Blog Reboot

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Today I finished a project that’s been going on for a while. It involved me doing some long form writing, which I haven’t done since I retired. I enjoyed it, so I decided to resurrect my blog and find some more things to write about in the coming months.

This blog was already called Collaboratively Speaking and I decided to keep the name, at least for now. So let’s make it collaborative. All comments, thoughts, plaudits, criticisms or links to further information or other blog posts that I write about, will be mightily welcome.

Further down the blog you will find all the old posts from when I was working. I left them around as some are still useful, some are historically interesting, some have sentimental value, and some just seem a bit weird today. But they get the occasional hit and there seems no real reason to remove them. After a five-year gap, I guess a pivot in the blog content won’t seem too odd.

But… if you subscribed a while ago, this is your warning that the subject matter has suddenly changed. I might still write a bit about social (e.g. Threads once it has had time to bed in a bit) but mostly this blog is going to be an eclectic mix of topics that catch my attention and will probably take me by surprise, as much as you.

Oh, and I’m sure there will be photographs! Isn’t it amazing what smartphones (even a two or three year old one) can do today…

But also, “real” photography, both digital and scanned from film, thoughts on photography, and probably musings about cameras that have loved. And, I’ve decided to try adopting the Oxford comma, as you just saw, so we will see how that goes.

Now I need to go away and think about about what to start writing about. Let’s see how long it takes for me to come up with my first post. I hope to have you along for the ride…

Reflections…

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S McRaeIn 1973 I arrived at Imperial College, London, as part of their first ever Computer Science undergraduate intake. I soon discovered a couple of departmental teletypes connected to the university CDC 6400 that I could use to send messages to other users of the mainframe.

The following year the department acquired an IBM 370 model 135 mainframe for its own use, and I spent my evenings helping the staff set up VM/370 (thus kick starting a systems programming career). It had a built in email application, which would soon be extended to (via RSCS) to enable networked mail between mainframes and around the world.

SEASAfter graduating, I stayed on at Imperial to support the use of the mainframe for teaching, and got involved with the VM User Group in the UK, SEAS in Europe and SHARE in the US – IBM user associations that helped me to understand Enterprise IT and build a personal network of contacts inside and outside of IBM. By the end of the 70s, we had dial up access to a mainframe in the US running VMShare, a group collaboration system accessed by companies and universities around the world – not dissimilar in capability to the bulletin boards of the 90s and what Facebook then Slack deliver in this century.

Through my network of contacts, in 1983 I joined a UK startup in Reading, UK, called Systell (later renamed Systems & Telecoms), as employee number eight. They had built a solution to connect the Telex machines (the global business network of the day) to Unix systems and my task (after some contract systems programming to fund purchasing an IBM 4331) was as part of a team developing a Telex Solution (VMTelex) for the IBM mainframe. Out first customer was a County Council in the UK, but it was really the oil companies with their extensive Telex networks that drove our business, and led us to an international market.Logos - 1

Our business got a great boost when IBM announced PROFS, the Professional Office System, running on VM, as it was the first recognisable business collaboration solution. We added Fax support to extended the business communication market (creating VMMessenger) and I became Technical Director, on the Board, and helped launch our US subsidiary. Soon we had customers around the world, and IBM became a reseller.

Logos - 2Then in 1990 we sold the company to Soft•Switch, a US vendor of email interoperability software  running on the mainframe (and later as a Unix appliance). As first Product Architect and then Product Manager for the integration of the product lines, I was involved in the evolution of employee collaboration from file sharing based PC email systems (like cc:Mail), to client/server groupware solutions (pioneered by Lotus Notes), and finally, with the emergence of the Internet and SMTP, email switching became redundant (though not before some of our customers were interconnecting twenty-plus different email systems and directories via Soft•Switch).

lotusibmI continued to be focussed on enabling employee collaboration through IT after Lotus acquired Soft•Switch and then IBM acquired Lotus – ending up as the fax/telex Product Line Manager, Shortly after which, we decided that Computer Fax was no longer a growth area and shut the business down! After taking a 6 week sabbatical in the South Pacific, I returned to join the Lotus Notes Worldwide Product Management team, looking for a new emerging technology area. As a result I became responsible for Unified Communications, working closely with the emerging Mobile & Wireless solutions group. That was followed by a return to the European team to manage the technical relationship with Nokia and Ericsson around WAP and their new, emerging Smartphones.

