Workforce Collaboration & the ‘App Store’

In a network economy, major competitive advantage is gained by having a strong developer ecosystem.  The more software that’s written for a product, the better the product becomes.  Generally.  The vast iPhone App Store catalog sets the phone apart from it’s competition.  The phone is a slick piece of hardware, but if it had the Jitterbug’s app catalog I don’t think it would sell as well.  Why not use the same model in the enterprise?

You’re  standing up your workforce collaboration platform, which is a good thing.  But, much like your cell phone, your collaboration platform becomes superior the more applications  integrate with it.  (Your goal is to make everything social, right? )  Why not set up a framework for developers (assumption: your company has software developers with spare time) to build apps and integrations for your collab platform?  Surely, your team doesn’t have the bandwidth to tackle that amount of work in a reasonable amount of time.  Instead of having them catch all the fish, why not let them teach others how.  It scales better.

A couple of benefits I see here:

1. As you increase the number of systems integrated with your collaboration platform customers (your employees, in this case) will be able to customize their working environment: personal portals/dashboards aggregating tasks, tools, processes, training, policies all in one place.   The promise of these collaboration platforms is that they can do this kind of aggregation, but the reality is that you already have systems that manage many of these things separately and are not ready to get rid of them.  And, to some degree, why should you?  Some of these systems are good at what they do but would be given a big boost if they were made social.
2. Increased user adoption of your workforce collaboration platform (because of #1)
3. Software engineers like this idea (at least the ones I’ve talked to).  They not only get a chance to spend more time in their cube, but they get to showcase their ‘gold nuggets,’ as one developer put it to me.  I think the technical term is egoboo.  Not sure if you have the concept of reputation management in your collab system, but this could certainly play into that.
4. You could possibly crowd-source and prioritize the apps/integrations to be built.  This would help fuel the adoption of #2 and would get the engineers in #3 fired up if they knew they were coding a solution that other employees want.
5. It’ll  get the good, reusable artifacts out from under that one-off CMS you’ve got.  The more systems you can make social, the more value they provide.  See #1.
6. Distribute the scope creep.  From what I’ve experienced, it’s easy to get pulled in lots of different directions.  So many customers (again, employees in this case) are eager for social & aggregation capabilities that you end up with scope creep (read: proliferation).  Not only could you distribute the creep, but you could increase speed to market and customer satisfaction.  It’s really like you’re expanding your project team.

Integration into other systems is a must when it comes to workforce collaboration.   If you’ve got the right kind of business, the internal AppStore makes a lot of sense.  The combination of potentially crowd-sourcing and prioritizing development could take your workforce collaboration software to the next level.

We’ll see how long this lasts…

In The Beginning…

Whether you’re a beginner or a 20-year veteran of the sport, you’ll benefit from this collection of newcomers’ tips and lifelong principles

via runnersworld.co.uk

I’ve decided to start running. Actually, I made the decision about three weeks ago and have six runs under my belt so far. Feels good to run again, which is a surprise to me. As recently as a year ago I was pretty sure I’d never want to go back to a sport that required so much isolation. I’m really not that much fun to spend long amounts of time with.

It’s taking a while for my body to adjust to the rigors of running, which is why only six runs in three weeks. I’m doing a lot more reading and investigation than I would have done ten years ago. Something’s telling me I’d better do my homework or I may get hurt. I think it’s my back.

After consulting some friends for initial advice I hit the internet. This article seems like a good place to start. Although it’s written in 2002, from what I can tell, it’s still good advice. To help with the motivation, I’m starting a spreadsheet that will journal my runs. Should be fun to see my progress. I’ll also be using a pretty simple lap timer on my phone – I’d use a GPS application but the coverage isn’t consistent enough for accurate stats.

I think I’ve got pretty much everything under control. Now I just need the weather to warm up…

CCRP – Command and Control Research Program

via dodccrp.org

With all that organizations are doing towards bringing in new tools to the enterprise, the bottom line is a better organization: more flexibility, more agility, more net centric.

From what I can tell, no organization has put more time into research of this effort than the military. Traditionally considered the paradigm for command and control, the military recognized the need for change in this new information age as early on as any.

Take a look at the papers on this site. I think you’ll be surprised at what you find and how much applies to your organization. From command and control to leadership in the 2.0 age. Very solid information here.

Skills Management in a 2.0 Light

Now that we’ve got an e2.0 platform up and running we’re looking at our next big phase in turning everything social:  integration with (or replacement of) other enterprise systems.  One of the first that comes to mind is our Skills DB.  The Skills DB does what it sounds like – it’s a database of skills.  However, now that each employee has a social profile on this new e2.0 platform, a portion of which contains skills information, what’s the point of having a separate system that has essentially become redundant?  Additionally, retiring an enterprise system like the Skills DB would certainly help the e2.0 business case.

In the 1.0 world, an employee was required to access the Skills DB once a year and update his/her skills with ‘level of experience’ and ‘last time used’ information; afterwards the employee’s supervisor would log into the system and validate the information.  In the 2.0 world, that process becomes unnecessary.  It will be important for employees to have a current listing of their skills for search and ‘recommendation’ reasons.  But an employee’s skills or expertise will be determined in other ways.  If your e2.0 system is designed to be put in the knowledge worker’s workflow, their profile will be dynamically generated by the work they do:  the documents they author, the ideas they generate, the discussions they participate in, the artifacts they tag, the questions they answer, the reviews their peers generate through feed-back loops.

