Carol Rozwell

I attended Lotusphere 2012 this week. Actually, I attended LotusConnect, the event focused on letting customers tell their stories about how IBM’s products service the business. The case studies from notable organizations such as TD Bank, Children’s Hospital and Caterpillar were compelling. Some implementations were further along than others, but all of the speakers spoke enthusiastically about the promise of social that ignited their projects and the subsequent benefits they are receiving.

Here are a few of my observations from the case studies:

• Executive sponsorship is still a CSF. This is not news to anyone who’s ever been involved in any tech deployment that changed how people do their work (and one could argue that if the technology does not create or enable process improvement, then why are you bothering with it?). Social is bound to change who people interact with  to get their work done, so it’s essential to have a committed executive sponsor involved early on – one who has the clout to remove the organizational barriers that hamper changing calcified work practices. With social initiatives, a team of sponsors is even better. A team should be able to work process change issues in parallel instead of serially.
• Anyone can originate a social project – IT, LoB leader, team leader, project leader or senior exec. It doesn’t really matter who gets the inspiration and sets off to figure how how social tools can help people perform their work differently. What matters is having the desire to fix some collaborative work practice that people know could be done another way that is better than they are doing it today. Any person in any part of the organization can have that spark. They do, however, need to have the ability to convince others of the merit of their idea.
• Some faith is still required. As one speaker commented, “believe in the value, not the problem.” More people are familiar with social media paradigms than a year ago, or two years ago. But some aspects of social are still unfamiliar to many workers. And that smelly red herring about age being an adoption factor still persists. The speakers reinforced the point that if the “new” thing was better than the “old” thing, adoption would follow. I appreciated the distinction one speaker mentioned about the drive to deploy vs the drive to gain adoption of a new social software tool. This is not just an issue of semantics. The critical measureof success is not how many employees have “it” but how many employees use it. So if there is clarity on the positive work outcome to be achieved with social tools, then give it a go, see what happens and advertise the results.

There is much more to be said about the opportunities, as well as the risks of social media, but I’ll have to save those comments for another post. Or you could plan to come see my talk at the Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit in March. I will be presenting a new piece of research titled “Social Media Risk: It’s Not What You Think It Is.” I hope to see or hear from you then.

Also, if you would like a more detailed look at Lotusphere, check out Bill Ives’ blogs.

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Category: Change management Collaboration Knowledge management Social media Social networks community social software     Tags: Collaboration, Collaboration dynamics, Organizational liquidity, risk, Social media, Social networks, social software

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This time of year, I like to review what people think is in store for us in the coming twelve months. I’ve read through lots of material, so I thought I would summarize a few points about what I hope will change in 2012 as well as a few trends I expect will play out.

First, what I hope evolves from 2011 missteps into greater insight:

• During 2011, I talked with too many social media leaders who were still focused on the ‘media’ and not the ‘social.’ We are in the midst of a significant business disruption, but all too often the discussion centered on ‘should I have a facebook page or not?’ (You may want to see my blog on the top ten signals that indicate your management doesn’t get social media). Yes, this is still an issue. I did a workshop with a client before the holidays. It started out with the Business Gets Social scenario presentation in which Gartner clearly recommends that the choice of technology is the last of the eight building blocks social media leaders need to plan for. So when it came to the discussion of ‘what should we do for social?’ the workshop participants started arguing about whether their social strategy should be built using product A or product B. Hopefully this year the emphasis will be on the necessary behavior change to espouse social and humanize the enterprise.
• Last year, social was still just an add-on to existing business processes, not an integrated, organized effort. Gartner recommends that social media leaders explore how they can augment existing business processes with social. The critical question in my mind is how to use ‘1000 eyes’ (See the blog post). But too many social media initiatives are disconnected from other enterprise activities. Another real-life example ripped from the headlines (or rather my own experience): I got a tweet from a vendor asking if I was going to join their webinar. This is a vendor I’ve worked with for years, one who regularly emails me stuff, so someone in marketing knows I am on their distribution list. When I declined the invite to the webinar, the tweeter asked me to send them my email so they could send me the slides post-event. Ah, well. Hopefully, we will make some progress in this regard, too.

