Welcome to my weblog, which I use for keeping track of interesting stuff. It serves as my basecamp for the exploration of the Internet, the "Blogosphere" and life in general.
It’s often advised that Enterprise 2.0 initiatives have more chance when coming from the bottom of organisations. For good reasons too: Enterprise 2.0 is all about empowering people, but often requiring radical changes in the way they work and relate together, both with their peers and with management. In terms of both testing what works and getting the tools accepted in the workplace the best way could then very well be to start low, small and with a few frontrunners or potential evangelists.
However, after a couple of experiments at work I now have a feeling that bottom-up Enterprise 2.0 has its own limitations, especially when critical mass is important to show the potential benefits (to employees and management) and tools don’t readily overflow with personal value (it’s not all Del.icio.us!) and when people are in the pursuit of busyness.
Or did we do our experiments wrong, actually violating the rules stipulated above (with the obvious benefit of hindsight)? Maybe more called for, to get some participation?
Writing this, I was remembered by a quote of Andrew McAfee:
Enterprise 2.0 is not a hype, but it is also not easy, and will serve to separate the winners from the loser” (link)
And:
I predict that the diffusion of these tools is going to sharpen differences among companies as some work to foster the new styles, modes, and practices of collaboration and others work (subtly or overtly) to squelch them. (link)
Asked the question on Twitter tonight but no response yet:
What would the most attractive feature on an employee social network that really draws people in (providing individual value)?
At the end of last year I created a list of 20 things to do on a social network in the office. The piece was the result of a personal brainstorm. But, as you might understand a lot of “utopia” ended up there. At least from the perspective of a employee in a company that never even though about social networks, let alone done some stuff on them. So let’s get down to earth…
To repeat: What would the most attractive feature on an employee social network that really draws people in? In my opinion for, in my case “busy bankers” but it might be for anyone else new to this stuff: personal value first should be the motto
So what’s personal value on a social network? Let me think again:
seeing photo’s behind those long-known names?
keep one’s resume (for the new potential boss to see)?
learning about the interest, hobbies, careers of colleagues?
seeing what you network is doing (= writing on the personal blogs in the network)?
finding people in the same specialism, related projects etc?
seeing what is written on specific tags (this is obviously 2nd or 3rd phase stuff….)
The trouble is that considerable critical mass is required to at least get some of the personal value from the activities mentioned above, although not to the same degree.
Let me refrase my question: What are the first things to focus on when building a social network behind the firewall in terms of features (next to usability)?
Last week, my Enterprise 2.0 evangelist spirit lead me to post a piece on our internal Wiki weblog (a blog exploring the value of social software) about the things I would want to do on an internal social network.
I believe that, using the collective intelligence of all people within the company should be one of the main themes in the drive for growth, efficiency and value. Actually that collective intelligence has been mostly unused to date, just lying there. Part of the answer to change that situation, is facilitating relationships and helping people connect.
On the blog I presented the result of a bit of brainstorming on my side on the things I would want to do on an internal social network (like LinkedIn or Facebook). Things that would make things easier and joyful. Things that would also make me feel more engaged to this place!
I came up with 20 of them. Anything I missed?
Find that expert in (…any work related topic that comes to mind…) when I need them.
Post questions to my network (for everybody to see of course).
Locate colleagues interested in the same things as I am (and meet up for lunch!).
Ask for opinions on a specific route for doing things (e-mail management?).
Check out and approach the people or manager(s) at my next job position.
Market myself within the company in the fields I am good at (personal branding).
Keep my resume and personal information readily available for all and easy to update.
Check out interesting projects going on (that I may be doing also and so save some time; keep me from re-inventing the wheel).
Answer questions that actually “find me” because of my profile and network (and be rewarded for my participation!).
Create communities of people around a specific topic to focus the individual effort and passion.
Learn about the people around me (who I greet in the hallway but know nothing about).
Discuss about idea’s, experiences, lessons learned, business process improvements, tools, policies, external developments.
