Communication is omnipresent in every business. While a lot is said and done about Communication Skills improvement, the area of improving Communication Process or the Communication Systems within an organization remains vastly ignored. There are sustainable benefits that can be achieved by improving the business communication system. Some organizations have already realized impressive benefits such as 100%+ improvement in operational efficiency and 50%+ improvement in sales. We cover the latest happenings, how a company can achieve these benefits and the common mistakes that need to be avoided.

1. How to Benefit from Improving
Business Communication
Ashish Belagali
© Acism Software Private Limited, Pune, India
Twitter: @Ashish1IT @kommbox

2. Introduction: Ashish Belagali
IIT Bombay: B. Tech 1992, M. Tech. 1995
Experience in software making, management, leadership
Heads Acism Software Pvt Ltd
Leads POCC. Ex-BNI, TiE
Interests: Music, Nature, Spiritualism

3. Agenda
1. Motivation
2. Business Communication Roundup
3. How to choose a tool
4. How to implement
5. Antipatterns

4. Motivation

5. Communication is Omnipresent
Consequently, an improvement in communication may affect
many areas of your organization positively.

6. Perspective
Communication Improvement
Communication Skill
Improvement
- Well discussed
- Many consultants available
Communication Process
Improvement
- Evolving area
- Not well understood
- High potential
- Sustainable impact

7. Communication System Upgrade
?
- Enriching – opening new possibilities
- Impacting our lifestyle
- Competitive advantage

8. Email is Badly Broken
Many organizations have people who receive 100+ emails
everyday. How much productivity can we expect from them?
- Context switching time
- Fatigue
- Sheer amount of time wasted
Theirry Breton – Atos CEO (2011)
――[E]mail is no longer the appropriate tool. It is time to think
differently.‖
Peter Allan (2011)
―Mr. Breton pointed to a recent study by the business
watchdog ORSE, which reads: Reading useless
messages is terrible for concentration, as it takes 64
seconds to get back on the ball after doing so. Poorly
controlled, the e-mail can become a devastating tool.‖
―‗The deluge of information will be one of the most
important problems a company will have to face,‘ said Mr
Breton.‖
⚓

9. Communications are Always HOT
Customer
Relationship
Management
Knowledge
Management
Project Management
thru Collaboration
Document
Sharing
Enterprise 2.0 /
Enterprise social
Enterprise
collaboration
Task
Management

10. Expert Advice
Experts differ widely
Example: Enterprise 2.0 Market Size estimations
- Gartner: 945 million (2011) → 2 billion (2016)
- Cisco CTO: 34 billion
- IDC: 1.6 billion
- Forrestor: 4.6 billion
- MIT sloan grad: 110 billion
⚓⚓⚓
..and often go wrong
Deloitte (June 2013): Over 90% of Fortune 500
companies will have a partially or fully implemented
ESN by the end of 2013
McKinsey (Nov 2013): Rate of adoption in industry
is far lower.
⚓⚓

11. Why?
Jacob Margan and Wendy Troupe explain:
―If you asked ten executives to define Enterprise 2.0 or
Social Media or Social Business, you‘d probably get ten
different answers,‖
―Right now, we‘re in the early stages of this category and
people are just not sure about the potential. ―
―Social Media and Enterprise 2.0 are still very new and
part of an ill-defined space — a space whose internal
boundaries remain fuzzy. ―
⚓

12. Grand Successes
For long proponents put forth great arguments in favor of using
ESNs. However the benefits were perceived mostly as intangible.
However, Andrew Borg published research findings of 629
companies (Nov 2013) which show impressive numbers. ⚓

13. Grand Failures
CIOs voted Enterprise Social Tools as
the most overhyped technology
of the year 2013.
Chris Heuer (Oct 2013)
⚓
⚓
―it is time to proclaim that Social Business is dead, or
at least dying before our very eyes.‖
―The words Social Business have not struck the right
chord with leaders. The movement has failed to earn
their faith, trust and budgets in a significant way.‖
Gartner (Jan 2014)
⚓
80 Percent of Social Business Efforts Will Not Achieve
Intended Benefits Through 2015

