Are you pounding your head against a brick wall when it comes trying to move your Enterprise 2.0 plans forward. You’re not alone.
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.”
I came across a great presentation by Ron Williams, Chairman and CEO of Aetna on innovation and leadership. He made a turnaround at Aetna with new focus on employees and customers and using information technology and fact-based decisions. He spoke at MIT Sloan School of Management. This is a really great session, don’t miss it.
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!
There are countless presentations that give an overview of Web 2.0. Slideshare.net is an excellent site for finding reusable presentation material on Web 2.0 and almost any other topic. I ran across this one from Lee Bryant presented at LegalTech09. The reason was that generally a law practice or legal department in an enterprise often has higher levels of security around information. I wanted to see what they had to say.
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.
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.
“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 employess are going to say. You might not be able to deliver what they want but you are able to meet them on their turf.
Forrester Research predicts that by 2013, the global Enterprise 2.0 will be $4.6 Billion. The biggest growth and share will be in social networking.
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
It used to be that in government circles there was much more difficulty in getting people to communicate both within and across agencies. Let’s hope that great vision of opening up government continues.
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.
One of the frustrating problems most organizations have is full, cluttered email inboxes. It’s not just email from dubious sources, but email(s) from your co-workers and subordinates. These full inboxes lead to many problems:
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.
Blogs are written for all sorts of reasons. Most are a labour of love viewed by a small band of readers. Corporate blogs on the other hand can and should have a much broader reach. They can be an important part of supporting an organization’s brand.
So what makes a successful corporate blog?
First and foremost is the realization that a blog is for the customer’s benefit – not for the company’s. It’s important to remember readers will only come back if there is value for them. That’s right value for them. Not value for the company. Readers don’t care if you are providing a nice, efficient press release site.
If you look closely at the search results you pull up every day (and even some of the Alltop corporate blogs), you’ll see that an alternative model of corporate blogging is beginning to emerge. Instead of writing about themselves, companies are following the lead of the other company blog in the Technorati Top 100 — Signal vs. Noise. They’re beginning to create content that’s not about their business, but that appeals to their buyer personas.
In each of these cases, the company is attracting a broad audience by focusing on content that is interesting to the demographic it serves rather than content about the products it sells.
Every company that is considering starting a corporate blog should spend some thinking about how this effort can support their brand. Otherwise publishing the blog could be wasted effort.
Our world is changing. Cost pressures, low employee engagement scores and green initiatives are on the radar of most organizations. It’s time for enterprises to take a serious look at teleworking.
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
