My 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes: E2.0 Black Belt Practitioner's Workshop – Part Three
Posted by Bill Ives on Mon, Jun 20, 2011
Here is the third in a series of notes on the 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. I am attending the E2.0 Black Belt Practitioner's In-Depth Workshop. Susan Scrupski is the organizer. Here is part of the session description: “Members of The Social Business Council, a peer-led community, have had an early mover advantage in thinking through the difficult transformational issues that are required to create a more connected, participatory, engaging enterprise ready to embrace the future. In this full-day lecture and interactive workshop, learn first hand from practitioners who have tackled adoption, architecture, change management, community management, education, governance, and the realities of living through an Enterprise 2.0 transformation.”
This picks up after lunch. Since there was no coffee after lunch, there will perhaps be a few more typos.
Jim Worth and Eric Ziegler covered Preparing For Realities of Going Mobile with Enterprise 2.0. They provided key findings from The Social Business Council Mobility SIG survey. Eric works for Vanguard and Jim works for Merck. Eric said that organizations are now missing opportunities to enable their employees to be mobile when this will be the wave of the future. Jim reviewed the survey results 64% of employees now carry more that two mobile devices. The audience was about the same. In the survey 70% saw mobility as a key strategic imperative and 30% said somewhat important. No one said mobile was not important.
There are multiple use cases in the survey. Email is the top one, then phone and calendar. Platform supported are: 90% Blackberry, 40% plus Apple, Andriod above 20%. The majority are using mobile to access enterprise 2.0 platforms. I found that the majority of vendors in both micro-blogging and collaboration suites have mobile support in a different survey I was recently involved with.
Eric said that mobile is going to happen in enterprise 2.0 so you need to be prepared. Conduct surveys. Do interviews. Identify and get all the stakeholders involved. Examine business processes to see where mobile can fit in. Determine the current state of mobile in your enterprise. Link the mobile strategy to your collaboration strategy. I read elsewhere is that collaboration will be the top business use for mobile beyond as a phone.
Jim talked about some design principles for mobile usage. Support the social and personal side of mobile apps. Your mobile phone is now your most personal device and people often panic if they do not have their mobile phone with them. Design for quick in and quick out. Your mobile device has become your access to the cloud. You are not tied to the device. Do not make apps device dependent but, at the same time, respect the capabilities of the device such as the small screen for mobile.
Eric said that you need to decide on the degree of central IT control. At Vanguard everything is controlled. You get a phone with 10 apps and you cannot add other apps. However, this can be limiting. If a phone is lost, everything is wiped out remotely. On the other end is the policy of employees bringing their own device. Also you need to define how people can use the mobile device, not just the device and apps. What is the right level of security? Now the major solution is the ability to wipe everything on a phone if a password is mistyped a certain number of times. There are country regulations on this also to consider.
Eric moved on to discuss the future. By 2015 Forrester predicted 38% of devices sold will be tablets so mobility expands. In our room all but one tablet was an iPad. There were many iPads in the room. I have friends with them and may move there soon.
Eric said the tech space in mobile is moving quickly with things like HTML5. The speed of access is increasing with 4G and beyond. There will be mobile app markets within some enterprises. Mobile will become a way to access enterprise apps that move to the cloud. The concept of keeping everything inside the firewall is going away.
Some one asked about what firms are doing mobile right. Jim asked Luis Suarez about IBM and he said that IBM allows for any device to connect. This supports the concept that work can occur wherever you are. Kraft Foods also has the work anywhere any time policy. This works well for competitive intelligence in the field as people can take photos of what others re doing and share them.
Liz Sumner covered Social Business Council Workshop Culture Survey results. They looked at the current state of change management within council members. How does the desired change occur in the most effective, least painful way? 43% of the survey respondents have multiple applicants in full production.
How did they define success - answers: social integrated into daily work, connections across boundaries, staff values it, specific metrics for participation, contribution to business goals, stop using 1.0 tools like email, and some answer they do not know. When asked what is the current state of their companies culture; 40+ % said repressive, and 16% said collaborative.
When asked about surprises: ineffective nature of traditional communication channels, power of invisible social networks (some people do not like social tools because they feel they already know who they need to know), low amount of experimentation by early adopters, high level of demand, passive nature of senior management.
Audience questions for further study: are companies using outside help or internal support, what different leadership is required, what are global differences, how many companies are using social to help transform business or just doing it to make business more social.
Bryce Williams covered Digital Literacy Skills in the Workplace: Why They Matter More Than Ever. Description: “As technology permeates every part of our work life now, and redefines how even collaboration gets done, a new set of skills and etiquette must be developed to learn how to work and lead out loud to be effective. This session will address findings from a research project and share some key lessons learned.”
Digital literacy skills are defined as the ability to locate, evaluate, share, and use information using digital tools. There is also the ability to lead others in this direction. Some skills are new to digital and others are traditional conversational skills such as do not waste other’s time and temper your ego. Using digital for social collaboration or discussion is an interactive activity.
As a breakout exercise, we were given the scenario of a threaded conversation got many responses and threatened to get out of control. So how to you keep it positive? Using a sports analogy, there are rules and officials to monitor and enforce the rules. I think that there should be clear guidelines and then community managers to monitor and help apply the rules. This should not be in an oppressive manner, but simply to facilitate the flow of conversation. As a community manager when do you step in and when do you let a conversation go forward?
Bryce then conveyed what happen in a situation that inspired this activity. The topic was the company’s performance evaluation system. People thought about stopping the thread but it was decided to let it continue. Several VPs got involved. Then the originator suggested that do something constructive. They summarized the discussion and met with the VP of HR who receptive to hearing the suggestions.