Here I start my coverage of the first day (workshops) from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston with the E20 Black Belt Practictioner Workshop by the 2.0 Adoption Council run and cultivated by Susan Scrupski (now Dachis Group)

I’ll keep on publishing my notes for all the day.

Building the Business Case (Jamie Pappas, EMC2)

• Defining clear goals: how support the org, how they connect to biz process (that is the answer to get ROIs), measurable, realistic or too optimistic?
• Addressing Pain Points: challenges that can be mitigated through E20 (info silos, org silos, lack of expertise, redundancy), what are some tangible use cases, what’s all this going to cost?
• Executive Sponsors and Key Players: this is really critical, find anyone already using collab, find who’s asking for these tools, make people that supports collaboration your friends, do the same for people not supporting collab, be open to feedbacks and be flexible, build use cases together
• There are so many tools: find tools that meet the needs of the business and pains, avoid introducing too many tools to the mix
• Don’t underestimate education: most people don’t know how to use these tools, they don’t know what to expect from them (i.e people upset by other people changing their content on a wiki!), use variety while training to address different learning behaviors (online, podcasts, videos, face to face), don’t forget traditional corporate education programs (for new hires, sales orientation, etc)
• Pitching the Idea: how to introducing the idea and to whom, use all the people involved in previous steps (influencers, advocates, bill payers, pain points, back to the biz), practice the pitch. If that’s a pilot its much easier
• Common Objections: no time, waste of time, we are busy, are we expected to pay employees to socialize, this is not for business, I don’t have anything to say, my boss doesn’t support this, one more tool to keep track of, too much time to learn. You don’t need to write unique master pieces, just talk about things meaningful for our business
• Dealing with Critics: anticipate possible objections, acknowledge objections, do not be dismissive, create a friendly dialogue, respect critical feedback, educate people about the potential, the use and misconceptions, accept that’s not for everyone.
• It takes time: EMC2 65% participation in 3 yrs take it slowly and plan gradually
• Time for rollout: ask yourself if you want to soft launch vs highly marketed, pilot of full roll-out (create suspense, expectations, whom), choose right channels and use WOM, engage supporters, evangelists, champions, don’t oversell and seed the community with great content
• What is success: define success. Is it fundability, participation, sentiment?
• Some benefits: corporate memory, connect people to people and to information, professional growth,
• Lather, Rinse and Repeat: it is an iterative process

Planning (Megan Murray, Booz Allen Hamilton)

You don’t have the answer, we don’t have the answer. Best go about the solution finding and planning in a collaborative manner. Here are some of the most important steps:

• Structure: how does e20 relate to the organization (Is that more structured, emergent, both), be supportive but not reliant on the organization, use both automation and participation. Keep on the formal, build for grow and leave space for informal.
• Staffing and Sourcing: What are the roles and attributes (It depends from you organization structure and culture) and where are this roles living? It’s about community management, technology, evangelism, strategy, demonstrations, marketing, moderation, gardening, championing, change management. Set up a governance model for participation (who will participate and will they govern), an engagement model (who will engage, what are their limits, how will the stay tuned), education plan (will education be available, who will deliver it, how will users teach themselves). Stuff appropriately to be responsive and have the resources to cover these activities
• Policies: one of the most uneasy you have to go through but also an opportunity to address the limits of the initiative. There is no new risk just increased opportunity for risk. Ask yourself what are the policies and who will enforce them. If you start small you can make your legal team less nervous. That’s the easiest way to go to evaluate and mitigate risks
• Mitigation and response: figure out which are the worst things that can happen. Find the right answers to these events so that you’ll have a proper answer in place just in case. Come up with the basic response and think human
• The help stack: different levels of support using the community. Self help (through tutorials, strategies, examples, etc), community help (users helping others, user added help content, organic faqs, user examples, user success stories), community management (cm response, manage help content, highlight good user examples, highlight success stories), help desk (functional help, issue tracking, metrics).

