Yesterday the time had come - I had a meeting with our business unit's top level executive to share my thoughts on enterprise 2.0. To make it short: I have his buy-in!! So what are the facts and learnings? Before the meeting I was preparing a lot of slides to capture the key ideas and learnings I achieved so far and come up with benefits for our company when using web2.0 technologies and leadership 2.0. From a structural point of view, the presentation slides were clustered in "getting attention", "stimulating desire", "re-inforce with reason" via springboard stories and "impact of change" (according Denning). In parallel spreading my idea about the need for social collaboration, I identified a couple people I could inspire. We had a first meeting and talked about how to approach the topic and via IT identified the right tool. And just a couple days before the meeting with my business unit manager - the breakdown: In the second meeting of our small group one person participated, who was not able to join the first time. He was told by his boss to come, who shared our enthousiasm. Unfortunately this was not the case for his underling. We were arguing and discussing nearly one hour about the necessity and added value of social collaboration tools. After a short disappointment, I already applied the learnings from my softskills and leadership qualities class of my MBA studies: I realized that I was on the judger path and by asking myself what I could learn about it, I instantly moved to learner and felt a relief. Wasn't that the perfect trial run for the meeting coming up next? I even went a step further as I was able to calm down one of the others favoring social collaboration and attacking this guy. And when trying to listen to all his negative appearing thoughts, we managed to bring out some important possible roadblocks we have to address in order to be successful in implementing social collaboration tools in our company. First of all, contribution has to be on a voluntary basis. Of course multiplier and leverage effects only come up to speed when wikis and blogs have relevant content, but forcing (even when it is gently) to contribute - e.g. from top level - does not work. But how do you get content in? Questions posed by critics or change resistive people will be: what added value is there? We already have knowlegde management systems in place! It was tried before and did not prevail! Review of content to prevent uncontrolled growth causes additional effort! Who should do that?
After this breakdown I showed the slides I was preparing to one of the people supporting me with that topic and the feedback was that business impact should be worked out more clearly. My original goal was just to raise awareness for the need of enterprise 2.0, but after these talks I learned that I have to work over my presentation.
In the next leadership class, I got very good inputs from our instructor, incorporating the business impact. But still the presentation was very high level, focusing on the ideas. This was also the biggest weakness of my presenation: the missing level of detail. As a learning from that I took with me that even when creating awareness for a topic in a presenation it is crucial to make up one's mind about the background on the topic at the listener's side. All the benefits and requirements for knowledge sharing and social collaboration were obvious for him. I got no resistance on that. And according him I would not get from any or at least any good manager. I wonder if he is right :) Anyhow, it was good, he shares this opinion! But what did work was the use of powerful questions and the approach of Denning to imagine the recipients being safe and then getting attention via showing issues with the current situation. That were the moments where he was attracted and starting to ask questions.
As mentioned, all in all he did like my presentation, shares my ideas but what he was really interested in was how to cope with the challenges mentioned above in my "mini breakdown", as he also was part of a community trying to build up a collaboration platform 10 years ago. It did not work out because no added value could be reached for the most part due to lack in content and missing ideas on how to address this issue. How can people be motivated and inspired permanently? How can uncontrolled growth be prevented? What are the best approaches to introduce a social collaboration plattform?
He liked my rough ideas to cope with that very much and gave me his support on that topic. As soon as I have identified a core team, set-up a rough project outline and inputs for best practice approaches on how to cope with the challenges, he is even willing to promote the idea on even higher company level. Besides that the positive feedback about thinking out of the box was highly appreciated!!
Bottomline: the start is done!! I got my mini-breakthrough and I am really excited where it will take us!
P.S.: when showing the slides to two of my backer (who are non-executives), my presentation worked! They were completely energized which shows that for that auditorium (with their background / knowledge level on that topic) the outline would have been perfect ;)
Mittwoch, 4. Juni 2008
Donnerstag, 29. Mai 2008
What Can I Learn From the Meeting With IT? A Cultural Change Is Necessary!
The meeting with IT department brought up some interesting thoughts and potential roadblocks I did not think about. But the contribution was very helpful on my way to create awareness for the necessity for enterprise 2.0 in my company.
After a short introduction about what I am out for, it was once again amazing for me how much is already there! Isn't that a sign for a big breakthrough that is shortly before happening? The colleague from IT just nodded to all the points I made. He has the same opinion. One more supporter joins!
