Back in January in one of the sections of a post titled “Exploring the HR Management Framework for Enterprise 2.0” I offered up the following:

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Employee Performance

Performance management has been a hot-button issue in most enterprises for a long time.  At its best, a well-designed and disciplined approach to performance management can play a positive and constructive role in delivering sustained high performance, and can be central to creating a performance oriented culture in the enterprise.

All too often, however, performance management schemes serve to remind us that too many workplaces are the adult version of grade school, with report cards and a parent-like boss who has unwanted power over employee’s future and fate.

360-degree feedback processes (soliciting input on performance from subordinates, colleagues, superiors and even external customers and liaisons) have been around long enough now to have most of the kinks worked out, and are probably a decent pre-cursor to forms of ‘crowdsourcing’ input on employees’ performance.  Many (most ?) of the social computing / collaboration platforms out there have features and functionality designed to offer support to gathering and processing information about peoples’ performance.

The culture of an enterprise is an all-important aspect of why and how performance management is used.  I expect that this aspect will become more important as social computing and collaboration continue to grow and spread.

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Let’s talk a little bit more about how managing peoples’ performance might be practiced in an interconnected, interactive (and cross-silo / cross-organization) and more transparent organization.

Sharing information and building pertinent and applicable knowledge from that sharing is one of the core (and still much-discussed) tenets of knowledge management (KM) – the buzzword that won’t go away.  Sharing information .. links, content, opinions, specific expertise, etc. … is also at the core of using social computing in the enterprise.  Some of the skepticism about being able to control it comes from not understanding clearly how it will fit into, or with, existing business processes, and I suspect that there is an accompanying fear that it may upend or distort some or mamy business processes, if the inmates are handed the keys to the gates.

At the same time, we are at the back end of at least 20 years of calling for breaking down or at a minimum de-rigidifying the walls of specialized functional silos in most hierarchical organizations.

In some sense, the invaders, or the barbarians if you will, are at the castle gates clamoring for the gatekeepers to let them in.  They’ll argue, with some reason, that customers have more power, and that empowered and trusted employess can and want to contribute more to any given organization’s effectiveness.

So … let’s assume that Enterprise 2.0 implementations continue to spread and grow.  Let’s further assume that many of them are at least semi-successful, and that net-working in collaboration with flows of information feeding increasing flexible business processes gains more and more traction.  Will we need to begin setting objectives and targets differently, and will that in turn necessitate that in a socially-networked or ’social business’ environment employees’ performance will need to be assessed and managed differently ?

My sense is that the answer is probably Yes.  People will be working differently, and in all likelihood in more interdependent ways than in more traditional teams.

Setting objectives, for example, will probably need to consider more the role and dynamics of the networks that are pertinent .. whether it involves greater connections to/with customers and markets, or to what purpose and degree the work that addresses the objective involves net-working inside the organization.  In other words, I think it will mean considering the nature of the work more than ever before.

Bring an organizational objective down into an individual net-worker’s performance objectives will also require consideration of how she or he works in the relevant networks, and what kinds of contribution are generated from the interaction in which they engage with others in the network(s) that are addressing the organizational objective.

I believe that there are a range of work design tools that can be useful with these issues .. mainly drawn from the organizational development (OD) field, such as the RACI matrix and accountability mapping.  They would need to become more commonly and frequently used, and I suggest that they would become as or more important than the traditional job description, with its assumptions about relatively static tasks and accountabilities.

Competency models are the most recent work design tool (I’ve written briefly about them here) that has become embedded in most workplaces in support of recruitment, employee – performance fit and as a foundation for assessing individual performance.  I also believe that the competencies associated with most roles (and certainly those that operate mainly in networks and with social computing and social networking tools and platforms) will need to be re-visited as the cross-functional, cross-organizational and internal – external connections proliferate.

