I went to the conference looking for movement toward (what to me seems to be an obvious opportunity) the integrating of social computing into HR Systems. I did see some progress in this direction, but those cases seemed to be the exception rather than the rule. At booth after booth, I asked the same question, “Are you looking at social computing as an opportunity for competitive advantage?” The results of my totally unscientific survey indicated a lack of innovation among most HR System vendors. Reflecting back, Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma comes to mind. (If you are not familiar with this book, it is absolutely worth reading.) I think many of the HR Systems vendors are suffering from this condition.

I will be the first to admit that social computing in not the magic bullet to move HR Systems to the next level, but a little dose of it couldn’t hurt. I think the focus really belongs to dealing with business objectives. I do believe that for the most part the HR System vendors are better at this rhetoric than the Collaboration System industry, who spend most of their time selling features. But when you really look under the hood at most HR Systems the talk of supporting the business looks superficial, as most of what is being done is simple process mechanics. There is little in these systems that promote development of new knowledge and supporting better decision making.

But through these social technologies HR has a tremendous opportunity to become more valuable than your PR department, your marketing team, and even your sales team by making a fundamental shift from control and comply to connect and engage.

This is from a post by Mike Thompson on his blog The Organizational Champion. Mike is focusing in on the same issues I am with Decision 3D, mainly that your internal culture, behaviors and processes will be reflected in how you are perceived externally. Moving in the direction of trusting employees will make better employees and strengthen your external image. Giving employees the freedom to interact with their peers without the rules and regulations typically imposed by HR governance is a clear expression of that trust.

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.

As people embrace social media in their private lives, they naturally expect to use similar tools within the enterprise.

This is one of the findings of a research report conducted by Jakbo Nielsen of the Nieslen Norman Group. The report tracks 14 companies in 6 countries and addresses how social technology is being used on their internal networks (intranets). Nielsen provides a summary of the report in this blog post. The full report can be purchased from the Nielsen Norman Group site for $298.

Most of the findings are in line with the operating principles behind Decision 3D.

Some of the key findings include:

• Slow adoption of social technology will risk losing workers who expect innovation in the outside world to reflect directly on how they communicate at work.
• The majority of social technology implementations began life as grassroots initiatives.
• Initiatives that were deemed successful and continue to provide value were predominately built to meet business objectives  and not just for the sake of technology.
• Social systems tend to be “self-policing” from within the community itself, and requires little “management control”; in fact too much management control tends to reduce the effectiveness of these systems.

My thanks to Bill Ives of the FASTForward blog for the pointer.

Can Social Media Help my Business?

The news is teeming with articles and updates about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all the new social media vehicles.

You may find them compelling in that, “it might be interesting to get in touch with my old college roommate” sort of way. You may also wonder if all of this stuff can really help your business. The answer is yes…or no.

The thing to remember about all of these on-line tools is that they are just that, tools. Twitter is not a silver bullet. Having a Facebook fan page will not instantly improve your marketing. These tools are only part of your overall plan, and it’s essential to remember that it’s the concepts these tools represent that are powerful. The concepts of trust, transparency and simplicity, that define social media, can be the leverage points for transforming your business.

Improving social connectivity within your organization is the mechanism for facilitating that transformation. Deployment of social media tools is just one aspect of that process.

Improving the ability for people to connect within your organization will increase your operational effectiveness. Allowing employees and stakeholders to connect and interact freely, beyond traditional hierarchies, will lead to improvements in your organization’s ability to:

• recruit tomorrow’s best and brightest
• engage employees and get the added value of their discretionary effort
• manage your workforce, by being able to easily find the right people for the right role
• innovate
• manage key risk factors around projects
• educate and develop your staff, partners, vendors and customers

In the end, the technology associated with social media may be part of the solution for improving your operations. But for those tools to be effective, you have to first address your willingness to be transparent and authentic, the first steps in generating trust. Trust is the currency of social connectivity, without it, technology alone is kind of like a boat, which is often described as “a hole in the water, into which one pours money.”

