Exploring The Future of Work : collaboration

Showing posts with label collaboration. Show all posts

Nov 4, 2011

Panel Discussion on Enterprise 2.0 #e20 at NASSCOM Product Conclave

Image representing Shel Israel as depicted in ...

Image via CrunchBaseNovember is going to be a month of conferences. On the 10th of November I would be in a panel discussion with Vivek Paul (ex-CEO of Wipro and Founder of KineticGlue), Sumeet Anand of Kreeo, and Vijay Doddavaram of Texas Instruments at the NASSCOM Product Conclave at Bangalore.

If you're interested in Social Business, Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 I suggest you attend the same :-)

More details here. If you have inputs on the session you can leave your queries, comments here

Am also excited because I would finally get to meet Shel Israel (co-author of Naked Conversations, one of the first books on business blogging) who's been an online friend for so many years! Shel would be conducting a workshop for startup entrepreneurs on how to make a great business pitch. Details here

Apr 11, 2011

What Is Social Collaboration in an Organization

My friend Prem blogs wondering what is social collaboration. He writes

The role power in a matrix organization is vastly diminished. Expertise power helps to a certain extent, but then in high performance/stakes teams everybody is going to be an expert of something or the other. The only other power left is relationship power. One negotiates using the relationship power to get things done. Reciprocity is a bigger coin than orders. No more command and control.

and then ends with the question:

Given this logic, what does 'social collaboration' mean? Where people collaborate outside of the contractual obligations? Which means outside of the role structures & job descriptions in the organization? Typical of a matrix organization, no?
What do you think? What are your views on 'social collaboration' and 'role power' in a collaborative enterprise (a bit more complex than a matrix organization)?

Well we call Qontext a social collaboration platform and wikipedia defines it as

processes that help multiple people interact, share information to achieve any common goal. Such processes find their 'natural' environment on the internet, where collaboration and social dissemination of information are made easier by current innovations.

So what's the difference between collaboration and social collaboration? In my opinion, while collaboration in the traditional sense refers to picking whom you want to reach out to, sharing your assumptions, objectives and negotiating with him/her, arriving at a consensus and going forth. There is a project mindset, and an approach that knows who the expert is.

The thought goes like this (in a consulting firm), "I need to send a proposal on Entry to a Market Strategy for an Emerging Country for a Consumer Durable firm". The person then searches for data around the experts of Market Strategy, Emerging Countries and the Industry expert in Consumer Durables. He then finds time with all of them, gets their inputs, negotiates time with them and their availability, and then they work together to make the proposal.

The one aspect IMHO social collaboration is different, is that it is emergent. I'll share a recent example on our Qontext internal network. I shared a URL with the bookmarking feature and alerted two people in the firm who might have been interested in the website. One of them responded with a comment on the bookmark that we should do something like what the website said and then I volunteered that I could spearhead that initiative. After this whatever happens would be "traditional collaboration". The social tools helped us to recognize a need and then collaboration would take place.

I don't really know what Prem means by "relationship power". The closest type of power is "referent power" (in the five bases of power) which is more identified by charisma to influence.

However I'd classify this behavior not as any kind of power but a serendipitous outcome based on people's need to get psychological rewards (likes, comments) from their peers and colleagues.

What do you think?

Let's dig into this deeper....collaboratively !

Nov 16, 2010

Organizational Culture and Enterprise 2.0

Image via Wikipedia
I recently read a quote "First we shape our tools, then they shape us"

So is the case with organizations. Every tool/technology/structure process that gets implemented impacts the organization in ways that usually wasn't the original intent.

We saw the way Quality, ERP, KM, Email were all implemented and how they have impacted organizations.

So why would Enterprise 2.0 tools be any different?

Collaboration or Community or Employee Content Creation would happen in organizations that have a culture that already encourage such behavior. However if an organization has a culture steeped in command-control-compliance mindset, then a tool that gets implemented will be ignored or actively subverted.

So if you're a Enterprise 2.0 advocate in a traditional organization that is implementing "social tools" without thinking through it - you need to tell leaders:

The benefit of the movement to social collaboration will be apparent in the long term
They will need to be role models to embrace social within the enterprise
People spending time on the tools won't be considered to be "goofing off"
Early Adopters would be recognized and acknowledged to enable them to be role models

What else would you suggest?

Nov 2, 2010

Thoughts on Enterprise 2.0 and the Social Intranet

Enterprise 2.0 conf - Rome, Dec 2009 - 078

Image by Ed Yourdon via FlickrWhat is the difference between Enterprise 2.0 and a "social" intranet? While E2.0 vendors might beg to differ on functionality here is the big difference according to me:

In enterprise 2.0 the tools enable employee to employee communication, awareness and collaboration
In the "social intranet" while employees do form communities, the primary focus is on the organization to employee communication customised by the "social" data shared by the employee.

