Social Computing's Role in Internal Communications: It's Your Immune System Booster

 

A few months ago, I asked "What Is the Role of Social Computing in Internal Communications". I had a conversation yesterday with J who had heard me speak at the IABC Seattle event on 2/25 and both my prep for that event and my conversation with J have helped me clarify my own answer to that question.

Following the IABC event J submitted a question on our Web site about some negative feedback that her client's company had received in response to some employee communication programs.

I had spoken at IABC about the fact that in the absence of an outlet for their frustrations, concerns or questions, employees will stew on them to a damaging degree. My advice was to "take the lid off the stew pot" by building more openness and transparency into your company communication strategy, including the use of social computing technology to engage a wider audience in a more dynamic and equitable exchange of information. Move your strategy from pronouncements to conversations, I said.

In talking with J, it became clear that she and her client are doing a lot of things right in addressing the negativity coming at them, but I think there's a chance here for them to seize the negativity and turn it into an opportunity for the company. Negative feedback hurts, but I believe that if you address the it properly - whether its external negativity from your customers or internal negativity from employees - you can actually create a positive return on negative feedback.

Social computing tools offer a chance to more easily, more quickly and more effectively address negative feedback, but keep them in perspective: social computing tools are just that - tools. They are tactics, not strategies. Solving a problem like the one J was describing starts with your company philosophy and your communication strategy. Once you have that squared away, then its time to determine where or how social computing tools fit.

For a communication challenge like the one J described, my advice is this:

1. First, keep the negativity in perspective. Remember what Abraham Lincoln said: "You can please some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time." I know, negativity hurts, and it's easy to let negative feedback get blown out of proportion. Don't ignore it outright, but don't think you have to change your whole plan because a handful of vocal people didn't like it. Sometimes you can't change the answer, but you can change the sentiment toward the answer depending on whether or not you engage it. Therefore, see #2...
2. Acknowledge the feedback publicly and use it as an opportunity to explain the company values. Acknowledge the feedback and tell them you understand they're not happy with the answer: you can't change the answer but you can explain how you got to it. Expose your thinking. They see that your answer wasn't arbitrary; it's based on reasoning and a set of values you can articulate.
3. Do that engagement in a public forum, so it's not in a hidden channel, but you make it visible to the entire community. This is where social computing tools like social networks, a blog with comments or even just a discussion forum can have a dramatic impact. By making your response public and transparent and by establishing ways for the community to engage and interact with what you say, you create the conditions necessary for people in the community to pick up that message and carry it forward on your behalf. As a manager it's tremendously difficult to overcome the cynicism and skepticism that some people naturally have for management. It's an unfortunate truth of management that often people are skeptical of your motivations, they don't believe that your decisions are rooted in the best interests of the employees.

If your motivations are rooted in the best interests of the employees, you should make it clear how they are and you should make it clear not just on a one-to-one basis, but do it globally, openly, transparently. So that everyone can see it. Because if you can explain it in a way that other people will pick up the message for you (and give them the tools to do that) then the dynamic is no longer management vs employee, you change it to a peer-to-peer dynamic and you can leverage the word of mouth phenomenon that works in sales. In this example you just happen to be trying to sell a point of view. But it's harder for you to sell an idea than it is to have an employee's peer sell it to him: they trust their peers more than they trust you. Whether they should or not, that's just the way it goes.

So that's the way I think you can approach an instance like the one J described where an employee is questioning a decision: you can explain the values, do it publicly, and turn it into a message that the community can carry forward for you.

And that is where I think there's also a larger strategic communication opportunity in a situation like this, and one that social computing is uniquely suited to help you with.

If you begin a process of talking more openly about what your company values are - not in direct response to a complaint, but in general and over time -- and reveal how those values manifest themselves in the decisions the company makes, that kind of exposition about company values can inoculate you from future problems because you're teaching the employee population what your values are, how to speak about them and you're creating a situation where in the future if some negativity comes up in a conversation between one employee and another, there's an increased chance that the employee listening to the negativity will have the information and vocabulary to counter the negativity before it gains a foothold and begins doing damage.

Don't assume people know your company values. Be as transparent as you can stand to be in revealing them through words and actions. 

