My grandfather never used computers, and he died when "wiki" was still just a word in Hawaiian. But in a single comment he taught me all about Enterprise 2.0.

Grandaddy (known to the rest of the world as Phil Plesofsky) was a mild-mannered, old-school stock broker with a boutique brokerage firm in Chicago. He wore pin-stripe suits so conservative that once he accidentally bought the same suit twice. His television idol was Fish, Abe Vigoda's character on Barney Miller. When the office eventually installed computer terminals on all the brokers' desks, Grandaddy tolerated his grudgingly, as if it were an uninvited relative who refused to leave but couldn't be thrown out.

The firm, Freehling & Company, occupied one floor of a pre-war high-rise in the Loop. It was laid out as a single, open room with two long rows of desks where the brokers sat. A big board at the front of the room rolled stock prices as a tickertape noisily clacked out updates from the business news wire. Brokers submitted trades by sealing slips of paper in plastic cannisters, which were sucked through pneumatic tubes to the main office. (Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/molly/3077775845/).

One of the rituals of my childhood was visiting the Freehling office. Grandaddy would walk my brother and me down the brokerage floor, stopping at each desk to meet Irv, Norm, Jake, Stanley, and the other brokers (all men). They shook our hands, praised our grandfather, and told us how much we had grown since the last visit.

In the mid-80s, Freehling was acquired by a New York investment bank, who moved the offices to a brand new granite-and-steel high-rise on Lasalle. There was modern furniture and original art on the walls.

For the first time, the senior brokers had private offices.

When I visited the new office--a teenager by this time--I was impressed by the new offices. I complemented my grandfather on the big step up.

"To tell you the truth, I hate it," he replied.

"Why?" I asked in disbelief.

"In the old place, when a broker got a tip about an upcoming earnings announcement or a CEO departure, we all knew about it instantly. You could actually watch the information roll across the floor like a wave, going from one desk to the next, to the next until everyone in the office was talking about it. Now we sit in our private offices, we close our doors, and nobody has the slightest idea what's going on."

That remains the best description of Enterprise 1.0 I have ever heard--which is why I still remember the comment over 20 years later.

Many of us today sit in the digital equivalent of Grandaddy's shiny, new, and very private office. We have powerful computers with big shiny screens and powerful tools for managing documents and sending messages. We have BlackBerries and iPhones. And in one respect, we're more connected than ever before.

But there's something missing. It's all private.  Sure we can email each other. Occasionally we even take the bold step of picking up a phone. But there's no ambient awareness. There's no serendipitous discovery of what a colleague is doing. There's no wave of information that rolls instantly down the shop floor.

Enterprise 2.0 is all about leaving the private office and returning to that big, open space with the wave of information rolling from one desk to the next to the next)

• |
• Permalink

Most CIOs I talk to want to spend more time on strategy--not platform strategy or application strategy, but business strategy. The fun part of their job isn't about keeping the lights on or the servers cooled. It's about using technology to fundamentally improve the way their companies do business.

Strategic relevance can be a sore spot for CIOs. Although most line managers agree in principle that IT is strategically important, CIOs still struggle for a seat at the strategy table. Senior leaders in manufacturing and other operationally intensive industries understand the importance of IT. But in other sectors, line management has a hard time seeing IT as more than a back-office support function. That's particularly true in professional services, pharma, media, and other knowledge-intensive industries which traditionally create value through individual talent rather than operations.

Enterprise 2.0 is changing all that.

Managers outside traditional IT strongholds are realizing that wikis, blogs, social networking, micromessaging, and other forms of online collaboration are dramatically changing the way people interact with each other. Most of the early Enterprise 2.0 implementations were driven by non-IT experimentation. Use of Enterprise 2.0 tools has been heaviest in precisely those knowledge-intensive industries that traditionally discount the strategic value of IT.

As Enterprise 2.0 matures, we are entering a strategic phase. Companies are moving beyond their early, ad-hoc, unmanaged experiments, and trying to figure out how it all fits together--not just for an individual department or project, but for the company and its customers. As one client told me last week, "We've done more to advance the company's strategy today than I have in the past year."

