Adoption Challenges for Enterprise Social Platforms

Published on Dataquest

Enterprise 2.0 technologies are inexpensive and attractive; lead to meaningful communication across teams and create contextual knowledge, help improve innovative capabilities, and facilitate solving of critical business problems collectively. Indeed, there is a clear evidence that Enterprise 2.0 technologies are facing protectionist barriers from the companies because of the fear of productivity losses and exposure of critical information. But, how is it that these technologies are not as successful even in companies which consider the new technology as a boon and are trying to leverage them? A closer analysis would reveal that this failure is not due to the technology itself, but because of various adoption challenges that are left unaddressed. In fact, it is the poor adoption that leads to less than desirable impact of an enterprise social platform and may lead to eventual fizzling out of the initiative.

Lack of Motivation Clearly, a large chunk of users feel that when it comes to just-in-time knowledge that matters, it is not always available within and they need to connect with people outside the company as well. In many places, we observe that this connect is not established and solutions that allow users to tap the knowledge in external network without compromising companys information security concerns are not provided. Not only this, the lack of purpose building and not doing enough to connect by the use of social media technology with proper efforts into the advancement of peoples careers also affect the success of such initiatives. The Solution Designing of TechnologyTechnology and tools implemented are often low on reliability and not steady which restrict their use. There is also a lack of alignment of these platforms with the work habits of employees. In the wake of a host of company websites offering a variety of services, it remains difficult for users to refer to and use all of them in combination with social media platforms. As enough focus is not attributed in putting together these technologies as a comprehensive solution, these are not easy to understand and use. Also, since sufficient thought is not given to making it an engaging solution, the usage often drops. Work LinkagesThe intended users already feel the deluge of information and cant see how yet another tool will help them. They end up looking at these initiatives as yet another layer of information management, which it is clearly not. By the same token, they end up considering its output as meaningless interactions and content, and see it as an additional work when they already have so much to accomplish in their daily work routine. They sense a lack of time to contribute and moderate the generation of knowledge content and may end up considering it as an effort-intensive activity. The real content around business issues is generated when all stakeholders are part of the whole and when customers and extended partners are also included in this exercise. For various misguided reasons, some companies often end up not extending the use of social media to clients and partner networks in tandem with its workforce. This reduces the impact. Driving the ChangeSince these technologies are new and rather drastic, there is a need for volunteers and champions to drive it. However, in many places, there is a lack of dedicated resources to drive it. This lack of resources often proves detrimental to its adoption while the blame is attributed to the technology. If the needed drive is missing, especially during the initial phases of the implementation, sufficient content and interaction will not get generated. The ProcessAs people have seen and experienced these solutions to be more democratic in the open web world, they find it difficult and constraining when restrictions are applied unintelligently. This could also be attributed to the lack of harmony between these solutions and processes within the companies. There is enough scope for aligning the social media usage and interaction with the processes in a company, but this aspect is too often ignored rendering people to notice this disconnect which leads to a sense of disillusionment. Senior Management Sponsorship and MandateThe mandate from management, including practical sponsorship from the senior management is a critical success factor for any enterprise-wide solution that is offered as a change from the legacy system. But, because of the social nature of Enterprise 2.0 solutions, any lack of senior management sponsorship becomes much more apparent and negatively affects the overall adoption. Consider a situation where supervisors in various groups neither consciously use these tools nor push their subordinates to use nor pull them into this initiative. This has a rather negative impact on people at large who are actually critical of making it a success. They become rather disoriented because of the lack of perceived willingness of their immediate supervisors. These are some of the key adoption challenges that companies have to keep in mind and address for the successful adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

Kreeo among Microsoft TechSparks 2010 Finalists

Kreeo is among the top 20 technology companies @ Micorosft Canaan TechSparks 2010.  Organized by YourStory.in and covered by  CNBC TV 18.

Top 5 out of 20 will be selected  in Finals on Fri, 13th Aug @ Bangalore.  

Update:

Kreeo selected among the Top 5 by Audience choice.

