Facebook for Business
March 10, 2010
This morning I found the article “The Facebook Imperative Cannot Be Stopped” through @TechCrunch on Twitter. In the article salesforce.com Cheif Marc Benioff discussed how the next evolution of software is to make every application like Facebook. His observation is that tools like IBM’s Lotus Notes and Microsoft’s SharePoint miss the mark when it comes to true collaboration. Tools like Notes and SharePoint allow you to collaborate on content by posting new versions or co-managing lists but have not allowed for true user collaboration and discussion. Sure they have discussion threads that can be topic focused but they aren’t seemless or as easy-to-use as Facebook.
Think about the conversations on Facebook. Your friend from out of town posts the question, “I need ideas for a 9 year old birthday party in the Cincy area”. Within minutes, the suggestion start rolling in:
Everyone that is your “friend” can comment on the question. Responses are real time. If the friend had sent an email, it would bounce through the servers and firewalls. Some would lose the mail message into their junk items, some would not respond, some would think to do it later (and then not do it). With Facebook, the question shows up in my “Most Recent” list. It’s there if I want to respond now or later. Responding is easy. All can see one another’s responses (unlike email where I may not be on a reply list). You are engaged in the conversation because it is easy and allows for debate.
If Facebook were smart they would take some of the same concepts in their free version and create a Business Edition. This edition would be installed within my firewall and rely on Active Directory for the users. New employees would be set up as they would be in email. The “friend” concept would be abolished as we are all colleagues that need to communicate with one another and all employees would be in my list. I no longer need a separate IM client, as that feature is already built in. Email is also built in…do I need corporate email? (FB mail does not allow for attachments, only links…). Additionally, my HR or event planners could post events and recieve RSVPs. The calendaring isn’t great in FB – perhaps that’s an enhancement??? To me, having a conversation with my colleagues just became considerably easier. Imagine the IT department:
Wow…wouldn’t that be great!! What features would you add to the business edition of Facebook?
- Jodie
The Reality We Can All Agree On
March 3, 2010
This post was originally shared on InfoManagementon 4.11.08. Although JB focused on Wiki’s at the time (Twitter wasn’t much of a tool 2 years ago), his wisdom is spot on!
– Jodie
*******************
For centuries, the encyclopedia was viewed as the single most reliable reference source for just about everything. Encyclopedia articles were written, edited, vetted and edited some more, until finally an article appeared that was as close to absolute truth as humans could make it.
Then came the Internet, and shortly thereafter sites such as Wikipedia. Now, instead of content on a given topic being determined by the elite few, anyone can contribute their thoughts, ideas and points of view. How egalitarian. The other side to it is all of this collaboration has created what comedian Stephen Colbert refers to as “the reality we can all agree on.”
That may be bad for pure academic research. Not to mention students trying to write their term papers with as little effort as possible. But it could be the way of the world for IT executives in the future. Forty-four percent of those surveyed by CIO Insight in November 2007 agreed that technologies that “gather and present the wisdom of crowds” will be among the most important technological developments in 2012 to 2017.1 So perhaps the “wiki way” will not be so bad for the business world.
For years, when organizations would outsource applications or services, they pretty much had to take whatever the supplier offered. And just as with the politics Colbert skewers on a regular basis, sometimes the choice wasn’t that you wanted option A so much as you really didn’t like option B, and wouldn’t use it/vote for it in a million years.
The wiki mentality has the chance to change that. Rather than settling for a hard set of capabilities based on the knowledge and abilities of the supplier’s internal development team, taking a wiki-like approach means using a much larger set of brains to create an application or service that is more flexible than in the past. This flexibility gives it the ability to satisfy a much larger set of demands, and to do it without waiting for the next major revision.
Take infrastructure management services, for example. A decade ago outsourcing the management of the data infrastructure at all was considered heretical. It was an organization’s strategic advantage, and thus not to be trusted to outsiders. Today, we’ve come to realize that the data (and our ability to analyze it) is the strategic advantage. The infrastructure is merely the vessel that holds it. It’s just like the difference between gold bars and a vault. One has intrinsic value, and the other is merely there to contain and protect that value.
Because of that, organizations are finding less and less reason to keep (and manage) the infrastructure inside their own walls. Perhaps the one thing holding them back is finding an infrastructure management partner that will do things the way they want them done.
With a wiki-style approach, that will change. The suppliers will become used to taking and incorporating customer input not only to satisfy the needs of a particular customer, but also to benefit their entire customer base. In other words, the ideas/improvements that Company A wants to implement are seen by other customers, and together the customer base helps drive the way the infrastructure is managed. The business model then becomes the reality the customers can all agree on.
