The Content Economy

My 7 work mantras

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 08:53:00 +0000

This morning I decided to share my "work matras" with my followers on Twitter:

Always strive for simplicity
Begin with the end in mind
Work smarter, not harder
Seek synergies, avoid waste
Think reuse before creating
Share everything that can be shared
Be open-minded to ideas and opportunities

Right now I keep them in a note in Notes, but I would really like to put them on a wall or have them as my background on my devices.

If you are interested in illustrating or visualizing these mantras, please let me know by leaving a comment to this post. I would happily share your illustration or visualization here on my blog.

UPDATE:

Below I will post any incoming illustrations and visualizations of my 7 work mantras below. Enjoy!

Linda Mill

Joachim Stroh

Getting one step closer to the Digital Workplace

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:20:00 +0000

Mobile and social concepts and technologies are redefining knowledge work and transforming our digital work environments. Mobile technologies enable us to get our work done regardless if we are at the office or not. Social technologies allow us to collaborate in new and smarter ways, within and across organizations.

If the Intranet is to continue to have a reason for existence, it has to play a part in this transformation. It has to evolve from being a website for information self-service to becoming a platform that connects people, information and tasks across the enterprise. It is feasible to assume that intranets will evolve, just as the Internet itself, into a number of services that provide relevant capabilities to people in different situations. These services will need to be optimized for specific usage situations and accessible from the device that we find most convenient to use in that situation. Most of these services will be inherently collaborative, leveraging social technologies to make the best possible use of our collective intelligence, so that we can get our work done in smarter ways.

In other words, the Intranet as we know it will seize to exist as it will blend into our digital work environment, a.k.a. our Digital Workplace. (By the way, if you’re interested in the Digital Workplace as a concept, here are a few definitions as well as my own take)

Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, the vision of the Digital Workplace can't be realized in a day. You can’t buy it off the shelf. Nor is there a single product or platform that will take you there. The only feasible way to get closer to the vision of the Digital Workplace is to adopt a think big / start small approach and establish a process for continuous service development as well as continuous improvements of ways of working. To avoid getting stuck in technology-centric thinking, you need to apply people-centric and service-oriented thinking and design principles.

This is essence what I talk about in my keynote at the Intranätverk conference in Gothenburg, Sweden on 21st of May. I will share some insights and practical advice on how to establish service-oriented thinking and how to start developing services for the Digital Workplace. If you happen to be in Gothenburg at that time, I hope to see you there!

UPDATE:

This post inspired Joachim Stroh to create this great 2-2 matrix and visualization:

The simple reason why most intranets fail

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 12:21:00 +0000

I’ve written on this blog and elsewhere about 6 things to expect from your intranet, why traditional intranets fail today's knowledge workers, what is wrong with SharePoint, if employees really need intranets (and answered the question with a 'no') and why the Digital Workplace is both necessary and relevant. You can find several reasons why traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers in these posts. But there’s an even simpler way to put it.

For an intranet team, the intranet is usually the center of the universe. It’s what they do.

For the employees, on the other hand, the intranet is only one component of many in their digital workplace that they need to interact with.

The intranet team may have a holisitic view of the intranet, being able to see how all its different parts fit together, and all the stakeholders it is there to serve. However, what most intranet teams lack is a holistic view of the employee’s everyday work and a holistic view of the employee’s entire digital work environment.

The only way to provide an intranet that actually supports the everyday work of the employees is to understand the work employees do on a daily basis, what tasks they perform, what information they need, who they interact with, and the typical situations they find themselves in. Including what other tools and services they use. These things need to be viewed from the employee’s perspective, not from the intranet’s perspective. Don't start with the intranet in mind. Start with the employee in mind.

It’s that simple – and that hard.

Facing a New Business Reality

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 08:23:00 +0000

We are all living in a world where the rapid development of new information technologies and globalization are changing everything; our society, entire industries, and the way we behave as consumers and employees. The days when brands could be built and markets created almost entirely through advertising in mass-media are over. Today, people who share similar needs or wants can easily connect with each other through their own volition, creating markets where they can exchange information about any products or services available that can satisfy their needs or desires. They might even create the services or products themselves. One thing that is sure is that the impact and reach of personal recommendations and influence has never been stronger, and it has all to do with the reach, immediacy and multiplier effects now available through the social web. If people like a brand and its products or services, they might become advocates for that brand, influencing their friends and other people with similar needs or desires to buy the brand’s products or services. The brand in turn becomes part of their social identities, which turns them into loyal and powerful brand advocates when they are considered as influencers among their friends or communities. If people start to dislike a brand and its products or services, or change their buying behaviors, they can create a force that might soon put the company out of business.

In a world where things changed less frequently and when there was plenty of time to react to newly emerged information, where markets did not emerge by themselves and change shape by themselves, it was possible to centralize planning and make long-term detailed plans and execute these plans over a period of several years. The contrast of this scenario to today’s situation couldn’t be larger. Most companies now operate in highly unpredictable and dynamic business environments where they are forced to prepare for the unexpected. They may still have an overall strategy and plan, but they need to be prepared to change it at any point in time and accept that the only feasible strategy is one that allows them to respond to change fast enough and good enough by distributing decision making power to everyone who may ever need to make a decision.

The ever increasing pace of change requires organizations to be able to respond to change by quickly mobilizing people and organizing and coordinating their efforts in new ways. To develop such abilities, Steven R Covey argues that organizations will rely on proactive and powerful leadership who:

“...keep a constant eye on the environment, especially when it comes to customer behaviors and attitudes, and make sure that resources are organized in the right direction. If they don't know what is happening in their business environments as well as within their companies and make sure to be headed in the right direction, "no amount of management expertise can keep them from failing"

The text above is from my contribution to the forthcoming book "Right Sourcing - Enabling Collaboration", edited by Rien Dijkstra, John Gøtze, and Pieter van der Ploeg. It's the result of the Right Sourcing project, a collective effort from a number of experienced contributors from 7 countries. The full book will be released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license. It will be published in a few weeks from now - be sure to keep your eyes open for it

If we want change we need to change the system

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 13:33:00 +0000

According to Deming, 94% of the root causes of all problems can be found and attributed to the system, and only 6% to the individuals. This means that when a problem occurs, we should start examining it with the assumption that the system is broken. Most times we will be right. When we repeatedly make the wrong decisions or face rework or duplicate due to lack of communication, the root cause is likely to be found in the communication system, and ultimately in the communication culture.

The system, as Deming defines it, is "a network of interdependent components that work together to accomplish the aim of the system.” (Wikipedia). Deming said that the system is the responsibility of management.

A lot of us are frustrated at work because we have gotten used to new ways of communicating in our private lives, but we cannot adopt the same behaviors at work. The first barrier we are confronted with is usually the lack of tools and platforms. How can we possibly share what we are doing or the ideas we have in an open and transparent way if we don’t have blogs or micro-blogs? Email and file shares simply won't do it. How can we make our knowledge more accessible and aggregate our collective knowledge if we don’t have wikis? It's not for anyone to edit and contribute on the intranet.