The adoption dance (Rawn Shah, IBM)

• Start off describing the style not the steps of change: put together the bigger picture of what collaboration means for different people, addressing specific fears, pain points and speek plainly (not wikis, not blogs)
• Make it relevant to each person: it’s impossible to describe for each one but you have to make people understand thinking about collaboration context and focusing on main common themes and using different tactics to reach different people. So the adoption and cultivation strategy should be unified but diversified for diverse people. Frame collaboration in terms of business processes. Your core job is understanding people and detect the problems to focus on. It could be employees, business partners and customers but in a very different way
• Make success visible. When you discover great ideas, success stories save that stories. Show what was the win, what was the benefit. Collect over time stories that are meaningful to different context, job roles, scenarios. You can do that through word of mouth or surveys. Share old stories with new champions. Spark ideas about what’s working
• Engage the eager ones but not only them. Identify the most vocal ones to spread enthusiasm. They are your evangelist and volunteers doing that on passion. Remember every one of them has a different vision that you have to respect. Provide them information that can use and share. That’s the only way to scale and contaminate the entire organization
• Look under the leaves. You have to figure out those who produce results but are not vocals. You have to support them to make them your evangelists as well. Accept that not everyone will be eager to spread. Their visibility will force for you program
• Reward good behavior: some time some kind of reward is helpful. Reward is not money. Reward could be visibility, opportunity. Connect the reward to the effort and impact of the initiative
• Set guidelines and behaviors: examples are be who you are, don’t pick fights, use a disclaimer, add value, respect the audience, speak in first person, use your best judgement, be the first to respond to your own mistakes, don’t forget your day job. Set visible common expectations and hold people accountable for their behavior and respect different cultures. Guidelines are not governance points but user behaviors.
• Create practices areas: not everyone is comfortable with enterprise 2.0 and you have to provide safety zones (where errors are forgiven) where to figure out the tools and how to use them. That should be temporary anyway. Everyone will practice at his own pace. Pace cannot and shouldn’t be imposed
• Set a rhythm, practice often: set a pace of regular events early on both on the part of the user and the community management team
• Take it in stride: it will take effort, time, energy. Take time to learn and to understand different rates different teams will need to participate
• Examples of a success story have name/ID and your job area, impacts (job role, business process, project), blurb (2-3 sentences on why this is a winner), benefit (2-5 word phrase on key win), active words (keywords, tags, adjectives, verbs)

Community Roles and Adoption Planning (Stan Garfield – Deloitte, Luis Suarez – IBM)

• Stan is community evangelist for Consulting at Deloitte Touche where he leads the SIKM Leaders Community with over 400 members globally and Luis is Knowledge Manager, Community Builder and Social Computing Evangelist at IBM
• Communities behind the firewall are groups of people who share specialty, passion, interest, roles, concern, set of problems. Communities are living organisms so very difficult to manage
• Community members deepen their understanding of the topics by interacting, asking questions, sharing knowledge, reusing ideas, solving problems together, developing better ways to do things
• People join a community to share, innovate, reuse solutions, collaborate, learn from others
• Principle for successful communities (community manifesto):
  • they should be independent by the organization structure and should be based on topics and served by collaborative technology
  • communities are different from organizations and teams (good table to embed). Teams have a mission and put together by an organization
  • communities should span boundaries transcending organizational structured
  • communities need to be actively and constantly (every day, every hour of the day) nurtured. Implement the SCENT (site, calendar, events, news, thread) and perform the SHAPE (schedule, host, answer, post, expand) tasks
  • community circle of life: content is important but you need a constant nurturing focused on helping people to connect. Content comes out from relationships. Communities give people a reason to remain in the company
  • community roadmap: establish core team, complete startup questionnaire, identify content to provide, read documentation and participate in training, begin community site development, launch (announce, increase membership, review metrics, add content stimulate collaboration)
  • Primary community roles: executive sponsor (envision the value both to the members and the organization), community leader (most passionate and able to spread the energy about the community), community council (right hand of community leader driving interaction and content), community members
  • How to build a community: decide general topic many people will passionate about. Ask them relevant themes.
  • Review existing communities. If communities already exist in your org see if they can be expanded, cultivated, resurrected before creating a new one
  • Select a committed community moderator/facilitator. He should know the subject, have energy, have time
  • Build community membership and communicate about the community (publicize it externally, while recruiting new members and communicating internally about what’s happening)
  • Keep the community active

