My 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes: Second 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 second keynote on Tuesday. This year they have multiple keynote speakers in each session. This one includes Sameer Patel, Partner, Sovos Group, Andrew McAfee, Principal Research Scientist, Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Management, Jim Grubb, VP, Corporate Communications, Cisco, Bryce Williams, Social Media Consultant - IT, Eli Lilly, and Christian Finn, Director, SharePoint Product Management, Microsoft.
Jim from Cisco started off talking about the networked organization from a structure perspective (not the Cisco Web perspective). As firms grow you put in some structure. Most start by functions. This works for a while but they not listening to customers so you align by customer segment. Then you realize that you are duplicating things within the segments. So then you organize by product type. Every time you reorganize you lose the benefits of the last version. Then you organize by geography. Then some go into a matrix structure such a geography by customer type.
He said now you can organize by network with today’s technology and be people focused. Old school tech forced you into a given hierarchy. Now with E 2,0 tools you can allow people to dynamically self-organize and reorganize. Activity streams help here and I certainly agree. I have been writing about these a bit recently including today’s AppGap post.
Prior to E2.0 knowledge at meetings was lost. Now you can have many asynchronous meetings that are searchable. You can now virtually sit together in synchronous communication anywhere. So barriers of time and space can be overcome.
There are challenges with these virtual reams. For example, how to you measure and reward performance. Jim said the technology is relatively easy. There needs to be new means for accountability. Cisco is changing their performance metrics to reflect these changes.
Sameer talked about CRM with a focus the response part. Gartner says 13 billion will be spent on CRM tech this year. This does not included the related costs. So he said what is happening within these systems. CRM is a contact management and reporting tool. Sales people do forecast and record wins to get paid. I have always had trouble seeing the value of CRM. It seems a record management system requiring manual entry. But it does not help with customers. The inclusion of social may help provide some value here.
Sameer said as consumers we want a new way of marketing we do not want marketing messages pushed out to us. I agree so much. I dislike unsolicited marketing messages. Now marketing can incur on the social Web (if you do it right). People are starting to look on the social Web to find information about products that they can trust. They have much higher expectations.
Sameer asked why talked CRM at a E 2.0 conference? The information that is needed for CRM is inside the enterprise and e20 can generate the right data to use to answer customer concerns. This makes sense to be but I was already convinced. I think that with enterprise 2.0 you need to break down the barriers between inside and outside the enterprise. It needs to be all the same thing. We discussed this at dinner last night. The ability to get metrics has greatly increased.
Christian Finn started with a story about the process at MicroSoft called “thinkweek” – a series of retreats where Bill Gates would read, often papers from employees. He would comment on them. It was a “Bill-centric” process in the 80s. It worked well. He wanted to scale the process so he put thinkweek on SharePoint so it was transparent. In the past you had to be invited to participate, now anyone could.
Then as Bill Gates got less involved the question came up – what to do with thinkweek. Will it goes away as it had been very Bill-centric. The value had been comments from Bill. Would people still want to submit papers if others review them. Also, how do you scale it.
They decided to relaunch it. It runs virtually twice a year as an ideation crowdsourcing effort. Any employee can submit a paper on any idea you want. Now there are roles to support this effort: authors, advisors, co-chairs. The co-chairs are senior people who look at papers, taking Bill’s place. They also pass on papers to others to comment and rate them. Also, anyone can access and rate a paper. This whole process requires people who are willing to share their ideas.
Last year there were more than 230 papers with a total of 400 authors. About 3000 people were active participants in some manner such as making comments. Many new ideas have come on both operations and products.
Andy next talked about threats to enterprise 2.0. The concept has become mainstream in the past 5 years. So the question is why? First, the technology meets a deep business need – how do we know what we know inside our organizations? The answers to our problems can be found within but the connections are hard to find. Solving the knowledge challenge is a big problem. Enterprise 2.0 tools can help here.
Enterprise 2.0 tools also address a human need to be part of a community, a community that we have a role is defining. We are social creatures so it makes business sense and sense to people.
After this glowing introduction he addressed the threats to all this. The first are managers who do not like the networked organization concept. They want to stay with top-down control and now socializing. He wondered about technologies that might address the concerns of this treat. He mentioned IBM Watson and its technology and the ability to “reason” as a possible solution. Watson can make its own links even when not made explicit in the content.
Now an old fashion boss can use this technology to extract meaning and avoid having people to talk to each other. I am also concerned about this “dumb down” approach. It is not new. When I worked in call center support, I always worked to make people smarter rather than having a computer dumb down the task with computer generated scripts. The call center people always hated this dumb down approach. People will rebel against this use of computers. Andy said people will not want to be made to work like computers.
One thing that people do better than computers is to know where to look next.
Bryce from Lilly now talked change and the leadership role. He has seen people emerge as leaders during the enterprise 2.0 process and gave examples. He started with a community of micro-bloggers four years ago that was used as a back channel at many events. People saw the value and it helped promote social media acceptance.
Bryce now moved to the present. He discussed some of this yesterday at the Black Belt session. They have been connected with some great events such as Connecting Hearts Abroad – a company program to send 200 employees around the world to help with health issues. They decided to use the system to convey the experiences of these participants. These people have been active sharing their experiences and this created a lot of response from the rest of employees. A number of people were able to collect things for people in need and others got help in their personal efforts in the program like how to work with young children. It has also helped drive adoption of the e20 system.
(from his session yesterday) They also supported the 100th anniversary of the firm. Many of the related t-shirts did not fit correctly. They organized a t-shirt swap through the system that drew a lot of attention. They connected with company newsletters and switched the function to the Jive system from email and it became much more efficient. It became more dynamic and not tied to fixed two week cycles. Now they are going to provide support for the CEO to ask questions to employees and get answers.
One great use case is the ability of people to help people. People ask questions and get answers from other employees. Also self-service help for systems such as SAP and SharePoint is very useful. Looking to crowd source how to update compliance policies. They have created a number of personal interest group such Wine Cellar, Foodie Network, and Travel Club. All these use cases have driven adoption. This makes a lot of sense. They were fortunate to have these possibilities and smart enough to take advantage of them in the right way.