Catherine Shinners

Social collaboration-the dynamics of working out loud

A significant benefit for users and organizations who employ social collaboration solutions such as enterprise social networking (ESN) is that it supports a more transparent, conversational way of working, enables more visible communication flows, and asynchronous yet interactive problem solving.

Organizations and workers struggle to address burgeoning workloads, to be able to create group cohesion and awareness for joint project work among globally dispersed teams, and often use static document production and email to collaborate on work and content production. Important comments or inputs are often buried in fractured email alleys and dead ends.

One of the major goals of more social ways of working is to enlist and open up the tacit know-how and experience that people possess. Workers have often been trained that they must do their work and bring back finished products to a group as ‘deliverables’. They can be concerned about being evaluated on generated their own completed work product before they expose the work to colleagues.

Bryce Williams, a colleague at Change Agents Worldwide came up with a brilliant shorthand description for this social modality, in 2010 - he called it 'working out loud'. Social collaboration allows knowledge workers to 'narrate' their work and helps them provide co-workers and team members a better sense of the immediacy and context of activities.

There's an important set of dynamics that is encompassed by 'working out loud' that also engenders a new set of behaviors and interactions. Here's a view to the flow of these dynamics and key engagement activities and results 

 

Transparent, conversational flow of work - social collaboration brings a more natural human, narrative flow to asynchronous group interactions around workflows and business processes and surfaces perspectives of people working together on projects or artifacts. The transparency and persistence of conversation threads in social collaboration tools let’s groups and team more visibly co-create content, and share and receive feedback, not just ‘in the moment’, but most importantly, in the current context of the flow of work. The structure of many social tools let’s groups more directly connect their content to a dialogue around the work with commenting, feedback mechanisms and tags.

Content awareness and accessibility - Social collaboration tools are designed keep people in the flow of work throughout a project. The experience in social collaboration creates an awareness of content changes and current conversational elements. People can get a view to this flow of dialogue and work by using activity streams, tags, or alerts to other mediums (i.e. email). This awareness lets people bring in immediate comments or insights, or references to important resources. They can see where content has moved along a work flow and avoid working on versions of artifacts that are outdated. Connecting content no longer means attaching a document in an email. New habits for working out loud include using the tools to create awareness - tagging, using affirmation signals (like button), creating and using filtering mechanisms in activity streams, linking other content into conversational flows. Developing awareness skills includes actively setting and modifying alerts and filter options.

Network-based group cohesion and connection - most social collaboration tools support ways for people to create rich and robust profiles. Organizational directories often simply features contact information, obscure job titles, and perhaps reporting structure. Rich profiles helps an individual create an awareness of their background, work projects, their social roles in the network (answers questions, subject-matter-expert). Bringing a deeper, richer set of information about an individuals experience and background can be used by teams to quickly orient to one another, as they move from project to project, gives everyone a greater context of the talents and expertise accessible to the team. The variety of interaction options also supports dynamic, open ways of connecting the insight and knowledge that people bring to the work process - sharing updates with microblogs, or comments, creating and contributing to discussion forums.

Knowledge building - as the work and conversations build and remains transparently persistent, access to group knowledge also builds. Important insights, viewpoints and problem-solving dialogue is not just retained, but can be viewed more relevantly in the context in which is was applied. The work flow process becomes a vital social learning process.  

I've observed and facilitated these dynamics in companies I've helped and worked with over the last few years, and I'm using them every day in the with colleauges Change Agents Worldwide communty.    I've seen individuals, groups and organization take up 'working out loud', to truly transformative effect with organizational agility, more relevance and empowerment in daily work experiences, and real business results.

 

 

 

Collaborative Culture, the Competitive Advantage-Telus at #KMWorld

This year's KM World (#kmworld) conference was titled "Building Collaborative Organizations: People, Platform and Organizations," and in the stories and talks at the event, it's evident that companies and organizations have moved past the vision moment to reaping rewards, tranfsorming culture and helping guide the way for other organizations.   It's a combination of culture, leadership, models of learning, and effective adoption of social tools, underpinned with focus on bringing it all to contextual relevancy.

Culture - Changing the Stripes of the Elephant in the Room
It's a commonplace that each organization has their own culture, but in my experience it's often like the elephant in the room - people walk around it, see only a piece of it, even operate as if it isn't there.  

 

Yet there's one thing that seems to be fairly common amongst work cultures around the world  - disengagement.  In a talk at KM World on November 8,  Dan Pontefract, Head, Learning and Collaboration at Telus, noted the level of engagement is alarming low in companies in the U.S.  - Aon Hewitt says engagement is only 20% - Gallup indicates 30% of American workers are engaged, with only 13% engaged worldwide.  The lost productivity of disengaged employees Gallup estimates costs the U.S. economy $450-550 billion.   What is engagement?  "the state of reciprocal trust between the employee and leadership to do what's right however, whenever and with whomever."    Putting social technology in the hands of disengaged employees won't alter the culture - and as he says, "without culture, there is no collaboration, no productive, positive or panoptic use of technology."

