De meeste bedrijven die tot nu toe hebben geroken aan Enterprise Social Media hebben ervaren dat veel van dergelijke initiatieven een kort leven zijn beschoren. De reden hiervoor is dat bedrijven nog onvoldoende in staat zijn social media in de ‘echte’ bedrijfsprocessen te gebruiken. Daar zijn de echte benefits te halen. Aan de hand van een concrete case laat Jaap Linssen zien welke voordelen het gebruik van social media hebben in een echt bedrijfsproces. Daarnaast presenteert hij de OrangeTrail ESM adoption best practice. Een bewezen leidraad om in de eigen organisatie mee aan de slag te gaan.

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Many bureaucratic decision making processes take such a long time because they are sequential. A case/decision generally moves from gate to gate. All delay in the process cumulates resulting in long processing time.

If in such cases a meeting were called where all required expertise and mandate were available, the decision could be made in much shorter time because all involved parties are able to directly interact. Social media comes very close to offering people the same opportunities to communicate as being in the same room together. Decision-making occurs much in the same way as in groups that are physically in the same room. One person posts a case and all people required for the decision reply to the post stating their opinion. Social tools can therefore support decision making significantly in situations where people are not physically in the same room.

Very political organizations often resist the use of social media to support decision-making on more strategic domains because social tools are not well suited to support political maneuvering. They create too much transparency.

Case:
At a large international firm in Brussels they have strict policies on education and event attendance. In practice this means that one requires clearance from three to four managers. Traditionally the request would be handed to the departments’ secretary on paper. She would sent the request to the first manager, get it back with an ok and send it to the next manager, and so on. This process took a lot of time. In the late 90’s they innovated and moved the process to email where the email would be sent, replied, and forwarded until clearance was complete. Still this could be quite a lengthy process. Today these requests are messages on an activity stream and all managers comment directly to it. This has reduced processing time by over 80% and there is no secretarial involvement required.

The most straightforward method is searching what people have put in their profiles. Most profiles ask users for all sorts of information. The input varies from dropdown lists to categorize individuals, tags to indicate expertise or interests, text fields to publish cv’s, etc. These types of profiles are not very powerful. Users are usually requested to fill in these profiles before they engage with a platform. In many cases the platform hasn’t proven its value yet and the exercise is viewed as a burden. Therefore, not enough attention is given to adding profile information.

In a more advanced stage other people are able to add content about an individual to a profile. This form is a better indication of true expertise. Its power is at the same time its limitation. There are numerous reasons why peoples’ current colleagues are not aware of all expertise of a person. The most important reason being that the person has held other jobs in other roles in other companies. This type of method should therefore always be combined with the method where the individual populates his or her profile themselves.

More advanced systems will collect activity of the user in the profile and combine that with ratings of that content. Profiles will be built up of activities of that individual. The contributions will be organized in meaningful ways, one of which is organizing contributions based on the rating of peers. Valuing expertise based on actual activity and contribution is the most powerful method. McKinsey reports that in a recent study of ESM use 30% of companies indicate to use social tools to allocate resources and match people to tasks.

Case: Project staffing
A large Dutch corporate ran a platform to share knowledge and connect its employees. After one and a half year they upgraded the profiles to show all activity of an individual. The platform also contained a button ‘This is valuable’. People used it to indicate if a specific contribution was valuable to them. In the profiles all activity would be organized according to its’ valuation by others. The profiles became CVs that displayed actual knowledge, interest and activity from a person. It didn’t take long before the HR department started to use the platform to scout for people to staff projects and positions in the company. After some time people in the HR department referred to the platform as ‘the real CV database’.

Furthermore, expertise can be found in searching the content on the platform and contacting the individual with the best contributions. When companies start using these technologies on a large scale relevance of search may become an issue if the amount of content is significant. This phenomenon is often referred to as big data. How do you find that gem from all the conversations? Search is one of the key elements of a social platform.

