The Open Government Challenge

Sometimes worlds collide and it is a good thing. Recently, my interest in enterprise collaboration has intersected with my engagement in local civic affairs and my exposure to the principles and practices of Open Government.

After several years of working at it, I have become quite proficient using social collaboration tools as integral part of how I do work - how I collaborate with colleagues and share knowledge in my professional life. So much so that I have come to take the use of social technologies for granted.

In my personal life I have been involved for the past two years in the successful efforts to reunite the two Princeton municipalities, The Borough of Princeton and Princeton Township. As of this past new year's day we are one community with one government. I was active in the grass roots effort to pass the consolidation ballot measure and then after the measure passed I was a resident volunteer on the information technology subcommittee of the Transition Task Force (TTF).

The TTF and its subcommittees were comprised of resident volunteers, elected officials, municipal administrators and their staff. The members of the TTF and the subcommittees collaborated to collect and analyze data, consider alternatives and make recommendations to the elected officials.

As I reflect on my experience on the TTF I must say that I believe that it was an excellent example of what I have come to understand to be the principles of Open Government. It was transparent, participatory, and collaborative. But the practices were not up to the Open Government standards. We did not utilize social technologies, such as a collaboration platform or a collaborative document management capability to collaborate. We were very reliant on face-to-face meetings.  Multiple versions of working documents had to be manually combined and reconciled.

We were committed to transparency and openness, all of the meetings notices were published in advance and the meetings were open to public attendance. However as a group we lacked the requisite knowledge and experience to employ social technologies effectively in practice. Despite the fact that all of the volunteers were highly skilled in their areas of expertise, we did not have a critical mass of savvy social technology users. Part of the challenge was also due to the time constraints imposed on the effort by the aggressive timeline from public approval to required transition implementation. There simply was not enough time to educate the group and establish these capabilities upfront in the process.

As I go forward I intend to expand my interest in enterprise collaboration to include the growing Open Government movement. I hope to put these principles into practice in my community. How about you?

Working Out Loud

Happy New Year!

Just over two years ago +Bryce Williams described a new type of behavior at work that is enabled by social collaboration tools. On his blog he posited that "Working Out Loud" = Observable Work + Narrating Your Work.

Image: http://johnstepper.com/2012/05/26/working-out-loud-your-personal-content-strategy/

Social media platforms enable "many to many" communications in a way that was not previously possible. And while there is great value in sharing content with your network of connections after it has been created, there is even more value to be gained by collaborating to create content in first place. Whether it be by capturing comments from a close colleague or serendipitous feedback from an acquaintance, leveraging the knowledge, skills and experience of the network to create value comes by creating together.

But the opportunity to exploit the leverage available to us is dependent upon our willingness to change the way in which we work, to expose our work to our colleagues and to invite others to contribute.

I have been experimenting with Working Out Loud as I perform my duties as an adviser to my client and as a leader on my project and in our consulting organization. To get started, I have made a few adjustments in the way in which I work, including:

• Establishing open groups on our internal social business collaboration platform for the team that I lead on my client project as well as other work related teams to which I belong,
• Inviting my direct team members, as well as extended team members, to join the groups,
• Posting a number of reference materials to seed the groups with material,
• Customizing the group spaces using available widgets to provide a continuous flow of fresh links to relevant internal and external content via tags and keyword searches,
• Updating my status on the platform routinely to reflect topics that I am working on,
• Publishing drafts of documents under development, with a statement of intent and structure, and inviting colleagues to comment and update as needed,
• Referring to content on the group page during meetings using an overhead projector and a web-meeting / teleconference,
• Actively sending a link to content on the group page in lieu of sending copies of content as an attachment to an email,
• Actively engaging in discussions and responding to requests for help,
• Publishing a blog, both internally and externally, related to my area of interest - enterprise collaboration,
• Religiously tagging my content to improve its search relevance.

I am pleased with the results so far. In particular, recently a few of my colleagues have started Working Out Loud as well.

Have you tried to do things differently, to Work Out Loud? Please let me know what you think or what your experiences have been so far.

Social is Dead, Long Live Social

Most enthusiasts have long recognized that the adoption of social business is about much more than just "Facebook for the Enterprise". It is about doing work differently, such as small teams collaborating to create content, not just individuals sharing content after the fact. Nonetheless, the similarities in the social technologies between social media sites, such as Facebook and Google+ and social business platforms such as Jive are striking and many. They provide many of the same social tools, including; connections and lists, status updates and activity streams, groups and discussions, photo and video sharing, messaging, and events.

When social media first came to enterprises as social business it was no surprise that it arrived in a familiar form, as a standalone platform. As is often the case with disruptive innovations, the market incumbents are generally not the innovators. SAP for example, long a market leader in enterprise applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM), have only recently announced SAP® Jam, their SuccessFactors based enterprise social software offering.