Telus, according to Pontefract had static, mediocre levels of employee engagement a few years ago. Under his vision and leadership, the company has developed  comprehensive cultural models, processes and practices.  Now the company's rating for employee engagement now the highest in Canada and in the top 1% globally according to Aon Hewitt.  That culture transformation is outlined in his recent book Flat Army that addresses all aspects of company culture, from leadership to collaborative work dynamics to social tools and virtual environments.    Telus' leadership philosophy is "Open, Collaborative, Connected," and embodied in fifteen attributes of the connected leader and "CLAM" the Collaborative Leader Action Model

• Connect with your people
• Consider what needs to be done
• Communicate what you are going to do
• Create the results
• Confirm the results
• Congratulate/say thanks

Leaders are helped to develop their skills to become a connected leader and actively practice this mode of leadership.     But it's also a participative leadership model with leaders contributing and not just consuming information, and becoming skilled at networking within and without their organization.

Telus has a connected learning model with formal, informal and social learning, and an array of tools to support all aspects of the model.    Their Habitat social environment is a place for ideas, jams, photos, 'my sites', blogs and wikis (Confluence) and portals (Sharepoint).   A virtual space, Telus Collaboration House (developed in partnership with Avaya) lets people gather and participate in a virtual world environment, and is used for 'fireside chats' and where all new employees go for on-boarding as they are issues 'passports' and acquire badges as they move through their orientation.  Telus is also using SAP Jam to provide activity streams, video sharing and micro-blogging.   Their company leadership program is now on on Jam, with 750 people working through a one-year curricula.   Telus is also using games to help employees understand how they might interact in their company stores.

Building the behaviors and providing a range of participative tools allowed them to internally crowdsource their "Customers First" project which generated the top four promises the company was going to make and keep to their customers.   As Pontefract noted this kind of exercise would typically be conducted at the senior executive team, who retreat for a period of time in a conference room, and then announcing the results 'fait accompli'  to the employees.    When Telus launched this effort in April 2012, they had 1100 team members engaged, with 1600 submissions, and over the course of six months winnowed it down to four.    

The culture is the competitive advantage for Telus.  What Pontefract and Telus has done is to make that culture explicit, collaborative, coherent, relevant and meaningful to all levels of the company, and to their customers.  
Pontefract indicated engagement is now 83% after three years.   He also noted that in the telco industry overall in Canada last year, customer complaints had gone up by 26% - however, Telus' complaints went down 27% over the same period, and the company did a two-for-one stock split recently.   Now, Telus, like Unisys, is taking their insight, knowledge and practice to market -  they've just created a Transformation Office to help other organizations with their collaborative culture.

 

The New Social Operating System-Pew Center Research

Lee Rainie, Director, Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project gave the broad outline of the era of networked individualism we're living in at a talk at KM World  (#kmworld) on November 7.   Based on extensive research and now published in a new book Networked: The New Social Operating System, Rainie says it's a cosmic level story about how technology has turned people into networked individuals - a new social way of living in the world that substantively different from the basic social units of our ancestors. It's made information social, turned workplaces and is driving organizational models for the enterprise towards networks.

One impact that has been that many institutions have lost measures of trust in the world, (the exception being the US Military and local institutions such as firefighters, librarians and nurses), and that trust has shifted to personal networks. Trust is being transferred from big organizations, hierarchical organizations to personal networks. Influence has shifted influence personal networks - people rely on friends more for recommendations, opinions, perspectives for activities, purchasing decisions, political points of view, etc.

These networks are differently composed - they are segmented, pod-like and layered (we have many more associations, friends, aquaintances than our parents/ancestors) including being able to incorporate what Rainie calls "consequential strangers" - these are not strong ties, or even weak ties, they are now players in your network. People that call on you, or follow you, or that you may reach out to you. One's personal networks through social media, therefore, perform new functions - they become sentries, evaluators, and your own personal audience - as we become broadcasters, getting direct viewing and feedback for one's life happenstances and events.

But it is not just a technological story - there are other drivers towards networked individualism - changes in family life, divorce, delayed age for births, blended families (s different way of extending one's personal network). There's also significant business structures and labor shifts - freelance economy, increasing contingent forms of labor, crowd-sourced labor pools. And transportation and living patterns are splaying out our networks. Friends live in different neighborhoods, different parts of the country.

There are growing identify shifts - including politics and religions. Network individuals are cobbling together their political affiliations away from formal parties or views (they are independent). Forty-four percent of Americans identify with a different religion from the ones they grew up with - with 1/5 of believers claiming  'none' indicating that while they may feel spiritually oriented they don't want to declare a religion. People function more and more as networked individuals and less as group members with their social ties and events organized around the individual rather than a social unit such as a family or neighbhoord school.

But it's the big technology trends that put all this on fast forward. One of those trends is the pervasive deployment of broadband to the home with 70% of American households having broadband, up from 3% in 2000. People are now spending more time online, but not just 'consuming' content but creating and activating content in new ways - they watch more video tell their stories, rate and rank things, make comments and give feedback. According to Rainie, 2/3 of adults and 3/4 of American teenagers are now broadcast creators of content - this range of online engagement - responding to the world, contributing and broadcasting content has dramatically overturned the media ecosystem.

Of course there's the always the connected story of mobile - 91% of Americans have a mobile device, 56% have smartphones and 34% own tablet computers. There are more mobile subscriptions than members of the population of the U.S. - 326.4 million in 2012 (up from 302.9 million in 2010) -- while the population is 319 million.

This leads us to be hyperconnected - Rainie say. Here's the demographic breakout of participation in social meda.

