frogpond

BarCamp Berlin: Social Networks and Enterprise 2.0

At the BarCamp Berlin me and Frank Hamm had an extremely interesting (and well received) double session on Enterprise 2.0. As we asked the participants what bothers them most, the discussion circled a lot around issues of adoption, change management et al.

Yet I managed to discuss some of the slides I prepared, focussing on the significance of social networks for knowledge workers. This is no easy play for Enterprise 2.0 implementation – and I ask myself how far social networking can make inroads into the enterprise. Not only is it seen with suspicious eyes by security-anxious corporate IT teams, it’s also an approach that HR most probably won’t follow: While we know that supporting (informal) networks is key for knowledge workers, and that they want to access a wide diversity of networks, the HR people fear that interesting employees may get snatched away by competitors if made accessible via social networks. While this is a somewhat distorted view of reality (hey, let’s block access to Facebook, but nah, we can’t take away the phone …) it surely puts obstacles in the way of corporate adoption.

Killing the Org Chart and Enterprise 2.0 Reality Check @ Web 2.0 Expo

Some notes (with added thoughts and remarks from me) on Sören Stamers and Nicole Duffts session at Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, Sören starts:

Self-organization moves the world (emergence, natural enterprise, complex systems theory, …)

But hierarchy controls the enterprise – why?

Hierarchies are vastly successful (military, church, mafia, …), but
– they kill creativity (which thrives on the edge, see Stowe Boyd)
– they kill agility
and
– they kill motivation (people don’t like to be told what to do, at least the people we want to have in our organizations)

So what’s the situation?
1. Rising complexity
2. Accelerating dynamics (and yes, not only in this web 2.0 world, think of accelerating product lifecycles)
3. Stronger Values (networks tend to create a sense of value, they evolve into higher levels of understanding, again here’s the emergence of patterns)

Three years ago CoreMedia was sensing the need for new approaches, to let go, to get the best of their (capable) people. Here’s how they approached this, they let go the old understanding of departments and rigid organizational structure:

– Get rid of departments, work in projects (so it gets easier to include external people into the work processes

– Transparency doesn’t hurt (open board/management meetings, this creates trust)

– Using Open Space meetings as an organizational method

– Collective awareness beats processes (big changes get easy when you have a global, shared understanding)

– Tools, yes, tools are important (they change the behaviour of people, again see Stowe Boyd) and yes, those web 2.0 tools are a really good afterburner. Sören cites Twitter as an example, but also showed us screenshots of the internal CoreMedia blogging platform), CoreMedia seems to be an interesting company to work for or to do projects with …

Next up is Nicole Dufft of Berlecon Research (Berlin, Germany) speaking about Reality Check: Enterprise 2.0 in Germany

– recently had a study among CEOs et al.
– focussed on knowledge-intensive industries

Some findings:

– a quarter of decision makers in KM-intensive industries do not know what Web 2.0 is
– of those who know, only a smart part know what to do about it
– 90% sees there’s a change going on, that requirements have increased (they sense that things are shifting
– less than half see they are good supported by their ITC team (surprise …)

All in all, web 2.0 ideas haven’t arrived yet. Those who should don’t use the tools, while there’s some scattered use now and then, there’s pretty little use on a company scale.

And really important: People asked do not recognise the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 (yet, these will only be really visible when these tools get used in an integrated, enterprise scale way)

Some Learnings
– Integrated E 2.0 solutions will have to replace insular tools
– Enterprise 2.0 will change the way we companies collaborate, exchange knowledge and ideas
– We as consultants must work hard to explain the benefits, to show them the usage etc.

Closing there was a round of statements and questions from the audience, all things that are bothering them:

– projects not working as wished
– we’re working in small teams, but they seem to don’t work well together
– we’re suffering from bad motivation among our employees – they seem to be too content
– we sense that we could be more innovative, but don’t know how to proceed
– we are a big organization, how can we kill the hierarchy (Sören says that one way may be a meritocracy, someone from the audience: make flat project teams, you need to network and build these small teams, this is a good idea even for big enterprises)
– listening is sometimes the bottle-neck, it is easy to make them write blogposts, but it’s hard to listen and act upon the things read (Sören offers a good idea: support the formation of weak ties in the organization, e.g. by having rounds of bilateral talks in the organization, whereby you create conversations and change the organization in the course of talking)

This was a good session, I enjoyed the audience participation and the presenters way of going on about this, Frank and Oliver did some liveblogging too, so I will link to their posts shortly.

The state of Enterprise 2.0

Dion Hinchcliffe analyzes the state of Enterprise 2.0, collects some of his learnings and introduces a new visualization:

Enterprise 2.0 is going to happen in your organization with you or without you.

Effective Enterprise 2.0 seems to involve more than just blogs and wikis.

Enterprise 2.0 is more a state of mind than a product you can purchase.

Most businesses still need to educate their workers on the techniques and best practices of Enterprise 2.0 and social media.

The benefits of Enterprise 2.0 can be dramatic, but only builds steadily over time.

Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t seem to put older IT systems out of business.

Your organization will begin to change in new ways because of Enterprise 2.0. Be ready.

and

Nothing extraordinary in here, yet these are nice heuristics to play and design implementation efforts by. While these heuristics don’t make our lifes easier – changing “state of minds” is harder than experimenting with nifty tools – they can surely help in planning our adoption strategy and organizational change management efforts:

[…] to get the full benefits of the Web 2.0 era, we must begin adapting our organizations and their information and IT resources (with suitable enterprise context) to this network-oriented model […]

Web 2.0 is gaining traction in the corporate world …

is this really reality? Now, I’ve been collecting and compiling some serious stuff on Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 adoption lately, some of them are worth pointing out … especially given a discussion I’ve had lately and that was revitalized today.

There’s this HBS Case on How Wikipedia Works (or Doesn’t) and the related discussion (“Wikipedia in Pinstripes”), that handles a lot of the adoption challenges social software has in the enterprise:

[…] Wiki is another experiment in how to generate more collaboration inside companies, but I’ve seen mixed results. It can be as simple as “We’re having an office party, please sign up on a wiki page, and tell us what you’re going to bring,” to “We’re going to run this project, bring in all your knowledge assets together, and then we can self-organize.”

What Wikipedia has shown is that self-selection is critical. Peer review is critical. So there is a challenge for firms that are used to managing employees and allocating the resources in a very top-down kind of way. Now we have a technology that enables self-selection, transparency, openness—how does a manager or management deal with the technology? Do they implement it in a way that’s true to the spirit, or is it top-down? And, again, there are some very successful examples and some not so successful examples.

Video on how to grow wiki adoption in organizations

I am catching up with some social software related videos I bookmarked in the past few weeks, and I wanted to point out one that I really enjoyed:

Stewart Mader on the enterprise wiki: why it matters to business, use cases, and how to grow wiki adoption in organizations.

It’s a pity that the slides that he used aren’t online (Stewart?), but still it’s a good one to watch.

59 categorized pieces of knowledge management

Lucas McDonnell has revised his pieces of knowledge management into five larger buckets: Issues, Processes & Methods, Related Skills & Disciplines, Technology, and People:

It’s a good thing to cluster these topics, ideas and concepts into broad categories, and this new visualization can easily serve as a starting point for deeper discussions. Now, when discussing social software related issues in the realm of knowledge management you’ll have to explore and examine all five categories, it makes small sense to prioritize or sequentialize them a priori, but the actual pilot projects must of course place its implementation efforts (and bets) on parts of this “opportunity space”.