June 19, 2013
The Altimeter Group’s report from earlier this year, The Evolution of Social Business: Six Stages of Social Business Transformation, offers the above graphic to exemplify the way social networking develops as the social activities of businesses mature. I tend to feel skeptical about many developmental models in social business simply because markets differ, sometimes in fundamental ways, and businesses organize accordingly. However, since a previous post here summarized the currently dominant Hub and Spoke approach as falling short as a way to organize collaboration in relation to customer experience, I feel elaborating on that point is in order.
Shared experience, not just shared information, is fundamental to the social networks underlying collaboration and innovation. Many, if not most, employees don’t only need to get to know one another through reputation systems, like who people tag as possessing expertise. As Thomas Vander Wal continues to point out, comfort with one another is needed to develop a shared experience that encourages the open sharing of information.
Collaboration means getting to know that other employees possess expertise on this or that topic, but also developing comfort with one another by sharing significant symbols relating to self, family, friends, and social activities, thereby understanding one another as people. Shared experience with co-workers and customers is a key factor in innovative business practices. It is especially important to multichannel collaboration.
Shared experience is so important because, as Karl Weick so deftly noted almost twenty years ago, it provides the basis for mutual understanding or, to put it bluntly, how we understand one another when we do things together. Nancy Dixon recently offered a concise summary of this point which I recommend reading.
I’ve noted the importance of shared experience to collaboration in several posts. Michael Sampson summarized the points I’ve tried to make as aptly as anyone in his post Get to Know Your Virtual Colleagues as People – and Good Things Happen (to Important Things Like Productivity) and his perspective is much appreciated by me. He noted:
Trust between collaborators is an important factor related to collaboration effectiveness. Spending time talking to and learning about the people you work with provides the mechanism for trust to flourish – if they are trustworthy – or diminish – if they are not worthy of your trust…It makes sense that when people experience the same thing together – creating shared history and shared memories – it binds the group together in a much deeper way than merely having the same information.
So, you might say, what does this have to do with organizational silos?
The best way to begin answering the question is to look at an interesting insight offered by Mark Fidelman and Dion Hinchliffe regarding the cross-currents enterprises face in attempts to use social software to increase collaboration. In Rethinking the Customer Journey in a Social World they noted:
…it’s the mindset of the social world, where everyone knows what everyone else is doing, and perhaps even thinking, that may very well be the hardest to adapt to and instill in our corporate culture. It’s a world where those who know how to tap into global knowledge flows in social networks on the “edge” of our businesses will succeed. Thus, we need a new vocabulary for understanding not only our businesses, but how it will deeply affect the entire experience of our customers, from beginning to end. This transformation of thinking and working is required in order to access the significant benefits of truly remaking how we engage with the market.
Their thinking seems torn between insight into where the changes for business are headed and what they think likely to happen in the short-term. Dion in particular recognizes the fact that social business requires organizational transformation when, for instance, he asserts, ” social business is first and foremost a transformation involving people and the organizations they work with.” Yet, if you consider where he thinks the in-roads for social software (including social media) are for business over the next year or so, the contrast in perspective is pretty distinct. Dion says in another post that it is in the vertical space of enterprises where most of the innovation is set to occur for social software.
While general purpose social software platforms can certainly be used in all of these areas, high impact application of social media to the way we work often requires application-specific constraints on conversations and the resultant community activity (my emphasis). This means social customer care benefits from conversations organized around support, social supply chain focused on ERP transactions, and so on, along with software that supports these applied uses.
Yammer spread out over Sharepoint sites is a good example. The enterprise use-cases of social business implementation offered by Ray Wang support Dion’s assertion. Indeed, one of the recent findings by The Community Roundtable offered in their 2013 State of Community Management report is indicative. The report observes that community managers are most often “hubs” and, further, that:
Key factors, such as the amount of cross-functional interactions and size of community teams [with external or internal focus — my point], are putting a resource strain on community managers, particularly in large organizations.
A key organizational point is worth making here because it relates directly to the burdens the hub-and-spoke model, whether cross-functional or dandelion, places on collaboration between employees, customers, partners, and other stakeholders. Indeed, the “Tip” offered by Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter regarding the “dandelion” hub-and spoke model is telling. He noted that,
the lines connecting the multiple hubs may be severed. Tip: provide way for spokes to connect to each other, not just be funneled through a central group.
Just like social networks do not respect organizational boundaries, edge cases do not respect vertical (read, silo-oriented) organizational constraints on conversation. This is an important point when you consider that most of the time spent by employees involves dealing with edge cases, i.e. exceptions to core processes. I suggest that at least part of this outcome results from the fact that not enough employees in the enterprise develop shared experiences. If you agree with me, I guess we just need to think about how to make this happen. If not, then you probably need a bit more detail which, hopefully, you can spare the time for.
