Normally I publish a brief review of the events I attend on this blog but this time is slightly different. The Intranetizens were not able to attend this year’s event in Copenhagen so I was asked if I could step in. No problem. Thus this year’s review of IntraTeam Event is published under the seemingly inconspicuous alias “Guestblogger” and you can find it by following this link:
I also had the honor of doing a brief presentation about Yammer in Grundfos and judging from both the popularity on Slideshare but also on the testimonials from the other delegates it went very well. If you are interested in the presentation you can find it embedded below and you are of course more than welcome to contact me if you would like to know more about our Yammer journey in Grundfos.
November may be one of dullest months of the year – especially in Scandinavia! Luckily some great people make this month much more interesting by hosting a number of conferences every year in November. This year I will be fortunate enough to attend two as a speaker – J. Boye 2012 in Aarhus and Intranett 2012 in Oslo.
First up is what I affectionately call “my local conference” and I have written a little about what I am looking forward to at this particular event. I hope that I will see you there!
Here’s a little exerpt of the post and a link where you can read more.
Apart from giving my own presentation as a part of the intranet conference track, I have also been given the opportunity to host a roundtable about social networking and the intranet. This provides an opportunity not only to share some of my own experiences but also to learn from others what works and what doesn’t – a great way to share in a more informal setting and hopefully get some ideas that can be used when you get back from the conference.
I have attended a fair share of conferences and event – some good, some bad. One thing that always makes me a little apprehensive is when the big vendors invite to the big annual events. It’s always a good chance to see all the new stuff in action but more often than not they roll out the red carpet and present a ‘Big Mac’ event. Big Mac in the sense that it’s beautifully presented but leaves few lasting impressions other than you are hungry again two hours later.
This morning I boarded the train from Aarhus at 05.42 with a slight apprehension and when I entered the beautiful venue 3½ hours later it was reinforced by the fact that it turned out to be a HUGE event. I don’t know what I had expected but a crowd of 1000+ delegates was certainly not it!
At the time of writing this I am on my way home from what ended up being one of the best events of its kind that I have attended for a long time. It would be a shame to say that my world was turned upside down but it was very refreshing to hear how IBM works with social business externally. Susan Emerick explained how everyone in IBM has the opportunity to participate on social platforms but also how they identify talent and resource people internally and make their participation an important part of their strategic go to market initiatives.
One of their very important conclusions was that the ‘digital engagement’ was 3 times more effective than the traditional digital marketing. I spoke to Susan afterwards where she reiterated this point – find an applicable area where you are likely to create new business opportunities – dedicate a portion of your budget to the new initiative – and compare…
The comparison obviously requires measurement. Measurement inevitably categorises content (and even people) as good or bad in terms of their digital efforts. In my opinion, this will become an inconvenient truth for many people in the social business. If you listen to many experts in this area they are advocating various pseudo-metrics related to how engaging you are but in the end it all boils down to what can be documented on the bottom line……or as Jerry McGuire would say – uhm, well, shout – SHOW ME THE MONEY!!
The Swedish Chef in action (photo by @unwiredchris)
However, the main topic for the social business track remained the challenges of creating an organization where the people and the culture embrace the value of sharing information and knowledge openly. Until this change is brought about it makes little sense to talk
about business opportunities in stead we need to focus our energy on getting the right mix of ingredients that make up a proper social business and this both begins and ends with cultural change – or to paraphrase ‘the Swedish chef’ Christian Carlsson who introduced the metaphor of social business components as ingredients in a bread:
“Culture is the yeast that makes a social business rise”
Enough about food….. What about the paper mentioned in the header? Well, I was not the only one who was surprised when all participants was reminded to fill out the evaluation form and hand it in before we left. I couldn’t help but to ask if that was what IBM defined as “smarter business” but as it turned out, they had learned that online forms were not nearly as effective for gathering feedback. Agree or disagree, if that’s the case then a piece of paper CAN be a smarter way – also in our hyper-connected world.
On my way from work today I heard a somewhat funny segment about how companies increasingly were looking for ‘ninjas’ when hiring new people. In fact the job ads mentioning ‘ninjas’ were up 2500% compared to last year – not to mention the jedis and rock stars who also seem to be in great demand.
