General Mills: Building a Team of Connected Community Managers — presented by Aaron Miller from SocialMedia.org on Vimeo.

His presentation made me consider two topics I often discuss with peers or with my students (whenever I’m doing training sessions on social media).

MANAGING SOCIAL: AGENCIES, INTERNAL OR A MIX?
At General Mills the presence of brands in social channels was previously managed by agencies. This, in Aaron’s view, meant that they were “paying to build agency skills & knowledge” and not their own, an interesting perspective no doubt.

I’ve seen companies completely outsource their presence on social media to agencies. Many times the decision comes not because they conscientiously believe they do not have the internal skills set or cannot afford to develop it, but simply because they believe it’s easier and probably faster to do just that, or because they see “being on Facebook” as the end strategy in itself and simply just want someone to run that for them so they can tick the “we do social media” box. Most fail to understand what “doing social media” should mean.

A great paper by Almighty entitled “Digital Isn’t Working (Yet)”  (thank you Armando Alves for sharing this on Twitter) features this delightful (yet sad because it’s true) provocation:

“We see organizations struggling to find ways to transform the manner in which they do business socially; to harness networks in meaningful ways. Critically, many of them find it difficult to articulate the value of social media to the organization in a way that merits ongoing investment. As long as it’s easier to go through the motions of publishing streams of ephemera than to transform into social organizations, the value of social will remain unclear.

There was supposed to be something beyond centralizing things on HootSuite.” [emphasis is mine]

Coming back to the topic of how to manage social, it is my personal opinion that an agency will develop your organization’s social presence only up to a certain point. Once you want to go past the competitions – “share this to win something”, “go to our app for a chance to…” – and past the well crafted or funny visuals that look really good on that Facebook page but probably add little value to your business and to your customers (in which case your brand is fighting for the attention of many in what I call the “entertainment side” of a social media presence), then you should think about internalizing social competencies and building up your company’s digital literacy.

For as much as communication and work processes with agencies or other partners might flow really well, they are not in your business (particularly important when the nuances of your product or service are hard to explain to non business related folks), they do not live your brand’s issues or strengths or peculiarities every day, and they do not have access to the unspoken side of the corporate culture that permeates the hallways, the cafeteria or the Christmas office parties.

And consider this for a moment: even if your organization is starting and you’re in the process of developing the internal team and skills, and thus feel the need to leverage on the competencies of an agency, are you sure the only “listening” you want to do of the conversations already going on about your brand, your competitors or your industry, is looking at that monthly report they will prepare for you (where you’ll probably pay more attention to the graph of the number of likes/followers than to anything else)?

General Mills decided to change the way it was approaching social so they built an internal team of 10 community managers, one for each brand, supported by agencies and contractors that act as an extension of that internal team. This way as General Mills gains internal experience it also profits from the experience and expertise of their partners to move things forward.

Community managers at General Mills are responsible for:

• developing the brand’s social strategy
• doing editorial planning
• working on content execution
• tracking and reporting base-level analytics

Aaron’s role is being the community manager of community managers, keeping them connected and learning from each other.

This is how the social brand team structure looks like at General Mills:

Source: http://www.slideshare.net/socialmediaorg/blogwell-los-angeles-social-media-case-study-general-mills-presented-by-aaron-miller

Every time I see such a scheme I cannot help but smile because in my role as Digital Marketing and Social Media manager at work I often feel like I’m playing Jack of all trades. Believe me it can be exciting and creative at times  but also a very lonely place (that’s probably one of the reasons why I like to manage a community of practice with peers from other close businesses, and why I value so much the stream of smart folks I keep track of on Twitter).

HIRING TALENT FOR SOCIAL

Another interesting part of Aaron’s talk was when he explained what he valued when sourcing for talent to this new social team at General Mills. In his words:

“We are looking for qualities more than we are looking for experience”

meaning they were valuing skills and competencies like being strategically creative, having good writing skills and also diverse backgrounds. But most importantly they were looking into how those potential employees used social media for themselves.

This reminds me of my latest post about digital reputation and also of the questions I like to leave my students with, especially those in social media marketing classes: how could someone discover you on social media? In a world where the way companies’ source for talent is changing, how could you connect to a network of continuous learning and future opportunities? If I wanted to recommend you and say “hey, check here some of the stuff she/he has been sharing/writing/working on”, where would I link to? Where is your “digital self” (besides the one sharing holidays’ photos with friends, discussing the latest football scores or doing check-ins in restaurants and bars)?

The answer is usually silence. Many have never even considered this topic. And I’m sure they will not fully understand what I mean until some sort of serendipitous digital magic – when opportunities flow to us – happens to them as it has happened to me before.

