GigaOM » Collaboration

The case for manager as urban planner

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:40:03 +0000

Here on GigaOM we often talk about the future of work for the worker – more empowered, less tethered to location, perhaps more demanding – and about what this means for managers (Yup, it’s time to give up on points for attendance). But the same shifts in technology and the economy that are rearranging things for individuals and teams are also changing what works for whole companies.

Organizations are such a large and steady feature of the landscape that imagining a fundamental shift in their nature is a bit mind-bending– sort of like seeing a mountain flex. But that didn’t stop Dave Gray, founder of XPLANE and SVP of strategy at consultancy the Dachis Group, from tackling the problem not too long ago on his blog Communication Nation. The long post is a compelling read and worth checking out in full, but the central notion is that we need to re-conceive of companies not as machines but as organically growing cities. Gray writes:

Historically, we have thought of companies as machines, and we have designed them like we design machines. A machine typically has the following characteristics:

1. It’s designed to be controlled by a driver or operator.
2. It needs to be maintained, and when it breaks down, you fix it.
3. A machine pretty much works in the same way for the life of the machine. Eventually, things change, or the machine wears out, and you need to build or buy a new machine.

But of course, redesigning a machine while it’s in operation is incredibly tricky and that’s exactly what today’s fast-moving marketplace demands. Plus, as organizations grow larger they often choke under the weight of their own bureaucracy. There’s a better way to conceive of a company, according to Gray:

It’s time to think about what companies really are, and to design with that in mind. Companies are not so much machines as complex, dynamic, growing systems…

What happens if we think of it less like a machine and more like an organism? Or even better, what if we compared the company with other large, complex human systems, like, for example, the city?… If we start to look at companies as complex systems instead of machines, we can start to design and manage them for productivity instead of continuously hovering on the edge of collapse.

What does city-inspired organizational design and management look like? Gray begins to answer this question by pointing to research carried out by Shell in the 1980s that identified long-lived companies. Shell found that many of them had an organic, city-like organization that was decentralized, tolerated the eccentric, and featured a strong, shared culture and a dedication to actively listening and being responsive. Referencing this research, Gray has practical suggestions as well as philosophical points to make

He urges bosses interested in social business design to give everyone in their organization a home — “a place where they can put, and see, their stuff: their projects, the links they want to get back to, the documents they have created, their role, qualifications, expertise and so on” — and find ways to encourage serendipity. Gray also stresses studying the culture you actually have before you start to try and change it, so you can nurture and bring out your organization’s inherent character – there’s no use trying to turn Omaha into Brooklyn. And as you progress, listen and adapt. He writes:

Think about how city streets evolve: one small step at a time. One retailer moves to a larger space; another goes out of business. One old building is torn down and replaced; another is rehabbed and turned into lofts. Pay attention to the culture, and watch how people react to the tools you provide. Are they using something in a different way than you expected? Find out why and see if you can enhance that. And what are they ignoring? If they’re not using something you expected them to use, go talk to them and see if you can figure out the reason.

But it’s not just Gray who is examining the implications of shifting from company as machine to company as city. Yammer’s blog recently suggested another consequence of this shift, one that should sound familiar to regular GigaOM readers. The post’s suggestion: empowering employees far more than previously.

“Companies are slowly realizing that without the right employees and the right internal culture and environment, they will never be able to compete externally and deliver goods and services at the speed of today’s business,” says the post. “The massive opportunity lies in a deliberate, collaborative and respectful partnership between the Company, the Employee and the Customer. To really capture this opportunity, we need to abandon our fear and figure out how we can work with our employees to harness their passions and their sense of power.”

Look at the future of work from the employee’s perspective and you see a move towards empowerment. Or start from an organization-wide view and you come to the same conclusion. Either way new ways of managing look more like supervisory urban planning, husbanding a network of individual citizens, rather than wrench-wielding managers tinkering with systems with that cast workers in the role of cogs.

What do you think of Gray and Yammer’s vision of the organization of the future as more like a city of empowered citizens than a machine?

