Will the future of work involve any travel at all?

June 23, 2008 at 7:33 pm · Filed under Distributed Work, Web Commuting

I think we may be at a genuine tipping point. The rising price of gasoline and other energy appears to finally be affecting people’s actual behaviors - on the job and off. There’s growing evidence that sales of gas-guzzling SUV’s and trucks are dropping like a rock, while more and more people are trying to find ways to reduce business travel, including personal commuting.

I’ve seen two major articles just this week about companies considering four-day work weeks, launching or expanding telecommuting programs, and doing everything they can to reduce inter-office and (sometimes) even client-related travel. And in our own consulting work we’ve even heard one CEO think out loud that she may have to offer her employees incentives or subsidies to come into the office to meet with their colleagues.

Here are the articles (well, it’s one article from the International Herald Tribune and one press release from the Institute For Corporate Productivity).

The Herald Tribune (June 10):

“As gas prices rise, some US employers look at cutting down on workers commutes”

The Institute for Corporate Productivity (June 23):

“With Fuel Prices Rising, U.S. Companies Work Quickly to Reduce Employee Travel”

I found this paragraph from the Herald Tribune story particularly intriguing -and a sign of things to come:

This week [the week of June 9], the U.S. House of Representatives approved legislation requiring the head of each federal agency to set policies allowing qualified workers to work from home or another convenient location [emphasis added]. Giving relief from high gas prices was one factor cited by the sponsor, Rep. Danny Davis, an Illinois Democrat.

What’s happening in your organization? Would you rather work from home (or nearby) one or two days a week, or commute as usual but do it for four ten-hour days? What other things are you considering as a way to reduce driving time and cost for your employees?

Special thanks to Lisa Horner of Citrix Online for pointing me to the Herald Tribune article.

Tags: telecommuting fourdayweek gasprices futureofwork productivity

Web 2.0 in the Enterprise. From Dilbert to Dude

June 22, 2008 at 12:21 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Enterprise 2.0, Intranets, Web 2.0

Earlier this week I was on a panel at a Churchill Club event in Silicon Valley. Hosted by Charlene Li of Forrester, the panel discussed web 2.0 in the enterprise and how social media is changing collaboration behind the firewall. On the panel with me were leaders from Best Buy, Serena Software and Oracle. Titled “From Dilbert to Dude: Succeeding with Web 2.0 Within the Enterprise” the panel discussed how grass roots social media efforts take on a life of their own as they move from being “under the desk server” initiatives to enterprise wide programs.

Steve Bendt of Best Buy talked about Blue Nation, a social networking site that connects employees at the retail outlets to the corporate offices and to each other. Now, the employees who are on the front lines talking to customers everyday, have a platform to discuss new products, exchange ideas and provide feedback to headquarters on what products, display formats and marketing strategies are working. It is a perfect example of a company taking advantage of the wisdom of the crowds concepts. Also, interesting is that after the launch of Blue Nation, employee retention has gotten easier as employees feel a part of something special and important. No thank you email from a CEO can compare to the satisfaction that people get when they feel they have contributed to something larger. Turnover of employees who use the site is just 8 to 12 percent while company turnover is much higher. 

Serena Software is another interesting company and I blogged about them a few years ago (on another blog) when they first rolled out their Facebook Fridays initiative. Rather than trying to build a behind the firewall social networking enabled intranet, Serena chose to build their intranet on the Facebook platform. But not just that, they also built tools to allow the Facebook pages to connect with company data sources in a safe and secure manner. So rather than bringing the employees to the intranet, they went to where their employees were spending most of their time - on Facebook. 

In the case of Oracle, what’s most fascinating was how quickly Connect, the internal social network got adopted. Within an hour of launching the site 270 people were using it. The next morning the site had 8,000 people on it. Currently, the site has 10,000 active users who share information, news articles, powerpoint presentations and discuss budgets. This again was an initiative that began with no funding but tapped into the inherent nature of people to connect with each other in a purposeful and productive manner. Paul Pedrazzi from Oracle also discussed the risks. He mentioned that a person wearing a religious head dress like a turban could claim denial of a job because someone saw his profile picture and refused to interview him.

