bFwvWXJlajBLdVhjU1FSWXBCVTFPSlhYY0RqekVhMDRob0N1TUZUMkxKdm1haU55Ymt4RGN3bHZzNmY3d3IzbHF5dEpkODN1cXNUT0NMWDhSRU9FTWQ0TzhwM1wvekpEWWV1YVN4SUZ0U2QwPSJ9

I echo the authors comments around building relationships and community as a driving force for new ways of and Facebook at Work does have nice features.

However, no communities or relationships within an organisation sit in isolation from the way work gets done or linked to its strategy, processes, workflows, campaigns or initiatives. You could spend time integrating Facebook at Work with search but eventually you will need to leave Facebook at Work to deal with the outcomes of the communities and relationships.

The benefit of O365 is the increasingly ‘seamless integration’ with other capabilities that may be needed as a result of the community outcomes. For example, files uploaded on Yammer will be hosted on SharePoint. Conversation on Yammer could bleed into a Skype Teams call. Videos displayed on Yammer will play through Stream. There is linkage to Office apps, O365 Groups etc. All activity will be understood and surfaced via Delve. The need to leave O365 becomes increasingly unlikely within the collaborative process.

The compelling narrative behind O365 will be the seamless integration with the way people collaborate, not just building community and relationships, but in group work, file sharing, communicating and other collaborative activities.

One things I strongly agree with thought is “It’s not the tool but the people and programming that make enterprise social a success.”

My bias comes from a people centric perspective (rather than document or process centric) so I’ll be interested to hear other folks opinions, especially if you have been involved in a Facebook at Work trial.

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.

What goes where?

Employees are faced with a range of tools to communicate, collaboration, share and network. Simply deploying new tools just confuses an already overworked organisation.

To expect many to understand what tool should be used in which context is foolish. One of the most important documents you can produce in the early days of a collaboration tool deployment is guidance to participants about what goes where.

This could be dressed up as a content strategy document, outlining where implicit and explicit knowledge / content should be stored or a straightforward guide on which tool to use when. Just map out some business scenarios and give people ‘guidance’ on which tool can be used to accomplish the task most efficiently.

Get this document into the environment early and it will save you lots of time answering questions from confused new adopters of the collaboration platform.

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.

From ‘Social’ to ‘Open’

Love the blog posts from Luis Suarez and this one is no exception as he challenges the terminology of using ‘social business’ and also where the next level of sponsorship will come for the tools and methodologies used to make the workplace a more ‘social’ (‘open’) place to work.

http://www.elsua.net/2013/01/08/social-business-in-2013-an-opportunity-open-business/

I agree ‘social’ still struggles to hit the right targets. Terms such as ‘social intranets’ and ‘social business’ may be used within the industry but to the people that sign the cheques and deploy the campaigns within the business it sits on the shelf with other terms such as ‘user generated content’ and ‘semantic web’ – people just don’t care how they are bracketed.

I like the term ‘open business’ and steers closely to my belief that the tools that enable greater engagement, collaboration and knowledge sharing within organisations that will lead to greater innovation for the company and a more democratic and inspiring place for employees to work and develop work / life balance. My only concern is the Risk and Compliance people in organisations may raise a concern if they hear of becoming an ‘open business’.

In terms of sponsor these type of tools currently IT and CIO (if there is one) have ownership or responsibility for much of the deployment. A savvy CIO will see how they can become a perfect fit for them to go beyond IT, step up, and take an enterprise-wide view.

A CFO may also become a good sponsor. Now, this is less obvious. Why get the numbers person on board here? Well, collaboration is first and foremost about creating economic value; it’s a strategic search for good cross-company projects. Many CFOs also oversee the strategy department, so why not add cross-company strategic activities to the portfolio?

I would steer away from Internal Communication, Brand or Marketing if you are looking for the social (open) tools to untap hidden expertise, knowledge or innovation. In most companies the more traditional Marketing and Communication roles have other priorities and agendas that don’t sit well with this type of tool. For example, Marketing may be extremely pleased if the social tool is fully brand compliant and has all the latest corporate messages. But that may turn users off in drove as the goal will be to create relationships and networks that create new value.

The head of HR should be a perfect fit for new streams of sponsorship and potential adoption campaigns. Good collaboration requires the right incentives, performance evaluations, promotion criteria, and people development. So it’s only natural for the head of HR to take on the role; that entails going beyond HR issues and working with others, such as the CIO, to craft a holistic solution to disengaged employees.

New roles emerging as we bridge the digital divide

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.

Digital must support the physical

Love this piece from RSA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Tilbury – digital workplace specialist

Working smarter in the digital workplace

Tag: knowledge