2020 Social: Because Business is Social

Designing Organizational Learning for the Social Business

Posted on 16. Feb, 2010 by Gautam in How To Guides, Ideas

Adults learn by social processes. David Kolb’s Experiential Learning: Experience as the source of learning and development (1984) theorized that four combinations of perceiving and processing determine four learning styles that make up a learning cycle. According to Kolb, the learning cycle involves four processes that must be present for learning to occur:

• Activist – Active Experimentation (simulations, case study, homework). What’s new? I’m game for anything. Training approach – Problem solving, small group discussions, peer feedback, and homework all helpful; trainer should be a model of a professional, leaving the learner to determine her own criteria for relevance of materials.
• Reflector – Reflective Observation (logs, journals, brainstorming). I’d like time to think about this. Training approach – Lectures are helpful; trainer should provide expert interpretation (taskmaster/guide); judge performance by external criteria.
• Theorist – Abstract Conceptualization (lecture, papers, analogies). How does this relate to that? Training approach – Case studies, theory readings and thinking alone helps; almost everything else, including talking with experts, is not helpful.
• Pragmatist – Concrete Experience (laboratories, field work, observations). How can I apply this in practice? Training approach – Peer feedback is helpful; activities should apply skills; trainer is coach/helper for a self-directed autonomous learner.

It is our belief at 2020 Social that social technologies can provide each employee with their learning content that suits their overall approach and help in better retention of learning. Hence the proposed solution will have elements that cater to all the above.

Part 1: Consists of static content that would help people to discover the “must know” aspects of what is to be learned

Basic Content focused on the Subject Matter that every new Executive/Manager would go through when they join the organization. It would cover the following

1. Basics of the subject expertise – Files, Websites, Videos, List of Books that act as a primer for gaining knowledge
2. Additional Reading Material – Documents that people can download
3. List of Resources – Agencies, Thought Leaders, Partners collated at one point.
4. List of People (yellow pages) – employees who have worked on Initiatives and how to contact them (email, Skype, IM)
5. FAQs – A series of basic questions focused on what a new employee needs to know
6. Best Practices – e-books, videos, ppts.

All the above can be edited by certain key people. Other employees can add comments below the content.
Once people have gone through this they can be tested for their knowledge using a quiz/survey tool – acting as a feedback measure to what they have learnt

Part 2: Dynamic Learning

What’s new and up to date in the domain and what is the buzz around the firm’s products/services/ operations and what is the Market/Competitive Intelligence

This would consist of a stream of constantly dynamic news and market/competitor intelligence that would get updated on an employee’s dashboard that he/she can click through and view the detailed content if he/she wants.Personalised Dashboard for each Employee which can be customized to follow information and news relevant for his/her own needs

1. RSS feeds of Google Alerts with key words around the brand name, competitor name, market name.
2. RSS feeds of thought leaders’ blogs and websites to ensure new ideas come directly to the employee’s desktop
3. Twitter updates of the who’s who of subject matter so that employees can track and even interact with them. Using lists curation services like http://listorious.com/
4. Competitive Intelligence – A dynamic page which is updated with news/tweets about the major competitors based on publicly available data. Collated and shown on a specific site. The comments section would enable the employees to add their personal experiences on what the competitor is doing in their specific regions.
5. New videos and Slideshows – Using a keyword tracking processes, new videos and slides updated on the specific subjects (like “Financial marketing” or “Consumer Behavior” or “HR Trends”) would be embedded in the dashboard of the employees.

Part 3: Collaboration

Enabling employees to learn from each other using learning logs, ideation and connecting with each other.