In discussing the Avenue A|Razorfish wiki and some client examples, I highlighted how understanding the motivations for use are important. We’re not on these social platforms just to socialize. Different people have different motivations and aligning those motivations with the social platform and the business needs is key to success. The wiki is viewed as a marketplace of ideas where people share their best thoughts and expect more in return. Sometimes the sharing even takes the form of bookmarks, blog posts and photographs - not just the regular word documents or powerpoint files. Through use of the wiki, natural experts who are the most passionate about specific topics get the attention and the focus that they deserve. 

The panel was also covered in Infoworld. 

ReadWriteWeb’s Advice on How to Comment About Your Company on a Blog

June 22, 2008 at 11:10 am · Filed under Reviews

We get a lot of comments from software vendors on this blog, especially on the reviews I do of other companies. I was pleased to see (via Puneet Gupta) this excellent advice from Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb in his post: How to Comment About Your Company on Blog Posts, Without Being Spammy. ReadWriteWeb writes about new technology and gets many comments. Marshall draws from their experience and reactions and speaks to those who might comment on their blog. I pass this on to those who might comment on this blog. Michael mentioned that less than one in a thousand who reads a post leaves a comment, so more comments please – just follow this advice.

There are five types of comments from company representatives that ReadWriteWeb likes to get: updates on new product developments, clarifications on your product or market position, articulation on product differentiation, kind words about the other companies, and comments that add humor or insider insights. Michael provides excellent concrete examples in his post for each comment type. He says these comments work best when they are delivered in humble manner and adds they are most effective when, “gently engaged with competitors and focused on adding value to the discussion of the whole sector.” You are also advised to be transparent about yourself and your interests.

Go to the complete ReadWriteWeb post to get the full story but I wanted to bring this to your attention.

Enterprise 2.0 — The State of E2.0 as per Practitioners

June 20, 2008 at 2:33 pm · Filed under Change Management, Communities, Enterprise 2.0, Reviews, Web 2.0, social networks

I’m still integrating and thinking about what I heard at the E2.0 conference in Boston a week back. My thinking was helped by a review of the excellent videos that are now available. Andrew McAfee moderated a panel whose membership was drawn from people who presented their (successful) case studies of E2.0 implementation. The panel represented a number of perspectives on introducing social tools:

• Simon Revell, of Pfizer,* adopted a “just do it” approach, introducing the tools, creating edgy introductory videos (see “Meet Charlie”), and nurtures the successes.
• Ned Lerner, Sony Computer Enterprises, responded to top-down management directives to use these tools (easy in a company whose business is internet gaming).
• Pete Fields, Wachovia*, who developed a concept for an integrated tool set that connected to corporate communications policies, and worked across the organization for 18 months to get buy-in before launching.
• Sean Dennehy and Don Burke, CIA*, who were inspired by Cal Andres “The Wiki and the Blog” to explore Wikipedia and see how discussion and history pages could naturally support the way that intelligence analysts work.

(* indicates a video of this case study is also available, on the same page linked above).

McAfee started by acknowledging that Enterprise 2.0 hasn’t yet taken over the planet, for a variety of reasons:

• The tools are not yet perfected
• Management is impeding adoption in some way
• Users are slow to take up the tools

There was general agreement that the current use within these organization is less than 10% of the employee populations, but each see that the growth is continuous in a positive direction.

Many of the “lessons learned” from these early adopters will sound quite familiar to those of us who have been on the leading edge of introducing technologies for collaboration and knowledge management into organizations, but there are some new twists. What works:

• Acknowledge and reward the early adopters and champions
• Pfizer has consultants available to help business groups get started and use tools appropriately
• Change management is essential. Wachovia involved organizational development, organizational pyschologists, and corporate communications, but still underestimated the difficulty of traction beyond the early adopters
• Look for ways to implement the tools “in the flow,” as part of work. Look especially for existing work processes that can be vastly improved and implement there. Organize around big problems, and don’t keep all the social tool usage under the radar.

Cautionary tales:

• Middle management can be harder to convince than senior management. (They are rewarded for “making the trains run on time,” not for encouraging people to spend time learning new tools.)
• It’s faulty to assume that what’s true on the web will work the same way in the enterprise
• Fight against lockdown. Turn down requests by users to have “private” spaces accessible by only a few people (yes, this one from the CIA!)
• Not all organizations are ready for transparency.
• Don’t assume that because everyone can have a voice that decisions will be made by the majority (the crowd). Leaders must learn to use the opinions of the crowd to inform and shape decisions, not to make them.

