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.

DARPA does Social Product Development

I believe that the application of social business collaboration (SBC) tools and practices will revolutionize enterprise business processes.  So I read with great interest the report Pentagon Pushes Crowdsourced Manufacturing in the New York Times on April 5, 2012 which describes a significant initiative to apply SBC to the Product Development process – from idea to manufacturing.

In the piece they quote LTC Nathan Wiedenman, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program manager:

“… The goal, he said, is to “democratize the design process.”

They go on to quote Joseph Salvo, manager of the business integration technologies lab at G.E. Research:

“This is about changing the paradigm so you can rapidly design and manufacture complex systems of all kinds,”

In the graphic that accompanied the report we can see the prominent role played by the “crowdsourcing platform” and collaboration technologies, such as wikis and forums, in their strategy.

It is clear to me that DARPA is embracing Social Product Development as means to achieve their goal “to cut the design-to-production cycle to two to four years”. As a taxpayer and SBC advocate I plan to watch this program closely.

Social Procure-to-Pay (P2P)

I have been involved with business process analysis and design throughout my career, as a logistics and supply chain practitioner and as management consultant assisting clients with business transformation initiatives. More recently I have taken an interest in the adoption of social business collaboration (SBC) tools by businesses and other types of enterprises. In particular I am interested in the potential for changing business processes, practices and organizational structures to take advantage the opportunities created by SBC technologies.

The Procure-to-Pay (P2P) business process is one of the core end-to-end processes of almost every enterprise. As depicted below, the process usually begins with a requirement to procure goods or services and is completed with payment to the supplier. In many organizations this process is enabled by an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

In a discrete manufacturing environment, where ERP systems were first deployed, the requirements are driven by a production schedule and determined by a bill of materials (BOM). The process is repetitive and often highly automated. In most cases, with perhaps the exception of approval workflow and exception management processes, there is restricted scope for social collaboration. The opportunities for social collaboration are upstream in the master data management, product lifecycle management and supplier relationship management processes.

However in most organizations the P2P process also supports procurement scenarios that are not repetitive and the requirements are not as clearly defined. In these cases there are real opportunities to change the way that work is done to exploit the capabilities of SBC tools.

For example if I have a need that could be satisfied by a range of different products then it would be useful to publish a description of my need to my social network, soliciting comments on the “best tool for the job”. This approach, often called crowdsourcing, is common practice in personal social networks, but current ERP solutions cannot easily support it. The ERP assumes that the requestor knows exactly what they want when they create the purchase requisition. In addition, if I share my needs with the network there will be situations when my needs can be met from existing unused inventories, much of which is not visible to the ERP system once it has been financially expensed.

These are but two examples of how the existing P2P process can be changed to take advantage of the capabilities of SBC tools. There are many more opportunities in this and other ERP business processes.

Today’s ERP systems carry with them the legacy of their past – their logical model of the business process is based upon the documents that manually flowed from function to function in the days before automation. The purchase requisition form feeds the purchase order, which in turn is acted upon to recognize the goods receipt. The supplier’s invoice is matched with the purchase order and the goods receipt document before payment is made. Each of these electronic documents existed as a paper document prior to ERP systems. In some cases the paper documents are still produced and filed.

In contrast, and in recognition of how knowledge work is done, the emerging SBC tools are people centric, not document centric. It will be interesting to see how the ERP software vendors choose to integrate SBC tools into their offerings. Can they bridge the people and document centric divides successfully?

Let me know what you think about the prospects for “Social Procure-to-Pay”.

Share more, Learn more

The other day a colleague of mine, Simon Scullion, posted a blog Balancing the use of our time which was built upon a quote from a post by Julien Smith, How to Change Your Life: An Epic, 5,000-Word Guide to Getting What You Want

the way your time should be spent is largely like a pyramid, with a wide base of learning, with a smaller level of acting on top of it, which is directed by the learning, and then on top of that, an even smaller level of writing about it. If you begin to live your life differently than the pyramid should be built, it becomes unbalanced and topples over

Simon re-interpreted the words “acting” and “writing” as “doing” and “sharing” and produced the image at left:

While I agree with their premise, the image that came to my mind was more of a cycle, where learning enables doing, doing enables sharing and sharing enables more learning.