In terms of actually assessing performance against objectives and required / desired competencies, today’s organizations have a foundation upon which to build.  Many organizations have implemented and have experience with using what is called 360-degree feedback as a core element or the input about demonstrated performance in a role or job.  The 360-degree feedback process can, I think, be reasonably well-adapted to the E2.0 context … the more difficult challenge is articulating the performance objectives in clear and meaningful ways whilst acknowledging that the roles being performed are participating in a range of networks and flows of information and activities.

Additionally, most (if not all) E2.0 collaboration platforms have or will have mechanisms that track activities, whether around objectives or around issues using tags, click counts, and elements of social network analysis (SNA), organizational network analysis (ONA), or value network analysis (VNA).  As organizations acquire more experience and expertise in using these concepts, I think there will come to be a base of information that will enable new forms of ROI .. namely what I and others have called Return on Investment in Interaction (ROII).

Performance management in organizations has always been a complex set of sociological and political processes. It doesn’t promise to become any easier, but there are signals on the horizon that suggest some ways forward.

Like I said .. no answers, just ideas and questions at this stage.  Beyond the ideas outlined above, there are more far-reaching ideas and issues being discussed in some of the conversation circles I inhabit that are examining more human-centered notions of knowledge work and how they may come together in new forms of organization. Those ideas and issues will no doubt continue to evolve as collaboration platforms and the Web continue to grow their impacts upon today’s organization and the work that is carried out in those organizations.

I’d be really interested to hear what you think.

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Major organizations are leveraging collaborative tools to improve the experiences for customers and constituents, and this was explained by representatives of two major global organizations. G. “Gurvais” Clayton Grigg, chief knowledge officer for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, explained how his agency is managing an enormous flow of data into an already massive amount of content and documents. He said it was estimated that the FBI maintains enough paper to create a tower 178 miles high.

The challenge is transfer the nuggets of important information on some of this paper to a digitized and accessible form, Grigg says. Paper artifacts will be around for a long time to come, he points out. “The bad guys aren’t going to be organizing their evidence as metadata,” he says. “They’re not going to hand you everything on a CD.”

He said the agency’s strategy is to better leverage three sources of information — data, paper, and people.

Questions that need to be asked about information include “What do we know?” “Who knows it?” “How is it being used?” and “How is it being shared?” Grigg says. The ability to connect people and help them collaborate is paramount, he adds. “While it’s really good to help people find data, it’s even better to help them find the people with the data,” he says.

Technology needs to take a back seat to people and business considerations, he adds. “When people come to me requesting a technology, I first ask them to describe the problem without technology. If they can do that, they understand the problem better.”

Michael Rossotti, application services sr. analyst at Merck, explained how the pharmaceutical giant was leveraging the FAST Enterprise Search Platform and complementary solutions to deliver the latest information to physicians and consumers around the world.

The company maintains two primary portals, Merck Medicus, for doctors, and MerckSource for consumers. Both now have search capabilities built in.

The goals of the implementation, begun in March 2007, were to “have the user experience be central,” Rossotti says. “We wanted to build trust with the customer. Sometimes our only interactions with customers is through our portals.” The company conducted a phased rollout of capabilities, starting with an advanced search feature for Medicus. The first phase was linking to 50 companies across the enterprise that were crawled on a daily basis. The portals were later enhanced with a federated search capability to other search results, but still contained within the portal page. In 2009, the company integrated its portal search capabilities with SharePoint, he says. Currently, the system sees about five queries a second, he says.

Rossotti says some of the lessons learned from the experience include the need to “be wary of feature creep,” as departments seek to activate more tools and enhancements at the sites. “If you start to do too much, the experience for the client can become too complex.” The priorities, Rossotti, are to “step forward on governance, and meet increased demand.”

Until recently, we had to use immense resources to pull this off. After all this was what marketing and politics was all about – getting hold of vast sums of money to push out our POV.

Only the big could play – until now.

Please excuse the diagram – but I know of no other way of showing this right now. This comes from some work I am doing with a client who has a service that is of interest to researchers. We built this model of the “Field” of a University as it pertains to how we might influence the Profs.