Two aspects of collaboration:

Enable collaboration in the process of making decisions - which is what some social business tools enable
Enable serendipitous discovery of people with shared interests and help people to connect and engage with each other

Obviously the "ROI" argument is easier for the first case - but somehow I suspect the payoff and impact of the second case can be higher and more disruptive

Unfortunately for organizations that seek to keep a control on the conversations, they will choose the "social intranet" over collaboration, as they are scared of the network and people to people connections.

On a different note, it's always surprising to me that the decision of an organization to embrace "social" is taken by a single person :)

Oct 23, 2010

HR and Collaboration Technologies - Why they don't meet

Rawn Shah of IBM shares a research on Chief HR Officers and asks Are Collaborative Technologies On Your HR Department’s Agenda?

Personally I think HR people (the vast majority of them) are scared of technology and try to shut it out of their minds. Very few senior HR people would be "geeks" - and a lot of HR directors still depend on their middle managers to do anything more complicated than an MS Office document.

To expect them to understand and leverage social technologies is a little bit like asking for the moon. That is why the Enterprise 2.0 and before it the KM agenda was driven by CIOs and CTOs.

As the workplace becomes more and more connected - and as people use their personal smartphones to connect with friends and networks outside corporate firewalls - even the CIOs and CTOs are becoming more and more irrelevant.

Why chance does the non-tech savvy CHRO have?

Here's the results of the survey that Rawn quotes:

In it CHROs say that they are relatively effective in managing labor costs, evaluating workforce performance, enhancing workforce productivity, sourcing and recruiting, and retaining talent. However, three key shortfalls emerged: cultivating creative leaders, mobilizing for speed and flexibility, and capitalizing on collective intelligence. These key shortfalls stand out because CHROs found that they were relatively significant in terms of future importance, but less effective in executing on them.

I find the third factor, needing to better capitalize on collective intelligence, most interesting because the study found that the ‘soft’ skills of collaboration and social networking can have bottom-line consequences. Financial outperformers (as measured by EBIDTA) are 57 percent more likely than underperformers to use collaborative and social networking tools to enable global teams to work more effectively together.

78 percent of HR leaders do not think their organizations are effective at fostering collaboration and social networking. Yet only 21 percent of companies have recently increased the amount they invest in the collaboration tools. Many organizations fail to fully utilize the knowledge-sharing resources they already possess. Only 19 percent of respondents regularly use collaborative technologies to identify individuals with relevant knowledge and skills. 23 percent use collaborative technologies to preserve critical knowledge, while 27 percent use it to spread innovation more widely across their organization.

Sep 21, 2010

SuccessFactors Goes Social

I have always thought that the folks at SuccessFators, a HRMS, got social media marketing. They've had an external facing blog for a long time and have also linked to this blog in the past :-)

So was quite interested to see that they had acquired CubeTree. More and more traditional ERP systems are going to go the social way methinks.

As I have said before - ERP is the interpretation of business processes while enterprise social networking is an interpretation of business relationships. Both need each other to be organizationally relevant. My view is that we'll see a lot more ERP and social networking providers to connect and build partnerships - or to buy out the complementary offering.

See related story here: SuccessFactors Adds Social Features to Business Drivers

SuccessFactors recently hopped on the social train via their recent acquisition of CubeTree, which adds free collaboration capabilities to its SaaS BizX Suite of business applications.

We covered a bit of CubeTree back the spring of 2009 when enterprise collaboration was on its way to becoming an official buzz term. With features like microblogging, wikis and profiles in the CubeTree arsenal, the company was winning the hearts of people like investor Mitch Kapor, who said: “At work, e-mail and IM are still the dominant online communications media. I believe that is destined to change with products like CubeTree, which help companies create enterprise social networks. I invested in CubeTree because I believe that social networking technology will be at the heart of the next generation of enterprise collaboration.”

Could he have been more right? Today, enterprise-level companies like Salesforce.com have seemingly put all of their eggs in the social media basket, and are doing quite well.

Presently, CubeTree offers even more social features than before, including:

Status Updates

Like Twitter, CubeTree's status updates are public, 140 characters messages that tell your co-workers what's up:
cubetree_status_update.jpg

Comments

Activities within the CubeTree system generate feed items that can be commented on by colleagues, just like a Facebook wall generates links to activities you perform on linked sites like YouTube and Flickr:
cubetree_comments.jpg

Feed Filtering

Also like Facebook, CubeTree Uusers can choose who they want to follow, as well as which types of feed items they want to receive. If there are particular feed items a user does not want to receive from people they follow, there is a setting to filter them out.

