Small Biz Sees Value in Social Media — Says Survey

October 29, 2008 at 12:00 am · Filed under social networks, social tools

The majority of small business owners say there’s gold in them there social media sites. Well, maybe not gold, but at least something to look into that’s potentially valuable to businesses.

SurePayroll, the online payroll service, conducted a survey asking small business owners if they believe social networking has business value. A majority, 55%, said yes. What’s more, the survey indicates that one out of every five of the small business owners polled had actually obtained at least one new customer as a direct result of using social media.

When asked which social media sites they have heard of, it’s no surprise that the 3 largest social media sites (here in the U.S.) are the ones most have heard of.  Over 80% had heard of  Myspace, YouTube and Facebook.  This chart of survey data shows that brand recognition is high for those 3 sites among the small business people surveyed.

Interestingly, though, when asked which social sites they actually use for their businesses, the picture looked different.  LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace were the top 3, with YouTube and Yahoo Groups tying for 4th place, as this chart of survey results shows:

What’s the bottom line?   Notice that LinkedIn is the hands-down favorite for small business owners to actually use.  Digg is none too popular with the small biz crowd despite being the “poster child” of social media sites.

SurePayroll’s Online Marketing Manager, David Rohrer, says small businesses need social media to stay competitive.

“It is no longer just an outlet for personal use — it’s rapidly becoming a must for business success,” says Rohrer. “Big business is tapping into the blogosphere and posting their company profile pages in online communities. Small business owners need to do the same. What’s so great about the online world is you don’t need a million-dollar marketing budget. In fact, the most effective online connections are free personal communications from a business owner to their community.”

The SurePayroll press release on this topic is here.

Notable + Quotable: telecommuting, home-based businesses, and going on a paper diet

October 28, 2008 at 10:35 pm · Filed under Notable + Quotable

Making Telecommuting Work
Amy Barrett checks in on the growing acceptance of telecommuting, noting, for instance, a 2008 study which found that  “telecommuting and flexible schedules were the third most important incentives when attracting new hires.” The piece goes on to offer tips for companies considering telecommuting, e.g.,: “Whether you’ve got one employee who wants to work from home or you’d like to get several out of the office to save on real estate, first draw up a telecommuting policy. Otherwise, those who are office-bound may suspect favoritism or discrimination.”

10 Ways to convince your boss to let you work from home
Susan Harkins provides tips for those on the other side of the equation: the employees who are lobbying to be allowed to telecommute: “There may be dozens of reasons why telecommuting makes sense for you. But to make your case with management, you need a list of reasons that make sense for the business…” A few of the selling points Harkins suggests you use with your employer: “Your place is cheaper than theirs; your productivity will increase; and employee retention will go up.”

Federal employees lack tools for mobile work, study finds
NetworkWorld’s Ann Bednarz reports on a study, sponsored by Telework Exchange, that indicates that while “federal employees are becoming more mobile… government agencies are missing opportunities to improve employees’ productivity when they’re working outside the office.” Some of the data: “Eighty-two percent of federal employees spend work time outside of the office each month, [and] among those, 42% telework at least part time and 20% spend at least a portion of two days per week outside of the office. In addition, 80% of mobile employees say they spend at least 20% more time working outside of the office.”

The Irish flunk at e-working
“In the decade or more since Irish executives have been encouraged to work from home to cut down on travel, help the environment and achieve a work-life balance, it seems we are among the worst in Europe when it comes to teleworking…” So starts this article which cites a recent study which found that “only 2pc of Irish executives telework at least one day a week, compared with 21pc of their counterparts on the European continent.” The piece goes on to theorize why Ireland may be slow to adopt teleworking.

Home is where the heart of our future economy is, and we should support it
Michelle Rodgers champions, in a UK-focused piece, home-based businesses, saying, “The potential to grow a global operation from a home office with a small workforce is immense. With a focus on working with partners rather then employing personnel, and on turnover as opposed to headcount, these home businesses are quite simply redefining our perceptions of growth.” The piece pulls together data from several recent studies, including one that suggested that such business owners are more hopeful about weathering the current economic crisis, and urges policy makers to work to better understand and support these ventures.

