Out from the shadows

One of the interesting phenomena of our social times is that much of the collaborative technology we have adopted at work has appeared without support or sponsorship from our IT departments. CIOs refer, with increasing anxiousness, to the challenge  of 'Shadow IT' - IT funded and delivered elsewhere. As their budgets tighten, they look with deep furrowed brows at the new 'engagement platform' that the Communications Team has just rolled-out with considerably more fanfare than a Sharepoint deployment ever got!

And they have good reason to be grumpy. Despite the apparent ease of dropping a web-based tool into the enterprise, it's rarely achieved without some degree of heartache  in IT. Machinations about synchronising profiles with those in the employee directory, bandwidth limitations on the campus wifi infrastructure, firewall settings, data management policies - Communications never thought about that, did they?

The solution? CIOs need to get social out from the shadows, illuminating it as a fully-considered part of our digital environment. CIOs need to think social from the outset and push-back into those dark corners of the enterprise. Arm-folded grumpiness is not the solution - an enlightened embrace is.

photo:  M Glasgow

Have you got Sunday Night, Monday Morning Syndrome?

There's a lot of chatter about Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and, let's face it, whilst most companies are still trying to get their heads around some of the challenges this presents, most people are simply getting on with it and bringing their own devices because it's often the most effective way to work.

But what can be done for those who are genuinely deskbound and limited to their corporate systems and platforms.  These are the people who suffer from "Sunday Night, Monday Morning" syndrome. At the weekend, they'll be playing collaborative games on the PS4, watching and uploading videos to YouTube, asking and answering questions from their networks in Jelly, chatting with friends in a Google Hangout and using any number of apps on their smartphones or tablets. Come Monday morning and they are waiting 20 minutes for a dusty corporate PC to fire up and, when it does, all of those slickly designed networks and apps are quite often blocked.

So where, does such a worker look for help? Well, let's hope that their company has rolled out an enterprise social network such as Yammer, or has some sort of knowledge management platform. However, quite often, those very networks which people use for personal time and leisure at the weekend are just as effective when applied to the world of work.  

Just think of how many 'how to' videos exist in Vimeo and YouTube, or how many people have asked and answered similar questions to yours in Quora. Sure, you aren't about to ask your Facebook friends about commercially sensitive projects right there on your wall, but you just might want to inbox a friend who works with a particular technology or company and ask for a piece of advice, mightn't you?

So, for those companies which still block social media and similar sites, just think about the extended networks of all of your employees and consider how they might be better used to your advantage if they could be accessed from the corporate desktop.  

You might not be able to stop people Bringing their Own Devices. Maybe you ought not to prevent them Bringing their Own Networks too.

Photo credit:  Thomas Stromberg

Get real. Get Social.

One of the tenets I follow in Building a Social Business is the importance of focusing on real business value. Personally, I’m quite comfortable in acknowledging the incredible contribution social is having to the way we work – I see it every day. But there is no better way to convince a sceptical CEO to invest time and money in the adoption of social technology and processes than talking about numbers in a P&L! Making the benefits of social ‘real’ is often the key to securing that precious commodity: CEO-level support for social business-building.

Fortunately there are some great stories out there to assist us in making social real. I find myself frequently citing giffgaff, a UK mobile service provider, who have used social technology to take out the cost of providing a service support function. Instead they have built a ‘gamified’ forum, relying on the crowd – their customers – to provide rapid and extensive assistance to each other. This is something that has broad relevance to all large corporates. If giffgaff can do this, at what point do you start challenging the need for your IT help-desk?

And if you needed more in your pursuit of making social real, why, McKinsey’s, that bastion of the corporate establishment, have produced a cracker of a report laying it all out for you.

All this helps you (and hopefully your CEO) realise that, in essence, social is a way of extracting latent value that has been built into the Internet. It’s an enabling technology, an enabling philosophy, that overlays valuable networks of knowledge and relationships on top of the connections that exist in the Web. Clever organisations like giffgaff are exploiting this to gain competitive advantage. Why wouldn’t you?

