Cathexis

Getting to Collaboration: The Executive and the Evangalist

This afternoon's Enterprise 2.0 sessions in the main hall were two good bookends to success in collaboration.

First, Andrew McAfee moderated a panel, querying Art Fritzson, VP and Walton Smith, Senior Associate at Booz Allen in a terrific session on "The Secret Sauce of Enterprise 2.0 Success at Booz Allen Hamilton."

Walt presented the details of the Booz Allen Hamilton "Hello" community at the Boston E 2.0 conference in June.  Walt and his community team have created a dynamic, engaged community that is widely adopted, actively used, and  not only connects people day to day, but also functions as a rapid on-boarding platform for new employees.

But it was Art Fritzson that was especially impressive as a senior executive with exceptional insight into the value of collaboration.  His daily remit is not Enterprise 2.0 per se (he runs the defense IT arm of their business), but he championed, participated, protected and engaged in this process.   

As he stated, "this transformation has been about moving the conversations to an online environment," instead of keeping them fractured and siloed in email, document management and business process applications.

The success of adoption, according to Art, is not about generational issues, but about relevance and learned behaviour.   While a younger generation of worker may be initially more fluent in the use of collaborative tools, any employee grasps the experience and the tools as soon as the relevance and usefulness is understood.

"Hello" , the collaborative environment at Booz Allen Hamilton, now exposes, captures, links, and fosters faster, more meaningful contributions and expertise into projects and relationships.   And Walton pointed out, that their 360 interview process doesn't just include feedback from co-workers, clients and managers, but an assessment of what intellectual capital they are contributing back to the organization by their participation in the community.

But all good success stories also require that "bottom's up" champion; that E 2.0 pioneer that enlists, cajoles, pushes, inspires, reassures, in short does 120 laps around the company to get everyone on board with the project of changing a company to a community.   

Three years ago, I was at Enterprise 2.0 when Andrew McAfee call for more user experiences and case studies.   There were lots of technologies to talk about and companies to present them, but only a smattering of real users.

Today's Evangelist of the Year award was a wonderful step forward, acknowledging the tremendous efforts it takes not only to implement new technologies, but the unique qualities it takes to change a culture.   The inaugural winner of this year is Claire Flanagan of CSC, who championed and led a successful company wide effort that yielded broad adoption across the entire company.
 

Moving to collaboration - moving the culture at Penn State

Sometimes the seemingly small story that has the biggest impact.   Bevin Hernandez story of Penn State's outreach organization let us in on some important perspectives about moving an organization to collaboration.  Bevin presented today at the end of a morning tutorial session at the first San Francisco Enterprise 2.0 conference.

The first part of the session, co-chaired by the capable Oliver Marks and his colleague Sameer Patel (now new business partners) was focused on identifying key elements to the process of "selling" Enterprise 2.0 to executives.   These were classic strategic business project selling and proposal techniques adapted for Enterprise 2.0; helpful, but not, perhaps, groundbreaking.

The Penn State story, however, was compelling.  Bevin and her colleagues were tasked with not only implementing a collaboration platform, but breaking through a culture that was fractured, protective of turf, deeply compartmentalized and unengaged.   (not so unusual, no?).     

The first part of the process, according to Bevin, was moving solidly into the Web 2.0 realm...no small incremental steps, or as Bevin quoted Nicholas Negroponte - "Incrementalism is the enemy of innovation."

To this end, the Penn State team chose ThoughtFarmer as their platform.   In a way, that was the easy part; its' ease of use and ease of deployment was apparently a factor. 

Here's some things they did to move the culture as well.

Building from a small team to a network effect:  Bevin and two other colleagues focused their communications and outreach effort from a tight team of three people and built their "network effect" towards change from that point.   

Tantalizing and engaging communications:  As the launch of the collaboration solution approached, they created intriguing communications pieces that focused on emphasizing the people, talents and background of the collaboration community.

Barn-raisings and volunteer recruitments:  The Penn State collaboration team reached out to the entire organization recruiting for needed skills and resources that could be allocated on a spot basis to help load content and expand outreach efforts.   This created buy-in and commitment early on, and established a second level of a core group that could help facilitate participation as the community evolved.