Here are a few social media trends for 2012 to ponder as you develop your plans:

• Emergence of what Gartner calls the nexus for four forces: The convergence of cloud, social, mobile and information into a unified set of forces shaping almost every IT-related decision. They key is that social does not live alone. (Gartner clients may want to read the report Predicts 2012: Four Forces Combine to Transform the IT Landscape)
• Increasing customer expectation for engagement via social channels. Here is the prediction from Jeff Mann and me: By 2014, refusing to communicate with customers via social channels will be as harmful as ignoring emails or phone calls is today. Let me know if you want the entire predicts report and I can send it to you.
• Increased interest in social analytics. This includes not only the collection of social intelligence information but also the organization competency to use the intelligence for more informed decision making. Yes, we’ve been talking about data-driven decision making for years, but now its feasible and there is additional insight to be gleaned from social network interactions.

The cool thing about a new year is that it gives us the chance to start over. I hope you are doing that with a joyful heart and a boatload of enthusiasm.

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Category: Collaboration Social media Social networks Strategic Planning Uncategorized community social software     Tags: Change management, Collaboration, Collaboration dynamics, community, Organizational liquidity, Social media, Social networking, social software

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I like my clients. Really. Most of them are wonderful people struggling with tough issues. They are overworked and resource-constrained, yet they soldier on trying to find solutions to wicked problems. They deal with conflicting management mandates and absurd deadlines with equanimity.

But every now and then I get a question that makes me wince. Someone asks a question 15 minutes into a 30 minute inquiry about an issue of critical and strategic importance. They hope for a simple solution to a wicked problem. They miss the point that these kinds of dilemmas cannot be solved with straight line analysis, more nuanced techniques are required (Gartner clients may want to check out Diane Morello’s report CIO Advisory: Why CIOs Are in the Thick of Wicked Problems and What They Should Do About Them or my report Use Storytelling to Solve Wicked Problems). A recent example came from a CEO who wanted to know which sales model he should adopt for the company: option A or option B.

This was a newer client, so I couldn’t tell if he really thought I could answer such a complicated issue with a few bromides or he was testing me (I hope it was the latter). So I suggested a series of questions that would need to be answered before attempting to give advice on the matter. And a longer amount of time to to create and consider options – at least longer than 15 minutes.

So often, though, we seek simple, short 15-minute solutions to problems that are really much more complicated than that. I once heard an experienced CEO comment that if she was only making those decisions when all it took was 15 minutes to decide on the course of action, then she wasn’t earning her salary. She could, she explained, schedule her calendar in 15 minutes increments so as to maximize the number of decisions she made during the course of a day. But then, she mused, she wouldn’t the making the kind of judgements that would be most valuable for her firm, her employees and other stakeholders.

Organizations around the globe are in the midst of a megachange as Business Gets Social. At a conceptual level, this change does not alter the fundamentals of human nature. Business has always been about people to people transactions. But social business is expected to rattle some entrenched organizational models as decision making becomes more inclusive and transparency “outs” conversations previously held in private.

Those leaders who appreciate the magnitude of this change and put in the effort to devise responses commensurate with complications they encounter as Business Gets Social should come out quite nicely.

But as Thomas Alva Edison commented: “Most people don’t recognize opportunity when it comes, because it’s usually dressed in overalls and looks a lot like work.”

Let me know what you think. Are there short cuts to decision making that work? How does your organization cope with wicked problems? Respond here or via twitter @CRozwell

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Category: Change management Collaboration Knowledge management Social media Social networks Strategic Planning community social software     Tags: Change management, Collaboration dynamics, Organizational liquidity, Social media, Social networking, social software, Storytelling

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It’s interesting how so many client inquires are initially described as questions about social media, but then really turn out to be variations of more traditional issues like collaboration, knowledge management or community enablement. The common denominator among these topics is the desire to use technology to make people more effective in their jobs. The promise of anything tagged “social” is the hope that technology will work for the worker, not against them.