One caveat here, of course, is that you can't just talk about the company values; you also have to follow through and live them. You can't just tell the employees what your values are; you have to create ways for them to experience the values.

But if you can become consistent about delivering experiences consistent with your values, become transparent about explaining the values that your employees are experiencing, and turn your company communication strategy into one that emphasizes engagement and conversation supported by two-way social computing technologies, then through that process you can create what amounts to a company immune system. In your body, you have white blood cells that fight of the negative forces before they become destructive. A company is the same way: the negative forces are dissatisfaction, frustration, dissengagement. You can combat those by building an immune system that is made up of people who understand your values, believe in what you're doing and feel included in it. They will inoculate you against the negativity.

Transparency, open discussion of values, open engagement of employees in a social communication environment are all ways to build that company immune system.

Well, anyway, that's how I see it. What do you think?

Bridging the Leadership Gap: A Social Conversation

Join us as we engage in a social conversation on leadership. Learn about the challenges of leadership from others. Share your leadership experiences. Discover best practices fellow leaders rely on to unleash the results they want.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 6:30 - 8:30 (PST) at thinkspace in Redmond, WA

http://bridgetheleadershipgap.eventbrite.com/

More on our upcoming events.

Ethan Yarbrough's Intro for Social Media Conference Northwest

The Social Media Conference Northwest 2010 is happening in Mount Vernon, WA on March 25, 2010. I'll be there with lots of interesting, innovative speakers to share ideas on how your business can harness the power of social media tools to advance your strategy. My session will be about corporate blogging, but whether you come to my session or one of the others, I just hope you'll come.

The Simplest Online Database: The Wiki as Strategic Information Management

By - Ethan Yarbrough and Ken Efta

Think a wiki is only good for small-group collaboration in your organization? Think again. 

We've been talking with a local nonprofit about their document management needs and how those needs are tied to requirements for accountability. As a nonprofit, they receive money from grantors and use these funds for the production of community-facing projects: media presentations, community events, and the creation and management of infrastructure to support those efforts. As the grantee, they are required to document how that money is spent.

The grantors-often large philanthropic foundations or corporations-have seen their endowments drop significantly with the weak economy. They, understandably, want to ensure solid fiscal accountability and reporting for anything they fund. That means the managers at the nonprofit must be crisp in their ability to explain how funds have been used. They have a financial accounting system and can generate reports showing the departments in which the money was spent. However, there is a need for precise visibility into documentation associated with a project, especially into data that demonstrates the brainstorming and decision-making processes that went into a project. Given these operational requirements, we were surprised to find that the organization's current information management process relies very heavily on Microsoft Exchange public folders and a Windows file share.

As you might imagine, that system is proving unmanageable.

Through our talks with management about what they needed to document, how those documents need to move through the organization for multi-team input, and how the grantors want to see the information, the tool that has emerged as their first choice for information management organization-wide is a wiki.

It's important, we think, to acknowledge that this is a far more strategically significant use of a wiki than many of us might imagine. That's not to say that others aren't using wikis that way. The U.S. Army field manual, for example, is now being translated into a wiki format to better keep pace with rapidly changing field conditions and practices. But it's probably more common for a wiki to be thought of as a tool for local, small-team collaboration or document-level collaboration (unstructured knowledge management), rather than a top level, organization-wide strategic management and accountability control tool. Yet this nonprofit feels the wiki is far better suited than traditional document and knowledge management systems.

Why is this? Ward Cunningham, the developer of WikiWikiWeb, the first Wiki software, described a wiki as "the simplest online database that could possibly work." That simplicity along with the acknowledgement of the wiki as a database is at the heart of what makes a wiki so powerful for this nonprofit: • There is a low bar for entry both in terms of cost and skill required from users. Many modern wikis have WYSIWYG editing tools that may it very easy for non-technical users to contribute.

