Occam Razor

Breaking Through Silos with Business Social Networking

When we talk about tearing down or breaking through Silos in an organization to improve communications and collaboration, these are the questions I think any business leader should focus on answering:

• Why do you want to break through silos in the first place?
• How come we have silos at all?
• What can I do about it?

1. Why break through silos, what is a silo and why should you care?

It’s simple; silos impact your ability to execute and to deliver results. Silos make it hard to share information and thus slow communications and prevent collaboration.

Whether your run a small company, or employ thousands of people around the world, you need simple and flexible communications that save you time and money, and help you make the most of business opportunities.

Breaking down information silos to improve communications has a direct impact on your bottom line, your ability to innovate and to stay competitive in your industry.

2. How come we have silos at all?

In reality, there are probably many reasons for this including everything from human nature to business management to information technology. There are however, two primary reasons for information silos upon which Human Resources and IT departments have had a direct impact on in regards to technology and software solutions.

Reason number one--We have ubiquitous, reliable communications throughout the business with email and mobile phones.

You can virtually reach out to any individual, literally anywhere in the world, at any time and do so reliably. It is pretty much inconceivable that you’d have a workforce without one of these basic forms of reliable communications.

They work great for one to one communications. But break down quite quickly when you try to use them to do work with multiple people at once. Email creates little tiny, one person silos in your inbox and saved folders. A bunch of really valuable data gets put in there, files, thoughts, communications, questions and answers it all gets packed away in folders and really only one person can get to it. It’s like a little library with only one librarian, who has the only library card; all the other users have to go through you to get access to the data. In many ways, mobile technology is just an extension of this phenomenon in its creation of silos, only with worse data collection and smaller, more temporal data.

In the inbox, because we’re not able to expose the exchanges publicly, we can’t get any wisdom of the crowds and the same questions get answered over and over and the same email chains keep making the rounds with outdated files attached. It’s a mess when information is trapped in silos and it creates bad communication.

Reason number two--  Enterprise 1.0 collaboration were inconsistent, they never got enough people on one system, and they weren’t easy to use – the result is that they usually aren’t utilized reliably by all or even most people inside an organization.

This is not to say that these weren’t good tools (e.g. file sharing, groupware, CRM, and other systems). In some cases these were revolutionary software tools for their time. But with the rise of the interconnected enterprise, where people are accessing data from mobile phones, the cloud and personal devices the gap between power users of these first generation tools and the everyday knowledge worker is widening.

You’ve got power users of legacy systems tying up information in 1^st generation tools that not everyone is on and most people don’t use. And you’ve got everyday users resorting to email for collaboration building smaller silos of information in their inboxes and mobile devices. Silos are being built everyday, everywhere across all size businesses.

3. What can I do about it?

Ok great you say. Now what can I do about it? How do I break through these information silos?

Tip #1 Make some communications public and available for discovery.

The types of communications you want to get out of email are the collaborations. Those emails that go to more than 2 people, which are about a project, that have a file attached for review or are asking a question to a broad group of people. You have to get those into a searchable, public space where people can find it.

How to demo using CubeTree to break down information silos in email and SharePoint to make collaborations availble on mobile devices and in public spaces.

Tip #2 Support Mobile with your social collaboration solution.

You’ve got to be on people’s mobile devices. People love their mobile phones and they love their email, possibly the only thing they love more is email on their mobile phone. So any system you put in place to improve email collaboration had better plug seamlessly into both. New users are going to ask “If I put it in your business social network, I had better be able to get notifications on important things in my email and on my mobile device.”

Tip #3 – Make it easy to use.

You can build a really great system and give it all kinds of power and configurability. But if you don’t make it easy to use, then most people just won’t use it and you’ll end up creating more silos of information. Incidentally, it’s also important that it can integrate with some of these legacy systems, like SharePoint, which most organizations (85%!) have.

Tip #4 – You’ve got to include everyone.

And by everyone, I mean EVERYONE in your company has to be on the system, even if they don’t use it. That’s why email and mobile applications work. It’s pretty much inconceivable that you won’t be able to send an email or call someone in your company. The same has to be true for a social network. Not everyone has to be a power user. But if I’m going to send you a message about a project on CubeTree, you have to be there, even if you’ve never logged in, your account needs to be there ready for you. It’s a key element to adoption.

