Connie Bensen

Yesterday’s webinar, Web 2.0 in the Enterprise, by Rob Koplowitz of Forrester was an excellent presentation that really got me thinking about the various aspects of building community inside the enterprise. Most of my focus has been external but the concepts of working efficiently, collaboration & building relationships applies to the internal aspects too.

Here’s an outline of the main points:

1. Knowledge workers – the next place for efficiency (email isn’t cutting it anymore & elegant web 2.0 solutions exist now that foster internal community building)

• collaboration is being redefined (and it’s traumatic to some)
• it’s about how people work & human activities
• brands need to differentiate themselves & they can achieve that by drawing on their employee’s ideas

I like Forrester’s definition of Web 2.0:

A set of technologies & applications that enable efficient interaction among people, content, and data in support of collectively fostering new businesses, technology offerings, and social structures.

Rob made the point that the first part is the tactical aspect.And the underlined part is what’s causing the ruckus. Digital natives are ignoring IT & wanting to use collaboration tools, information sources & networking options that aren’t necessarily endorsed by the Enterprise. These solutions are relatively inexpensive or open source & the younger generation expects to work in a Web 2.0 environment. The good news is that these tools require little or no support from IT, so they easily be outsourced. Rob provided stat’s that over 50% of organizations are considering implementing collaboration strategies & 25% will be implementing Web 2.0 technology.

He gave an example of how Bell Canada creatively responded to the economic threat of Google. They utilized the long tail to stimulate idea generation from employees by creating an internal blog encouraging idea generation & then the ability to vote. The highest rated ideas & the lowest were championed by the executive level for subsequent strategic planning.

Blogs are a good way to gather ideas from staff internally & document information. Wiki’s are used for collaboration. The value of both is that they build brand inside the organization. They encourage organizational change. Once people get used to using the blog/wiki they enjoy contributing. Both provide a "corporate memory" that is invaluable. And Rob pointed out that new voices emerge from the organization. It puts email back to the purpose it was intended for.

The slide below highlights what Web 2.0 offers. Information becomes artifacts. Down on the bottom left is where IT needs to be involved in ensuring that policies, security & compliance are followed. This removes the risk & allows for more transparency because the purpose of the tool has been reviewed & approved.

How to go about implementing this?

• Assume that the existing compliance, privacy, security & discovery procedures apply
• The organization needs to assess authentication & security.
• Decide on the levels of the policy

What’s appropriate considering the situation?

• Internal versus external information
• Public versus private systems
• Trusted vs non-trusted info sources

Rob listed out things to look for:

• Authentication model
• Security model
• Integration with search strategy
• Policy management
• Integration API’s

He wrapped up his presentation by encouraging the audience to find strategies that harness the new Web 2.0 tools. Building community internally can provide business value today.

I want to make a point that the tools/services are very reasonable for building community internally or externally. We just need to help organizations get over their fears & encourage them to start experimenting!

Please share your experiences. Someone sent me a note with their story & I’m going to interview him & share it with you.

Well, we knew that already! But if you want to get an overview of how Teens are using social media then the new PEW report on Teens & Social Media has some amazing facts. In November I wrote about Digital Natives in the Workplace which talked about how the stat’s below will shift the future.

93% of teens are online & 64% are creating content!

• Girls are blogging more (35% compared to 20% of the boys)
• Boys are more likely to watch & upload videos (21% vs 10%)
• Digital images – almost 90% have posted photos or videos! & interact by commenting

For communication, the cell phone is the primary choice of 70%

• 60% texting
• 47% messages over social networks
• 22% email (J. Owyang’s prediction that email is dying is showing)

(the reason that it is more than 100% is because teens use combinations of the above)

This quote is quite interesting in that mentorship is acknowledged as a key role. This phenomenon can be seen with any community no matter the age range.

MIT professor Henry Jenkins notes that, along with the rise in popularity of participatory media applications, there has also been a concurrent development of “participatory cultures” that serve to encourage all of this user-contributed content. Jenkins defines a participatory culture as “a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.”

Take away -

Reading the report is like looking into the not too distant future. In next five years the use of social media & participation in networks are going to keep increasing at an exponential rate.

Jeff Pulver sent a request to a group of us in Facebook. Someone asked him for help on a research project. I don’t have anything written on this topic, but my recent librarian skills love a good challenge!

I’m taking a class in organizational behavior and I have to write a research paper. I would like to write about how new media is changing structure within organizations and how people manage. I would like to look at how recent grads with new media skills will possibly enter the workplace with greater skills in the area than their superiors and how this changes hierarchy within the org…

Social media has changed many things in regard to organizational behavior. I will use myself as an example. In August my employer decided to allow me to work remotely. Granted they have others working remotely, but it seems the exception rather than the rule. As Community Manager I work with customers externally, but also internally with all levels. That underlines one of the premises of social media is that siloes are leveled & people move to the fringe of the corporate membrane. (Robert Scoble I believe).

It has also leveled the playing field in networking & I’ve experienced this with my social networking in meeting people online. So, social media has changed the hierarchy within some organizations. My company started doing betas this past summer & will continue to do them. And there are case studies of companies like Dell where they’ve used social media to help their brand.

But I should clarify that I am not a ‘new grad’ and I don’t necessarily have greater skills than my superiors. I just have an intense interest in social media & it compliments the skills of those I work with (at all levels). My goal is share & teach my skills that can further the mission of our company.

To research this, I would recommend a couple of articles that Forrester Analyst, Jeremiah Owyang has written to get an overview.

• Outlines a timeframe for the integration of social media into the workplace. If anything the trend will be later than this. The article is an excellent overview of the upcoming changes.
• a video that talks about best practices for the adoption rates of social media ranging from digital natives (the recent grads) to existing employees needing to adapt (digital immigrants).

Then I would research the terms ‘digital natives’ & future. I started for you & it was interesting:

In ‘Digital Natives’ will drive web 2.0 into your business Gartner Analyst Anthony Bradley says this about digital natives:

They bring with them a set of expectations of how they will interact and the tools they’ll use to interact, and they can be woefully disappointed walking into organizations that don’t have some of the Web 2.0 tools that they’re used to using for building relationships and getting things done

In the same article Gartner analyst Tom Austin said

Enterprise 2.0 technologies need to be “free form,” or informal, messy and participatory, to make co-workers comfortable.

An interesting White Paper by Jon Husband: From Hierarchy to Wirearchy: The future of workplace dynamics (and mentions the Cluetrain Manifest – no surprise! It’s an interesting read)

Organization charts are still useful, but only as they become more fluid. Certainly, they appear in a much wider range of shapes than before, and often convey new messages about power, status and control. “Organigraphics,” or pictures of the ways organizations flow and operate, are clearly more pertinent, accurate and useful, according to strategy and organizational structure guru Henry Mintzberg.

And here’s a book for in-depth reading:

In The Future of Management by Gary Hamel, he suggests that management needs to be reinvented.

The underlying principles of hierarchy, bureaucratic control, and pay-for-performance worked well when the objective was efficiency. But today companies need to deliver on a broader set of objectives, and they need to be far more creative than their forebears.
So rather than force-fit our old management practices to the needs of today’s companies, we should actually develop a new set of practices – based on new principles such as community, variety, and creativity.

Do you think that would resonate with the new generations coming into the workforce? (I think I may need to read his book!).

So in going to Amazon to look for that book, I see a number of new books on leadership that may be good for your research (use your library!). This one looks particularly interesting: The Future of Human Resource Management: 64 Thought Leaders Explore the Critical HR Issues of Today and Tomorrow

Good luck with your research & let me know if you need more. The reference desk is always open!