I hope to use the results of this effort to help advance the cause of enterprise collaboration.

Organizational Communities can be a source of insight and competitive advantage for organizations that are willing to listen. In order to take advantage of this opportunity, decision makers should connect with these communities, treating the connection as a partnership.

Decision 3D helps organizations develop community partnerships.

Decision 3D will work with your organization to design, develop and deploy a Partnership Infrastructure that improves communication and information flow between an organization’s decision makers and its communities. Decision 3D uses a processes called Decision Due Diligence to facilitate Partnership Infrastructure development.

Definitions:

• Community – A group of people that share a common interest or objective
• Organizational Community – A community whose shared interest or objective is related to the operations and/or outcomes of an organization; members may be inside or outside the official boundaries of the organization
• Partnership Infrastructure – The tools, processes and desired behaviors that facilitate effective communication and information flow between parties
• Decision Due Diligence – A proprietary process developed by Decision 3D to assist in community partnership development. Click here to find more detail about the process.

Examples:

• Project Community – Members share interest in the outcome of a specific organizational project; members may be internal or external to the formal organization, depending on the scope of the project
• Brand Community – Members share interest in a particular brand of the organization; members are typically internal and external
• Geographic Community – Members share geographic proximity, though may work for different divisions or functions; members are typically employees
• Divisional Community – Are part of the same formal organizational structure, though may work in different locations; members are typically employees
• Functional Community – Members share skills and developmental interests; members are typically employees
  
  

From the R/W/W post, the five key points in BAH’s success were:

• Empower Evangelists - “when many people think of an evangelist, they think of an individual or two that take up the mantle of enterprise 2.0 on an ad-hoc basis. But Booz Allen went about it in a much more directed way by bringing together a cross-functional team to develop and deploy the software.”
• Draw on Past Experience – “The fact that they drew on past attempts to understand just how they should move forward was a essential factor in the outcome…”
• Know Thyself - “…the real trick is having enough self-awareness as an organization to know when to discard the given wisdom.”
• Create a One-Stop-Shop – “…constructing more silos out of multiple enterprise 2.0 platforms creates more problems than you ever had with just email and filesharing.”
• Just Solve Problems for People – “…an unwavering focus on solving real problems for people within the firm, not aiming at the vague goal of boosting collaboration and openness.”

If you notice, none of these key success factors are really about technology, but instead they are all focused on organizationa behavior and business objectives.

Community, Hierachry: Cognitive Dissonance

There seems to be a trend toward companies jumping on the social media bandwagon for marketing and promotional purposes. As much as I love social media and the promise it delivers, I believe that most of these efforts are going to crash and burn. The reason; non-alignment between internal cultural norms and the desired external perception.

Most organizations that are now starting to find the religion of “customer engagement” operate internally as authoritarian hierarchies. This causes cognitive dissonance among the people that are trying to implement the social media strategy. How can you expect someone, that operates day in and day out getting approvals, wondering what the boss wants, and asking permission, to understand and be able to implement an viable external community environment?

If organizations really want to engage with customers and become part of the conversation, they need to start by holding up the mirror and seeing themselves. Only those organizations that are willing to loosen the reins and allow an internal community culture to take root, will be able to successfully engage their external stakeholders as a community.

Here is a classic case of a project that did not engage with its communities. The UK National Offender Management Information System project (called C-NOMIS) has been a colossal failure. Reading what happened is a point by point litany of how to do a project poorly.

• Poor vendor relationships
• Sponsors out of the loop
• End users unprepared and resistant to required process change

The underlying theme across the board is poor information flow between the project team and the communities that had an interest in the project outcomes.

Hiding the facts, not listening to stakeholders, and dismissing supporters will inevitably lead to sub-standard outcomes for your project. Opaque project management is not the way to go.

Transparent Project Management is! Transparency is key to project success. Making sure that at every step, any interested party has full access to the details of what is happening and giving them the ability to provide feedback will significantly reduce the types of problems seen in the C-NOMIS project.

Decision 3D can help build transparency into projects, and avoid these types of problems.

The key concept to pull out of this thread is that technology and behavior must work in concert to achieve improved results. This is a must watch video if you want to get a better idea of our objective here at Decision 3D. When you read the articles and watch the post, think about the intersection of tools and behavior…

From the Oliver marks article:

Chambers talks about the gradual huge transition in the management of the company – the shift from Command and control management to collaboration and teamwork.

This is a behavioral change for Cisco management, that aligns with the capabilities of the networking products they use and sell. Having all of those tools available but not changing to a collaboration and teamwork culture would have propogated a disfunctional organization. Instead, Cisco is one of the strongest and most admired companies around.