This wiki mentality is also being used in areas such as product development. Open source software is doubtless the best-known example. Open source applications are constantly being improved upon by the people who use them; more importantly, as users develop improvements they are morally and contractually obligated to share their innovations with all other users. It doesn’t take long before one person’s great idea becomes the reality all users can agree on.
This idea is now being expanded into other product areas. Communities are springing up to help organizations tap into a much wider range of brain power than they’ve had access to in the past. Here’s how they work:
Suppose Company A has an idea for a product or service, but isn’t quite sure how to make it work. They can go to a community site and look for individuals or other organizations that may have the expertise they need, or they can post a notice of their needs on the community site. Company A and interested members of the community can then brainstorm the concept, divide up the work and ultimately share in the rewards.
One of the advantages of this community-based approach is that it removes many of the old limitations of business, such as geography and budget. Organizations are free to seek out talent wherever it happens to live and can review solutions from several providers – while only paying for the one they ultimately accept. The end result is the sum of the knowledge of all who contribute to it, which is certain to be greater than the knowledge of any single individual or organization.
Therein lays the opportunity. Rather than relying solely on our own knowledge and experience the way the old encyclopedia-makers did, the wiki approach allows organizations to leverage a much broader range of knowledge and experiences than they could ever afford to develop internally. Sure, some of that “knowledge” might elicit a smirk from Stephen Colbert. But it won’t take long before the cream rises to the top, as it always does. And at that point, the business reality truly will be one we can all agree on.
Reference:
- CIO Insight. “The Technologies of Tomorrow.” CIOInsight.com, December 12, 2007.
- JB
10 Signs of Business Intelligence Partnerships in Your Organization
January 14, 2010
In today’s corporate and institutional IT world, much has been done to create “partnerships” between IT and the User Community more often known as the Business. The users are the people that are responsible for keeping revenue coming in, expenses predictable, and ultimately, bringing in a profit to fuel the company onwards. There’s many articles published in business and IT journals as to the positive benefits the organization receives when there’s alignment within a Business Intelligence initiative. So, you’d think that we’ve already dissected and solved this problem and it’s now in the history books.
Not so. Dilbert is alive, healthy, and very much well fortified in the “partnership” between IT and Business.
Here’s 10 Telltales from a person that has both a IT and Business professional’s perspective that you really do have a Business Intelligence partnership.
- Lunch. OK, I’m writing this waiting for one of my manager’s to bring me a “sack lunch” turkey sandwich. But I’m serious. Lunch. When’s the last time you have been to lunch with your business user? When has he or she picked up the tab for that lunch? Communications is the key to any Business Intelligence initiative since the information requirements are dependent on the external business environment most of the time and, in today’s marketplace, the environment is constantly changing. Frequency and intimacy of conversation not only about last weekend’s loss of your favorite playoff team but more so what’s going on in business last week that is going to affect the kind of questions you are looking to “ask your data?”
- Mea Culpa. Saying that you made a mistake…Rework, reloads, unsuccessful night refreshes…operating a business intelligence environment is not easy work. There’s a lot of moving parts to a mature BI platform along with updates, patches, network traffic and internet dependencies and the like. There’s got to be daily production huddle sessions, weekly project enhancement meetings, quarterly capital, budget and funding meetings, and annual business strategy alignment sessions. All of these meetings have to be tightly integrated between IT and the Business in order for the Business Intelligence platform to prosper.
- Monitoring & measuring. “What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get managed” as the modified saying goes. A mutually-agreed measurement and operational reporting system needs to be applied to any Business Intelligence initiative. At least, the successful ones. The partnership has proactively agreed to “what constitutes acceptable” in advance so that both parties can provide a seamless report card.
- Social measurements, too. Not only do we want to measure “system performance” and other traditional IT operational metrics, one also wants to consider the social aspects of the platform. Is everyone timely and present at the respective meetings? Was everyone prepared with their part for the meeting? Are the “partnership duties” getting deprioritized (this especially happens in the business side since the business operationally will pull the business people directly into business problems and not IT problems.
- Cradle-to-grave Documentation. Documentation doesn’t mean to just put the information into a project plan when building the BI platform and then shove it into a drawer. Rather, documentation of the business questions that are asked every day, week, month, quarter depending on the business problems involved. The business is changing, thus, driving heuristic questioning. Having an active collaborative environment to document these is extremely important to sustain the platform.