If you're a CIO, your company is looking to you to show the way. How will Enterprise 2.0 change the way you do business? What benefits can your company realize? How will this change the way you collaborate internally? How will it change your interactions with customers?

This is a golden opportunity to move out of the back office and drive your company's business strategy. Are you ready?

• |
• Permalink

A lot of companies ask me whether contests are a good way to spur social software adoption. In my experience, contests can be very effective in generating buzz, awareness, participation, and enthusiasm. They can also be demotivating and marginalizing. It all depends on how you run the contest, and the right way to do it is counterintuitive.

The theory that many people bring to contests is informed by classical economic theory: If you want to motivate people to change their behavior (e.g., to blog, create a wiki page, comment on a thread, etc.), it helps to give them an incentive. The bigger the reward (or potential reward), the more likely people are to participate.

In my experience, it doesn't work that way.

I've seen companies run contests with relatively big prizes (e.g., a new iPod, a case of fine champagne), and I've seen companies run contests with small prizes (e.g., a $20 Starbucks card, a box of chocolates). In my experience, contests with small prizes are more successful than contests with big prizes. Small-prize contests generate greater participation, and that participation endures beyond the end of the contest. Large-prize contests generate a surge of participation during the contest itself, but that surge typically fades once the contest is over.

Why are small prizes are better than big ones? It's actually not that uncommon. There's a fair amount of academic research showing that rewards can actually negatively impact behavior. That's because participants start responding to the reward rather than the other social, moral, or personal incentives they may have felt before the incentive was introduced.

In one famous experiment, researchers found that local residents were more inclined to accept a nuclear power plant in their town if there was no financial reward than if they were "bribed" to accept the plant. In another experiment involving negative rewards, researchers found that introducing late pick-up fines at day care centers increased the number of late pick-ups, as parents stopped viewing on-time pickup as a personal obligation and started seeing it as a financial trade-off.  (Thanks to Barry Schwartz, who pointed me to the literature.)

These experiments support my own observation that social software contest are not successful when employees are motivated by a valuable prize. The wrong employees participate, their contributions aren't very good, and they drop off as soon as the prize is gone.

I still think contests are a good way to stimulate participation. Contests can focus an organization's attention on the rollout, and motivate new people to participate. But it's critical that the prizes have value which is modest or merely symbolic. By offering a small prize, you can make the contest interesting and fun, without introducing the negative side-effects of a larger prize. You have to give them something to win--not because they want the prize for itself, but because they want to win. (I'm reminded of the movie Trading Places, in which multi-millionaires Randolph and Mortimer Duke destroy their nephew's career and reputation over a $1 bet.)

So what prizes do I recommend? Here are a few ideas for modest gifts:

• A Starbuck's or comparable gift card for $15-25
• A nice box of chocolates
• Lunch at a local restaurant
• A bottle of wine

If your company is a little more fun-loving, you can even offer something on the campy side, e.g.,

• A Neil Diamond CD
• A cheesy trophy of some kind
• A dozen cookies hand-baked by the head of the department

Above all, keep the mood fun and playful. Remember, you're not appealing to people's greed. You're appealing to their creativity, their desire to have fun with their colleagues, and their drive for friendly competition.

• |
• Permalink

Mom always told me, "It's what's inside that counts."

Companies are finally paying attention to how social media affects their business outside the company walls.  They recognize the extent to which Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and other mass-collaboration forums present both opportunities and risks. There is excellent thought leadership on the topic, including Wikinomics, Groundswell, and Jeremiah Owyang's blog, just to name a few.

Less well understood is the value of launching social software inside companies. Tapscott and Li/Bernoff each devote one chapter, late in their respective books, to "internal wikis" and the "internal groundswell". External collaboration seems to be the main course for them, while internal is only dessert.