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Change Management, Collaboration, Experience Design, Innovation, Social Business Design, Social Media, Social Networks, Uncategorized | Tagged: co-creation, Collaboration, community, Customer Communities, Enterprise 2.0, John Seely Brown, social business, Social Business Design, Social Media, social software | 
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Posted by Larry Irons
May 9, 2013
Podular Design — From Dave Gray’s Connected Company
In “Institutional Innovation and Podular Design“ I noted a number of insights from the Aspen Institute’s report, Institutional Innovation: Oxymoron or Imperative?, especially that “the most important innovation challenges are now in fact institutional in nature.” As an aside, let me just note that institutions typically change in dramatic ways only over long periods of time. Think of institutions such as religion, government, the economy, and then consider the various organizational forms in which these institutions took shape across cultures over time.
One insight I have not discussed in previous posts is relevant to understanding the changing way teams work together in organizations and, by implication, in a Connected Company — as outlined by Dave Gray. Richard Adler the Rapporteur for the Aspen sessions, noted that,
“New findings about the power of collective intelligence and about the most effective ways of organizing teams are providing practical insights about how to accelerate innovation.”
To start, let’s consider many companies organize teams and then turn to the “power of collective intelligence” mentioned by Adler to see how the two relate to podular organization. Several research projects in recent years noted the fuzzy boundaries of teams in large organizations. Skilful Minds first noted this phenomena in Who’s on Your Team? Enterprise 2.0 and Team Boundaries , and then a couple of years later in Social Learning, Collaboration, and Team Identity.
In fact, the phenomena of transitory team membership is so pervasive that some people propose we analyze “teaming” rather than teams when talking about how groups organize for cross-functional purposes within, or between, companies. Consider, for example the way, Mark Mortensen summarizes this trend in team dynamics,
First, organizations increasingly require collaborations to be fluid in their organization and composition, able to adapt to the rapid changes of the external environment. Second, collaborations increasingly overlap with one another, sharing resources — including people — as those resources become more limited due to increased competition. Third, collaborations must increasingly take into consideration the different contexts within which collaborators are embedded, including locations, time zones, cultures, and languages, structures, or organizations.
The liminality of such transitory teams results from several institutional challenges including the high degree of misunderstandings that initially occur due to team members rarely having the time to translate the different ways of thinking that people bring from their professional specializations into a mutual understanding of their shared business purpose. Developing mutual understanding requires shared experiences, getting to know who you are collaborating with, not just what they do or their skills profile. In addition, conflicting functional priorities, and often a lack of clear accountability, make it difficult for such teams to remain focused on the business purpose of their collaboration.
Teams were not always organized this way. As Mortensen notes, teams in multi-divisional companies were, at one time, defined by bounded and stable team membership and common goals that interdependent work was required to meet. Cross-functional teams in such companies today are not typically defined by bounded and stable membership, and common goals are still too often related to divisional performance driven by scalable efficiency rather than a connection to the purpose of the business the team is serving.
As Brown and Hagel recently observed:
Over the last 40 years, the emergence of new digital infrastructures and a global liberalization of economic policy have increased the pace of change exponentially. Many companies that were extremely successful in earlier times of relative stability are now finding that their relationship architectures are fundamentally misaligned with the needs of their business today. As the pace of change increases, many executives focus on product and service innovations to stay afloat. However, there is a deeper and more fundamental opportunity for institutional innovation—redefining the rationale for institutions and developing new relationship architectures within and across institutions to break existing performance trade-offs and expand the realm of what is possible.
Institutional innovation requires embracing a new rationale of “scalable learning” with the goal of creating smarter institutions that can thrive in a world of exponential change.
The challenge then remains how to enable organizations to adapt to their ecosystems by enhancing access to flows of knowledge that are likely to result in learning. Leinwand and Mainardi recently observed that permanent cross-functional teams tend to fare better than transitory teams in engaging organizational ecosystems. As they note:
We’ve recently seen a more robust cross-functional construct emerge, one with an overarching organizational structure, based on building and maintaining a distinctive capability. Members of these capabilities teams are assigned permanently to them, reporting there rather than through a functional hierarchy.