Let it Be:  For Bevin and the Penn State team it was as much about the technical solution as moving the culture from "Me to We" and allowing the collaboration environment to develop more organically than the typical business process application rollout.  They encouraged and supported a sense of trust, openness, ease of participation. 

Low Tech But Effective:  The collaboration implementation team created a professional development series of printed briefings about effective ways to use and become comfortable with collaboration and Web 2.0 technologies.  

In the early days of Enterprise 2.0, (a mere two years ago), stories of engagement centered around cowboy tales of a cadre of bleeding edge technology movers and shakers implementing at the outer rims of the organization.  Now, as Enterprise 2.0 moves across the chasm, there's more discussion about deploying Enterprise 2.0 solutions as another enterprise application, with all the attendant issues of integration, interoperability, switching costs, etc.    What's often missing is recommendations on how to move the culture into collaboration.

Bevin Hernandez' Penn State story was a refreshing tale of engaging people directly with a gentle but focused approach at transforming behaviour and practices as a key part of implementing E 2.0 in their organizations.

Context is Crucial - Team Workspaces and the next "Wave"

Oliver Marks wrote a thoughtful piece in his Collaboration 2.0 blog last week.    He highlights the dangers of the burnout isolated remote workers experience, and his piece validates some key points about the need for online business practice to incorporate a sense of context and connectedness.

While the percentage of knowledge workers not physically present on site in company offices has increased, the assumption is often that the VPN connection to the corporate Intranet email system is sufficient to enable the individual to participate fully in a work setting.  What is missing, however, is the sense of immediacy, interactivity and, most importantly context visibility.     

It's not just the dis-location, psychologically speaking of the individual knowledge worker, but team productivity and management effectiveness that is impaired.   Without a sense that one can assess quickly the adapting and changing context of a group working on a project, countless hours are spent trying to catch up to the current flow of conversation and important action items amongst a working group.

Online team workspaces are too often simply used as repositories for file sharing, but not used to embed a continuous sense flow of work nor of group interactivity to support that work.

Collaborative team solutions have evolved recently to move beyond the co-authoring, shared work product capabilities of wikis or online project solutions by adding the interactivity of social networking in order to bring that sense of group context into the workflow.   From MS Sharepoint to Socialtext one can see the evolution to include more participatory capabilities.     

The limitations of relying relying on an asynchronous communication mechanism such as email for communication immediacy, light workflow, and team collaboration for many years was offset by the ability of physically co-located workers to "smooth the edges" and "reinforce the context," by dropping by their co-workers cubicles, or huddling at the water cooler.   Selective use of distribution lists and forwarding in email is also a great tool for command and control management styles and information hoarders.   

What knowledge workers need, whether on-site or remote, is consistency of visibility and interactivity with their co-workers or team members.  It is in that context that they can make decisions and judgements that are relevant to the currents of the project, so that they can contribute optimally to a projects assets.

Much is often made of a generational gap between an older generation of worker hidebound by email and younger generation who is fully versed in the online participatory behaviours.   This generational gap, however, is an obfuscation.  The real issue is that the old tools often bog down everybody.    

Google Wave, for instance is an attempt drive past the email model of group interaction and move straight into a completely contextual and interactive model of accomplishing group work.    In this context there is no such thing as a "remote worker."

Businss Benefits of Web 2.0 - Global Survey Results from McKinsey

Business implementations of Web 2.0 (or Enterprise 2.0) have been underway long enough for the benefits and adoption examples to bear some analytical fruit, which is what McKinsey has just documented in their latest report "How companies are benefitting from Web 2.0: McKinsey Global Survey Results."

The good news is that there are validations points in all aspects of business operations; internal collaboration, touchpoints with customers, and with partners and suppliers.   Close to 1700 executives were surveyed by McKinsey, and 69 percent indicated measurable business benefits.   

Organizations are clearing noting the same benefits of Web 2.0 collaboration both within the organization and with their partners; accelerating access to knowledge, speeding up their ability to tap into intellectual capital embodied in their own staff, and reducing cost of communications (meeting logistics, travel).

Companies are also seeing more value in their marketing efforts with enhanced results in awareness, conversion and loyalty, while Web 2.0 integration in customer support operations has documented benefits in customer satisfaction and lower support costs.

The important news - Web 2.0 is now an established part of business operations, and it's adoption and integration into businesses and organizations has had enough longevity and an extensive enough footprint to be measured and evaluated.