This part would focus on how employees can use social software to connect with each other and work together to create strategies, tactics, execution. This would consist of the following parts:

1. Ideation Platform: A blog/wiki in which senior management asks for ideas around a certain campaign, product on initiatives
2. Status updates – would let other people know what the employee is working on so that if anyone has any ideas/lessons to share can do that via the tool.
3. Lessons Learnt: Similar to the ideation platform focusing on the past initiatives and what worked and best practices learnt from them
4. Sharing project plans for campaigns and getting peers’ feedback on them.
5. Q&As with partners, senior management, consultants – which are archived – and after some time some which are basic can be moved into the FAQs section in the static part.
6. Discussion around events like conferences, trainings that some employees go to – can share learnings, videos, slides with the rest of the peer group – resulting in richer and more learning

(Cross posted at Gautam on Organizations 2.0)

Employee’s Participation in Enterprise 2.0 initiatives

Posted on 15. Feb, 2010 by Gautam in How To Guides, Ideas

I can see whatever the issues that were there during Knowledge Management also getting repeated when it comes to sharing and collaboration in the Hyper-Linked Organization aka Enterprise 2.0

During the turn of the century – when KM – and the dream to let employees share what they know – was directed , the KM advocates (like me!) suggested that knowledge sharing should be given rewards. The thought was that if a person does not see a benefit for himself why would he share his knowledge with the behavior.

I have changed my belief – in part due to analysing my own behaviour on the social web.

Behaviours like sharing and collaboration are Organizational Citizenship Behaviors – and are a product of Employee’s Engagement with the organization. This discretionary effort is not like one’s work behavior – and needs to be rewarded not monetarily – but psychologically.

Psychological rewards will impact only a very few of employees, and that is okay.

Highly engaged employees who would indulge in Organizational Citizenship Behaviors follows the Power Law – much like social networks’ law. In that a minority will create and curate the majority of the content.

So what are the ways that such employees can be recognized?

1. Public Acknowledgement – A leaderboard style table of key frequent contributors is a dynamic public assertion of who is helping and creating content
2. Social Voting and Curation – Like the rating system it shows the people whose content has been deemed most useful by the users.
3. Collaboration – When a person shares content about a certain domain area it reveals his/her interest in that area. Involvement of the person in that domain would be a dream.

What are the other ways in which such contributors can be recognized?

(cross posted on Gautam on Organization 2.0)

Thinking about Social-ERM

Posted on 13. Jan, 2010 by Gautam in Announcements

Many business leaders and HR professionals I meet and talk to take stances that are either on the lines of “Oh, Orkut and Facebook is such a drain on my company resources and time ! I need to ban such stuff – or at least regulate it – so that we can do our jobs better”

Or (and this is a smaller number) some CEOs, COOs, HR professionals and many Marketing professionals – the ones who are more open-minded, say – “Hold on, here are some things that are changing at a fundamental level in the way we engage with the external world, and our employees are out there on Facebook, Linkedin, Orkut, Twitter – talking about their jobs, our products, answering questions from their friends and strangers. If we can’t ban this, how can we channelise it?”

Welcome to Social ERM

Yeah, I just coined the phrase Social ERM – and I take this off from the concept of Social CRM that Gaurav blogged about.

So what would Social Employee Relationship Management do?

1. Listening - Monitoring of the social web to keep track of what your employees are saying on various platforms about their work/ industry/market/ customers/ organizations/ other employees.
2. Profiling - This step would involve trying to classify your employees in the following ways -
   1. What kind of postings are they carrying out?
   2. Do they respond to user queries?
   3. Do they post about new stuff that is happening in the industry/ market ?
   4. What is the influence they have built?
   5. Who is their audience?
3. Sharing and Connecting - This would look at building an online community within the firewall amongst the people you have profiled so that they can share and curate the content each of them create on different site
4. Collaboration - The next step would be for these online innovators to create content jointly or ideate on what they can work together – or to reach out to each other when faced with a external query not in their area of expertise.
5. Converting and Supporting - When one does steps 1 and 2 – one would also discover disgruntled employees – This step looks at how HR and Operations can respond to the source of that negativity so that the at least become neutral if not positive. However, I foresee companies still not being open enough to do this, but one does hope!
6. Energising and Retaining - Clearly employees who engage in social media in the work arena are excited by other rewards and recognitions than employees who are not vocal about their work. HR and Operations needs to think new ways to energise and retain these employees – and giving them augmented roles with social media responsibilities

So CEOs, COOs, HR professionals – are you ready for Social Employee Relationship Management?

My NASSCOM Talk: Made in India, Made for the World

Posted on 09. Jan, 2010 by gaurav in Events

Yesterday, I gave a talk at the NASSCOM Emerge Friday 2.0 event about how the time is ripe for Indian startups to target the global market: ‘Made in India, Made for the World‘.

