Today we’re all plugged in. The best performance you’ll get is when people work from where and when they want. If you shove somebody in a cube and force some training, telling them to do things they wouldn’t normally do, they won’t be as creative … and giving recommendations is a creative process.

This isn’t your grandparents Airstream. And this isn’t a 20th century form of telecommuting. Needle provides a platform that brings fans, brands and customers together. Needlers, as the fan/experts are known, can be selected by the client company if it has existing connections with its fan experts, or by Needle through the client company’s social networks. The key is that Needlers are passionate fans who love to talk about the brands they cover.

Map of Needlers and realtime chats – shown on screen inside the bus

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The result for Getty was a 20 percent increase in the efficiency of its software development throughput. At Rally, they gained increased insight into what tools their customers need to manage portfolios of information technology projects.

Nina Schoen, Getty’s senior director, planning and program management, describes their introduction to Rally’s preview of its upcoming agile portfolio management offering, Rally Portfolio Manager, as an “amazing coincidence.” Explains Schoen, “We were about to start moving to this new portfolio management workflow, and a team member knew that Rally was interested in a portfolio management offering … the feedback loop was instant. I’d never participated with a software partner like that. Catherine Connor [product manager at Rally] has amazing listening skills. She was really able to fit into our shoes.”

Getty had started the transition to lean/agile software development three years before meeting Rally. Getty was excited about the benefits of the new development approach, but Schoen notes that they felt their business stakeholders were distrustful and frustrated with the process. “We used Alan Shalloway from Net Objectives [consulting services] to understand what was at the root of the business dissatisfaction,” Schoen says. “It wasn’t around the technology, but rather around how we organized the work. It hit every single way we organize the work — new roles, how we manage the portfolio of projects at the exec level, how we set expectations around delivery.”

The Rally/Getty co-design highlights how technology and organizational practice can be built together to achieve clarity around needs and expectations. Schoen says that before the technology and organizational redesign,

Our planning process was flawed. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do in Q1, Q2 …,’ but when we looked at the list it was probably four years worth of work. The priorities were unclear. Our businesses didn’t know who to contact to get what done and how things got decided. We had steering meetings where we came to consensus, but it was a very imperfect model.

The situation improved after the process change and the implementation of the Rally Portfolio Manager preview. “We now let lines of business set their own priorities,” says Schoen. ”There’s less disruption as things are more visible. Accountability is back in the hands of the business where it should be. We don’t set time frames until we’ve started something and know a lot more. So many companies build road maps that are just plain wrong. Now we have the trust from our executive team — things are going to change, we’re going to learn more …”

Schoen says that they didn’t receive any pushback from the businesses:

We’d gotten to a point where the problems had become clear to the company. This change was really a process change that had a toolset … Changing how people think about how things work is always hard, but we got through it. It helped that we have a culture of change at Getty Images — that [the businesses] have a voice.

Co-creation is a deep form of transparency. With transparency, you can see the project developing. With co-creation, you can tailor the design.

Getty was able to rebuild wireimage.com, a Getty Image website that is critical to the entertainment area of its business. Schoen says, “That site had a lot of functionality that was unique, but we wanted to make that functionality available on other sites. Because of the new workflow we were able to bring that to customers a ton faster, potentially six months faster, a bit of wild guess but probably true. And they love it.”

And what did Rally gain?

Rally could see the explicit and tacit needs Getty had in its process. “This led to the delivery of Rally Portfolio Manager, which makes Rally a single system of record for both business and agile development teams to gain visibility into development progress,” said Catherine Connor, product manager.

Co-creation, available to use through better communication and changing norms, is one more step in reducing barriers between what a business needs and what it can get from its suppliers.

How else can co-creation speed up and improve our professional relationships?

Image courtesy of Flickr user lumaxart.

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“To most effectively build a thriving enterprise social network, the existing groundswell community, forward-thinking leaders, and use case influencers must be directly involved and feel a personal connection to the success of the network,” said Murray. He noted that although all three of these user groups are important, they each play different roles.

Marketing, sales, information technology, and formal communities of practice are all tangible units at the heart of an organization. Yammer’s implementation experts have found that great things happen when these segments identify use cases for the product. Groundswell adoption and executive attention are both valuable for awareness, but the heart is best able to combat the “what’s in it for me” questions that push back against any new collaboration tool. The heart has identifiable work to get done that can often benefit in a visible way by having faster or broader access to knowledge across the organization.