I couldn’t help but related it to last week’s Adobe Digital Marketing Summit in London where I came face to face with the digital marketing world once again – a world which I have been a little out of sync with after moving into the intranet realm about 5 years ago. All the more interesting it allowed me to pinpoint some of the development that has happened for the digital marketing professionals and how online marketing has transformed from being very creative profession to become that of number crunchers and controller – maybe even Ninja-controllers…
This is a positive thing. It doesn’t only show that online marketing is reaching a new level of maturity but also that we are getting better and better at leveraging the true strength of online media: Everything can be measured! I posted a tweet about the fact that ‘big data’ was largely absent, but a reply made me realize that these guys don’t think about the concept of ‘big data’ – they are already using these vast amounts of data every day to track what we buy and what our friends recommend all to make sure that we get a tailored, personalized experience throughout the web – and hopefully we’ll buy some stuff along the way.
Honestly, I found some of the insights gained a little disturbing. Everything is about the personalized experience which is all well and good, but if everything is based on what my friends (and friend’s friends) do online are we then not running a risk of losing the individuality somewhere along the way? If you use the internet and social media to seek new inspiration about whatever and all you see is information based on what your friends have done, is it then really new inspiration or are we running around in a circle where we become more and more alike and a circle that becomes more and more tightly knit?
Arianna Huffington gave a very inspiring keynote which was closely related to the above. Like many others she made the point that the ubiquitous social networks makes us more disconnected to ourselves and that we need to remember to disconnect, but more interestingly she also talked about how companies focus heavily on relevance and not resonance. Relevance can be created based on actionable data because you then know what I want and like. Resonance is different: You need to provoke thoughts, challenge my opinions, even my view of the world. There’s no guaranteed sale in resonance, but if you succeed you can rest assured that you have something way more valuable than a mere customer.
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The conference? If conversion rates, lifetime customer value, repeat purchases, and those kinds of things are your game then it’s a great event and you should certainly go. If you, like me, focus on the digital workplace within companies and the disruption going on here, I believe that there are better choices for inspiration.
I got some good good input about data privacy, interesting sneak peeks, and – as already mentioned – a very inspiring keynote from Arianna Huffington but other than that it missed the mark for me.
How do we *do* social? In our wiki? In the document management system? …or do we just buy Chatter/Yammer/SocialCast? These questions are being asked in many organisations – my own included – and the answer is not always easy. Truth is we *do* social where it makes sense. It’s not about the tool, it’s about the context.
What about the social intranet? Personally, I’m not too fond of the term as it indicates that we need something new. A new intranet. This may very well be the case, but I find it much more important to look at when, where, and most importantly why people should use the social features on your intranet.
Chris McGrath and Ephraim Freed from Canadian ThoughFarmer have written a very interesting white paper that dives a bit deeper into what a social intranet is and what it can do for your enterprise. Among other things, they advocate that HR need to take a lead role in making companies more social and the workforce more engaged. I agree that HR is a vital player due to the fact that they reach all corners of the enterprise but your social initiatives should be carried out in a symbiosis between Comms, IT, and of course HR.
One of the conclusions from Jane McConnell’s Digital Workplace Trends 2012 is that the emergence of collaboration solutions in companies is re-creating corporate silos – the very thing that increased collaboration was supposed to break down – but the main difference is that by introducing a social layer, i.e. a social intranet, you can bridge the silos and the serendipity of social media is likely to make it easier to discover gems of knowledge.
According to a study by Gallup, presented in the white paper, the companies with the most engaged employees have seen much higher growth rates than those with less engaged employees. This fact alone ought to command at least some attention from management. It’s hard to disagree that a happy employee is more likely to be an engaged employee – it’s harder to agree on how you make people happy (and make more $$$ along the way).
I strongly believe in the intranet as the hub for the digital workplace but as I wrote earlier I’m not too sure whether it should be dubbed a social intranet. It’s a matter of words, agree, but I would like to see it as “The People Centric Intranet”. The most important task on intranets in numerous surveys is to find people. The consumerization of internal platforms creates an expressed need to connect and follow fellow employees and share updates with them but you still have a large proportion of your intranet that consist of documents, forms, etc. which is not very social.
One of the big questions is what benefits you will get from a social intranet. It depends on the resources that you put into it but also on the culture of your company. If informal communities are common place, I would venture a guess that you are much more likely to succeed than if you come from a more traditional culture. A cultural change is a big job and this is where HR – due to their wide reach – would be formidable change agents. You people who can act as ‘flight attendants’ on the journey. You need to get safely airborne but once you are in the air the attendants need to make sure that the passengers are happy and have a comfortable journey. Hopefully it’s going to be a long haul flight
One of the finishing comments in the whitepaper sums everything up very nicely:
“Successful social intranet become virtual places that employees inhabit rather than visit”
I personally believe that this should be the ultimate goal for all intranets – social or not.
