Synergise IT

I live in an apartment block in Melbourne and I have a funky building manager. He is wonderful. Recently, he “created” a web 2.0 website with a simple forum and stuck a note on the way out of the small apartment block. The uptake of the forum was amazing. Within the first day, there were about 50 hits and 3 members.

At the moment, the site is getting one or two posts a day and all the important stuff is being discussed on the site. Even with such a small community Web 2.0 is solving daily communication problems and with people’s life getting busier and work hours getting longer, this seems to be a great platform for people to manage the stuff going around their apartment even at work without meeting the building manager. This community of approx 100+ people has proven to be extremely effective, purposeful and powerful.

Peer production is an interesting topic. For the purpose of this blog post, I will define peer production as a user-to- business relationship i.e. someone designs/solves a corporate problem and gets something in return (generally monetary rewards). Please see the GoldCorp or P&G’s Connect+Develop program. Peer production is also used to refer to an organisation’s customers contributing for the better of the organisation.

Peer production is not the same as open source development like Linux or Apache neither is it Wikipedia or Flickr contribution. Such kinds of contribution does not get any rewards and the motive to contribute is different from people who joins peer production communities.

First up, contributors in peer production communities, gets money if their solution gets selected and implemented. Secondly, they sometimes do not get the recognition on their solution whereas recognition from open source contribution is slightly more transparent. These are the two high level differences.

I hope to answer how to make peer production happen within your organisation. I believe that there is a motive for most, if not all, things that people do and for peer production to happen you need to give your customers and contributors outside your organisation some value for helping you. You can take the easy way out and just give $$$. However, money doesn’t solve all problems and not all contributors wants money. One must understand that some of these contributors might be the top brains of their industry/expertise and they might be looking for other things. Organisations must study who are their target audience, provide a combination of value for them and build a relationship with these top contributors - they are your best asset. These people are the trusted third party advisors who are experts in their area or a consumer of your products. Listening to what they say might save alot of time and money on your R&D.

I never knew Professor Randy Pausch. However I chanced upon this video (which 4 plus million people watched) from the Google Blog post. He passed away two nites back. I am glad I have watched his final lecture.

PBWiki created a ROI calculator on their website. Even though its not the most accurate and best ROI calculation method, I do think its a good start. =)

I always believe that for people to use Enterprise 2.0, organisations must give people the purpose and reason to use it. In a knowledge economy, many employees are required to think and make decisions at various levels. However, many employees nowadays still use systems like SAP, Siebel and “friends”. So how can organisations make Enterprise 2.0 relevant to employees when they spend most of their work time handling other types of systems? Simple, integrate - however, its easier said than done!!! I shall give you a Telco example.

Telco software
Most might not know, other than my deep interest in Enterprise 2.0, I have interests and experience in implementing telecommunication systems. I have worked with various software in the market and understand them pretty well. While all these software has APIs, web services and stuff like that, they are pretty much targeted for integration with other telco system providing different kinds of functionality. Telco software should improve and integrate better with Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

Enterprise 2.0 and Telcos
Within the lifecycle of a customer, Enterprise 2.0 / Web 2.0 can provide many benefits for the customers and employees should be part of it. So when a customer buys a new phone/internet service via the call centre or online, workflows are triggered to carry out various tasks depending on the business rules. However, shit always happens. Somehow, something will break due to many reasons and troubleshooting begins. Enterprise 2.0 can facilitate the troubleshooting process through its collaborative capabilities and save time as other people can contribute to the troubleshooting process and streamlined communication improves turnaround time. Also, in many cases, the call centre and the troubleshooting dudes are located in two different places and this helps to save money on phone calls.

Web 2.0 and Telcos
Also if there is a fault in the system, Web 2.0 can inform the customer quickly so that you save the call centre costs of affected calling in to whine about it. Web 2.0 can also help to reduce problem calls to the call centre through online forums, discussions and commenting. The idea is to let your customers help your customers.

Telcos are big companies and expensive to run and everyone is different. I am not saying that all telcos needs to do the above. I am saying that Telcos needs to understand Enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 and study how such technologies can help them save money, increase efficiency and reduce errors and if such investments are worth it or not.

I am in a love-hate situation now. I love my RSS reader because it delivers news, blogs and rss updates from work. Its great! But every hour, I get hundreds of notifications. I read selectively. However, its just too much.

Alrite, if I sign up to a RSS feeds from say, NY Times World news, I am bound to get quite alot of updates because somehow people are constantly interested in people killing each other. However, for my work related RSS feeds, I get a whole lot of unrelated feeds too. However, within the work related feeds, there are a few feed updates that I need to action on. At the moment, I am pretty flat out at work and I still have to go through the feeds to get my action items - that was a pain in the butt.

I then thought wouldn’t it be good to have intelligent feeds? The RSS feeds can organise and tell you which feeds are more important than the rest from analysing the content/tags, where it came from, time line associated with it (work related and if available), who wrote it and rank all of them.

With Enterprise 2.0, more and more people are working across boundaries, teams and projects and currently there is no good way to sort out the feeds / information / emails that comes from all these various places. I am truely suffering from information overload.

Wall Street Journal Blogs published a study conducted by Ed Moran on “Why Most Online Communities Fail”. I found this study extremely amusing. Please read the article before reading on.

… according to Ed Moran, a Deloitte consultant who just completed a study of more than 100 businesses with online communities. Not surprisingly, these sites failed to gain traction with customers. Thirty-five percent of the online communities studied have less than 100 members; less than 25% have more than 1,000 members – despite the fact that close to 60% of these businesses have spent over $1 million on their community projects. “A disturbingly high number of these sites fail,” Moran tells us.

