The Intranet that’s Social

Of late I’ve been spending far too much time than is healthy in some of the nitty gritty issues of a tactical deep dive with no less than 5 separate Jive Software installs and how they all connect with Active Directory, LDAP, synchronisation, permission structures, and the like. Added to this are topical projections on how to bridge them, create walled gardens, secure shared extranets and to connect to SharePoint, 2007 and 2010. And running along side this are mobile devices – iPhone, Blackberries, iPads and the like, integrating Outlook into the social layer and with these mobile gadgets, and synching it all with the Office suite.

Coming back up for air some thoughts come to mind.

1) The social intranet isn’t so much a social intranet, it’s an intranet that’s social. By this I mean the each of the data structures connecting to each other represent a sociality of things to which people engage at certain points.

2) An enterprise social network is aint nothing but a database with a nice GUI on top, with which people engage – they they engage with each other via the sociality of the things – Jive, AD, Outlook etc.

3) The mobile devices both fragment and unify the system

4) Microsoft holds it all together in the form of Active Directory (and that’s a lot of enterprises)

5) Rick is inherent and the only way of dealing with this is a flexible yet resolute approach

6) We live in interesting times…

All told though – what we’re creating, using, evolving and evolving with is a fluid layered and yet structured aggregation. And of course what I’m describing here is a mere technical layer, a schemata. What’s really interesting is not how this connects together, nor even how people connect together and with it. What’s really important is what they produce because of it, the physical, practical outputs it enables and engenders.

And what’s fun is this, we don’t know what that outcome might finally be…

I keep on seeing e-mails, they’re nearly always e-mails though one was a DM on a central Jive site, for a ‘space’. We need a space, can we have a space, we need some where…In all of these instances the desire is for a geography, a terrain, a sense of place. ‘My team needs somewhere to live’, they seem to say, can you make us a clearing in which we can build a site?

It reminds me somewhat of a vague memory of Martin Heidegger’s clearing in the forest where the density without needs an opening and thus an abundance of light. I think Heidegger may have been harping on about meaning. But then there was also the paths in the forest. Perhaps we call these streams, streams of activities.

And it’s these activities that are more important. Rarely do I see requests for an activity, ‘we want some activities’, ‘we want some action’, ‘we want to act’. These of course are the most important.

At the top of one of the 5 Jive sites I’m working on at the moment someone, the community manager no doubt though I haven’t checked who, has posted an announcement. This says simply: ‘This is not a document store’. This encapsulates entirely what is changing here.

There’s a shift, tectonic maybe, from working with a store of documents, to people engaging together with each other and these documents. Most people when they encounter these new forms don’t realise this, they want spaces, and sub spaces and even more subspaces. They then get so lost in the resultant labyrinth that no one bothers to find them, there is no activity.

If on the other hand, the focus is on the activity and not on the store, this simply does not happen. The need therefore is to start not with structure, architecture and taxonomy but with a structural folksonomy created by users’ actions. This of course marks the end of what to now has been known as the intranet.

The Strange Death of Liberal England,

George Dangerfield, 1935.

One of the things I’m quite often asked for is the answer to ‘what makes a social business / Enterprise 2.0 project a success?’ What the questioner is after, is often at heart what they need to do to make their project a success. In many ways there’s no definitive answer here as each social project needs to be approached, managed, evangelised and generally nurtured into being in different ways. I’m seeing this in no small way on my current engagement where I’m helping do all the above to no less than five fully-loaded Jive sites.

The diversity of this engagement is stimulating and it has also gotten me thinking about what the success factors might be to really make things rock. Or put another way: what do you really need in place and what do you need to do, to make a social business project a success?

What follows is an outline of some of these elements. One caveat: I’ve worked on too many projects where one or more of the fundamentals are not in place and so while such an absence doesn’t preclude success, it does make it that more harder to achieve. So the motto here is, don’t lose heart if you don’t have all of the below, they’re not all essential. And excuse the overlaps…

Infrastructure

1)  Use the right social platform. This will vary from environment to environment but select the one that works best for your existing architecture and processes, but also one that can help reinvent both. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and Forrester’s Wave are good enough places to start to review the options. And don’t just go along with what Comms/IT/Marketing (delete as applicable) say is best – do your homework.

2) Pray for a good network. If your employees aren’t all online, with decent PCs and good connections then your work is going to be harder. Not necessarily a bad thing, so long as you’ve innovative minds on your side.

3) Fully Funded. Most projects I’ve worked on have been strapped for cash. Having the budgets in place to support the project is very helpful.