Permanent cross-functional teams provide an institutional basis for what Hagel and Brown refer to as edge businesses that develop within large-scale enterprises, noting that such companies “should resist the temptation to confront the core, and instead focus on opportunities on the periphery or at the ‘edge’ of their businesses that can scale rapidly.” I suggest below that Dave Gray’s conception of podular organization affords an important insight regarding how the institutional innovation of edge case businesses can develop and organize. Read the rest of this entry »
1 Comment | Change Management, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Experience Design, Innovation, Learning Experience, Social Business Design, Social Media, Social Networks, Web 2.0 | Tagged: Aspen Institute, business process, Colab, Collaboration, cross-functional teams, distributed teams, Enterprise 2.0, Experience Design, GE, Innovation, John Hagel, John Seely Brown, liminality, podular organization, Richard Adler, Web 2.0 | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
January 31, 2013
Podular Design — From Dave Gray’s Connected Company
In Social is the plural of personal JP Rangaswami contends that institutional innovation is required to achieve the potential that social software offers organizations in general, and for-profit companies in particular. JP’s voice is one of several important contributions to current thinking about innovation. For another example consider the Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society Program. It produced a series of roundtables with the Deloitte Center for the Edge over the past few years. Until the 2011 session the focus was largely on talent development. However, in the most recent session, Institutional Innovation: Oxymoron or Imperative?, the focus was on institutional innovation. It is an interesting change in terminology largely because much of the attention in the learning and development world today is on talent management along with employee engagement as cutting edge concerns. However, as Richard Adler the Rapporteur for the Aspen sessions, explains,
If institutions developed in and optimized for the previous generation of infrastructure are no longer working, then where innovation is most urgently needed is not in product development but in the design of institutions themselves.
Let me just say, I don’t challenge the idea that product innovation cycles are shorter due to globalization, nor that product innovation cycles are important to companies today. The whole focus of customer experience management emphasizes learning from customers while they learn from you, whether through ethnographic research , traditional surveys, or social media analytics, but always with the intent to better fit product/service experiences with the customer’s needs.
My point is that the most important innovation challenges are now in fact institutional in nature. Many companies employ senior executives and managers who use social networks in their personal lives but are either reluctant or stymied about how to integrate similar patterns of communication into their work. This point is reinforced by the recent finding of Stanford University and the Conference Board from a survey of 180 senior executives and corporate directors of North American public and private companies. The lead researcher concluded that, “We know that executives and board members are using social media. However, familiarity with social media is just not translating into systemic use at their companies.”
We continue to see organizational ambivalence over how social relationships contribute to business outcomes. For instance, a recent IBM study reported that only 22% of CIOs surveyed think managers are prepared to incorporate social media into their work. Managers generally fail to acknowledge that social networks contribute to business outcomes and that enabling human connections between stakeholders (employees, business partners, customers) adds value to the company when employees share a substantive understanding of the business purposes served by the enterprise’s organization. How to facilitate that substantive understanding is the biggest question facing anyone considering collaboration and innovation in today’s companies.
As my recent post, Revisiting the Great Innovation Debate contended, it is essential for people working in distant places, whether down the block, across the state, or on the other side of the world, to have a sense of a shared office to develop adaptive capabilities. Indeed, recent research on distributed work by Hinds and Cramton contends that knowing who one is collaborating with is a crucial part of the know how, the practical, institutional knowledge, that enables the adaptive capability organizations widely recognize they need to innovate, as well as deal with exceptions to process through informal and social learning.
The point isn’t totally new, nor is it passe’. As many social software vendors acknowledge, it is important to integrate collaboration tools into the flow of work for them to succeed as useful tools. However, as a previous post noted, Social Software, Community, and Organization, that doesn’t mean the social communication afforded by particular tools is more effective if it supports only formal workplace, i.e. functional, goals. Social software must afford the capability for those using it to develop shared experiences of one another as people, not just corporate role players.
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Posted by Larry Irons
August 15, 2010
What do you think the typical manager might say if you told them their employees don’t gossip and engage one another enough in social interaction at work?
Most managers know about the water cooler effect. However, not enough understand the meaning of the concept and how it relates to performance and collaboration. People thinking about how to support collaboration and performance need to keep in mind the simple fact that employees don’t only gather around the water cooler or coffee pot to get a drink. They often use getting a drink of water, or a cup of coffee, as a pretext for taking a break, and information sharing happens incidentally as they interact in that informal process, sometimes playfully, with their peers and, in exceptional organizations, their managers.
A couple of studies released this summer dealing with performance and collaboration in teams merit consideration in this regard. Not so much for what they specifically say about performance and collaboration as much as what they imply about the importance of social relationships to both.
The consulting firm RW3 recently released a study of distributed teams, reporting that “40 percent of members on virtual teams believe their groups are underperforming”. We previously discussed such distributed teams, noting that team members often disagree with team leaders about who is, and is not, on the team. Michael Schell, CEO for RW3, noted in Chief Learning Officer magazine that, of the teams studied, “Half of these teams never meet in person…They don’t get time to create any kind of rapport, which is very important when you’re working across cultures.”
