Beyond the Cube

After spending Herculean efforts to get executives at your company to “get” social computing, you finally receive the green light to rock and roll.  You think you have reached the promised land.  But a new challenge, one that can derail your efforts, is looming on the horizon:  The executive who is a kid in the Enterprise 2.0 candy store.

What is the kid in the candy store syndrome?  It is an executive who went from curmudgeon to sipping the KoolAid…but now wants to drink every flavor of KoolAid.  One of the key symptoms is daily email messages asking if you have “looked at X vendor or vendor Y”. You suddenly go from executing & deploying selected vendor(s) products to chasing shiny objects.  Vendors that were originally evaluated and didn’t make the short list, are using foilware “flare” to lure the novice executive into their grasps.  Enterprise vendors that once laughed off 2.0, suddenly have an “integrated” offering.  Your problem is potentially massive because everyone and their brother is entering into this space.  In 2010, it will be hard to find a HR, Sales, Enterprise, Supply Chain supplier that isn’t 2.0 “ized”.  Executives who are salivating in the Enterprise 2.0 candy store will send your strategy, execution & your team into a tailspin.  How can you avoid and manage the sugar high?  Here are tactics that I use to manage the challenge:

• Solid business & technical requirements is your deflector shield:  If you have well documented requirements and use those to evaluate all vendors’ solutions, then you have a data driven process.  Data is the best weapon to fight off emotional knee jerk reactions.
• Set-up a dedicated play area:  We are still in the infancy stage of 2.0. You aren’t going to find one vendor who can deliver everything you need nor have one solution you can deploy and leave alone for 3 years. If you wait for the perfect solution, you will be waiting for a while. Pick vendors that satisfy the core solutions you need to deploy today.  At the same time, set-up a sandbox that allows your team & bleeding edge adopters to try out new “candy”, test usage models and watch list potential future capabilities.
• Leverage analyst reviews:  Industry analysts get a bird’s eye view of all the vendors in the space.  They are on the vendor “briefing” circuit and get advance insight into company product direction.  Top analysts will also publish reviews & ratings of the vendors.  One report could potentially save you from meeting with a multitude of vendors and arms you with credible data to discuss with your candy store executive.
• Usage model proof-of-concepts: Some of the best feedback comes directly from the end users themselves.  Once you have a short list of vendor products (recommend 3 max), throw them into a 2-3 week bakeoff.  Key users and business stakeholders are invited in to test their usage models, their requirements and usability of the menu of solutions.  If users have given a product a thumbs down, they will not use it if you decide to deploy it.
• Develop vendor scorecards & executive business reviews: Performance of your current vendor is critical to ensure you are delivering business value to your company.  Using scorecards that rate the vendor on delivering to your expectations, not only helps you do robust vendor management, but it allows you to have indicators.  If you have a scorecard that shows everything is in the green, then it is hard to make an argument to change vendors just for the sake of trying new “flavors”.  In addition, pulling in your executive into quarterly or bi-annual executive level reviews, can provide assurance  that your vendor selection is still the sound choice.
• Show the cost of change: Stabilization is essential towards achieving critical adoption of your Enterprise 2.0 platform.  Any changes in your standard solution, especially to the user interface (UI), should be minor.  It is challenging enough to encourage employees to incorporate 2.0 technologies into their flow of work, let alone force them to constantly re-learn technologies because the vendor changed.  Changing the user interface will hamper full adoption, which hampers your ability to extract full business value.  In addition, there is a resource cost for data migration from one platform to another.  A value tenet of social computing should be to reduce time and reduce costs – not add to them. Financial impact speaks volumes.

I am at the end of the 1st month my 8 week  sabbatical.  I had lots of big plans to invest in thinking, pondering and writing about practicing Enterprise 2.0.  Good intentions, but that is all they have been.  I have writer’s block.  Errr…edit.  I have social computing block.  My brain is revolting from thinking about it.  It is even to the point that I have to shield my eyes from Twitter – most of the folks I follow are in the biz too.  What has happened to me?

I realized that I am stick-a-fork-in-me-done.  Burnt.  Fried.  Just before I left for sabbatical, my boss looked at the lengthy list of items my sabbatical coverage was assuming responsibility for.  She gasped and stated, “You are going to kill yourself trying to bring social computing to (this company).”  Well unfortunately it isn’t an open and closed case.  Being a practitioner of enterprise 2.0 means that my wardrobe now includes fashionista flak jackets. My “hit the bottom” ah-ha moment ultimately arrived when I recently sat down and drew a map of who and what gets a piece of me.  My pie had work taking up 50% of the pie. I think a bit of denial comes out in this one- reality is probably 60%.

