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June 30, 2011 by Patti

New themes for “Enterprise 2.0”

I spent two days at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last week  to get the pulse of this emergent ecosystem of vendors, practitioners, consultants, and thought leaders and to connect with many of my favorite fellow travelers from the KM world. A lot has been written already about the conference, and as usual the earliest blog posts were reportage and those coming along this week a bit more reflective. See especially Cecil Dijoux, Esteban Kolsky,  and Sameer Patel (so far).

On the vendor side, it’s clear that as the market is maturing; it’s all about the platform now (see my previous post) and there are a number to choose from. (Some look a lot like intranets, but I think we’re supposed to think that intranets are passé. To me, the intranet is the “home page of the enterprise,” social or not; it has to be where eyeballs start the day, where hands go to search, and where people connect with people and content.)

What felt different (and this has been said by many) is the shift in tone that occurred based on the selection of keynote speakers  away from vendor pitches (with a glaring exception or two) and toward thinking about the nature of business and work. The Wall Street Journal picked up on Jive‘s CTO’s comment  “that the emphasis has shifted toward business outcomes” in its article Enterprise 2.0 is growing up.” But it was not just about business outcomes.

It was also about the nature of business, relationships (companies <-> customers <-> employees), and some pretty simple principles of management. I had picked Mike Gotta‘s workshop, Organization Next, to attend on Monday, bypassing (except for an occasional drop-in) the Blackbelt practitioner’s session. (Ok, so I was just looking for a larger picture all along and at least at this E2.0 conference I found a lot of good stuff to listen to.) Mike’s workshop was HR-focused, looking at ways that HR managers are coping with/thinking about responding to changes in the employer/employee relationship. Daniel Rasmus did a nifty scenario planning workshop that brought home the number of uncertainties that exist about the world we live in.  Sara Roberts of Roberts Golden also did some great interactive exercises around organizational agility and change management. It didn’t feel like a technology conference at all.

(Sara also did a terrific keynote on Wednesday, “why employees are/should be managing the company,” introducing the notion of working within a complex system: setting the proper boundaries that enable leadership to emerge. She started with the metaphor of streams of humanity on the sidewalks of New York and how people can move in and out of the stream easily.)

In his elegantly constructed Tuesday morning keynote, the always inspiring John Hagel nimbly set  the tone for a business-focused conference. Starting with last year’s big E2.0 question “How do we get adoption for social software?” he linked adoption to passion and performance (“If you are interested in performance you have to be interested in passion”). People who are engaged in activities they are passionate about will connect with other people — and if you’ve got the platform available, and right, then they will use it in conjunction with passion. The only metric that matters is engaging passion.

(Later in the morning, Bryce Williams from Eli Lilly talked about how social collaboration was enabling emergent leadership in the organization. In his terrific stories, he emphasized how people succeeded because they were able to follow their passions. In the afternoon, in a session on innovation, Roy Rosin from Intuit talked about building an innovation environment: “[it means…] letting people build on their passions.” Sara Roberts said, in her workshop on Monday: “Meaning is the new money.” )

Rachel Happe, of the Community Roundtable, talked about the strategic imperative of communities: “Relationship and Culture are the only sustainable advantage.” And, she insists, that it takes time to cultivate communities, that our tools and technologies are pushing people “on a collision course” with information (beyond the capacity of our brains to process well),  that people must be given time to develop relationships and in an environment — culture — that provides the context for acting on information. “All management is community management.”

Rachel also emphasized changing organizational structures, confident that network structures will remain viable.  Organization structure had also been a big topic for Sara on Monday, who brought it all down succinctly to “What are we trying to do?” “Who needs to be connected with whom?” “Who is already connected?” “How can we foster the connections we need?”

John Stepper described how the “social media” journey at Deutsche Bank started with that core KM method, communities of practice, followed by a community of media enthusiasts, and a focus on expertise before going to technology. He summarizes this approach nicely here. In his keynote, he described how working in networks (oops, I mean communities) helped people to “step out of the org chart.” Terrific phrase. More organizational talk from Jim Grubb, VP of Communications at Cisco: “Your “org chart” is a people chart that needs to be dynamically ordered according to what you need to do in the moment.”

Enterprise 2.0 itself is a highly collaborative event and organizational microcosm. The tweet stream transcripts (767 pages, 20 per page) and links to presentations and blog posts are all posted in the self-organizing wiki set up by Jim Worth.  The community that organizes around this conference deserves a better name than Enterprise 2.0 (and “social business” doesn’t cut it, either). This conference was renamed and repositioned from a series of conferences on collaboration software and technologies, I think around 2008 (after Andrew McAfee coined the term, which was just 5 years ago.)  The co-evolution of people and technology is reaching a point where we can, and should, be looking outside the boundaries of enterprise technologies to understand how to manage, work with, and enable people to work together to create value beyond the corporate sector. E2.0, Boston 2011 has opened the door to many more conversations about how we move into this future.