* 61% of all adults
* 43% of seniors are on social networks
* 78% 30-49
* 60% 50-64%
* 89% of young adults

One of the trends of social networking in older adults is that they are reconnecting with ties from their childhood or youth - a factor Rainie calls "Restored Latent Ties" (or as someone mentioned to him 'Resurrection Ties'). And while older adults often expressed dismay at how youth and young adults seems willing to expose a great deal of ther personal life on social networks, he says that the older adult population are now joining health communities online and discussing a great deal about their ailments and medical issues, and getting emotional support and friendly advice and recmmendations from those interactions. People are also interactcing across generations - 56% of parents of teenagers have friended their children on facebook

The nature of networked information

If you've read David Weinberger's book  Too Big You Know you know we're living in an information age that's different from linear created information patterns and practices. Now information is pervasively generated, consumed and is actively participatory, social and linked and becomes more personalized via new filters. Rainie noted a recent USC School of Business report that this trend is only going to intensify.

This will require networked individuals to be more discerning - and ironically due to the need to filter and focus on a manageable set of network ties, there may be more limited serendipitous encounters due to information overload. People may also be doing more horizontal reading - i.e., scanning, not finishing articles and filtering at a more horizontal level. The question becomes - are people living in information bubbles, only getting reinforcement from sources in that bubble?

Networked work

The new social operating system is affecting the world of work as well. It's not about being in one small bounded group in a hierarchy. Many people are now doing simultaneous work on multiple projects,  in multiple, distributed teams and with multiple "bosses" and heavily reliant on technology for communication and coordination. Rainie characterized this as moving from a traditional 'fishbowl' of shopfloor or cubicle cities to a networked switchboard model - where the individual is the orchestrator of things.

The benefits of this emerging model is that it can surface extra information, allows organizations to apply talents where needed, brings in mulitple perspectives and solutions, allows the enterprise to be more fluid and nimble and potentially more innovative, supports diversified, better decision-making.   But there's also problems with trust, focus, coordination, loyalty, extra effort in managing a complex flow, and institutional memory lapses.

 

Business Value with Social - Wells Fargo, Unisys Stories at #KMWorld

Ross Cavanaugh, VP, Internal Collaboration, Wells Fargo and Susan McCabe, Global Program Manager, Knowledge & Collaboration at Unisys Corporation shared the podium on November 5 at KM World (#kmworld) to talk about the impact and business value of social and collaborative engagement in the enterprise.

Wells Fargo is a 300,000 person company with many distinct business units. Due to that environment, they have a variety of solutions and platforms they use - Sharepoint, NewsGator, Yammer, Jive, but importantly they maintain control of the social objects, the conversations across all platforms.  

Crossing generations of workers

A common thread throughout the conference, and echoed by Cavanaugh, is social models of work and engagement are vital to leveraging knowledge worker know-how and translating it in ways that be consumed by others - especially as older workers are nearing retirement - surfacing and activating that knowledge happens conversationally.   And while millenials use social completely different ways, according to Cavanaugh, it's a growing population in the workforce and they are adapting to using it  in a business environment. One interesting concept he mentioned was crowd consumption as a way to parse and create awareness out of an increasing volume of content. He called out that success in the cororate workplace is no longer predicated on what you know and what you can do, but it's about what you share and what you teach others to do.

Susan McCabe, Global Program Manager, Knowledge and Collaboration  at Unisys Corporation noted that companies are rolling out enterprise social programs to address a host of issues:  knowledge silos, the disconnect between ideas and innovation, the challenges workers have to find and connect with subject matter experts, inconsistent knowledge capture, large organization culture mindsets that have typically rewarded knowledge hoarding, limited opportunities for social learning (the preferred method of adult learning), and inefficient onboarding. She observed that 59% of organizations are planning or currently implementing an enterprise social business platform but only 17% of companies that have transitioned to an ESB platform have achieved an employee adoption use rate of more than 75%.

Unisys Corporation has one of the real success stories for adoption and integration of enterprise social into the business and work culture of the company. For Unisys, their growing collabration culture is providing them market agility, enhancing professional development, delivering workforce efficiencies and supporting better customer service. Their program has also created a depth of business expertise in the area, and the company is now delivering a set of social business services.

Leadership engagement - for real 

From a technology perspective, their social network is built on Sharepoint 2010 and Newsgator with some customization that integrates their HR systems and tightly integrated search. McCabe noted that a killer app for their social network the ability to put out a question and get an answer from across the network.

The the other 'killer app" for Unisys has been the active engagement and leadership from their CEO, J. Edward Coleman, in the process. As Coleman is quoted as saying "The key to fueling the success of social knowledge sharing is for employees to be curious and feel empowered to openly and transparently share." And he has walked the talk - by actively participating and reaching out across the network, using the news feed to ask questions, add people as his colleagues, blog himself and having his senior leadership blog their weekly status report - in short giving him total transparency into the business.

The Unisys mission has been tap the value of social technologies by making its use an intrinsic and integrated part of the company's work experience and culture and their adoption approach and success building people capacity, not doing it to them, but showing what's in it for them. T hey began with a culture transformation strategy and set key objectives in 6 areas, leadership alignment, engaging cross organizational stakeholders, awareness and communications, employee empowerment, education and training and incentives and recognition - employee spotlighting, badging, tied to the company's esiting rewards and recgognition program. They created a company-wide knowledge and collaboration stakeholder's council, that included IT, HR, Legal, finance, global operations, marketing & communications, learning and development, sales and strategic services, business units. They continue to do a annual workshop, where they share their business strategies and they talk about how social can help them with their strategy success.

