So one thing then happens is people start forming private groups within where it’s supposed to be a very open enterprise-wide tool. And then what happens is the group don’t actually get used. Right?

They get so little value from restricting the audience. You know, you naturally gonna get more diverse, you’re pulling out a certain question or problem that you have from a thousand people than you are from ten. If you end up forming a group in the public collaborative tool with the same ten people that you already work with all the time, well, you can already them all way and ask them a question, or a problem. And so… I’ve talked a lot about this observable work thing, and spoke about it at the Enterprise 2.0 conference last year. You know people… When we talk about collaboration the transparency, the transparency angle the collaboration brings in to large organizations, many people just are ready for yet, they don’t how to work in that environment, managers don’t know how to manage that environment.

It’s something that, I think, is just going to take time. I hope we can take that time and progress, and we don’t see some sort of backlash against this kind of tools in enterprises. But I’m doing my part to be sure we go forward and don’t have the backlash. You know, what that means usually, is that we have to become… People at my level, managers, directors, we have to educate leaders, up, we have to educate users, down. We have to work on cultural change… I honestly came up with the tools, I was mesmerized by first Sharepoint, and then Yammer, and we use a tool called Traction Teampage, and all of these tools provide a lot of things, they enable things that we could not do with the current toolset. What we found is we ran smack into all those people cultural “way we currently work” issues. And we are now stepping back a little bit away from the tools, and going back to the people’s side of things, and trying to address “ok, let’s not come in just saying we gonna to change your world. Let’s see what we can do to make your world better and work with you to do that, and proceed through that path as opposed to say we gonna change everything and you gonna love it no matter what, because…

I’m an IT, my first reaction was to go with the tools, and that wasn’t the right reaction. That wasn’t the right path.

You know, when we started using social software in my IT group, one of the motivations for me was… I have a large distributed team. I just couldn’t keep track of that, I couldn’t keep track of what was going on. And I think in large organizations, in any kind of organization, you need to collaborate across common silos or common organizational boundaries or whatever, to collaborate across geography, lines of business… You know i have people reporting to me, and friends in Texas, and in California, Arizona, all over the place… my site is in Chicago, and I threw some technology at the problem, we had to rethink a few of the things we did, but, you know, we ended up with… You know, it’s where the documentation lives, it’s where the compliant work lives, it’s where the issues… issue tracking happens. It’s was all of these… You know people talk about these barely repeatable processes, they need not to live in the transaction system but they’re happening all over the place. We really needed to put some kind of boundary around it and say “here is how we do this stuff”, and… you know… a social software platform is really the only thing you could throw away. I mean, I would always sit down and I would try to draw an entity relationship diagram and think about data models and things… And then I come to realize you don’t start with data models when you try such stuff you start with a few principles, you start with a basic framework, and then you kinda have to let things happen after that. That’s some very uncomfortable thing for a lot of managers; you have to get ready for people in your organization, your employees, your managers, coming to you with “you say you hadn’t thought of…” Things are going to happen that you wouldn’t predict. You know one thing we never had happened, we never had any of that “oh no, somebody said something on the collaborative platform that everyone could see that they shouldn’t have said. You know that?”

That doesn’t happen in communities where there is usually high level of trust and this isn’t an enormous amount of people on the internet dealing with each other. And, you know we got a lot of value out of that, but that was finding value in a group of hundred to hundred and fifty contributors with up to a few thousands people that were interacting with this. We didn’t start with saying “we’re trying to solve the problem of 60.000 people”. I’m skeptical of some large deployment because, what I’ve seen is they’re just turning to a bunch of glorified discussion boards online that no one actually uses to get real work done. Starting, to me, is that to achieve the collaboration through the social software, you start small and you scale out, based on examples that work.

You do it through solving people’s problems that they currently have, giving them tools to get their job done, not giving them tools that help the manager provide more control. They can sense that, workers sense that a mile away, if the technology that’s being put in place is something that’s about control and not about really making them more effective

Property, intellectual property, you always have to worry that anyone you are collaborating with or working with is going to steal your idea or pass on that information to someone else… It’s about loss of control. Really. My personal experience is that lack of external collaboration has been about loss of control. And, I think that’s one thing people can get uncomfortable that is the loss of control that some of these… using some of these technologies, opening up organizational boundaries a little bit to outside parties. So, I look at that and say, well, I don’t know how to solve it other than saying let’s come back to starting small and communities trust.