Nonetheless, some folks still stumble over the “social” part of social media, social software or social business. They need reassurance that the same business conduct principles that applied to their organization and to the people working for them from the pre-social business era still are valid. For example, anyone who’s ridden a hospital elevator has probably seen the admonition to medical personnel reminding them to refrain from discussing patient information in public places. This rule of business conduct applies as much in elevators as on the social web.

Perhaps the concern about whether the rules have changed or not stems from some of the negative press generated when someone does something silly or stupid using social media. It is true that social amplifies whatever is going well or poorly. And it spreads information quickly and indiscriminately. After all, social networks are messy.

Organizations struggle to understand how social media will impact their processes. We are early on in the uptake of internal and external social media. There is still much confusion about what it means to become a social business. Process impact will become more apparent the more we gain experience with socialized business activities. What remains consistent is the business conduct rules. What we advised employees as “the right thing to do” in the days of phones and email still stands.

But.

The “but” is that where there is confusion, there is the opportunity to remind and re-educate. If some people think that social changes the business conduct equation, then this belief needs to be addressed. One approach I’m researching for a case study is a training program that puts employees into use case scenarios and lets them figure out what to do in each circumstance. It’s been successful because the training gives employees the skills to deal with real-life situations rather than abstract information on what social media is.

Those people designing or redesigning their collaboration, knowledge management or community enablement programs may want to keep this in mind as they plan their roll out strategy. The business basics that govern your organization’s conduct in the market place – values, legal and fiduciary requirements, ethical treatment, etc. – retain their importance as business gets social. But, if employees are confused, it’s a great time to remind them of what the business conduct rules are and why they are there.

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Category: Change management Collaboration Knowledge management Social media Social networks community social software     Tags: Change management, Collaboration, Collaboration dynamics, Collective, communities of practice, community, Community of practice, CoP, Knowledge management, Social media, Social networking, social software

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During the past few weeks I’ve had the pleasure of traveling to Durham, NC and Miami, FL for two very different but related events. The first was the Immersion Day hosted by Fuqua School of Business Professor Tony O’Driscoll. The second was the Cisco Collaboration Summit for analysts, consultants and partners. While the events were very different, there are some common themes worth noting.

First, a bit of explanation for each. The Immersion Day was designed to give students, faculty and invited guests a glimpse of what various people who study social media think about its impact on business today and in the future. While many people attended in person on the Fuqua campus at Duke University, more than five times as many watched the video stream. In addition to my presentation, there were sessions from IBM, PwC, McKinsey and Cisco.

My summarized impression of the day is that social business is already a reality in practice but that the organizational change required to deal with this significant shift lags social adoption.

The Cisco Collaboration Summit exposed attendees to the company’s collaboration vision and plans for bringing products to market that support the vision. Their watchwords for collaboration included mobile, social and visual. Throughout the two days, attendees saw numerous practical uses of technology with an emphasis on video.

My summary of the summit is the need to collaborate across devices and applications, with employees, business partners and customers. In short, no one expects their only collaboration device will be a PC, just like no one expects the only mechanism for sharing content will be an email with file attachments.

Which brings me back to the Immersion Day. I will admit it was a shock to learn that so many more “attendees” watched the video stream than came to the actual event. Were they as engaged as the people who were there in person? We will never know. Although I am not sure I could prove that the people sitting in seats in the auditorium were any more “there” than the people online. When I asked whether any of the people in the auditorium were solely engaged in the day’s event, no one answered yes. (Duh)

What is certain is that social business includes multiple technology modalities that can be accessed in real time and after the fact. It forces the integration of interaction methods and devices, as well as content types. And it needs to do so in a way that builds on – not just layers on – the technology investments in mission critical applications organizations have already made.

Additionally, these events confirm that the emergence of video for business communication and video accessed via mobile devices is underway. At the very least, this means we need to add the ability to be effective communicators in a visual medium to our list of skills.

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Category: Change management Collaboration social software     Tags: Change management, social software, video

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Any Gartner analyst knows that interest in particular topics waxes and wanes, sometimes for discernible reasons and sometimes we don’t know why. This week’s topic was knowledge management, or as the aficionados call it, KM. The first client call was a review of a KM strategy and then other discussions progressed from there. What comes up frequently – and did again this week – is a confusion over KM, collaboration and social media. What do these terms mean, how are they different, or are they even different?