- Executive sponsorship by both IT and the Business. Even though most of the activity is well beneath the executive offices, the business questions being analyzed and solved are most likely directly related to the profitability and the overall strategy and performance of the business. So, do they go to lunch? Do they understand that there’s a Business Intelligence Partnership? Smile.
- Show me the money! Funding. How budgets get spread between IT and the Business can actually be the fundamental reason why a Business Intelligence initiative succeeds or fails!!! There’s a lot to be said about the CIO that can navigate through today’s budget world. How a CIO leverages both capital appropriations and current expense for Business Intelligence requires the involvement of the Business. You see, building the environment with hardware and software and consulting services can all follow GAAP principles for accounting. Where the difficulty lies is how to separate the operational overhead of running the BI platform along with the constant stream of enhancements. If one doesn’t budget for the enhancements, the platform ends up slowly (or quickly in today’s economy) becoming antiquated.
- A partnership of Innovation. Most of what IT does is not innovation itself. They use innovative technology; although once deployed, it is an operational system that is supposed to run and run and run. IT professionals are paid to execute, operate, and make budget….and most of the time at the lowest common denominator when it comes to operational availability and budget. BI platforms are rich with innovation through new technology, of course, but more so through Heuristic Questioning about the business problems at hand that day. Innovation comes through leveraging data and asking “Why?” and “What if?” The BI partnership must have an innovation DNA in order to truly leverage the data to its greatest value.
- Survived a reorganization or three? When, not if, the company/organization reorganizes, the Business and IT organization can change slightly or dramatically. I have seen many a healthy BI partnership get destroyed over new org charts. When you reorganize, the IT and Business leadership must have a Partner Summit of sorts in order to protect the operational care, feeding and ongoing plans of the Business Intelligence environment.
- Internal public relations. I was with the famous Peter Drucker at the 1996 Cognos Convention out in San Diego and had a chance to ask him some questions. Why can’t we get everyone to want to have their data in one location so we can get rid of all of these disparate spreadsheets? “In the old days, man fought with swords, daggers, clubs, and ultimately, guns. We are carnivores and that will remain. Today, we fight with information. We hide it, disguise it, hoard it, and mislead with it. It’s our contemporary personal weapon of force.” Based on some of the latest stories coming off of Wall Street, the CDO crisis, the Mortgage lending crisis, and the insider trader diabolical, and certainly the many Ponzi schemes that have ruined many a retirement savings plan, I have to agree with what Dr. Drucker said. At the same time, I truly believe in the good of mankind, if the IT and Business groups have strong leadership, an active business strategy, and a general knowledge that if the team is rowing all at once you can accomplish more than if you are not, then the general support of a Business Intelligence platform will be a positive enabler for the company’s well-being.
There are probably 10 more ideas supporting a Business Intelligence Partnership with IT and the Business. I hope that these Telltales stimulate you to advance your partnership! Good Luck!
Collaborating In 24 Hours
August 6, 2008
“What a great idea! Now we just need to get one of the finance guys involved, and maybe Terri from marketing. Finance just moved to Fargo, right? And Terri’s good on the phone. I think this is going to work well! Let’s start projecting some revenue numbers.”
Now all you need are some collaboration tools. You have an opportunity to impact the bottom line. Big time. Maybe $10M in revenue this fiscal year, especially if you can beat the competition to market. You start with email, which soon becomes unwieldy with your fifth spreadsheet revision that needs to be in 10 people’s hands. You know your organization supports a portal – or something like that – that you’ve heard makes this kind of thing easy. So you talk about going that route and start asking questions.
“Yep, we have an enterprise architecture team that is in the planning process for rolling out our enterprise portal implementation”
Uh-oh.
“We’ll get you lined up to get on board. We’ve ordered the hardware and should have the infrastructure setup in no time. Once we have the governance model sorted out we’ll get you guys started.”
Blank stare. What? Did he just say I could collaborate on my project with some others? Or not? After a moment of awkward silence – for you, not him as he didn’t understand that anything was wrong – you tentatively agree, not so sure what you agreed to, and walk back to your cube wondering if this was all a dream.
What you were just told is that you’re going to need a block of hardwood, say oak, and then some steel. If you have the budget perhaps you need fibreglass instead of wood. Then you need to get the cold forging equipment working in order to harden the steel and align the molecules, a lathe or molds to shape the wood and fibreglass, and then some epoxy to fix the steel in place. In, say, six to nine months you’ll have your hammer. Oh, and even though you just want one hammer, someone has to pay for the equipment and the bodies to keep the process running, 24×7, for everyone. So your hammer will cost you $2,384.88. This quarter.
