Author Archives: John Tripp

Social Software and Business Performance (Part 1)

Bill Ives has an interesting post on his Portals and KM Blog talking about a new research report from Deloitte called Social Software for Business Performance. Bill’s post focuses on the section of the report that deals with establishing proper metrics for social software impact, but we want to highlight other areas of the report in our Project Wall posts.  To begin with, let’s look at the need for employees to perceive usefulness in the platform in order for true adoption of the system to take place across the workforce.

Deloitte and Ives both rightly argue that the current metrics for “adoption” of social software are not very useful because they are based solely on the number of users who interact with the system.  We think that this measure of adoption is especially flawed, given that most companies who are implementing a social software platform see expertise identification as a key low-hanging fruit for the project and mandate that users enter the system and create an expertise profile.  If we simply measure the number of users who have created a profile, are we really getting a sense of “adoption” of the platform?  Clearly not.

On page 5 of the report, Deloitte describes a case study at Alcoa:

“At first, employees only used the Traction software platform because their managers required it. However, as employees identified and shared specific ways to use the software to improve their performance and work more efficiently, they integrated it into their daily workflow.”

Employees look at tools and evaluate their usefulness based upon the ability of the tool to help them get their job done.  Until employees evaluate the social software system through the lens of “what’s in it for me?” and consequently make a positive assessment, adoption of the system is unlikely – except in the case of managerial mandate.

However, when a social platform is used to create context-specific business-driven applications, the social platform’s value becomes transparent to users. Another quote from Alcoa:

“One day it just clicked for me. I realized how using the software could really improve my productivity. From that point on, I started using it whenever possible and not just when my boss told me to do so. That’s when I started seeing [the system] help me do my job better.”

Now that’s adoption.

Businesses that have implemented social software platforms need to help users find the value in social business interactions in order to drive adoption and business value.  They can do this by providing context-specific social business applications on top of their platforms, such as social project management.

More on social project management and its ability to drive business performance in Part 2 of this post later this week.

What does social business mean?

Over on Luis Benitez’ blog, he’s got a post about what it means to be a social business, there’s a lot in that post, and most of it’s really good.  Be sure to check it out!

One thing that is really refreshing about IBM’s view on social business is that it is not especially technology focused.  In the past, Lotus, especially at Lotusphere was incredibly tool-centric.  (e.g. – Want to become an e-Business? Here’s the software for that!  Want to become a Knowledge Business? Here’s the software for that!)

However, in Luiz’ post social business is described as follows:

“Social Business:

  1. embraces networks of people – It’s not about B2B or B2C. It’s about P2P (person-to-person) to create business value.
  2. is engaged and has conversations online with its customers, employees, suppliers and embraces
  3. is transparent and is ready to be open to ideas and capitalize on those
  4. removes boundaries both inside and outside so that your people reflect your brand
  5. is nimble because they are engaged and transparent (see #2 and #3 above) and can make quicker business decisions”

What is missing from that definition?  That’s right…technology.  While it’s true that most of these things can [only?] be enabled by technology, the fact is that no technology in the world will make a business into a social business as described above.

So, social business is about doing business a new way.

Technology can help that along…but it can’t do it for you.

Picking an Entry Point into Social Business, Part 2

As discussed in Part one of this post last week, until recently the typical value proposition for social business was on the customer engagement and marketing side of the business.  This clearly has been, and will continue to be, a core area of social business strategy and value generation.

What is more exciting is the newer concept of applying social business to build trust, and effectiveness  within the organization, across traditional structural and cultural boundaries, and across task contexts.  As IBM’s second two bullet points illustrate. [IBM at Lotusphere identified three “top” entry points into social business:

  1. Customer Service/Marketing
  2. Product or Service Development/Operational Effectiveness
  3. [Operations/] Human Resources (Operations was omitted from several of the presentations)]

Traditional organizational practices create defined and hierarchical communications paths.  Social Business recognizes that while these traditional communication and collaboration channels may provide structure, and reduce information and communication overload, they are too slow, filter out important information, and do not allow the right information to get to the right person.

Because all businesses are social enterprises, impediments to communication must be removed, people must be empowered to get the information they need, when they need it, and be alerted to changes in the project environment from which they must learn. Further, relevant communications should not stop at traditional organizational boundaries.  Where appropriate,communications should be extended across intra- and inter-organizational walls, to access needed expertise, gather and share information, and to engage the wider social fabric of the organization.

New Product Development is a clear example of a corporate initiative that calls for collaborative interaction, but fundamentally NPD is a project-based effort, and therefore IBMs bullet points can be generalized to all projects, as can operations, part of the third bullet point. (I didn’t attend a session where the HR aspects were addressed clearly, but I assume that they are describing general employee engagement via internal social business)

So in the last two bullet points, IBM is clearly advocating the use of social business to drive project efficiency, innovation, and effectiveness, which we believe to be the new killer app of social business – Social Project Management.

