Michael Idinopulos

http://michaeli.typepad.com/

Michael Idinopulos is Vice President of Professional Services and Customer Success at Socialtext. He leads the Customer Success Team which is responsible for all aspects of post-sale customer delivery, including technology and customized programs to deliver training, adoption, and organizational change. Before joining Socialtext, Idinopulos was a consultant and global Director of Knowledge Technology with McKinsey & Company where he led the creation of McKipedia, one of the earliest large-scale enterprise wikis. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from U.C. Berkeley. His recent publications include "Do You Know Who Your Experts Are?" in Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning (Oxford University Press). Idinopulos lives in Philadelphia and blogs at http://michaeli.typepad.com/

Customer Success

Hospira’s Veterans Day Blog

By Michael Idinopulos | November 12, 2010, 6:28 pm | 1 Comment

Usually I use this space to advocate use of social software “in the flow” of work. I write a lot about business processes, workflows, incentives, and IT integration. Today I want to talk about something completely different.

Yesterday, medical devices and specialty pharmaceuticals leader Hospira created a Veterans Day Blog on their internal Socialtext implementation. It was something of a departure for Hospira, who typically uses Socialtext for “in-the-flow” things like IT collaboration, HR information, and professional development. The Veterans Day Blog wasn’t “in the flow” at all. Whoever set it up was simply creating a space for colleagues to share their thoughts and feelings on Veterans Day. No workflow, metrics, no ROI. The blog was active for one day.

What a simple concept. What a powerful result.

Dozens of Hospira colleagues contributed. Parents sent wishes to children deployed overseas. Ex-soldiers gave shout-outs to comrades still in the service. People remembered parents who had served. Veterans explained when and where they had served. People recognized Hospira colleagues working with the armed forces overseas.

Most posts came from first-time contributors. All were personal. The cumulative impact was deeply moving.

In this age, especially in the technology business, it’s easy to get swept up and carried away by the flow of work. I’m personally grateful to Hospira’s Veterans Day Blog for reminding me once again that work is all about people.

Customer Success, hospira, use case

The Social Software Grassroots Myth

By Michael Idinopulos | October 19, 2010, 6:19 pm | 12 Comments

Call me crazy, but I’m going to attack another another social software orthodoxy: the Grassroots Myth.

The Grassroots Myth is my name for the notion that the most effective way to bring a new social software platform into an enterprise is through bottoms-up, viral introduction.

There’s something very right about the Grassroots myth, but also something very mistaken.

Like all good myths, this is based on a heroic legend. The details of the story vary from one company to the next, but the central elements are almost universal. It all begins with a single, junior-level employee. I’ll call him Joe, after Joe the Plumber, the “common man” immortalized by a

Joe the Plumber, Grassroots Myth Icon Extraordinaire (Credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/38729188@N00/2987725752)

bizarre moment in John McCain’s presidential campaign. Joe is hard at work on a project or task that requires exchanging lots of ideas and content with colleagues across the organization. Joe sports an iPad and reads Tech Crunch daily. He’s tech-savvy, but doesn’t actually work in the IT department. Late one night it occurs to him that some sort of Facebook-, Wikipedia-, or Twitter-like collaboration tool could really help. So Joe does a little Internet research, finds a cheap or free hosted service, and –Voila!– that very night he is up and running. He posts some content and invites a few colleagues. Then, as the commercial goes, he tells two friends … and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on. Six months later, the whole company has adopted the tools and Joe is a hero.

It’s a wonderful story: the little guy who transforms his company through the power of a great idea.

It’s not quite that simple.

There are certainly Grassroots success stories out there, but they’re the exception not the rule. The more common experience is less rosy. Joe is working on his project, finds and sets up some collaboration software, and invites his colleagues on the project. His colleagues use the software to collaborate, and really like it. They tell a couple friends, but the friends are busy and not as tech-friendly as Joe. They like the concept, but can’t quite visualize it. They ask Joe to show them, but somehow the meeting keeps getting postponed. Joe launches the tool with another project he’s working on, and the same thing happens: the tool works great for the project, but goes no further. Joe demos the collaboration tool for his manager, Jane. Jane loves it and invites Joe to demo for the entire department. A few people ask Joe to set up accounts for them, but after a few days they misplace the login information and never go back. Joe continues to push the tool for his projects, and people continue to like it … as long as Joe is leading the charge. IT gets wind of the project and expresses concern that company data is being hosted externally by an unapproved vendor. Joe gets accepted to Harvard Business School (having impressed the Admissions Committee with his essay on collaboration). Joe leaves, and the company settles back into its (inefficient) email-based collaboration habits.