True to the spirit of web 2.0, the conference site (linked above) remains available as a community archive of presentations, comments, and interactions. What is the spirit? I liked Pete Fields’ definition of “Enterprise 2.0:”

Connecting people for the purpose of deriving business value

Browsing through this site should help you find people with whom you might connect to delve deeper and find more… to help with your own journeys.

Facebook Groups in Business Webinar: Your Questions Please

June 20, 2008 at 9:54 am · Filed under Collaboration, Collective intelligence, Webinar, social networks

Thanks to TheAppGap sponsors Intuit Quickbase next Wednesday June 25, 3pm EDT we”ll have a chance to share learning from our Facebook Groups in Business Investigation convened December 2007.  

Webinar details are posted here along with the registration.

PLEASE JOIN US.

To ensure we address your questions about observing the  dynamics of 10 Facebook Groups December 2007- February 2008, please submit as comments below.

The 10 participating Facebook Groups and owners (from 6 countries and 4 continents) who made the investigation possible were:

Bordeaux Colloquium- Kimberly Samaha
Cscout- Ray Cha
eSquared- Eric Edelstein
Hellenes Educators & London Jewish Cultural Centre- Niki Lambropoulos
Huddlemind Labs- Dave Duarte
Marketing 2.0- Francois Gossieaux
Network PR- Jenni Beattie
RNIA Supporters- Adam Kovitz

As investigation co-conveners with Bill Anderson , Victoria Axelord and I monitored our 21st Century Organizations Facebook Group.

The investigation was supported by advisors  Jeffrey Keefer, Patti Anklam, Jill Howell, Josh Katinger, Danielle Ravich, and interest from the Knowledge Innovation Network, University of Warwick  to which the first findings were presented March 6. The slides are here. 

Our Facebook Groups learning included:

• What it takes to drive activity in a Facebook Group
• The importance of purposeful business objectives, and
• Gaps in Facebook administration tools.

We also experienced the challenges of facilitating a peer-to-peer action research intitiative across 16 hours of time zones but the joy of collaborating with an extraordinary ad hoc “network in the word” (as  fellow AppGap contributor Patti Anklam describes) that assembled for this investigation. Proving the power of online to connect and serendipitous real world encounters, only one Facebook Group owner was known to the conveners before the investigation begin.

Having your questions in advance to guide webinar planning is appreciated as is your registering and joining our conversation about Facebook Groups in Business June 25, 3pm EDT.

1. What interests you about Facebook Groups and their potential value for your business? 

2. Have you successfully used a Facebook Group to support your enterprise or started a group and watched it lie fallow?

3. What have we missed?

 Please share your insights and questions.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

RightNow Brings New Survey and Online Chat Capabilities

June 19, 2008 at 8:45 pm · Filed under Reviews

I have written about RightNow several times, (see Customer-centric CRM from RightNow and Obama’s Answer Center - CRM from RightNow on the Campaign Trail). This week I caught up with Andrew Hull, their Director of Product Marketing and we discussed their latest updates. To put this move in context, Andrew said they have four core product strategies: e-self service, multi-channel contact center support, consumer-centric CRM, and building out the RightNow ecosystem. The current move, labeled RightNow May ‘08, primarily addresses the second strategy.

With their new online chat capabilities, RightNow provides enterprise feedback management capabilities across multi-channel customer contact points including phone, email and Web, across service, marketing and sales operations. RightNow May ‘08 takes this multi-channel feedback and automatically captures the customer input in a central knowledge base. The customer input is not siloed in the channel it was received. Then a company can take immediate action from this common knowledge base to deliver a better customer experience. Their response is also not limited to the channel in which the customer feedback was received. For example, they support online customer chat and can respond directly through this channel and then send an email follow-up to support their initial response. Here is an exampl eof an online chat screen with a survey.

Andrew said that their research indicates that RightNow is thee first to market with this complete multil-channel feedback capability in a SaaS solution. I think that cross-channel coordination is essential for effective customer service. I have created a number of call center support systems in the past and this was always a goal but we had more primitive tools and it was hard to get seamless integration and required much more manual effort.

You can now activate customer satisfaction surveys over the phone, via email, and on the Web with online chat. RightNow can trigger a survey after an online chat interaction with a service agent.. Results can be compiled for trend analysis, and individual responses are included within customer profiles to enable more personalized service on the next customer contact, regardless of the channel. Customers can also indicate in their profiles their preferred channel of communication. Here is a link to a demonstration of how the RightNow feedback system works.