Value From Sharing Across Similar Stores & Regions

Supervalu  (a nationwide grocery and pharmacy company, which owns Albertsons, Lucky, and Jewel-Osco) provides an especially good example of how Yammer can help facilitate collaboration. When Supervalu’s CEO Craig Herkert started in 2009, he aimed to transform the company through “radical transparency” and give the stores a hyperlocal focus to better meet their customers’ needs.

With a history that goes back to 1870, Supervalu was a conservative company where social media use was rare. There had been informal use of Yammer at Supervalu for years, but things didn’t take off until the business units began developing ways to support the hyperlocal efforts in the stores.

In one particularly effective project, store directors photographed product displays, posted the pictures on Yammer, and linked the images to local demographics and outcomes. Directors in similar situations (e.g., a college town during spring break) were able to use that information to decide which displays were likely to generate the most sales.

Herkert’s executive vision gave collaboration and transparency greater credibility and budget, but it was the business goal at the heart of the company that gave the collaboration efforts the energy to spread.

As Herkert says in this video, “Yammer has made my life easier, but what it has really done is made my life as a CEO better. Better because I’m able to listen and converse with all of our associates. Real time. All the time.”

7-Eleven convenience stores provide another example. Similar to Supervalu, Yammer was adopted by a groundswell community, and the executives were on-board, but it was in the heart where the value grew.

The company is built on a very distributed model with stores spread around the globe. David Sacks, Yammer’s CEO, said 7-Eleven aimed to use Yammer to “unify its distributed workforce, drive consistency across franchise locations, and foster better communication among employees and leadership.”

7-Eleven’s information technology group was the first to use Yammer, but now the dominant use case is of directors tracking regional trends and sharing that information. They also appreciate how easy it is to quickly share examples of employees supporting their guest services culture. For instance, a story about an employee who helped a customer change a tire in a 7-Eleven parking lot might not be something that would be emailed to all, but it’s perfect for a short post.

Sharing with a Purpose

Sharing is a crucial part of collaboration, and tools such as Yammer provide us with low friction ways to share our knowledge, activities, and results. Yammer’s experience with their clients suggests that while broad, groundswell support and executive attention are important for creating a viable network, business success comes from sharing at the heart of the organization’s work.

How are these three levels (groundswell, heart, executive) of importance in your own collaborations?

Images courtesy of Yammer

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WikiOrgCharts CEO Farhan Memon got the idea for the collaborative org chart while he was working at AOL . During his time there, his team had monthly meetings with external partners. Because they lacked insight into the partners’ knowledge and reporting structure, the AOL group struggled to figure out how best to work with the outside team. A colleague drafted an org chart of the other company, and Memon thought, “this org chart is good, but what I’d really like to do is work with colleagues to fill in the blanks and append information to the org chart.” Having a clearer picture of the roles and relationships makes it easier to know where the bottlenecks are, how decisions are made, and how to manage the underlying connections throughout the project, explained Memon.

Building a wikiorgchart is similar to creating an online family tree. (Memon says that they looked at genealogy websites for user interface inspiration.) You drag a person into position and then use linking lines to show the relationship between people. The privacy settings let you shift from the default of identified contributor to anonymous contributor. When members contribute people and relationships to the org charts, they gain the points they need to do their own searches. (The premium membership does not rely on points.) You can start your own profile by linking to your Facebook and LinkedIn pages. This quickly provides information about where you sit in your organization(s), and earns you more points for adding to your profile.

When it comes to getting your resume into the right hands, WikiOrgcharts has some advantages over LinkedIn . Search results on LinkedIn can be limited by a person’s position relative to your existing LinkedIn network and the type of account you have (free versus a variety of paid levels). WikiOrgCharts provides unlimited access to the available information — as long as you have accumulated enough points through participation, or, similar to LinkedIn, have a paid account.

Like Wikipedia, WikiOrgCharts is always growing, but the company has given the site a head start. Said Memon:

We built out the site using a number of different data sources, including social graph information, SEC data, and data from federal government employees. We’ve accumulated 9 million profiles. Our system automates some processes such as bucketing people from different companies, but we’re improving other processes such as sematic matching of companies.

Sensemaking, social intelligence, and the ability to connect are critical skills for modern work. WikiOrgCharts provides a tool to gather the data you need to begin those activities.

Images courtesy of WikiOrgCharts.

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Something as simple as a publicly-sharable spreadsheet can greatly improve communication in the workplace, allowing everyone to see how different steps in a project relate to manpower, timing, and other resources. The Oshkosh, Wisconsin School District provides a useful example of Smartsheet’s capabilities.

When David Gundlach, deputy superintendent of the school district, was brought in, the district’s network was often down. It was “an unreliable, dysfunctional setup,” he said.

