The One Year Club: Five Things Companies Learn After a Year of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption

enterpise 2.0

I’m attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I’m sharing my notes from this session. At the outset, organizations are often eager and excited about the benefits they anticipate from cultivating adoption and use of social and collaborative tools. But talk to those same organizations six months or one year after they’ve started, and you’ll hear a different story. Some organizations have experienced measurable success, others are struggling with a range of adoption and use issues, but all will tell you to watch out for several factors they didn’t anticipate.

  • Stewart Mader, Founder and Senior Consultant, Future Changes
  • Thomas Vander Wal, Principal & Senior Consultant, InfoCloud Solutions (speaking, just briefly, from a remote, undisclosed location.)

The issue of lack of capacity is re-thinking how you use the space. He used some urban design analogies, including community adoption and reliability. (Stewart’s wife is a landscape architect.)

Stewart advocates focusing on solving small day-to-day issues instead of trying to change the enterprise. Changing the enterprise is scary to most people. Mass collaboration is not the right way to go. (Wikipedia is a bad model for Enterprise 2.0.) Smaller groups of people who trust each other works better for collaboration.

Collective, community, collaborative, sharing listening and holding onto are each different activities. Different Enterprise 2.0 tools are better at some of these activities and not so good at others.

When focusing on the group, you need to know what type of interaction they need.

Never underestimate how busy people are and how easily they may dismiss a new tool.

Another myth is the 1-9-90 rule (1% create most of the content, 9% do some, and 90% are passive.). Its true for the internet, but not true inside the enterprise. (I also found this to be true. There is much more contribution when focused on a group.) Tools focused at the enterprise as whole, as opposed to working groups, will have fewer contributors. The tools will not have a hockey stick adoption curve that you see on the web. You will see steps of adoption inside the enterprise. You may see spikes of activity, especially after a presentation their use. But that use is merely exploratory.

Rules are for impatient people. See what works and adapt to the use. A pilot is the stepping stone to demonstrate utility and value. Case studies are nice, but internal use stories are much better. Adoption happens at the lunch table. Hearing it helped solve a problem for a person they know is the best sale tool.

Enterprise 2.0 tools are like swiss army knives. They do lots of things. You need to find the best uses. Give people permission and encouragement to find the best uses.

A wholesale replacement can often been seen as being out in left field. People do not like big changes. People have an easier time adopting tools that ease an obvious pain point. You need to fix a problem. The problem is a need. Focus on day-to-day problems.

Tools are the foundation. You need them. But you need to know how to use them.

Stewart ended with his analogy to dog “messaging.” See more: What Can Location-based Social Networks Learn From Dogs? Stewart seems to learn a lot about messaging from his dog.

Straight from the Horses’ Mouths

enterpise 2.0

I’m attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I’m sharing my notes from this session. The 2.0 Adoption Council presents the market’s first in-depth research on a representative sample of early adopters in large organizations. This session will cut to the chase on issues that have plagued pundits and vendors alike.

Dan and Carl conducted a survey of large companies that have been adopting Enterprise 2.0 tools. The companies all had over 10,000 employees. None have deployed to 100% of employees. But of course many, many companies do not even have email deployed to 100% of their employees. Most shop floor employees do not have email.

Resistance is real. Most of the resistance comes from users. In the survey 49% encountered IT resistance and 64% experienced management resistance, but 72% experienced resistance from users. Of those 38% overcame IT resistance, 40% overcame and only 32% overcame user resistance. So the user resistance was the strongest and harder to overcome.

Looking at management issues, the biggest issue is measuring ROI: 69% experienced issues with ROI, but only 12% overcame it.

The biggest issues with IT was the immaturity of the technology. 54% experienced resistance from IT, but only 17% overcame this resistance.

Lessons learned:

  • Enterprise 2.0 isn’t free
  • Driving adoption isn’t magic, it requires
    • resources
    • time
    • focus
    • money

The ROI is there. It’s just hard to measure.

Analysts on SharePoint 2010

enterpise 2.0

I’m attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I’m sharing my notes from this session.