At first it may seem counter intuitive – how does my sharing enable more learning?

It has been my experience that when I share my thoughts I have learned a great deal from the comments and feedback that follow. In some cases I have been challenged to explain my ideas more clearly or completely. In other cases I have had to respond to holes or inconsistencies in my argument. While I may not always agree with the comments, sharing my thoughts certainly has stimulated me to learn more. Sharing can be the driver of a virtuous cycle.

In their recent book Race Against The Machine; How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, authors Brynjolfsson and McAfee describe the accelerating rate of technology innovation and how it relates to the demand for labor.  

The New York Times have an excellent graphic that shows how the rate that technologies spread in our society has accelerated over the course of the last one hundred plus years.

   

One of the implications of this phenomenon is that the shelf-life of the body of knowledge for a particular technology is growing ever shorter. As a result what you have learned in the past becomes increasingly less relevant.

So, if I build upon Julien and Simon’s thinking and the observations made by Brynjolfsson and McAfee and the New York Times, then I conclude that we need to change the balance of our time spent learning, doing and sharing in favor of sharing and learning. We must leverage increased sharing to accelerate our learning and enable us to continue to perform the work and deliver the services that are in demand.

Is your organization encouraging you to share more? Are you changing the balance of your time spent doing, learning and sharing?

Please share your thoughts, I want to learn more! 

Internalizing Positive Externalities

In my last blog post, He just up and did it, I speculated about the potential to use employee education as a means to overcome the resistance of ingrained habits and a fixed mindset that have conspired to prevent potential users of social business collaboration (SBC) tools from investing the time needed to master the new technologies, change the way that they do business and share their valuable content.

A comment about that post from one of my colleagues, Mark Masterson, raised a good point:  

Because one thing you're overlooking here is that there is a cost/benefit analysis implicit in every single worker exposed to the potential change. For some, the cost (amount of effort, degree of education, psychology, whatever) will exceed any imaginable benefit. Every time.

I think that it is worth exploring the economic concept of Externality to see if it can help us to crack the cost/benefit nut.

In standard economic theory an externality occurs when a third-party is affected by a transaction between a buyer and a seller. As a result, the price of exchange does not reflect the full cost of producing or consuming the good or service. The classic example used to illustrate this concept is that the price of goods produced in a factory that emits air pollutants as a by-product of the production process does not reflect the costs to society of the negative effects from that pollution. As a result the prices of the goods are set too low and the goods are over-consumed.

In order to address the problem of the failure of the pricing mechanism there are public policy remedies that can be applied, such as a pollution tax. In theory, the funds collected from the tax could be used to mitigate the effects of the pollution, thus reducing the harm to society. An alternative approach is to establish regulations that require the producer to “internalize” the third-party costs by either paying for remediation or prevention, such as installing pollution control devices. As you can imagine establishing a fair remedy can be very challenging – it is not possible to precisely determine the actual external costs.

Externalities need not always be negative, they can be positive too – the third-party benefits instead of being harmed. However, when positive externalities exist the goods or services will be relatively under-consumed rather than over-consumed.  It has been said that public funding of education is justified by the positive externalities generated by education - the benefit to society of a more productive and innovative workforce.

At this point you may be wondering what all this economic theory has to do with the choices being made by employees and their cost/benefit calculations.

One of the key benefits that can be enabled by deploying SBC tools is access to the Network Effect. As the number of users of the network increases the value to its members, and the enterprise as a whole, increases at an accelerated rate. The network effect is an example of a positive externality scenario.

It is reasonable then to consider what policies can be employed to internalize the positive externalities – to make them part of the employee’s cost/benefit calculation. Should an organization create an incentive for individuals to share content with the network, such as rewards or recognition programs? At the very least, shouldn’t the organization incorporate a discussion of externalities and the network effect into their education curriculum? Can we use these or other approaches to bring the employee cost/benefit calculations into alignment? There may not be a perfect solution to the cost/benefit problem but there are things that can be done.

Before you say “not so fast Henry”, I am aware that there are challenges and potential side effects of creating incentives for sharing. Since it is not possible to determine the actual value of sharing content, then how do you determine the correct level of incentive? Additionally, some employees may game the system for their own benefit, sharing more content just to qualify for incentives. This behavior would degrade the average quality of content and effectively impose a tax on their colleagues. 

