The Connectbeam Social Computing Blog

Enterprise 2.0 Conference: A Platform to Measure the Evolution of a New Market

This was the third time that Connectbeam sponsored the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. It was yet another great show with so much to learn and explore. The most amazing thing was to see how the market has evolved over the last three years. Not trying to say we’ve reached the tipping point in the Enterprise 2.0 market by any means, but it was clear that companies are moving forward and trying to find ways to apply Enterprise 2.0 technologies and principals to better address current collaboration needs.

 

In June of 2007, Connectbeam sponsored the first Enterprise 2.0 show. Our demonstrations at the show centered on the ability to bookmark and tag the information people were finding using Google and other internet search engines.  We also demonstrated our first interface into the Google GSA.  People were widely interested in our solution, with the majority of discussions centered on understanding “What is Enterprise 2.0 really?” 

 

At the Enterprise 2.0 show in 2008, we launched our initial Centralized Tag Repository solution – now known as the Social Activity Repository.  We worked with a very large networking company in the development of the new capabilities, and our demonstration centered around the ability to automatically capture tags (labels) as they were being created in the Atlassian Confluence wiki, and provide those tags and related social content (expertise, communities, etc.) directly within MS SharePoint and Outlook. Our out-of-the-box SharePoint webparts were a hit and were on display at the Microsoft booth.

 

As you can imagine, we were very excited with the new release, and there were several very interested potential customers for the technology.  On a much larger scale, however, there were many attendees at the show who were just trying to decide “which Enterprise 2.0 technology should I deploy first, a wiki, a blog, or social bookmarking?

 

The Enterprise 2.0 show in 2009:  what a tremendous change in just one year!  The show attendees were highly knowledgeable, and many were experienced in implementing Enterprise social applications.  In fact, we spoke to many companies that were already making product changes.  They implemented a wiki or a blog a year or two ago, and they are now making decisions to replace technologies which haven’t truly met their needs. I can clearly recall a year ago at the same conference we had to repeatedly explain what a ‘tag’ was and how tagging – specifically in the form of a folksonomy – was useful for sharing/discovering content and expertise. We probably completed over 200 demos at the 2008 conference, and the one question which seemed to be asked the most was “why are some of the words in the tag cloud bigger and bolder?”

 

This year questions from attendees were not much about ‘why’ – why use wikis, blogs, etc. – but more about ‘which’ and ‘how’. People were more interested in ‘which’ wiki, blog, microblogging or collaboration solution to use and the ‘how to’. What are the best practices in implementing E2.0 solutions given the traditional collaboration tools in the existing IT infrastructure? Yes, we know it’s not just about the technology, but how do we get past the ‘cultural’ barriers behind the firewall? Companies have also realized that the true value (ROI if you will) is measured by applying E2.0 principals to ‘improve’ or ‘replace’ existing business processes that simply don’t work today. This is truly a sign of the evolution of a new market.

 

We were really excited to see that our ‘social activity aggregation’ message was well received and resonated with almost everyone who stopped by our booth or attended the presentation. That by itself says a lot about the evolution of this market. The following diagram from our presentation at the show illustrates how Connectbeam fits into a typical social collaboration ecosystem in an enterprise, and help connecting traditional and E2.0 world together. I thought I would use an example and briefly describe the solution in case you missed us at the show:

 

Imagine in a large Fortune global 500 enterprise, Corporate IT has decided to rollout SharePoint MOSS 2007 – that includes wiki and blog capabilities – and NewsGator RSS as company-wide news feed and collaboration platform. Engineering in R&D department, however, have been using Atlassian Confluence wiki to manage day-to-day design, and project team collaborations for a while. The marketing team has been using the Yammer microblogging service for the last 3 months to communicate company news and messages with all employees. The technical support team, on the other hand, has been piloting and now ready to roll out Telligent Community to engage with external customers and partners. There are probably other homegrown tools and solutions in play but let’s just assume this is the current social software footprint at this company. In the long run, each tool above will greatly help employees and management solve a series of collaboration and communication problems. However as ‘standalone solutions’ they create new ‘social information silos’ because they don’t communicate with each other. The content stored in the Confluence wiki by the engineering team might be very valuable and relevant to the product marketing team who uses SharePoint on a daily basis, but don’t necessarily use the R&D wiki – they might not even know that wiki exists! So this and similar real world examples from our clients illustrate the need to aggregate social activities and user generated content across the enterprise regardless of the originating source. That’s where Connectbeam Social Activity Platform^TM comes into play.

