Collaborative Enterprise

Enterprise 2.0 & The Flywheel

We seem to have come full circle in our debate around the impact of culture on Enterprise 2.0. Couple of years back, Tom Davenport stirred up a hornet's nest with his "Why Enterprise 2.0 won't transform organizations" post. In that he said:

"The absence of participative technologies in the past is not the only reason that organizations and expertise are hierarchical. Enterprise 2.0 software and the Internet won't make organizational hierarchy and politics go away. They won't make the ideas of the front-line worker in corporations as influential as those of the CEO. Most of the barriers that prevent knowledge from flowing freely in organizations - power differentials, lack of trust, missing incentives, unsupportive cultures, and the general busyness of employees today - won't be addressed or substantially changed by technology alone. For a set of technologies to bring about such changes, they would have to be truly magical, and Enterprise 2.0 tools fall short of magic." [ Emphasis mine ]

More recently, Steve Radick wrote a meticulous post on how Enterprise 2.0 reflects the culture in an organization. He had a bunch of snippets from conversations in their Yammer network. He goes on to make a few recommendations : " Consider incentivizing employees to share information and collaborate with each other.  Make information sharing part of their annual review (my team reviews the employee’s contributions to our internal network during their annual assessment debrief).  Reward staff for taking risks."

And couple of days back, Gil Yehuda in his post on his experiences in the E2.0 conference in Boston says he is frustrated the "motherhood and apple-pie" lessons about E2.0 . He agrees that culture does play a key role and that the Enterprise 2.0 community needs to start working on this.

My triggering point for this post was a post by Peter Bergman in the Harvard Business blogs on the best way to change corporate culture. It is in many ways a recapitulation of fundamental issues organizations face on the cultural side. He says:  "Performance reviews and training programs define the firm's expectations. Financial reward systems reinforce them. Memos and communications highlight what's important. And senior leadership actions — promotions for people who toe the line and a dead end career for those who don't — emphasize the firm's priorities. In most organizations these elements develop unconsciously and organically to create a system that, while not always ideal, works."

What all of this really boils down is two things - human and social capital. Toyota in my view could be one such company - the robust and high performance knowledge sharing network they have built across their supply chain is a case in point. See research paper here .

Quoting from the paper:

"Toyota’s network has solved three fundamental dilemmas with regard to knowledge sharing by devising methods to (1) motivate members to participate and openly share valuable knowledge (while preventing undesirable spillovers to competitors), (2) prevent free riders, and (3) reduce the costs associated with finding and accessing different types of valuable knowledge. Toyota has done this by creating a strong network identity with rules for participation and entry into the network. Most importantly, production knowledge is viewed as the property of the network. Toyota’s highly interconnected, strong tie network has established a variety of institutionalized routines that facilitate multidirectional knowledge flows among suppliers."

Remember this was years before we even started speaking about Web 2.0. Inevitably, organizations that have invested in building human/social capital and a collaborative culture will stand to benefit the most from E2.0. Anecdote's whitepaper on "Building a Collaborative Workplace" neatly summarizes the essence of this :

"Of course technology plays an important role in effective collaboration. We are not anti-technology. Rather we want to help redress the balance and shift the emphasis from merely thinking about collaboration technology to thinking about collaboration skills, practices, technology and supporting culture. Technology makes things possible; people collaborating makes it happen."

And remember, this is hard work!! Building this work culture and ensuring that there is value alignment [ everyone believing in the lean philosophy in Toyota is an example] across multiple stakeholders are not easy. In Toyota's case, one of the challenges was to optimize the entire supply chain using lean principles and the supplier network in particular and the larger Toyota Production System in general played a key role in that. It seems to have taken a lot of hard work to build out these networks, evolve norms, align values and ensure that all of these rolled up to specific business objectives like the rapid diffusion of lean production techniques across the supply chain. Could Toyota have done this better with E2.0 technologies? Looks like it would have helped them accelerate this journey but then it would have been possible only because they had a strong cultural and business foundation.

The interesting inference I can make is this-At a more fundamental level organizations need to realize that Enterprise 2.0 is possibly a new lever to set the flywheel in motion and make it go faster - The principle of the flywheel is one of the analogies Jim Collins uses in his book "Good To Great". He speaks about a host of things that add up to set the flywheel in motion - Level 5 leadership, getting the right people on board, confronting brutal facts, the "Hedgehog" concept, a culture of discipline & technology as an accelerator.  Jim did not think of technology as a change agent but this could be changing - E2.0 and a Gen Y/X workforce could fundamentally challenge this notion IF organizations focus on the other levers as well.