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Enterprise social tools are garbage, says Red Hat CEO

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 14:02:25 +0000

Updated. Fans of enterprise social networking have high hopes for these tools, touting their potential ability to break down silos, increase morale and cohesion, and pierce the executive bubble. But as hot a topic as the likes of Jive, Yammer ~~and Asana~~ are, not everyone is a fan of the concept. In fact, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst recently described them as garbage, reports Business Insider:

Everyone’s talking about the importance of engaging employees, and the Facebook generation and collaboration tools. All of that is garbage … collaboration is a culture. It’s not a set of tools.

Despite all the hype, “you can’t buy your way to collaboration. If employees are not already working that way, tools become nothing more than a high-tech version of the never-used suggestion box,” writes BI’s Julie Bort, explaining Whitehurst’s point of view.

The idea that offline culture might hinder enterprise social adoption has been raised here on WebWorkerDaily before, but when speaking to the executives of companies selling these products, it’s hard to get anyone to admit that a less than open corporate ethos might undermine these tools, nor that they may lack the power to transform a organization’s troublesome tendencies to horde information or sugar coat information for the higher ups. These executives have no trouble knocking the competition’s adoptability or user friendliness, but few seem willing to admit the problem might not be product design or flawed roll outs but human nature and corporate culture.

While enterprise social seems like a great lubricant for information exchange and collaboration at companies that already value these things, can these tools really work if a firm doesn’t already have a culture of sharing?

Update: Asana was described in the Business Insider story as an enterprise social network, but it is actually a productivity and task management tool.

Photo courtesy stock.xchng user sundstrom.

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3 popular ways to screw up enterprise social

Jessica Stillman — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:00:51 +0000

Enterprise social networking may still be in its infancy when it comes to widespread adoption, but its popularity as a buzzword could hardly be hotter. What’s the result? A lot of folks with little experience of how to best use enterprise social tools rushing to introduce them. That’s not a recipe for a flawless roll out of new ways of working and sharing.

So what usually goes wrong? At Net:Work 2011 Podio CEO Tommy Ahlers suggested companies often make things too complicated, complaining about “Swiss army knives” that try to solve every problem and end up failing users. When I spoke with Yammer CEO David Sacks a few weeks ago, he suggested that companies often go wrong by “trying to bolt that on to some existing tool, because if the tool isn’t built from the ground up to be social, it’s not going to have the level of usability that’s required.”

Now David Lavenda, VP of marketing at social email company harmon.ie, has gotten into the act, offering up common ways that well intentioned companies muck up the roll out of social tools and suggesting better ways to bring these tools to your team. “Simply throwing out social tools isn’t going to work,” he says, pointing to recent Forrester research that found widespread under-utilization of social tools. The study shows that even though companies have invested in an average of five or more tools, 64 percent realized few, if any, benefits from that investment. Only 8 percent actually use social collaboration software once a week.

So what should you do if you want your company or team’s move to social to go as poorly as some of the roll-outs documented by Forrester?

Imagine your team loves change. Some people like nothing better than to shake things up and try something new, but you can be pretty sure that’s not everyone on your team. So when you’re thinking about rolling out a tool to make your organization more social, keep in mind the howls of complaint that greet even the smallest changes to social networks in the consumer space.

“People are naturally reluctant to change,” says Lavenda. “Enterprise 2.0 author Andrew McAfee warns organizations to, ‘never underestimate the fondness of people and organizations for the status quo.’ When transitioning to a social model, it’s imperative to understand exactly how users work. Then, build a strategy and toolset that integrates with these practices in a way that makes sense with their current workflow, rather than asking users to make a dramatic change in their behavior.”

Rip and replace. If the wheel is turning along with just a bit of a creak or wobble, it’s not a good idea to try and entirely reinvent it. “People are often lured into thinking they need something entirely new to solve a problem. Instead of a D-Day approach that flips the switch on relatively unproven technologies like blogs, wikis and allied next-gen tools—essentially asking employees to immediately abandon existing tools like email and documents—plan for a gradual introduction that allows users to get up to speed with new functionality and capabilities at a comfortable pace,” recommends Lavenda, adding, “the idea is to improve productivity, not hinder it.”

