Synergise IT

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.

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.

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!

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.

I’ve been speaking to many “Normans” lately and its extremely eye opening to hear some in depth comments on what people really think of Enterprise 2.0. Sam Lawrence got it pretty spot on the different statements Normans would say. By the way, Sam just wrote a really really good post on the anatomy of the enterprise octopus. Totally recommended.

As an enthusiast and evangelist, I have been using blogs, wikis, social networking tools and countless collaboration tools (testing and reviewing them as they roll out of the factory). It has certainly improved my productivity, expanded my network of friends and increase my knowledge. This is what I showed some of the Normans I work with.

1) I started logging on to the corporate wiki and showed how people from across the world contributes and edit each others work, discussed and came to conclusion on difficult and complicated problems. No face to face meetings, possibly no conference call as well but consensus was achieved through the enterprise wiki. This Norman browsed around the Enterprise wiki (first time he was there) and found information he was looking for previously but could not find it. He saw the value straight away.

2) I opened up Twitter and my blog. My blog allowed to rant about stuff, ask questions, write about my experience and document my knowledge. There was some levels of discussion with people I have never met before who contributed to the increase of my knowledge. Some of these people even became my online twitter mates! I am building my own little knowledge empire and its growing.

I went on to explain to this Norman that if people across the world who works for different companies, have only one known common interest (enterprise 2.0), never met/spoken in their life and is exchanging and sharing information and knowledge via the very same tools they preach about. These are random people and they are helping each other to grow and learn more about Enterprise 2.0. Something must be right here and the conclusion is that the more you give, the more you get back.

Even though Wikipedia is built collaboratively but most people can’t seem to transform that idea to the enterprise. Another Norman said “Wikipedia contributors are geeks with no life and no such people exist in my company” I went on to look for three people in his company who contributed to Wikipedia who were NOT geeks and they have a pretty amazing life. That changed his perspective.

3) I showed another old Norman the Lego video and that shut him up totally. It changed his perspective of “organisations tries to create the best products they THINK its the best for them and force it down their throats” to “have a relationship with the customer, listen to them, improve on their ideas and give them what they want”

This is how I get people excited about enterprise 2.0. How do you do it?

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?

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.

Mike and myself is in a Mindtouch frenzy at the moment. We have both looked at Mindtouch previously, felt that its easy to use, pretty, great navigation and all, we actually missed out exploring in depth into the extension side of things until a few days ago. Read Mike’s review here.

I have to admit, I am not the best of programmers nor a code crunching nut - in fact, I don’t even consider myself as an amateur. However, if I can do it, then ALOT of people can do it. Its that simple. I have spent half the weekend playing with the extensions and its great fun, powerful and most importantly - simple.

Having said all these, I spent the other half of the weekend looking for a wiki - preferably a free one. This is a personal wiki for my post-graduate studies (for my supervisor and myself to collaborate on and a online repository for my thesis) and I looked at a HUGE amount of Wikis. TikiWiki, PhPWiki, SocialText, WetPaint, MediaWiki and Mindtouch. I have personally either installed or tried the online versions of all of them and decided on Mindtouch Deki Wiki hosted on Wik.is. Even though that means I have to pay $99 per year for only 10GB of space. Oh well, good things comes at a price.

I cannot emphasise enough how simple Deki Wiki is. Creating content is simple, managing the Wiki is super easy as well. It also has the power to extend its platform to add almost anything under the sun is something NO OTHER WIKI can do. Simplicity and power at its best!

After one weekend of Deki Wiki, I am surely a convert now. Keep up the good work MindTouch ROCKS and keep up the good work.

Blue Ocean Strategy talks about creating brand new markets and making your competitors irrelevant. I think its a great concept and surely doable. However, doesn’t mean that you buy the book, read it and process it, you would be able to come out with a great strategy that will make competitors irrelevant and make heaps of money. Its just not that simple.

While your organisation is working on that, Enterprise 2.0 can help pool together all the tacit knowledge held within your organisation and get people together to collaboratively work on a strategy. Many strategies were created within boardrooms with senior executives using their perceived perception of the company’s operations to formulate a strategy. However, with senior executives being far from the actual front line, they might be out of touch with the reality of the company.

Enterprise 2.0 can capture this tacit knowledge through wikis, blogs and funky tools - the best part of it all, you can search for it. It can also provide a platform that allows a bi-directional communication that allows some employees to provide feedback on the strategy thus ironing out any loose ends.

Having said all these, the culture of the company plays a key role in the success of this and Enterprise 2.0 experts must be hired to provide the implementation strategy, change management advisory, provide education to employees and evangelise the power of Enterprise 2.0.

A collaborative, supportive and transparent organisation can help provide that competitive advantage many organisations have seek for.

Stewart Mader author of WikiPatterns published a series of videos over 21 days on wiki adoption. Check it out.