Demonstrate your skills not degrees

Sumeet Anand & SM Nafay Kumail

Published on Times Ascent Online , August 06, 2010 at 11:32:03 AM

Gone are the days when only a decent relevant education from a reputed institution resulted in life-long employment bliss. Despite a decent academic background, at every juncture in the career, one has to prove that one has skills for the next larger role 

Changes in the economy have completely transformed the job market in the last couple of decades. India too is struggling to adjust to this reality. In India even today, people with long experience in the traditional sector are thoroughly surprised when they come across an IT professional with a background in sociology or anthropology. Gone are the days when only a decent relevant education from a reputed institution resulted in life-long employment bliss. Today, education alone doesn’t lead to a good employment opportunity. Even if a decently qualified person gets called for an interview, it might not lead to a gainful employment but a much less educated candidate who can convince the interviewer of the relevant skills for the job-on-offer could make it. Even if someone with good educational qualifications gets hired, it may not always lead to a successful career. Despite a decent academic background, at every juncture in the career, one has to prove that one has skills for the next larger role.

Changing priorities of employers

In this rather welcome situation, both people who want to get hired and those who want to hire will have to come to terms with the reality and focus on the right skills. Right from preparing resumes to working towards higher goals in professional life, people need to demonstrate that they have the right skills to be able to execute jobs, learn on-the-job to get better at what they do, and remain on the continuous journey of acquiring the skills for future. These skills are different from the certified knowledge coming from the degrees of the courses completed (however relevant these may be to an industry). This is more so for the job aspirants because the unconditional advantage of having a professional degree is fast withering away. Candidates appearing for a job not just face competition from many equally qualified people but also from less qualified people from no-so-famous colleges who are demonstrably much more skilled at doing things and taking up challenges.

Employers are also increasingly realising that what they need are people who can take up the challenge by using and continuously honing their skills and not only the folks with degrees with higher grades and people coming out of institutes with higher ratings.

The social media connect 

Both experienced professionals and candidates entering the job market have to specially focus on showing their skills to people who are involved in performance assessment and to potential employers. With social computing becoming handy tools for people of all hues, working professionals and going-to-be-working professionals can do great deal of self-branding to show how they have acquired and honed relevant skills to solve problems. Blogs, wikis, online presentations, and answering questions to help solve unique business problems on wider social networks are just a few ways of doing it. Resumes have to also start looking different. In a less than 10-minutes video on YouTube, you can show that you can communicate verbally well but can also demonstrate how well you organise your thoughts and what are the key areas of knowledge and skills you highlight. The first hurdle of being able to communicate is crossed. Now you can easily move on to other better social computing tools that help you in expression and organisation of your portfolio of knowledge, skills and works for prospective employers to explore even before they meet you face to face for a formal interview.

Applying social computing for career advancement

Sumeet Anand & SM Nafay Kumail

Published on Times Ascent Online, July 23, 2010 at 02:07:59 PM 

Experienced professionals and new entrants into professional playfield can use social computing to advance their individual brands and create a comprehensive visibility for their prospective employers

The social computing context

Picture this: More than 4 million Indians are on LinkedIn; around 1 billion videos are uploaded on YouTube daily; active users of Facebook will reach 100 million very soon; average 3 million tweets per day on Twitter; 2/3rd of global online users visit social networks.

This is a reflection of how fast social computing is catching up the imagination of today’s professionals and denotes the tools our current generation is growing up with and older generation getting comfortably accustomed to. In such a scenario, it is necessary to explore how best the experienced professionals and new entrants into professional playfield can use social computing to advance their individual brands and create a comprehensive visibility for their prospective employers. 

 Dynamically updated profile

Gone are the days when resumes took a long time to develop in response to particular job openings. Today, all that is needed is to fully and dynamically update your profile on one of your favourite professional network websites and use the link or use it to modify as you wish for a particular job. It would be futile here to detail how easy it is to build, update and enrich your resume over professional networking tools on the web.

Showcasing the capability

People can showcase their interest areas and contributions by not only concepts and ideas they are following but also how they are reacting to various technical and business issues being discussed. Earlier, expert professionals could not express themselves for technical people aren’t always good writers. But now, with simple and smart tools that new social computing provides, experts don’t have to write serious papers to express themselves. They can just put a quick reaction (twitter), refer to relevant sources (direct website links), short and detailed opinions (blog) and start discussions on any social media website (Facebook). And all the meaningful contribution that people make can be aggregated at one place for anybody to see. Even things that you like and recommend can become a pointer to your interests and orientations for your future employer.