The collaboration group influenced adoption and employee behavior through role-based socialization and peer-to-peer testimonials. They also initiated challenges like their ten by two challenge where new sales reps were asked to explore new aspects of the social environment and participate in the network for ten minutes each day for two weeks. The new reps were able to find out who was working on their accounts and participate and get help on putting together a customer proposal. Regular communications campaigns with monthly themes helped make social media a shared responsibility and helped to socialize key policy tenets.

The result? 91% of targeted employee user groups create a profile and use the newsfeed, 77% of the total global employee population is engaged and using the enterprise social network, and 100% of their senior leadership have active 'my sites,' and are authentically engaged. And the successful practice they've developed internally is now evolving into a commercially viable service delivery asset.

 

 

Photo attribution - 1) Gelito/Shutterstock.com 2) Rafal Olechowski/Shutterstock.com

 

 

 

Building Collaborative Organizations with Nicco Mele

This morning's energetic and insightful opening keynote Building Collaborative Organizations at KM World (#kmworld) was delivered by Nicco Mele, who teaches public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and is a leading expert in the integration of social media and Web 2.0 with politics, business, and communications.  He's also author of the recently published book, The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath.  

Nicco started off with a perspective that the world the world changed in 1984, not because it was the launch of the first Macintosh but because Chuck Hull invented stereolithography - what we now call 3-D printing.  Nicco himself has a 3D printer at home, and he told how he was able to download the blueprint for shoes and printed sandals for his children on a recent sunny day instead of driving to the mall and buying them.   He also noted that two days later, a man in Texas published the blueprints for printing an AK47.

What does this have to do with building collaborative organizations. Our technology profoundly empowers individuals at the expense of our team or institutions. The power individuals have in our age of technology he describes as radical connectivity, the way that we're connected to each other all the time, without order or hierarchy.   What happens when this technology encounters the institutions (media, armed forces, government, mega-companies) of our time.

All organizations and institutions need to re-think their relationships with their customers and constituencies. According to Mele, it's our job to build more collaborative organizations given that individuals are empowered with  radical connectivity. He noted that at the end of the Edwardian age, after King Edward VII's funeral, three monarchs across Europe corresponded with one another contemplating a world in which their monarchies would continue to reign far into the future over a colonized world. A few short years later that was all swept aside and in a most violent and destructive way.

Mele feels that our organizations and institutions are similarly unable to anticipate and respond the rapidity and transformative nature of this age of radicaly connectivity.

He referred to the work from Turings Cathedral which talks about how the first computers were built - the motivation was to support the development of a nuclear weapons program. Over the next decades computing power was primarily in the hands of large defense, governmental or commercial institutions. He noted that the first computer science academic program was launched at Purdue in 1961. These early computer science students grew up in the the 1960s on college campuses in the middle of the civil rights and anti-war movement, and it influenced their perspective on the populist possibilities of computing, embodied in the 1974 book Computer Lib  by Ted Nelson with the call to action "you can and must understand computers now." It was a vision of the future that expressed a moral imperative for individuals not only to have access to computer power but that they must actively pursue understanding that power.

The current radical connectivity era shows completely that transformation from big institution to personal is realized - computing profoundly empowers individuals (the top Twitter accounts are of individuals, not brands for instance), and is profoundly intimate (we connect personally and directly with people, and with elements in our environment) and intentional ("we come to our technology with intention"), not leaning back and watching TV or sitting passively listening in a meeting.  As Mele pointed out, when we think about knowledge management and collaboration in organizations, we must bring a deep understanding of the these three elements.

When organizations and institutions fail people, those people have the power not just to opt out, but to start their own highly impactful efforts. From media to education to corporations, Mele had examples of this power. For instance, eight of the 10 top grossing films in the U.S. were original stories in 1981, and only two were sequels, whereas last year there were no original movies. This tired rehash has driven people, in part, to take matters into their own hands, forging their own entertainment via services like YouTube.

The model of higher education delivery is undergoing enormous pressures, as costs have risen astronomically, the debt burden on college students now a grave threat to economic security for the millenials. (see student debt load in U.S.).  New models are arising quickly with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) delivering top notch content to tens of thousands of students around the world. Udacity and Georgia Tech have recently announced a new MOOC-based computer science master's degree program for $7,000.    And, Mele noted, currently over one third of American workers are now self-employed -- the first time since the Civil War that so few American workers are employed by large companies.   This brings many new challenges to individual workers with respect to economic security and career development as well as organizations and businesses around security, intellectual property and professional development.

The pace and direction of government, organizations and institutions operate differently: given the highly accelerated pace and direction of our technology, people now have legitimate expectations of what is possible and in often greatly accelerated time frames.

Mele closed with several key points for consideration

• If you're in an organization, you have to understand that every person you're dealing with has more power than you do and understand how to build systems to address this new dynamic.
• Building collaborative teams is about combining leadership and distributed power.   The most important part of knowledge today is the diversity of your network (i.e., as David Weinberger noted in Too Big to Know)
• Don't forget about the power of proximity and face-to-face encounters - think local - Think about how we build our knowledge networks and how we can bring that to face- to-face elements 

We really need to re-think our relationships with our customers and constituencies, he says. A few short years ago he would have referred to the group in the room as his audience, but now, as we Tweet and text he acknowledges the direct engagement and participation of his 'former' audience. He remarked that as his students engage online during his classes, he provides a class hashtag and projects the conversational Twitter stream on the wall of the class.

