Synergise IT

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?

Andrew McAfee met Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt and Andrew asked the following question (please read Andrew’s post for full coverage)

“Eric, like many people here I teach at a business school, and I’ve always been disappointed with the results whenever I use Google as a case study. My executive education students always say that there’s nothing for them to learn from your company because it’s just is just too different from theirs— you’re very young, you’re in this strange online industry, and you’re full of people with 145 IQs.

I’ve been trying to push back against these arguments in the classroom, but as I listen to you here tonight I’m starting to think that my students might be right! As you’ve described it, Google seems to be a completely unique organization. So what can other companies and managers really learn from you?”

Eric’s response was response was something like this:

“They can learn to listen. Listening to each other is core to our culture, and we don’t listen to each other just because we’re all so smart. We listen because everyone has good ideas, and because it’s a great way to show respect. And any company, at any point in its history, can start listening more.”

Enterprise 2.0 can help senior management listen to their employees. I believe that a group of 10 senior management eyes can’t see as much as all the employees within a large organisation. All employees should contribute for the better of the organisation and assist senior management in making the right decisions. Senior management should not look at this is losing their powers. Instead, Enterprise 2.0 would make their life easier. Everyone contributes and with that information, senior management then makes the final decision. Senior management’s job is to decide on the future of the organisation based on their extensive education, experience and good business acumen. They can use enterprise 2.0 to collect feedback and deliver the best results for the company.

We can learn from one of the success factors of Google which is to LISTEN.

I have been thinking about this question for a long time and I have somewhat came out with an answer.

Critical mass is important for enterprise 2.0 as it can help pool in ideas/information from around the company (across departments, locations and cross hierarchy). Ultimately, collaboration techniques and social media is probably the best way to connect everyone up and provide a platform for employees to input information that is related to them. So to answer the question if critical mass is important for the success of Enterprise 2.0, let me give you a small scenario. A company of roughly 20 employees sitting in the same office. Simple enough.

Let’s assume if the company has something like Jive’s Clearspace. Its a Enterprise collaboration software and social media platform. It features some of the most exciting tools organisations are looking for like rich profiles, document management, Wikis, discussions and project management. I feel that Clearspace is a good tool to use to analyse this question that I am discussing here.

Lets look at each of the feature with regards to the short scenario above.

1) If everyone is sitting in the same office, rich profiles would not really matter as everyone would know everyone and they would probably have small talks and catchups over coffee or something like that. Human interaction is normally preferred over internet communication - at least its more personal. Online discussions is an additional channel for the 20 employees to discuss work. How that would work out would really depend on the culture and environment of the company.

2) Document management, project management tools and wikis - these tools are important for any organisation. It helps you locate, manage and store information.

From the above, it seems apparent to me that a software like ClearSpace would help a small organisation to manage their operations better through a single collaborative platform. However, the social aspects of enterprise 2.0 would probably not work so well due to the close proximity of the employees.

I can then conclude saying this. A single collaborative software would be helpful whether the company is big or small , but social media/networking would require critical mass to achieve its benefits. (edited Monday morning) Critical mass is important no matter how you look at it. Everyone should be using it or contributing to it for Enterprise2.0 to be successful. If no one uses the collaborative software, it becomes just a pile of code doing nothing. If people do not contribute to the Wiki or upload files to the document manager, it becomes useless. The more people who are actively using it, the more successful Enterprise 2.0 would be for the organisation.

Please leave your comments if you have any. I would love to discuss more about this.

My research brain is exploding with ideas and I have recently did a enterprise 2.0 experiment and below are the lessons learnt. I am sorry I can’t disclose the details of the experiment but I can tell you what I got out of it.

1) Technology is important. Clearly the tool must meet the requirements (Duh!). However, what I mean here is that usability is EXTREMELY important. Average is not good enough. It must be so simple baby bommers can learn it quickly.

2) Collaboration will not work if no collaboration is needed.

3) Teams working at the same location sitting beside each other tends not to use collaboration tools. They rather talk about it.

4) Collaboration requires “champions” within the teams to push and evangelise the benefits of Collaboration. They also work as a role model for collaboration.

5) Advanced messaging is a requirement just like “The Wall” on facebook. The tool must be able to send private and public messages to everyone or just a specific group.

If you like more details, please contact me.

I have been getting many incoming search strings to this blog on SharePoint and KnowledgeTree and I would like to address this question people might have.

Interesting enough, I actually asked KnowledgeTree this question last night but after the meeting, I felt I had asked a rather silly question. Sharepoint and KnowledgeTree are two different products. Traditionally, Sharepoint was a document manager and until now they are still a document manager. However, Sharepoint has added new collaborative and Web 2.0 features into it. However, KnowledgeTree is a document manager with some collaborative features, it doesn’t have the enterprise content management, business forms and business intelligence components that Sharepoint has. If you ask me, Jive’s ClearSpace is probably Sharepoint’s competitor (P.S. Clearspace does a MUCH better job).

KnowledgeTree is Free (pay for support if you want for the community edition. There’s an option to pay for the commercial edition where you get extra features and support - see comments section for more. Thanks Natasha) and Sharepoint, like many Microsoft software, is horrendously expensive. If you are looking for a excellent and cheap document manager, KnowledgeTree is the way to go. If you are thinking about Sharepoint, think again and again. There are many other super excellent options out there. KnowledgeTree has many great features and good extension capabilities. I believe KnowledgeTree has positioned itself as a excellent open source document manager but not a full Enterprise 2.0 suite.

I have one little tip: make sure everyone do their in depth requirements gathering process for any system you are thinking of building / implementing.

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Just to add a point, KnowledgeTree is a fit for purpose Document manager and I totally recommend it to everyone.