Gaming the Enterprise, Part 1 of 2

by Tom Cummings & David Mastronardi, originally posted here

Last week, Dave and I attended the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas.  Saturday’s keynote was given by Seth Priebatsch, the orange-clad and exuberant Chief Ninja of SCVNGR, a location-based gaming start-up.

The title of Seth’s keynote was The Game Layer on Top of the World.  As he explained, the changes we’ve observed in social media over the last ten years have culminated in the “social layer.”  Real life connections have become online connections. Facebook has become your social life. Twitter has helped you make new friends. The social layer is primarily about these connections. And it’s essentially done being built.

But now that this foundational social layer has been built, Seth believes the “game layer” can be built on top of it.   Over the next ten years, we’ll see (and help build) an interactive layer built on an amalgam of our personal motives. Whereas the social layer is a layer of connections, the game layer will focus on influencing these individual motivations — something far more powerful than simply being connected, especially if those individual motivations can affect a larger group goal.

Seth discussed several ways in which game layering can improve current problems. School grading systems could shift from getting good grades (in many ways, simply a “status” that can change on any given test day) to reaching a new level (indicative of progression and achievement).   Schools could reward accumulated knowledge and achievements, similar to how players “level-up” to a new status in a video game — unlike grades, it’s very difficult to quickly “level down” in most video games.  Email lists can become customer acquisition tools (after all, he argued, Groupon is just an email list with some basicgaming aspects like “free lunch” and “countdown” added on).  And restaurants and bars can increase loyalty among location based service users by shifting from exclusive ownership  (becoming a mayor) to inclusive ownership (joining a society).

What Seth didn’t talk about is the game layer in the enterprise.  The potential exists for an organization to create “games” that will influence individuals to alter their behavior in order to benefit both themselves and the organization as a whole.  While there are game aspects currently at play in many parts of a company, these mechanics are often tacit games — they’re not formally structured as games and lack intentioned corporate outcomes driven by consistent personal motivations.  These tacit games result in intrinsic rewards that vary per employee, while intentioned games result in both intrinsic personal achievements and extrinsic rewards that are desirable to all individuals, and in the end, the organization itself.

For example, many training programs are tacit games.  After a day of training, employees may receive intrinsic benefits like increased competence, more self-confidence, or a larger knowledge base — all things that will help them succeed at their job.  But intentionally adding a game layer to a training program could give employees an extrinsic reward for completing training — a virtual ‘badge’ indicating that they’ve become an expert in a certain topic area.

As the game layer is spread through the organization, the employee can seek out more rewards.  Attend more training?  Earn a badge.  Sign up for an external course?  Earn a badge.   Eventually, after earning several badges, the employee would level-up to a new status, indicating the progression of their acquired expertise.

But these badges and statuses won’t just be virtual tchotchkes.  They’ll be real-world indicators of expertise and competence.  If a coworker is looking for an internal expert, they won’t have to rely on word-of-mouth recommendations or even an internal directory where employees often self-define their expertise.  They would simply seek out their coworker who has reached the appropriate level needed for the task at hand.   Ultimately, the enterprise benefits from this intentional influencing of individual motivations with a work force that is more trained, more connected, and with more clearly identified skill-sets.

Farther down the road, performance reviews and promotions will be able to partially account for how much an employee has learned on the job by simply noting how many badges have been earned or what level has been achieved.  After all, wouldn’t the decision to promote one of two equally skilled employees would be just a little simpler if one had five more “badges” than the other?

At the end of his keynote, Seth showed how communal gameplay can solve complex problems.  Everyone in the audience was given either a blue, a green, or an orange piece of paper.  In order to “solve global warming”, players (the entire audience) had to exchange their color cards so that every person was holding the same color as everyone in their row — instead of a random arrangement of colors, the first row would be all green, the second all orange, etc.  If everyone could achieve this in less than 3 minutes, SCVNGR would donate $10,000 to the National Wildlife Federation! In less than two minutes, the audience won, proving that large problems can be solved if individuals focus on their own personal motivations that drive towards an intended group outcome.

