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

10 Reasons NOT to Ban Social Media In Organisations – The Meme

A couple of days back, I am sure you would still remember how I put together a tongue-in-cheek (Coming from my Hippie 2.0 side) blog post where I shared a couple of thoughts on the Top 10 Reasons to Ban Social Media in the Organisations that Jane Hart shared over at her blog coming from a YouTube video put together by Ron Desi with that same title. Well, it now looks like we have got ourselves a new, rather interesting, meme going on. And this time around I’m biting it. Why not? Hope you, too! Here is why…

It all started with that blog post from Jane, then my good friends, both Harold Jarche and Jack Vinson picked it up and created that meme as a result of putting together a couple of rather insightful and worth while reading articles: Ten reasons by Harold and Ten Reasons by Jack, respectively. From there onwards a couple of folks have been following up already and Jane herself put together a follow up entry where she describes the rules of the meme (She is also doing a marvelous piece of work combining all of those insights on this particular link, so watch it grow over time!):

"Create a counter to each of the reasons. Maybe the conversation shouldn’t even be about these "reasons to ban" but should come up "reasons to use" social media""

So, here I am, wanting to chime in on this meme and try to answer each and everyone of those 10 reasons why social media should NOT be banned in organisations. Here is a quick recap of them all, so you can quickly put them in context:

1. Social media is a fad.
2. It’s about controlling the message.
3. Employees will goof off.
4. Social Media is a time waster.
5. Social media has no business purpose.
6. Employees can’t be trusted.
7. Don’t cave into the demands of the millennials.
8. Your teams already share knowledge effectively.
9. You’ll get viruses.
10. Your competition isn’t using it, so why should you?

And here you have got my contribution to each and everyone of them starting in the same order they have been covered elsewhere already, hoping not to repeat myself too much and perhaps succeed in adding my two cents into the on-going conversations, wishing that other folks would jump in as well. So, let’s go and do it! Let’s start!

10. Social media is a fad: Yes, yes, I know. I have been hearing and reading about this one since early 2000, when I was first exposed to social software tools (Community wikis, in this case), and fast forward 10 years later (Yes, 10 years later!) we are still talking about it. If that’s a fad then I wish there would be plenty more of them, I am afraid. Social Software has been with us since 1997 and growing stronger than ever, to the point where plenty of people are spending more time in social networking activities displacing even something so pervasive as email is. Yes, indeed, we would have to start saying that email, too, is a fad, don’t you think?! (It’s been there for over 40 years already!)

9. It’s about controlling the message: This is an interesting one, for sure! Jane talks about it as a myth. Actually, I would go one step further. Control has always been, and still is, an illusion. Controlling your knowledge workers and their actions is an impossible task to do for anyone, more than anything else, because those knowledge workers are the first ones who know exactly how to put a stop to that control if it jeopardises their own identity and personal privacy: they would leave the company. As simple as that. Oh, and the same thing happens with security, for that matter.

8. Employees will goof off: Of course! We have been doing that for centuries and we will continue to do that for many more to come! It’s part of our human nature when we lack the motivation and involvement to remain engaged with what we do. When businesses have managed to wear off our passion for our jobs and instead treat us as resources, not even human, that’s what you can expect. It’s a fair game.

Like I said, we are going to continue to goof off for many decades to come, but, to be honest with you, if we would want to do that we wouldn’t need to make use of social networking sites in the first place. We have got other means of doing it much more successfully: email, personal phone calls, the water cooler breaks, extended breakfast & lunch breaks, late arrivals at work, and a long etc. etc.

If you don’t want your employees to goof off, treat them with respect, trust them, empower them to co-share that responsibility of running a business, treasure and nurture their professionalism, because, after all, haven’t you hired a bunch of professionals to do the job in the first place? If not, don’t blame the employees; you may need to look into the HR hiring process altogether from scratch …

7. Social media is a time waster: Of course! Have you noticed how, every so often, we have got these wonderful studies that claim millions of dollars have been wasted by all of that time we seem to spend on social networking sites? How those social interactions help us decrease our productivity substantially? Well, how about if we tackle the issues where we would need to: how are business keeping their employees networked, connected, motivated and engaged to do their jobs so that they don’t bump into time wasters?