Simply put, if you want to have a lot of Profs use your service, you have to start not with the Formal University and least of all with the most tenacious gatekeeper IT. You are best to find the Big Man on Campus – the most influential Prof with the Lab that all look up to. If she likes what you have, she can find her own money to buy it. Being a “star” she does not need the university as lesser Profs might. If  she buys and uses and likes it, then the lesser stars join. The laws of Adoption come into play.

Not only does the BMOC influence her colleagues in her university but because she is a true star, she carries weight in other universities. She may also have formal links in that she may be collaborating with another Lab or Labs. She is a vector for “infection”.

If you have a service that can also serve the small, then you can increase your power by finding the Rising Star. This junior prof has no money. He is new but brilliant. He too wishes to rise to be a dominant player in the field. If you can have a close to free version of your service, he can use this to rise. Then all the rest have to follow as well.

It is better if you then can find local allies. In every system you will have the cops and you will have the social workers. The cops are usually IT or HR in organizations. The nice people in Universities are the Libraries. They are usually genuinely interested in learning and in serving and tend not to be tied to any Right Way. My bet is that every field has these brakes or accelerators.

Finally, to get the big boost, it is likely that you will find regulators or agencies who may find that your service serves them too. With their support, you can tip the system.

I don’t think that this model is confined to Universities. I think that it is Fractal.

I think that all fields have the same deep structure and so are open to this type of approach. In every field there is a dominance hierarchy. There is an external boundary. The job in every field is to get to the centre and to hold the dominant role. This is true in music, in art, math, banking in everything.

There are Stars at the centre, there are gatekeepers, there are Rising Stars, there are infection vectors, there are sponsors, there are pitfalls. All fields have this kind of structure. If we said that the university model was classical piano – it would be the same. If we said it was war doctrine, it would be the same. Hey it is the same for Social Media.

So why is this helpful to you? Because this approach is a true game changer. You don’t have to have vast resources to capture the interest of a field. You do have to have something that is authentically good. But if you have this, then we can use this model to move up the adoption curve with few resources. In fact once you get momentum, the system will do nearly all the work for you.

If I am correct, then this model is a simple map of any field and so enables anyone who wishes to rise or influence any field, to plot a strategy.

This then brings us back to my first post. If this is the map, then we also know how best to harness our social power to have the best journey.

Do we know enough now for you to have the optimal team set up in the optimal way to have the power to get influence on the field that matters to you?

I think we do – but what about you?

I think that they should be: for surely all else in Nature that is about relationships has math? Light, Gravity, Water and Heat etc. So why would there not be Math that supports how Human Relationships work?

I was re-reading my favourite text the other day – Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language – and I was stunned, but not surprised, to learn that not only do we humans have a gradient of Trust governed by math but that there are limits in the physical space as well beyond which, we fall out of community. Naturally these limits are hardly known, least of all by architects and maybe hardly at all by any of us who wish to design a physical space that promotes a healthy human community.

Alexander brings up this topic in the section on Small Public Squares (Pattern 61). He asks why so many public squares are dead space?

Here is the Space Magic Number #1 – 70.

• We cannot make out another face much over 70 feet away
• We cannot hear another person properly over 70 feet away

Any space that exceeds this – Piazza San Marco and Trafalgar are exceptions because they are a nexus in a large city and get filled to the right density – feels un social.

So here is Space Magic Number #2 – 300

• Any space with more than 300 square feet per person will feel “deserted”
• So a space with a diameter of 100 feet needs 33 people in it to feel ok
• So a space with a diameter of 35 feet needs only 4
• A space with 60 feet needs only 12
• It’s hard to get 33 or more people into a public space at any one time – it is much easier to get 4

I wonder – do these numbers then tie into what we know about group satisfaction – (Chris Allen)

My bet is that there must be a link between these two sets of numbers.