So far, Indian startups have focused on tweaks for the local market, not inventions or tweaks for the global market, partly because Indian VCs have tended to fund me-too startups with a business model focused on enabling transactions for the local market (book a air/ rail/ bus/ movie ticket).

However, in the last one or two years, several Indian startups have dared to build products for the global market. On my list are enterprise collaboration players Zoho, Deskaway, Uhuroo, Remindo, Cyn.in and YouSuggest, consumer focused web 2.0 startups like LifeBlob, AuthorStream, GizaPage (and the now dead Fachak and Kwippy), widget company Tell-a-Friend/ SocialTwist, flash-maker Toufee and online tutoring company TutorVista. Do let me know if I have missed out startups that should be on this list. With a little luck, several of these startups can become global players, and some already have.

I think there are five trends that are enabling Indian startups to target the global market –

1. SaaS/ Cloud Computing: The SaaS based delivery model enables such startups to sign-up users without a significant upfront investment in a sales and distribution channel and the cloud computing infrastructure from players like Amazon allows them to scale seamlessly as more users sign up.

2. Application Ecosystems: The application ecosystem created by Facebook, OpenSocial, Twitter, iPhone, Android and Nokia Ovi enables startups to build and distribute applications quickly. Over the next two years, as more players set up structured marketplaces like the iPhone marketplace, I expect these applications ecosystems to become the key driver of entrepreneurial innovations around the world, including in India.

3. Social Connections: The people behind the tech blog ecosystem (TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, WebWorkerDaily, Scobleizer) that drives initial adoption for tech startups are more accessible than ever, on Twitter, Facebook and their own blogs. The Indian tech blog ecosystem is also evolving with Digital Inspiration, Pluggd.in, WATBlog and MediaNama building a large Indian and international readership and some of us are beginning to build a global reputation as thought leaders in the web 2.0 space. There is increasing interest in finding and highlighting startup success stories from the emerging world, especially India and China. The world is eager to listen to us and we have more means than ever to tell our stories. Not only that, these social connections can even help startups find international employees, partners and investors.

4. Viral Loops: Social media doesn’t only help startups leverage social connections; startups can also tap into the viral loops created by social platforms to build buzz. Aggregators like Techmeme and Tweetmeme and virality machines and platforms like Facebook Connect enable startups to grow virally by tapping into Facebook’s 350m user base.

5. Support Ecosystem: Social media and web 2.0 tools can also help startups convert and support customers. Startups can use Twitter to find prospects and track customer complaints and then use Skype to convert or close them. GetSatisfaction is emerging as a strong customer-driven support platform that can enable tech startups to offer support at scale without building a big support team.

At one level, ‘Made in India, Made for the World‘ is a manifesto to encourage more Indian startups to build web 2.0 offerings for the global market. At another level, it’s also a reminder to myself as I try to build 2020 Social into a global social technology firm, based in India. The journey has just started, for all of us, and I hope that we’ll have the will to go all the way.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

The making of a Social Organization

Posted on 21. Dec, 2009 by Gautam in How To Guides

At 2020 Social one of the things we believe is that we are a our own petri-dish. We experiment with technology and processes to convert ourselves into the kind of organization we think is suitable to be called social.

So not only do we have a blog, a Facebook page, a twitter account, a twitter list showcasing all our tweets – we’ve also now started a wiki to focus on building a repository of social media successes in India – and will invite participation from like minded folks soon.

On the other side of the seriousness spectrum we have started a Fun page where we publicly talk on the lighter side of life at 2020 Social

Internally we are driving online collaboration using three tools, Google Apps for mail, document sharing and calendering - Socialtextfor internal conversations and collaboration on a wiki – and Basecamp for project management.

As social media enthusiasts we have noticed that internally even we need to see a business/behavioral benefit to using a tool – and we understand that more traditional businesses would need to see it more.

One of the way to showcase this is look for external cases where ROI has been calculated – but we believe that using the tools showcases a greater commitment and a better story for any client.

What do you think?

If you’re in the advisory business how many times do you apply your advice on yourself?

(Cross posted from Gautam on Organizations 2.0)

How to Build a Social Organization

Posted on 10. Dec, 2009 by Gautam in How To Guides

This post was collaboratively written on a wiki by Gautam and Abha.

