E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Social Computing Training Is All About Changing People’s Behaviours

Last week there was an article published over at Harvard Business Review‘s The Conversation blog that surely attracted plenty of attention all over the place, not only because it certainly is a very good read, but also because it touches base on a key point for a successful adoption of social software within the corporate world: Training on Social Computing.

I know there are plenty of people out there who have been claiming all along that if your social software tools would require extensive training and education for your knowledge workers you are not doing things right, because they are far too complex to be used in the first place. After all, Web 2.0 tools are relatively easier and much more friendly to use than whatever else we have been using in the past, right? Well, may be not…

Check out the article Intel’s Social Media Training by Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd. Like I said, it’s a good, solid piece that describes quite nicely what Intel’s strategy is for social media training and education for everyone of its employees. But the best part of the article is the listing of examples of the education provided as part of that strategy.

I am not sure whether you may have noticed the slight difference, perhaps, with other training strategies on social computing adoption available out there, but Intel’s puts the money right where it should well be: not on the social tools themselves, but on changing and adapting people’s behaviours. On provoking a social change both inside and outside of the corporate firewall and using the social tools as what they have been all along: just enablers!

That strategy is just so spot on! And I am really glad it’s been highlighted in the article throughout, although perhaps not using the same words; still, I have always believed it’s the right approach towards helping knowledge workers adopt some of these new social tools. Coming from a KM & Collaboration background myself, one of the main key issues that knowledge workers have always claimed has been the lack of training and education on Collaboration.

Yes, we are all social beings, we all like to socialise, both outside and inside our workplace, yet collaborating successfully sometimes is not as easy as what it may seem. In fact, there may be some challenges out there, like throwing collaborative tools (And I’ll be including email in here as well, even though I don’t consider it myself a rather collaborative one!) out to people with nothing else than a single "You’ll figure it out in its due time, not to worry; start using the tools today!"

That’s why I really like Intel’s approach; instead of throwing people out there to these new social tools to help them share their knowledge across and collaborate much more effectively, they are placing the focus on demonstrating actively how knowledge workers can change some of their work habits, and behaviours!, to make use of these social software tools much more effectively, so that collaboration happens much easier than ever before.

It takes a lot of effort and hard work to make it happen, I can tell you, but placing the focus on showing people how they can improve their day to day productivity with these social tools, vs. a focus on what the tools have got to offer is definitely the right step forward and one that is bound to be successful. That’s something that I can relate to as well in my day to day job.

As part of BlueIQ (IBM’s initiative to help drive the adoption of social software within the company), and over the last good few months, we have been putting together a very dynamic and active training program that keeps updating itself constantly, where our main focus are not the various social software tools we make use of, but more the tasks / activities that fellow IBMers can achieve using these tools.

That’s right! Those training modules are aimed at helping knowledge workers become more productive, because, at the end of the day, that’s what it is all about: improving people’s productivity on their day to day tasks and activities. And social software tools are just that, like I said above already, enablers that allow me to get the job done much easier, faster and much more efficient and effective than some of the various pain points we all keep suffering from, while we still make use of those other traditional collaborative tools. Yet, the focus hasn’t changed over time: pick up a good 10 to 20 of the most frequently executed tasks, activities and to-dos and show your employee workforce throughout how they could complete them, much more satisfactorily, using social computing tools.

So far that training program is one of the stars from the overall BlueIQ initiative with a really high % of acceptance by those attending the courses, as well as those consuming their content offline at their own leisure, which, to me, comes to confirm the fact that just because the tools are so easy to use it doesn’t necessarily mean people wouldn’t want / need additional education resources available to them, so they could be even better at what they do currently. That’s where traditional KM & Collaboration failed to deliver and why I do hope that things would be different for this new wave of social networking tools, both inside and outside of the corporate firewall.

Because the way things are at the moment, we probably don’t have much of a choice anymore if we would want to remain competitive…

Tags: Harvard Business Review, The Conversation Blog, Intel, Social Media, Training, Education, Social Media Training, Learning, Jeanne C Meister, Karie Willyerd, Changing Habits, Changing Behaviours, Social Changes, Productivity 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Communication, Productivity, Tasks, Activities, Task Centric Computing, BlueIQ, Adoption, Enablement, BlueIQ Enablement, Competitive

Finding Experts in Your Company … Through Micro-Sharing

There is no doubt that one of the big challenges in the corporate world that every single business faces more often than not is the ability to find experts successfully in a timely manner. It’s probably, next to finding information, the number one challenge that every single knowledge worker faces on their day to day workload routines. I’m sure that every company out there has been trying, over and over again, to come up with successful solutions that would help tackle such problem over the course of decades. So as part of those solutions which role do you think social software tools play in helping out solving such issue(s)? Do you think they would help make things easier for us? Make things worse perhaps…?

