The Content Economy

The invisible manager

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Mon, 21 May 2012 08:50:00 +0000

An invisible manager is a person who holds the position as manager and who works behind the scenes to make sure the actors get what they need to perform at their best; autonomy, access to the relevant resources, good working conditions, recognition, space to think and act. Invisible managers help to find and recruit talented people. They help to take care of all the stuff that makes the people who will perform lose their focus. They stand somewhere behind the scenes, observing that things are all right, and act on things which aren't. As invisible managers, their role in making the play a success is significant. However, they should remain invisible to both the actors and the audience.

(Image from stock.xchng)

It is important to understand that holding the position as manager is not the same thing as being a leader. Unfortunately, many managers believe it is. Although someone can be both a manager and a leader at the same time, in my experience many managers are not leaders; it is because they haven't been assigned as managers primarily because of their leadership skills, but because they comply well with the existing management model. They are loyal, ambitious and meticulous.

The leaders are often elsewhere, trying to stay away from management because they are afraid of getting stuck in status quo (it is a manager's responsibility to maintain status quo). Thus there is often a tension here between managers and leaders: while managers are defenders of status quo, leaders are agents of change. Leaders live and breathe uncertainty, while managers defy and try to fight or prevent it with all means available. Leaders find new paths to moving the enterprise forward, while managers try to get people to walk in line along existing paths. Leaders are driven by passion, while managers are usually driven by other things such as monetary rewards and climbing in the hierarchy.

So, a manager does not always have to be a leader. It is important for anyone who thinks about entering a management position to realize this. Are you a leader? If so, do you want to continue as a leader and develop your leadership skills? Then you might think about how you will be able to do that in your new role.

Managers who are not leaders but who try to act like leaders are just drawing attention to themselves as persons rather than the work that has to be done and the challenges which have to be dealt with. They are themselves too much space and drawing attention away from real leaders and work. They obstruct work. Instead, they should step back and focus on being invisible managers. Great managers make themselves invisible and help to make true leaders visible. If they also have a leader within themselves, they need to manage less to lead more.

3 ways to improve knowledge worker productivity

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Tue, 15 May 2012 20:23:00 +0000

One of the simplest definitions of productivity can be found in Wikipedia:

"Productivity is a measure of the efficiency of production. Productivity is a ratio of production output to what is required to produce it (inputs). The measure of productivity is defined as a total output per one unit of a total input."

Knowledge worker productivity in the digital age is something completely different. We are still trying to figure out what it's about and how to fuel it. On the one hand, digital technologies allow us to interact with much more people and information across time and space. On the other hand, they make us more isolated and less able to use our natural communication tools such as voice and body language. They disconnect us from the physical places where we are. Yet it is the context (information in your surroundings, the situation we are in) that explains to us what we need to do, when, how and why.

The more dynamic, complex and uncertain our business environments become, the more people and information we need to be able to access and interact with. The more people and information need to be available to us, the more challenging it becomes to make them findable and easily accessible. The faster we need to produce results, the more challenging it becomes to handle the number of interactions. This is why we often find ourselves stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Simply put, knowledge worker productivity in the digital age boils down to getting the right things done as fast a possible. To improve it we need to do three things:

1. Provide enough context so we know what goes on and what we need to do in any situation.

Simply put; we have the information that tells us what to do, when, how and why. It is all about making the right decisions, about taking the right actions.

2. Ensure that we can access and find all the resources we need.

All the information, tools and people we need must be findable and accessible in any situation. Capture and use information from interactions to improve relevance.

3. Make it as easy as possible to interact with the resources.

We should spend as little time interacting with a resource that is needed to achieve the purpose of the interaction.

Context. Access. Relevance. Simplicity.

Want to boost productivity? Simplify!

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 10:43:00 +0000

In an HBR IdeaCast interview with Chris Zook from Bain & Company, he shares their finding that 85% of executives see complexity, in one form or the other, as the main barrier to seizing business opportunities and being successful in an ever changing world:

"They either felt it was becoming more difficult to react to an increasingly fast world in businesses that are more complex and more muscle-bound, or to see and perceive what they need to react to or internally to decide, and to mobilize, or to focus resources for a long enough period of time"

Is seems as most people are hoping to find the silver bullet, a new IT system that will solve all their needs. Yet, introducing a new IT system often increases complexity unless you take a truly user-centric approach. What looks like simplification from a high-level top-down technology-centric perspective (typically a system map or EA models) can actually increase the complexity for individuals, making them less productive and less able to create synergies that make the enterprise as a whole more productive. Many organizations prefer this approach because it looks like things will be simplified and because it is (or seems like) a straight-forward way to deal with the complexity, but the end result will likely be that real problems (caused by complexity) are not solved and that no real and sustainable business improvements have been achieved.

According to the 4th annual IT Adoption Insight Report produced by Oracle UPK together with Neochange, the effective usage rates of enterprise software are down compared to two years ago, with users experiencing productivity losses of around 17%:

"It’s like giving everyone Friday off. Many factors contribute to this problem but, simply put, end users are struggling to absorb the glut of IT investments made over the past several years."

From a top-down technology-centric view it can seem like consolidating two systems into one will save costs and reduce complexity. In reality what sometimes happen is the opposite: the activities performed by people can be more complex to perform and the support they get from the new IT system might not be fit for their needs and the situations and conditions they work under. The much needed customization of the system then comes as an afterthought, and despite enormous investments in customization the end result in terms of benefits gained can turn out worse than the situation was before. People's work situations don't necessarily get easier when multiple systems are being replaced with a single new system.

In my experience true simplification can only be achieved by reducing the complexity of the interactions between the parts of a system (people, information, technology and other resources). It requires you to study these interactions in detail - why they are needed, when, who interacts, what they lead to - find typical interactions and then simplifying those interactions. Simplification efforts have to start with getting a thorough understanding of how work is done; what typical activities are performed and by whom, in what situations, under what conditions and how the activities and the people (or machines) who perform them are interdependent. They have to be measured and evaluated based on the effects they have in daily work.