In the next post, Dave and I will explore one way in which game mechanics could play out in the enterprise.

 

Communication as Work: In Real Life

In my last post I wrote about communication being an important aspect of knowledge work and decision making.  I can sometimes get a little too academic with how things are supposed to work and so I thought I’d write a follow-up post that uses a concrete example (IRL for some) of how communication helped me and my colleague, Tom Cummings, just the other night.

The setup here isn’t that important other than to to say we were at the beginning stages of a new project and decided a brainstorming session was in order.  We found an empty conference room, a whiteboard and started to get our ideas down.

Social Business Design aside:  This conference room is what we commonly refer to as a silo.  A silo is anything (an organization, software…a conference room) that keeps information within its walls, making it hard for an outsider to discover what is going on behind them.  Tom and I were working alone, the rest of the company had no visibility into what we were doing.

Five minutes in to our brainstorm we were interrupted by a much more responsible group of colleagues who actually reserved the conference room for a meeting.  We packed up our stuff, white board included, and as there were no other conference rooms available, made camp in the hallway.  It’s important to note that this is really the only hallway that exists in our open floor plan office, so by default it is the highest trafficked hallway we have.

Social Business Design aside: A hallway is very much like a dynamic signal, a ‘dynamic information flow produced by constituents.’ As Tom and I were working in the hallway we were being passed by other employees with different experiences, expertise, points-of-view and tacit knowledge. Our activities were now visible to the rest of the company.

In the hallway we were being passed by colleagues.  They could see what we were working on and chose to either keep walking or stop and engage us.  We experienced both.  Within ten minutes, Tom and I found oursleves in a conversation with two colleagues each knowledgeable and experienced on the work we were doing.  Over the next 30 minutes we discussed our current situation, the vision and goals for the project, recent trends and developments and lessons learned from having ‘been there and done that.’  Afterwards, Tom and I literally went back to the drawing board to incorporate what we had just learned.

Social Business Design aside:  I mentioned that colleagues in the hallway would either keep on walking or stop to talk to us.  This is an example of a metafilter, ‘what’s important to one person may be meaningless to another.’   Those who wanted to participate could, those who had other interests could keep on going.  By being in the hallway (the dynamic signal) we were making ourselves visible to the rest of the company so they could decide to participate or not.

It’s impossible to compare the Dave & Tom-only project to the Dave & Tom + Colleague Feedback project (because the former will never happen) but everyone involved felt much better about latter: more input, more experience, more tacit knowledge.  We had engaged in communication and collaboration that resulted in a much more holistic approach to our work.  Our path forward became more clear, informed and actionable.

You might not have the collaboration luxury of working in the same office as the rest of your company, so this might not be your everyday experience.  The good thing is you don’t have to be in the same office to collaborate with colleagues.  There are fantastic tools available that will give your company all the virtual hallways, metafilters and whiteboards it needs.  But, tools are the easy part these days.  Your company is filled with smart people, gathering knowledge and insights every day…are you prepared to use them?

Communication as Work

A knowledge worker spends a good portion of the day communicating – meetings, status reports, emails, phone calls, water cooler talks.  Much of this activity is considered unproductive overhead; when you look at a calendar full of meetings you wonder when you’re going to get any REAL work done.  And while many popular forms of communication may be inefficient and ineffective, communication is work; perhaps the most important work knowledge workers do.

Knowledge work is aimed at turning information into something decisionable and actionable; too often reports, presentations, survey results are mistaken for such.  While they are a key part of the decision equation, they are not enough.  They don’t provide insight.  The only thing they’re good for on their own is filling repositories.