IBM Workplace SplashWhen IBM then announced their re-imagined collaboration portfolio, IBM Workplace, it was natural for me to lead the launch in Europe. Always focussed on the emerging technology! When that ambitious initiative finally closed down, as IBM refocused its collaboration efforts on IBM Connections which fit better with the emerging enterprise social networking market, I was a founder member of the worldwide Tiger Team which was responsible for articulating the business value of this new way to work, helping clients create a business case for their use, and then working with them on technology adoption programs. What we were really doing was enabling the people side of digital transformation, though the phrase wasn’t yet being used. And that’s what I did for the last 10 years of my time with IBM.

Throughout it all, my career was often powered by my user group involvement. I ended up as Chairman of the UK VM User Group and Treasurer on the Board of SHARE Europe (as we rebranded SEAS, before merging it with GUIDE Europe to create Guide Share Europe, GSE). This continued with our heavy involvement in the Electronic Messaging Association in the US, which led to participation in the IETF, where I helped to define Internet standards and became an author of RFC 4239 for Internet Voice Messaging. It also naturally led to participation in EEMA (the European Electronic Messaging Association), where I joined the Board (and remain Vice Chair today, although over the years its focus has moved on from Messaging and Directories to the Identity Management, Trust, Privacy and Security aspects of IT).

During my time with IBM the whole collaboration world has evolved, from email to groupware to knowledge management to enterprise social networking. Meanwhile Enterprise IT struggled to evolve with it – or to cope with the move from PCs to mobile devices as the way people communicate. Technology adoption is hard. I had dinner with Dave Crocker in the late 1990’s. His name is on RFC 822, one of the core standards for Internet mail. He described how people kept saying to him how amazing it was that email had suddenly grown from nothing to dominate enterprise communications in the mid 1990s – whereas he knew that he published that standard at the start of the 1980s.

Looking back, it is interesting how external, inter-company collaboration has been both the holy grail of enterprise collaboration and at the trailing edge of technology adoption by businesses. First telex/fax, and then SMTP, were about the only solutions used until the emergence of internet-based business social networks provided a way for employees to go round the IT department and collaborate externally by themselves. As the digital revolution finally starts to change the shape and structure of enterprises – and, with Cloud, rewrite the definition of enterprise IT – it seems clear that the next generation of enterprises will have a very different attitude to how their employees collaborate.

In the words of Amara’s Law, “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”. I like to adapt this thought as “We tend to overestimate enterprise IT’s ability to adopt disruptive technology in the short term and underestimate the change it causes to how enterprise IT works in the long term”.

One thing is clear: change will continue. My last two external events were the ISSE conference in Brussels, where I chaired a panel on Quantum Cryptography, and the EEMA Fireside Debate on Cognitive Machine and Artificial Intelligence, where I led a discussion about the impact of AI on the world of work.

Today I retire from IBM. Reflecting on my career it has been all about the sue of different emerging technologies to improve the way employees work: helping them collaborate, network and influence; and helping the organisation they work for to optimise their processes, motivate their staff, align their activities and gain insight from their conversations.

During those 34 years since I joined that startup in Reading I have been trying to help employees to work together when they are not physically together (separated by time and distance). It’s been quite a journey, from Teletypes & Telex to Quantum Computing & Artificial Intelligence. But its always been about people – who are at the heart of any organisation – and the way they use technology to do their jobs.

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Safety Matters: and in the workplace it is everyone’s responsibility

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Never has the topic of Safety been more in the news – and with the dreadful events an Grenfell on everyone’s mind, many are asking questions about whether they do enough to ensure safety in the workplace? Or do they also have a disaster waiting to happen?