 

Social activities from various platforms and solutions above are aggregated through out-of-the-box or custom connectors (using published REST APIs) and the ‘people to people’, ‘people to content’, and ‘content to content’ relationships are analyzed and captured for future collaboration use.  This aggregation service can deliver the most relevant user generated content and activity ‘in the flow’ of the user’s daily workflow – through integration with existing applications and not by introducing yet another destination.  This not only improves overall productivity but also greatly increases the adoption of newly added E2.0 tools in the enterprise collaboration ecosystem.

 

We also believe that a strong analytics solution – not displayed in the picture above but an upcoming part of Connectbeam’s offering – built on top of the social activity repository is an essential part of this service and can greatly help with raising awareness and visibility into ‘how’ people interact and connect with each other and ‘where’ they turn to share and discover information and expertise. One can only imagine how valuable it would be to extend this solution to outside the firewall, connecting customers, partners and suppliers social interactions.

 

So to summarize my thoughts on this year E2.0 conference, I can think of 3 takeaways:

1. The Enterprise 2.0 market is rapidly maturing and decision makers are increasingly interested in applying new social technologies.
2. Large enterprises won't standardize on a single platform or application anytime soon. There will always be valuable social content and activity in point solution.
3. There is a real business need to aggregate and analyze the social metadata and user activity from various collaboration tools and E2.0 solutions across the enterprise, particularly as the number of these tools in use grows.

Looking forward to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2010 at Boston.

Using Social Network Analysis to Identify Innovation Inhibitors - Masterfoods USA

We've talked previously about the value of stronger employee social networks. A great study by researchers at NYU, MIT and BU described the benefits of stronger and more diverse employee networks for information seeking. And the ways to improve their measures.

But here's something that should be considered...if you map out these employee connections, what are you looking for, and what actions would you take to improve the health of the enterprise social network?

Turns out there is a good body of research around this. We came across the work of Professor Rob Cross of the University of Virginia. Here is Professor Cross's background:

For over a decade, my research, teaching and consulting has focused on applying social network analysis ideas to critical business issues for actionable insights and bottom-line results. I have worked with over 200 leading organizations (companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations) on a variety of solutions including innovation, revenue growth, cost containment and talent management.

He has published research papers and case studies. Today, we want to focus on the published case study for Masterfoods USA, a division of Mars, Inc. Masterfoods operates three core business: confectionery/snack food, pet care and main meal food.

Note: Neither Mars nor Masterfood are Connectbeam customers.

Masterfoods' Growth Hinges on R&D

Masterfoods had successfully grown through expansion into new markets. That growth strategy was slowing, so the company wanted to increase its share of existing markets. Key to that was a healthy R&D pipeline.

Masterfoods management was not worried about having talented people. Rather, it felt like the internal networks needed help to better connect people with ideas, knowledge and political capital. Management wanted to "encourage employees to leverage the right expertise across the extended network (inside and outside the organization) to bridge otherwise disconnected worlds."

A critical issue was that the R&D group, after operating as a centralized group for several years, was being assigned to separate business units. Understanding existing relationships was an important step in managing this process.

Here is how Professor Cross describes the "why" behind the network analysis for Masterfoods USA:

• To identify the R&D network, and develop a plan for maintaining and building relationships necessary for ongoing innovation
• To pinpoint where connectivity needed to be improved so interventions would be accurate and successful
• To take advantage of the diversity of the three core businesses and the best practices among them, particularly related to innovation flow

So the company worked with Professor Cross to map out the internal social networks of employees. This was done in a decidedly low-tech way, via surveys. But the data was valuable, and compelling.

The Analytical Work

The survey was a relatively simple activity. Respondents were asked: "Please indicate the extent to which the people listed below provide you with information that helps you to accomplish your work." From these answers, combined with other data, several interesting results emerged.