• A wiki is not carefully prepared content designed for a presentation. The wiki is designed to invite the user to contribute to creation of content. Thus, in the case of the nonprofit, it allows teams to collaborate, aggregate ideas, and, ultimately, support the brainstorming and project delivery that helps demonstrate how funding is used. If ideas are at the core of the nonprofit's ability to survey, then the wiki becomes the garden for these ideas.
• Wikis allow users to very easily create links and make associations between topics and keywords on different pages. This is true even if the destination page doesn't exist and a wiki "stub page" shows the intention to include data in the future. Users at our nonprofit can even continue to link to documents and materials stored on their file share.
• The nonprofit employs many creative people, and if ideas are discarded in the project development process, they're not lost. Team members can return to view and link to old ideas that may prove useful on later projects. Additionally, many wikis have version control so that if key information is overwritten, administrators can revert to previous versions.
• Wikis are freeform and any member of the organization can contribute to and comment on the project development. This is especially important in giving visibility to management as they talk to project stakeholders and grantors, while also allowing management to ask questions and comment on progress.

Of course, meeting this final need was at the heart of their decision to use a Wiki for project development: management can not only show their stakeholders and grantors what department they allocated funds to, they can show the thinking that went into the process of developing a project. Yes, this meets their need for fiscal accountability. But exposing smart, creative thinking is also likely to increase the likelihood that funding future projects grows out of delivery existing projects. In fact, the nonprofit is already brainstorming about how to take the wiki even further. They're considering:

• Inclusion of features for rating ideas and content, modules specifically for adding keywords and feedback, and integration of project management add-ons (for example, project status and key performance indicators)
• Making the wiki available on an extranet so that the grantors themselves can contribute to aspects of the creative process
• Making portions of the wiki open, on the internet, to solicit ideas from the broader community and help build momentum to fund projects that matter most to the people likely to benefit from them.

A wiki can and should start simply. And modern wiki solutions will definitely scale to the maturity and sophistication of the organization. But the strength of any wiki solution, the "simplest online database," resides with way that people are brought together to contribute content, share ideas, and provide the links to other ideas thus helping to build that database. That is at the heart of the wiki's manageability, is how a very simple tool can occupy a very strategic role in an organization.

The Importance of Organizational Culture to Intranet Success

I talked with a friend of mine -- I'll call her V -- last week regarding her intranet woes.

Her company, a national retailer headquartered in Seattle with storefronts in 13 states, recently launched an intranet to replace their previous information sharing systems which relied heavily on shared file folders and public folders in their Outlook email system. The previous system was of little value to the company: employees found it difficult to find the information they needed -- neither the share, nor the email folders were effectively searchable. Often, employees would simply default to calling one another on the phone or sending group emails asking for the whereabouts of the content they needed.

The intranet was intended to create a central location for the storage and access of business-critical information and also features social computing tools to make it easier for employees to connect with each other, build networks of relevant resources and foster community in the company.

But adoption numbers are low.

In talking with V it became clear that the issues blocking adoption are hardly technical and are almost entirely cultural. Among the cultural challenges to overcome and some best practices that might help, I see these:

1. Resistance to learning new technologies -- the organization has developed operational habits around the shares and Outlook folders. As inefficient as those tools are, they nonetheless now exist as the devil these employees know. They'd rather limp along then take the leap into uncertainty associated with learning something new.

• Adoption Best Practice that Could Help: Training, training, more training. I've said before that the launch of your intranet is not the end of the project. It's the beginning of the training phase of the project. Ideally, training would be identified as a need from the outset of project planning, but even if it wasn't, if you launch and then see little or no uptake, you can salvage the situation by planning training sessions. Those sessions should grow out of listening first -- talk to the employees about what they're uncertain about and build the training to address those concerns. In addition to formal training, encourage employees to help each other through the new tool since the ones teaching will learn more if they're having to teach others and the "students" will be more likely to engage if they see their peers validating the new tools by using and evangelizing them.

2. Fear -- During our conversation, V told me how she had tried at one time to create a Facebook group for members of her organization. She wanted to foster community among the widely dispersed employees and also try to bridge the gap between the corporate management personnel and the retail personnel. The Facebook page was a failure. People didn't want to join because they believed that, if they joined and became connected with management, then management would just use the Facebook page to "check up on them." According to V, management was present on the Facebook group but never participated and some of the senior managers admitted that, "Well, yeah, we are there to check up on people."

