The Connectbeam Social Computing Blog

Enterprise 2.0 Conference: A Platform to Measure the Evolution of a New Market

This was the third time that Connectbeam sponsored the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. It was yet another great show with so much to learn and explore. The most amazing thing was to see how the market has evolved over the last three years. Not trying to say we’ve reached the tipping point in the Enterprise 2.0 market by any means, but it was clear that companies are moving forward and trying to find ways to apply Enterprise 2.0 technologies and principals to better address current collaboration needs.

 

In June of 2007, Connectbeam sponsored the first Enterprise 2.0 show. Our demonstrations at the show centered on the ability to bookmark and tag the information people were finding using Google and other internet search engines.  We also demonstrated our first interface into the Google GSA.  People were widely interested in our solution, with the majority of discussions centered on understanding “What is Enterprise 2.0 really?” 

 

At the Enterprise 2.0 show in 2008, we launched our initial Centralized Tag Repository solution – now known as the Social Activity Repository.  We worked with a very large networking company in the development of the new capabilities, and our demonstration centered around the ability to automatically capture tags (labels) as they were being created in the Atlassian Confluence wiki, and provide those tags and related social content (expertise, communities, etc.) directly within MS SharePoint and Outlook. Our out-of-the-box SharePoint webparts were a hit and were on display at the Microsoft booth.

 

As you can imagine, we were very excited with the new release, and there were several very interested potential customers for the technology.  On a much larger scale, however, there were many attendees at the show who were just trying to decide “which Enterprise 2.0 technology should I deploy first, a wiki, a blog, or social bookmarking?

 

The Enterprise 2.0 show in 2009:  what a tremendous change in just one year!  The show attendees were highly knowledgeable, and many were experienced in implementing Enterprise social applications.  In fact, we spoke to many companies that were already making product changes.  They implemented a wiki or a blog a year or two ago, and they are now making decisions to replace technologies which haven’t truly met their needs. I can clearly recall a year ago at the same conference we had to repeatedly explain what a ‘tag’ was and how tagging – specifically in the form of a folksonomy – was useful for sharing/discovering content and expertise. We probably completed over 200 demos at the 2008 conference, and the one question which seemed to be asked the most was “why are some of the words in the tag cloud bigger and bolder?”

 

This year questions from attendees were not much about ‘why’ – why use wikis, blogs, etc. – but more about ‘which’ and ‘how’. People were more interested in ‘which’ wiki, blog, microblogging or collaboration solution to use and the ‘how to’. What are the best practices in implementing E2.0 solutions given the traditional collaboration tools in the existing IT infrastructure? Yes, we know it’s not just about the technology, but how do we get past the ‘cultural’ barriers behind the firewall? Companies have also realized that the true value (ROI if you will) is measured by applying E2.0 principals to ‘improve’ or ‘replace’ existing business processes that simply don’t work today. This is truly a sign of the evolution of a new market.

 

We were really excited to see that our ‘social activity aggregation’ message was well received and resonated with almost everyone who stopped by our booth or attended the presentation. That by itself says a lot about the evolution of this market. The following diagram from our presentation at the show illustrates how Connectbeam fits into a typical social collaboration ecosystem in an enterprise, and help connecting traditional and E2.0 world together. I thought I would use an example and briefly describe the solution in case you missed us at the show:

 

Imagine in a large Fortune global 500 enterprise, Corporate IT has decided to rollout SharePoint MOSS 2007 – that includes wiki and blog capabilities – and NewsGator RSS as company-wide news feed and collaboration platform. Engineering in R&D department, however, have been using Atlassian Confluence wiki to manage day-to-day design, and project team collaborations for a while. The marketing team has been using the Yammer microblogging service for the last 3 months to communicate company news and messages with all employees. The technical support team, on the other hand, has been piloting and now ready to roll out Telligent Community to engage with external customers and partners. There are probably other homegrown tools and solutions in play but let’s just assume this is the current social software footprint at this company. In the long run, each tool above will greatly help employees and management solve a series of collaboration and communication problems. However as ‘standalone solutions’ they create new ‘social information silos’ because they don’t communicate with each other. The content stored in the Confluence wiki by the engineering team might be very valuable and relevant to the product marketing team who uses SharePoint on a daily basis, but don’t necessarily use the R&D wiki – they might not even know that wiki exists! So this and similar real world examples from our clients illustrate the need to aggregate social activities and user generated content across the enterprise regardless of the originating source. That’s where Connectbeam Social Activity Platform^TM comes into play.

 

Social activities from various platforms and solutions above are aggregated through out-of-the-box or custom connectors (using published REST APIs) and the ‘people to people’, ‘people to content’, and ‘content to content’ relationships are analyzed and captured for future collaboration use.  This aggregation service can deliver the most relevant user generated content and activity ‘in the flow’ of the user’s daily workflow – through integration with existing applications and not by introducing yet another destination.  This not only improves overall productivity but also greatly increases the adoption of newly added E2.0 tools in the enterprise collaboration ecosystem.