Key findings:

1. Network Connectivity: The overall network is well connected for information sharing and decision making, but there is a very high reliance on a few people, particularly leaders.
2. Cross-Boundary Collaboration: There are comparatively low levels of connectivity across segments and several disconnects across sites.
3. Distribution of Expertise: Several gaps exist between skills that people have and those people indicate they need. In some cases, connections were not made between expertise areas that should have been connected.
4. Innovation and Learning: There is potential insularity within the network. However, more connected people reach out externally more often than those less central.

Surprise: After seeing the survey results, Masterfoods management was surprised by the people identified as most central in the network.

Pareto Principle: The number of relationships in the network would fall by 18% if the 12 most central people were removed.

Business Unit Silos: Information sharing outside business units was generally minuscule. Even for natural overlap, such as confectionery/snack food and main meal food.

Internal A-Listers' Smothering Effect: The Masterfoods USA network suffered from domination, where the voices of a few central network members were drowning out novel ideas. Senior management felt that new product opportunities were being missed because new and potentially disruptive ideas from less influential scientists in other competency areas were not being heard.

Leave the Echo Chamber: The 12 most central people in the R&D network seek information outside the R&D group significantly more than everyone else.

Follow-Up

From these results, Masterfoods was able to understand the dynamics of the R&D network, including what made people successful and what was inhibiting innovation. Executives put into place individual and community-wide action plans to address these findings.

The challenge, of course, is to monitor and improve these connections over time, and to measure them on an ongoing basis. There is a role here for enterprise social software to be a tool for improving internal social networks.

And if this sort of work is of interest, we encourage you to check out Professor Cross's other case studies.

Connectbeam Spotlight 3.0 Is Now Available - Here's the 'Why' Behind the New Release

One of the great things about working with our enterprise customers is that we get a ringside view into what they want to accomplish and what issues they are facing. Companies see the benefits of collaborative information sharing, and are working hard to connect employees and knowledge. Andrew McAfee articulated well the value of information sharing and collaboration in his bulls eye post, which provides a great analysis for the value of internal social networks.  The companies with whom we talk are moving aggressively to create authentic, useful employee social networks.

With that as backdrop, we're pleased to announce today the release of Connectbeam Spotlight 3.0. Spotlight 3.0 adds a number of features to the Connectbeam application designed to make information and expertise easier to find and share. Full details are available on our Products page. Here are the release highlights:

• Integration with leading enterprise applications
• Feeds of user generated content from Enterprise 2.0 apps
• Social Profiles with both employee-provided knowledge and experience, and real-time updates for their work activities

There's a lot to this release, and the Connectbeam website and data sheets will tell you more.

We wanted to give you a sense of why we released Spotlight 3.0. The reasons shed some light on the direction of the enterprise market.

In-the-flow: Michael Idinopulos of SocialText wrote about the differences of putting tools in-the-flow or above-the-flow of employees' daily activities. This is a critical consideration for vendors in the social computing space, and it's an approach we pioneered here at Connectbeam. To maximize knowledge touch points, and user adoption, inside an organization, we're big fans of in-the-flow tools. That's why Connectbeam integrates with leading enterprise apps. We want to put information and internal resources right at the fingertips of employees.

Connect enterprise apps: Companies have significant investments in their existing technology stacks, both financially and operationally. They also tend to have a collection of best-of-breed apps, particularly in the enterprise social computing realm. Full-suite Enterprise 2.0 solutions are still a ways off. So the problem they're experiencing is a lack of visibility for the amazing amounts of user generated information that has been created inside their walls. Connectbeam sees tying together these different apps as a major benefit for companies. Through our Connectors and APIs, we pull in content created from across the enterprise, including wikis, blogs, news feeds, forums and other applications.

Workstreams: Connectbeam's roots are as the leader in social bookmarking and tagging inside the enterprise. Fundamentally, what we bring is the ability to tap employees as sources of relevant data and filters for what's valuable. From this, everyone in the organization gains. With Spotlight 3.0, we're extending this philosophy by integrating the workstreams of employees. Workstreams include bookmarks, wiki entries, blog posts, forum discussions and other activities. There's tremendous value in providing a single repository where these workstreams:

• Can be organized and are searchable
• Form the basis for social networking and collaboration
• Can be discussed
• Are integrated into the everyday applications that employees use

That's a brief explanation for how we approached Connectbeam Spotlight 3.0. Hats off to the team for a great job pulling this one together.

