Tonight I attended a Churchill Club panel discussion on Succeeding with Web 2.0 Within the Enterprise, with Charlene Li of Forrester as the moderator. The four panelists each gave a run down on their internal Web 2.0 projects for employees -- all about sharing information and ideas.
Speakers:
Steve Bendt, Senior Manager, Social Technology, Best Buy
René Bonvanie, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Marketing, Partner Programs, and Online Services, Serena Software
Paul Pedrazzi, Vice President, Strategy and Innovation & Founder of Oracle AppsLab, Oracle
Shiv Singh, Vice President, Social Media & Global Strategic Initiatives, Avenue A|Razorfish
Here is what I took away from the discussion. It makes me want to dive in with a wiki or network of our own!
Ten Tips for Creating Successful Web 2.0 Solutions Inside the Enterprise
- Trust is #1. Trust your employees to act like adults and do what is right. Trust them not to vandalize an internal wiki. They won’t.
- Let go of control right away; let the users define it. Let users manage themselves.
- Keep your budget and the project small to start – you want to experiment and learn.
- Pick something really important to solve.
- It’s all about sharing. Getting your employees to share will lead to innovation.
- Reward those who contribute ideas and share content. Frequent contributors float to the top. It increases their social capital, they get to be known as experts in a field; they get new projects in those areas; people turn to them as experts.
- Try stuff and fail. Best Buy reacts to the tangible. Theory is great but…..
- Psychology and games. Students need to learn now for work later: social and behavioral psychology. Application of game mechanics to the enterprise. Make work fun.
- Redefine privacy. Almost everything a company creates can be shared with customers. Only a few things, really, can’t be shared. Guideline: put everything on the network except for a few things. (Serena)
- Provide sponsorship, not edicts.
What will you get if you do this?
- Innovation!
- “Unbundle the corporation.” (I am not quite sure what that is but I loved it. Rather like Question Authority.
- Democratization of the corporation. The bigger the company gets, the more energy it needs to spend managing. Social tools remove the friction and let people manage themselves.
- A flatter organization. Ideas can come from anywhere.
- Young people coming out of college will expect these tools. Be ready to enable them to do their best work.
- Meritocracy vs. aristocracy (what we have now: I have the title, you do what I say)
• If it’s done right, email volume will decrease in a big way. All the emails that go to more than one person and aren’t time sensitive (most of them) could go to a public site where they will be stored. We can quit asking for the same information over and over.
Some Practical Tips from the Panelists
- Use software that makes it easy to change quickly. (Best Buy)
- If using a public social networking site (e.g., Facebook), bring in 16 year olds to train your 40 year old employees on how to use, what to post (resumes are good) and not to post (party photos). (Serena)
- Let employees use the social media they are already using. If they save a bookmark with delicious, or post a photo on Flickr, let them give it a special tag and have it automatically shared in your internal wiki. (Avenue A|Razorfish)
- Can create successful projects bottoms up or top down. It depends on the culture of the company.
- Measurement: Best Buy figures that if the benefits seem to outweigh the costs, you are doing well.
- Every 6 months we change ownership of the wiki. (Avenue A| Razorfish)
- How did the project get funded? Serena funded it by “no longer paying Microsoft for their stuff. We went to Facebook, it’s free, and now I have time for Facebook Fridays with my employees.” (my table mates smiled uncomfortably at me…)
- Yes, you have to listen and pay attention to legal, IT and others. They have genuine concerns that you need to address in your project. But lots of these issues go away when the project becomes real. Charlene suggests putting together complete doomsday scenarios with planned mitigations to walk HR and legal across to see what the benefits can be.
- Today, corporations incent employees to compete individually. They might like to share, but they have a job. People aren’t compensated on sharing ideas but on impressing the boss, competing with other employees. Today’s education system and corporations reward individual contributors. The world is far too complex for individuals to succeed. Need to depend on others. No one can know it all.
OK, and now I a confession to make. We have been tossing around ideas of creating a way for startups to publish information about themselves. And immediately lots of questions and objections arise. Who approves the submission? What is the workflow? How long do we wait before reminding the approver to approve? What qualifications should the startup have? How do we verify they have those? What if a company publishes garbage or rants or...? You get the idea.
I was discussing this scenario with a great little comany, Leverage Software -- with Joe Kleinschmidt, CTO and co-founder. Pretty soon Joe says, "Oh, Kris. Oh no no no no no. You have it all wrong. You don't need to worry about any of that." Turns out that Leverage has tons of customers and tens of thousands of users for their private label social networking software, and maybe 3 times out of hundred of thousands of posts has anything negative been posted. When it happens, the community lets the moderator know.
So, Joe was right all along, as Charlene Li said when she kicked off the discussion this evening: "Let go of control." People will manage themselves and it all works out in the long run.