What happened to Joe, and why do so many social software innovators cling to his myth in the face of real-world experience?

I said before that there’s something very right about the Grassroots myth. That’s the content part. What you really want inside the enterprise is what I call “Content Grassroots.” This is distributed content creation from the ground up. This is the community that spontaneously forms around a shared interest in pediatric medicine, the engineering team that decides a wiki workspace is the best place to manage project deliverables, the sales manager who posts a photo in order to show a new demo booth to colleagues in other regions, the virtual conference that attracts hundreds of colleagues to a real-time brainstorming “tweet-up” on improving the customer experience. This is social software in action. This is where Joe really shines.

A lot of people confuse Content Grassroots with another type of Grassroots effort which is less benign: Technology Grassroots. Sourcing a new technology, platform, tool, or application via the Grassroots is an exercise in confusion and frustration. You end up with multiple solutions, all competing for attention. End users are sent to lots of different destinations, apparently for no good reason. There’s little or no integration with existing applications or data flows. Users don’t know which tools will survive and which will die. IT is concerned about security, performance, and stability. Organizational silos are reinforced, not diminished. Worst of all from a social networks standpoint, the company’s attention is fragmented across multiple tools, each of which struggles to achieve critical mass.

That’s where our mythical Joe usually fails in reality. When it comes to social software, your technology can’t be driven from the grassroots.

The most effective way to empower your Content Grassroots activity is to provide a single, unified, integrated technology. Invite everyone in. Integrate with company Directory and Single Sign-On. Integrate with other enterprise applications. Make sure everyone knows that it’s secure and it’s not going away.

Then let them blast away.

Here’s one way to put it: Content grassroots good, technology grassroots bad.

Here’s an even simpler way to say it: IT owns IT, and content owners own content.

Crazy? Obvious? Accurate? Stupid? Tell me what you think…

adoption, business value

Customer SuccessEnterprise 2.0

Social Software Adoption: When Good Companies Do Bad Things

By Michael Idinopulos | October 6, 2010, 5:34 pm | 6 Comments

Why do good companies do bad things to social software adoption?

In my previous post, I listed 6 things that companies can do to stimulate adoption of enterprise social software.

Make it your Intranet
Make it the primary destination for must-have information
Integrate with your company directory and, ideally, Single Sign-On (SSO)
Integrate with enterprise sear
Integrate with existing enterprise applications
Launch to your whole company (i.e., skip the pilot)

This advice ain’t exactly rocket science. And yet, few companies do them–even companies that are working very, very hard to stimulate social software adoption. Why is that?

One thing I learned as a McKinsey consultant is that organizational dysfunction is most frequently what causes good companies do bad things. So in order to understand why companies aren’t doing the most basic things to stimulate social software adoption, I went looking for an organizational explanation.

I didn’t have to look very far. I have met the enemy and, once again, he is us.

Looking across identified three fundamental organizational failures that explain why companies are sabotaging their own efforts to roll out social software.

1) Technology under-investment. Many companies got into enterprise social software with cheap or free wikis, blogs, or other social software thingies that were thin on functionality, integration capabilities, and administrative tools. “This isn’t about the technology,” people told themselves, “it’s about organizational behavior.” That’s true…but only up to a point. If you’re rolling out to more than a hundred people, you need technology that can stand up to the needs of your organization. I don’t mean just the “social” needs of the organization, but the business, administrative, and usability needs as well. That includes a comprehensive feature set like blogs, wikis, microblogging, corporate directories, groups, and social networking. It also includes back-end stuff like Directory and Single Sign-On integration, data security, technical scalability, and reporting metrics. Isolated point solutions without deep integration capabilities may be cool and fun to launch, but they won’t take you far.