And if they still need some convincing to start working on their personal digital/social reputation, then I’m hoping the example of General Mills should be of some use.

But first things first. JP’s post will make your mouth water as he details his successful quest to find a restaurant that does justice to a particular dish he likes. But it ends (spoiler alert!) with the story of how the restaurant owners preferred to be thanked via a recommendation on TripAdvisor instead of the usual tip:

“People don’t want to be thanked in cash, when you could recommend them to others. That’s what matters to them more than the cash”

danah’s brilliant post with interrogations on the future of work describes her dream job (a dream job indeed!):

“I’m a researcher who gets to follow my passions, investigate things that make me curious. I manage my own schedule and task list. Some days, I wake up and just read for hours. I write blog posts and books, travel, meet people, and give talks. I ask people about their lives and observe their practices. I think for a living”

But what got me thinking again about a topic well under discussion nowadays was this bit:

“People keep returning to the mantra of “work-life balance” as a model for thinking about their lives, even as it’s hard to distinguish between what constitutes work and what constitutes life, which is presumably non-work. But this binary makes little sense for many people. And it raises a serious question: what does labor mean in a digital ecosystem where sociality is monetized and personal and professional identities are blurred?”

Which led me to consider this: I firmly believe that in a digitally connected world with blurred frontiers between our personal and professional “selves” we shape our reputation continuously through what we write, the opinions we give, how we care for others and engage with them, how we contribute to the communities we belong to, the content we curate, the side projects we are involved in, the positive or negative signals we choose to amplify on the social web.

And we help shape the reputation of others by giving them our attention, sharing what they do or write, but mostly by conceding them our thoughtful recommendations and endorsements, just as JP will probably do for that restaurant.

That is why I took some time off this sunny Sunday to write a (non-solicited) LinkedIn recommendation for a work colleague I enjoy working with (and I don’t feel like going into the whole “LinkedIn killed recommendations with the endorsement skills functionality” debate, at least not today).

That is also the reason for always explaining why I (at times) recommend people on Twitter via the Friday Follow (#ff).

So my point is: if you care and endorse, then help shape someone’s reputation by acknowledging and visibly recommending their work. And yes, without expecting a recommendation back in return.

• power as a relationship and the impact that has on our traditional notion of empowerment: in short, for someone to be empowered means that the power is obtained against some other(s) social agent(s)
• the concept of network making power: who gets to set the rules that create and re-create those networks? How is decision-making done in networks?
• the fact that the great inspiration for the post was the work of sociologist Manuel Castells

The topic of power reminded me of a painting by Giuseppe Baruffi I saw last year in a museum in Bologna that depicted the city centre and five big towers (“Le cinque torri”). The legend of the painting explained how rich families would erect towers as a symbol of power (and yes, as you may have guessed it, size mattered: the higher the tower, the greater power that family had). I could not find a Creative Commons image of that painting but the following image should give you a good idea of what Bologna looked like with all the tower constructions (if you understand Italian you can find more information here).

Bologna in the 11th century by Angelo Finelli

But it was the last item, the reference to Manuel Castells, I found particularly interesting since the more I explore and learn about organizational transformation and design, the more I find myself investigating sociology-related topics such as social networks, group dynamics and how societies and institutions (re)organize.

Holding a management degree, I look back on my “Psychosociology of Organizations” classes and realize how little I remember of that topic and how hard it must have been for the teacher to engage a class of 18 year olds on their first year at the new world one calls university!

But the reference to Castells rang another bell as some time earlier Jon Husband, that I had the pleasure of meeting recently at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris, had shared on Twitter a link to a talk Castells recently gave at the prestigious RSA entitled Networks of Outrage and Hope. So on the train ride to Lisbon to attend Social Now, I just relaxed and listened to the audio recording.

In that talk Castells explores the recent explosion of social movements, especially since the movement in Iceland in 2009, and the role of our increasingly networked societies (and the online tools that shape that connectedness) in those movements.

In his research he has documented millions of people involved in those movements in over 100 countries, most of them visible via the occupation of urban space in thousands of cities, with many of those actions communicated and coordinated under the radar of mainstream/traditional media.

And though acknowledging that each of those movements may be fighting for different reasons, Castells was able to determine what those movements have in common:

1. they are movements for dignity resulting from an emotional outburst, usually a feeling of deep anger, in a non-tolerable situation such as a feeling of oppression, misery, exploitation. At some point all this suffering makes people at large unable to control themselves any longer: they need to take action
2. a process of construction of a protective space –  a sense of togetherness – occurs when people share their fear and anger with others. This is where communication is very important (and where those with power try to control the communication flows and channels).
3. they have a common starting point: they are network social movements enabled by the power of new online communication channels (corresponding to a new social organization – the networked society) that then develop through different paths and forms of actions or protest
4. they are always spontaneous in their origins and grow virally
5. they are usually leaderless movements

So Castells is seeing the rise of what he calls network social movements: a new form of social movements corresponding to a new form of society (the networked society) that, in turn, corresponds to new forms of cultural institution domination and counterdomination.

