Synergise IT

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.

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.

Previously, I conducted an experiment and it didn’t work out very well. I have since started another experiment at the request of a close friend.

Let me tell you abit more about this. I wanted to increase collaboration among two different teams across two geographical locations. It is not possible for these teams to have regular face to face meetings and they are both working on the same thing.

So I encouraged everyone on the team to get onto a Wiki, pre-populated the Wiki with some important information and structure. When the team first logon, they commented they wanted this and that and I accomodated the requests accordingly. As 90% of the team has never contributed to the Wiki before, I spent 10 mins explaining to concept of the Wiki and “best practices” to them. I did not enforce any rules on the wiki and let them do whatever they wanted.

The outcome was the total opposite of what happened previously. Everyone started playing with it first and one senior staff said “its easier than I thought”. Within a day, everyone on the team was contributing their part of the puzzle to the Wiki. What I found was that different people used it differently. Some was commenting alot, some were uploading their completed Word files to the wiki and using it as a document repository, some were afraid of commenting on the wiki and sent comments via email. I must say these are not best practices for sure. However, I am not too bothered - at these they are using it.

I was invited to re-educated them again. I reiterated the same story I told them on the first meeting and more questions arose (mainly conceptual and technical questions). Most of them were much more attentive and the meeting was more interactive as well. They were hooked for sure. Its been a while now and EVERYONE loves it. I get emails of satisfaction for implementing this for them.

Just for everyone’s curiosity, 1/2 the team were baby boomers! This time round, I got the technology right as well!

Co-creation, peer production or open innovation, whatever you call it, its pretty much the same thing - Getting your customers and community to provide feedback and spend time exploring and innovating new/existing products/services for your benefit.

McKinsey & Company released a new paper on The next step in open innovation and it talks about co-creation, how organisations can win from it, what are the hurdles and discussed about many case studies like Lego, Boeing, Threadless and Peugeot.

There are three ways to win with co-creation according to McKinsey
1) Capturing value from the co-create product - Well, Lego reap much benefits by talking to and understanding their die-hard fans. Watch this video.

2) Capture value by providing complementary product or service - Red Hat sells technology services to uses of Linux. IBM also invested a substantial amount of money and time in the open source community (Linux) and installs its software on their servers and sell it as a package.

3) Benefit indirectly from the co-creation process, for example, through an enhanced brand or strategic position. McKinsey did not give any example on this but I believe this is more from the marketing perspective where people start playing around with your product and learn more about it, the brand image becomes better(??) Do I make sense here?

There are hurdles as well according to McKinsey.
1) Attracting and motivating co-creators. This is simple - you need to squeeze time out of the right people to contribute to your organisation for free or for a small price/incentive.

2) Structuring the problems for participation. I totally believe that for co-creation to happen, a big problem must be broken down into bite size portions and people can take one portion each and explore/innovate on it.

3) Governance mechanisms to facilitate co-creation - well we have rules and guidelines in almost all aspects of life. Co-creation shall be the same.

4) Maintaining quality - There are two ways to look at quality within an open environment. a) the team is only as strong as its weakest link or b) look at the quality of Linux and Wikipedia when the critical mass is achieved. I believe for the success of an open innovation program, critical mass is absolutely important. Look at Marketocracy its almost a open source mutual fund and its Marketocracy Masters 100 Fund Received 5-Star rating from Morningstar in May 2008. That’s achievable by the 55,000 strong community they have.

I had the luxury and pain of working in two extremely diverse projects previously.

The first one - a highly supportive, trusting and friendly environment. Enterprise 2.0 tools was implemented - wiki, collaborative project management and IMs. Everyone worked really well together and there was NO conversation like “I will send you an email to confirm what we have just spoken (so that I can document this conversation)”. People trusted each other and the Enterprise 2.0 tools flourished. People contributed, shared knowledge and discussed for the better of the program. When the client saw what we were doing, they asked to join in the “fun” and the relationship between the client and us became better as well.

The second one - a extremely cunning, slimy, scheming, competitive and politically challenging environment. Armed with a extremely good Enterprise 2.0 experience, I thought Enterprise 2.0 might reduce/soften the politically climate. I was extremely extremely wrong. I proposed E2 tools a few times and it got rejected. It never went live. I then checked out a FAQ that someone else had in another part of project. There was some information on it that I needed and a few months later, I went back and the page was missing. After some investigation, I found the guy who deleted it and asked him why. He said, “my boss didn’t want me to share such valuable information.”

Although through the above examples, I cannot generalise on the requirement for trust and friendliness as a prerequisite for the success of Enterprise 2.0 but I do believe to a certain degree this will be true. If the organisation is politically very heated, it is unlikely people would share and contribute. After all, humans are more likely to share with someone else if they trust and like the person - this is human nature.

