Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) was the darling of the Enterprise 2.0 conference this summer. Their success story about the deployment and adoption of social technology seemed to have all the pundits and practioners buzzing with excitement. Of the several articles written about the BAH case, I found the one from Read/Write/Web the be excellent, giving a good overview of what BAH did.
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.
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.
