By looking at my tag cloud of the various projects I have been involved in I can now look forward to an exciting 12 months or so in a new business.  Staying with the message of social messaging you will start to see some new tags showing up in the tag clouds. I expect increased exposure to public consultation and engagement, business information management, linked libraries, indigenous rights and political governance.

If you have feedback about any of the topics I’ve discussed, feel free to contact me on Google+

In the digital world social network marketing (SNM) is the popular tool by which we subscribe to certain social messages (curiously, googling social messaging at the time of writing returned the wikipedia file for Twitter). For business, under the surface of SNM is a lucrative segmentation of ideas and concepts to build business intelligence around on-line applications. SNM is akin to digital democracy. The cloud facilitates enhanced relationships between online services and the marketplace like media does for polititians.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately as I recently had a major project that had to make a positive impact on the culture in our business. Even with buy-in from the the highest level of management – there still needs to be an enormous effort expended to filter the messages through and ensure that it sticks.

In reality that requires a strategy and a lot of resource – or if you can muster it: the right talent and the right tools.

In the digital realm your document library can form the backbone of your strategy – this allows communication of the bigger picture by linking to “more info” whilst the release sticks to message. Where a gap in your message appears apparent simply plugging it with a document allows you to manage the social message campaign (or if you’re stuck for time placing a holder file and ask your audience to contribute/collaborate). This is a great example of where discussion boards and wikis are useful in the corporate environment – we had SharePoint 2007 but no commentary which means that feedback is best obtained face to face through workshops and focus groups.

Once you’ve developed a campaign plan (mind mapping with experts is a constructive tool) the next step is to segment your audience and work on your channel strategy for each segment (e-mail, intranet, meetings, seminars).

Team leaders, project managers, management and stakeholders, teams and experts, training staff and of course customers will have differing preferences around how they are to be engaged. For well resourced projects this also means that you can tailor the content for each channel.

In our organisation we have a very active communications and marketing department so were able to focus on our policies and procedures library would deal with the majority of follow up questions (the 80:20 rule). The advice of somebody skilled in copy writing is always of value.

Often in smaller businesses it is better to take a more adaptive approach – this also allows you to leverage off the benefits of being more dynamic and innovative compared to larger competitors.

An example of weathering a recession is Niche Media Limited. In 2010 this small business with rather large clients (including Fortune 500 companies) underwent a major change in it’s business model. They wanted to shed their cute elevator pitch company and develop into an industry leader. This business now holds a significant market share of a broad range of highly competitive niche markets in the New Zealand advertising Industry. Ethnic Media (Ethnic Media New Zealand) is one such channel that has been developed as a new avenue of web 2.0 marketing approaches. This was a business transformation done on an extremely small budget (which was often paid in-kind). The web developer 4 Acres provided the expertise to develop on-line relevancy in a traditionally niche media space but without the cost of geo-political constraints. On-line advertising within a network of sites develop what in web1.0 speak would be called a hub but in web 2.0 is the cloud.

Just because the budget was low, should not detract from the incredible investment in people and process that was run in parallel by the new management team. The initial change started with a blip in staff turnover and then as the new team stormed its way to effective, there was a flurry of fresh and exciting new leads (including several major central government contracts – with campaign funding in the millions of dollars).  As the new sales team focused on customer service the pace of change became too rapid and there was a lot of talk with the bank for funding the new working capital requirements of a now national business with staff frequently traveling now around New Zealand supporting campaigns and developing new relationships with active social messaging sources.

Having business certainty under control the business restructure and subsequent change campaign left standing a business focused on developing business relationships and improving industry performance connecting with diverse communities and building global brands from the ground up.

In the beginning the biggest challenge was meeting demand for services. When major campaigns were at their peak this often came at the cost of lost leads. Stakeholder engagement continues to be a major focus for the company but now also on finding new networks and business partners so that BAU service delivery becomes a function of a bigger cloud of like-minded businesses and agents. Niche Media is now a significant force in the industry with the managing director speaking on the circuit and new services under development.

In Larger organisations there is a greater potential for influencing and manipulating campaigns through on-line activities. But how do we make on-line campaigns go viral?

The environmental factors and politics of an economic recession impact on how smoothly change management campaigns go. Whether a private company or a public institution, stress and uncertainty become a challenge for project management. In my case however there was a lot of novelty and energy from some of the departments who provided internal support services (accounting, comms and marketing, legal, customer services and the techies), however even those relationships can come under stress and comuniction issues need to be able to be quickly pulled in.

