After I presented the Open Enterprise 2009 award to Booz Allen Hamilton ‘Hello’ team lead Walton Smith in Boston (also on behalf of Stowe Boyd and the conference), I had an opportunity to catch up with team members Megan Murray & Donna Lucas, who are in the trenches working with technology and change management respectively at Booz Allen.

If you were in Boston for the conference you’ll notice we’re actually outside and the sun is shining: this was recorded during the final hours of the conference when the rain finally stopped!

If you register (free!) on the Enterprise 2.0 conference site you can see my 15 minutes talking about the open enterprise 2009 research project and Walton Smith presenting the winning Booz Allen Hamilton (’BAH’) case study, which gives added context to this video.

I’ll briefly summarize the above video but strongly recommend watching it - 8 minutes of very useful information.

Donna and Megan start with a a useful discussion about the teams’ success with rapid adoption, with 41% of employees using the system, which they attribute to a rapid amount of ‘press coverage’ within the organization.

Buy in from senior leadership - active and visible executive sponsorship has really helped with change management and in driving adoption. Donna finds that just getting new users to fill out their profile is enough of a catalyst to expose them to the utility of the system so they come back and get involved.

Silo busting is successful, albeit with some ‘kicking and screaming’. Requests for very narrowly focused communities for small parochial teams are met with an effort to open up topics to a much broader community, in order to more widely share information.

Connectivity between business units has greatly increased cross domain and cross solution through community management, as users realize other parts of the organization are focused on similar needs to their own.

Stimulating conversation across community really helps build adoption patterns, while email traffic and usage is gradually finding a viable alternative in the BAH environment.

Carefully listening to feedback from users has helped make the system better, faster and easier with continuous iteration of improvement.

Metrics are an important component to measure success and had just been gathered in a detailed audit by Donna at the time of this interview. This provides rich detail around what to do and where to go next in planning future strategy which is on point for user needs.

Middle management is ‘the toughest nut to crack’ but are seeing benefits in saving a few hours a week through greater efficiencies and cutting back on redundant email communication.

Change management includes dealing with 5,000 new employees a year in a 23,000 person company, which adds a layer of complexity to the rapidly evolving ecosphere served.

There is a culture of bringing users at al levels into the feedback loop and then using that information to make the resources better, faster and easier.

It is a continuous effort to drive momentum in most cases although there are pockets of users who are now self sustaining, these are people of all types and at all levels who see the environment as the best way to get their work done

Congratulations again to Booz Allen Hamilton on a well deserved victory!

See also my companion post on ZDNet

Thoughtfarmer are the creators of social intranet software which adds a social layer to the basic address book and read only web pages of 1.0 style intranets.

All users can now add and edit content so long as they have security restrictions permission. As well as updating their personal contact details and profile, Thoughtfarmer gives access to blogs, feeds, work stream views and Twitter style social connections.

Customers essentially come from two different places: people who’ve never had an intranet and are starting from the round up and those upgrading from an older intranet to Facebook and Wikipedia style functionality.

ThoughtFarmer runs on a fully Microsoft environment of Windows Server, SQL Server, Active Directory & Exchange and is often used as a replacement for SharePoint.

Chris says Sharepoint often winds up as a glorified shared drive and to make it good you have to embark on a full development project which can can take 18 months. while ThoughtFarmer is often integrated with SharePoint the fact that it can be installed and up and running within a very short period often leads to it becoming the de facto collaboration solution.

Sharepoint are strong in parallel for compliance, document discovery and other structured, tracked data.

While 80% of customers are using the product globally across their entire organization it is often used as a departmental solution at companies such as Electronic Arts.

As a Canadian company ThoughtFarmer are very familiar with the need for multilingual capabilities and have customers all over the world, multiple language packs and support the Google Translate API.

Chris says that launching from top down takes a big marketing effort and sites a core value of enterprise 2.0 as the difference between working above the flow and working in the flow - providing a better way to work makes a huge difference.

Chris cites great usage of customers such as resort developer WATG, and design company IDEO as groups of people who don’t allow software to get in the way of innovation and in person collaboration.

IDEO are an industrial design company who have evolved into an innovation and design company with eight  international offices and 500 employees.

Starting out historically with small project teams using lots of post it notes, it was hard to collaborate across organizations that are spread out across the world. IDEO looked for ways to build tools to build communities around common interests, passions and expertise in order to become one interconnected organization. Allowing employees to reveal what they’re interested in and working on was seen as being of great value.

They started by building a design team to attempt to see internal processes as a client engagement to craft an appropriate environment for IDEO work practices.

The goals were to build a system that targets process friction points and addresses them without overwhelming people with new processes and tools.

The IDEO Intranet environment is contained in a custom Ruby wrapper, using ThoughtFarmer for wikis, Movable Type for blogging and some legacy asset and data applications.