 

We also believe that a strong analytics solution – not displayed in the picture above but an upcoming part of Connectbeam’s offering – built on top of the social activity repository is an essential part of this service and can greatly help with raising awareness and visibility into ‘how’ people interact and connect with each other and ‘where’ they turn to share and discover information and expertise. One can only imagine how valuable it would be to extend this solution to outside the firewall, connecting customers, partners and suppliers social interactions.

 

So to summarize my thoughts on this year E2.0 conference, I can think of 3 takeaways:

1. The Enterprise 2.0 market is rapidly maturing and decision makers are increasingly interested in applying new social technologies.
2. Large enterprises won't standardize on a single platform or application anytime soon. There will always be valuable social content and activity in point solution.
3. There is a real business need to aggregate and analyze the social metadata and user activity from various collaboration tools and E2.0 solutions across the enterprise, particularly as the number of these tools in use grows.

Looking forward to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2010 at Boston.

Mining Social Software Interactions to Develop the Enterprise Social Graph

In doing some research, we came across an excellent white paper by Laurence Lock Lee, James Matheson and Stewart Mader. In WikiMining, WikiNetworks and Wikinomics, the authors studied the co-editing and commenting interactions of participants in the wikipatterns.com wiki community.

Objectives of this research included:

• Measuring the health of the wiki community,
• Understanding which participants had the highest network centrality, and
• Seeing how well this interaction analysis correlated to the actual social relationships among participants

We've written previously about social network analysis and its value in a corporate setting. While the wikipatterns.com research is not in the enterprise, much of its analysis is consistent with Professor Rob Cross's work on employee networks inside organizations. Read the paper for some good real-world context to the principles of social network analysis.

What especially caught our eye were these two findings:

1. Correlation of inferred social networks to surveyed actual social networks
2. Percentage of relationships that occurred strictly because of the wiki

Let's examine these two findings a bit more.

Correlation to Actual Social Networks

The study's authors mined the editing and commenting interactions among the wiki participants. The idea here is that if you and a colleague both edit a wiki page, that is tallied as a "relationship unit" between the two of you. By analyzing the depth and breadth of these relationships, the authors constructed a social graph among the participants. These map of the social graph, called a sociogram, is shown below:

 

The authors then surveyed wikipattern.com participants, asking them to identify their actual social relationships within the wiki community. Only a subset of people responded, but enough did to construct a meaningful stated social network for participants.

The authors then compared the inferred social network to the stated social network. The basis of comparison was "degree centrality", which analyzes the number of connections a person has. The table below shows the Top 5 participants based on degree centrality:

 

In looking at the top five most central participants, four names show up in both lists. In reviewing all participants, the authors find a statistically significant 0.77 correlation.

What this says is that there is likely a way to use social software, such as wikis, to mine the enterprise social graph. The study authors are appropriately cautious with this declaration. Their study is one of the first we've seen that tackles this idea.

Social Software Fosters New Relationships

An important benefit of social software is the diversification of one's relationships, which we've discussed here before. Finding and interacting with others outside of your regular internal contacts has tremendous value for you personally, and for your company overall.

In conducting the wikipattern.com user survey, participants were asked to characterize the relationships they had with others on the wiki. There were four options:

• Prior relationship > 2 years
• Prior relationship < 2 years
• Relationship created through the wiki but now extending beyond it
• Relationship through the wiki only

The survey participants characterized a totla of 117 relationships based on one of these four options. Of those 117 relationships, 37 were the latter two types - formed through the wiki. In other words nearly a third of the relationships were based on participating in the wiki.

This finding is valuable. It shows that providing an open collaboraiton and sharing platform results in new connections not previously made. Which is a key benefit of Enterprise 2.0.

Looking forward to more research in this area.

Enterprise 2.0 and Human Capital Management

We were checking out SlideShare presentations last week, and came across a nice one by Knowledge Infusion. Knowledge Infusion consults with companies on human capital management. Clients include MetLife, Dow Jones, Symantec, AAA and Lawrence Berkeley Labs.

Their presentation is titled "Social Collaboration and Talent". There are some interesting points made in the presentation, and we wanted to discuss them. First, here's the presentation:

Social Collaboration And Talent - Knowledge Infusion (Feb 2009)

View more presentations from Jason Corsello. (tags: jason_corsello knowledge_infusion)

Now, let's talk about some of Knowledge Infusion's slides.

Slide 13: The Concepts of "Management" Are Changing

The emerging relationship of employees to management de-emphasizes transaction feedback as the primary interaction. In terms of talent management, leading HR-oriented firms are focusing more on back-n-forth interactions, conversations and what employees contribute. In this world non-tangible employee shills and competencies increase in value. Employees also put more work into peer collaboration, not just completing tasks as assigned by their managers.

Connectbeam take: Directionally, this is a change in the world of work. It's still early for this to be a trend yet. But as companies slowly look at the new ways to handle talent management, these observations ring true. Social software, that facilitates and captures these non-tangible aspects of collaboration, is a great tool for helping in this regard.