  • e2 ModeratorIrwin Lazar, Vice President, Communications Research, Nemertes Research
  • Christian Finn, Director of SharePoint Product Management, Microsoft
  • Mike Gotta, Principal Analyst, Burton Group
  • Rob Koplowitz, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

SharePoint is a platform. The move from the 2003 version to the 2007 solidified the treatment as a platform. It is also getting better integrated with the rest of the Microsoft development framework.

SharePoint does require a big overall strategy. It’s not a lightweight deployment. But the deployment of lots of grass-roots deployments of Enterprise 2.0 tools causes lots of governance, privacy and control issues. SharePoint helped manage those issues. But the 2007 was flawed and caused its own sets of problems.

SharePoint 2010 requires top-level decisions and policies before the grass-roots content creation can begin. It’s tough to start small. Maybe the cloud version/SaaS model is better. It’s more agile.

Christian, after sitting quietly, pointed out that software is both a platform and an application. People to be able to use it right out of the box. He admits that SharePoint will not move as fast, but that means the platform is more stable. They are open as a platform, welcoming third-party add-ons to bring additional functionality.

The panelists agreed that SharePoint did a great job of focusing on things like records management. But SharePoint, with its 3 to 4 year development cycle, will always be behind the market. Christian points out that 3 years it the typical adoption cycle for software.

The Social, Mobile Web: Business Productivity in an Era of Twitter, Facebook, and Unified Communications

I’m attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I’m sharing my notes from this session. Clara Shih,founder and CEO of Hearsay Labs, which develops web applications to track brand engagement and accelerate sales on Facebook and Twitter. She is also the author of The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff.

Facebook is CRM, its the way to manage your contacts and stay in touch. She makes the argument that email is dead.

(I think this is a losing argument. You will lose just about everyone if you make this statement. So what if college students are not using email. They are not working inside a business organization.)

Companies are investing more time and money on social media as part of their marketing strategy.

She put forth that Facebook is the template for online identity. It has become socially acceptable to share photos, interests and demographic information. You can get to know people more quickly.  Now you also have the layering in the real-time identity.

The transaction costs of communication are being reduced. Email was cheaper than phone calls. Facebook and Twitter allow you to reach an even broader audience even cheaper. Especially, keeping in touch with weak ties.

She showed the tool she made called Faceconnector (originally called FaceForce) that pulled Facebook information into Salesforce. Essentially enhancing that CRM system.

Is Enterprise 2.0 a Crock?

enterpise 2.0

I’m attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I’m sharing my notes from this session.

  • e2 Moderator – David Berlind, Chief Content Officer, TechWeb
  • Jamie Pappas, Manager, Social Media Strategy, EMC
  • Bryce Williams, Social Media Consultant, Eli Lilly
  • Megan Murray, Community Manager/Project Coordinator, Booz Allen Hamilton
  • Claire Flanagan, Senior Manager, KM and Enterprise Social Collaboration, CSC
  • Bruce Galinsky, Director IT, Metlife
  • Greg Lowe, Social Media Architect/Program Manager, Alcatel-Lucent

David started off by point out that this session was set up as a response to Dennis Howlett’s Enterprise 2.0 What a Crock. (Although he didn’t mention Dennis by name, merely saying a ZDnet blogger.) The panelists are part of the Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Council.

Workplace Transformation.

The first topic the panel addressed was workplace transformation. Greg pointed out that Alcatel wants to break down organizational silos so that people doing similar things can find each other. He points out that in big organizations have a hard time finding internal expertise.

Claire pointed out that the tools are enabling devices.She points out that the tools are not an incremental change, but a quantum leap. She comes from knowledge management where the concept was to push information into a new silo. These new tools allow knowledge capture as part of the workflow.

Bruce agreed. The tools make sharing easier.  Bruce emphasized the need for speed and innovation in the marketplace. Enterprise 2.0 tools help.

Business Process

Claire points out that the 9-to-5 office has been eroding. People are collaborating around the world, so face to face collaboration is not feasible.

Intellectual Property/Privacy/Governance

You need to focus on the governance and compliance issues. There was some discussion of the benefit of open governance, allowing organization groups to get input from other groups in creating policies.

