Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2013 – Day 1

Dion Hinchcliffe opened the conference but since I was stuck in the Paris traffic jam I was only able to listen to the last minutes of his talk. He named Jive, IBM Connections and Slaesforce Chatter as most used enterprise social networking (ESN) tools. As a result of the benchlearning project social intranet (#blp12) we created an “Enterprise 2.0 Flower” with the top 8 categories of tools used by the project participants and the mostly named software packages. Since Chatter is not in the flower model I will look it up later on. Dion had a good collection of facts and figures about Enterprise 2.0 in his presentation (hopefully he will publish it in his blog).

Robert Shaw told the story of Atos' zero email program. They evaluated about 200 social software tools and felt that about 80 would fit the company's needs. In the end they came up with a short list of two and decided use bluekiwi (in fact they bought the company). The rollout activities are all around communities with a given purpose (departements, projects, interest groups) and roles like global community managers, business unit community managers and community leaders. The main goal of the approach is to reduce the usage of email (use case: email detox) since the 70k employee company sends about a billion(!) emails per year with each employee has to spend 2-3 hours to handle his inbox a day.

Sandy Carter (Weblog) from IBM showed the IBM social business agenda (I still do not like the term and prefer Enterprise 2.0), a set of questions you should ask yourself before starting an E2.0 program. IBM is also providing a “sell your boss kit” with facts and cases to convince managers that social media is a relevant thing to do (are they not convinced yet? :) This might be important since according to Sandy 79% of the companies use or plan to use social software but only 22% of middle managers feel prepared and only 27% of the companies have dedicated E2.0 roles. Ther is,also a readiness checklist to assess the cultural readiness of an organization. Sandy showed cases like McKinsey, TD Bank (WOW story community) and the Digital IBMer Hub in her talk. IBM suggest that organizations establish a “digital council” with compliance and legal being part of it.

From the panel discussion with all the speakers for me the most important issue that we begin to live in a “World 2.0” with new principles and rules of operation and success. So Enterprise 2.0 is not only about innovation in a company's ICT infrastructure but about responding to a changing environment and learning about the new success factors (and even factors of survival). I think therefore we need to think about how a “Management 2.0” has to look like. And by managment I do not only mean the managers or top managers but also management functions like project managment, process management, innovation managment and even the self-management of knowledge workers.

After the coffee break Louis-Pierre Guillaume from Schneider Electric (about 140.000 employees) present their community approach as an attempt to push social learning. They define a community as a group of people who share a interest, craft, or profession (quite similar to Etienne Wengers original definition). Mai n goal of communities is to share collective intelligence, to have fun, collaborate, share knowledge and to network across functions and businesses. The program Communities@Work defined a community lifecycle (need, design, launch, maturity, closing). The responsible person in a community is called community leader (not a community manager). The community leaders are responsible for driving dynamic, ensure facilitation, keep activities relevant to the group, encourage participants, foster trust and collaboration and share community results and sucess stories. About 22 communities have been launched so far. We call theese community aproaches “engineered” in “contrast to “organic” or “hybrid” community approaches.

Harald Schirmer from Continental (Corporate HRD & Organizational Development) talked about the social network ConNext. I already heard about it in our benchlearning project social intranet last year and in one of the talks at KnowTech 2012 in Stuttgart. The initiative started with looking at the corporate culture (this year every employee will take part in a 2×2 hours culture workshop). The CEO is really behind Enterprise 2.0 and puts emphasis on it at a major executive event (now the fourth year in a row). As software platforms IBM Connections, SharePoint, Sametime, and Omnifind as search engine is used. The evaluation project started in 2010 with participants from IT, communication, HR and quality/knowledge management. The project focussed on the person in the center, the individual share and the team share visualized in concentric circles (quite nice graphic). The role of a “guide” was defined as multipliers to help with language, bring in local knowledge and beeing a power user. About 200 guides are active worldwide who are really engaged (see also video of guide kick-off 2012 on YouTube).

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm-np_XNqMc&w=500&h=305]

After a very nice lunch session with french food and wine Martin Roulleaux Dugage talked about using social media for innovation at Areva. Focus is to access expertise, speed and agility, engagement, information security, cultural openness and innovation. In his presentation he showed a nice comic strip on knowledge sharing and collaboration from dilbert.com (again it seems the problems with intranets back in 2000 were quite the same as today :) Internally an innovation hub was launched on top of an E2.0 platform (Hyve) with a process of sharing ideas, a commmunity and a place to track own ideas. The submitted ideas are categorized with technical topics to match them automatically with internal experts. Innovation points are used to measure the activity level of employees. Basic elements are “innovation challenges” (campaigns with 100-200 people taking part) with three phases (develop concept, set up project, proof concept) and a duration of 4-8 month. Successfull projects get funding. After 3 month more than 1700 registers users, 65 ideas submitted, 12 pre-projects submitted and 2 patents filed. Two of the main lessons learned are to manage expectations of all stakeholders and to have a tight integration with business processes.

Jane McConnell talked about The Social Intranet (R)Evolution afterwards. She emphasized that she would wish that intranets undergo a revolution but because of legacies it will be a long lasting evolutionary process. In an intranet 1.0 the structure (hierarchic) and ownership (communcations, IT) are pretty clear. In an intranet 2.0 (social intranet) people are empowered and roles of management, HR, communications etc. are challenged. Jane named 5 reasons why social intranets didn't took off so far: no urgency (no “why”), middle management forgotten (we think senior mgmt buy-in is the main obstacle), no real empowerment (vision communicated but people are not really empowered to act on the vision), fragmented digital environments (siloed platforms, the social network can provide “social glue”), and lack of knowledge about change management (she mentioned Kotter's 8 steps). In her eyes strategic principles are more important than policies (“freedom within a framework”, the framework is a set of strategic principles). Recommendation by Jane: you should start with social media internally (Enterprise 2.0) not externally (Web 2.0).

Then Rawn Shah (Weblog) give an talk about work ethos, purpose, and productivity in the enterprise (he prefers ethos over ethics). The question is not “what's in it for me?” but “what's the purpose?”. In a matrix with expertise, collaboration and purpose as swim lines he showed that we do not have sufficient managment tools to manage purpose in organizations today. He suggested that we go from an production (industrial) society to a service society and connected this to values like creativity. I personally would be careful here because there are a lot of services consisting of routine tasks that do not need any creativity at all. I think routine/non-routine is the better demarcation line leading to knowledge work and the knowledge society with routine/non-routine tasks in production and routine/non-routine tasks in service delivery.

The last two talks of the day were by George Ell (GM of Yammer) and Oliver Jacob from Zyncro. Yammer was acquired by Microsoft in 2012 for 1.2 bln. and is now part of the office group. George had a very funny slide naming the “intranet a $ 4 million lunch menu” :-) He suggested to start a social initiative with topics that are already existing, boundary spanning and senior managers involved (e.g. sustainability, CSR) or to run a YamJam telling employees to use a certain amount of time every day for a defined time. He also suggests to test and adapt use cases in iterations of 2-10 weeks (which was also a result of our benchlearning project). Then Oliver talked about the next ten steps in Enterprise 2.0. I have to admit that I never heard of zyncro software before but it looked pretty good. It can be used in social intranets (enterprise social networks) or with external stakeholders (private social networks). Native apps for mobile use are available on all common platforms.

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