Slide 14: How Work Really Gets Done

This slide notes that "new forms of leadership are required", with the ability to work within a network of people becoming much more important than discharging one's duties as required by one's position in the company hierarchy.

Connectbeam take: Hierarchies aren't going away, and they have a rightful place in terms of focusing the troops and ensuring common understanding of strategies. But they have also historically been the only way for work to get done. The cultural change of putting employees more in control over how strategies are achieved and leveraging one another's skills and knowledge is what has changed. It's a basis for companies to benefit from the whole knowledge of employees, not just what they know for a specific task.

Slide 23: Making the Invisible Visible

Drawing on the work of University of Virginia Professor Rob Cross, about whom we blogged recently, Knowledge Infusion points out the value of employee network analysis. In the example presented, the person at the top of the hierarchical chain actually has very limited connections to employees within the business unit. However, one employee appears to be a central enabler, despite being much lower in the organizational hierarchy. This employee connects many of the other employees. Loss of this central connector would present a significant disruption in collaboration.

Connectbeam take: This finding is one that probably resonates strongly with employees. They know of that person is so instrumental to connecting people for work. The same principle likely applies to information as well. Certain employees provide some of the most accessed information, and clearly are instrumental to the flow of knowledge inside the organization. Because colleagues' engagement with this information is invisible, it may be hard to know which employees are delivering the most useful content.

Slide 25: The Evolution of Talent Management

Here is what talent management entails, per Knowledge Infusion:

• Process support
• Recruiting
• Performance management
• Compensation management
• Succession planning
• Learning

The evolution of that work is the wrapping of social software tools - wikis, blogs, conversation tools - around that process. Building on the combination of traditional talent management work and these new tools, human resources professionals gain the following benefits:

1. Employee engagement
2. Informal learning
3. Customer engagement
4. Rapid time-to-productivity
5. Speed time-to-market
6. Social network analysis

Connectbeam take: The list of benefits are spot-on. It's interesting that Knowledge Infusion came up with these in relation to human resources. We've long believed that these benefits apply to most departments within organizations. Being part of an overall talent management strategy makes sense to us.

Slide 39: Identifying the Risks with Enterprise Social Software

Knowledge Infusion surveyed companies to find out what concerned them most with use of enterprise social software. Here are the results:

• Sensitive data and information become exposed or getting outside the company (56.7%)
• Nascent market of technology vendors that are still unproven and immature (37.7%)
• Employees wasting time/not doing their job (35.9%)
• The technology becoming obsolete or outdated quickly (27.7%)

Connectbeam take: Governance and productivity in the realm of enterprise social software is something we've discussed herebefore. The risks of employees inadvertently sharing sensitive information are a real issue. Consider it terms of risks. First, the information is made accessible internally, not out on the public web. What is the likelihood that someone will reveal sensitive info that way? Probably not too different from current email risks. To prevent data sharing for the possibilitythat something sensitive will be revealed means all the benefits of open data accessibility and collaboration are foregone. How bad is the risk of internal exposure of sensitive data?

As for the nascent market for technology vendors, one approach is to use installed versions vs. hosted. Installed lets each company maintain control over its data. If companies use cloud vendors, always available downloads of company information can mitigate concerns.

Enterprise 2.0 Is an Important Part of Human Capital Management

Forrester analyst Craig Symons noted the following with regard to human capital management:

Today, more than 85% of a typical S&P 500 company's market value is the result of intangible assets. For many companies, the bulk of these intangible assets is its people, its human capital. It is no longer what you own that counts but what you know.

Talented people are found throughout the different locations and business units of organizations. Giving them a chance to be found and to more broadly advance company operations is good for the enterprise, and good for the employees. Social software is a key enabler for this.

Using Social Network Analysis to Identify Innovation Inhibitors - Masterfoods USA

We've talked previously about the value of stronger employee social networks. A great study by researchers at NYU, MIT and BU described the benefits of stronger and more diverse employee networks for information seeking. And the ways to improve their measures.

But here's something that should be considered...if you map out these employee connections, what are you looking for, and what actions would you take to improve the health of the enterprise social network?

Turns out there is a good body of research around this. We came across the work of Professor Rob Cross of the University of Virginia. Here is Professor Cross's background:

For over a decade, my research, teaching and consulting has focused on applying social network analysis ideas to critical business issues for actionable insights and bottom-line results. I have worked with over 200 leading organizations (companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations) on a variety of solutions including innovation, revenue growth, cost containment and talent management.

He has published research papers and case studies. Today, we want to focus on the published case study for Masterfoods USA, a division of Mars, Inc. Masterfoods operates three core business: confectionery/snack food, pet care and main meal food.

Note: Neither Mars nor Masterfood are Connectbeam customers.

Masterfoods' Growth Hinges on R&D

Masterfoods had successfully grown through expansion into new markets. That growth strategy was slowing, so the company wanted to increase its share of existing markets. Key to that was a healthy R&D pipeline.

