This post first appeared at Diversity Analysis

I spent some time recently talking with Terri Griffith, a lovely lady who also happens to be a professor of management at Santa Clara University. Terri’s focus is on the “implementation and effective use of new technologies and organizational practices.” Terri hunted me down after seeing a post I recently wrote about the disconnect between technological tools and the culture within the organizations that are attempting to deploy those tools.

Over 30 minutes or so, Terri and I had an energetic conversation about technology implementation, and the wider Enterprise 2.0 space. I’ve said many times before that it concerns me that most Enterprise 2.0 commentators have a high level perspective on organizations and thus miss the all to important aspect of how culture on the shop floor is an impediment to adoption. Or, to put it more correctly, how technology fails to design products based on the realities for shopfloor workers.

All this got me thinking about my role in a former life, in which I consulted to organizations helping with Design Strategy (capitalization intentional). In this role I attempted to build cross functional teams that could ideate outside of the constraints of the status quo, while empathetically hearing the perspectives of others. Often when doing this work we would defer to the concept espoused by design consultancy IDEO, that organizations should look for individuals who fitted the mold of “T-shaped people”

According to IDEO, T-shaped people:

have two kinds of characteristics, hence the use of the letter “T” to describe them. The vertical stroke of the “T” is a depth of skill that allows them to contribute to the creative process. That can be from any number of different fields: an industrial designer, an architect, a social scientist, a business specialist or a mechanical engineer. The horizontal stroke of the “T” is the disposition for collaboration across disciplines. It is composed of two things. First, empathy. It’s important because it allows people to imagine the problem from another perspective- to stand in somebody else’s shoes. Second, they tend to get very enthusiastic about other people’s disciplines, to the point that they may actually start to practice them. T-shaped people have both depth and breadth in their skills.

I’ve had a notion I’ve been tossing around now for five years or so and it’s one of triangle shaped people. I don’t want to push the metaphor but humor me a little on this one and I’ll explain. You see the problem I see with T-shaped people both in IDEO’s definition and from what I’ve seen in practice, is that these people have a very thin veneer of broad knowledge – connect many of these people together and, beyond the thin veneer, there are huge functional gaps between them.

Rather than merely semantics, this is a major risk for organizations as much damage can be done by groups that, from appearances at least, have broad ranging skills. When let loose on projects, this thin veneer can soon develop cracks and be the cause of project failure.

Triangle shaped people are very different however. They begin with a broad skill base but, rather than only having this breadth over a very fine depth, their skill base narrows gradually as it deepens – these people are balanced and have much higher levels of what I call skill volume than the T-shaped individuals.

The thesis goes that T shaped people collaborate but don’t increase an organizations skill volume much if at all. Triangle shaped people however greatly increase skill volume in a "sum of the parts" type way.

Beyond skill volume however, triangle shaped people have an important benefit when working in groups. In a cross functional group staffed with triangle shaped people, members alongside each other have much more closely aligned areas of deep knowledge – for this reason, an approach that encourages triangle shaped people can result in a deepening of knowledge across the entire team.

It’s an area I’m re-energized about and one which I’m looking forward to collaborating with Terri on further.

Cross posted on Diversity

I saw a tweet the other day that heralded the fact that someone I know who runs a business support agency had begun using microblogging service Yammer. Great you might say… well maybe.

I’ve had previous conversations with this particular individual (who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons). A year or so ago I was surprised (actually somewhat flabbergasted) to receive an email from his PA telling me that this person had been impressed by an article I’d recently written. The email was all of eight words long – and I can’t help but wonder how much more time it took this person to instruct his PA to write it than it would have done to write it himself.

One thing I enjoy about the dealing with software companies directly is that (generally) no matter what level you sit within an organization, you’re a technologist at heart and hence embrace different communication technologies. I’d be shocked if any of the SaaS CEOs that I’m in regular contact with actually had a PA let alone had their PA write their emails.

