“…rule-following employees are worth zip in terms of the competitive advantage they generate”.

Gary Hamel, “The Future of Management”

Watson Wyatt, a human resources consultancy, does a large-scale annual survey looking at return on investment for communication strategies. One section of this year’s report focused on Social Media as used by 328 organizations that collectively represent 5 million employees in various regions around the world:

• The most prevalent reasons for not increasing the use of social media stem from a lack of resources and knowledge, rather than legal restrictions
• Companies that are using social media to engage employees are using these tools to address a variety of topics. The most prevalent topics are collaboration and team building, adapting to change, and promoting health and wellness.
• Highly effective communicators are using social media tools 2-3 times more than the low-effectiveness group of companies to reach employees. Most participants (65 percent) expect to use social media more next year.

Here are more 2010 predictions. Forrester
has issued a report, Collaboration Needs Will Fuel A
Smartphone Surge, by Ted Schadler with
Matthew Brown, Brownlee Thomas, Michele Pelino, and Peter Schmidt, with the
subtitle: The
Surge Can Be Funded Through A Bring-Your-Own Smartphone Strategy.  I appreciate receiving a review
copy.  It predicts that 2010 will
be the year of the smartphone surge.

The Forrester team
surveyed 3,904 information workers nad found great excitement about about
smartphones, “attracted by the ability to email, collaborate, and work with
documents from anywhere.” While only 14% percent of information workers across
the US, Canada, and UK already use smartphones, another 64% would like to. This
compares with general consumers usage at 78% with mobile phones and 11% with
smart phones. That yet to be fulfilled demand in information workers, along
with some employers’ willingness to share monthly mobile costs, sets the stage
for the surge. This calls for KM and other information professionals to
determine a strategy for effective and coordinated usage. There is also the
numbers to pressure mobile carriers to cut costs across plans.

I imagine that most
smart users also use a fraction of the capability of their devices. I know I
do. I see my colleagues using much more capability.  The report provides along list of potential capabilities and
their current usage from email (92%) to enterprise apps (7%). Some others
include: personal contacts (84%), work calendar (83%), IM (48%), emergency
response (17%), and team collaboration (12%). The last one should go up
dramatically if the report is correct it its predictions.

Location flexibility
is the top reason (60%) for using a smartphone over a laptop. The increased
reach will provide the ROI for smartphone, according to Forrester report. While
this seems obvious, there seem to be two reasons here: the portability of the
device and the extended access, and these will continue to evolve. Having
greater wifi access will mitigate one difference and such devices as the tablet
might go into the other.  However,
I think the convergence of capabilities into a single type of device that takes
two forms will balance that out.

In other words,
content that used to come through many channels such as music, TV, Web, phone
now comes through one device (see for example,  TV Moving
Closer to Mobile Phones and the Web and Who Will Win TV Sets or Computers? I now have all my music and
photos on my iPhone, as well as my laptop and have stopped using separate
devices for them. However, this device will take two forms, one that sits on a
desk and perhaps even connects to a larger monitor and one that fits in your
pocket.  There will be an increased
need to synch these devices and that needs to be part of the smartphone
strategy.

There is much more in
the report including suggestions on how to start your smartphone strategy. 

“Repeat after me, this is not an information revolution, it is a relationship revolution”

Tweet by John Hagel (@jhagel)

The cool technologies that are transforming the competitive landscape and how companies operate are not prototypes in some electronic giant’s lab. They’re in the marketplace, and affordable. You don’t have to overhaul your IT architectures to implement them. If anything, they improve the value of that architecture that you spent gillions putting in place.

And, as a bonus, these technologies promise to, in the words of one CIO, “make IT fun again!” The promise of new, cool technology depends on IT-smart business leaders, who discover the potential in them through experimentation and application. These are learn-by-doing technologies that are not programmable by IT. Employees will “reprogram” how their companies operate based on how they use these technology. IT’s job is to teach, coach, observe, and scale. Imagine the impact of having everyone in the business 10% smarter about IT? It’d do a lot more good than making everyone in IT 100% smarter about the business.