Collaborating with peers, experts and prospective employers

It is nothing new. But with social computing professionals are much closer to their friends, peers, experts and employers. It is not surprising that many important posts, especially in IT and other modern industries are being filled using internal references. In fact, people are rewarded by the recruiting company if their referrals work.  The more you network and collaborate, better are the chances of your being approached for a suitable role and chances of getting to know a developing opportunity improves manifold. 

Collectively learning and knowledge ecosystems

While collectively learning over these social networks, you create your own body of knowledge which you can refer to at various points in time and knowledge ecosystem that build over various networks also have people that formed the various ecosystem. This visibility of you collective knowledge assets and groups in which you make this contribution will you in your career advancement a great deal. This creates a visibility around your association with the kind or quality of content and people.

A comprehensive and dynamic representation of a knowledge worker’s capability

In essence, effective use of social computing allows us to create a smart professional profile, learn collectively with friends, peers, experts and interested users. This helps build not only networks of professionals but also networks of knowledge which helps create a comprehensive representation of the capability of experienced and new professionals.

The Business Benefits Of Social Learning

Sumeet Anand and Nafay Kumail -  7/14/10

Published on CLOMedia

One thing repeatedly emphasized among learning and development professionals is the importance of getting “a seat at the table” – making their presence known to and establishing regular interaction with a company’s senior leadership. CLOs with the right technology and business perspective can change the face and fate of a company, but they need to be seen and heard to do so. Toward this end, CLOs need to go beyond procuring and implementing necessary training solutions and programs to directly connect their roles with the business outcomes of a company. The best way to do this is to improve workforce performance and demonstrate the effect of this on the bottom line.

Information technology, of course, plays a role. Ever since the advent of IT, it has dominated solutions offered to improve workforce performance, from computer- and web-based training to virtual classrooms and social-media-based knowledge preservation and transfer. Interactive learning conducted via the Internet and the accompanying mechanisms that capture and store the entire learning process for future use have become critical across a broad range of industries. The pace of adoption here has been rapid.

It is also worth noting that people learn where they spend most of their time. Learning doesn’t happen in isolation; it’s a function of communication and motivation. But learning has not yet been made as social as it could be. Using web-based social networking tools for learning and development can facilitate cost savings, which is a direct way to demonstrate the business impact of learning.

As any CLO knows, building out, delivering and maintaining a training program is costly. Web-based social networking tools can be rolled out comparatively inexpensively and meanwhile help people learn collectively. CLOs can help companies and individuals build their own learning networks and ensure that these are scalable. This is particularly essential in reaching younger employees. CLOs should recognize that young professionals have grown up with social networking tools and thus focus on phasing out entrenched legacy technologies such as e-learning modules that may be outdated in favor of interactive social networks.

This can only be achieved if collective knowledge is shared, curated and dynamically updated on a single platform that also allows knowledge collaboration and networking. Learning and development professionals should seek out a platform that enables them to not only save time spent on learning, but also solving day-to-day work-related problems faster – something that will increase employee productivity and customer satisfaction. This will also leave an active knowledge reservoir for new employees who can better navigate the intellectual capital of an organization. The end result is a learning process essential to the business overall, which ensures learning’s seat at the table.

Why Enterprise 2.0 Will Fail In Organizations? It’s not about Technology

If we look at the trends in technology (especially enterprise software) you will see a pattern.  First a new concept is unleashed by researchers, analysts, management gurus or technologists like e-commerce, knowledge management, performance management, collaborative enterprise, SaaS, utility computing etc and then technology vendors hijack it (at times they first create a buzz word themselves) and transform it into a technology product space.

It is true that ICT is required to enable any new management or business concept but none of these concepts are really about ICT.  Somewhere most companies forget the point that ICT is JUST an enabler and nothing more, a specific implementation to suit your needs and managing the change is the key to success.