Here is the bottom line as I see it : If yours is a great organization, E2.0 can help your flywheel go faster in the direction you want. If yours is a good organization, E2.0 can be one of the levers to help you set the flywheel in motion and eventually make it go faster. And this time around, technology holds a real good chance of being a change agent by enabling socio-technical ecosystems.

Organizational History & KM

I was reading this article on change agents in the Harvard Business blogs and one of the things that the author wrote about caught my attention [ probably because I saw a KM connection]. He asks "Have you figured out how your organization's history can help to shape its future?"and then goes on to quote Psychologist Jerome Bruner's view on creativity : "figuring out how to use what you already know in order to go beyond what you already think." This to me also seems to become  one of the fundamental objectives of knowledge management if it changes to "figuring out how to use what we already know as a organization in order to go beyond what we already think".

Having said that, I also this this poses a paradox :Shouldn't KM also help organizations challenge long held assumptions and beliefs? Many times what we know and believe conditions us so much that we fail to act otherwise ..we don't see things "as they are".

KM practitioners need  to consciously look at organizational history to explore the roots of beliefs/assumptions and unwritten rules that negatively influence an organization. Organizational history could be a useful element in evolving a KM intervention.

Google Wave Implications On KM

I have thinking about the implications of Google Wave on KM and enterprise collaboration.  Interestingly, many of them have been propounding the end of email and the end of IM. And some of them have taken on the new complexities that real time/concurrent editing can bring in - issues ranging from the cognitive impact of seeing what someone is typing as they type it to privacy. It's been really interesting!!

This debate is going to continue for rest of the year as Google prepares to go live with the Wave.

My interests around Google Wave are from a KM perspective. Will Google Wave change anything for good in the KM world? I think it holds great potential to solve some of the fundamental problems inherent to KM as we know it. Three areas where I believe it will have a positive impact :

Flow Versus Stock

For starters Google Wave blurs the line between what was traditionally knowledge flows and knowledge stocks. As O'Reilly rightly put it, in the Wave world - "conversations become shared documents." This has huge implications on enterprise KM. Let me go back to the Andrew McAfee's SLATES for a minute. The "A" in the acronym stands for authoring - lowering barriers to authoring is one of the fundamental challenges in KM and I think by blurring the lines between conversations and documents, Google Wave goes a long way in enabling this.

Everything Is Fragmented

That is principle number 4 in Dave Snowden's 7 principles of knowledge management. Here's what he has to say :

We evolved to handle unstructured fragmented fine granularity information objects, not highly structured documents. People will spend hours on the internet, or in casual conversation without any incentive or pressure. However creating and using structured documents requires considerably more effort and time. Our brains evolved to handle fragmented patterns not information.

I believe Google Wave is closest from a "enabler" perspective to augment this behavior. Would be good if eventually Wikipedia's discussion pages get replaced with embedded Waves. That could create richer and far more distributed conversations around articles.

Contextual Collaboration

While I haven't seen gadgets getting embedded in a Wave in action as yet, it would open up a new range of possibilities to enable contextual collaboration in enterprises. Being able to pull in business data from systems like ERP,CRM, Logistics etc., and being able to seamlessly wrap conversations around it will be a huge breakthrough. I guess the Wave makes it far more seamless while there have been a host of other solutions to this problem.

Stories As Swarming Points

Organizational storytelling has been an effective way of driving change and managing knowledge. The key question is how do we scale storytelling in large, distributed organizations?

Here are some ideas I have been thinking about :

1. Knowledge managers in enterprises need to be doing what Robert Scoble and others do at Podtech.net . Meet interesting people, get them to share interesting stories, ask interesting questions and share it with the rest of the business unit, department etc.,   
2. Collect a range of stories that can be used to inspire and help people learn. Don't label stories as best pratices or worst practices. They are just practices as they happen in the organization. Clay Shirky speaks about this here. For this to work in organizations, there needs to be a culture that tolerates failure to a certain extent.
3. Explore a low cost way to gather and host stories - Google Video for business and Veodea are good options. You can find a review here. 
4. Set the stage for communities to emerge aroud a story or clusters of related stories. Stories hold great potential of becoming swarming points  [ Link to an interesting paper by  Dave Snowden and C.F.Kurtz ]

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Do you know of any organization that does this or a variation of this? 

Reputation Systems For Enterprise 2.0

Gartner recently identified seven key characteristics of a good social application purpose. A clearly defined purpose and scope is necessary but not sufficient for the success and sustenance of communities within enterprises.  One of the other often overlooked areas in Enterprise 2.0 applications is Reputation Systems. As enterprises try to foster communities, it is crucial to choose and deploy the right reputation patterns to ensure adoption. 