Then, if and when we get access to social tools and platforms, we soon realize there is a second and much bigger barrier to overcome: our existing communication culture. It is much easier said than done to change the norms that tell us how, what, and with whom we should communicate.

Even with the new tool in place, most people will cling on to their existing behaviors and practices. An existing behavior that has been automated and turned into a habit always requires a lot of effort to change, even if the new behavior will make things simpler for us. People often stick to inefficient behaviors simply because they have automated them - they do them on autopilot. If the system doesn’t force or encourage them to change their habits, then why should they?

A norm – a behavior we share with other people and that is expected of us to – requires even more effort to change than changing an individual habit. A few individuals alone cannot change it: there need to be a critical mass of people who make the effort to change their behaviors.

To change the communication culture, it is not enough to change the tools. We need to change the system. All relevant components that make up the system must all be changed to support the change we want: goals and measures, leadership and management practices, processes and routines, incentive systems, policies and rules, IT systems. And as management is responsible for the system, the system cannot be changed without management committing itself to make the change, setting a clear vision and roadmap, and walking the talk by changing behaviors themselves.

Finding smarter ways of working together

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 22:55:00 +0000

Lots of people complain about dense meeting schedules and overflooded inboxes. Yet, few people try very hard to find the root causes or to explore better ways of working. Instead, time and energy is wasted on blaming the tools, asking for more disk space, and sorting emails into folders. In a work environment where our work is more or less invisible (digital), we tend to see the symptoms of our inefficient practices (such as full email inboxes and meetings all day long) as evidence of hard work.

Few executives and managers pay these things much attention, and the ones who do often seem to think that investing in new technologies will make the situation better. Although technology is an important ingredient, there are some even more important ingredients in any recipe for achieving smarter ways of working together; people, their needs, their attitudes and behaviors, and the situations they find themselves in at work.

It is high time for organizations to take productivity and collaboration tools for what they really are: tools that enable people to work smarter together. It might seem as common sense, but if you take a quick look around, you will find plenty of organizations where this kind of common sense isn't put into practice. In fact, technology-centric thinking prevails in most organizations; any new technology, product or feature that is implemented is perceived as a silver bullet that will solve automagically solve a bunch of problems once deployed. What these organizations fail to acknowledge and act upon is that real and sustainable business improvements come from continuous efforts aiming to improve ways of working, not from throwing a set of new tools or features at people every now and then. Ways of working cannot be improved if you don't have people as your starting point - understanding their needs, attitudes and behaviors, and the situations they find themselves in. After that, you can add the technology ingredient.

Is the office really the best place to get work done?

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 18:19:00 +0000

Yahoo’s decision to ban working from home can hardly have escaped anyone’s attention. Whatever the reasons might be, to me their decision sends out a signal of desperation and reveals that Yahoo's management is incapable of dealing with flexible working.

"Green Paper - Managing in a Flexible Work Environment" from Australian Institute of Management

In some respects, the flexible work environment presents a more demanding context for managers. In this complex or heightened environment deficiencies in management skills development more generally are foregrounded. In effect management weaknesses -
irrespective of context - are exposed, opening the opportunity to better target skills development as a consequence.

A major challenge to implementing flexible work is attitudinal. Business owners or senior executives may perceive that flexible work arrangements are associated with a lack of commitment to the organisation. Perhaps resistance comes from a busy line manager, fearful that implementation of flexible work arrangements will become yet another item on an already crowded ―to do list. Or again, colleagues may resent flexible work as a privilege extended only to the lucky few.

Research shows that underlying this attitude is a set of assumptions about the idea of the "ideal worker": someone who is able to work full time, and to be solely committed to their job, because they are supported by someone outside the workplace who attends to their non work needs. Such a worker may have been the norm in the past, but this is no longer the case. Work is no longer neatly contained between set hours. Workers have a multiplicity of non-work responsibilities and interests which they seek to balance against their work roles.

Nevertheless, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the ―ideal worker continues to shape expectations in the workplace. Until this assumption is challenged, flexible work may be perceived as a curiosity, privilege, nuisance or unnecessary cost.

"Why You Should Work From a Coffee Shop, Even When You Have an Office" by Wesley Verhoeve, Lifehacker

While team Family Records was in between offices in early 2012, we had 6 weeks to bridge until our new space was ready. During that time we were fortunate enough to be taken in as guests byawesome companies for stretches of time, and for the remainder we took over corners of coffee shops all over Brooklyn and Manhattan. The experience of working out of coffee shops was so positive that even after we moved into our new home, I made sure to get in a few "coffee shop days" each month. For carpal tunnel related reasons alone, I would not recommend working out of coffee shops every day, but here are some reasons why it might be great to try it for one or two days every month.

A change of environment stimulates creativity. Even in the most awesome of offices we can fall into a routine, and a routine is the enemy of creativity. Changing your environment, even just for a day, brings new types of input and stimulation, which in turn stimulates creativity and inspiration.

Fewer distractions. It sounds counter-intuitive, but working from a bustling coffee shop can be less distracting than working from a quiet office. Being surrounded by awesome team and officemates means being interrupted for water cooler chats and work questions. Being interrupted kills productivity. The coffee shop environment combines the benefit of anonymity with the dull buzz of exciting activity. Unlike working at home, with the ever-present black hole of solitude and procrastination, a coffee shop provides the opportunity of human interaction, on your terms.

Community and meeting new people. Meeting new people always provides me with new ideas, a different perspective at existing problems, or an interesting connection to a new person doing something awesome that inspires me. Today alone I met a top Skillshare teacher whose class I will now take, a sleep consultant, a publicist who offered to help with a project, and a wine consultant who recommended some bars.

"They Work Long Hours, but What About Results?" by Robert C Pozen, The New York Times

IT’S 5 p.m. at the office. Working fast, you’ve finished your tasks for the day and want to go home. But none of your colleagues have left yet, so you stay another hour or two, surfing the Web and reading your e-mails again, so you don’t come off as a slacker.

By applying an industrial-age mind-set to 21st-century professionals, many organizations are undermining incentives for workers to be efficient. If employees need to stay late in order to curry favor with the boss, what motivation do they have to get work done during normal business hours? After all, they can put in the requisite “face time” whether they are surfing the Internet or analyzing customer data. It’s no surprise, then, that so many professionals find it easy to procrastinate and hard to stay on a task.

There is an obvious solution here: Instead of counting the hours you work, judge your success by the results you produce. Did you clear a backlog of customer orders? Did you come up with a new idea to solve a tricky problem? Did you write a first draft of an article that is due next week? Clearly, these accomplishments — not the hours that you log — are what ultimately drive your organization’s success.

"Open-plan offices make you less productive" by Vatsal Anand, Onlymyhealth

In a study on the impact of open-plan office environment on the productivity and well-being of employees, researchers have found that it is not the best. The new study claims that the commotion of a modern office leads to a drop in productivity by 15 percent and well-being of workers by 32 percent. According to study researchers, the unwanted noise and other aspects of such an office can distract their brain from the task without them even noticing.