We will shift our focus to Social Project Management specifically in our next post.

Picking an Entry Point into Social Business

At the recent Lotusphere 2011 conference, IBM emphatically promoted its vision for Social Business.  While the conference has been blogged about in many places, we’d like to focus on one particular component of the IBM argument for Social Business, namely that of choosing an entry point into Social Business.

Throughout several of the keynote addresses and other sessions, IBM described the need for businesses to choose an entry point into Social Business.   While admitting that “there are many other potential entry points,” IBM’s top three areas are:

  1. Customer Service/Marketing
  2. Product or Service Development/Operational Effectiveness
  3. [Operations/] Human Resources (Operations was omitted from several of the presentations)

While these three areas indeed make sense (as blogged about here), it is important to understand that the choice selected even among these three options is a direct reflection of a business’ key assumptions and its strategy for becoming a Social Business.

When contemplating the choice, ask yourself if you are looking to become a social business on the outside of your organization, on the inside, or both?  While many businesses see value in customer outreach and marketing that comes from having an externally facing social presence, it was refreshing to hear IBM emphasize at Lotusphere the benefits of meeting a business’ internal social business needs.

Externally focused social media and social business efforts are really nothing new.  But the recognition of the potential value of becoming an “internal” Social Business is a much more recent phenomenon.  In the end, businesses are social entities.   Each person in the business is a member of multiple social networks both internal and external to the organization.  Every member of the business team has unique social connections inside and outside of the organization.

What would happen if a business (or a team within a business) could tap into the entire spectrum of social networks to identify the expertise needed to complete business goals?  What would happen if a project manager could “see” the entire social network of her team and leverage those rich connections to better communicate with the greater business community at large?  There are a significant number of internal processes and operations where the visibility and awareness created by social technologies can be brought to bear to deliver real business value.

Getting back to the top three entry points…

IBM identified Customer Service/Marketing – a typical value proposition on the external side – as number one.  This is not surprising given the general acceptance of externally focused Social Business.  Social CRM is in fact a good vehicle for transforming the traditional customer acquisition and marketing channel from a push-based, interruption heavy, broadcasting model to an interactive model of openness and trust between a business and its existing and potential customers.  But really this is just “another” channel for surfacing a shift in marketing focus that is already well established.

We see the real value of creating a Social Business as further pushing the envelop of what social can do for business by fully engaging both internal and external facing processes – entry points #2 and #3 in IBM’s list.  Our next post will focus on the bang for the buck that comes when businesses morph into Social Businesses using this approach.

Article on IBM’s strategy on Activity Streams

In a follow up to our post on Ambient Awareness, Forbes has an article on Activity streams, and IBM’s strategy on them.  (Activity streams are the operationalization of Social Business Apps ambient awareness.)

The article in Forbes stresses the “surprise” that can occur in Activity Streams (although “serendipitous” seems to be the term most utilized “out there” in the blogosphere).  This concept of surprise or serendipitous awareness is exactly the kind of effect that ambient awareness builds.  However, what is missing from the article is the concept that it’s not just the “ah ha” surprise of one post that a user sees that is important.  Rather, it’s is the cumulative impact of hundreds (or thousands) of small pieces of information, some important, some trivial, that over time build into social networks the kind of “ESP” described in our previous post.

Another important thing in this article is the fact that IBM is embracing open standards for Activity streams (as is Trilog Group, our sponsor).  To really get the full effect of social business, platform vendors like IBM have to make their platforms very open standards friendly.

Social Business Applications Promote Observability via Ambient Awareness

In our previous post, we discussed the issue of work observability, and the fact that in knowledge work, observability is an issue.  In any environment, people are impacted by huge amounts of information. This information is largely ambient – meaning that the information flows to people just by them being present in the environment. Whether hearing a snippet of a conversation, seeing a pile of papers appear and disappear, or simply reading body language, humans make significant judgments about what is going on around them through being bombarded tiny bits of informal, mundane information. These bits of information are so small, and are so much a part of the environment that we don’t notice that we are even processing them. This information is truly ambient – it is part of the environment.

The key to making work observable is feedback. Just like the apprentice artisan received constant feedback and information, teams that work together constantly communicate and share, building team awareness. However, that communication is constrained by time, distance and team boundaries. When working on project with distributed or very large teams, communication becomes compartmentalized even within the team. These communication and awareness boundaries reduce the observability of work.

