A Revolt Is Coming
Sam Lawrence's post last week reminded me of the push back that I got selling Y! Enterprise Messenger a number of years ago.
It is a great satirical post on the reactions that companies have had to collaborative technologies throughout the recent history finishing on social software. It specifically struck a chord with me today as I was on a call with a prospect who was concerned about her employees spending too much time reading and commenting on corporate blogs. She explained that the perception was that reading the same message in email was productive but that reading it in a blog was a waste of time. Huh?
It was one of those days.
The major difference in selling IM vs. social software is that IM had one competitor - whatever free version of IM that the company had informally standardized on. Social software has competitors for everything that you want to do. There are free blog platforms; there are free wikis; there are close to free project management systems; there are free social networks, there is free Twitter. There seems to be a free or close to free alternative for everything that Socialtext, SharePoint or Connections can throw out there.
Free is awesome for the consumer, but it isn't so hot when it is an unsanctioned product behind your firewall or when confidential company data is out in the open. The challenge, as an IT professional, is implementing these technologies in a sanctioned manner before grass roots efforts, with multiple solutions crop up all over your company.
Based on what I've seen, the grass roots efforts are dominating this war. The knee jerk reaction from IT will be to attempt block these services at the firewall, at which point it will be too late. Employees will find that these services are too valuable and they can't live without them. That is when you will have your revolt.
Scientia potentia est
Knowledge is power. - Sir Francis Bacon
My dad always reiterated this growing up. The more you know, the more valuable you are to the community, your employer and your social-network. It is why plumbers get $150 an hour to come and fix leads during times of emergency and 20 somethings are being tapped to develop Web 2.0 strategies for Global 2000 companies.
As an industry, we've been spending a considerable amount of time trying to better understand adoption of business social network tools. Gia Lyons had a great post recently entitled 'Why is it so hard to get smart people to share?"
I'm confident that the reason that smart people find it so hard to share, is that, as commenter, Richard Fahey points out, the traditional belief is that sharing your knowledge with the masses, greatly diminishes the value of that information. Why would I pay a plumber to fix my leaky toilet if I know how to do it myself? But as we've discovered, the opposite is true. When people advertise & share their knowledge, the premium for that knowledge increases. Likewise, not sharing the knowledge depreciates the value of it.
In Gia's post, she specifically calls out retiring Boomers who seem to be the most reluctant to share. Not being a boomer, I can't speak directly for the generation, but from what I have seen, this is has to do the mentality of seeing the value of their knowledge as their personal value. Unfortunately, usually what these people know isn't the Holy Grail of knowledge, it is usually just corporate guidance that should be as open as possible to help people out.
I also don't believe that there is a reluctance to share their knowledge individually, you regularly hear of some old tycoon taking a young whippersnapper under his wings. Most people, as Gia points out, are really great about sharing information one to one with a trusted party. But there needs to be a sense of familiarity with the person before she lets you in on the secrets to success.
The biggest corporate help that my generation can receive from the Boomers over the next few years will be that they recognize that, once they retire, their knowledge is worthless, but that they are not. The companies that they've given their life too for the past 30 or 40 years are now the young gun, not just one person, but everyone.
So to the Boomers, now is the time to open up and share what you know. Don't just guide one young person to success, guide them all.
Socialtext is Made of People
If you've been following my posts recently, you've undoubtedly noticed that the recent posts have been about people, the content that they create and why it is important to be able to find those people. Content is good, but being able to identify its creator and connect to that person is significantly more valuable, especially as it pertains to enterprise data. These were extremely subtle hints of things to come from Socialtext.
Well, those things have come! We are all extremely happy to announce that we are launching two exciting, major new features to the wiki foundation; Socialtext Dashboard & Socialtext People.
- Socialtext People -- social networking adapted for the enterprise. Throughout the Socialtext wiki, Profiles are made visible so at any time you can pivot to the people behind the content. Profiles and a user directory make it easy for colleagues to introduce themselves and discover implicit and explicit expertise. People can subscribe to the activity of colleagues. Groupings enable users to declare interest and expertise on their profile and other's profiles, making group forming as simple as adding a tag.
- Socialtext Dashboard -- personalized and customizable dashboards of internal and external social software activity. The social news feed of your colleague's activity in wikis and beyond aids attention management. Enterprise-class and standards-based widgets, that users can generate, customize and assemble with a simple drag-and-drop user experience for what they find productive for them.
- Collaborative Intelligence for sales and marketing, as implemented for market leaders including Humana and SAP
- Participatory Knowledgebase for service and support, as implemented for market leaders including Symantec and Microstrategy
- Flexible Client Collaboration for professional services, as implemented for market leaders including MWW Group and CoActive Marketing Group
- Business Social Networks for partners and customers, as implemented for market leaders including United Business Media and Epitaph Records
How to Make Friends and Get Things Done
I’m often surprised by the parallels between my current role at Socialtext and the old days when I was selling Yahoo! Enterprise Messenger. One of the major objections that we faced when selling enterprise IM was that people would just use it to talk with their friends.
This was dumb, of course and it showed a more serious problem of not trusting your workforce, but in the end (long after YHOO shut down the BU), executives realized that instant messaging & presence was an important communication channel to get things done. We are facing the same challenge with enterprise social networks. As executives become more aware of these collaborative tools, they have two schools of thought.
The first is that this is just MySpace or Facebook behind the firewall and that employees will just use it to flirt with the cute girl in marketing or the hot guy in sales. Waste of time & HR nightmare. On the other side of the coin, there are more forward thinking people that recognize the value in social networks as a conversation starter amongst employees that may not necessarily know one another but have projects or success metrics in common. These are the people that understand that enterprise social networks will act as a tool to identify not only where the knowledge is, but who are the experts and provide a mechanism to connect them with one another.
Years ago, my first impression of social networks (Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo! Groups to some extent) was that they were, in my opinion, a ginormous time sink with no inherit value. Now that I’m utterly addicted to them, I am amazed at a.) my ignorance b.) the conversations that have started with people who are much more knowledgeable than I in this industry and c.) by opting to receive others broadcasts, I can learn more about what the leaders in this industry are doing and keep abreast of market trends.
The fascinating thing about these public networks is that the information, since it is public, needs to be fairly genericized. If I work for a large company on Project X, I can’t very well broadcast the latest ongoings of the project across Facebook or Twitter. It would be career limiting at best and I’d probably end up in a major lawsuit at worst.
However, there are people outside my immediate circle of managers and employees that are probably interested in what is going on with Project X. Equally as important, I’m interested in who these people are that are following Project X and what I can learn from them. I want them to be able to reach out to me and provide their guidance and insight as to what they know.
It is important to make friends with the people that you work with. At the end of the day, though, it is more important to get stuff done. With Enterprise Social Networks, you can accomplish both.
Hints of Things to Come
There was a great post yesterday on ZDNet about Socialtext. The killer quote was:
“Businesses look for solutions and that’s what SocialText is in the business of providing,” says Mr Lee. SocialText was the first commercial provider of wikis, which are group editable documents, similar to the popular Wikipedia. But SocialText has gone way beyond the wiki, so far beyond that maybe wiki is no longer needed as a term. I would describe SocialText as providing a social business application suite, especially with some of the new stuff coming out (which I can’t talk about just yet.)
Collaborative applications is another way to describe social business applications, but even here, the language doesn’t do justice to describing the potential business benefits of a consumer IT type approach to the enterprise.
It is cool to be part of something getting this kind of attention. More to come soon.