There are good reasons why super-smart people like Tapscott, Li, Bernoff, and Owyang focus disproportionately on external collaboration. First, external is sexier. External collaboration has far-reaching consequences for a company's strategy, and even its business model. That's heady stuff. Internal collaboration, by contrast, is all about working across silos and accelerating decision-making. Only org geeks like me get excited about that. Second, external collaboration has an obvious business owner--the Marketing Department--and therefore an easily identifiable market for books, speeches, and consulting services. The market for internal collaboration is more diverse. It can be IT, the CEO, the COO, HR, Corporate Communications, or no one at all.

But let's think about that. If your Marketing department is driving collaboration and the rest of the company isn't participating, then all you're getting out of social media is marketing. Marketing is a nice thing, but companies social media generates much more value when companies engage on a deeper level. You want your Product people to have conversations directly with the people who use their products. You want your Support people to talk directly to the people they're supporting. You want your Salespeople talking directly to their prospects. It's not just about marketing, it's about mobilizing your company to interact continuously with the individuals who drive your company's performance.

As the CEO of a marketing agency put it to me, "How can we collaborate with our customers when we can't collaborate with each other?"

Collaboration requires a huge cultural and operational change for most companies, and a steep learning curve for most employees. They have to overcome their fear of transparency, learn new tools, master new lingo and communications conventions, internalize new ways of working, and change their daily routines.

It ain't gonna happen by following Ashton Kutcher on Twitter. If you want your employees to embrace social media, you need them to learn how to use social media for real work. Professional and personal interactions follow completely different norms and patterns.

The best place for your employees to learn professional social media is inside the company. Thomas Vanderwal was right when he told me that social media adoption is all about comfort. Most employees are intimidated by the openness and transparency of social media. By launching these tools internally--within teams, departments, divisions, business units, etc.--you acculturate your employees in controlled, comfortable environments. You can train them, educate them, watch them, and even (horrors!) let them make a few mistakes. Once your employees get used to using social software inside the company, it's easy and natural for them to expand their interactions to include customers, channel partners, and even the general public.

I think of Enterprise 2.0 adoption as a journey through a succession of benefits. I've illustrated them in what I call the "Social Software Value Matrix." The first step in the journey is pure operational improvement. You're not really changing the way you do business, just enhancing existing interactions within existing silos. Over time, the tools lead employees to interact in new ways, across silos. This creates cultural change as the company reinvents the way the different pieces of the business interact to create value. Finally, and most dramatically, companies can create new interactions with customers and channel partners. That's business model transformation, and it only happens when your business is ready for it.

The good news is that there are benefits to your company all along the journey. By collaborating more effectively internally, your company will achieve better operations, faster decision-making, enhanced innovation, and accelerated cycle-times. Getting there is indeed half the fun.

And once again, Mom was right.

• |
• Permalink

Since Alan Lepofsky and I spoke last month at Social Media for Government, I've been having a lot of conversations with beltway folks. There's a ton of interest in social media in government. It all started back in 2006 when the intelligence community launched Intellipedia as a community-based forum for sharing vital information across intelligence agencies. I started getting involved with government uses of social media when I joined Socialtext in the fall of 2007. Since that time, the community has come a long way. Here are some trends I'm noticing:

Government folks are really jazzed about social media. Within all industries, there's some level of excitement and passion for social software. In government, it's off the charts. I think that's because there's such a high level of frustration with existing rules and restrictions. People are dying to talk to each other, and to free themselves from the restrictions that government processes have put in place. Intellipedia was an inspiration to many, many agencies and individuals.

It's not just Intellipedia anymore. The government community is savvy about social software. It's not just Intellipedia, and it's not just wikis anymore: people are talking about and using blogs, wikis, social networking, and micro-blogging. They're using proprietary tools for internal collaboration and social networking, and they're using public tools like Twitter, Facebook, and Wikipedia to reach out to the world beyond the Beltway.

The interest has an hourglass shape. Senior government officials "get it"; they see social software as a way for government agencies to be more integrated with the communities they serve. Junior and mid-level staffers "get it"; they see social software as a way to cut through bureaucracy and work more effectively day-to-day. The obstacle I hear about again and again is upper-middle managers who have internalized the need for minimizing risk, while not yet adopting a strategic mindset around serving the needs of the agency's external stakeholders.