While the RW3 research points to a salient issue in distributed teams, it fails to acknowledge that merely recognizing and talking about the impact of cultural variation on performance and collaboration, whether in informal online meetings or in training, fails to address the main issue. Members of distributed teams perform more effectively when they understand one another as people as well as employees. Specifically,
Collaboration means getting to know that other employees possess expertise on this or that topic, but also developing comfort with one another by sharing significant symbols relating to self, family, friends, and social activities, thereby understanding one another as people.
Merely orchestrating virtual water cooler meetings on a regular basis does not address the issue, especially when management coordinates the meetings. As I observed in a previous post on the importance of empathy and collaboration to social business design,
People who identify with one another are more likely to share information proactively, without waiting for others to ask for it, because they understand how their own work relates to that of other people and see the flow of work from multiple points of view, spanning silos. Too many social computing experts view collaboration from within a command and control prism, assuming people collaborate because coordination and communication are part of their job description.
Effective collaboration really requires proactively sharing information with those it affects, not simply reacting to information requests. It means anticipating the future impact of actions you take on the responsibilities of other employees or business partners, or the needs of customers. People really don’t do this well unless they see other employees, and customers, as people too. Indeed, this is one of the main reasons that social networks increase in importance as collaboration decreases as a face to face activity.
Recent research on collaboration, performance, and job satisfaction in co-located teams provides useful findings to consider in thinking about what social networks add to the mix in distributed teams.
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15 Comments | Change Management, Collaboration, e-Learning 2.0, Learning Experience, Social Business Design, Social CRM, Social Media, Social Networks | Tagged: Collaboration, Customer Experience, e-Learning 2.0, elearning 2.0, empathy, Enterprise 2.0, Experience Design, Social Business Design, Social Media, social networking | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
March 4, 2010
Harold Jarche recently offered a framework for social learning in the enterprise in which he draws from a range of colleagues (Jay Cross, Jane Hart, George Siemens, Charles Jennings, and Jon Husband, all members of the Internet Time Alliance) to outline how the concept of social learning relates to the large-scale changes facing organizations as they struggle to manage how people share and use knowledge.
Harold’s overall framework comes down to the following insight,
Individual learning in organizations is basically irrelevant because work is almost never done by one person. All organizational value is created by teams and networks. Furthermore, learning may be generated in teams but even this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks. Social networks are the primary conduit for effective organizational performance…Social learning is how groups work and share knowledge to become better practitioners. Organizations should focus on enabling practitioners to produce results by supporting learning through social networks.
Indeed, Jay Cross suggests that the whole discussion needs framing in terms of collaboration, and I tend to agree. Yet, saying social learning occurs largely through collaboration means delving into the subtleties of how social networks relate to the organizing work of project teams as well as to their performance. After all, much of the work done in Enterprises involves multidisciplinary teams, often spread across departments, operating units, and locations.
One of my earlier posts posed the question Who’s on Your Team? to highlight the importance of social networking to establishing team identity and enhancing knowledge sharing across distributed, multidisciplinary teams. Its focus was on the importance of social software applications in the Enterprise to the ability of distributed project team members to recognize who is on their team at any point in time, and who isn’t. Organizational analysts refer to the challenge of establishing team identity as a boundary definition problem for teams, when members are spread across large distances whether geographic or cultural in nature.
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12 Comments | Change Management, Collaboration, e-Learning 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Learning Experience, Social Business Design, Social Networks, Web 2.0 | Tagged: awareness, Collaboration, Dachis Group, distributed work, empathy, Enterprise 2.0, Internet Time Alliance, shared experience, social learning, team identity, twitter, Web 2.0, wiki | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
October 22, 2009
Chilling Tales from the Porcelain Seat
You know social networking is going mainstream when service companies like Roto-Rooter start using it. My sewer line backed up yesterday and I called Roto-Rooter to clean it. The guy came out like always, did the job, and I paid him. As he handed me the receipt he also gave me a flyer that asked me to go to either Google, Yahoo, Citysearch, or superpages.com and write a review of the service. Once a week Roto-Rooter selects a name from the reviews submitted on any of these search engines and refunds the cost of the service. It doesn’t say whether the selection process is random or related to the sentiment of the review.
I was a little surprised that such an old-world service like plumbing would encourage customers to review their work. I guess that impression comes from a recent review I wrote on Yelp about another plumbing company in St. Louis. My review was far from flattering. Anyway, I thought Roto-Rooter’s engagement of social networking interesting enough to check out their activity. Sure enough, they have a blog that Paul Abrams, the Public Relations Manager, updates regularly, and Roto-Rooter maintains a presence on a range of social network channels. From their blog,
Follow us at Twitter under @RotoRooter and here’s our main page on Facebook. You’ll even find a Roto-RooterTV channel on YouTube where you can see pet rescues, old commercials and instructional videos for DIYers. Then check out our photos on Flickr.
