The (Social) Network Is Your Company

May 17, 2013 By Leave a Comment

John Gage, the 21st employee of Sun Microsystems coined the now famous phrase:

“The Network is the Computer”

which became a prominent feature on the Sun Microsystems’ logo and motto. More than that it became part of their philosophy before the large scale adoption of the internet. They realised that the combined power of computers, interconnected, is the real computer – able to carry out more complex tasks than would otherwise be possible by the boxes we sit in front of today.

That same philosophy applies today in the world of social networking. People use Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and other social media tools to extend their friendships beyond what would otherwise be possible.

If Sun Microsystems recognised this in the 1980s, and the late 2000′s saw the rise of social media as a phenomenon which validates and amplifies our own experiences, then why would this philosophy not also apply in business?

For example, the collective experience of people attending a rock concert and sharing their photos on a social media platform amplifies the experience for all who participate. I might get to see angles of the stage I couldn’t from where I was standing because someone else, at that angle shared their photos. I might get new insights to the dynamics of the band or catch a moment which couldn’t be seen from the distance I was from the stage.

What amplification of experience would your organisation experience by extending the natural personal networks of your employees? By making it much easier for employees to find and stay in contact with co-workers with similar issues, working on similar projects or just simply engaged in similar work you extend the reach of their experience to angles which had not previously been connected.

But what virtue is there in sharing the photos? Well, the natural altruisim of individuals comes in to play and encourages everyone who is connected to contribute what they have for the collective good. That photographer would get to see my photos, and those of many others, encouraged to do so by him sharing his pictures.

Encouraging your employees to become interconnected in a business social network is one of the simplest ways of bringing down the barriers to communication in your organization. By connecting the people, the naturally begin to share information and exchange ideas to such an extent over time that the network itself takes on the characteristics of the company. The collective intelligence of the organization is held in the social network and because it is shared it is not dependent on any single node (or individual) any more.

Your staff’s collective knowledge and experience becomes shared and networked amongst everyone else. There’s no single point of failure any more. There becomes a culture of sharing what you know because others do it and people find value in what others choose to share. As I have blogged before here, your value in the social network is not what you know, but what you share.

Consider, therefore, how important building a social network in your organization actually is. This is more than an intranet, a shared server, public folders or just a discussion forum for people to gossip. This is a way of engaging people’s deep-seated desire to be recognized, to be satisfied and to co-operate.  To create satisfaction, Herzberg says you need to address the motivating factors associated with work. He called this “job enrichment”. His premise was that every job should be examined to determine how it could be made better and more satisfying to the person doing the work. Things to consider include:

  • Providing opportunities for achievement.
  • Recognizing workers’ contributions.
  • Creating work that is rewarding and that matches the skills and abilities of the worker.
  • Giving as much responsibility to each team member as possible.
  • Providing opportunities to advance in the company through internal promotions.
  • Offering training and development opportunities, so that people can pursue the positions they want within the company.

It’s less about technology and more about actually finding a way of working which genuinely makes your organization more motivated and much smarter.  A social business network, such as IBM Connections, can let you do that.

Filed Under: IBM Connections, Social Business Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

How I saved eight minutes today by doing nothing

April 29, 2013 By Leave a Comment

This is a short example of something that landed in my inbox today which, I confess, I was so impressed with I just had to share it.  In the nearly twenty years I have been working with Notes I have become accustomed to receiving emails with DocLinks, and more recently URLs to databases or other applications which a user wants me to interact with.

A DocLink, for the uninitiated, is basically like a URL but specifically for a Notes document in a database somewhere.  This predates URLs by about 10 years, at least in the form that we know them.  Traditionally a user would send me a doclink to a document in a Notes database they wanted me to act on.  More sophisticated apps used emails with Doclinks to run a workflow of some kind.

This model carried over into the internet world and any messaging system these days can easily send you an email with a URL to a web page which might contain actions for you to perform.

Notes, however, with version 9 is different.  Using Embedded Experiences Notes can do the work of getting that web page or application the original email and presents the action you have to perform in the context of the message.

Notes working with a Connections embedded experience

One of the reasons this is good is because I don’t need to go clicking on a link to find out what the message is about.  It’s presented, with the fidelity of the original application, right there in the email.  The buttons work, I can perform all the same actions as the original application has, but I am doing it inside an email.

This is a big productivity gain as I don’t need to move from one application to another, I don’t need to log in each time to another system simply to see what a link contains and I can deal with the action straight away.