Knowledge, unlike the data and information contained in reports, is a living & breathing thing.  It can’t be put in your enterprise content management system.  It exists in the heads of employees (often referred to as ‘tacit’ knowledge), constantly being shaped by different stimuli: articles, blog posts, pictures, models, books, conversations with colleagues, etc…  Communication is the process by which this constantly evolving knowledge is applied on data and information to a decisionable end.  This process will generate insights on how to take advantage of the information you have gathered.  Unless the reports, presentations and survey results are subjected to scrutiny and analysis through communication, no insights are created and decisions are delayed or malinformed.

Communication is more than just a block of time on your calendar.  It’s an opportunity to  share knowledge, gain insight, make better decisions and create for your company a competitive advantage.

What does communication look like where you work?  Is it enabling the application of knowledge to data and information?  Where do your company’s insights come from?

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.

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.

Untapped demand for social tools can lead to bad decisions

So you’ve been tasked with bringing social media tools into your company and transforming the way it does business.  That’s a big task; but the boss thinks it’s time…he thinks it might be good for business and anyway all the new hires are demanding it.   So you start socializing the idea and you begin to realize it’s not just the new hires.  HR, Finance, Biz Dev, Engineering, IT, oh my.  Everyone is talking about it.  Innovation, collaboration, expertise location; we’re on our way now.  And you’re the one who’s going to give the masses what they want.  You’re the man!   You do a little research, make a few calls to vendors, maybe even a consultant.  What?  They want to take you out to dinner?  That was easy.  And they’re going to let you pilot their software?  They’re flying down tomorrow!?  You start thinking you’re pretty hot shit.  Well, slow down, because you could wind up in way over your head if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Things can move pretty fast if you’re not ready.  That proof-of-concept (that you were only going to let 25 users in on) becomes a pilot (we’ll keep it to 500) becomes production (how many licenses do we have to buy?!)  in the blink of an eye.  And you might not even realize it.  Employees are dying for their company gives them ‘Facebook for the enterprise.’  You give them something, ANYTHING, that resembles a status update and I dare you to tell them, ‘that was only a proof-of-concept, it didn’t meet our requirements.  We have to go back to the drawing board.’

Good luck with that.

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.  (And, by the way, only you know what your business problems are).  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 they need.  If you can make them happy and solve their problems you greatly increase your odds of success.

If you’re reading this post, time to market for your social initiatives is the least of your problems.  Don’t be pressured into making a move before you’re ready.  This (r)evolution is going to bring about a major shift in the way companies work and it is not a fad.  You are not going to miss out on the benefits  if you decide to take an extra month or two or three to get it right.  Measure twice, cut once.

Holes in the Dam

Sounds like an ominous title, and it could be, just depends what the dam represents; in this case, it’s work as usual.  I’m starting to see some small holes that will eventually lead to major culture changes, and the latest step my company has taken in that direction flew completely under the (my) radar.  

While we are piloting Lotus Connections, it’s not having the success or effect we’ve thought.  There are many different reasons attributing to the lack of fanfare around this launch, but those are for another post.  Because we run Notes, we thought we’d reap significant advantages by installing Connections however, the results aren’t there.  As an added degree of difficulty, there’s been lots of hoopla around this pilot and it’s been hard to live up to the hype.  

Enter the acquisition of an Enterprise RSS solution.  I thought I was ‘plugged-in’ but I had no idea we were even investigating this type of tool.  It’s a big company, what can I say?  Anyway, as soon as I found out, I immediately got added to the pilot group and started setting up my feeds (imported right from Google Reader – very slick).  It is AWESOME.  It looks (limited to corporate branding, so there’s only so much we can do here) and feels like a real web-app.  It’s intuitive and does exactly what you’d expect it to do.  This is not an another enterprise app.  

After I imported my feeds (did I mention how easy it was to be able to import them from Google Reader?) the first thing I noticed was that the team running the pilot, instead of sending out updates through email, was sending updates/tips&tricks/how-to’s/FAQs as feeds through the tool.  No emails!  How smart is that?  They get it.  Let me get take a slight diversion here…

…Each day, beginning at 12:00am my Blackberry vibrates for about 3 minutes straight.  I get hit, as most employees do, with automated emails from the different systems/communities/tools/etc… we use at work.  Very rarely do I care about any of the content in the email, but there is an occasion when I need to look at them.  99% of the time these emails get deleted, it’s usually the first thing I do in the morning before I get my coffee.  It’s  really the only thing I do all day that doesn’t require me to think.  