It is my experience that social networks have evolved cultural responses to the “over-share” problem, with active policing by the members of those that violate the group norms. Failing that there are means to “turn down the volume” on repeat offenders. I have also found that SBC tools, such as content ratings and “likes”, can be used to highlight the valuable content, allowing it to “bubble up” and separate it from the mundane. The usage pattern for SBC tools is different from earlier collaboration tools. While the norm for reviewing your email inbox may require reading each message, this is not true for an SBC activity stream. I rely on keyword tags and “top liked” widgets to keep me informed of valuable content. I certainly don’t review every document, discussion or blog that passes by in my activity stream.

What is your organization doing to address the challenges of motivating employees to share their valuable content with the enterprise? Have you tried any of the approaches mentioned or perhaps something else? 

I would be pleased to hear what you think.

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?

Every part has a story

Early in my career I was a material planner in the field service logistics organization of a large manufacturer and distributor of computers. I was responsible for planning for field returns, demand, supply (purchases and repairs) and inventory balances at the international logistics operations (ILO) facility, which was the central distribution center (DC) in the spare parts supply network. In those days the planning was mostly manual, with the assistance of spreadsheets. We knew the history of demand, but not much else. We didn't know the rate of consumption of the parts by service engineers and we didn't know the inventory levels in the supply locations below the central DC level. As you can imagine, managing the balance between service levels and inventory investment was quite the challenge given the lack of completeness, accuracy and timeliness of information.

In the years since the capabilities of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) applications have improved dramatically. Today's material planners can see the history of consumption, demand and returns. They can see inventory balances across the supply network and have tools to enable planning distribution and re-distribution as needed. They employ sophisticated forecasting algorithms and incorporate additional information, such as the size of the installed base of equipment being supported, into the development of plans. The planner can even identify non-recurring demands, such as pipeline fill or trade show requirements, so they can be excluded from the demand history.

Even with all this information, material planning is still very much more of an art than a science. As one of my colleagues used to say – "Every part has a story". What has been missing is access to that story. Why is the failure rate of a part increasing - have the usage conditions changed or is it being put to a new and different use? Why are we seeing so many returns for a part – are the stocking level strategies being changed out in the field or is another part being used in its place? The list of questions is endless.

Until very recently the planner had no means to conduct a dialogue with other interested and informed people, such as the branch logisticians or field service engineers, to learn that part's story. The increasing use of social business collaboration (SBC) platforms in the enterprise, and the integration of those SBC tools with existing ERP and SCM applications will enable the planner to fundamentally change how they perform their work. They will start their day reviewing the comments in their activity stream before they open their planning workbooks. Instead of reacting to events after-the-fact, they will be able to anticipate and plan for them in advance. By connecting the planner with their customers in the field the behaviors that stem from uncertainty and exacerbate problems, such as increasing local safety stock level in response to a (temporary) disruption in supply from an external supplier, can be avoided.

The role of the material planner will begin to resemble that of the conductor of an orchestra. They will lead and manage the discussions via the SBC platform and coordinate the adjustment of plans in the ERP / SCM accordingly. They will be able to improve customer service levels while simultaneously reducing inventory investment.

The ability to access previously inaccessible information is fundamentally changing the nature of work. A key resource constraint is being removed. I believe that there is a compelling business case for incorporating social business collaboration tools into enterprise business processes.

What do you think? Is this happening in your enterprise? Your thoughts are very much appreciated.

The beginning of the end of Serendipity

Almost everyone has experienced serendipity at some point in their lives. As a culture we have attached a romantic connotation to it, as evidenced by the romantic comedy of the same name. So it is with no great satisfaction that I suggest that we have now reached the beginning of the end of serendipity.

According to Wikipedia Serendipity means:

a "happy accident" or "pleasant surprise"; specifically, the accident of finding something good or useful without looking for it.

Consider for a moment the following scenario. I am working late in my office with a colleague, planning for an upcoming project. We are discussing possible candidates for one of the critical technical roles. At just that moment the perfect candidate, a colleague that neither of us knows directly, walks by on their way out of the building. Miraculously, my iPad notifies me just-in-time for me to jump out of my chair and chase them down.

How did this happen?