People anticipate a major take-off with the Obama administration. Government staffers who use social software still feel like mavericks who are doing something that is, at best, grudgingly tolerated. A lot of folks I'm talking to think this will change with the new administration. The Obama campaign understood deeply the power of informal communities and was extremely sophisticated in mobilizing those communities. It's a reflection of Obama himself, the man Rudy Giuliani so memorably mocked for his experience as a "community organizer." A lot of people in D.C. now sense that social software is about to go mainstream in a big way.

• |
• Permalink

Some time ago, I blogged about the difference between in-the-flow and above-the-flow uses of wikis and social software more broadly. At the time, I argued that "above-the-flow" use cases fail to generate adoption for the same reason that knowledge management failed in the 1990s: because it's really hard to motivate people to step outside their daily flow of work and do something extra. My conclusion was that social software delivers maximum business value when workers use it to collaborate transparently "in the flow" for things like managing projects, writing trip reports, capturing meeting notes, etc.

In short, my attitude was: In-the-flow rocks, above-the-flow flops.
 
This way of putting this has been bugging me lately. I've had the nagging feeling that my attitude towards above-the-flow was overly dismissive. A recent conversation with Nat Welch from the Center for Applied Research finally clarified for me what my analysis had been missing. Nat pointed me to the distinction between brokerage and closure articulated by Ronald Burt, a business school professor at my alma matter, the University of Chicago. Burt describes the distinction this way:
 

Brokerage is the activity of people who live at the intersecting of social worlds, who can see and develop good ideas. Closure is the tightening of coordination on a closed network of people.

Put differently, brokerage is all about sharing ideas, drawing connections, and making introductions across people who don't already work together--contributing above-the-flow. Closure is all about improving the productivity and connectedness of existing groups and relationships--collaborating in-the-flow.
 
Burt's point is that both forms of activity bestow professional advantage on their practitioners and benefit the firms in which they take place.
 

Closure is a complement to brokerage such that the two together define social capital in a general way in terms of closure within a group and brokerage beyond the group.

We need closure to work more effectively on day-to-day tasks. We need brokerage to innovate and execute holistically across different parts of a common business.
 
On a pragmatic level, this means that companies should pursue a range of use cases for their social software implementations. They should build out above-the-flow use cases that stimulate innovation across organizational silos, e.g.,

• Competitive intelligence
• Best practice sharing
• Professional and personal communities of interest
• Personal interests and expertise location

At the same time, they should also build out in-the-flow use cases to deliver operational efficiences to existing groups, e.g.,

• Project plans, timelines, and documentation
• Trip reports, meeting notes, interview notes
• Standardized documentation of repeated processes

Our social interactions are defined by both, and our social software implementations should reflect that.    

• |
• Permalink

Social software is changing in ways that profoundly impact the way companies should approach adoption.

A year ago, the focus was on individual technologies (wikis, blogs, RSS, etc.). We are rapidly evolving to more comprehensive solutions that integrate multiple technologies into unified platforms for enterprise interactions. That's the insight behind Socialtext 3.0, and it's the level at which companies are implementing.

As the market has shifted from individual technologies to integrated solutions, we're also seeing a dramatic shift in the level at which companies are implementing. A year ago, companies were piloting social software for individual teams or departments. As the solutions become more comprehensive, companies are evaluating them for enterprise-wide deployment. They are looking to social software to transform their organizations--their entire organizations. They're trying to change behavior on a grand scale, not shake up a team or two.

That calls for a very different approach to adoption. Last year, everyone was asking what makes for successful social software pilots. Now it's time to answer the question at a strategic, company-wide level: How can forward-thinking managers use integrated social software suites like Socialtext 3.0 to garner adoption across their entire companies?

The answer is not "Do what you did in the pilot, only bigger." Company-wide deployments are very different from departmental ones. It's like campaigning for the U.S. presidency: you're not really running one national campaign, you're running 50 state campaigns...or 5,000 regional campaigns. Each of those campaigns has its own local leadership, demographic profile, issues, and economics. 