Most importantly, when are we going to have studies done on the huge amount of money and time lost when knowledge workers can’t get their job done because they can’t find that expert or that piece of information while they are still trapped inside their teams and organisational silos when they know and realise that within a matter of minutes, using social networks, they would be able to find them successfully?

6. Social Media has no business purpose: Of course, not! That’s why social media doesn’t humanise your enterprise, does it? Or is it quite the opposite? How about flattening the organisation, breaking down silos, helping knowledge workers find both content and experts much easier, facilitating serendipitous knowledge discoveries, bringing further up clarity, visibility and openness in both how people collaborate and share their knowledge? How about being one of the major drivers in helping build trust levels by tapping into the crucial realm of social capital, which we all know is eventually what drives business nowadays (When was the last time you purchased a product without trusting the vendor? If you have, I think you should question that one first, I’m afraid)? Yes, indeed, social media has no business purpose, or does it?

5. Employees can’t be trusted: Oh dear, if your employees can’t be trusted, why is is then that you have hired them in the first place? That’s like you trust that robber with your house keys to take care of the house while you go on vacation for three weeks!! Really? You don’t trust your employees? Whether you like it or not, they are your brand, and I do seriously think you should probably take much better care of your brand than no trusting it altogether, don’t you think?

In fact, trusting your employees and treating them with respect, care and appreciation will help you take your business into a new ground, one where they will become trustworthy enough to engage in conversations with your customers to keep them happy and engaged. Now, how is that for a bad thing? Is it? Trust them. They are your bloodstream, the DNA of your business, whether you like it or not, so you might as well treat them with respect and treasure their passion and commitment, because otherwise when you may need that blood transfusion to survive you may not longer have a donor…

4. Don’t cave into the demands from the millennials: Of course! Why should you? After all the vast majority of your workforce are all baby boomers, who will be working still for another 20 to 25 years to come, right? Oh, wait, that’s not that accurate anymore, I am afraid, is it? Baby boomers are already retiring, and in two to three years it would be those younger generations the ones that will outnumber, by far, those older generations. But, it gets even more interesting, still …

Those older generations are starting to retire and leave the workplace, and all of the huge amount of knowledge they have accumulated over the course of decades is going away with them. Who are they going to transfer it to, before they go? What tools are they going to use? Email? Instant Messaging? The phone? Oh dear, that doesn’t sound like an interesting outlook into take into account in the next few months, does it? Whether we like it or not, the younger generational working style relying more and more on social tools is here to stay, so the sooner we adopt it and embrace it, the better. The much more amount of critical knowledge we would be capable of not just preserving, but also reusing and augmenting further. Why would you want to reinvent the wheel from scratch once again? Haven’t we all done that far too many times already? If you don’t cave into those demands, I think very soon it would be yourself the one looking out for a new job out there, one where your next boss may be one of those young millennials working for a company that decided to adapt and change to that new and refreshing working style… Up to you. Really.

3. Your teams already knowledge effectively: A wise man once said "E-mail is where knowledge goes to die", so if you think that your knowledge workers have been sharing their knowledge efficiently through email, I guess you would need to think about it, once again. It’s not happening. Yes, I realise you may have all of that wonderful explicit knowledge captured in knowledge sharing repositories and that you may have a rather solid content management repository strategy, but did you know that only accounts for about 5% of the total amount of knowledge and information generated by your workforce? Indeed, that small fraction.

It’s not such a bad thing to complement such wonderful CMS strategies with the adoption of social software tools where tacit knowledge could flourish in a rather rich environment and get combined with all of that Intellectual Capital your business has been capturing for decades. Why neglect the fact that most of the work done today gets carried out through those informal tacit knowledge exchanges where individuals are more in control of their work and knowledge flows giving them an opportunity to manage, much better than anyone did in the recent past, their own personal knowledge? Why neglect the best of both worlds when they complement each other so nicely? Remember, right now, right as we speak, you are already missing out on 95% of all of the knowledge "available" out there.