A good starting point would be to check Yahoo's social interaction design & reputation patterns and see which of them or their variants would suit your enterprise and the specific application. 

Yahoo defines the problem well :

"A person participating in a social structure expects to develop a reputation and hopes for insight into the reputations of others, but each designed model of participation and reputation embodies its own set of biases and incentive structures. Balancing these forces determines in large measure the success or failure of a social system."

This is true of social apps within enterprises as well. So what are the key factors to consider while choosing the reputation patterns for social apps in enterprises?

Three of the most important things to keep in mind:

Understand the social app and it's purpose

Most social apps for the enterprise are likely to fall somewhere in the competitive spectrum that Yahoo defines. Every social app is different and would require different kinds of reputation patterns depending on how collaborative or competitive you want the communities to be . For instance, the reputation pattern you choose for your enterprise wiki to co-author policies and procedures may be different from the one you choose for your enterprise idea management or social Q&A platform. 

Cultural and Demographic fit

Some of the patterns are likely to backfire if we don't understand the cultural nuances of departments and the enterprise as a whole. It is important to design reputation systems that have a judicious mix of competitive and collaborative elements depending on the culture of the enterprise. Gen Y typically responds well to competitive reputation patterns like the LeaderBoard and Points. A large scale social Q&A platform that we deployed uses a variation of the LeaderBoard pattern - close to 41% of the users are in the age group 18-25.  Competition to get on the LeaderBoard for various categories is making things interesting. 

Larger Enterprise 2.0 Strategy

It also helps to look at reputation in the context of your larger Enterprise 2.0 strategy. For instance, reputation across multiple social apps [ social bookmarking system, wiki/Knol, social Q&A platform, idea management system etc.,] within the enterprise can be rolled up to serve as a proxy for the individual's expertise in a specific area. As social apps get integrated more and more with business processes, they are in the long run, likely to turn into interesting and trustworthy proxies for expertise. Reputation systems are likey to have a huge impact on how social networks will evolve within enterprises and so it becomes imperative to keep the big picture in mind even as you choose reputation patterns for stand-alone social apps.

Enterprise 2.0 - Organizational & People Readiness

Enterprise 2.0 promises to offer wonderful new ways to connect and collaborate inside and outside the enterprise. However, to realize the true benefits of a Wiki Workplace we need to  factor in organizational [ primarily to do with "support structures" to foster collaboration, senior management involvement etc.,] and people readiness. Here is my attempt at defining a people/organizational readiness framework for Enterprise 2.0.

There are four levels in the People/Organizational readiness stack.

• Dysfunctional
• Resistant
• Threshold
• Organic

Typically, organizations would fall into one of these quadrants.

Dysfunctional

At this level there is low people and organizational readiness for enterprise wide adoption of Enterprise 2.0  technologies. Employee engagement at work is usually low. There are no incentive schemes in place to encourage collaboration.These enterprises also have a history of series of change management mishaps in spite of making a sincere attempt to drive change.

There are a number of organizational barriers to communication including managers who are not willing to let go of command & control, lack of commitment from the senior management, ill-defined or undefined virtual team structures, roles and responsibilities. There is a serious lack of alignment of enterprise vision,mission and values with individual/team objectives. The political climate and power structure in the organization are not conducive for effective decision making to happen.

Resistant

There is high organizational readiness but low people readiness. Typical causes include a disengaged workforce that is unwilling to learn, managers who are not willing to let go of command & control and turf war. There is poor alignment of enterprise vision,mission and values with individual/team objectives. In some there may be high attrition rates.

There may be innovative HR policies and systems in place with little or no impact on driving change. There are well defined virtual team structures,roles and responsibilities. Leadership building at multiple levels to foster a collaborative culture happens though the impact is low. The political climate and power structure in the organization are conducive for effective decision making to happen. Historically, these enterprises would have faced significant change related challenges – typically signaled by an increasing change management budget with low returns.

Threshold

There is low organizational readiness but high people readiness. I believe that a workforce that is at the threshold would be more open to change as compared to that in the Resistant phase . Organizations at this level can expect significant adoption and use of virtual collaboration tools provided they address organizational barriers. For instance, managers across business units may be willing to collaborate,but existing compensation/bonus schemes may encourage knowledge hoarding and hence inhibit collaboration. The political climate in the organization may not conducive for effective decision making to happen.There is no conscious effort to train managers on new ways of leadership that reflect new ways of working.