In the talk he explains how these are movements that act on the culture and mind of society vis-à-vis political movements acting directly on the State. As Castells says, “they change the way people think, not the way people vote”.

He also explains the concept relational notion of power in society as “part power and part counterpower, always”, though drawing attention to the fact that power can be gained from two very different methods: coercion or persuasion.

To the question “are revolutions tweeted”, many times seen in articles about the Arab Spring or the Occupy movement, Castells explores the role of the Web and social platforms in these network social movements. He sees them as

“the protected space where in principle people can organize themselves and setup calls for mobilization which cannot be easily repressed”.

And here he makes the important distinction between control vs surveillance in stating that governments and other institutions cannot usually control the messages though they can, more or less easily, surveil the messengers.

Revolutions, he says

“come always as a reaction against oppression, misery and exploitation. But that is not enough: you need the social process that triggers the transformation and that social process is built by people communicating to one another those emotions (anger), on elaborating a project through communication processes and channels, and then acting together through a transformation of power relationships. The transformation of the public sphere of communication through the Internet [networked] is critical to the elaboration of new social movements that challenge [established] power.”

I’ve been paying particular attention to the impact of social media on society and citizenship ever since I’ve started organizing Cidadania 2.0, an event on that topic, together with Ana Neves back in 2010. So if, as me, you are interested in these topics I highly recommend you grab a cup of tea, seat comfortably and enjoy the audio recording of his talk. You won’t regret it!

Stowe did the closing keynote of the event and if you want a summary & tweetable version of his talk it would be something like this:

“The future of work is cooperative and we don’t have the right tools yet”

Let me try and explain why: the world has changed. Radically. Permanently. Stowe, as other great thinkers like John Hagel, believes that we are not, economically nor financially nor as a society, going through some sort of phase that will sooner or later go away, and put us back on track from where economies were before the financial crisis.

We now live in a VUCA – Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguous – world (though Stowe doesn’t call it that): fast-paced, networked and based on pull (vs push) communications. Welcome to the post normal world!

In a post normal world, the structures, strategies and principles that guide our economies, societies, businesses and even the way we approach work need to be redefined. And in Stowe’s view in such a world the future of work will increasingly rely on fast-and-loose projects based on swift trust between weak connections (per opposition to traditional projects based on deep trust that one establishes with stronger ties through many interactions over time), thus developing the necessary agility businesses and individuals need to thrive in a fast World.

@stoweboyd: The future of work vs the our current present way of working #socialnow twitter.com/pedrocustodio/…

— Pedro Custódio (@pedrocustodio) April 19, 2013

(note following comment from Stowe: below processes should read push and not pull)

At this point, a side note: if you are unfamiliar with the research of sociologist Mark Granovetter you should check his work on the strength of weak ties.

And a second side note: companies are made up of informal networks, they have always been. Only those networks are not visible and surely not represented by the org chart. For a better understanding of this topic I recommend the work of Valdis Krebs and his company Orgnet, and the research of Rob Cross.

FROM COLLABORATION TO COOPERATION

“The central economic imperative of the new economy is to amplify relationships” (Kevin Kelly cited by Stowe Boyd)

Stowe sees the future of work developing from the collective nature of collaboration to the connective nature of cooperation, which ties in with the fast-and-loose approach to projects he introduced: networked work, built on loose social affiliation and on the value of weak ties.

When it comes to the distinction between the two concepts, I turned also to the work & framework of Harold Jarche:

 ”Collaboration is just getting things done. Cooperation is what drives the extended enterprise — customers, suppliers, partners and anyone else touched by the business”

Collaboration vs cooperation by Harold Jarche

This good comment also explains the difference between both concepts by using the cycling peloton metaphor.

Stowe had already unveiled what would be the topic of his keynote in a blog post for GigaOm:

In brief, we are seeing a transition from process-defined work, where tightly defined rules and narrowly constrained roles shape people working lives, and organize the company culture into a collective mindset, toward relationship-framed work, where people use creativity, innovation, and connection to determine how to accomplish increasingly nonroutine work, and where we see a shift to fast-and-loose cooperation from tight-and-slow collaboration

“Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools!” Marshall McLuhan RT @alexosterwalder

— Daniel Hudson (@webtechman) April 20, 2013

The above tweet was shared by Daniel Hudson just a day after Social Now and immediately led me to consider something that Stowe shared with us: we don’t have the right tools yet to support a cooperative model of work as the majority of tools around are based on collaborative models (check this post by Stowe on how cooperative tools need to become engines of meaning). That’s probably why he keeps track of so many different tools, especially those being developed by startups that can (in theory) more easily innovate by breaking away from existing mental models of how we approach work.