My good friend, the always insightful and forward-thinking, Gil Yehuda has put together a very comprehensive blog post where he is actually coming up with what could be a really worth while trying effort on tackling this problem of finding experts (I agree with him that using a locked out database won’t be very helpful…). He actually uses the example of Web 2.0 consumer offering Aardvark, that allows people to ask questions, wherever they may well be, to experts in multiple various ways, at the same time that the experts have got plenty of choices on how they would want to respond back. A very interesting and fascinating method for Q&A, which I would agree with could also work very well in an Enterprise environment.

Have a look and read it through over at Finding Experts in Your Company and you will see how Gil’s approach is not so crazy, after all, of moving the working principles from a consumer related social software offering into the corporate world and making it work rather successfully. Here, at IBM, like in many other businesses, we also have this challenge of finding experts, specially when you come to think the IBM entire population (Including contractors) is up to 500k people. And we have taken a whole bunch of different approaches to try to find the best solution. Some of them *do* work, some others are not so efficient. But we keep trying …

Here’s my favourite one though; one of various options, but one that’s starting to grab more and more traction and become an indispensable solution to that everlasting issue of finding the right people at the right time with the right level of information / skills to help us answer even the toughest questions: Enterprise Social Software Micro-sharing/-blogging (Yes, I know, I’m one of those folks who still makes a distinction between micro-sharing and micro-blogging…)

Most folks out there would probably know by now how for a good while we have been exploring the world of micro-sharing/-blogging behind the firewall with research projects like BlueTwit in order to instigate that ambient intimacy, that Leisa Reichelt coined a while ago; or that declarative living that James Governor has been talking about all along or that narrating your work that Dave Winer coined a while ago as well. And it proved to be rather successful for the several thousand people who use it on a regular basis.

But then came our internal deployment of Lotus Connections Profiles and its Boards feature that took the whole concept of micro-sharing/-blogging into a new level. Day in, day out, thousands of micro-messages get shared across and a good chunk of them are interactions taking place directly between experts and seekers of information. And all of that out there, in the open, public and transparent to everyone (Behind the firewall, that is…), so that people have got an opportunity to chime in accordingly, if there would be a need for it, or just learn along the lines.

We are starting to see how plenty of the Q&A interactions that used to take place through traditional, more private & secretive tools, like email, are starting to be moved into such open space as Profiles Boards, with the immediate result that information that was hidden before till the next iteration would take place, now it’s available to everyone through great real-time search engines like SaND. Never mind the transparency that’s been happening all along allowing multiple networks to benefit from the social interactions of, perhaps, a few…

There are plenty of benefits that I could list from fostering this kind of behaviour, and perhaps in a follow up blog post, I will go and list a bunch of them, but for now, I would want to leave you folks with what I think is the main one and which, more and more, knowledge workers are identifying as the real gain for micro-sharing behind the firewall: an opportunity to create a direct, uninterrupted, connection, the spark of a starting and always growing fruitful relationship, between subject matter experts themselves and those seekers of information to help them solve those problems. So that, eventually, SMEs can spend more of their time working on more complex questions / queries, since those relatively simple ones have already been answered in the various social networks making all of that new information available to everyone.

Like I said, I will be coming back to this particular topic, since it’s one of those areas that has always fascinated me all along, coming from a traditional KM & Collaboration background, specially seeing the kind of impact that social software tools are having in helping solve one of the longest, still standing, problems we have been facing from all along in the enterprise world.

If you have ever been thinking about what could well be a good, solid business case for Enterprise micro-sharing/-blogging, I guess this is as good as it gets. And I haven’t even touched the subject of the multiple informal learning processes involved all along through those various open and public social interactions. Even if they are just a few characters at a time …

Tags: Finding Experts, Expertise Location, Expertise Locators, Gil Yeguda, Aardvark, Web 2.0, Q&A, Questions and Answers, Experts, Subject Matter Experts, Seekers, Enterprise Micro-Sharing, Enterprise Micro-Blogging, Micro-Blogging, Micro-Sharing, Ambient Intimacy, Leisa Reichelt, BlueTwit, Declarative Living, James Governor, Monkchips, Narrating Your Work, Dave Winer, Lotus Connections, Connections, Profiles, Boards, Search, SaND, Real-Time, Business Cases, Use Cases, Studies, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, Productivity

It’s All About Work Life Integration; It’s All About You!

One of the topics that I set myself to blog about way back when I first got things started over here a few years ago was surprisingly enough about Work Life Balance (Yes, I know, it doesn’t have much to do with KM, Collaboration, Communities, Learning or Social Computing for that matter… but not to worry, bear with me… ); and that everlasting battle of living both a fruitful and satisfying online and offline life without going crazy along the way. Well, it’s been a long while since I shared a blog post on this topic, so I thought I would spend with you folks today a few minutes talking about it. Because, in my own experience, it’s not about striking a good work life balance, but eventually it’s all about Work Life Integration.