The Paper Diet: 30 Tips for Home and Office
Michael Bloch enumerates the many ways we can cut back on our paper usage. As he points out: “The pulp and paper industry consumes the most water of all industries in OECD countries - and is one of the biggest industrial greenhouse gas emitters. Aside from the wood, water and energy consumed; chemical processes involved with the creation of many types of paper products generate toxic by-products that wreak tremendous damage on the environment - the land, water and air.”

Not dead, just resting
The Economist weighs in on the paper usage issue in a discussion of how discredited technologies can be unexpectedly resurrected. As the article points out, since the dawn of the computer age there’s been talk - a “techno-Utopian prophecy” - of a “paperless” office. Problem is it didn’t happen. “What actually happened was that global consumption of office paper more than doubled in the last two decades of the 20th century.” And yet, picking up the on premise of the article, “the prediction seems to be coming true at last. American office workers’ use of paper has actually been in decline since 2001. What changed? The explanation seems to be sociological rather than technological…”

The Office of 2015
Catherine Rankin Harper imagines the office of the future: “With such emphasis on developing technology to enhance portability and mobile communication, it seems a very real possibility that the office of 2015 may be a table at your local coffee shop, the sofa in your front room or even seat 1A on a jet somewhere over the Atlantic.”

A Master List of Big Brand Social Media Uses

October 28, 2008 at 8:58 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Collective intelligence, social tools

Here’s an example of crowd-sourced intelligence in action, when it comes to social media:

Peter Kim put together a big list of business uses of social media.  Then with the input of his readers, he’s expanded the original list and as of this writing there are 279 brands listed, with references to how they are using social media. 

The list includes everything from Daimler’s Slideshare account, to Intuit’s Tax Almanac wiki, to the Progressive Insurance traffic widget on Yahoo.  There are non-profits, media, government and military organizations represented too.

Now you might wonder, “what’s so unusual about a list that readers have contributed to?”  Nothing, actually.  Happens all the time on blogs and wikis.

But it did not stop with one list. 

Then another blogger sliced and diced his list.  You see, Peter had divided his list according to brands/organizations.  Then Ray Schiel of the Global Social Media Network divided the list according to applications and functionality.  Thus, if you want to see which big brands are podcasting, for instance, it’s easy to see at a glance.  Want to know which big brands have a YouTube channel?  You can find that out too, with the list of organizations involved in online video.

Breaking the monopolization on programming

October 27, 2008 at 9:45 am · Filed under Web Apps, Web Commuting, Work Design

The Economist Magazine has a 14 page special report on Corporate IT in its latest issue. Most of the articles invariably talk about the “cloud” and how it along with software as a service is changing technology. The key point is that software as a service is transforming the technology industry and its importance cannot be overestimated. Whether it be Google App Engine, Salesforce.com, Netweaver and Windows Strata, all the major technology players are doing more with software as a service in the cloud.

But a critical question is what does this mean for the future of productivity in the workplace? Given less attention in the special section, was a thought that I found rather compelling. The notion that anyone can start programming (in less than 20 minutes!) using a new generation of cloud based, software as as service  tools that make development easy.

Think about that for a moment. Just as finger touch typing is becoming pervasive among the Gen X and Gen Ys so too may basic programming. Imagine the next time an employee needs to mash together data from different databases, visualize them and host a provocative discussion about the implications, he can do so by creating his own program on the fly. As the Economist article emphasized, the geeks would lose their monopoly on programming with these easy tools and employees could dramatically increase their productivity.

Maybe this is a little far fetched, but then again the thought of a computer on every employee’s desk was as well not too long ago. And some of the tools that make programming user friendly, already exist today. Its just a question of whether “self service” can be extended to the domain of employees creating their own programs to meet their immediate business needs.

NetAge OrgScope – Understanding the Real Structure within Your Organization

October 27, 2008 at 8:41 am · Filed under Reviews

I recently spoke with Jessica Lipnack and Jeff Stamps at NetAge.  They have been in the collaboration business for over 25 years and through many waves of technology.  I have served with Jessica on several panels and was intrigued by their new offering, OrgScope. We started with its context and origins.