This is in contrast to another organization I’ve been involved with (and yes, I’d love to name and shame but I won’t) this organization is a multi billion dollar business involved in selling telecommunication products and services and alas, a large number of the workers within the organization seem unable to use the phone let alone email.

But all of this isn’t merely an exasperated rant – rather it’s a cry to think about culture, not technology. All the microblogging, collaboration, e-this, i-that and mobile everything else technology in the world is of little effect if the people within the organization have a culture that doesn’t encourage responsiveness, dialogue and open-communications. So please people – focus on the system, not the technology….

First published at CloudAve

At last year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco, the highlight presentation for me was one given by Kathleen Culver and Greg Lowe from Alcatel Lucent. Their presentation was an excellent look at some of the benefits of Enterprise 2.0, and then some of the detrimental impacts that those benefits can bring.

Last week I posted about one of these very pitfalls, telling the tale of social media being used in a professional setting by a bully trying to build themselves up by dragging others down. Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Council founding member, practitioner and thought-leader Susan Scrupski left a comment reminding me of the presentation Greg and Kathleen gave. I reached out to Greg who graciously agreed to let me use the presentation and write a blog post around it.

What’s interesting for me about their presentation is that, despite there being some skepticism about Enterprise 2.0 generally, most commentators are couching that skepticism in terms of “where is the value” type questions – looking to prove the real benefit from the tools we’re all evangelizing, These commentators tend to be a little hypocritical, using these social media tools to build their own personal brands while at the same time pouring scorn on the value of the same tools within the enterprise.

Kathleen and Greg however take the benefits the tools bring as a given, but then parse those benefits in terms of some real risks that go alongside them. They do so along several themes – flexibility, accessibility (both geographical and chronological, context specificity, information availability and retrievability.

It’s an excellent presentation and well worth a few minutes viewing.

Key is their summary – bear in mind these are two Enterprise 2.0 proponents who, despite understanding the risks, still see the value in the tools. Their advice in order to mitigate the risks?

• Avoid “Alert Fatigue”
• Unplug yourself
• Focus on your audience
• Make your smile count (in person)
• Don’t be stupid (watch what you type)

Kathleen helpfully provided a link to the references they used in the talk. Again this reiterates a bit of a theme of mine relating to the perils of enterprise 2.0  definitely not a reason to avoid using the tools but something to bear in mind.

As part of a new offering that fellow CloudAve blogger Krishnan Subramanian and I are developing, I’m looking at doing some work in this space in the next few months – hoping to develop some whitepapers and practitioner guides touching on these issues – watch this space for more.

Recently Krishnan Subramanian and I were talking about writing a series of whitepapers as a guide for organizations looking to adopt technology – there’s many highly technical documents on offer but something worded more as a “10 easy steps” type series was what we envisaged for this particular offering. To use the term coined by another commentator in this space – we’re looking to be the advocates for the users of this stuff.

Fortuitously we both met up with MindTouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson at the defrag conference in May and we mentioned to him what we were looking at doing. He saw the value in our approach and agreed to support us in the writing of our first paper which looks at the key things that prospective buyers of collaboration software need to ask.

The ten questions are detailed below:

• Is your product extensible to meet the changing face of the collaboration landscape?
• Does Your Product Support Standard Governance Frameworks?
• Does Your Collaboration Product Integrate with My Existing Technology Landscape?
• How Does Your Product Support Access Standards?
• How Flexible Are Your Data Location Requirements?
• How Does Your Product Administer Security?
• Is Your Product Standards Compliant?
• Can Your Product Scale With Our Planned Adoption Rates?
• How Robust Is Your Solution?
• How Viable Is Your Business Model?

You can download the whitepaper in full here. Thanks to MindTouch for supporting the creation of this paper and if you’d like to talk about ways we can help clarify what customers really need to think about when it comes to SaaS, Cloud, Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 generally, feel free to get in touch.