Sheesh. Is it worth it? Collaboration? Yes. Procuring, building, and supporting the infrastructure with all the hardware and bodies necessary knowing that you’re somewhere in line to get attention behind the other ideas six to nine months from now? Uh…no.
So don’t wait. You have ideas that need to be addressed and supported now. We’ve developed a solution that allows us to get the collaboration tools you need into your hands in short order. Imagine having an idea and actually getting to work on it later that day. A process that used to take weeks to support your idea has been reduced to two or three days, and we’re quickly making progress to make this a matter of hours. We deal with all the hassles, and the environment exists today. Just bring your ideas.
So if you’re a marketing department, or if you’re in finance, or legal, or heck, even in IT, and you need to support your next great idea in order to get everyone one the same page – and keep them there – immediately, you can have your collaboration tools now. Just ask.
You won’t need to know how to build the hammer. You’ll just need to use it.
- Andy
My Education at LUCRUM
July 15, 2008
It seems like it was just four months ago that I stepped through the doors on the 11th floor of the Harland Building. Wait…as a matter of fact…it was…. So four months ago I was recently accepted to Law School, had just finished up my job with my firm working for P&G and was looking forward to my future enslavement in the legal industry. (Nervously laughing at myself) At first I thought, cool…got some time to do nothing for a while. But after a week I got bored and started looking for something constructive.
I came across LÛCRUM, and saw they had a need helping out in Marketing. I figured why not, I was a business major at Xavier, had some marketing classes, and had just worked for a great marketing company in P&G. As a matter of fact I worked in Trademarks. Furthermore, I had worked in the Real Estate, Finance, and Legal industries as well as a behemoth fortune 25 in P&G. Yet I had absolutely no experience in the IT sphere, thus I saw it as a chance to diversify my skills, and perhaps gain a little wisdom.
Now I don’t have, and perhaps never will acquire the IT acumen which is on display at LÛCRUM, but when I started to look for a job in February, the crux of my decision was based on how much I could learn, how much knowledge I could gain. Though I still can’t, and probably never will be able write code, conduct an alignment session on the particulars of collaboration tools and by no means could attempt to spell BI, I have gained an appreciation for the service that we provide. I see the great importance to what we deliver, an in a small way, have reinforced why one of the central themes concerning The Future Value of Business is profit, (LÛCRUM). Oh, and the people here are tolerable as well. ?
Yet, the best thing that I leave with from LÛCRUM is, the appreciation and the understanding of the importance of our endeavor. To me, the meat of what we do here is getting the important information, to the right people, at the right time, so they can make the right decisions. For a person about to embark on law school this seems very pertinent. Being able to decipher the right information, from the wrong information, or even the more right information from the not as right information, is what separates the great lawyers from the not so great lawyers. Obviously I want to be the former instead of the latter. I guess I could call this LI Legal intelligence, instead of BI. However, unfortunately, in the legal field collaboration is a rarity, and at times a liability. Some things you just can’t change I guess. But I digress.
In this day in age, where technology enables copious amounts of information to literally be at your fingertips, it is now more paramount than ever to know what information is worth your attention and what’s not. Furthermore, the truth, I find, must often be found through rigorous and diligent search. Those willing to do the aforementioned are a rarity unfortunately. We accept readymade answers to our questions, and speed and convenience have replaced precision and clarity. Thus, we make our decisions on limited knowledge. A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. This is exactly where LÛCRUM fills the gaps in information technology.
LÛCRUM’s leverage is making information fast and convenient, without losing clarity and precision. This will in turn make judgment more acute. LÛCRUM -clairvoyant, perhaps not, judgment, speed, and vision, absolutely. To me these things cannot be substituted.
And now I bid you farewell. I can only hope that my future in law will be as bright as I believe LÛCRUM’s future can and should be. It has been a fun few months for me, getting to know the people, the company, and being enlightened as I have. Wish me luck down in Miami, and perhaps, some Tuesday in the future, I will return to put my two cents in once again.
Part 2, Collaboration “It’s not about technology” – expanded! (Statement 2)
July 9, 2008
If collaboration was about the technology, then…
We would be focusing on how to support collaboration’s needs, when collaboration was meant to support our needs. Our organization ends up working for the ‘collaboration implementation’, when in fact the implementation’s entire existence was meant to work for the organization. It is completely upside-down. We have all felt that pain, when ‘systems’ miss their mark – While they do bring lots of change to the organization, its in the wrong direction!
