My 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes: First Tuesday Keynote
Posted by Bill Ives on Tue, Jun 21, 2011
Here is another in a series of notes on the 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. This covers the first keynote on Tuesday. This year they have multiple keynote speakers in each session. This one includesJohn Hagel III, Co-Chairman, Center for the Edge, Deloitte & Touche, Mike Rhodin, SVP, IBM Software Solutions Group, IBM, John Stepper, Managing Director, Deutsche Bank, and Brett Shockley, SVP, Corporate Development & Strategy, Avaya.
John began the question – does social software really matter? Framing the answer will help determine adoption. Metrics that matter vary by your level in the organization. You need to cover each level – senior execs – financial metrics, middle managers – operational metrics, employee level – individual metrics.
He gave an example of social media in a transit authority. They big challenge occurred around some operating metrics around repairing buses and getting them back on the street. Locating the right parts was a big factor in the delays. So they installed a micro-blogging platform to help find the right parts. This transformed their view of social software from a marketing tool to a tool to help operational measures.
This reminds me of the portal I was involved with in the UK in the mid-90s to help home heating repair services providers. There was a similar issue and the ability to share information across the country rather then within the local depot to help with parts was a big win that won people over to the portal.
John went on to how you can support sustained collaboration. He gave an example with SAP. They created the SAP developer network to support the launch of their portal software, NetWeaver. I did a case study on this back in 2004 and it was very innovative at the time (see Four Examples of Wikis Working within the Enterprise). They gave recognition to problem solvers and people developed reputation.
Here is what I wrote at the time: SAP's Software Developer Network (SDN) wiki is a reference and collaboration tool for more than 1 million independent SAP software developers. It uses a point system to encourage participation and recognize its most active and valued members. As Beth writes, under the SAP Contributor Recognition program, members are awarded points for every technical article, code sample, blog post and wiki contribution they make. SDN employees rank wiki posts based on their content and value to the community.
John went on to talk about game software helps build collaboration through offering increasingly complex challenges that require the help of others. He is also looking at long term trends in the US economy. He had not found answers. So they looked at all US companies form 1965 to today in terms of return on assets. It has declined by 75% and the decline continues. He feels that one of the consequences is increasing performance pressure on executives. We need to reverse this trend by getting passion in employees like the gamers are able to inspire.
Mike next talked about beyond collaboration – the need for analytics. He said he was going to cover why social software matters in the enterprise. He referred back to the start of the Web in the mid 90s. New business models emerged. The lasting effect was the way things are done inside companies. Now there is another big change. Companies are thinking they should be more proactive this time as many were passive in the mid 90s change.
Mike said now we have the age of the empowered employee. Social business is about putting intelligence into the way people interact. A big part is the metrics on how people interact and using this to make smart business decisions. IBM has 4 million people in their developer community. This certainly supplements the 300,000 employees.
Barriers between customers, partners and employees are dropping. People are more likely to listen to people outside your firm about your products than your marketing efforts. Now you have to treat your customers differently as they become your best marketers. There is also crowdsourcing of new product ideas. The ability harvest knowledge from an ever-growing network is expanding. You can also fine tune your marketing efforts based on customer actions and feedback. He gave an example of a sneaker firm that could access and track responses to a marketing program during the World Cup to improve their efforts.
Sentiment analysis has been done through surveys that took long to process. Now you can apply analytics to a social network and detect issues in real time. You also get better data, not just quicker data, as long as the sentiment analysis tool is accurate.
John from Deutsche Bank now talked about changing work through social software. He is responsible for social media at the bank. It was a challenge at first as he struggled to find way to show value for the bank. Then he came up with examples that he shared with us. First, a senior manager wanted to help people get better at certain roles. So they set up communities of practice around these roles. The first were in the tech area and they got measureable improvements in work performance. He covered this in more detail in the Black Belt session yesterday.
They established formal roles to support the communities. Now they are preparing to launch CoPs in 5 other areas. Jon said that his early struggles in his role helped with the later successes. Now they have a social business council and looking at way to help people to work better. They have curators to support communities. They are looking to cut help desk calls by 50% through collective help through the social networks. They are collecting success stories.
Brett from Avaya next covered “customer 2.0.” He began discussing some of the changes in work location, demographics, etc. More consumer Web devices are getting into the enterprise. There are applications everywhere with the cloud.
Brett defined customer 2.0 (young people) as being born with a keyboard and an attitude. There are 80 million of these young people. I always have trouble when they limit these issues to “young people.” I might be considered an old person but I have the same issues and concerns, and even attitude. I do not like automated phone responses either.
There are now many customer communication channels. Unified communications is a factor here. But now you need “video ready” people in customer service. He also reviewed some of the new technologies they are using such as natural language processing. I tend to find the automated voice responses that claim to understand me not yet able to process my concerns. I just ask to talk to a real person. Sometimes I have to put affect into this request and that does seem to work. Some automated systems require you to get loud to really listen and get you to a real person. How about better empowering the real people more?