Lots of information have been already distributed through out the net about the Enterprise 2.0 FORUM / Cologne, that took place already nearly two weeks ago. Now we finished cutting and setting up all the recorded video materials - so here we go with the presentation of Suw Charman-Anderson talking about the “adoption strategy for social software”.

Well - actually she was talking about “training a cat” - and how the cat will not do anything without a reward for doing it. So as the first key point of successfully adopting social software she advised to think about a rewarding system. Further aspects she is talking about were

• the importance of identifying the problem on the day-to-day work of the individual that can be solved by social software
• the user-centric adoption as bottom-up approach that has more potential to be successful than the top-down approach
• the need of a leadership by engagement - I would do the reference towards Rod Beckstrom’s catalyst personnas
• for the implementation of social software projects she proposes a “trojan mice” aproach in the means of small projects introduced into the ongoing organisation (to grow securely)

Many more interesting advices may be taken from the video:

Actually the importance of the rewarding system was also a big issues being discussed in the open space session. (I am just working on a transcript of the discussions - will translate this also to English soon!)

There are two aspects regarding the rewarding system I’d like to share with you:

1. the grade of participation in social software projects must be part of the evaluation by the objective agreement
2. participation in social software projects must be transparent to be socially acknowledged (means the need for activity streams!).

What advices do you have on this?

Following a link on Martin’s Delicious recommendations I stumbled upon Richard Dennison’s note about the new BT case study - which is already quite interesting to read (see also this video!). While being on Richard’s site I came along another interesting post about the Intranet evolution which again hijacked me to some thoughts about the decentralization of information systems as underlying idea of the Intranet 2.0 evolution. Have a look at my other post and let me know about what you are thinking.

Note: See this as a practical example of the creative power of social media - talked about here.

In a recent post Bernard Lunn of RWW lists some objections CIOs have towards social media. He comes up with the following issues:

Unpredictable scaling issues.

Security against IP loss.

Integration.

Loss of productivity.

Accidental brand damage.

I would say most of them derive from the software-as-a-service concept Bernard implies towards social media - but with all those open-source offerings like Wordpress, DokuWiki et al, elgg, Laconi.ca and others the corporate implementation of social media is not limited towards SaaS concepts. And regarding the best-practices like for example BT they are mainly installing and implementing software tools rather than using services (- I think I will interview JP on this at our E2.0 FORUM this week!).

The security discussion regarding “the loss of intellectual property”, the productivity issues as well as the fear of “accidental brand damage” are in fact some critical aspects that need a mind change - but for these cases the co-workers are faced mostly (at least for Germany) with the situation that they are limited to access only certain business sites. Maybe you are laughing but I know of a bunch of companies that are not even able to access Facebook, Twitter or even XING. So here you have the situation you don’t even think about social media but about the danger of the Internet.

So bringing back the question towards this post and asking you, my dear respective Enterprise 2.0 experts, what are your answers to the CIO’s objections?

The discussions about micro blogging services have reached another peak these days with Yammer winning the beauty contest at TechCrunch50. Despite all reservations regarding Yammer not being very innovative this incident at least turned on the light on looking at micro blogging services as Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Identi.ca or as well Yammer (see full list of tools at Jeremiah Owyang) as a corporate tool.

I do not want to rewrite everything that is said about corporate micro blogging but 1) give a little differentiation towards the discussions, 2) sum up a short recap of some interesting German discussions on this topic and 3) come up with some thoughts about some requirements on the side of the user’s perception and understanding of this tools.

Regarding the first aspect - in a lot of discussions about Twitter, Yammer and Co. I miss the differentiation between the scope of its application. Well - as Yammer provides micro-blogging towards a closed network, and Twitter is fairly open in the cloud - we have to distinguish the use of these tools for external corporate communications (for which Yammer is not very applicable) and internal communications and collaboration purposes. So for me corporate is not corporate - and if I want both with one tool neither Yammer nor Twitter is the right choice - implementing my own Laconi.ca instance would therefore be a better approach - combined with Twhirl as a desktop client.

