John Hagel III, Deloitte.
[These are my notes from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2011 in Boston. Since I’m publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error. Please excuse those. To the extent I’ve made any editorial comments, I’ve shown those in brackets.]
NOTES:
- Does Social Software Matter? Yes. To prove this, choose metrics carefully to understand the impact of the business of the software. Start with an operational need. Then see how social software can address that operational need. Finally, collect and review performance metrics that demonstrate the effect of social software on that business need. This moves social software beyond a glitzy marketing tool to a key driver of better business performance at an operational level. Follow this funnel of metrics to determine where to deploy social software for maximum impact.
- How to deploy social software? Start with a fairly narrow situation that does not require much effort to participate, but has a direct impact on the workspace. (Choose a specific transaction.) Once you get preliminary results, give recognition to participants and success stories. Then, as you build reputation, you establish expertise that lead to relationships. These relationships then provide the foundation for more sustained collaboration. Hagel gives the example of the user networks that were created around their Netweaver product. The community is so highly participatory that now the average time to obtain an answer from the developer network is 17 minutes. Further, as expertise and relationships have grown via the network, teams have come together to create new applications.
- World of Warcraft This online game provides a good model for how we can work together via social software. As the challenges grow, participants learn tha by working together, then jointly find better ways to overcome challenges.
- What are the Keys for High Performance? If you want sustained performance improvement, you need passionate employees with a questing disposition. However, current studies show that only 20% of employees are passionate about their work. Further, passion is inversely related to the size of the organization in which they work.
- American Performance is Collapsing. Unlike the Red Queen, we are running faster and faster, yet falling behind. As a result the return on assets of American companies has plummeted. He believes that the only way to overcome this is to use passion as a catalysts for better performance in the workplace.
Above and Beyond KM 