This release is part of an effort to make on-line customer communication more personal. In August ‘07, RightNow added emotion detection features that gauge customers’ opinions by applying an emotional rating to text-based customer communications. In its February ‘08 release , RightNow added topic monitoring capabilities that automate the review of customer sentiment by grouping or clustering common topics within unstructured text responses. I think are these are all useful additions to provide a more human and empathetic quality to automated and on-line customer interactions.

Notable + Quotable: Glassdoor, Comotivate, DocStoc, and the launch of Work Literacy

June 19, 2008 at 7:24 am · Filed under Notable + Quotable, Tips + Pointers

At Glassdoor, Find Out How Much People Really Make At Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, And Everywhere Else
TechCrunch profiles Glassdoor, a new site that allows people to anonymously review places where they work or have worked in the past as well as declare their salary and compensation packages: “The idea is to collect as much detailed salary information and feedback for every job title at a company so that job seekers can know how to evaluate an offer, and current employees can see how they are doing relative to their peers.”

Unisfair Now Offering Job Fair Opportunities
Unisfair now has a virtual version of the traditional job fair. The article: “If the company’s survey is anything accurate, 64% of 100 human resources managers feel such online services could improve hiring efforts.”

Work Literacy Launches
As the way we work continues to change, sites such as your very own AppGap and the just-launched Work Literacy are emerging to help people better understand and navigate new tools and work methodologies. As it describes itself, Work Literacy “is a network of individuals, companies and organizations who are interested in learning, defining, mentoring, teaching and consulting on the frameworks, skills, methods and tools of modern knowledge work.”

Comotivate: Reach For Goals Together
If you have problems keeping yourself motivated to achieve your goals, then Comotivate might be the app for you. “It’s not built so much as a collective cheerleading squad for its membership. Instead, its more about completing the mission.”

Searching for definition
Reviews last week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. The author’s general impression was that there’s no strict definition for what enterprise 2.0 means and that’s a problem: “…there is ambiguity around what E2.0 is, which is unhelpful for vendors and their potential clients alike.”

DocStoc Tackles Email Attachments
A new feature from DocStoc makes creating multiple email attachments easier. The instructions are simple: “After downloading their OneClick application (Windows only) you can send attachments directly from Explorer. Right-click the documents and a single click will upload them to DocStoc (public or private as you choose) and generate an email so that you can tell people where to find them.”

Working fast on Office 2.0
Robert Scoble shares his notes on a conversation with Chris Capossela of Microsoft Office, including reasons why businesses aren’t keen to adapt the newest web 2.0 tools, including the contention that “they need to know these services will stay up.”

Over 90 Minutes Per Week Spent on Personal Web Surfing at Work
A press release about new research out of the UK that found that the average office worker there spends more than 90 minutes of every workday on personal internet usage. The reaction to this study is mixed, with the author noting that “while many organisations are supportive of staff visiting non-work related websites, and view it as a motivational perk or a modern-day tea break, others are troubled by the amount of use, or have had to sack staff for serious abuse.”

The Growth of Web 2.0 Services
While Web 2.0 services proliferate and continue to offer ever more features and functionality, there’s still lots of room for improvement. This article includes a few recommendations such as “The ability to mix and match content from a variety of sources can be used to provide pre- and post-roll ad-insertion that is targeted to individual customer profiles.”

Make Money By Networking with Passitto
Ever wondered what LinkedIn would be if you were given money for each referral? If so, say hello to Passitto. According to this news item, “Passitto is all about referrals. Who you want to meet, who you want your friends to meet, and who wants to meet you. You can get credits or money for referring others and you can use those credits you build up as currency for obtaining more referrals for your own business.”

Brightidea.com – Brings Focused Enterprise 2.0 Capabilities to Innovation

June 19, 2008 at 7:20 am · Filed under Reviews

I think that Brightidea has a smart strategy for bringing social computing capabilities into the enterprise. They have picked a focused application that addresses a critical issue for any organization. Brightidea adds the capabilities of social computing to the idea generation and implementation process. Their WebStormTM product is an Idea Collection and Ranking Portal that facilitates the innovation process. It configured as the front-end interface to their Innovation Pipeline Management (IPM) platform. The IPM Platform is a suite of tools used to manage ideas from conception to reality, with modules for research collaboration, cost estimation and revenue forecasting, and other aspects of the product development process.

