Enterprise 2.0 Starting Points

I have been discussing the introduction of web 2.0 tools into a global organisation with a contact recently and a few familiar points arose relating to the introduction of these tools / way of working. So to help address them, I have broken these points down into some headings:

Understanding - There is no point in implementing web 2.0 tools for the sake of it. You must understand both your target audience internally and how these tools can improve how you do what you do. Here you must look at how collaboration is different in the new way of working compared to how it is currently being achieved. From basic principles it is about connecting people through their knowledge and expertise by providing the environment (real & virtual) which encourages them to share information as part of their daily operation. This famous "Meet Charlie" deck gives a nice introduction to the potential of what can be done:

Meet Charlie - what is Enterprise2.0?

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: 2.0 enterprise)

Support / Sponsorship - Once you fully understand what web 2.0 is about ("I get it!"), you now need to get your organisation on board. There are 2 elements to this:

1. Senior Management - The initiative needs to be supported top-down by senior management in the organisation (across all divisions / geographies). This is required from the beginning, and will work in a lead-by-example method e.g. Executive Blogs. The sales pitch to this group needs to echo their needs from existing programmes. Avoiding redundant effort, avoiding repeated mistakes, taking advantage of existing expertise, making individuals more effective, making teams more effective.
   
2. Grass Roots - The initiative needs to be driven laterally by communities of practice at grass roots level. Employees need to be encouraged to participate and rewarded for contributing. The model is suited to achieving a critical mass of users to ensure trust and sustained engagement for ongoing success.
   

Education - Web 2.0 is new to many, so it is important to convert these people by demonstrating a clear benefit to them from using the tools. Removing the technical jargon for business users can help to speed their introduction to web 2.0. I am a big fan of the CommonCraft show which has taught us to focus on plain english explanations of technical tools / concepts for business users. An example of how they simplify these concepts is RSS in plain english:



Starting Points - I believe that the best starting points for the introduction of web 2.0 tools are those which have high visibility, are cross divisional / geographically dispersed and can have a quick turn-around for early results. Operations & Technology is always a good area for testing the waters in this domain. The tasks and roles in O&T divisions are suited to adopting tools like instant messaging, wikis for documenting practices / ideas, RSS feeds for monitoring systems etc. Prove the value here and the other areas of your organisation will follow.

Growth - You need champions and evangelists to drive adoption and early growth for a successful beginning for your web 2.0 initiative. It is so important to fuel the flame of enthusiasm early on by demonstrating functionality, mentoring and supporting your user community. I had posted in the past about the characteristics of a wiki champion, but they are applicable to all web 2.0 adoption really:

• Be a Clear Communicator
• Be a Coach
• Be Patient
• Be Enthusiastic
• Be Engaging
• Have Fun!
  

Measurement - This is a real grey area, as the metrics could be different for each organisation depending on the goals of your initiative. There are however some emerging examples of what organisations are measuring when it comes to examining trends and ROI for web 2.0 programmes. Things like # of unique users, # of unique contributions etc. This slide deck shows some of the metrics that Accenture use for their knowledge management initiatives:

Measuring the impact of knowledge management

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: knowledge management roi)

This is by no means an extensive coverage of this topic, however I would encourage those interested in Web 2.0 or enterprise 2.0 to use the tools online to discover more e.g. YouTube, SlideShare, RSS Readers / Blogs, LinkedIn etc.

Introducing RSS to your Organisation - The Business Case

As part of my current MSc in Operations and Technology Management, we are undertaking a module in Technology Management. One of the current assignments I am researching is the investigation of how RSS (Really Simple Syndication) can be used as a new information channel for those areas of your organisation whose product is knowledge/information.

The examples I am looking at in relation to financial services are the press office and research units which produce press releases, market commentary, financial outlooks and other research material. I want to understand the relationship between these departments and their prospective customers (investors, journalists and the wider customer audience).

The first hurdle to overcome is the language used to introduce and explain RSS technology to the primarily business users who work in these areas. I presume it is unlikely that they will fully understand RSS, let alone know what it is (I am basing this on a statistic from my first dissertation in knowledge management where out of 101 people surveyed in a large financial services organisation, only 24 had heard of RSS - approx 24%).

I am a big fan of the Common Craft Show and their suite of videos which explain technology concepts in "Plain English". Their video "RSS in Plain English" is a good place to start:




I have also begun looking at existing financial services organisations who are using RSS to deliver updates to their prospective customers. Here is a sample set of RSS listings:

Northern Trust Corporation
ING Wholsale Banking
UBS Investment Research
Royal Bank of Scotland
Bank of America
RaboDirect

I will update how I get on here again, but my thinking is that if I was a journalist, I would appreciate automated feeds instead of having to visit each site every day to keep up-to-date with what is happening. Hopefully I can pitch RSS as a valuable, inexpensive tool which can enhance the offerings of the press office / research unit in the pilot organisation.

21 Days of Wiki Adoption by Stewart Mader

Keep a close watch on Stewart Maders 21 days of Wiki Adoption. This set of 21 short videos will help you to understand the concept of Wiki use in your organisation.

Stewart is the author of 2 books, Wikipatterns and Using Wiki in Education. I have followed his blog on wiki patterns for some time now, and he is great at explaining the wiki concept in "plain english" just like the guys at CommonCraft.

The key thing about this series of videos is the simplicity and clarity of the examples that Stewart delivers. I frequently get asked in my organisation - "What is a wiki?" (this normally comes about 15 mins into my demo of our enterprise wiki!).