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June 14, 2010 by Patti

#e2conf - Selling the Case

My posts over the next few days will be “live blogs” from the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Rumor has it already that 50% of attendees are practitioners. I take this to mean that we are well over the “chasm” in adoption and that the focus now is going to be on how to implement well. My personal listening for this conference includes:

  1. Leadership — not just issues about  the management of IT in the context of enterprise 2.0, but what changes will be required of leaders in this interconnected world.
  2. Measuring effectiveness — one of my current client projects is focused on understanding what social media tools support organizational effectiveness in what ways.
  3. Related to #2, how to assist clients in selecting the right technology to meet their needs.
  4. How can companies build an intranet in such a way that it can grow from the inside out, that is design so that they can selectively open up content to outside partners as they evolve a knowledge base in the context of a social networking space

Sameer Patel and Oliver Marks of the Soros group have a session on “Selling the case for accelerating business performance with enterprise collaboration technologies.” They are up against the day-long “black-belt practitioners” workshop, so attendance is  sparse. I’m hoping for insight into #2 above (Bolded text below indicate the sectionof the 3.25-hour workshop).

The Big Idea  key question to be addressed is the “What’s in it for me?” Marks emphasizes that you have to be able to

  • tell individuals how they will be able to get the work done that they are being paid for, when they currently think they are fine with email
  • tell business unit managers how the shift will improve their business
  • address the culture. Get your arms around how the company works now.

Marks recounts / neutron bomb / culture will come out the same

[Concurrently, @rappe links to a post by Sam Lawrence, “Social media isn’t going anywhere. (What’s it for?)” by which he means, it’s here to stay, so let’s get going on doing it right. (This is a key theme of this conference.) The session I am in address the ways that you need to talk to executives. This is part of what you need to get right.]

Marks and Patel continue with the key elements of Designing the Executive Pitch. They caution that you have to be careful not to position this as revolution (execs like to hear that others have already tried this stuff out). You can’t go in and tell execs that you are going to change the company’s DNA.

Assuming that you have a good idea of the Vendor Landscape, you will know which vendors to bring in.

[enter vendor panel] Panelists talk about how they sell to the C-suite, focusing on the business problems without talking about technology. Elevator pitches:

  • Omar Divina from Socialtext: “You have the official org chart and you have the connective tissue of the informal organization. This software will help you make better connections across the
  • Jordan Frank from Traction Software (doesn’t think that you can sell with an elevator system). “Most companies have systems that are designed to work when everything go right. Social software helps us to build systems that will work when things are not going right.
  • Brian Stern from Newsgator: “I ask the question, ‘have you nailed your collaboration and communication needs within your company?’ “

Given questions about how to engage the IT department in the conversation during the initial sales cycle: A lot comes down to questions of “how does this app fit into my existing infrastructure” as IT people are not engaged with the “social stuff.” Some companies think they need to implement social social software but come to the table with a laundry list of features, but without

  • passion for what social media can do
  • understanding what business problems they want to solve
  • use cases

Most successful use cases: twitter stream, central place for monitoring events, intranet collaboration.

One of the interesting questions/ surprises from conversations with customers (as per Jordan Frank):  How are we going to apply six sigma to this? Though it strings one first as absurd to think about applying regimental continuous improvement, it is worth thinking about how a company could tune the implementation based on measurement of effectiveness. Jordan has been thinking about this lately, and  blogged his thoughts on social process engineering yesterday.

It’s reassuring that vendors (at least these three, and I’m sure many more) are able to articulate the importance of deploying to customers who are ready and willing to work to make the implementation successful.

[exit vendors]

Sameer and Oliver continue a discussion of Getting Executives on Board. Without using the word “network,” they imply that it’s important to get people “outside the room” on board. That is, the E2.0 pitch might happen in a closed meeting to the decision-makers, but when they leave the room they’ll be calling colleagues to find out what they think. Understanding this informal network of influencers is important. (Of course, this applies to selling anything, not just E2.0)

Execution Planning includes requirements definition, mitigating risks, and addresses the issue of metrics. You have to establish metrics to gauge the success of the project — agree on metrics.

  • Process performance. How well is a process executed today? What can we assume about what will be different?
  • HR performance. Evaluating contributions of people as a gauge of “keepability” (my word)
  • Communications performance. Teaching leaders to engage and communicate in new ways.

Launching the new environment is the topic of Bevin Hernandez of Penn State on the culture shift from “Me to We,” understands throing that every organization has (great phrase:) “a thousand points of ‘no’.” Her case study works through the steps from creating a core team, enrolling champions, launching a print media campaign with catchy postcards and getting started guides and thumb drives, putting the exec on YouTube, etc.

In transitioning the intranet, the Penn State outreach group re-branded their intranet portal from  “my.outreach” to “our.outreach.” A great example of using language to start to make a shift. She had more to say about language, but I’ll save that for tomorrow - she’s one of the morning keynoters.