Finally, as covered in the paragraph for collective intelligence, if you formulate your question well, the expertise is likely to find you.

Compared to traditional knowledge management the knowledge that is captured is a lot more relevant to other users because it has a clear context and is often demand based. If knowledge is shared as an answer to a question it is 100% relevant. If a specialist needs to share his knowledge without a clear audience and question, it is very difficult to make the knowledge relevant to others.

The third great benefit to knowledge capture through social tools is related to knowledge or information becoming old and out of date. A lot of information stored in traditional knowledge systems is out of date the moment it is uploaded. With social media the knowledge is always connected to people that uploaded the information and took part in the conversion. If the stored information is out of date, one can always contact the people involved and in most case these people will poses the up to date information or will be able to point to the person that has that knowledge.

Case: Collaborative innovation
One of the top 3 insurance firms in the Netherlands had a platform to share knowledge and connect people. One day an event took place in the life of an employee and he asked himself why this was not a product his company sold as the market for it was enormous. He decided to ask the question on their platform. He didn’t get a satisfying answer. He then proceeded to state he was going to find out if such a product made sense for the company. First he asked if there were any market research available in the company on the specific market. Within one week he received 5 research reports from different places in the organization. Based on these pieces of research he created a few rough concepts and used the platform to ask colleagues to help him improve the concepts. This process lead to 4 key concepts that were sufficiently interesting to further research. For each concept the employee asked an actuary to do some initial calculations. This process has created two things of value for the company. Firstly, at this time one division of this company is developing one of the concepts to be taken to market in 2012. Secondly, by asking specific questions to build the concepts and the business cases, this employee left a trail of knowledge that holds most of the knowledge and experts about this specific market and product type.

Social networking technology allows an individual to ask the whole company for help and get answers within minutes from people they had never heard of. They don’t need to go and find expertise but expertise will find them.

Other great ways to utilize the collective intelligence of a company is to collect ideas fromthe organization or use the organization for problem solving. Companies that gain some experience in this field then move on to use the crowd to further enrich and grow the best ideas. People will collaborate on bringing together market intelligence, discuss technical feasibility, and explore financial aspects of the innovation. While people are working on this together all their conversation and shared material is captured building the company’s knowledge about the future.

Case: Idea generation
A global telecoms company adopted a challenge based, collective intelligence approach to collaborating on cost-saving. Using a social tool that manages the innovation process a question was posed by the CIO to all staff ‘what can you do to help us save cost’? The first flurry of participation was reinforced by some very pro-active comments from the CIO. People posted ideas to which the CIO responded ‘go and make it happen’. This closing of the idea to action loop prompted a rush of participation as people came to believe they could really make a difference. One early idea, submitted by someone in the billing department, enriched by people in legal, technical and financial went from raw idea to implementation in 4 weeks and saved the company 5 million euros a year. A review of the process identified that without

Similar to collecting ideas but a lot more powerful is the practice of using ESM to develop strategic plans and have large of groups participating in that process. Companies that are successful at this have less issues executing strategy as it is lived by the organization. These organizations often define strategic domains in which they believe the organization should develop itself. These domains get special collaboration spaces. Large groups of people deliver information and knowledge they find outside the company to these domains. ‘Everybody’s eyes’ will find significantly more relevant information then a small strategy team.
The role of strategy teams shift from doing the research and analysis to lead an explorative conversation where they constantly focus the companies brainpower by asking them questions and giving them problems to solve. Strategy teams will become facilitators and conversion leaders.

We view these tools more as an evolution of the Internet than as a very specific phenomenon. Below is a list of the most important technologies that are all social tools.

Blog

Blogging was one of the first Web 2.0 phenomena that gained momentum. Simply put, blogs allow anyone to become a reporter. A blog is a stream of articles. In most cases visitors of the blog can comment on the blog.

