Enterprise Social Computing is all the rage in the world of intranets and portals. The rise of blogs and wikis on the Web has prompted governments across the globe to put these and other social tools to use behind the firewall.
Why?
• To harness, capture, and learn from the knowledge of its employees…especially those who will be retiring soon.
• Improve policy outcomes
• More efficient use of government information
• Streamline internal operations
• Attract top talent
• Greater transparency through information dissemination
Imagine if social networking tools like blogs and wikis could be used as a means of interaction by the federal government bodies. Governments could interact to a far greater extent with citizens as well as with internal and external resources.
Shannon Ryan, President and CEO of non-linear creations, who has cemented his position in an international network of internet authorities, and is a regular and reliable source of information for the media about web strategy, execution and metrics, will demystify the concepts surrounding social computing.
The presentation will:
1. Give the broader market context for the rise and popularity of social computing.
2. Show you how you can benefit from social computing in your space.
3. Give a real “how to start” road map for building the framework to benefit from social networking.
4. Provide some lessons learned already from clients in this new fast moving space.
9. Objectives
1. Provide a clear understanding of the Web 2.0 technologies /Social
Computing landscape and give everyone a baseline to move forward
2. Identify and discuss some of the key challenges faced by the public
service
3. Explore a few public sector sites that showcase the social computing
tenants of: Transparency, Participatory, Collaborative are see how they
are changing the dynamics and service delivery models within the Public
Sector
4. BREAK
5. Understand how trends outside the firewall influence your own social
computing initiative within your intranet – possibly with even greater impact
6. How to answer these important questions
Why bother with ESC in the first place?
1.
Figuring out the ROI
2.
What to expect?
3.
7. Show you a demo of the NLC quick start for ESC on MOSS
8. Give you a roadmap on how to start.
10. Full disclosure
» I am bona-fide cynic in this area.
» I’ve been through the internet wars … hell, I remember the
browser wars, and when the “fish cam” was the coolest thing on
the web
» Web 2.0 (or whatever we agree to call it) is new, untested and
not fully documented … move carefully
» I also did an undergrad in Soviet and Eastern European Studies
… so I am big on understanding the theory first, before the code.
• That being said…
» There are some REALLY interesting, valuable and potentially
revolutionary trends happening that have the potential to add
significant value to your enterprise.
11. NLC: Executive Summary Technology Partnerships
» Founded in 1995 reference-able clients in
private and public sector
» Offices in Ottawa and
Toronto with global client » Proven expertise in
base implementation of leading
software
» 50+ full-time specialists
packages, systems
» Privately held
integration, and custom
company, profitable &
development
stable
» Solutions Groups:
» Our goal: leverage the
1. ECM
potential of internet
technologies to deliver 2. Enterprise Search
business value 3. Microsoft Stack
» Result: extensive list of 4. Web Marketing
14. Setting the playing field
» Are part of a social network?
» Book club, chamber of commerce, hockey team, etc.
» Are part of an online social network?
» FaceBook, Linked-In, MySpace, etc.
» Have contributed to or edited a Wikipedia page?
» Author a blog(s)?
» Use a feed aggregator?
» Have created a YouTube video?
» Watch YouTube videos?
» Use social bookmarking tools?
Tweeters or Yammer’s?
»
15. Let’s understand the
terminology
» RSS
» UGC
» Mashups
» Wiki The elusive Web 2.0
» Blog
» Social Bookmarking
» Tagging
» Twitter
17. Key Challenges – the trifecta
1. Aging Population
» Rising healthcare costs
» Smaller working age population
» Knowledge loss
» Increasing claims on public pension
2. Increasing Citizen Expectations
» Service delivery guarantees
» Programs and services tailored to their needs
» What I want, when I want it.
3. Emerging Mega Issues
» Environment
» Health
» Trade
» Terror
» Poverty
» Etc.
18. So how the heck will social computing
help with all this?
Uh… well, it can’t. Not all of it. That’s why we still need smart people in government.
19. But it certainly can help “grease
the wheels”…
» Improve policy outcomes
» More efficient use of government information
» Streamlined internal operations
» Save costs
» Attract top talent
20. The real place it should help
»smarter people
» Faster cycle time, improved problem-solving, more time on mission,
higher morale, etc.…
38. Why bother with ESC?
1. You have no choice, the trend is irreversible
(see next few slides)
2. Your current intranet is dead … or dying
3. It has REAL, but new, business benefits
4. Competitive advantage
39. What is the ROI?
1. Discover and connect with Experts
2. Share and unlock tacit knowledge
3. Attract (and more importantly, keep) talent
4. Reduces Storage Requirements
5. Increases Availability of People
6. Increases Organizational Productivity
7. Organizational transparency
40. The real ROI?
»smarter people
» Faster cycle time, improved problem-solving, more time on mission,
higher morale, etc.…
41. Measuring ROI
» How do you measure the impact of any
investment in the organization: by its outcomes.
