He just up and did it

In her recent report, Making the Business Case for Enterprise Social Networking, Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group explains that although organizations are embracing social networking inside the enterprise, they are experiencing mixed results.

“Some organizations have deployed social-networking features with an initial enthusiastic reception, only to see these early efforts wither to just a few stalwart participants.” 

She goes on to explain the problem.

“Most companies approach enterprise social networks as a technology deployment and fail to understand that the new relationships created by enterprise social networks are the source for value creation.” 

If you are interested in social business collaboration (SBC) in the enterprise then I suggest that you have a look at her report.

In this posting I would like to begin to explore how our habits conspire to limit the degree to which we unlock the value creation potential of SBC technologies.

We all have heard of the Digital Divide between the Digital Natives and the Digital Immigrants. In his seminal article, Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Marc Prensky, said

“It’s not actually clear to me which is harder – “learning new stuff” or “learning new ways to do old stuff.” I suspect it’s the latter“.

I agree.

More recently, in Carol Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success the concepts of fixed and growth mindsets are explored, including their relationship with the ability to change and learn throughout life.

As I assume many of you have, I have seen examples of colleagues failing to use the new ways to collaborate. Some resist the use of instant messaging in favor of the more familiar email messaging. Others insist on sending documents as email attachments instead of simply providing a link. On occasions when a number of colleagues have needed to collaborate in real-time, we have limped along using only a teleconference, painfully describing to a remote participant the contents of a document projected on the screen, when a webinar would have been quick and easy to organize. Ironically, many of the same folks that complain the most about the difficulties of finding content on an SBC platform also fail to use the tools that facilitate search such as tags, likes and ratings.

The people that I refer to are intelligent, hardworking and dedicated to their profession. So, what holds them back? It appears that their ingrained habits and fixed mindset have conspired to prevent them from investing the time needed to master the new technologies and change the way that they do business. For many years as an ERP implementation consultant I have extolled the benefits of a combination of education and training when deploying technology. I believe that an educational curriculum required for successful SBC deployment must include a healthy dose of social psychology, an area which I have not recommended in the past.

If an organization employs a coordinated program of education and change management initiatives, then it is possible to change works habits and to adopt a growth mindset. It does not happen by accident. How-to training will not be enough.

I am interested to know what your organization is doing to help its Digital Immigrants succeed. Please share your comments.

I’ll be there for you

A recent challenging experience with a collaborative workshop has inspired me to think in new ways about the impact that social business collaboration (SBC) technologies can have on productivity and the quality of work.

It was not that long ago that an effort by a small team to collaborate on a task from a distance was difficult and marginally productive.  For example, attempts to use email to collaborate on an analysis of an urgent business problem suffered from a lack of timeliness and were limited in the ability to scale the number of participants effectively. Teleconferencing could be used to overcome the timeliness and scale problems but introduced new constraints on the ability to share all but the simplest content. In addition, these styles of collaboration were fairly impersonal and devoid of non-verbal communication.

The traditional definition of proximity is nearness in space, time, or relationship. In the pre-digital age this definition was probably sufficient. With the advent of SBC technologies I believe that a broader perspective of the concept of proximity, one that includes virtual nearness and sensory inputs, such as visual and audio content, is appropriate.

As a result of the introduction of low cost, high quality personal video conferencing and synchronous document editing tools, a geographically dispersed team of experts can be assembled on-demand that can share rich content and collaborate in real-time. And because the participants can see and hear each other, their interaction is far more personal. Important non-verbal communication is not lost.

The ability of an enterprise to effectively utilize social business tools is dependent upon new ways of thinking about business problems, such as finding cost effective ways to overcome the tyranny of distance. Those that cling to traditional ways of doing business will become increasingly irrelevant and unable to complete.

In addition to traditional tools, I have added some of the more recent SBC tools to the list below. They are presented in descending order of notional proximity. 

• Video conferencing
• Web meetings
• Video casting
• Teleconferencing
• Email messaging
• Blogging and micro-blogging
• Wiki documents
• Discussion forums
• Instant messaging
• Photo sharing
• Audio (pod) casting
• Text messaging

I am interested to know if your organization is investing in SBC technologies, enabling and encouraging your use of any of these tools to solve business problems, reduce costs, improve productivity or improve service delivery. 

Please share your thoughts and experiences.

Sometimes the Answer is Just Staring You in the Face

I have been thinking about the ways in which social business collaboration technologies can be used in the enterprise to facilitate achieving business objectives, such as improved customer service, improved productivity, and reduced costs. At first I thought that the challenge was to simply reengineer business processes to take advantage of these “enabling technologies”, much as has been done in the past. Now I am not so sure.

My point of reference for many years has been Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation. When I consider how ERP has helped to redefine how work is done, some of the things that come to mind include improved planning processes and tools, improved integration of business processes across functional domains and significant automation of tasks. In many ways the beauty of ERP is that it enables the enterprise to systematically decompose business problems into manageable and executable chunks.  For example, the time buckets for sales and operations planning is months and quarters, the time buckets for master scheduling is days and weeks and the time buckets for production execution is hours and days or shorter. The process allows you to seamlessly move from one level to another. From the perspective of the employee, the interaction with ERP software is fairly straightforward. There are business roles and processes to learn and procedures to follow but any one transaction is impersonal, more or less deterministic and concrete. ERP does not typically engender much of an emotional response.

What I have failed to appreciate is that the “social” in social business represents not only an opportunity to do things differently but also presents some new and very different challenges. Not everyone places the same value on sharing information or collaborating, nor feels as comfortable doing so. Social interaction is far more personal than interacting with an ERP system, much less deterministic and far more abstract. It is no surprise then that we view it as acceptable if only fifteen percent of users are contributing content in a given month. If you experienced a comparable rate of participation in an ERP setting then the business would grind to a halt.  

It may seem “as obvious as the nose on your face” that social business is very different than what has come before, but I must admit that I wasn’t seeing the extent that this is true. As I continue to develop my understanding I find myself drawing more on the practice of social science than computer science.

Years ago I took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment, a “questionnaire designed to measure psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions.” I found that the assessment provides a useful insight into personal preferences. For example, the following is a description from Wikipedia of the preferences of one the sixteen possible combinations of assessment – ENTJ:

·         E – Extraversion preferred to introversion: ENTJs often feel motivated by their interaction with people. They tend to enjoy a wide circle of acquaintances, and they gain energy in social situations (whereas introverts expend energy).

·         N – Intuition preferred to sensing: ENTJs tend to be more abstract than concrete. They focus their attention on the big picture rather than the details, and on future possibilities rather than immediate realities. They tend to focus on the final product rather than the current task.

·         T – Thinking preferred to feeling: ENTJs tend to value objective criteria above personal preference. When making decisions, they generally give more weight to logic than to social considerations.

·         J – Judgment preferred to perception: ENTJs tend to plan their activities and make decisions early. They derive a sense of control through predictability, which to perceptive types may seem limiting. ENTJs often try to predict outcomes and plan accordingly

This model, and others like it, helps to remind me how different each of our needs and preferences can be. I plan to keep this in mind as I think about social business collaboration in the enterprise.

What do you think?