Business and IT – Why can’t you guys just get along?

About 6 months ago I wrote the article below but didn’t publish it at that time. I remember that I thought it was too off topic and that I was ranting a little to much…. Today I read an interesting discussion on the collaboration between IT and Comms on the G+ Intranet and Digital Workplace forum and remembered this one and now is the time.

I’m still making gross generalisations in the post but since I am one of the people who have crossed the chasm from business to IT, I also feel that it is worth sharing these observations which are rooted in my own experience as seen from both sides of the divide and I feel quite confident that this will not be my last post around this topic

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Some months ago I was attending an internal course in IT Service Management. I can honestly say that I didn’t find it particularly interesting. Half way through day two and in the middle of a very exciting *ahem* presentation of the process for implementing changes I started to think about how the entire system was designed to limit human interaction! Everything was neatly divided into boxes and workflows made sure that everything was moved along to the next step as soon as you had made your contribution. Very smooth.

Elaborate standards are put in place to ensure this: Standardised solutions, a predictable future, smooth transitions and continuity. Why do we then still talk about the chasm between IT and Line of Business. The processes are very linear and leave little room for learning in the process and it’s when that happens that things start to go pear shaped. The system and workflows grind to a halt and all of a sudden you NEED human interaction to get things moving – the very thing that the processes and systems have eliminated.

I am aware that the above is a rather crude generalization, but I’m taking it a step further by stating two hypotheses:

1) IT put their trust in having proper systems and procedures.
2) ‘The business’ put their trust in having proper colleagues.

In IT it’s about ensuring business continuity and that’s about rigid systems and procedures – people are by no means robots but they are there to make sure things are running as smoothly as possible so that technology helps rather than obstructs work. In the business it’s about profit, business development, and innovation – things that require research and often a lot of trial and error. Certainly not something that fits nicely within rigid systems but some times a rigid system can also help you be more efficient. The challenge is that it is not nearly as interesting to fill out an online form than it is to walk over and have a chat with the cute receptionist.

No wonder that we all too often find ourselves caught up in the ‘them and us’ discussion. As long as you have these two organizational silos we will not get rid of this. The radical solution is to get rid of the IT department and integrate the people in the organisation. You may argue that this will require more coordination but I’m not so sure about that. It will be a different kind of coordination and that is of course a daunting obstacle. Either way, you certainly need to cultivate the competence of mutual understanding or – at the very least – find someone who can translate and challenge. I’ll end this post with a few well-meant words of advice to both sides of the divide:

Hey ‘IT guys’…
1) If you insist on referring to your business counterparts as “Customers” – treat them as such or the WILL take their business elsewhere. A place to start: Ask if you would do business with yourself if you received the same treatment.
2) There is ALWAYS a business reason! It may not be evident and it may not be good, but it is not something you can determine on your own. You need to explore it together.

Hey ‘Business guys’…
1) You are very vocal about don’t understanding any “computer stuff” but have no problem telling when something is too expensive, complicated, etc. – and then you go off and buy a system or tool that you heard about at a random conference. Where’s the credibility in that? Why would I, as the IT guy, take you seriously?
2) You have many great ideas that “just” or “simply” need to be made. There’s no such thing as “just simply”. I usually say “just” takes 4 hours and “simply” takes 8. Do the math.

…and Hey! Both of you!
Pick up the phone. Grab a cup of coffee. Open up. Ask questions. Try to understand. Ask more questions. Yes! It takes time and effort and you may even find it frustrating but in the end you will find that it has been worthwhile building the bridge and there is no question that your colleagues will benefit from much better solutions than they have been used to.

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…”

Balancing openness and comfort – a real-life story

Meet Joel. Joel has just created a new collaboration space on the company’s collaboration platform. Everything went nice and smooth, and as a part of the process Joel decided that his collaboration space should be avalable for everyone – ”Heck, I’ve got nothing to hide and if people should take a closer look it’s OK with me!”

Meet Tim. Tim has also created a new collaboration space but Tim has a lot of confidential information which should only be shared within his project team. The latest addition ot the team is a part-time consultant, Louise, who have been granted access to the collaboration platform. Tim really likes the flexibility, but something doesn’t quite feel right. He calls the webmaster and his fears are confirmed: Louise has access to all the public places on the platform. Yikes!

Tim decides to abandon the collaboration platform fearing that Louise, even though she is a trusted partner, she has access to other information related to the company and Tim simply can’t accept that risk.

Meet the webmaster. Initially, he is sad that Tim has decided to abandon the collaboration platform since it has proven very useful and quite popular due to the very open nature. Colleagues sharing Tim’s view has been discussed as a part of the project and the project team made the decision that if you can’t accept the openness, the collaboration platform is just not for you.

The above approach is commendable and probably also the best way if you have a small intranet team since it requires relatively little oversight. However, this approach also requires a high degree of mutual trust. Both between the adminstrators and the employees, but also among the employees themselves, but since they are both readers and owners we have a conflict. The role ambiguity creates a need for having some kind of fence around one’s own yard in order to comfortably use a platform like this which ultimately ends up contradicting the idea of having an open platform.

A gordic knot? Far from it but this issue needs some careful consideration. As I see it there is one big question that remains unanswered is: How do you create an open and transparent platform while attending to people’s need for having a place of their own?