He cited the 2008 Obama campaign as a case book example of distributed power and leadership.   The campaign created deep culture of integrity and responsibility.   First, they brought volunteers to a more deeply engaged commitment to the campaign through a formal application and interview process.   The volunteers, in essence, were brought into a higher tier of campaign management than typical of campaigns.   And once onboard they were almost entirely managed through technology.

In a final call to action, Mele exhorted the people in the room to demand accountability.  As he described it, in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, a crowd-sourced social media investigation spontaneously arose and the wrong man was identified with the result being that people rushed to accuse and approach and call the home of his family. Twitter, for instance, could have let people know if they wanted authoritative information they could track and follow the FBI and Boston police investigation (see my blog post on social media use in Boston - The Engaged City: Boston CIO). As Mele noted, a network left to it's own devices can become a mob, and yet our traditional hierarchies are challenged and never before has so much public space been privately owned (Amazon, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft (Skyp), Twitter).

Mele encouraged the audience to remember "This is really about all of you, your imagination, your ability lead"

High Performance Workforce: Emerging Skills and Competencies

Employee productivity has been the mainstay of top line growth and bottom-line profitability since 1993, according to Breakthrough Performance in  the New Work Environment: Identifying and Enabling the New High Performance a recent report published by the Conference Executive Board (CEB).   Employee productivity over this period, at 3.23% CAGR,  led the profitabiity of companies, while growth attributed to revenue per cost of goods sold (COGS)  and invested capital has been flat to negative.

For employees, that productivity has come from their adjusting to high increases in workload,  managing more complexity in the work that they do, and adapting to a geographically dispersed (and therefore virtual) work context. 

Despite this sustained workforce productivity over the last 20 years more is being expected.   CEB surveyed 1500 executives and found that, on average, business leaders want an even larger leap of 20%  in workforce productivity to meet their growth objectives.    

Both managers and workers will have to adjust to new skills, capacity building and enablers for this kind of productivity.

However, managers and HR performance assessment processes focus on valuing and rewarding high performers to the degree that they exhibit business acumen, task and process mastery and technical skills     By relying primarily on these traditional models, CEB says, organizations will miss 65% of  potential high performers.  

Through its research, CEB has identified ten differentiating competencies for high performance in the evolving work environment (what Jane McConnell calls the unified workplace web).   Those competencies include prioritization, teamwork, organizational awareness, problem solving, self-awareness, proactivity, influence, decision-making, learning agility and technical expertise.

Driving the need for these competencies are significant trends -  increases in knowledge work, more interdependent work and frequent organizational change.  

Workers surveyed over the past three years have experienced frequent changes in organizational objectives and structure, and a high increase in the amount of work requiring collaboration -- often working and interacting in expanded networks of 10-20 or more people daily according to the CEB report.  Workers are needing to make more decisions at lower points in the organization.  In this kind of environment, enabling and encouraging broad employee networks are vital.     

These new skills and competencies underscore those called out in a study done by the Institute of the Future a couple of years ago.  The study Future Work Skills 2020 looked at six major trends driving new skills, including extreme longevity, advance of smart machines and systems, a more computationally driven and globally connected world, new media ecology, and superstructed organizations.    

In a world moving in this direction, important skills include sense-making, social intelligence, novel and adaptive thinking, cross-cultural competency, computational thinking, transdiciplinarty, design mindset, cognitive load management and virtual collaboration.

In a globally connected model of working and with extensions in human longevity, cross cultural competency also means cross-generational competency as well. In a knowledge economy, young workers need to be engaged effectively, workers need to plan on learning as a persistent component of professional development and the experience, skills and insight of older workers can't be cavalierly sloughed off.

What do these various new takes on skills and competencies mean?    For workers, already articulating a sense of stress at increases in expectations and fluid work environments, it's important to develop skills at managing and filtering information, developing influence in personal networks, and expanding social ties across 'superstructed' organizations.  

For leaders in organizations it means enabling and supporting collaborative work, valuing and rewarding performance of those who can work collaboratively, and who express agility in networking and learning as a strong component of their work behaviors.   

Shutterstock images1)etimammos 2) Haslo Group Product Studio 3) Stocklite 

The Way Work Will Work - Reflections from E2 Boston

One benefit often accrued to social business is that it is foundational to improving employee engagement, and thereby maximizing the potential contribution of human capital in an organization.   In the innovation workshop at the E2 conference, Ari Lightman of Carnegie Mellon noted the overall lack of engagement in the workforce is startling - Lightman cited a 2010 Gallup poll that indicated that 49% of U.S. workers were not engaged, 18% were actively unengaged (at a loss of $300B annually) - leaving only 33% of employee fully engaged.     