2. You’ll get viruses: Errr, no, thanks! I’m a Mac, I work with my iPhone, my iPod Touch and my iPad, sitting right next to my MacBook Pro. Viruses? No, not for this knowledge worker, I am afraid. But even if I were on a Windows platform, I trust the links and information / knowledge shared by my social networks and know exactly what to click and what not. That’s why nurturing them has taken so much effort and energy over the course of the years. They are my social collaborative filter and they feed me with the best content available out there, and no viruses at all. Remember trust? I trust them to help me find the right information, just as much as they trust me to do my bit of sharing and feed them back with what they need. No stinking viruses over here. Thanks very much!

1. Your competition isn’t using it, so why should you?: Oh, dear, think again, please; if you are worried about what your competition is doing, or not doing, you are asking the wrong question. It’s not what your competition is doing, but more why are your customers already talking to your competition using all of these social tools and engaging on meaningful and trustworthy conversations? You should be asking yourself why are they talking about your competitors’ products and not your own? You should be asking yourself why are they becoming the brand of your competitors’ products so strongly that other customers and business partners are starting to pay attention to them and listening to them?

That’s the set of questions you should be asking about. Whether we like it or not, we are at a point in time where social networking tools are just so pervasive that there isn’t any business out there which may not have been toying with the idea of improving the way they work, collaborate and share their knowledge with customers, as well as internally, using these social tools. You should not be an exception. You can’t afford it at this point in time. If you have, you have already missed out a huge opportunity.

Social media, or social computing / networking, whatever term you may want to use at this point in time, although there are some slight differences, depending on the emphasis you would want to give them, are no longer a fad; they are here to stay. They are the ones that are changing business, and how we do work, at a rather fast and rampant path, just like they did with our society changing us all for good; and it is no longer a matter of whether we would want to jump into the bandwagon or not. It’s a matter that if we don’t, we can count the years before we become extinct, as a company, because we wouldn’t be capable of sustaining such labour based businesses in the knowledge economy of the 21st century.

Oh, in case you may not have realised it just yet, the train has already left! Hope you managed to jump in …

Tags: Hippie 2.0, Hippies 2.0, Ban Social Media Meme, Jane Hart, Memes, Ron Desi, Harold Jarche, Jack Vinson, Ten Reasons, Fad, Control, Trust, Goofing Off, Illusions, Time Wasters, Connected, No Business Purpose, Social Capital, Social Enterprise, Flatten Organisations, Humanising the Enterprise, Millennials, Baby Boomers, Knowledge Transfer, Working Styles, Viruses, Competition, Competitors, 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, Tacit Knowledge, Explicit Knowledge, Intellectual Capital, Ad-hoc Collaboration, Knowledge Economy, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Personal Knowledge Sharing

Collaborative Culture: On Reinventing the Social Enterprise

Those folks who have been following this blog for a long while now would probably realise how, for quite some time, I have firmly believed that the main challenge with regards to the successful adoption of social computing within the enterprise is no other than a cultural one. Nothing to do with technology, or the tools, nor the processes, but the culture itself; and the interesting situation about all of this is that every single corporate culture, from every single business out there, is different. Different from one another. Unique. Something that whether we like it or not, we just cannot copycat. Not even with a cross-sharing of "best practices" on this very same topic.

So, eventually, what may work for one business may not work for another. That’s why, to me, the challenge does not lie with making the social tools available to knowledge workers, or apply day to day business processes to those social tools, but rather on how every single business would need to adapt, and unleash, their own corporate culture to these social networking tools. Why? Because more than anything else the experience is going to be different for everyone. Time and and time again! The corporate culture is the one that would eventually shape up how successful that adoption would be. Or not.

However, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything that we cannot do about it and, instead, leave it down to every single corporation to figure it all out by themselves. Actually, quite the contrary! There are a whole bunch of common traits that permeate quite nicely through each and every single business out there. No exceptions. And the interesting thing is that whether you have been trying to figure it all out already around Enterprise 2.0 for a while, or whether you are beginning to look into it, there are plenty of really good resources out there that we could look into for those common traits I mentioned above. In particular, one of them that I find is an essential read for all of us, social software evangelists, out there. And for all of those folks who are interesting in social networking for business for that matter.

I would strongly suggest you take some time out to go and read thoroughly the indispensable article put together by Deb Lavoy, published over at CMS Wire, under the heading Collaborative Culture, or the Real Enterprise 2.0. In case you haven’t read it just yet, I would highly recommend you do, because it is a stunning piece that truly highlights some of the main characteristics related to corporate culture that you would need to take into account in order for social networking to flourish within a corporate environment. Yes, indeed, it is that good! To me, one of the essential readings for 2010! Without any doubt!

Now, I am not going to spoil Deb’s entire article describing what each and everyone of those common traits are all about. Like I said, I would love for you guys to go over there, to that article, and read it through, as I am sure you would be enjoying it quite a bit altogether. However, what I would like to do over here is perhaps share a line or two, trying to add further up on each and everyone of those highlighted items that Deb covers very nicely and thoroughly; hopefully, adding my two cents into the conversation of what I think clearly highlights the way forward with regards to a successful Enterprise 2.0 adoption path. Sooner or later, slowly or rather fast, in small fractions or in full force. Either way, eventually getting there…

So let’s see where we end up…

1. The Power Shift from Information Hoarding to Sharing: Yes, indeed, transitioning successfully from "Knowledge Is Power" to "Knowledge SHARED Is Power"; what in the past may have been an acceptable corporate behaviour, with the emergence and adoption of social tools, that’s no longer the case. It becomes one of those traits that will help improve the way knowledge workers collaborate and share their knowledge out in the open, and available to everyone. So that everyone benefits and those same knowledge workers can then see their digital eminence grow exponentially, which will always be a good thing for the business. Personal branding anyone?
2. Replacing Perfection with Perfect Aspirations: That’s right, what my good friend Harold Jarche has been postulating for a while now: life (and work!) in perpetual Beta. That way businesses become more agile, more open, more engaging, more involved and committed to providing the best of customer experiences, even though it may not well be the case initially. That trait of failing, learning rather quick, and adapt accordingly would become essential for most businesses, including the various examples Deb mentions in her article as a good starting point…
3. Transparency: What can I say about this one that may not have been said already? I think I could perhaps make the connection between the previous one and its aspect of failure with that one of co-creation. Transparency will help businesses go out and talk to customers about their own experiences with their products and make them co-participate and co-create unique experiences to the point where that direct, transparent dialogue would no longer be a nice thing to have,but an essential one to survive.
4. Participation: Indeed, with transparency and co-creation comes participation. Perhaps a better description may well be engagement. And not just with customers and business partners. Internally, too! In fact, that internal engagement is going to be essential in helping prepare knowledge workers to be capable of holding meaningful conversations amongst themselves, to provide them then with a new comfort zone, before they go out and engage with their customers. For far too long people have been living inside their Inboxes as their main method of participating and certainly what may have worked there for decades may not well work out all right in the open, public, and transparent Social Web. So preparing to participate, to engage, is going to be critical. And the sooner folks would start, the better.
5. Leadership: As Kathy Sierra once said, over 4 years ago already!, social networking for business will surely be surfacing a new kind of leaders, much better prepared to make the right decisions with the right level of information and knowledge about the corporation itself, and, most importantly, within a flattened organisational structure that would help them understand and fully embrace how, finally, work will get done more effectively around networks and communities, vs. just the traditional hierarchical structures and as such everyone can be the new leader. A leader who will serve to lead, a leader who will help their knowledge workers to be awesome at what they do best, to free them up from their constraints and let them become the free agents they have always been, but never fully embraced. True Open Leadership, indeed!
6. Collaboration: And, finally, the glue that would make it work; the trait that most corporations have been enjoying already for decades with similar concepts like groupware and knowledge sharing, but that social networking tools will take into the next level; what Nancy Dixon described just recently rather nicely as "leveraging collective knowledge", that I blogged about yesterday. That massive online complex collaboration environment that would permeate throughout various different conversations and that would portrait quite nicely the 4 hallmarks that Deb mentions as well, and which are critical for open collaborative activities: shared mission, mutual respect, trust and commitment.

