Online with Customers

October 7, 2008 at 1:21 pm · Filed under Communities, Management, social networks

Gartner, getting ready for its annual Expo, posts a tidbit from their research:  “By 2010, more than 60 percent of Fortune 1,000 companies with a Web site will connect to or host some form of online community that can be utilized for customer relationship purposes. ” (found via Tweet from one of my clients).

Consider (another “C” word?) how this interaction with and among customers might change the nature of work.  It depends, of course, on the way that the online community for customers is structured, and especially how it is managed. The Gartner press release goes on to say, that “by 2010, more than 50 percent of companies that have established an online community will fail to establish mutual purpose, ultimately eroding customer and company values.”

Purpose, structure, style and value are the four facets of networks that I describe in Net Work. To create a successful intentional network requires attention to a distinct set of elements in each of these facets.  One of the elements of structure is membership: defining exactly who the members are, what the criteria are, and how the purpose of the network creates value for all participants. Within the elements of style are openness and trust.  Do the criteria for membership adequately reflect the needs of the customer audience? Do C-level customer audiences need different assurances of trust than broader consumer audiences? Of course they do.

Thinking of C-level audiences put me in mind of  a different kind of community, INmobile. This is not precisely a customer community, but a protected space for executives in the wireless and telecommunications companies that is supported by  IdealWave, a recruitment firm specializing in these industries. I met CEO of IdealWave, Matthew Corbett,  last Spring on a webinar, and was able to connect with him in person easily as his office is just a few miles from my home. INmobile membership is strictly limited and controlled. All the members trust this environment and are able to have secure dialogue about events, to ask and answer questions, and to develop rapport without being in a public environment.  The community’s has grown to over 2,000 members since its inception just two years ago.

For a customer community to  develop and maintain a strong community of interaction at this level would, I think, need to be just as careful in selecting both which customers to include as well as what internal managers and senior staff to allow access to the community. There is so much promise in creating the conditions for ideas to emerge as customers bounce off each other, that it should be a no brainer for companies to want to look at designing the best possible interaction experience, starting small and letting customers apply and be admitted based on a select set of criteria.

Once customers are online and communicating with each other, there is no going back. Customers are part of the community, and work as we know it will change.

Infoworld’s 10 Future Shocks for the Next 10 Years: The Superstruct Game

September 30, 2008 at 2:33 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Collective intelligence, Management, Talent Management

Marking Infoworld’s 30th birthday 9/23/08 their staff and IDG review the series of past future shocks “from the ascent of the personal computer to horrifying strains of malware to the sizzling sex appeal of the iPhone.” to look ahead to the potential future shocks in the next 10 years.  The list makes an intriguing read:

1. Triumph of the cloud

2. Cyborg chic

3. Everything works

4. Nothing escapes you

5. Smartphones take center stage

6. Human-free manufacturing

7. Perfect image recognition

8. Big Brother never sleeps

9. Unbroken connectivity

10. Relationship enhancement

Infoworld has summoned a thoughtprovoking list, but I wonder from your perspective, how many of these future shocks are already arrived?  Contributor Bob Lewis’s observations about the potential of human-free manufacturing to impact job loss and wage decline particularly caught my attention:

 “Right now, manufacturing in the U.S. is up, while manufacturing employment is down. By 2018, automation will have hit enough labor sectors that while the GDP will continue to grow, fewer and fewer people will receive that growth in the form of wages. This will drive either social collapse or the establishment of a no-apologies welfare state.”

Infoworld’s list makes me think about the individual and organizational challenges the next 10 years of technology innovation will bring.  How will people and enterprizes adapt to put these new tools to work positively?

Stories and analyses emerging from the financial industry failures witnessed in recent weeks and months remind us of the crtical human factor in successful technology adoption.  False human judgements about risk levels built into trading algorithms and platforms failed to highlight the serious and contagious financial losses accumulating in global organizations. Further, as my colleague Victoria Axelrod eloquently articulates (most recently during our KMWorld Open Networks for Co-Generating Knowledge workshop), how rapidly will organizations move to adapt compensation programs to reward more effective ways of working emerging technology enables?