Being able to put out a few thoughts now and then, tag them and let them go for all to react on, learn from. And of course read your thoughts!
Be aware of what is going around in the space I am involved with and beyond.
Quickly learn about the (new) work and colleagues when landing in a new position.
Find out where people are working with my educational and work experience.
Want to know what my network knows that I should know.
Just want to keep my list of contacts (who to approach for what?).
Trace the person who knows that special person who knows about that particular topic.
Hey, I would even like to post a few photo’s of ING events to share with everyone around here.
Via fellow Enterprise 2.0 enthusiast Scott Gavin I found the great blog of Richard Dennison, Intranet and Channel Strategy Manager at Britisch Telecom, which I immediately added to the E2.0 section in my RSS reader.
By the way, the sentence that drew most of my attention was:
...letting people express themselves is the fast track to engagement.
especially because of the importance of “engaging people” at work and my personal feeling of what tools that offer people an outlet for their opinions and idea’s, could mean and do for a company.
Finally please find a very nice presentation of Richard:
If HR is all about attracting good people, making them better and retaining them, isn’t then HR the natural partner for a corporation-wide Enterprise 2.0 project?
Of course some support of IT is a requirement too, in terms of some minimum infrastructure.
Via Martin Kloos I found another brilliant little movie from Michael Wesch of Kansas State University about how the internet changes how we think about storing and refinding information and the role of tagging.
My personal favorite quote:
“We no longer just find information …together we can make it find us”
Hereby also a link to my post on the David Weinberger’s book Everything is Miscellaneous, a book which clearly was the inspiration for the video.
Andrew McAfee, one of my Enterprise 2.0 guru’s at Harvard, just posted an article The Pursuit of Busyness that voices the concern and frustration of a lot of people trying to bring social software tools into the workplace, but fail because of general lack of participation.
To quote:
Companies that are full of knowledge workers and that have built cultures that value busyness face a potentially sharp dilemma when it comes to E2.0. These companies stand to benefit a great deal if they can build emergent platforms for collaboration, information sharing, and knowledge creation. But they may be in a particularly bad position to build such platforms not because potential contributors are too busy, but because they don’t want to be seen as not busy enough.
And even if the leaders in such companies sincerely want to exploit the new tools and harness the collective intellgence of their people, they might have a tough time convincing the workforce that busyness is no longer the ne plus ultra. Corporate cultures move slowly and with difficulty, and it will take a lot more than a few memos, speeches, and company retreats to convince people that it’s a smart career idea, rather than a poor one, to contribute regularly and earnestly to E2.0 platforms.
Where I come from, we just finalised a big survey around the company-wide wiki, with as most frequent mentioned anwers, explaining the lack of participation, being “no time”.
It is difficult to overcome the “what’s in it for me” hurdle without clear management signals that participation is seen as “valuable contribution”, for tools that do not have a “direct-reward-after-contributed” effect. Social bookmarking might have that, but a company wiki surely not.
So our strategy is really geared towards exploiting management buy-in signals whenever we can, besides the usual highlighting of beneficial user cases etc.
It is all about changing culture…and as I wrote in an earlier post called Enterprise 2.0 does not come costlessly it is all about realising the impact and benefits of social software like in the chart below:
If people in organizations have more freedom to work laterally and diagonally and in all the other directions within the organization, then you’re going to see more creativity and innovation. You’re also going to see a lot more potentially useful connections emerge organically… This doesn’t come costlessly. One of the benefits of the organization of a corporation is the potential for streamlining and efficiency that hierarchy brings to bear. Ultimately, it’s a trade-off, in terms of where you want to be on that creativity vs. efficiency spectrum. The nice thing is that innovations in technology and in organizational design are allowing us to push out the frontier of that trade-off, so that you can get more innovation without sacrificing efficiency to the same degree.”
Introducing social software takes a lot of effort, but its worth it all the way!
I just had to draw a chart about that… (forgive me for being such a bad graphical artist :) )
About a week ago I spotted that expression “war for talent” again. It was mentioned in a newspaper report about the troubled corporate culture at the Dutch bank ABN AMRO.