Further, you can integrate third-party applications like Twitter and Google Docs so that your co-workers know what you're up to not only at work, but everywhere else, too.

SuccessFactors + CubeTree

SuccessFactors provides what they call "Business Execution Software" (BizX), which aims to help organizations maximize business results. With the CubeTree integraion, the BizX sweet now offers all of the CubeTree social goodness mentioned above, as well as:

Automatic Synchronization: Employees can start collaborating immediately without waiting for colleagues to accept invitations; automatic provisioning and de-provisioning of users; increases the findability of relevant colleagues to follow and build robust social graphs

Single Sign-On: Employees sign in only once to access their BizX dashboard, social networking and collaboration capabilities

Global Cloud Infrastructure: The enterprise social and collaboration capabilities from CubeTree will run in SuccessFactors’ global cloud computing infrastructure

“Poor communication gets in the way of execution,” said Dmitri Krakovsky, vice president of global product management, SuccessFactors. “With activity feeds and collaboration features incorporated into our Business Execution Suite, we help solve this information flow problem and fundamentally change the way companies work. When every person across the company can share and collaborate with one another, that’s when real work gets done.”

Sep 17, 2010

Leveraging Social Media Tools for Learning

Image by cdorobek via Flickr
As a person who's passionate about learning - as well as a social media enthusiast - I have blogged and talked about how social tools could be used for learning within organizations.

So I was quite excited to get a copy of Marcia Conner and Tony Bingham's book "The New Social Learning". Marcia is a Partner at the Altimeter Group and Tony is the CEO of the American Society of Training and Development.

The book is a great collection of leading edge organizations that are experimenting successfully with various social technologies (like internal social networking, microsharing, video-tagging, communities of practice) to enable their employees to learn and connect with each other.

The first good news is that you don't need to be a tech organization to deploy social tools to enable people to learn from each other. The examples in the book range from organizations like the CIA to Booz to Wells Fargo to Coca Cola.

The second good news is that deploying these tools does not mean a lot of expense unlike the earlier investments into technology that enabled learning like LMSs and e-learning content.

The third good news is that trainers can breathe easy. They are not going to be redundant anytime soon - but if they leverage these tools they can help their learners learn better and faster.

What I liked about the book is that it takes each argument that organizations would take against implementing social media tools - and gives reasons why it would work. This is a great resource for HR and learning people who are looking to be change agents. It has tonnes of tips on how to leverage social media for in-person events like conferences and classroom events.

The book also looks at the underlying reasons why social technologies are being adopted - and how organizations have a choice to either get in their employees' way or to use it. There's an appendix on governance which looks at organizations like IBM and how they put in systems and processes that help them become a "social business"

Where I think this book could have been better would be by including a chapter on non-social media savvy HR and L&D people on introduction to how they can use each tool for their own growth and learning. Maybe there's another book idea there?

That aside, this is a must read book for anyone who is working in the areas of employee learning and wants to build a more open and collaborative learning organization.
You can see the book's website here and keep up with it on Twitter at @newsociallearn

Oct 30, 2009

Knowledge Work and Collaboration

A very insightful article in McKinsey's What matters column on the challenges of measuring productivity of collaboration in Knowledge workers, and also insightful comments.

Primarily the article argues that while technology is deployed - productivity of collaboration is different than the way productivity is measured in the traditional deployment of technology.

The article states:

Our research suggests that improvements depend upon getting a better fix on who actually is doing the collaborating within companies, as well as understanding the details of how that interactive work is done. Just as important is deciding how to support interactions with technology—in particular, Web 2.0 tools such as social networks, wikis, and video. There is potential for sizeable gains from even modest improvements. Our survey research shows that at least 20 percent and as much as 50 percent of collaborative activity results in wasted effort. And the sources of this waste—including poorly planned meetings, unproductive travel time, and the rising tide of redundant e-mail communications, just to name a few—are many and growing in knowledge-intense industries.

The steps the article suggests are:

Defining knowledge workers and how they work
Applying technologies

I would add that other support processes and structures followed by the organization must be analysed to understand how it is impacting collaboration too.

One of the main issues that become bottlenecks is the disincentive to collaborate and a tact approval or even explicit reward system that focuses on contra-behaviors.

For example if a new worker sees that the people being praised and held up as star performers are lone workers - that becomes a very strong reinforcing psychological mechanism to not collaborate.