Thoughts anyone?  Meantime if you would like to participate in a collective intelligence project to project the future in 2019, the Institute for the Futures’s SuperStruct Game begins October 6, 2008 here:  http://superstructgame.org/ 

~ Jenny Ambrozek

You Know that Directory of Web Apps? Found It, Sort of …

September 30, 2008 at 10:56 am · Filed under Management, Web Apps

A while back I wondered aloud about where to find a directory to look up Web apps.  A variety of sites and blogs have posts that cover SaaS apps / Web apps.  But I was looking for THE definitive place.

Mashable.com doesn’t give us the definitive directory, but it is getting closer, with its list of 270 Web apps for running a business.  That’s in addition to an earlier list of 230 Web apps from last year.  Add them up and you get 500 Web apps between the two posts.

They range from accounting apps, to calendar apps, to project management apps, to virtual office apps, to email apps, to voicemail apps.

Both posts do a good job of pulling in the smaller providers.  However, many of the industry leaders are missing. So are some of my favorite apps.

For instance, while in last year’s article I saw QuickBase, still I didn’t see other standards such as:  QuickBooks Online; ; Billing Manager; Email Center Pro; eXpresso for sharing Excel spreadsheets; and several other familiar names.

The posts definitely are worth checking out to find some new apps you may not be aware of.  However, there’s still a need for a directory in my view. 

Tim O’Reilly & Co Come to New York: Web 2.0 Gets Real

September 20, 2008 at 2:35 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Economic Development, Enterprise 2.0, Management, Web 2.0, social networks, social tools

CNet’s Caroline McCarthy has captured the essence of the Web 2.0 Expo in New York this week that was underway as Wall Street events and corporate failures hurricaned through global financial markets, the economy and prompted urgent actions by Hank Paulson and company in Washington. We all lived a week that I couldn’t imagine a script writer envisioing.

With 2 decades experience  in the technology world being part of,  and watching, technology companies both aspire and fall, (starting with PRODIGY the online service), I couldn’t help but wonder as I walked the Web 2.0 Expo halls how many of these companies will be around this time next year? 

I counted 150 plus Web 2.0 Expo booths including the Long Tail Pavilion.  Among them were  a handful of the now global brands and companies that through decades have both created the computers and applications that laid the foundation for the Web, and impress by adapting and sustaining through changing economic and technology times:  Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel, Intuit, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems.  Then there were the next generation companies–Amazon, eBay and Salesforce– who drove new business models leveraging the Web, and continue to do so in the case of Amazon and Salesforce by promoting utility computing via the cloud. What lessons they all offer the Long Tail pavilion participants if only their management will take a moment to look around and back.

In retrospect I wish I had tallied the number of times I saw “social” plastered on banners and product feature lists. Given the themes in a recent piece colleague Victoria Axelrod and I published  about “Open Net∞WORKing Organizations” (for India based Effective Executive Magazine), CNET writer Caroline  McCarthy captured my observation that labelling your product “social” in this environment is not enough.  Priority one is business models and technology solutions that deliver demonstrable results to enterprises:

“Indeed, most of the buzzed-about companies at the Web 2.0 Expo, as with the Demo and TechCrunch50 events earlier this month, were enterprise-oriented services rather than free consumer applications. There’s a real question as to whether companies will spring for these products in a time of tightening budgets, but ultimately, it’s a positive sign: business models, not cute fads, are at the forefront.” 

Tim O’Reilly, in his Thursday morning “Web Meets World” keynote,  translated this message into a call for individual action, specifically that people in the room “build technology that solves real problems and makes a difference.” 