Enterprise 2.0 2009 - Pivot Moment

This year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference shows a marked evolution from two years ago.  

Andrew McAfee had written his important paper on the topic “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” in April 2006.  The E2.0 conference of 2007 was talking theory with precious few real life examples to discuss, and so the event was technology and vendor heavy.

Good news.   This year the story is that there are stories - real life examples of companies and organizations implementing the technologies, and engaging their workers, constituents and partners.   From aerospace to the military, education to manufacturers, it’s now clear that there’s experience in what works.     

The U.S. Army uses uses it’s Milspace to support a community of 30,000.   company commanders who use their online collaboration platform to quickly turn to fellow commanders for ideas and knowledge.   Status updates are focused on learning as an “What are you learning today.”    Milspace makes full use of multi-media with video Leadercasts and Gaming features for learning.   For the U.S. Army this kind of collaboration speeds time to competence in a rapidly changing environment.

For the Department of Education in Minnesota, online collaboration connects teachers with the business community in their state to match up teacher needs in STEM education with community members who can offer resources of talent and donations. 

Karen Klinzing, Asst. Commissioner of the Department of Education in Minnesota indicates that STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) is vital to the economic well-being in their state.   It is estimated that Minnesota will have an increased of 20-33% in scientific and technical occupations in ten years, but there is a trend, so the DOE are looking for creative ways to help augment the teaching of these skills in the public schools.

The Minnesota DOE launched an online community getSTEM-MN.com in February of this year to match teacher needs in STEM education with potential donors in the business community in Minnesota.   A teacher can request expertise, donations and other support allowing business community members to align their capabilities easily with teacher and school needs.   

The getSTEM brand has already taken off.   Ms. Klinzing mentioned that within 24 hours of the launch of the site, she was contacted by three other states to launch similar efforts.   In the coming months, the getSTEM project will launch in several other states taking the same approach.

Booz Allen Hamilton, winner of the Innovator of the Year Award at this year's conference, their online community for employees hello.bah.com not only keeps current employees connected, but is now the vital component in on-boarding new employees.   According to Walton Smith, of BAH, with 5,000 new employees expected to be hired this year, hello.bah.com is now a vital element of on-boarding and orienting new employees.

Boston Bound - Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2009

It’s summer and time to head for Boston for the annual Enterprise 2.0 Conference. I'm looking forward to catching up with colleagues and getting a perspective of what's evolving.

When I attended in 2007, Andrew McAfee called for real life stories about engagements and implementations.   Enterprise 2.0 had been defined but not fully realized.

It’s exciting, then, to see that there are panels and speakers that represent even more engagements as well as the technology advancements at this year’s Enterprise 2.0.

I’m looking forward to panels like Community and Social Network Sites: Think Adoption, Not Deployment, with a panel that includes Genetech, Sabre Holdings, and Harvard University

The Enterprise in Action track has a a real diversity of companies and organizations talking about their own experiences.  

One panel of particular interest in this vein is Real World Customer Edition: Stories About Social Computing Deployments.    In my own work, I’ve been looking at how social computing can help education system leaders engage in education innovation.   Karen Klinzing, Assistant Commissioner for Education for Minnesota is one of the speakers on this panel discussing how social computing tools are being used to promote STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math).     

I’m going to ask some of these panelists not only how they create collaborative work environments internal to their enterprises, but how they use these mechanisms to engage with partners and customers and other key stakeholders.   Hopefully, we’ll see a fuller story developing along these lines.

Enterprise 2.0: The Conference, is a place to hear about innovation in solutions and technology, but it’s also a place to hear perspectives as organizations implement the technologies and foster the process of organizational change.   From Volvo, to Lockheed Martin, Harvard University, Genetech, and the U.S. Army, this year’s conference looks to be showcasing the practical roadmaps as well as the vision.

Collaboration: Why It Needs to Be a Real Business Practice

U.S. business executives often talk about the need to embrace "collaboration," as a means to being more competitive and innovative,  with collaboration viewed as an accelerator to both characteristics in the global marketplace.

But why?   Well, we should probably follow the money.