The more the merrier. More may be better when it comes to chocolate cake or vacation days, but not when it comes to tools for the social enterprise. Rather than asking your team to log in to six different things, try to find solutions that allow them one go-to place for many needs. “An effective social strategy must start in a familiar environment and then aggregate all other pieces into the users’ base of operations. The goal is to eliminate steps, not add more. Bundling collaboration tools together in a common context and shared window drives faster, more widespread adoption and delivers the promised benefits of social enterprise integration much quicker,” says Lavenda.

Have you experienced any serious screw ups in the real of enterprise social that you’d like to warn others to avoid?

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Yammer time: Collaboration from the heart

Terri Griffith — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:12:31 +0000

For a three year-old enterprise social network, Yammer has a sophisticated understanding of how customers come to value their tools. Brian Murray, head of implementation strategy, walked me through a few customer stories, describing a common implementation pattern. A freemium product like Yammer often enters an organization through individual employees who have started using the free version as an informal part of their work. But while the consumerization and groundswell support of these tools is important, it isn’t the biggest lever for implementation. Likewise, while executive leadership is crucial for an overall vision, financial support, and a model of ideal behavior, it isn’t the biggest lever either. The big lever is in the heart of the company.

“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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Email in the enterprise: entering its twilight at 40?

Miguel Valdes Faura, BonitaSoft — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 20:00:44 +0000

Earlier this year, European IT services giant Atos Origin declared its intentions to completely phase email out of their internal operations within the next three years. This perhaps the most compelling case to date that suggests the declining necessity of email in the enterprise. While it’s certainly premature to declare email — which turned 40 years old in 2011 — “dead” as a technology, it’s fair to acknowledge that a new generation of communication tools is gaining traction as a more effective means of communication for the enterprise.

Email is without a doubt the most tried and true technology for both enterprise and personal communication, but it’s not without its shortcomings. Specifically, Atos CEO Thierry Breton cited email’s spam-like nature as one of the biggest contributors to “information pollution” that’s bogging down management. His goal is for Atos — which has nearly 50,000 employees worldwide — to be a “zero-email company” within the next three years. In place of email, Breton says that Atos will increasingly encourage its employees to collaborate on instant messaging and social networking platforms.

This marks the first time an organization of this size has made such a definitive statement on email, but it almost certainly won’t be the last. In truth, the gradual shift from email to messaging and social networking platforms began some years ago, but it’s only recently that this phenomenon has penetrated the enterprise from the consumer side.

Over the past several years, the rise of social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter have taken a lot of the conversations that once occurred on email to other channels on the consumer side. While email is still a central repository for tracking updates from various networking sites, it has become decidedly less useful for interacting with friends and colleagues on a daily basis compared to mediums like instant messaging and streaming content feeds.

As is often the case, the consumer side embraced these platforms well in advance of the enterprise. Instant messaging, Facebook and Twitter have all been in use for years for personal computing purposes. As the “internet generation” has come of age, entrepreneurs have increasingly put effort behind enterprise-friendly communication and automation tools. The rapid rise of platforms like Yammer and Salesforce’s Chatter - which are exclusively geared towards the enterprise — suggest the larger rise of the “social enterprise.”

The social enterprise refers to a premium on enhanced collaboration and real-time communication in the name of greater organizational efficiency. As such, there’s no single be-all, end-all tool that will ultimately replace email. Rather, a suite of complementary tools are gradually emerging as more effective mediums for enterprise collaboration.