Despite their late arrival in the market, I believe that if SAP delivers on the promise of integrating social capabilities into their enterprise applications then they may find that their timing is well placed to capitalize upon continued social business adoption. While the early adopters, such as marketers, may have been willing to take a chance on the then emerging social technologies, the late adopters, such as supply chain managers, will expect a more proven and mature solution before they make the leap.

Dion Hinchcliffe provides an interesting take on social business adoption in his posting The leading indicators of social business maturity in 2012

As both the market and the technologies continue to evolve I believe that we will look back on the end of 2012 as the point when industry recognized that social business is now the new way of doing business. Businesses have always been, and will always be, inherently social. Social technologies may enable businesses to do work differently, but they are not an end in themselves. Instead, social technologies must be tightly integrated with the enterprise applications that enable businesses to serve their customers and manage their products, supply chains and resources.

I have come to appreciate more and more as time goes by that context is meaning. The challenge of a standalone social business platform is that it exists external to the flow of work and thus the business context. For a discussion or document in a standalone platform to have meaning the context must be re-established. In contrast, if the social technologies are integrated directly into the enterprise application then the context of discussion of a customer's problem or a manufacturing challenge is seamlessly maintained.

Over time I think that the integrated approach will prevail. What do you think?            

The evidence is building

Late last month the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) published an excellent and important report The Social Economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies. If you have an interest in topics such as Social Technologies, Social Business or Enterprise Collaboration then I suggest that you take the time to read it.

The report is full of interesting statistics and analysis. It provides a survey of the evolution of social technologies, describes how social technologies create value within and across industries, reviews how social technologies create value in five industry sectors, discusses the implications of social technologies and concludes with their perspective on the future of the social economy.

McKinsey's estimates on the potential for annual value creation (between $900 billion and $.1.3 trillion) and knowledge worker productivity improvement (from 20 to 25%) are staggering. Even the skeptics must take note of these numbers.

As enterprise adoption rates accelerate and spread from leading to lagging industries we will find what many already know to be true - deploying the technology is the easier part. The bigger challenges include restructuring the organization away from rigid top-down hierarchies, creating a culture that is more open and engaging and re-designing business process to incorporate social collaboration practices and leverage social technologies.

Changing how work is done is hard work. As a friend and colleague of mine is wont to say when we discuss business transformation and the deployment of technology - "the soft stuff is the hard stuff".

If you read the report then let me know what you think. Do you agree with their analysis and estimates? I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

The People You Should Know

If you are a user of a social platform such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+ then undoubtedly you are familiar with People You May Know, the tools that are designed to help you to expand your personal social network to reflect your existing offline, real world network of relationships.

As described in The Facebook Blog: People You May Know

People You May Know looks at, among other things, your current friend list and their friends, your education info and your work info. If you are already friends on Facebook with some people from your last job, for example, you may find some more of your former coworkers (assuming they are visible to you in search) among the "People You May Know' suggestions.

I was fortunate to have recently attended a presentation by John McCarthy of Forrester Research, Inc. based upon a research report that he co-authored, “Mobile Is The New Face of Engagement” released February 13, 2012.  In his talk John asserted that “The perfect storm of technology change centered around mobile will drive significant technology and organizational change”. His perfect storm included a set of technology innovations including cloud, [big data] analytics, mobile apps, smart devices and social [networking]. He went on to provide examples to back up his claim.
 

I found his argument to be convincing, which set me to thinking.

While discovering the people that I may know may be interesting, discovering the people that I should know could be extremely valuable, particularly if a recommendation were made at the right time and place.

I have been user of social media for several years now. At first I had accessed social media sites almost exclusively from a desktop in an office or home office. It was rare, if ever, that I would spend any significant amount of time accessing these sites from a laptop while on-the-go. However, since I acquired a smartphone, and more recently a tablet, my usage pattern has shifted dramatically in favor of mobile access.

Like many smartphone users my “relationship” with my mobile devices is much more personal than it ever was with my desktop and laptop computers. I’m sure that there are several reasons for this, but the one that I would like to focus on now is the usage context. When I am working at my desk my real world experience is disconnected physically and emotionally from the abstract cyber world that social media inhabits. I believe that this disconnect underlies the potential to accumulate “social friends” that are not really friends at all. When I am mobile, moving about in the real world, my smartphone and often my tablet are my companions. They help me to navigate, find and experience the things that I need, when and where I need them. They are very much connected to and a part of my reality.