But that is ok for me, as if it takes them 15 mins to query the technology, then maybe the underlying benefits of collaboration, knowledge sharing and intuitive information retrieval are more prominent. The best bit is when we get to the cost!

So follow Stewart's videos and learn! As Luis Suarez said:

I bet, I know, I am sure of it, that after watching through the entire show with the different episodes, you would be more than ready to start deploying those wikis within your organisation.

RSS in plain english

Another great video from CommonCraft, this time explaining RSS. Personally, using an rss reader (Google Reader) has greatly improved my interaction with the web, especially when I am researching. It saves time, and keeps me up to date with sites, or blogs I am interested in.

Innovation does not have to be invention

When people think of innovation, they almost always think of it as producing something "new". Sometimes this can be misleading though, as often the best value can be realised by tweaking or just changing how a process is done. If we focus too much on finding that "eureka" moment, then the sponsors of innovation will grow tired of the big budget failures.

Dr. Anita Sands, SVP of Innovation and Process Design at RBC, gave one of the most popular keynotes at this year's Digital Marketing Conference. Some of the points from her speech:

• Innovation connects what is possible to what is valuable to our clients and our shareholders.
• Don’t mistake innovation for invention; innovation doesn’t have to be something new.
• New ways of applying old stuff, or kind of new stuff.
• APPLIED innovation. Ideas are not the problem. Implementation and measurement are the challenge.

In the video below, from the conference, she gives us two great points:

• ..there is a better way to do what you are doing
• ..there is a better way to look at something you already know

I think that these very simple principles are a great starting point for anyone involved in innovation or a project which requires some "out of the box" thinking. It is also important to remember that innovation must provide value, there is no point in investing in innovation for innovations sake.

Google Docs in plain english

Another great video from the guys over at CommonCraft. This time they are showing the collaborative benefits of Google Docs.

We have all experienced difficulty when mailing multiple colleagues attaching documents. Who has what version?, who is working on what part?, how many copies are there? Which one is the right version?

They put it simply:

Instead of attaching a document to an email......attach an email address to a document.

A great application of this scenario behind the firewall would be for document review and sign-off. As a software engineer in an organisation governed by SOX, we regularly have to review Technical Spec, Functional Spec, Test Plan reviews etc. However, the situation becomes a nightmare.

Consider this timeline:

• Day 1: I mail colleagues A, B, C, & D with the document (version 1)asking them to review it and provide feedback.
• Day 2: Person A has a comment, so I update the document and re-send (version 2). Later that day, B & C mail me with comments on version 1!
• Day 3: D asks me to re-send the mail with version 2 attached as they have accidentally deleted it!

Frustrating? - Collaboration is not facilitated by simply using email with attached documents. As the video points out, why should we ever have a situation where there are 4 copies stored of the same document?

What is Enterprise2.0?

In my last post, I shared the title of my KM dissertation - "Enterprise 2.0 – Using web 2.0 tools to improve collaboration & knowledge sharing in an organisation". So here is my first post in relation to understanding what Enterprise2.0 is all about.

I was thinking about how I would present the idea of Enterprise 2.0 to others who may not be familiar with web 2.0, social networking or indeed knowledge management. I came across this excellent presentation on slideshare called "Meet Charlie - what is Enterprise2.0?" which I think sums it up nicely:

I think my focus will be about examining the traditional methods on slide 31:

• Outlook
• Project
• Excel
• Word
• Internet Explorer

and comparing them with the benefits of the tools on slide 32:

• Wikipedia
• Google Docs/Mail
• Blogging
• RSS
• Instant Messaging
• Linkedin (Social Networking)

Overall, I think this is a great presentation and helps explain Enterprise2.0 in "Plain English", a style which is proving very popular as used by the folks over at CommonCraft in videos such as:

Wikis in Plain English

RSS in Plain English

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

Inbox Zero

Here is a great video called "Inbox Zero". The presenter is Merlin Mann, a well known productivity guru and creator of the popular 43 folders website talks about Getting Things Done, the importance of getting your inbox to zero, and strategies for dealing with high volume email.

I love the comparison of the processing of email to a deli worker taking orders. If the deli worker continues taking orders without making sandwiches, the queue would grow longer and their customers would grow angry. Similarly, if we keep reading mails without actioning them we will never get anything done.

He has a list of 5 actions, of which one applies to every email:

• Delete
• Delegate
• Respond
• Defer
• Do

He also says that you should never have to scroll beyond 1 screen in your inbox!

Social Bookmarking in plain english

Here is another great video from the guys at CommenCraft. This time they are focusing on Social Bookmarking using sites such as del.ici.ous.

This video explains how social bookmarking can be used for:

• Personal Knowledge Management
• Collaborative Bookmark Sharing
• Tagging

Visit the CommonCraft video archive at The CommonCraft Show.

RSS in plain english

Another great video from the guys at CommonCraft. This time they explain how RSS(Really Simple Syndication) works:

This one would be excellent in showing your senior execs why the intranet should have RSS built in so that employees can receive all the information they want without wasting valuable time trying to traverse through often over complicated intranet sites.

Wiki's in plain english

This is a great video from the guys at CommonCraft explaining how wiki's work:

I think it is brilliantly simple, yet expresses the key advantages of wiki's:

• Collaboration
• Simple Editing
• Anywhere, Anytime Editing
• Fun!

It would be a useful tool in a demonstration to executives/senior management who may never have heard of or used wiki's.