So how should companies approach their social software implementations on a "national" scale? Here's a starting point of six pieces of advice I've gleaned from my interactions with customers who have successfully implemented social software on a grand scale:

1. Encourage a broad range of use cases. Different groups will find value in different ways: finding experts, managing projects, surfacing ideas from the field, communicating to staff, building social communities, monitoring competitors, staying in constant contact with customers, etc. Encourage the diversity, while looking for common patterns.

2. Recruit energetic champions across the organization. It's very clear from the customer studies we've done that individuals play a major role in determining who adopts these tools and how. Enlisting energetic evangelists in their respective geographies and divisions is critical. You need both generalists who touch many different parts of the organization and specialists who can deliver deep penetration in local areas.

3. Launch the tools with hands-on experiences for new users. Social software is fun...once you try it. Don't just show it to your company; create a moment that forces them to actually try it out. Use large-scale gatherings (physical and virtual) to pull in large numbers of people at once.

4. Route repeated activities through social software. Use your social software to supplant email on routine information requests. Some of those activities should be common across the entire company, while others will be group-specific.

5. Integrate with existing systems of record. Social software can be a great way to enhance CRM, document management, and other structured systems of record with more free-form context, conversation, ideation, and socialization.

6. Leverage public communities. The Enterprise 2.0 world is changing fast, and your fellow practitioners are inventing new best practices every day. Use them!

Reactions? I want to know what you have seen work at a company-wide level!

• |
• Permalink

Stowe Boyd recently posted the following statement:

It came in response to a post of mine about Enterprise 2.0 adoption where I wrote that:

Boyd's drawing a really important distinction here. In our daily lives, we are all members of various groups: our families, neighborhoods, church groups, ethnic groups, etc. Also at work, we are members of groups: departments, business units, project teams, carpools, weekend soccer players, etc. These are collections of people--more or less dynamic, more or less formal--who share some common set of attributes, activities, or interests. At the same time, we all have our personal networks--the individuals whom we know and interact with. There is of course a lot of overlap between a person's groups and her network; we know many of the people in our groups. But an individual's personal network typically spans multiple groups. My network, for example, includes my colleagues at Socialtext, my former McKinsey colleagues, my neighbors in Philadelphia, the other parents at my childrens' day care, and so on.

When Boyd says that Enterprise 2.0 is about personal relationships in networks and not group membership, I think he's saying that the point of Enterprise 2.0 is not to enable existing organizational groups, but to empower and mobilize social networks for getting work done in new ways.

Who's right? I think we both are.

Boyd makes a really important point about social networks. Web 2.0 is waking us all up to how powerful it is when social networks are made transparent. From a professional standpoint, a worker's long-term career development,  sense of belonging, job satisfaction, mentoring and guidance, etc., are often driven more by social networks than by formal groups. That trend will accelerate as social networking takes off in earnest within enterprises.

But it's important to recognize that the fundamental unit of collaboration is the group. Departments, divisions, business units, teams, committees, etc., are the wheels on which almost all companies run. That's not an Enterprise 1.0 or an Enterprise 2.0 thing; it's a reflection of the fact that collaboration around tasks of any size requires continuity and accountability.

This isn't an either/or thing, however. The sweet spot for Enterprise 2.0 lies at the intersection of group collaboration and social networking. As I've blogged about before, Enterprise 2.0 has business impact when it's integrated in-the-flow of everyday work. For most workers today, it's their group work that's in the flow. Social networking becomes truly valuable--and generates meaningful organizational adoption--when it's layered on top of, and appropriately integrated with group collaboration.

• |
• Permalink

Everyone who works on enterprise collaboration software knows that organizational adoption is really important, and can be hard to achieve. Yesterday's Socialtext 3.0 launch has introduced an exciting new twist. In fact, I think it has completely changed the social software adoption game--for the better.