As this community blog is mostly about internal communications and collaborations issues I will focus my second point on the German discussions that are limited to this. (Regarding the external communications potentials I wrote on our German Social Web WORLD Notizblog.) Joachim Niemeier - moderator of our upcoming E2.0 FORUM - had published a very nice post discussing some arguments for the application of these tools and some usage scenarios. His arguments for the usage of these tools include the following:

Provisioning of an easy-to-use communications instrument

Easy documentation of discussions and decisions in form of “micro-information”

Documentated contextual feedback on these micro-information (not getting lost in any email chain communication)

Provisioning of methods to identify the cooperation/project partner (within my organization) and to build up a common understanding of my work/project

Well - these arguments for these tools are kind of the aims as well as the problems to be solved. I would still add some more mediate argument. A lot of critics on social software - esp. on micro blogging services - includes the vast amount of noice and distraction it produces. As I wrote on our Notizblog regarding social media providing noise with social bindings and mechanisms for agenada setting I see this noise implies a great potential for any creativity process - this breaks the thing again down towards Tim O’Reilly’s word of “fostering the collective intelligence” with Web 2.0. Within the discussions and informations exchanges there are a lot of ideas for innovations - and esp. micro-blogging services are very effective on this because they limit the idea spreading on a number of characters and make it very easy to distribute them.

Regarding the usage scenarios Joachim Niemeier brought up the following ideas:

Defining processes

Debriefing projects

Project management in general

Dirk Röhrborn complented these thoughts with another systematic approach on the usage scenarios:

Micromessaging (short messaging)

Awareness / Serendipity (transparency towards the business activity)

Microdocumentation (structured documentations)

Microlearning (learning in small units)

And yes - here I also would add the item of “Supporting creativity processes”.

Last but not least - I would like to start a discussion about the requirements to introduce these tools towards my organization. As an social software idealist I instantly started a Kongress Media network on Yammer after I heard about it - because as a geo-dispersed organization we are very much suffering from the information overload the email exchange is bringing to us. (Therefore I am eagerly following the results of Luis Suarez’ experiment!) But still - I believe that micro blogging could solve some of our problems - but my folks are very hardly adopting to any kind of social tool - and at last to the newest gadget that is out there in the world. So how do I get there? Dirk Röhrbein is writing in his post about the understanding that is needed for the success of these tools. So I assume we need Twitter to succeed for the masses before micro blogging can be implemented in a substantial way - as weblogs also had to be adopted by the masses before corporate blogging had become acceptable. But maybe it only lacks the best-practices. In the discussions at Joachim Niemeier’s post Martina Goehring as well as Martin Böhringer are talking about some micro blogging best-practices - maybe I or Joachim Niemeier can convince them in writing down their experiences in a guest post at this place - until then I open up the discussion to let you tell me your experiences.

I have read at Mike Gotta about his research in the field of social networking within the enterprise. As we have some cases on this at the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 FORUM I wondered whether there are some more people out there that are interested in bringing together some case studies about this? Martin Koser (frogpond) just started a case study research on all wiki cases that have been presented at our conferences this year. We are looking forward to publish this in a wiki at this site soon (http://wiki.enterprise2open.com) - and therefore I thought it would also be a great idea in adding some more social networking cases.

If you’re interested, just let me know.

I just stumbled upon an interesting research paper of the Harvard Business School (via Collaborative Thinking of Mike Gotta) that discusses the “struggle of balancing the conflicting demands of efficiency and innovation”. While it’s clear that efficiency (in the means of constant or better business results at less or at least constant expenses) and innovations (in the means of new or better products or processes for new or faster exploitation of the markets) are the two main strategies within highly competitive markets, it is mainly unclear how to enhance both in the same matter as it seems that they are two ends of a bi-polar scale.

The HBS paper concludes this with the following:

Organizations can become more efficient in the short run by replacing costly, unpredictable problem solving activity with consistent, streamlined routines. However, this efficiency often comes at the cost of long-run adaptability. The more organizational activity is dominated by stable routines, the less the organization learns, and the more rigid and inflexible it becomes.

For the solution in the middle the authors discuss the role of perturbations as novel stimuli that disrupt organizational routines and drive innovation. In regards to this the authors submit the following:

“… highly disciplined organizations can sustain exploration by deliberately perturbing themselves and by creating knowledge for exploratory interpretation that translates perturbations into problemsolving, learning, and adaptation”

As lever to this the organisation needs to reach “ambidexterity - the capability to sustain both exploitation and exploration simultaneously” by inforcing a “lively intellectual debate”. As research object the paper discusses the production system of Toyota and its application of the “principle known as autonomation or jidoka”.

Processes are designed to stop production when faults occur, thereby calling attention to accidental perturbations.

Means every occuring problem within the production process leads towards a complete process stop of the production line (by ringing the “andon cord”). That drives the full awareness of all workers and managers towards this problem and leads towards a more immediate solving-process.

The authors conclude:

Perturbations disrupt exploitation and create opportunities for exploration. Thus, they impose a short-term cost in the form of reduced exploitation performance in order to obtain a longer-term benefit in the form of new knowledge. If such new knowledge enables more effective exploitation, then exploitation performance in the presence of perturbations may quickly rise above the level that would have been obtained without perturbations, even after taking into account the cost of perturbations.