Our first review revealed a few “spanners in the works” so to speak. With any amalgamation program involving disparate processes and systems and most importantly team cultures probably the best thing to come out of scoping this review is that there will be lessons learned that will save a lot of time and money in subsequent campaigns. To give some context to the review, this project involved amalgamating 7 sets of policies and processes to engage a particular segment of our citizenry (about 100,000 people) in fulfilling its obligations that had been occurring in the community for many years without more than minor deviations from previous years.

The next part of this post is adapted from a section I wrote in the campaign debrief report. Where context is required to understand the learning I have included annotations in italics and our future plans as corporate policies develop and the toolkit available to our site expands..

There is great potential for business silos to be interconnected to improve cohesion and integration. As well as having impassioned business units who actively engage with technologies like SharePoint you also need the support framework and the enterprise policies to help develop a conducive culture.

This review is purely looking at the effectiveness of the team site to deliver a communication platform for change management. Some of the things we had already put in to place before we finsihed with the review

Talking to content publishers across the business I sense a range of reactions to technology as it reaches further into their personal space. We are becoming increasingly connected electronically and the range of preferences about how people do connect is hugely diverse and interesting to consider from a SharePoint perspective. Particularly in the corporate environment.

SharePoint has the capability for a site administrator to control down to the lowest level imaginable what a user can and cannot do/see/feel on a site. This is done through the user management and policy configuration settings. SharePoint can also integrate with your campaigns through social networking tools and telecommunications devices to lift engagement based on the user’s role.

Permit me to illustrate. Our business is predominanlty staffed by managers, admin support, clerks/processors, field agents, project teams and advisors. Each of these groups are held in a “container” with different settings based on default subscriptions, how they connect (e.g. managers by blackberry) and what permissions/access they hold. When a new field agent joins the organisation, their supervisor completes the necessary paper work to get swipe card access, user account settings and – permissions set for file server and SharePoint access. Because this field agent is recognised by our policy to be more valuable in the field than the office we can enable mobile services to their user account, connect and then train them in systems use to improve sustainability and business efficiency. Conversely, SharePoint in portfolio development teams (advisos and project leads are built with full Office2010 integration so they can hook in from any office (via citrix) and update in real-time workflow tools, documents and project models. Policy can also control moderation to panui boards (discussions) and survey/feedback channels. Your site then acts as a hub for delivering business impovement with feedback and commentary for some users and dedicated workspaces on-line for others.

The generation myth

You need the technology to balance the push and pull of information (see next post) to be user-friendly so that even the least technical people are able to use it in their daily work. Orgnisations hire the right people for the right job. Having experience with Microsoft Office is pretty standard these days, and that is all you need for ShrePoint as it is really just a cloud that follows your p.c. that you cn share with others. Setting realistic targets about staff engagement will help to determine what campaings are working and what you can learn about what to push and what to pull. Over complicating your user policies will stemmy organic development of innovation.

When people are passionate about their work and the business invests in team culture then SharePoint has useful tools to use in your strategy. If Outlook is working fine and tracked changes in Word 2003 still get’s the job done and people are happy – why would you change it? Regardless of whether you are nearing retirement, a baby-boomer, or  Gen X,Y or Z the technology must cater to all. Having the option to push or pull I think is the point.

Key to preparing the business for the big push will be instilling an understanding of the difference between a push and a pull strategy. There is some useful literature on the subject. Managers will need to be willing to expand their traditional toolset, utilising active forms and managing subscriptions. Content publishers will need to plan each workspace (managing the lifecycle of data and encouraging content subscriptions and increased interactivity. Once the business has useful content to pull campaign management will push business performance improvements.
Here are two collaboration elements of the SharePoint toolset that are able to utilise push strategies effectively. The first could be used for project work and the second for a learning and development module.

SharePoint Workspace

A Workspace in SharePoint 2007 is not much more than a new way of thinking to Outlook based appointments. It is the more powerful SharePoint 2010 editions that will deliver öut of the box” amazing workflow management and collaboration capacity.
The good news is that all of the elements in our deployment are easily upgradable to the later edition. Having a technology roadmap allows our business to align our strategic investment decisions with the enterprise architecture plan (e.g. We will investment in new mobile device (Windows Mobile) and office equipment (e.g. video conferencing) technology when the enterprise will be able to support them). Upgrading application software and systems may also depend on projects in other departments (e.g. CRM, NAR, SAP).