I’m not known for engaging in definitions debates. While it is important to be clear and accurate in one’s communication, I derive little joy from discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. What is important is not what term is used (as my friends in the mid-west say, “it don’t make no never mind”) – but clearly defining the value you expect to get from the initiative. The critical questions that need to be answered are “what do you want to achieve?” and “how will this make your target constituency’s life easier?” Both of these questions must be answered with a very high degree of specificity if the initiative will be successful. (Gartner clients may want to read my research note describing a process for doing this.)

In most cases when I talk with clients about KM, collaboration or social media, what they want to gain is similar: they want to get more benefit from the information assets inside or outside their organizations. The complication is that as the problems they are hoping to solve by applying these knowledge assets increase in complexity, so does the likelihood that the knowledge needed to solve them cannot be neatly codified.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should mention that I’ve been a member of the Boston KM Forum for more years than I care to think about. The KM Forum is ably guided by Lynda Moulton and Larry Chait. Periodically we will discuss whether a name change for the group is required. After all, KM has certainly changed a lot over the past decade. But somehow we just haven’t come up with a better term and so we stick with what we have (and then of course there would be the expense of changing all the fancy stationery (grin)). And we acknowledge that topics that fit under the KM banner include content management, learning, innovation and collaboration.

So don’t worry too much about what you call that project that aims to get more value from information assets. Instead, spend the time looking for ways to get people better connected and allow them to filter out the useful knowledge from wealth of information that surrounds them.

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Category: Change management Collaboration Knowledge management Social media Social networks Uncategorized community social software     Tags: Change management, Collaboration, Collaboration dynamics, communities of practice, community, Community of practice, CoP, Knowledge management, Rewards, Social analytics, Social media, Social networking, Social networks, social software

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Any experienced program manager knows that a critical success factor for organizational change is having managers mirror the behaviors they expect to see in their employees. For example, managers must demonstrate their collaboration skills with fellow managers if they want employees on their teams to work collaboratively.

So it’s a particularly difficult situation when the leader of the collaboration program cannot collaborate with other team members. A critical fact of collaboration is that you can’t do it alone. Your ability to collaborate can only be demonstrated when you are interacting with others.

These are some of the typical behaviors of non-collaborators:

• Lack of receptivity to ideas other than their own
• Seldom acknowledging the work of other people (e.g. not providing citations, links or references to colleague’s work)
• A habit of restating what someone just said but rephrasing it with their pet phrases and key concepts
• Starting new work projects with an ignorance of prior art

I raise these issues not to complain but to seek some suggestions for how to deal with them. Is it possible to present information to help the non-collaborative person see how their behavior is negatively impacting others? Are there effective ways to help people make adjustments to their style that peers can suggest? Will these suggestions be taking seriously?

Have you come up with some effective techniques – short of firing the person – that help the non-collaborative leader (or colleague) become more collaborative? If so, please share your thoughts. Post a comment to the blog or send me a tweet @CRozwell.

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This week Anthony Bradley and I delivered a webinar titled “Taking A Strategic Approach to Social Media.” During the webinar we asked the attendees three questions about their social media initiatives. Here are the results from those polls.

Question: How would you characterize your organization’s social media initiatives? 142 people answered this question.

19% – We’re trying to figure out what to do, but haven’t implemented anything yet.

23% – We’re experimenting with social media internally.

28% – We’re experimenting with social media externally.

23% – We’re well underway with a number of initiatives.

7% – We’re old pros with social media.

Question: What is the top reason your organization is investing in social media? 155 people answered this question.

36% – Strengthen customer relationships

30% – Enhance brand awareness

6% – Share information with business partners

25% – Help people find and work better with each other

3% – Meet CEO or board objectives

Question: Who is leading your social media initiatives? 168 people answered this question.

27% – Multiple lines of business

10% – Social media steering committee

18% – IT

35% – Marketing

10% – Other support orgs (PR, HR, etc.)

