May 15, 2011

Ten Ways Enterprise 2.0 Technology Can Boost Your Bottom Line

Posted in Business Intelligence is for business! tagged Enterprise 2.0, Information Management, Social Networking at 3:30 pm by Beth McNally

So web 2.0 is here to stay, despite the recent embarrassing antics of Facebook. There are lots of ways it can be used to interact with your customers, but what about the most valuable asset of most knowledge driven companies – your employees? I don’t mean scouring facebook for their drunken photos and giving them a ticking off on Monday morning – everyone’s entitled to let their hair down, and I can’t think of a faster way to make your top talent leave. What I have in mind is an internal, private social network where – like linkedin users or conventional bloggers – your employees actually want to share their knowledge. This kind of system is usually called Enterprise 2.0.

Most of the new generation of enterprise grade collaboration software comes with built in support for things like internal blogs and wikis; and let your employees create their own profile pages with lists of skills and interests, follow the blogs of other staff members, and build a network of colleagues across the enterprise. However, tools like Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 and IBM’s Lotus suite don’t come cheap, so let’s have a look at some of the possible benefits…

My first five benefits use the kind of functionality you’ll find built into these tools.

More innovation – the R&D department don’t have a monopoly on good ideas. It may take a culture shift, but get them blogging about the problems they are trying to solve, and a flood of interesting solutions are likely to come back from the rest of the business. Research has shown that getting people from different silos passing information to each other produces innovation and encourages the spread of best practice. Make it easy for staff to find people through friends and skills registers, and stay in touch with the latest ideas on each others blogs.

Improved productivity – if staff can find the knowledge and people they need faster, they will be more productive. Letting employees create profile pages detailing their skills provides a fantastic resource for project managers, but also for other staff who need advice on a specialist subject. Staff will have a much better chance of stumbling upon information they didn’t know they needed, perhaps on a colleague’s blog or a link in a tweet.

Lower staff turnover – everyone wants happier, more engaged employees. Research on happiness has shown that social connections are far more important than salary, and one of the main reasons that employees give for sticking with a company long term is their colleagues. Allowing your employees to build a stronger social network, and see their contributions valued by others should be a great morale booster, even if it’s just through comments on their blog, or people calling out of the blue saying “I saw your profile, and I could really use some help with….”

Motivated employees who share the corporate vision. Research shows that telling a compelling story is a key part of inspirational leadership. Senior people in large organisations can’t speak to all of their employees in person with any kind of regularity, but an internal blog gives them somewhere to tell their story of how the business is moving forward. If they can make it entertaining, people might even read it…. 😉 Microblogging tools like Yammer also allow senior staff to connect in an informal way to large numbers of employees, and explain what is important to the business and why.

Identifying skills gaps – tools like SharePoint let employees list their skills, and search for other people with the skills they need. Managers can see which skills are most in demand, and which staff people choose to go to with questions. If there are skills in high demand which very few people have, it might be worth recruiting or training some more people in those areas. Conversely, if certain highly skilled staff members are never being consulted, perhaps it is worth investigating why. The skills needed by most businesses are in a perpetual state of flux, so being able to track your skills needs over time may reveal some useful patterns.

To realise my next four benefits you’ll need some friendly maths and technical types to help you analyse the social network your employees have created.

Better forecasting – good predictions are a vital part of corporate strategy. Research has shown that sufficiently large groups of employees working as a network can make better predictions than individual managers, but only if there is a reward for getting it right (rather than a reward for agreeing with their boss). This is usually implemented through an internal market where employees can buy and sell a fixed number of predictions for each event, and are rewarded if the prediction they are holding comes true. The price of the predictions at any given moment is used to to produce a forecast. Google have implemented this in a big way – there’s a good study on it here. One of the most interesting parts of this study shows that a mixture of serious and “just for fun” predictions got the largest number of staff participating in the serious predictions.

Finding future leaders and innovators – applying graph theory to social networks lets you identify leaders, followers, influencers and outliers. Apply this to your employees to find out who introduces new ideas, and who inspires others to adopt them, and promote employees into roles that make best use of these skills. The outliers are important too – you want to encourage discussion, not groupthink. People should be able to challenge entrenched ideas and ways of working. The recent financial crisis is an excellent example of groupthink run amok, so if all of your outliers are leaving you may wish to take a long, hard look at how the company handles dissent. This would also be invaluable information in a highly unionised environment.

Identifying communication breakdown – before it cripples your business. Suppose your sales and R&D teams don’t talk to each other. Perhaps there’s a personality clash, or perhaps they’re just located in different time zones. Normally, you’d probably only find there was a problem if you went looking for it – perhaps a new product has flopped, or the financial results just haven’t been up to scratch lately. Network visualisation let’s you actually see which groups are exchanging ideas, and gives you a chance to spot communication breakdowns as they emerge, and nip them in the bud. Knowing where your networks are strong, where they are effective, and where they are vulnerable is the first step towards improving them.

Identify and retain key individuals – network analysis can provide a systematic way to identify key individuals, who represent a risk to the business if they leave. Even just the informal network behind the organisation chart can be revealing….

My last benefit is really more of a warning. If you don’t introduce an enterprise wide social networking tool you run the risk of individual functions each purchasing their own, perhaps on a SaaS basis. Although this will help each function individually, it will actually inhibit the kind of cross-functional information flows that drive innovation, and migrating everyone from their separate networks onto an enterprise wide one later is going to be an expensive headache. If you catch wind of a department striking out on their own, it might be worth turning the project into a pilot, and if it works well roll the system out across the business.

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