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These were some of my thoughts after reading the whitepaper. I strongly recommend that you download a copy and put it on your Easter reading list – you can find it here: ThoughtFarmer – Social Intranets & Employee Engagement
The first conference day was kicked off by Tony Byrne, who set the scene with a very down to earth presentation and some may even have found it a bit discouraging, but personally I found it quite refreshing that someone dared to remind us that few companies are succeeding with online collaboration at scale. Some might even disagree, but if you look at case studies presented at conferences etc. I do agree with Tony on this one. Only a few are doing it well, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do it, and personally I remain convinced that we are standing on the edge of a major change in the way we cooperate.
This naturally raises the question on how we then succeed which ties very nicely into a trend I saw at this conference: The rise of Internal Community Management.
It may not be big news but it was certainly new to me to see the very strong manifestation of the need for community managers in the organization. Not only was the term “distributed community management” introduced, but I sat through presentations from Alcatel-Lucent, SEB, and Aviva where the presenters all touched on the topic. SEB had even recently hired Anna to become the internal community manager. I found it very interesting and believe that this is these are the examples of how the role we today call “intranet editor” will change into the facilitator for collaboration and networking throughout the organization and there is no doubt that if we want the visions for the digital workplace to happen we need a lot of Annas.
To stay in the pragmatic track, I will have to say that this is hardly a surprise to see community management become more important. If you look at the commercial web services, community management has been the talk of the town for at least the last two years and focus is only increasing. I see this as a(nother) prime example of how the trends from the commercial web seep into the organization and create a demand for similar capabilities and that companies need to hire people with new competencies.
The Shell Wiki
The case that impressed me the most was from Shell and how they implemented a wiki in the organization. Griet Johannson presented some very convincing facts and figures and I was very surprised about the very honest and straight forward approach they had taken. It can be summed up to: “If you are looking for something in the wiki which isn’t there, it’s YOUR responsibility to create it!” Basically it all starts with a search query with the obvious purpose of finding information, and you don’t find it you are probably going to search elsewhere and you are then obliged to contribute to the common good by sharing your findings which then can be corrected and expanded. Simple. Easy. Pragmatic…..and it FINALLY made me see why I have had a hard time getting to terms with how a wiki should work. It’s about search. Not structure.
The Aviva Service Bar
Through a conference like this you hear about many great ideas and concepts. If you ask me the most interesting was when Luke Mepham presented “The Service Bar” initiative from Aviva. The IT department had simply created a posh bar-like setting where people could stop by with their computers – both work and private – and get a service check or support with a specific issue. The basic idea was to help people get the necessary tools to work remotely and then provide a little extra service. I think this is a truly great idea. We can do almost everything from our chairs through webcams, IM, etc. so we need to come up with places where people are “allowed” to meet on company time. Helpdesks and similar functions are all great, but we still need the physical meeting. It be less of a trend and more of a personal crusade for me, but we need to challenge the arm’s length principle that is in virtually all kinds of support and create room for more F2F contact – also for simple things.
A big thank you to delegates for two great days (and evenings) in Copenhagen, and also a congratulations to Kurt and his IntraTeam for another inspiring conference. I’m ready for another dose in 2013
If you would like to read more from the conference, you can take a closer look at the links below.
Blogposts
Very nice recaps of all three days from Sam Marshall: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3.
“Can business processes and social media co-exist?” – This was one of the first big questions on day 2 of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit asked by Bertrand Duperrin from Nextmodernity and that question lead to a very interesting discussion of the role of social tools in the world of Business Process Management (BPM) – something that links nicely back to the theme from day 1 of harnessing the conversations taking place in the organization. Traditional BPM lack a proper feedback loop to ensure proper organizational learning, but if you intelligently integrate social tools, this gap may be filled.
Another very valid point from the BPM conversation was that you need to focus on visibility of the social features. If you just add a social layer inside the processes, you may find yourself creating ‘social silos’ effectively working against the purpose you are trying to accomplish. One thing that struck me was that nobody seemed to have succeeded and although everyone agreed that we should start with the people using this, I was not left with the impression that this was happening at a large enough scale. If we are to succeed with more ‘social’ business processes, we simply MUST get out there and involve people – all people.