Jessica and Jeff were working with a large energy company in Europe that wanted to consolidate over 100 country companies into five global divisions, of which the European division was the largest. NetAge, which had been working with this company on improving collaboration for a number of years, proposed an idea to the newly-named EVP of the European region. What would happen if they mapped the new organizational structure as a network, then analyzed it?  The EVP agreed, which led to the development of OrgScope. Jeff proposed drawing HR data from the firm’s SAP system to create a picture of the actual reporting relationships within the organization. “All enterprises have organization charts,” Jeff said, “but few look at their entire structure as a whole. Often you only know one or two reporting relations removed from yourself and perhaps some of those at the top. But it’s impossible to hold an entire organization chart in your head unless you’re very small.” And, as Jeff pointed out, very few companies, if any, analyze their hierarchies as networks.

The technical challenge was how to visualize this data for an organization of 5,000 people. After some investigation, NetAge decided to build OrgScope on StarTree, a hyperbolic viewer designed for visualizing large data networks. Originally developed at Xeroc PARC (then spun off to Inxight, which was bought by Business Objects, which was bought by SAP), StarTree maps hierarchies. Jeff’s innovation was to apply the mapping technology to organizations, then add features unique to organization and work life. As the NetAge site says, “Hyperbolic graph layout uses a context + focus technique to represent and manipulate large tree hierarchies on limited screen size.” Click to a dynamic OrgScope map to see this work in a 4000-position model organization.

Through this kind of mapping, organizations can “see” things they otherwise couldn’t. In the case of the energy company, they discovered that their organization was not in the expected pyramid shape but rather a diamond. Instead of most of the jobs being at the bottom, most were in the middle. Instead of there being a relatively even distribution of management span, it turned out most managers (about 80%) had only a few people reporting to them while about 20% had a relatively huge number reporting to them, in one case, 38 people. And, to the surprise of senior executives, most of these high-reporting-span managers were five or six levels down in the organization, out of sight for the people at the top.

OrgScope provides models of organizations that everyone can share, contributing to real transparency. NetAge has developed similar maps for other organizations, which you can see on their web site. Included there are maps of the Boston-area healthcare “network,” a complex web of connections among fierce competitors, and, most recently, maps of the network evolving out of the Office of Financial Stability, the US Treasury organization charged with distributing the $700B economic package (see below).

Jeff pointed out that they can draw data for constructing maps from many places, including HR systems like SAP, from LDAP data, and from traditional org charts. The LDAP data is potentially broader, Jeff says, as it includes contractors who have access to companies’ information systems. These people are often invisible in traditional HR systems but because IT has to grant them access and because such people always report to someone in the organization, their names and positions show up in the IT directory.  Moving beyond reporting relationships, OrgScope also maps team memberships (which LDAP similarly captures through permission structures), information flows, and workflows, which together give more complete pictures of the organizational network. Of course, Jeff points out, you can further enhance these maps with social networking information. But, he cautions, it’s always good to start with what everyone agrees on—the reporting hierarchy, which, for better or for worse, exists in every organization.

Once configured as desired, the OrgScope maps can published to the web as a Java applet and viewed in a browser, as the examples show. Here are some of the key OrgScope attributes, as covered on the NetAge site:

Visualize. See the whole network, provide context for each part. Seeing is understanding. Collaboration across boundaries requires access and transparency.

Navigate. Use the map for searching and finding specific people and information in larger context, creating new organizational and learning routes, and serendipity. URLs connect map to internal and external webs of disparate information.

Analyze.  Where data is relatively complete, the map can be analyzed as a network. Node metrics and distributions provide management tools and scientific measures for improvement and comparison with performance measures.

Here is a sample map applied to Boston area healthcare providers and a link to the dynamic OrgScope map.

But there is much more as OrgScope is just one component of the network and collaboration work that NetAge does. Its power comes in the broader context of understanding collaboration within the organization and facilitating action based on the transparency revealed. For example, NetAge is currently working with the US Army to increase virtual teams and collaboration in the Battle Command Knowledge System (BCKS), which I have written about before in describing the Army’s Warrior Knowledge Base (WKB).  This is another excellent collaboration effort but it generally addresses users at lower levels in the Army. (see - US Army’s Battle Command Knowledge System (BCKS) Moves to XML-based Platform).

NetAge is working on “The Teams of Leaders Handbook,” an effort to promote collaboration at higher levels. Working with the BCKS team, NetAge created the handbook to support the “Teams of Leaders” effort generally, directed at addressing the Army’s need to promote collaboration at higher levels. NetAge also has helped design the structure for the BCKS virtual team spaces, built on SharePoint.