Some other noteworthy technologies that are emerging in place of email include:

Process automation tools: Automating processes via business process management (BPM) tools enables automated responses and actions via automated emails, instant messages, etc. that prompted actionable messages (I.e., a “yes/no” button). This can eliminate the tedious back-and-forth associated with corporate functions like employee on-boarding/off-boarding, invoicing and employee requests. BPM has seen a spike in interest in recent years, with mega-vendors like Oracle and IBM putting more effort into their BPM offerings, and smaller vendors like BonitaSoft (my company), Intalio and BizAgi also offering BPM suites.
Enterprise portals: While enterprise portals have existed for some time, they’ve recently begun integrating more social features to increase collaboration between employees — often via real-time, streaming feeds with more accessible user interfaces. More and more, these portals are including plug-ins for other features like process automation and instant messaging to create a wider social intranet in which employees can collaborate. eXo and Liferay are two examples of enterprise portal vendors that have successfully incorporated a social aspect into their respective offerings.
Semantic web technologies: This is a still-evolving area that, while it has yet to make a significant mark in the enterprise, is poised to emerge as a critical technology in the near future. As organizations continue to struggle to manage the massive volumes of unstructured data generated by internal communication, it’s important to have tools capable of properly sorting and analyzing the information it generates. Examples of this can be seen today from the likes of Microsoft (Powerset/Bing), Apple (Siri/Apple 4S) and Google (FreeBase), among others.

This is not to say that email is not still a necessary component of enterprise communication; it’s still a vital cog for many core organizational processes. However, with the rise of tools such as those mentioned above, it’s undoubtedly seeing a decline in overall usage — particularly in terms of internal collaboration. Atos’ decision to phase out email is perhaps the most ringing endorsement yet for the notion that email is being gradually phased out of the enterprise, and it will be interesting to see how many other large scale organizations will follow in its footsteps over the next several years as collaborative technologies continue to evolve.

Miguel Valdés Faura is the CEO and co-founder of BonitaSoft, a France-based company that produces business process management (BPM) software and provides commercial services and support for the open source Bonita project, of which he is also co-founder. Follow Miguel on Twitter @MiguelValdes.

For more information about the future of collaboration tools, check out GigaOM’s Net:Work event on Dec. 8, 2011.

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Social technologies at work? What social technologies?

Jessica Stillman — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:04:23 +0000

As my colleague Kevin C. Tofel has pointed out, new research from Forrester reveals that consumer phones are invading the enterprise, but that’s not the only area of collaboration the study probes. Like the phone findings, some takeaways confirm realities we already see under way at offices every day, but others undercut so-called trends often mentioned by media cheerleaders (including GigaOM).

So what other collaboration trends does the study confirm? Remote work, it turns out, is largely a privilege of those higher up in the office food chain. Previous demographic studies on telecommuters and remote workers have revealed that they’re a highly educated, highly paid lot, who are generally higher up in their organizations. Forrester concurs, saying:

The report also reveals that workers are untethered from the office as they rise in rank. 53 percent of individual workers are office-bound, but that number drops to 35 percent among managers and supervisors, and plummets to just 10 percent among directors and executives.

No surprises there, then, but another finding is eye-opening. Here at WebWorkerDaily, social technology at work is a big topic, and we cover a variety of social tools for enterprise, from Jive and Chatter to Yammer. But despite its being a fast-growing market segment with huge media buzz, Forrester reveals exactly how far these technologies are from going mainstream. The research concludes (italics are mine):

Adoption of enterprise 2.0 technologies is still nascent. Only one in six Gen Y professionals uses social tools. Despite significant and ongoing investment in enterprise social technologies, their roughly seven-year lifespan within enterprises has yielded a maximum of 12 percent adoption within the overall workforce. This market has failed to displace traditional collaboration technologies like email as a preferred way to communicate at work.

Of course, this finding doesn’t mean that 12 percent isn’t the thin edge of a very big knife. We may yet see social for the enterprise slice into the mainstream market, but the Forrester research is a nice reminder of the gap between what’s commonplace among media types and geeks and what’s still alien to “regular people.” Several articles have made this point lately about consumer social media and Twitter. Perhaps it’s worth making about enterprise social as well.

For the time being, is enterprise social overblown?

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Why Google+ could find a home in the workplace

Simon Mackie — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 17:40:56 +0000

Last week, Google rolled out a beta of its highly-anticipated new social networking platform, Google+. Reaction to the launch so far has been mainly positive, with praise for the app’s design and features. But having played with Google+ over the last few days, I think that it may find a home in a somewhat unexpected market: the workplace.