Now, when a hiring manager is looking for a software engineer with .NET experience, instead of going to an isolated Skills DB (where the info might be a year old), all they have to do is a quick search in the e2.0 tool.  Immediately they will be given much richer, up-to-date, information on all the employees with that skill set.  Plus, the hiring manager will be able to validate the claimed skill by looking through the activity of the employee, the projects they’re currently working on, the feedback from peers, etc…

Some takeaways:

• We can retire an enterprise system – good, bottom line-savings there
• Employees no longer have to compartmentalize logging their skills as a separate part of their day, it’s now in the workflow – good, productivity gain, current skills info maintained
• We’ve completely revamped the way we manage our skills and look for talent to fill internal job req’s.   – process improvement, if we can fill reqs faster, we can get to market faster
• ‘Work’ is now out in the open to be judged  - wow
• Peers can provide feedback in an open, public forum – geez (are we ready for this?), skill validation can now be vetted as opposed to the opinion of one person
• Information (Skills DB) previously accessible/searchable only by hiring managers is now out there in broad daylight for anyone to see/search/use – empowering, organizationally flattening, potential for emergent outcomes.

Google Wave and Jevons’ Paradox | Socialwrite.com

The idea that we do not need to create tools that take up more of our time and attention, but instead we need to start building social tools in business that focus first on productivity and results, and on being social as a secondary goal.

via socialwrite.com

We pitch this idea internally as ‘margin taker or margin maker.’ In the drive to make everything social, tools need to put social in the knowledge worker’s every day workflow. Compartmentalizing work from social is not an option.

In keeping with that idea, I don’t see how a social tool in the workplace will be effective without promoting efficiency. And maybe ‘efficiency’ is the wrong word, but there needs to be a productivity or time element taken into account when you’re evaluating a potential solution or measuring whether an implemented solution is value-added. Knowledge workers are over-subscribed as it is.

My last point on your last paragraph – agreed. The key to bringing effectiveness to the social effort isn’t by improving on the tools that are already collaborative – email, IM, etc… It’s taking the tools that were never social in the first place, making them social and putting them in the workflow.

Requirements

Ever think you know someone really well and then you meet one of their siblings and they’re completely different?  You never could have imagined it.  Same parents, same church, same school, same neighborhood.  What gives?  One goes out all the time, the other stays in.  One got straight A’s, the other never finished high school.  One likes their beef grass-fed, the other is vegan.  I think you get the idea.

Well, IT projects can be a lot like that.  You can have two projects, same goal and they can be worlds apart.  Same company, same vision, same CEO, same culture, same training.  What gives?  Well, I’ve had the opportunity to work in such an environment (project = e2.0 deployment) and I can tell you what gives.  It’s the requirements.  Well, not so much the requirements but from whom they come.   Talk to IT.  Talk to BD.  Then talk to HR, Marketing, Comms.  Then go and talk to your ‘product’ folks.  Worlds apart.  Even though everyone at the company is committed to the same mission, they’ve each got their own role and their own care-abouts.  The ‘thing’ they want designed is obviously going to be biased to what makes their world tick.

So, to whom do you listen?  It’s a tough decision in the ’social world’.  My advice is actually the same I offered in this post I wrote in June (I was at the e2.0 Conference in Boston).  The difference is that now (more than 3 monhts later) I’ve got the experience to back it up.  Turns out I was right.  Doesn’t happen often.  But when it does I’m going to blog about it.  Here’s an excerpt:

My advice to you is do your homework.  Know the vendor space, know your architecture, know your security model, know your requirements.  Most importantly: know your business and how this new tool set will help you solve your BUSINESS problems.  Do all of this before even approaching a vendor.  Get a sponsor from your BUSINESS.  HR is not OK.  Comms, eh, you’re getting warmer.  IT…COLD.  Get at the heart of what your company does and find out who does it.  Once you find them, they will tell you everything you need to know.   If you can make them happy and solve their problems you greatly increase your odds of success.

Looking back on that advice, it’s a little rough around the edges, but it absolutely rings true.  Jeremiah Owyang has a new post here where he urges companies to bring ’social’ beyond just the marketing department.  I agree, but if you’re talking internally focused efforts (and I understand that wasn’t his intent, so this is not a criticism) his advice doesn’t go far enough.  You need to start with the ‘core of your business’ folks.  They will cover many requirements of the other functions, but it won’t work the other way around.  Once you get the right requirements from the right people you’ll have created an excellent foundation from which you can become holistic.

Go Gints

– Sent from my Palm Pre

First my bike, now my car…

– Sent from my Palm Pre

Always a no-no…

– Sent from my Palm Pre

Seek Omega: 10 Enterprise 2.0 Sites that Everyone Should Keep an Eye On.

10 Enterprise 2.0 Sites that Everyone Should Keep an Eye On.

It’s very difficult to keep up with news media, blogs and your Twitter followers.  Too many posts, too little time, too much noise.

Some Enterprise 2.0 blogs matter to me more than others.  Some are merely fun, some educational, and some provincial.  Others are just visionary and thought provoking .

So here is the list (not in any particular order).  Feel free to tell them I sent you. 

via seekomega.com

Based on the list of E2.0 blogs in this post, I’d say my definition of ‘E2.0′ differs from that of the authors.

For me, E2.0 has always referred to the technologies and practices of using social media tools to improve the knowledge management, productivity and innovation among employees. There’s no outward facing aspect of E2.0.

A number of the blogs listed started out as Web2.0 blogs, focusing on the consumer side of the house. It only makes sense, though, that these two areas have an overlap.

My definition probably has to evolve to include externally facing tools/applications/processes. However, I still think the focus of E2.0 is about improvements internal to a company.