How would 2020 Social engage with organizations to build collaborative, open organizations

At 2020 Social we understand that while business is social – organizations must change internally to be truly authentic and social externally.

We have posted earlier on the changing nature of leadership in the age of social web within organizations, as well as some of the deeper trends driving this reality in organizations.

As the nature of work itself changes from personal productivity to group and team work, organizations need to have better tools to get work done between people.

Knowledge work can often get to be frustrating in most organizations because information is passed around in emails and often a lot of to and fro happens when two or more people try to collaborate on it. The problem gets compounded when people are in other locations

Social Technologies can address the issues that challenges communication and collaboration within organizations. It takes the focus away from information and puts the people in the centre of the conversation. Collaboration and internal networking can help employees use existing relationships to not only reach out to distant experts but also build trust and foster team and group bonding.

Tools to broadcast company related information can be leveraged by the organization.

2020 Social will engage with organizations in three main phases to make them social and collaborative

Diagnose

Diagnose would be the first step in a three step engagement process This would consist of two meta approaches – after the beginning of the engagement:

1. Interviews with senior stakeholders
2. Focus Group discussions with other employees

The output of this phase would be

1. Major areas where collaboration is a challenge
2. The business impact of non-collaboration
3. Priorities that need to be addressed
4. Sign off by top management on metrics to be tracked.

The interviews would also give data on the current level of readiness and maturity of the organization and its employees around the following areas:

a. Technology savviness
b. Readiness to experiment with new systems
c. Current level of work that can be done collaboratively

Based on organizational needs 2020 Social also looks at helping organizations develop social media policies that impact both internal and external social media and networking interactions.

Select

Based on the needs of the organization 2020 Social consultants would test various third party tools and select the one most appropriate tool with the functionalities suitable to the client

These tools would be a SaaS (Software as a Service) tool that an IT department is not required to maintain it on a regular basis. Currently we are in active talks with several such tool providers and in the process of tying up partnership agreements with them.

Engage

2020 Social Consultants would work with the client to train people on the behaviors and the tool. This would be necessary to drive adoption in the organization.

Some Objectives of the Tool related  Training would be around

• Familiarity with product
• Roles of different user groups
• Usage of tool in specific scenarios

Objectives of the Behavioral Training could be

• Understanding changes how work itself is changing
• Articulating current pains and how they impact business outcomes
• Understanding that change in the way work will be done
• Helping them articulate apprehensions so that they can be addressed either in the training or later

Depending on the understanding and the complexity of the client system these could range from a workshop to a “train the Champions” approach and help desk support for the organization.

Want to know more?

Ask us how we can help you leverage social technologies within the organization.

And you can look at these three scenarios how we can help organizations build organizational culture, create an innovation mindset and facilitate effective team working by leveraging and creating internal communities around a passion and vision.

DeskAway – Enterprise Collaboration tool review

Posted on 04. Dec, 2009 by Abha in Reviews

Synage is an Indian web company founded in 2007 that delivers software as a service (SaaS) solutions to the global market. DeskAway,  a web-based on-demand project management  and collaboration tool  is their flagship product.

DeskAway offers varied pricing and plan options ranging from a free version (3 Projects and 5 users) to a fully packed version at $99 per month (unlimited projects and users, 25 GM storage, detailed reports, SSL security, backup, E-mail integration and more). All plans offer user rights options – you can see only what you are authorized to see.

We found the interface easy to use, clean and inviting. It was easy to get started without really digging deep into the How To tutorial /video and it was nice to see how tips and tutorials were generously placed on various pages but with the option of closing them all in one go in case you felt confident of finding your way around independently.

Always feel that a tabbed view makes an app largely clutter free and easy to navigate and at the same time allows a lot of features to be packaged in well. DeskAway scores high marks on this account and makes good use of a tabbed UI and frames.

Here’s a list of some of the interesting features:

-          Dashboard – Overall view of activity on all your projects. List of past and current tasks and also a list of tasks shared via E-mail. The right frame prominently displays the overdue tasks and milestones

-          Projects – Listing of projects and also a project calendar view. Tasks can be quickly added and updated from this view itself. All resources related to the task like milestones, files , timesheets etc. are directly accessible. Quickies and personal notes can also be added to any project. One can also view Work Reports that gives an overview on the state of completion of all projects and associated tasks/milestones. This report can be generated for specified time periods and projects as well.