2) IT-Business Misalignment. With the trend towards Software as a Service (SaaS) and hosted solutions, many line executives think they can do this “without IT”. I’ve even seen examples where an individual department or business unit launched a “secret” social software project that they kept hidden from IT. That may help “the business” get up and running quickly, but it’s a sure path to adoption failure. You can’t integrate with LDAP, make social software your Intranet, integrate with enterprise apps, or integrate with search without bringing IT to the table. Try to hide social software from IT, and you’ll end up hiding it from your end users, too–no matter how hard you try to promote it on the down-low. Even if IT isn’t driving the effort–even if IT isn’t managing the service–they still need to be at the table, and committed to the project’s success.

3) Innovation Marginalization. Because social software is innovative, companies sometimes think and talk about it in ways which marginalize it as a mere experiment. “This is a cool, crazy experiment. We’re just going to put it out there and see what happens. In a few months we’ll decide what to do with it.” This messaging appeals to innovators and early adopters, but it turns off everyone else. Why should they invest time learning a system that might not stick around? Why should they build content and processes around something that could be gone next quarter? When you position social software as a core part of your company’s technology capabilities, that’s when your colleagues in the mainstream will pay attention and start to use it.

Taken as a group these organizational factors explain why companies set themselves up for social software failure. Are you having trouble achieving social software adoption? If so, take a page from Pogo‘s book. Look hard look in the mirror. Which of these organizational failures apply to you and your company? What can you do to address them?

adoption, enterprise social software

How to Beat those Social Software Adoption Blues

By Michael Idinopulos | September 24, 2010, 6:12 pm | 2 Comments

Does social software adoption have you singing the blues? If so, you’re not alone.

In the enterprise social software world, everyone’s talking about adoption. There are breakouts on it at Enterprise 2.0. Lots of smart people are blogging about it. There’s a LinkedIn forum. Heck, there’s even a whole Council dedicated to it.

Why is adoption such an issue?

Most people blame their adoption blues on organizational culture. Eavesdrop on adoption conversations and you’ll hear things like this:

“Our culture rewards people for hoarding, not sharing.”
“People over 30 just don’t get social networking. Unfortunately, that’s exactly who we need for this to succeed”
“Middle management isn’t comfortable with transparency.”
“We have a culture of email that’s hard to change.”

To borrow a phrase from always-quotable Dennis Howlett: What a crock.

To borrow another phrase from the also-quotable Pogo: We have met the enemy and he is us.

Social software adoption becomes an issue when companies impose their own barriers to adoption. Not cultural barriers, but operational barriers. They sabotage their own social software aspirations by making the tools available in ways that are guaranteed to frustrate all but the most determined users.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: enterprise social software gets adopted when it’s placed in the flow of work, rather than above the flow of work.

I get a lot of nods when I say that, but most enterprise social software tools live very much outside the flow of work. It’s almost as though the company is trying to keep them as far away from the flow of work as possible. I’m not talking about complex workflows or business process engineering. I’m talking about dead-simple, nuts-and-bolts usability barriers that stand between a typical employee and enterprise social software adoption. Take a clear-eyed look at most social software implementations and you will likely find that:

It’s yet another place to go for information
It’s not required to get any job done
It requires an additional login and password
It’s positioned as a pilot, so everyone sees it as temporary

Given these barriers, it’s no wonder companies are disappointed with enterprise social software adoption. It’s almost as though they’re going out of their way to prevent their employees from using social software as a real work tool. It’s like they’ve invited their company to a fantastic party with great food, fantastic drinks, and a killer band. But they’re throwing the party miles away from the office in a place no one has heard of. They’re not providing transportation, nobody has a map, and there’s no GPS coverage. No wonder people aren’t coming.

If your social software implementation isn’t getting widespread adoption, ask yourself which of these applies. You’ll probably find that at least half of them do, maybe even more.

The good news is that these things are pretty easy to change. They’re not big, abstruse, concepts like culture, psychology, generational mindsets. They are straightforward implementation decisions, many of which may be under your control.

