In this video Stowe Boyd interviews Charlene Li (co-author of Groundswell). Use it to re-energize your Enterprise 2.0 plans. Some of the enlightening quotes are:

• “it won’t go very far without an executive champion”
• “when you put social technologies in place it starts tearing down the way that power is shared”
• “when you give the power to people to post into a wiki or write a blog, [...] and if you let them do it freely, that diminishes the gate-keeper role. [...] and if you think about the way that organizations are laid out, its usually a bunch of silos, and social technologies puts a big stick of dynamite in that”
• wondered why we are finding blogs so little used. “I think its because people don’t like blogging. It’s hard to find time to sit down and compose your thoughts. [...] It asks people to communicate in a very different way. [...] I suggest to executives that they not blog, but they sure talk a lot, so I suggest they video themselves.”

Charlene thinks that enterprise Twitter-like tools will displace a lot of email. “It supplements the natural communication already going on, like IM, which many enterprises have already adopted.”

Posted on the Enterprise 2.0 Conference Blog.

If you only have a few minutes, the first 2/3 of the video is what you should watch. Some key points:

• making the case for change
• transformation through technology in a very short period of time
• 92% of employees take the employee survey (45 minutes)
• key question – is my manager / supervisor practicing the Aetna way (at 83%)
• they had a situation where staff did not admit they worked for Aetna
• employee engagement moved from 48% to 78%
• the are focusing on a high performance organization (expectation, not fear based)
• their performance management system is based on results AND leadership (can’t get results while not developing and leading staff  - if you achieve good results but have poor leadership = no reward!

Source: MIT World

Althought this was for a legal conference, just view the slides and remove the (few) references to firm and practice. It applies to any large organization. Lots of good information. Slides 9 & 10 has a good list of the types of Web 2.0 tools.

What meeting?

Wonder why your brainstorming sessions are a bust? Mitch Ditkoff (Ideachampions) gives us some of the most common reasons:

1. Poor facilitation
2. Wrong (or poorly articulated) topic
3. Unmotivated participants
4. Insufficient diversity of participants
5. Inadequate orientation
6. No transition from “business as usual”
7. Lack of clear ground rules
8. Sterile meeting space
9. Hidden (or competing) agendas
10. Lack of robust participation
11. Insufficient listening
12. Habitual idea killing behavior
13. Attachment to old (“pet”) ideas
14. Discomfort with ambiguity
15. Hyper-seriousness (not enough fun)
16. Endless interruptions
17. PDA addiction (Crackberries)
18. Impatience (premature adoption of the first “right idea”)
19. Group think
20. Hierarchy and/or competing sub-groups
21. Imbalance of divergent and convergent thinking
22. No tools and techniques to spark the imagination
23. Inelegant ways of capturing new ideas
24. No time for personal reflection
25. Pre-mature evaluation
26. No follow-up plan

Now that you’ve finished nodding your head 26 times, check out some of the excellent advice to make your next brainstorming session a success. 26 Reasons Why Most Brainstorming Session Fail (and what to do about it)

• Each year the amount of information created in the enterprise, paper and digital combined, grows faster than 65%.
• Non-productive information work, such as reformatting documents or reentering documents into computers, consumed more than $1.5 trillion in U.S. salaries last year.
• Survey respondents spend as much as 26% of their time trying to manage information overload.
• Respondents split their time evenly between dealing with paper and digital information, but 71% prefer to deal with digital information.
• The amount of time U.S. information workers spent last year managing paper-driven information overload cost $460 billion in salaries.
• Reducing the time wasted dealing with information overload by 15% could save a company with 500 employees more than $2 million a year.

Source: IDC survey, Information Overload Site

And more serious:

• 28% – The percentage of the typical workday wasted by interruptions caused by unnecessary information
• 53% – The percentage of people who believe that less than half of the information they receive is valuable
• 42% – The percentage of people who accidentally use the wrong information at least once per week

So what is IOS? Watch this video!

“Social media makes listening easier. But listening is scary because we might not like what we hear.”

Ethan Yarbrough explores the topic of social media and says its better to be engage in the conversation because it is happening whether you are there or not What do you tell a company that fears social media.

If you really want to listen, then you need to be prepared for what your customers and employees are going to say. You might not be able to deliver what they want but you are able to meet them on their turf.

One example of an enterprise social network is NewsGator’s SocialSites. It built on top of Microsoft SharePoint and provides a dynamic space for communities, expertise location and “work streaming”. Two screenshots from NewsGator Profile Page and Community Site.