As it appears from Het Financieele Dagblad (sorry in Dutch), the bank initiated a campaign to battle the corporate culture of “fear and keeping silent”. Internal research on the corporate culture has shown that employees are afraid to speak up, fearing management backlash and impacting ones’ career. ABNAMRO management thinks that in order to remain competitive it needs a more open culture in which people feel comfortable to give feedback and provide idea’s for improvement.
Some telling quotes from the newspaper article:
“Traditional managers, who continue to stay away from open dialog, should fear for their job”
“Talent must be able to think free and communicate.”
“Improving the culture is essential in the war for talent, customers, the transformation of the bank and the future of ABNAMRO in the knowledge economy.”
“If we want to realise our ambitions we need to get rid of this fear and the attitude of keeping silent.”
“We can only be competitive if culture makes a 180 degree turn, towards a situation in which people address each others behaviour, if they point out suggestions or idea’s, compliment each other and dear to criticise.”
A nice fact about the campaign is that ABNAMRO hired a “communication guru”, called Bradford Michaels, to travel to around 30 offices in the Netherlands to spread the word on open communication. After the campaign, management announced the guru to be a fake, which caused mixed feelings among personnel. Some question this approach, because a campaign meant to generate a culture of trust, featured quite a misleading (or humorous?) element, potentially causing more harm (or additional mistrust) than good.
JP Rangaswami’s version of “war for talent”
Around a year ago I came across this “war for talent” expression in a powerful talk by JP Rangaswami (then DrKW now BT) during Blogs and Social Media Forum 2006 (please find the link to podcasts: session two).
JP used the expression in relation to social software (in his case wiki’s and blogs) and what the new tools could mean for companies competing for talent (“the war”). His notion: best corporate strategy ever is to attract the best people. But then the issue becomes how to release and free their talent given the corporate environment and tool set, in order to make the people spend their time doing the right thing. JP specifically pointed to the need to get talent share and collaborate and make sure not to keep these people in knowledge silos.
Essentially both ABNAMRO and JP mean the same: provide room for open communication for the benefit for the organisation. But both apply it in a somewhat different direction:
ABNAMRO foremost and first to build trust, to reap the benefits of feedback loops later
JP for creating freedom to connect and share (the trust is assumed to be there already).
A role for social software to get some trust?
Now, being very much a proponent of social software too, I wonder how these could fit into the picture? By the way the article has one mention of an internal weblog, that of CEO Netherlands Mr. Schmittmann.
Could social software tools be a part of a strategy to come achieve more trust ands openness? Would employees be willing to participate? Under what circumstances?
Of course, I think that throwing a tool in the situation will not help to improve the situation per se. Their needs to be some kind of trust-reboot.
However, I do feel that if the a substantial part of ABNAMRO management starts communicating through an open channel like an internal weblog, there might be some value. Management has an important example function role during a campaign to force culture changes. But the weblog initiative should certainly not only involve top management, but especially managers much closer to the “work-floor”, because they are the one’s doing the day-to-day communicating and judging over carreer moves. And what would management do with a weblog? Well, here is a list: justifying decisions, providing vision and direction (eliminating the noise), actively seeking feedback and, this is important, provide prove of taking feedback serious.
Of course, one needs to measure the impact, because one issue is that of an echo chamber. There could easily be a situation where the same group of brave (or ignorant) people are commenting and providing feedback and the majority still hold back, fearing backlash. But if all goes well the participation should rise, which could be proxy for the return of trust.
What do you think about this? Can internal weblogs perform a function in turning around a troubled corporate culture? Anyone got a nice example?
All content on this weblog is presented on my personal account, representing my own views, and as such does not necessarily reflect the views of my past, current or future employers.
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Comment [4] | 
posted Apr 16, 09:39 pm on Apr 16, 2008 |
category: Enterprise 2.0
/ Social software
Last week, 
About a week ago I spotted that expression “war for talent” again. It was mentioned in a newspaper report about the troubled corporate culture at the Dutch bank