It’s not hard to turn on the information spigot within business through deployed technologies, the challenge is in filtering information to expose it to the right people at the right times and guiding intelligent usage for maximum benefit. There’s tactically a strong element of information flow plumbing in order to reroute the way people access and interact with it. If you have too many ‘personal digital lifestyle’ documentors in your organization they may frighten off all the other folks you are guiding towards more efficient ways of working.
Getting people to think as individuals in order to contribute more intelligently to their place of work is a timeless holy grail, and while modern Enterprise 2.0 technologies enable this thinking the herd mentalities and seductive pressures of the narcissitic consumer web can pollute the best of intention.
Oliver Marks on the “sea of cubicles” (ZDNet) another argument for nuanced approach to enterprise collaboration
“Companies Aren’t Communities” a nice wake up call for enterprise social bleeding hearts
There are three groups of people who cling to the “company as community” concept: the “kumbayeros” who wish that companies were as open and democratic as communities, public community managers whose consumer-facing experience has shaped the way they view all online social interaction, and community software vendors who are looking to re-purpose their consumer-oriented products for the internal market.
In the enterprise, we need to take a more pragmatic approach. As the old saying goes, “The business of business is business.” Social software fails when it tries to turn businesses into consumer-style communities. It succeeds when it turns businesses into better businesses.
Fantastic call for integrating social into business process, and — equally important — training not on a tool, but training on “how to do your job now.”
User-Generated Enterprise Applications?
Today, many enterprise applications, whether custom developed or commercially available, fall into the trap of trying to be too many things for too many people. By 2020, user-developed business applications will evolve from spreadsheets and simple databases built and maintained by a single “power user” to feature-rich, lightweight applications built by anyone to address the needs of the individual, small teams, or entire departments. These will be shared across the enterprise, enhanced by the internal user community, and extended outside the firewall to suppliers and partners.
Now I work for an enterprise software company, and I happen to believe the market will be safely crowded by 2020. But what will enterprise applications look like? How will they be packaged and sold? By whom? For whom?
I’ve been kicking around a theory that in the age of SharePoint and other flexible platforms (Google? Facebook? Salesforce.com!) all packaged software is just a series of decisions pre-made: from functionality, to interface, to branding, to extensibility, you-name-it.
The smart players may be the ones preparing for the age of the power user. The lowly clerk or admin who needs a unique app on Tuesday, builds it Wednesday, and makes it available to the enterprise app store for scaling on Thursday.
How powerful is that?
Advice for Innovators: Maybe lay off the facts when trying to get buy-in
Given the power of our prior beliefs to skew how we respond to new information, one thing is becoming clear: If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn’t trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.
This quote, from Chris Mooney’s excellent piece on the phenomenon of motivated reasoning, comes near its end. Here he gives possible ammunition to those who would try to win over another whose worldview triumphs over inconvenient scientific fact — at least in the context of the current debate.
Mooney closes with the suggestion we reserve those damning facts that brought us to our own belief on the matter, and instead “lead with the values” and appeal to the other’s lifelong experience of constructing beliefs. At least be respectful of it.
New facts, new studies, new data won’t instantly sway someone entrenched and invested in their own way of thinking. Someone with a litany of anecdotal evidence and worn intellectual cowpaths.
I deal with this very issue in my hierarchical corporate environment. I am exceedingly fortunate to be given the freedom of movement and political cover to explore the potentials in new tools and processes. I work diligently to find allies at my own level of operating.
But appealing to the management layers — even those who’ve provided me this very breathing room — is a challenge. Often it’s a matter of delivering conspicuously on the task assigned (“Give me a place to store documents that everyone can access.”), then devoting nights and weekends to the innovative, the forward-thinking, the ‘solution qui anticipe’ (“Tought about a wiki instead?”).
It’s a thin line to walk.
Michael Healey: Why Collaboration Should Center Around Email
IT organizations have 11 major choices today when it comes to technology-assisted communication and collaboration. Some are old and boring, like the phone and fax, while others — like telepresence rooms — make you feel like a Jetson….
IT teams need to assess each based on whether they support six critical integration points, three interoperability benchmarks, and three user requirements. View this as a checklist for success — or a harbinger of the troubles ahead if they’re ignored. And they all start with email.
Thorough and actionable, if not slightly mistitled. Like Harmon.ie’s entire business model, Healey asserts Enterprise 2.0 solutions will not succeed if corporations must quit email cold turkey.