His vision of the future of work seems to me to imply a freedom of choice to pick whatever tool is best suited for the job at hand or for the end goal in mind (“do I need to collaborate on this or just cooperate/share something/tap into my network of weak connections?”). But ideally an interoperability or some sort of connectivity between these different tools is needed and here I guess a true challenge lies (not innocently, one of the questions the panel most asked was related to the ability of the tools presented to integrate or connect with other different applications).

THE ROLE OF BUSINESS PROCESSES

In a fast-and-loose, networked, post normal World, what is the role of business processes? With cognitive (complex and based on problem-solving) work on the rise, organisations will need to reconsider how they approach business processes that usually aim at routinising work.

Stowe hinted on this topic also, stating that processes will act more like guidelines of “consider doing that this way” than rigid and prescribed models of what to do.

CHANGE AND LEADERSHIP
With my head spinning (in a good way) after his talk, I had the opportunity of asking him two questions: how do companies transition to this new model of work (should they start at the edges as John Hagel and co suggest?); and what is the role of leadership in a cooperative, post-normal and networked model of work?

On the topic of change Stowe compares the movement needed inside companies to that of a complex contagion that needs a high level of advocacy to reduce the risk. Most probably, changes are sparked by what happens outside the organisation (at the edge) starting with individuals that have high betweenness. To him, all change starts at the individual level, a characteristic even more important in a fast-and-loose model.

So where should companies start? They should find the positive deviants, those already changing towards a future model, and involve them in figuring out how to build that positive contagion throughout the organisation.

Which leads us to question number two: the role of leadership. In Stowe’s view the role of the leader is to find those positive deviants and encourage those behaviours and change. The leader will increasingly act as a mentor. This reminds me of Richard Collin‘s idea of leaders as farmers of trust and harvesters of skills (interestingly, Richard cites Stowe Boyd on this presentation).

THE ROAD AHEAD
We are now in a time of transition, a period for rethinking how we organise as businesses, as individuals working for businesses (or setting up our own business) and as a society. I am particularly thrilled to be living in such a time. The opportunities are vast. The challenges are immense. There is no map of the future, no blueprint of how to navigate in a post-normal World. But this is a big part of the thrill: we can pave the road to the future as we make the journey!

[added on the 7th of May: Stowe Boyd wrote about his keynote for GigaOM Pro. Part 1 is here & Part 2 is here]

With a unique format, Social Now challenges social tools to demo themselves and show how they would address the challenges of the same fictitious company named Cablinc. The experts panel role is to question vendors from the perspective of business needs & concerns (my role), user experience (Pedro Custódio) and IT (Phil Hill). Through those questions or comments our aim was to help the audience make sense of what was being presented and think through some of the questions they might want to ask in a real vendor discussion.

Experts panel at Social Now 2013 | photo by @retorta_net on Flickr

As I seat at my favourite cafe by the seaside, that familiar place where waiters know how I like my toast, I’m thinking not about the tools themselves but about what we are looking for (in the case of participants whose companies are not yet using social tools to support work) or what we are currently trying to achieve (for folks already working on experiments or implementations of social software for business).

Are we looking to transform the way our companies work and organize, or “just” trying to improve how they get stuff done? (and I write “just” because I’m not making any judgment regarding one goal or the other). Or are companies (or better yet, individuals promoting change inside companies) consciously using the “excuse” of improving work as Trojan mice to introduce pockets of change with a true transformation in mind?

My question arises from the fact that improving work, at an individual and group level, might be very important but not necessarily transformational.

And if we are not aiming to transform them, because I believe that in some cases the end goal is not transformational but implementing incremental small improvements on top of the existing organizational structure and business processes, then are we really preparing organisations for the post normal future that Stowe Boyd shared with us during his inspiring keynote?

#socialnow #futureofwork drifting towards cooperation, to network-oriented, the value of weak ties & loose social affiliation @stoweboyd

— Ana Silva (@AnaDataGirl) 19 de abril de 2013

As Emanuele Quintarelli suggested in his opening keynote:

The social enterprise is transformational so changes need to consider the power shifts that will occur inside

Shouldn’t we be considered the Erase and rewind approach that he suggested? And are we doing that? Honestly and purposefuly doing that?