Open-plan offices were designed with the objective of promoting interaction among the workers. It was expected that such a free interaction would promote creative thinking and result in better problem solving approach. Study researcher Dr. Jack Lewis has discredited the wisdom of thinking on these lines. He states that such a work environment is not conducive for the concentration of the workers. If a phone goes off in the background while you were concentrating on something important, the resultant interruption is a waste.

The brain can respond to distractions without the person even being aware of it.
Similarly, in modern offices, if the employees are not allowed to have their own decorations on walls and desks, it is not conducive to their welfare. Workers should be allowed to personalise their working area. It improves their productivity and well-being as with a surrounding of their choice, they feel more engaged and comfortable, and are able to concentrate much better.

Don't ever let any employee lose sight of the customer

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 09:52:00 +0000

At IKEA, every employee that doesn't work at a store, from the CEO and administrative personnel to the people installing and maintaining servers at their data centers, have to work for a few days every year in an IKEA store. That means all IKEA employees, not only those who work at a store, are meeting and serving customers. After a few days in the trenches, they have gained real-world experience from Ikea's core business, including the challenges the store personnel face when meeting and serving customers. They can bring that experience back to their office and, hopefully, better understand what they can do to make the core business even more successful. Most importantly, they never lose sight of the customer and that serving and providing value to the customer is their reason for existence.

I have asked myself many times why I haven't heard of any other company doing the same thing. A lot of companies try to copy their business model, their products, and even the entire concept and customer experience. But they don’t seem to copy the things that build the IKEA culture.

When I help organizations improve their customer experiences or internal processes and ways of working, I start by talking to the people who meet the customer. A good starting point is the customer service people, because no one understands better what works and doesn't work - seen from the eyes of the customer. They usually also have a good view on what business activities add value to the customer and what activities are waste.

It is my experience that the further away from the real customer people are, the more they tend to focus their time and energy on things that don't have a clear connection to creating value to the customer; politics, climbing the career ladder, who reports to whom, inventing new roles, fighting to protect their positions. Simply speaking, the things you cannot spend time and energy on when you are standing next to a customer.

It is my opinion that everyone in an organization should be part of customer service, and work with customer service for at least a few days per year. What would happen if every employee, regardless of what they work with, would start their work day by asking questions such as: How can I serve the customer today? How can I make the life of the customer easier or better? Will the things I have planned to add value to the customer? If not, how can I avoid doing them and do something of value?
I am pretty sure it would help to transform an organization from mediocrity to greatness.

How do we end the reign of internal email?

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 12:09:00 +0000

If you follow my writings on this blog and CMS Wire, you have perhaps stumbled across my CMS Wire article “Time to Break the Habit of Internal Email” or the follow-up article “Moving Beyond Email”. This is blog post can be seen as a continuation of those two articles and an expansion of a Google+ post.

Every customer I work with, and for, is suffering big time from the problems of internal email.Virtually every bad decision, delayed project, disengaged employee, duplicated work or rework is due to insufficient and/or badly executed communication – which to a large part can be blamed on how we use email and that we haven't yet adopted better ways of communicating with each other. Large, distributed, and specialized organizations operating in a dynamic, fast-paced and constantly changing business environment simply cannot continue to rely on email as their main means of communication (or physical meetings and phone calls in situations where they simply cannot use email). The thing is that the problems with email is getting worse. As Michael Arrington wrote on TechCrunch about a month ago, user data from Cue reveals that people are getting more emails than ever before, while at the same time fewer emails are being read and we're taking more time to respond. Although these findings are about email use in general, I am pretty sure it applies to internal email as well.

If you look at the four different types of communication illustrated below, it is easy to find problematic aspects of email for all types of communication. For the average organization, email is the primary tool for all of them. The red arrow illustrates the in what direction you will find the most problems with email-based communication.

Although a lot of the employees are aware of the problems with internal email, not much is being done about it. The way many implement social collaboration platforms, as a silo of its own and not as a real replacement for email, is simply putting lipstick on a pig. Instead of simplifying some kinds of communication such as many-to-many conversations, the introduction of a social collaboration platform might even make the burden of communicating worse if it’s just added on top of existing tools without trying to fundamentally change the ways people – and managers in particular - are communicating with each other inside an organization.

I believe the main reason for the lack of change is that email has been seen as a perfect tool for managers to communicate with their subordinates, leaving little room for feedback loops, dialog and open discussions among the employees. It feels safer that no one outside the list of the recipients can see what they are communicating and to whom. Why expose yourself to the risk of some external stakeholder questioning what is being communicated, or asking for more information? I believe this has fostered a culture that is the opposite of the one we associate with external social media. Over the years, email has become an institution for management communication, and to expect that the people who created the institution and are dependent on its existence will destroy it is perhaps a bit naive. Only visionaries and leaders will be able to do it. We can expect that anyone who tries to change status quo, will be questioned by the people feel threatened by any change.

Revisited: Culture comes first, technology second

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 10:29:00 +0000

The chances of successfully introduce new technologies and ways of working in an organization without having at least some understanding of the existing culture are very slim. Often there are also many different sub-cultures in an organization, especially when it comes to communication, which makes things even more complicated.

With a good understanding of the overall culture as well as influential sub-cultures, you can find the sweet spots where technology can make a difference and press the right buttons to make the introduction of new technology influence and change the culture. Understanding the exiting culture isn’t just limited to understanding what attitudes and behaviors people share – it also includes understanding what forces that shape and preserve the culture, such as power, status, politics, management practices, communication practices, and so fort.

If the task of introducing new and smarter ways of communicating and collaborating within organizations only was about finding out what technologies are needed, things would be so easy. But then again, if it was that easy, I probably would be doing something else, something more challenging. As things are now I can think of no bigger or more exciting challenge helping organizations work smarter by getting better at communicating and collaborating.

A couple of previous writings on this theme:

Do these adoption challenges sound familiar?

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 12:29:00 +0000

As a number of passionate employees are trying to introduce a new communication system that allows employees to communicate with each other in new and potentially more efficient ways, they are confronted with a number of challenges such as the following:

Most people have a hard time understanding for what purposes the technology can be used
There is a lack of buy-in and support from top management - they don't see why they invest anything in the new technology
There are no good techniques available for creating business cases and calculating ROI for implementing the new communication technology (the technology has been developed by passionate engineers for pure fun - it's easy for them since they already have access the hardware that makes it possible)
There are islands of users across the organization, but no mass adoption of the new technology. The technology has only been adopted by tech-savvy early adopters and there is really no broad adoption yet.
Although many people have created profiles in the system so that they can be contacted, they haven't made it an habit to read messages that are sent to them. The consequence is that people stop using the system since they don't get any response from the people they tried to communicate with.
Many, especially managers, are concerned about what people will write when using the system, and mechanisms and procedures for censoring is discussed. The security department is assigned the responsibility of dealing with messages that don't comply with rules and guidelines.
There is great uncertainty (and lack of awareness) about the potential of the technology when it comes to improving productivity of information work.