This blog entry is inspired by another article that was written a few hours back by my good friend, and former IBM colleague, Alan Lepofsky under the title "Finding The Balance Between Online and Off" and I can certainly recommend it as an interesting and thought-provoking post on what are some of the various different challenges that knowledge workers face today with regards to their own exposure to the online world: The Social Web.

Alan questions that, as more and more social networking tools keep flourishing and demanding much more of our attention and that of our various social networks we hang out with online (We can see the latest example with Google Buzz), it is becoming increasingly more difficult to make it work in a balanced way with our offline lives. To the point where, while we may enjoy quite a bit our own online lives, we seem to keep neglecting the offline ones. And that may not be a good thing altogether. Read through his entire post and you will see what I mean…

For a good number of years most businesses have been trying to strike that good balance between like and work for each and everyone of their knowledge workers. More than anything else, because it’s probably the right thing to do (And you will see what I mean in a couple of minutes…). However, things didn’t always work out as they should have and eventually if you would go out and start asking those employees they would tell that work life balance is a myth. At least, for them!

Well, it shouldn’t be! After all, we are all smart and very productive knowledge workers, aren’t we not? I mean, "A knowledge worker is someone who gets to decide what he does each morning" (Beautiful quote by Thomas A. Stewart), so why is it that difficult to strike that good balance between the two? To me, it’s all about our inability of "Saying No!" (By the way, I would strongly recommend you read that wonderfully crafted article by Alexandra Samuel, although I would totally understand it if you say "No!" ).

It’s about our inability to let things go (Like reading every single thing that comes through your way – Facebook, Twitter, email, newsgroups messages, Instant Messaging, etc. etc.); to let information fly past by us without even having a peek at it; to say "No!" to other fellow knowledge workers, because we don’t want to hurt their feelings; to be ourselves when we already know what’s right and what’s not so right (Working from 6:00 am in the morning till midnight is not right! No matter what your boss or your colleagues tell you about it or regardless of that huge deadline that is approaching!).

And things are only getting worse! All of that thanks to social software tools! Yes, that’s right! With them the always thin line between work and life becomes thinner than ever. We are now more capable of working remotely, distributed and virtual that our personal offline lives, vs. our online work related ones, are becoming almost impossible to distinguish. And that’s when we are starting to be in trouble, as Alan has put it quite nicely under the rather insightful questions he ponders towards the end of his post.

So, you may be wondering, where do you draw the line? How do you put a stop to it? Where have I drawn the line myself (Specially seeing how most folks who know me seem to be perceiving how I seem to "live" out there, up in the clouds, on various social networks, when it is actually not the case)? Well, it starts with that concept I mentioned at the beginning of this post: it’s all about Work Life Integration!

IBM‘s short article on The New Workplace Model puts it quite nicely:

"In today’s fast-changing world, the most skilled and creative professionals expect to take charge of their own integrated lives"

That’s right! Spot on! It all starts with you! Not your boss, nor your peers, nor your family, nor your friends. It all starts with you taking responsibility, and action!, for your own online and offline life; for your own work and personal life; in short, it all starts with you taking care of yourself. No one else. Just you! Yes, I can tell you you may not please your boss, your colleagues, your family, friends and whatever other acquaintances. But that’s fine, don’t worry too much about it! Why? Well, for a very good reason: because if you don’t do it, NO ONE will! That’s why it all starts with you deciding what you do each morning. But think wisely. That’s where work life integration kicks in! That’s where you take back control of who you are and how you may make use of your time, both offline and online.

Unfortunately, that’s something that I learned myself throughout the years the hard way. Till one day (Those of you who know me well would probably venture to guess when that happened and be right) I decided to put a stop to it. To say enough was enough. I wanted to make that work life integration work out for me all right. Not for everyone else, but for me. I’m sure it wasn’t pretty for everyone, but thanks to that move I could probably state I’m still alive and kicking and *loving* what I do, both offline and online!

Thus the next time that someone asks you to do something, to read something, to comment on something, to get something done even, sit back, relax, count to 10 while you are taking a deep breath and evaluate, rather carefully, whether that new task fits right in with your recently re-discovered self: the one who understands that what matters the most is your own self, because no-one else would for you … Time to take control back of who you are both online and offline, don’t you think?

Tags: Work Life Balance, Work, Life, Balance, Work Life Integration, Integration, Alan Lepofsky, Offline, Online, Google Buzz, Thomas Stewart, Knowledge Workers, Saying No, Alexandra Samuel, New Workplace, Models, Self, Things That Matter, Smaller Things, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, Productivity