No, it was not one of the happy accidents of The Three Princes of Serendip.

The convergence of four emerging technologies, including; social, local, mobile, big data (analytics), enabled by the cloud, is rapidly changing the information landscape. As I suggested in my earlier posting, Too Much Buzz?, it may soon be the case that all that is known can be easily accessed on demand by anyone, anywhere, at any time – for free.

In fact, it was a context engine that allowed me to capitalize on the fortuitous arrival of the perfect candidate. It knows about me and my needs - my location, the project that I am working on and the roles that I need to fill. It also knows possible ways to meet my needs, including my network of colleagues and their network of connections, the skills and expertise of this extended network, and their real-time location.

All of this information is currently available or will be in the near future. Social platforms, such as Google+ or LinkedIn provide information about skills, networks and projects. Local and mobile tools, such as foursquare or Google Latitude on a smartphone, can provide real-time location information. A software agent could use big data capabilities to leverage this information and establish the context needed to alert me to act at just the right time.

Yesterday's announcement by Google of Search, plus Your World is a big step in this direction.

Before you bemoan the end of serendipity, consider the number of times when events failed to conspire to create a "happy accident" and you were left wanting.

Let me know what you think. I can't wait for a few pleasant surprises.

The context engine

I recently read a terrific book about translation, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, that has inspired me to think about social business collaboration (SBC) in a new way. Amongst the wide range of topics covered by the author, David Bellos, is the relationship of words, context and meaning. He states something that we often take for granted "… For translation, and for us all, meaning is context." David goes on to say:

"The expression "One double macchiato to go" – an expression I utter most days, around 8 a.m. – means what it means when uttered in a coffee shop by a customer to a barista. The situation (the coffee shop) and the participants (customer and barista) are indispensable, inseparable parts of the meaning of the utterance. Imagine saying the same thing at 2 a.m., in bed, to your partner. … The words would be the same, but the meaning of their being said would be entirely different."

I believe that it is possible to relate David's assertion on the relationship of context and meaning to the world of information technology and social business collaboration with my own assertion that context is the bridge between data and information.

In my blog posting, Too Much Buzz?, I referred to a piece on Social Media that appeared in The Economist on December 31, 2011. They concluded the article with the following:

"As communication grows ever easier, the important thing is detecting whispers of useful information in a howling hurricane of noise. For speakers, the new world will be expensive. Companies will have to invest in ever more channels to capture the same number of ears. For listeners, it will be baffling. Everyone will need better filters—editors, analysts, middle managers and so on—to help them extract meaning from the blizzard of buzz."

There has been talk of late of the convergence of three separate but related emerging technologies – Social, Local and Mobile (SoLoMo). It is my contention that a fourth component, Big Data, will join with the other three to form "SoLoMoDat". By combining contextual information, such as who, what, where, when, why and how, SoLoMoDat will provide the basis for a context engine that will enable us to easily "…extract meaning from the blizzard of buzz".

We are already seeing commercial examples of this type of capability. Consider the value generated by intelligent recommendations made by services such as Pandora, Netflix, Amazon, Google Translate and Eureqa. If the context engine knows all about me – my skills, my interests, my projects, and my network of colleagues (and their skills etc.) then how far away is the capability to consider context when generating a social business activity stream that is meaningful to me?

For example, if I have the task of planning a project to solve a particular customer's business problem, then wouldn't a context engine be able to recommend the people to reach out to that have solved this problem before? My stream would become much more relevant and collaboration would become more agile and effective.

This may sound like fantasy, but I think that given the accelerating rate of technological advancement we will be working with these types of tools in a few short years if not months.

The real question is not the technology, it is the human element. Are you ready to do things differently?

 

 

It's Deja vu all over again

[with apologies to Yogi Berra]

When I read the discussions about the challenges of deriving business benefits from Social Business initiatives I am reminded of some of the root causes of failures with ERP initiatives in the past:

• Lack of Executive Management Engagement / Accountability for Project Success
• Unclear Vision and Objectives (Inadequate Business Case)
• Inadequate or Wrong Resources Assigned to the Program
• Weak Program Governance and Project Management
• Failure to Understand or Commit to Data Quality
• Inadequate Process Development / Redesign
• Inadequate Organizational Change and Risk Management Programs
• Competing or Conflicting Business Priorities
• Inadequate Education / Training Programs
• Technology-driven focus with minimal business involvement

As my colleague Mike Gallagher has reminded clients in Executive Education sessions, "People, not Software Solutions, are the Key to Success".

