This is another in a series of notes from the 2009 KM World. These are near real time notes so please excuse typos and spacing issues. This is the Opening Keynote: Resetting the
Enterprise With 2.0 Collaborative Tools by Andrew McAfee. Here is part of the session description.
“Andrew McAfee focuses on how
emergent social software platforms are benefiting enterprises, and how smart
organizations and their leaders are making effective use of them to share
knowledge, inspire innovation, and enable decision making. He shares
strategies, stories, and real-world examples of successful enterprise
collaboration using 2.0 tools.”
Andy began with his definition
of enterprise 2.0, It is “the use of emergent social software platforms by
organizations in pursuit of their goals.”
Here is what I wrote recently. (see What is Your Definition of Enterprise 2.0? Here is
Mine.) I think they are very similar. Andy said
that now technology is not being used to tell people what to do but instead it
is being implemented to let people decide what to do about it. I really like
this. He then asked those who find their intranet easier to find stuff than the
Web. Five people raised their hands. This is the first time that I have seen
anyone raise their hand as I have been asking audiences the same question with
attribution after I first heard Andy ask it several years ago.
Andy told a story about the recent
time when he was in a rental car that did not work. So he tweeted and asked for
help and got 16 responses in a few minutes, most from people he did not know.
People do want to help each other. I found this out last weekend when I had a
Twitter spam attack and got lots of help to fix it. So he said let’s stop
worrying about the risk of social media within the enterprise. People are
usually helpful. He finds very few horror stories inside the enterprise.
One difference from the Web is that
your identity is traceable within the enterprise so bad behavior will be found
out. I would add that you are also working with colleagues who hopefully share
a common goal. In fact, I think that enterprise 2.0 can help people be more
aligned around common goals. Andy said that enterprise 2.0 has improved his
view of humanity.
He then said to avoid the idea
that there is one way to do things. Innovation is more the issue now than
strategy. There are now chief innovation officers. Crowdsourcing is becoming
more common. Companies are now sending problems out on the Web for others
outside the enterprise to help them solve the issue. Merck is one example. The diversity of people looking at an
issue increases the rate of solving a problem.
The key is building communities
than people want to join and participate. Verizon has opened up a portion of their web site and let
others help them solve customer issues.
Some people are spending a lot of their time for free helping Verizon
with customer service. These
people do get status and recognition.
Andy said he used to be against
the wisdom of crowds. He thought crowds would get dumber when they got
together. Now he has completely changed his mind. He gave an example where a group prediction market beat an
expert and a synthesis of the polls on the electoral college vote spread in the
2008 US presidential election. The
lesson: crowds can be very wise. You should enable peer review and experiment
with collective intelligence.
The great benefit of using
Enterprise 2.0 is not sharing documents for collaborating. This is helpful but
it is not the biggest benefit. Instead it is connecting the dots on issues. He
gave the example of the wiki set up by the US intelligence community:
Intellipedia. Because of this wiki people now know better who is doing relevant
work on topics of interest. They
are discovering useful people on their topics of interest. There is less parallel play and
re-inventing the wheel.
He gave some major benefits
from a recent McKinsey study that found increased customer satisfaction,
increased innovation, access to knowledge, access to internal experts, and employee
satisfaction. While these results
are likely from true believers, the magnitude is impressive. Adopting enterprise 2.0 seems to be a
necessary move. Now the internal
processes of the organization can be supported through technology.
He concluded with some pointers
for success. He twisted this by
talking about how to fail. Declare
war on traditional management and technology, Bad idea for two reasons. It is
bad marketing and it is wrong.
Allow walled gardens to flourish. Do not have disconnected content and
teams. Accentuate the negative. Do
not worry too much about the risks.
Another thing to avoid: Try to
replace email. It will be hard and
email does have its uses, especially as a single source. We tend to overweight the advantages of
the technology we are using. A
replacement technology needs to be ten times better than what you are
using. Email is the current
technology and is not that bad. Over night success occurs when there is no existing
technology on the issue, examples are Facebook and Twitter.
Another thing to avoid: put
into many features. Keep it simple like an iPod, Google, etc. Technologists love features but users respond
to simplicity even it then think they want more features.
Another thing to avoid: Overuse
the word “social.” This is not top of mind for senior execs. While I would
agree with this I would also not go with enterprise 2.0 with execs. It seems
that technology labels are difficult in general. Just promote what it does.
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