If you like to know how social strategy can change an organisation check this video below! Its amazing! Listening to your customers can mean alot things - new revenue, increase revenue, new perspective, more fun, more loyalty and etc… Thanks Paul!

Jay at e2oh wrote an excellent post on the need to engage Gen Y within the corporation. A good read.

I would like to extend his post and talk more about how to connect and attract the best Gen Y talents external to your organisation. Gen Y are people born in 1980 and onwards - this means that the oldest Gen Y employee is only 28 this year and heaps of younger Gen Y’s are entering the job market every year. So how can you connect the top talent in this pool? They approximately have less than 6 years work experience and many have none or just a couple of years.

So what does this pool of people need other than job satisfaction? I would say money. This pool of people are generally younger and with entry level corporate salary, it would be hard to maintain their alcohol, boyfriend/girlfriends, travel, shopping and everything else they want to buy. This pool of people also have something organisations want - their revolutionary ideas. So why not connect with the Gen Y’s through competition with cash rewards at specific professional societies, universities or clubs targeting the right pool of talents?

This has many advantages.
1) Helps an organisation identify the top talent through the deliverables they provide.
2) gain new ideas and solutions to your problems.
3) Through connection to your organisation, even if they are not interested in changing jobs, they would be able to promote your organisation through the word of mouth to their massive network of friends.
4) Offer them cash in return for them to follow your organisation on Twitter, Facebook and keep them updated with the latest development and build your organisation’s own little empire of talents without the salary and benefits package.

All these comes at a super small cost. For example, cash prize of $5000. What’s that sum of money to a large organisation? The benefits of doing this greatly outweighs the cost.

“The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight.”
Malcolm Gladwell

If you apply the same rule to a group of people then understandably, collaboration technologies would allow them to easily gather their ideas together and work together as an efficient source of insight.

IBM recently conducted interviews with 1,130 business and public sector leaders worldwide in 45 countries and the end result was the IBM Global CEO Study. Assuming that IBM has conducted this research with the same level of academic rigor as universities, this study would be a world changing piece of finding.

The main outcome of this research is as following:

1) Hungry for change: The Enterprise of the Future is capable of changing quickly and successfully. Instead of merely responding to trends, it shapes and leads them. Market and industry shifts are a chance to move ahead of the competitions

2) Innovate Beyond Customer Imagination: The Enterprise of the Future surpasses the expectations of increasingly demanding customers. Deep collaborative relationships allow it to surprise customers with innovations that make both its customers and its own business more successful.

3) Globally Integrated: The Enterprise of the Future is integrating to take advantage of today’s global economy. Its business is strategically designed to access the best capabilities, knowledge and assets from wherever they reside in the world and apply them wherever required in the world.

4) Disruptive by Nature: The Enterprise of the Future radically challenges its business model, disrupting the basis of competition. It shifts the value proposition, overturns traditional delivery approaches and, as soon as opportunities arise, reinvents itself and its entire industry.

5) Genuine, Not Just Generous: The Enterprise of the Future goes beyond philanthropy and compliance and reflects genuine concern for society in all actions and decisions

Enterprise 2.0 concepts fits right in the middle of the results of this report. Disruptive by Nature, Globally Integrated and Innovate Beyond Customer Imagination is the outcome of extensive collaboration, communication, sharing and collective intelligence executed internally and externally of the organisation.

Clearly this is a idealistic outcome of collaboration and enterprise social networking. To get to this point, there is alot to be changed.

1) Perception of organisation within organisations.
2) Flattening of organisation hierarchy
3) Increase organisational transparency
4) Release of control from senior management
5) Adoption of collaborative and social networking tools
6) Move away from emails to collaborative tools
7) Trusting a stranger over the internet
8 ) and many many more…

Personally, I do not think this will happen too quickly as such changes involves the entire organisation and many organisations have their own political walls and wars to get through before such ideas can even be approved to be implemented. However, I can say that things are looking good. =)

I have recently experienced collaboration technologies within a politically intense situation within a large organisation (good thing I was only there for a day). I must say, whatever benefits that Enterprise 2.0 promises was threw out of the window and the Wikis and comments became a war ground. The moderators could not do anything productive as many were afraid to take sides or have already taken a side. It was a power struggle, childish fight and just absolutely retarded.

After this experience, I had been thinking hard about how can Enterprise 2.0 succeed in such an environment? Lets just put it this way - Enterprise 2.0 (social networks, collaboration, communication…) is a tool and its controlled by humans. Just like paracetamol, while it can help you reduce your headache and make you feel better, abuse of paracetamol can lead to death. My question is how can we prevent this from happening?

Guidelines can help.
Moderators can help.

What else?