As an IT group, we are now relegated to simply supplying a service/product and not partnering with the business. Anyone can sell and supply a service or product – this is a commodity. Sure there is some value here, but far greater is the value that a partnership brings. Don’t miss out on those partnership opportunities that can align an organization’s strategy and tactical plans. These are the opportunities that can separate us from our competitors!
We miss the big picture when we focus on technology first. In my post “Part 2, Collaboration Tactical Verticals – expanded! (Statement 10)”, we see that collaboration is an entire buffet of technology options and configurations, and just like making a good salad, we need to add the components that work for us – not someone else. Abstracting technology out of collaboration allows us to focus on the need, then to develop strategic initiatives for the different “domains of collaboration”. The best strategy for instant messaging may be to simply turn it loose in the organization. But, that same strategy doesn’t hold up for work flow where we may want to introduce a common enterprise taxonomy with rules and metadata integration. This abstraction of technology from collaboration also allows us to better match the value and return on investment with our efforts and the impact it brings to the organization’s culture.
Thinking about technology and making decisions in this upside-down context, will lead us to a situation where we are constrained to the features that exist in the product that we chose. For in this context, we consider first the features and then the need – we are thinking of the solution prior to identifying the problem. We are hammers and everything looks like a nail. Throw any analogy out there you want, at the end of the day, we put all our focus on the solution and try to force fit it to a ‘problem’. What we should be doing is looking at the business problems we are faced with. We need to spend time understanding people, teams, and our culture.
The key is not to loose business agility; by having a true collaboration strategy, we keep this agility – responding quickly to the ever changing marketplace by applying the best solutions at the right time.
It’s always easier to first seek technology, to get that initial shot of momentum. But what is it worth to you. Technology connects our strategy to tactics!? If you think of it this way, we can develop our strategy over time with the business leaders without regards to the complexities of technology. Then at the appropriate time, we consider the impacts of our strategic directions with our technologists. This way we have the business people driving the business and the technologists getting us there. This abstraction allows leaders to lead on both sides of the equation. The business leaders will benefit by not being constrained by the dependencies on technologies and are set free to vision us to the future. The business person will say “Don’t tell me what I can’t do…just let me set our direction”! And the technologists will benefit by having the clarity of a strategy without the burden of business strategy development. Then the technologist will say “Don’t tell me how to do it…just tell me what you want”! It’s a win/win situation.
Now the magic is to meet in the middle and develop that partnership! Click here for my 13 points regarding collaboration.
~ Scott Felten
Part 2, Collaboration Value Alignment – expanded! (Statement 6)
July 3, 2008
“Ready, Fire, Aim!” is all too often the norm. Yes, we were ready and yes we fired, but without aim, what are we hitting? Activity does in fact breed productivity, but we need to be focused.
Statement 6, “Collaboration Value Alignment!”, Make sure that you revisit with the sponsor(s) often to ensure that the value they expect is in fact the value you are working towards. Business changes; adapt your strategy and plan accordingly!
Did you ever hear that quote, “Don’t just sit there, do something!”? Well, regarding collaboration it’s more accurate to say “Don’t just do something, sit there!”. It’s that ‘sitting-there thinking’ that is the key. In my post today, I will talk about the missing part – alignment. Alignment (or focus or aim) depicts and agreed approach; where everyone is pulling the same side of the rope. It’s both establishing the goal AND getting that goal shared by others (sponsor, senior leadership) at a deep level. When we approach anything of a complicated manner, its best to do so in an iterative fashion. With collaboration, we need to take advantage of that iteration cycle to ensure that we are still on track.
Collaboration is not an overnight installation. Rather, it’s a cultural change, a transition. Transitions take time. It is not a light switch that we suddenly switch to the on position. This transition time must be reconciled against many factors, such as:
- Competition requires the business to make changes. What was once true today, may not be valid a month or quarter from now. In order to compete, the business must make these changes. So, a risk for a collaboration effort is to be acting on ideas, goals, objectives and expectations that grow stale. Understanding the value that collaboration brings in the context of meeting and surpassing our competition is core to establishing a strong practice that really delivers.
- The political landscape ebbs and flows. Strong leaders are vital to momentum within an organization. This momentum can be used for collaboration. However, as we all know, tactics are born of strategy and strategy is an outgrowth of leadership. So, a risk that we must mitigate around this potential political change is that we don’t solely hitch the collaboration effort to the current political momentum. Yes, we need to take advantage of the ‘current momentum’ that is riding within our organization, but make sure that momentum is monitored and that our collaboration efforts are loosely coupled to it.