My point here is this:  they aren’t using email.  The automated email issue is easily solved with the enterprise RSS reader; and because automated email affects so many people in the company I predict we’re going to start to see a major culture shift.  This is the tip of the iceberg.  It may seem minor at first, but employees (especially the most reluctant to change) need to be able to see the power that these tools can provide.  Getting rid of ‘junk’ email is something everyone wants and we’re now providing an elegant, intuitive solution to that problem.  This is a small win that we can point to, and say ‘if you liked that, let me show you a few other things…’

This win puts a small hole in the dam of work as usual.

 

PS – I think it’s important to mention the difference in approach used in marketing the RSS capability .vs Lotus Connections pilot.  The Connections pilot utilized a top-down strategy, everyone knew it was coming and therefore it is trying to live up to inflated (unachievable) expectations.  Everyone has been waiting for this solution, and they want it to be much more than what it is.  To be honest, it’s not fair.  Connections isn’t a bad tool, it’s just been promised to deliver beyond its capability.  Expectations weren’t set appropriately.  It will be hard to be anything but a disappointment.  

The Enterprise RSS solution, on the other hand, was able to stay in the shadow of Connections.  No one was expecting it to be the panacea…no one was really expecting it at all.  It’s easy to exceed expectations when there aren’t any.  They will benefit from viral marketing as well; workers will either stumble upon it themselves or they will hear about it from their colleagues, not their supervisors (and that’s important).  

There is a very good change management lesson to be learned when it comes to introducing social media capabilities to the enterprise.

Is Twitter Knowledge Management?

I’m not sure it’s the first thing that pops into a KM purist’s mind, but it does seem to fit this definition surprisingly well.  

In my current role, I’m responsible for bringing change to the way our employees traditionally do their work.  As a big part of that includes the adoption of social media, one of the agenda items I’m pushing is an enterprise micro-blogging capability.  Outside the walls of work I not only have  fun participating on Twitter, I do derive a great deal of personal value from it as well:  insight into my passions (both personal and professional), peer review & feedback, expertise location, network expansion, timely alerts to pertinent information (I actually first learned the date, location, speakers and topics of my own company’s annual IT Forum on Twitter from a non-employee…that’s crazy!), and innovation & ideation.  

I believe knowledge is highly social and that it happens in the cracks between our published and documented work:  in the water cooler, email & IM conversations we have that aren’t indexed or searchable; in the impromptu meetings and white-board sessions that have no minutes or ‘share this with others’ button.  Imagine moving those interactions to a platform capable of storing, indexing & making searchable those interactions?  By capturing   the lifestreams’ of its users, Twitter does a very good job of  tracking what’s in those cracks and by extension KM.   Maybe a better way of putting it is that the social nature of knowledge lends itself to Twitter.  

Here are the Motivations of KM as Wikipedia defines them:

• Making available increased knowledge content in the development and provision of products and services
• Achieving shorter new product development cycles
• Facilitating and managing innovation and organisational learning
• Leveraging the expertise of people across the organisation
• Increasing network connectivity between internal and external individuals
• Managing business environments and allowing employees to obtain relevant insights and ideas appropriate to their work
• Solving intractable or wicked problems
• Managing intellectual capital and intellectual assets in the workforce (such as the expertise and know-how possessed by key individuals)

Well, heck.  I’d say Twitter does most, if not all of those things.  If those are your ‘holes in the wall’ then I’d say Twitter could definitely be your drill.  Here’s a post from Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang (I highly doubt that if you’re reading this you don’t already know who he is) that might help fill in some of this posts’ gaps.

