My Favorite Enterprise 2.0 Session: American Hospital Association

This was the session I was looking forward to the most but I missed it due to an early flight. Karthik shared some of his insights and content with me and it looked fantastic. In depth with models and frameworks and some actual tangible things companies could put their arms across.

I think the challenge is that every organization has it’s own way of doing things. For example every company I have worked with and interviewed stated that senior level executive support was crucial. Yet when I spoke with AHA I was told that this actually started off as a much lower profile initiative and sr level execs were not involved. AHA actually started this an IT driven project which I found quite interesting.

I’ve seen some orgs start with a pilot and watch it grow from there and have seen some companies abandon pilots. Based on the study we are going to be publishing soon we actually found that a large portion of companies just started playing around with collaboration and testing things out and then watched it grow from there.

I’m always tempted to say I disagree or agree with what other companies are doing but it’s quite hard to do so since I am finding,as Gil Yehuda says, there is no such thing as enterprise 2.0, it’s YOUR enterprise 2.0.

Jacob, thanks for your post. It was great finally meeting you at the show. Bummer that you missed Karthik’s talk, but I’m glad you got a chance to talk with him. Check out his video if you haven’t seen it already.
I agree that companies are different, but only up to a point. Different companies may come to Enterprise 2.0 from different directions: Top-down, bottom-up, big-bang, pilot, whatever. The universal truth that Karthik tapped into is that these tools only get widespread adoption when they’re squarely integrated into the flow of work. How that happens may vary from one company to the next. In AHA’s case, IT simply went out and did it. In other companies, the shift has been CEO-driven. In still others, it’s driven by internal communications or HR. Regardless of sponsor, adoption takes off when the company’s core processes and technologies become social. That’s the destination. How you get there is your business.

Yep, completely agree with you on that. One of the things I think Karthik addressed when I spoke with him is that, as you mentioned, this shouldn’t change or augment how people work it should compliment it and support it. If employees have traditionally needed 3 steps to accomplish something then the organization better make sure that this doesn’t increase, needs to remain at 3 or shorter.

Great post Michael!

Michael, the strategy you are suggesting is absolutely the way to go, unfortunately very often you are challenged by situations in which that isn’t possible. For example, I’ve worked with many big companies where they had for example very different tools without any chance of integrating, or in which they were already using other social tools.

A simple example of this are companies that rely entirely on instant messaging system with ad-hoc groups for managing almost everything.

What would you do in that scenario?

In my experience there are various strategies and all of them are very aligned with the concept you were expressing about the working flow: you have to find a way insert your tool/change into that in order to be part of that.

The three-point strategy you explained above is an excellent example on how to do that, but I’ve seen other strategies working equally well, both for consumer products and internal products. For example part of one of the sentences you used at the beginning is right for me: “start with a small pilot”. After that however you have to evolve it, instead of “letting it go”, because you can’t rely on virality (well, if it happens, not on that alone!). And thats a path that leads to total adoption, driven in different ways, as you were saying.

In the end, most of the time you have to start with the question: How could I add social dynamics into the existing flow?

And after that, you evolve adding psychological insights: motivations, needs and social usability.
As Jacob was saying: there’s only YOUR Enterprise 2.0.

David,
We agree philosophically, but i’d push back on the claim that “very often you are challenged by situations in which that isn’t possible.” When isn’t it possible? I’m not advocating some sort of forced march off of existing tools (IM or otherwise) which, I agree, can be extremely difficult in large organizations. If people use IM today, then embed IM in an Intranet experience that also includes blogs, microblogging, wikis, social networking, etc. Integrate presence awareness from your IM tool into personal profiles. Weave the two experiences together, and let user behavior drive the new normal.
Thanks for the comment!

Well to answer “when” I should get into details, it’s a very case-by-case scenario, but sure, most of the time “isn’t possible” means “it’s too expensive”, not impossible at all, so you have to plan a very careful strategy.

Also, in some situations you have very strong human factors, for examples entire parts of companies that use one tool, and others that use another one. Unifying means often again a very expensive solution or different strategies like building a layer on top, mixing signals, and so on. Again, every time is a matter of flow, and every time has a different strategy.

Davide you’ve hit the nail on the head: Cost. A more integrated solution is also a more costly solution. To put it bluntly, some companies have unrealistic assumptions about what it’s going to cost them to change the way people work. A large company with a lot of enterprise applications needs to spend some money on integration; I don’t see any way around that. On the plus side, the better products (read: Socialtext) have highly robust APIs that make integration economical to build and maintain over time.