- A technology is not the substitute for collaboration, it’s not about technology at all. The danger here is that we use the words collaboration and collaboration technology synonymously. We need to abstract technology away from our collaboration strategy. (When we add it back, it becomes tactical.) If we tie those two concepts together, one risk is that our strategy will be killed when technology changes. We need to have a real strategy that hold without specific technology. This way, we can make strategic changes at a place where it makes it possible to keep our senior leadership focused on strategy, value and direction and not burdening them with the complexities and intricacies of technology… This way senior leadership tells us what they want and not how to do it.
Bringing these few points together leads me to my conclusion about alignment and collaboration value. The value that collaboration brings today may not be the expected value of tomorrow. To ensure that we are always right on, we will need to set up a method of keeping our value proposition fresh. Fresh vegetables sitting around rot. The same thing will happen to the best collaboration strategy – if it sits around, it will rot; decay over time to something that is both not desirable and not useable. Eventually, one will have to simply throw it away. This is why the best produce is purchased daily. We need to have this same mindset in our relationship with senior leadership. How do we keep our stuff fresh? How do we match their value to our strategy?
- Work with senior leadership to develop a value proposition that is expressed in measurable terms. Depending upon your organization, you may have to set a vision (but let them own it) or drive their vision or take notes and direct/confirm their understanding.
- Plan a strategy that stands without technology (actual products). At a high level, get directional support from your senior leadership (governance, sponsor, CxOs).
- Formulate a tactical plan by completing the future vision, adding products and services.
- Put together an internal marketing plan and begin to socialize the message. Make sure you know your audience and state it in WIIFM (what’s in it for me) terms.
- Iterate through the plan. Break the plan at strategic points along the way. Use this opportunity to communicate with your senior leadership both what has been done and what is ahead. Create trust by being vulnerable. It’s precisely at this point in time that you need to reach deep to extract from them their value expectations. Don’t hide anything here, we are all-in together! The right conversations must take place at this time. We need to ensure that we are all committed to a common course of action. Listen to the things that you don’t really want to hear. Make adjustments.
- Update your strategy to reflect changes in value expectations and proceed to step 3, tactical planning and so on…
Remember, it’s not enough to establish value and conquer. It will serve no one to ignore those changes that we see or hear about, hoping that we can keep on our current course. We need to add that ‘sit there’ break point where we open up to senior leadership and get real vulnerable. Of course no one enjoys that potential course change. But who does it benefit if we set the original course to Hawaii when at some point everyone thought we were heading on an Alaskan cruise!
Alignment is the art of frequent and vulnerable communication with a constant reaching for understanding and direction by all. When leveraged around collaboration value, we will bring our organization to new heights! Click here for my 13 points regarding collaboration
Dress appropriately; we are going on an Alaskan cruise!
~ Scott Felten
Does your organization “digg” Enterprise 2.0?
June 17, 2008
Some time ago, it made big news when the first Baby Boomer started collecting Social Security. It is now big business to advise Baby Boomers on retirement strategies, retirement communities, places to retire to, etc. Baby Boomers (ages 44-62) are the biggest workforce out there today, but it won’t be that way for long. Gen X (ages 29-43) doesn’t have enough workers to replace the retiring Baby Boomers. And those from Gen Y or the Millennials (ages 8-28), who are coming into the workforce for the first time, have very different expectations of the workplace and a very different view of technology. After all, Gen Y has been around since the birth of the internet and has grown up with online connectivity.
Surveys show (and probably this would be no surprise to most of you) that Millennials are the ones who have embraced Web 2.0 with open arms compared to the other two groups. Gen X is a close second to Millennials when it comes to using different Web 2.0 technologies. But Millennials are more likely to use Instant Messaging, use Social Networking Sites, download digital media, and play online games. Millennials are more apt to send or receive multimedia messages on their mobile phones, send or receive text messages on their mobile phones, etc. Most Millennials are constantly connected to technology, be it their MP3 players, mobile phones, etc. Millennials also tend to use a very different language when it comes to sending text messages or IM – they have many different acronyms like for example, BRB means “Be right back”, and they tend to use emoticons i.e. characters like 
and 
, quite liberally. Millennials have been using social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook for quite a while. They DIGG stuff or BURY it! They share bookmarks via del.icio.us. They “twit” interesting content! They are more likely to publish a video to YouTube or podcast or publish a blog or web page.