Forming the best groups in the best spaces will surely have an impact on the power of these groups. This then raises another question. Might getting the group size and the group space optimized have an impact on group power?

Do these numbers have any connection with Adoption?

Might knowing more about ideal groups and ideal spaces address the question that we all have – How can I optimize my power in the world?

Our model until now has been to use money as a substitute for social power.

Are we close now to seeing the Social Power Model? I think so.

In my follow up post to this, I will share a Fractal Model of how we have found social adoption to work in a university setting. If this is Fractal, then the social design we see in a University should match all fields of social groupings.

We may be getting close.

A number of themes for successful enterprise 2.0 adoptions emerged from the data.  Like many others, the respondents indicated that, “though technology is important, it is not about technology.”  The report went on to state that, “moving toward enterprise 2.0 is not a standalone game; it has to serve the overall corporate vision. The transformation has to plant its roots into the organization’s culture and strategy.”  The report used Schein’s organizational culture model, and the Early Strategies’ Enterprise 2.0 maturity model.  It segmented the transformational requirements into three levels.

At the organizational level transformation must support a strategic vision.  This could be a broad goal such as being a pioneer in the area or a more focused one such as moving toward more corporate social responsibility. At individual level, the transformation has to help with the daily work.  The broad goals of the organization may not be top of mind for the employees who have to undergo a change in the way they work and/or the tools they use.  Getting the job done better and more efficiently will be the main driver for them. At management level, an enterprise 2.0 transformation needs to help create a different and more accurate and up-to-date management model.  I believe that the transparency built into enterprise 2.0 tools and practices can certainly address this management goal if used properly.

I think this is a useful approach and these three levels need to be working in harmony for the general health of the company, as well as any enterprise 2.0 adoption efforts.  The report also states that the benefits on all three levels need to be communicated widely during the adoption process.  So far these results are consistent with most management and technology transformations. The report goes on to offer some new insights that may be more specific to enterprise 2.0.

First, it stated, “although there are complex impacts on management, it is important to note that by simply participating, managers transfer their status into the new paradigm; while not participating creates a real discrepancy.” I would agree as the nature of transparent tools changes to course of work. I know of one firm that had its first project come in under budget when they adopted enterprise 2.0 management tools. They attributed this to the transparency as everyone could see what has happening at all times in the process so accountability was clear and continuous improvements were made (see Changing Organization Behavior at XM Radio through Enterprise 2.0).

Next, the report stated, “Middle management appears to be the organization layer where adoption is the slower, or most difficult, for all types of organizations and at all stages.” Now this has frequently happen in organizations going back to the Roman army but it remains an issue to address. Booz Allen spent the majority of its change management efforts on this level as it moved to an enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform.

The third point was, “Networking tools (rich directory, profiles, microblogging, forums, tagging, …) may be deployed just before collaboration tools (wikis, groups, …), or together, rather than the other way around or not being prioritized.” Some of the vendors have recognized this and are prompting their networking tools as a “Trojan horse” before getting into the more complex process of aligning collaboration platforms to work processes. These networking tools can show quick returns and provide a means for viral marketing of these benefits.

The report suggests that, “communicating externally about the internal change may help to change the mindsets internally.” This is an interesting idea. Those that have been successful in enterprise 2.0 are by definition early adopters who often like to promote their efforts in the external world.  This external promotion will indicate the importance of the transformation, as well as potentially provide more pride within the workplace.

Finally, it added that it helps when “new educational modes: mentoring and collaborative learning, structured or unstructured, when the community takes care of improving each one’s participation.”  I have always found that collaborative peer learning produces the best results. Enterprise 2.0 tools now allow for this peer learning to be more effective. For example, I have seen several instances where switching to blogs in the learning platform dramatically increased results.

I think these are all excellent points. There is much more in the thirty eight page report as I have just touched on a few highlights. It is available at the Early Strategies web site.