Jonathan Ferrar, VP of Smarter Workforce at IBM noted in his talk, The Rise of Social Business: Creating a Smarter Workforce to Deliver Exceptional Customer Experiences and Better Business Outcomes at E2 in Boston in June 2013, there are several major shifts in our networked economy that are changing the nature of engaged work, and one of them is the 'rise' of the independent worker.    He cited a Harvard Business Review article indicating that currently 30% of US workers consider themselves independent, but that will increase to 50% by 2020.   The nature of "employee" engagement therefore could become slightly more complex when perhaps 50% of human talent contributions are contingent, short-term and project focused.  

Along with the increase in the percentage of independent workers,Ferrar called out three other major trends leading to workforce transformation -  there's the rise of social in the workplace, supporting more bottom up engagement in hierarchical organizational structures, big data and analytics, with decision-making and management insight being increasingly informed by interaction and information that are published and transparently available, and the impact of mobile technology, providing increased flexibility and timeliness of access.

IBM's perspective on the potential of these major trends is that they can change the nature of hierarchies by tapping and empowering the collective intelligence in an organization, use the accessibility of analytics, both behavioral and mathematical, to support human judgment and decision-making, invoke 'constant collaboration' through the transparency of social networks, use more predictive modalities to drive career paths and roles, and ultimately catalyze a 21st century supply chain of workers and work.    

This is an area of increasing focus for IBM since completing its acquisition of Kenexa, a recruiting and talent management solutions company, late last year and bringing to market this spring new big data analytics software and services for workforce analysis.  These kinds of offerings help companies as they adapt their existing human resource and enterprise infrastructure systems to what Jane McConnell calls the unified workplace web.

Enterprise social systems are supporting new models of engagement and new patterns of collaboration, last June at E2  Mike Gotta (now with Gartner, then with Cisco) in his presentation he discussed how new social tools in the enterprise create activity streams that are a multi-faceted lens on information, the social graph, and expanded temporal, spatial and visual elements.  He noted then that capturing micro-interactions in an activity stream data store becomes more strategic.   But it's also important that the systems and algorithms for capturing and analyzing this information are transparent and adjustable for individuals.  

For some companies these new modalities of work are foundational to their business and operating models. Topcoder is a software product development company that brings the expertise of over 400,000 developers from around the world to deliver services along the spectrum of the software development lifecyle.  Indeed, Topcoder has atomized the work processes in that cycle such that it enables them to draw out hyperspecialists from their community.  

New projects are sourced out to their community via contests - Topcoder has developed more than 30 specialist contest types and their developers compete by delivering a completed project.   Using this model, Topcoder then chooses the highest quality product and the coder is renumerated.   The second ranking coder does receive some renumeration, and the third receives points towards a monthly ranking and recognition program.

Topcoder presented at Crowdsourcing 2012 in Los Angeles last summer and talked about their model.  The best quality product is obtained for a project, while the contests drives skills improvement of others in the community and reduces the 'single-points-of-failure' issue in projects - when three people do each task, there's a better chance of rapid completion of product.   

While a deeper understanding of behavioral science is certainly informing workforce changes, an understanding of culture and how humans must be able to create 'systems of meaning' are important.    Driving towards 'knowledge worker piece work' may dehumanize and undercut some of anticipated efficiencies.    Humans need context, a view of the horizon, and ability to see connections and develop trust in order to shape, create and innovate.

Back to Ari Lightman and the innovation workshop at E2.   Ari observed that the current generation of entry workers, Gen Z, are fully digital, experientially - over 90% of kids under 18 play online games, (and spend over 80% of their time failing).    But equally importantly, they've already established patterns affinity and engagement through collaboration and community - creating their own tribal support systems, so it will be interesting to see how this all meshes with organizational structures and boundaries, an increasingly 'independent' workforce, and a traditional sense of 'employee'.

 

 

 

Enterprise Social Networking Across Channels, Devices and Languages - Panel Conversation at E2

David Carr of Information Week brought together an excellent panel "Enterprise Social Networking Across Channels, Devices, and Languages"  at E2 on Wednesday, June 19 to share their insight into enabling enterprise social networking in a global environment. Carr first became intrigued by the topic in writing an article about disaster relief.   One of the tools he learned about was Coalition Chat - initially developed for military use -- that allows one an individual to type in chat messages, the recipient being able to view it in a split screen user experience with the text presented in both the originator's language and an immediate translation into the recipient's own language. Social initiatives a vital to organizations and companies - there's tremendous value in the tacit knowledge that people possess.

Language Strategies

Keith Laska, CEO of SDL Languages Technologies Division, shared a perspective on why language flexibility is so important.  He noted that there 7+ billion people on the planet and 80% of them don't speak English. There's also 6.5 billion mobile phone units globally (1.5 billion of those being smart phones), and the world's compute activity generates over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data a day.  

Supporting real connection amongst KPMG International over 145,000 employees( located in 152 countries) was the first order of business according to Vishal Agnihotri, Assoc. Director of Global Knowledge Systems. Establishing a connection and governnance framework across countries, legal regimes and cultures was a significant body of foundational work for KPMG's Enterprise Social Networking, and the project engaged the general counsel and risk officer, especially around privacy laws.

Gloria Burke, Director of Knowledge and Collaboration Strategy and Governance at Unisys Corporation (23,000 employees in 90 countries) indicated their company began to run into issues as to how they reached constituents in different countries. In Brazil, for instance, employees were having challenges understanding and presenting the Unisys solutions as the source material was in English, so authoritative content was professionally translated into Brazilian-Portuguese and Spanish.