Often the best source for innovation is the team within your business. A great leader can turn them into entrepreneurs who are hungrily looking for new opportunities. The key is empowerment. By empowering people you enable them to achieve goals through their own ideas and efforts. The leader sets the destination, but the team chooses the route.

Of course not. For years, the prevailing practices for productivity were project and process management. Now that we’ve begun to recognize the critical role of collaboration, and collaborative software for improving productivity….(Good) Collaboration software helps connect geographically dispersed teams, dramatically improves communication, and creates a shared workspace where team members can contribute, aggregate and iterate information and work. Shared workspaces help the team create and maintain a shared view and understanding of their problem space – the military calls this a “common operating picture”. The logical (and critical) next step is to enable this team to plan, track and execute with the same level of ease and convenience as they can now communicate and aggregate work.

Keith Errington: “Web 2.0 – Collaboration vs. Control“

…this leads us to the more fundamental problem behind Web 2.0 adoption. The people making the decisions at a strategic level, need to understand these technologies, what they mean and what they can and cannot do. Then they have to see how they can be used to meet their organizational objectives. And then they need to implement them to the depth appropriate to the proposed strategy and with the right level of control. They need to understand the implications of the success of such projects to both the budget and the corporate culture. But one of the strengths of these technologies is that often their effect adds up to much more than the sum of the parts – that they generate new paradigms and evolve into systems that defy strategy and planning. They cross departmental boundaries and break down barriers between the organization, its customers, and its suppliers. And once users get the taste of openness and collaboration, they generally want more – it’s difficult to get that genie back in the bottle.

The Gilbane Group is gearing up quickly for another one of their conferences. The Gilbane Content Management Conference in San Francisco will be held May 18-20, 2010. This year’s conference will cover a number of topics including Web technologies, content management, and collaboration tools.

Web, content, and collaboration technology have reached a new level of maturity. This is true in terms of technology, but more importantly, it is true in terms of what businesses expect to be able to do with these tools. Web and enterprise content management permeate every aspect of an organization. Public facing internet sites are the front door to an organizations’ products and services, and where customers, partners and investors engage with the corporate brand and develop perceptions. Internal websites, whether in the form of intranets, blogs, wikis, or portals, provide knowledge workers increasingly efficient ways to collaborate and share knowledge. Customer and internal-facing applications share requirements that call for a number of enterprise content, publishing and infrastructure technologies, such as multi-lingual, social media, search, and integration software.

Gilbane San Francisco is organized into four tracks so that whether you are responsible for marketing, IT, a business unit, or an internal function, you will be able to easily navigate among the conference sessions. The four tracks include:

• Customers & Engagement
• Colleagues & Collaboration
• Content Technology
• Content Publishing

CMS Report is proud to be a media sponsor for Gilbane San Francisco 2010. If you plan on going to the conference, CMS Report has some good news that is going to save you some money. Our sponsorship of the conference entitles CMSReport.com readers to receive a special $200 discount to the conference. To receive the $200 discount, you’ll need to use the code “cmsreport” when you’re asked for it during the registration process.

read more

A couple years ago, Jeff Whatcott introduced to me the concept of a social publishing system. Within minutes after reading his article, I knew I wanted to expand further on his idea of social publishing and discuss the potential impact social publishing would have on content management systems. During this time period, Andrew McAfee was continuing to observe the emergence of Enterprise 2.0 into the normal day to day business world. From these two moments, I couldn’t help myself from dreaming of the opportunities I had before me to learn more about social publishing and collaboration tools.

I have waited for almost two years for the right time to start a new website that focused on Enterprise 2.0 topics which were beyond the scope of CMSReport.com. Starting with the new year, I began to realize this is the right time to introduce a new site that focuses on social publishing and collaboration. Today, I want to introduce you to SocPub.com. At the time, there isn’t much to see but I promise you the future is bright for this domain.

read more

Social media has intensified the loss of consumer trust by creating a new channel in which consumers no longer need to trust businesses, they can simply trust each other. Social media allows people to grow their own communities to supply resources, one of which is consumer trust. If we are interested in a new product, we don’t have to trust what the ad on TV says, we can sit at the computer (or phone) and in 5 minutes access a community of thousands of reviews and suggestions. Businesses must acknowledge that their traditional channels of trust may be broken.