Erase & rewind: think about power of people, communities & their relationships inside the enterprise, the social glue #socialnow

— Ana Silva (@AnaDataGirl) 18 de abril de 2013

Transformation is not easy and is many times a scary concept. It takes time to achieve and especially time (and mental availability) to understand & consider what transformational will mean for each of our businesses or side projects. And with the tsunami of busyness that our organisations are in, we barely have time to thoughtfully consider how to approach the next project we are involved in, let alone pause to rethink how to (re)organise for the fast paced, networked, post normal world that Stowe envisions!

I don’t know about you, but for the last year or so I approach my participation in events or conferences around the topic of enterprise 2.0, social enterprise or social tools for business (whatever you prefer to call it) not as a way to watch keynotes or check the latest case studies or tools, but (mostly) as a golden opportunity to “pick people’s brains” about how they view what they and their companies are doing in this sphere, how they approach change, where do they start (the edges or the core)…

And these encounters always make me wonder: are we aiming high enough? Am I aiming high enough?

A few trials and tribulations on the editorial side delayed initial plans a bit but finally the book (in Portuguese) Novas Tendências em Marketing Intelligence was launched yesterday to my great pleasure. Hooray!

The book features four chapters where I’m either the author or the co-author (and suddenly I’m reminded of the frantic rhythm I experienced during 2010 while juggling several projects!) with topics ranging from Sampling and Market Research, New Trends and Challenges in Market Research, Data Mining & Business Strategy, and Business Process Management.

To mark the event I was invited to participate in a discussion panel around the impact of these new trends in businesses together with BPM expert Jorge Coelho and Data Mining expert Carlos Soares. Each of us brought to the table our different views on the current challenges and opportunities that businesses experience, and I started by reminding the audience that in a VUCA world we need to rethink organizational design and challenge some of past management practices and the way we design our business processes. As John P. Kotter stated in a great post for HBR in November 2012:

Perhaps the greatest challenge business leaders face today is how to stay competitive amid constant turbulence and disruption

The conversation soon defaulted to the topic of big data, though I’m far from being highly knowledgeable on the topic, and the panel ended up being a warm-up session for a talk on that same topic presented by Miguel Veloso. Miguel kicked off his talk by highlighting some trends:

• customers are demanding personalized solutions from brands
• customer touchpoints with a company or brand have increased significantly
• the digital shift (or Darwinism) is upon us
• companies are trying to organize & act with customer-centricity in mind (though I would say in many cases it’s more lip service than anything else)

He then explained how the evolution of computing power and technology enabled more sophisticated data processing and analytical capabilities, increasingly giving rise to data-driven innovation processes: the right product or service, for the right customer at the right moment. These higher analytical capabilities, coupled with the volume, variety and velocity of new data generated, characterizes the big data phenomenon (though when it comes to volume Carlos Soares introduced an interesting concept: “big” should be evaluated vis-à-vis an organization’s computational power and not as an absolute quantity).

Companies must understand how to integrate different data sources, including existing structured transactional data with new data formats, but most importantly what that data will help them accomplish in terms of improved business processes and value generated. And here Miguel left us an important warning: success starts with defining the strategy and goals behind any big data project and only then considering the 3 pillars of a big data project: technology, processes and competencies (this sounds common sense but how often common sense is forgotten in many organizations? Many times it seems).

On the topic of competencies both Miguel and Carlos seemed to agree that data science is a combination of art, science and engineering, a combination not easily available in the market. The risk, Carlos warned, is that with not enough data scientists around to do quality work, we run the risk of inflating the big data bubble and leave it to, and quote, “snake oil consultants that charge twice as much because it’s a big data project”.

All in all it was a very agreeable end to a workday. And it’s not every day that you get your name featured in a book!

Often when meeting people that also work in geographically distributed companies I take the opportunity to pick their brains on how they view and address some of the challenges of different nationalities coming together to get stuff done, particularly when it comes to applying the concepts of Enterprise 2.0 inside their organizations. Believe me, conversations are always fascinating as we seem to share most of the pains no matter in which countries the organizations are.

Because I find the topic both fascinating and challenging, I was very much pleased when Twitter (what else, right?) “threw” at me two very enjoyable resources.

The first is this long but well worth reading post about Collaboration, Empathy, and Language in Global Teams. I was particularly struck by findings of some studies on the imposition of English as the lingua franca for some organizations such as the one I reproduce here:

Regardless of the level of English fluency, “almost all nonnative speakers experienced a feeling of diminished professional standing as their companies designated English as the organizational sine qua non…Feeling both restricted by language ability and reduced vis-a-vis their organizations created difficulties for nonnative speakers, because the gap between their mother tongue and English remained stark. This hidden turmoil had drastic consequences for employees and their global collaborators

Ouch! The post then goes on to explain the importance of stimulating empathy (yes!!) between employees of different nationalities in order to overcome some of the challenges and facilitate collaboration. You should read the full post, really.