So, you’ve no excuse, now. Go upstairs and make it real for your CEO. You’ll be a huge step closer to building that social business.

photo:  reynermedia

So, how about this for a Social Business?

Today I'm working out of Ziferblat, on the corner of Shoreditch High Street and Old Street.

It brings a new concept in social working to London, having already become popular in the Ukraine and Russia. 

Imagine a cafe where the food and drink is free but you make it yourself.  Instead of paying for what you consume, you pay for the time you spend here - a "micro-tenancy" if you will.  It's three pence per minute and, for now you track your own time and leave your fee in the donations box on the counter when you leave.  Soon you'll be handed a funky old alarm clock on arrival as your own personal timer. 

You press a roadside doorbell to gain access and then it's up a flight of stairs where you are welcomed by your host (Mark today).  

Mark pointed out the wifi password, invited me to take a seat anywhere, invited me to change the music if I wanted to or play the guitar or piano!  There are books on the shelves to read too, and in the kitchen there's free tea and coffee plus as much toast and jam or biscuits as you can eat.  You can bring your own food and use the microwave too. 

It's busy.  Articles in The Guardian, The Telegraph and elsewhere have raised its profile to the extent that the coffee machine broke yesterday with the demand. So it's instant coffee today! 

It's a buzzy atmosphere with people working quietly on their own or in small groups, there are even a couple of informal team meetings under way.  People are working with people they know.  People are sitting with and meeting new people.  Someone is playing chess and using a Rubik's cube at the same time! 

Nick Drake is on the record player, but I might change that in a while. No hang on, someone's just put I Am Kloot on.

It's a happy, busy and stimulating working environment.  Will this social business model take off?  We'll see, but judging by the air of productivity here today and the pile of coins and notes in the honesty box, it's off to a healthy start. 

It's open 10am until midnight, seven days a week. 

Useful links here:

http://london.ziferblat.net 

facebook.com/ZiferblatLondon 

twitter.com/ziferblatlondon 

instagram.com/ziferblatlondon

Going Social? Don't Forget the Fun!

I dropped by a couple of conferences in London last week, both dealing in one way or another with the emergence of social businesses... whether they call themselves that or not.

There were a number of 'good news stories' as established corporates told delegates of the successes they'd had in rolling our enterprise social networks as well as some of the challenges they faced.  I even told a good news story or two of my own.

One thing I did notice, however, was that a couple of these organisations had sought to implement 'social' as if it were A.N.Other bog-standard enterprise application.  The fundamental differences of social technologies and their implications for culture and behaviours hadn't been ignored, but they'd certainly been deprioritised in favour of the C-Suite's preference to deploy a tool aimed at boosting productivity rather than anything that might be seen as fun or, God forbid, be described as Facebook for the enterprise.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, these rollouts were being cited as successes, but I do think there is a risk that the opportunity to taste secret sauce inside an enterprise social network may be lost if corporates feel that the only way to implement is to pretend it's another SAP upgrade from the 1990s.

Some of the best implementations take seriously the boosts to productivity which can be gained through enhanced collaboration and the power of sharing... but they don't forget the fun.

Photo:  Bethany Weeks

Innovating socially: the old and the new

I'm as evangelical an advocate of social technology and processes as anyone. However, in the work I do to build 'social businesses', I'm regularly reminded of the importance of not throwing the old (pre-social) baby with the new (social) bathwater. Social technology is a great exploiter of the power that exists in the connected world we inhabit but it doesn't mean that all that came before is irrelevant. Indeed, it is often the coupling of what we've always done well with the power of social that yields real value in the organisation.

Reading +Tim Kastelle's excellent piece on 'Why your innovation contest won't work' provides a topical illustration of the importance of keeping the old with the new. Tim's thesis is that the current vogue of running collaborative 'ideation' activities - contests, jams, etc - crowdsourcing ideas through social technology, detracts from the really difficult part of innovation: turning ideas into reality. He believes that organisations focus on this part simply because it's easy.