New Aberdeen Report Indicates that Best-in Class Companies Make Greater Use of Social Computing

I recently read the June 2008 Aberdeen Group report, Workforce Collaboration and Web 2.0, that has some nice things to say about social bookmarking and social computing, in general. The report drew on an aggregation of surveys and interviews with more than 270 organizations worldwide. They defined workforce collaboration as “connecting employees and sharing knowledge to achieve identifiable goals.” That sounds like our objectives for Connectbeam.

For purposes of their analysis, the Aberdeen Group divided companies into best-in-class, industry average, and laggards. The best-in-class group reduced project completion time on average by 34%, shortened time to resolution on average by 22%, improved new employee time-to-productivity on average by 19% and decreased training cost per employee on average by 14%. These are all good numbers.

Using these distinctions, Aberdeen then looked at the use of web 2.0 (aka social software) for collaboration in the best-in-class group. They found that 39% of companies that are considered best in class use social software to find the experts within their organization while only 20% of companies than are not considered best in class do this. This means that best-in-class organizations are 69% more likely to use social software to ensure employees are connected to subject matter experts.

These best-in-class organizations also make significantly greater us of social software throughout the employee talent management process. For example, 48% of best-in-class organizations use social software to help with employee on-boarding while only 11% of the others do this. An important part of on-boarding is finding the right people in the organization and to understand who knows what about what. These are all objectives for Connectbeam.

The Aberdeen report said that these best-in-class organizations are using social software in more strategic ways and more “more likely to focus on capturing institutional knowledge, expertise, and experiences, codifying it and making it available throughout the organization.” I could do agree more. They also said that these best-in-class companies “focus on generating and capturing content form the workforce and allowing others to access it and add to it.”

There is a lot of additional valuable material in the report. The Aberdeen report concluded with these required actions for companies than want to be best-in-class and remain in this status. They must capture and transfer organizational know-how, seek collaboration between IT, HR, business managers to ensure the right technologies can be supported, and educate stakeholders on the potential and derived value of workforce collaboration. The first action has been covered above. I think the second is also critical as there needs to be an enterprise strategy for social software to achieve the network effects on enterprise collaboration and information access and to avoid creating a lot of silos of disconnected social software tools. This second goal is essential to produce the substantial value that can be communicated in line with the third action.

This is one in a series of analyst’s reports that are consistently coming out of the value of enterprise social computing. I have covered the Gilbane report on Collaboration and Social Media-2008, the Forrester Report on how Corporate Social Networks will Augment Strategic HR Strategies, the AIIM Research on the Need for Integrated Approach to Enterprise 2.0, and the Forrester Predictions of Large Growth in Social Networking Market. Each of these reports are consistent with, and support, the Aberdeen conclusions.

Effective Collaboration - Michael Sampson’s Blog

Michael Sampson, who writes the blog, Effective Collaboration, mentioned our re-launch in his Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams Report (April 14, 2008). I certainly appreciate the recognition and it caused me to take a look at his blog. The tagline is "improving the capability of teams that can't be together, to work together." Michael runs a consulting company in New Zealand that has this same focus. He frequently runs his Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams Reports that aggregate news in the field. There is also a nice mix of conceptual posts.

His most recent series covered the Brightstar 6th Annual Information Summit in Wellington New Zealand. There was a useful case of a major Sharepoint implementation at the Bay of Plenty District Health Board that included lessons learned. The organization wanted more than document management, but also better standards compliance with accountability, auditable, controllable, and compliance. So they drove a change of culture and process, along with the implementation. To this end they were able to use the features of Sharepoint to support collaboration, as well as document management. One of the features we are including in our next release of Connectbeam is the ability to integrate our social networking and tagging with other applications like Sharepoint through bidirectional open APIs. This feature can increase the collaborative potential of Sharepoint as I will discuss in an upcoming post. Michael covers Sharepoint and collaboration extensively in his blog and offers a number of white papers on the topic.