Key questions to answer include: are you listening to the concerns of your workforce around safety? Do you ensure that the employee you hire have the right attitude to safety? Do you actively encourage employees to think about safety, rather than just posting instructions on noticeboards and in email newsletters and hoping everyone reads them? Are you sure your employees understand why the safety rules are important, not just what they are? Do your employees collectively help enforce safety?

… Or are there just a few voices in the wilderness talking about the topic and being largely ignored?

Creating a Safety Focus through People Engagement - social tile

Workplace safety is just one area where engaging the workforce in a conversation helps significantly to drive business outcomes. There are many related areas where the same process applies, from cybersecurity (making employees, a significant weak point in your defences, aware of phishing and human engineering attacks while applying the security updates you want them to) to customer satisfaction (ensuring that every customer touchpoint with your employees builds on your corporate messages and embodies your customer service ethos).

Workplace safety has always been one of the key engagement patterns that IBM has used to drive adoption of these technologies – because adoption of an engagement platform is not the end goal organisations have in mind, rather improving business outcomes is what they are trying the achieve. To do this, technology is not enough: both cultural change and process change are critical to creating these outcomes.

A culture of workplace safety is best achieved through open, transparent discussions with all staff about its importance – and these conversations can also highlight the process changes needed to succeed. A colleague of mine used to work in process improvement for a company that ran an oil pipeline across the US. By encouraging conversations between the three divisions responsible for different parts of the pipeline, he was able to identify an operational procedure in one division that had been actively abandoned in another division because of safety issues it raised – this preventing a major safety and ecological disaster that was waiting to happen.

That is why more and more organisations are adopting employee engagement platforms that go beyond team collaboration and support conversations across the business, horizontally and vertically.

I’m currently working with my friends at Tap’d Solutions on a webinar to explore how employee engagement can impact safety matters.

If your employees don’t think that safety matters, then this could be a crisis for your business that is just waiting to happen. Are you engaging with them on the topic in the way you should be?

Updated 26/6/17: The scheduled Webinar on this subject has been postponed due to logistical issues. Dates removed from the post and I will make a new blog post once it is rescheduled.

 

Team Collaboration and Employee Engagement

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Over the last few years I’ve been spending a lot of time talking to HR people about the way employees use technology to do their jobs. As someone with an IT background, who is often frustrated that conversations around the technology used to communicate and collaborate are too focused on cost of ownership and richness of functionality, rather than on whether the tools actually help employees to do their jobs more effectively, it has been refreshing. As an expert in HR said to me recently, “I don’t care what tools people use, I only care about what they do with them”.

Of course, such discussions also have their frustration – especially when business people say “don’t talk to me about choice of collaboration tools, in this organisation collaboration technology is something that is inflicted on us,” or IT pipe up in a meeting and say “so we’ll do that with Sharepoint as it is our strategic collaboration platform” even though it is not suited to the use case being discussed and so will end up not being adopted by the users.

I really don’t think this can go on. I see business people actively promoting Shadow IT to their teams because the solutions IT are providing are not fit for purpose, sometimes with IT turning a selective blind eye as they have no budget to address the need, and I see HR teams wanting to reinvent their workforce and the way they work, but knowing that they will fail if employees continue using last generation technology.

What is clear to me is the IT must become actively involved in the design and capabilities of the digital workplace if they are going to create a workforce that can respond to the consequences of digital transformation and the business disruption it brings. I’ve been talking for a while about the fact that business need to move from a “tools outward” model (deploy the platform and see how people use it) to an “employee inward” model (design employee journeys to maximise productivity and the value that employee brings to the organisation). It is time for HR to start thinking about the entire employee experience (not just they way they engage with HR processes) as leaving the tool choice to IT is going to become a drag on the organisation transformation required for the digital age.

One of the areas where we have failed to help with this change is in the way we use the term “collaboration” to encompass all forms of employee to employee interaction, resulting in a “one tool fits all” mentality which doesn’t match reality – and certainly doesn’t fit with the way the Mobile, Social, Cloud, Analytics and Cognitive enables tools that people use in the private lives have evolved.