-          Calendar – A monthly view on activities/tasks/milestones scheduled for each day of the month. This view however is rather basic and not very appealing. Tasks and personal notes can directly be added from the view as well.

-          Blogs – New blog posts can be created and shared with teams using this tool. One can also subscribe to RSS feeds here.

-          Search – one of the most useful features. Searches through all or selected sections. We however found the search to be rather slow! Also the search successfully located a file only when words used in the description tag were used and not when the actual filename (these were not specified in the description tag)… found that disappointing.

-          Reports – give a graphic view of the status on all projects. Interesting and useful feature

-          Status – Just like in Facebook you can update your current status on DeskAway. This helps your colleagues to know what you are working on

One suggestion for future roll outs of the product would be to incorporate wikis and truly make teams collaborative.

All in all we’d say these are a great set of well laid out project management tools. Great functionality and very useful reporting formats. DeskAway has come up with a good basket of offerings within 2 years of its inception at an enticing price point and is poised to take on established players like Basecamp, Zoho and others.

Using social technologies to build Organizational Culture

Posted on 30. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in Case Studies, How To Guides

BUILDING AN ENGAGED WORKFORCE

The Story Until Now
(scenario 3 from here)

Over the last two decades LMN Corp has grown from a family owned business to a professionally run conglomerate with diverse interests in shipping, mining, IT, telecom and media. Growth has been robust as the diversifications have paid off.

Sumit Bangia, the 50 year old COO of the company, has been an old LMN hand. Over the last few years, Sumit has become increasingly concerned with the increasing turnover of younger workers. Sumit’s trusted HR Head, 35 year old Shalini Taneja, found out from exit interviews that recent recruits felt disconnected from the conglomerate and felt that they didn’t know how they fit into the big picture.

Sumit and Shalini decided that the key to retaining young recruits was to build an open organizational culture where young recruits could connect with each other and older mentors across levels and functions. It was also important that they felt empowered and encouraged to bring their whole self to work.

When Gautam met Sumit he said “I don’t think we need more increments and higher salaries or better designations to motivate our people. We’ve hired some great people over the last few years – if we can just make them connect with each other and discover their strengths and then get out of their way, I am sure they will take us to great heights… my question is how can I help help them to tap their full potential and connect with each other?”

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Gautam tells Sumit “You have the right approach, however before jumping into an initiative like this you have to think through certain aspects”

“What are those?” Sumit asked, intrigued.

“The first thing is you have to understand such an initiative will mean disrupting existing power structures – are you sure you want to do that? Will the rest of the management team support this initiative?”

Sumit pondered on Gautam’s question “Maybe not, but I am prepared to push my way through – as this is what will enable us to break to the next level”

“You can’t push an initiative like this Sumit, it has to be owned by all the leadership.. however what you can influence is by leading the way – and influencing others to follow your lead. Let’s assume over all your objective is to increase the engagement of people with the organization and with each other, would that be right?” asked Gautam

“Yes true” agreed Sumit

“You need to build a community that will congregate around areas of work, levels and other areas of interest”

“You mean like a Facebook for the whole group?” Sumit asked.

“Well, it would look like that, and have rich features to encourage people to connect with each other – however there would be features that would encourage a mix of social and business interaction. What would really help this would be the softer aspects of the initiative”

“Such as…?”

“It would encourage people to connect with others, discover people across organizational silos, understand them beyond their roles as individuals – and trigger overall encouragement. It has been proven that having friends is a sign that people will be more engaged at work.”

“Really…?”

“Of course, people like to work in a place that enables them to bring their whole selves at work”

“How do we know that people won’t just goof off? Keep chatting?”

“You’ve got to give them guidelines, Sumit. We can help you in evolving these guidelines. Many large organizations have such guidelines. However, you have to remember that the ‘how we use it’ will become a process when people realise that they have to work with people, not to do things to them. People like you and your senior team will be instrumental in creating that mindset – which is why we’ll have to collaborate with them extensively to make this a success.”