Let’s get specific. When I compare Socialtext customers who struggle for adoption to those who achieve mind-blowing success, the difference comes down to a few simple, actionable best practices:

Make it your Intranet. This is the single biggest thing you can do to drive adoption.
Make it the primary destination for must-have information: HR Forms,
the company directory, new hire information, IT support requests, C-level blogs. That’s honey which attracts people to your site–even
people who aren’t tech early adopters.
Integrate with your company directory and, ideally, Single Sign-On (SSO). People are busy. If you require an extra login prompt or worse yet an extra password to manage, you’ll lose a lot of them–upwards of
50%, according to some Socialtext customers
Integrate with enterprise search. This one’s pretty clear, but it’s remarkable how few companies actually do it
Integrate with existing enterprise applications. When social software provides a window into other enterprise applications, it moves
to the center of your company’s flow of work.
Launch to your whole company, not a small subset. Take a look at my earlier post on why you should Skip the Pilot.

Companies that follow these steps are doing everything they can to drive their employees to social software, rather than away from it. The results are striking. I predict–and this is probably conservative–that you’ll see a 2x – 5x increase in adoption when you implement these changes.

So which category are you in? Are you driving employees to social software, or are you driving them away?

adoption, business value

The End of the Culture 2.0 Crusade?

By Michael Idinopulos | June 24, 2010, 2:40 pm | 14 Comments

There have been a lot of great summaries of what was discussed at last week’s Enterprise 2.0 show in Boston. But for me, the most interesting topic was one that was not discussed: Culture.

That’s a big change.

Right up until a few months ago, Enterprise 2.0 discourse was dominated by a movement which I like to call the “Culture Crusade.” A collection of practitioners, analysts, consultants, and vendors alike have been saying that changing organizational culture is the key to successful deployment of enterprise social software. “If you don’t have a collaborative culture,” says the crusader, “all the tools in the world won’t help you.” The crusaders cited culture as the reason for failed implementations that led to the familiar phrase, “The tools were great, but we just don’t have the culture.” Consultants exhorted companies to make sure that their social software projects included a cultural change component.

Last week, the Enterprise 2.0 world turned a corner. Nobody pounded the table for cultural change. Nobody talked about incentives or change management. Nobody talked about transparency or modeling collaborative behavior.

Instead, people talked about process.

Eugene Lee focused his keynote on process. Mike Gotta and Marcia O’Conner talked about it in a breakout on microblogging. Rachel Happe, Dennis Howlett, Sameer Patel, and Ted Schaedler talked about it in our sidebar conversations and on blogs. The growing consensus: Social software delivers business value when it integrates with business process.

Process, rather than culture, is increasingly seen as the key enabler of social software in the enterprise. Rather than wringing our hands and gnashing our teeth about how to change organizational culture, we’re looking at how to insert social tools into the existing business process. Conversely, we’re also starting to look at how business processes can be redesigned and optimized now that these social tools are available.

This is the most pragmatic shift in focus since the inception of Enterprise 2.0. It will have huge effects on the pervasiveness of social software in the enterprise, because it shows a clear path to the business value companies can realize from their implementations.

I’ve been arguing for some time that social software achieves widespread adoption only when workers use it in the flow of work. Asking your colleagues to step outside their daily processes and tools to share what they know or network with others won’t get you very far. (Trust me, I’ve tried.) Bringing your colleagues collaborative tools and practices that make their daily processes better, faster, cheaper, and more interesting does work. It’s all about process. Improve the process, you win. Don’t improve the process, you lose.

We are far better at managing process than at managing organizational culture. We know how to study process, how to assess its breakdowns, how to re-engineer it, how to build tools that enable it. The shift to process means that, as they so rarely say in New England, you can get there from here. There’s a way to get to the types of processes and organizations to which we all aspire.

We also now have a workable approach to quantifying social software ROI. Business process, almost by definition, are measurable. Well-run companies know what metrics matter for each business process. They know how to measure those metrics. They understand the downstream effect that changes in their metrics have on the effectiveness of the process, and ultimately on company’s overall business performance. When we integrate social software into business processes, we automatically inherit the tools, frameworks, and benchmarks that have been developed in support of those processes.

For the first time, we can get there from here.

business processes, Enterprise 2.0 Conference

I’m not Gonna Pay a Lot for this Enterprise Social Software!

By Michael Idinopulos | May 25, 2010, 3:07 pm | 0 Comments

When I was a kid, there was an incredibly stupid (but apparently memorable) ad campaign for Meineke mufflers, in which various characters stubbornly declared “I’m not gonna pay a lot for this muffler!”

I thought of that ad campaign while reading our recent case study on Egon Zehnder’s use of Socialtext.