To transform an organization’s technology infrastructure successfully you need to consider the people involved and their skills, the organizational process, and the technology tools. This is true whether you are in a high-tech start-up, a stable engineering firm, hospital, or school district.

Gundlach used Smartsheet to layout all his project plans — everything from managing education projects, community meetings, website redesigns, school board meetings, and tech implementation and transition projects. He used the Gantt capabilities to show how different tasks are dependent on each other. Showing subtasks provided greater granularity to the plan, and it helped him open discussions with the school board about whether or not a project was doable and what resources would be required.

Because of the complexity of the projects Gundlach had developed, and the number of people he had to keep connected across different community meetings and topics such as budget cuts, he needed to visually communicate the projects’ magnitude to keep everyone moving in the same direction.

“It’s more important to have the community on board than to get the technology. [I knew that if the community was] on board, they would see the value of [a sustainable technology budget] and then deliver on that…. The people are the tough part. The technology is the easy part. [You need to look ] through a systems lens and know that the implications may impact four or five others. And you need to know the interrelationships between those four or five.”

Our general familiarity with spreadsheets is part of their strength and what makes them such great tools for communicating with a diverse audience. “Don’t run away from the things you’ve already mastered,” says Smartsheet’s CEO Mark Mader. “Embrace the things you already know. But you also want to capitalize on the things that are now available to use, such as cross office and cross country sharing. If you can merge those two, you have a very powerful solution.” 

“When I first got here, I said, ‘we’re going build a network that I can plug anything into,’” said Gundlach. Smartsheet had an easy, clean, powerful interface. And since it works with Google Apps, everyone could have the same view of projects.”

Smartsheet, Google Apps, Dropbox, and Box are now all part of the district’s infrastructure. The district said no to many non-web-based tools. “Parents and teachers need the same resources at home as they do at school,” said Gundlach.

The new set of cloud tools helped him educate the school board and the community about the amount of work necessary to finish the transformation. Once the board could see the options, the dependencies between the projects, the resources required, and visualize the process (and obstacles), communication changed and things started improving quickly.

“Five years ago I couldn’t have done what I did without a lot of cash,” said Gundlach. But thanks to the power of the cloud, today Oshkosh has one of the finest state-of-the-art school district infrastructures.

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The press release announcing the launch specifically mentions two groups who should benefit from their new offering: Solopreneurs (Wrike’s term and I like the image it suggests) as well as bigger teams. The solopreneurs may come to the free version because of the price, but stay for the power of Wrike’s task-focused approach. Bigger teams will also benefit from the price, but may be especially interested in the fact that though the free version is limited to five power users, you can add an unlimited number of collaborative users and host an unlimited number of projects (see the table below for the feature differences between the free and premium versions). While hardcore enterprise users will want the premium/paid version with its powerful Gantt charts, many users will benefit from this new freemium option.

Wrike is built on the idea of real time project collaboration, where the most important thing in the software is real time data crowdsourced from users. That means they have to be where the users are doing their work. In a recent interview, Filev told me, “…activity streams are cool and helpful, but you want the real time data available. As soon as the data gets outdated, the software becomes useless. Go where the data is.”

Wrike’s plan is to go where people are already doing their work — in this case Google Apps — by integrating with Gmail™, Google Docs™, and Google Calendar™. (Wrike already has integration with Jive.) This will allow users to easily integrate Wrike’s project management tools without making great changes to their current work practices.

Filev says users can upgrade and downgrade at anytime. Wrike is comfortable with this approach as it fits with their vision for the product and their sense of their — and their users’ — business models. Filev says there is enough additional value in the premium version that they are not concerned with cannibalization and look forward to being seen as a flexible choice. By being able to up and downgrade at will, users can align their Wrike relationship with the changing needs of their business. During times of complex projects or need for more power users — Wrike’s premium product is the choice. If business changes to revolve around simpler projects — Wrike’s free product is available.

From my conversations with Filev (my prior Wrike coverage and a recent podcast we did together), I’ve come to believe that he and Wrike have an enlightened view. He says, “the experience of using different cloud apps should be fluid…The future is going to be different. It’s less likely to be one giant provider [in the cloud] — best of breed across the cloud” is more likely to be the model. As a result users will be more engaged in choices about which tools are best for their work and the payment scheme that is best for their business.

Are you feeling more comfortable with the options offered by freemium tools? Are you confident that these are real business model choices versus bait and switch?

Images courtesy of Wrike.

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Although tight ties between performance and feedback are important, the two are often separated by the realities of organizational life. “Annual reviews rely on hazy recall, with managers remembering recent events and overlooking what was done earlier in a review cycle,” says Stanford Professor and organizational expert, Jeff Pfeffer.