And, just in case you are wondering, the service was excellent though it isn’t one I like needing to buy.
Posted by Larry R. Irons
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7 Comments | Customer Experience, Social Media, Social Networks | Tagged: Customer Experience, plumbing, Social Media, social media marketing, social network, social networking | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
September 23, 2009
My last post discussed the Open/Closed culture fallacy in social business design. I made the point that leaders of large corporations are typically unable to answer the key strategic questions posed by David Armano of the Dachis Group in a recent important post, Re-designing Your Business Culture. Among other questions, David asked:
Do we want real connections established between employees, customers, partners?
How can we reward those in our ecosystem who actively contribute?
Do we actually want to engage those who want to engage us? Can we?
As this post’s subject indicates, my interest here is to explain how social network analysis, applied to the ecosystems of organizations, helps apply social business design in a manner that avoids the fallacy of open/closed business cultures. We can’t know how open or closed a business culture is until we research, analyze, and understand both its formal and informal networks.
As I noted previously,
To paraphrase Valdis Krebs, a social network analyst, more connections are not necessarily better…Valdis Krebs, and other social network analysts engaged in ONA (Rob Cross and Steve Borgatti, for example) contend that the most efficient and effective adaptation to emergent challenges lies in “the pattern of direct and indirect links” in the ecosystem. You can read a straightforward overview of ONA by Valdis.
This post continues David’s line of thinking by considering a combination of two of his strategic questions in light of the open/closed culture fallacy. I also take a stab at noting how to answer his last question.
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11 Comments | Collaboration, Customer Experience, Experience Design, Innovation, Social Networks | Tagged: business culture, Collaboration, community-based planning, Dachis Group, design thinking, empathy, hybrid thinking, organizational network analysis, Social Business Design, social network analysis, Steelcase, workplace effectiveness | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
September 22, 2009
Think about a closed business culture. Try to visualize what it looks like. What do you see? Does it look something like a pyramid?
Now, think about an open business culture. Try to visualize it. What image comes to mind? Does it look something like a spider web turned on its side?
These two imaginings pose similar relationships between their parts. A three dimensional pyramid flattened out is about the same shape as a spider web. It is a matter of perspective as to whether one is more open or closed than the other. When connections are made across, rather than only between, the existing nodes in a network we can start to visualize informal relationships in a way that adds value to discussions of culture. It sounds simple, at least initially.
So, how do these observations relate to culture and social business design?
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8 Comments | Experience Design, Innovation, Social Business Design, Social Networks | Tagged: Customer Experience, Dachis Group, empathic research, Experience Design, multi-channel, Service Design, Social Business Design | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
August 18, 2009
The emergence of social media provides people inside and outside organizations with a way to actively speak about, speak to, and engage the product and service offerings of enterprises. Currently, 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content and 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands. Enterprises, on the other hand, listen to, engage, and act on insights gained from social media.
A recent study of social media engagement by Ben Elowitz and Charlene Li covered the 100 largest brands and, among other conclusions, noted that,
One recurring theme throughout these case studies is that engagement cannot remain the sole province of a few social media experts, but instead must be embraced by the entire organization.
Channels, policies, processes, touch points and transactions are increasingly viewed as parts of the social experience organizations use to encourage employees in collaboration (also known as — Enterprise 2.0), and engage customers in conversation (also known as — social media) for the purposes of innovation and transformation of the business. The common goal of the ongoing discussion involves transforming business practices to incorporate social relationships into the value proposition to customers and other stakeholders.
Integrating engagement into enterprises is crucial to strategic efforts to use social software throughout an ecosystem, inside and outside the formal organizational hierarchy, as social business design. My contention is that such integration is most likely to succeed with a focused approach to informal learning. In my last post, Scalable Learning and Learnscapes in Social Business Design, I offered the following point.
The concept of learnscape is a useful framework for thinking about the strategic challenge to the range of learning activities occurring as companies attempt to create feedback loops between their brand experience and the functional areas of their enterprise, especially in regard to the multidisciplinary collaboration needed to make these efforts successful.
The concept of a learnscape, initially outlined by Jay Cross, focuses our attention on designing ecosystems to heighten the innovation and performance of people. I lay out some thoughts about learnscapes and shaping ecosystems below, using key concepts from the Dachis Group’s framework, initially discussed in an earlier post on HP’s WaterCooler project. I don’t claim these insights provide proven techniques for shaping enterprise ecosystems. But, I do think they point in a useful direction for those thinking about Enterprise 2.0 and social media strategy to keep in mind. Read the rest of this entry »
3 Comments | Collaboration, e-Learning 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Learning Experience, Social Business Design, Social Networks, Web 2.0 | Tagged: brand, Collaboration, Dachis Group, e-Learning 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Learning Experience, learnscapes, social network, user experience, wiki | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
July 15, 2009
Social Media Snake Oil?