To illustrate this, I’ve been using the contrast between team collaboration and enterprise wide employee engagement. No-one can doubt the need for good team collaboration tools – and, indeed, the tools in this area are finally improving significantly as team start to move from email, Sharepoint and Skype towards platforms like Slack, Box, Cisco Spark and Watson Workspace.

However when organisations try to use those same tools for organisation-wide engagement, they hit a problem. Team collaboration tools are all about focusing on the current activities and not getting “distracted” by things outside. These activities are limited to those directly involved or with a need to know. By default they keep content private, only sharing final team deliverables.

Lack of Engagement

The solution is an enterprise engagement platform.

Engagement Platform

The benefits of enterprise wide employee engagement are manifold. The best known exponent of this is John Stepper with his Working Out Loud movement – building relationships that matter to create a collaborative, innovative culture. Opening up to engage with the rest of the organisation (and beyond!) provides easier access to expertise and knowledge, enabling better decisions and helping get work done faster. But I believe the benefits go far beyond improving individual productivity.

Engagment Platform Benefits

When conversations happen beyond the team, they enable ideas and insight to flow up and across organisations – the most obvious benefit being increased innovation, more effective management and less nasty surprises. Similarly these conversations help understanding flow down an organisation, so every employee can make every decision in the context of the organisations goals and strategy as well as their tactical needs. They spread awareness across different business units, departments and teams so that the actions employees take every day are aligned with the strategy at the top and the actions being taken in other parts of the organisation.

This requires the opposite to silos – it requires open, transparent behaviours. It is what enables agile, outcome focussed teams to coordinate what they do instead of creating potential conflict. It helps avoid unintended consequences and provides early warning of an approaching crisis.

That is not to say that an enterprise wide engagement platform can replace a team collaboration platform. It can’t. But the same is true the other way round. Trying to use a team collaboration platform for enterprise wide engagement simply will not deliver the desired results.

Of course, deploying an engagement platform will not, of itself, deliver these benefits. People have to use it in the right way. That requires a cultural shift, supportive leadership that truly leads and personal change of behaviour. But we know that behaviour change is hard, so it requires well designed tools that support and encourage this change.

Fortunately, we already have engagement platforms that have been proven to support this way of working: enterprise social networking tools like IBM Connections – although we have traditionally done them a disservice by calling them collaboration tools. They deliver a very different user experience to team collaboration tools but, because their scope is the whole enterprise not just a single team, they require a level of commitment and organisational change that goes far beyond something IT can deliver alone.

But it is exactly this change that HR must think seriously about as it tries to build a workforce fit for the future.

Catching up with Social & Other Media in 2016

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Looking back, I realised that I failed to publicise several of the other social media posts I published in 2016, so here is a summary (the headings are links to the content):

Collaborative Ecosystems – You are not alone

Was a guest post for the European Union’s FutureEnterprise project, funded by the European Commission to opening new avenues for Internet-based Enterprise Innovation in Europe, for which I was a Subject Matter Expert. The blog post looks at how social networking can provide mutually supporting ecosystems to enable innovation.

Digital and Social Media Opportunities for HR and Employee Engagement

In an interview with Jo Dodds for DSMLF Radio (a podcast series for the Digital & Social Media Leadership Forum, which is available on SoundCloud), I discussed how use of a social collaboration platform in businesses can encourage employee engagement and help HR to better achieve their objectives organisations to better leverage the diversity of their workforce.

A New Way to Collaborate

This webinar looks at IBM’s cloud collaboration service (IBM Connections CloudIBM Connections Cloud), explaining how its social networking and engagement capabilities take collaboration to a new level, and enterprise-wide level, and allow it to outperform alternatives like Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite.

From Collaboration to Engagement

My presentation at ICON UK 2016 on how social collaboration technologies can be applied to improving employee engagement and hence business results is available on SlideShare.