4) Fully Supported. It’s a lot easier when IT support the project and buy into the social idea. (See below too).

Culture

1) Leadership. Get your leaders on board – get visible support, get them seen using it and spelling out where Social fits into the scheme of things.

2) Middle Managers. Get your middle managers on board. This is vital – they can and will spanner the entire project!

3) Ducks in a row. If Comms don’t already own it, make sure they’re fully synched in. Ditto with HR and Marketing. Get the 4 ducks of Comms, IT, HR and Marketing in a row.

4) Digital People. A digitally savvy, socially aware workforce is a big plus – even if they’re currently disengaged and fed up with the company as a whole.

Engagement

1) Engagement Strategy. Decide on how to engage with people. Map it out.

2) Dialogue. Always aim for conversation – this is 2-way

3) Business. Align the social engagement strategy to the business strategy – focus on the what matters most targets & aims.

4) Pleasure Principle. Doing business doesn’t have to be painful, leverage the fun side of social.

Planning

1) Share the ideas. Have a clear & shared plan.

2) Plan for Success. Decide what success looks like up front.

3) Measure it! Decide on how to measure success up front.

4) Milestones. Create aims and milestones.

5) Monitor it. Review at regular intervals, listen to what people are saying, ask them what they think.

Leaders, Champions & Users

1) Tell your leaders. Get your leadership team on board

2) Find your friends. Identify champions, get them promoting social

3) Create a Champions Group. Create a social Group to support your champions

4) Create a Comms Plan for your Users: who, where, when & with what channels

5) Training. Decide on how your audience will be trained & supported

Activities

1) Activities. Decide on a series of engaging events, projects & initiatives.

2) Gamification. Make the activities game-based, for example, blogger of the month, best video, most creative Group.

3) Challenge. Think of ways to challenge the users to channel their creativity.

4) Timeline. Create a roadmap of the activities with a supporting comms plan.

Make it Personal

1) People. Feature people at al times – a picture of one person is worth a 1000 docs.

2) Video. Moving pictures is what makes social, really social, bringing it to life – people like videos, use them often and widely.

3) Success. Celebrate success, show people what people & teams are doing.

Make it Practical

1) Day work. Provide practical examples of how social can be used in everyday work

2) Crowd Source. Show how other people are using social tools in their daily work

3) Structure. If there’s a best practice, make a structure or template that others can use

4) Create User Cases. For example, Projects, Meetings & Conferences, Pitches, Multi-Location Teams etc

Make it Aspirational

Think Big!

If you don’t think big, don’t worry – you teams may do it for you…

Pulling it all together

As I think pictorially, this is how it all looks as a diagram. Get the foundations in place. Work from that. Always think outside the structure by thinking beyond what’s really possible…

A Tweet by John Hagel caught my eye last week:

John was referring to one of the findings of The Shift Index, as published by John and his team at Deloitte. What caught my eye in contrasting passion to that of engagement, is that engagement is such a buzzword and is often heralded as the key endeavour in so many different contemporary realms. For example, in both the consumer and business to business marketplace, customer engagement increasingly the aspiration of much social relationship management and the topic of many a social media marketing book and website.

However the engagement John was referring to here was not that of engaging in the social marketplace, but that of employee engagement and the need for what he defines as a new level of engagement, that of passion and thus, the passionate worker.

“Worker Passion, different from employee satisfaction, denotes an intrinsic drive to do more and excel at every aspect of one’s profession.”

The Flow Index

The passionate worker is a nuanced entity in the Index and stands also as a metric for monitoring aspects of long-standing and systemic change taking place in the US economy. Alongside social media use, the passionate worker stands as a metric for what the Index calls a ‘Flow Amplifier‘. This amplifier forms part of what the Index dubs a Flow Index, which is a broad measure of the changes brought about by a shift from Knowledge Stocks to Knowledge Flows. The other two drivers, Virtual Flows and Physical Flows define movements in connectivity and virtualisation, and the movement of capital and people.

Only 18% have passion

But measuring passion is more than just a metric, it also ups the ante in terms of the whole issue of employee engagement and opens up questions on just how engaged workers really are. Thus, while most American employees are, to use one measure of engagement, satisfied with their current company, only 18% are passionately engaged with their current employment:

“The bottom line is that nearly 80 percent of workers lack passion regarding their jobs.”

This is important for the Index, as only the passionate worker is fully engaged with their job – the satisfied worker may like and contribute to their work, but this is ultimately not enough.