Work gets done by employees through informal networks. Individuals/Groups use existing collaborative tools in innovative ways and there is major proportion of the workforce that is using existing tools . Employees are engaged at work and there is significant alignment of enterprise mission,vision and values with individual & team objectives. However, there are no or very minimal HR policies/systems in place that encourage collaboration at work.  Community leaders tend to emerge from the fringes and play a key role in sustaining communities through sheer determination.There are a number of communities of practice that are purely bottom-up with no organizational support. Hence, they have very little enterprise wide impact in most cases. In some cases organizations tend to intervene and “manage” communities leading to their demise.Historically,change management efforts in other enterprise wide initiatives would have achieved desired results.[Eg.New Technology/Process Adoption,New Behavioral competencies,New Leadership styles etc.,].

Organic

At this level there is both organizational and people readiness for change. Enterprises can absorb substantial amounts of change with minimal effort from formal entities. There is very strong alignment of enterprise mission,vision and values with individual & team objectives indicating that the organization has succeeded in disseminating its vision, mission and values at all levels. Employee engagement at work is usually high and there are innovative work practices that foster a collaborative work culture.

Incentive schemes at this level of maturity would be at the "golden mean". Typically, these schemes rely on peer recognition and self-satisfaction. This is augmented with more tangible incentives that are neither too less nor too much. Too much of reliance on tangible incentives would mean people may steal knowledge and credit. Too less of it may dampen the inherent willingness of people to collaborate.There are well defined virtual team structures, roles and responsibilities.Enterprises at this level encourage transparent and open discussion of issues of interest to employees. The political climate in the organization is conducive for effective decision making to happen. Leadership building and training happens at all levels to embrace new ways of working.

Enterprises at this level have enterprise wide communities of practice that seamlessly augment formal teams. Informal Communities are recognized by the enterprise and there are support structures for these as well. Organic enterprises realize that “managing” change top-down has its limitations. They have a deep understanding of the social dimensions of collaboration. Communities Of Practice become a typical way to drive change bottom-up. I believe that in the long run with the right organizational structures and incentives in place - Change should manage itself.

KM Adoption & Human Social Behavior

Seth Godin  wrote about the "Hobby Economy"  couple of years back and said :

"More and more people are spending more and more time (and money) on pursuits that have no pay off other than satisfaction."

This is as intriguing to enterprise KM strategists as it is to economists. As we go about designing  rewards and recognition schemes for enterprise KM/Collaboration programs, what is the right balance to strike? We have known for long enough that intrinsic reputation is as important as tangible rewards. Now there is serious research evidence to corroborate this. A recent article in Neuron says that social approval lights up the same regions of the brain as monetary rewards. Here is a summary of the research:

Despite an increasing focus on the neural basis of human decision making in neuroscience, relatively little attention has been paid to decision making in social settings. Moreover, although human social decision making has been explored in a social psychology context, few neural explanations for the observed findings have been considered. To bridge this gap and improve models of human social decision making, we investigated whether acquiring a good reputation, which is an important incentive in human social behaviors, activates the same reward circuitry as monetary rewards. In total, 19 subjects participated in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments involving monetary and social rewards. The acquisition of one's good reputation robustly activated reward-related brain areas, notably the striatum, and these overlapped with the areas activated by monetary rewards. Our findings support the idea of a “common neural currency” for rewards and represent an important first step toward a neural explanation for complex human social behaviors.

You can see a related video here :

This is a very important finding which will have implications on many dimensions of KM in enterprises. Given that we know that reputation does play a very important role, it would be interesting to ponder over the following questions:

• What does the CKO do to bring in the right balance of rewards and recognition?
• Again for the CKO : What are the cultural aspects to be considered for the right kind of recognition systems?
• How do Enterprise 2.0 consultants and UI folks design enterprise KM systems seamlessly incorporate "social approval"?  [ Lots to learn from the Web 2.0  world !!]

Enterprise 2.0 - Unleashing The Collective

Many of the Enterprise 2.0 discussions tend to begin and end with blogs and wikis predominantly. Enterprise 2.0 holds as much promise to improve knowledge sharing within organizations as it does to improve knowledge creation. The Collective as defined by Thomas Vander Wal holds the key to unleash effective knowledge sharing within organizations. At the heart of both the collective and collaborative is the idea of a social object. This post explores one possible way KM/collaboration strategists can leverage the collective and improve knowledge sharing within enterprises.

At a high level the strategy will include the following :

• Understand Online Behavioral Patterns Outside Work
• Use Low Cost Probes To Identify These Social Objects
• Identify Social Objects That Have "Maximum Gravitational Pull"
• Unleash The Collective Around Social Objects That Matter
• Build Bridges Between The Old And The New

Understand Online Behavioral Patterns Outside Work

It makes sense to look at the average age of your workforce and the demography in general  to understand how they are using tools in the consumer internet to reach out to friends and family.
You could map out those behavioral patterns, understand organizational objectives pertaining to collaboration/KM and then explore the right kind of tools for deployment. The outcome of this should be a deep understanding of the kind of social objects people are creating outside work. For instance, in the company I work for, roughly 30% of the workforce is on Orkut. An Orkut "Scrap" is a social object that people are very used to outside work. What does this mean to enterprise KM/Collaboration strategists?