He showed me that a prove of concept has been done for a new version of the intranet based on web 2.0 technology including blogs, social networking and category based content search. The concept was presented across the company and agreed to be very supportive to forster collaboration and information sharing. He even told me that our CEO was very open for these kind of approaches. Everybody agreed that even one design error that could be prevented in a product development would pay off the investment for the new intranet concept. The complete implementation takes about half a year. So there should obviously be no doubts, right? Unfortunately no budget was given to the project yet. How can this be I asked. Then we discussed about issues seen and that there is still a good way to go - it is really a cultural change that is and has to take place.Of course there exist people who are more pro-active with sharing knowlege even if it takes some effort and some who are less pro-active. But some employees see knowledge sharing as a threat. They try to build up knowledge as a competitive advantage against other colleagues. Isn't that a logical result from the leadership style and rigid structures built on distrust? Is it because of a bad personality of these people or more because of the hostile environment for collaboration? Managment and leadership is a good keyword. Jobrotation is in everybody's mouth and considered a good thing, right? Not everywhere! I was told that also some resistance is coming from leaders who are afraid of losing good people to other departments in the company. Is that the case? Does a collaboration tool really make the difference if somebody leaves for another job or department? And if people change positions, is that bad for the company? Also social networking is seen somehow problematic. Yes, you can find technical experts or people with information or tacit knowledge! But if they are asked to share this knowledge by other people, they are kind of working for other departments leaving a lower percentage of working resource for the department paying for them. This shows that also in the way companies are organized new ideas and approaches have to be found.
Especially blogging is seen problematic. Worries exist about opening a new communication channel for people to just complain about things or even post illegal contents. This means, an implementation of web 2.0 tools also poses a need for review of contents. Additional manpower and ressources are necessary to achieve that.
Apart from all these challenges one message clearly shows that the whole topic of social collaboration is heavily evolving: within my company more than 20 from one another independent Wikis were created!! There is a huge amount of energy that tries to bubble up! But clearly ways have to be found to foster and remunerate solid contributions in order to boost Wikis and blogs with contents. E.g. Microsoft has variable pay of their evangelists partly based on number and content of their posts. Incentives could work as well.
All in all the support and positive responses I got so far provide me with more and more energy to move on with that idea of creating awareness for the need of enterprise 2.0.
After a short introduction about what I am out for, it was once again amazing for me how much is already there! Isn't that a sign for a big breakthrough that is shortly before happening? The colleague from IT just nodded to all the points I made. He has the same opinion. One more supporter joins!
He showed me that a prove of concept has been done for a new version of the intranet based on web 2.0 technology including blogs, social networking and category based content search. The concept was presented across the company and agreed to be very supportive to forster collaboration and information sharing. He even told me that our CEO was very open for these kind of approaches. Everybody agreed that even one design error that could be prevented in a product development would pay off the investment for the new intranet concept. The complete implementation takes about half a year. So there should obviously be no doubts, right? Unfortunately no budget was given to the project yet. How can this be I asked. Then we discussed about issues seen and that there is still a good way to go - it is really a cultural change that is and has to take place.Of course there exist people who are more pro-active with sharing knowlege even if it takes some effort and some who are less pro-active. But some employees see knowledge sharing as a threat. They try to build up knowledge as a competitive advantage against other colleagues. Isn't that a logical result from the leadership style and rigid structures built on distrust? Is it because of a bad personality of these people or more because of the hostile environment for collaboration? Managment and leadership is a good keyword. Jobrotation is in everybody's mouth and considered a good thing, right? Not everywhere! I was told that also some resistance is coming from leaders who are afraid of losing good people to other departments in the company. Is that the case? Does a collaboration tool really make the difference if somebody leaves for another job or department? And if people change positions, is that bad for the company? Also social networking is seen somehow problematic. Yes, you can find technical experts or people with information or tacit knowledge! But if they are asked to share this knowledge by other people, they are kind of working for other departments leaving a lower percentage of working resource for the department paying for them. This shows that also in the way companies are organized new ideas and approaches have to be found.
Especially blogging is seen problematic. Worries exist about opening a new communication channel for people to just complain about things or even post illegal contents. This means, an implementation of web 2.0 tools also poses a need for review of contents. Additional manpower and ressources are necessary to achieve that.