Next year,  2009 it will be 20 years since Tim Berner’s Lee invented the World Wide Web,  transforming the way we work and business is conducted. Connsidering the technology themes emerging from Web 2.0 Expo, in the context of financial industry crises and reorganization, and Tim O”Reilly’s call to code to good purpose, it seems we have indeed entered both a new, more grown up,  eyes wide open and wiser world for the technology business.  Have we?  I wonder what you think.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Happy at Work/Happy in Work

September 19, 2008 at 5:23 pm · Filed under Management, Talent Management, Work Design, social networks

What makes people happy at work? Connections with other people. What do the connections mean for us? According to Rob Cross, who closed the Network Roundtable last week with thoughts on the importance of networks, listed some of the ways we use our social networks at work:

• Help getting work done
• Advancing our careers
• Gaining political support for new projects and ideas
• Making sense of events, rumors or trends
• Seeking personal support (e.g. after a bad day)
• Gaining a sense of purpose in work

Roundtable research is predicated on the hypothesis that better networks improve our ability to get work done, not just because of access to expertise or work-related assists, but also because of our affiliations with others. A “better” network is one that is diverse, where the dimensions of diversity may be related to levels in the hierarchy, areas of expertise, geographical distribution, age and tenure. It must also be diverse in providing the additional types of support that make work a comfortable place where we can also be who we are as human beings.

I’ve had a number of conversations lately with people who haven’t heard of Twitter, are just getting started with it, or who have drunk the Kool-Aid. Microblogging tools, including FaceBook status updates, are altering not only the way we create and  sustain relationships, but are augmenting our ability to extend the dimensions of those relationships. The more glimpses I get of others’ personal lives (the little bits that intersperse tweets about conferences, news items that rock, memes, and conundrums, the more I feel that these people are also part of my network. And when I see them in person, it’s always with a greater degree of comfort.

I believe this to be true for those of us consultants out here in the world, and would love to hear from people who are fortunate to be living in companies that provide this relational extension. Or who provide other means for employees to build and retain strong and diverse social networks.

Because another driver of the Network Roundtable’s research agenda is the evidence that people who are happy at work — by virtue in good part of having strong and diverse networks — are better performers.  Happiness is a result of good social capital, a critical element in a virtuous cycle that is linked to better business performance.

One More Time: How Do You Manage Telecommuters?

September 7, 2008 at 4:36 pm · Filed under Change Management, Distributed Work, Management, Web Commuting, Work Design

 (this post is adapted from a similar one I just posted on the Future of Work blog, “Managing Telecommuters - Chapter 573.2“)

“How do you manage people you can’t see?” - that’s probably the number one question we get asked whenever we discuss the financial, environmental, business continuity, and social benefits of telecommuting (or, as we prefer to call it, flexible/mobile work).

And it probably won’t go away anytime soon. It’s a legitimate question, even though we believe the answers are reasonably well-known and not all that profound.

Anyway, with all the recent concern about gas prices and global warming, telecommuting (by whatever name) has been lots of attention lately. The most recent report I’ve seen is an Associated Press story by Joyce M. Rosenberg that appeared last week in a number of print and online publications (”Letting staffers telecommute requires management“).

Rosenberg’s focus is on the necessity for managers to reach out, to spend more time talking to remote employees by phone, and generally to focus more on results than on hours worked.

Here’s one small business owner speaking about one of his remote employees:

“The biggest issue I have is tracking time and knowing when he’s working,” said [Lloyd] Princeton, the president of Design Management Co. “The doubt starts to happen when he has offsite meetings — various doctor appointments or the vet.”

But, Princeton said, “he gets the work done. He does quality work for clients.”

That last sentence is critical. As we say all the time, “Manage by results, not by walking around.” Establishing clear performance goals and defining deliverables, budgets, and deadlines is Job One for managers of telecommuters.

But of course there’s lots more to it than that. Over the next week or two I’m going to offer some more formal guidelines and ways to think about establishing and managing a telecommuting program. And I’ll suggest at the outset that technology is critical to making telecommuting/flexwork work, but by itself IT is only a tool; as with any tool what matters is how you use it

The most important thing to remember is that it’s not just a matter of sending people home, or letting them come and go. There are a number of critical legal liabilities - to say nothing of management challenges - that will jump up and bite you if you don’t think them through in advance of launching a telecommuting program.

The benefits are enormous - for companies, for communities, for individual employees, and for the planet. But they don’t just happen naturally. Check back here frequently for suggestions and recommendations.

Tags: telecommuting management distributedwork flexwork futureofwork