While Facebook and Twitter have been massively successful in the consumer space, they’re not really suited for use in the workplace, as they make it difficult to keep personal and work-related information separate, and few companies would be happy about the possibility of potentially confidential information being broadcast to the world. Google, however, has produced an app that’s much more suited for use in the workplace by building Google+ around its Circles feature, which enables users to limit the sharing of information to specific groups of people, and by incorporating some very useful built-in collaboration features.

Circles, effortless contact management

Google+ is a lot like Facebook, offering users the ability to connect to other users, post status updates, share links and photos, and so on. But where it differs from apps like Facebook is its use of Circles, which allows users to define groups of contacts and then only share specific updates and other information with that group. Circles are effectively easy-to-understand privacy controls. They can be set up via an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, and there doesn’t appear to be any limitations on the number of them you can define.

You could, for instance, have a Circle for all of your work colleagues, a Circle for your team and then also create ad hoc Circles for project teams as required. This ability to easily control who you share specific pieces of information with is powerful, and very useful in the workplace: you may only want to send an update regarding the status or a project to only those colleagues working on that project, for example.

Facebook has tried to give users a similar degree of control over contact management with its Lists feature, but it’s clunky and nowhere near as well-implemented or as central to the experience as Circles is; while Google + is effectively built on top of Circles, Facebook’s Lists feature feels like an afterthought.

As Google+ is a general-purpose social networking tool, a user can connect with any other Google+ user. This means that, unlike with many of the private enterprise social networking apps like Yammer, Jive, tibbr, Socialtext and Salesforce Chatter, people can use the app to easily communicate and collaborate with people outside of their organization — contractors or clients, for example.

Hangouts, Google+’s killer app for remote teams

Hangouts is Google+’s built-in multi-user video chat tool. It allows users to chat with up to ten people simultaneously and it’s really well implemented. Unlike other video chat apps, where you generally have to ping the other people you want to chat with on IM or email, get them to open their video chat client and then connect with them, Hangouts enables you to “hang out” in a video chat room, advertising your availability to chat to your contacts. If no-one else is around, you can leave it running in the background.

It’s all browser-based, so the user doesn’t have to fire up another app, and allows for much more spontaneous and effortless collaboration than other video chat app I’ve tried. I think it could potentially come close to replicating an “in office” experience for remote teams, allowing for the virtual equivalent of wandering up to a colleague’s desk to discuss a problem, or the traditional “water cooler” social chat.

Hangouts has an intuitive interface: Whoever is currently talking is highlighted in the large central window, with everyone else displayed in strip of smaller windows underneath. In my testing, it works really well, with little lag. There’s a built-in IM feature for sharing links and so on, and also a YouTube feature, which enables users to share the watching of YouTube videos (which is neat, but probably not all that useful in the workplace). As Om noted, Hangouts is group video chat done right. It’s much better than Skype’s somewhat clunky group video chat feature, it’s free, and as it’s standards-based, it could be integrated into other applications, too (if you’re curious, Janko has written an interesting overview of the standards-based tech used to build the service).

Hangouts isn’t Google+’s only collaboration tool. It also features a built-in group texting feature called Huddle (see Stacey’s review here), which is currently only available on Android handsets.

Keep your team up-to-date with Sparks

Another great feature that differentiates Google+ from Facebook is Sparks. It lets users define an interest (robotics, for example), and then trawls the web looking for articles related to that interest, making it easy for users to find relevant articles to share. This could be useful in the workplace for research or keeping abreast of industry news, for example, helping users to stay up-to-date with topics of interest to them and their team, and then easily share and discuss any particularly interesting bits of information.

Why Google+ isn’t the perfect enterprise social-networking tool — yet

While Google + is well designed and has a lot of really great features, it’s not the perfect enterprise social networking tool just yet; it’s got a way to go before companies like Yammer and Salesforce should begin to really worry. Firstly, as Mathew noted, it needs users. Google+ is still in beta, but even after it launches to the general public, even if Google is massively successful in getting new users to sign up it will be a while before Google+ can get anywhere near rivaling Facebook’s numbers.