Unisys also has a social platform - they use NewsGator and Sharepoint across the company -- so they also had a need to have translation on-demand. In their governance model, they have three tiers of tranlation - a social news feed is on-demand, so the expectation for translation is to make it easy and fast with immediate translation but lesser expectation for absolute accuracy. Employees intranet home pages are machine language translations, while curated, authoritative company content is professionally translated for accuracy and cultural sensitivity.

Burke noted that Unisys developwd a global culture transformation strategy, starting with executive leadership.  Their CEO and senior executives completed their profiles, and regularly share information and affirm others for contributing and sharing.   The adoption rate has been strong as well.  Over an 18 month period 16,000 employees have come on board.   The company has established governance and guidelines for online courtesy, sharing, engagement and best practices and encourage employees to post in their most comfortable language.   By offering better language support into their social platform, they avoid challenges of people copying information out onto to Google in order to translate material.

Models of Engagement and Leadership 

Obtaining and keeping knowledge has been a traditional source of power in organizations, but in a networked world, true power,  Burke indicated is one's ability to take what you know and share it.  It's important to become a transparent thought leader making one's know how available more dynamically in various contexts. While language access is a critical governance and implementation consideration, the panelists noted that culturally, they're not seeing a big difference in acceptance and adoption of enterprise social networking.  At KPMG early adopters tended to be in the U.S. and Holland.    While at Unisys, Burke observed that in some countries people were careful about sharing their personal information (legal considerations in some venues), but behaviourly, people were willing to share content and information about their work.

Managing attention and information flow is an important technique to master.   Vishal Agnihotri of KPMG noted that there can be pitfalls with a new volume of material coming in over activity feeds. She finds searching by hashtags powerful and suggests that individuals be strategic about what they follow.   She also finds it helpful to pause an activity stream as needed without 'unfollowing' important flows completely.

Both Burke and Agnihotri underscored in their remarks the need for well-thought out governance models and socialization of expected norms as vital to minimizing risks and issues. Burke mentioned a strong strategy around communities as well with a published governance structure on aligning related communities. Unisys transitioned organizational and regional intranet sites to communities. Individuals with certain types of roles such as project managers or engineers are also encouraged to join communities of practice around the domain of expertise.

Executive leadership can't be left out as an important motivational factor in adoption.  The first thing the Unisys CEO does in the morning is to scan to global news feed to get the pulse of what's going on, and as he travels to company offices in various regions and cities, the first thing he asks is 'are you following me' according to Burke. Executives do want more direct interaction with all the ranks, she says, and encourages the thought that even executive blogs are an avenue to share ideas and invite transparent comment.

This was a thoughtful and valuable session with helpful guideposts from real case-study scenarios for implementing social inside large enterprises.

 

 

The Engaged City - Boston CIO at E2

During the fireside chat on Tuesday, June 17 with City of Boston CIO Bill Oates and Laurianne McGlaughlin, Editor in Chief at Information week, we got a view into how social and mobile innovation has a real impact on the quality of life in the community. Mayor Tom Menino, who has been in office for close to 20 years has been focused on neighborhoods and people, according to Oates. When Oates first joined as CIO, there was a 24 x 7 hotline service for Bostonians to use to call in pothole or graffiti issues, or concerns about their neighborhood.  The service was phone based and run with a small Access database. Calls would be taken and noted and the information was directed to people in the appropriate departments to address.  The City of Boston is a $2.5 billion operation with 17,000 employees so there's been operational fragmentation and building of systems in departmental silos.

The hotline service was redeisgned to go mobile in 2009. Called Citizen's Connect, community members can download and utilize the system as a mobile app (available for Android and iOS). Interestingly, Oates noted that when they moved to the mobile application, a new set of demographics began to use the service - people noted that when they called the hotline number, it felt like complaining, but as people use the mobile app they felt more like they were helping their neighborhood and the city. As they begin to use a mobile system with a more robust database the analytics on on the submissions is very important to evaluate responsiveness, service follow through and resource needs. They also build in acknowledgement and recognition programs such as naming potholes repaired with people's help in identifying it, and a Street Cred points program.

This idea has taken hold beyond Boston.    Commonwealth Connnect expands the ability for other cities to deliver a similar service to 46 communities around the state. This has really helped spread an innovation model with technology.

Oates talked about the mining of social media data on the day of the Boston Marathon bombing.   Social media was used extensively to outreach to the community especially around the Shelter in Place period. He noted that after 9-11 there was lost of investment interoperability of radio for public safety services. And with social media, there's need for increased broadband public safety network capacity as people share more data, photos, videos, voice content. The city's call center typically will handle 8-900 calls per day but handled over 10,000 calls the day of the marathon bombing.

Last year the city created a social media strategist position (it has upwards of 40+ social media accounts). Oates highlighted how the city was part of the social media conversation during that week with the Boston Police Department having 48 million impressions that week

The city is also improving its understanding and sentiment analysis around events that happen in the city - celebrations, community gatherings as well as emergencies

Another innovation at the city has been the Office of New Urban Mechanics so named because Mayor Tom Menino had been called the urban mechanic when he first got elected. It's situated right next to the mayor's office and functions as an open door to city hall. Citizens have place to pitched their ideas, and the office helps creates a pipeline o f innovative opportunities. They use it to create applications, solutions and new projects, One project Technology for Autism Now (TAN) was catalyzed by a mother of an autistic child, and utilizes tablet-based tools and the city partnered with a couple of local public schools to develop it.