As Millennials enter the workforce, they are going to be very keen on continuing to use Web 2.0 tools that they use constantly in their personal lives. Matter of fact, some surveys show that a good chunk of the population that uses sites like Facebook or MySpace tend to visit those sites several times daily and they tend to hang around for a while on each visit. So what does this mean for the enterprise?
Organizations and companies that want to attract and retain technology-savvy talent need to look at the use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies in their environments. Social networking tools should be embraced with appropriate governance. Consider leveraging the power of mashups to integrate different applications and present them in a slick interface. Look at re-designing applications keeping in mind that Gen Y tends to view the web and web sites and experiences quite differently. Some statistics suggest that Millennials tend to get easily bored and will not wait for a web page that takes longer than 3 seconds to download. Millennials tend to migrate away from companies they perceive to be stodgy or behind the times. Millennials are very comfortable with virtual worlds – how could you leverage that organizationally? Leverage the power of crowd-sourcing and folksonomies. If Baby Boomers are retiring, and there’s not enough of Gen X to replace them, how would you attract Gen Y to those jobs? Are there ways of using Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis and podcasts to capture the knowledge in the minds of Baby Boomers before they retire so as not to lose all that precious capital?
Ready or not, the Millennials are coming and the workplace is changing! The question of interest is, “Are they coming soon to your organization” and are you ready? Will they “digg” your use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies?
Part 2, Collaboration Tactical Verticals – expanded! (Statement 10)
June 17, 2008
Highly optimized teams perform at high levels – their productivity exceeds the sum of the parts. Moreover, each member contributes at a higher level and becomes more productive. Of course they also feel more committed and take pride and ownership of accomplishments. If done right, the team is the vehicle to bring game-changing, record-breaking innovations to market!
It’s no wonder that the investment in teams is the single best investment!
Gartner predicts that “by 2008, 50% of individual performance will be determined by the individual’s participation in projects and other collaborative work. This will cause an accelerated demand for collaboration, informal project coordination, social networking, expertise location and social process support technologies.”
It is now a business minimum to monitor activities on an almost 24/7 basis – just watch your spouse on vacation try to put away that blackberry! With travel costs soaring (gas prices), we are now relying more on mobile technology, web conferencing and high-resolution videoconferencing – especially as our virtual teams become the norm, expanding across time zones, and national, linguistic and enterprise boundaries.
The needs are real, very real. And if not met properly, shadow IT steps in to fill that need. The result…email grows out of control to morph into some kind of collaborative document repository, and source for best practices and even stretching to perform workflow. There are also non-coordinated initiatives in play that lead to multiple standards and duplication of costs and efforts. At some point, these will need to be reconciled. It is not different then the company that allows master data management to consist of enterprise level spreadsheets to hold data in a persistent manner. Yikes!
Lets start by stating the need that your success will depend upon the appropriate standardization and scoping of the collaboration stack. I view it as a 2 dimensional thought. The first dimension is strategic – it’s the enterprise level (horizontal) of collaboration. This is the level that everyone (knowledge workers, that is) in the organization is aware of and has come to depend upon. This builds upon the intranet concept, bringing to the organization additional corporate-wide tools. This is a good step in changing the corporate’s culture – but that is another blog yet to be written. The second dimension is the title of this blog “tactical verticals”. This is the ability to scale collaboration services ‘when the time is right’. Better said, when initiatives exhibit different configuration of characteristics, then there is a corresponding configuration of collaboration services. Hopefully, these are kept to a few in number and truly driven by need.
It’s always good to start at the foundation. So, lets group collaboration a couple of ways and list out our potential services. There are web-based and non-web based technologies”
Web-based collaborative technologies: Email, Web Conferencing, Team Sites, Document Versioning, RSS Reader, Forums, Chat, IM, Surveys, Shared Calendaring, Social Software, Knowledge Mgt. Systems, Blogs, Wikis
Non-web based collaborative technologies: Telephony, Faxing, Voice Mail, Video Conferencing, Workflow, Project Mgt. Systems, Code Control
But, lets group them by functional capabilities:
Electronic Communications
PC Based eMail
Mobile eMail
Wikis
Community Sites
Team Sites
Document Versioning
Blogs
RSS Reader
Electronic Conferencing
Forums (message boards, discussion groups)
Online Chat
Instant Messaging
Internal Survey Tools
Web Conferencing
Collaboration Management
Electronic Calendars
Workflow Systems
Knowledge Management
Social Software Systems
What are your next steps…? There are many angles to consider, but for this blog (tactical verticals), I would suggest:
* Take inventory of your current toolsets
* Determine who owns ‘collaboration’
* Decide upon a horizontal enterprise-wide standard
* Develop tactical vertical attributes (when do you need IM, voting, work flow, wikis, etc…)
* Configure a collaboration stack for each scenario
* Perform a gap analysis (what do you need that you don’t have)
* Determine standards (products/technologies/best practices) for each
Take the next steps…look at:
– Value
– ROI
– Current Culture
– Transitioning
– Marketing
– Etc…
Having tactical verticals ensures that you can scale your collaboration stack when you need to – the goal here is to match the team’s need with the appropriate technology. Simply allowing everyone access to everything may introduce the wrong controls and lead to chaos and confusion. You have one shot at this – you can’t un-ring the bell! Once these tools are embedded in people, processes and technology, they are hard (if not impossible) to remove. The key to consider is to keep your options few, so that you don’t end up with a dozen different configurations to manage. Click here for my 13 points regarding collaboration
Good Luck!