With CubeTree you add collaboration into the SuccessFactors BizX Suite. Which means it’s tied into a system that everyone in your company cares about! Because everyone has a profile in the SuccessFactors suite that they use to find information and map their goals and do their performance review and all the other BizX activities, you know your collaboration tools are part of a system that people use and are already on. Which means you get 100% coverage with SuccessFactors CubeTree--just like you get with email and mobile phones!

4. Results

Follow these tips to unlock all the information stored away in those email and legacy system silos. In doing so you’ll improve communications, save time and money and include everyone.

Companies that implement social colaboration tools see these distinct results:

• 30% increase in the speed of access to knowledge
• 20% decrease in travel costs
• 30% increase in the speed of access to internal experts

Source: McKinsey Quarterly – December 2010

All that adds up to measurable results. Implementing social collaboration solutions, like CubeTree, to break down informational silos has a direct impact on your business. Allowing companies to make better decisions, faster.

Breaking Through Organizational Silos with Social Collaboration

This is my latest presenation and webinar. It's a short overview of how new business social networking tools can help break through traditional silos to help all of us make better decisions, faster in the workplace.

 

3 Simple Steps CEO's Can Use To Engage Employees

I am working with a CubeTree customer whose CEO wants to communicate with employees, engaging them with real opportunities to interact. The IT Director and the CEO agreed that the existing channels, email and the company intranet, were falling short.

We discussed three simple steps that executives can follow to engage employees through CubeTree: informally with microblogging, more formally with blogging, and as an observer.

Step 1: Micro-blog. With microblogging, executives can easily communicate directly with the employees. CEOs are on the front of some of the most exciting daily events for the company. It is motivational and inspiring for them to share their insights on meetings with customers, visits to branch offices, and talks with partners. The whole company benefits from the positive environment created when the CEO sends a shout out for a job well done. Sharing these events in real-time, even using photos to highlight an update, is a powerful way to connect instantly and emotionally with the entire workforce.

On the receiving end, employees get a real pulse on what's happening in the business from the perspective of its leaders. It lets people know that their work matters. Then, because it's a collaborative system, they can communicate back! Because it's more informal than email, microblogging makes it easy to comment and provides the executives with direct feedback from the employees on the front lines.

Step 2: Blog don't email. For more formal communications like state of the union messages, CEOs can use the personal blog. This provides a way to communicate to a broad audience without the message getting lost in employee's inboxes. With blogs, it's easy to add links, photos and video, which improves the message's "stickiness". But the real advantage of the blog is that readers can comment back, and others can see these posts and then add their thoughts to the conversation, creating an authentic discussion with multiple points of view. Of course, email does let people reply, but most are reluctant to spam their colleagues. Even if employees don't hesitate to reply, the conversation often gets jumbled due to messages received and replied to out of order. A conversation in email is much harder to read and participate in than the same discussion in CubeTree.

Step 3: Read and react. As an observer on CubeTree, the CEO can keep an eye on the business across virtually all the major projects in the company. Similar to microblogging, it's unfettered, unfiltered access; it's watching projects evolve in public groups not just getting the updates in prepared reports. That allows the CEO, at critical points, to interject a comment or nudge an idea in a direction that's best for the company. As people in the organization brainstorm and come up with innovative concepts, those who see the "big picture", like the CEO, will recognize and adopt the ideas that company needs to be successful. Without CubeTree, these ideas might never have seen the light of day.

As the CEO and other execs lead by microblogging about their day to day activities, blogging about major initiatives, and participating in CubeTree conversations, the employees will be better informed and offer valuable feedback. Employees will take cues from the company's leaders and increase their use of microblogging and blogging as well. And as they do this, the workforce will be more active and more engaged, which for the company means more innovation and better business execution.

Facebook is the 3rd largest country on earth.

There are some startling statistics about the adoption of Social Media and Mobile technologies in the refreshed Socialnomis video from Erik Qualmann. 

My favorite statistic is a toss up between: if Facebook was a country is would be the third largest on the planet OR social media has replaced pornography as the #1 activity on the web.