Masterfoods management was not worried about having talented people. Rather, it felt like the internal networks needed help to better connect people with ideas, knowledge and political capital. Management wanted to "encourage employees to leverage the right expertise across the extended network (inside and outside the organization) to bridge otherwise disconnected worlds."

A critical issue was that the R&D group, after operating as a centralized group for several years, was being assigned to separate business units. Understanding existing relationships was an important step in managing this process.

Here is how Professor Cross describes the "why" behind the network analysis for Masterfoods USA:

• To identify the R&D network, and develop a plan for maintaining and building relationships necessary for ongoing innovation
• To pinpoint where connectivity needed to be improved so interventions would be accurate and successful
• To take advantage of the diversity of the three core businesses and the best practices among them, particularly related to innovation flow

So the company worked with Professor Cross to map out the internal social networks of employees. This was done in a decidedly low-tech way, via surveys. But the data was valuable, and compelling.

The Analytical Work

The survey was a relatively simple activity. Respondents were asked: "Please indicate the extent to which the people listed below provide you with information that helps you to accomplish your work." From these answers, combined with other data, several interesting results emerged.

Key findings:

1. Network Connectivity: The overall network is well connected for information sharing and decision making, but there is a very high reliance on a few people, particularly leaders.
2. Cross-Boundary Collaboration: There are comparatively low levels of connectivity across segments and several disconnects across sites.
3. Distribution of Expertise: Several gaps exist between skills that people have and those people indicate they need. In some cases, connections were not made between expertise areas that should have been connected.
4. Innovation and Learning: There is potential insularity within the network. However, more connected people reach out externally more often than those less central.

Surprise: After seeing the survey results, Masterfoods management was surprised by the people identified as most central in the network.

Pareto Principle: The number of relationships in the network would fall by 18% if the 12 most central people were removed.

Business Unit Silos: Information sharing outside business units was generally minuscule. Even for natural overlap, such as confectionery/snack food and main meal food.

Internal A-Listers' Smothering Effect: The Masterfoods USA network suffered from domination, where the voices of a few central network members were drowning out novel ideas. Senior management felt that new product opportunities were being missed because new and potentially disruptive ideas from less influential scientists in other competency areas were not being heard.

Leave the Echo Chamber: The 12 most central people in the R&D network seek information outside the R&D group significantly more than everyone else.

Follow-Up

From these results, Masterfoods was able to understand the dynamics of the R&D network, including what made people successful and what was inhibiting innovation. Executives put into place individual and community-wide action plans to address these findings.

The challenge, of course, is to monitor and improve these connections over time, and to measure them on an ongoing basis. There is a role here for enterprise social software to be a tool for improving internal social networks.

And if this sort of work is of interest, we encourage you to check out Professor Cross's other case studies.

When Your Enterprise Customer Asks About Social Software Governance

Jennifer Okimoto is a social computing evangelist and management consultant for IBM Business Consulting Services. As you can imagine, she's very experienced in working with large companies in the implementation of large-scale software.

On her blog, she recently posted a great piece about the issues of social software implementation and adoption. Specifically, four questions that relate to governance issues.

In this post, we want to highlight the questions and highlight her responses. We'll then examine one of the questions in greater depth.

1. How detailed should social media guidelines be?

Jen recommends keeping the guidelines simple, clear and few. Too many rules will result in employees not reading them. And guidelines are an overarching set of principles and behaviors, not a codified set of rules.

2. When introducing social media into the workplace, how do we address HR concerns about reduced employee productivity?

Her answer is one that we share as well. Employees are simply transferring activities to social media that they have always been doing offline:

• Searching for people
• Connecting
• Sharing
• Conversing
• Researching

We're going to explore this one a little further in a moment.

3. How do you guide employees or manage employees in navigating the gray with respect to posting content that is or is not appropriate in the work environment?

Jen offers a good perspective here. The community is very good about identifying these types of posts and responding accordingly. For posts that are clearly beyond questionable-for-work territory and are solidly in an offensive zone (e.g. racist, sexist, xenophobic), company management shouldn't hesitate in removing them. And deal with the employee through regular HR policies.

4. What about content that falls squarely in the HR domain? What if employees use social media to publicize HR issues, or to "supporters" to their cause?

Jen notes that IBM generally is hands-off with regard to what employees post. This particular issue hasn't happened. But she stresses that so long as everyone is respectful, the conversation can carry on.

Improving Employee Productivity

We have long maintained that usage of social software will improve productivity, not reduce it. It's the same content, conversations and ideas that employees have always had, but now put into applications that allow:

• Broader participation: more viewpoints, ability to tap the right information
• Findability: when you can find the person or information you need quickly, you're going to get things done faster
• Stronger connections: strengthen and diversify your internal ties, avoid receiving redundant information from just your in-person connections

For the final word in this post, we turn to Intel corporate blogger Laurie Buczek. In her February 13, 2008 post Why Intel is investing in Social Computing, she writes the following:

The average Intel employee dumps one day a week trying to find people with the experience & expertise plus the relevant information to do their job. We have calculated some of the $$ impact due to lost productivity & opportunity.  Let me just say that it is motivating us to take action.