It's a simple as that, but not as simple as buying that new "silver bullet" IT system.

Making the dark matter of the business universe visible

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 06:54:00 +0000

It has now been a while since I read “Far from the Factor – Lean for the Information Age” by George Gonzales-Rivas and Linus Larsson. It's an excellent book, bringing the Lean philosophy and tools to the modern knowledge-intense and virtualized office. The authors of the book uses the same analogy I have used many times to explain the enormous amounts of hidden and invisible amounts of information which exists in all modern business environments:

“The bulk of the universe seems to be dark matter, mass that exists but cannot be observed. Only about 5 to 10 percent of the stuff in the universe can be seen directly. Information flow is the dark matter of the modern high-tech office environments. “

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

The equivalent of the visible matter is the “official” information captured into process procedures and documentation, operating manuals, policies and instructions, training manuals and courses, etc. It prescribes how work should get done, but as Gonzales-Rivas and Larsson point out it should not be taken as a documentation of how things actually get done:

“The unofficial, back channel and non-ex officio ways of getting things done are the dark matter. They can’t be seen, that is, an audit of methods and procedures would not reveal them, but their effects can certainly be felt. Ask yourself if any of your coworkers have taken you aside and explained “how to really get things done around here.”

I guess we can all recognize ourselves in this picture. If email and attachment ping-ping isn’t the default practice to communicate, share and collaborate on stuff, then it's most likely some free and easy-to-use - but unsanctioned and sometimes banned - web 2.0 tool. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard something like “to get things done around here, you need to get a DropBox account. Just store your stuff in the official directories when the work is finished, but working with the official collaboration tools just doesn’t do it for us. It’s not designed for the way we work.”

In a post of mine from 2009 called "The Dark Matter of the Business Universe" I used the same analogy to highlight the amount of information exchanged in conversations:

”Businesses obviously record transactions today, and most businesses try to learn from them in order to find ways to improve how they manage and operate their business. But how much does the average business really know about the conversations taking place?

Most business conversations are transient and passes by without a notice, only touching a those individuals who participate in the conversation. Why? Because the vast majority of business conversations either take place over phone or face-to-face. Most of the conversations that are captured are typically buried in email inboxes and almost impossible to access, analyze and learn anything from.

In a way, most business conversations are like dark matter. We know it must be there, but we can't see it and don't know what it is.”

What social tools will do, when used properly to shift legacy practices to better practices for sharing and collaboration, is that it will surface and provide access to much of the information that already exists, but which is recreated when it cant be found, duplicated like a virus when being exchanged via email, and leading to sub-optimization and bad decision-making since it is not available to those who need it. Although we cannot observe it directly, this dark matter of the business universe, we can infer its presence from these kinds of effects.

Many still seem to fear that the introduction of social tools such as blogs, wikis and micro-blogging will create huge amounts of information and cause information overload, but what they really should be worried about and deal with is the enormous amounts of information already being created, re-created and duplicated en masse in our digital business environment. It is not the amount of information per se that is the biggest challenge to solve – it's the amount of duplicated, incorrect and irrelevant information that is not traceable to any person or project, and which cannot be trusted even if it – against all odds – is found. Social software and Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, blogs, social bookmarking and micro-blogging can both reduce the volumes of dark matter and shift dark matter to visible matter at the same time. By making the information that exists visible, accessible and stored in one copy at one location rather than being multiplied for each user who accesses it, we will be able to avoid the negative effects caused by the multiplying dark matter. Moreover;

”Social software and the use of tools such as wikis, blogs and micro-blogs in a business context help to make potentially important business conversations visible and thereby possible to analyze and learn from. Social networks does the same thing with informal networks. The informal networks which are so important for most business can now be charted and analyzed. It is a can't-miss opportunity for organizations that want to know their business better and improve how it is managed and operated.”

How to create change

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 11:59:00 +0000

How to create change

View more presentations from Oscar Berg

How to spot technology-centric thinking

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 06:13:00 +0000

I hear questions such as the ones below being asked all the time:

What should we have on our intranet startpage?
How do we get people to read corporate news on the intranet?
Should we have comments to news?
What features should we have on our collaboration platform?
When can we have blogs and wikis?
How should we use SharePoint?

Often, the people who ask these kinds of questions think they have a user-centric mindset, that they put the needs of the users first, but what they are saying is actually evidence of the opposite.

Questions such as the ones above are evidence of technology-centric thinking, and as such they are more dangerous than they might sound at first. We really don’t help to make it easier for users to do their job by asking these questions. We might get all excited about a new feature, tool or design, thinking it will really help to increase the users’ productivity, but unfortunately the opposite often becomes true; for every feature we add, we add to their burden. The simple reason is that we use the wrong starting point for our questions - the technology.

(photo from stock.xchng)

The questions we should be asking are such as the following:

How do we help users create workspace awareness? How do we help them know what is happening and when it’s their time to contribute?
What information do users need in different situations? What information would be relevant to them?
How can we help users share their opinions, ideas, experiences, knowledge with each other?
How can we help users do their job whenever they need to, wherever they are?
How can we help users who collaborate communicate better within their teams as well as beyond?
What kind of technical capabilities do users need to perform their tasks?

The bottom line is that we need to take the user’s perspective as our starting point. The best way to ensure that we really do is to define and ask the right questions. We should stop asking questions about intranets, SharePoint, mobile devices, blogs, and wikis. Instead, we should ask ourselves and others what users need in order to do their job in different situations. Only if we do that we will be able to provide technical capabilities that help them do their job in a better way and make better use of their talent and potential. Until that happens, the great productivity potential that exists in improving knowledge work remains untouched.

An antidote to management by email

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:20:00 +0000

I once got a new business area manager (my boss' boss) who introduced himself to the consultants in his business area by sending a long email with instructions on how we should act if we would find ourselves in a situation without an assignment, or in "a situation of non-utilization" as he preferred to put it. Many of my colleagues who read his email didn't even know who this guy was, and only a rare few had actually met him in person even though he had been with the company for a few years.

