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.

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.

… 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.

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.

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.

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.

How can we ensure or promote such kinds of behaviour within the organisation? Also, can the tool have any features to prevent “bullying” from happening?

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!

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.