Good point. Social software is about improving productivity. Keep that in mind when it comes to governance and enabling open employee participation.

Putting the Social into Microsoft Outlook

"E-mail. No-one thinks of it as a social app. It's hardly what we think of as Web 2.0, yet it's the most social piece of software most of us use each day."

Suw Charman-Anderson

Suw's observation is spot-on. If you were to survey companies today, you'd find that nothing compares to email as the application most actively used by employees. Not wikis, not blogs, not social networks, not anything.

One can abstract out the social aspects of email to see why it is the most social application inside the company:

• Contacts = social graph
• Email threads = online interactions
• Embedded links = information sharing
• Attached documents = content collaboration
• Search = findability and recall

While the next generation of software applications lend themselves significantly better to providing these social characteristics, email will continue to be a dominant form of communication, interaction and sharing in the years ahead. And there are plenty of other uses for email that nothing else can really replace. As Irwin Lazar wrote on the Enterprise 2.0 blog, "let's face it, we aren't giving up email."

Email is the most comprehensive record of employees' social graph, and it's where employees will turn for interactions. So what are some smart ways to leverage that?

Connectbeam Social Profiles Integrated into Microsoft Outlook

Through Spotlight Connect for Outlook, employees' Connectbeam Social Profiles are embedded into every internal email. Here's a screen shot of this integration:

  

What we've put in this profile is the following:

• Contact information, synchronized with LDAP or Active Directory
• Expertise - as created and managed by each employee
• Projects - as created and managed by each employee
• Recent Activity - content created across different social software apps plus bookmarks
• Employee profile toggling - click another email recipient name, see their profile

The social profile makes it easy to see what colleagues are doing and what they know, all at a glance from the Microsoft Outlook inbox.

Leverage Attention to Improve Awareness

The idea is to leverage the attention people give to their inbox and their contacts there. As we wrote in the January 2009 Connect Newsletter, people look to their close contacts first for information. Certainly this is a connections silo that Enterprise 2.0 needs to break, but it's also an opportunity to improve the way in which valuable information is distributed within the organization.

The Connectbeam social profile updates throughout the day as employees go about the work they do anyway. No extra effort is needed to keep the profiles updated. And the activities - bookmarks, wiki entries, blog entries, etc. - are provided as links so others who see something of interest can scan them themselves.

Email Context Extends Employees' Information Connections

An useful dynamic of emails is that recipients can include those who are one's close contacts, as well as colleagues with whom one is less familiar. This becomes the basis for enabling workers to access information beyond the recurring set of people with whom they interact.

Emails are wonderful for providing specific context. The sender has a purpose for composing the email, and an understanding for why others would find it relevant.

Tapping this context is valuable. Whereas an employee might not scan information for a distant connection normally, in the context of an email, there is heightened interest in what others on that email may be doing. That's the moment you're looking for.

With the Connectbeam social profile integrated into Outlook, colleagues become more than a name on the email list. They have a set of activities and declared expertise and projects. Since they are on the same email with one's close conneciton, this information becomes more relevant.

By matching a wider and deeper amount of information about a person to a contextually relevant moment of considering an email, companies have a natural way to foster stronger and more diverse connections among workers.

See for Yourself

To wrap things up, you can check out the demo below which shows how Connectbeam's integration with Microsoft Outlook works (running time 4:41):

Three Silos That Enterprise 2.0 Must Break

"Expertise is emergent" says Harvard professor Andrew McAfee.  By this, he means that the people and information which can help with a particular issue can come from anywhere inside an organization. Greater access to a diverse set of information, analysis and opinions is a driver of the success of prediction markets.

Given these factors, why haven't companies instituted better ways to allow expertise to be emergent? Historically, the tools haven't been up to the job. The nature of most business applications is to focus your attention on executing a specific task. It's efficient, but the idea of making what workers know and do accessible to a wider audience was really never part of the plan.

Traditional work has three silos which limit companies' ability to realize the full value of emergent expertise:

1. Information silos
2. Knowledge silos
3. Connection silos

Addressing these three silos is a key responsbility of Enterprise 2.0 if it is to drive meaningful improvements inside companies. Let's examine each of them.

Information Silos

Information silos are repositories of recorded information that are inaccessible in the regular flow of work. This definition deliberately broadens the meaning of silo beyond being only a closed application with limited user access rights.

Email is an example of an information silo. Only those who receive the email can access information in it. Your computer's local hard drive is another example of an information silo.

But how about something like a wiki or a blog? The information is accessible to all. How is that a silo?

If you think the key characteristic of a silo is that people aren't accessing the information, then any friction which limits people accessing information raises the "silo factor" for an application. With email, it's a structural limitation to access. With open applications, the silo is based on the failure to put the information in-the-flow of daily work. If employees don't consult an application for information they need in their jobs, you have a de facto silo.

Strategies for breaking these silos differ.