The exciting thing about all of this is that, whether we like it or not, most corporations out there already enjoy plenty of these traits; in fact, they have been living by most of them for decades, although perhaps in a different shape and form: one where closeness overruled openness: one where opaqueness darkened clarity, visibility and awareness; one where knowledge hoarding was seen as a healthy activity because most people didn’t know better (Still think you are indispensable?); one where management by fear was the rule, instead of a healthy fun @ work mentality; one where command and control (of the message and of the knowledge workers themselves) was considered appropriate, neglecting altogether freeing up the battery humans that Lee Bryant talked about a couple of years back.

Lucky enough it is also those very same traits and characteristics that I have discussed earlier on that are helping change corporate cultures at a rather rampant pace into embracing successfully social networking for business. So much so that we are not starting from scratch altogether; in fact, we are probably not inventing anything new in here, but instead, in this case, we are all now, fully embarked, on a new exciting and unprecedented mission: reinvent the social enterprise.

Is your corporate culture ready for it?

Tags: Culture, Corporate Culture, Corporate Environment, Business, Business Value, Deb Lavoy, CMS Wire, Collaborative Culture, Real Enterprise 2.0, Information Hoarding, Knowledge Hoarding, Knowledge Is Power, Knowledge Shared Is Power, Harold Jarche, Perpetual Beta, Beta, Transparency, Co-Creation, Participating, Engagement, Leadership, Leaders, Leadership 2.0, Kathy Sierra, Servant Leadership, Servant Leaders, Open Leadership, Social Networking for Business, Collaboration, Collective Knowledge, Nancy Dixon, Shared Mission, Mutual Respect, Trust, Commitment, Freeing Battery Humans, Lee Bryant, Headshift, Reinventing the Social Enterprise, 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

The Three Eras of Knowledge Management – Towards the Collective Knowledge of Conversations

Every now and then there is this blog post that, when reading through it, you can’t help but embark yourself on a wonderful trip down the memory lane on something that comes so close to your heart that you just keep nodding in agreement and content on how good and thorough it is in describing the state of things. In this case, Knowledge Management. And in this particular case the superb blog post put together by Nancy Dixon under the title "The Three Eras of Knowledge Management – Summary". Outstanding read, if you haven’t gotten through it just yet…

Yes, indeed, in that lengthy, but really worth reading altogether, article Nancy takes us all through a fascinating journey in describing incredibly well the various different stages that good old Knowledge Management has gone through over the last 15+ years, distinguishing three main eras of KM that I bet most knowledge workers out there could very well identify still going on in their own organisations.

If you are one of those knowledge workers interested in KM, or doing KM, this is one of those blog entries you should not miss out on! It is that good! (My good friend Harold Jarche‘s reference to it, amongst several other KM related readings, is another superb read on the topic to which I will come back at a later time to add further up…). Now, I am not going to rip off the article and spoil the read by quoting some of the various different elements. I would rather suggest you go ahead and spend a few minutes going through it. What I will share over here though would be the three headings that Nancy identifies as those 3 Eras of KM, so you can get an idea of what she is referring to on that article:

1. "Leveraging Explicit Knowledge
2. Leveraging Experiential Knowledge
3. Leveraging Collective Knowledge"

I think it would also be quite nice to share over here the graphic that describes, pretty well, the history of KM over the last 15+ years I mentioned above already and which she has also shared over at her post. I bet once you go through it you would have a pretty good idea on what each of those KM stages has been like throughout the course of the years and, most importantly, where we seem to be heading. So here you have it:

After you have gone through it, I am sure you may have noticed the same KM trend that I saw right away. Funny enough it’s one that throughout the years it ends up highlighting the main key premises under which Knowledge Management was born a while ago in the first place. For those who still remember, I am referring to the famous pyramid of what constituted the basics of a successfully KM strategy: Tools, Processes and People.