In most companies senior managers use blogs in order to achieve improvements in the way they communicate with all employees. This usage doesn’t reflect the core power of blogs (anyone can be a reporter) but it is a new channel for management and corporate communication. Most companies use the blog in the same way as they used to use the company newsletter. It’s a way to communicate decisions, new policy, or other important issues. This type of use is ‘traditional’ communication. It informs people. Many companies make the mistake of solicitation for reactions at the end. This does not contribute too much because people are very aware of the fact that they can in no way influence the outcome. Hence, these reactions are usually made up of people that are disgruntled with the decision or try to be smart to get the attention of senior management. We advise companies to stick to traditional push communication for this type of communication.

Using the blog to inform the company of your activities is a powerful way for senior management to get the company engaged with important issues. People like to have insight into a senior managers doings. These blogs are only successful if its form is informal and informative. They are powerful tools to steer a company through a change program by raising the issues faced early in the process, over time visiting different potential solutions, and slowly coming closer to the moment of truth. It allows people to slowly get to terms with the inevitable. There are two ways in which senior management can lose credibility through using this way of communicating. They need to realize this is a personal way to address the company. Formal communication should be done through the formal channels, not this channel. Because this form of blogging is very personal, do not use ghostwriters. If the company finds out, this will cause serious issues with the company’s confidence in their leadership.

Furthermore specialists in the company use blogs to inform the organization about their domain of work. Examples are blogs about company products, HR, or IT security. This form again comes closer to the blogs’ core purpose where everyone can contribute. For these blogs one should also be very considerate when soliciting for input. The general rule is: Only ask for input if you are prepared and committed to use peoples’ input and show it. In all other cases, refrain from it because is creates a cynical attitude toward the way management values its’ employees contributions.

Wiki

A wiki is a platform where all pages can be created and edited by its users. The most well known wiki is Wikipedia. Wikis have 2 big qualities with regards to corporate life:
1. They allow a group of people to work in the same document. Anyone can make changes in the document. The wiki stores all versions to be able to go back to previous versions if the changes are not accepted. Typically groups of people successfully using a wiki have high trust amongst each other. Content like process descriptions, manuals or procedures is very suitable to manage in a wiki environment.
2. Within a wiki platform it is possible to create links between content. For example: in the sentence “To evaluate coverage for laser treatment on eyes one needs to take into account articles 45 and 65.” In this sentence there would be a link from ‘laser treatment on eyes’ to the description of the procedure and links from the numbers directly to the articles.

Forum and Microblogging

Forums and microblogging have differing origins and might have minor technical differences. However, the core of their function is that they allow people to engage in dialogue. People can contribute by sharing ideas, asking questions, giving status updates, sharing opinions, etc.

Dialogue is the core of the contribution social media has. Microblogging is therefore the most important technology of a company’s collaboration toolset.

Key to this form of conversation is what is often referred to as threaded conversation. Individuals are able to reply directly to the posts of others. With threaded conversation, interaction is kept together. SharePoint and Twitter are examples of platforms that do not have threaded conversation. Most ESM microblogging tools do have threaded conversation.

Activity streams

Activity streams are very similar to microblogging and forums in the way they look. They display a personalized list of activities that have taken place on the platform and that are relevant for that specific user. Most of the content in an activity stream is made up of posts of individuals from microblogging. However, activity streams also display other content related to other functions on the platform such as documents being shared, items liked, people joining the platform, agenda items being created, etc. Different software vendors use the activity stream in different ways.

We are seeing the first signs that activity streams are becoming the place where all digital and work related information comes together. They are becoming the employee’s dashboard on their work. As companies are more and more shifting towards the use of broad collaboration platforms the importance and richness of the activity stream will increase. These activity streams will also start to become connected to front end and back end systems. People within a company will start to follow clients, not just on twitter, but also in their CRM system and other systems. In case of a significant update in the status of a client all people that are involved with that client will receive an update. If there is a necessity to have a conversation about it, this can be started directly in the comment box of the update. The conversation and all knowledge used is stored and if decisions were made, they are traceable.
We are clearly seeing software vendors moving in this direction. Salesforce.com is connecting its social platform Chatter to its CRM system and we see other software vendors also moving into this space.