I realize that implementing ERP is not the same as implementing Social Business. The former is formal, structured and hierarchical and the latter is informal, relatively unstructured and networked. I believe that the lessons learned apply nonetheless.

Are you ready to do things differently?

Too Much Buzz?

In a recent article about Social Media, Too Much Buzz, The Economist newspaper takes a somewhat skeptical and definitely cautionary tone.  The sub-title for the piece, Social media provides huge opportunities, but will bring huge problems, sums it up nicely.  

They go on to say:

Cyber-enthusiasts gush about the way social media help entrepreneurs. They have a point: disruptive technologies reconfigure old businesses and create new ones. Facebook could let companies aim their ads more accurately. Firms are starting to use internal social-networking tools, such as Yammer and Chatter, to encourage collaboration, discover talent and cut down on pointless e-mails. Youngsters are happy to embrace it, but older managers may be less keen. The use of social media within companies could be quite disruptive to traditional management techniques, particularly in strongly hierarchical firms.

While I agree with much that they have to say, I think that they may have missed the bigger point.

To fully appreciate the long-term implications of emerging social business technologies I believe that it is necessary to step outside of our current understanding of how work is performed. Consider instead a world in which all that is known can be easily accessed on demand by anyone, anywhere, at any time – for free.  If you lived in such a world then how would you go about your work?

Since in this world there is no information friction, the emphasis would be less on efforts to create, sustain and exploit a monopoly on specific information (intellectual property) and more on enhancing the capability of the enterprise to employ range of information in new and different ways to solve business problems. This is a world where work is organized less to focus on invention, which is about the creation of new information and more to focus on fostering innovation, which is about the use of information.  The former is often accomplished through a small group of elite resources, while the latter is accomplished through enabling and engaging the entire enterprise. Success in this world will be much more dependent upon the ability to connect, communicate and collaborate. Success will come from thousands of people working together to leverage the full extent of their collective experience to understand problems and create solutions.

In an absolute sense this idealized world will not come to pass; the movement of information will never be completely frictionless.  But if you consider the accelerating rate of adoption of the SoLoMoDat technologies (Social, Local, Mobile and Big Data) something like it is rapidly approaching. In my opinion these technologies, which have emerged somewhat independently, will be combined to enable new and very different ways of doing business.

As The Economist claims, these new technologies will in fact provide huge opportunities.  But it is only the firms that combine the use of the new technologies with new ways of doing business, innovating and collaborating, that will succeed in this new world.  

The Soft Stuff is the Hard Stuff

A colleague of mine correctly points out that Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is really about a codified set of principles, policies, processes and practices and not about software. Enterprise software may enable ERP processes, but implementing Enterprise software does not ipso facto deliver the business transformation or disciplines required to truly embrace ERP. There is no software silver bullet. That is not to say that an organization that implements Enterprise software cannot derive benefit from the effort. Many of the ERP processes that are transactional (execution) in nature, such as customer order processing, procurement and production execution, can be enhanced by the integration and best practices delivered by Enterprise software. The planning processes of ERP, such as Sales and Operations Planning (SOP) and Master Scheduling can be enhanced to a degree by Enterprise software, but the real business benefits will only be realized if the enterprise makes the organizational changes and adopts the policies and practices required for ERP.

I have been assisting clients with ERP initiatives for sixteen years. While the scope of the effort has varied from client to client, most have opted for an integrated approach that includes both their logistics planning and execution processes. For example, many of my industrial clients have deployed master scheduling, material requirements planning and capacity planning processes alongside order processing, procurement and production.

It has long troubled me that a minority of my clients has attempted to implement SOP, which is one of the most valuable and powerful ERP processes. I believe that this is largely because the business transformation aspects of the SOP process are more critical to the success of the deployment than the software aspects. SOP is in many ways a "social" process. Many firms lack a cultural framework to enable the cross functional collaboration that is a pre-requisite to SOP. The ability of all the parties involved, including Production, Finance and Sales and Marketing to agree on the "one plan" is predicated upon the active leadership of senior management and willingness to compromise. For all too many organizations, particularly those that see software as a silver bullet, this "soft stuff" really is the "hard stuff."

