COPE with BYOD – Motivators and the impact of Cloud

Spurred on by an article about devices as Corporately Owned Personally Enabled – or COPE for short – as an alternative to Bring Your Own Device, I had a – by Twitter standards – lengthy dialogue with Chris Tubb about the motivators for BYOD. This post is a follow-up to one of my recent posts and also a summary of my own thoughts during my dialogue with Chris.

The basic idea of COPE is that the company that has provided you with a device (e.g. a laptop) to get your work done. Instead of enforcing harsh restrictions on what you can install and what you can use the device for, you are allowed to install software and use it for the purposes that you deem fit – within reason. The big question is whether this is a real alternative to a potentially very costly BYOD strategy.

In my experience people’s needs for using their own devices for work purposes comes in three different disguises. All three are valid motivators but what I find interesting is the underlying reasons and with the idea of COPE, you also have an alternative.

1) Power and Capability
Your work device is less capable when it comes to speed and availability of software than what you are used to at home. This means that you feel less productive at work which increases your frustration. A personally enabled (COPE) device is not likely to solve this as it will STILL be the corporately sanctioned equipment.

Bringing your own device will help as this is the root cause of your frustration – you just know that you can do better. If I were to play devil’s advocate here, I would say that it is your employer’s responsibility to make sure that it is not technology that makes you less productive and if they provide inferior equipment, they must also accept inferior productivity.

2) Mobility and The Digital Workplace
Your job allows you to work from anywhere at any time. The problem is that you find the corporate devices limiting as they don’t fully support this and you will have to bring more than one device in order to take care of your personal stuff. In other words, if you are working with the digital workplace and aim to create a more coherent solution for your company, this ought to be interesting for you.

COPE fits perfectly in this scenario. I have a corporate device – I have access to tech support when I need it AND I can even use the device for what I need when I need it. Bring my own device? Why should I…?

3) Vanity and Status
Hardly a primary motivator for bringing own devices, but some undoubtedly find it very motivating to be able to flash the latest Android phone or the new iPad. COPE will not solve this as companies (almost) never will be able to provide the cutting edge stuff. BYOD is a potential solution, but also potentially VERY expensive for companies.

Either way, I see these motivators as largely extrinsic – comparable to a pay raise. It will provide a short term motivation boost but the most important long term aspect will be the intrinsic motivators i.e. your job. No amount of gadgets can make up for poor job design.

So both BYOD and COPE may work? Yes, but is this the real issue? In my job I work with creating a digital workplace that is available when and where you need it. I can’t help but think that in 10 years’ time when most things have moved to the cloud, we will look back at the BYOD discussion and wonder what the fuss was all about. Moving to the cloud simply took care of all these things by making everything accessible through a browser. Dare I mention that this has been possible for years by using a Citrix solution?

In the end this has nothing to do with devices it is all about creating a consistent and SECURE access to company assets that will allow you to use them from anywhere and from any device which makes it very important that companies carefully evaluate the motivators for BYOD/COPE in the organization and decide on a (potentially costly) path forward. Right now we are just in a situation where the road ahead is not obvious but waiting at the intersection for the light to change is just not an option.

Smarter business in the year 2012 – also on paper…

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.

3 different takes + 1 opinion about BYOD

Lots of people – also internally in my organization – talk about bringing own devices to work (BYOD). On one side in some ways it is easier for companies – and me – to let me to bring my own cool gizmos that I know inside out instead of having to stay on the cutting edge. On the other side companies ought to provide the tools that enable you to get your work done and it must work sufficiently fast, reliable, and most important sufficiently supported. This will not be the latest candy-themed Android OS or the newest iPhone, but it still gets the job done.

Personally I’m not quite sure where I stand on the topic but three BYOD themed articles/blogsposts have caught my attention today – each offering a different view on the BYOD debate. I will share them here along with a few of my thoughts.

The user perspective
“What’s my motivation? A mental model for BYOD” is a great post about how people have different motivations for wanting to bring their own devices to work. A very good starting point for a discussion as I have experienced that the BYOD talks quickly evolves into an arms race about features and specs – not about the underlying problem itself and this is in my opinion where you need to start.

The management perspective
The header “When BYOD Is a Productivity Killer” almost says it all and it did make me a little apprehensive. It turned out to be about how using your own device will make work seem more pervasive thus making it easier to switch off. The concluding sentence “Essentially, BYOD eliminates the free work that employees with corporate phones were doing.” makes me question if the author has understood the basic BYOD concept at all.

The bigger perspectives
Gartner offers a bigger picture and I have to say that I agree completely with their statement that “BYOD is not for every company, or every employee…..For the vast majority of companies it is not possible to force all users into a bring your own (BYO) program without substantial financial investments — and considerable support from senior management. It’s hardly revolutionary but there are some valid points and I believe that this is how we will see this trend play out.

Where does that leave me? Have I gotten any closer to form an opinion on BYOD? I’m not sure that this is about devices at all. It’s more about how work becomes more independent of time and place. Productivity and purpose will determine how and if BYOD will apply to your situation. One thing that’s 100% safe to say is that if BYOD is about “free work” – heck, if your company is even considering such a thing as “Free work”, no amount of gadgets will solve that. It’s about trust and respect and this truly IS the most important foundation stone of any BYOD initiative.

Community management, Wikis, and a bar – Learnings and reflections from IntraTeam Event 2012

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.