Similarly, though with more colorful language, past CEO of Yahoo, Carol Bartz says,

I have the puppy theory. When the puppy pees on the carpet, you say something right then because you don’t say six months later, “Remember that day, January 12th, when you peed on the carpet?” That doesn’t make any sense. “This is what’s on my mind. This is quick feedback.” And then I’m on to the next thing.

Our product life cycles are getting shorter and shorter — putting more pressure on how quickly we can form teams and work effectively in and across teams. At the same time, team members are often working apart or on-the-go. In order to give effective feedback in this environment, managers need support, and performance management platforms, such as Rypple, aim to help.

In the most adept teams, members know who knows what, who needs what information, and how to coordinate as a result. Rypple’s mobile capabilities mean that feedback can be given and received in ways that parallel the stream of daily work.

Rypple also helps make goal setting a living process, rather than an annual consideration. After an individual or team goal is set, other people can be invited to track the goal. Progress can also be monitored publicly, adding further accountability.

When I talked with Daniel Debow, co-founder and co-CEO of Rypple, he said that Rypple replicates common online behavior. People regularly check spaces like Facebook to update their activities and see what others are saying. Rypple “harnessed what was already happening,” he said.

Rypple supports “a desire to do what we already know is common sense,” Debow said. He also noted that managers should coach people every week or two, update goals, and recognize performance immediately.

In the weeks since the call, I’ve noticed additional cases highlighting the wisdom of speeding-up and socializing feedback.

For example, I went back to reports that Zappos had done away with annual performance reviews. In a presentation on their membership-required ZapposInsights site, they say that they found annual reviews unproductive. “Nobody wants to give them or receive them…If everyone is always in open communication, then annual reviews are redundant and not very useful at all.” Zappos does use a culture assessment as a feedback tool, but they are careful to say that this is not a substitute for annual performance reviews. Given the company’s open communication style, annual reviews just don’t have a place.

“A recession is a good time for managers to focus more on evidence and less on received wisdom or old habits. Asking hard questions about performance management would be a good place to start,” says Jeff Pfeffer. In my opinion, we have an opportunity to improve performance management in modern organizations. The people are ready. The technology is ready. Our organizations should be ready.

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The problems

I spoke with Greg Merkle, vice president of product strategy and design at Dow Jones (a News Corp subsidiary) where he oversees user experience for Factiva and other enterprise information products. In the Factiva research project, they were trying to learn about how people use their products and fit them into their various workflows.

Merkle gave me his take on our information environment, citing two different uses for data. “In the consumer world it’s keeping up with your friends,” he says. “In the business world, it’s being situationally aware, knowing what are your peers doing. It’s increasingly difficult to manage the flow of information in our personal lives as well as the enterprise.”

Merkle sees filtering as a possible remedy. “Historically, we had a centralized librarian — a filter for the organization,” he says. “In the past decade, there’s a trend to decentralize research and the role of the corporate library. Many consulting companies, for example, are asking people to do their own work [research]. This adds another level of noise around consistency of how we gather, share, and collaborate.”

The socialness of our work also has changed. Merkle says we need to better understand how to share articles, facts, and ideas. We need to go “beyond collective intelligence to collaborative intelligence.”

The personas

As the Factiva team thought about how their customers are searching, alerting and working with analytics, they saw that they needed to break away from the product and go from the outside in in a way they hadn’t done before. The Factiva team wanted to take a look at the end users and how their roles were evolving. They used an ethnography approach to follow a small set of customers’ activities in great detail. (See design and expert ethnography company IDEO’s take on ethnographic research: pdf.) Factiva took a product-agnostic approach to watching how these select customers interacted with data over the course of the business day. The customers also participated in a journal and noted their mood during specific tasks.
As a result, Factiva identified six different personas that they could use to help focus their products for different needs.