After Business Process Management, the next track focused on ROI – or rather how we should forget about the way we traditionally think about ROI. Alexander Richter from CSCM presented some very interesting thoughts on this topic arguing that we obviously need to measure the outcomes of social business initiatives, but you have to take many things, eg. organizational maturity, into consideration when setting your success criteria – you can see his slide deck here. Social media is inherently about WIIFM (What’s in it for me) but there is just no universal answer to that question – hence the M for ‘Me’.
Personally, I got a lot of inspiration from this – particularly from Peter Kim from Dachis Group who mentioned both social network analysis (SNA) and net promoter score (NPS) as measures that could be useful. We need simple metrics similar to the NPS but the challenge is that these metrics are subjective and flawed in many ways. HOWEVER this may not be such a big issue. You are measuring internal tools/services = the metrics must first and foremost be relevant for the company, so wouldn’t it be possible to reach internal consensus about interpretation and KPIs? I believe so. OK, You will not be able to benchmark against others, but if we the starting point is that every company is unique, why would you want to benchmark based on fixed KPIs? Surely it would result in nothing more than discussions on why ‘we’ are different from all the others….!
The closing keynote by Dion Hinchcliffe from Dachis Group was exactly as inspiring as I had hoped for. He provided lots of insights into the success factors for social business and some of the emerging trends. I think everything can be summarized nicely to say that it is all about organizational transformation and how we adapt to continuous and rapid change. The organisation of the 21st century will be about radical change, social engagement, ecosystems, and knowledge flows. A summary of the presentation would almost be a blog post on its own, so instead I encourage you to check it out on Slideshare.
To summarize two days in the frozen French capital: Good conference with lots of input, but the presentations and discussions also brought some underlying frustrations and questions to the surface. I see two ‘forces’ working in opposite directions: We stick to the arguments about how the value of social is very hard to measure, but at the same time we are reluctant to make decisions due to the lack of objective data. The bigdata trend will help here, but the above ‘conflict’ must be reconciled to get things moving. Right now we are in a position where we know that something needs to be done, but not quite how…
The final lesson from the conference comes from Fabian Seewald who explains Enterprise 2.0 in less than 2 minutes using some rather unusual means
The opening keynote of this Paris event was a shared session with Rawn Shah from IBM and Yves Caseau from Bouygues Telecom titled “Understanding Social Business Excellence”. Rawn started out with an excellent presentation about the importance of harnessing the pervasive conversations emerging in companies and linking them to the business goals. It may sound very simple, and the prescribed formula was also very easy to understand and pragmatic. How you adapt it to fit your own organization and the objectives of your Line of Business is a different topic.
One thing that struck me during both presentations was that social business practitioners on one hand seem to be in a hurry to denounce Frederick Taylor’s principles of scientific management and on the other hand can’t seem to get everything measured and aligned with Lean and other somewhat traditional management processes. We also talk a lot about engagement and trust, but the minute people actually start to engage, we shift focus to monitoring what they do. I find this somewhat ironic, but I also think it goes to show that many of these principles are still in full working order when it comes to our production environments, but also that we need to revisit and revise these ideas to include the knowledge workers of the 21st century as well.
A topic that was touched upon in many talks was motivation and rewards which made gamification a ‘hot’ topic. Interestingly enough, when speakers from companies who have well established communities were on stage, rewards and motivation were not something of their concern. I’m 100% sure that it has not come over night and that while extrinsic motivation through eg. gamification may help increase adoption, it is the intrinsic motivators that make people come back and turn it into a vibrant community. I see quite a few analogies to Herzberg’s two-factor theory, but that’s a topic for another day.
Jon Mell from IBM and Jerome Colombe from Alcatel Lucent were prime examples of two companies with thriving communities. It quickly comes down to culture and management support and as Jon argued that if management sees Engagement as ‘free work’ you are not likely to succeed in creating communities. In Alcatel Lucent there is a very strong backing from the CEO which I believe is the key to their success. They have community ambassadors, but the title sounds like a voluntary/honorary title – much like the concept of the “Yammer midwife” I heard about at a recent event. Both great concepts but that degree of volunteerism is hard to achieve in many organisations.
