Here you can find my notes from the first day if the Enterprise 2.0 conference. These notes are taken in real time while I’m listening to sessions so they won’t be perfect but hopefully interesting and helpful.

Social Business: What is it? And why should I care? (Claire Flanagan, CSC)

• Does social really matter? It’s a social revolution, you can tell from Facebook, Twitter,  how much we care. Social media is affecting politics (Egypt, USA, etc) but it is also a business revolution
• By 2014 social networking services will replace emails in 20% of business (Gartner)
• What is social business? there are many definitions but basically they are environements that support members to engage, create, organize, share information and find / connect with others
• The next generation enterprise chart from Dion Hinchcliffe it is about engagement and processes both inside and outside
• Personal vs Social Business Goals? There are personal motivations to use social media but for businesses to improve productivity, speed, innovation that is more about revolutionizing relationships with customers, revolutionizing workplace. All these activities should support an overarching social business strategy
• Is that really really business value? Yes for productivity, cost savings, growth, satisfaction
• What’s different? social business works the way people want to work from content centric, 1 way content intranet and portals, explicit recruitment, top-down to individuals than can participate, user generated content, user centric activity streams, openness, transparency, emergence
• What are the key features? Main use cases are socialize people & content, find, intelligence leveraging the ability to locate expertise, co-create & collaborate, organize, personalize. Some examples sentiment analysis, social media monitoring, bookmarking, following, watching, profiles, rss feeds, activity streams, rating, etc
• Where do you start? Start with building the business case (it’s a process not a document for moving through phases)
  • Be credible, do your homework, talk to executives sharing stories and connecting them to your company’s culture. Translate all this into an executive pitch
  • Define goals and establish sponsorship: documenting business requirements, finding people that help you, validating your effort across geographies,
  • Evaluate ROI, TCO, Audit: just now you can start evaluating tools in the right way to get an objective indication
  • Recommend: recommendation will flow from what you did before
  • Pilot: you can start smaller through a pilot
  • Production: integrate with the rest of the processes and companies
• Mitigate Risk: FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt). Understanding users, members, stakeholders fears and address them to mitigate them. Listen to individuals and involve them. If you don’t do that early your project is at risk
• Organize for Social Business from Jeremiah Owyang: going through social business journey  you will evolve your organization through centralized, distributed, coordinated, multiple hub & spoke, holistic
• Staff for Community Management: social business is not yet another IT tool cause it changes how employees and customers work with you. You need to think about culture, organizational change, content, engagement. Have a look at the “Framework for 2.0 Adoption in the Enterprise” from the 2.0 Adoption Council. You’ll ned Project leader, core team and IT architect, business sponsors, community managers, champions or advocates
• Build and execute your roadmap: you need about your transformation change and engagement plan. Have a look at the Social Business Roadmap from AIIM aiim.org/roadmap. Dimensions to address are emergence, strategy, development, monitoring, participation, engagement, governance, optimization
• Where are you on your journey? Evaluating social business, launching program /pilot, adoption to scale, advanced social business. WOW! Most or the participants have already launched at least a pilot. Some evaluating, some more scaling or already a social business. This is very different from previous years!

Are you ready to do this? Prepare to transform your Enterprise and its culture (Kevin Jones, NASA and Simon Scullion, CSC)

• Understand your culture. People are already collaborating. There are many chances people are already working together and you don’t know that. You have to understand where is the interest coming from (top, bottom, middle, specific department). Thing about norms that you will have to break through to have success. Tradition carries a ton of weight
• Easing the transition. How to make it easier? Identify the areas where passion is and engage with people, explaining how they can work with you. Think about advocates to extend your message and make it relevant to people. Understand what type of information people already talk about. Have you got silos with discussions repeating themselves again and again? Enlarge conversations to improve efficiency. Look for business initiatives already in place that can benefit from openness and transparency
• Prepare for a culture shift. Be realistic: it is going to take a lot of time, not happening overnight. Help people to understand the benefits and how things will change. Help them to see the value and adapt respecting different backgrounds and needs. Education is a central part of the journey through different channels
• Overcoming Objections. You need to be prepared by having responses:
  • Time is a threat. This is not about adding new stuff or more load, this is about improving your daily work
  • Concerns about something that can go wrong but this could be happening already my mail or phone. This is a new environment that curates itself with proper guidelines in place
  • Information overload. We surely need better filters to handle new orders of information
• Winning over naysayers & critics: put together success stories early to make results understandable by executives. Be enablers of experiences. Be a master in distributing stories. Loudest critics could become your biggest supporters
• A new way of working. Working out loud. Help existing communities to accept, change and adopt. Handle transition. Set the example choosing low hanging fruits and show how existing processes or communications are broken and can be improved. The more you can help establish groups, the easier change management will be. Unfortunately we are in the business of not making other people comfortable

Don’t forget the technology. Key considerations for your community (Paul Anderson, Disney and Tracy Maurer, UBM)

