frogpond

Wiki usability and Enterprise software sexyness

There’s an interesting debate going on, which is definitely worthwhile to follow. Arguments are exchanged whether, and if so how enterprise software can be as “sexy” as the all new web. Robert Scoble triggered it off (but somebody else called for it in the first place), got criticized and even flamed badly, others came to help, and so on. You know the game, see Techmeme for more. I am sure you will be enjoying the discussion in all branches and forks as much as I am.

While discussing UI, usability, user-friendliness and all is interesting (though putting lipstick on a pig really doesn’t help much) – well, even the endless arguments of “industrial-strength-software proponents” are entertaining in a way because we know better (this is dire stuff, and I ask myself if those guys ever worked with enterprise-style-software like R/3) – I want to chip in some observations from another perspective.

As a long-time enterprise software user, developer (yes, I was – years ago in my old life) and today enterprise 2.0 & enterprise social software consultant, I want to offer look at this from a position of wiki advocate (-evangelist, if you want).

Are enterprise wikis sexy? Most people don’t think so – but I think they get it wrong: Enterprise wikis are interesting not because of their advanced technology, their polished user interface or their neat mark-up language – in fact these are kind of disadvantages most of the time when we want corporate adoption to take off. Like when people doubt whether the wiki markup language will be accepted in their companies – they sure don’t deem wiki markup sexy. Yes, these are no shiny tools, they don’t offer eye candy, but they are well suited for doing their job.

The key is to start from business applications and needs – not tools. If the starting point is a specific business application like e.g. project management or business development support, users will judge the sexyness of the application in a different way – they will look for personal use and business value primarily.

Wikis soon gain “cool tools status” – just because they offer room for flexible emergent uses, coupled with great simplicity. In this light Dave Snowden opens a can of worms, which should attract more discussing, when he’s pointing to the inherent differences between complex social software and standard enterprise ware.

So yes, wikis can even be fun to use, and while sexyness is always a matter of taste, this is a good start and adds to the other wiki benefits like scalabity, connectivity and cost effectiveness that stand on their own anyway. This is no “fantasy land”, this is today, the 21st century and the changes will be great, and they won’t be about technology or tools:

Enterprise 2.0 is already upon us, providing us attractive, usable, reliable and secure applications. We just haven’t made the move to adopting it. But it’s happening now, with Generation M, mobile, multimedia, multitasking and here. Now.

An Inside Out perspective

Tracking down the presentations from last weeks Intranet 2.0 Forum in Zürich I also checked out the blog (called Inside out) of Richard Dennison, Intranet and Channel Strategy Manager at British Telecom, which I can easily recommend – a blog with a tag line as his must be good (see for yourself, please).

I particularly enjoyed his article “Five reasons not to let social media tools onto your intranet“, which dissects common contrarian attitudes towards social software in the enterprise (mostly by providing pointers to other pragmatic pieces in the same blog). Even when I don’t buy into all of his ideas and concepts I’m subscribed and look forward to more insights like these from the BT organism.

Intranet 2.0 Forum am 7. Dezember in Zürich

Leider musste ich meine Teilnahme am Intranet 2.0 Forum in Zürich kurzfristig absagen. Das ist sehr schade, ich hatte mich bereits sehr auf das Wiedersehen von bekannten (Stephan Schillerwein u.a.) und unbekannten bzw. bisher nur internet-bekannten Menschen (Leila Summa u.a.) gefreut. Mehr als ein kleiner Trost ist aber die ausgezeichnete Berichterstattung in verschiedenen Blogs, die mir die Aufarbeitung der Veranstaltung ermöglichen. Nicht dabei ist aber nicht dabei und nichts ganzes – ich bin froh dass die Gelegenheit zum direkten Gespräch und zum lockeren Wissensaustausch beim Kaffee (und ein oder zwei Nusstängeli) dank Kongress Media bald wiederkehrt.