The foundation of Social Business Application effectiveness is Ambient Awareness. Similarly to the Facebook news feed, social business software provides constant small updates on events related to a project or portfolio. This stream of small pieces of information creates what sociologists call “ambient awareness”. Rather than increasing information overload, this large number of small pieces of information create greater understanding. The New York Times described the paradox while discussing the Facebook news feed:

“This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

“It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,” Haley went on to say. “I love that. I feel like I’m getting to something raw about my friends. It’s like I’ve got this heads-up display for them.” It can also lead to more real-life contact, because when one member of Haley’s group decides to go out to a bar or see a band and Twitters about his plans, the others see it, and some decide to drop by — ad hoc, self-organizing socializing. And when they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they’ve never actually been apart. They don’t need to ask, “So, what have you been up to?” because they already know. Instead, they’ll begin discussing something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.” [Link to NY Times]

Social Business software creates context specific ambient awareness, which because of the broad set of information provided to the team makes the work visible in “surprisingly sophisticated” ways.

The Need to Make Work Observable

As work processes and products become more and more heavily focused on knowledge work and knowledge production, work has become less “observable”. Whereas in a physical production environment, the visible work product is the final work product itself, in information and knowledge work, the visible work product is often descriptions of the final work product, namely requirements documentation, specifications, and project plans.

In knowledge teams, a key issue that affects both team performance and the perception of the team by its stakeholders is the observability of “what’s going on” with the project. Too often, status communications are infrequent, untimely, and incomplete, and even within the team, there is uncertainty and confusion as to what is the current status of the project.

Observable work is a term that has been used for several years[1] and which generally defines the ability for an observer to understand the process, progress, and status of a project. Jim McGee and others have noted that as the dominant production paradigm has shifted from craft to industrial to knowledge work, the ability for an external observer to identify the process being used to create, the progress toward completion, and the overall status, including risks, has become difficult[2].

When a person desired to enter a pre-industrial, craft-oriented profession (for example, blacksmith, glazier, or watchmaker), a young apprentice would observe how the master worked, painstakingly learning by mimicking the master, failing to some extent, and then mimicking again. By receiving many small pieces of information the apprentice learned and, over time, became the master. This intense informal feedback allowed learning to occur, and this kind of feedback is what observable work is all about.

In any kind of work, the ability to communicate the what, why and how of what is being done is crucial.  In an observable work stream, this feedback is constant, but in a typical large team or distributed team environment it is missing.  Social Business Applications help to create this stream of constant feedback…more on how they do that in our next post.

[1] At least since 2002, see – http://www.mcgeesmusings.net/stories/2002/03/21/KnowledgeWorkAsCraft.html

[2] ibid

What is a Social Business Application?

We’re hearing a lot about Social Business lately, especially with the emergence of social business platforms like Connections from IBM Lotus.  Social business platforms like Connections provide an enterprise and its partners a “visible” social network in the same manner that consumer social networks like Facebook do.  These social business platforms provide the basic social business framework for collaboration.

However, there is a big difference between social networking (Facebook) and social business – context.  When you use Facebook, the context is your life, and Facebook is not very good at letting you “compartmentalize” or “categorize” your life.  Essentially, if you’ve got a Facebook friend, they’re going to be a part of whatever you post on Facebook.

When you are at work, you operate in multiple disparate contexts, whether via a number of projects, or roles, or teams.  Social Business requires the concept of context, which is where social business applications come in to play.

Social business platforms provide the potential for contextual collaboration.  Many provide the ability to create simple collaborative spaces for a context.  However, business contexts are highly specialized, and custom social business applications, such as Social Project Management, and Social CRM provide far more powerful contextual collaboration than a simple “space”.

Social Business applications like Social Project Management are customized contexts for social collaboration.  They depend on the presence of a social business platform, and they add value to the social business platform by providing another “reason” for users to engage with the platform.  As more users engage with the platform, from whatever context, the social business platform gains value.

To illustrate, Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.  Social Business platforms seem to follow this same curve.  However, with social business applications, the value of the platform is multiplied again by the number of contexts within which the users engage on the platform.

Social Business Applications are the value multiplier of social business platforms.  They provide new reasons for users to engage with the platform, and they provide value above and beyond traditional versions of applications for all the reasons that social business platforms provide value – they connect the right resources (inside and outside of teams ) in order to get work done more efficiently and effectively.

Welcome!

Welcome to The Project Wall!

After our great time meeting with folks at Lotusphere, and our continued discussions with customers and partners, we realized that there’s a great deal of confusion and questions about social business platforms, and social business applications.

This blog is our attempt to both join and lead the conversation about social business software, how social business applications add value, and why social business platforms are so critical in the future.

We are sponsored by Trilog Group, but this is not a Trilog Group-centric blog. While we of course will discuss Trilog’s offerings at times, we’re hoping that this blog can be more of a forum for understanding the value of Social Project Management, and other Social Business Applications.

Stay tuned, we’ve got a lot of ideas, and a lot of questions that we want to get your input on!