Companies need to start stop not trusting their employees. The biggest threat is from within. But you need to educate employees. Malicious people will find ways around the lock-down. Email is no more secure than Enterprise 2.0 tools.

Religious Wars (Technology and Generational Bias)

The importance is tools that are easy and intuitive to use. Some companies prefer open source, some prefer Microsoft and others IBM. People want the tools to communicate better to remove information silos.

Bottom-Line Business Benefits

The elusive quest for ROI on technology tools. The panelists agree that this is the biggest challenge. It is hard to show the direct benefits of collaboration. One panelists took the time saved approach to measurement. The tools allowed a project to be done faster. Another did a comparison of the time and money comparison between reply-all emails and a wiki. (Of course, this is soft dollars.)

Then the audience joined in.

One question was how you value the better decision-making that can come from use of Enterprise 2.0 tools. A panelist gave the example of how the company sent an open question on how to save money. They got lots of good feedback and money-saving ideas. The tools allow management to get better feedback and an ability to tap into the conversations happening in the organization.

Claire pointed out the need to find a tool that is “addictive.” Employees will vote with their feet and use what works best for them. Tools need to be easy to use and intuitive. And of course, useful.

My Take

Enterprise 2.0 is still looking for pays to justify itself. People that have used the tools (at least the good tools) do find them addictive. The problem is comparing the tools to email when it comes to ROI. The ROI for email was easy. Email was obviously cheaper and faster than mail or overnight delivery of documents. It was also cheaper than a phone call. The ROI for Enterprise 2.0 tools is much more elusive.

I think Enterprise 2.0 should look to some of the arguments for knowledge management. Sure, knowledge management largely died because the tools and approach were flawed. I find the Enterprise 2.0 approach to be the better approach to knowledge management. You are capturing the intellectual capital of your enterprise as part of their workflow.

Integrating Google Wave into the Enterprise

enterpise 2.0

I’m attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I’m sharing my notes from this session.

  • Andy Fox, Vice President, Engineering, Novell
  • Alexander Dreiling, Program Manager, SAP
  • Gregory D’Alesandre, Product Manager, Google Wave
  • Chad Wathington, VP, Product Development, ThoughtWorks

Greg started off, giving a brief demo of Google Wave and the concept. (I started using Google Wave a few weeks ago, but it has left me a bit confused. You can find me at [email protected].) Most other existing communications tools are a poor substitute for face-to-face communication. But at times, electronic communication can be better if you can get real time communication and enable multiple people contributing and editing at the same time.

They started off with no lock-down because the first thing most deployments do is lock down features and editing rights. He did state that the tool is currently very buggy and still being tested.

Alex came up next to show what SAP built on top of Google Wave for business process management. They built a gadget called Gravity. He has a flow chart, with each action box contributed by different people. He also showed an analysis gadget showing  graphs and charts related to the process.

Chad showed how he integrated his company’s project management tool called Mingle with Google Wave. He showed how you can bring data from Mingle into a Wave. They can also create a new task in Mingle through a Google Wave. Each task in Mingle can show the Google Waves that mention that task.

Andy showed Novell’s Pulse. Novell latched onto the Wave Federation Protocol that allows the serves to interact and allow real-time collaboration across platforms. Andy emphasized the benefits of real-time collaboration.

Greg came back and said that most of Google Wave code will be open-sourced. It’s not clear what the business model will be for Google.

Social Media: Policy Formation & Risk Management

Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco 2009

Today, I am in San Francisco at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference at the Moscone Center, speaking on a panel about social media policies.

I gave a presentation on Cloud Computing at the 2009 version of the Conference in Boston: Evening in the Cloud and Compliance and a presentation on blogging at the 2008 version of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston: What Blogging Brings to Business.

I was happy to hear that the conference was still interested in having me, even though I have been moving away from the Enterprise 2.0 space.