In recent years I have been following the emergence of social business collaboration (SBC) tools with great interest. I have since refined my point of view. Perhaps the SOP collaboration that has been lacking in the past was partly due to a lack of capabilities. It is possible that this barrier to the effective deployment of SOP can be overcome through the use of SBC tools. I can foresee critical components of the SOP process, such as aggregate demand and supply planning and the pre-SOP meeting being enabled by a collaboration layer that is fed by the underlying Enterprise applications. For example, the demand planning process starts with a forecast and then incorporates the inputs from a variety of stakeholders before a demand plan is generated. A marketing or product manager could subscribe to the demand planning data in his activity stream or dashboard and provide feedback and inputs to the demand planner with a minimum of effort.

The introduction of more technology alone will not solve the problems of an unreformed ERP initiative. However, if the deployment of SBC tools is combined with an effective business transformation initiative then the likelihood of achieving the full extent of the business benefits from an ERP implementation will be greatly enhanced.

From OWS to the Enterprise

The folks engaged in the “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) movement have used the catch phrase “We are the 99%” to emphasize the income inequality that has arisen in the US in recent decades, as the income of the top 1% households accelerated, while it stagnated or declined for the majority of Americans.  According to a recent Congressional Budget Office report the share of total income that flowed to the top 1% increased to 60% by 2007, up from 50% in 1979.

While the popular movement focuses mostly on the top 1%, there is a broader perspective on the increasing polarization of wages and employment that is relevant for the Enterprise and the path forward as we adjust to new technologies and the new economic realities.

In their recent e-book, Race Against the Machine, authors McAfee and Brynjolfsson describe “How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity and Irreversible Transforming Employment and the Economy”.  It is an excellent book and a must read for anyone involved in information technology or interested in the economy.

In short, the book seeks to “reconcile two important facts. 1) Technology continues to progress rapidly. In fact, the past decade has seen the fastest productivity growth since the 1960s, but 2) median wages and employment have both stagnated, leaving millions of people worse off than before.”

For example, in the following chart we can see that real wage growth in recent decades (1980-2005) is lower than the post-War decades (1950-1980) for each of six occupation groups.  However, in the more recent data we also see that the real returns to the more skilled occupations are increasing while the returns to the less skilled occupations stagnate or decline.

Source: The Growth of Low Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market, Autor and Dorn, June 2011.

It is well known that as the nation endured the transformation from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy in the 19^th century, more jobs were created than lost and employment opportunities increased for skilled and semi-skilled labor alike. The authors argue that in our most recent transformation from the industrial to the information age, digital technologies have eliminated jobs faster than enterprises have been able to adapt.  The majority of the resulting impact on wages and employment has been felt in the low to middle range of skills through the automation of routine tasks. 

As we go forward and digital technologies continue to improve we should expect to see even the more abstract work of skilled professionals become subject to automation.  The authors cite Google’s self-driving car and IBM’s Watson computer as examples and harbingers of what is to come.  As was the case with the mighty John Henry, men may win the battle against the machine for a time, but we may not win the war.

But the authors do not end on a sour note.  Instead they restate the problem from “Race Against the Machine” to” Race With the Machine”

“The John Henry legend shows us that, in many contexts, humans will eventually lose the head-to-head race against the machine. But the broader lesson of the first Industrial Revolution is more like the Indy 500 than John Henry: economic progress comes from constant innovation in which people race with the machines. Humans and machines collaborate together in a race to produce more, to capture markets, and to beat other teams of humans and machines.”

All of which brings me to my point.  We must take a very hard look at how we collaborate in the Enterprise.  We are in a race, but not against the machines.  Our race is with our competitors.  The factors driving the polarization of employment and wages will reach our shores before we know it.  We simply can’t stand by as our competitors out-innovate, out-deliver and out-compete us.

Is SBC this decade's ERP?

It is the deterministic nature of transformational work, such as manufacturing fabrication or assembly, which allows a logical business process model to closely approximate the work performed in the real world.  The work to be done, the methods to be employed, the resources to be consumed all can be determined and modeled.  The development first of Materials Requirements Planning (MRP) and then later Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP II) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) processes reflect this tight relationship between the real world and the logical world.  At the same time information technology capabilities increased dramatically and costs were reduced by several orders of magnitude.  It is no surprise then that software applications emerged to enable and automate MRP, MRP II and ERP planning and execution processes.