• If the silo is based on structural access limitations (e.g. email, local drive), getting key users in the organization to actively change their behavior is an important step. Relevant information that others want needs to migrate to social software
• If the silo is based on an application being out-of-the-flow of daily work, integrating that application and its content with existing systems is a smart strategy. Notifications of relevant content are also useful for share of mind.

The strategies for addressing these silos are actually more complex than laid out above, but those are topics for another day.

Knowledge Silos

Knowledge in this case is the information and perspectives we carry around in our heads. As Telligent's George Dearing tweeted the other day:

client's comment discussing collab strategy -- "it's not about sharing things in SharePoint, it's about sharing our brain"

Our heads are the silos. There are actually two definitions for this, tacit and implicit:

Tacit: The subjective, intangible knowledge we have, but of which we are not aware and cannot articulate.

Implicit: Knowledge that can be articulated, but has not yet.

In the knowledge management movement, historically the effort was on recording the information people carried in their heads. This is an honorable undertaking, and the reirement of the baby boomers is a motivator for this.

But the act of recording information outside a direct tangible need is laborious and incomplete. It's estimated that 80 - 90 percent of organizations' knowledge is tacit or implicit. The effort to record this would take a lot of time and quickly become out of date, as such knowledge is constantly evolving.

A better strategy for breaking the knowledge silos is to expand the opportunities for what's inside people's heads to be applied as situations occur. This is fundamentally different from the historical KM focus. The emphasis is not recording information, but on matching people to others who can help them.

The typical organization is not well-equipped for accessing the knowledge inside people's heads on a scalable, recurring basis. Sure, mass emails would catch attention. But also hits a lot of people who won't have knowledge that can help and will become treated as spam over time.

Increasing the intersections of need and knowledge is the opportunity for Enterprise 2.0 to help organizations.

Connections Silos

The most natural thing for people to do is to turn to those with whom they have existing strong connections when they need help. Approaching total strangers to help answer questions is not typical or welcome behavior.

The challenge this presents is that solving problems becomes overly dependent on the knowledge of those with whom you share strong ties.

 

This isn't to say they won't provide valuable input. But there are two risks with being overly reliant on strong ties:

1. Development over time of a redundant point of view by the group
2. Missing valuable input from someone who could be quite helpful

This is the third silo, call it the Connections Silo.

Enterprise 2.0's mission is to expand the scope of one's ties inside an organization. Connections don't happen overnight, so exposing the activities and knowledge of others gives rise over time to familiarity with different colleagues throughout the organization. And enabling employees to find colleagues who might be able to help lets them do a bit of outreach: the first step in diversifying one's information connections.

The Opportunity

This is a prescriptive post. It doesn't go in-depth into the optimal ways to solve the three different silos, although it does give some of our point of view. But generally, breaking these silos is the assistance that social software vendors must provide to organizations. It is then that expertise can be truly emergent.

Four Enterprise 2.0 Prognostications for 2009 by Industry Leaders

The new year 2009 is underway, and with that we're enjoying the round of prognostications about what lies ahead the next twelve months. Three particular sites caught our eye:

• Susan Scrupski's Hello 2009. Here's lookin' at you, kid.
• Mike Gotta's 2009: Planning Considerations for Enterprise 2.0
• CMS Watch's Tony Byrne and Alan Pelz-Sharpe in 12 Technology Predictions for 2009

There is some commonality in the areas covered. And what's interesting is to see where these folks agree, and where they diverge. Let's take a look at some of their predictions, and we'll add our two cents.

Microsoft SharePoint

In the enterprise software world, no observations are complete without considering Microsoft SharePoint.

Susan Scrupski:

Just deal with it. Microsoft will continue to play in the starring role of the 800-lb gorilla in the corporate corridors of IT power. And, sadly, IT still has a heavy hand in what technology users can liberate their inner social child with. If Microsoft says it has wikis, blogs, and RSS then guess what...? IT will believe them and make a safe choice.

Mike Gotta:

My position for some time has been that the next release will be a tipping point for Microsoft's social computing efforts. Either Microsoft "gets it right" and delivers a forward-looking release with significant improvements that transforms SharePoint into a market-leading social computing platform, or it delivers a release that has only incremental improvements to existing functionality that reflect a backward-looking competitive landscape (circa 2008 as things get locked-down).

Tony Byrne:

The next release of Microsoft SharePoint will cause customers to reassess. Byrne says that he expects Microsoft to release a Beta version of Office 14 in 2009, which may include some updated SharePoint tools. Even though the 2007 edition of SharePoint is still very new to a lot of users, many have complained that they've been unable to fully comprehend certain functions -- and the new release is expected to address those concerns, Byrne says. This fervent hope, he adds, may lead to a re-evaluation of the product among current and prospective users.

One thing I can say from our perspective is that we continue to get a lot of inquiries about how we integrate with SharePoint. We tend to point out the ability to make content from across the enterprise social software apps available inside SharePoint.