When I am stationary and working at my desktop the best that any social media site can do is recommend the people that I may know. It lacks the critical information, time and place, which are required to determine the proximity of people to each other, so it cannot effectively help me to meet the people that I should know. But when I am mobile my device knows where I am and where I’m going. Increasingly, using social data resident in the cloud and synthesized via analytical tools, it knows what I am doing and the things that I am interested in, so a mobile app can make a relevant and timely recommendation.

In doing research for this post I came across the relatively new social discovery and geo-location app Highlight which “helps you know when friends and other interesting people are nearby”. I have not used the app long enough to draw any conclusions, but I expect that over time it, or others like it, will be able to help me to find the people that I should know.

I believe that enterprise collaboration will be greatly facilitated by the extension of social business tools to the mobile realm.

What do you think? How are you preparing for the opportunities and demands created by mobile and related technologies?

Reengineering your Social Business

I have mentioned in the past that my professional background lies in the logistics and supply chain domains. Over the years I have been focused on helping clients to meet their business objectives by adopting the principles and practices of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and implementing ERP software. In many cases these ERP initiatives were either preceded by or included significant business process reengineering (BPR) and business transformation efforts which were critical to enabling the ERP effort and delivering businessvalue.  As I investigate the emerging principles and practices of Social Business and develop my thoughts on Enterprise Collaboration I find myself considering the challenges and opportunities from the perspective of BPR.

Much of the current thinking on Social Business is oriented around generic use cases, such as “Ask a Colleague”, “Find an Expert” or “Crowdsourcing”. Given that Social Business is fundamentally about people, networks of relationships, communication and collaboration, it makes great sense to consider things that way. However I think that the key to deriving business value from becoming a Social Business is through changing the way that the enterprise organizes and performs work. This is why my thoughts are drawn back towards BPR.

At first I thought I could simply have a look at a particular process, and the functions and activities that compose that process, and spot the places where I could plug-in one or another Social Business use case that is relevant. As I described in an earlier posting, The Happy Path, there are in fact a number of processes where a use case, such as “Find an Expert”, can be easily employed to help to quickly and efficiently resolve the exceptions that occur during normal operations. An enterprise embarking upon a Social Business journey could analyze their end-to-end business processes and find a number of places where use cases could provide value quickly and with a minimum of effort. It is my opinion that these opportunities would represent only the “low hanging fruit”.

In order to assess and identify the full extent of the opportunities I believe that we need to carefully re-examine each and every function in the business process. I contend that our day-to-day familiarity with “how things are done” obscures the way in which a relative lack of information sub-optimizes the design and capability of the process. For example, once a production operation has been designed and deployed successfully we often take for granted the efficiency and effectiveness of the design. Prior to the availability of social business collaboration (SBC) tools there were no practical means to obtain input in a timely manner from all of the many experts throughout the enterprise. As a result valuable insights into tools and techniques elsewhere would not be leveraged. However, if the manufacturing engineer were to share their work using status updates or by tagging content then it could be visible across the enterprise and stimulate engagement. Well maintained employee profiles can be used to quickly identify resources from around the globe that have the relevant knowledge, skills and experience for the task at hand. Better yet, rather than working alone and then sharing their work, experts can use SBC tools to collaborate synchronously on the creation of work products in the first place.

Is there a limit to the Social Business reengineering opportunities? I don’t think so. Any work that is done by people and which requires information should be considered.

What do you think? Is there a limit to the processes and functions that should be considered? Is there a better approach than business process reengineering?

Please share your thoughts.

Social Sales and Operations Planning

In a post on his blog, Pretzel Logic, Sameer Patel put forward an argument Why Exception Handling Should be the Rule . His discussion of exceptions in the post aligns nicely with my recent blog post, The Happy Path.

Patel's model of the three Modes of Work - Process, Project and Exceptions provides a convenient way to analyze enterprise activities.

Whereas The Happy Path discussed Exceptions, in this post I will describe an example from the Process mode that illustrates the opportunities for enterprise collaboration through the integration of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and social business collaboration (SBC) technology.
Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) is one of the central ERP business processes.  In short, the process integrates the inputs from enterprise organizations and aims to set an agreed rate of production that satisfies the demand (sales) plan and takes into consideration inventory plans.  Although the process is typically managed by an individual, it is inherently collaborative in nature. The input and insights from sales, marketing, customer service, product management, operations, engineering and finance are combined to establish the sales and operations plans.

The Sales & Operations Planning Cycle

Imagine the potential to improve the quality of the planning process outcomes by expanding its reach to include inputs directly from the folks on the front lines of the enterprise. For example, customer service representatives can provide real-time intelligence on product use and acceptance before it shows up in the sales history. Sales representatives may have information about competitors and the steps they are taking to counter your moves in the marketplace.

I hope you agree that there are valuable insights from across the enterprise that through the integration of SBC technologies can be leveraged in ERP processes such as sales and operations planning.