Accelerate your business

So... you took a long, hard look at the reasons Why you want to try out social technology and one of your goals is to accelerate some portion or process of your business. It could be as simple as you have a very short time frame in which to roll out a new product or service, and have to find a way to do it faster without losing the quality your customers have come to expect. Some examples of projects or goals that could be accelerated include:

• You are introducing a new and very large software application,
• Your intranet is stale and your web development team is buried and can’t get to it to keep it fresh enough for it to be valuable to your team,
• A large policy document needs a rewrite and you need it done quickly, or
• You need to document a business process or system.

Rather than going with traditional development options for a project like this, let’s take a look at how one particular Web 2.0 technology can help you achieve your business goal faster than going with a traditional business response.

A Wiki, named after the traditional Hawaiian word for "fast", is an option you can use to meet any of the goals of projects like this in a very short period of time. A Wiki is a web document created by and editable by more than one person, typically powered by one of many Wiki software platforms available on the market. Access controls and rules can be easily imposed on contributors. How could a Wiki accelerate the rollout of a very large software application?

Traditionally, a technical writer, trainer, or engineer is assigned the task of developing the documentation required to serve the population of end-users that will likely have to use this new and very large software application-bottlenecking the implementation of the system until it is ready. Rather than going this traditional route, a Wiki can be used to democratize the process. What do I mean? Well, rather than have an individual of small group of individuals develop this documentation -a Wiki would allow for contributions to the documentation to be made by ALL of the members of the roll-out team, up to and including end-users! Every developer on the project and every end-user would be able to contribute to the document, much as you are able to edit articles in Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that is arguably the largest and most popular Wiki project on the planet.

From a Human Resources perspective, a Wiki has many benefits as well.

1. Engagement. Besides accelerating your project, by involving more of your employees and giving them “skin in the  game”, you get more engagement from a greater number of your employees,
2. Cohesiveness/ Teamwork. A tenet that distinguishes a group of people from a team is a shared goal or objective. By making everyone responsible for the document, you are going to get a more cohesive team.
3. Quality. Again, making everyone responsible for the quality of the document spreads out the responsibility from a few to the many. This has the effect of community policing to ensure the company is putting its best foot forward, and generally increases the quality of the output.

Can you think of some of the other benefits that implementing a Wiki would have for your organization?

- Alex Santos
Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

Got Social?

Simon Sinek has a fabulous speech that he gave at one of the TED conferences discussing his philosophy Start With Why. Nothing could be closer to the truth when looking at ways to incorporate Social Technologies into the workplace. Web 2.0 tools are almost ubiquitous in our personal lives. We live, learn and play with these tools at home, and the generation entering the workplace will be demanding these tools to make their jobs easier and more fulfilling. In order for your employer brand to remain competitive, you'd be well advised not greet this new workforce with "oh, we have a policy against that here". You need to convene your Training, HR, and IT heads and strategize how these technologies fit, or not, with your culture's values. Then ask yourself, looking at your firm's goals-could adopting one of these technologies accelerate achievement of your goals or maybe even help you blow past your goals and into performance territory you never even dreamed possible? What stakeholders in your business would benefit the most from the use of these tools? Could your supply chain be streamlined or accelerated by better connecting your staff to your suppliers?

Look for KPI's in your organization that could be positively impacted by the introduction of one of these tools. It's important to do this in order to select the right tools for your culture, and to establish some baseline from which to measure benefits to your business. And I'm not just talking about ROI. Also, look for workflows or communication channels that could be streamlined by the introduction of one or more of these tools.

After you have defined your Why's for incorporating these tools, it's time to narrow down your selection... and boy what a range of possibilities you have available to you. We'll take a look at some of your options and their use in the business world next week.

- Alex Santos
Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

Two steps forward, one step back

I remember back in the day the anguish at receiving my FREE hundredth AOL CD-ROM in the mail. As if my mailbox didn’t already have enough junk in it. Back in the day, what a great repository of content AOL was. After about my 20^th CD-ROM in the mail, I actually made the switch from CompuServe to the AOL network which was growing in ubiquity. The anguish was in seeing how insanely great the AOL walled-garden of content was, yet how troubling that their databases weren’t intelligent enough to know that as a subscriber- I did not need another annoying CD-ROM in my mailbox!