The question is how do organization induce perturbation - and therefore the exploration of new ideas and innovations:

Organizational exploration can be sustained in two ways: unconsciously, through natural processes of variation, selection, and retention (C.f. Campbell 1960); or consciously, by intentionally influencing the flow of perturbations that the organization experiences or the exploration undertaken in response to perturbations.

In regards to Toyota the authors come up with the following statement:

A former executive VP at Toyota notes, “Toyota’s top managers berate people who don’t try to come up with new ideas or who don’t take up new challenges, but not people who try something and fail. The role of senior managers is … to help subordinates with new ideas or challenges … That’s what makes trial and error possible (Hino 2006: 91-92).”

Therefore a culture or organizational scheme of accepting trial and failure supports perturbation and exploration of innovations.

[At Toyoata] routines for inducing perturbations include shortening cycle times, shrinking buffers between process steps, and training programs that teach front-line workers to formulate and conduct experimental changes.

But perturbations needs to be induced carefully:

As Nonaka observes, “Without reflection, the introduction of fluctuation [perturbations] tends to produce ‘destructive’ chaos” (Nonaka 1994: 28). Organizations that possess such knowledge respond to minor perturbations with vigorous exploration, while organizations without such knowledgestubbornly revert to established processes even in the face of severe and highly destructive perturbations.

As key levers for exploiting the relationship between perturbations and exploration the paper concludes two five aspects:

• Agency: including commitments of the members of the organization, heuristics asat Toyota that valorize the pursuit of seemingly-impossible goals or the obsessive elimination of waste, even in miniscule amounts and routines that determines the degree to which perturbations drive productive exploration.
• Saturation Frequency of Processes: defines the maximum rate at which organizational units can learn from perturbations
• Dispersion of perturbations:Perturbations contribute most to long-term organizational adaptability when they are widely dispersed across the organization’s process hierarchy, instead of being concentrated in particular levels or functions
• Upward and Downward Filtering: determines how perturbations propagate through the organization’s process space
• Signal Content of Perturbations

Concluding implications made from the authors are the following:

• To sustain adaptability in the long term, perturbations must occur throughout the organization.
• In highly disciplined organizations, adaptability depends on the active participation of organization members in inducing and interpreting perturbations.
• Management must trust employees to perturb processes, teach them to detect and interpret perturbations, and motivate them to do so.
• In the long term, business success depends as much on the commitment and knowledge of frontline employees as on strategic decision-making by senior management.

While this research gives a very organizational approach to the topic of how to change organization while still being efficient, I see also some implication in regards to the Enterprise 2.0 discussions. I think the paper gives a very sharp insight towards the underlying mechanisms that can be realized by introducing social software within organization. Because the instant and collaborative approach of social software tools help to build up a constant and to all members of the organization transparent level of perturbation - wikis,  weblogs and micro blogging that are distributed and aggregated by RSS and social presence solutions as internal lifestreams supporting the distribution of organisational knowledge and keep up a steady stream of disturbance in the streamlined organization that may lead to problem-solving solutions across the organization.

There’s an english summary of the latest pre-conference-interview up at my site (”Pre-Conference interview: dbWiki - building a Web 2.0 corporate knowledge base“). Joachim Niemeier talked to Dr. Matthias Büger, Vice President, Group Technology and Operations and Jamil Ouaj, GTO Communications of Deutsche Bank AG.

One thing I analyzed is the understanding and rationale that’s standing behind the support and introduction of corporate social networks. Well, as always there are different takes on this subject, and you may find flaws in my analysis, from the blog post:

[...] I guess that for employees it’s important that their professional networks aren’t confined by the narrow limits of one organization (they’re no life-timers, are they?). And I am seeing more and more “natural optimizers of personal professional value” - these people value and master relationships no matter what company the other nodes are in, companies need to loosen up their borders anyway and they’re doing it in other places too [...]

The other thing relates to project management for Enterprise 2.0 initiatives, here I would argue for a more light-weight approach, but I can surely see their point too. Here’s a clip of what I wrote:

[...] Banks they put so much attention on risk management, governance and diligence that it seems hard to approach things differently. See, while I hold project management dear, I also like the light-weight aspects of Enterprise 2.0 and the swiftness it brings. Hence I would rather argue for the creativity and agility of “planned and controlled experimentation” than the security of coordination meetings, processes and all (”Abstimmungsrunden und Teilprozessen”).

Well, this promises to be an interesting conference, let’s explore this space in real-time and if you’ve got remarks and/or ideas feel free to leave them here or over at my personal site.