Guest Columnist and CED member, Lee White, is the founding member of Decision 3D, LLC. Before starting his own company, Lee worked with GlaxoSmithKline for 14 years delivering innovative operational solutions and facilitating change initiatives. He established Decision 3D to help small to mid-sized companies envision and implement organizational improvement initiatives based on the concepts and tools embodied by the Social Web.

• Recruitment
• Engagement
• Workforce Management
• Innovation
• Risk Management
• Education

In every organization, most, if not all of these issues are key to success. A concerted effort by organizations to enhance social connectivity will have the benefit of improving outcomes related to these issues. Let’s see how:

Recruitment

As individuals gain more control over their own information and have a growing ability to communicate globally, they will avoid organizations where these abilities are limited. Organizations that embody the principles of transparency, openness and sharing will have the advantage in hiring tomorrow’s best and brightest.

Engagement

Engagement means getting and keeping people’s attention. It means generating passion around a topic, issue or product. It means getting people to invest their discretionary resources in the organization’s behalf. If we are talking about employees, that discretionary resource is effort/time/focus. If we are talking about customers, that discretionary resource is money and/or time spent telling others about the brand.

Workforce Management

Retaining your best talent, knowing who knows what, and identifying competency weaknesses are all critical for workforce management. In an open, social environment where transparency is a core value, getting the right people to the right job becomes significantly easier. If someone is particularly skilled or has unique knowledge of a certain topic, that person is easily identifiable in a social environment. It is also easier to identify workforce shortcomings and find ways to overcome them.

Innovation

The key to innovation is combining disparate information to generate new insight. The process of social connection reduces the friction of information flow between disparate sources. This is essential if people are to get information that they traditionally do not have access to. Opening information channels across boundaries allows innovative ideas to emerge.

Risk Management

Projects, product development, organizational change efforts, all have elements of risk associated with them. The reduction of risk should yield improved results. An open, social environment that exposes all phases of a project, development effort or change initiative, will uncover problems sooner than traditional approaches. The sooner problems are identified and resolved the lower the risk of time-line extensions and cost over runs.

Education

It has been said that the only true competitive advantage is the ability to learn faster than the competition. There are few ways better for learning than sharing your knowledge and experience with others. A social infrastructure that facilitates the easy sharing and finding of information will improve an organization’s learning capability.

REWIRE the Organization

The process of REWIRE’ing an organization is primarily a culture change. Technology can support the effort, but the key element is the willingness for decision makers and opinion leaders to move to an open, transparent mindset. The way an organization choses to approach information and how it flows through an organization is critical. To achieve the full impact of REWIREing an organization, access to information must be based on the assumption that all information, by default, is public. From that initial state a justification must be made to limit access to information. This approach is contrary to most organizations, but the opportunities are huge for those that can master this paradigm shift..

Here is the post that prompted my reaction.

The right approach is to first determine the problem you are trying to solve. The implied problem in the post above is how do you capture, codify and get value from unstructured customer insight. Yes, understanding and engaging with social media will likely be part of the solution, but there are other significant questions to be answered as well.

• Who are the customers you want to listen to?
• How are you currently listening to them?
• How do you currently deal with customer insight?
• Who controls and has access to the existing structured data?
• etc.

I hope that people will stop looking at social media as some sort of silver bullet and start looking at objectives and the core problems that need to be overcome.

Here is a bit from one of Peter’s recent posts:

We need to improve what we do today with the ultimate goal of changing the way we work and connect with co-workers, customers, suppliers, shareholders, and other system participants.  Social technologies should change the world of work – applied to not just to marketing and IT, but also HR, finance, legal, and every other functional area.  And potentially change the functions that exist at all.

I am excited by the implication of what Peter is saying. That implication being that the leading thinkers and practioners in the area of social enterprise are beginning to move away from discussions of tools per se and toward how these tools can be part of broader solutins to real business problems.

I hope that Decision 3D will be able to contribute significantly to this conversation.