As Jeff explains it, the virtual team room design is technology neutral, and rests on the method that he and Jessica have laid out in their books (most recently, Virtual Teams): people, purpose, links, and time. This alleviates what Jeff calls “the blank page problem,” where new teams want to collaborate and use shared online spaces but have no idea where to start. See the screenshot of the online team room that BCKS has constructed for the Teams of Leaders project in SharePoint using the NetAge methodology.

Finally, NetAge is applying its expertise in transparency through collaboration to the current economic crisis. Here is certainly an area where more transparency is needed. In a series of posts on Endless Knots, Jessica’s blog, they recommend to creating a public, visible map of the network of organizations and people that spend and receive funds, a “Google Earth” for the players and contracts, which they’ve done on their site using OrgScope to visualize these relationships. They also suggest the creation of a public searchable database on all emergency financial spending using the model of www.USAspending.gov, dubbed “Google for Government” (See this government site, which describes itself as “Where Americans Can See Where Their Money Goes.” Now, here is another helpful idea and a great application for OrgScope. I hope it gets traction. Here is a sample of how part of it might look and a link to the dynamic map.

The “C’s” of Complexity

October 26, 2008 at 9:32 am · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, KM, Notable + Quotable

A while back, I shared musings about how the powerful letter “C” invokes the purposes and principles of knowledge management.  I concluded with the work “complexity.” Colleague Dave Snowden (whose perspective on complexity has formed the basis for much of my thinking about working with networks) has been working on his list of the “C”s of complexity.

The initial three: Constraint, Coherence, and Connectivity.

Augmented to five  with the addition of Context (yeah!) and Coalescence

As of yesterday, the sum is now seven  if you think of Culture and the word Complexity itself (though Dave had earlier posited using Cynefin in this list, which is his framework). In my generational view of knowledge management (as blogged in the link above), the overlap between Dave’s list and the “KM” list currently consists of the words Context and Connectivity (”Connections”  in Dave Pollard’s words).

He promises more, but it gets more and more difficult to remember a list when its extent gets too large. It’s also impossible to use a mnemonic! c what I mean?

ROI, Worker Efficiency and User-centred Design

October 25, 2008 at 4:48 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Work Design

I’ve been advising a multi-national company here in Australia about knowledge management practices. Apparently, though, there’s only a small window of opportunity for them to install some new software, so their plan is to do the technology installation first and then train people to use it.

It reminded me of Taylor’s Industrial Age and how the introduction of new technologies back then meant improved efficiency. I know many managers today who also hold to this premise, so they seek out software that will deliver them better compliance and improved risk management capability, particularly in the area of electronic document management and recordkeeping. Some even believe that it will deliver improved efficiency for the findability of information by staff and  an improved capacity for knowledge management.

What often results, though, is the introduction of new ways of working that:

• Do not align with the way individuals currently work or even want to work
• Enforces a way of thinking of information that does not match the way people think about the information they use or want to use

The outcome is a diminished capacity to realise the return on investment and an increase in the amount of change management required to change the way staff think and behave. Personally, I’ve found that when risk and records management are involved in the equation that demand a set way of working, people simply become non-compliant and develop work-arounds to suit the way they want to work — and no amount of training will change the way they work.

To achieve the best return on investment then, work needs to be designed to more closely aligned to the way people think and the way they behave. Logically, only then should technology decisions be made and introduced.

Those organisations who are leveraging social computing tools in the workplace are discovering that because people know how to use these tools, because they like using these tools, and because it has an immediate ‘whats in it for me‘ factor, their introduction at the enterprise-level brings an immediate ROI without training.

The way to achieve this is to apply user-centred design principles:

1. understand how people want to work and how they think about information
2. design and identify tools that best align with workers thinking and behaviour

Forrester’s POST methodology for introducing tools into an enterprise summarises this approach well:

1. People: know how they think and behave
2. Objectives: determine what behaviour you want to reinforce or change
3. Strategy: work out how you intend on delivering your objectives and the ROI you’re seeking
4. Technology: match the people, objectives and strategy with an appropriate technology

This approach essentially puts the proverbial cart back to where it belongs — after the horse — and therefore achieves efficiency that it seeks.

M