The collaboration market is too big for Microsoft not to get right, even if it means iterative releases. While not perfect, SharePoint will continue to draw interest.

Enterprise Social Software Adoption

This is an area that gets better every year, but still needs to be a top-of-mind issue for vendors.

Susan Scrupski:

The opportunity for vendors is to help show the way, gently introducing concepts and not igniting wholesale culture shock/religious wars about how work should be done. The emphasis for 2009 will be the soft side of the 2.0 (r)evolution: PEOPLE vs. technology. Changing hearts and minds, not dazzling displays of tech grooviness.

Mike Gotta:

The need to focus on non-technology factors rather than the underlying tooling was a consistent theme during client visits and telephone inquiries as well as the field research study I conducted on enterprise social networks. Most IT organizations are not charged with time, money and resources to really focus on adoption issues.

The social nature of these apps makes it tough to force adoption, unlike, say, installing an ERP system. We've actually got a set of starters and guidelines for using Connectbeam, specifically for the project champions and the initial users.

This has always been important, and will continue to be so in 2009.

Trialing Social Software

The enterprise social software industry continues to innovate, and new apps and features are introduced regularly, like microblogging start-up Yammer.

Susan Scrupski:

A-list vendors with easy to use, useful technology will find it easier in 2009 to sell into forward-thinking (risk averse) enterprises. There will be budget available to experiment with these technologies as the recession/global crisis will accelerate the “do more with less” mantra.

Mike Gotta:

The trend now is to downplay reliance on point solutions (e.g., blog vendor, wiki vendor) and think more along the lines of a "social platform" (e.g., a consistent platform that offers blog, wiki, and a social network site). This makes the decision more complicated in some ways but the investment becomes less volatile and the investment has the potential to have more staying power in the market.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe:

Social computing will continue to make inroads, while smaller niche players will sneak in with new offerings. "So much hype is cleared away and the reality is starting to come through," Pelz-Sharpe says. The report predicts that standardization is still a ways off -- probably 2010 at the earliest. Movement toward social computing will build, but it remains a young market.

There's some truth in what Mike says, as vendors add more functionality there will be a natural uptake in adoption of suites with higher functionality. But Enterprise 2.0 is nowhere near a maturity level for this to happen on a meaningful basis yet. The innovation will continue from vendors.

Also, once a point solution has become ingrained in the processes of a company, it becomes hard to dislodge.

Social Software Analytics

The thrust of Enterprise 2.0 has been on employee collaboration. But as the originator of the term "Web 2.0" Tim O'Reilly notes in Why Dell.com (was) More Enterprise 2.0 Than Dell IdeaStorm, 2.0 is about more than explicit collaboration, contribution and "the wisdom of crowds".

Mike Gotta:

While this area would include social network analysis (SNA), it would also include all types of social analytics (rankings, ratings, tags/bookmarks, etc). Without social analytics, it's difficult to know how to measure what's going on within social systems and how to value those interactions and activities. I hope 2009 will be the kick-off of this topic becoming more of a priority.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe:

Enterprise search now involves personalization, stickiness, and analytics. Pelz-Sharpe expands upon this notion: "At the end of 2008, buyers were starting to understand the limitations of search engines. Search is a complex area, and buying needs to reflect that." There will be new emphasis placed on application search -- and the idea that "you are what you search for" will become central to enterprise search.

Analytics remains a fairly untapped area inside enterprise social software. Yet the upside for this informaiton is tremendous. Better handle on where the focus of the line employees is, improved understanding of internal employee connectors, netter handle on the enterprise social graph, and toher uses.

Expect more innovation around this in 2009.

And So We're Off to the Races

Fun to see what experienced, smart folks are thinking about the social software market. Now it's time to go make it happen this year.

Photo credit: iMorpheus on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/sfj/1313709/

Connectbeam as Social CRM? Named 2009 Company to Watch on ZDNet

It's always a pleasure to find your company named a "Company to Watch". This week, Connectbeam received that honor in a post by Paul Greenberg on ZDNet, CRM 2009 - Companies to Watch For - Part Tree, er...Three.

Paul Greenberg is the president of The 56 Group, LLC, author of the best selling book "CRM at the Speed of Light: Essential Customer Strategies for the 21st Century" and was one of nine people named by CRM Magazine as 2008 Influential Leaders.

Now here at Connectbeam, we're energized by the possibilities that sharing employee generated content and activity. Share what you find out on the web, share the content you create in different social software apps. And in doing so, you're creating a much richer picture about yourself inside the company.

But CRM? When a guy like Paul Greenberg mentions you in that context, you take note. Here is how Paul describes Social CRM:

"The interest in extending CRM applications and strategies into communities and social media will increase in the large enterprises as they begin to realize that to retain their customers they need to engage them in more valuable activities that will lead to continued purchases."

And it makes sense when you think of it that way. Let me give a couple examples of how this works.

External Market Intelligence

Say you're a large company monitoring your brand, compatitors and market out on Twitter. You either periodically run a search on search.twitter.com to see the latest, or you have a persistent search going via RSS. You find people tweeting good and bad things about you and your competitors. Now the challenge is this: how do I effectively bring the tweet inside the enterprise, share it with others and make it findable?