Cognitive Dissonance

There is a problem here however as the Index argues that companies find it increasing difficult to keep hold of the very people vital to their long-term success. A cognitive dissonance is created between what they desire and what they experience and the passionate worker can leave to pursue other often more individualistic endeavours such as forming their own smaller company, contracting and consulting.

This, the Shift Index argues, is a big loss and of paramount importance: the stakes are not just about engagement and employee satisfaction, passionate workers the Index argues are of vital importance for the long-term well being of the American economy.

The Performance Paradox

To understand this role of the passionate worker, we need to look at the the macro-economic backdrop. The picture painted by the Index is counter-intuitive to much mainstream thinking. Most people would argue that the increases in productivity brought about the arrival of a knowledge based economy have been translated into an increase in value generated. However, in what Index dubs the ‘Performance Paradox‘ companies find it difficult to hold on to this created value, even when they’re more productive.

“…productivity is not translating into profit for companies. The old assumption that improvements in productivity lead to higher returns turns out to be flawed.”

And this it turns out, hold so even in those sectors with the biggest use of new technology:  the Technology sector itself, plus Media, Telecommunications, and Automotive.

A picture of decline

The Index depicts this in graphic fashion in terms of the Return on Assets and on the Return on Invested Capital over the last 4 decades:

The real importance of the Passionate Worker

It’s against this picture of decline that the role of the passionate worker becomes so important:

“In a world driven by the twin forces of technology infrastructure and public policy shifts, the primary source of value creation for companies is moving from accumulating and exploiting “stocks” to participating in “flows” of knowledge. This activity takes place primarily through talented workers, who monetize the intangible assets that now account for the lion’s share of profits at big companies in the developed world. Since passionate workers have a greater propensity to participate in knowledge flows, it makes sense for companies to find ways to increase the amount of passion workers find in and bring to their jobs.”

The passionate worker can help achieve this turnaround this via two propensities: they have questioning and connecting dispositions. The questioning disposition means that the passionate worker sees challenges as opportunities for new ways to do things; while they will connect up with relevant others to achieve these gains. The important thing to stress here is that in an economy defined by Knowledge Flows that it’s via these traits that the passionately engaged worker brings value, new value.

“Passionate workers drive sustained extreme performance improvement. Without passionate workers, at all levels of the organization, companies will find it increasingly difficult to turn around the continued deterioration in financial performance which has thus far been a key marker of the Big Shift.”

Conclusion

I’ve only touched the surface of the Shift Index and focused on those aspects that interested me the most. It’s rich and complex with a lot of detail and well worth reading in full. A couple of closing remarks. Firstly the Index is about America, as a European I would have liked the scope to be increased – does what holds for America hold for Europe for example?

Perhaps more importantly, I would have liked to have seen a more global comparison of profitability. The real and massive shift we seeing is that of productive power and wealth and ultimately most likely political power from West to East, the symptoms of which we see played out in the form of recession. Do we therefore see the same declining rates in China as seen in the US? I think probably not. And as for the UK…well at least there’s still a substantial industrial economic base elsewhere, here, all we seem to be left with are those knowledge flows…Is this enough?

Finally, the declining rates did remind me of a tendency discovered by an obscure old German philosopher once dubbed ‘The Declining Rate of Profit‘. Is there a difference?

A couple of interesting implementation guides on deploying Social Business technology / Enterprise 2.0 have come out recently. The first is from AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management), who are often big advocates for using Microsoft’s SharePoint platform as the social platform. The second is from IBM (please see below)

AAIM take an 8 step approach:

Emergence

Strategy

Development

Monitoring

Particpation

Engagament

Governance

Optimization

IBM take a similar approach using what they describe as an ‘Agenda’ framework:

I particularly like the way IBM see the importance of embedding the social technologies into business process while keeping it relatively simple: the core concepts are networking, transparency and agility. They the say combine to create:

An effective social business embodies a culture characterized by sharing, transparency, innovation, and improved decision making. Such a culture enables deeper relationships with customers and business partners. This culture encourages people to document and share their knowledge and ideas with others, so that everyone can recognize, refine, and improve those ideas and content.

The key question for me here is this – how useful are these in practice, can they be used as literal guides or as handy sign-posts? My take is more the latter, but I do think that these are very useful starters.

The guides are free and can be downloaded here:

Social Business Roadmap

Using IBM Social Business to Take Your Business Relationships to the Next Level: A Game Changer for Small, Medium, and Large Business