How I am divided up today

My husband is shouting from the roof top to everyone he encounters that he is” not exaggerating….my wife works at least 60 hours a week.”  But that isn’t the whole story.  I am a mother of a 2-1/2 year old and 4 year old trying to find balance in raising small children, being a good wife, giving back to the community, staying connected with friends at the same time having a fulfilling career.  Oh, and  I am fighting a daily “change agent” battle at work, putting dinner on the table, paying bills and keeping the house clean too.    Notice I didn’t even include in the list – “me”.  Time for a manicure?  Hahahahaha – you should be a comedian.  So is this “woe me” so unique to me?  No.  And this is the problem.  I am not alone in the quest for work & life balance as a working mom.   My role model mother lived the same craziness, I just didn’t realize how crazy until now.  Yes- I have become my mother!

Balance.  Let me burst the bubble right now.  There isn’t balance.  Don’t even think you can get it.  It doesn’t exist.  What there is though, is a life that is lived with purpose and priorities placed front and center.  My anthesis of what I am actually doing. So I am changing my focus during sabbatical.  I am not going to write about practicing 2.0.  For at least another month I will be writing about what I am learning on sabbatical.  Once I get back to work, I will re-enter the world of social computing and you will hear about my experiences.  But I am going to mix in my progress towards sanity and living my priorities.  Hopefully I will be able to become a practitioner of both enterprise 2.0 and healthy working mom habits. Let the journey begin.

It is the million dollar question for social media and social computing efforts. “What is the ROI (Return of Investment) for social media?”  I just got asked this for the gazillionth time last week.  According to Wikipedia, ROI is the “ratio of money gained or lost on an investment relative to the amount of money invested.”  On the flip side, business value is defined as an “informal term that includes all forms of value…expands concept of value beyond economic value to include other forms of value such as employee value, customer value, supplier value…many forms of value are not directly measured in monetary value.”  What I and  the rest of my peers in the industry have discovered is the actual monetary investment necessary to deploy 2.0 technologies is very trivial.  So why do some many executives ask for up front ROI?  Why not ask what is the business value? What is the value being created? Caution: Business value isn’t ROI in sheep’s clothing but is intrinsically implied by exec’s questioning.   To add to the “why” questions….”why is it that nobody asking for the ROI of current collaborative and/or 1.0 technologies such as your external website or email or instant message….better yet – the phone sitting on your desk?  Why does social media get held to a different standard?

In a recent Information Week Global CIO Virtual Event, one executive stated that the cost of providing social computing is so “trivial” that it is not difficult to say the ROI of infrastructure is guaranteed.  I agree with that.  If we really want to dwell on ROI, then the discussion could be very quick.  You literally would only need to “return” very little back to the company.  Depending on if you use Open Source or commercial grade technologies, your investment could be as low as picking up a case of “two buck Chuck”.   Let’s run a scenario for a mid-size company (50,000 employees).

• $500,000 invested for four to five technologies (heavier emphasis on commercial grade software)
• Industry average employee burden rate is $100,000
• Then, break even ROI is the efficiency or savings of 5 people or less than half of one percent of your workforce power

In most companies that I have worked for over my career, senior executives typically don’t bat an eye at this degree of expenditure.  Heck, for some corporations, the $500k is what they spent just for the first day of their annual sales conference.

Toby Redshaw, Global CIO, Aviva, made a recent statement during the Information Week Global CIO Summit,  that IT gets “trapped by accountants”.  He advocates to look at the bigger picture, even go beyond productivity measurements.  Toby states that investing in and utilizing 2.0 technologies isn’t about productivity. It is about solving business challenges such as staying ahead of the competition, accelerating speed of decisions & quality of decisions. Social technologies have the capacity to stop un-innovation.

So if the financial investment and monetary return is trivial, than what is really going on? My theory is that it is not about the ROI.  Decision makers use ROI as a blocker.  Your executive is exhibiting several anti-patterns. Fear. Control. Intangible Means Unmeasurable.  Jen Okimoto from IBM did a great job of laying out the classic anti-patterns for web 2.0 during the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston (see Jen’s: Anti-Patterns slide deck).

Knowing that you are dealing with classic anti-patterns, what can you do? 