I’m trying to convince my peers and leadership that we don’t necessarily need the traditional threaded discussion board or Ask An Expert-type application; that if we do our change management correctly all we need is micro-blogging, a document management system that gives URL’s and maybe a link-trimmer, a la Snurl.

Those three things are a powerful combination, they’re cheap and low-risk, too (I’m guessing if you’re interested in KM your company already has a document management solution that spits out URL’s).  Twitter may not be your father’s KM solution, but it certainly solves his problems.  I’m getting more and more convinced of this every day…

I believe we make sense of the world…

…instead of the other way around: the world makes sense.  It’s a question of philosophy, but one that’s essential when it comes to knowledge management, at least where I work.  

It’s been a crazy week, and all signs point to it continuing, but I wanted to get a post out on this topic because this difference in philosophy is something I feel strongly about.  

The title and opening sentences of this post are brought on by this article.  For me, the opening and ending sections are the real eye-openers.  The reason it hits home is because we have some ontological efforts going on at work, and as I was reading this article a simple phrase kept popping into my head…’YES!’

Even without a lot of thought (unfortunately, that happens all to frequently with me), it only makes sense that the effort required to classify  the different types of electronic ‘objects’ that exist at work would be monumental.  Seems like a never ending task, akin to a dog chasing its tail.  Is it worth it?  Does it make business sense?  I’m not sure; it seems like over-engineering or over-architecting from where I’m standing.  

Why would a company do this?  I’ve been using the example of the drill vs. the hole in the wall a lot lately.  Makes sense to use it in this case as well.  What are we really getting after with all of this classification?  what’s our hole in the wall?  I’m pretty sure I know what it is and I don’t think we need the ontology-drill to get at it.  

I like the solution the author, Clay Shirkey, provides:  let the users classify the data through tags.  I’m a social media guy, so I guess I’d choose a social media drill.  But it just seems like a lot less work and risk that would give you the same result.  The difference in philosophy here is really dictatorship vs. democracy, command & control vs. power to the edge , the individual vs. the market, and the side you fall on dictates the drill you will use.

The lights just got turned on, but am I home?

This past week has presented me with a new direction at work.  I have been tapped to lead efforts to bring about a more collaborative working environment.  Before this change, I was a willing and eager  participant in my company’s Lotus Connections Pilot.  Now I am leading efforts of a potentially alternative (potentially complementary) effort altogether.   I’ve been thinking and blogging about the change that I believe needs to happen, now I get to lead it.  

However, as much as I have been thinking and blogging, nothing has necessarily prepared me for doing.  I have spent the last few days locked up in a conference room with my architecture lead brainstorming, wire framing, road mapping and most importantly, breaking down how we work & examining our culture.  It was eye-opening.  I had never actually given any thought, nevermind analyzed, the way my company (and yours, most likely) goes about doing its business.  We’ve got our email (boy, do we have email) and Enterprise Content Management systems and different applications engineers use to make stuff that blows up other stuff, but all these systems are so…what’s the word?…’isolated’ gets close.  Using them doesn’t expand my horizons or introduce me to new ideas, ideas that could improve the way I work, make me happier, more productive and make my company a better place to be.  I email & IM the people I already know, use the same techniques I’ve always used, get feedback from the same people that always give me feedback.  However many times we try to introduce a new tool, it ends up being the same thing with different packaging, never bringing about the desired effect.  

This project has forced me to finally put my vision of our workplace down on paper.   That turned the light bulb on for me (it was more like someone turning up the dimmer, but very slowly).  After I got beyond the tools, I started to notice the differnce in the workplace culture that I was defining.  It’s an organization that looks very different from the email based one that I see today.  Instead of the isolated application and employee, everything becomes connected.  Well, at least the potential is there.  It’s then up to you and me to take advantage of that potential, to pull the power out to where we work – at the edge.  And once that happens, your organization looks very different, like flat different.  And once your organization is flat, the rules change.  To what? I don’t know yet.  But they change.