Cognitive and the Office of the Future

This webcast from IT Pro features a conversation hosted by journalist Stephen Prichard in which Clive Longbottom, of analyst firm Quocirca, and myself discuss Cognitive Computing and how it is going to impact employees and the way we work in the future.

cognitive-the-office-of-the-future-itpro_cs999_ibm_webinar_banner2

As usual, the theme of all of these is how digital transformation is changing the way employees collaborate, engage and work . Expect more on this topic as 2017 continues.

As always, discussion on this topic is welcomed in the comments…

Are we still talking about Tags or Taxonomies?

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Sometimes its easy to forget that things that are settled in your mind, are still unclear to others. This is especially true when you are immersed in an organisation that uses social collaboration as the main form of communication, when a lot of the world still uses email only.

So when I was asked recently whether tags should be standardised, it rather took me aback. But then I remembers that 10 years ago, much heated debate and excitement was  provoked by tagging philosophy. In fact, one of my earliest social bookmarks was this 2005 article on Tagging and Why it Matters by David Weinberger at Harvard in which he argues that:

…the biggest obstacle to KM achieving its vision of making all information available to everyone in the organization was in fact the difficulty of building and maintaining large classification systems. Even then, such systems never represent everyone’s way of thinking about things. Tagging, on the other hand, doesn’t require a team of Information Architects to argue for years over whether the right term is “natural language processing,” “language parsers,” or “nlp.” Users can use whatever term works for them…

The conclusion I have come to over the years is that tags and taxonomies are different things: both have value, and both are good for certain purposes. This is very visible in platforms like WordPress, where a blog post can be assigned both categories (a classification system the blog owner creates) and tags (applied more informally with greater variety and changing over time). We also argued interminably about things like whether they should be case sensitive (is “conservative” the same as “Conservative” as a label, but also what will people type when searching?) In fact, I blogged about tagging back in 2012 in the importance of tagging.

Ultimately what sold me on tags as the more important tool was the fact that they can reflect the needs of different user communities and evolve as those needs change (and no-one was even talking about being agile then). So, taking the example of an organisation I came across recently, SEPA means Scottish Environment Protection Agency to one group of people and Single Euro Payments Area to another. Does that mean one of them has to change the terminology they use and the way they label things? Nor practical. You can, of course, create a hierarchy (“environment/sepa”, “payments/sepa”), but that puts content in silos – and then if you happen to be in the wrong place when looking for something you will not find it. In general, promiscuous tagging is recommended to address this issue – so if I tag something with “sepa, single, euro, payments, area, eu, eurozone”, then even if my “sepa” search comes up with a whole load of stuff about payments, refining it with “environment” will get rid of them.

One thing to remember is that the flexibility of tagging doesn’t mean standards will not emerge. Displaying a type ahead list of tags to choose from is one way this happens in enterprise social platforms like IBM Connections, but even more critically the whole point is that the tags reflects the terminology that the users are used to using to refer to whatever is being tagged – so they naturally use the same terms (or learn to use the same terms by observing what others do). The alternative (forcing everyone to use a specific term) has a significant disadvantage that it means that anyone who doesn’t understand the terminology cannot effectively find anything – whereas if they were able to discover a few things that have also been labelled using the terminology they know, they can then be led to the right terminology by seeing the tags on the content they do find.

Now this doesn’t mean that categorisation is worthless. It has valid uses (just like Folders – which are basically categorisation of files). However, as it turns out, tags can be used to implement categories but not vice versa. Typically a standard prefix is used to indicate a category within tags – and, as discussed before, complex categorisation requires a hierarchy anyway. So using the tags “org.environment.sepa” and “org.payments.sepa” gives you a way of providing very specific access to content – at the cost of intellectual complexity: why would someone interested in European financial settlements know whether to look for “org.payments.sepa” rather than “org.eurozone.sepa”? However as long as the “sepa” tag is also used, they would pretty quickly realise that the the results all contained either “org.environment.sepa” and “org.payments.sepa” and so know which one to use in future.