Here is the session description for today’s panel presentation:

Policy formation, risk management, media relations, and governance programs become a critical requirement as organizations assess implications to the enterprise arising from employee participation in social networking sites and use of media. Issues related to security, confidentiality, intellectual property, data loss protection, brand image, compliance, and human resources (i.e., ethics/conduct) are critical to address before problems arise.

  • e2 Moderator – Mike Gotta, Principal Analyst, Burton Group
  • Speaker – Christopher Burgess, Senior Security Advisor, Cisco
  • Speaker – Doug Cornelius, Chief Compliance Officer, Beacon Capital Partners (that’s me)
  • Speaker – Scott Mark, Enterprise Application Architect, Medtronic

First up, we plan to ask the audience whether they are interested in policy issue for internal deployments (Enterprise 2.0) or issues related to public uses (Web 2.0). The session description is broad enough that attendees may be expecting either. As it happens, most of the same issues are present in Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0. The conference itself has been including both. Since many of the innovations are coming from the public web 2.0 side, ahead of the enterprise side.

Rather than put the audience to sleep with a bunch of PowerPoint presentations, we are planning a discussion of the issues. Since I needed to organize my talking points, I figured I would make them into a blog post so that I could find them.

Having a Social Media Policy

From my perspective, the first thing a company needs to decide is what stance to take on the use of these tools: Pro, Con, or Neutral. Few companies are ready to fully embrace 2.0 tools.

Regardless of the stance it is important to have a policy for social media tools. Blocking access, by itself, is not a policy. It is easy to access the sites from a mobile device of home computer. Blocking access on the office network is just an annoyance.

The policy can also act as an educational tool for the employees of the company.

Security, Confidentiality, Data Loss Protection

These concerns are true for any communication media or portable storage.  Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 do not pose unique challenges for these issues.

The difference is the main benefit you’ll hear at the Enterprise 2.0 conference; these tools make things more findable. Before Google, it was hard to find things on the WWW. Google changed that, making web content easier to find. Most Enterprise 2.0 platforms exploit some of the same things that make content findable. Remember that it’s not just the bad things that are findable. These tools also make the good things findable.

The importance of good policies and education is to make the good things vastly outnumber the bad things.

Off-Duty Activities.

What is personal? What is work? What is your time? What is the office’s time? Those are issues that most companies are wrestling with as the economy moves to more of a 24 hour economy. Regardless, an employer will have a hard time disciplining an employee for things they do “off-the-clock.” Here are some specific state laws on the topic.

Colorado – Colo. Rev. Stat. § 24-34-402.5: In Colorado, it is an unfair employment practice to fire employees for engaging in lawful activities that take place off the employer’s premises during nonworking hours unless (a) the activities engaged in relate to a bona fide occupational requirement or is reasonably and rationally related to the employment activities and responsibilities of a particular employee or a particular group of employees, rather than to all employees of the employer; or (b) the activities engaged in create a conflict of interest with any responsibilities to the employer or the appearance of such a conflict of interest.

New York – N.Y. Lab. Law § 201-d(2)(c): Employers in New York cannot take any adverse action against an employee on account of that employee’s engagement in legal recreational activities if the employee engages in the activities outside of working hours, off of the employer’s premises, without using the employer’s property.

North Dakota – N.D. Cent. Code § 14-02.4-03: Employers may not take adverse action against an employee or applicant on account of the employee’s or applicant’s “participation in lawful activity off the employer’s premises during nonworking hours which is not in direct conflict with the essential business-related interests of the employer.”

Overtime

If hourly employees are using these tools off hours for the benefit of the company, there is a potential wage claim.

Data Privacy

The European data privacy laws need to be considered as part of a Web 2.0 or an Enterprise 2.0 deployment. These data privacy laws regulated the collection of personal information and the transmission of the personal information to another country.

In the US we think of data privacy as social security numbers and financial account information. Medical information has also fallen into that category. But the European view of personal data is as much about your religious and ethnic information as it is about those other categories of information.

A deployment as simple as publishing an internal photobook of personnel would violate the European data privacy laws.

First Amendment

The First Amendment protects citizens from government censorship. First Amendment rights will apply if you work for the government. Otherwise, employees are generally free to exercise their First Amendment rights as ex-employees.