That email really stuck with me. There is truth in the saying that first impressions last, especially when what you see is a person's behavior. I believe this was actually my first encounter with a person in a management position who practiced management by email to the extreme. After this experience I have become better at recognizing and spotting this style of management where managers rather hide behind Excel sheets, Word documents and lengthy emails than to meet people in person, even when it is possible to do so.

I am not sure that this style of management would have worked even in a factory in 1930's. I am sure the managers back then were much more present than many of today's managers, simply because they had to be physically close to the production to listen and learn what needed to be done so they could instruct the workers what to do. That's is also the problem with management by email; the lack of listening and lack of learning. If there is no listening, then communication also suffers. It will be hard to reach a mutual understanding of what needs to be done and how to get it done.

What this essentially means is that if you don't listen, you won't be able to communicate efficiently and you won't be able to lead people. Despite this, there are lots of managers practicing management by email and who think they are leaders. In my experience, lack of self-awareness is the common denominator for all bad managers I have encountered, so it is only natural that they think of themselves as leaders when they really aren't.

When looking at the increasing problems with employee engagement in many organizations today, I believe much of it can be blamed on lack of listening and communication, and ultimately lack of leadership, among management. These are the people who make decisions that affect people and their situations, and making those decision without knowing enough about the people and the situations they will affect is a sure path to failure and misery. Organizations require more and more of their employees, but management is not listening to them. There is no chance managers can empower their people to get the job done faster and better without listening to them and understanding what they need.

(photo from stock.xchng)

Unfortunately, the misuse (abuse) of tools such as email can increase the distance between the managers and the people doing the are supposed to be leading. Instead of leading, they divert most of their attention to reporting (pleasing their manager to safeguard their own positions) and primarily meet their people in the form of names in emails and Excel sheets. What they should be doing most of their time is to listen and communicate with their people, analyzing their situations and trying to figure out how to empower them to get their work done.

In a world where distributed and virtual organizations will become the norm, you need to find antidotes to management by email and general lack of listening, and you need them now before it is too late and all the talent has left the organization. This alone is a reason why organizations should look to replace broadcasting tools such as email and traditional intranets with social tools that allow rich and intreractive real-time two-way communication that help to bring people closer to each other by making them listen and communicate more. And why you should always aim to have face-to-face meetings whenever it is feasible and there are important and complex things you need to communicate about. These tools are the tools for real leaders, and it is easy to find the real leaders for the digital age in your organizations, simply because they find it wise to embrace these tools and learn new habits that make them better at leading virtually.

On a final note, to prove the truth in the saying "a fool with a tool is still a fool", my old business area manager also tried blogging for a while (because it was the cool new thing to do). But in the end he wasn't really interested in listening to what other people in his unit or elsewhere had to say. He just wanted to continue broadcasting. After a couple of months of broadcasting on the business area blog (which you could comment, but not from outside the firewalls where most people spent their time), he stopped and reverted to good old email. Foolish. Just sayin'.

The collaboration pyramid (or iceberg)

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 08:07:00 +0000

The majority of the value-creation activities in an enterprise are hidden. They happen below the surface. What we see when we think of collaboration in the traditional sense (structured team-based collaboration) is the tip of the iceberg – teams who are coordinating their actions to achieve some goal. We don’t see - and thus don’t recognize - all the activities which have enabled the team to form and which help them throughout their journey. We see the people in the team, how they coordinate their actions and the results of their actions, but we rarely see the other things which have been critical for their success. For example, we don’t see how they have used their personal networks to access knowledge, information and skills which they don’t have in their team already but which are instrumental for their success.

The layers which are below the surface are usually not recognized or valued. Below the surface you typically find:

The direct and indirect contributions from people outside the team – by the extended team, stakeholders and external contributors
Other kinds of broader and ad hoc collaboration (social collaboration) than those that fit within the traditional definition of (structured, team-based) collaboration
The ongoing community building that makes people trust each other and commit themselves to a shared purpose
The efforts of gaining the workspace awareness that is necessary for making the right decisions in any collaborative effort

Bring those above the surface so they can be recognized and supported. If people can't do those things, even the traditional collaboration efforts will suffer or might not even happen. If we are to improve efficiency and effectiveness of collaborative efforts, we need to better support these layers.

The first step towards improving these layers of collaboration and support other kinds of collaboration is to recognize their existence and value.

Drive out fear with transparency

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 07:52:00 +0000

“Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company. Fear is not the best motivator. It destroys innovation, creativity and trust.”

(W. Edwards Deming's quality point 8, "Drive Out Fear")

If you have read my writings here and elsewhere, or perhaps listened to any of my talks at conferences and events, you know that transparency is one of my favorite subjects to write and talk about. It is because it is the anti-dote to the lack of good collaboration, sharing and communication that destroys so much value in organizations today.

For one thing, transparent communication leaves little room for rumors by putting all the facts on the table and makes people more engaged by allowing them to ask and access the pieces they might be missing. Transparent communication is especially important in hard and uncertain times when people risk being paralyzed by fear of losing their jobs. It is also important when people need to confront themselves with substantial change efforts as it can be used to encourage people to enroll in the change effort, taking active participate in designing and implementing the required changes.

Transparent communication from management also demonstrates their trust in people as people are given all the facts and can make sense out of it themselves instead of just taking part of an official story told by management.

I am fully convinced that the organizations which will be successful in the years to come are organizations where talented, creative and dedicated people want to work and where they are allowed to reach their full potential. For that to happen, the culture must be built trust, not fear. Transparent communication will help to drive out fear from an organization and replace it with trust.