14. Why the Diversity?
Diversity
Some get it
- Understand the space
- Map tools to their needs
- Manage the implementation
Some don't
- 6 Antipatterns
Bertrand Duperrin (Jan 2014)
―Focus on philosophy, not technology.‖
⚓

15. Motivation of This Talk
?
Email is broken. The challenges are real.
Great benefits await you – if you manage to dodge failures.
It is not hard to get it. - No rocket science
We need a different mindset to deal with it.
Let's cut through the hype and use common-sense
– that's what successful companies did.

16. Business
Communication
Roundup

17. Business Communication
External world
With
external
world
Within
branches
HO
Internal to a
branch
Branch1
Branch2

18. Tools to Fix Email
What They Are
Attempt to fix email system where it appears to be broken.
– Following a path of least resistance
Sometimes, it's about imposing some rules.
Sometimes, it's about adding intelligence.
Tools
Gmail
Shortmail
Limiting number of recipients
Group email ids
MS Xchange, Mithi, Zimbra

19. Document Sharing Systems
What They Are
Ability to share documents with others.
Not all documents have the same access rights.
Documents may be versioned.
Tools
Dropbox
Google drive

20. Task Management Systems
What They Are
Focus on improving the accountability through giving
better task management infrastructure and views
Central unit is a task, tracked by status, due date etc.
Tools
Asana
Trello

21. Project Management thru
Collaboration
What They Are
Project Management systems which help you track project
progress through collaboration – as opposed to traditional
hard approach.
Central unit is a project -- within which tasks, discussions
and schedules are tracked.
Tools
Basecamp
ActiveCollab

22. Knowledge Management Systems
What They Are
Create a long term knowledge asset for the organization.
Let employees create knowledge content and classify it
based on taxonomies. Emphasis on knowledge curation.
A continuous challenge is converting tacit knowledge into
explicit knowledge and encouraging people to share it.
Tools
Varied

23. Customer Relationship Management
What They Are
Catering to communication needs of marketing / sales.
Maintain a database of leads / opportunities at various
stages, and communicate with them.
Tools
Salesforce
Bitrix
Zoho CRM

24. Customer Support
What They Are
Ticketing systems, which allow customers to raise tickets
and internal team to access, work on and close those
tickets.
Each ticket has a unique id, and status updates are made
visible to the customers through email / portal.
Tools
osTicket
Zendesk

25. Enterprise Collaboration
What They Are
Let teams of employees collaboratively create
documentation that is of use to the organization.
Employees are given ro / rw accesses to different parts of
the collaborative documentation.
Tools
Confluence
Mediawiki
Google docs

26. Enterprise Social Networks
What They Are
Attempt to replicate the success of social media within an
enterprise.
―Facebook for enterprise‖ approach
Tools
Yammer
Jive

27. Intranets
What They Are
Internal portal for employees enabling HR and
communication.
Typical communications channels are email, chat, PM.
Integration with other enterprise tools.
Tools
Typically custom-built

28. Comprehensive Tools
What They Are
A single tool usable across different purposes.
Possible either through extensive configurability or inbuilt
flexibility.
The only contenders to take away the catch-all aspect of
email.
Tools
Sharepoint
Kommbox

29. How to Choose a Tool

30. Understanding Your Needs
Communication is an important element
of the organizational culture.
=> The communication
styles, philosophies, expectations vary
highly
- from geography to geography
- from sector to sector
- from organization to organization
Do you understand what will work / what
will not work in your organization?

31. Small is Beautiful
Choose a tool that is
- Not hard to configure
- Can assist in your immediate use scenario
- Can grow with you
Do not fall into the feature trap.
Understand the philosophy of the tool.