Secondly, Google+ isn’t yet set up to work with Google Apps accounts, which precludes a large number of potential enterprise users from using it with their main work email accounts. However, it’s probably safe to assume that Google+ will be made available to users of Google Apps soon — and the prospect of integrated social features in Google Apps powered by Google+ is a tantalizing one.

Finally, although Circles is an easy to use and intuitive way for users to determine who they share specific bits of share information with, it’s not perfect: there have already been reported privacy concerns with Google+ and Circles, with updates being forwarded on (or “reshared”) beyond the original Circle it was intended for. Google is being responsive to the concerns and is now addressing that particular issue, so hopefully any lingering privacy concerns will be ironed out before the product sees a more widespread release.

Of course, as Jess noted earlier today, the success of enterprise social networking tools depends on much more than just the technology itself. But Google’s latest foray into the social space is very well designed and offers a a great range of features. Assuming the company can tackle any privacy concerns that pop up and can persuade enough users to join the service and give it the initial traction it needs, Google+ could well become entrenched in the workplace.

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Enterprise social media: offline company culture impedes implementation?

Jessica Stillman — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 12:04:12 +0000

With Google again jumping into the social game with Google +, social is incredibly hot on the consumer side. But while Facebook and co. blaze a trail for home use, in the workplace interest in social has been smoldering away for years without really catching into a similar bonfire.

Why? Previously, WebWorkerDaily has spoken to Yammer co-founder and CTO Adam Pisoni who explained that some executives fail to grasp the full benefit of social for enterprise. But perhaps there are other reasons social media at work has failed to catch on as speedily as it has at home that have nothing to do with the limitations of the tech itself or the imaginative failings of corporate honchos.

Writing on the IBF blog, Katrina Pugh explains that many of the corporate clients she works with fail to garner the full benefits of social media tools not because these tools are badly conceived or improperly rolled out, but because the larger corporate culture that surrounds them makes workers hesitant to fully utilize social. Without these two offline prerequisites, she writes, organizations will fail to reap the full benefits of social media:

Interpersonal trust comes from a sense that you who are asking for my help (or from whom I am asking for help) are worthy of that engagement. Worthiness might come from relationships I’ve developed with you or your team, or from an affiliation we share (part of the same company or network). I will go out into a public forum, a SharePoint Discussion or Yammer thread, and try to help you. Interpersonal trust doesn’t mean we’re best of friends. Richard Hackmann, renowned Harvard University team researcher, found that for teams and musicians, a small amount of friction generally results in a better quality product or performance. You might say, where there is trust, interpersonal trust trumps like-mindedness.

Individual safety comes from the sense that sharing will not rob me of something I value, such as credibility, recognition, or respect. If the organization rewards me explicitly for inventing my own solutions, I’ll close myself to input from others. If the organization rewards me explicitly for being the “subject matter expert,” I’ll hold knowledge close to the chest until I know I’ll “get the credit.” These hold-back behaviors come from outside the social media world, and spill over into that world, in the form of absent experts, opaque comments, and grandstanding.

She concludes that whatever tools or techniques you bring to a your organization, “only when leaders encourage inquiry (versus defensiveness), welcome diversity (versus group-think), and invite respect (versus judgment)” will people fully engage with social media at work.

Do you agree?

