Best Practices for Regaining Business Agility

• Dr. CheeChin Liew, Project & Community Manager, BASF SE, Germany

He’s covering connect.BASF – Online Business Network of BASF:

• BASF world’s leading chemical company, 105K employees, $50M sales, 6 offices and 380 production sites
• Mixed team with program manager, community managers, IT, advocates, marketing & sales
• Goals: Business results and transition from hierarchies to formal & informal networked communities
• connect.BASF has 3 pillars: Networking (among employees & communities), knowledge sharing, communication
• Benefits: employees can present themselves and be visible (profiles), build up & strenghten network ties (communities), find experts (tags), share knowledge (blogs), work together (files & wikis)
• Sponsor is a board member while the steering committee: coordinator, communications, marketing & sales + an extended team and later Research, IT Project management and IT Architecture + at the end advocates and change management support from HR (so even the structure has been growing gradually)
• Hand-off activities: connect.BASF day (talks, community hour, etc to promote exchange among users), showcase, consulting in supporting units to tie the community to specific business tasks
• No control: “In flocking there is no central controlo. Each bird behaves autonomously”. Releasing control means enabling huge variety of behaviors
• Launched through 4 steps from 1K users to +10K users from May to July. After the 4th communication initiative they stopped doing that having existing members inviting others virally. Now 15,5K users ins 5 months. People really engaged grows more slowly (5K in 5 months). Quite the same numbers from every region: global, north america, south america, asia pacific, europe, germany. With local promotion initiatives North America has started blogging quicker than others
• How is the community built up? Different kind of communities: 1K communities, 3 types (open, moderated, restricted). Moderated community less than others while restricted communities started growing after few months
• How to handle 1K communities? Communities have an emergent structure. U40 (Users for Organizations) is a kind of communities of experts & professions (problem solving & gain recognition). U4U (Users for users) Some communities are for social networking connecting people with a common interest (self organized to build up stronger ties). O4U Initiatives and services (guided by internal communication to reach visibility and transparency). 040 for Projects & Working Teams (fully business oriented to integrate workflows & systems). Progression from open, to moderated, to restricted communities. Different types of support for different communities. i.e not too much work for social networking communities, much more for project communities.
• Idea: If a 5% of a “human” flock would change direction, the others would follow suit
• Success Story 1: Microblogging for exchanging studies, adding other studies, marketing manager shares this info  frmo an info professional with all her team
• Success Story 2: Employees feel connected in hour of need through a blog for a donation in Pakistan. Employees could follow the amount of donation and promote a 2nd stage for helping people in need

Highlights:

• platform people oriented and voluntary (opt-in)
• visible commitment from top management
• leadership by advocates and community builders
• transformation of communication and workflows
• sharing of benefits and success stories

Best Practices for Enforcing Business Innovation

• Stephan Oertelt, Innovation Manager, BMW Group, Germany
• Alessandra Pelagallo, Program Manager , Telecom Italia

Starting with BMW:

• Innovation management to go from idea to innovation
• Challenges: growing scarcity of resources, sustainability, low emissions and regulations, megacity problem, etc
• Innovation Phases are impulses & reqs >> Ideation >> Exploration >> Implementation –> Series Development > Production> Commercialization
• How can we enable the ideation process: Idea >> Concept >> Invention >> Subjective innovation
• An innovation system is a complex ecosystem connecting ideas and people
• Ideas are produced in a social setting through RedSquare with comments, reputation, votes, expert search, social networking, topic driven ideas
• Examples that came out: A new scooter invented by the community
• Benefits: fill innovation pipeline with ideas and collaborating on those ideas. Particularly interested in radically innovative ideas
• Learnings: E2.0 no substitution for real communication but a useful complement (you still need real workshops), you have to make it attractive and viral (keeping it closed and desirable at the beginning), usability, process integration especially with innovation processes is needed (you want to know how the ideas progress), intrinsic motivation (feedbacks, rankings, credits, monetary incentives not very successful for innovation), transparency (the community regulates itself and abuse notification take point off from your profile), revolution (as an attractive factor and to break bad corporate habits while gaining credibility in the community), anonymity with alias name prevent group thinking, participation is more 50/30/20, challenge through idea competition to stimulate higher performance, holistic through different stages of maturity that should be supported differently
• You need Process & Org, Leadership, Methods, Communication & Information

The we go on with Telecom Italia and the Archimede project:

• Archimede is collecting ideas from 20K employees in the open access area (part of technology and operation) involving hundreds working places, different backgrounds, different skills & jobs
• Goals: knowledge sharing about best practices to enhance business processes, involving people directly and no hierarchical
• Topics were decided in advance (mostly technical topics) with a format for ideas (Issue, Solution, Benefits, Open Points)
• Using likes, superIdeas, invitations, groups, suggestions, comments
• Results: from 2K ideas in 2008 to 8.3K in 2009, 15K accesses, 792 comments, 6K unique visitors in 2009
• Evaluation process: evaluation teams experts on a specific topics (1 per topics) based an a grading matrix (implementability, customer satisfaction, innovation, time reduction, cost savings, transparency, marketing impact with different weights)
• Feedbacks to all participants: updates on posted ideas, feedback on participation, award ceremony, updates about evaluation, final feedback on evaluation
• For the company: quick selection of ideas, best practices extended, knowledge system, project’s feedback, action plans, ideas’ implementations to improve processes
• 69% awarded ideas are also implemented. i.e different sleeves to improve working security and efficiency. Some ideas were much more complex to implement impacting different departments
• Lessons learned: strong brand awareness internally, give feedbacks to participants and managers, top managers’ commitment, making people feeling involved, structures on unstructured systems through an evaluation process, focus on key business issues, incrementing 2.0 features usage

Workshop about Enterprise 2.0 & Business Processes with Bertrand Duperrin

• People and expectations: Mix of customer companies starting their Enterprise 2.0 journey now (manifacturing and services mostly), consulting firms trying to anticipate future trends, traditional software vendors looking forward to the transition from workflows to emergence
• Reasons for the workshop: businesses are getting interested into this topic to answer the ROI question, a way to drive adoption leveraging mandatory activities, avoiding the introduction of additional tools disconnected from the everyday work (putting in the flow)
• Communities of practice vs Socializing business processes. You can start with one or the other but there’s clearly an intersection and at the end people needs will push your processes to evolve
• Traditional vendors not focusing on people. Social software vendors not looking into processes. To put them together you need APIs
• What about barely repeatable processes? I believe the first level is socializing existing processes but the end goal is helping employees to be really emergent
• The key is adding social tool in context (Sameer Patel wrote about this a number of times). Bring tools where people already work
• Are we saying that the SAPs, Oracles, IBMs, Microsofts on a side and Jives, Telligents, etc will end up dancing together to build a new kind of company?