The other resource was Steelcase’s study on Patterns of Work Cultures among 11 countries:

Source: http://360.steelcase.com/articles/the-same-but-different-mapping-the-patterns-of-work-cultures/

Source: http://360.steelcase.com/articles/the-same-but-different-mapping-the-patterns-of-work-cultures/

The findings have implications for the physical workplace design, the business of Steelcase, but not only as I think it provides some interesting clues for understanding different work habits and expectations depending on the country, with direct impact to the policies and tools we design to support work and collaboration. In fact, Steelcase goes beyond their métier to address current challenges of how work gets done in many distributed organizations:

Demands for increasing creative collaboration and innovation have shown that rigid organizational structures based solely on hierarchy are proving to be less effective than networks. Leading organizations comprise of project teams, committees, communities and individuals, all of which are virtually and physically networked

Check the full edition of Steelcase 360 dedicated to different work cultures here.

Boas leituras*!!

*enjoy your reading

I was invited to participate in the panel entitled “Digital Workplace Framework”, aiming to shed some light on the building blocks & framework of the digital workplace, as well as discussing the concept and challenges of systems or applications integration. So, it was a very tech oriented theme but one that I find very important to address.

I was there as a practitioner with a non-IT background which for a panel discussing technology is quite interesting. The goal was to share my views on how practitioners should challenge their IT teams and the vendors working with them – thinking about users’ needs and experience, solving the integration challenge when integration is needed, building tech capabilities for a future of work increasingly interconnected – and also to talk a little bit about an experience I had with a pilot project.

The panel featured Stephan Schillerwein as a main speaker on the topic of the Digital Workplace Framework, Jon Froda (co-founder of Podio) and myself on the discussion panel and Claude Super as moderator.

Stephan shared his views on the topic of Digital Workplace, drawing attention to some misconceptions around this concept. He emphasized, for example, that too many times the discussion focuses too much on the digital aspect and not that much on how work gets done and should be supported by technology. He defines Digital Workplace as

A Digital Workplace is the enabling technology to bring out the best in people – individually, in teams and entire organizations – for work in a post-industry age

and feels we should look at the concept from the perspective of the employee and his tasks. He then went on to tackle the technology aspect, offering some reasons that help distinguish the technology enabling the digital workplace from previous technologies such as portals (many of which notoriously failed), namely:

• technology has moved forward
• the Digital Workplace is now seen as business critical in many organizations, a trend due to continue
• there’s no reason for us not to think about the architecture, and the logical interaction/integration, of the different systems or applications enabling work

And on this final topic I jumped in to share how a pilot project I managed proved that the apparent strong interconnection between social and content managing capabilities, as shown in the pre-pilot/on paper & Powerpoint stage, in fact proved not quite true for the sole reason that technology really didn’t respond how we expected (expectations are an interesting thing, aren’t they?)

I also shared some thought provoking quotes which I share here:

• [on integration at a process level and in the flow of work] when it comes to integration on a process level, in the 2013 Digital Workplace Trends report, Jane McConnel concluded that “very few organizations are currently integrating social collaboration into enterprise processes in a way which is changing how they work”

• [on the importance of open standards to ensure interoperability] in an article last year entitled Enterprise Social Networks Need Open Standards, Dion Hinchcliffe said that “social media in general has proliferated so extensively now that there are often a half dozen or more social apps that we use every day in our personal lives, in the workplace, or both. But they usually have quite limited interoperability when it comes to our identities, data integration, and inter-social network user experience. Thus, our work in them is fragmented and siloed, limiting their reach and value”. But in his opening keynote Dion Hinchcliffe stated that one of the few predictions he made last year that did NOT materialize was the adoption of open standards, which left me wondering how we will achieve that interoperability. During the Q&A session following his keynote both Cordelia Krooß and Luis Suarez asked very relevant questions related to integration, both at a process and technology level, which makes me confident that at least part of the community will continue asking the tough questions.

• [on challenging the current state of technology to enable the connected organization] in her brilliant post entitled 2013 Prediction: Social Business Tech will Stop Blaming Culture for Failure, Deb Lavoy offers this statement “In 2013 the industry will acknowledge that while we’ve made great progress in the last five years, the technology that naturally leads to a well orchestrated, connected, collaborative organization has yet to arrive”. From some of the stories I’ve heard practitioners’ experience often validates this: we are not there yet.

During our preliminary discussions to prepare the panel, Jon Froda, which during the debate warned that there’s “too much intra and not enough net in the discussion about intranets/digital workplace”, offered an interesting perspective on the topic of integration which I picked up and brought to the discussion table.