Metrics and Measurement (Ted Hopton – United Business Media)

• UBM has an initiative on Jive.
• They are using logging levels, daily contributors, page view, unique visitors, active members, consumers, contributors, page views per area, who’s creating and viewing content, active members by level of activity
• Annual user survey asking how much people have used the platform to do things (access information, communicate with colleagues, organize info, find people’s contact, get work done, helping colleagues), positive outcomes, why don’t you use it more (it’s hard to find things, it’s not integrated into work process, don’t have time, etc). Net Promoter Score = how likely are you to recommend using it to a colleague?
• UBM is sharing success stories
• Metrics will and should evolve together with the understanding of both technology and community’s dynamics
• There are no generally accepted benchmarks for E20 communities. Benchmark against yourself, culture, objectives

Metrics and Measurement (Donna Cuomo – The MITRE Corporation)

3 Case studies:

• Improving MITRE’s Research Program Selection Process: deployed an innovation management tool for research competition (Spigit), codified a research competition process encouraging broader participation both in submitting and commenting ideas and improving general user experience. 39% (2872 of 7278) employees voted. User experience assed through surveys.
• Social bookmarking to improve resource sharing, leveraging other research across teams, help with expertise finding, increase participation in knowledge sharing, more granular information management, ease refunding information, subscription topic areas (17% internal bookmarks, 83% external bookmarks, 27K bookmarks, 154K tags, 18K unique, average 56 bookmarks with 5.4 tags
• Social Networking Analysis (bill donaldson, sal parise, ball lyre) on social software and technology mediated networks to understand brokerage roles, the impact on personal innovativeness and personal connections (uniqueness)
• Measuring business value: articulate goals first and understand that end users are not only user group, increasing connections has value, you need to reach critical mass to really measure the value

Position Social Collaboration Tools in the Enterprise Richard Rashty (Schneider Electric), Bryces Write (Eli Lily)

• Companies have a lot of tools but users are not interested into tools for tools’ sake: “not another tool”
• How does this all fit together or better how this is all going to help me working better
• Understand business processes and how to use tools to eliminate complexities
• Analyze critical needs and current collaboration tools and understand if you need another tool. Integrate it just in case
• Critical factors to understand if you need another tool: impact on consumption, keeping users engaged, flexibility, ease of use, user perception, grassroots behaviors, do you need to extend collaboration to external actors, opportunity to convert potential and weak ties in strong ties across org structure, project teams and locations, aggregate and filter horizontal and vertical exchanges
• Tolerance levels of early adopters are higher so that’s a good idea integrating the adoption strategy to technological strategy
• Pilots to handle expectations and integration
• Deciding and educating about at which phases and in which scenarios to use different tools

Mitigating Real and Perceived Risks (Bart Schutte – Saint Gobain and Kevin Jones – NASA)

• There always going to be people resisting for real or fictional reasons. How to address these risks and fears?
• The more you talk about this the more you are turning skeptics into evangelists
• I don’t have time for this, what if people are publishing the wrong information, compliance, why using this if I’m already successful, more material for liability, saturation, too much info, need to be careful about what I say, don’t want negative comments, what I write can be used against me, personal data issues, middle managers resisting or loosing control, reputation and credibility issues, things other say about me, confidential info made visible
• Managers, employees and executives have different fears
• Real Issues: employee right issues, personal data protection issues, company liability, control challenge for managers, confidentiality concerns, workers’ council issues
• Perceived issues: no clear ROI/Business justification, waste of time, inappropriate content, accuracy of information, participant’s age or ability, unsupportive culture, controlling content, information overload, abuse
• It’s all about people. Most issues are emotional and none of them are new. Web 2.0 adds velocity
• On real issues go to talk to HR and Legal asap and bring them onboard
• On perceived issues go to talk to stakeholders asap, create policies and support, use senior champions to carry messages of openness, use the community to monitor and auto monitor, report on issues that are not sufficiently addressed by the community, trust users, evaluate real risk and potential impact, have prepared answers, refer to real experiences where possible