I have just read the transcript (in Swedish) from a "witness seminar" in 2008 about early email systems, and the challenges mentioned above were a reality during the early days of corporate email in the 1980's. One such system was the MEMO system that run on mainframe computers (it was originally developed by Volvo and SKF in close collaboration with IBM). I have used the MEMO system myself for several years when working as consultant for customers, as it was just recently replaced with Microsoft Exchange in several large Swedish organization. It is especially interesting to note the following observation from the talks with people who developed, introduced and used early corporate email systems:

"these systems were developed alongside ordinary work, just for fun. Decisions were based on visions rather than economical calculations such as cost-benefit analysis."

Does this sound familiar? :-)

Note that this was way before companies and organizations started using email for their external interaction with customers, suppliers, resellers etc. So there wasn't any external pressure on organizations to change their ways of communicating internally. It was a technology-driven process where the use cases and value was discovered along the way.

Furthermore, broad adoption only seemed to happen as formal communication flows are moved to the new communication system, especially news - since news can travel faster in the new communication system. It wasn't until the new technology was integrated and made a natural part of the daily work that it gained adoption and started to create value for the organizations that had implemented it.

Another interesting observation is that the designers of these early corporate email systems understood that e-mail wasn't at all suitable for many-to-many communication due to risk of creating information overload and creating massive amounts of duplicated information. However, they found that email was lovely to use for one-to-one communication. But they didn't like the "push" nature of email and preferred that people could "pull" the information they needed instead. They even discussed not adding features for creating mail lists. It wasn't until a manager said "I want to inform all these people" that the feature was implemented. But bear in mind that at that time the communication between managers and employees was mostly one-way communication, which means that the number and complexity of many-to-many conversations was very limited compared to today. The increasing use of email for many-to-many communication that has happend over the years is also main reason why email has developed into the biggest productivity drain for knowledge workers today. It provides clear motivation form introducing social technologies that are designed for many-to-many communication at scale.

The most interesting studies on Social Business from 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 20:37:00 +0000

Looking back at 2012, there have been quite a few interesting studies directly or indirectly related to Social Business. I have selected the studies that I have found most interesting, highlighting some of the key findings from each study. Taken together, I believe they provide a pretty good picture of the current state of Social Business. Enjoy!

The Digital Advantage
by Capgemini Consulting and the MIT Center for Digital Business

During three years Capgemini Consulting and the MIT Center for Digital Business have studied how digitally mature companies (see report for definition) perform in comparison to those who are less to embrace new digital innovations. Key findings include:

Digitally mature companies generate more revenue and are up to 26% more profitable than their industry competitors. This is also reflected in a higher market value.
No industry is immune from digital transformation, and every company in every industry has some competitors that can be considered ad digitally mature

The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies
by McKinsey Global Institute

Besides highlighting the potential in using social technologies to reach consumers in new ways, this research by McKinsey Global Institute reveals there is twice as much potential value in “using social tools to enhance communications, knowledge sharing, and collaboration within and across enterprises”. Key findings include:

Using social technologies to enhance internal communication and collaboration could increase the productivity of knowledge workers with as much as 25%.
The annual value that could be unlocked by social technologies in four sectors lies somewhere between $900 billion and $1.3 trillion.

The Business of Social Business: What Works and How It′s Done
by The IBM Institute for Business Value

The IBM Insitutite for Business Value surveyed more than 1,100 executives worldwide and conducted in-depth interviews with 26 companies that are recognized as leaders in social business. Key findings include:

46% increased their investments in social business in 2012 and 62% intend to increase their investments during the next two years
67% of the companies are applying social business within their marketing and 54% within public relations function
Customer service and sales are two areas where social business adoption is expected to grow most rapidly

Engagement @ Scale in The Large Enterprise
by Social Business Council / Dachis Group

The Social Business Council asked the question ”How far along are the leading early adopters” in terms of introducing social collaboration software and embracing new ways of communicating and collaborating. The study that surveyed only very large enterprises with more than one billion USD in annual revenue. Key findings include:

57% of the companies reported that only 10-20% of their eligible workforce is active on their social collaboration platform.
Only 4% of the companies had already integrated external and internal social business initiatives.
51% lacked both existing integration and plans for such integration.

2012 State of the Social Intranet Study
by Prescient Digital Media

In late November, Toby Ward from Prescient Digital Media published some preliminary findings of their 2012 State of the Social Intranet Study, revealing that ”executives are not happy with their enterprise social media (intranet 2.0):

37% of executives rate their social intranets as poor or very poor while 17% rate their social intranets as good or very good
39% of employees rate their social intranets as poor or very poor while 21% rate their social intranets as good or very good

What Do Corporate Directors and Senior Managers Know about Social Media?
by Stanford University’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance

This study surveyed more than 180 senior executives and corporate directors of North American public and private companies, revealing “a disconnect between companies’ understanding of social media and the actions they are taking to apply it to their business”. The study found that although companies understand that social media can be used to improve many aspects of their business, they also realize there are risks associated with it – so they typically prefer to maintain status quo (do nothing).

The State of Enterprise Social Software Adoption in 2012 (Paid)
by International Data Corporation (IDC)

IDC found that the focus of social business is shifting, as well as the use cases. Key findings include:

Use cases have grown into customer experience, sales enablement, digital commerce, enterprise social network (ESN), innovation management, and socialytics.
In 2012, 67% of companies surveyed have deployed corporate-sponsored enterprise social software
The level of autonomy an employee has on how they manage individual task and business workflow has increased.

The Economics of A Fully Engaged Enterprise
by PulsePoint Group in collaboration with The Economist Intelligence Unit

This study provides evidence that there lies real economic value in social engagement:

32% of senior executives report that an unclear strategy for change is a roadblock for social business adoption.
Companies that fully embrace social engagement are experiencing four times greater business impact than less engaged companies
The average return on social engagement was calculated to be between 3-5%. The most engaged businesses are reporting a calculated 7.7% business impact.
The lowest performers achieved a 1.9% estimated return.Two thirds of the organizations achieving the highest returns reported that their C-suites are active advocates of social engagement.

The 2012 Social Business Global Executive Study and Research Project
by MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte

3,478 managers from companies in 115 countries and 24 industries were surveyed as MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte tried to answer the following questions: Will social networking and social software have a similarly transformative effect on business? Are they already doing so? What kinds of enterprises are benefiting the most? And how are they benefiting? Here are some of their key findings:

52% of the respondents believe that social business is important or somewhat important to their business today.
86% of believe social business will be important or somewhat important in three years.
Social business is viewed most often as a tool for external-facing activities.
Some leaders are enthusiastic, but lack metrics to prove value.

Social Media Around the World 2012
by InSites Consulting

Rounding up this collection of studies is one that provides lots of facts and figures and some interesting insights on the status of social media in 19 countries, such as the following:

The large majority of consumers would like to help brands and companies they like.
About 80% of all internet users are open to being involved in any form of collaboration with a brand.
Half of the consumers would even like to be involved in developing the overall strategy of the brand.
45% are willing to help in creating the next advertising campaign.

A simple framework for Enterprise Collaboration

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 10:02:00 +0000

“The introduction of smarter ways of working together across the extended enterprise enabled by a new breed of innovative concepts and technologies.”