Subscriptions Management
Each of our business portfolio managers will be managing subscriptions. Here are a few useful points about subscriptions:

• A list of contributors with user-privileges based on project plan requirements (read-only, publisher, power-user)
• Campaigns are used to raise engagement. This campaign can be a highly sophisticated (and expensive) technology solution, or simple propoganda and integration with traditional methods (usually adressing concerns about generation gaps (not valid in my experience).
• Content is King. Your content must be easy to understand and provide dynamic content (links) to related topics (see earlier posts on taxonomy and meta data).
• Customer segmentation reporting can be used to target content push to individuals and groups subscribed to a service (important when you have a lot to say and you want to send a different message tone).

What I am learning from my readings and conversations with SharePoint and document management experts is that as a business you have to be very clear about how any technology solution fits in your broader program. Technology is no silver bullet. Your business must set strict paramaters about how technology facilitates improved customer service or (as in our case) improved environmental sustainability. Monitor. Review. Improve.

top level: Function
second level: Activity
document level: Subject
Detail Level: Project/Case

This will help us to structure the high level information pages in a way that visitors to our site will find easy to navigate. We can then attrribute tags or labels to content so that we can easily search and associate information across our site (e.g. if you are reading an interesting document under one portfolio and would like to see if a similar document exists for another you can click on the appropriate tag in the tag cloud and see what other related documents are available (assuming that other parts of the business subscibe to the same meta data taxonomy)). The most popular metadata labels will need to be consistently used across our portfolios. This will be achieved by using meta lists from within SharePoint.

How might this look?

Consider this early draft of the collaboration site. Information is founded on FOUR functional areas as the image shows:

If the model is representative of the business’ activity then we can actually use a simple filtered table to see how the lower level containers of information are described. By adding a notes field we are able to find a valuable starting point for havesting othe meta lists. Then Subject Mtter experts (legal, comms if necessary) to identify the business rules and exceptions to the compnies data and map it to Scorecard/dashboard reports and opeations projects for improvement.

To see a published example of the draft document taxonomy as of the time of writing. Click here (you will likely require permission so drop me an e). What you will see from the filtered information is that our notes fields are rich in meta data that directly corresponds to the work we do and connections in our taxonomy are immediately clear. And with the benefit of enterprise architecture we can link into databases creating significant opportunities for system integration (a long way down the line but useful food for thought for the purposes of our review).

TAG CLOUD

I really like the attractive cloud buttons that you see on blogs and articles. I thought it might be fun to show you here, so I went on the hunt for a gadget on the web. I found a free one with relative ease but a properly designed tag cloud will be based on policy and be mostly automated based on user defined tags. SharePoint has an Enterprise solution that if deployed correctly into the business could be a panacea for records and archives purposes (important when many of our documents must be stored in perpetuity as per statute).

By taking all of the operational KPIs and a few key documents from our program workspace I have built a heirarchy of data upon which we can build our taxonomy. See the next blog for more.

This tagging of documents then allows a connectivity between disparate sources that often sustifies the expense of deployment. In our case we were able to quickly link budgets, procurement, white papers and business cases together to improve our pocurement decisions resulting in a more successful tender process.

We needn’t waste time with a fax machine when we can share on-line in purpose built collaboration space using Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services (MOSS). Fortunately with clear support for MS SharePoint in our organisation data can be easily shared across the organisation through our Intranet and the Internet through our own public sites.

The Natural Step framework is an Internationally recognised Systems Analysis framework and presents an excellent opportunity to engage service champions in the conversation of how the system works once you pull it all together. Because sustainability is a system concept a business study will have the benefit of identifying best practice from the lowest tiers up. The front-line will input into design; recognising opportunities for further service improvements. A system topology that will optimise the use of enterprise resources will allow each department to access new tools and innovations improving service performance dramatically. During our recent mega-merger we utilised the Intranet and SharePoint lists to quickly establish regional KPIs and standardised terms – which enaabled to integrate faster with our communicaations and marketing departments much more efficiently than other departments who did not.

click to enlarge

People are part of the system and the most valuable asset of the organisation. As such, they should be empowered by their system and not restricted by the organisation. A series of workshops built understanding of the parts of the system which over time actually facilitated the beginning of a more cohesive culture. As a facilitator with plenty of leadership experience I was able to encourage the fostering of ideas and develop them into system thinkers.
Here we have an old image from the Microsoft website about how SharePoint can benefit your business (if you click it will open in a laarger screen). The tools on the right are a handful available that will improve administrative efficiency, provide business intelligence reporting and provide a reliable platform for information dissemination through the next period of change.