The Confluence of Enterprise Social Collaboration and Social Media

Off late, we are seeing an emerging trend that could rankle the CIO department that is already under siege from BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and Cloud applications creeping into the walled gardens of the enterprise. Social Collaboration products are one by one starting to integrate their products with social media management suites.

Just look at the recent updates from two different enterprise social collaboration products:

HootSuite Welcomes Enterprise Social Network Socialcast to App Directory

HootSuite Collaborates with @Yammer, Adding the Enterprise Social Network to the App Directory

As you can see social collaboration products now want to leverage ideas from the outside the enterprise for sharing within the enterprise. This could be a twitter feed with a link to some cool idea that needs to be shared with the R&D team or a LinkedIn article on how not to run sales programs.

Clearly such integrations are a one-way streets. They obviously don’t allow you to post from the enterprise collaboration application directly to Twitter or Facebook.

Social Media applications like HootSuite that started primarily as a tool for individuals to manage their social media updates are now slowly invading the enterprise. I guess that where the money is. This  is just one more trend that will keep CIOs awake wondering about the security vulnerabilities that come with posting twitter links within the enterprise. As far as I am concerned that’s a risk worth taking.

Srinivas Krishnaswamy

Enterprise Social Learning – Poised for Growth

The Enterprise Social Learning Space has come out of the closet. The big boys are paying attention to this domain as we saw Microsoft acquiring Yammer last month for $1.2 Billion and Oracle and Salesforce.com have also jumped into the fray with the acquisition of Vitrue (for $300 Million) and Buddy Media (for $689 Million) respectively.

While the spotlight was on Yammer, you might have missed the developments at Socialtext. I received this message from Michael Idinopulos, GM & Chief Customer Officer at Socialtext (it was a mass mailer to all users). According to Idinopulos, “It’s an exciting time! The capital markets are validating enterprise social in a big way. Socialtext has received a strategic investment from Bedford Funding. Our deployments are growing by leaps and bounds. Most important, our customers are integrating Socialtext into their core business processes at warp speed.” Socialtext will be integrated into Peoplefluent’s (owned by Bedford) Human Capital Management (HCM) Suite, which focuses on offering tools to help companies recruit better.

June also saw Jive’s stock go up on the possibility of an acquisition. SAP is already in the game with Jambok that came into the SAP orbit through SuccessFactors. We also have players like Saba touting their social learning platforms.

There is no dearth of action in the enterprise social learning space. There are vast swaths of industries that remain out of bounds for enterprise social learning tools because of regulatory and legal hurdles. The real winner in this race will be the one that can address challenges pertaining to security and control. Its a strange conclusion considering the product category!

Srinivas Krishnaswamy

Formalizing the Informal Organization Structure

I have been hearing about the utopian organization where small teams of highly empowered and networked super heroes conquer the world. No matter how informal an organization is, I doubt if an organization is capable of truly leveraging the knowledge and contextual information of every one of its employees when it matters the most. We lose bids because we did not know that we had relevant expertise that could have tilted the balance in our favor; we repeat the same mistakes over and over again, because the learning from the experience is only with a few individuals. These drawbacks are amplified by the fact that there are no menu cards for tacit, experiential, or contextual information.

Large enterprises have intranets, and many of them now have social learning platforms like Yammer, Social Text, Jive to name a few. However, even less formalized and collaborative approaches to sharing information, insights, and knowledge has the same drawback mentioned above.

Early in January, I met Prithvi Kandanda, founder of GoTalk2. GoTalk2 is a mobile application that allows you to trade knowledge. If you are an expert in cooking, you list your expertise in a directory and also indicate what it would cost for somebody to pick your brain. When another member of GoTalk2 decides to become a cook, he may decide to look up your profile in GoTalk2 and decide to talk to you (and of course, payment is routed through GoTalk2). It’s a simple yet powerful tool that allows you to trade your knowledge. 

GoTalk2 works great because it makes accessing expertise easy without the need for establishing a personal connection. I may hesitate to talk to my neighbor even if I know that he may have valuable insights that could benefit me. But when we make this transaction anonymous and you know your neighbor is willing to “share” his wisdom for a fee, our inhibition fades away (assuming, the price is right!).

The point I am trying to make here is that formalizing informal organization structures has its merits as it levels the playing field and allows organizations to treat information and knowledge as a freely “tradable” item within the organization. Ability to access information should not be dependent ONLY on the “connections” you may have established. The problem with an enterprise social learning platform is the fact that they widen the informal network and perpetuate the disproportionate advantages enjoyed by people who have the knack of building networks and relationships. While informal connections and exchanges are important, formalizing informal exchanges within the organization will benefit the organization.

