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 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.

Short notice that I blogged an english summary (and personal analysis) of the third pre-conference interview Joachim Niemeier did with Arne Schümann of Festo. It’s here at my personal site: “Changing organisations via Enterprise 2.0 - Festo“, while you can find the german language fulltext of the interview here at the Enterprise 2.0 Forum site: ”Fallbeispiel: Enterprise2.0@Festo - Biographie eines Projektes“.

Festo is an internationally operating german company which I choose to describe as a “family-owned global player” - the interview covered their approach towards Enterprise 2.0, their context, background, organizational setting and the obstacles and challenges they’re seeing. My main learning from the interview is that changing organisations via Enterprise 2.0 is both hard and (potentially) extremely rewarding - nothing new here for you, I guess … still, there are some interesting points in there, like i.e.

• the role of hierarchy and how to deal with it when it must evolve into something like “guided autonomy” (and yes, I couldn’t resist to voice my doubts, would love to hear your thoughts)
• my take on the small rant objection by Mr. Schümann that “most Enterprise 2.0 consultants are way too theoretical” - and some links to posts by me about the “E2.0 consulting value proposition”

I attended a mashup* Event on Enterprise 2.0 in July at BT’s spectacularly plush little auditorium in London (you can watch the whole event on video at that link). It was a pleasant evening, characterised by hearing JP Rangaswami speak (the man is a walking recruitment advertisement for BT: “This could be your boss. Why work elsewhere?”) — and finally getting to meet him, briefly, in the flesh — as well as by my friend Simon Wardley’s purported swan song of an Enterprise 2.0 talk (and if you know Simon’s love of ducks, you’ll understand why that was a crack most worthy of a wince).

But the most interesting thing for me about the evening was the audience. This was not a tech heavy audience: most of the folks attending were business, with a smattering of vendors hoping to sell to them. And of the business types, the majority tribe was marketing and communications people. They seemed to be there to try and understand how they could use these new tools to enhance their role and control the impact of them (which, if done properly, ought to be a win for everybody: consider the meme of the “Authentic Enterprise”). That was an interesting coincidence for me, as I had, just that week, been engaged in a bruising battle within my own organisation over the idea of opening up the floodgates and allowing the outside world to see (via blogs) some of our talented people actually thinking and working. My primary antagonist in that debate (still ongoing) is marketing (supported by their stormtroopers, the lawyers). So I couldn’t resist the temptation to generate some heat, and, as the panel opened up for questions, the one I posed was this:

“There’s a common refrain heard in the echo chamber of Enterprise 2.0 bloviation that ‘IT is the enemy’: that these tools empower business people to work around a lumbering and prohibitive IT, yada, yada. But are IT people really E2.0’s greatest foe? Or is it marketing / communications? Is it the people in charge of ‘the message’, who are now confronted with (some) loss of control over it?”

That generated some mild uproar, as expected, and a number of “That’s nonsense” responses from the crowd. But to be honest, none of the answers we heard that night from the panel really took a strong stance on the issue. So, to my mind, the question is still an open one.

What do you think?

On my personal blog, I wrote up a thesis on the idea that the proper mix of business process management (BPM) and social networking + collaboration software might be the “killer app”, at least in the near term, for the Enterprise 2.0 domain.

As blog posts tend to be (especially mine), that’s a quite wordy post — long and dense, and not light reading. For my inaugural post here, I’ve chosen to present the same information, but in a slightly more digestible format (I hope). I’m a fan of using different modes of discourse — I hope this one will prove interesting and / or useful to you.

Just using my administrative freedom on this site and introducing another E2.0 fellow on this blog - Prof. Dr. Joachim Niemeier (XING, Twitter, Blog). As involved within the Wiki Wednesday Stuttgart Martin knows him a lot longer than me, but still - first time I got to know him was at the Dresdener Zukunftsforum 2006, where he - as the former CEO of T-Systems MMS - acted as an engaging moderator of this great event. This is also the reason why I asked him to do the moderation at our upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Executive FORUM. So give him also a warm welcome!

In the absence of Martin I feel very free in doing some administrative tasks and inviting some more people of the European E2.0 community in contributing to this blog. First one to be introduced is Mark Masterson, “Senior Solution Architect and resident troublemaker” at CSC - to be found on the net at Twitter, XING and LinkedIN - or directly on his blog “Process Perfection”. Give him a warm welcome.

He just called for a email bomb DOS attack on elsua who is trying hardly to get away from email as information exchange tool.

… and this blog continues it’s mission to bond and connect the Enterprise 2.0 community (now at the CeBIT 2009).

So we’re collecting material and ideas - stuff that matters and that’s interesting to discuss about - for another take. Feel free to add your thoughts and your ideas  - for this blog but also for the upcoming Enterprise2Open events at the CeBIT 2009.

Yes, there will be another open format, just as this year, but probably on a wider and expanded scale, so we’re looking forward to many of your ideas.

And while I am taking a little summer break, my co-blogger Björn Negelmann will continue on this theme.

Just a short reminder, that even when we moved the domain, the feed is still in place, offering all posts plus selected enterprise 2.0 links.

The videos of the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT are now online, check them out, nice stuff and worthwhile content in there, including Simon Wardley’s introduction

Link: sevenload.com

and Dion Hinchcliffe’s keynote:

Link: sevenload.com