“Be yourself.” It’s one of the rules of social media. If you’re blogging, tweeting or Facebooking for business, be real—or you won’t be followed. Yet, how do you pull off “authentic” while maintaining the company brand message? It’s tough enough for a small business. What if you’re #2 on Business Week’s best global brands list, with nearly 400,000 employees across 170 countries? At IBM, it’s about losing control.

“We don’t have a corporate blog or a corporate Twitter ID because we want the ‘IBMers’ in aggregate to be the corporate blog and the corporate Twitter ID,” says Adam Christensen, social media communications at IBM Corporation. “We represent our brand online the way it always has been, which is employees first. Our brand is largely shaped by the interactions that they have with customers.”

• By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.
• By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.
• Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.
• Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.
• Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.

The University of Saskatchewan unanimously selected Cascade Server as their institutional web content management system. Find our more about how collaboration was key to their success.

The University of Saskatchewan unanimously selected Cascade Server as their institutional web content management system. Find our more about how collaboration was key to their success.

The Big Shift cascades through all dimensions of our life. The Big Shift will also transform how we communicate with each other. We are moving from a world of deep analysis communicating explicit knowledge to a world of rich, personal narratives communicating tacit knowledge. Narratives powerfully help to shift perception from static objects to dynamic relationships.

“Knowledge used to be understood as an internal property of an individual. Today knowledge should be seen as networked communication. The network is the amplifier of knowledge. This requires us to learn new ways of talking about education, reward systems and organizing in companies, and most of all, work itself. The process of communication is the process of knowing. You can only know what you are doing in conversation. If we want to influence the process of knowing we need to enable new habits of participation and new habits of communication.” (Esko Kilpi)

“Data in the hands of a few makes for order; but data in the hands of many makes for endless possibilities.” (“The Whuffie Factor” by Tara Hunt)

“Social media is about participation, getting the entire workforce engaged and creating synergies…it’s often the relationship between the parts, their interdependence, that makes a difference.” (“Social Media at Work”, Jue, Marr & Kassotakis, 2009)

“Each communication episode provides the potential for people to learn something new about their partners, make decisions, monitor the state of the work, take corrective action, and perform other joint activities. If the communication episode does not take place, then the information exchange and joint action will not occur.” (“Distributed work” by Pamela Hinds & Sara Kiesler)

“Social Media didn’t invent conversations, it only surfaced them.” (Brian Solis)

“Throughout the primate world, social networks provide a fast conduit for innovation and information-sharing that help the group as a whole to adapt to its environment.” (“Glut – Mastering Information Through The Ages” by Alex Wright)

It takes a lot to make this kind of collaboration happen and become efficient and effective, especially when the team members are distributed in time and space and need to operate as a virtual team dependent on various technologies. This team needs to overcome barriers such as time, location, organization, culture, language, attitudes, behaviors…but I won’t get into details about those things in this post. Here I will focus on the concept of “collective collaboration”, a term which I tried to define in a previous post.

To become efficient and effective, the team needs to reach a common understanding about their purpose, objectives, tasks, roles, and so on. The only way to do this is by communicating with each other, and the richer, more interactive, and more frequent this communication is, the better are the chances for the team to reach and maintain this common understanding across time and space until their purpose is fulfilled. Obviously, it is easier to do this for a team consisting of people belonging to the same organizational unit, located in the same place, speaking the same language, sharing values etc than it is for a virtual team consisting of people with various backgrounds from different organizations from around the globe.

Over time, as the team members get to know each other better and develop a shared understanding of things, they are likely to become more efficient. They develop strong ties to each other. Their ideas, knowledge, attitudes and behavior will converge.

This also tends to lead to group think; the team members “try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas” (Wikipedia). Since they all share the more or less the same information, they eventually think more and more alike. This makes them dependent on a constant inflow of new and relevant information from their environment. Hence the need for collective collaboration; the kind of collaboration that allows the team to access all information they need from the environment – inside as well of outside of the organization they belong to – and thereby helping an enterprise avoiding such things as sub-optimization, redundant work, waste, bad decision-making.

