Enterprise Social Networking: real world learnings

Posted on November 30, 2008 by Rob Gray

On Friday we had a round table discussion related to enterprise social networking (some may refer to enterprise 2.0). Some best practices from real world projects emerged, and there were some excellent questions that raised the discussion level.

Thanks to Bertrand for contributing to this list. Check out his advice on this blog post

For those unfamiliar with enterprise social networking, I would describe it in a nutshell as web-based solutions that connect employees, business partners and customers by forming engaged virtual teams and communities around specific business objectives. No doubt some of the academics and purists will disagree with this, but hey it’s my blog and I’ll say what I want to

Real world lessons learned

Have an achievable business goal

A business social network with no goal eventually fails. Projects where people “just want to try it out” usually fail because there is no common goal or shared values. A group of people without shared values/goals is not a true community.

The justification is not always the same as the goal

For example the goal might be to improve communication and performance of a distributed team, but the financial justification could be around reducing costs. In this case, reducing costs is not the reason for doing it, but it keeps the FD happy.

Start small

If you start small, you don’t have to find a lot of money to get started. Whether you build something yourself or buy an off-the-shelf product, you should be able to get going for less than £25K (remember if you build it yourself it’s people’s time, hardware, software etc. so it’s never “free”). Even tools like Ning and Yammer, although not really “enterprise-class”, are good options if you have no particular goal and just want to mess around with some of the concepts.

Find champions

Champions will be the ones that make it happen. In an enterprise there will be many different initiatives, and each one should have a person that drives and engages their community or group. This is very much along some of the ideas behind tribal leadership.

Get executive buy-in

If you’re an executive, don’t buy a social networking tool “for the generation Y employees” without participating yourself. Exec involvement massively increases participation because people are driven by the visibility. If your peers know that you did something great that’s partially motivating. If our CEO knows, now that’s a motivation.

A social network without people has no value

Therefore participation is key. Focus the energy of the group around the goal, so as to drive participation. Combining the launch of your social network with a physical event is a great way to do this.

Define and explain what people are expected to do (for example are people required to come up with new ideas, ask questions, share their best practices?

Measure Frequently

measure activity, emerging content themes, participation type & rate, and achievement against the business goal. any decent enterprise social networking platform will have this capability. Social Networking is a means to improve business so the ultimate measurement should be about business

Prepare to adjust & tweak

people are not 100% predictable, live with it don’t fight it. if you’re measuring what’s going on, you can adjust to it.

Expect the unexpected

things don’t always go as planned. sometimes people do things in a different (and better) way to what you expected. embrace that and people will know that they are empowered

Some interesting questions?

should you have a “gardner” – someone who grows the community but also removes “weeds”?
along these lines – does moderation in an internal context inhibit contribution? i.e. why would I contribute if someone can override me?
should there be a strategy to change “lurkers” (people who read) into active contributors?

Are you ready for Web Point Twenty?

Posted on November 17, 2008 by Rob Gray

2.0hhhh

These days we are flooded by a plethora of 2.0 stuff aren’t we?…. Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, BI 2.0 Outsourcing 2.0,eCommerce 2.0, Resourcing 2.0, Project Management 2.0, Recruitment 2.0, Jake 2.0, KM 2.0, Library 2.0, Health 2.0, President 2.0, Government 2.0, Retail 2.0, Search 2.0, Mobile 2.0, Lift Trucks 2.0, or why not buy a Ford Fiesta 2.0? Microsoft was clearly ahead of the game because Windows 2.0 came out in the late 1980s!

What do all of these have in common? Well it’s obvious isn’t it? They are all better than 1.0

When will the madness end?
Even the experts get confused… at a recent retailing conference one of the keynote speakers talked in a very opinionated manner on his views of “web point twenty”!!!

Does it really matter what you call it? Does anyone care?
Anyway it’s now back to the grindstone, I’m waiting for web point thirty-seven. Rumour has it that’s going to be the big one.

Do you have any ridiculous examples of people jumping on the “2.0 bandwagon”?

How Enterprise Social Networking could save you £45K

Posted on September 29, 2008 by Rob Gray

The key to calculating Enterprise Social Networking ROI is to keep it simple.