And how right he is. Done badly, crowdsourced ideation can be the technological equivalent of that crime of innovation: the staff suggestion box! Placed ceremoniously in reception, covered in last year's Christmas wrapping paper, it sits there waiting for employees to earnestly surrender their latest epiphany to 'Management' in the firm belief that it will be acted on and transform the business. The result: an overwhelming amount of ideas and a rapid realisation that no-one had thought through what they were going to do with them.

As Tim says "Innovation is the process of idea management". The key determinant of success is what happens after ideation. This is where that traditional, pre-social activity comes in. Taking the time to establish good old innovation governance and funding mechanisms means that ideas can be taken through to material benefit as quickly as possible. It's the discipline of the (old-school) stage-gate process that makes innovation work.

Despite what Tim says, I believe that effective ideation is as key to successful innovation as what happens after it. Tapping into a source of great, relevant ideas is essential for innovative organisations. And, with a bit of pre-social thinking, social ideation can enhance your innovation process. Two specific elements make a big difference. Firstly, constrain the ideation - explain clearly and persistently to the crowd what your stage gate parameters are so that they focus their ideas accordingly. Secondly, involve those instrumental in implementing the ideas (the budget holders, the customers, etc) from the outset of the ideation process. And social technology helps bring all this together, connecting the crowd and the decision-makers. Dare I say it, connecting the new with the old!

photo:  Will Hastings

Instinctive work

Being social is instinctive. We're social animals after all. We have assimilated social technology into our lives with unparalleled speed and intensity. For us, social feels natural and something we should never have been without. However, as with much 'instinctive' human behaviour, mapping social into the workplace is not a straightforward task. Becoming an effective Social Business is something that warrants a bit of forethought; not a huge amount - social is a world that flourishes in the absence of protocol - but success comes more willingly when you invest a bit of thinking up front. This is particularly so when much of your current business is already working reasonably effectively in a decidedly 'pre-social' manner. Here are three things +Tim Difford and I have found helpful in our pursuit of building great Social Businesses.

Define the use case Having a clear and widely understood expression of why and where social technology is going to make a positive difference to work is, we believe, an invaluable first step on the way to success. We frequently create simple 'Use Cases' to define the outcomes we are anticipating and their impact on the business. Publishing these at the outset enables us to explain what we are planning to do, guides how we configure the environment and finally helps us explain results. In our opinion, use cases (or whatever you choose to call them) are the single most important factor in directing instinctive social behaviour into productive success.

Help others find their voice Using social in the workplace can be pretty scary - even for those all over Facebook and Instagram in their private lives. All of a sudden people tighten up, become extremely wary about revealing their inner thoughts in the full glare of a professional audience. Social technology is most effective when people are comfortable with 'working out-loud'. And not just one or two confident evangelists, either. Social needs volumes to work and you need to get as many people as you can past the nervously-tiptoeing-through-etiquette stage into social-fluency as quickly as possible. Two suggestions here. Firstly, role model. Loudly and obviously. Blatantly use hashtags, @mentions, likes and other taxonomies, signposting their value for all to see. Secondly, give people a safe sandpit to experiment in. Consider creating private areas where an individual can feel that the jeopardy of exposure is limited prior to leaping into the wider enterprise and beyond!

Make it ordinary In many ways an organisation's journey to enlightenment will only be complete when social moves from being something special and exciting to something ordinary and, dare I say it, unnoticed. Much of this transition will be Darwinian. 'Natural selection' will ultimately ensure that the medium of social will eventually supplant much of the pre-social world. However, there is also room for some judicious 'intelligent design' in the building of a social business. Don't rely on the power of viral uptake alone. There's nothing coy about social. It is brash and loud and should be bold too. Identifying some core day-to-day processes and actively transitioning them to social is often the key to getting things moving. This isn't about mandating the elimination of email, but it could and should be about replacing regular communiques, running workflows and publishing governance documentation. On its journey to the ordinary, contriving social is definitely OK.

photo:  Howard Lake