Ernst Decsey – Is digital workplace becoming an accepted term
Mark Morrell – What is a digital workplace

Presentations on SlideShare
Kristian Norling – Search analytics in practice
Jerome Colombe – A step to the digital workplace
Sam Marshall – Loving the intranet
Oscar Berg – Why traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers

E2.0 Summit Day 2 – Don’t change the process, change the execution

“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

Thank you to old and new friends for a couple of inspiring days in Paris and congratulations to the Kongress Media team with a very well executed event. If you are looking for more information, you can find links to presentations, etc. on this wikipage

Thoughts and takeaways from the Enterprise 2.0 Summit – Day 1

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.

Microblogging – The sound of inevitability…

(Ok. The header may be a little over the top….)

As a long time Twitter user, I strongly believe in the power of microblogging. Twitter has enabled me to build an international network with other online pros who provide excellent daily insights for which I am very thankful. I am not claiming to be an evangelist and sing the 140-character praise at every given moment – all I am saying it that I derive a great deal of value from it. And so do others.

A couple of days ago I read this article about how schools and universities have started taking to Yammer. I would not say that this comes as a surprise to me, but it hadn’t occurred to me that it could be valuable here as well since they’re all on Facebook? Right?

Yammer Trumps Facebook for Some Graduate Students

On second thought I immediately started thinking about the implications of this. Today, many companies struggle with the internal social dimension – my own included – and most initiatives are on grassroot level, or at least they have started there. The reason for this struggle comes in many forms and shapes and unfortunately one of these is the Y shape – Why?

Although a good question indeed, and although there is no a single answer, you’d better get on with answering that question if you want to keep up the pace. People like the author of this and the likes of him may have been banging on about this for a long time, but has failed to provide a proper ROI or business case, but the fact is that this is not a clever, flavor of the month idea – this comes from outside. From the web. From the services that people use and find useful. They want to be able to have something similar ‘inside the firewall’ as well.

The best example I can think of is Enterprise search vs. Google. I acknowledge that finding reliable information easily is paramount in any organisation, but with the ascent of Google, the focus on finding information has increased vastly. People today google everything, and they expect to be able to do the same when they are at work. We are leaving the requirements for enterprise search alone here, but I think that it is safe to say that people are not going to be satisfied before they have a Google-like experience at work too. This is not because people have become more demanding – they have just seen an extremely good solution AND it is available for them at home, so why can’t we have Google at work?

Same thing goes for collaborative services like Yammer, SocialCast, etc. People are used to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, etc. from home and now they expect something similar at work. Add to that a generation who will be more and more familiar with these types of services from schools and universities entering the companies. Something is going to happen.

It will not happen over night, but I do find a great deal of comfort in the fact that this change will happen whether we want it or not, and I can’t help but think of a quote from the movie ‘The Matrix’: “Do you hear that Mr. Anderson?… That is the sound of inevitability…”

There’s an app for that – but do we need one?

How often haven’t you heard the expression “There’s an app for that!”. Among online pros it is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek comment, but unfortunately other are listening and it seems like they have the impression that if there’s NOT an app for that we certainly need to build one!

Look! Apps! (by Cristiano Betta)

But wait a minute – Don’t we need a proper, rock-solid business case? Nope. Not this time. Apps are great. Just great. And we’ll be first movers – that’s value enough!

…Eh?!?…

Admitted. Not the usual approach, but for once someone has seen the infamous light and they believe – a rare thing these days, but also where many great things start.

In other words, and to answer my own question from the header: YES! We need the app! If everything goes as planned you will end up with a (free) test for mobile platforms for internal communication which – for the likes of me – is far from revolutionary, but is a giant leap of almost Neil Armstrong’ish proportions for others. Success is not a given, but with solid backing and strong interest you are certainly on the right track – even before you get going properly.

A few cautionary thoughts have also entered my mind: I’m not saying that we shouldn’t build apps and explore all the new exciting corners, but it is our responsibility as online pros to look beyond the novelty effect and make sure that it fits in with the rest (…dare I mention Second Life?). One day the novelty wears off and the last thing we want is to be the last ones at the party having to clean up after the others just because something was cool for 15 minutes. There’s not much fun in that!

——————

Stay tuned for updates – the above is a summary of my own thoughts following an app-discussion and at the time of writing things are looking good

A trip to the Lotusphere and back

“It is curious how often you humans manage to obtain that which you do not want.”
– Spock (Star Trek)

No. I’m not a trekkie – nowhere near! I found the above quote while asking Uncle Google a few questions about how Vulcan was related to Star Trek. It may sound like a slightly odd thing to do on a Tuesday evening, but the explanation is quite simple.

IBM Denmark hosted a local version of “Lotusphere Comes to You” today and one of the things they presented was something called Project Vulcan – hence the Spock reference.

Admitted – I was quite apprehensive before going to the event and this is probably rooted in my daily interactions with big blue which are rather far from innovative and thought-leading. The room was full of IT people and being a comms man, I felt a bit like the odd one out…

Project Vulcan was featured as a part of one of the presentations and that confirmed to me that IBM still are remarkably close to the cutting edge when you look at their projects. What I found particularly interesting about this project, albeit only seeing a very brief demo, was the addition of what I would call a “stream layer”. This sits on top of your email, your activity feeds, but also your BI tools creating a continuous stream of updates some of which you need to act on and others which is just information.

This is obviously a big change to the way we work today and certainly not something that will happen overnight, but with an increasing demand (and supply) of information this could very well be one way to solve the everlasting, crowded inbox problem by supplementing it with something more nimble. This something will ultimately make us more effective by providing relevant info when we need it – and we need it!

Sadly, an event like that reminds me that IBM the sheer size makes it considerably less realistic that I will ever see a solution like that inside “my” firewall: We are simply too far removed from the thought leaders. This means that all the great ideas are lost somewhere on the road from there to here, and that’s a real shame.

For my part I hope that Project Vulcan will live long and prosper