Does your organization approach using social media in its business as something to fear or as something to evangelize? Several recent observers note that incorporating social media into business involves changing the culture underlying communication patterns and decision-making in many large organizations.
Amber Naslund, for instance, tells us that adopting social media means changing the mindset on how to do business. In particular, she says using social media in business means “giving your customers a visible, valuable say in how you do things, and having the faith that doing that is just good business.” On the other hand, Caroline Dangson, of IDC contends enterprises aren’t yet sold on social media and that “there are executives still fearful of the transparency that comes with the social media spotlight.” Specifically, Caroline says that,
Corporate culture has everything to do with adoption of social media. I believe the number one factor preventing full adoption of social media is the lack of executive trust in employees. This culture is about control and creates a workplace of silos. This type of workplace is not set up to be social and the silos are barriers to worker productivity.
So, here social media sits, between fear and faith. Needless to say, the truth about social media’s implications for business design lies somewhere in the middle. The fact of the matter, as Todd Defren tells us, is that we need to begin seriously discussing “how Social Media Thinking will impact the greater whole of the company.”
As noted in an earlier post, keeping in mind the distinctions between formal, process-oriented organization and informal, practice-based organization is crucial in thinking through the collaborative challenges posed by social software for enterprises and designing for the experiences supported. We can learn a bit about the complexity of the challenges involved by considering a recent framework offered on social business design by the Dachis Corporation team and discussing the way it relates to a recent report on an experiment in enterprise social media at the Social Computing Lab of HP Laboratories.
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8 Comments | Brands, Change Management, Collaboration, Innovation, Social Business Design, Social Networks, Web 2.0 | Tagged: Customer Experience, Enterprise 2.0, Experience Design, Social Business Design, Social Media, socialCRM, Web 2.0 | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
July 7, 2009
David Armano recently asked the question, Is the Hub and Spoke Model Adaptable? Anyone who ever worked on a project team in a large organization, especially corporate enterprises, probably recognizes the hub and spoke team design depicted in the graphic above. In this post I take a closer look at the hub and spoke design’s purpose in hierarchical, bureaucratic, organizations–the kind associated with industrial society. Our next post discusses how David answered his question and what an adaptable hub and spoke model implies for social business design.
Project management, typically consisting of one or more team leads clustered in the hub, considers the failure of any spoke’s functional work practices to align with approved best practices as evidence of process ignorance, a failure of competence in following the detailed process requirements in the team’s project plan, not a failure of the organization’s adaptive capability. The hub and spoke model’s basic idea is that a matrix-organization, consisting of cross-functional project teams, optimizes the traditional hierarchical organization by adding increased flexibility in responding to market demands for innovation in products and services, and maintaining adherence to a standard management process. However, as Rob Cross and Robert Thomas observe in their recent book, Driving Results Through Social Networks,
…most projects and processes are enabled by productive networks that form among some (but not all) team members in combination with relationships that bridge to key resources and expertise outside of the team.
In other words, much of the collaborative effort going into innovation projects also involves social networks that aren’t part of project teams. Instead, these networks emerge from relationships with others in the enterprise, or from outside friends and associates. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that some research into geographically distributed teams shows that on average, only 75% of the employees on any given distributed team agree about who is, and who is not, on their team. The challenge increases in importance as project teams form and disband more rapidly to manage risk and opportunity, thereby increasing the already fuzzy distinctions of formal organization, i.e. official teams, and informal organization, i.e. social teams.
Ross Mayfield summarized the point well in the following observation:
Process is “how work should be done.” And Practice is “how work is actually done.” When process fails (exceptions), people use practice to fix things. When process doesn’t exist, practice fills the void. While people don’t realize it when they engage in practice, they actually are tapping into community — an informal social network within or beyond the enterprise to discover expertise and get things done. The problem is that we haven’t had the tools to support good practice. The problem is that we haven’t developed the group memory around practice that creates institutional leverage. In fact, we still design organizations to prevent practice and cultures that hoard knowledge and communities.
I suggest that the real value of social business design comes from the promise it holds for enabling management practices to develop to deal with the following fact: Social networks do not respect organizational walls, they never did.
Shared experience, not just shared information, is fundamental to the social networks underlying collaboration and innovation. Many, if not most, employees don’t only need to get to know one another through reputation systems, like who people tag as possessing expertise. As Thomas Vander Wal continues to point out, comfort with one another is needed to develop a shared experience that encourages the open sharing of information.
Collaboration means getting to know that other employees possess expertise on this or that topic, but also developing comfort with one another by sharing significant symbols relating to self, family, friends, and social activities, thereby understanding one another as people. Shared experience with co-workers and customers is a key factor in innovative business practices. It is especially important to multichannel collaboration.