This week I spoke with Matt Greeley, the CEO at Brightidea. They started out in the consumer web in 1999 and moved to the current enterprise focus in 2003. While they currently work inside the firewall, some of their customers are having them reach outside to get customer and business partner input on innovation. One of the impressive uses of Webstorm outside the firewall is Cisco’s i-Prize. Here Cisco has launched a contest and invited the world to give it great ideas. The winner gets to join Cisco and is funded to make the idea real. I will cover i-Prize in a separate post, as it is a great story. Brightidea’s Webstorm manages the collection, ranking, and discussion of these ideas from over 100 countries.

Matt said they decided to put increase support around their innovation process as it is increasingly becoming a critical differentiator in today’s faster moving economy. You innovate or die. My local area is littered with companies such as Wang and Digital that failed to understand this. It is not sufficient or often feasible to just throw more people at the challenge rather companies should evaluate how technology can help. Since innovation is, in reality, a social process, it makes sense to apply social computing capabilities to this issue. Matt said that their research indicates that they are the first in this space with a comprehensive social computing solution. Here is the landing page of one of their innovation networks.

Here is a screen shot of an idea list.

Matt indicated that they also selected a specific business process so they could show concrete and measurable value for a social computing application. This struck a strong chord within me as I have been promoting a similar concept for knowledge management for years. I think that for most new IT applications to succeed they need to be tied to real business problems within real business processes and then measured by how they effect these processes.

One of the examples I used to use for the need for concrete business measures was ironically in the innovation process. In 2000 I helped develop an enterprise portal for Sainsbury’s, the UK consumer food chain. The first application within the portal served their innovation process. It was the most pressing business challenge they faced at the time. We used such measures as decreased time to market, number of first to market ideas, product success rates, etc. We used the relatively primitive portal and content management technology of the day. While it was successful, I wish we had Brightidea and social computing then. Matt said they and their clients are now looking at such measures as time to market, time to decision, value of the total innovation pipeline, and on schedule product launches. Their customers are taking these results to the Wall Street analysts to demonstrate the progress they are making in innovation and the projected future value of the company.

The controlled transparency offered by the social computing capabilities within Brightidea helps moves things along. Those who need to know, now know. Those that do not need to know are not distracted. There are dashboards that senior executives can use to monitor progress of their new product pipeline and apply resources where needed. Transparency leads to accountability and this can lead to productivity if managed in a supportive manner. Many of their clients previously used siloed applications such as Excel and now they have much greater access to knowledge and the ability to provide input throughout the product development is dramatically increased. There are likely a number of paths to taking enterprise 2.0 within organizations. I think that Brightidea is traveling down one of the most promising ones.

Upcoming AppGap webinar: Using Facebook for business

June 18, 2008 at 3:07 pm · Filed under Communities, Webinar, social networks

Next Wednesday afternoon at 3 p.m. EDT, we’ll be hosting a webinar on how businesses large and small are using Facebook to raise awareness, build buzz, gain customer insights, and increase sales.

The hour-long event, about which more here, will feature some of the observations and learnings that came out of the recent study conducted by AppGap contributor Jenny Ambrozek and her colleagues Victoria Axelrod and William Anderson in which they took a close look at how Facebook business group owners are putting the site to work for the good of their company. Jenny will be joined by some of the participants in the study and will be putting to them questions raised here on the blog or in real-time during the webinar.

Jenny will surely weigh in with another post or two about the study and webinar in the coming days but we wanted to be sure to get the word out here ASAP - please let others who’d be interested know about it.

Find out more and be sure to register for the event.

The Secure Enterprise 2.0 Forum

June 18, 2008 at 8:59 am · Filed under Reviews

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference I spoke with David Lavenda, VP Marketing and Product Strategy at WorkLight. I have written about them on this blog. See WorkLight Provides Enterprise 2.0 Security. Now they are promoting the Secure Enterprise 2.0 Forum that is designed to support the secure use of Web 2.0 to do business.

As their site says, “The Forum is comprised of top executives at Global Fortune 500 companies that are ready to address the security challenges posed by Web 2.0 technologies, such as wikis, blogs, RSS, widgets and gadgets, personalized homepages, social networks and social bookmarking, which are becoming increasingly popular in the enterprise. The Secure Enterprise 2.0 Forum promotes awareness, industry standards, best practices, and interoperability issues related to the introduction of consumer technology into the workplace.”

I think this is a good move and it will be interesting to see where this organization goes.