Internally, it is best to avoid religious and political discussions. (Unless your organization is a religious or political organization.)

Labor Relations and Union Organizing Activity

While employers are permitted to lay out policies as to what employees may blog about in relation to work, employers cannot implement policies that have the effect of chilling an employee’s exercise of his or her Section 7 rights under the National Labor Relations Act-, nor can employers discipline employees for blogging about “wages, hours, or terms or conditions of employment,” such as the company’s pay scale or vacation policy. See Timekeeping Sys., Inc., 323 N.L.R.B. 244 (1997).

Additionally, outright bans on blogging about the employer will likely be viewed as an unreasonable impediment to self-organization in violation of the NLRA. See Konop v. Hawaiian Airlines, Inc., 302 F.3d 868 (9th Cir. 2002), cert. denied, 537 U.S. 1193 (2003) (In this case, the court found that blogging that involved an employee attacking his company’s management and president online may trigger “concerted activity” provisions under federal labor laws.).

Anonymity

Although staying anonymous (or using pseudonym) sounds like a good way to keep out of trouble, it’s hard to stay anonymous on the internet for long if someone wants to find you.

Internally, there is little need to be anonymous. I have heard example of feedback tools that preserve anonymity.

One example of the issues that come from anonymity/pseudonym is the Cisco Patent Troll Tracker blog case.

Identifying Your Employer and Use of Company Name or Company Logo

Once you identify yourself as an employee of the company, what you publish will be associated with the company.

One should also consider what happens to Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 content when an employee leaves. Internal is easier to deal with since the employee has left. It is easy enough to keep the content published and the user id showing that the person left the company.

With Web 2.0, there are more issues to consider. Can the employee take a blog with them? If it is on their domain, the company will have a hard time stopping them from taking it with them. If the blog is on a company domain or subdomain, it’s probably going to stay with the company.

Productivity Drain

There are some legitimate concerns that employee productivity will be diminished when they are allowed to use web 2.0 tools or Enterprise 2.0 tools are deployed internally. You need to be prepared to address these concerns.

Recommendations

A true recommendation is generally a good thing. There are specific regulatory limitations for lawyers and registered investment advisers using public recommendations.

If a supervisor gives an employee a good recommendation on LinkedIn, it will be hard to later discharge the employee for poor performance.

Criticizing the Company

Some criticism can be considered whistle-blowing and be subject to legal protections. If the employee’s negative comments concern the employee’s reasonably held belief that the company is engaging in illegal activity, the employee may also be protected under whistleblower protection laws.

Monitoring and Discipline

One of the key reasons for adopting a policy is to discipline for bad behavior. The policy sets the behavior standard. Employees are expected to live up to that standard.

The other use of the policy is for eduction. The better purpose for a policy to prevent the person from partaking in the bad behavior at the onset.

Using E 2.0 tools to Draft

One thing I encourage is to use the enterprise 2. 0 tools to help draft the policy. Put a draft policy up on a blog for comment.

Examples of Social Media Policies

Here are some good examples in helping to draft your own policy:

Further Reading on Social Media Policies

Some more reading for you:

Doug’s Collection of Social Media Policies and Articles:
http://delicious.com/dougcornelius/blogging_policy

Join Me at Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise 2.0 SF

On November 4, I will be out in San Francisco at the West Coast Enterprise 2.0 Conference on this panel:

Social Media: Policy Formation and Risk Management

Policy formation, risk management, media relations, and governance programs become a critical requirement as organizations assess implications to the enterprise arising from employee participation in social networking sites and use of media. Issues related to security, confidentiality, intellectual property, data loss protection, brand image, compliance, and human resources (i.e., ethics/conduct) are critical to address before problems arise. In this panel session, Principal Analyst Mike Gotta of Burton Group will moderate a discussion with practitioners involved in social media strategies.

I will be on a panel with these folks:

  • Mike Gotta of Burton Group
  • Christopher Burgess, Cisco – Senior Security Advisor
  • Scott Mark, Medtronic – Enterprise Application Architect

Free and Law Firms

free the future of a radical price by Chris Anderson

I just finished reading Chris Anderson’s new book: Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Given that I am a lawyer, I kept thinking about how his concepts apply to law firms.