Once you get used to this approach, you discover that tags are a great way of refining sepatagcloudsearches (in IBM Connections, by clicking on the tag list on the left hand side of results). So you can quickly refine a free text search by clicking on a tag: e.g. if “sepa” finds a load of both payments and environmental stuff, clicking on “environment” produces a relevant set of results. Or if you don’t find what you want, you can remove “environment” and add “scottish” or “scotland” instead until you do get what you are looking for. This approach also works well starting with a categorisation search (“org.environment.sepa” to get all content related to SEPA, then click the tag “waste” if you want information related to that topic).

The good thing about using tags is that they can change as the terminology changes (have you ever had your department renamed?). The bad thing about using tags is that they will change as terminology changes. In the short term, that is handled by searching for multiple tags. In the longer term, relevant content either gets retagged as needed (as people realise they had to use the old tag to find it, and so add the new one as well) or gets systematically retagged by the content owner (by searching for the old tag, and then adding the new tag to those objects found which are still relevant) – yes, that requires some effort, but will be done if doing so provides value (and time will hopefully not be wasted on it if it does not).

Which leads to my last thought, which is a generic response to questions of the form ‘should I use “colour” or “color” as the tag?’ The answer is to ask the question “why are you tagging it?” If the answer is just so you can find it again, use whichever tag you will search on. If you want other people to find it, then try to imagine what they will search for (which often means using both, in this case so that both British and Americans will find your content).

To conclude then, my recommendation is: tag everything promiscuously with the audience for your tags in mind; create taxonomies when it makes sense to formally categorise data, and implement them as structured tags (and then make sure there is effort and governance to manage them going forward).

Secret Code Breakers and Public Social Media

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Around 10 years ago, I went to Bletchley Park, home of Station X and the British code breakers of the Second World War who cracked the Enigma cipher, shortened the Second World War and layed the foundations of computing as we know it today.

A few years later I encountered Dr. Sue Black on Social Media as she launched her campaign to save BP for the nation (SavingBletchleyPark.org), then shared a stage with her at a BCS event and subsequently helped crowdfunding her book: Saving Bletchley Park (which was officially launched in paper form last week, having been available as an eBook for a while). As a supporter I've had my copy for a while, but it was only when I took a few days vacation after Easter that I had the time to read it.

Book Cover

In the book, you don't just learn what it was like to work in a top secret, code breaking organisation during World War 2, and how to run an effective social media campaign in the modern day, but also get insights into BP's influence in creating computers as we know them today, the crucial importance of the Women of Bletchley Park and some of Sue's other efforts to promote women in IT.

Sue and her co-writer Steve Colgan skilfully interweave the anecdotes and stories of real life Bletchley Park veterans with Sue's own story: from her first visit to BP, through her initial campaigning in the tradition media, to her discovery of Twitter and subsequent recognition as both a social media guru and key saviour of Bletchley Park. Vivid, first hand accounts are the common characteristic of both stories, making the book both informative and engaging – not just for anyone interested in history, but also those wanting to use social media to create history today. As a first hand account by one of those figuring out how to use Twitter effectively in its early days, it contains many tips for those wanting to utilise it effectively for campaigning today.

When I came to put Saving Bletchley Park onto its bookshelf after reading, I discovered that I have a small library of Bletchley Park books and was reminded that the The National Museum of Computing was closed when I visited the park – so it's definitely time for a return visit.

To get your copy of Saving Bletchley Park, visit Amazon, your favourite eBook store, Waterstones or your local independent bookshop.

 

Moving from Employee Enablement to Engagement

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As social, mobile, cloud and analytics technology continue to redefine collaboration, organisational structures and the way business is done, HR is coming under increasing pressure to take a central role in engaging and empowering employees, not just enabling and evaluating them.These technologies are redefining what it is to be an employee, as millennials expect to bring the technology they were brought up with into the workplace, redefining how organisations function, as aspirations to build a startup culture and work with an ecosystem blur the boundaries of the workforce, and redefining the business models around which current management structures were designed. Agility, empowerment and engagement are what a modern business wants from its employees – and it is looking to HR to help to deliver what IBM calls a Smarter Workforce.