If you dig under the surface enough, there is often a monetary benefit staring you right in the face…

A lot of debate goes on about the Return on Investment (ROI) of Enterprise Social Software… in my opinion probably too much debate. Sometimes the answer to making a business case is more straightforward than people think. In this post I’ll give an example of how an investment of £75K for an enterprise social networking solution was justified.

First of all, the technology itself is not important, so rather focus on what it will do to improve the organisation (tangibly or intangibly), and/or derive bottom-line benefit… in a normal business this boils down to the following question: how does it help you achieve an organisational objective, financial or otherwise?

An actual example

For example of a financial benefit, one technology organisation that I have worked with holds regular regional meetings for their European sales managers. Typically, they get together for 2 days every 1 or 2 months in a European city. These meetings are very valuable because these people all work in different countries, and never really see each other face to face outside of these get-togethers. It’s a great way for people to bond, for new starters to become integrated into the ‘virtual team’ and for everyone to share new ideas, success stories and best practices.

The “business-as-usual” way of doing things:

A typical event runs over 2 days; on day 1 they discuss some of the latest issues such as new competitive threats, latest product offerings, and top issues from “the field”. Of course they have the obligatory evening social event (which is great for team bonding) and then day 2 is all about making decisions and taking action based on the discussions from day 1.

Room for improvement?

This is all great, but there were a number of opportunities here for increasing effectiveness.

The 2 day event is quite expensive just in terms of venue hire, accommodation and catering (£80K to £175K depending on number of people).
Day 2 was the only day where decisions were being made, day 1 was just a necessary precursor to this happening.
There was no continuation of the discussion and team interaction between these events.
New starters were very dependent on these events for getting to know their counterparts and becoming more effective.

Measuring it

So how has an enterprise social networking solution helped them, and how do they measure this benefit?

Discussion around important issues now happens on a day-to-day basis rather than once every few months. Due to these virtual conversations, the physical events can focus on “day 2 – making decisions” rather than needing a whole day prior for discussion workshops. This reduces the time required from 2 days down to 1 day, which is a significant cost saving of around £45K – £75K per event depending on location.
Competitive threats can be addressed much faster, and the opinions and insight of many employees can be captured because there is no dependency on time zone or location.
New starters can ramp up very quickly because all past interactions are captured in a transparent (yet secure) way. They can also get to “know” their geographically dispersed team members before actually meeting them, because everyone has a personal profile that shows their photo, background, bio, skills and expertise, and connections to others. There is a specific payback & return based on new starter ramp up time which I’ll cover in another post.
Success stories are now told as they happen, which energises the sales teams in other subsidiaries and reinforces the unity of this large “virtual sales team”.

So, some of these benefits are tangible and some are intangible. I don’t think one is necessarily more important than the other, but when it comes to justifying expenditure, it’s quite important to present tangible benefits such as a cost saving or increased revenue opportunity, with the intangibles reinforcing your case and making it more appealing.

The bottom line

In this instance, forking out £75K in order to save £90K (2 events, saving £45K each) within 6 months made the investment decision simple and straightforward. The intangible benefits are probably even more valuable than this, but intangibles alone are not going to justify an investment unless the amount of £££ is extremely low.

Coming up with this justification had nothing to do with technology or tools, it was about “what does it enable us to better than we do today, and will that improve our organisation and save us money”.

If you have any examples of how you have made your business case for investment, I’d love to hear it!

**Rob Gray**

Enterprise 2.0 Webcast with AIIM

Posted on June 24, 2008 by Rob Gray

On Friday we did a webcast with AIIM about Enterprise 2.0

The slides are on slideshare:

blueKiwi Enterprise 2.0

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: aiim bluekiwi)

We did a quick poll half way through on which web tools people use (just from a sample)… the pic below shows the result:

We covered web 2.0 and some of the differences to Enterprise 2.0 and how to lay the foundation for a successful implementation. There was some really good interaction and some great questions that I’ve paraphrased:

“email is like crack cocaine in some organisations”… how do you get people to stop overusing it?
participation needs reward as an incentive, not always monetary… in the world of web 2.0 (consumer technologies) this could be with ‘kudos’ and reputation. Do you think that works within the Enterprise, maybe there needs to be a combination of financial and “social capital”
What about some individuals that monopolise the social network? Does this “drown out” other people that also want to be heard?