Enterprise social software is supposed to be cheap. There’s open source, there are plenty of low-cost competitors, and there are hosted options. What Egon Zehnder discovered, however, was that a lot of these options–even the so-called “free” options–weren’t nearly as good as they first appeared. Here’s how EZI’s Bill Hopkins describes it:

“Once you factor in the total personnel cost of implementing and maintaining a Sharepoint or some other major piece of on-site infrastructure, the price gets a lot higher than just the software. We didn’t have budget for dedicated FTE’s we could devote to this project.”

Bill’s thinking immediately went to the possibility of a SaaS solution, but he was concerned that a traditional hosted solution was a non-starter for the Firm’s leadership.

“Security is incredibly important to us,” said Bill. “One of the reasons why our clients trust us is because they know we are utterly, fanatically discreet. Often the very fact that we’ve been engaged to fill a position would be front-page news if the papers found out about it. From an IT standpoint, that means our data must be completely secure. There was never any chance of letting our data leave the firewall. It just wasn’t going to happen.”

Bill has put his finger on a fundamental economic challenge for enterprise social software deployments. On the one hand, companies want the comfort and security of keeping their data inside the firewall. On the other hand, they’re concerned about the ongoing maintenance burden associated with traditional on-premise installations. This tension is particularly acute for mid-size companies, who have all the same confidentiality concerns as their larger competitors, but fewer IT resources to throw at the problem.

The good news is that, as Bill discovered at Egon Zehnder, a managed appliance provides the security of on-site deployment without the ongoing cost of maintaining a traditional on-site deployment. You can get your organization–your entire organization, not just a pilot group or two–quickly, easily, and without ongoing support burden. No fuss, no muss.

You’re not gonna pay a lot for this muffler.

Egon Zehnder Case Study on Intranet 2.0

By Michael Idinopulos | April 30, 2010, 11:31 am | 0 Comments

Socialtext has posted our newest case study on enterprise social media: Executive search firm Egon Zehnder International. It’s a real success story of how one of the world’s great professional services firms has transformed its intranet from a crufty document warehouse to a dynamic forum for firm-wide collaboration.

Amid the globalization of the executive search industry, Egon Zehnder is using Socialtext to connect researchers and consultants world-wide for things like:

Current research on specific industries, functions, and executives
Up-to-date information on the firm’s work with strategic clients
Approved templates for engagement proposals
Current marketing materials describing the firm and its approach to specific types of searches
Thought leadership on industry and functional trends
Expert help handling exceptional searches, i.e., searches with specific and non-standard requirements

The case study talks in detail about what made Egon Zehnder’s project a success, including:

Compelling business case, closely tied to the firm’s strategic objectives in a rapidly changing environment
Secure yet cost-effective deployment with the on-site managed appliance
Tight partnership and alignment across Training, IT, and the firm’s leadership
A solution that took off like wildfire, because it met the needs of users

I’m personally very excited about Egon Zehnder’s success. Michael Kieran and I worked closely with James, Bill, and Ramona throughout the process. We witnessed first-hand the project’s evolution from a concept in London to a whiteboard sketch in New York to a global rollout to a strategic capability of the firm. It has been an exciting journey and a true partnership.

Read, enjoy, and tell us what you think!

Enterprise Microblogging For Fun and Profit

By Michael Idinopulos | April 21, 2010, 1:03 pm | 0 Comments

“It’s cool, but is it work?”

That was the question of the day last week when I visited one of Socialtext’s newer customers, Oxford University Press. We’re deploying to all 4,500 employees, and they’re a wonderful client: intelligent, committed, and keenly aware of both the threats and the opportunities that social media present to the publishing industry. I went to OUP’s New York office to lead a Lunch-and-Learn to help OUP staff understand how Socialtext can fit into–and improve–the way they work.

When I started talking about Socialtext’s microblogging capability, one of the participants interrupted to ask: “When I microblog on Socialtext…am I working or not?”

It’s the elephant in the room–not just for enterprise microblogging, but for enterprise social media in general. There’s lots of buzz about Twitter-like tools inside the enterprise. There’s also a lot of skepticism about that buzz.

The answer, of course, depends on what you’re microblogging and with whom. Like other social media, Socialtext is a vehicle for communication and interaction. So the question “When I microblog, am I working or not?” is a little bit like asking “When I talk on the phone, am I working or not?”. It all depends on what you’re saying, and to whom.