» PROBLEM: ROI and accounting are
inappropriate measures of performance.
» ROI is a relic of the industrial era, when assets
were tangible and repetition was the path to
success in the factory. Today, the intangible
assets you cannot see are far more valuable
than those you can.quot;
42. Trend Number 1
Social Networks will redefine the way we
look at work inside the organization
43. What makes social networks so
special?
» Social networks are not new…
“It may have been possible in the past, for things to have
happened in isolation, but from this time forth, the world
must be seen as an organic whole, everything affects
everything.”
Polibius
born c. 200, died c. 118 BC
Megalopolis, Greece,
44. What are social networks?
» A social network is a social structure
made of nodes that are tied by one or
more specific types of
interdependency.
» Or in plain English:
» Social networks are essentially about
who know who, and who knows what.
45. Why are social networks important
to business?
» If you scratch the surface of any business, you’ll
find two very different organizations.
» The formal organization - the one that can
be represented by the boxes of an org chart.
» The informal organization - the one shaped
by the day-to-day interactions of employees –
conversations in hallways or in airport
lounges, exchanges of messages through
email and voicemail, conversations over a
squash game.
46. Networks in your Organization
McKinsey Quarterly
Harnessing the power of informal employee networks, 2007
Lowell L. Bryan, Eric Matson, and Leigh M. Weiss
47. Why should that matter to us?
» Unfortunately, most IT systems are geared to the needs
of the formal organization and ignore the informal one.
» In the “formal organization” software like
SAP, PeopleSoft are “enterprise applications” that are
designed through elaborate, top-down processes.
» The “informal organization” is served, instead, by
simpler, personal software … quot;comfort appsquot; like e-
mail, PowerPoint, Excel, and the watercooler.
49. Most of the really useful
information that flows through
a organization never gets
captured or broadly shared by
employees.
50. The organization loses the ability to
truly harness, capture, and learn from
the knowledge its employees create
51. social networks – they’re for
kids
» In stark contrast to IT systems, social networks shape
themselves to their users rather than forcing the users
to adapt to preset specifications.
» They do what the big enterprise systems so often fail to
do: they make the codification and sharing of
valuable information easy.
» And this MAKES GOOD BUSINESS SENSE!
53. Codified Knowledge vs Context
» “using codified knowledge in the form of
electronic documents saved time during
the task, but did not improve work
quality or signal competence to
clients, whereas in contrast, sharing
personal advice improved work quality
and signaled competence, but did not
save time,”
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1841
54.
55. Trend number 2
The applications you thought to be “consumer
services only” are quickly coming inside the
enterprise.
56.
57.
58. “No company will build or sustain a competitive
advantage unless it capitalizes on the combined
power of individualized workers and social
dynamics.”
Gartner Group also predicts that wikis will become
mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of
companies by 2009.
59. Trend number 3
The rise of user generated content is
upon us like a tidal wave – and its
coming to your intranet
60. User generated content
» Be afraid
» Trust me when I say this – UGC is coming, and if
the public web is any indication, there is going to
be a tonne of it, and quickly.
» How much and how quickly…
61. How embarrassing, Dad’s on YouTube
» Four of the top 8 most trafficked sites on the
Internet are social media sites that didn’t exist a
few years ago:
» YouTube.com (more than 100 million videos
are served EVERY day … or for the geeks in
the room 550 GB per minute!)
» MySpace
» FaceBook (bigger than the population of
Russia or Japan)
» Wikipedia
62.
63.
64.
65. Trend number 4
The age and demographic profile of
your users / customers / employees has
shifted
66. Damn … we are getting older
» According to the OPM (Office of Personnel
Management) within the US federal government
300,000 or 16% of the total federal workforce will
retire by 2010
» 22% of the American workforce holding
executive, administrative, and managerial positions
are set to retire THIS YEAR
» At a local level, the city of Tucson, Az. is just one
example of how the retirement wave is breaking over
local government
» At the end of June 2008, the city had 7 department director
vacancies including: police chief, fire chief, finance director, water
utility director and neighbourhood services director all due to
retirements.
67. Lets take email for example
» Legitimate e-mail will drop to 8% this year, down
from 12% last year, according to Redwood City
(Calif.) e-mail filtering outfit Postini Inc.
» Why?