In practice, this transformation occurs at two levels: the macro or strategic level where leadership is provided, permission to change is granted and the rate of adoption is managed; and the micro level of individual teams, processes, departments or business units that pioneer new practices to address the challenges they face – whilst continuing to coexist with legacy operations around them, which were built in the old world. This freedom to drive change at the micro level is key to maintaining traditional revenues and reducing the risk that comes from massive disruptive change.

IBM BusinessConnect 2015 in the London this November I was heavily involved in the HR Day, where instead of giving HR leaders a day of presentations we ran a series of workshops designed to get them to share experiences with each other, under the guidance of IBM thought leaders. A recurring theme of the day was giving the employee a voice, with discussion on areas like continuous listening to better understand the workforce, using analytics on employee generated data to gain new insight, engaging with employees to create a culture that enables change, leveraging diversity to avoid groupthink, and using customer facing staff to better understand the changing market.

Talking to delegates, there was a high degree of variability in terms of digital platforms used to give the employee a voice and how they were being deployed (even the terminology varied from Engagement Platform to Talent Suite to Social Intranet to Collaboration to Enterprise Social Network). In some cases, HR teams were taking the lead by leveraging specialist jam platforms, wrapping social collaboration around employee survey platforms or deploying talent management platforms – often as stand alone services using a Cloud platform. In other cases, they leveraged external, cloud based services already being used in business units to improve the way they work. Finally, there were organsations with an enterprise social strategy, where IT offered a platform that could be used for HR purposes – offering significant benefits of reach and integration with where employees were already doing their jobs.

Earlier this year I participated in the Munich and London events in another IBM seminar series Continuous Listening – The Future of Employee Voice where I talked about how the IBM Connections social business platform (in the Cloud or on premises) could be used to increase the effectiveness of employee surveys by engaging with employees around the process. I demonstrated four specific ways in which such engagement could add value to an employee survey.

Taking just a couple of examples: when asking employees about their level of satisfaction with some aspect of the business, what if you could provide a link to a collaboration space where they could make concrete suggestions about ways it could be improved, comment on ideas from other employees and then vote on the ideas offered? Or how about engaging employees in discussions around the actions being taken to address concerns identified in the survey, crowdsourcing the answers to questions management might have about the concern and letting your employees know that their voice was being heard – and so encouraging them to engage seriously in future surveys.
This is a great example of using an employee engagement platform for a specific purpose. But it also illustrates the extra value that comes from having an enterprise wide platform where employees genuinely engage every day, with their team, with other employees and with management, because if it is where they do much of their work it avoids the need to “go somewhere else” to take part in this process. The engagement platform becomes, in effect, part of their desktop (or, increasingly, something they always have in their pocket). That is why IBM offers its Connections technology platform in different forms – on premises or in the Cloud, enterprise wide or packaged for a specific business purpose, in a browser or on a mobile device – enabling customers to move from niche deployment to enterprise use as their needs evolve.

Cloud, Mobile, Social and Analytics aren’t just impacting HR, these technologies are also challenging the IT department to transform. Just providing a tool, like a laptop or email, is no longer enough. In today’s world organisations need well designed employee experiences that address specific business needs – use cases like the employee survey above. IT can’t create those. It can provide a rich engagement platform, with capabilities like collaboration, social networking, team places, communities, audio/video, knowledge management, jamming, etc., but in today’s world of consumer grade IT and technologically empowered employees the business needs to take ownership for using the platform to deliver results.

As well as HR doing that for itself (using an engagement platform for Onboarding, Surveys, Talent Management, Appraisals, etc.), HR needs to partner with IT to help the rest of the organisation to use its most powerful resource – an engaged workforce – to deliver more satisfied customers and better business results by not just enabling and evaluating employees but empowering and engaging them.

The return of the accidental recipe

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I haven’t been blogging regularly recently – I’ve been distracted by other things – and I’ve decided that I need to fix that. However as I’ve been busy during my working hours, I decided to resurrect something from early in the life of this blog – an accidental recipe.