The Social Business Starting Point

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 13:14:00 +0000

After reading Riitta Raesmaa's excellent post "Trust-based Collaboration and Cultural Differences", a summary post of the topics Riitta has been writing about during 2011, I was inspired to do the same thing. Looking back, I realize that my main theme for this year has been social networking as the operating system of an enterprise, and that using social software to enable people to connect with each other, with the resources they need, and with the tasks they need to carry out to achieve their goals is the starting point of a social business transformation (see Connectedness, Social business can be really simple, We Should All Care More About Transparency)

Happy New Year!

Informal networks have always been important, if not to say critical, for good decision-making in organizations. They have compensated for the lack of bandwidth and the slowness of formal information flows, the ones which typically follow the hierarchic reporting structure of organizations, by rapidly bringing new and more complete information to the awareness of decision-makers. Yet until recently the power to build and maintain informal networks were primarily possessed by those people within an organization who possessed formal positions in the hierarchy. Their positions allowed them to allocate the time and resources to build their informal networks. Anyone who had a strong informal network could influence decision-making, and informal networks were considered as something bad – especially if someone outside the hierarchy had strong informal networks.

Today informal networks are increasingly considered as an organizational asset, especially if they become visible and if more people are given the chance to develop them. The social web and enterprise social software enables people to connect and build their own networks without much effort. This means they can more easily get access to the information needed making the right decisions themselves, right there in the situation where they are need to make a decision. As more people are empowered to do this, the enterprise becomes more agile and responsive, increasing its chances of surviving and thriving in a global, connected and rapidly changing business landscape. So if there is any art the modern enterprise needs to learn and master, it is the art of connectedness.

The core of social business is to create transparent and open digital environments that people are free to join and where they can participate and engage in conversations with anyone about the things they care about. At work, the things people care about would most likely be their work, their colleagues, their customers, and their shared objectives and purpose. You can mobilize them to engage about virtually anything, be it ideas, tasks, customers, products, continuous improvement, or processes.

When people can gather around the things they care about, even if what they care about is just to get their work done, they get the opportunity to get to know and build trust in each other, creating and developing the kind of relationships that make up the foundation of sustainable organizations.

So, the core of social business is to connect people with other people, tasks and information. That way you can mobilize people throughout the workforce, activating the relevant talent and expertise, to achieve just about anything.

What is still lacking in most online work environments is a really intelligent system that informs people about what’s going on elsewhere, a system that provides them with cues and signals telling them when it’s time to act, when there is certain information they need to consider, and so forth. It is common knowledge that we need workplace awareness to be able to work together efficiently and effectively. We need workplace awareness to be able to make the right decisions, because a decision is right only if it serves not just our own goals but also the goals and purpose of the entire enterprise – and that can’t be done without considering many of the decisions and actions other people make

Most online work environments are still just information self-service desks with a bunch of applications for performing specific tasks. They are designed to keep us on track with the task we have at hand so that we perform the task as efficiently as possible. Unfortunately, they are also designed for sub-optimization when they really should be designed for synergy-creation and coordination, allowing us to look in any direction in order to find the right path forward. An environment that is designed for synergies and coordination must by necessity be built on openness and transparency. This is one of the main reasons why I am such a strong advocate for openness and transparency.

Social Collaboration vs The Existing Communication Culture

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 10:09:00 +0000

Sometimes (and quite often according to my own observations) there is a significant gap between the existing organizational culture and the kind of culture that readily will embrace and adopt social software and social collaboration practices. The existing communication culture, which can be seen as a subset of the organizational culture, reveals a lot about an organization’s readiness to adopt social collaboration practices. Here are a few characteristics of organizations where there is high resistance (or ignorance), especially among management, towards the new ways of communicating and interacting which social software enables.

Tightly controlled communication flows

The organization is strictly hierarchic in the sense that it is not ok to bypass the chain of command when communicating with others. Hence it is unthinkable that an employee will communicate directly with the CEO, and vice versa. Management wants to maintain the illusion of being in control of employee-to-employee communication, especially when it comes to employee-to-management or employee-to-group communication.
The organization is heavily dependent on email communication. They are using email groups for communicating information to specific groups. No-one is allowed to email any other groups than the ones they belong to. They are not allowed to email other groups within the same hierarchical branch of the organization chart, or everybody within their branch or division. It might even by that only managers are allowed to email groups, while all others are just passive receivers (forget about announcing that you're leaving for another job).

Overreliance on traditional communication technologies

There is little awareness of other ways of communicating than face-to-face meeting, phone calls, emails and documents, as well as of the limitations and problems of the existing ways of communicating. The technologies provided by the organization are limited to phones, email, and a traditional intranet which serves as a top-down, one-way communication channel and information self-service portal.
The individuals in the workforce are not very used to new technologies such as smartphones, web conferencing, chat/IM even in their private lives. Virtual collaboration does practically not exist and even if there is an inherent need for it, it is rarely articulated. Awareness of the business drivers and possibilities for virtual collaboration is low.

Lack of understanding of the importance of communication

Managers don’t see communication as their key responsibility and their communication skills are not being considered important when appointed as managers. They are considered good managers because they are loyal to the management and bureaucrats who love - and excel at - reporting facts and figures upwards (and sometimes downwards) in the hieararchy.
Communication skills and the understanding of the importance of communication is also low across the workforce. Many employees believe that the purpose of documentation is to produce documents and don’t really understand that the purpose is to communicate certain information in an effective and efficient way to anyone who might need it.

How do these observations relate to / correlate with your own observations? Which barriers do you see as the main ones when it comes to failing to adopt social collaboration practices?

What do you think about the future of work and business?

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 18:31:00 +0000

Will it be more knowledge-intense?
Will it require increasing specialization?
Will it need to get done faster?
Will it require better use of talent?
Will it require more creativity and innovation?
Will it require that we use our intellectual and social capital more effectively?
Will it require more involvement of customers, partners and other external stakeholders?
Will it need to change and adapt to changing conditions more rapidly?
Will it require faster access to information and expertise?
Will it require people to collaborate more?
Will it require organizations to collaborate more?