In the past 25 to 30 years, the aggregate value of stock market has steadily and pronouncedly shifted to an asset base of "intangibles." Ultimately that means the value resides with the talent and skills of the knowledge worker and their capacity to engage in knowledge creation and value with colleagues, partners and customers.   And that knowledge and value creation is the result of what is termed "tacit interactions." 

In an Accenture report published in 2004, Future Value: The $7 Trillion Challenge, notes that those intangible assets have "supplanted tangible assets as the key value drivers in the economy."    

That transition in asset characteristic is shown in the Accenture graphic from Jurgen H. Daum's 2002 book, "Intangible Assets and Value Creation."

Despite any impact of the 2008 downturn on specific numbers, this trend remains the nature of asset value and value creation in the 21st century.

While advancements in communications and Web 2.0 collaboration technology and tools are major enablers of collaboration practice, and there's lots of discussion about those technologies, what's often missing is the concomitant discussion about the actual, disciplined practice of collaboration.  

One of the best articles on the practice of collaboration is a Harvard Business Review article entitled Collaboration Rules by Philip Evans and Bob Wolf.  And while the article was published a few years ago, it recommendations often remain the exception rather than the rule in organizations today.

Here are Evans and Wolf's Collaboration Rules, highlighted in a mind map.

Technology underpins many aspects of this model, but just as importantly, the Evans and Wolf "rules" speak to culture, behavior and practice.   I'll be talking about each one of these areas in upcoming posts.

Collaboration and the Gig Economy

According to Tina Brown in a January Daily Beast article, we’re all doing knowledge piece work, and have entered the age of “The Gig Economy,” where college-educated professionals & knowledge workers find themselves working “Gigs” instead of jobs – short-term, project-based efforts, for fee.    No health benefits, no stock plans, no 401ks.    These folks are trying to stitch together enough “Gigs” to make the “Nut” which, according to Brown, is the amount of “Gigwork” income it takes to make the middle class income formerly acquired with that one-steady-job-with-benefits.

Tina Brown’s world view doesn’t seem as shiny as Dan Pink’s, the one he called out in his 2001 book entitled “Free Agent Nation.”   Back then Pink viewed the diaspora of the formerly fully employed as an army composed of the  “independent worker, tech savvy, self-reliant, path-charting, micropreneur.”    But this more upbeat view was on the pivot point of the Dot.com boom implosion into the Dot.bom bust.  A free-wheeling Free Agent Nation was a tech-age version of the traveling guild worker of the Middle Ages: skilled, self-sufficient, and joining a community of other guilders for interesting work.  In the Middle Ages they’d get together and say build a Gothic cathedral.  Now, according to Brown they're doing spot projects among multiple clients.  

What’s interesting about Brown’s commentary is her observations of the challenges for both companies or large organizations and the peripatetic,  Gig-worker as they try to coordinate, collaborate and communicate among those projects that’s been “pieced” out from companies.

According to Brown, organizations and companies may enjoy of the cost benefits of Gig-workers who have no benefits, but their organizational behavior still expects to conduct meetings and interact along a model where people are physically present.  

Gig-workers have to communicate and coordinate multiple projects across multiple “Gigs”   being nimble, agile, as they connect and collaborate electronically with each client.     Gig-workers are creating online guilds as they create communities to identify work, and highlight their portfolios.

Companies themselves are challenged trying to track and connect with this new class of knowledge worker, while the “Gigsters” spend time, money and effort trying to keep consistent collaboration with their clients.     Many companies are trying to foster better collaboration tools and practice within their organizations, but in this model, we’ll also have to have Enterprise 2.0 with a twist of Gigging,  please.

 

Virtual World Conference: The Intel User Community Case Study

A small gem at the Virtual World Conference last week was Paul Steinberg’s presentation of the genesis and launch of the Intel user community in Second Life. Humorous and helpful, Paul, of Intel's Software Solutions Group, readily shared the peaks and valleys of getting an online user community going in a virtual world.

Like all good online user communities it starts with a good vision, and as Paul articulated “What Intel should be doing is convincing the public that they are the real artists of society by going into details of what actually is involved in creating a new microprosscor, ….”

With executive blessing and a committed resource, the Intel project went through a couple of learning curves. The first was getting the right “look and feel” of the Second Life location. Initial design points from external designers ranged from something out of a 1950s Sci Fi flick, to a large confectionary concoction run amok.  But the once the clean and open space was designed, then the project was launched last spring, (two launches to ensure global time zone coverage).