Let me say a few things up front.

First, this is an excellent book that will make you think about how these concepts apply to your business. For my prior employer, a large law firm I saw lots of trends in the book.

Second, I am part of an example that Chris uses to defend his hypothesis: GeekDad. Chris started GeekDad as the parenting blog for Wired magazine. The blog is led by Ken Denmead as editor who gets a nominal retainer. The rest of the contributors are unpaid volunteers writing for a magazine conglomerate that makes good money selling ads on GeekDad. I am one of those volunteer contributors. (You can see my name in the list of core contributors in right-hand column.)

Third, Chris does not take the position that everything should be free. He merely points out that more things now can be, thanks to the reduced costs of computer power, storage and networking.

Fourth, I paid for the book out of my own pocket. Free, the book is not free. Free, an abridged audio version is free online.

The Long Tail

Free is an extension of his previous book: The Long Tail. In that book he showed how the sale of large quantity of less popular titles can collectively sell as much as the few popular titles. You can make this work when you have cheap storage. Free takes the next step of what happens when your marginal production costs get close to zero.

There are many studies that show there is a big difference between something costing very little and something costing zero. Therefore you will attract a bigger audience if you round down. With electronic distribution, the marginal cost for adding the next customer is close to zero. So Chris says round down.

How Do You Make Money?

Chris outlines 50 different ways that you can make money even when you are giving away some of your product. Chris does not advocate giving away everything, just some of the things when the marginal cost is close to zero. One of the big distinctions is whether your product is atoms or bits. Atoms are expensive to produce and distribute. Bits are not.

He divides the idea of Free into four categories: cross-subsidies (give away the razor, sell the blade); advertising-supported services (from radio and television to websites); freemium (a small subset of users pay for a premium version of something, supporting a free version for the rest); and non-monetary markets (in which participants motivated by non-financial considerations develop things like Wikipedia and GeekDad).

Freemium is the model that Chris seems most in favor of. You give away a limited version of the product, but charge for the full version, add-ons and enhancements. SocialText just adopted that model for their wiki product: Free for 50. You can use a limited version of the product with up to fifty people at no charge. That freemium model got me using it.

Information is Expensive but Wants to be Free

Chris quotes Stewart Brand:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

What about law firms?

Let’s look at the most extreme examples, Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe‘s free business formation contracts and Wilson Sonsini’s Term Sheet Generator. There’s no cost to use the forms and no registration required to download them. Businesses can use them free. Other lawyers can use the forms as if they were their own and use them to serve their own clients. But the free product may help capture business. There are big segments of the legal market that can’t afford to hire these firms. Now, a business using these may be more likely to use the firm because some of the work has already been done. The firms could charge far less to review a completed form than if the firm were to begin the incorporation from scratch. It may offer them a competitive advantage if opposing counsel presents them with one of their own forms.

But those examples are new and few.

There is an incredibly common freemium model adopted by almost every law firm: Client Alerts.

When you had to mail these alerts there was a dollar cost associated with that distribution. To better phrase that, there was a stamp cost associated with distribution. Now distribution are costs are minimal. The costs are the same whether you email it to 500 people or 50,000 people. The same is true with viewing it on the law firm’s website.

I think it is quaint that some law firms still use the “client alert” label. I get more alerts from firms that do not represent me, than I do from the firms that do represent me.

Lawyers and their firms are giving away this valuable legal insight in the hopes that you will hire them to represent you in a matter related to the information in their publication. They use the publications to showcase their expertise, but in the process give away some of their substantive knowledge.

The book is worth reading. You should start thinking about how free may affect your business.

References:

He divides the idea of Free into four categories: cross-subsidies (give away the razor, sell the blade); advertising-supported services (from radio and television to websites); freemium (a small subset of users pay for a premium version of something, supporting a free version for the rest); and non-monetary markets (in which participants motivated by non-financial considerations develop things like Wikipedia and <a href=”http://www.wired.com/geekdad”>GeekDad</a>).