Socialtext 3.0 is going to appeal to non-power-users, or what I call the "I don't care about the latest gadget, I just want to do my job" crowd. It's not just the smooth user experience, personalizable dashboard, and global navigation (though those things certainly help.) To my mind, the real game-changer is the integration of social networking into the Socialtext collaboration suite. Socialtext 3.0 has bridged the gap between group collaboration and social networking. That is going to have a profound impact on enterprise adoption.

Finding people within companies, especially large companies, is a killer app. On virtually every corporate intranet, the Company Directory is by far the most heavily used application. It often accounts for north of 70-80% of intranet search activity. Even your least techno-savvy colleagues understand the need to find colleagues. So it's relatively easy to get a new user to try the tools.

As new users start to use the tools, they quickly wake up to the possibilities. Public social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are penetrating the mainstream over-30 crowd at a surprising rate. More and more people are realizing that looking a person up in the phone book is only one way to find her. Best of all, it's fun and addictive.

Once people try it, social networking has a unique ability to jump across organizational silos. Blogs and wikis led the charge of social software into the enterprise world. Those forms of collaboration are wonderful, but they can be difficult to scale beyond the department level. Individual teams and groups derive tremendous value from using blogs and wikis in the flow of their daily work. But the thing about daily workflows is that they tend to center around a defined group of members and business process. Even when one group is rockin' and rollin' on blogs and wikis, moving to another group within the same company can be a challenge. Each new department or team is a brand new adoption curve.

Harvard Business School Professor Andrew McAfee has blogged insightfully that social networking's strength is the way in which it discovers, utilizes, and reinforces weak ties across a distributed social network. In an enterprise context, that means that social networking allows people to identify and connect to colleagues outside the usual suspects. Since those colleagues are almost always in a different group, department, team, business unit, etc., social networking has a natural ability to span across organizational silos more easily than other social software applications.

Because of the way Socialtext has integrated social networking with group workspaces, social networking adoption triggers adoption in other areas as well. The actions of my colleagues in Socialtext People automatically directs my attention to the workspaces they're working in. That pulls me into conversations and documents that are new to me, and reinforces my use of other parts of the collaboration suite.

From an adoption standpoint, this is a whole new world.

• |
• Permalink

Dawn Foster of Fast Wonder Consulting recently posted a really useful, practical discussion of different types of structures for corporate communities. She puts corporate communities into three categories: emergent, highly structured, and adaptive.

• Emergent Approach: Community has little or no structure at launch, and a structure emerges over time
• Highly Structured Approach: Communities have a detailed, thought-through taxonomy at time of launch
• Adaptive Approach: The community launches with a few very broad categories, from which structure emerges and develops over time

Foster advocates the Adaptive approach in most cases as being the most flexible and easiest to implement. I wholeheartedly agree, and will chime in with a few supporting observations.

I've seen plenty of examples of communities that launched with a high degree of structure. Many of them worked...after a fashion. But these "communities" usually are really publishing tools where a few people post things and everyone else consumes. (I've seen this a lot in professional services firms, which tend to have large knowledge management or practice staffs whose very job it is to post industry updates, pitch packs, methodologies, etc.) This isn't necessarily a bad use of the tools; many companies are much happier on a collaboration platform than on a larger, more expensive, and less user-friendly Content Management System. But it's not exactly community.

I've also seen examples of successful communities following the emergent approach, but this tends to work best with very small groups (e.g., under 30 or 40 people), and where there's extremely strong momentum going into the project.

With respect to the Adaptive approach, I think it's very important to pick the right types of categories. Because of Wikipedia, many people think "structure" has to be something encyclopedic like industries, geographies, market segments, etc. But what I'm seeing in the field is that a structure is often most effective when it guides a user as to the types of actions or activities the tool supports. In that spirit, here are some structural categories worth considering:

• Instead of email
• Meeting notes
• Feedback
• Big wacky ideas
• Overheard from customers
• Questions and Answers
• Reusable documents
• Company processes

What other categories have you seen work well? I'm curious to hear!

• |
• Permalink