According to his study, there are so many errors that companies made during their implementation. First of all, online community platform is supposed to be a growing and evolving platform. Its a content platform and no matter how well you migrate your data from other platforms, people need to get used to using your online platform. Spending a million bucks on community projects gives me the impression companies did it with the Big Bang approach. To me, thats a no-no.

Personally, I feel that companies do need a community manager (read: sysadmin). However, many people I speak to thinks that the community manager is the gardener for the whole wiki or collaborative platform. I totally disagree. The community manager is to strategise and manage the community but not editing text, moving pages and organising stuff.

To get a successful online community running, the best way is to give it to a professional consulting company like BearingPoint who has the experience and knowledge of creating such types of systems SUCCESSFULLY. Even though, organisations might get bottom up adoption of such technologies, consulting firms should be hired to provide a long term strategy, vision and change management to provide organisations with a clear road map of their investment.

First things first, no one gets smart just by sitting around doing nothing. Learn and explore is the key.

I spoke to a Norman online recently and I thought it was so funny. First of all, this dude is from Asia and being an Asian and personally, I do not think that the culture and mindset in Asia is conducive for open collaboration, sharing and enterprise social networking. Feel free to comment if you think I am wrong or you have any good or bad experiences implementing Enterprise 2.0 in Asia. Let me continue with my conversation.

So he said this “Why would I wanna share my knowledge? I do not want to share my excellent ideas!” First of all, if anyone think that they are the smartest around, think twice. Even Professor Andrew McAfee asks for public contribution on his work. Well, he’s got a PhD and is the guy who coined Enterprise 2.0. I would think he is smart but he stills contribute to the knowledge.

As a Enterprise 2.0 implementer, I constantly think of various roadblocks and speed humps organisations might face and when I think of it, I blog about it most of the time. I will research and make sense of the problem and try to come out with a solution. I must say, I never have the final answer. I write about it and my friends read it, my colleagues read it, my peers read it and people online read it. Regularly, I get people dropping by my desk and say “Great post! I had a similar experience…” or “Mate, I don’t agree because…” I learn from whatever they say, even though I might not agree at that point of time, I will always take it with me and think about it from their point of view. Most of the time, I learn something new, a new perspective, a new idea.

So how does it make me smarter?
1) Thinking of a problem, framing the problem, researching and coming out with an initial solution makes me think and find out something I didn’t know before. I learnt one new thing.

2) From researching, more often than not, you will come across something not related but interesting (hopefully useful, but nevermind if its not). I learnt another new thing.

3) After writing and posting on my blog, I get feedback and comments. I might learn nothing here if not comments but if there are 10, I will learn 10 things.

So from here, you can see that everytime you contribute, you will surely learn something - at least one thing. Continuously, I learn more.

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule) states that, for many events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. My academic friend asked me this earlier this week, if Pareto rule holds, therefore an Enterprise 2.0 investment (might cost hundreds of thousands to implement) might not be a good idea at all. If 80% of the content on an Enterprise 2.0 platform is contribute by only 20% of the employees then it defeats the purpose of enterprise wide collaboration and the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 would not be achieved. Theoretically he is right.

However, from my experience of implementing Enteprise 2.0, if the organisation creates a purpose for people to use the Enterprise 2.0 platform for their daily work and team collaboration across geographic boundaries then the uptake would be extremely different. Lets face it, most people do not like to work and they are at work to make money. So for people to adopt something new and move out of their comfort zone to use Enterprise 2.0 technologies, it must first be directly beneficial to their work and make their life easier on an individual basis.

Whenever I speak to newbies about Enterprise 2.0, alot of questions arises. Some are genuine concerns and some are Norman-ish questions. However, when a real life example is provided and I illustrate how Enterprise 2.0 can help them and make their life easier, they become converts straight away. Within hours, they get onto the platform and never looked back and so far I can see that contribution volume is based on the amount of work they were assigned to complete and not the 80-20 rule.

From the above, I can safely say that The Pareto Principle doesn’t apply. I will continue to look more into this and monitor the long term results. There might be chance that Pareto principle might hold in the long run.

I am extremely fascinated by Andrew McAfee’s paper on “Investing in IT that makes a competitive difference“. As I wrote previously, I believe that IT can only be an enabler in terms of providing competitive advantage and I believe this is the same for innovation. The reason why they are the same is that after all, the computers can only perform whatever we feed it. Yes to a certain extent a computer can “think” and calculate however, ultimately humans are the ones who controls it and, at the moment at least, its only as good as the person who operates it.

By the way, Susan Cramm wrote a good post on the Harvard Business Publishing blog titled “Meet the Challeneges of Consistent Innovation“

I believe that there are some problems organisations need to solve before encouraging constant innovation.

1) Information asymmetry - what my boss knows is not what I know. This is a constant problem within organisations and even though Enterprise 2.0 hopes to solve this problem, it will always be there. Tacit knowledge is not easy to capture. Human emotions and relationships is even harder to document. Not understanding the full picture can make some kinds of innovation very difficult and the recommendation might not be very good.

2) Rejection of innovation. So employees put in the hard yards and went above and beyond to innovate on something. Something they are passionate about. However, if the boss doesn’t like it or its just not good enough, they were rejected and told to either improve on it or in the worst case, to bugger off. Such kinds of employees are valuable as they have went over and beyond and the last thing any company would want is to piss them off.

3) Quality of employees. For innovation to happen, generally, employees needs to be enthusiastic, motivated and generally being happy at work. Why is Google getting much more innovation as compared to the average Joe company? Other than having 20% of the time to work on innovative ideas, you can say that employees are happy working at Google. Its easy to say make people happy at work but getting there is a nightmare.

I am sure there are more work organisations needs to get to before constant innovation can happen. Constant innovation has benefits that can lead to higher employee satisfaction, job satisfaction and loyalty. Its something organisations must look at.