So often, as you work on digital transformation, the end goal changes as you progress. You start off thinking you will end up in one place, but you learn and experiment as you go, and sometimes what comes out of the other end is much more wonderful that you expected at the start. True transformation often emerges, rather than being designed (we give the name Design Thinking to a process that is not really about designing to an end goal, but designing as you go – so you really don’t know what the endpoint is until you get there).

Tonight I had an idea for dinner. Fish baked in the oven and using up the new potatoes and large beefsteak tomato that I had in the cupboard. I bought a cod tail from the fishmonger (though you could do this with any solid white fish) and looked what else he had around – some shallot onions would help, a small fennel, and the herb section included a bunch of Dill which seemed promising (may thanks to Sandy’s the fish shop in Twickenham for both inspiring and providing the key ingredients for this meal).

Now any of you who have worked with me on social adoption projects will know that I start with known frameworks that work, and tons of experience, and make the rest up as I go along (depending on the emerging business needs and the evolving culture of the participants). I cook the same way.

So here is the recipe I invented (generous for 2 people):

  1. Clean a couple of handfuls of new potatoes and parboil them for around 15 mins.
  2. Meanwhile, I used a Le Creuset casserole pot to cook the dish, on the hob and then in the oven. Lightly fry 2 or three shallot onions (finely chopped) with a chopped garlic clove in a little olive oil for a minute. Add a small fennel (sliced) and fry for another minute. Throw in a roughly chopped beefsteak tomato (or whatever tomatoes you have to hand) and half a bunch of Dill (I used just the leaves and left the stalks behind). Sprinkle with black pepper and stir together.
  3. Add a small Cod tail (skinned) to the pot in largish pieces. Add a splash of white wine. Thickly slice the parboiled potatoes and spread on top. Cover and transfer to a preheated oven at around 180 degrees.
  4. After 15 mins, remove the lid and spinkle with  good covering of parmasan cheese. Continue cooking without the lid.
  5. After a further 10 minutes, transfer to under the grill (I have a combined oven/grill so I could just switch it to grilling).
  6. After 5 minutes or so, remove and serve (with additional parmesan – and, of course, a glass of the white wine!)

It was one of those times when I really didn’t know how it would turn out, but it seemed like a good idea. And the result was amazing – the potatoes really absorbed the flavours, especially the Dill which made the meal very special.

Whether you are transforming organisations or cooking dinner, there is nothing quite like exceeding expectations!

Solving Business Problems with Better Collaboration

Posted on by Standard Reply

Three years ago I was invited to meet with a local authority to discuss advanced collaboration. They had just been informed that the council’s head office was to be sold, so they had to find ways of enabling a workforce that was used to being “in the office” to do their jobs effectively from distributed locations or from home. This required a cultural change as well as new working practices, so new collaboration tools that can help users to make this transition would be key to success.

Recently I was invited to present on “Socialising your Intranet” at the National Communications Academy Scotland event for Scottish local authorities, so I contacted the council to discuss how their project had gone and whether I could use them as a case study. It was great to hear their excitement about the journey that had been on over the last few years. From the start, support from the Chief Executive down had stronger than they expected and they had actively engaged managers and team leaders to become agents of change in their organisations – resulting in over 50 use cases being implemented already, from better supporting community hubs, to transforming the registrar processes, to improving traffic flow on the roads. The final value was much greater than simply facilitating the move from fixed desks to remote and home working that had been their starting point.
Find the pain points that will drive the necessary investment of time and effortA colleague and good friend, Louis Richardson, likes to explain how much easier it is to sell someone a headache pill rather than a vitamin pill. Sure, vitamins are good for the body, but if you can help to get rid of someone’s headache they will be much more committed taking the medicine and making the changes needed for success. In this case, the urgent need to move to distributed working was the first reason to act, but then using middle management (so often inhibitors for change) as the driving force for a new way to work was a brilliant way of finding more headaches – and curing them.

So what are the headaches your organisation faces? Could better collaboration tools and techniques help to address them? Finding a new way to work has helped many organisations become more agile and adaptive in a changing world. Could you transform your organisation into a more satisfying, more successful place to work.