If you answer yes to most of these questions, when do you plan to get started to prepare for success (or avoid extinction)?
In five years from now?
In three years?
How much time do you have that your competitors don't have?
How do you know they didn't start already yesterday?
When are you going to find out?
How about now?

Recent writings on how to empower knowledge workers

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 10:28:00 +0000

Here's a quick way for you to catch up with my recent writing on this blog and elsewhere. Your comments and feedback are most welcome.

CMS Wire

Tieto Future Office blog

The Content Economy (this blog)

Social business can be really simple

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 13:49:00 +0000

Sometimes we tend to overcomplicate things, and we fail to see the forest for the trees. The same applies for social business.

Social business doesn't have to be that hard - and it shouldn't be. In fact, by focusing on the core, social business can be made really simple.

The core of social business is to create transparent and open digital environments that people are free to join and where they can participate and engage in conversations with anyone about the things they care about. At work, the things people care about would most likely be their work, their colleagues, their customers, and their shared objectives and purpose. You can mobilize them to engage about virtually anything, be it ideas, tasks, customers, products, continuous improvement, or processes.

When people can gather around the things they care about, even if what they care about is just to get their work done, they get the opportunity to get to know and build trust in each other, creating and developing the kind of relationships that make up the foundation of sustainable organizations.

This is why connecting people is the core of social business, and here are four ways to do it and why you should do it.

#1 Connect people to each other

When people can connect to each other and engage in conversations about the thinkgs they care about, they are likely to become more engaged and develop a sense of shared identity that turns them into more motivated, productive and cooperative coworkers.

#2 Connect people to their work

When people can connect to their tasks and the information and people they need to perform those tasks, it will increase their efficiency and productivity because they will get the right things done in the right way faster.

#3 Connect people with shared interests

When people who share the same interests or challenges can connec and share (reuse) expertise and lessons across borders, it increases effectiveness by reducing sub-optimization, improving decision-making and reducing redundant work.

#4 Connect people to their markets

When people can connect to people and information residing outside their own organizations, they get the opportunity to listen and learn from, as well as influence, their ever-changing and dynamic external environment. That enables them to anticipate and address problems and opportunities, to become more proactive. It contributes to making the organization as a whole more responsive and agile and increases it's ability to innovate and grow.

So, the core of social business is to connect people with other people, tasks and information. That way you can mobilize people throughout the workforce, activating the relevant talent and expertise, to achieve just about anything.

For many organizations a good starting point is to increase employee engagement by connecting people. Social software can help you do that, but like any technology social software is just an accelerator. It is not the spark that lights the fire. Whatever it is that might make people in your organization feel disempowered, you will need to find the root cause and fix it. By enabling people to connect and have conversations, you will probably find out where you should be looking.

Can your company survive without connectedness?

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 15:38:00 +0000

Re-using existing intellectual assets and enabling people to perform to their full potential is the required next step in operational excellence. With better connections we can solve problems and act upon opportunities in a fraction of the usual time. We can achieve it fewer resources and by activating underutilized resources such as expertise hidden in distant corners of the enterprise. The digitalization of businesses has provided the foundation for building powerful networks and utilizing the power of those networks. All that has to be done now is to join up the dots, or rather, to enable them to connect by themselves, and make sure that the concepts of collective intelligence, crowd-sourcing and social collaboration find their way into the company.

Can your company survive without doing this, without connectedness?

I posted this question at a webinar hosted by Central Desktop this Tuesday. Below you can wiew the webinar recording or simply browse through the slides.

Collaboration Insights Webinar: Can Your Company Survive Without Connectedness? from Central Desktop on Vimeo.

Can your company survive without connectedness?

View more presentations from Tieto Corporation

Transforming into a social business

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 09:59:00 +0000

Tieto has just published a strategy paper on how to transform into a social business at Slideshare. The paper, written by my colleague Philipp Rosenthal and me, questions the technocentric way that many organizations have approached social business (or rather social software) this far and suggests a business-oriented approach to socializing business operations, focusing on how to use social technologies to support prioritized business operations and on supporting the transformation with the right change management approach. Transforming into a social business

View more documents from Tieto Corporation

Can this be your future work environment?

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 09:18:00 +0000

(photo from stock.xchng)

Imagine an environment characterized by the following:

It is as easy to get started for a newbie as for an experienced professional
The time from preparation to execution is really short
You can do it anywhere, any time
You can set your own goals
You can do it in your own pace
You can get guidance and coaching on demand from experts and mentors
You get immediate feedback about your progress and performance
You can easily coordinate and share your activities with other people
Real-time positive feedback from people you trust help you refuel when your energy levels are low
Your performance is documented in the flow instead of as a separate activity, adding no extra work load
You can evaluate your own efforts and progress and adjust your goals
You can make your performance and achievements visible to your environment
There are many ways, requiring no effort, for others to recognize and celebrate your achievements
By being able to make your activities visible and recognized by other people, you influence more people to follow your example

This could very well be a description of how it is to work in a social business, but it’s actually a list of things I believe have contributed to the "running phenomenon": the trend that more and more people in all ages are putting on their running shoes and starting to run on a regular basis.

I know of many people who, like me, have never been running regularly before, who have even seen running as something dreadfully boring and painful, and who slowly have turned into runners. Their reasons for running might vary, such as improving their health, losing weight, or becoming part of a community or social group. Regardless of their reasons, some are not at a point where running has become a part of their social identity. By that point, it's virtually impossible to stop. They have developed an intrinsic motivation for running and rely less and less on the extrinsic motivation and rewards once helped them getting started.

The key to this trend has been environment that motivates people to run and triggers certain behaviors. A lot of techy things like smartphones, mobile apps, GPS, presence, cloud computing, gamification and social software have been used to create this environment. Yet, it couldn’t have been created without a deeper understanding of what motivates people and how to design an environment that triggers the right behaviors.