During the period of evolution from MRP to ERP the scope of the business processes incorporated into the model expanded and with it the type of work and class of users expanded.  Transactional (clerical) work, such as order processing, was also codified and enabled by software.  In fact, much of the real world work of transactional workers, such as generating orders forms, stuffing envelopes, sending and receiving mail and filing forms has been automated or eliminated.

Over time many organizations took advantage of the efficiencies gained by refining the roles and the nature of the work performed.  For example, the role of a buyer in the purchasing department has shifted from order placing to source selection and negotiation.  The nature of the new work is less transactional and more intersocial and knowledge oriented.  Knowledge work, however, is much less deterministic than either transformational or transactional work.  There are methodologies, best practices and software applications that can be used to guide and enable the knowledge worker, but the tight correlation between how the real work is done and how the business processes model reflects that work has been lost.  Knowledge work is more abstract and less tangible than either transformational or transactional work.

With the more recent advent of specialized applications, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) that go beyond the scope of traditional ERP processes, many in industry have adopted more general terms like Enterprise Applications or Enterprise Systems in place of ERP software.  While these applications are exceeding useful to the knowledge worker, enabling the manipulation of large amounts of data in service of improving performance, they fail to capture the social component of knowledge work.  To me they represent an extension of the capabilities beyond ERP, but not a new paradigm that addresses the challenges of enabling knowledge work.

This begs my question to the reader – Are the emerging social business collaboration (SBC) tools, such as Jive’s SBS, Salesforce.com’s Chatter and SAP's StreamWork, this decade’s Enterprise equivalent of ERP?

The Happy Path

I have been involved with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and its predecessors (MRP and MRP II) throughout my professional career, first as a practitioner and later as an solution architect and implementer. In recent years I have also developed an interest in the emergence and adoption of Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) technologies such as the Jive social business software platform. Lately I have been thinking about how E2.0 technologies will change enterprise business processes, with a particular focus on the integration of E2.0 and ERP.

One of the key ERP business processes is Purchasing, a variation of which I have depicted below. If the master data is accurate and complete, and the employees are well trained and equipped and the suppliers cooperate then all should go well. The goods should be requested, ordered, received, inspected, putaway and available for use, without delay. 

In the language of software and ERP we have just described The Happy Path

The challenge is that for even the best run organizations things are not always so happy. There are non-trivial exceptions and problems that arise that need to be dealt with quickly and cost effectively. In some cases the problem scenarios can be anticipated and policies and procedures can be put in place to deal with them. Unfortunately, not all types of problems can be anticipated nor is it cost effective to invest in positioning expert resources throughout the enterprise just-in-case.

In the scenario presented below a problem is found during the inspection process. The inspector would have collected some information, such as a physical measurement, from a sample of the goods received and compared the values with the product specifications. If the difference was greater than the tolerances allowed then the goods would be rejected. In this case two things would happen. A quality notification message or workflow would be generated and sent to the appropriate (pre-determined) expert and the goods would be set aside pending analysis and final disposition.

No matter how much skill and knowledge the particular local expert possesses there will be cases when they will be stumped. Ultimately the goods could be accepted (perhaps under a quality waiver), returned to the vendor, reworked or simply scrapped. Regardless of the disposition there would be delays and higher costs.

So how does E2.0 fit into this scenario?

Imagine an organization with a range of experts scattered around the world. In a typical manufacturing enterprise there would be people in a variety of roles, such as component engineers, buyers, quality inspectors, manufacturing engineers, and production artisans that have knowledge and expertise that is relevant to assessing and resolving non-conformance's. Perhaps the problem has been previously encountered in a sister manufacturing plant and they have a quick rework procedure that they can share. Maybe the specifications and tolerances are too tight for this particular application and the product can be used "as-is" without risk. 

Whatever the outcome social enabled processes can help to resolve exceptions and issues quicker and at a lower cost through enhanced enterprise collaboration. There are real opportunities to integrate social business software solutions and practices with existing enterprise processes and solutions, delivering real business value to the enterprise.