In this one example above I saved about five seconds.  That might not sound much but today I got about 100 of these emails, so I saved 500 seconds, a little over 8 minutes.  Let’s say half of the employees in IBM (200,000) saved (conservatively) 5 minutes a day using this.  That’s 16,700 hours PER DAY we’ve saved.  Multiply that by your day rate and you’re clearly more productive by being SOCIAL BUSINESS.

Filed Under: IBM Connections, IBM Lotus Notes Tagged With: , , , ,

Socialize your Shared Folders with Notes 9.0 Social Edition and IBM Connections Activities

March 12, 2013 By Leave a Comment

To mark the launch of IBM Notes 9.0 Social Edition I wanted to show how the combination of Notes and Connections provides a flexible  solution to sharing folders of information whilst making you and your team truly SOCIAL by working together on your tasks.

In my last blog post I demonstrated how to use Activities in IBM Connections to restructure a project and manage the process.  In this post I want to show how the System of Engagement – i.e. engaging people in managing the project and its tasks, can be turned into a System of Record - one which is used as a long term store of the information relating to a project.

How does this theory stack up in day-to-day practice however?  Well, if you read my previous post on Activities and Project Management you can see how to manage the actions.  Now I want to show you how to record the details of the process.

To start this process, and to mark its launch day, I am going to use IBM Notes 9.0 Social Edition.  It has a sidebar which can be connected to your Connections environment to show what Activities you have and to allow you to interact with them without jumping between them:

Image 11-03-2013 at 21.50 5

The Activities sidebar is integral into IBM Notes 9.0 Social Edition and provides a bridge between your email and your Social Project Tasks.  This is the same structure we examined in the last blog post.

The example email I have shown in the screenshot you can see that there is also a file attached to the email.  When I drag the email from my drafts to the Activity a few things happen:

Image 11-03-2013 at 21.50

First the integration creates an Entry in my Activity outline in the area where I drop the email.

Next it creates a second Entry with the file attachment:

Image 11-03-2013 at 21.50 2

If we log into the web browser version of IBM Connections and go to the Activity we can see the email dropped into place:

Image 11-03-2013 at 21.50 3

You can see from the entries that it creates that one has a Bookmark with a Lotus Notes icon and another (a child of the first) with a paper clip icon.  The first is a copy of the email I dragged in together with a link back to my original email in my mail file.

It uses a notes:// URL format so it relies on having IBM Notes installed and for the end user to have access to the mail file.  In any case the message is included in the Entry so you don’t need to go back to Notes to see the email:

Image 11-03-2013 at 21.51

You can of course spawn new entries from either the email or its attachment, such as a comment, more tasks and so on.

Taking this approach you might consider having a new section in your Activity, labelled “Communications”, and treat it like a Public Folder where everyone involved can place their communications or other information.

In this way you can use Activities and IBM Connections as providing a way of converging Systems of Record (like document management systems) and Systems of Engagement (like wikis and forums):

Social Business connects systems of engagement and systems of record

Social Business connects systems of engagement and systems of record

You can now treat Activities as your System of Record for a project or major task.  You can manage all the actions, record comments and save all your communications and files relating to the project directly in the same place.  Everyone has access to the same version of the truth, everyone sees what’s been happening and most importantly you are engaging everyone to participate by making it easy to share.  As Ginni Rometty (IBM CEO) said just last week (at 12 minutes 10 seconds):

In a social enterprise,….., your value will be not what you know, but what you share.

When you combine your new found social project management skills together with the encouragement to start recording and placing all the information that lead you to the decisions you made on that project you will find that the value of what you share increases enormously. Using a tool like IBM Connections’ Activities makes that possible NOW.

Thanks to Bruce Elgort for suggesting a couple of edits to this post!

Filed Under: How To..., IBM Connections, Social Business Tagged With: , , ,

Using Activities to Restructure and Manage a Project

March 11, 2013 By 1 Comment

Earlier today I was preparing a project for handover to a colleague. Although we have a documented process we follow for the work, it is in the form of a Word document and can be difficult to track which steps you’ve completed and which are still to be done. So that my colleague and his manager can work through the steps to be performed in a set order I went about using one of my favourite applications within IBM Connections – Activities.

Activities is like a simple to-do list manager which can expand into a multi-user, multi-community project management and documentation solution. It brings SOCIAL PROJECT MANAGEMENT to any department and avoids the situation where only the project manager might know the true status of a project.