Srinivas Krishnaswamy

Social Learning in Enterprises – A Catalyst for Innovation?

There was an interesting article in The Wired magazine recently on the idea of “clusters of innovation”.

Quoting from the article, “Several years ago, statistician David Banks wrote a short paper on what he called the problem of excess genius: It turns out that human geniuses aren’t scattered randomly across time and space. Instead, they tend to arrive in tight clusters. (As Banks put it, talent “clots inhomogeneously.”) In his paper, Banks cites the example of Athens between 440 and 380 BC. He writes that the ancient city was home to an astonishing number of geniuses, including Plato, Socrates, Thucydides, Herodotus, Euripides, Aeschylus, and Aristophanes. These thinkers essentially invented Western civilization, and yet they all lived in the same place at the same time. Or look at Florence, Italy, between 1440 and 1490. In a mere half century, a city of fewer than 70,000 people gave rise to a staggering number of immortal artists, like Michelangelo, da Vinci, Ghiberti, Botticelli, and Donatello.”

The article attempts to make sense of this phenomenon by invoking the idea of the presence of particular meta-ideas, which support the spread of other ideas. First proposed by economist Paul Romer, meta-ideas include concepts like the patent system, public libraries, and universal education. The article cites several key meta-ideas that could potentially impact innovation. They are:

1. Immigration (mixing of new ideas or new influences)
2. Education (society places value on education)
3. Institutions that promote risk taking (as demonstrated by the professional leagues in the US that churn out winners every year by placing risky bets on rookies)

This article made me think and I think we can start piecing together a blue print for generating innovation within the enterprise by design rather than by accident. Here are my candidates for meta-ideas within the enterprise:

1. A culture of thinking outside the departments (a systems approach to solving challenges and identifying opportunities).
2. A platform to bring together SMALL groups of passionate people based on ideas and interests that can cut across hierarchies and geographies.
3. A culture that promotes risk taking.
4. And most importantly, the willingness to share learning, ideas and the openness to accept ideas from people that are not “superiors”.

Social Learning platforms might well be the canvas on which points 1, 2, and 4 above can be implemented. They can create a space where ideas can mingle and take the form of real innovation. Check out this interesting video:

While it is easy to point out to the Googles of the world that seem to have mastered all the four meta-ideas, I am very curious to find out how companies operating in heavily regulated industries, such as pharma, are approaching the need to have a free flow of ideas. Hopefully, I will stumble on some answers soon.

Srinivas Krishnaswamy

Barriers to Enterprise Social Learning

The fundamental engine for a successful enterprise-wide Social Learning initiative is the need to make available, tools that will allow employees to easily share information, know-how, and knowledge with others. But just because you implemented Yammer or any other similar tool in your company doesn’t guarantee adoption. Just like any other software implementation, Social Learning implementation requires a well thought-out strategy for educating users about the framework, provide training, monitor usage and impact on an ongoing basis, and plan for the future based on what went right or wrong with the implementation. It all seems straight forward, but it will be useful to understand certain hidden barriers to a successful enterprise social learning initiative.

People are just lazy: The time and effort needed to create content or capture your thoughts into content so that it is presentable to everybody else within the company is something that requires additional work on an already over-burdened employee. You will find that in most of the companies that have an internal blog, only a few brave souls contribute and the vast majority of us are happy reading what others are saying.

Afraid of negative consequences: People don’t want to get fired or look like an idiot in front of the world. Our insecurities about what we think we know and we don’t know will keep us from sharing. From a management stand-point, the negative consequences of letting people share their thoughts freely is unnerving especially in a hierarchical set-up.

Politics: A politicized work environment is guaranteed to nuke any social learning initiative. People are more interested in keeping information or knowledge close to their chest lest the rival group gets one up on them.

Drinking your own Kool-Aid: While we love organizations with strong cultures, the very purpose of social learning is to provide an opportunity for your organization’s culture to evolve and keep pace with times. Keeping the “conversations” restricted and in line with the “approved” view from the top defeats the very purpose of implementing a social learning platform. I am not implying that there shouldn’t be any guidelines at all.

Clash of the Generations: Baby boomers still constitute a significant percentage of executive management that takes the decisions on social learning. Baby boomers are themselves new to the concept because of the simple reason that they did not have social media tools when they grew up unlike their Gen Y counterpart that are flooding the workforce. The preacher himself needs to be baptised first!