Now enter the new intranet and its social networking tools. As I said, few employees are using it. Having heard the Facebook story and the employees' reason for avoiding it, I'm not surprised to hear they aren't actively participating in the internal social tools either. Clearly, there's a lack of trust in this organization.

• Adoption Best Practice that Could Help: Find a champion in senior management. When it comes to enterprise social computing tools, a present, but non-participatory upper management is probably worse than a completely absent senior management. A senior management that lurks, never participates, never shares, that isn't an active part of the community but stands ready to swing the hammer of reprimand over things they see and hear in the online social community has a chilling effect. They're Dick Cheney lurking behind the hedges. To turn this situation around, you need an active, enthusiastic member of the senior management team to jump in and participate, share, encourage others and just generally make the environment a positive one. They can make it safe. If employees see that senior management is participating, the implication will be that a) senior management won't think my participation is a frivolous use of my time, therefore b) nothing bad will befall me if I choose to enter and participate in this environment. Fear kills adoption. Making it safe encourages adoption. Someone in senior management has to prove it's safe by being there to welcome people as they come to peek inside.

3. A Culture of Hoarding -- Many employees at V's company are more inclined to hold information back rather than share it, thinking that by doing so they somehow protect their position in the company. This is not an unusual problem to encounter. Pete Fields touched on this phenomenon during a presentation at the 2008 Office 2.0 Conference in which he mentioned that we're entering an era in which the ethos of "whoever shares the most has the power" is replacing the old model of "whoever holds on to information retains power". We may be entering that era, that shift may be occuring, but it happens at different rates in different companies. And at V's company, the fact that cultural shift hasn't gained momentum is a serious block to successful adoption of the community-building and collaborative features of their new intranet. 

• Adoption Best Practice that Could Help: An incentive/attention program. The Prosci Change Management Method tells us that all change happens at the individual level and that it only happens when your strategy builds awareness, desire, knowledge, action and reinforcement (ADKAR). V's company, therefore, needs to create an environment in which those employees who are not changing their behavior develop a desire to make a change. They have to want to change or they won't change. To make people want to change, then, you have to show them what's in it for them if they do change. There are differing opinions about whether the best approach is to use a carrot or a stick to create the desire to change. I'm of the opinion that flogging employees for not participating may move the adoption needle slightly, but it will move the resentment needle significantly. Therefore, I advocate finding carrots -- positive incentive, not negative incentive -- to entice people to change.
• For example, you could develop a system that awards employees with a point each time they share on a wiki or comment on a blog. Expose the points to everyone so employees can compare their point totals against their peers and let employees cash their points in for rewards once they reach a certain threshold.
• The second element of this kind of program, though, needs to be attention. When employees participate by posting content on a blog, make sure someone comments on it (preferably someone senior); make sure new blog posts are highlighted for the rest of the community to see (visible content begets content); when someone reaches the point threshold and cashes in, praise them and highlight them, advertise the fact that someone just won something. And it doesn't hurt to make it clear to people that, even if participation in sharing behavior doesn't impact their employment security and advancement directly, human nature being what it is, it's just a fact that the people who do share will get noticed more and it's the people who make themselves noticeable that tend to get opportunities in most companies. So sharing information is a way to pull the spotlight in their direction a little bit.

It comes down to this really: the best way for V's company to improve their intranet adoption numbers is to travel back in time to before the new intranet was created, talk to their employees about what features would help them and what they'd be likely to use, design around the employee input and then plan a strategy for incentivizing and rewarding participation.

Since they can't do that, they at least need to understand that enterprise social computing projects like their intranet are really culture-change-management projects. If they proceed with that understanding (V, to her credit, gets it), and recognize the strong role of human psychology in the problems they're encountering, then they can still improve their adoption numbers significantly.

Enterprise social computing adoption is a major concern pre- and post-launch. I've listed only a few best practices that I've seen work. What would you add to this list? What advice would you give V's company to help them achieve the results they were hoping for?

(For an overview of a successful implementation of an enterprise-social-computing-enabled intranet, see Bill Ives's 6 part series "Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen". It'll do ya good.)

How Do You Know What You Know?

Something as simple as a blog tool can help your employees share what they know and learn from each other. However, though blogging is straightforward, there are still ways to do it wrong. And right.