5 reasons why your company should be distributed

I’ve noticed a new trend in Silicon Valley. More and more startups are beginning life as distributed companies, and investors and partners are starting to accept it as normal. Our company Automattic is distributed, and I’m ready to sing the praises of running a business in this way. BTW, I thinkdistributed (“evenly spread throughout an area”) is a better description than the more commonly used virtual (“nearly real or simulated to be real”) for a company that has people working from all over the place instead of a centralized office. In Automattic’s case, we currently have over 50 employees spread across 12 US states and 10 countries.

Here are my top 5 reasons why you should consider the distributed model for your company:

via toni.org

I think that this is indeed the future – the full text follows here

As with all good network designs – most of the direct and indirect costs of the organization go away.

The capital costs are shed and are taken up by the nodes. People work from their place. With their gear. Huge expenses off the table. Huge potential to have the best gear for the staff.

Most of those interruptions go away – who can get any work done at the office these days?

Most of those silly meetings go away.

With NO Commute – so they get hours of time back a day. Let’s say 2 hours a day. 10 hours a week. 40 hours a month. (That’s a working week). 12 weeks a year! That is a lot of dentist visits, plumber visits, time with kids and spouse, time to nap, time to do whatever. And all this time was pulled out of the air as a result of not commuting.

Then of course there are the direct costs of commuting – the car, the transport. It costs $9,000 a year to run a car fully costed. How about coffee and lunch? What do you spend today? $5.0 – $20 a day. That is $1,000 – $4,000 a year for coffee and lunch! How about clothes? I used to buy 2 suits a year as a man. Women can’t get away with that. How much does going to work cost you in clothes? $2,000 – $5,000.

Daycare – well you might still want to send your kid off to daycare but now you might be able to do this locally and walk there. You will not have that pressure at the end of the day to juggle that project and getting to daycare on time. If your child is sick, you have options. And with all the money you have saved on the other things, you can afford a good one.

They live where they want. Huge choice given back. Not only can you choose what part of town, but what town or even country.

Then firm can also hire from a market of 6 billion versus from the local pool – the full talent pool of the planet is open to you.

The costs of travel to meet and hang out now and then are tiny compared to what is spent on a conventional organization.

The communication tools that connect you all now are all but free as well. The Skype offices have big screens that are ON all the time – so you can look up and call out to a colleague in another city as if she was in the next room – for free!

So why not your office? Well if your organization is all about control, then this will never happen. if your organization is all about process and not results, this will never happen. If your organization hires people who don’t have the skills to deliver, this will never happen. If your organization is like this – why are you still there?

Posted via web from Rob’s posterous

A Fortune 500 company was counted as having a blog if they had a public-facing corporate blog from the primary corporation with posts in the past 12 months. This is the same definition used in the prior 2008 study. The data was collected in October and November 2009. One hundred-eight (22%) of the primary corporations listed on the 2009 Fortune 500 have a public-facing corporate blog with a post in the past 12 months. This is an increase from 16% in the prior study. The top 100 companies on the list represent 39% of the 108 blogs in the 2009 F500.  In 2008, 38% of the total number of blogs came from the top 100. Consistent with the findings on the 2008 Fortune 500, 90% percent of the Fortune 500 blogs take comments, have RSS feeds and take subscriptions

A company was considered a user of Twitter if they had an official corporate account. Of the 108 blogs located, 93 (86%) are linked directly to a corporate Twitter account, that’s more than three times as many as members of the 2008 list. One hundred and seventy-three (35%) of the primary corporations listed on the 2009 Fortune 500 has a Twitter account with a post within the past thirty days. Of the top 100 companies on the list, 47 have a Twitter account.

One hundred and twenty companies (69%) consistently responded with @replies or retweets within the past thirty days. These Twitter accounts are kept up-to-date with current news and information. There is consistent interaction with other users and on-going discussions that are easy to follow.

