Supernova 2007: because technology is everyone's business

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Enterprise User Perspectives

Case Study: drKW
JP Rangaswami, former CIO of German investment bank DrKW, says they launched a collection of wikis, blogs, IM, and other social software in part so his bank could stay up to speed with Gen N, the next generation of employees who are going to expect these things in the workplace.

The challenge was to find a few early adopters who would see the value in using these tools, add functionality, and spread the word. Then adoption spreads like a virus. The more lightweight the software is, the more likely it is to be adopted. If it’s hard to maintain or hard to use, it won’t fly.

They initially looked at wikipedia as a model for how to store their teaching materials and documents. Within 8 months of bringing the wiki in, 75% of their documents were on the wiki, not on the intranet. They allowed the intranet to atrophy.

By empowering the end user to do the publishing and editing, they saw a huge shift in the way people use the information. Once they’re doing things faster and better, he says you can make the business case for ROI. It can’t be a top-down mandate to use the technology. It has to be driven from the bottom up.

Case Study: NextPage
Cydni Tetro of NextPage says when they were developing the NextPage service, they looked at how people work on office documents individually and together to get projects done. Certain aspects of user adoption influenced design (e.g., if there is one person who fails to use the system, such as the manager who still uses email).

They set up the document management application as a hosted service. No critical data is stored in the enterprise, because the enterprise doesn’t necessarily want to be a data warehouse. The client component resides on the desktop and tracks everything that happens to a document. No matter where the assets exist or how they got there, the app knows what version it is and what’s happened to it.

Document management technology has been around a long time, but it’s been process-driven. The process-modeling approach takes too long and is too costly. The Web 2.0 approach is bottom up, with users driving the adoption and use.

Compliance in using a collaborative tool can be a problem. If IT introduces the tech, and users don’t see how it will solve their problems, adoption can be slow.

Case Study: SAP
Jeff Nolan of SAP says they looked at how to connect service components so people can use them. They’ve automated processes and moved away from transactions to collaboration. Implementations can be departmental or divisional. They target super user nodes, so not everyone needs to buy off on a service.

When they introduced a wiki (using SocialText), instead of giving users a blank piece of paper, they provided a basic level of structure and hierarchy. Then adoption skyrocketed. Similarly, they use blogs internally as a publishing mechanism.

Usability is critical to gaining implementation. You have to give users sensible ways to do their work. They use usability experts to put a structure around the social software interface.

Workshop Discussion
The discussion around social software in the enterprise ranged from usability and adoption issues to security and compliance monitoring. Some key points:

Look at social software as conversation enablers. When you have talented workers, you make it more exciting to work together. They can search across data silos to access and connect information scattered among many departments. These tools empower the workers. They also solve problems of document management, teamwork and communication. Having conversations is key to getting work done across departments.

Enterprises are inherently social environments. Your success is contingent on your ability to work within the social network. There’s the paper organization chart, then there’s the informal organization of working groups and alliances. Once you provide a way to interact that is measurable, you can discover the true organization and the real opinion leaders.

These social systems ultimately make organizations more transparent, as they expand to include the external world. Internal information may become mobile enough that it escapes the control of the organization. Although fears surrounding security issues are exaggerated, there do have to be some controls. For example, there can be a meta layer that crawls the network to detect and monitor compliance.

When you develop a system were people can contribute regardless of their formal roles, you have to have a level of trust. There are some simple rules that employees are expected to follow (e.g., confidentiality). The legal department may be wary of the risks involved. Their job is risk mitigation. Developers of these tools need to provide options that legal can be comfortable with, but you have to ask: What do you trade off as a result of a zero-risk approach?

From an organizational behavior perspective, most people in an organization have specific jobs. The problem and impediment to social networking is, people are incented by the division of labor. The problem is not publishing. It’s getting people to subscribe to the collaborative system. You have to overcome assembly-line thinking and empower people to work across silos, outside of traditional roles.

To promote adoption within the enterprise, you have to be a better change manager. Sometimes, you have to be willing to lose your job over it.

“If you don’t have, ‘So fire me,’ written on your T-shirt, you shouldn’t be working for a large enterprise,” says Rangaswami.

Cutting-edge companies are using these tools to do things they did before, only more efficiently (e.g., using a wiki to facilitate software design).

The remains the question of where money is to be made in this space. Panelists identified three models for making money: Idea to market, problem to repair, and sales to cash. These tools can directly impact revenue if they help you get ideas to market faster. Businesses are pressed to be innovative. Social software enables innovation.