So the bottom line is this: If the environment described above can turn almost anyone into a runner, we can be pretty sure that a work environment that is designed with an understanding of what make people more motivated, collaborative and productive at work, and where performance models and management practices are adjusted accordingly, can turn an underperforming business to one that thrives and outperforms its competitors.

Connectedness

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 21:21:00 +0000

From Edward M. Hallowell’s, "Connectedness," in Finding the Heart of the Child, Association of Independent Schools in New England, Inc., 1993:

"What is connectedness? It is a sense of being a part of something larger than oneself. It is a sense of belonging, or a sense of accompaniment. It is that feeling in your bones that you are not alone. It is a sense that, no matter how scary things may become, there is a hand for you in the dark. While ambition drives us to achieve, connectedness is my word for the force that urges us to ally, to affiliate, to enter into mutual relationships, to take strength and to grow through cooperative behavior."

If there is one word that can describe the era we are now entering, and the power that disrupts and changes everything from our individual and social lives to business environments and society, it is probably this word: Connectedness.

Connectedness is the state of being connected, about being “joined or fastened together”, “associated with or related to others, especially to influential or important people.” (The Free Dictionary). It can also be seen as a sense of being a part of something larger than oneself, as a sense of belonging, or a sense of accompaniment. Connectedness is what makes enterprises tick and enables people to work together towards a shared purpose. It is what creates and shapes markets, and what influences our attitudes and behaviors.

The days when brands could be built and markets created almost entirely through advertising in mass-media are over. Today people who share similar needs or wants can easily connect with each other by their own force, creating markets where they exchange information about any products or services available that can satisfy their needs or wants. They might even create the services or products themselves. One thing that is sure is that the impact and reach of personal recommendations and influence has never been stronger, and it has all to do with the reach, immediacy and multiplier effects now available through the social web. If people like a brand and its products or services, they might become advocates for that brand, influencing their friends and other people with similar needs or wants to buy the brand’s products or services. The brand becomes part of their social identities, which turns them into loyal and powerful band advocates if they are considered as influencers among their friends or communities.

What all this means is that most brands don’t create or even shape markets anymore. At best, they co-create their markets together with their customers. And the fundamental force behind these new market dynamics can be captured with one word: Connectedness.

In a world where things changed less frequently and when there was plenty of time to react on new information that emerged, where markets did not emerge by themselves and change shape by themselves, it was possible to centralize planning and make long-term detailed plans and execute the plans over a period of several years. Those days are also over, and businesses have to be prepared for the unexpected. They might still have an overall strategy and plan, but they need to be prepared to change it at any point in time and accept that the only feasible strategy they have to respond to change fast enough and good enough is to distribute the power of decision-making to everyone who might ever need to make a decision.

Informal networks have always been important, if not to say critical, for good decision-making in organizations. They have compensated for the lack of bandwidth and the slowness of formal information flows, the ones which typically follow the hierarchic reporting structure of organizations, by rapidly bringing new and more complete information to the awareness of decision-makers. Yet until recently the power to build and maintain informal networks were primarily possessed by those people within an organization who possessed formal positions in the hierarchy. Their positions allowed them to allocate the time and resources to build their informal networks. Anyone who had a strong informal network could influence decision-making, and informal networks were considered as something bad – especially if someone outside the hierarchy had strong informal networks.

Today informal networks are increasingly considered as an organizational asset, especially if they become visible and if more people are given the chance to develop them. The social web and enterprise social software allows empowers people to connect and build their own networks. This means they can more easily get access to the information needed making the right decisions themselves, right there in the situation where they are need to make a decision. As more people are empowered to do this, the enterprise becomes more agile and responsive, increasing its chances of surviving and thriving in a global, connected and rapidly changing business landscape. So if there is any art the modern enterprise needs to learn and master, it is the art of Connectedness.

Designing a Less Dysfunctional Knowledge Management System

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 09:44:00 +0000

This definition of a Knowledge Management System (KMS) can be found in Wikipedia:

"a (generally IT based) system for managing knowledge in organizations for supporting creation, capture, storage and dissemination of information. It can comprise a part (neither necessary or sufficient) of a Knowledge Management initiative."

I am personally not too fond of this definition. First of all, it makes it seem like a knowledge management system can exist and function independently from the people who are using it. In addition, as a Druckerian I believe in Peter F Druckers expression that "you can’t manage knowledge. Knowledge exists between two ears only." This is why I would rather see a knowledge management system as a dynamic network of interconnected individuals who share and learn together, supported by various forms of information technology. With this definition it is easy to see that every enterprise has a knowledge management system. What differs is how well it functions, which is today heavily dependent on how well it is able to make proper use of information technology to sustain and improve itself.

Large and dispersed enterprises typically involve multiple organizations and their performance thus relies on a successful orchestration and alignment of all the efforts within and across the different organizations. In practice this requires the integration of multiple professional informal networks and this integration is primarily done by allowing people from different organizations to meet and connect with each other to establish communication. Until recently, an organization’s capability to connect people with each within the organization and with other organizations involved in an enterprise has been very limited and costly. So this was a task done by managers, sales people, formally appointed experts and other people who had the possibility to travel and meet a lot of people in their daily work. They aggregated the connections in their own networks, and connected the enterprise. These people acted as hubs, or what Malcolm Gladwell calls connectors, helping to connect people and expertise across the workforce. Although their function adds immense value, it is easy to see how easily they can become bottlenecks when there is a need to speed up and broaden the flow of information and that they exercise immense power over the performance of the enterprise, a power that could be misused in various ways.

The natural approach to avoid these kinds of bottlenecks is to create ways to increase the number of direct connections between people and allow people to build and connect their networks so that information can flow across networks. Until recently this hasn’t been practically or financially feasible.

Now back to Drucker again. All the knowledge within an enterprise, residing in the heads of its people, can only be "managed" in the sense that people create and maintain digital representations of their knowledge in various forms (from simple text messages to documents and rich media) and that they find ways to exchange, aggregate, organize and maintain those representations together. To their help they have information technologies which help to extend their human abilities to do all these things. Modern information technologies allow us to represent our knowledge in various forms and share them as well as accessing the representations created by other people, no matter where they are located or what team they belong to. In theory, that is.