Is Social Media just a fad? You will decide if it is or not based on whether you personally derive value from it. This video seems to say that enough people do and those who resist its adoption will likely find themselves on one side of a digital divide.

You can find the statistics on Socialnomic's blog. But the video is better and set to Fatboy Slim.

Better product roadmaps - 2 tools to help you

 

 I just spent the last two days of the week in Product Owner (CSPO) class with Mitch Lacey and Luke Hohmann in downtown Bellevue.

One of the things that really stuck with me from the class was a section that Luke did on road-mapping. There were two things he did that I thought were really valuable. Valuable enough that I'm sitting here in a coffee shop writing this post on Saturday morning waiting for my product manager, Peter Goubert, to show up so we can start using some of the mojo I learned in class on our own product roadmaps for Agile On Demand and TeamTrack. 

The first valuable thing are the Innovation Games® we played in class. Those are activities wedid  help us collaborate and solve complex problems like prioritizing backlogs, planning roadmaps and negotiating business value. The games come in a lot of flavors and are for playing with your team, your stakeholders and your customers. I've played them a couple of times now with my team at Serena, with citizens at Games for Democracy and am planning them for customers at an Agile Tech-Day in New York next month. The net of the games is that they are a way to interact with opinionated groups of people, get them to drop their inhibitions and find out what they really think and know. One of the games we played, called Prune the Product Tree, worked very well for taking a backlog of items for a product and mapping them against key dates and dependencies to start the creation of a meaningful product roadmap.

The second valuable tool is a pattern language and template for creating roadmaps that actually work. You can find them here. The template takes into a lot of factors and organizes them into related swim lanes, which allows me to take into account a 'real' business value for the release. It's meant to be visual so you can blow it up and hang it on the wall. Developer teams use them to understand the what and why of the schedule, managers can understand what and why to prioritize and stakeholders can understand what and when to promote and push to customers. It's the best holistic view of a road map that I've seen. And I'm eager to put it into action with my own group. It also fit together nicely with the games and it made sense to take the results of a game, like prune the product tree, and apply it to a visual graph of the roadmap using the template.

The games are excellent if you're looking for a way to re-envigorate your customer and stakeholder conversations. They help to re-focus conversations and get the meat behind what people are telling you. I find them very valuable and if you're lucky enough to be in a city where Luke's got a games class coming up you might want to check it out.

Really useful resources presentation on using Social Media for Product Market Research

Use of social media for product market research ss

View more presentations from Scott Gilbert.

Innovation Games

Luke Hohmann has got me going on his Innovation Games® ideas. I sat down with him over coffee a few weeks back. He wanted to talk about using the games not just for product management but adapting them for use in outbound sales and marketing efforts. The idea has really resonated with me. 

The games are a natural fit for classic PM's who want to interact with existing users to identify pain points and prioritize lists of future features. They are a better vehicle than classic customer advisory boards and focus groups. Or perhaps its more accurate to say they are a better way to handle your CABs and focus groups than traditional questionnaires, usability tests and 'open discussions'. The games take advantage of a social sigma like process to improve products through social feedback. You might say that companies can use things like Twitter, UserVoice or Get Satisfaction to replace their electronic suggestion box (suggestions@email.com or feedback@email.com), while Innovation Games® can replace stuffy survey's, questionnaires and stale CABs with real social interaction that matters.

The next leap as Luke was describing it to me is to use the games proactively for sales and marketing. Taking the games beyond the classic PM realm.

I'm going to attend the a CSPO class with Luke and Mitch Lacey here in a few weeks, they're going to play a few of the games in the class. I'm looking for as much exposure to them as possible. Coming up on April 7th, I'm going to run one of the games, along with Jeff McKenna at the Bay Area Tech Day for Serena Software. We're going to use the Speedboat game with attendees to identify pain points in our customer relationships and establish a benefit to solving each.

Adapting scrum for marketing teams.

Learned a new trick this week about making scrum work for marketing teams. And I had to be using a tool to do it. The trick? I added due dates and budget as things to track on each story. Using Agile On Demand as our tracking tool I was able to easily add fields to our stories for both. Tracking due dates is typically not an 'agile' thing to do for those that are developing software with scrum. For marketing scrums though, it's just another kind of dependency. As us budget. Dates can be fungible and budget can change. Being able to track 'estimates' of both helps marketing teams size and rank stories for each sprint. Also, using Agile On Demand I was able to get the budget column to roll up so I could get a running estimate for each sprint and release. Cool. It's helping me manage demand against resources in a time when execution is key.

