At Enterprise 2.0 Boston Conference this week I attended a discussion about the details of the Open Enterprise research by Oliver Marks and Stowe Boyd. While listening to folks talk about their insights into making e20 work, someone asked about stories of failure - where people are really struggling with e20 in their organization. It’s natural that those who feel their efforts have really gained ground want to share the story. Not as likely to hear from those who are frustrated in their efforts.
So I thought I might share some of challenges and lessons learned after nearly a year at Johnson & Johnson attempting to build collaboration, community and e20 for a virtual organization of about 1000 Global Procurement professionals.
Leadership/Organizational dynamics
Play close attention to leadership activity on social tools: I blogged about this recently, when I realized what had happened in a series of comments months ago on one of our early blog attempts. Lessons learned:
- Coach Leaders ahead of time about the essence of communicating with these tools: praise the good, ignore the bad, be prepared to accept criticism, and never come across as critical or negative. Doing so will freeze all activity. Dion Hinchcliffe spoke about leadership behaviors on day 1 of the e2 conference: “Leaders need to get used to a lot more give and take,” he noted.
- E20 expects Leaders who respect the crowd – if leaders fundamentally believe they are smarter or better than the crowd – there will always be a lack of respect and trust. If this is the culture in your organization, it’s going to be hard to change – but you know where the good leaders are – focus on them for encouragement and trust, and leave the grouchy ones alone.
- Pay close attention to the tone and quality of leader interactions online as soon as they happen. A big lesson learned for me. Comment numbers alone don’t account for success - you have to watch what leaders and individuals are saying to make sure the tone and the climate remain open and friendly.
- E20 from the outside in: You can’t fully transform what you are a part of. I’m not 100% sure about this – but I recently blogged about an insight I had about my own failures to push, nag, coax and guide leaders to take a more open approach. I felt that my behavior was constrained by the organizational dynamics. I need to think through this further, but I would suggest to maybe position e20 strategists in a BIS or PE group – once removed from the organization they are trying to transform. Again, needs further thinking.
- Watch for organizational fear– organizational dynamics that foster fear. A few weeks into my stint at J&J the organization had a pretty classic shuffle: At a high level, someone decided quickly that things weren’t working out with certain players, and someone got “ousted.” With nothing said about what had happened. Now, this is very common story in corporate America – but it creates a terrible environment for enterprise 2.0. Not only is trust, authenticity and openness clearly not happening – but individuals are fearful about just the basics of keeping their jobs. It’s the kind of overlord approach that really needs to disappear fast if e20 is going to take root.
- Work harder to understand executive reluctance: In a nutshell, our CPO blogged twice a year ago, and nobody commented so he didn’t want to try again. The blog was not getting him what he expected - so he walked away. It took me many months to get this realization. Actually, it took me a minute, once my manager shared this with me, but I was not as aggressive as I might have been in probing to find out why the CPO was not blogging.
Planning/Resources
The cost of doing e20 is not high - but resources have to be alllocated correctly. Key insights for me were revelations about the amount of resource allocated to Community Management and Change Management:
- Community management is critical to success: Dion Hinchcliffe suggested 25% of an e20 project should be dedicated to community management. And, he said, “The quality of the community management team will directly determine the success of the e20 effort.”
- e20 is not your Father’s Change Management At BAH - 50% of their costs were Change Management: At J&J we fundamentally failed to consider the amount of change management and community management needed – it simply was not in the budget, and not in the skillset of the IT group that was supposed to deliver the project. I see now that the IT Business Analyst team charged with delivering this project were taking a very standard approach to IT delivery – factoring in some lip service to Change Management, but not truly understanding the social and organizational implications of adopting these tools. But it begs the question: Should the IT team have these skills? Or does that lie with the business ?
- Understand how communities are defined now and focus on the nuts and bolts of defining those communities in the new environment. For community management and SharePoint (especially) the devil is really in the details: The typical process for communicating to groups of people is using groups in Outlook or maybe published DLs in the Directory.
Define very clearly for end users the process for migrating that group of names to the new community membership list, and Make Sure you understand how to manage those groups (add, delete). Also understand the right approach for opt in/opt out, notifications, and participation.
- Understand the Adoption overhang: : Stowe talked about a “Technology overhang” – where the tools available to the masses on the WWW but not in the enterprise. Well I think there is also an Adoption overhang, where expectations for e20 adoption are based on the viral adoption experience on the WWW. With maybe some rare exceptions - that will never happen in the enterprise. (one exception being the experience of adopting Sametime IM at IBM – my theory there is that Lotus Notes was so slow that people just turned to the faster tool