In practice, a knowledge management system cannot function properly or produce the required results if all the layers of an enterprise – such as processes, organization, practices, information and IT solutions - aren’t designed to be as open and transparent as possible. If any of those layers is designed in a way that makes it closed and opaque, it will make the knowledge management system dysfunctional. The ability of the enterprise to quickly adapt to its environment and respond to external stimuli, such changing behaviors of the market, will be limited. If there is not enough inflow and exchange of information within the system, few ideas will be created within the enterprise and it will be hard to make the ideas which are created reach those who can make them happen. Teams will become silos and revert to group-thing which lead to suboptimal decisions and keep their knowledge and ideas to themselves, operating as an enterprise of their own with their own purpose and goals. The enterprise becomes like a federation of states without proper common governance and with trade barriers that hinder free trade and thereby the development of wealth for the federation as a whole as well as for the individual countries.

Enterprises have now the opportunity to apply social principles and technologies to improve the performance of the enterprise as a knowledge management system. It is now practically and financially feasible to increase the number of direct connections between people and allow people to build and connect their networks so that information can flow across those networks more smoothly. Besides making this possible, social technologies also allow us to represent and share our knowledge in much easier and richer ways, many times as a byproduct when we simply try to get things done together. Our social interactions happening through social technologies further enrich the representations of our knowledge with more information (or metadata) that make the representations easier to find, interpret, understand, use and reuse.

This does however not come automatically. All layers of the enterprise, from the organization to the IT solutions, need to be designed for maximum transparency and connectivity. They also need to be designed to encourage and make it really simple for people to connect and interact across all structures, thereby making it more likely that there will be a continuous exchange of valuable information and knowledge across the enterprise. Only then will they have a functioning knowledge management system that allows them to proactively deal with the challenges of today’s global and ever changing business environment.

Fat clients are back - big time

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 14:31:00 +0000

Back in the days when I used to develop software (1992-1998), the client-server paradigm for software development ruled. Data was stored on the server-side and it was, except for server side calculations, manipulated locally on our PC desktops. We interacted with the data via fat but highly interactive, stable and speedy Windows applications.

When the world wide web arrived to our desktops, it was sort of implied that web sites would evolve into highly interactive applications run inside of a web browser. The web was the future, and we assumed that it would mean that we would interact with everything via a web browser. Yet, the last couple of years we have seen things moving in quite the opposite direction. The client-server paradigm with fat native clients is back. What is new is that the servers are in a cloud somewhere and can be accessed via web applications in a web browser as well as via native apps.

Several trends interplay and pave the way for the comeback of fat clients, such as the following:

Our consumption of rich media such as video, photos and music increases
We store more of our information in the cloud (because we want to be ablet to access it from anywhere)
We want highly interactive, reliable and fast user experiences also when it comes to Internet-based tools
We are becoming more and more mobile, using mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets
The capacity of the Internet and broadband connections, especially mobile have a hard time keeping up with, ever increasing traffic volumes

The bottom line is: we need the broadband for shuffling our content, not for downloading applications. Besides, it doesn't make much sense to download an application every time we need it, especially if it's easy to access and install the application locally on a device. App stores make these tasks really easy and nothing like the messy and error-prone installation procedures we have gotten used to with Microsoft Windows.

The risk of downloading and infecting devices with malicious code also decreases if it is just content and not applications that is downloaded. No code except maybe for style sheets and content markup would be downloaded. Security mechanisms, such ad encryption and access rights, can be put the content itself so that it does not slip away and get into the wrong hands.

Fat clients are back big time, and there is no reason to think they aren't here to stay.

Learning How To Become Strong Customers

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 10:07:00 +0000

The waste valve in our bathtub at home is the step on type, which ratchets open and closed as you step on it. A few days ago, it suddenly got completely stuck. I had to remove it using a screwdriver. As the bathtub is only three years old, I didn't expect such a vital component of the bathtub to break. I believe no-one who buys a bathtub should expect that.

Instead of contacting the (online) reseller through which we bought the bathtub, I decided to contact the manufacturer directly. I found a “info@...” email address to their HQ on their web page and wrote to them in an email about the broken component. I didn't demand anything in my email, but I made three things clear:

The quality of their product is not acceptable if it breaks after only three years
As the quality of the product is far below what is reasonable to expect, I don't want to spend time and energy contacting a reseller who anyway would need to contact the manufacturer.
By contacting them directly and describing the problem with the product, they get direct feedback from a customer about their product that might help them improve it.

Two days after I sent my email (today) I received a package in the mail. My kids brought it to me and I opened it. It contained a replacement product for the waste vale together with a delivery note from which I could read that it was free of charge. The replacement product made of metal (brass) instead of cheap plastic like the old one.
My oldest daughter, who I had told about my email to the manufacturer, then said to me with a big smile on her face:

"It pays to complain. It always does when you complain about something."

"Well, not always”, I replied, “but it often does. Most companies are sane enough to listen to customers who come to them with rightful complaints or are dissatisfied with their products because they don’t meet their expectations. Smart, isn't it?"

"Yes!"

I believe it is lessons like this one that will teach my kids how to become strong customers.

Although I really appreciate the no fuzz strategy the company had when dealing with my complaint (sending a replacement product immediately at no charge) I still can’t stop thinking about what would have happened if they also had replied to my email. If someone at the company had replied and told me they were happy to receive my input and that they will send me a replacement immediately at no charge, then this story could have been a positive story about them – their brand, their products and their customer service – instead of being a story about how I hope my kids will learn how to become strong customers.

I will send them a link to this blog post in my thank you email.