A few of the key messages from the report are:

• that consumer Web 2.0 products are not long-term solutions for enterprises, especially free or ad-supported services
• IT continues to be the gatekeeper preventing Web 2.0 applications from being leveraged in the enterprise
• business areas are asking for these tools and bypassing IT if they find a service that will help them in some area
• IT is worried about scalability of these applications
• IT budgets are primarily focused on maintaining legacy applications with little capacity to look at these new tools
• younger employees growing up with these tools will want something similar when they arrive at your doorstep to work
• IT is concerned about the security of Web 2.0 applications
• major enterprise players (IBM, Microsoft, etc) will make Enterprise 2.0 a feature of their monolithic solutions
• major growth in the enterprise will not happen until the baby boomers retire from the executive ranks
• social networking tools that allow customer interaction, profiles and participation in discussions and blogs will receive significant investment

Read a good review of the Forrester report.

Enterprise 2.0 Spending - Forrester

Via ReadWriteWeb.com

Social software in government headed for mainstream

Two great quotes:

Government folks are really jazzed about social media. Within all industries, there’s some level of excitement and passion for social software. In government, it’s off the charts. I think that’s because there’s such a high level of frustration with existing rules and restrictions. People are dying to talk to each other, and to free themselves from the restrictions that government processes have put in place. Intellipedia was an inspiration to many, many agencies and individuals.

and…

The interest has an hourglass shape. Senior government officials “get it”; they see social software as a way for government agencies to be more integrated with the communities they serve. Junior and mid-level staffers “get it”; they see social software as a way to cut through bureaucracy and work more effectively day-to-day. The obstacle I hear about again and again is upper-middle managers who have internalized the need for minimizing risk, while not yet adopting a strategic mindset around serving the needs of the agency’s external stakeholders.

• constantly expanding email servers
• wasted time navigating through email topics that you are not really that interested in anymore
• missing the emails that are really important
• way to much material left around when you really wished it had been deleted

Folio reports via Techcrunch that Neilsen company has deleted the Reply-to-All Button from Outlook. Check out the article for a copy of their corporate email announcing the change.

reply-to-all not available

I think this is a great idea. Way to often staff just keep on hitting Reply-to-All when it is not necessary. If you need to inform, discuss or include many people, they should use one of many collaborative tools available for that purpose.

This podcast from Podtech.net and sponsored by Verizon Business provides a strong case to include a teleworking intiative in your 2009 planning. Some key points:

• to be effective, teleworking needs to be supported right from the top of the organization
• productivity and engagement scores can go up when employees are given the option to telework
• IT needs to step up and deliver reliable, secure and cost effective solutions during 2009
• technologies such as collaboration, unified communications and mobile access need to be part of the mix
• cost savings are available from implementing a hoteling workstation environment
• reduction in carbon footprint and congestion show corporate responsibility to staff and customers
• HR needs to provide training to managers who will have staff working from remote locations

Source: Podtech.net

Sponsored by Verizon

So slow

ZDNET reports on the Computerworld article “The 5 reasons IT can’t speed things up”. I think the first two are way overdue in being addressed.

A focus on big projects. In every case, the whole structure of the IT organization — from project offices to approval processes — is geared for large projects that last a year or longer. The projects are strictly linear, with business analysts interacting with architecture to produce reference solutions, then development experts converting that into designs, and then specifications being laid down. All this is good for getting a big effort right, but these steps slow down the work.

Hostility toward new ways of doing things. These IT organizations won’t invest in and experiment with new tools, approaches and methods until there is a project “worthy” of them. Meanwhile, no business client will take a chance on anything new. The result is that yesterday’s languages, tools and methods remain today’s — and likely tomorrow’s.

Silence rather than dialogue on IT investments. When business people are left in the dark about IT’s existing portfolio, they can only wonder: Are the existing pieces expensive to maintain and test? Is the company losing technical quality through skills attrition or lack of investment by vendors? Is it suffering declining functionality as the work processes evolve and the software doesn’t? Without portfolio feedback, the business can’t judge whether to extend what it owns a little longer or to start again for the next decade. More often than not, the business defers to IT — and IT defers to what it already knows.

The business side’s commitment level. Not all the problems are in IT. In every one of these companies, the business does not make IT tech projects a priority. Decision-makers don’t come to meetings, and key issues aren’t worked out early. Far too often, core questions — “What is a superior customer experience?” or “What is a premier supplier?” — aren’t asked until late in the game.