Social Networking (linking)

Social networking refers to technology that lets people connect to each other. This networking allows people not to only maintain a network of strong ties but also keep up to date with people with whom you have weaker ties. A persons’ network of strong ties is the network of people they know well; your friends, family, and colleagues. Dunbars’ law indicates that people are not capable of keeping up to date with a network larger then 150 people. Above that number the ties become weaker. Social networking allows us to better keep up to date with those weaker ties by linking to them in various ways. When people update their profile or when they post updates, questions, ideas, etc. we are notified and stay informed.

Using your own network or the networks of the people you are linked to allows you to quickly find expertise or leads. The problem with most linking systems is that they lack context. In many cases it is much more interesting to know why people are linked than to be aware of the plain fact that they are linked. This is especially true in a corporate setting. Knowing that people have worked in project X together or knowing that a group is linked because they delivered last years strategy document is very valuable. You can then navigate the organization based on subjects and see what people are involved. We are not aware of any major social collaboration platforms having this functionality today.

Profiles

Every social tool has profiles. The importance of profiles differs greatly with the way in which they are used. In most software the user fills in the profile for others to be viewed and found. The value of such profiles is very limited. The data in these profiles is always outdated if people are happy in the job they are in. The reason for this is that people only update their profile when they have just started a job or when they are looking for another job.

The value of profiles updated only by the people themselves is limited by the fact that they display what the person wants to display and not necessarily what that person has really done. The value improves when other people can add information to profiles. There are some tools that let other people tag other peoples’ profiles. This is better because it generates a view of what others think the qualities of that person are. The best way of utilizing profiles is to populate the profiles with the actual activity of that person on the platform. There is nothing more powerful to judge a persons expertise then being able to see what these people are contributing.

Rating and liking

All social tools let users rate or like. Fundamentally the use of these techniques fall into two categories:
1. Behavior: Liking or praising what individuals have done.
2. Content: Liking content, company/team actions, products, or services.

Ad 1. Using the like function to praise the actions of individuals is a widely used way to say ‘well done’ to individuals. In most cases these likes are ‘nice’ for the person receiving them. They can also be very powerful instruments for management to stimulate specific behaviors. All employees welcome a public like from management. These likes are also a powerful way for more senior management to stimulate those people they normally do not interact with. Finally, this type of stimulation is also a powerful way to increase the adoption rates of social platforms. Some tools have further developed the ‘like’ phenomenon and have developed special praise functions and badges that indicate certain status.

Ad 2. When a person posts content (a message, document, image, etc.) other people can indicate they ‘like’ that or rate it. ‘Liking’ is a relatively simple way of rating. There are also methods that score content. In corporate environments rating is most often used to select ideas. The philosophy behind this is that the best ideas and content will automatically float up. This way of using the wisdom of the crowds has major drawbacks. Because almost all powerful ideas require change and large companies reject change, the natural tendency of an organization will be to reject powerful ideas. Hence, the rating mechanism will only surface mediocre ideas.

Combining rating content with profiles is a very powerful mechanism. Profiles of people display contributions of people and their rating. Such a mechanism makes sure that in a profile one can see what contributions of an individual others appreciate most. In general these contributions will correlate highly with expertise and interest. When the profiles become richer, they will become a very good indication of a persons’ ‘real’ qualities. We are not aware of any major software vendors offering this type of functionality yet.

Most social tools have rating and liking functions. Our experience indicates that these instruments are most potent as a tool for (senior) management to stimulate adoption and the new way of working. We haven’t seen any cases yet where the rating has caused useful ways to automatically select ‘the best’ content. In the future, rating peoples’ contributions will accumulate to a portfolio of expertise in profiles.

