Above and Beyond KM

Lee Bryant (HeadShift, Dachis Group) discusses how to motivate and manage people by using open data within the enterprise. For him, the next stage of social business is listening — and then using the resulting data to change the way our businesses work.

[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:

• Social Business is not just about collaboration. It’s also about weak ties and dynamic signals to enable change based on ambient information inside and outside the enterprise. He points to the work of Dave Gray regarding pods within companies and the use of customer data and analytics to transform companies like Amazon. These companies are listening carefully to their customers and then taking that information to change the way the company works. The data is taken from a wide source and applied in small focused ways by “two-pizza” teams.
• What can we learn from Big Data? Google has the data now to determine if a couple will divorce in two years’ time based on their spending patterns alone. Until now, however, we have used customer data in a rather narcissistic way — do you like me? How am I doing? What’s the sentiment about my company? Instead, we should be sharing the insights gathered from customer analytics beyond the marketing department. Equally, we should be gathering data within the enterprise and sharing the insights internally.
• Focus on the Right Data. With a nod to the home town crowd, Lee referred to the recent victories of Boston sports teams and the transformative impact of data on performance — at least with respect to the Red Sox, as reported in the Michael Lewis book, Moneyball. The key to reaching these insights is to immerse yourself in the entirety of the data. Until you do this, you can’t really understand the rhythm and logic of that data — what it is telling you. For this reason, he is skeptical of hired-gun quants who swoop in with targeted analysis.
• Get Beyond the Rear View Mirror. Analytics without change are nothing more than a rear view mirror. To move beyond, we need to get that data into the hands of people within the enterprise who can make a difference. However, the worst possible way to do this is to deliver the data via a report. By contrast, there is no better way to motivate people and trigger change than to provide them with relevant feedback via realtime data. The best way to do this is via activity streams (rather than reports) that can be shared throughout the organization and within the flow of daily activity. Using tags and filters, people within the organization can subscribe to the data streams that have the most relevance to their work, thereby ensuring constant access to a wide-range of pertinent, diverse real-time data.
• The Next Stage for Social BusinessSocial Business tools allow widespread sharing. To really leverage these tools, use them to spread internal and external data. To ensure the insights gathered from the data gets into the right hands and result in useful action, spread the data via activity streams that can permeate the day-to-day workflow of the people who can take action.

Lee Bryant (Headshift, Dachis Group) and Andrew Woolfson (Reynolds Porter Chamberlain) spoke about building a bespoke integrated social business platform for a law firm.

[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:

• Social Business in Legal: They wanted to create a social platform for better knowledge flow in a law firm. Reynolds Porter Chamberlain (RPC) was willing to give the project team “permission to play.” The firm was also prepared to invest in something new because they wanted to own a tool that would better reflect the way their lawyers worked, they wanted to eliminate vendor limits on innovation and they wanted to use this deployment to energize the firm.
• Understanding the Matrix of Relationships Before putting in some knowledge systems, you need to understand the relationships among the firm, the partners, the clients and the formal/informal groups within the firm.
• Selfish Interests Lead to Collective Benefits.They focused on servicing individuals within the firm, while looking for opportunities to share benefits more widely. In fact, a goal of the project was to create a client-driven system that could be shared with clients later. Since the launch of the system, it has already become known as a critical tool for winning new business.
• Build, Buy or Assemble?Some of the off-the-shelf platforms did not promise the level of control sufficient to allow the degree of innovation the firm was determined to undertake in coming years. HeadShift used Attensa (RSS), Confluence (wikis) and other tools on top of a firm wide platform. They used activity feeds as a “universal event bus.” They continue to “abstract” the specific business apps from the underlying social platforms. As a result, IT runs the platforms and data while the business units own the apps.
• RPC EdgeThis tool has just one the prize as best knowledge management innovation at the 2011 KMUK conference. The Edge is personalized for each user, showing their activity streams and selected RSS feeds (internal and external) in the context of the groups to which the user belongs. The “personal pivot” in this system is critical. It starts with a personal profile. Anything and everything can be bookmarked for yourself or for your colleagues and turned into a stream. These items can also be saved for later use. There are a variety of group spaces (organized by type) that provide wiki-type work space, as well as activity streams, messaging, people information, links to specific content, etc. A typical group space might be dedicated to a legal practice.
• Knowledge Collections.When there is a new topic, users can quickly assemble a knowledge collection, which then is turned into a feed that can be shared with others. In addition, they create precedent collections that have some tagging to help organize and present the contents.
• Custom Bid RoomsThe created a space for auction deals. It allows them to gather key documents and resources, customized for each deal.
• Trainee WikiThe trainees use this tool to share information on how to practice law and how to function RPC. This also helped change law firm culture regarding disclosing what you know and don’t know.
• Kill the Intranet.RPC used a deliberate adoption strategy. They did not create pilots (Woolfson thinks they communicate weakness). Instead, they launched across the firm first and then started focusing on meeting individual needs. The firm wide launch also allowed them to win external awards for Edge, which then helped sell the system internally. Another key adoption strategy was that they turned off the Intranet. Instead, they made available in the new system the small portion of the Intranet that actually was used regularly.
• How to Determine Success?Rather than getting hung up on misleading participation data, they are collecting internal anecdotes and external awards.
• Next Steps.They are talking about Edge to their clients. They are showing clients how Edge supports client service delivery, which may in turn help identify new ways to collaborate with clients. RPC wants to do more than just create another client deal room or extranet.