His view was: if many employees are in fact handling the ever growing number of exceptions to defined business processes through excel files and emails, thus flying away from the business applications put in place to support those business processes, then should we in fact worry about integrating existing business applications with social software capabilities, or should we just let social software help address those pain points and transform the business processes without worrying too much on the efforts of technological integration? [and on the topic of social software for business performance you cannot miss this report from the Deloitte Center for the Edge]

The way forward remains undefined as it seems that different opinions prevail and we have yet few concrete results from what companies are doing in this front and the impacts they are observing (again, we are not there yet). And I also believe that we won’t find a magic formula for how to solve the integration challenge. Maybe the answer will be the not so glamorous “it depends”: on the organization, on how work gets done, on how work & business will be transformed.

Stowe Boyd offered another interesting perspective on this issue this week when stating:

enterprise vendors want to build broad tools that can be sold to thousands of people at one time, in one deal. They are stuck in an enterprise software sale mindset. The vendors are caught in a trap, building big flat layers of software that are designed for sales reps to sell instead of deep and narrow software tools that are designed for users to solve their most critical issues

And Harold Jarche also wondered this week that

Enterprise knowledge sharing will never be as good as what networked individuals can do. Individuals who own their knowledge networks will invest more in them…Whoever creates an organizational structure that bridges the individual-organizational knowledge sharing divide may have significant business advantages

As I’ve stated in my last post, diversity of perspectives and the questions that they generate are a sign of a community which is down-to-earth & focused on making sense of the current transformations affecting organizations, work & society. So we may not have all the answers but we surely can’t stop fighting the good fight, asking the right questions and continue the discussions (at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit or elsewhere).

I’ll shamelessly “steal” Deb Lavoy’s end tagline from her posts and for the moment just say: the best is yet to come!

At the end of day 2 @fredericw tweeted an interesting proposition for attendees: summing up the event in 5 keywords.

Hey #e20s fellows, how would you summarize these 2 days in 5 #keywords ? #e20s5w What did you learn?

— fredericw (@fredericw) 21 de março de 2013

That proposition is the basis for this blog post as I digest on the last few days.

ADAPTATION
Luis Suarez, one of the best known faces of the E20 community and a great guy, proposed at some point we should stop talking about adoption of social and start talking about adaptation: building capabilities to deal with an uncertain world; adapt to the different needs & styles of working of employees.

To me this is highly related with Jon Husband‘s definition of a social business as a social system focused on purpose & results and on building capabilities (organizing for adaptability and agility). (PS – Jon has promised to blog to go deeper into this definition and I’m looking forward to it).

LEARNING
One of the discussions I found more interesting, and a topic that I think will be increasingly relevant both on a personal and organisational level, is that of social learning, a theme I covered recently in this blog. Ellen Trude brought to the event a fresh perspective on what it means to learn at work and for work purposes, and how different it is from the current approach of organizations to training. In her view a social business is a learning organization.

As she stated “the workplace of tomorrow is more complex than that of today but maybe we are now more apt to deal with complexity now”, which somewhat is connected to the need of building adaptable and constant learning organizations. She also looks at learn not from the perspective of acquiring skills (traditional view of learning) but from the prism of developing competencies (to thrive in a connected world).

Business, and work, is increasingly connected: as Dion Hinchcliffe stated in his opening keynote “in a traditional world we are used to being asked to do everything ourselves. We need to learn to let the network do some work for us”. And learning will also increasingly occur, in a dynamic and constant way, through networks.

CHALLENGES
According to Thierry de Baillon “we need to rethink organizations. What we now have are organisations that are complex systems. This means there is no available framework for these kinds of enterprises”. So challenges still abound, uncertainties remain, different perspectives

I can’t help but feel as if we were sailors, setting out into the vast unknown and unchartered territory of the organisation of the 21^st century, armed with nothing but a few guiding tools but no clear map of how to arrive there nor of what we will find. Being Portuguese this feels like an homage to the brave period of the Portuguese discoveries in the 15^th and 16^th centuries, and I deeply hope I can contribute to this exploration and navigation.

And I was reminded, both through the discussions in the event and the always fascinating conversations on those moments of delightful conviviality outside of the official program, that perhaps it is still too early for us to expect big conclusions or recommendations, which makes me question if we should be talking about maturity.

A challenge was what myself, Rawn, Sebastian, Rogier, Martin, Nathanael and Benoît embraced in the Management Hackathon on the Principles for the New Organization (on a side note, organisational design was a topic often addressed during the event). The outcome was a concept inspired from the work that Dave Gray has been doing about the Connected Company that organises into pods: small autonomous units that tackle specific ventures in a self organized way.