This is the definition of Enterprise Collaboration that I currently use when explaining it to other people, and here are three reasons why I find it useful:

If puts focus on ways of working together, and that we need to find better ways of working that make better use our individual and collective time and capacity. To do this we need to reflect more on why and how we use certains tool (a fool with a tool is still a fool).
It not only stresses that new technologies are core enablers, but also new concepts such as crowdsourcing, collective intelligence, social networking, and cloud computing.
‘Across the extended enterprise’ means that the scope is not limited to teams or organizations. A collaborative effort can potentially involve any stakeholder – even customers and consumers – as well as any number of stakeholders.

Let’s put this in contrast to the more traditional view of technology-enabled collaboration (virtual collaboration).

Traditional collaboration technologies (a.k.a. groupware) and ways of working focused on team collaboration, e.g. people working together on a common task or goal. The choice of this focus wasn’t as much due to what was possible from a technological point of view, as it was due to the fact that the need for enterprise-wide collaboration wasn’t apparent and imminent at the time when these technologies were introduced. Business process management addressed the needs for cross-enterprise coordination and communication that existed at that time. R&D, Production, Sales, Marketing and other business functions focused on optimizing the performance of their own activities and the business strategies that were crafted by top management didn’t just set the overall plan but pretty much detailed what each business function should be doing.

In a highly dynamic, fast-paced and inter-connected business environment, this way of running a business is no longer possible. Tomorrow's organizations will have to be more as a flock of birds, or shoal of anchovies, than can take new shapes when required. Instead of relying on long-term planning, we have to be prepared for the unexpected. Coordination must happen sideways, in all directions, all the time. Decisions must be made wherever and whenever they need to be made, by people who understand the environment where it is to be executed, while at the same time keeping the shared purpose and big picture in mind. This cannot be done if we continue to work with our own tasks in business function silos and blindly follow detailed strategies crafted by top management, dictating the execution without adjusting it to the (changing) environments where the execution is to take place.

I see Enterprise Collaboration as an umbrella term for more or less all concepts and technologies that enable smarter ways of working together. One of the concepts that fit under this umbrella is Social Collaboration. It is a concept that has been adopted by many software vendors in the collaboration technology space lately, IBM, Oracle, OpenText, and NewsGator to mention a few.

Social Collaboration is different from traditional collaboration in the sense that it stretches and scales far beyond teams. It connects people throughout the extended enterprise to allow them to collaborate on any purpose, big or small. It allows for instant and immediate many-to-many interaction, conversations, sharing and co-creation involving anyone from anywhere within the enterprise. As social collaboration builds upon principles such as openness, participation, and recognition, it helps create the workplace awareness that is required to make decisions locally and still seeing the bigger picture.

The driving force behind social collaboration is the need to remove structural holes in the communication between people, and it does so by helping people to discover each other, connect and build relationships far beyond their teams and business functions. By being able t build new ties and and strengthens the weak ties between groups, the likelihood of group thinking and the sub-optimization that happens when groups optimize for their own goals without seeing the bigger picture decreases. In other words, the negative effects of team collaboration are balanced up.

Although technology is a core enabler for Enterprise Collaboration, there is much more to it. It is often said that three key elements are necessary to build a successful enterprise: People, Business, and Technology. The trick is to achieve the right mixture and balance of these three elements. Some of the most important aspects to address for each element are illustrated below:

The picture above can be seen as a simple, high-level framework for Enterprise Collaboration efforts. People are the engine of any enterprise, and such things as purpose, culture (values, attitudes, behaviors), incentives, skills, and engagement determine how well the engine runs. Business sets the direction, defines what needs to get done, by whom, when and why, and evaluates how we are performing. Technology is the core enabler, providing us with an environment and tools to achieve things together without being delimited by geographies and other barriers to communication and coordination.

What do you think?

There's so much waste - can you see it?

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 13:32:00 +0000

As information work has become digitized, the work that many of us do on a daily basis has become less visible. Chances are it will never be seen, or recognized. What is more, the time, effort, and talent that is wasted on doing the wrong things won’t be seen either. Neither value-adding nor non value-adding work is visible.

McKinsey Global Institute estimated the potential for improving knowledge work with social technologies to 20-25%. So, there seems to be a huge – and overlooked – potential in improving knowledge work. The thing is; if we don’t see it, we can’t improve it. If just make digital work visible in our digital workplace, measuring it will be (well, sort of) a piece of cake. This means that a mayor challenge to improve information work is to make our work more visible, for example:

Making it as easy to sharing what we do with as little effort as possible
Capturing information about our activities and interactions with information resources and other people
Creating a transparent digital work environment where we can see what is going on, who is doing what, when, where

Although technology is important, it really comes down to improving our work practices if we are to unlock any of the potential that lies in improving knowledge work. It’s not just about ensuring that we get the expected return on our investments in collaboration and communication technology. The real question is how the technology can make us work smarter, doing more with less, faster.

Instead of putting our hopes to technology to improve productivity, introducing one tool or application after the other, we should really strive for simplification, and discuss how we can work smarter. It is equally important to reflect on what we shouldn’t do, what tools and features we shouldn’t have, as it is to reflect on what we should do, and what tools and features we need to get the work done.

Social Business and The Digital Workplace

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 09:03:00 +0000

For those of you who follow my blog but don't know I also write for CMS Wire, or for some reason have missed out on some of the articles, here are my most recent ones:

The Six Pillars of Social Business

"For any organization that has the ambition to survive in the long haul, it needs to look beyond the quarter economics and invest aggressively in initiatives aiming to improve collaboration and organizational agility, including establishing a culture and practices that continuously improve collaboration, knowledge sharing and communication across the extended enterprise. It has to build it’s future on the six pillars of Social Business."

Social Business: We Have the Tools. Now What?

"The reasons may vary, but the fact that social tools have been bundled with information management platforms such as SharePoint mostly likely has made the decision to introduce them fairly easy. It is almost as if this has taken both corporate decision-makers as well as the early adopters by surprise. Now that we all have the tools, what shall we do with them? How can we use them to change the way we work? And even if we see the use cases and want to change our ways of working, how do our work environments encourage and enable us to do this?"

Six Core Digital Workplace Capabilities: Designing with the Workforce in Mind

"The failure of the technology-centric approach to improving knowledge work is a major reason why new concepts such as “Digital Workplace” have a reason for existence. The Digital Workplace encourages us to take a more holistic approach when designing the digital work environment for an organization’s workforce. Rather than focusing on the individual solutions and tools such as intranet sites, collaboration tools, communication tools and productivity tools, we need to start with identifying the needs of the organization and its people and take a holistic approach to designing their digital workplace."

The Digital Workplace: The Need for Good Practices in a Complex Work Environment

"Today's workforce has a growing number of tools at their disposal to communicate, collaborate and get work done. But there is a concurrent increase in workflow complexity, which, left unmanaged, results in time lost and inefficiencies. It's time to bridge the gap between the two. For easily repeatable tasks, the process has often been defined and implemented in the systems you are using, such as an ERP system. In knowledge-intense and highly dynamic and collaborative work environments, processes are often barely repeatable (check out Thingamy for more on the concept of barely repeatable processes). This means that knowledge workers who participate in a task have to design or redesign the process each time it is executed. Much more is required from those who participate in a barely repeatable process than an easily repeatable. Instead of simply following instructions created by a process engineer, you have to be a process engineer yourself and design the process on the fly as you execute it."