• Focus on the business value, but be cautious to clearly lay out that business value is not always, nor likely to be  monetized in the near future.
• Do benchmarking of your peers and the industry.  If few industry peers have mastered the ROI, then likely you won’t either. This can “normalize” your efforts.
• Become close partners with your controller or finance person. Jointly work on a proposed business value model.  Let your credible finance person deliver the message that monetized ROI for social media is currently elusive.
• Identify potential business challenges and focus for the emerging technologies.  Partner with line of business stakeholders to align early use cases to test and prove out the delivery of desired value/results.
• Work with your security and HR teams to do a risk assessment. The assessment will  identify the associated risks for deployed solutions AND also the risk of inaction. Knowing the risks in advance allow for informed vs. fear based  business decisions to be made. 
• Reverse mentoring for executives who fear and want to control social media.  The next generation work force can help shed light on the use and value of the tools.  Executives will better understand that it isn’t a matter of “if” but “when” your workforce will evolve the way they work. They may have an “a-ha” moment that the change has already occurred at the grassroot level.
• Get external 3rd party validation.  Yes, I know you are THE expert.  But sometimes a resident expert is viewed as a biased evangelist.  Get your CxO on the horn with a peer over at another company deploying & reaping value from 2.0; call in your favorite analyst to talk about emerging technologies and why to embrace vs. fear them; leverage the number of super duper consultants out there.  My experience is that light bulbs go off when someone else repeats exactly what you have been saying for the past 6 months.
• Lastly, have patience.  In order to survive this journey you must be in it for the long haul.  Make sure you are surrounded by peeps that can be your emotional support team. You will ask yourself numerous times “WHY am I bothering?”  Getting a regular pow-wow with people just like you at other companies. It  helps keep you refreshed, renewed and potentially find new avenues to achieve success.  You are a change agent.  A pioneer.  It will be challenging.  In the long run- you will succeed!

Welcome to Beyond the Cube!  This blog is the point-of-view from a practitioner of social computing within an enterprise. Whether you are a big, mid-size, small or non-profit organization, driving new & disruptive social technologies into the workplace is not for the faint of heart.  The technology is 25% of your challenge. Thus, I thought it would be fitting to write my first post  about the personal value and corporate value associated with social technologies – the opportunity to work differently.  At the heart of becoming a social enterprise is a new path to think differently, connect instantaneously, discover serendipitously, innovate radically and work differently.  What other tools or method inside an enterprise allows me to remain always connected with my “customer” base?  Disseminate information quickly and easily?  Provide transparency to decisions and actions?  Have unknown knowledge holders reach out to me?

From my perspective.  Nothing comes close to the social technologies. None.  Nada.

I have blogged in other venues about a solid role model, Luis Suarez.   Luis recently posted an update about his personal & his company’s (IBM’s) five year journey with social computing- the Business Value of Social Software.  It is a MUST READ. Some of the real nuggets from the post include the shift that Luis and his organization made from deriving power from hoarding information to deriving power from sharing information. What did he became?  In Luis’s words, “visible; easy to reach and connect with; always willing to help and share my knowledge with those who needed it (And with those who may need it at a later time, too!) in an open and public way; willing to share my expertise, experience and know-how across the board with those who I know, and those who I may not know yet; willing to feed those resources with knowledge and expertise that otherwise would have remained in my own head, or my computer, for that matter, and therefore with very little access for others to enjoy.”  Can we honestly say there isn’t value in that?

Within the company that I work for, teams & individuals have already finding  immediate value with the new social platform we launched in March.  One corporate marketing team “tripped” upon another group’s conversation about a great research resource.  Unbeknown to them, an internal group provides a centralized repository of excellent market intelligence.   They were immediately connected and found useful research & data. The marketing team was able to leverage some of the charts & graphs for a presentation that same week.  For me personally, I have found a lot of value in a transparent method to provide updates, disseminate information & gather feedback directly from stakeholders across the company.  A recent example was with a delay of the launch of a new capability in our suite of social tools.  Was it easy to fall on my sword publicly – no.  But my customers (employees) got one place to go for immediate information, updates, ask questions and provide feedback.  I got major kudos for the transparent updates.  I just proved to myself all over again how valuable this medium is.

Now back to Luis.  So what is his summation of the business value?  According to Luis, “embracing a new model of collaborating and sharing my knowledge (Much more open, transparent and public than ever before, ever since I decided to live “A World Without Email“) with other fellow knowledge workers has allowed me to prove the point that you can work wherever you want, whenever you need, and with whoever you would want to reach across, depending always on the context, by making extensive use of social software and forgetting about measuring people just by their sheer presence versus their overall performance and results obtained. That is what social software has done not only for me, but also for the company I work for…”

Welcome to living and breathing social computing.  It truly takes thinking differently in order to work differently.   I look forward to sharing my perspective and learnings along the journey towards transparency, sharing, discussing, exchanging ideas…..transformation to a knowledge & learning based organization.  It is all about becoming a true social enterprise that harnesses knowledge & people power to stay ahead of the competition.