Fueling Effective Team Working using Social Technologies

Posted on 27. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in How To Guides

Shared in the flow workspaces to enable Team Work Effectiveness

THE STORY SO FAR
(scenario 2 from here)

Alacrity Legal Technologies is a new Legal Process Outsourcing firm which focuses on a complex method of helping law firms in the US get their litigation issues outsourced to India. On each of these teams it needs the various groups of people to work together so that case materials and lawyer’s notes for clients to work on before the start of the day. Hence teams of law researchers, Indian lawyers and US client managers need to work together to get fast turnaround times.

Sundar Raman, the 43 year old CEO of the firm, is concerned at the high levels of customer complaints – the key theme being that ALT teams always seem to be missing their deadlines. Sundar decided to dig deeper and found that the delays are caused by the serial processing nature of the work: a mis-communication in the to-and-fro chain of emails would stop everyone else’s work and cause serious delays.

Sundar instinctively knew that a way for people to work on documents together without necessarily emailing versions back and forth would speed up the deliverables.

“But I don’t know what that toolkit looks like,” Sundar told Gautam, “and I don’t know if it’s even possible to change the work habits of seasoned paralegals and lawyers.”

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

Gautam reassured Sundar that many organizations shared his dilemma. The nature of our work, especially knowledge work, has dramatically changed while our communication toolkit hasn’t.

“The model for email is offline filing systems,” Gautam explained to Sundar. “The system of Inbox, Outbox, Drafts? They spell the “I do my job, and now the ball is in your court” – There is little sharing of contexts – people don’t really write about the attachments they send or what people have to work along with.

So I’d tell Sundar Raman that what Alacrity Legal Technologies that what they need is for groups to work together in “Shared In The Flow Workspaces” – In The Flow to signify a natural way of working and not something that has to be done externally or in addition to ‘regular work’.

The Governance aspects of such a system would adhere to workflows, have access rules and align to the team roles in the group.

Some of the features that would be needed, and the behaviors that ALT would enable in such shared workspaces are:

• Wikis - these are shared pages which anybody who has access to can add and edit text, images and even video. People can add links to internal and external sites and keep a track of changes made by people. So one can say goodbye to confusing version numbers when more than 2 people are working on the same document.
• Content Repository – This is a shared drive/folder where all relevant files are tagged by the group and it is possible to search them
• Microblogging / Status Updates - helps people keep others informed of what they are working on, what issues they are facing and therefore
• Project Management – Helps people to assign roles, tasks and in calendaring timelines of when they are supposed to get back with work

Using these tools, and understanding how to manage the change process from current ways of working – ALT can make its teams work faster and more effectively.

Trends towards Open Organizations

Posted on 16. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in Trends

Organizations are primarily communities first – and profit making machines later believed Arie de Geus and wrote it in his book The Living Company. These days, however, now businesses need to be social communities to survive and thrive.

We at 2020 Social believe that businesses will move to the next level of growth not by doing the same things that they were doing but by embracing some of the biggest trends that are shaping today’s culture.

Some of these trends that are having an impact on the workplace are:

1. Speed of decision making: As external change on organizations comes faster and faster, and as organizations get flatter and flatter – decisions are expected from the front line level which directly interact with customers, be they sales or customer support people. However often they don’t have access to information that they need to really do it well.
2. Transparency: As society and government opens up – employees are expecting similar transparency within their organizations – and when organizations are seen as secretive and opaque they lose either their employees energy and commitment – or at risk of losing the employees themselves to competition
3. Collaboration: As organizations move to more and more knowledge based work, the output that groups of people working together achieve is exponential to what people can do individually. However, collaboration does not happen in a vacuum. It starts with people’s willingness to collaborate aided by the way work is structured, processes are defined and the tools that are available to help people connect and work together with others
4. Sharing:  Today’s youth has grown up with social networks where sharing information and pictures is the key to connecting and relating to others. It combines expression and relatedness – considered by many to be the two fundamental human drivers. To really engage with and to leverage the strengths of these younger employees – who are India’s post-liberalisation generation – they would have to enable these aspects in the workplace too.

Originally posted on Gautam on Organizations 2.0.