Enterprise 2.0 will also fail in organizations that do not understand the following:

• It is never about technology, just use it as an enabler.  Look at implementation of each initiative as a combination of technology and non-technology methods.
• Just features is not enough, usability and relevance of how it is implemented is  more important.
• Requirements come first, so first define your requirements and the context of using enterprise 2.0 before calling software vendors.
• Its about everyone, a multi functional team with representation from IT, HR, KM and business units must evaluate and select the right technology and specific requirements from it.
• You don’t need support staff, so transform them into evangelists.
• There will never be instant success, treat it like a transition to a new way of working  and have patience to evangelize it properly.
• Motivating employees is the key, work on identifying ways to reward and recognize adopters, others will follow early adopters.

What else you think can be added to this list of reasons?

image source(geekandpoke.typepad.com)

Applying Social Media to Harness Collective Intelligence

Sumeet Anand and Nafay Kumail -  6/16/10

Published on CLOMedia

Social media technologies are pervasive today, and not just because of their novel and innovative nature or because they are some transient fad. Their dominance can be attributed to the inherent human desire to interact, share and learn about and from each other. But why is it then that so many companies are blocking their workforces from social networking sites? And why do people prefer to interact on external social sites rather than their companies’ internal social platforms?

The Dilemma
Today, companies are faced with a great dilemma: Should they allow their employees to engage in social networking at the cost of productivity? Is blocking people from collaborating socially going to hinder the learning process? And since companies can’t always keep track of all employees while they are engaged in social networking, isn’t there a risk of employees sharing things that are not in the interest of the company?

The dilemma on the people side is no less grave. People, especially the young workforce entering the marketplace, love to connect using tools they have grown up with, and they feel lost without them. Members of the older generation also have jumped on the bandwagon because they know that the Web and social networks are where the action is. It is not surprising that the overwhelming majority of the workforce wants companies to have a social media organism.

What approach is best for an organization: allow people to use external social networks or have an intranet-based enterprise social platform of their own?

Acknowledge the Change
The situation demands a solution that suits all stakeholders. Companies and institutions should first accept the reality as it exists. It will be difficult to overlook the changes that are happening in the world. Remember that in the beginning, even e-mail was provided to a limited set of people by organizations due to the same fears that companies have today about social networking.

Companies should start exploring the possibility of turning social networking activities into a competitive advantage by ensuring that their employees’ social interactions are meaningful and intelligent. The collective intelligence paradigm should be used to its maximum. This ensures meaningful interaction among users of social media by providing them with a platform where they can interact, share and solve business problems when they confront them by learning from each other.

It’s Only Natural
Learning is social in nature and is a function of collective communication. Organizations can use the power of social media to foster this culture of learning from each other. It is not always necessary to take a course in order to learn. If companies provide a platform and a framework around social computing tools for their people to meaningfully interact and collectively learn, this will become an extremely useful exercise for both businesses and employees. Companies want employees to become more efficient at what they do, and employees consider growth in learning to be the second most important reason to stick with a job or a company. Both ends can be met via social networking.

The following are key steps in doing so:

• Identify the knowledge domain and key stakeholders.

• Allow selective access to external social networks that add value to the business.

• Have an internal enterprise 2.0 platform that focuses on harnessing the collective intelligence of key stakeholders in the company’s knowledge domain — i.e., employees, customers, partners, and virtual and part-time associates.

• Look at securely enabling an inside-out connection through your internal social platform.

What’s needed is intelligent application of Web 2.0 or social computing features and tools that can help companies and individuals build and sustain knowledge without expending the kind of money and resources previously required for this purpose. What’s also needed is a solution that helps professionals adopt peer networking tools and a technology that helps them improve their knowledge and discover new applications at the same time. Social computing offers a great platform for the expression, organization and discovery of meaningful information. The solution should thus help companies and individuals reduce learning cost and get the desired benefit without going through the archaic models of knowledge management and corporate training.

Thus, by turning the focus of social networking toward collective intelligence, companies will not only save on overall training costs by a huge margin, they will end up with a much larger value from the investment in people development. A collective intelligence solution also helps create a corporate institutional memory, which is a critical need in the wake of changing business priorities and employee attrition.