So, the team members need to know what is going on elsewhere. Otherwise, they will most likely miss out on information that can be valuable to them and the common good of the enterprise. The problem here is that it is not easy to see and find out what is going on elsewhere in a large and distributed enterprise. Of course, we can use our informal network to become aware of other initiatives that we might depend on, but it is virtually impossible to use this network in an efficient way with traditional communication means such as phone calls, email, and face-to-face meetings. It requires a lot of hard detective work, so why would we spend time and energy on monitoring and listening to our environment unless we have a very specific and urgent problem we need help to solve?

As openness and transparency of information increases, we won’t only be able to discover new information that might be valuable to our team. We might also discover new people, connect with them, and share information directly with them. Social networking helps us extend, strengthen and use networks, providing the basic infrastructure which is needed for fast access and sharing of relevant information. Over time, we might develop enough trust in each other and develop the kind of strong ties we need to be able to collaborate in a team.

Over time, open, rich and frequent communication, sharing and interaction will help to build a sense of belonging and community, a feeling that we are all contributing to a common good. Then we might actually help each other even if it doesn’t bring any direct return to our team or us as individuals, other than the recognition we might get from our peers – and possibly increased social status within the community. This helps to build employee engagement, which makes us more motivated and productive as individuals.

For this to happen, it is that our contributions are recorded and visible to others. If our contributions are not seen, then we won’t be able to get the recognition we need to continue contributing. So, we need a platform that does that.

Andrew McAfee defines and explains the reasons for such a platform as follows:

“Most current collaboration technologies, including email, instant messaging, and cell phone texting are what I call channels. They essentially keep communications private. People beyond the sender and receiver(s) can’t view the contents of information sent over channels, and usually don’t even know that communication has taken place. Information sent via channels isn’t widely visible, consultable, or searchable. And no record exists of who sent what to whom, so channels leave no trace of collaboration patterns.”

“The new generation of collaboration technologies that are underpinning Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, in contrast, are all platforms. They’re repositories of digital content where contributions are globally visible (everyone with access to the platform can see them) and persistent (they stick around, and so can be consulted and searched for). Access to platforms can be restricted (to, for example, only members of an R&D lab or a team working on a particular deal) so that proprietary content isn’t universally visible within a company, but the goal of a platform technology is to make content widely and perennially available to its members!”

The information exchanged via channels form what I previously has described as the “dark matter” in a business.

When connected to each other, these Enterprise 2.0 platforms make up an eco-system of “information hubs” – blogs, wikis, communities, micro-blogging, media sharing, forums… – that allows us collect and maintain information in a collective way within an enterprise.

These hubs must be flexible to accommodate any kind of information that we need to share. Anyone must be allowed to access and contribute to these hubs, but participation must be voluntary. With easy access and authoring combined with the informal and organic way we maintain these information hubs, we ensure that threshold to participation is kept as low as possible so that we maximize the number of contributions.

By linking the hubs together, we are creating a user-generated, interlinked and rapidly adaptable body of knowledge which is open to everyone. The links combined with tags that we apply ourselves to the information makes it easier for us to organize the information, but also to find and discover relevant information with the use of filters.

With abundance of information, we need more than filters that allow us to narrow things down until we have relevant information. We also need a way to be alerted when there is something new for us. Instead of having to surf around and visit each and every information hub that might contain information that is relevant to us just to check if something is new, we can use signals in combination with filters to tell us when there is new relevant information available to us.

We also need a way to simplify consumption. Syndication does that for us. By making new information come to us instead of us coming to the information hubs, we save the time we otherwise would spend on navigating to different information hubs. If the information comes in a standardized format, we can also use one single way to interact with it. This means that our capacity to consume information greatly increases as we have to spend less time and energy on learning and remembering how to navigate on an information hub.

These are just some of the ways in which Enterprise 2.0 technologies and “mechanisms” can support collective collaboration within an enterprise. But the technology is just one side of the coin. To borrow the words of Larry Hawes:

“No business case will sell social software to a firm that doesn’t already value collaboration in its culture. If the ROI is needed to convince an organisation that collaboration is a good thing – then ROI is the least of your problems.”