By Ethan Yarbrough and Ken Efta, Allyis Inc.

It is critical to any company's success that it gain and maintain an accurate awareness of the expertise present in the organization. As Hewlett-Packard Chairman and CEO Lew Platt famously said "If HP knew what HP knows, we'd be three times more profitable."
 
 And today it is easier than ever for an individual to publish his or her own content, a development with great potential for companies looking to access and make available institutional knowledge. However, studies have shown that the mere introduction of user-generated content tools into a community of knowledgeable professionals is not likely, in and of itself, to spur active participation in knowledge sharing. Simply giving engineers a blog platform and asking them to dump the contents of their professional brains into it for the organization's good will not work. Even if the employees are inclined to want to share, it proves nearly impossible for them to access their latent knowledge in the abstract.

Interestingly, though, when they are able to use those tools to engage one another's ideas and interact with each other in the flow of their work, professionals become able to transmute latent knowledge into the explicit knowledge that becomes a resource to the organization. Therefore, when designing user-generated content systems for the enterprise, it's essential that both content discovery and consumption be given consideration equal to content production. If you give employees the ability to speak without building a correspondingly intelligent way for others to hear, then your content creators are the trees falling in the forest when no one is around.

Our thoughts on this topic have been shaped by a recent analysis conducted by one of our consultants, on a client's intranet-based blogging environment. A handful of design flaws in that system threaten to obscure, rather than highlight, ideas generated by employees. While access to the system, built in SharePoint 2007, is unrestricted so that anyone who wants to start a blog can do so simply by clicking the "start a blog" link, certain other design choices, if left uncorrected, are likely to render the blogs largely unused simply because the content creators are not connected effectively with content consumers:

1. Content Organized Only by Author, Not by Topic: On the current home page of the blog platform, there at last count a total of 30 employee blogs (out of about 180 employees). All blogs are listed by employee name, but no other information is visible when scanning the list of blogs. In a widely dispersed workforce, employees don't often know each other by name, so the list of names is not a relevant way to present blogs to the user base. Our colleague's short usability test revealed that users would prefer to see content organized by topic rather than by user.
2. No "New Post" Indicator: There is no indication of which blog was updated most recently, and no indication of what content exists in any of the blogs. Nor is there any indication of which blogs are generating comments by the readers. For someone who wants to have an at a glance view of what bloggers are saying and how readers are responding, it all has the feel of a party going on behind tightly closed doors.
3. No User-controlled Categorization or Rating Features: It is common in most consumer blog platforms to allow the writer to add tags to each post indicating through the use of keywords what the post is about. Additionally, many platforms allow users to quickly rate blog posts to show how useful it was to them. Our client's blog platform doesn't allow any such user-controlled definition or rating that could help represent the community's view of which blog materials are most interesting or most relevant to the goals the organization is pursuing

What this client has built is a content repository. What they need is system that promotes user interaction with that content.Our advice to our client? Highlight content on the blogging platform's home page via some organizational content features that will entice content consumers, driving them to the posts that will matter most to them:

a.  Most Popular Posts: Show which content is most popular among readers according to qualitative ratings of each post
b. Highlight Recent Posts by Category: Allow content producers to have finer control over categorization and show blog posts on the home page organized by those categories to give content consumers an at-a-glance view of what content is most relevant to them.
c. User-Generated Tags and Tag Cloud Navigation: Beyond giving better control to creators of blog content, we recommend building some intelligence into the system itself: empower the platform to capture and track tags submitted by content consumers which then feed an alternate, user-generated navigation like a tag cloud.
d. Highlight Content Consumers by Showing Comments: Highlight how consumers of blog content are interacting with the authors of the content by showing the top one or two comments for each of the posts on the homepage. You expose the conversations happening for the rest of the content consumers, encouraging them to participate or at least give visibility to what their peers are discussing.
e. Highlight Most Visited Posts: Because a large percentage of users may read posts, but will never comment or rate a post, include a section on the home page that highlights the most visited blog posts based upon the user traffic. This would lend insight into what the organization as a whole is reading and thinking even if they leave no other trace of interaction with the content.