Then came the big worldwide-open WWW, and these pay-for-access walled gardens quickly lost their appeal in favor of a more open ‘net. Everything was going to be out in the open, our content, our music, our photos, ourselves and even the architectural diagrams and maps to our military bases. Huh, you say? A funny thing happened along the way to our new open and more transparent lives. MySpace, Facebook, and many of the publicly available social networks came around and taught us the dangers of putting ourselves on the web so completely. Something similar is happening to many organizations today, as they realize that “putting it all out there” isn’t such a bright idea. This “one step back” is the realization that you must engage openly in this new frontier, but that when we all have an opportunity to share bits and bytes of our organizations with the outside world-we mustn’t do so with reckless abandon.

This brings me back to the walled gardens, not the old AOLs, but the new social walled gardens of content being rolled-out by leading companies. Leading organizations are replacing their aging intranets with more robust and collaborative social networks and content repositories. In effect, they’re leveraging the brainpower of their people in more intelligent ways than their competitors in the market. These organizations are outsmarting the competition by inserting all of the best that working socially has to offer, while maintaining the control and security that their data and the business requires. I’d say- that’s one smart step back!

_______________________________________________________________________________

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

5 questions you should ask to gauge your social network readiness

As you begin your research on introducing an enterprise social network into your organization, there are a few questions you should answer to ensure your culture is ready. 1.  Is your workforce already using publicly available web 2.0 technologies and tools to work smarter? Don't kid yourself on this one, you may be blocking Facebook and Twitter from your employees but many are already sharing their PowerPoint presentations via Slideshare, exchanging links to useful information they come across on the web via Instapaper, and collaborating on proposals, budgets, and other documents via

Google Docs. In many cases, your employees are even updating their LinkedIn profiles with the hopes of being found by their next employer. Why are they doing all of these things you ask? Because they can, and because you haven't provided them with an in-house alternative so that they can leverage today's best technologies to make them more efficient.

2.  What are your goals for introducing a private and secure enterprise social network? As with any other initiative, you should have some goals for rolling out an enterprise social network. Else, why pursue one? Consider carefully your goal before falling head over heels over a particular piece of technology to achieve your goal. This can’t be stated enough, as there is a huge and growing market for tools that will catapult your business into the “social” era. Are you looking for a medium for your CEO or Chairman to communicate with the front line more efficiently? Are you looking to provide a platform for your employees in similar positions to share best practices on-the-fly? Are you looking for a platform to connect employees who are geographically distant but who need to collaborate on projects more effectively?  Whatever your goals are make certain that they are clearly defined.  Different platforms deliver different capabilities and you may quickly find that a standard out of the box solution might not meet all your needs

3.  How will you introduce it and who will be responsible for "seeding" it and developing the network into an invaluable tool? Rolling out a tool of this nature isn’t simply something you can impose on your staff. An enterprise social network can be a great opportunity to re-emphasize how much your organization values communication and teamwork. You should give much consideration to the type of HR policy that will accompany the roll-out of the tool, how you will communicate how the tool can and will be used, and specifically- the benefits TO THEM of using this valuable tool. Additionally, someone in the organization should bear the responsibility of seeding the community’s forums and generally be available to answer questions about its use. Ideally, the platform is designed WITH staff so that you can gain internal buy-in for the platform even prior to its launch.

4.  How will your organization respond to both the praise and the criticisms that will be aired in the network? Empowering your staff with an enterprise social network can be a double-edged sword. If your organization isn’t accustomed to honest feedback, this may come as a shock. When and if the organization gets criticized, the response can either encourage the growth of your network or stymie it completely. While praise is generally received positively in an organization, it is important not to retaliate against individuals who offer constructive criticism of the organization’s products and services. Instead, these comments should be viewed as learning opportunities from which the company can improve. Overreacting to criticism will only discourage further use of the network as employees fear “big brother” and any consequences that may result from their candid use of the network.

5.  Is your CEO on board? Lastly, the answer to this last question is crucial to your network’s success. Not gaining the buy-in of your CEO or of your executive team for a project that will touch everyone in the organization is a recipe for disaster. Gaining their support for this initiative involves educating them on this technology and how it can vastly improve the way you work. This is where everything you learned in coaching “up” the corporate ladder will come in handy.

_______________________________________________________________________________

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter @collabor8alex.