Above and Beyond KM

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.

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.

This session is presented by Jim Worth and Renee Creciun and Christine Skoroda of Merck.

[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:

• Merck started their enterprise social business effort in 2009. Before then, there were active communities of practice, knowledge management/ knowledge sharing, collaboration activities and they had an enterprise Portal (as front end to SAP). The research group started work on a wider social business platform and then included two other divisions in their efforts. However, there was no integrated enterprise-wide approach. When the three divisions launched their social business platform, they sent an email notice to 300 people, but took no other formal launch actions.
• SharePoint. Unlike many other companies here, Merck elected to build their social business sites on a SharePoint 2007 platform.  They augemented SharePoint with Newsgator and other third-party tools. (Newsgator helps with community activities and management.)
• Office Communicator. They integrated with Office Communicator so that they can display presence.
• Activity Streams. They have status updates that start with the question, “What are you working on?”
• Efficiencies. They have quick links to help employees do necessary tasks efficiently such as preparing expense reports.
• My Documents. This is a MySite that allows users to share specific favorite documents with other users.  It saves employees from repeatedly email documents.
• Legal Issues. They worked closely with their Risk Office to make sure they satisfied all applicable compliance requirements. There were lots of legal requirements because they operate in a regulated industry. Plus they had to ensure they met legal requirements in each country in which they operate.
• Merger. The biggest organizational challenge has been that the rollout of these social business tools occured at the same time as Merck was merging with Schering Plough. By virtue of the merger,  natural networks were broken and had to reformed. It was also much tougher to find expertise within the now much bigger organization.
• Business Goals. They were trying to make the merged organization feel smaller than it was. In addition, they were trying to shift from individual efforts to more collaborative efforts. Finally, they were focused on reducing waste across the organization.
• Portal. It used to be a repository for information relating to chores that had to be done.  Now it is shifting into being a place where work gets done. Because this is done through a Portal, engagement isn’t just about professional networking. It’s also about providing core documents and resources.
• Adoption. They had a recent campaign to increase the number of people who engaged with the platform and completed their profiles. Merck gave away prizes (including iPad2s) to encourage people to participate. Ultimately, this helped surface expertise across the organization.
• Communities. They have lively communities focused on specific topics. Participants tend to be highly engaged. They are now starting some communities focused on specific levels of the organization. These require different governance and support. They also have practice communities focused on specific functions within the organization.
• Community Stewards. Each community has a community steward. (This person needs to be identified before the online community space is created.) The stewards function as “reverse mentors” within their respective communities.
• Recognition Buzz. Anyone can provide compliments to a colleague for work well done. You don’t need to sit at a specific level within the organization.
• Mechanics. They standardized community templates, support methodology and navigation. This means that users don’t need to learn a new way as they move across the site.

This session is presented by Tony Byrne (Real Stories) and Shawn Shell (Consejo Consulting).  You can find the session slides at http://www.e2conf.com/boston/2011/presentations/workshops.  Username: workshop; Password: boston2011.

[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:

• Typical SharePoint myths:
  • it provides unique collaboration services
  • it is easy to use
  • it is low cost
  • it represents the latest and greatest
• What is special about SharePoint?
  • close ties to the rest of the Microsoft Office suite
  • huge armies of  ”Redmond Partners”
  • the breadth of services available via this platform
  • the implied development model is individual and departmental development rather than enterprise-wide development — the tool is more focused on features for users and for developers (to customize the environment), but less so for back-end administrators.
• Strategy. Microsoft’s strategy behind SharePoint is that it is intended to help keep Microsoft Office relevant in an age of web services.
• What services does SharePoint offer for collaboration? At first blush, it appears to be feature complete in that it claims to offer most social tools (except microblogging).  However, it isn’t really plug and play out of the box. While it is possible to provide basic blogs and wikis, you’ll need to purchase third-party services to deploy other fairly typical forms of social functionality.  Once you get beyond very basic project-based collaboration, then SharePoint is nothing more than a development platform.
• “Communities” are a weak point in SharePoint. Communities in SP2010 are more virtual or implied.  This is why people are using third-party services like Newsgator to plug the gap in community management services and features.
• Search. The out of the box search is decent,but it isn’t FAST.  Be careful, because most of the demos you see feature FAST. Third-party search engines layered on top of SharePoint don’t always function well.
• Development Cycle. SP has a 3-year development cycle.  However, towards the end of each cycle, users tend to do a lot of bespoke work.  This leads to the need to do a lot of catch-up at the beginning of the next cycle.  This also presents a problem in the social business arena, where changes occur more frequently. To address this and similar concerns, Microsoft is providing more frequent service packs to release new features and bug features in the midst of a development cycle.
• Don’t Talk About SharePoint. It’s like a blank slate.  Talk about the specific applications or solutions that you create with (or on top of) SharePoint. For example, deploying a tool to solve a business challenge (e.g., improve service quality) is a business solution worth talking about.  The fact that you were able to do it using the SharePoint platform is great, but chances are that SP by itself  was not the complete answer.  You probably needed something extra.  Therefore, talk about the business win — not the foundational tool.
• MySites. Many people are scared to death of MySites.  One big problem is that MySites don’t scale to companies with hundreds of thousands of employees. MySite allows up to 50 thousand MySite collections per web application. If you have multiple applications, you can have a terrible mess.
• FAST. It is not free. It isn’t necessary unless you have an enormous number of document (e.g., more than 50 million documents). If you have fewer documents, there are other, cheaper, less complicated third-party search tools that work better for you than FAST.

This session is presented by John Stepper (Deutsche Bank) and Bryce Williams (Eli Lilly).  You can find the session slides athttp://www.e2conf.com/boston/2011/presentations/workshops.  Username: workshop; Password: boston2011.

[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:

• Some Big Challenges of Working in a Regulated Industries
  • “Regulations present a perfect reason to do nothing.” Some of this is because few truly understand the rules, although all fear them.  Therefore, there is little incentive to change what works.
  • Early in the process, involve the key people who understand the regulations and need to be part of developing your governance structure. Build smart compliance into your system.
  • Even if you are being innovative, try to find precedents in your industry so that people in your company aren’t faced with the daunting task of testing the rules. Membership in organizations like the Social Business Council can help you learn about success stories in your industry.
  • Take smart risks. Some risk is necessary for innovation, but don’t bite off more than you can chew.  Incremental change is better.
• Communities of Practice. Start here.  They are focused on real business issues and are close to the frontlines. Use the experience of your communities of practice to identify and spread success stories and best practices. Consider bringing community leaders together into an internal council to help with compliance.
• Eli Lilly’s Social Collaboration. They had some challenges related to regulation and existing technology.
  • Their collaboration tool could house only transitory information.  No documents of record.
  • For privacy reasons, they could not pre-populate the collaboration space with content. Further, they decided not to link to their document management system.
  • They had to use an opt-in method, rather than rolling it out across the enterprise with a full participation default.
  • They had to integrate their SharePoint Portal with their Jive collaboration platform.
  • They used their collaboration tool to facilitate internal communications in connection with various Eli Lilly events (e.g. anniversary celebrations, humanitarian efforts, etc.)
  • They use the tool to crowdsource news, activities and events with community questions/clarifications.
• Key Benefit of Eli Lilly Social Business Effort. It makes it easy for Eli Lilly people to help their colleagues.
• What about SharePoint? Consider the waste and expense associated with users across the enterprise trying to turn SharePoint into a collaborative website. If you implement a proper social business tool, you will spend a great deal less on SharePoint waste.  With those cost savings, all the proven benefits of collaboration within the enterprise are just gravy.
• Focus on Value. One key value of collaborative tools is that they help reduce the number of times the same questtion needs to be answered time and time again.  Before launch, consider asking the service/answer providers within your organization to pre-populate your collaboration tool with FAQs and answers to questions that are critical. This should help reduce their workload going forward.