This was IDEO’s fifth attempt at launching wikis before they got it right. Email is still alive and strong as a primary communication medium but wikis are getting stronger usage. Internally people now find health claim forms and other bureaucratic materials through wikis instead of email.

The system has had a very enthusiastic uptake internally, becoming very integral to the way people work. There is now a high level of internal blogging.

Although aware that every culture is different, IDEO offer consulting to other companies based on their experiences creating their internal collaboration environment.

Connectbeam started as an internal business social bookmarking tool like del.icio.us, then learnt going into large enterprises that a social aggregation service was more valuable, so they are working hard on enabling the joining of siloed content.

They see their products as an evolution of the corporate directory, a social context service across the set of applications behind the firewall to be served up where users live their lives.

Questions people are asking are ‘how to determine ROI’? ‘How can we see what is happening in all the organizations across our enterprise’?

Sanjeev believes momentum is building around Enterprise 2.0 but anything that involves organizational change, as is the case with Enterprise 2.0, and you are talking five to six year time frames.

Adoption cycles: Connectbeam deals typically start with a small pilot and expand out. As the adoption cycle kicks in, value is seen and usage expands.

Connectbeam are seeing uptake by middle management for pilot adoption as well as top level blessing and grass roots adoption.

People don’t really see the endpoints yet - Sanjeev thinks this will ultimately be a service which is woven into the entire organization and at some point it will be as fundamental as the company directory.

Rigidly organized companies are starting to adopt because they see the value, while the safety factor of feeling comfortable with acceptable security standards is a significant customer concern.

There is a confusion among the wider population about the broader ’social media’ space and what is providing core value and what is superficial.

Measurement of metrics in business use will help significantly but there is no credible way to ‘put something in and measure the ROI in 90 days’. This is a serious enterprise evolution which will take 3-5 years to be truly unified and measurable.

The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) has 65k members around the world in a community that provides education, research, and best practices to help organizations find, control, and optimize their information.

AIIM is also known as the enterprise content management (ECM) association.

President John Mancini defines research, training and evangelical surfacing of information as their core values.

• The historical problems around managing paper content and now digital assets is discussed, with electronically stored information production increasing rapidly in volume.

• John created a very successful Ning community site over a single weekend which is thriving but now has the classic silo problem of information being locked into it.

• Traditional IT departments can be very locked, and therefore shadow It is a huge issue.

• The business value of Twitter is largely around ad hoc, informal, uncontrolled, user oriented content to get around static IT.

• Regulated industries have a huge problem with multiple content buckets from a legal perspective, there is clear delineation of who is responsible for discovery.

• Enterprise content management professionals tend to think in a records management mentality instead of how to keep tabs on unstructured communication.

• Emphasis is on ‘thou shalt not’ instead of how to tackle these issues in many member organizations.

• Few members have confidence in their ability to reproduce and use email as a system of documentation so who knows where we are with blogs, wikis and Twitter…

• Twitter is used by AIIM internally, and also track Twitter activity to drive users back to the AIIM website.

• AIIM is seeing some uptake of Twitter in their member base but are in the vanguard of usage. The world of content management in the 166,000 smaller businesses is ripe for more agile, flexible content management than the larger solutions in the ECM industry.

• The issue of bespoke solutions dependent on size and need comes up and John comments that Enterprise 2.0 is not a monolith.

In an interesting twist, Ulrike Reinhard interviewed me about the Open Enterprise 2009 study:

A few weeks ago, during a busy two weeks in Europe, I interviewed J.B. Holston, the CEO of Newsgator. Despite the slight fuzziness of the video (I think J.B. needs to spring for a better webcam), his thinking was pretty sharp.

A few highlights:

• Newsgator has interated aggressively since last summer’s E 2.0 conference, where the SocialSites product was one of the finalists in the Launchpad.

• Newsgator has been focusing increasingly on integrated applications, making the company oriented more toward a platform strategy.
• The economy has had an impact on many segments that have been strong for the company, like financial services. However, even in that sector, there is a ‘harder times, so drive faster’ attitude that is leading to fast uptake in some companies.
• Large companies are finding it essential to integrate groups across the company, and also in the face of mergers and acquisitions they need low-cost, quick turn-on applications to achieve integration.
• As the world has come to see inherently more risky, companies seem to willing to accept more risk. J.B. sees less of the extended bake-offs testing and evaluating alternatives, perhaps because Web 2.0 deployments are so much smaller than SAP, for example.
• One client, with 150K seats worldwide, approximately 50% in each of two large organizations that have merged. One of the two sides had been deploying Newsgator’s SocialSites, but now they are accelerating that across both sides so that they will have a means to coordinate and collaborate right away. The ROI is obvious, immediate, and large.
• Newsgator seems to be more of a top-down adoption model, although the consumer products have established a brand awareness in the minds of users. Executive management is essential to the roll-out for large deployments like Newsgators, J.B. confirms.
• J.B. agrees that large deployments in multinational organization encounter all sorts of cultural and Cultural issues — meaning corporate and real-world cultural barriers to understanding. He goes into some detail about legal issues with privacy in various countries, as well as the importance of community managers within companies adopting these tools.