The future of Corporate IT is...

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 08:57:00 +0000

Information technology is everywhere today. There is basically no business development initiative that doesn’t include information technology as a key ingredient.

Paradoxically, the IT department as we know it will cease to exist, and in some - even large -organizations it already has (I know about a few).

The current development with the increasing digitalization of work and interactions with customers and other stakeholders requires IT to become a proactive partner to the business. IT-enabled business development will to a much larger extent be driven by business developers with IT skills who don’t belong to the Corporate IT department.

Some prophecies are just meant to happen. Systems, processes and resources that can be outsourced will be, and we will see more cloud computing for bread and butter IT, much as we have seen before with telephony and web conferencing. It will happen also for ERP and CRM, and for collaboration.

Organizations will need to strengthen their business development capabilities, which to a large extent requires knowledge and skills in IT. They need to understand and apply new technological concepts such as Social, Mobile, Cloud and Big Data - what Gartner calls "The Nexus of Forces". But it is a different skillset than most people who work in a traditional Corporate IT department have developed, as needs are shifting from implementing and maintaining infrastructure and enterprise applications to implementing services and solutions that can create competitive advantage for their business.

What’s wrong with SharePoint?

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 08:14:00 +0000

You've probably seen or heard the message quite a few times: "We can build a intranet for you in less than one week". (Me and Jeff Willinger had a good laugh at this particular rollup)

I am sure they can. But it is really "How fast can you build me an intranet?" the most important question you want an answer to? I can guarantee you that it's not. For one thing, it assumes that you know exactly what you need and that you know that you will find everything you need in one product out-of-the-box. When did that happen recently? Have you even heard it happen to anyone? (Well, I believe it when I see it.)

The questions you really would want to get answered are likely questions like "What do we need to improve and why?" and "How can an intranet help to improve it?". So, the first thing you will need to do is to cover your eyes and ears when you read about or hear messages such as the one above, and instead spend your time and energy on finding answers to questions such as:

What pains are we experiencing, where, and how can those be relieved?
How can our work be supported, taking into account the entire flow of a particular task or process?
How will people interact with the solution in the context of their work, at what touch-points, and what value will each of those interactions give them?
What will you need to improve that is outside the scope of the platform, but necessary to make work flow smoother end-to-end?

The last bullet is anything but unimportant. If you just improve a part of a task or process, the investment in the new solution will be wasted if there are hurdles elsewhere that make it hard, or provides no added value, to adopt the new way of working. The chain will break at its weakest link.

Let's take an example: Many organizations have implemented SharePoint to support collaboration and communication in projects and other collaborative efforts. For this purpose they typically implement team sites with lots of features and a nice corporate look and feel. Still, so many organizations fail to get the basic document management capability that it supposed to be SharePoint's main capability to work. After some initial attempts by users to collaborate on documents via SharePoint, they usually continue to collaborate on documents as they used to before, emailing attachments back-and-forth, or working on the document on file server with ad hoc versioning in the file name. SharePoint becomes a place for storing documents when the documents are completed, which in combination with the fact that few people see the value in visiting SharePoint when they work with their documents elsewhere turns it into a document graveyard.

"80% of email users with SharePoint access continue emailing documents back and forth, instead of sending document links and using library services for check in, check out, and version control. This is consistent with the overall population of email users surveyed"
- September 2010 uSamp survey

First, let's be clear with one thing. This is not SharePoint's fault. Blaming the product is simply the wrong approach. It's like blaming the soup when you’ve spilled soup on your shirt. Blaming the product is what you do when you're too embarrassed to confess that you have made the wrong choice of product, or implemented it incorrectly. Or when you want to indirectly blame the person who did just that (my suggestion: try to find the root cause instead and fix it).

Every product has it's weaknesses, and those weaknesses typically exist somewhere outside of the scope of the product. The weakness is this example lies in a part of the typical workflow people use when collaborating on documents that the product doesn't support, for one reason or another. This leads me to the second point: What the product supports and what it doesn't support should be a well-know fact from the start. It's one of the reasons why you would hire a company to implement SharePoint for you. They should know what the product can do and what it cannot do, and be able to explain that in the context of your work. They should help you spot and fill in the blanks. Do you think a company that tries to sell you a new intranet in one week will do that?

In the example described above, such a simple thing as adding a third-party product for SharePoint to the mix can make all the difference. There are vendors, like harmon.ie, that have made it their business model spot weaknesses in products that make work break, and provide solutions that help organizations overcome those weaknesses. If organizations would just adopt a similar way of thinking and approach to implementing technologies for information workers, they wouldn't waste so much money on implementing technology solutions that doesn't get used or bring the expected returns.

As my friend Michael Sampson, Collaboration Strategist, puts it:

"Clearly you need to know what the technology can do…but the focus you should have is: how can I bring these features and capabilities to core business problems and pains people are dealing with."

Yepp. But that's obviously easier said than done.

My take on the state of Enterprise 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 09:51:00 +0000

A simple, but rather narrow, definition of Enterprise 2.0 is to define it as the introduction and use of social networking platforms to improve collaboration (and many-to-many communication) within and across organizations. While collaboration traditionally has been restrained to a small group of people, it can now extend far beyond the traditional team to involved large networks of people from within and outside the organization.

The characteristics of this new breed, or generation, of communication and collaboration tools allow for people to communicate and collaborate more freely at a greater scale, with a higher degree of participation, and with more immediacy and richness than was previously possible. Collaboration can now happen more dynamically, allowing anyone from anywhere inside or outside the organization to quickly start communicating and collaborating around an idea, goal, problem, or opportunity. This kind of collaboration becomes increasingly important as the business environments changes more rapidly, competition increases and customers expect faster and better service. You can even involve other customers in the collaboration, allowing them to help each other with support or so they can contribute to the development of a company’s products and services.

Is anyone there yet?

If you take this simple definition and purely look at the implementation of tools and technologies, then many organizations are well on their way if not already there in some business processes or parts of their business. But if you look at what is required to reap the full value from this kind of collaboration in terms of improved agility, innovation and productivity increases, most organizations have still a long way to go. Many organizations are just paving cow paths with the new technology, clinging on to existing practices and not developing better ones with the use of the new technology.

There is also, besides adjusting existing structures to allow this kind of collaboration to happen freely, a need for a corporate culture than is more open and transparent and less controlling and hoarding, a culture that allows for and encourages greater participation and autonomy among the workforce. This is the tricky part, because it requires a change of people's mindsets, attitudes, and behaviours. To change these, we need to change many of the things (systems) that have shaped the corporate culture, such as how employees is incentivized, how authority and accountability is implemented in the organization, and how leadership is being practiced.

Some organizations will (and some have already) experience a backlash and disappointment with the new technologies not creating the expected benefits. Often this will happen because there is too wide a gap between their readiness for this kind of working and the change they want to see. But, the good thing is that these new technologies themselves help to accelerate such a culture change since they make it simple to create, share, have conversations and connect with other people and information from anywhere.