I find that most of my clients get started by microblogging about, well, microblogging itself. The medium is the message. But as a user becomes more comfortable, the message becomes, well, the message. It’s not unusual to see a progression like this as a new user finds her way into microblogging:

“Is this thing on?”
“We’ll use microblogging to share information.”
“Wow, I’m microblogging. Cool!”
“There are oatmeal cookies in the 10th floor kitchen. Come and get ‘em!”
“Does anyone have an electronic version of the slides from last week’s Sales kickoff?”

There’s a natural progression implicit in that series of posts, from testing to socializing to getting work done. Some users complete the progression, others do not. A couple weeks after launch, it’s not uncommon to see a separation between members of an organization who lead the way, and their colleagues who form the rest of the pack. Sometimes there’s a decrease in the volume of activity, accompanied by a marked increase in quality. By quality I mean that

Posts are related to work; and
It’s clear that someone (the author and/or audience) could get value from the posts; and
They’re not the kind of thing that could be just as effectively communicated via email.

Here’s a little test you can run. If you have a microblogging platform, search for the term “anyone”. You’ll find that it usually shows up in cases of exception-handling. These are cases which fall somewhere outside the organization’s standard resources and processes. Almost by definition they are relatively uncommon, but they can suck up an enormous amount of time because the organization isn’t set up to deal with them. A post with the word “Anyone” in it is usually asking for information or help, in an attempt to address one of these exceptional needs.

Oxford University Press let us have a peek at their data, and here are some of the results we got when we searched on “anyone” (reprinted with OUP’s permission):

“Does anyone speak Turkish and would be willing to review a translation for us?”
“Has anyone here in the UK got a copy of last Saturday’s Telegraph magazine?”
“Does anyone know when (Publication) official launch date is?
“Does anyone here work on (Journal Title). Stock has mysteriously arrived in the journals distribution centre”
“It’s time to learn more about web usability. Can anyone recommend any training courses, books, or websites/blogs?”

That certainly looks like work to me.

enterprise microblogging

How to Find Enterprise 2.0 Champions

By Michael Idinopulos | February 3, 2010, 12:03 pm | 1 Comment

Enterprise 2.0 champions aren’t where you think they are.

Many managers these days are trying to identify members of their organization who will embrace social media tools and practices within their organization. That’s a healthy development for Enterprise 2.0. It reflects a shift in thinking from the preliminary questions of Why and Whether to the intermediate question: How?

Unfortunately, many of the folks I meet don’t know where to look for their Enterprise 2.0 champions. A lot of managers find themselves walking the halls to find colleagues who “get it”. They’re not sure exactly what “it” is, but like Simon Cowell on American Idol, they’re out searching the organization for fresh, undiscovered talent that have “it”. There isn’t universal consensus on the criteria for “it-ness”, but here are some of the things I’ve heard managers say they’re looking for:

The Young and Hip: “Jimmy’s only 28. He grew up on Facebook!”
The Tech-Savvy: “Mary’s always got the latest gadget. She’s a natural for this!”
The Connectors: “Martin knows everybody. He’s the ideal social networker!”
The Visionaries: “Isabel is so visionary. She’ll totally get what we’re trying to do!”

These assumptions don’t lead to effective rollout strategies. There are three reasons for this:

These broad psychological categories don’t accurately predict Enterprise 2.0 adoption. I’ve seen far too many examples of people embracing Enterprise 2.0 long after their crystals would have stopped glowing on Logan’s Run. (If you’re reading this blog and you get that reference, you’re probably in that category yourself.)
They’re not actionable, at least not at any scale. If you’re trying to roll out across an organization of 5,000 or 10,000 employees, how are you supposed to know who the connectors are? Who’s tech-savvy? Who’s a visionary?
They don’t transmit. We’ve all seen the lonely social media evangelist, howling in the corporate wilderness about the fact that no one else “gets it.” Sooner or later that champion gives up, moves on, or simply trudges on in noble obscurity. The energy and enthusiasm of evangelists translates into organizational change only when the enthusiasm transfers. If that enthusiasm stems from the evangelist’s personal quirks, it won’t transfer.