The result of such changes, we feel, would be to attract new readers and to increase the engagement of existing readers. Readers will be much more likely to find new content (and unforeseen connections between existing content), which can in turn inspire comments and more new content in response to existing posts. Although our client would need to evaluate this in terms of their own success metrics, we hypothesize that these approaches would produce more to indicate to users that the blogging platform was truly a useful, dynamic and relevant knowledge source. At any given moment, the people consuming content would be engaged with the people producing the content. They'd be actively connected. That active connection would draw out latent knowledge that would otherwise remain untapped. And over time, the organization as a whole could better begin to see and to benefit from what it knows.

Intranet Design: Put Management of Your Company's Knowledge in Employees' Hands

I have often advocated on this blog for introducing user-generated content tools into your intranet environment. Your organization will benefit if you give employees a way to share their expertise, knowledge and experience with each other on tools like blogs, microblogging platforms and wikis.

User-generated content = good.

But today I am advocating for an even more important element that is often overlooked in intranet design: User-generated context.

I've been moved to this way of thinking after reading Andrew McAfee's new book Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges. One of the most interesting ideas in the book, for me, is McAfee's discussion of how a collection of individual actions can yield group level benefits.

To explain that idea McAfee describes how Google developed a new paradigm for determining the value and relevance of Internet content. Google doesn't rely on human beings to analyze and categorize Internet content (as Yahoo! did in the early days), and it doesn't rely on an AltaVista-like "spider" approach in which the search engine crawls across the Web reading meta tags to determine what each page was about. The first model clearly is not scalable, the latter makes it too easy to lie to the search engine by putting in bogus meta tags that make your page appear higher in the results.

Wanting to return more reliable and relevant search results, Google developed an entirely different approach. Google based it's search results not simply on what people said their page was about, but by paying attention also to how many people had linked to a given page. Google's assumption: The more links to a page, the more valid and the more valuable the content on that page must be.

And that's the idea of individual action delivering group level benefits: individuals, one at a time, without knowledge of one another, chose to link to a given Web page. It happened one link at a time, but in the aggregate it proved a significant indication that the page being linked to was valuable. The structure of results we all see when we search using Google is the group level pattern that emerges as a result of the multiple individual links made.

It should be your goal to create a similar opportunity with your intranet. To realize the value of Enterprise 2.0 you have to put context control over your company's professional knowledge into the hands of employees. Each employee must be empowered to add to the knowledge base by expressing the ideas that they think are important. But letting them express ideas is not enough. To really achieve group-level benefit from these individual acts of expression you need to do three things:


1) Increase the number of employees who can engage with the content their colleagues create (tear down the walls -- more about this in my next post)
2) Allow any person engaging the content to link to it, to tag it (think delicious.com for the enterprise) and by doing so, create relationships between that content and content of their own, or other content posted elsewhere on the intranet
3) Reveal to the organization the links the community has established between pieces of content and the associated tags the community has created

These actions by individual users build a context around the ideas that no appointed editor or knowledge manager will ever be able to establish as well. An editor simply will never see all the ways an idea connects to other ideas -- those connections are only visible when ideas are filtered through experience, and an editor only has his or her own experience through which to filter. But when you allow each member of a community to filter each idea through their individual experience, to identify and create the links they feel are appropriate, then aggregate the many individual connections into a collectively-derived context for each piece of content, that's when you really begin to get lasting benefit out of the knowledge collected in your intranet.

User-generated content = good
User-generated context = better

Avoiding Deployment Issues with Visual Studio Sharepoint Workflows from Source Control

There are a couple headache inducing issues that I wish I'd come across the solution for earlier when attempting to load and deploy a SharePoint workflow with code stored in source control.  If you open the solution and immediately attempt to deploy, the first error you will get is "Value cannot be null.  Parameter name: uriString." 

The answer seems obvious once you realize what Visual Studio is trying to tell you, but it wasn't immediately apparent to me from the error message the first time I came across it.

Normally when you create a new workflow project in visual studio you will be prompted to specify a local site to use for debugging along with the name of the workflow.  When loading a project from source control however, that step doesn't get completed.  