Here’s some observations from Paul.

On the virtual locale: Focus on interaction and community, not cluttered look and feel.

Keep cool: Initial skepticism from some participants, voiced in the blogosphere, should be acknowledged but not over-reacted to. The community settles in pretty quickly. Especially if the mission of the community is clear and above board. 

Not just outreach, but in-reach: Once the project started, all sorts of internal Intel connections also emerged, creating a whole new network of people with new connections not formerly apparent through the usual forms of corporate communications. Internal participants were truly cross-functional not just engineers, but marketers, many of whom were already on Second Life or other virtual worlds that the Paul didn’t know existed.

Virtual Worlds are optimum for interaction and engagement. Don’t over develop content for a venue like Second Life.  Websites are good for that. The Intel venue is now hosting a calendar of regular events for the next quarter; at least 2-3 month. He also described a coding contest for customized bots that was very successful and turned into an all-day event.

Stay true to your community: In Intel's case it means reaching out to technical people on technical terms and not do marketing.  Some of the presentations Intel organizes are by noted technologists external to the company.

Keep the corporate PR people (politely) at bay. Dialogues in a user community will range from positive to negative, but it should be able to play out within the community without too much intervention.

In short, the Intel community Second Life presence has a clear mission, keeps its focus on a technical community, emphasizes interaction and engagement, and with Paul’s willingness to experiment and evaluate, evolves with the needs of the community, both internal and external to Intel. Cool.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Getting to Collaboration – Virtually and in 3D

3D applications and virtual worlds are moving dramatically into the enterprise and not just in the realm of e-learning.  Virtual worlds can enhance collaborative work inside the enterprise and deliver value to customers in the marketplace.

This week, I attended the Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose, and  Wednesday’s  enterprise panel on “Applications That Work” , moderated by Linda Ban of IBM’s 3D Internet and Digital Convergence group, assured the audience that the enterprise virtual world was not synonymous with Second Life.  Business needs for virtual private worlds with security and access control were acknowledged.

There’s a tendency to use the terms virtual worlds and 3D applications interchangeably. 3D applications are often employed to do group exercises and practice (i.e., disaster and emergency responder scenarios, visually rich training experience on complex tools and instruments).

Virtual worlds are 3D, visually immersive collaborative environments, with strong elements of online social networks to foster interactivity and informal learning, and often in a way that is persistent and sustained beyond a vocational training session.

Virtual world communities of interest and interaction can be part of a spectrum of tools to enable distributed project management. Teams in a virtual world, meeting in a 3D project or situation room,  readily access  unified communications mechanisms (IM, VoiP, Chat), or and can integrate document and application sharing functions into the 3D experience.   

Proton Media’s initial core competency in e-learning has evolved to include, ProtoSphere, a 3D environment for project collaboration and informal learning.  A hosted or on-premise offering, depending on the customer’s preference, Protosphere’s live, virtual 3D world, also has social networking and collaborative tools such as blogs and wikis, simulation capabilities, VoIP and text chat.

VT&T’s capability wasn’t 3D, per se, but a 2D representation of a meeting room, with whiteboards and screens for application and document sharing, a “file cabinet” in the corner, that contained all the team’s project artifacts (documents, project plans). VT&T’s strength was in its robust integration with typical corporate communications and applications environments, making the  project room an easy extension of existing infrastructure

While Multiverse’ platform play is primarily focused on the online game and 3D Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMOG) it’s capability is readily used for non-game virtual worlds. Their customer, Accelerate was demonstrating a virtual employee “on-boarding” application where a new employee receives their initial orientation.

IBM had a strong presence at this conference, with a large booth, and presenting or moderating several panels.   According to Wayne Smith, a consulting specialist with the 3D group, IBM is very active in helping customers identify the right virtual world technology for use internally and for customer engagement.

 

*Second Life Brand Map

Wayne demonstrated the Deutsche Bank presence on Second Life, where DB engages their customers in visualizing some of their real-world goals and then develop a financial plan to realize those goals.  Deutsche Bank, according to Smith, has kiosks in their brick-and-mortar settings for customers to access the Second Life-delivered services.

It was a fascinating two days.  More observations and summary on the way.