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23 Comments | Brands, Change Management, Collaboration, Experience Design, Social Business Design, Social Networks | Tagged: Change Management, Enterprise 2.0, Experience Design, project management, social business, social capital, social software stack, Web 2.0 | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
May 28, 2009
Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) is a term used by Doc Searls and other members of ProjectVRM to distinguish market relationships between vendors and consumers where the latter gain increased control over that commercial relationship. Building on the VRM concept, Jeremiah Owyang recently noted that VRM offers a potential future for public relations agencies in which the future of PR is in representing communities rather than brands. As Doc recently declared,
We therefore resolve to avoid all relationships in which the privileges of loyalty are determined entirely by the seller, and to construct new terms and means of engagement that will work in mutually constructive ways for both customers and sellers, for the good of all.
So, in the spirit of the Declaration of Customer Independence recently outlined by Doc, I offer the following turn of the century anecdote for thinking about Customer Managed Relationships (CMR).
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6 Comments | Community 2.0, Customer Communities, Customer Experience, Social Networks | Tagged: Community 2.0, Customer Communities, customer community, customer managed relationships, Experience Design, personalization, social network, social networking, vendor relationship management, VRM | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
April 20, 2009
- The Cynefin Framework
As noted in a previous post, the promises made by brands are increasingly judged on whether they converge with the customer experience across channels of service in organizations. The challenge is a longstanding one for all organizations. However, the increasing adoption of social media makes the challenge more pressing as word of mouth (WOM) from customers, suppliers, competitors, or others amplifies their ability to communicate their experience with your brand to others. Word of mouth communities and networks using social software are increasingly spread over regional, national, and international borders, making them much more important to those who market branded products and services, online and off.
Speaking the language of customer-centricity is not good enough. Companies must talk-the talk and walk-the-walk for brand strategy. Brand strategies are most effective when based in the design and delivery of business services themselves. Listening to the conversations people engage online about a topic (such as your brand), and eliciting the participation of those people in the development and refinement of products and services, are two key parts of an experience design strategy. Even though you may think this is a “Duh!” insight, consider recent findings on the engagement gap.
PriceWaterhouseCooper’s 12th Annual CEO Survey recently reported that most CEOs,
…believe that data about their customers (94%), brand (91%) and employees (88%) are important or critical to long-term decision-making. However, strikingly low percentages of CEOs say they have comprehensive information in these and other critical areas that contribute to organisational agility. Just 21% have comprehensive information about the needs and references of customers and clients. Less than one third feel they have all the information they need about reputation (31%) and the views and needs of employees (30%).
Not surprisingly, the ability to anticipate customer needs is the widest gap between the information CEOs report they need to make decisions about the long-term success of their businesses, and what they currently possess. This post explores the Cynefin (pronounced cunevin) Framework as a helpful approach for thinking about the importance of dialogue with customers in efforts to bridge insight and action.
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Leave a Comment » | Customer Communities, Customer Experience, Experience Design, Social Media, Social Networks | Tagged: brand, co-creation, community, Customer Experience Management, Cynefin Framework, dialogue, Experience Design, Social Media, WOM, word of mouth | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
March 2, 2009
A recent Economist article discusses the relevance of Dunbar’s Number to friending in Facebook, and its relation to the size of social networks, especially networks of close friends. The article addresses a similar issue outlined in an earlier post here on the influence of influentials on Twitter, which focused on findings of a recent study by members of the Social Computing Lab of HP Laboratories .
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2 Comments | Social Media, Social Networks | Tagged: facebook, friends, social core, social media marketing, social network, social networking, twitter, Web 2.0 | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
January 16, 2009
Social Networks that Matter
Without going into links to specific posts, I’ve noticed a trend among many blogs I try to keep up with over the past couple of years. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen prominent bloggers post publicly about having to pare down the list of RSS feeds they read, or tweets they respond to. Since Peter Kim’s blog is the most recent instance of the trend I’ll use one of his recent posts as an example of what I mean. Peter noted that he increasingly hears an echo chamber across social media blogs in which the same content, case studies, anecdotes, etc. gets repeatedly posted and commented on. More cynical observers might contend that the complaints about information overload from influentials is a little like strutting in front of a crowd. Nevertheless, it is difficult to dispute the point that attention is a scarce resource on the Web. So is engagement.
Ross Mayfield recently pointed to a study published by researchers at the Social Computing Lab of HP Laboratories that addresses the point succinctly by pointing to constraints on friendship in directed social networks such as Twitter. A directed social network is characterized by an absence of explicit reciprocity constraints, fifty people can follow one person without that person necessarily following any of them. First Monday’s most recent issue includes an article, Social Networks that Matter: Twitter under a Microscope, that reports on a study of Twitter users by Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero, and Fang Wu of HP Laboratories.