Apart from all these challenges one message clearly shows that the whole topic of social collaboration is heavily evolving: within my company more than 20 from one another independent Wikis were created!! There is a huge amount of energy that tries to bubble up! But clearly ways have to be found to foster and remunerate solid contributions in order to boost Wikis and blogs with contents. E.g. Microsoft has variable pay of their evangelists partly based on number and content of their posts. Incentives could work as well.
All in all the support and positive responses I got so far provide me with more and more energy to move on with that idea of creating awareness for the need of enterprise 2.0.
Donnerstag, 8. Mai 2008
First Steps
Preparation of my presentation to the executives
After reading Denning's book, I tried to put together a presentation for the business unit manager in my company. I put a first draft on our MBA google sites collaboration platform and got some very valuable feedback from our course instructor of the soft skills & leadership qualities class (thanks Charles!!). These will flow into the next version. While looking for available information on enterprise 2.0 I am really amazed how much is already out there!
Do you know, what blogging, tagging, social networks and mashups are about? What amazing things can be done with them? Can you imagine how much energy is emerging in collaborative networks?
First approaches in my company
Speaking with colleagues about my idea, I was surprised how easy it was to convince them and get support. A lot of them see the necessity of collaboration and welcome my approach a lot. They even already come up with ideas about how or where to use it. My department manager supports my as well and encourages me with it.
In order to have a more solid bases for my idea and presentation, I called IT to find out, which web 2.0 technologies are supported. And I was surprised again! Guess what? There is already a "media wiki" implemented and running by our R&D departments in Austria, which is officially supported by IT! Next week, I will have a meeting with the eCommerce manager from IT and discuss what else is already supported in our company. That makes it a lot easier to convince the management board, as the efforts for implementation are minimal. With a colleague of mine, inspired from what I showed him, we already came up with the idea to set up a blog for external customers. This would give us the possibility to have a closer contact and find out about their issues and ideas about our products. Additionally this would give the company a more personal face.
Stay tuned, I keep you posted. It's already starting to take off!!
After reading Denning's book, I tried to put together a presentation for the business unit manager in my company. I put a first draft on our MBA google sites collaboration platform and got some very valuable feedback from our course instructor of the soft skills & leadership qualities class (thanks Charles!!). These will flow into the next version. While looking for available information on enterprise 2.0 I am really amazed how much is already out there!
Do you know, what blogging, tagging, social networks and mashups are about? What amazing things can be done with them? Can you imagine how much energy is emerging in collaborative networks?
First approaches in my company
Speaking with colleagues about my idea, I was surprised how easy it was to convince them and get support. A lot of them see the necessity of collaboration and welcome my approach a lot. They even already come up with ideas about how or where to use it. My department manager supports my as well and encourages me with it.
In order to have a more solid bases for my idea and presentation, I called IT to find out, which web 2.0 technologies are supported. And I was surprised again! Guess what? There is already a "media wiki" implemented and running by our R&D departments in Austria, which is officially supported by IT! Next week, I will have a meeting with the eCommerce manager from IT and discuss what else is already supported in our company. That makes it a lot easier to convince the management board, as the efforts for implementation are minimal. With a colleague of mine, inspired from what I showed him, we already came up with the idea to set up a blog for external customers. This would give us the possibility to have a closer contact and find out about their issues and ideas about our products. Additionally this would give the company a more personal face.
Stay tuned, I keep you posted. It's already starting to take off!!
Dienstag, 6. Mai 2008
Motivation
Easy collaboration and exchange of knowledge are central topics to deal with future challenges for companies and leaders. The use of web 2.0 technologies is the first step to a co-creative working community.
How are enterprises affected by these changes? What effect does that have on leadership?
Reflecting on future leadership attributes during my MBA studies, I decided to take the challenge to introduce a wiki in my department and roll it out to the complete business unit. This is my personal contribution to change my company into a co-creative working community. I want to use this opportunity to test out my leadership abilities using Stephen Dennings approach of "inspiring action through the narrative" (ISBN-13: 978-0787987893).
I invite you to participate on my journey to find out how to drive change in today's companies.
How are enterprises affected by these changes? What effect does that have on leadership?
Reflecting on future leadership attributes during my MBA studies, I decided to take the challenge to introduce a wiki in my department and roll it out to the complete business unit. This is my personal contribution to change my company into a co-creative working community. I want to use this opportunity to test out my leadership abilities using Stephen Dennings approach of "inspiring action through the narrative" (ISBN-13: 978-0787987893).
I invite you to participate on my journey to find out how to drive change in today's companies.
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