Summary

Social tools have many forms and shapes. The biggest impact on company performance comes from the combined use of microblogging and activity streams.

Taking the perspective of the often used SWOT diagram, most organizations have focused on improving strengths and weaknesses for the past decades and have neglected to improve their capacity to deal with opportunities and threats.

Being able to deal with opportunities and threats requires the power to innovate, the power to creatively help clients, and the power to seize quickly arising market opportunities. Most companies have organized a few people in marketing and a handful of people in innovation to seize opportunities. The other 99% of the company is encouraged to stay within the boundaries of their job and in many cases discouraged to spend time and resources on activities outside that scope. None of these companies are making an impact. Those companies that are seizing opportunities are doing so because they are capable of generating broad participation of employees within the company.

Because ESM allows all employees to participate and work together regardless of rank, time, and location it is a very powerful tool to help companies redevelop the capability to seize opportunities and deal with threats.

Unlike the social media that deals with marketing and branding there is less hype around ESM. Although we do see that the majority of large organizations have started to experiment or are investigating the use of ESM. Enterprise social collaboration products have been around for about five years. Only 12 percent of information workers have access to enterprise social collaboration software, and only 8 percent of them use it at least once a week, according to a Forester report from late 2011. A McKinsey report shows different results. They found that in the important industries roughly 2/3 of employees have access to at least 1 social media tool.

Forester continues saying that organizations will increase their spending on enterprise social collaboration software at a compound annual growth rate of 61 percent through 2016, a year in which the market for these products will reach US$6.4 billion, compared with $600 million last year.

ESM holds a very big promise to make organizations much more agile and market focused. “When adopted at scale across an enterprise and integrated into the work processes of employees, social technologies can boost a company’s financial performance and market share” according to McKinsey (2011). To achieve such results entails more than just supplying the technology to people.

The essence of Enterprise Social Media is that you can work with anyone, anywhere, and at any time. It is different to traditional IT because it comes very close to people having a conversation. Put in a business perspective this greatly improves productivity, creativity, and problem solving. Because people work together online, all the knowledge they share and utilize is automatically captured and available to others. The few companies that are successfully using ESM are seeing great improvements of employee participation and engagement with the company.

The coming weeks we’ll be discussing many aspects of Social Business here. Come back and check it out.

Below are the videos of our presentations about social business.

Competitive advantage as we know it has vanished. The value of knowledge is declining everyday because it dissipates so quickly. The game is about “how fast can I create new knowledge?” To excel at in this game you need to:
1. Change as fast as change itself.
2. Make sure innovation is the work of everyone all the time.
3. Get your people to bring you the gifts of their creativity.

The management models that go with this are:
1. Adaptive
2. Supporting innovation
3. Engaging

The key question is; how do you get this done in a large corporate? First of all there is a mind shift where managers morph into being leaders and facilitators. They are no longer dictating what needs to be done, but should answer the question: “How are you helping your employees succeed in their job?”

Secondly a lot can be learned from the Web. The web is an immensely innovative ecosystem that is constantly changing. Much of this is caused by some deep values:
1. Openness
2. Meritocracy
3. Flexibility
4. Collaboration

To summarize Hamel’s speech: companies should start to lead and facilitate their employees to succeed and become an ecosystem with deep values comparable to the values the internet has.

We agree with Hamel’s take on management 2.0. Social business can be a great facilitator of the process of moving a company to a state where they again become more competitive. Social business potentially holds the same values as the Web and can bring a tremendous pace of change to a company. However, many organizations will try to resist these values at first. With our programs we help our clients find fertile ground for change. In these sweet spots we carefully create and nourish the right examples. You will not succeed in creating core values like openness, meritocracy, flexibility, and collaboration by dictating your employees. It is through creating the right examples and encouraging people to follow those examples that you will manage to evolve into a competitive organization.

OrangeTrail’s perfect track record is due to our unique combination of skills and experience of change management and social business.

Enjoy the video!