Rachel Happe, Principal, The Community Roundtable.

[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:

• How do you define a Community? A group of people with unique shared values, behaviors and artifacts. Communities are opt in; you can’t force people to join. People participate because they get more out of them than they put in.
• Communities are Essential to Social Business. The strategy is to make organizations more humane, adaptive and resilient in order to increase revenue through relevance and reduce costs through crowdsourcing.  Communities help make this happen.
• Technology alone is not enough. Technology is improving so quickly with respect to social media that it is a constant race to stay on top of the changes. However, the speed of technological change far outstrips the speed at which a person can adapt to those changes. When people are forced to operate at that speed, people break.
• Information Arbitrage is not enough. In the early days, social technology could be used to increase the seed of information.  Perfect information led to strategic advantages in negotiations and operations. However, once all your competitors have adopted the technology, you lose the competitive edge with respect to speedy access to information.
• Relationships are the Antidote.

Andrew McAfee discusses Threats to Enterprise 2.0: Old-Fashioned Bosses and New-Fangled Computers.

[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:

• Why has E2.0 Succeeded?This group of technologies meet a deep-seated business need: they help companies know what they know. They connect digital resources and brain resources. (McAfee quoted Lew Platt, former CEO of HP: “If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive.”) It also must a deep human need: to be part of a community that you define and to have a voice within that group. Further, the number of bad incidents resulting from the freedom provided by these tools remains wonderfully low. In this case, trusting your employees has resulted in people behaving as mature professionals.
• Old-Fashioned Bosses They believe that productivity depends on a hierarchical organization with close supervision. They believe it is a more rational, linear, non scary approach to management. By contrast, the networked organization terrifies them.
• New-Fangled Computers. McAfee reminds us about IBM’s Watson playing Jeopardy. It should make us nervous about E2.0, because it sits upon document and makes sense of it based on a new set of algorithms that don’t rely on data relationships and linking to identify sense and relevance. (By contrast, E2.0 depends on network, relationship, network, linking.) Theoretically, the power of Watson allows old-fashioned bosses from turning off the network and social software, deploying instead these supercomputers working in isolation.
• How do we save E2.0?Switch from using it to respond to questions whose answers are findable in a knowledge base. Computers can do it faster and better. Instead, use social software to help create “Eureka” moments. Focus on answers that require innovation and creativity. Focus on the areas in which humans have a comparative advantage over computers.

Christian Finn (Microsoft) talks about the ideation process at Microsoft. They have “ThinkWeek” to plan the future.

[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:

• ThinkWeek. This is something Bill Gates started — it was a personal retreat during which he read through a stack of papers written by Microsoft employees. He passed notable papers on to other decision makers within the company. Originally, you had to be invited to write a paper for ThinkWeek. Ultimately, it was a way to get your ideas in front of Bill Gates and obtain his comments (and, if possible, his support).
• ThinkWeek Today.Now ThinkWeek participation has been opened up to the company. Microsoft has a call for papers, which can be related to any subject of interest to the company (including admin and HR). The papers are prepared with senior review by subject matter experts who can provide thesis supervisor level of review and support. The focus is on finding ideas that are original and supported by rigorous thinking and writing. The papers are posted and available for anyone to read. They are then rated.
• Reach and Value. Last year, there were over 200 papers by over 400 authors from 13 countries. About 50% of the total Microsoft employee base will read at least one paper. Plus active communities spring up around the papers to provide comments on the ideas within the papers. What’s the value for the company? First, it massively increases the number of ideas generated. Plus because of the wide review and comment, the ideas are refined to a higher quality level. For authors, the process provides a valuable boost to their professional reputation and network. The company can also mine the ideas across the papers to identify meta trends. The process creates a rich treasure trove of ideas and thinkers who can be tapped later. Finally, the business value — the winning ideas have a measurable impact on the business. The two examples he gave were XBOX 360 Kinect and the Microsoft employee buses (both of which started with ThinkWeek papers).