To fix this error all you need to do is look for the "Target Site" property of your workflow solution. Clicking the button that appears when you highlight this field will bring up the new workflow dialog box that allows you to configure the local site, associated lists, and trigger options. 

The second deployment issue you may eventually run into is an Access is Denied error when Visual Studio attempts to copy the workflow and feature xml files to your SharePoint installation.

This happens if the workflow is deployed without first checking out the feature and workflow xml files.  The read only attribute of the files in source control is applied to the files in your features folder, preventing further deployments.  Deleting the existing files from the features folder and ensuring they are both checked out in source control will prevent the issue from reoccurring.  It only takes a few instances of having to delete them manually before you'll remember to check out everything.

4 Benefits of Social Computing: Do Companies Know They Need These?

In October of 2009 I spoke to an audience of HR professionals at the Society for Human Resource Managers (SHRM) Strategy Conference in Phoenix, AZ on the topic of developing a social computing strategy for their businesses (look here to see what I told them). I recently received my evaluations from that session and among the comments submitted by the audience was this one:

Interesting talk. But I'd like to hear more about how social computing applies in regular businesses.

What does "regular businesses" mean? I didn't have the opportunity to ask the person who'd written that, so I'm left to draw my own conclusions. I assume he/she meant businesses that are not technology companies. Assuming that's what the person meant, they might be interested in this article over at Read Write Web: Facebook In the Factory: Manufacturers Want Social Software Too. Manufacturers, the article points out, are becoming the "surprise adopters" of social computing. For example, wikis for recording best practices and capturing knowledge of departing engineers are big with these companies. Manufacturing is a pretty "regular" business, right?

But that question -- how does social computing apply to regular businesses -- is still nagging at me. The implication of the question is that social computing is a tool the benefits of which are only applicable to some organizations. When I couple that question with the findings of theblueballroom's study of social computing use in internal communication efforts which found that email, newsletters and posters still rule the corporate communications roost I'm left asking a fundamental question of my own:

Are the benefits that social computing can deliver benefits that the majority of organizations have yet to realize are benefits they need?

I'll explain.

Here's the list of the top four uses of social computing from theblueballroom's study:

1. Sharing knowledge
2. Building community
3. Collaborating during projects across departments + offices
4. Communicating quickly across the business

The benefit of social computing is that all of these things become, if not easier, than certainly more active, more robust and faster in organizations that employ social computing. I therefore see these as benefits, as well as uses.

Sharing knowledge has always happened in business: people talk in the lunch room, office mates turn in their chairs to help each other solve problems. But do companies realize that knowledge sharing needs to evolve from a point-by-point happenstance to the level of corporate strategy?

Community building has always happened in businesses: colleagues become friends, social interaction in addition to work defines people's experience with their company. But consciously creating, cultivating and nurturing communities with the company? Is that something that businesses, on the whole, understand is important to their success today? It still seems to me that a lot of businesses feel like community is OK as long as it doesn't detract from production, but they don't yet see community as a strategic goal they want to dedicate a lot of time and resource to, nor do they see community's contribution to better, more efficient and higher quality production. And for that reason, selling the idea of social computing as a way of jump-starting the formation of community within your organization remains a hard sell.

You're selling an outcome that isn't in demand.

Same with the idea of collaborating across departments and communicating across the company. Both seem to still exist in the realm of mistaken perceptions:
1. The perception that the increased information sharing and increased transparency that accompanies both activities weakens rather than strengthens the organization.
2. The perception, when it comes to communication across the company, that as long as management's message is regularly pushed out to the employees then the communication hurdle has been cleared, regardless of the fact that management isn't listening to understand the reaction by employees to the messages communicated
3. The perception, with regard to collaboration, that contained, team-centered collaboration is the zenith of possibility for collaboration within the company or that to cultivate a different, wider, more asymmetrical collaboration model is somehow dangerous and an economically suspect pursuit.

To deny the need for the kinds of benefits that social computing can bring to an organization is to rest on your laurels within an environment in which you increasingly do not know what your organization knows.

And what are the consequences of that blindness? Morton Hansen has a very interesting analysis of that question in the context of the latest intelligence failures around the attempted Christmas Day bombing of Northwest Flight 253.