Zu den Berichten:

Leila Summa verweist auf ihre Slides (pdf) zum Vortrag “Wanted Mitarbeiter 2.0: Wenn Technologien auf Nutzer warten” und linkt auf Kommentare dazu von Jürg Stuker, CEO von namics.

Saim hat hier eine kurze Zusammenfassung gebloggt, u.a. mit diesem Originalton von Jürg Stuker (meine Hervorhebung):

Jürg Stuker, CEO von namics, zeigt sich von der Wiki-Idee begeistert. Er schildert den Einsatz eines Projekt-Wikis bei namics sehr praxisorientiert. Der Grundgedanke: Je weniger ein linearer Prozess vorliegt umso besser funktioniert ein Wiki, das Änderungen und Aktualisierungen in einem Projekt, durch teamorientiertes Erfassen des Projektgeschehens, sehr viel besser dokumentiert als irgend ein anderes System. Es ist dabei sehr wichtig das gegenseitiger Respekt, Wertschätzung und Vertrauen die Grundregeln eines Wikis sind. Die Einhaltung dieser Regeln wird durch die Verwendung der eigenen Namen und Mail-Adressen unterstützt.

Schön dass er hier selbst noch die wichtigen Erfolgsfaktoren der Implementierung zusammenfasst (“Tipps für den erfolgreichen Wiki-Einsatz in Firmen”, Slides als pdf):

– Ängste aktiv im persönlichen Gespräch adressieren (nicht im selben Medium)
– Ergebnis dauernd über Hierarchie stellen
– Alles was nach Silo oder Wand aussieht, sofort abreissen
– Keine Zugriffs- oder Editierbeschränkungen! (alle User dürfen alles)
– Alle Projektinformationen sind im Wiki zu finden (Vertrauen schafft Vertrauen!)
– Jeder User schreibt seine Wiki-Inhalte selbst!
– Nur persönliche Usernamen und E-Mail Adressen nutzen
– Es braucht einen WikiGnome
– Aktiv Anlässe schaffen, das Wiki zu nutzen
– Min. eine Schlüsselperson (z.B. Schutz vor Ressourcenabzug, Rückendeckung bei Entscheiden) muss zu 100% im Boot sein.

Ich bin zwar mit der Maximalforderung “alle Nutzer dürfen alles” nicht einverstanden weil sie in den Anfangsphasen der Einführung nicht praktikabel ist – stimme ihm aber zu dass dies für viele Unternehmen ein lohnendes Ziel wäre.

Die umfangreichsten Berichte hat ohne Zweifel aber Webonomy von Swisscom gebloggt, Frank hat hier die verschiedenen Posts kurz angerissen und verlinkt, aufgefallen sind mir persönlich der Eintrag zur Präsentation von Leila Summa

[…] im Bereich Intranet vielen Firmen meilenweit voraus und hat erkannt, dass dies ein fundamentales Instrument für den Mindchange Richtung Enterprise 2.0 ist.

und zu Richard Dennisons Vortrag (“Social media im Unternehmensumfeld bei der British Telecom“), interessant:

Lessons learned beim Einsatz von “social media” im Corporate Umfeld:

– Nicht auf die Risiken fokussieren, sondern auf den Nutzen!
– Start small and build slowly! Die Benutzer sollen die Richtung und Geschwindigkeit diktieren.
– Binde die Benutzer so früh wie möglich ein – suceed or fail quickly … and cheaply!
– Binde Legal, HR, Security etc. ein und zeige auf, dass es bei der Einführung von “social media” Funktionen nicht um eine Revolution geht, sondern um eine Evolution.
– Realistische Erwartungen setzen, um Enttäuschunge zu vermeiden
– Den Enthusiasmus der Enthusiastischen nutzen – vor allem wenn es “Seniors” sind.

Daneben hat Webonomy auch noch Jürg Stukers Vortrag ausführlich dokumentiert – vielen Dank.

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 […]