We envisioned work much more project-based, with managers acting as sponsors for projects which develop though self organised teams (the pods) that come together. In order to give visibility to the different competencies of colleagues, rotation dynamics would be put in place to foster network effects. Accountability is important in order to make sure that projects get done and progress is tracked & reported. And in this new work design, teams self regulated but this new reality needs to be fostered through an environment that allows teams to fail forward. We thus thought it would be important to recognize and “reward” failure (through the chicken award ).

DIVERSITY
Different people, nationalities, languages, backgrounds, ages. But also different wording regarding the phenomenon we are witnessing, different views on how to prepare organizations for the challenges ahead and different opinions on the current state of affairs: I guess what Dion Hinchcliffe’s had in mind when he said in his keynote on the current state of Enterprise 2.0/Social Business that “when something matures, reality sets in and we get pragmatic“ is based on a different view of the present than that of Euan Semple’s that in his keynote worried about us “turning what could be a very powerful change into a highly structured thing put into little boxes?”

This is actually a very healthy sign. From diversity comes debate, questions, possible paths and a shared construction of the future.

COMMUNITY
Once again the Enterprise 2.0 Summit proved me, though proof was not needed, how smart, knowledgeable, kind and caring is the group of people that online and offline contribute to the discussions around this topic and share their expertise and experience. The conversations that occur during events such as this one are increasingly what I treasure the most!

Some “usual suspects” as Samuel Driessen, David Demetrius and Oscar Berg were missed.

A final word of congratulations to Björn and his team for organizing yet another good event and a thank you for inviting me to participate in a discussion panel (more on that on a separate blog post). Having organized events myself I know how stressful and crazy things can be and how difficult to find the correct balance between topics, speakers and dynamics of the event.

For more great resources you should definitely check Emanuele Quintarelli’s liveblogging notes (what would be of our community without him!).

It is an exciting time for digital practitioners and 2013 promises to be a turning point for many organizations. The digital workplace concept is gaining momentum as organizations are beginning to realize that work is fundamentally changing

This is one of the opening quotes that can be found in the Digital Workplace Trends Report 2013 created and published by renowned intranet and digital workplace expert Jane McConnel. The report is the 7^th in a series of annual survey, until 2011 known as the Global Intranet Trends report, and was based on an online survey with 362 participating organizations from several industries located primarily in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.

Jane was kind enough to let me take a look into the findings of this year’s edition.

In the report, the concept of a digital workplace is defined as follows:

A coordinated, holistic view of information, collaboration and application platforms, services and tools used by the workforce to support their work. It includes managed, collaborative, social and mobile dimensions.

The findings highlight the differences between two major groups: the early adopters and all other organizations. The report sees 2013 as being the year for digital workplace awareness and experimentation for most organizations, while for early adopters change facilitation will be predominantly on the table.

2013 is also expected to be the year companies tackle the mobile access challenge and put some structure & governance, as well as facilitating search and content discoverability, through investments in information organization via actions of information architecture, taxonomies and tagging.

Some key findings I’d highlight from this year’s report:

• main drivers for tackling on the digital workplace challenge are improved organizational intelligence and improved efficiency & cost savings
• capabilities related to social collaboration and seen as more transformative regarding the way work currently gets done in companies (commenting, user-generated content, crowdsourcing and social networking) are those where the gap between deployment and adoption is wider. I could argue that several factors might help explain this gap, including the fact that the distribution of participation inside the firewall might not exactly follow the famous 90-9-1 rule but some sort of distribution of participation (through commenting or producing contents) will always exist
• older technologies such as video or web conferencing and real time messaging seem more mature, both in terms of implementation and adoption, than, for example, activity streams. I think some factors might help explain this: the benefits for each employee are easier to perceive: “I cannot travel to that meeting but I can still attend from a distance via videoconference”, “If it weren’t for the web conferencing functionality I might not even be involved in this discussion”, “Not sure if colleague A is at her desk, I’ll just ping her via the internal instant messaging system since she is connected”. As for activity streams, and as I’ve discussed before, the lack in digital literacy on how to benefit from social tools to get work done might hinder their adoption.
• when it comes to integrating social into existing business processes, the report states that “very few organizations have embedded social capabilities into enterprise processes”. This is not surprising and supports what other surveys and stories from early adopters have shown. But there is an increasing awareness as to the potential benefits of integrating social capabilities with other systems that support work, while at the same time the embedding of social would help transform existing business processes, though this seems easier said than done.

For a full account of the findings of the report, beautifully organized as highlights ready to use in meetings or other internal discussion sessions, you can purchase the 2013 report here.