The problem with these psychological approaches is that they focus on the traits of individuals, in the absence of any business context. They presuppose that it is something about an individual’s personality, experience, psychology, or talents that determines whether that individual will be a valuable contributor to your social media rollout. What it misses is the central importance of organizational role. Recruiting social media champions based on personal criteria is like recruiting for a football team on raw talent, when you haven’t thought at all about who is going to play which positions. If you just pick players based on their individual characteristics (speed, strength, agility, etc.), then you end up with a bunch of fast, strong, agile guys who are collectively unable to move the ball down the field.

There’s a better way to do this.

In my experience, the most reliable way to generate sustained Enterprise 2.0 adoption is to target business functions and activities that are structurally motivated to improve collaboration. In other words, look for individuals whose professional success in their role depends on the things that Enterprise 2.0 will help them do.

In her memoir, “Madame Secretary”, Madeline Albright tells a revealing story. Shortly after transferring from one agency of government to another, she found herself in the Kafkaesque position of writing a formal rebuttal to a position paper she herself had written. “You stand where you sit,” Albright notes wryly. In other words, your actions are guided by your organizational role, not by your personal beliefs or psychology. Or as they say in the Godfather, “It’s not personal. It’s just business.”

The same principle applies to social media. I haven’t seen strong correlations between enterprise social media adoption and age, gender, tech-savviness, political affiliation, sexual orientation, toothpaste preference, or any other identifiable psychological characteristics. What I do see are strong correlations to role. When it comes to using social media, you stand where you sit.

Here’s an example. Several months ago, we implemented Socialtext for a major global media company. Adoption ballooned month over month until it included thousands of users, with more joining every week. A little social network analysis revealed that most members of the community were invited, through one or two degrees of separation, by a single marketing manager. She wasn’t particularly senior, and she wasn’t based in corporate Headquarters. And yet she was transforming the way her company works.

We contacted the marketing manager to learn what it was about her that inspired her to invite so many colleagues into Socialtext. It wasn’t her age, her love of technology, or her gregariousness at cocktail parties. It was the fact the she works in Marketing. “I’m responsible for marketing a new product line that’s very different from what we’ve sold in the past,” she told us. “Our sales force is still struggling to understand how to talk about it with customers and prospects. Hundreds of people email me with questions. I’m trying to make it really easy for them by creating a single place where they can find the current marketing materials, get their questions answered, and surface issues with our approach. Socialtext was the best way I could find to do that.”

Like Madeline Albright, she stood where she sat. The demands of her Marketing role, not her personal passion for social media, made her an effective social media champion.

This isn’t an isolated example. In most companies we work with, Marketing “gets it” ahead of their colleagues. They’re eager to jump on board, and to invite their colleagues in Sales, Product Development, Customer Support, and other functions. That’s because their organizational role requires them to do many of the things that social media helps companies do:

Continuously maintain rapidly changing information
Answer questions and gather feedback from their internal customers (primarily Sales and Business Development)
Convene conversations about customer needs (across Sales, Marketing, Product Development, and Customer Support)
Elicit feedback on the accuracy of public messaging (primarily from Product Development)
Identify resources to help with “corner cases” (e.g., non-standard uses of the product, unusual sales pitches)

Because the Marketing Manager’s commitment to social media wasn’t a personal thing, it transferred quickly to other parts of the business. Other Marketing groups got wind of the project, and started posting their own content, creating their own workspaces, starting their own conversations. Then it started to spread beyond Marketing, to Sales and Product groups that had initially participated as consumers of Marketing content. Marketing’s cross-silo reach positioned them to involve different parts of the organization, which then went on to do their own thing. That would not have happened if Marketing’s success had been a function of one person’s passion.

Marketing isn’t the only function that works this way. Within every organization, there are multiple functions that are structurally motivated to drive social media adoption. Here’s a pretty good starter list:

Research (especially demand-driven research in professional services firms, e.g., consulting, accounting, legal, financial services)
Product Development (especially consumer, pharmaceuticals, financial services, technology)
Marketing
Project Management (especially where teams aren’t co-located)
Human Resources
IT (for Helpdesk-related issues and for internal discussions about what IT business needs and wants)
Corporate Communications

So if you’re looking for Enterprise 2.0 adoption within your organization, here’s my advice: Pro-actively target the individuals and functions where professional success depends on exchanging knowledge, information, and ideas across large parts of the organization. That’s where the real champions sit–whether they know it or not.