• Some of the questions about technology in your head: what technology should I select for my company? How do I know which one is best? How will I know when I have enough tools? Should I wait until this space pick the winner? I’ve already invested in an IT platform and should I just use it? Saas or On premise? Is my company ready to invest? Do I need community managers? What I do with my enterprise portal?
• Role-based approach. Technical feature-matrix doesn’t work (tech changing too fast, non traditional solutions should be considered, new features introduced every day). Think about the service you want to provide and technology only after that. What do employees need and how do they work? Map solutions based on how they support roles. Focus on differentiators and what users like. Without adoption you get no value at all. Think about how to use the information you are going to collect. Just don’t do that top down. It’s about bringing people onboard not features.
• Example service model: enterprise, communities, teams, individuals (horizontally) + mobility, rich media, search & access, security & identity (vertically, areas that always need to be addressed) + (at the bottom) network, storage, hw + custom solutions to be plugged in. You can use the model to do a gap analysis and check what tools you have and need.
• Release planning and quality assurance. Prepare yourselves to support your community, understanding and fixing bugs, learning new features, see how new releases react with the environment
• Social doesn’t mean launch and leave. Testing, education and support remain key to success. It is not Facebook. 1 on 1 coaching sometimes helps to change behaviors.
• Prepare your community to understand new features and updating documentation with changes that are introduced
• Most important reason to communicate change? Employee goodwill because they know, show responsiveness to requests to increase trust, reduce confusion and frustration to limit anxiety
• Communication. Anticipate impacts and explain technology in terms of the value it brings. Use new technology as a way to excite and increase engagement
• Make sure your business case includes people. As for QA and Testing, you need to understand the impacts of new features in your environment and to communicate them to members
• Cannot do it without a community manager
• Risk mitigation. if you are not caring about issues and questions, you are going to waste even more time later on, members feel you don’t care and stop participating, the community manager still has to address things that don’t work, it will be a failure and you won’t probably have another chance in the future
• Creativity. Try to make it funny while announcing updates. Try to encourage participation. You can use polls, contests, videos. You can also leverage some incentives
• Portals as a way to integrate everything together is going away while content dissemination is not. A social platform is a way to get ubiquity and provide tailored content

Getting beyond technology. Driving adoption that matters for business results even in regulated industries (Bryce Williams, Eli Lilly and John Stepper, Deustche Bank)

• Regulation is an amazing way to not do anything
• But you can act even without becoming a victim. Please don’t accept to do nothing
• 5 ways to take back control
  • Don’t wait until you’re about to deliver for involving the entire company and willingness to work with you. Especially legal!
  • Fill in the gaps. Think about process. Don’t wait for other people for bringing functions together and fix processes.
  • Connect practitioners. Connecting people to prove value
  • Know industry precedents. “Someone else is doing that already” is the best thing you can tell to who runs the governance
  • Take smart risks. Balance risk with the value you expect to generate and maturity of your company. Start internally if you can
• 2 ways to start driving change. Two things you can do immediately: 
  • Help me get better at key roles by connecting people with the same job across silos. Through communities of practice you can support change management. You can also help people get through compliance or avoid surprises. Get credibility.
  • Creating an internal council to share best practices and shape central services. Become relevant to the business
• Only after this you can accelerate your social business journey
• Adding social into the flow, inside processes is not easy in regulated industries: i.e record retention had to stay in Sharepoint, user directory couldn’t be pre-populated, positioning collaboration compared to the intranet (they disabled the file management feature of the collaboration platform)
• To still get traction they used compelling events and interactive corporate communications (including crowdsourced news, activities, questions to the CEO.). People are helping other people, use social for self service! Support others to let communities emerge (even about personal, health related, travelling, food, etc themes).

Social Business Council workshop culture survey results (Liz Summer)

• They asked “What’s the current state of change management in the Council’s social business initiatives?”
• Change management has been explained by participants as mandatory, inevitability, force and submission. It is the biggest endgame towards compliance. It should be way different than that!
• What needs to happen so that desired change takes plance in the most effective and least painful way?
• The question has been responded by experienced and knowledge companies mostly among 10K – 50K employees and 1-5K active users
• Definition of success for participants: social business tools integrated into daily work, connections across boundaries, staff values it, specific metrics for participation
• Company culture among participants: 47% conservative organizations, 16% collaborative, 15% varied, 22% others
• Lessons learned about change management process in social business initiatives. What came as a surprise? Ineffective traditional communication channels, power of invisible social networks, low experimentation by new adopters, millenial people not different from boomers, so much training was required, so much time needed for change, passive level of senior management.
• Further questions: when and how are users best involved, how many people and in what roles leads to successful change management, which definitions of success produce the best results?
• Quotation ” Social business tools cannot be rolled out. They grow when they become a solution to a nagging business problem”

Digital literacy skills in the workplace. Why they matter more than ever (Bryce Williams, Eli Lilly)