The change isnt always… can never really happen by being dictated with saying you all shall do this, we all shall collaborate and do this thing. Whether it’s internally or across the partners you have to build the relationships and build trust. And if we look at it that way, you can apply whatever technology you’re going to apply. You can use the world’s greatest web-based collaboration platform, but what you don’t do is you don’t gonna put your intellectual property portfolio on the web and ask anybody for their opinion on, you know, your patents. You might put a few things online somewhere around a specific project with one or two external partners and say “let’s go solve this problem together”. And we happen to now have some really interesting easy to use technologies that can help us do that, that we can’t do before, because before we had to meet one into a conference room, lock the door, put a bunch of papers down on a table and project something on a wall. Now we can make that collaboration happen more easily, but it doesn’t change the fact that you would start small with trusted relationships.

We talk a lot about employee engagement, that’s a big buzzword these days, and it’s important you know. I guess there are plenty of studies that correlate high engagement with high results. In my point of view, collaboration is what can drive engagement, because when people are connected to each other, they going to feel connected to the team and the community and the company. And once they feel that connection intrinsically through collaborative work, they’ll be quite happy to say “I give you a 10 out of 10 on.. This is a nice place to work in”. This is one of the questions in employee engagement surveys, “this is a nice place to work – my manager treats me with respect – I value my interactions with my colleagues”. And if you’re naturally working collaboratively, you don’t even have to think too hard about those questions, you just reflexively answer 8 or 9 or 10 out of 10.

On the other hand, if you don’t have that culture, and you don’t… you aren’t encouraged to walk across department boundaries, team boundaries, and are only evaluated through individual performance, you know, I think you’re not gonna get a high engagement score, no matter how many strategic updates your manager sends you to try to make you feel connected to the company. You have to FEEL it really to be able to do that. My approach has been around transparency and collaboration to make my IT organization be connected to each other and connected to the business because… Now that’s one of the classics knocks on IT people is that they’re disconnected from the business.

We are trying by making what we do transparent to the rest of the company, they can actually feel connected to us, and we invite people in, rather than saying “we are a black box, stay out of our black box, we’ll develop the tools here and give you the tools to do your job”. It’s a working process, that’s definitely a working process, but it’s actually fun and energizing to work that way. It really is. We come to with the mindset, you really try to find answers to problems through working with people and being connected to them. It’s just a lot of fun.It be not fun for all people but, it keeps me energized.

I see a lot of evolving standards, I see people wanting to start taking a lead and say “we now wish to develop standards on what we mean by activity streams”. Just like we figured out SMTP years ago. We figured out ways that we can send emails messages back and forth to each other, across organizational boundaries, but we don’t have these collaborative technologies. We don’t have standards around that right now. How this legacy technology is coming to evolve and integrate what’s new… We are stuck right now with the every individual vendor’s vision of what they think the future is right now. I don’t think there is anything coherent right now that is taking around “this is where we are going to go”.

I’m as lost as everybody else is, frankly, you know, I know that we can bring in social software tools that can really supplement very broken processes right now, but I say, well, it’s still not integrated to my ERP system and it’s still not integrated to my data warehouse, and it’s not integrated to this for that, and… I’d love to just blink my eyes and be fifteen years later, have all of these problems just worked out, but I’m realizing that I’m gonna have to live through these changes. I think it’s fascinating. What I don’t know is… the regular people think about how their work environment is changing. How they collaborate with people and tools that they use today, the regular people, what do they think when they think collaboration. Do they think about their toolset, or they just kind of OK and they wanna let the technologists drive where this goes. I don’t know. Mean, sometimes I see people really willing to come to us and say “you know, this is really broken. I’ really love to not have my communication technology, collaboration technology, disconnect from my transaction system”. Some people actually starting to come by us and say “I wanna see this come together. I want there to be, you know, it’s like system of engagement and system of record coming together to really help us do end-to-end process. Why should I have to have a shipping transaction that is stuck. Why should I have to stop in the ERP system, and go to the issue management system, and fix that, and then come back to the transactional system, and unstick that shipping transaction”.

They want it. Some people starting to say “I know those technologies can make that seamless for me, and all by the way I am the shipping manager, I wanna be looking at an activity stream, that would bring up all the current problems that’s happening with the shipping”. Well, you know, there’s probably hundred ways to solve that problem right now and we don’t have a clear path to do it, but I definitely do see it from right side for I see people saying it can be better, there are things that are broken with the current toolset, there are things that are broken with the current mindset, and “you guys, you IT guys, you can go fix that for us”. And I say…

Maybe