32. How Many Tools?
Using a single comprehensive tool has
benefits vs using multiple special purpose
tools
- Cost concerns
- Integration concerns
- Data fragmentation concerns
- User confusion concerns
Counterview

33. How to Implement

34. Create Consensus
Organization-wide consensus of how
the tool will be used.
Create champions in different
departments.

35. Top Management Support
Active Support from Top
Management is crucial
You cannot leave it entirely to the
employees. There needs to be a clear
mandate about using the tool.

36. Adopt Quickly
Experiment on pilot
scale (optional)
Adopt quickly in the
organization
A low-scale implementation has larger chances of failure.

37. Monitor & Change
Champions to
monitor the use and
benefits
Change the
direction as
warranted
Easy to make changes early enough.

38. Antipatterns

39. The “Feature-heaviness” Antipattern
The CEO wants the organization to be cutting edge (sometimes
due to the hype surrounding ESN) and a small group gets the
responsibilty to choose the enterprise collaboration tool. The
group creates a long list of features (wiki for
something, discussion forum for something else, task
management for yet another thing etc), and recommends a tool
which is the most feature rich. The company ends up spending
high amount of money in the product and expensive consultancy
that is needed to configure the product.
Further, the organization finds it tough to get its employees use
the tool because of its complexity (see the Confusion antipattern), and the implementation fails. Bertrard Duperrin warns
organization against taking such feature-centric approach

40. The “Confusion” Antipattern
The product features create a confusion in the minds of end
users. For example, when a user wants to add a piece of
knowledge, she gets confused whether she should create a
discussion in the discussion forum or create a wiki page. In the
absence of clear guidelines, the users would use their own
discretion which will eventually lead to the ―conflict‖ antipattern.
The confusion would create a heterogeneous use of the tool and
ultimately the exercise becomes fruitless.

41. The “Conflict” Antipattern
CEO asks the employees to use a tool and the employees start
using it. Many people from different departments try to figure out
the tool and make the best use of it for themselves and their
departments. When these efforts are not coordinated, expectation
mismatch between the departments emerges after a while. If not
corrected in time, this results in fragmentation in the way it is used
and ultimately the whole purpose of using a common platform is
lost.

42. The “Disinterest” Antipattern
The CEO asks a team to evaluate a product. Unless there is a
committed product champion whose KRA aligns with the product
use, the product remains unused. The people say they want to
evaluate it, but they never find time to do so. Without a
commitment from anyone and zero push from top
management, the steam runs out.
Many times it happens because nobody wants to take the
initiative. Everyone wants someone else to start, or maybe that
the tool would bring about some magical improvements on its
own. It doesn‘t, and the implementation dies out.

43. The “Overuse” Antipattern
With a zeal, a collaboration tool gets adopted. Everyone puts in a
lot of updates and there is a lot of interaction. People are happy
about the successful implementation and some examples of
collaboration happening over the platform are seen as success
signs. The conversations on the platform start slipping into a more
casual mode, and signal-to-noise ratio starts going down. A
realization slowly dawns that people are spending way too much
time with the collaboration tool and they get less time for work. By
this time, the tool is so much embedded into organization‘s work
patterns that it could be too late to return.

44. The “Misfit” Antipattern
Some times, the failure is attributed to a misfit between the
organizational culture and the tool. Many experts profess that the
―social‖ effect needs a near flat structure in an organization, and
no topic should be a taboo. Many organizations find it difficult or
impractical to make these changes. Many times, the social
principles seem to contrast with something that is deeply
ingrained into the organizational culture.
When misfit occurs, the quality of discussions / updates that
happen over the ESN is perceived as low, and they seem to help
no one. For some time, companies push the implementation with
the hope that something may come out. But eventually, in
absence of any good benefits, the implementation dies. The two
sides (one promoting change in company culture and the other
opposing it) keep debating endlessly.

45. Questions?
Happy
Communicating!
Ashish Belagali
Email: ab@kommbox.com
Twitter: @Ashish1IT @kommbox
LinkedIn: http://in.linkedin.com/in/belagali/