Archive for November, 2009

The Enterprise 2.0 coffee machine

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

I’m quite certain every manager can vouch for how important the coffee machine is to their business. And for those that think they are just time wasters, well..

Because, not only does it provide the workforce with the much needed caffeinated brew, but first and foremost, it provides the necessary space for:

  • Exchange of ideas
  • Exchange of information
  • Social interaction (who does what ?)

But, there are some shortcomings:

  • The information is volatile
  • Ideas cannot be formally credited
  • The information is confined to those present at this particular time
  • The advent of anti-smoking laws has split the workforce into essentially 2 separate groups

And that’s where social media tools can help. Of course, no-one expects that it can entirely replace the coffee machine – at least because social media tools do not provide one with caffeine (yet), but some of the information exchanged during social interaction – basically “gossips” – is probably best kept “volatile”.

But most of the information exchanged and social networking should be seen as business assets, and therefore should be exploitable as such. Appropriate tools should allow anyone to feed the system using free flowing input such as informal textual information, pictures, sounds, videos and hints – and leave it to the system to organize, formalize, categorize, link, etc..

For the workforce, there are multiple incentives

  • They get credit for new ideas
  • They can track their own progress
  • They can track other people’s progress

For the business and management, it gets even better

  • They can track their workforce progress
  • Individuals have easy and intuitive access to information
  • Individuals have easy and intuitive access to the people who possess the relevant information
  • From a HR standpoint, it becomes possible to get candid information about morale and such
  • Information fed into the system becomes persistent asset
  • Information can be fed quickly without the hassle of looking for specific forms and whatnot
  • Information can be fed even by those who do not drink coffee, smoke or either/both

–Ivan

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Selling 2.0 internally

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

On the same day we had our seminar, I went directly to my company’s boss – who happened to also attend the seminar I was talking about in my last post.

My intents here were simple : Get a candid view and eventually to start getting ready the field for our OWN implementation!

Unfortunately, he hadn’t seen the whole pitch (can’t blame him – a CO line of work hardly allows sitting down for hours listening to someone explaining concepts) – so some work had to be done – and that’s within the allotted amount of time he could spare for me.

So when I came in his office, with all my high hopes and renewed interest in the matter, I was slightly put down when he merely brushed away the whole concept – and pretty much gave me the “unbeliever” look. “Nah.. I don’t believe in this whole 2.0 thing”

But Enterprise 2.0 is not a matter of faith ! It’s a matter of business and hard facts.

And his first rebuttal was actually my anchor : Basically, he was stating that he couldn’t get his employees (yours truly included) to file reports or transmit simple facts to the rest of the team. He gave me an example of what happened when one of our partner’s salesperson changed – and no-one was aware of this because the information wasn’t spread around. So his objection was : How can we expect our people to sign onto blogs, wikis and whatnot when we can’t even get them to fill in simple forms ?

So it hit me. This is *exactly* what 2.0 is about ! How can you expect a busy person to browse through a hierarchical file structure, find the right form, fill it with intricate and (mostly) useless details when all you are asked to convey is something it would take you 20 seconds to just “say”. The answer is simple : Just allow the people to enter their information the way they would “say” it! And leave it to the 2.0 tools to sort it out for you.

Not only is it more simple for the employee to fill some non-formal report – without having to search the whole internal document hierarchy to find the appropriate form (something that will never get done unless under duress), but instead just feed it to the information bin. The tool is there to classify this for you (and if you can give hints, so much the better !). And not only this, but when the critical piece of information has been fed into the system, it now becomes part of the whole. The next time someone needs to know about “Salespeople at partner XXXX”, not only do you get the latest news, but you also get *who* brought it up (and you may then be able to ask for more details if necessary)

So it goes from 10 minutes searching the forms, and 3 minutes filling in the form – for some information no-one will read to a 30 seconds quick type in a text box, adding a couple of tags – for some information that is easy to find and that can be relayed to you so you can give details if people are interested.

At this point, my boss started looking fairly intrigued. He hadn’t thought of it that way. He didn’t give me the go to start implementing a whole 2.0 infrastructure in the company. Although I might have convinced him – or at least – given him food for thoughts, there are other considerations to take into account (some way more political than I care to even think about !).

But it was a step forward !

–Ivan

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A helpful 2.0 seminar

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

Today, as part of my pre-sales software engineer job at bestware, I was attending an Enterprise 2.0 1/2 day seminar which I had a small part in setting up. Our primary goal here, of course, was to help our partners understanding the ins and outs of the 2.0 mindset and, consequently, help them sale the Lotus Connections software suite to their customers.

Although 2.0 makes everything more simple to the end-user, justifying the benefits of some non-trivial management readjustment is far from being a simple affair. So we hired the services of Nextmodernity, a consultant firm in the 2.0 area to explain this to our partners. The plan was to start with explaining what “Enterprise 2.0″ means, then presenting Lotus Connections as a capable social tool, and finally, start an open discussion with the audience to see how this could be all made to fit together.

Nextmodernity dispatched one of their top-notch individuals, and as expected, Marc de Fouchecour was up to the task delivering a simple yet effective What/Why/How speech, using simple laymen terms (after all, this is also what 2.0 is about !) to lay down the foundations.

Now, the expected objections were raised. These partners are essentially “IT” companies, so having to deal with the higher execs to explain them how the whole management concept can benefit their business seemed to some of them as something of an extraordinary task – or at least – something they were possibly not ready to do just yet. Here, the implied answer was simple : Just as we weren’t competent to deliver the appropriate 2.0 message, we hired competent consultancy, so could they !

Also the usual fear of the rogue poster, whistleblower and no-good-doer were brought up and the usual rebuttal was given : not only are there not that many of them, but giving them a playfield may actually help mitigate whatever damage they may be doing out in the wild !

The proverbial foundations having been laid down, we could now deliver our own personal message on how Lotus Connections could be offered as a solution. The demo went smoothly – despite IBM having rolled out a brand new version on their internal servers, almost (but not quite)  throwing our resident IBM specialist off foot – demonstrating how all the pieces fit together.

The seminar ended with the mandatory luncheon – and – I make it it was a good sign – lasted well beyond the timeline we had set ourselves by more than a couple of hours !

Going back at the office with renewed perspectives and the feeling of having moved forward, I went to see the boss (not my boss. I mean *THE* boss), with the firm intentions of testing all of this on him.

Mind it, I wasn’t taking any risk. In my company we have a pretty liberal policy about what we can tell to our hierarchy.

But I’ll keep this one for next time !

–Ivan

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