First published on CloudAve.com

I have a friend called Jennifer (name and details changed, obviously). At school she was a loner without many friend who, as loners often do, overcome loneliness by bullying smaller kids in the playground. Jennifer managed to gain “friends” by doing this, although they weren’t really friends, rather individuals who were scared that they’d become the target unless they joined in with Jennifer’s shenanigans.

Well, luckily for her schoolmates, Jennifer grew up, studies and entered the workforce where she was forced, at least to a certain extent, to forego her bullying behavior in the interests of fairness, due process and the common good.

Until today that is…

You see the advent of social media in its various guises has given Jennifer the opportunity to once again throw her weight around and make life difficult for others. Involved in a part of an organization that makes extensive use of social media type tools, Jennifer has a wide following in her vocational field and uses this following to bully others the way she used to use her heft to do so all those years ago in the schoolyard.

Now my enterprise friends will tell me bullying in the work place has always existed but social media and enterprise 2.0 tools have extended the reach an individual can communicative with – this is an unquestionably great thing when it comes to collaborating on specific projects, but it’s also a dangerous thing when used inappropriately.

I’ve spent long time talking with Enterprise 2.0 practitioners, attending enterprise 2.0 events and hearing about the barriers to adoption. Generally we’re grasping to find either good case study examples of enterprise 2.0 being put to work or fixes for the oft mentioned barriers to adoption – none of however 9at least in public) are prepared to front up and tell the stories of Enterprise 2.0 gone wrong and used for ugly purposes.

And in this we run a real risk – by burying our heads in the sane and not “outing” the dark side of social media, we play into the hands of those who view the blogosphere, Twitter and social media generally as a complete waste of space. If we don’t tell the stories, and develop ways of avoiding the pitfalls these tools enable, they’ll use the same tales to discount E20 outright.

So here’s a plaintive call to those using social media generally and Enterprise 2.0 tools more specifically: Don’t hide the use-cases that feel uncomfortable, rather use them as case studies, develop solutions and show that like a community of old, so too can a virtual community stand up and police its own.

Everyone would be a little happier if we did that…

First published on CloudAve

I’ve been a follower of Helpstream CEO Bob Warfield since before I begun blogging. He’s a super smart, super analytical SaaS commentator who left the world of full time blogging to enjoy the rewards of corporate leadership. I’d have made this session no matter what, the fact it included a bunch of other really smart people provided further justification. Clara Shih is the CEO of Hearsay Labs, Natalie Petouhoff,- is a Senior Analyst for Forrester Research and Wendy Lea is CEO of GetSatisfaction and Phil Fernandez is from Marketo.

Petouhoff gave the analogy of cave drawings from eons ago – when all else is gone the messages remain – hence her perspective that the discussion about support has to occur at a management level. Customer service is broken and we’re in the midst of a perfect storm. years and years of terrible customer service and the emergence of social media are lead to a business transformation. Social media is a catalyst for change within an organization.

Fernandez explained that Marketo had active support from its inception – it’s an essential part of their customer support portal for both inbound and self service support contact. He gave an example of case diversion during the recent release of their updated offering. The inbound support ticket mix is changing between phone, email and web. Approx two thirds are human assisted while the remainder are self-service.

Lea talked about the Get Satisfaction freemium model and that they encourage their users to build community wherever is most appropriate for them – whether it’s on their own site, in Facebook or wherever.

Warfield explained that Helpstream is trying to combine social and process – creating a repeatable process around social interactions.

The panel discussed ComcastCares and how just showing customers that an organization cares is so important. Petouhoff talked about the fact that customer service departments are continually told to do more with less – they’re not supported in their role. Lea explained that the majority of people signing up for GetSatisfaction are doing so to use it for feedback – marketing and customer support need to be integrated. Warfield explained that the customers really want an integrated experience with a company.

Warfield discussed the concept of “deflection” where customer services aim is to have their customers NOT engage with customer services. The trick is to integrate the inbound communications and therefore have customer support become an asset rather than a cost to the organization.