~ Scott Felten
Part 2, Collaboration Definition! Expanded. (Statement 1)
June 17, 2008
“Consensus is the lack of leadership!” – Margaret Thatcher. I am in total agreement with that statement. As a matter of fact, I absolutely love it and have lived by it for many years. Question: Is collaboration simply a way to gain consensus? If so, then is it valid to say that “Collaboration is the lack of leadership”? I say, yes…and no!
Definition “People working together on creative, non-trivial issues that requires deep thinking and an exchange of ideas in an iterative and cumulative manner by domain experts.”
I will try to state this as simply as possible and demonstrate why “Collaboration may or may not be the absence of leadership”.
But first we need to understand teams. So, let’s look at team dynamics (attributes of a team). If you have read any of Jon Katzenbach’s books (The Wisdom of Teams and Peak Performance, as well as Real Change Leaders and Teams at the Top), you will walk away with a better understanding about the various aspects of teams.
There are 3 dimensions to any team.
• The Challenge – Business problem to be solved
• Work Style – Type of work, level of communication
• Leadership Approach – Applying the right leadership style
The type of business problem dictates the work style and leadership approach for the team.
Coordination-oriented Teams.
Is the business problem familiar to the organization, is it based on a known process and is it time sensitive? This dictates a team of highly specialized experts in their domains, working individually on their part of the solution and time is the driving factor. Coordination is key for this type of team. It is lead by a leader that coordinates individual contributions. In this case, the collaboration level is not as deep. It may be a common repository for terms and reference documents as well as the place where final deliverables are held and project plans are maintained. Often times the implementation of this level of collaboration is tactical – the company sets up a base set of collaboration features for ‘any team’ – its just the standard corporate collaboration configuration.
In the case, collaboration is simply a minimum level of service offered by the organization – a strategy set awhile ago. Here, consensus may in fact be the lack of leadership; as the type of business problem and work style demands a high degree of individual leadership. Here the leader needs to be the main broker of communication; keeping track of the project’s schedule and deliverables. Here the leader would make decisions (of course a good leader always seeks advice). I would agree that on this end of the spectrum, collaboration may be the lack of leadership. In this case, poor leaders may fall in to the trap of allowing the group to lead.
Collaboration-oriented Teams.
However, if the business problem you are trying to solve is unfamiliar to the organization, it is likely that your team will need to invent new processes. In this case, while time is certainly a factor, the best solution takes priority (implementing a poor solution in this case is disastrous). For these team attributes, collaboration is key. This type of team often shares in the work and often rotates leadership responsibility as domain experts lead discussions. Here the team is mission lead. All team members work collectively and share information at a high velocity. In this case, the collaboration level is deep. It may have custom designed work flows and voting/survey tools. Each member is available via online chat. Document management with versioning and edition features are enabled. There is a high velocity of meetings handled by web conferencing. Also the use of wikis and team electronic calendars are priority 1 – so that the mission continues!
In this scenario, collaboration is tactical – it is deployed because the business challenge demands a high velocity of collective work – a high degree of communication and thought sharing. In this case, the role of the leader rotates as people. Here collaboration is not simply gaining consensus, rather here collaboration is leadership!
I have painted both ends of the spectrum. The truth is always in the middle. Keep in mind that during the different lifecycles of a project, your team dynamics will ebb and flow from individual coordination to team collaboration. The trick is to choose a level of collaboration that will scale to your need! More to follow! Click here for my 13 points regarding collaboration.
Happy Collaborating!
~ Scott Felten