I’ll give my opinion but I’m really interested in the opinions of others…

email addiction

On the email front, I think that people need a compelling alternative to email. If the tool that you are trying to get them to use is more difficult than using email then they’ll still use email. If the tool that they use helps them to reduce their email overload, and it’s easier than email, maybe that’s a good start to weaning people off email. I don’t think email should be eliminated… but BAD use of email should be eliminated. In my work at blueKiwi I never use email to send information to multiple people, only 1:1 when it’s appropriate (like forwarding an external mail to someone internally). This has reduced my email to less than 15 per day.

Reward

Inside an enterprise, I think that reward could be linked to objectives, but could be getting into dangerous territory if there is a direct $$$ incentive such as $$$ bonus for x% contribution. It also needs to be as “ungameable” as possible (which is why manual voting/ranking doesn’t work inside orgs even if it works quite well on the web.)

The monopolisers

even though there is a danger of someone becoming “overactive” in a social network, this is a great problem to have. The value of the content needs to be implicit rather than explicit for this to not be a problem. For example, a persons contribution is interesting if other people bookmark it and share it with others, rather than rely on a 5-star manual rating.

In general, I think enterprise social networks provide the less rowdy employees to actually have a voice and have their contributions valued, because of the transparency that a social network offers. This also stops people’s ideas from being “stolen” because they are out in the open from the beginning… so everyone contributes to that idea rather than tries to claim it as their own.

Let me know what you think… have you got some good ideas on how these issues can be tackled?

The Power Struggles of Internal Blogging in the world of ‘Enterprise 2.0′

Posted on February 19, 2008 by Rob Gray

I read an interesting post about Internal Blogging on Library Clips, talking about some of the benefits of internal blogging. In the beginning, blogs were something that existed on the public Internet, but soon people started experimenting with blog use inside of the organisation. The post referred to above covers many appropriate scenarios and benefits to internal blogging, and the one element that I want to expand on is group blogging.

As the name would suggest, a group blog does not have a solitary author, but rather a group of people that are able to author a single blog. This means that you benefit from the authoring power of the masses, but the content is still viewed over a single ‘channel’ – i.e. as an information consumer I only need to subscribe to the one blog. The typical communnication mechanism that this would replace would be something like a weekly internal email newsletter, usually authored by one or two people. A group blog is a better tool for this type of internal communication, as employees become much more engaged in the process because they are now a part of it, rather than just consumers.

However, the issue with ‘empowering the masses’ is that it can lead to a loss of control. For example, if Joe Blogs (being the blogmeister that he is) decides to blog about his night out on the town, the chances are that most people don’t care, and he is just adding to the problem of information overload…. the internal group blog is just not appropriate for his musings of a personal nature… that’s what his personal blog is for. So how do you strike a good balance between empowerment and control?

A good example of how this has been achieved is an internal group blog that is used at Microsoft UK. If you’ve ever had to deal with the Microsoft organisation, you’ll know that it can be very complex, with individuals and small groups extremely focused on their particular areas. This is a good thing in terms of business performance, because people have clear goals and can channel all their energy into a focused area. However it also means that people may not always be aware of what others are doing in other business groups, meaning that an opportunity for shared learning is lost. A group blog provides an easy way to keep up with what others are doing in the organisation. At Microsoft, a weekly email newsletter (owned and authored by 3 comms people) has been replaced by a group blog, enabling any of the 2000+ staff to become authors of this blog. It’s a great way for people to share what has been going on in their part of the business, but how does Microsoft stop this from becoming a complete free-for-all with no control?

The answer is quite simple; they have added a short approval process for blog postings, shifting the responsibilities of the 3 comms people from being content authors, to ‘executive editors’. Now, instead of having to write a newsletter from scratch, they can review all blog postings, rejecting anything that they deem to be innapropriate. I think that this strikes a really good balance between empowerment and control. Microsoft benefits from the experience of the trained comms people, yet still manages to engage and empower employees by allowing everyone (potentially) to have their voice heard and share their views and successes.

In the world of ‘Enterprise 2.0′, striking the balance between empowerment and control is a delicate, yet vital, principle. It doesn’t only apply to blogs, but also wikis and anything else that is ‘end-user generated content’.

ironman triathlete, with a day job

Tag Archives: Enterprise 2.0