» Perhaps the biggest death knell for e-mail is the
anthropological shift occurring among
tomorrow's captains of industry, the text-
messaging Netgens (16-to-24-year-olds), for
whom e-mail is so quot;ovr,quot; quot;dn,quot; quot;w/e
(over, done, whatever).“
73. Why the intranet?
» The intranet is (should be) “the social hub” of your
enterprise
» Intranets have not lived up to expectations:
» Workers not using intranet to do work
» They are not adding any value to the corporation
» They are getting bigger and more expensive to run
» Adoption rates going down
» Ineffective for knowledge management
» More information is being created every day
74. Intranets… Expectations Gap
Better communications 90%
Improved processes 80%
Knowledge sharing best practices 72%
Improved efficiency 65%
Reduction in paperwork 65%
Avoid duplication of effort 63%
Real time information sharing 55%
Cost savings 55%
Melcrum intranet survey 2001
75. Intranet 2.0 roadmap
1. Undertake ONA as a roadmap to understanding your social
network
2. Build the framework for content contribution and participation
» Individual “my space” pages for EVERYONE
» Wiki’s for iteratively refined content
» Blogs for sequentially discussed content
3. Begin capturing and categorizing the information
» Social Bookmarking and tagging technology
4. Aim for more ad hoc “conversations”
» Team sites
5. Implement and tune your search strategy
6. Adoption, adoption, adoption
7. Bring the inside, outside, when appropriate
77. Organizational Network Analysis
» ONA is the logical first step in understanding
how work actually gets done in you corporation
» Identify key knowledge vulnerabilities in a
network by virtue of both what a person knows
and how their role (or departure) will affect a
network
» Gives you a target list of who people in your
organization trust and interact – use this!
» Provides a tangible metric to gauge the success
and health of the information flow within your
company.
81. Build the framework for
Enterprise 2.0 content creation
» My Site / Personal pages
» Key in expanding the network and the interactions
» Wiki Examples:
» A CV Wiki allows all employees to maintain their profile
» A project documentation Wiki allows real-time updates to technical docs
» A 'How-To' guide that documents the steps of how to handle a public
disclosure request. On this same page, they attach the actual
template, giving employees everything they need in one place.
» Fast, simple, centralized posting of news, announcements by anyone
» Blog Examples:
» Highlight lessons learned during a project
» Employee “profile” blogs
» Knowledge leadership
82. Capture and Categorize
» Internal content:
» Tagging of content – taxonomies,
folksonomies
» External content:
» Social bookmarking and tagging
» Collective intelligence
» In-bound RSS feeds facilitate aggregation
83.
84. Ad Hoc Sites / Communities
» We really like
SharePoint as a
technology to users to
create a new, self-
contained sites
» These grow
spontaneously around:
» Projects
» Committees
» Social Activities
» May be entirely rogue –
not known to intranet
» Security and
permissions vary
85. Critical Role of Search
» Intranet 2.0, if successful, promises explosion of
content
» No formal information architecture – it will grow
organically, from every angle and corner of your
organization
» Careful selection of enterprise search solution is
critical. Look for:
Ability to “trim” results by permissions
»
» Capability to search structure and unstructured data
» Capacity to create collections
» Search analytics
» Tuning facilities for promoting specific content
» Again we like MSFT here for a number of integrated and FAST
reasons
86. Adoption, adoption, adoption
» What happens if you throw a party and no one
comes?
» The “hardest” part of the equation will be the startup
and adoption – not the technology
» There is a reason all the of the Intranet 2.0 is only as
good as content contributors
» Keys to success:
» Use ONA as your roadmap
» Focus on absolutely simple ease of use
» Identify likely early adopters and allocate time for their use of
intranet
» Start small and quietly – have executive promote once it has
content/is rolling
87. Avoiding Social Network Fade
» Managing profiles isn’t itself a reason for an app
to exist
» Give people a reason to come back
» Keep it interesting
» Lifestream
» Comment wall
» Status
» Notifications
90. A few more tips
» Assess your organization’s cultural readiness.
» Policies are necessary. What can and can’t be
done needs to be defined and anonymous
postings should not be allowed (everyone needs
to own their contribution).
» Focus on the people, not the technology.
» Everything is about conversation and dialogue.
» Everyone gets to have their say. Prepare to
relinquish control and share the process.
91. Possible Next Step
» NLC 3 day readiness
assessment
» NLC Social Networking in
the Enterprise Whitepaper
coming in early March
» More info:
Shannon Ryan
shannon@nonlinear.ca
http://www.nonlinear.ca
92.
93. Before all this web
stuff, how did
organizations and
corporations
function, learn, engage, m
ake money, expand, etc.?
94.
95. A few more tips
» Assess your organization’s cultural readiness.
» Policies are necessary. What can and can’t be
done needs to be defined and anonymous
postings should not be allowed (everyone needs
to own their contribution).
» Focus on the people, not the technology.
» Everything is about conversation and dialogue.
» Everyone gets to have their say. Prepare to
relinquish control and share the process.
100. Possible Next Step
» NLC 3 day readiness
assessment
» NLC Social Networking in
the Enterprise Whitepaper
coming in early March
» More info:
Shannon Ryan
shannon@nonlinear.ca
http://www.nonlinear.ca