Enterprise 2.0 adoption

Transparency, not Anarchy

By Michael Idinopulos | September 21, 2009, 1:18 pm | 5 Comments

In a recent post, ZDNet blogger Dennis Howlett asserts that Enterprise 2.0 is a “crock.” It’s a smart and thought-provoking post, which has elicited equally smart and thought-provoking replies from Andrew McAfee, Thomas Vander Wal, Larry Hawes, Gil Yehuda, and others.

I think Dennis’s argument is wrong. But it’s interestingly wrong, which is a very good thing. (There’s a special place in heaven for interestingly wrong arguments.) Rather than tackle the’ entire argument, I’ll focus on my favorite part. Dennis writes:

Like it or not, large enterprises – the big name brands – have to work in structures and hierarchies that most E2.0 mavens ridicule but can’t come up with alternatives that make any sort of corporate sense. Therein lies the Big Lie. Enterprise 2.0 pre-supposes that you can upend hierarchies for the benefit of all.

The problem with this provocative sentiment is that Dennis doesn’t understand the difference between transparency and anarchy.

He’s not alone. Dennis has picked up on the unfortunate fact that a lot of Enterprise 2.0 rhetoric has a man-the-barricades, throw-the-bums out flavor. That’s particular true on Twitter, the blogosphere, and industry conferences, where the most outspoken advocates–Dennis’s E2.0 mavens–dominate the conversation. If you listen closely, you can hear La Marseillaise (or is it just Les Miserables?) playing on the hotel muzak.

But when you look at real Enterprise 2.0 implementations in real companies, a different story emerges.

Companies are not using blogs, wikis, social networking, or micromessaging to upend hierarchies. They’re not trying to introduce anarchy to corporate America. They’re not fighting a moral crusade to free the downtrodden knowledge worker from the tyranny of the org chart. But they are using these tools, and using them to good effect.

Successful Enterprise 2.0 practitioners have learned that it’s a mistake to radically realign accountability within their organizations. They respect, preserve, and even reinforce the roles and responsibilities already prevalent within the organization. If your job used to be to manage Tech Support in your company, then guess what your job is after your company adopts Enterprise 2.0? You guessed it: managing Tech Support. That responsibility is still on your shoulders, just as it was in the old days.

The difference is that Enterprise 2.0 gives you and your team information and relationships that help you accomplish the things for which you are and remain responsible. You can see who is working on what, even when you’re on different continents. You can access relevant information from other departments. You can quickly put your fingers on documents otherwise lost in the bowels of your email in-box. You can see and discuss in public the issues that your colleagues are already grumbling about in the company washroom. These are good things, and companies are adopting them because they’re good business.

When Dennis says that “Enterprise 2.0 pre-supposes that you can upend hierarchies for the benefit of all”, he is confusing transparency with anarchy. Put differently, he’s confusing information access with decision rights. (For more on the difference, see McAfee’s The Great Decoupling and Ross Mayfield’s Decoupling Decision Rights and Decentralization. Andy and I also talked about it a couple years ago in a memorable panel discussion at Razorfish.)

Enterprise 2.0 pools information, so that workers can benefit from enhanced access to their colleagues and their colleagues’ work. That’s transparency. But Enterprise 2.0 does not pool decision rights. Embracing Enterprise 2.0 does not mean that workers can assume decision rights that formerly belonged to others. That would be anarchy.

But fear not, oh champions of freedom and enlightenment, all is not lost! Enterprise 2.0 can still free you from the chains that oppress you!

“Hierarchy” is a pejorative term, often used to suggest that senior decision-makers are ignorant, out-of-touch, or otherwise unqualified for the responsibilities the organization accords them. The more transparent an organization is, the less likely that problem is to occur. Open, ongoing conversations with staff, customers, and channel partners make management better-informed, less isolated, and more engaged with what’s really happening in the organization and the marketplace. It’s easier to focus on what really matters, and harder for managers to succumb to yes-men and wishful thinking. And it’s easier for staff to understand management decisions, even when those decisions are controversial or unpopular.

When decisions get made in a transparent organization, we don’t call it Hierarchy. We call it Leadership.

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Michael Idinopulos

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