By integrating into email — the corporate go-to for communication, document exchange, even task management — your chosen E2.0 solution can offer each individual users choices at the point of transaction for how they’ll choose to complete their work.
The more efficient methods will naturally, organically emerge. Peer pressure and the very nature of collaborative tools will combine to spread best practices virally.
johnkleeman: SharePoint for Social Learning : Hero or Villain?
…in the corporate world you cannot “toss a rock in any direction without someone mentioning SharePoint as the glorious solution for social learning”. I’m afraid this is definitely true on this blog! He points out several disadvantages of SharePoint, the key ones being…
Points to “blog entry by e-learning analyst Craig Weiss, titled “SharePoint – Social Learning Savior?” Does not mention 3rd party true LMS players integrating into SharePoint and taking advantage of its social features.
@joeshepley “Build So They Will Come” on SP planning, via CMSWire #sharepoint #techcomm
What I want to do in this post is to walk through some ways to avoid the if we build it mentality and better tailor your SharePoint implementation to the people who matter the most — the end users.
There are four broad activity areas you need to focus on to not only understand your end-users’ needs, but have a fighting chance of meeting them as well:
- User Segmentation
- Use Case Analysis
- Technology Mapping
- Training and Communication
Nicely written piece on the aspects of SharePoint planning that tend to fall through the cracks.
Interesting that these are best practices followed by the typical user-advocacy roles that have been around for years (usability, online help, documentation, training, change management, etc.).
The difference here, from my perspective, lies in the tendency for these concerns to be “tacked on” to the project after the fact — and ultimately squeezed when budgets overrun elsewhere. Software teams and their executive stakeholders have a sense of the results they want from the tool and will focus exclusively on those ends. Adoption is abysmally slow as a result.
With an endlessly configurable platform solution such as SharePoint, there are no concrete “ends” to speak of. Implement once and empower vertically, is the model.
It is the responsibility of the SharePoint end-user community to develop its own pool of expertise, its own minimum capability standards under proper governance, its own collaboration maturity trajectory. It is equally the responsibility of line of business management to set goals, enable the creative conditions, and then get out of the way.
“Ten top issues in adopting enterprise social computing” @dhinchcliffe via ZDNet
Unfortunately, despite an growing body of encouraging case studies, evidence, and research, the jury is still out on total impact social computing will have on businesses. This return will even vary widely for many organizations for a number of reasons will explore below. At present, the uncertainty is simply because that there are not enough organizations that have incorporated social computing approaches (which encompasses the full range of social software as applied to business that include social networks and Enterprise 2.0 to things like crowdsourcing and social CRM) across their lines of business for us to get a complete enough picture. Even the ones that have done it, haven’t done it long enough to see what the results actually are.
Nearly a year old, but still valid. Interesting when viewed in larger perspectives of recently-completed “Social Media Mgmt Handbook” http://amzn.to/eVEQTX
Robin Good’s definitive overview of real-tme content curation
Content curation is one of the most disruptive forces to have emerged in the last twelve months and one that will continue to expand its reach and influence in the coming years. Content curation, and with it, all of the infinite number of other curation sub-niches (video, news, social, products, data, etc.) will see a true blooming of applications, tools and services that will further enable individuals and organizations to create high-value content collections, digests, and newsradars of all kinds.
Thorough overview of curation principles and positioning for content professionals. Topics include:
Part 1: Why we need it
Part 2: Aggregation is not curation
Part 3: Types and real-world examples
Part 4: Process, key tasks, workflow
Part 5: The curator attributes and skills
Part 6: The tools universe
Part 7: Business applications and trends
Content curation and value: The business of context
Content curation: Why is the content curator the key emerging online editorial role of the future?
Online news content and distribution strategies: Content curation and user syndication are next
Online content curation: The key to building visibility, authority and value
Market research via 2.0 Adoption Council @20Adoption
The 2.0 Adoption Council is conducting ground-breaking research on its members. As each member is screened for eligible membership in the Council, our data set is among the best in the business for early adoption of 2.0 technologies and practices.
Reports 2009, 2010
A Framework for 2.0 Adoption in The Enterprise.
Enjoying the learning thus far. Nice to see organized, sophisticated, tool-agnostic approach to adoption of 2.0 principles in large enterprises — where resistance can be most profound..