At project’s end, the business won’t participate in testing or invest in deployment support. That’s a governance breakdown. Successful IT projects are a partnership, but too often the business side fails to do its part.

Corporate style. Corporate behavior influences what you can do. If your performance evaluation system is too rigid, or if you are required to plan (and then execute according to that plan) with nothing held back for change, your speed will be limited. Here, IT can push against the limits, but it’s hard to go any great distance past them.

Computerworld column by: Bruce Stewart

So why is it so difficult change behaviour. Take out wiki and replace with SharePoint and you still have will the tendancy to use email and separate documents.

Collaboration - Email vs. Wiki

From : Wikinomics Blog

For enterprises that truly want to benefit in the area of agility and teaming, a quick read and action can reap huge benefits.

We observed, for instance, one workgroup that rearranged their standard cubicles so that, instead of having a cluster of four served by a centre aisle with barrier walls to provide privacy, they opened the four up and created a centre meeting area with a round table. This group — technically oriented — wheeled up to the centre table and back to their “desks” at the margins of the space 10-15 times a day. (The lunch period, instead of being an “eat out” time, moved to become much more of an “eat in” session at the centre table, a mix of social time and “what have you heard” information sharing about industry news and developments.) This group was the parallel to the same function in another office: the other office made no such changes. Four people outperformed (quality and quantity of work) twelve in a more traditional setting: none of the four had ever been anything above a “satisfactory” performer before the change.

Today’s technology (wireless, VoIP, web conferencing and online collaborative spaces) allow anyone to work in the office environment that is suitable for the task. As office furniture is upgraded or offices relocated, fully reconfigurable offices should be high on the list.

Watch the video at Government Technology where Vivek Kundra, CTO for Washington, D.C. talks about using these tools while acquiring a new police evidence warehouse.

This is Procurement 2.0, using the services available on the internet to move to a increased transparency for the duration of a systems acquisition. This short interview will change your opinion of how the public sector is using these “consumer” tools.

Source: Government Technology

In a recent conversation with one enterprise, I was surprised to hear that while the voice and data teams worked on plans for migration to VoIP and unified messaging, they had not consulted with the IM group — which had its own plans to deploy an enterprise IM application which offered integrated voice and video.  This failure to communicate could have led to redundant, non-integrated systems, resulting in higher costs and a management nightmare. (Think of the scenario when the help desk gets a call that the voice chat capabilities in Microsoft Live Communication Server 2005 aren’t working, only to call the voice group and be told that the voice managers have no idea what the user is talking about.)

In case you hadn’t heard about it, some companies have begun blocking RSS feeds at the firewall. The rationale for this short-sighted, counterproductive bit of paranoid stupidity ranges from bandwidth worries to productivity concerns.

For Immediate Release” podcast from an IABC colleague who informed us that his company has a policy against watching or listening to any streams at work due to bandwidth concerns; they also are forbidden from downloading MP3 files. So employees here can’t determine whether a citizen marketer has made a negative commercial about their company and posted it to YouTube or listen to a business-focused podcast during lunch. Brilliant. And all to protect precious bandwidth.

These decisions around bandwidth are so yesterday. Any organization that is concerend about bandwidth in this manner, has not entered the Internet age.

But many companies haven’t figured out yet that today’s web isn’t the same web around which they built their in-house capabilities back in 1999 or earlier.

The Internet is the #1 information and communications tool for any business. Controlling access goes against all good business sense.

I’ve covered the reasons this philosophy represents the height of cluelessness, but to recap…

• An employee’s home computer is a personal tool, but it gets used for work all the time. Work-life integration is the name of the game today. If you expect me to take work home, then expect me to live part of my life at work.
• The measure of productivity is how much work is getting done, not how much time an employee spends on non-work-related activities. Employees will stay late, come in early, or take work home. They won’t simply let it slide. Nobody wants to lose his job so he can check sports scores on ESPN.
• Nobody ever got fired for checking sports scores at work in the New York Times. The web is the new newspaper.
• Telling employees you don’t trust them—any of them—is a great way to earn some of the lowest engagement scores in the business world. (Trust is a key determinant of engagement and commitment.) Companies with large populations of highly engaged employees earn double-digit growth. Those with large populations of actively disengaged employees earn zero or negative growth. So which is preferable: locked down computers and no growth or open access and double-digit growth?

Arstechnica is reporting that teens prefer using real-time and community communication tool rather than email. Teens say e-mail is for old people. This shift is slow but needs to be watched.