Beyond launch is driving usage, always, and relentlessly. Social media isn’t going anywhere.

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October 8, 2008 by Patti

Generations

You know you’ve been touched by a powerful idea or theory when it keeps coming back to mind, and begging you to apply its perspective to other ideas you encounter or read about. I’ve been touched by the Strauss and Howe theory of generations.

Deb Gilburg, of the Gilburg Leadership Institute introduced the idea (first described in the 1991 book Generations) to a recent meeting of our local idea network Gennova. The theory has it that there is a cycle of generational patterns that repeats every four generations (approximately 22 to 26 years). Strauss and Howe have characterized the four patterns and have mapped these patterns to 350 years of American history. Each pattern both shapes and is shaped by the historical context of its time, but the underlying characteristics of each pattern remain the same.

We are now accustomed to thinking about our three primary current generations, Boomers (the first generation to actually identify and name itself), GenX, and GenY. There are, of course, still many members of the pre-boomer “GI” generation that took us through WWII and its immediate antecedent, the generation that Strauss and Howe call the “Silents.” The archetypes that typify these generations are the Hero, Artist, Visionary and Nomad. A “turning” occurs after each cycle of four generations. The 2007 HBR article, The Next 20 Years: How Customer and Workforce Attitudes Will Evolve, though a bit scarily prescient in that it lists both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin as exemplars of Generation X. There’s also a lot of free stuff on the web site linked above.

This intriguing theory shows up, of course, in my current work to understand how to implement social tools in the enterprise given the distinct differences between the Boomers who fill the top management ranks, the GenXers coming up to management, and the GenYers who we look at as group-oriented, network-and-tool-savvy, and eager to be assigned important work. The tool part is an instance of history (in this case, the march of technology) influencing the generation. But, the group-oriented nature of GenY as this generation gets down to work, in the same way that the previous “Hero” generation, the GIs, got to work to organize and defend the world against tyrannical and mad dictators.

Previous Hero generations came of age during wartime (Revolutionary, Civil, and WWI) and we are of course at war on many fronts. But the challenge that unites a Hero generation does not need to be war. It could, for instance, be a planetary threat — like global warming — that will need people to set aside politics to accomplish bold endeavor.

This notion of the generational styles shows up for me in many ways recently. In a blog over on theAppGap, for instance, I reflected on current criticism of why managers do not think deeply. I wonder if there is a generational aspect to this. Reading about Daniel Goleman in a recent strategy+business article, (perhaps a blog on this anon) I wonder if the organizational development movement is an aspect of self-introspective generational pattern coming of age.

And, in looking at notes provided to me by KMWorld speaker Peter Andrews of IBM, I see the the pattern anew as he distinguishes the current state and future state of workers, saying of the future state “Workers identify with peers” and “Work centers around the endeavor.” Take this out of Andrew’s organizational context, it’s not hard to see these terms being applied to the GI generation.

Last, this past weekend walking my visiting cousins around the Revolutionary battlegrounds and the homes of Transcendalist writers (who, like us Boomers were of the “Prophet” archetype) I thought again about generations seized by ideas. Later, around the kitchen table with my cousins I thought of our own GI-generation mothers and of our grandmother, Alma, who raised ten children and who’s laugh I can still hear. Alma, like many Americans (the work is decidedly US-specific) doesn’t quite fit her generation — the Lost Generation — as she was born to Danish farmers in Wisconsin and married an immigrant Dane who shod horses.

Generations is a long and fascinating read and I suspect that when I finish I might start all over again. Having some fresh perspective will do odd things to you. As long as you keep your perspective about it.

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August 19, 2008 by Patti

The Class of 2012

My alma mater, Beloit College, has been publishing a mindset list for the last eleven years. The mindset list is always an interesting reminder of the cultural touchstones that divide generations. The list contains reminders that the incoming class of Freshman, most of whom this year will be 18 years old, have never known or experienced. For example, for these students:

  • Martha Stewart Living has always been setting the style.
  • Clarence Thomas has always sat on the Supreme Court.
  • IBM has never made typewriters.
  • The Hubble Space Telescope has always been eavesdropping on the heavens.

I found it interesting, for example, to know that IBM actually did stop making typewriters in 1990 (the cutoff year for this mindset list). And that these kids won’t understand the transcendental accomplishment of the Hubble any more than those of my generation can understand how our grandparents felt when they first saw airplanes.

There is some trivia in the list as well: For these students,

  • The Green Bay Packers (almost) always had the same starting quarterback.*
  • They have never known life without Seinfeld references from a show about “nothing.”

The list provides guidance for the professors and instructors at the college, so they can understand how the world occurs for their new students. It’s always fun to read.

*At least that will change now. Having spent time with my cheese-head** family over the summer, I can attest to the wearying hourly updates on Brett Favre and the Packers decision processes.
**I am a cheese-head, I use the term only with great affection.

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