Petouhoff discussed the need for openness, honesty and authenticity. The conversations are occurring anyway, it’s important for companies to embrace and engage with them. She gave some statistics about customer retention in the case of good support – it’s apparently 65% higher than otherwise.

Lea gave the example of Nike running who for $8000 per annum got a GetSatisfaction widget that has drawn huge content that is invaluable to the organization for product development. Warfield used an example of InfusionSoft who have leveraged Helpstream to capture the voice and sentiment of the community.

Lea contends that social media is shifting communications to a much more “natural language” approach – less guard and beating around the bush and more openness and honesty. Again the themes of authenticity, naturalness and honesty. Warfield concurred, saying that social media is just about people – people doing what they do in real life.

A great session with much agreement around the table…

This is the one in answer to a recent post by provocateur Dennis Howlett in which Howlett asked whether Enterprise 2.0 is in fact a crock. Moderated by David Berlind from TechWeb he had a bevvy of Enterprise 2.0 practitioners.

Therein lies the Big Lie. Enterprise 2.0 pre-supposes that you can upend hierarchies for the benefit of all. Yet none of that thinking has a credible use case you can generalize back to business types - except: knowledge based businesses such as legal, accounting, architects etc. Even then - where are the use cases? I’d like to know.

Five principles;

• Workforce transformation
• Business process/operations
• Intellectual property/Privacy/governance
• Religious wars (technology/generational biases)
• Bottom line business benefits

Greg Lowe from Alcatel-Lucent talked about their desire to unlock institutionalized knowledge and enable collaboration. Berlind asks why that desire is any different now from in the past. Lowe’s answer was that tools and technologies available today enable those aims. Claire Flanagan from CSC and Bruce Galinsky from Metlife agreed that it’s the technologies that really enable the promise of sharing and co-creating.

Berlind asks how that actually transforms the workforce. Megan Murray from Booz Allen Hamilton says this is happening no matter – expectations are higher on both the organization’s and the employee’s sides. Enterprise 2.0 technologies are enabling that to happen faster, better and more readily.

Berlind asked about the cultural change that needs to occur within an organization. Bryce Williams from Eli Lilly agreed and said that they see Enterprise 2.0 as a gateway to moving the organization into a more open approach – it’s the “starter drug” to get the organization hooked on open communications.

Jamie Pappas from EMC mentioned that Enterprise 2.0 isn’t a cure all or fix all – it’s an enabler and relies on the advocates throughout the organization to adopt it.

Much discussion about business process – have we hit the wall in terms of agility? No – it’s just baby steps and there are profound benefits yet to be realized.

Governance, there is a culture shift happening and the technology needs to keep up. One good approach can be called “participatory governance” where those who have skin in the game develop the governance models for those tools but do so in concert with the traditional governance approached.

The intellectual property concerns. All panelists agreed that organizations need to stop not trusting their employees. People are generally inherently good and those who are not will always find ways to maliciously expose data. Sure put good governance in place but beyond that trust the people to do the right thing. “I can’t stop you from doing stupid things but I can make it visible when you do them”.

In terms of the business value the difficulty is that its very hard to show true metrics for the gains that can be made form enterprise 2.0 – there are significant anecdotal benefits that need to be extrapolated to an organization-wide benefit. Booz Allen Hamilton gave an example where a 3000 employee reply-all email was analyzed and once the cost of people replying and unsubscribing was taken into account, there was an internal cost of $250000 – enterprise 2.0 can solve many of those issues. Extrapolating that up through the organization, the contention is that if a simple thing like reply-all can create such costs for an organization, high level operations can drive huge benefits.

It was very much a case of the converted preaching to the converted – it’ll be interesting to see what the originator of the title has to say about what the panelists had to offer.

The one we’d all been waiting for – ever since the Rasmussen brothers announced Wave at Google I/O in May, we’ve been waiting for some hard examples of the power that Wave can bring. Gregory D’Alesandre (Dr Wave), Product Manager for Google Wave ran presented three examples of Wave integrations from Novell, ThoughtWorks and SAP.