• Digital literacy: ability to locate, organize, understand, value and analyze information using digital technology. Working knowledge of current technology and how it can be used. Digital literate people can collaborate and work more efficiently
• Digital literacy skills for social collaboration: What can I share? Where should I share? How do I keep up? How do I lead an organization to keep up?
• New concepts of a new world: building and maintaining personal brand, managing online conversations, setting filters and effective listening, picking the right tool to do the job. Old skills that still apply are control your ego, don’t waste people time, giving more to getting more, staying away from social garbage generators
• Digital literacy is key in how individuals and companies are managing sensitive situations leveraging them as an opportunity for learning and improving more than for bashing people. Learn the new world and respect it

Case Study: Lowe’s Home Improvement (Andrew Carusone)

• Retail company not making products but selling services
• Through Enterprise 2.0 Lowe is able to design a room without leaving it, have a showroom experience with big box value, tackle a complex exterior with a simple solution, support a homeowner with a community of expertise
• Lowe’s could maximize enterprise performance by using collaborative technologies to enhance communication streams, transform traditional monologues (tv, email, phone) into dialogues, make available new tools to connect employees and the information they needed to serve customers, create self-fueling new ways of working where employee and company behaviors are valued
• They started experimenting in 2010 with a simple discussion forum. People started to use it for unexpected scenarios. Employees wanted to collaborate and risks could be mitigated through transparency, reputation, recognition
• “what often looks like a pebble landed as a stone”. A single idea immediately became half a million dollar revenue
• They moved to a more sophisticated platform like IBM Connections. Business value got amplified in term of business performance, employee capacity. ROI is a trap, but benefits are real! Idea of ROC (return on collaboration emerged)
• What they learned: benefits higher – risks lower than anticipated. Resistance emerged from the middle. Need a strong UN-ADOPTION plan. Performance and capacity are strong antidotes to resistance. Never talked about technology or capabilities
• In 2011 they rolled out Connections. Everybody got in immediately. They didn’t even know how to manage it. Focus on behaviors not numbers. You cannot compare a community to a different community but you can tell which behaviors are making a difference. It’s not a back-office application
• Driving adoption organically both bottom up, top down and in the middle. Middle management gets formally enrolled.
• They went through awareness & understanding, engagement, commitment
• Did new risks emerge? No!
• It takes a connected enterprise to make Home Improvement simple. From employees to customers
• Instead of the return on technology bought they proved the return on performance, bringing tacit knowledge near explicit activities. You need a partnership between IT and business
• Stats and facts: 45M pages/month,4K communities, 3K blogs, all content is published in real-time, 1 community manager monitoring site-wide activity
• 4 types of communities: E40 for expertise (knowledge exchange, problem solving), 040 practice and working teams (business oriented communities, submerge into workflows), e4e networking and interest (self organized communities, build stronger connections), 04e dialogue and initiatives (employee communications, visibility & transparency)

Case Study Merck & Co (Jim Worth and Renee Creciun)

• Global healthcare leader working in 140 countries
• Sync Enterprise Portal: social intranet with targeted news, employees profiles, communities, activity streams based on Sharepoint 2007 and NewsGator Socialsites and connected to SAP. The enterprise portal is the collaboration environment
• They have home, our company (top down), about me (user profile automated populated), my workplace. Integrated with Office Communicator and presence
• My workplace has activity streams and it is where work is done. Links to resources for getting work done. Colleagues every user is following. Any user can post documents he wants to share, communities a user belongs to
• Two communities templates: communities of practice and organization communities
• How did they get here? Started 2009 internally. They have 15K researchers (basic research, preclinical, development, MMd, research informatics, external research and licensing, GHH Marketing and Sales, E2-PLC + EKM, DS, Enterprise Portal OneMerck.com)
• Challenges: with sponsorship, legal (regulatory, product litigations, intellectual property), Technology, corporate attention and focus (it was launched during the merger). They needed country by country approval based on local privacy laws!
• Adoption metrics: new communities need to be requested and they currently have more than 100 of them, 10K profiles
• Business needs they are trying to address: accelerate transformation change, reuse information and assets, rebuild professional networks, efficient communication, standardized collaboration, bridge geographical and organizational boundaries, improve employee engagement, enable collaborative culture, accelerate use of best practices
• Opportunity: two way comm, allow employee to weigh in on content, reduce redundancy, inefficiency and waste, creating an institutional memory
• In homepage they are mixing general (lead story and news, external press releases), personalized content  (divisional and country news) + social content (featured communities, videos)
• At the end of the day people want to find expertise and they want to find good knowledge to be able to get their jobs done more efficiently
• The collaboration environment has changed communication behaviors helping folks to reach people far away in the organization and locate both content and expertise
• In the future they are going to launch project / program communities
• Culture, change management and adoption: after 1yr and a half they got the right level of sponsorship, standardized professional networking through templates and the support model, reviewed privacy laws with local councils, per community metrics tied to organization and geographies (also a way to guide people participation), began to enhance employee engagement and communication
• Focus for the future: reaching sustained adoption, scaling the governance model, extending the focus on mobile, metrics, search, regions and countries, external communities