Whenever I encounter business leaders who scoff at the idea of social computing as a necessary part of their employee engagement strategy (which I've written about here), or as part of their internal communications strategy or as just a part of their business operations in general, I wonder if they retain any perception of how they, themselves, have gotten to where they are. No one advances in life by closing themselves off from community -- quite the contrary, we succeed based on the number and the value of the connections we make. And if we, as part of a group, can forge connections that bring new ideas, new opportunities, new energy into the group, then the group's success is improved. Why, then, do business leaders feel it's wise to deny their employees opportunities to forge more (and richer, more valuable) connections with each other?

When they deny those opportunities, it's a resource embargo -- they're starving the group, but the group is their own company.

Will we look back at the skeptics of this era and find that many of them, if they did not change, went extinct?

Turning Noise Into Signal: Records Management as Customer Relationship Strategy

Stop thinking of records management as a cost of doing business and start thinking of it as a proactive business tool.

By Ethan Yarbrough and Ken Efta, Allyis Inc.

"I am the customer, why is customer service making me do so much of the work for them?"

That's the question our friend Joyce was moved to ask after her latest frustrating interaction with her bank. Joyce told us the story of how she received an email, ostensibly from her bank, urgently requesting that she call the number provided to discuss "issues related to the credit card ending in the digits xxxx." Understandably concerned, she moved quickly to call the number provided.

The people Joyce reached offered no information, but repeatedly insisted that she give them her social security number so they could clear everything up. Joyce refused; it just seemed fishy to her. She ended the call and logged on to her account on the bank's website. There she initiated a new message to customer service in which she pasted the text of the email she had received and asked if she was being scammed.

The response from customer service arrived the next morning and confirmed her suspicions: "It does appear that you've been a victim of an attempted identity theft. Please call 1-800-xyz-zzxy at your earliest convenience to discuss responses to this matter."

Joyce called the number provided to follow up and what followed was a frustrating day of dead ends and blind alleys:

1. Bank personnel had no record of either Joyce's email to customer service or customer service's response to her. She had to recount all the details over the phone.
2. After recounting the details over the phone, Joyce was told she was talking to the wrong department (even though she was talking to the department at the number provided by customer service) and was transferred to another representative
3. When she was connected with the correct department, they, like the first department she'd spoken with, had no record of Joyce or her email and she, again, had to recount all the details over the phone.

No one Joyce talked to seemed to know she had just talked to someone else. Conversations did not build on previous conversations; each new person's work on Joyce's case started from square one.

By no means is this lack of information integration unique to Joyce's bank, though it is an instructive example of the inefficiencies that can ensue and the impact to customer confidence that can result when records exist in silos.

But what if Joyce's bank treated their records of her customer service transactions as part of their communication strategy by keeping Joyce informed of the status of her issue and keeping track of the broader context in which her customer service issue existed? Let's assume for a minute that the customer relationship was so important to them that service transactions became records, the same as other financial and legal records:

1. The bank would define a data lifecycle to foster the aggregation of customer service data. There would also be excellent discoverability of transactions both for individual customers as well as patterns of transactions across the entire customer base.
   
2. Joyce's bank would provide signals to their customers about the actions they're taking as part of the service transaction. Think of FedEx's original Web-based tools to track packages: the tools gave their customers indicators of where a package was on its way from the shipping origin to their doorstep. Even if the package had not yet arrived, customers could see where it was last scanned. That information alone greatly increased the confidence of FedEx customers. In the case of Joyce's bank, they could push out indicators to her that acknowledge receipt of her issue about the fraudulent email, add a note to ask a clarifying question, or let her know that the issues has been referred to the electronic fraud department.
   
3. The bank would create processes and tools to help filter out noise from signals, retaining the information most important to the customer relationship. An organization like a bank will need to decide what information is not important, and should be discarded.

By changing the way the bank thinks of and values its customer service transactions-and by thinking of Customer Relationship Management as records management-Joyce's bank could greatly improve its ability to serve its customers. Joyce would no longer have to recount her story to each service rep because they'd already have a quickly retrievable record of the issue and would be able to find other customers who'd received the same phishing email. Individual customer service records could take on an organization-wide importance, both for how they improve the communication with the customer and how they inform the organization.