Sameer Patel (Sovos Group) asks if we’ve forgotten the “relationships” in CRM/

[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:

• What’s Wrong with CRM? “CRM is…one…giant…contact management and reporting tool.” It tends to be used for static one-way communications with clients. It rarely is used to create and build relationships over time. So what’s the point?
• Where are the Customers? They are not willing to answer your sales calls via the telephone (at meal times) or via email. Rather, they prefer to talk to other customers to learn about your services and products. With search engines, access to information regarding your products and services has been equalized — it’s no longer your company’s exclusive domain.
• What do Customers Expect?They want a productive relationship with you. How does this work? they want engagement not data — they want to connect with the experts in your organization who can help them. The expectations regarding latency are changing as well. If your product/service is relatively simple, they expect speedy answers. If you product/service is relatively complex, the customer will give you more time, but they expect a speedy and authentic acknowledgement that you are committed to solving their problem. Finally, they expect global competency and local relevancy. Connect them with the people who can help — regardless of location.
• Who needs to be involved?Not just the folks in sales and marketing. You also need subject matter experts within your organization, as well as the people at the edge (e.g., the person who makes the deliveries.)
• Move Past the Social Software Group Hug.The feel good group hug has been nice, but now we need to identify and track hard data that can help us improve performance. What sorts of things should you be tracking? Changes in lead time, effects on known performance objectives within the company.

Jim Grubb (Cisco) talks about the challenges and opportunities of working productively across a networked organization.

[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:

• Organizations are Changing. New organizations rarely have much structure at all. Over time, they organize along functional lines. Later, they may reorganize by type of customer or type of product. However, every time you centralize on product type, you lose the benefits of organizing by customer; if you organize by customer, you lose the benefits of organizing by function. So what happens when you reorganize by geography? Companies can try to organize by a matrix, but this can cause complications.
• What’s a Networked Organization? It doesn’t have an “org chart.” It has a “people chart.” Teams are brought together virtually on an ad hoc basis to address specific problems, regardless if those problems concern function, customer, product or geography. Once they have addressed the problem, they are dispersed to work where the next issue arise.
• How Technology Helps.Technology can help us collaborate and work, both synchronously (which is the traditional approach) and asynchronously. All of this can be done virtually and regardless of organizational, geographical and time barriers.
• Technology is not enough. You need to support the new technology with new processes and culture. And this needs to be tied to clear accountability for improved performance. This also means changing the rewards system to support this new way of working.

Brett Shockley (Avaya) talks about how Customer 2.0 is forcing companies to change the way they provide customer service.

[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:

• Who is Customer 2.0? They are digital natives who were born with keyboards in their hands. Now that they are graduating from college, they have more disposable income. And they are intolerant of older forms of customer service — they are unwilling to sit on the phone in a voicemail loop. They would much prefer obtaining service directly over the web. Most of all, they just want service via their smartphones.
• Are companies ready for new customer media channels? Are their customer service agents trained to provide the kind of support that Customer 2.0 needs? Does the company have a platform that integrates all the channels that a customer might use so that it is a seamless experience. (This avoids the typical problem of starting a service request via the web and then being forced to begin all over again over the telephone.)
• Smarter Smartphone Technical SupportAllow basic customer data gathering via the smartphone and then pass the information throughout process without requiring rentry. Then provide a knowledge base to allow self-service technical support. If this doesn’t solve the problem, transfer the customer to a service agent, but give the customer credit for the time spent in self-service and move them ahead in the queue.
• Customers are setting the agenda.60% of customers change their method of contacting service providers based on where they are. Therefore, companies need to be prepared to meet customers where they are. Further, 83% of customers say they choose businesses based on the quality of service provided.

John Stepper (Deutsche Bank) asks what real business problem are you trying to solve? Until you know the answer to that question, you should not deploy social software.

[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:

• Communities of PracticeThey started by creating communities of practice. These communities of practice produced measurable results with respect to the performance of the participants and their businesses. One manager described the CoP as the best productivity tool. They help participants work across organizational boundaries. Participants are in a variety of business units, including HR and compliance. Within a year, they will have 50 CoPs with over 10,000 members. The CoPs are tied to institutional decision making so their activities have direct impact on the business. This is a completely new way of working for the bank.
• DB Social Media Council.They use this as a way coordinate approaches to the use of social software. They force the organization to make their social software relevant for the business.
• The Key Focus: Help Us Work BetterThey are focusing on stopping the waste, reducing the information overload. They believe that they will be eliminate email and meetings by 25%. They also expect to reduce help desk calls by 50% by the autumn. (These are hard targets that they are working to meet.)
• Don’t just retweet the revolution Don’t just hype functionality from the sidelines. Apply the tools to real problems within your organization and change the world.

Mike Rhodin, IBM.

[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:

• Moving Beyond Eyeballs.The internet business model isn’t just about collecting “more eyeballs.” Now businesses should be connecting customers/individuals to help gather intelligence that drives the business. If the business isn’t driving this, someone else will.
• Traditional Marketing is DeadConsumers don’t believe the traditional marketing materials that are pushed at them. By contrast, they are willing to trust the advice of complete strangers who are within business-related communities. Further, insights shared by customers within these networks can help generate breakthrough ideas and can improve speed to market.
• Build Knowledge Networks. These social networks represent an important knowledge network. They help gather information across your customer base and connect that with the knowledge base within the organization. This evolving knowledge network will fundamentally change how we work as the network grows. It allows for data mining across many more relevant data sources. It allows sentiment analysis — this is something HR could use to address employee attrition.
• Analytics Move Your Social Software Beyond a cool tool to a criticial business asset.