J.B.’s insights confirm many of our findings: management leadership is essential, community must be nutured, and hard times lead to strong incentives for adoption of high payoff solutions. He made a great comment, that “these are still early days, and there is no unified field theory that everyone agrees to about how to drive adoption.” Couldn’t have said it better myself, although Oliver and I hope to turn the corner on that problem, at least, as we jump into the case study side of our research this month.

Box serve up over a quarter of a billion files a year for two and a half million users from their ’software as a service’ file access and sharing platform.

From a base offering which makes it easy to move large files around securely and freely, Box connects to dozens of integrated third party applications including Google, Microsoft, Autodesk, Zoho, WordPress, and Picnik to provide an increasing range of collaborative options.

During this conversation we cover:

• The fundamentally important role granular permissions play in allowing users to control precisely who sees stored content and how they are able to interact with it
• For large enterprise deals, Box pass various IT compliance tests in order to fit security standards
• The myriad small and medium sized businesses using Box include many financial and legal companies who generate a lot of content to store each year
• Box is primarily geared to serve groups from a few to a few hundred, and is seeing their signature ease of use encourage uptake and adoption in a wide a variety of businesses
• IT organizations are becoming more progressive and in some cases specified Box as an effective way to manage content using the freemium model. This allows IT to store content cost effectively while focusing on core company targets
• Ad hoc line of business uptake is very common due to focus on solving the problems of people trying to share files: users can use as much or as little of the services offered as they like. control and flexibility are key attributes
• The economic situation is a ‘perfect storm’ which plays  to Box’s strengths and has resulted in markedly increased adoption patterns as a low cost solution to urgent problems

I interviewed Jordan Frank, of Traction Software, recently, an old friend that I haven’t spoken to in several years. Jordan and Traction have been working with companies applying social tools for quite a long time — almost ten years — and his insights are quite interesting, and detailed.

A few highlights:

• Jordan makes a distinction between Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 as being based on individual versus group rights and responsibilities. It’s interesting that this difference is one of the key elements that I have stated for years actually define Web 2.0 social tools, where Web 2.0 social dynamics are based on the individual. From my perspective, Jordan’s distinction is not where things are headed, although it might be the case that today enterprise software is still very Web 1.0.

  Frank points out that the majority of what workers write about is work related, not about personal activities, so even though personal authorship is still primary, the contributions are oriented toward shared, or company-defined, activities or projects.

• Jordan characterizes the company’s ten year mission as being ‘page-based’ collaboration. When asked about the rise of ’streaming’, Jordan agrees that microstreaming and the asymmetric follow model of Twitter offers something new, and Traction has adopted some part of those innovations in recent releases.
• Jordan makes a great case for the ticker-toy nature of social software, where from a small set of elements — like posts, tags, groups, and so on — an amazing number of use cases can be satisfied.

Jordan describes a number of case studies that are extremely interesting (I hope they apply to our case study program), and covers some interesting sales motivations: a great interview.

Morten Hansen has spent 15 years researching collaboration, starting in academia when doing a phd at Stanford, studying international business unit efficiencies at Hewlett Packard before moving on to be a professor at Harvard Business School. Hansen has a substantial body of research materials around many aspects of collaboration which he has now condensed into a book.

The central argument in Hansens Book ‘Collaboration - How  Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity and Reap Big Results‘ is that bad collaboration is worse than no collaboration.

Working across organizational values can create tremendous value or destroy it - the hoarding and squabbling endemic in large companies can actually make  collaboration more expensive than not attempting it, and ‘the more collaboration the better’ is simply not true says Hansen.

Defining an underlying  ‘Management Architecture’ -the basic building blocks for effective collaboration - is the goal of Hansen’s book.

In a recent Harvard Business Publishing paper Hansen defines three key areas

• Overestimating the return on collaboration
• Ignoring Opportunity Costs
• Underestimating collaboration costs

As examples of the way people typically overestimate synergies.

Collaboration for the sake of it without intelligent structure can be very costly and unfocused. Picking a project with the best returns includes eyeing the ‘collaboration costs’  - are there frictions in the company with people not seeing eye to eye and hoarding information?

Some people just don’t want to collaborate - and open enterprise tools aren’t going to change this.

Hansen discusses the idea of managers practicing ‘T’ shaped management: results in their own job (the ‘I’ shaped part of the T) and results by collaborating across the company(the cross bar of the T).

“What we need is a new revolution in the Human Resources function: What kind of people do we recruit into the company? They’ve got to be people who have these attitudes that their job is to do both. who do we reward, how do we evaluate them?

We need to have a horizontal evaluation system and a vertical evaluation system.
And people who cannot function successfully at both should not be in a company that is trying to be collaborative”.

Please also see my book review on ZDNet.