e2.0 blog

Interesting blog posts around the web previous week:

Making Money with Twitter
"Twitter Japan is more community oriented than other parts of the world which are all about ‘Me’.  Japanese Twitter users often have different accounts for different communities."

If your customer falls in the forest of your website
"Do you really think those crude, meaningless statistics about page impressions, visitors and hits are anything other than crude and meaningless?"

Enterprise 2.0: How a Connected Workforce Innovates
"Some companies now say: Why stop at lead users? Why not let everyone take a crack at helping us develop a new product, improve an existing one, or solve a vexing problem? They no longer specify who can participate in the innovation process; they welcome all comers. Enterprise 2.0 tools are designed to help with these more open innovation processes."

Who is in the driving seat of Enterprise 2.0 adoption?
"As I see it, what is being changed is WHO is in the driving seat and HOW the adoption is being driven. Instead of your boss being in the driving seat, with you in the back seat, it might be that it is your collegue, or a group of people that you belong to, or your friend who is in the driving seat. People you trust."

Do you have more good links from this week? Post them in the comments and share with us all!

The CIO in general question the need to install a blog- or wiki tool. Why? We already have SharePoint installed - it supports this, right?

Yes – skimming through the feature list gives us that answer. The problem with SharePoint is not the technology. It's the culture.

For me SharePoint is an administrative tool. What do I mean by that? SharePoint's strengths, if any, are document management, support for processes, permission management, and so on. Nothing wrong with that.

On the other hand - blogs and wikis are not considered administrative tools at all. There is simply a different culture around them - and they are on a head-on collision course with SharePoint. Blogs and wikis are grassroot forces where rules are defined by the creative people using them - not the administrator.

The difference is huge and is reflected in the result. Where native tools enhances all the benefits with wikis and blogs, implementing blog and wiki alike features in SharePoint puts more burden on the information department stressed to "align it", triggering the built-in resistance.

You might find this absurd and don't agree with me at all. But the culture surrounding a tool does matter.

I'm still waiting for a success story implementing native wikis and blogs in an organization with SharePoint - it has full support for it, at-least according to the feature list – and have had it for some time now.

Most intranet experts agree that the intranet – or whatever collaboration tool a company is using – has to be useful. Otherwise nobody will use it – quite obvious when it is outspoken literally. But exactly what is useful to the staff that is supposed to use it?

Is it the updated sales info or the competitive analyses, which is considered the hard side? Or is it the lunch menu and the latest gossip, which we call the softer side of the intranet?

Many, and we are among them, have been talking a lot about the importance of the softer side of the intranet. James Robertson calls it the human face of an organization:

“In addition to being useful, intranets can and should be enjoyable to use. Maybe even fun. At a minimum, they should always present a ‘human face’ to staff, one that is engaging and encouraging.”

But how far should this go? What if the intranet turns into a relationship-driven Facebook clone and is all about soft issues? Is there a chance for that to happen? According to Fredrik Wackå, yes there is:

“No matter how much I agree – and I do – the “softer side” must be treated cautiously. It has a tendency to take over. Many communicators seem to think that it is much more fun to work with company culture than with saving time for co-workers and increase efficiency. An intranet can be soft also. Also. But primarily it’s a rock hard work tool." [my translation from Swedish]

What do you think? How soft should a collaboration tool be? Where do we draw the border?

Interesting blog posts around the web previous week:

Future principle: ubiquitous access
"In 2015, staff will have ubiquitous access to information and functionality, delivered at the point of need, regardless of where they may be."

The immense value of expertise location will help drive enterprise social media
"In large, geographically distributed, professional organizations, expertise location can be a 'killer app' which provides immense return on the implementation of social computing."

There is no Enterprise 2.0, there is your Enterprise 2.0
"In some cases E2.0 is about the tools, and in some cases it’s not.  Some clients should have included HR first, and others don’t need to."

The Rise Of Networks, The End Of Process
"Increasingly, people's work is being viewed as a shared aspect of social relations. Time is a shared space, where we cooperate toward shared ends."

Do you have more good links from this week? Post them in the comments and share with us all!

Recently we launched Incentive as a part of the E20 roll out on SBAB. SBAB is a government owned bank in Sweden. Let me emphasis GOVERNMENT OWNED. You direct response - I assume - is… stale, complex decision processes, rules - on and on, and on.

But this… this is based on a true story.

It all began in March 2009 where I was invited to present the concept of Enterprise 2.0 on a large company meeting at SBAB office in Stockholm.

Pia, who booked me, was frustrated. She knew that SBAB should do this – but didn’t have the “tools” to convince them. Inviting me as an objective speaker and lecturing Enterprise 2.0 in general terms helped. After the meeting almost everyone responded “WHY! Why haven’t we been doing this before?”

In June we installed the platform but the holidays came in the middle and we postponed the official launch.

In September we sent an open and free to participate invite to introduce the “google sbab” initiative. We wanted to give a feel of an informal and inspirational get together – so what the heck, we offered pizza and beer.

On this session we identified the champs, gardeners and the lurkers. People were inspired. Skeptical. Curious.

Pia and I was happy – we were on the road - our journey had begun!

We extracted some data from the installation yesterday, and this is what we found.

 

Total shows all activities going on (comments, files, new profiles, etc). What we can see is that the wiki is the most popular type, blogging (posts) way behind. But look at the number of profiles… that few generate that much?

The total count of profiles in November was 195 (in total they are about 400) – but we also extracted that the active part of that number was slightly under 40% - to be more accurate 74 users.

74 users generating almost 4 000 wiki contributions… in five months! Yaay!

And we have so far only released this to one business unit within SBAB, consisting of 40-50 people – but there is 74 active users?!

We have succeeded in creating the pull effect instead of pushing it out. People want it. We achieved the grassroot effect.

SBAB has become the role model on how to implement Enterprise 2.0 within the financial sector in Sweden, no doubt!

The most important success factor to this was… Pia. Again I discover how important it is with the right attitude on the inside. Fighting for its rights. Believing.

To sum up the “rights” we did, I would say the top four is:

1. Got the acceptance from the management – but made sure that we were free to explore & experiment without interference
2. Kept it small – we saw an immediate need within one unit and we pleased that need.
3. Saw the importance in keeping it informal – this is a tool you are free to use, like post-it notes. If you don’t use it – don’t.
4. Clear vision – “to Google our own Wikipedia”. The purpose of the initiative was not purely to provide an “everybody can publish” environment. More important for us was “everybody can search AND FIND” – because then we will reach 100% of the users.

Pia ends up with saying “We have increased our efficiency with at least 10% over these five months”

As far as I'm concerned - this is true rock'n'roll! Internal communications has become hot -and this thanks to E2.0.