Oates shared his views on open data sets and open government.  He observed that open data isn't  about "let's go find how many data sets we can find and pulish them" but, open data should be a strategy. He indicated that the city we will publish as much relevant information as possible, though as they also handle health and education data, privacy is vital.

These kind of innovations help the citizen's really get engaged and make a difference in their community.

Carnegie Mellon - Blueprint for Innovation Workshop at E2

Driving innovation through enterprise applications is the key theme of this year's E2 conference, so to provide the right context, the conference opened with a day long Carnegie Mellon Blueprint for Innovation workshop.   Ari Lightman, Director of the CIO Institute and Chris Labash, of the CLAB Virtual Communications Lab led the workshop that helped participants understand the mechanics of innovation, and creating an environment for teaching, managing and measuring innovation value.

The workshop participants were a varied, global cohort  of arounded 40 people included attendees from Scandanavia, Germany, France, Nigeria, Columbia and the U.K., and representing equally varied industries from rail systems, finance, media and cosmetics.   Clearly developing a company's innovation muscle is of vital interest.

Innovation Playbook

The workshop was structured to provide an innovation playbook with a framework, approaches and best practices.   Chris Labash, who worked for many years for Ketchum where he was responsible for creative product - a function he harkens to being 'on-demand innovation."   He outlined the six phases of innovation - imagination, creation, consideration, integration, validation and participation.  The creation phase he says is where you discuss, share, embellish, explore ideas.   This notion of 'playing around with ideas" is neurologically the same as when children do creative play.  And as Thomas Edison is to have said "if you want to have a good idea, have a lot of them"

Consideration is really about the rubric your organization has for determining which ideas move forward.  Labash reviewed how A.G. Lafley drove Proctor and Gamble from a numbers culture to an innovation culture - a company that had no innovation portfolio when Lafley became CEO. P & G developed their SIMPL process for innovation that guides them through identifying customer focused propositions through business qualification and market launch.  

As good ideas move through a process from ideas to consideration the validation phase lets you identify the value  - increased revenue, decreased costs, increased productivity or increased social good.

In thinking through the adoption curve for innovations, five factors have been articulated by Everett Rogers.   People respond to the new by assessing whether it has relative advantage to similar elements in their live, or compatability, i.e., how compatible is this with the way they live their life.  Complexity is also a consideration - complexity in new products, especially electronics may dampen acceptance and induce feature fatigue  in users.  trialability and observability are also an important element in adoption.  People what to try things before they adopt them (free samples, free trial subscriptions to online services). 

It's about culture

An organization or societal culture can get in the way of adoption.  Things that impact adoption of innovation can be running up against dominant design (think qwerty keyboards), or tradition (ill-fated attempts at metrics system adoption in the U.S), politics, economics, definitions of goodness and short v. long-term thinking.  Ari Lightman indicated that it's helpful to analyze the culture a bit in considering an innovation's opportunity, and referred to Denise Rousseau's onion model of cultural analysis.

• Fundamental assumptions (center of onion) taken for granted beliefs, nature of business, mission, enviornment
• Values - revealed preferences reflected in decision regarding scare resources, time, money, people
• Behavioural norms, shared ways of behaving way to live the values,
• Patterns of behaviour oservable repeated practices (i.e., meetings)
• Artifacts - physical and sumbolic indicators communicatingculture

Generation Z -  Innovation in their DNA

Baby boomers are often referred to as a population bulge, but right now 45% of the world's population is under the age of 25.  Gen Z is that generation born in 1995 or later, and are just entering college.  Lightman says, are inherently gamers (in the U.S., over 90% of kids under 18 play online games and 80% of the time spent in games is 'failing' - experimenting, re-trys, re-boots.   The deep experience of playing online games lets them overcome barriers, collaborate in joint experiences and let them experience the positive emotions of joy, relief, creativity, excitement and contentment.  Gen Z wants those experiences in their work.  

From an increasingly younger age. Gen Z has  learned not just how to access information, but to exercise an ability to find and access applications that let them manage and maneuver their own experience.   As the incoming generation arrives they need an environment where they can be fully engaged.   The overall lack of engagement in the workforce is startling - Lightman cited a 2010 Gallup poll that indicated that 49% of U.S. workers were not engaged, 18% were actively unengaged (at a loss of $300B annually) - leaving only 33% of employee fully engaged.   

Gen Z is very tribal - they are composed of communities and teaming - but communities are about helping and sharing a function as social structure with an embeeded culture in it. Tribes help individuals get up to speed very quickly on projects and gives them much more in terms of interaction, engagement, meaning and is often a more meaningful affiliative association than those assigned by the organizational structure.

But Gen Z doesn't stick around -- according to Lightman, he queried a financial services company recently about new college recruit retention rates - 60% of them left the company.   With Gen Z, he said, they will either innovate around you or leave, and either way the company loses insight and measurement of an emerging workforce.

To innovate, iterate

Innovation involves lots of iteration, and it's important to involve a diversity of talent inovlved. Labash reviewed some techniques for ideation and design thinking include de Bono's Six Hats, storyboarding, mindmapping.  The day ended with a group exercise with several teams exploring and developing an idea.

 See also: Crash Course in Design Thinking review