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.