(I would really like to know if they already knew about the problem, and had changed the material from plastic to brass to solve it)

Useful Information Workplace Resources

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 10:47:00 +0000

Need more interesting stuff to read? Here's a list of information workplace resources which I personally find useful. Enjoy! :-)

We Should All Care More About Transparency

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 06:35:00 +0000

When using online communication tools the barriers to communicating with people who are physically located somewhere else is not increasing with distance. It is just as easy (or hard) to communicate with someone across the world as with someone on the next floor in the same building. If we just make communication richer, more interactive, more real...then the vision of being able to work with anyone from anywhere will be realized. There’s just one more really big thing we need to fix…

What is still lacking in most online work environments is a really intelligent system that informs people about what’s going on elsewhere, a system that provides them with cues and signals telling them when it’s time to act, when there is certain information they need to consider, and so forth. It is common knowledge that we need workplace awareness to be able to work together efficiently and effectively. We need workplace awareness to be able to make the right decisions, because a decision is right only if it serves not just our own goals but also the goals and purpose of the entire enterprise – and that can’t be done without considering many of the decisions and actions other people make.

Most online work environments are still just information self-service desks with a bunch of applications for performing specific tasks. They are designed to keep us on track with the task we have at hand so that we perform the task as efficiently as possible. Unfortunately, they are also designed for sub-optimization when they really should be designed for synergy-creation and coordination, allowing us to look in any direction in order to find the right path forward. An environment that is designed for synergies and coordination must by necessity be built on openness and transparency. This is one of the main reasons why I am such a strong advocate for openness and transparency.

If you happen to be interested in more of my thoughts about openness and transparency, make sure to check out my recent CMS Wire article "3 Reasons Why Organizations Need to Increase Transparency" and earlier writings such as "Why transparency is key to Enterprise 2.0" and "The Age of Transparency – Rebuilding trust".

Facebook is not about sharing

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 07:33:00 +0000

To most Facebook users (me included) Facebook is not about sharing - it is about staying close to their friends. Sharing is just a means to do that. When they share something, they open a window through which their friends can see them. Their friends might pass by the window just to peek in, or maybe they'll even stop by for a second or two, giving a thumbs up or dropping a comment: "Nice done!" or "Happy birthday!".

Photo credit: Alejandra Mavroski

The purpose of opening a window is to bring someone closer to his or her friends. That makes it less important what they share; they can pretty much share just about anything with anyone. If a friend doesn't find something they share interesting, the friend will simply ignore the window and move along to the next. There is no need to tag what is being shared to make it easier for recipients to filter their activity streams, nor is there a need to "neatly organize your friends into buckets" for targeted sharing.

That's the beauty of if - the simplicity.

Although the activity feed is messy, with important stuff mixed with trivia coming from any direction - current friends, acquaintances, colleagues, ex-colleagues, classmates, family members, childhood friends - it's still simple. You read, you like, you comment, you post. That's about it. You can even choose to only read, to lurk around. Your grandparents can do it, and so can anyone. That is one reason why they continue to use Facebook, but the main reason is that Facebook helps them come closer to you and other friends, and sharing is just one of the means to do that.

Note: A study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that active Facebook (who uses it several times per day) has on average “9% more close, core ties in their overall social network compared with other internet users. Facebook users also tend to friend other users with whom they’ve actually met in real life; the average Facebook user has never met only 7% of his/hers Facebook friends.

It's still about information - but different information

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 11:19:00 +0000

What is information - really?

Information is something that tells us something about something. Information is our mirror of the world, often created in retrospect. It helps us to understand the world better, to see the things we need to see in order to better navigate our way to wherever we are going in the real world - but only if we have access to the right mirror exactly when we need it. The right mirror – the information - should allow us to see everything we need to see to make the right decision, rendering a complete picture without any distortion, cracks or missing pieces.

The picture we see in the mirror is often made of a lot of individual pieces of data. On its own, a piece of data does not tell us much, if anything. We need to put the data together to turn it to information, creating a mirror. What the mirror shows depends on what pieces of data we have, and how we fit the pieces together. Different mirrors help us see different things, different perspectives. They help us to create new insights about the world we live in. We can also be fooled, when the mirror presents something which is not true.

Just think for a moment about how far we’ve come since the first information technology, the written language, was introduced, with so many new and disruptive information technologies having changed our societies, businesses, and life in general. It’s thrilling, but also sad because not everyone in the world has yet access even to the first information technology.

For businesses, information technology is their primary means to manage and operate their businesses, as well as to innovate themselves and their products and services. The information they have access to and their ability to use it purposefully ultimately determines their success. The better they understand the world, and the faster they do it, the greater advantage they can get compared to their competitors.

The key to build and maintain a successful business today lies much less in improving the operational performance of manufacturing processes than it did just a couple of decades ago. That knowledge that can easily be copied, which means that the manufacturing processes can be executed in locations where the cheapest raw materials and resources can be found. Instead, what determines the long term success of a business is its ability to access or create and make use of information. Doing so requires having access to the right talent – the people – who can turn that information into knowledge and who can turn the knowledge into the right actions, fast. The information they use, their raw materials, comes not so much from data generated by their manufacturing processes as it comes from data about what people (customers) like and need, how they behave, and the relationships they have to other people and things that affect what they like, need and how they behave.

The right people with the right talent who get access to the right information in the right time can create the right products and services and offer and provide them in the right way to the right customers. Right? It is not primarily the data originating from transformational and transactional processes that enable them to do that, but rather information and insights created from near real-time data about people’s social interactions and whatever other trails of data they leave behind when interacting with information systems.

Much of this data is available to any business who wants it, sometimes for free and sometimes for a fee, The best survival strategy of today and tomorrow is hence not to try to get unique access to data and to protect that data from falling into the hands of others, but rather to ensure instant access to all relevant data that is available and improve the organization’s ability to make sense of and act upon it before anyone else does. That can't be done without becoming more open and transparent, and encouraging and enabling sharing and collaboration across all barriers. Information must flow unhindered to anyone who can quickly make sense of it and act on it together, which can’t be done without becoming a more social business.