Well, that trend highlights how we seem to be coming back to basics essentially. Back then, as you would be able to see, KM had a rather huge and significant focus on how organisations would capture successfully the explicit knowledge from knowledge workers. The emphasis was on the tools and technologies themselves and how businesses could capture most of that knowledge through rather cumbersome and inefficient processes (Nevermind the tools!) that surely helped turn off plenty of folks on their motivation to share across that knowledge.

Obviously, things didn’t work out all right, for the various reasons that Nancy highlights in her article, so we moved on. And we moved, better said, we shifted gears and placed the focus back to where I think it should have been from the very first beginning… Once again, on the people! On the knowledge workers themselves helping them facilitate that knowledge transfer. So that focus would no longer be on the technology, nor the tools, nor the (business) processes. Just the people! Right where it matters.

That’s probably where we are nowadays, at least, most organisations would probably identify themselves enjoying that second KM era. It surely highlights the interim stage of where we are now, which is that one of empowering knowledge workers to be much more in control of their knowledge flows, of how they collaborate and share their knowledge across, regardless of both the technology and the processes. What some folks have called Personal Knowledge Management / Knowledge Sharing (Whatever term you would prefer). Yes, I realise that PKM has been there for a long while now, but I think you would agree with me that with the availability and further flourishing from social software tools, it’s taking on a new purpose, a new meaning altogether…

And it looks like we are readying already for that next era of KM where we will change gears, once again, and move from that individual experience of knowledge sharing inside a group (i.e. teams, networks and communities) to a massive online group collaborative environment "that [will] bring with them greater organizational transparency and [that will] give rise to more diverse perspectives in the organizational conversation. The use of crowd sourcing, cognitive diversity, and predictive markets draw on a wider base of thinking, both internally and externally, that increases organizational innovation".

Exciting times, don’t you think? Now, the really fascinating thing from this trip down the memory lane though is that each and everyone of those KM eras don’t try to replace one another as the next best thing. At least, they shouldn’t! They could eventually work together in co-existence providing a much more balanced approach towards what perhaps managing knowledge should be all about in the first place: an organisational, individual AND group activity with multiple levels of engagement, but all of them with a single mission…

That one of helping businesses innovate faster becoming more agile through true open, public, transparent and co-creative knowledge sharing activities where knowledge workers would be collaborating efficiently and effectively with their customers and business partners regardless of the knowledge sharing, collaborative and social software tools in place. They will become what they have been all along: enablers. Just that. So eventually we would need to always acknowledge, and embrace fully, where the focus and emphasis should remain for those knowledge sharing and collaborative activities: the people!

Hopefully, this long journey has helped us learned along the way on what worked, and what didn’t; move on trying to avoid making the same mistakes once again. Nancy has very nicely shown us the way of what lies ahead and I do hope you folks out there reading this piece would take on a new mission, in case you may not have gotten started already: helping your business understand why conversations are, after all, important, if not essential, to succeed in the Knowledge Economy of the 21st century.

Tags: Nancy Dixon, KM, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, Learning and Knowledge, Organisations, Businesses, Technology, Tools, People, Processes, KM Eras, KM History, Harold Jarche, Explicit Knowledge, Tacit Knowledge, Experiential Knowledge, Collective Knowledge, KM Evolution, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Personal Knowledge Sharing, PKS, Balance, Knowledge Transfer, Innovation, Co-Creation, Knowledge, Knowledge Economy, Enablers, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, Conversations