The authors analyzed data from 309,740 people using Twitter. They compared the network of interactions people actually engage in while using social computing technologies such as Twitter to the network of connections with whom one shares a social relationship. Networks of actual interaction are considered networks that matter by the authors.
By networks that matter we mean those networks that are made out of the pattern of interactions that people have with their friends or acquaintances, rather than constructed from a list of all the contacts they may decide to declare.
In other words, the research focused on reciprocity as well as connection in studying the social network of Twitter.
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13 Comments | Brands, Collaboration, Social Media, Social Networks, Web 2.0 | Tagged: Dunbar number, hidden network, influentials, reciprocity, Social Media, social network, social networks that matter, twitter, viral marketing, word of mouth | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
December 29, 2008
As a previous post noted, assessing the business value of instructional design involves more than measuring the contribution of formal training to Level 3 and Level 4 outcomes defined in the Kirkpatrick model. Training professionals also need to understand and support informal learning processes, on-the-job and off, that enhance performance. Most of the learning that produces business value occurs informally, dealing with exceptions to formal business processes, yet most of the attention paid to learning is focused on formal training.
One can reasonably say that Web 2.0 applications, such as social software and social media, are changing the relationships between instructional designers and subject matter experts much like those between customer communities and product designers. Both increasingly involve situations of co-creation.
The emerging recognition of eLearning 2.0’s importance to enhancing collaboration and performance means that training professionals, especially instructional designers, can add value to their employer/client’s business by learning to facilitate and manage the co-creation of learning content with employees, or even customers. Anyone experienced in instructional design in recent years is familiar with the general challenge of co-creation whenever they use information content for course design ( slide shows, documents, etc.) that subject matter experts originally created as a resource for a presentation. The presentation content too often is substituted for observation and in-depth interviewing as a first step in analysis.
Such Rapid eLearning, though shifting content development toward the subject matter expert’s control, maintains the traditional role of training in incorporating design principles. The process of co-creation in eLearning 2.0, on the other hand, shifts control over development and distribution of learning content toward subject matter experts willing and able to share what they know, especially when they see other people who need to solve familiar problems.
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4 Comments | Collaboration, e-Learning 2.0, Innovation, Learning Experience, Social Networks | Tagged: co-creation, Customer Communities, e-Learning, e-Learning 2.0, eLearning, elearning 2.0, instructional design, kirkpatrick model, mzinga, social media measurement, social network, training, Web 2.0 | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
September 26, 2008
Peter Kim offers an interesting observation on the way social networking relates to the qualities of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon and the insight offered by Michel Foucault that Bentham’s design served as an exemplar for organizational discipline in the industrial age. Peter notes that Bentham’s design made prisoners uncertain whether the prison guards were watching their behavior at any particular moment. He also points out that the design of modern cube farms in offices not only foster collaboration but also afford observation by managers and peers.
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5 Comments | Collaboration, Community 2.0, e-Learning 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, Social Networks, Web 2.0 | Tagged: e-Learning 2.0, elearning 2.0, panopticon, social networking, Web 2.0 | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
August 7, 2008
The social networking capabilities of Web 2.0 technologies provide numerous opportunities for product and service providers to engage customers. Two interesting examples of companies reaching out to engage their customers come from the footwear industry, specifically Nike and adidas. Some of you may already know about these two examples. However, the difference in social networking strategy between the two is worth thinking about.
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6 Comments | Brands, Customer Communities, Customer Experience, Experience Design, Social Media, Social Networks, v-Tags, Web 2.0 | Tagged: adidas, customer community, nike, social networking, visual tags, Web 2.0 | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
April 30, 2008
Thomas Vander Wal recently offered an interesting discussion of how collective understanding and collaborative understanding differ, and why those differences are significant to social software, specifically in relation to folksonomy. Thomas’ concern is that many observers, and he points to the Wikipedia entry for folksonomy specifically, conflate collective understanding and collaborative understanding when considering folksonomy. He notes that, even though the two terms are similar, their differences manifest as distinct capabilities in social software.
…the term folksonomy was coined to separate tagging done in a collective manner (each individual’s contribution is held separate and collected or aggregated to build a fuller understanding, as the tagging is done by and from the individual reading the media for their own retrieval and is also share out with others). Collaborative tagging does take place and there is a need for it in certain situations, but it is not folksonomy.
First, Thomas makes a key point that remains unspoken when many people write about social software. Read the rest of this entry »
2 Comments | Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Social Networks, Web 2.0 | Tagged: Collaborative Tags, Collective Tags, Enterprise 2.0, The Long Tail | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Skilful Minds 