• The Compass: This strategic thinker has the big picture in mind and uses research and information gathering to make informed decisions about a company’s future. Compasses are able to identify growth and investment opportunities from a mile away and need access to information — both recent and historical. This professional sets the organization up for success by initiating the research and analyzing it. They also assign and review information sent to them from senior level staff members.
• The Connector: This well networked individual lives and breathes news and information. As a “go-to” source of information for others, their personal and professional interests overlap—in fact, they may be resident workaholics. These individuals require access to a broad range of information from different sources including social media, print and online news, research, TV/Radio etc. Connectors focus on making new connections, enhancing old ones and defining opportunities for each. They laser in on the details to determine worthwhile opportunities to pursue or things to share and often encourage collaboration.
• The Captain: Captains need information quickly to make near-term tactical decisions and longer-term strategic decisions and set goals. Captains initiate, delegate and receive/review research conducted by mid-level and junior staff. They also conduct initial research and then pass it off to their colleagues to look into further.
• The Miner: The Miner wants targeted information to stay on top of current events particular to their industry, clients and competitors. They’re often known for digging up and gathering information independently to make sure it’s pertinent, accurate and credible. They’re also big on leveraging their research to foster relationships or network (i.e., they like to be prepared, and look smart).
• The Scout: Scouts are reactive and make things happen. They’re focused on the deliverables and their research behaviors are triggered by events and projects. Typically given assignments for review, they’re always monitoring specific topics or keywords to report to their superiors as-it-happens.
• The InfoPro: The InfoPro is the next generation of the corporate librarian and one that lives and breathes research and information. Methodical in their thinking, these individuals identify, retrieve and analyze information to determine the connection between words, numbers, ideas and people. Typically aligned with business objectives InfoPros are required to prepare information for their colleagues and determine the strategy behind the content.

In closing, Merkle said, “We have the tools, but now it’s about the users.”

We’re the users. Knowing that there are these identifiable personas, how can we both become the best in the roles we’ve chosen for ourselves and best interact with the other roles for clarity, creativity, and deeper understanding? What more would you like to hear about collaborative intelligence? Let me know, and I’ll follow up with Merkle.

At GigaOM’s Net:Work conference on Dec. 8, we’ll talk to experts about information overload and next-generation collaboration. Super Saver tickets are available through Nov. 5.

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The United States alone faces a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts to analyze big data and make decisions based on their findings. 

Stephen Gold, vice president of worldwide marketing at SPSS, an IBM company, talked with me about how people and educators should be thinking about the opportunities that this shortage presents and how people can become data-savvy managers (and individual contributors). He pointed out that there is an “explosion of information” in almost all organizations and functions:

Think about all the activities that are being tracked today, and not just the amount, but the type [much of it unstructured] and it’s doubling every two years. Originally, people said ‘that’s just the social media,’ but there is unstructured data in surveys, call centers… What if we could put that to work?

There is a void of skills: both deep analytical skills — the heavy lifting of data mining — but also for the data savvy manager. If I’m in finance, I need analytics for risk; if it’s supply chain, then I need optimization; for marketing, customer segmentation. So we’re seeing this demand and this need.

And the need is starting to push out. People in a variety of roles are starting to understand the value of being data-savvy and how the different kinds of data and analyses can be used to influence behavior, improve organizational policies and practices, or pick the best answer:

• Predictive analytics: Using past and current data to answer questions about the future
• Scorecarding: Tracking business metrics against strategic and operational outcomes for better decision making
• Dashboards: Real-time presentations and aggregations of relevant data
• Social analytics: Metrics from social media and networks
• Content analytics: Assessment of available content and how it is used
• Web analytics: Tracking traffic and key words used to find particular sites

According to Gold, universities can provide students with data-savvy backgrounds through four steps:

1. Extend the current course curriculum with insights and exercises. People need to be comfortable with information and analytics. This could be basic applied statistics. Moves toward greater visualization of the data with drag and drop interfaces that put the heavy technical issues into the background are helping.
2. Develop specific courses that focus on the applications for marketing, finance, social networks, and operations. There needs to be a basic understanding of natural language processing to know the kinds of questions that can be asked — but the focus needs to be on the questions and problems to be solved.
3. Create more Centers of Excellence that are cross-college collaborations: Computer Science + Business for example.
4. Establish degree programs: DePaul, Carngie Mellon, Northwestern, and many other schools are formalizing the background for data savvy managers — as are community colleges and continuing eduction providers.

Our discussion stayed focused on questioning skills, not skills required to run specific tools or analyses. Gold described an IBM collaboration with Yale’s Center for Customer Insights to create student learning opportunities with real-world data and enterprise analytic software. Even though the students weren’t especially quantitatively-oriented, they were able to understand and digest the technology, understand the problem the customer was having, and suggest “deep meaningful validation points” to the organization.

(On the technical side, IBM is offering IT professionals free bootcamps to get up to speed.)

Business analytics took a huge jump in 1979 with VisiCalc bringing spreadsheets to personal computers. We seem to be poised for a similar jump with data savvy managers needing to open their minds to modern massive, unstructured, and linkable data. Events such as GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference provide opportunities to see the moves leading companies are making and better position yourself for a role as a data savvy manager.

Image courtesy of Flickr user afagen.

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