Use Low Cost Probes To Identify These Social Objects

While I don't have empirical evidence to back this up my experience has been that there seems to be some relationship between social objects and organizational culture. For instance in the company I work for, Social Q&A has grown at an unbelievable pace  while document collaboration is yet to take off. It is important to quickly iterate and identify the right social objects that are likely to improve knowledge sharing within the enterprise. Perhaps these are questions or micro blog entries or discussion forum entries.

Identify Social Objects That Have "Maximum Gravitational Pull"

Understanding online behavior and affinity towards certain social objects presents the opportunity for enterprise KM strategists to evolve a KM/Collaboration strategy around similar social objects within the enterprise.  From the list of all potential social objects identify ones that have maximum gravitational pull. The balance to strike is to identify social objects that have maximum gravitational pull from the end user perspective and at the same time have maximum organizational impact from a knowledge sharing perspective.

Unleash The Collective Around Social Objects That Matter

Enterprise Social Q&A platforms, Enterprise Microblogging platforms and plain old discussion forums surface different dimensions of what an enterprise knows collectively. These are not necessarily collaborative in nature. These are nice examples of  platforms that enable "collective social interaction" as Thomas Vander Wal calls it. From a KM perspective, the collective is as important as the collaborative. The Collective is made up of "information affinity" based social networks. I either find someone else subscribing to a feed of my bookmarks or someone responding to my question and hence we share some affinity towards subject matter X. Questions become social objects - and this together with answers,comments, feeds and tags unravel hidden social networks. Similarly, microblog entries are social objects. In many cases unleashing the collective has a tremendous impact on knowledge sharing in the organization. I see collaboration as a catalyst for knowledge creation and is not necessarily a pre-requisite for knowledge sharing to happen.

Build Bridges Between The Old And The New

There are usually one or two tools that the workforce uses heavily. Predominantly it is email, though it could be  IM or perhaps even your  company bulletin board. When you work on an adoption strategy it is extremely important to explore ways of making use of the attention in these sweet spots. There are a number of ways of doing this - Some examples:

• Notifications of updates in wikis/blogs/social Q&A platforms through email/IM
• Allowing blog posts through email/IM
• Allowing posting questions to a social Q&A platform via email/IM

Social Q&A Platforms In Enterprises

Larry Irons quotes Stewart Mader on the potential use of wikis in onboarding people.  While I agree that wikis could be a key enabler in such a scenario, they are not sufficient. If we were to look at onboarding as a knowledge management problem, there are three major things we need to attack:

1. Give newbies in the team a safe environment to lurk, listen and learn from those who have been in the team/organization for a while.
2. Give them the right tools to find out who knows what, whom to turn to when they have a problem and general team dynamics - Essentially to help them understand how work gets done in the team.
3. Enable social proprioception in the team. Clive Thompson wrote about the idea of social proprioception sometime back. He says like proprioception which is the body’s ability to know where the limbs are, social proprioception enabled by tools like Twitter gives a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination. [emphasis mine] Social proprioception is extremely crucial for teams and more so for virtual teams. Tools like Twitter bring in a new dimension to the “signaling” aspect in Andrew McAfee’s SLATES model for Enterprise 2.0.

I believe there is a need for an ecosystem which first allows people to ask questions - specifically in the context of onboarding and also in the larger context. "Asking questions" is an intrinsic part of human nature. Social Q&A platforms ,Microblogging platforms within enterprises [ read Yahoo Answers and Twitter  for the enterprise] and even plain old discussion forums can play a very important role here. Most of one's knowledge needs begin with questions like "Where can I find information on HR benefits for my position?" or "Whom do I speak to clarify this clause on Sarbanes Oxley?" and so on. Questions come first and people need a place to post this. Answers may point to Wikis/Blogs/Expert Profile Pages and so on. We need to put conversations before content.

Return Receipts & Trust

Emails with return receipts are ok when it is really necessary. When people use return receipts too frequently, two things happen:

• The recipient gets annoyed
• Trust between the sender and the recipient gets eroded. When you over use return receipt, you are sending out an implicit message that you don’t trust that the recipient would read your mail otherwise - This by itself is a disincentive for the recipient to read and reply. A vicious cycle of mistrust sets in.