Like many others I have been struggling with the term “Social Collaboration” (Can you collaborate without being social?), but today I heard a fresh take on this. Collaboration was a shift in technology – Social was (is) a shift in culture. Agree or disagree, I think it makes a lot of sense to look at it like that and now I am not so sure that I will continue crusading against the term social collaboration
These were my main thoughts after the first day of the #e20s, as the event is known under on Twitter. I already look forward to more interesting insights tomorrow. If you are interested in a more detailed account of the presentations, head over to Samuel Driessen’s blog where he has been live-blogging from many presentations.
After a great day with lots of input – some of which I blogged about here – I was back in the basement for more insights. A little more preoccupied with the fact that I had to do my own presentation (which went well if you ask me) but the day also provided more great insights.
One of the first presentations was from BT. I have seen this presented several times, but I have to say that they are doing a great job and there’s always good ideas to find here. The interesting thing this time around was that BT has encouraged ’non-business’ social stuff in order to get the social side going – a really good approach, but also one which requires very good support from management.
If I compare to my own company I am sure that there will be a substantial divide between those who think it’s a good idea and those who don’t. Who is the bigger group is hard to say, but regardless I think everybody should keep Richards wise words in mind: ”People don’t come in thin slices – they come in 3D”. What he meant was that companies focus on a very small portion of a person. That portion consist of the expertise needed to fill the job role. Everything else is best left at home. Personally, I would like to see more ’3D people’ in the workplace. Wouldn’t you?
The ROMEC case featured a very entertaining music video which was a very welcome break, but the main takeaway for me was their use fo offline initiatives to drive traffic to the intranet. Nigel told how they used postcards sent directly to the employee’s homes to encourage use of the intranet. Simple and reasonably easy. In my opinion this is something that many, including ourselves, should do a lot more of. As a company you still want to engage with them, but in order to achieve this, you must look in the bag of old marketing tricks. Comms and marketing may be a bit like cats and dogs, but here’s an area where we can benefit from working together.
The final presentation of the day was the one I was particularly interested in. Attending a course in strategic management, I have recently turned in a paper on internal networking and in the process of writing this I have been thinking a lot about the future workplace and how loose ties become more and more important in diverse organisations. Luis shared very interesting insights in how IBM has become a very ’disconnected’ company and yet the social technologies help them stay connected allowing the IBMers to work when ever and wherever. He mentioned that people did not share their own work under their own name on the 16,000 blogs as much as they contribute to the internal IBM wiki which has more than 1 million page views per day. Very interesting that the internal sharing is driven by more altruistic motives, and not fuelled by the ‘Ego factors’ mentioned on Day 1…
Luis’ closing remark: ”Work happens wherever you are. You are work. Work is you.” was a very appropriate end to another day with lots of good input. After all, it was Friday afternoon close to 6 pm, and in a way this sould be classified as work, but a most inspiring kind.
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A brief epilogue: Thank you to all delegates for two days of excellent networking and last, but not least, a thank you to the ForwardNetworking team, Jozefa, Martin, and Luuk, for two excellent days.
Internal social media have a hard time getting priority in most companies – if that’s the reason for the Internal Social Media Forum being held in a hotel basement in Madrid is not for me to say, but the thoght did enter my mind during the first day.
Regardless of the venue, I did see some very interesting presentations with some good learnings, ideas, and food for thought. The highlight of the day – at least for me – was the presentation by Jerome from Alcatel Lucent. I was truly impressed by the level of internal transparency and openness they have achieved in a company of 77,000 employees.
The most striking takeaway was that the users had rejected Sharepoint as the platform of choise!
Sharepoint rejected?
Users had a say?
I’m officially impressed! According to Jerome, this wasa due to the fact that people brought their expericences from ’outside’ platforms like Yammer and Facebook which made them expect the same simplicity internally.
Other interesting takeaways was the focus on gamification from Verizon. Elizabeth told how they focused on the person and not the processes which, obviously, talks to the ”Ego-factor” that all people possess in some degree, and there is no doubt that vanity is a very powerful motivator when it comes to user adoption.
The final presentation of the day was from SAP and what struck me the most was the honesty about what makes people tick. Not strategies, not figures, but stories about real people. If you find what Angela and her team has dubbed ’Extreme Heroes’ and tell their story you create lots of engagement. It may not be strictly business relevant, but in this age of social media, engagement is what you are looking for, and what company can honestly say that they don’t want engaged employees?
All in all a very interesting day 1, and I am certainly looking forward to the sequel tomorrow. Stay tuned for more from the basement in Madrid, or follow the hashtag #ISM2011 on Twitter :-)
Posted by Martin Risgaard 