A quick scan of the results reveals that most attendees believe social media has applicability for their organizations and they are testing to see what it is. Initiatives remain in the hands of marketing, although more CEOs or board members are sitting up and taking notice of the strategic potential of social business. For most, social media programs are not yet guided by a steering committee.

I hope some of you will join me in Orlando for Symposium ITxpo to hear more about the impact and potential of social media as Business Gets Social.

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Category: Change management Social media Social networks Strategic Planning social software     Tags: Change management, Metrics, Social media, Social networking, Social networks, social software, symposium

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Social has turned the corner from interesting to imperative. However, some business leaders are reluctant to explore how business getting social might benefit their organization. They believe that social media isn’t relevant for their organization or that it’s just a “consumer thing” and only marketing needs to pay attention. They make statements that imply that social media is dangerous – statements which, upon examination, often reveal a misunderstanding of how all businesses are being changed by social.

To poke a little fun at the topic, we pulled together a top 10 list of our “favorite” statements about social media. Hopefully, you won’t recognize anything your management says about social on the list. But if you do, it’s an indication that maybe they don’t yet quite understand the upside of social. We hope this top 10 list will make you chuckle. But don’t forget that underlying every statement is a perception that needs to be dealt with.

The top 10 signals that your management just doesn’t ‘’get’’ social media are:

10. They start telling you anecdotes about how their children use social media, then start shaking their heads.

9. They get somebody to ghostwrite their blogs.

8. They ban access to social media because people will waste time or “someone might say something bad about us.”

7. They say, “Our customers are over 40, so they aren’t on Facebook or Twitter.”

6. They put a summer intern in charge of the social media ‘‘project’’.

5. They ask, “Why do I need input from social media? All the really smart people already work for us.”

4. They say, “Show me an enterprise that increased its revenue by using social communications.”

3. They don’t define the purpose, but want to try ‘‘something’’ to ‘‘see what happens’’.

2. They insist that every communication be approved before it’s posted on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, or other social networking site.

1. They think that creating a Facebook fan page is a social media strategy.

Let’s hope you don’t hear too many of the above statements in your own company, but if you do, remember that business getting social is inevitable. Educate yourself and the senior leaders in your organization about how social media is being used to enhance interactions with employees, business partners, customers, prospects and the social Web. Search out good ideas, and adapt them to make them work for you.

If you are a client, you can read the full report “Top 10 Signals That Your Management Doesn’t “Get” Social Media and What To Do About It”.

I’ll also be presenting a series of sessions on Business Gets Social at our upcoming Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, October 16-20, in Orlando . Here’s the list of the sessions I’ll be doing.

I hope to see you in Orlando next week.

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Category: Social media Social networks social software     Tags: Social media, Social networking, Social networks, symposium

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One of the sessions I moderated at the PCC Summit was a roundtable discussion of how to develop a social media strategy that services internal and external needs. The participants represented a variety of industries and circumstances, yet they shared a similar set of challenges:

• Running to catch up with consumer expectations
• Dealing with the belief that the social media cannot be controlled
• Figuring out what they should be doing on social media
• Determining which issues need to be uncovered when developing a strategy

At the end of the discussion, I asked each participant for their best practice for developing a social media strategy. Here are some of their suggestions:

• Create a really strong relationship with a respected senior executive who will carry the social initiative forward. You need someone who can articulate the opportunity of social media and deal with any  lack of understanding of the magnitude of social business.
• Decide what you want to do, then break the social media program down into initiatives that can be prioritized and timescaled. You need a quick win and killer app to build credibility.
• Social is people-centric so indentify the audience clearly. Find the point of pain that social will alleviate. Avoid all the fancy words – get to the value statements “this is how social will improve your situation” expressed as a what’s in it for me (WIIFM)
• Provide lots of support for the rollout. Pay attention to good project practices and organizational change principles.
• Put social governance in place ASAP – who will do what, who owns what channel, who determines how social will be used to support improved work practices.

I hope you find some useful nuggets in these suggests as you plow forward with your efforts. We will continue the discussion in Orlando at Symposium/IT Expo.

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Category: Change management Collaboration Social media Social networks community     Tags: Change management, Collaboration dynamics, Innovation, Social media, Social networking, Social networks, symposium

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