Every time you use any sort of communication technology you’re trying to achieve a goal, to get something done. With Google Wave the idea is that rather than understanding the “end goal”, users can start a Wave which can conform with the shifting objectives over time. D’Alesandre gave an introduction to Wave for the one or two people in the audience who haven’t seen it before. He explained that Google use Wave internally a lot and they find that all current communication technologies are a poor replacement for face to face interactions however every now and ten it’s better to interact electronically (he gave the example of a 12 person meeting with everyone trying to talk at the same time) – Wave enables this mass interaction without so much noise (although I’d have to say it does introduce significant dissonance as heavy users of multiple person IM will know).

The Wave team has purposely avoided giving lots of lock-down options to Wave – if you allow people to lock their content down, Wave becomes very email-like – openness and flexibility increases the collaborative potential.

D’Alesandre talked about Wave as a platform and invited their platform partners to show their offerings.

First up Alexander Dreiling, Program Manager from SAP who demoed two gadgets that SAP has built – Gravity is a gadget that allows business process modeling to be collaboratively built. See the demo video below;

Second up, Chad Wathington, VP, Product Development, ThoughtWorks demoed the integration of Wave with a software development project management tool. I covered the offering in more depth in another post but basically it allows for tasks to be created relating to a project all from within Wave and have them reflected in the project management tool. As I said in my post – this integration doesn’t show much more than could be achieved with a standard email/PM integration.

And lastly Andy Fox, Vice President Engineering from Novell showed their integration using the Wave federation protocol – Pulse. Pulse aggregates multi channel communication as well as a list of relevant contacts – it’s effectively a social CRM/communication offering. It brought to mind Gist’s offering and, while it helps aggregate lots of data, it does little to ease the burden of the firehose of information. The addition it does bring is the enablement of visibility in real time – but it does raise some question as to the value of asynchronous vs synchronous communications.

Some interesting integrations… but yet again nothing entirely ground breaking.

First posted on CloudAve

Andrew McAfee, from the Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Management, believes we’ve reached a tipping point in terms of the acceptance of the tools and techniques of enterprise 2.0.

McAfee sees some positive signs and some danger areas - “We have the opportunity to snatch defeat out of the jaws of success”. The way that’ll happen;

• Declare war on the enterprise
• Allow walled gardens to flourish – an interesting analogy to Napoleonic land division in Paris where smaller and smaller lots were created all divided with hedgerows – let’s not go there…
• Accentuate the negative – the risks aren’t quite as bad as people make out, don’t dwell on them
• Try to replace email
• Fall in love with features - “what’s the simplest possible thing that could work”
• Overuse the word “social”

Andrew is the father of the Enterprise 2.0 term – while his shtick is getting perhaps a little tired – he’s still got a valuable voice to add to the discussion.

First posted on CloudAve

A live blog of the presentation….

Christian Finn, Director of SharePoint Product Management, and Alina Fu, Product Manager, Social Computing talk about the SharePoint 2010 offering.

An interesting approach – Christian and Alina ran a “speed dating” session trying to message the major thrust of 2010. Christian pushed the big customers who use SharePoint to collaborate and, with honesty, admitted the failings of an ActiveX-centric approach.

Personal connections, finding subject matter experts, consumer features for the enterprise. 2010 has a dynamic newsfeed directly to an individual site. Personal profiling linked with contextual search.

2010 has a better user experience across blogs and wikis – unleashing the creativity of the users. Enabling the use of podcasts within the product.

User rating and commenting of content inside or outside of SharePoint. Tagging linked to newsfeeds.

The security question - “It’s Microsoft so it’s safe”. Content management extends to the social media content.

Flexibility – 2010 enables advances customization, within the browser for an individual user or a team. A full range of APIs and tools to customize the look, feel and functionality.

And the speed date is over… And the audience goes wild… (not so much)