The researchers concluded that, “the continued steady adoption of blogs and the explosive growth of Twitter among Fortune 500 companies demonstrate the growing importance of social media in the business world.” I certainly agree.  It is interesting, but not surprising, that the growth with Twitter exceeds that with blogs. Many marketing departments that missed the blog movement have jumped on the Twitter bandwagon.

Benoiff wrote that he originally used to wonder “why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com?” He pondered at the time that applications should be run from a simple Website, without software or hardware to install and pricey consultants to hire. That was the inspiration for Salesforce.com, he says. Now, he says, enterprise software needs to adopt the collaboration and social networking aspects of sites such as Facebook: “We need to take this idea to our businesses. We need to transform the business conversation the same way Facebook has changed the consumer conversation. Market shifts happen in real time, deals are won and lost in real time, and data changes in real time….”

While Benoiff used his declaration to make a blatant pitch for his latest “Chatter” feature, his point is worth some healthy debate.  After all, when the Web and commercial Internet first emerged in the early 1990s, nobody immediately connected the dots between Websites and enterprise applications, which were largely accessed via industrial-strength green-screen terminals directly attached to back-end behemoths. Nevertheless, a decade later, every enterprise application was accessible through a front-end browser, which had become the new norm.

Critics, such as Charles Zedlewski in a follow-up post, argue that Facebook is more of a consumer entertainment venue than a serious, behind the firewall mission-critical application. And, it can be argued that Facebook is the flavor of the month, and two or three years from now, some other type of service will have captured the imagination of fickle consumers.

Actually, the evolution of enterprise software already began a number of years ago, even before Facebook began its existence as a college students’ online meet & greet.  I mentioned the dramatic move to Web browser-style interfaces in the 1990s. Now, even without the influence of Facebook, enterprise software is feeling the powerful tug of social networking and Enterprise 2.0, and endpoints will continue to evolve to a collaborative look and feel that enables end-users to maintain their own virtual areas, sharing data and content for a multitude of purposes.

The intranet is starting to become the entry point into the “workplace web” – the collection of resources and information needed by staff. This includes applications, intranet sites, specialized portals, team spaces, collaboration spaces and so on. This was the original vision for many intranets but rarely realized. The current evolution is from a fragmented workplace web to a hybrid one and finally to the end goal, a unified workplace web. In the “unified” workplace web, the intranet or enterprise portal is the front door to the organization’s information, business and collaborative resources and places. There is a ways to go as today only 15 percent of the survey participants have achieved a “unified workplace web”.

Team-orientation is rising as firms are starting to bring collaboration spaces inside the intranet. Today, the vast majority of organizations already have team places but they are usually not considered part of the intranet. These places sometimes become mini silos. Now as the way of working becomes more collaborative and enterprise 2.0 concepts spread, this is beginning to change.

A more people-focused approach is being adopted. In the past the intranet has traditionally been a place where organizations provides content for employees to read and use. Communication was primarily top-down. This is changing with the introduction of social media. I have found that advanced organizations are recognizing the need to be more people oriented. That was the case with the Booz Allen work where profiles are the foundation for their collaborative system.

Intranets are also becoming more real-time through chat, micro-blogging, and other tools. In addition, intranets are also becoming place independent as anytime, anywhere access grows through mobile devices and home access.

These are only some of the highlights. I certainly agree with these trends. You can see the complete report at Jane’s Net Strategy site.

“The era of light computing has begun, and social media is big enough that the average person can shape perceptions. A Web site is no longer the most meaningful way for us to interact to tell companies about their products or to use online services….  At any given time, it is likely that conversations about big businesses are happening on Facebook, Twitter and other social media, and those conversations can be initiated by anyone from anywhere.”

Wortington labels a big part of this trend as “social CRM,” in which not only do businesses and customers talk to each other, but customers talk to one another as well.  Businesses that rely solely on Websites to facilitate communications will miss out on the dialog.

How is your company or organization engaging in this latest evolution?  Are your customers networking with each other?  In all likelihood, they may be — whether you are part of the conversation or not.