The Future is now

Got to talking with an old school buddy of mine today. Was looking for some information about technology books and publishing (he works at O'Reilly in my hometown). In the catchup part of the conversation he mentioned he was playing in a new band, The Community College. He quickly IM'ed me their MySpace page and sent me some of their tracks for my iPhone. Garage punk, circa 1977, if you're interested. We talked about their upcoming show in Sacramento. I posted a link to my Facebook to get the word out. Their cutting a 7" soon. Which would be cool, but I don't have turn table anymore. So he recommended I pick up this one that plugs into my MacBook Pro. Whole conversation took less than it took to write this blog post and happened completely over the net. Love it. Now if I can just find a USB enabled transporter so I can make the show.....then I'll really know it's the future.

It's lightweight conversations like these that are driving the communication patterns for modern marketing. I say lightweight because they are easy to initiate, spontaneous and immediately relevant to what you're going to do next. They completely blend the lines between personal and work. And they often include product and service recommendations based on personal experiences. They are semi-public via your social networks, so others can also be influenced by them. They are also extremely important to the individuals involved.

As Marketers it's important to be involved in the conversations when your products are part of the chatter. Being genuine is important, so product quality (in either direction) and transparency of marketing intention are king. Mad Men marketing approaches to this channel just don't work as well as they do in others. The goal I think is 'un-marketing', be transparent and no-bullshit approaches work best...misspellings ok.

Marketing Scrum

An open letter to David Booth at Gravity Gears in response to a LinkedIn query about Agile Practices applied to Marketing. January 2009.

 

“Hi David.

Good to hear from you. As it happens I do have some experience in applying Agile to marketing departments.

I've implemented Scrum here at Serena for the Product Marketing group (6 people) and am the scrum master. We've had great success using it to organize work and to minimize the impact of "fire drills". We use many elements of Scrum, although certainly not all of them apply (for example I've not figured out how to apply automated testing to marketing in a literal sense). We have daily stand ups with the team to check progress. Our team is distributed across 3 states, so we use the phone, webex and an Agile tool to help. We write user stories and track them in Serena's Agile On Demand product (Full disclosure: I work for Serena and a senior product marketing manager for this product). That's were we keep our burndown charts and use a virtual task board to share information and burn down story points. We also use planning poker to size and estimate work. We're using two week sprints an have bi-weekly planning meetings. All members of the team write stories, but our manager, the director of product marketing, acts as the product owner to set story priority and help organize stories into themes.

It has yielded some excellent benefits. It has increased cooperation and cross pollination between distributed team members. It helps us provide a litmus test to fire drill projects from outside the group by allowing us to show what work would be displaced if we take on a fire drill and then allow the requester to judge if it really needs to be done, or if it can wait until the next sprint. This has greatly smoothed out the flow of work and provided immense visibility to other marketing and sales groups into what the Product Marketing group is working on. Many stakeholders from outside the department participate by listening in on the daily standups and help contribute story acceptance criteria.

In the next sprint (we have since done this with success) we are implementing a Demo Phase, where we show what work has been completed for review by stakeholders. We think this will greatly increase visibility and collaboration with other departments. There is already allot of interest in extending this method to other departments in the company (our web team is now part of the Scrum).

Our Developer Teams already use Agile as well. Jeff McKenna, one of the co-founders of Scrum, provided some basic training for all members of the Scrum. And then he has essentially been my coach and the team's coach for working out our adoption. It's great fun, has yielded benefits immediately and I think is improving the quality of the work and reducing stress in the team.

I think allot of the things marketing teams do already in the course of their work are Agile by nature. Teams do tend to be self-organizing, requirements are frequently changing, work is constantly changing in priority. Using Agile as a framework for structuring the work actually helps give meaning and structure to a process that otherwise can seem chaotic. In particularly I think it gives the individual contributors in the marketing department a clear list of objectives and work to be completed in the short term while still giving them the ability to change if required.

Patchen Noelke”