What about the tools?

Typical tools labeled with Enterprise 2.0 are tools such as micro-blogs, social networking sites, blogs and wikis, social bookmarking, activity feeds, and so forth. But we see that new kinds of tools and solutions that have been designed based on social principles and that uses social mechanisms (such as tags, links, search, ratings, comments) are being introduced all the time. The innovations are to a large extent driven by the innovations on the commercial web and consumer markets, and they give rise to new ideas on how to use the new technologies inside and between organizations. When we apply the thinking and design principles behind the social web in a business context, new solutions will emerge.

So, what we are currently seeing is only the beginning of this new generation of communication and collaboration technologies. We are only beginning to scratch the surface on how we can improve knowledge worker productivity and collaborate better to improve operational performance. As I’ve mentioned before, the biggest part of this potential can only be unlocked by changing other aspects in how organizations are being managed and operated today.

I believe we can expect a lot of innovation happening in this space in the years to come, with enterprise applications being integrated with social tools and also being redesigned based on social principles in order to enabler enterprise-wide collaboration. But the greatest change we will see in how we approach new technologies, as we will have to work much more with changing our cultures and existing practices and behaviors, not just rolling out new technologies to users.

Why the Digital Workplace is both relevant and necessary

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 07:04:00 +0000

I have previously written about the need to ask the right questions when trying to find out how information technology can help us work smarter. Technology-centric thinking often make us go astray. Perhaps that is why I couldn't resist answering the following question posted in the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) group on LinkedIn:

Are Social Collaboration tools going to replace traditional Intranets, or become part of the Intranet?

This question generated an interesting and constructive discussion with folks like Sam Marshall and Martyn Green, and ultimately it highlighted why a term like 'digital workplace' is both relevant and necessary. Below follows my two answers merged into one.

As information workers we need to have access to certain capabilities (a combination of processes, information, resources, and technology) that help us get our jobs done. Traditionally, capabilities such as information access have been provided to us via a web-based Intranet, and before that on paper organized in binders. As work is becoming increasingly digitized and virtual, the number of capabilities we need to have access to increase, as well as our expectations and requirements on how those can be accessed, and what characteristics they have. For example, many of us see a need for capabilities such as team collaboration, document management, virtual meetings, and social networking/collaboration, and we want them to be easy to use, social, attractive, and integrated. We also need to access those in any situation; using the device we have at hand.

In the light of this, I believe the question whether social collaboration tools are going to replace intranets or not is irrelevant – although I can see that it is relevant for someone who is an Intranet manager, or a software vendor.

If we are to focus on how to enable organizations and their employees to achieve their goals, the real questions we should ask are such as the following:

What capabilities do employees need, and why?
How are we to provide those to employees so that they can get their job done in the best way possible, whatever situation they might find themselves in?

Sam Marshall brought the notion of the digital workplace into the discussion:

To me the appeal of talking about digital workplace rather than intranet is to acknowledge that there are significant changes happening, many of which are outside of intranets but which impact employee experience. They all matter and they all benefit from joined up thinking.

I agree 100% with Sam. As I have previously argued, talking about and conceptualizing a ‘digital workplace’ can help us think more holistically, and with less technology-focus, about how to serve the needs of organizations and information workers. In contrast to terms like 'intranet', ‘social collaboration tools’, or 'enterprise social networking platform' that directly make us think about specific technologies and solutions, the digital workplace can help us think more about the places where people work, and what they need from their workplace to get their work done. In a digital world, that place could (and will) be anywhere, so we will have to think more about what situations employees find themselves in.

In this respect the digital workplace also highlights a paradigm shift in how organizations are using IT to support information work. Previously it was primarily administrative personnel that used IT for information worker tasks, and they performed them at their desks at the office during office hours. Now, virtually all employees need to perform some information worker tasks on a daily basis, and they need to be able to perform them wherever and whenever the job needs to get done. There simply is no time for them to go to the office to get the information work done. Perhaps they don't have an office to go to. They need to do it in the situations where they actually work.

Mobile technologies, cloud computing, and social technologies are some of the key technological enablers in this paradigm shift. Another - and even more important - enabler is that we design IT solutions to fit the needs of individuals in different situations, instead of implementing standardized one-size-fits-all (people and situations) enterprise software primarily designed for process efficiency, but with little thought about the productivity of individuals. I believe the digital workplace can help us focus more on how to design IT solutions that fit the needs of individuals in different situations, and finding the right mix of technologies to deliver the required capabilities. To start with, it can help us avoid getting trapped in technology stove-pipes.

Will the real expert please stand up?

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 21:06:00 +0000

At a job interview some time back, the managing director of the company I was interviewed by named two different WCM systems. Then he asked me which one of two I believed was the best. He obviously wanted to test my expertise in WCM, which he had heard of before the interview.

Although I was quite familiar with both products, I answered him that I couldn't possibly pick one or the other. Not without first understanding the needs of the organization that was to choose between the two products. Using my expertise in web content management, I could help them identify and describe their needs, state them as requirements, map those to the technical capabilities of each product, and then recommend the product that best fits their requirements (needs). Doing so requires you to ask the right questions, and knowing how to find the answers.

I believe it wasn't the answer he had expected, but I do hope he learned something about what it means to be an expert from my answer.

Being an expert is not about knowing everything within a certain domain. It is about being able to ask the right questions, and having the skills and network to find the answers.

In fact, if I hadn't been connected to so many smart people myself, I would have missed adding network part of being an expert (thank you @KluwerLearning).

Tasks, networks, and transaction costs

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 08:06:00 +0000

The following tweet by the always excellent thinker Esko Kilpi got me thinking (and writing) this morning:

Here is the train of thought it set in motion.

We are all, as employees of organizations, hired to perform certain tasks. We perform these tasks to create value for someone. The work we are to do is not a role, or a function. Those are just conceptual containers, making it easier to define tasks that we are responsible for, and what tasks other people are responsible for.

To our help, as we perform our tasks, we have our own knowledge and experiences, information, various resources such as IT tools and systems, and – we have our own networks. Those networks connect us to even more knowledge and experiences, information, and resources that might be needed if we are to be able to perform our tasks. This is especially true when we encounter situations we have no previous experience from, when we lack information to make decisions, when we are faced with exceptions and problems that we cannot handle on our own – or where we would perform much better if we made use of the intellectual capital and resources we are connected to though our networks.

In reality, we never work in isolation. Any enterprise involves at least two persons; the provider of a service or product and the customer, and most of us work in much larger and more complex enterprises than that, involving hundreds or even hundreds of thousands of people - if we don't count the customers. The things we do as individuals are inter-connected with the things other people do. At the very least, our work is connected by a shared purpose, commonly expressed as vision and mission statements. To achieve that purpose, each and one of us don’t just need to do the right things (tasks) in the right way, but we must also coordinate our work. The work we do is connected on different levels, and these networks must be coordinated.