Image courtesy Flickr user Scott McLeod

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The impact of social tools on the enterprise

Simon Mackie — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 18:00:28 +0000

Following on from the massive success of social apps like Facebook and Twitter in the consumer space, over the past couple of years we’ve seen a new wave of social networking tools, such as Yammer, tibbr, present.ly, Socialtext and Salesforce.com’s Chatter hoping to capture similar successes in the enterprise market. These tools are attractive to businesses looking for new, more efficient ways to communicate and capture knowledge and offer potentially great benefits: the ability to break down information silos and to flatten traditional organizational structures by stripping out management layers. But in reality, will these new enterprise social tools reduce hierarchy, or will they just provide a way for employees to “goof off” during work hours? To find out, I decided to speak with some organizations that have implemented and being using enterprise social networking software for a while, including Deloitte Australia, the American Automobile Association, and the American Hospital Association, about the tools they use and the impact they’ve had on the organizations themselves, and I’ve detailed my findings in Measuring the effects of social tools in the enterprise over on GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

All of the companies I spoke to reported similar benefits from their adoption of social tools:

Breaking down silos
Connecting like-minded individuals
Reduced need for meetings
Leadership access and buy-in

Given the benefits reported, and generally positive senior management sentiment towards these tools, I think we’ll see much more widespread adoption in a short space of time.

To get the complete detail on how social tools are transforming the companies that use them, the benefits the companies reported, and patterns of adoption, check out the full article over on GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

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As email passes 40, is a midlife crisis in the cards?

Andy McLoughlin — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 12:04:56 +0000

A few weeks ago, electronic mail, or email as it’s now affectionately known, hit the respectable age of 40. When Ray Tomlinson, a young computer engineer, sent the first email in 1971, he could only have guessed how it would impact the way we communicate in both our business and personal lives.

Email has transformed the way people shop, bank, communicate with family members and do business. Now an essential tool for approximately one billion mobile workers across the globe, email continues to dominate the way in which we communicate.

Four decades since the first message – believed to be “QWERTYUIOP” – email seems to be going strong. But is it about to hit a midlife crisis? With web workers now using more sophisticated collaborative apps and social business tools to communicate and share information, are we going to see email’s reign come to an end?

Email is a great communication tool. You can get in touch with business colleagues, family and friends at the touch of a button. Gone are the days of waiting by the front door for a letter from uncles and aunties across the globe, or sitting by a fax machine waiting for that signed document to come back from a client’s legal team. However, email isn’t a collaboration tool. Anyone who has tried to collate feedback from numerous colleagues on a document over email knows how painful the process can be. No one seems to remember which version the team is working on and there is always that one person who sends over some (supposedly) final amendments overnight. Hours can be wasted waiting for emails to go back and forth, searching through inboxes for missing documents, and putting large files onto CDs, USB sticks or FTP servers due to file size restrictions.

It is little wonder then that web workers across the globe are turning to the likes of Dropbox for storing and sharing files. Store your files on one computer, and they’ll automatically appear on your other computers with Dropbox installed. Simple. Indeed, Apple has finally joined the party and realized that emailing photos from your phone was so 2010 — its forthcoming iCloud service will provide a far smarter way to move your content between devices. Evernote is another popular tool with remote workers, enabling you to quickly capture anything. Whether it’s a photo, a screenshot or a web site, whatever you capture is stored, processed and made searchable. And, of course, there’s Huddle. Being cloud-based, Huddle enables you to manage your projects, files and people on any device, from any location.

With social networks making it so easy to stay in touch and share information with people in their personal lives, the demand for such simplicity in the workplace has increased. Take Facebook, for example: You can message your friends, share your photos and videos (and every other aspect of your life should you so wish), and co-ordinate events from wherever you are. With more than 500 million active Facebook users spending 700 billion minutes per month on the site, and more than 200 million people tweeting, email’s grip on our personal lives may well be coming to an end.

For business, however, it’s a different matter. Yes, there are tools being used to make our working lives easier, but removing email from the workplace completely will require more than just introducing intuitive, easy-to-use tools in the office. It requires a change in habit. Email is deeply entrenched in our daily working lives and moving to other tools will require a culture shift. Any new tools and services need to be integrated into processes from the outset of a project / program / campaign so that people become accustomed to using an alternative tool. And this is before you start the mammoth task of introducing client and partner companies to your amazing new tool. While email may not dominate workplace communication in another 40 years, there’s life in it yet!

Andy McLoughlin, Co-founder and EVP Strategy at Huddle, can be reached on Twitter @Bandrew.

Photo courtesy Flickr user ilamont.com.

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