Hi Michael,

yes, the best solution is the integration of all processes in a single platform, but as Davide wrote isn’t so easy. I have two questions. When you talk about “adoption”, do you mean just the adoption of the platform, the applications, the tools or the adoption of particular collaborative practices too?
In my opinion a good interaction design is very effective for an indirect social adoption. In other words, a good collaborative app produces in the same time the adoption of the tool and of the specific social collaborative practice. It’s an implicit process. Like twitter’s constraint that push the user to be a better minimalist communicator. A good platform with the right design could be very effective.
But in my experience, a good platform it isn’t always enough to trigger a co-evolution between user-platform and between group-community. The adoption of the platform and the adoption of collaborative practices and cultural code need more than a good technology and interface. The indirect social adoption is very important as a good usability but we have to work on several levels.
So, last question, what’s your strategy for a better adoption of the platform as a trigger to the adoption of collaborative behaviors and practices?

Gian, I take a fairly simple (perhaps simplistic) view of these dynamics. If workers are using social software, and if it’s helping them get better answers to questions, identify colleagues with relevant expertise, improve access to critical information, etc., I view that as collaborative practice. More important, I view it as good business.

Right. I think that the point is the implicit “how” present in your “if” (… if the workers do this and that, etc.). Same platform can produce different levels of adoption in different groups. In this empty space, between what is constant in the processes of adoption and what is different for each case, we can find the real value of a good consultant approach and good platform (from code to interface, etc.).
This middle space is where I work using Psychology applied to Interaction Design and to Organizations in Social Business Projects. I don’t want to make spam of my work, I just want to be clear for a better dialog
For example, recently I’m working on the process of social proximity as a basic cultural code for collaboration behaviors both in the group than in the community. Variables that are part of a continuum between group and community through the platform interaction and UX.
How does Socialtext work in this multifactorial levels?

Gian, I think you and I have fundamentally different approaches to organizational change. I’m saying that when implemented well, collaborative technology is itself a major driver–probably the primary driver–of collaborative change. You don’t have to do a lot of complex organizational diagnostics to create a more collaborative company. Just integrate collaborative tools into the flow of work, do a little evangelizing, and let the organization show you the way.

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I see.
Month after month, I think our approaches are different but complementary.
It ‘a matter of maturity of the market. The adoption of platforms and applications with social logic of incentive for collaboration triggers new needs and behaviors inside organizations.

Interesting comments. This leads to developing a compelling strategy and implementation plan. I recently posted an article in my blog ‘Enterprise Collaboration Strategy – 15 Key Steps for Successful Implementation’. I have addressed some the questions related to integration, adoption etc.

http://goo.gl/WiXPe

Let me know your feedback and comments.

Karthik, thanks for the comment, the post, and the awesome Enterprise 2.0 presentation. Loved the blog post, and have retweeted.

Posted a detailed post on 10 key adoption strategies.

http://goo.gl/IQxUz

[...] they actually referenced what service they chose – it didn’t really matter. I suggest you look at what Karthik Chakkarapani shared (it’s by far the most valuable and clear content on this topic), but here is a great summary [...]

“The universal truth that Karthik tapped into is that these tools only get widespread adoption when they’re squarely integrated into the flow of work. How that happens may vary from one company to the next.”

This is a really concise and clear way of saying this. I think it’s also worth mentioning two points:
1) the “how that happens” isn’t just dependent on the company context, it’s dependent on what problems you’re trying to solve. Integrating business applications and enabling signals/micro-blogging doesn’t require careful testing because it’s a broad problem of connectivity and efficiency. This is dramatically different from the needs of project collaboration.
2) because Karthik just “did it” (which I applaud), it also helped that IT was behind this. While this makes sense intuitively, I’ve found that from my experience, it is rarely the IT team that is leading the foray. They had the advantage of knowing how to integrate all the back-end systems, which helped them choose the right vendor. This is very different from a business unit analyzing their team’s needs or even a CIO running a requirements gathering across the organization. I’d love to hear more about how Kathrik and his team identified and prioritized different needs on the selection criteria.

For more on the value of a pilot: http://wp.me/p1CWCg-2g
For more on the role of different players in decision making: http://wp.me/p1CWCg-34

Thanks!
Josh

Josh, thanks for your points. Let me just pick up on one point that you make: that IT’s role was central to AHA’s success. This is an important point, and it challenges one of the the fundamental Enterprise 2.0 orthodoxies. From the early days of E2.0, the pundits were saying that these tools need to be implemented from the bottom up, as grassroots implementations. They pointed to a few anecdotes of grassroots success in implementing platforms. Now that we have more data, I think it’s clear that IT plays an incredibly critical role in standardizing and institutionalizing these tools. For more on this, see my earlier post: http://www.socialtext.com/blog/2010/10/the-social-software-grassroots-myth/#comments.

[...] they actually referenced what service they chose – it didn’t really matter. I suggest you look at what Karthik Chakkarapani shared (it’s by far the most valuable and clear content on this topic), but here is a great summary [...]