As organizations are becoming more knowledge-intense, and need to adapt the enterprise to an ever-changing business environment, work (tasks) is also becoming more and more inter-dependent. It needs to be even more connected. We are now starting to realize that the formal structures and systems that we have created to make our work easier to control, measure, and improve inhibit rapid coordination and change instead enabling it. The paradox is that the network, the basic architecture of work upon which we have put the formal structures, is much faster at adapting to a changing environment. What it excels at is access and dissemination of new information. Many of the existing formal structures and systems are associated with transaction costs that simply makes it impossible to create, manage and distribute the amount of information with speed and precision they way we need to.

So, suddenly we need to adapt our formal structures and systems to support the network instead of constraining and suppressing it. We need to create a better balance between our capability to optimize our enterprise and our capability to adapt it to new situations. This is the challenge that more or less all organizations are facing today. To find the solutions for this problem, we cannot simply look in the rear-view mirror. We must try to envision the future we are heading into, and innovate how organizations and enterprises are designed, making smart use of new technologies that make the transaction costs for communication and coordination drop dramatically.

Email is the biggest productivity drain for knowledge workers

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 08:50:00 +0000

Although email has many good sides, we shouldn't be blind to the many problems that come with using email for work-related communication: information is hidden in the participants’ inboxes and cannot be accessed by those outside of a conversation, the information in an email duplicates like a virus for each recipient it is sent to, redundant attachments consume disk space, and having conversations and coordinating activities becomes messy as soon as two or more people are involved. But the one thing that has made email the biggest productivity drain for knowledge workers is the burden this style of communication puts on the recipient. It is up to the receiver, not the sender, to add structure to the communication and deal with the chaos in her inbox that this lack of communication structure leads to. All sorts of emails end up in our inboxes with no good way to easily filter out what is relevant and what context the email belongs to. It is entirely up to us as receivers to create filters and apply structure to the communication - and this has to be done by every individual who is participating in an email conversation, for all email coversations we participate in! If we combine this with the phenomena of occupational spam, where there is no way for the recipient to opt out of some conversations she has been added to by the sender, the situation easily becomes unmanageable to many people and creates enormous amounts of waste in organizations.

I have illustrated the differences between what I call an "occupational spam culture" and an "opt-in culture" below.

In an opt-in culture, each and everyone can choose which conversations they want to participate in and contribute to – which most likely will be the ones where they can add most value and which they enjoy participating in. It implies that conversations are open by default and hosted on open platforms. If this is combined with ways of communicating where the sender applies the structure to the communication so that the recipients don’t have to, huge amounts of waste can be eliminated and people can use the time and energy that is freed for value-adding activities and seeking out situations where they can add value with their expertise.

The good news is that there are many proven solutions out there that are just waiting to be adopted. For example, instead of communicating with your project team using email, you can communicate using a team blog. What you will do is to impose structure on the communication by sending the information to a specific context where it gets associated to previously communicated information and becomes available to anyone who has access to the blog. The information will not be buried in people's inboxes, it does not need to be pushed to their inboxes if they don't want it. From an organizational point of view, information and knowledge that can be of use by other people within the organization is captured and made available. Not as a separate activity, but as a biproduct of a communication process.

Even people who are using email by habit can be "lured in" to this kind of communication. Just don't tell them they should start blogging. They can still write their messages in their email clients and send them as emails, but by sending the messages to blogs instead of to lists of email addresses they will put the information in the context where it belongs. Even if the other team members choose to subscribe to the blog via email (as an alternative to visiting the blog or subscribing to an RSS feed), the information will stay on the blog and be available to those who might need it. Once the receivers have read the information, they could delete their emails and still be confident that they can find the information on the blog. In other words, there is no need to spend time organizing those emails in folders in their email client to simplify re-finding the information. They could just visit the blog to browse or search it, or even find it using the enterprise search. Should they choose to comment on the information that was posted on the blog, why not do it on the blog instead where everybody can see who has commented and what, instead of creating numerous messy email threads using reply all?

If it is this simple, and it really is, then what are you waiting for? (ok, there's on part that is hard, and that is making people change their habits)

The Digital Workplace concretized

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 09:00:00 +0000

If have previously discussed how do define the Digital Workplace. To be clear, it isn't about remote working, virtual teams, or mobility. It isn't about intranets, collaboration tools, or social media either. No, the Digital Workplace is about taking a business- and people-centric approach to providing information workers with the right capabilities in the right way so they can get their work done.

Another way to express it is that the Digital Workplace represents a shift from a technology-centric and product-oriented approach to supporting information workers to a people-centric and service-oriented approach. I’ve illustrated this shift in the below diagram, where I've also plotted some basic capabilities outside the circles.

Questions such as "What capabilities do we need to have?", "Which services should we provide to users?" and " How should those be designed?" cannot really be defined until we know the business needs and the needs of people in different situations. The Digital Workplace is – deliberately – a vague and abstract concept; it is impossible to describe exactly what it is because it will be different from one organization to another. Yet, there is definitely a need to concretize what a Digital Workplace might look like and what capabilities it could provide. For this purpose I will describe and discuss a few such capabilities in my next article for CMS Wire early next week (earlier writings can be found here):

Task Coordination
Finding People
Networking
Meetings
Communication
Sharing

I will also cross-post it a shorter version of the article here afterwards. Please stay tuned!

The Mobility Paradox - Stuck between a rock and a hard place

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 08:09:00 +0000

If you're a knowledge worker like me, the idea of having to go to the office and sit down at a desk to start working is starting to sound ridiculous. Even if an office hours and face time culture prevails in most organizations, the people we work with are increasingly expecting us to do our work when it needs to get done, wherever we are. "I'm out of the office" or "I'm not by my computer right now" are beginning to sound like lame excuses for not working, or as signs that we, to borrow a phrase from John Stepper, keep "working like it's 1995". More often than not it is a sign of failure from Corporate IT and (ultimately) top management to support the workforce to be productive in an increasingly challenging business and work environment.

The challenge, and paradox, that many individuals face is that they haven't been equipped with the right devices and services to work from anywhere. And moving from one situation to another, from one device to another, from one tool or IT systems to another, doesn't work smoothly enough. Often it doesn’t work at all. Some IT systems simply require them to go to the office if they are to get their work done, even for such a tiny task as approving an invoice - that potentially could be done from anywhere.

Of course, it shouldn't have to be this way. It for sure cannot stay this way. Tasks that can be performed just as easily when you are on the go, in any situation, should also be possible to perform on the go, in virtually any situation. The benefits with mobility are obvious; to name a few, it will increase the clock-speed of business, it will simplify collaboration, and it will make you less stressed since you don't have to hurry back to the office a.s.a.p. to get make that invoice approved.

Much more can be said about mobility and how important it is, and how critical it will become in the years ahead, both to the productivity of individuals in the workforce and to the overall operational performance of your organization. But for me it is also important to stress that mobility isn’t a capability; it is a way to provide services that bring certain capabilities to the people who need them, tailored to the situations when they need them. As such it is a key characteristic of the Digital Workplace, creating leverage for whatever capabilities it should provide.

The right approach to mobilizing the workforce must be to first understand what capabilities your organization and different types of individuals need to have, and then look at what services are needed and how those should be designed to bring the right capabilities to the right individuals in the right way. Mobility is, just as social technologies a cloud computing, a key concept and technology to leverage those capabilities.