Synergise IT

Enterprise social networking and collaboration are great with heaps of promised benefits - better communication, collaboration, connectivity, better human captial management across silos and geographic location. That’s all good.

However, managing the relationship outside of the Enterprise 2.0 platform is crucial as well. Technologists being introverts in general, sits infront of the computer hammering stuff away and do not really communicate their “magic”. So on an enterprise 2.0 platform, they would do the same and one day some technologist comes out with a fantastic idea and, due to a large variety of reason, did not communicate it. Well, alot of the times an assumption is made that management will read it, pick up the great idea, give recognition to the person who created it and implement it. However, that’s generally not the case. Imagine if you contributed something and someone picks it up and shows it off to the management / boss, that wouldn’t be very nice. I would argue that Enterprise 2.0 requires some level of trust but I can’t say everyone is trust-worthy.

I believe that if you think that something is fantastic and all, do not expect Enterprise 2.0 platform to help you fully communicate your ideas. It can help you do that if everyone is trust worthy, however, you should also make sure that its communicated to the senior management so that you can claim your incentive. Building real relationships and advancing in your career is still extremely important and should not be viewed as a replacement.

Let me introduce you to the 2.0 way of killing your career :

1) Collaboratively b*tch about your boss/peers with global colleagues.

2) Try to get “friendly” with a colleague of the opposite sex on the company Wiki.

3) Usage of vulgar words on enterprise social network site

We must understand that even though Enterprise 2.0 is magical but its not for all kinds of information. There are some things that should be and must be left for the private conversation. People must not see it as a email replacement but really more as a new way of working - collaboratively.

As many might know, one of the keys of successful marriage is strong and honest communication. That’s how humans nurture relationships. Constant communication makes the bond within the organisation strong. So what happens when you have good communication within a marriage? It leads to a reduction of misunderstandings / fights, more efficient handling of the relationship, kids, household and everything else in between. So how is this similar to an organisation?

I strongly believe the same theory applies to organisations in a slightly different way. Better communication would lead to a reduction of misunderstandings / political fights, more efficient handling of the projects, employees, operations and everything else in between.

Communication is something everyone does everyday. However, its not easy to administer good communication within a large company around the world. Enterprise 2.0 is here to solve this problem. At my workplace, we have been so efficient in harnessing the power of global talent, even I was surprised. We have started reaping the benefits of a truly global team and when I asked myself how it all happened? It all started through a simple Enterprise 2.0 platform.

Some would also say, “Ask and it shall be given, seek and you shall find”.

Economic theory states that people are generally driven by incentive to do something. Without incentive, then it would be harder to get an employee to do something or be motivated to do something. For example, people work from 9 - 5 is for money and thats the incentive. So what is an employee’s incentive to contribute to an Enterprise 2.0 platform?

There is a few ways you can look at it. Firstly let me list the different types of incentive:

Remunerative incentives (or financial incentives) are said to exist where an agent can expect some form of material reward — especially money — in exchange for acting in a particular way.
Moral incentives are said to exist where a particular choice is widely regarded as the right thing to do, or as particularly admirable, or where the failure to act in a certain way is condemned as indecent. A person acting on a moral incentive can expect a sense of self-esteem, and approval or even admiration from his community; a person acting against a moral incentive can expect a sense of guilt, and condemnation or even ostracism from the community.
Coercive incentives are said to exist where a person can expect that the failure to act in a particular way will result in physical force being used against them (or their loved ones) by others in the community — for example, by inflicting pain in punishment, or by imprisonment, or by confiscating or destroying their possessions.

So if you use coercive incentives then all employees must contribute because they work for me and I say they must contribute. Or you can do something like, if anyone contributes more than 100 entries per period, then the person would get X amount of dollars. Or you can “emotional blackmail” your employees to do it. However, all of the above has at least one fatal flaw (I will not go into details on the flaws).

How do you get people willingly contribute to the platform? I think the best way to increase adoption is to do a “head fake” education. I first heard of this idea from Professor Randy Pausch and what it really means is to teach people something but in actual fact, the person is learning something else. For example, Alice is a Java teaching tool but students do not see it that way. It tells a story and makes you do stuff but in actual fact, you are learning Java! I think the same should happen for Enterprise 2.0.

Depending on your situation, you could use it as a day to day business process tool and slowly start getting people to communicate via the tool and move into contributing on their own accord. This way people slowly move into the whole 2.0 idea.

There are many ways you can do it and its really up to your own imagination. =)

Blogging in the enterprise internally is something I cannot figure out. As avid bloggers would know, it takes a few years for a blog to take off and be popular. First, content that a blogger generate must be good. Secondly, you need to build a community around you. Thirdly for the blogger to get feedback, alot of readers are required (according to the “1-9-90″ rule, 90 read, 9 participate and 1 create content). Blogging maybe a good medium to “think out loud” but bloggers wants feedback as well.

I cannot figure out why organisations would want to implement blogs IN the enterprise.

1) Though blogging software can be free like wordpress but resources to maintain the server and blog governance is expensive! You need to hire someone to do the job.

2) People nowadays change jobs to quickly. Assuming, if it takes at least a year for blog to mature and before an employee starts blogging is another year. By the time the blog matures, the employee is thinking of leaving. Even worse if the blogger is popular, announcing the employee’s departure can hurt employee morale.

3) Network effect is important. If you blog about something, you would want people to provide feedback and the more the merrier. If “1-9-90″ rule holds true, then putting the blog on the world wide web will generate more readers and viewers. It can also act as a marketing medium if the person stays long enough and is popular enough.

4) Blogging is something personal. You spend time thinking, writing and reviewing your blog entry. As days and months/years goes by you have alot of entries and its your own piece of “art”. Personally, I would hate it if my company takes it away from me when I leave (because its an internal corporate blog). So where is the incentive for the blogger?

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We have all heard of internal blog success stories but what are the statistics? I would like to know that. Leave your thoughts as well.

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.

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.

I have been looking at IBM Lotus connections recently and I must say that its a pretty impressive product. As compared to Jive’s Clearspace, its generally the same but I am sure Sam would would be able to tell us more about the in depth difference. I think the final decision between the top few products in the market (IBM Lotus connections, Jive’s Clearspace, ThoughtFarmer or SocialText) would really boil down to cost, maintenance and support.

One thing I really do not understand about IBM connections is that it doesn’t have private or public messaging capabilities.

1) It doesn’t have the Facebook’s status (i.e. Sean is writing a blog at the moment and wondering why Connections doesn’t have this functionality). This might not be that important but the next one is.

2) It doesn’t have facebook’s “the wall”. I can’t write a message to one person or a selected group of people! Come’on if this is a social platform, its about communication and sending a message would probably be one of the most common way of communication. I would expect a few messaging capabilities a) public message to one person b) public message to a group of people c) private messaging. I would also expect a event calendar / invite functionality but this is really secondary and would be a “nice to have”

If anyone from IBM is reading this and disagree with me, feel free to educate me. I might be wrong here and glad to learn from anyone. Also if you are from Jive, ThoughtFarmer or SocialText, please feel free to let me know your differentiating factors/features.