With Connectbeam, you bookmark it into your own, behind-the-firewall database. You can tag the tweet with labels that give it context, such as a product name, 'feedback', 'positive' or 'negative' and a number of different ways. Whatever makes sense to you and your organization. And you can put it in a dedicated Group, such as Customer Feedback.

When someone runs a search for customer feedback, your saved market intelligence shows up. And if you have an app that accepts RSS, you can pipe these saved tweets into it.

In this way, you've got an easy, effective way to stay on top of market chatter. For additional thoughts on this subject, see Social media redefines traditional business intelligence strategies.

Internal Experts

The other use is when others in your organization are writing about a product, customer, competitor or market trends. They may be doing this on a wiki, blog or forum. Currently, there's no good way to ensure that these great contributions are seen by the wider organization. Nor is it easy to identify who knows something about a customer.

By aggregating the content created by employees across the organization in these social software applications, you have the basis for expanding the reach of this information anywhere someone is looking for it. You also now know who has experience with these different areas.

This occurs because aggregated employee generated content can be added to pretty much any search engine, be it internal or external. Run a search on the intranet or CRM app? You won't miss the latest content created by employees. And you'll get a list of related users.

Social CRM - Let's Check This Out for 2009

Thank you Paul Greenberg for really cracking open this topic. It's one that many companies are thinking about and is only growing in importance. We look forward to seeing how companies look at this in the coming year.

Micro Economies of Attention

The term "attention economy" is one that receives lots of...attention. It is the natural progression of the information economy. The production of information outstrips the growth in users, meaning that attention is a scarce resource. Hence the notion of "economy".

Hewlett Packard's Social Computing Lab released a paper that evaluates the motivations of employees to participate in organizations' social software applications. Revealing the long tail in office conversations studies the interactions, social graph and participation motivations in H-P's WaterCooler social media platform.

Included in that report is the term "micro economies of attention". The context is that since individuals control their own attention and what content they produce, each employee has a supply-demand curve for user generated content. The importance of understanding this dynamic is that adoption by employees is key to the success of Enterprise 2.0. And an important part of the adoption is understanding motivations for participation.

From the H-P research:

When employees perceived increased visibility of their contributions, they were more likely to actively participate and to report positive experiences.

This idea of "micro economies of attention" got us thinking here. In a recent presentation, we discussed three ways to increase information's reach. How would those use cases look plotted as supply-demand curves?

Supply and Demand for User Generated Content

If you've ever been a student of economics, the graph below will look familiar:

 

The graph reinterprets the scarce resource as user generated content (UGC), with attention being the "price" associated to that content. Here's a quick explanation of the curves:

• Supply = the more attention an employee receives, the greater the participation

• Demand = the more attention required to find and take in content, the less content will be consumed

"Attention" is this context essentially means share-of-mind. An employee has taken the time to read and consider content, and may reach out to its creator and use the content for her work. Closely related to attention is time, as there are only so many hours in the workday where an employee can read content.

A single demand curve masks the differences in use cases for consuming information. Here are the three ways in which employees consume information:

1. Search = purpose-driven activity, to solve an immediate need
2. Serendipity = happen across information that is relevant
3. Notifications = purpose-driven activity in that notification related to something of interest to the user, but lack the immediacy of solving a problem

Let's examine the different content demand curves for these use cases.

Demand Curves for Three Content Consumption Use Cases

The charts below segment employees' content demand curves by use cases:

 

Search is an activity related to a need of personal importance to an employee. She has to find information to help her move forward on some work. She will invest a meaningful amount of her scarce attention on content she finds when she's running a search.

Serendipity has a different curve than Search. If it requires too much attention to view random information, expect very little content to be consumed this way. Employees don't have time to go through a stream of content with the hope that they'll find something useful. The less obtrusive and time-intensive you make Serendipity, the higher the amount of content that will consumed. As the curve's shape indicates, the amount of attention required has to be fairly low before an employee takes in meaningful content. Serendipity really works best with quick views of information, in-the-flow of an employee's daily work.

Notifications sit between Search and Serendipity. Because an employee has actually opted into these, they will receive more attention. Whether RSS or email, Notifications can command more attention from employees than Serendipity. But there are limits. Providing effective filters for notifications ensures that there isn't a deluge of content for a given topic of interest.

Quick Example of the Effect of the Three Demand Curves

The chart below plots the three content demand curves by use case:

Following the blue dotted line...

• For a given quantity of user generated content, employees are willing to invest more attention on Search than on Notifications or Serendipity
• For a given "price" of attention, employees will consume more content via Search than for Notifications or Serendipity

It's About Employee Adoption

Understanding these curves is an important element of increasing the visibility of employee contributions. In the micro economies of attention, different content demand use cases command different levels of attention.

All three information reach use cases are important, for different reasons. A smart social software implementation program will leverage all three.