Activities’ tasks are aggregated and joined together so that you, as a user, can see all the work you’ve to do, across all your activities, sorted by date order. This makes for a tremendous productivity gain as I don’t need to go hunting in each Activity to see what’s coming next.

In Project Management parlance, Activities provides a multi-level task facility and management of several Activities essentially acts as program management, or portfolio management.

In my case I wanted simply to get the procedure we have, which is how to install an IBM Sametime Standard Server, into the order in which I believe my colleague should carry out the steps. Rather than going through the standard procedure, which lays out all of the tasks in a linear order, I realised that it would be more convenient for him to have it broken down into a number of telephone calls/remote sessions he will conduct with the customer.

When you create an Activity in Connections it opens what I can only describe as a project home page. Here you can structure your activity into sections, add comments and other content and all the tasks that you or your colleagues need to perform:

SA1

In the example above I have created nine sections, each designed to group the tasks that my colleague has to perform into the calls or sessions he will have with the customer. 

In each section I have placed all the tasks I believe he needs to perform:

SA2

As you can see from the structure, IBM Connections lets you create a multi-level to-do list for all the tasks to be performed.  These can be many layers deep as you need for your project.  Note that there is already one comment posted next to the “Obtain Sametime software from Passport Advantage”.  The social aspect of Activities allows any participant to start a discussion on a single tasks and spawn additional tasks off from these.

My colleague’s manager is an author in this particular activity.  He has chosen to Follow the Activity (see first screenshot).  Rather than ask questions about whether or not a particular task has been done, by following the Activity he gets updates in his Activity Stream in IBM Connections each time something changes.  This also avoids him being bombarded by emails with status updates.

In the depths of each task in my Activity I can provide as much or as little supporting information as is appropriate.  In the screenshot below you can see one of these tasks opened out for more detail. 

SA3

  1. The field “To Do” is the title of the task itself.
  2. Tags let me assign system-wide to this particular task.  This is really useful in the future if I do a search for a particular technology or skill in Connections.  I can then find actions one of my colleages carried out on a particular project and if necessary get in touch with him to get some help.  Tagging makes it really easy to find information or people who can help you.
  3. Assigned To is obvious enough – who is going to do this particular task.
  4. Due Date is when it’s needed to be done for.
  5. Attach File lets me attach multiple files for this task, such as a very detailed sequence of commands, or a file which needs to be supplied for the software.
  6. Add Bookmark would let me provide links to wiki articles, blog posts or in fact anything that has a URL which might be pertinent to this task.
  7. Custom Fields lets me put extra placeholders in.  One of the most common custom fields we add is the “Expected Time to Complete” field which describes how long the task would normally take.
  8. The Description field is where you can provide as much information as you see fit about the tasks which need to be carried out.  It uses the Connections Rich Text editor so there are lots of options for formatting and producing bullet-points etc.
  9. If this is a task that I want to make visible only to me – such as a review of the overall Activity, I can flag it as being private. This means that although the whole Activity will appear for those who are members of it, this particular task will be hidden only for me.
  10. Lastly, although Connections normally sends an email message to the Assignee of the task, you can also choose to notify others of this particular task.

These tasks can be made into a very sophisticated hierarchy of tasks and sub-tasks to suit the needs of your project.

I hope this brief introduction to Activities sheds some light on the power of the tool at your disposal as a Connections customer.  Look out for another blog post on using Activities Entries with your IBM Notes Activities sidebar as a way of capturing email and other information alongside your tasks.

Filed Under: How To..., IBM Connections, Social Business, Technical Stuff Tagged With: , ,

Integrate LibreOffice with IBM SmartCloud and IBM Connections

March 9, 2013 By Leave a Comment

In a previous blog post I expounded the virtues of using the IBM Connections Desktop Plugin for Windows to make working with IBM SmartCloud for Social Business and also your own IBM Connections environment more seamless.  In this post I am going to describe how to use a popular alternative to OpenOffice, LibreOffice, to access the same services from any platform using IBM’s CMIS integration services.

Content Management Interoperability Services is a standard used amongst enterprise content management system producers to help improve the compatibility of the backend with the multitude of front ends, such as mobile devices, desktops, etc, that want to access them.  IBM has built CMIS compatibility into SmartCloud and also Connections so you can use this fact to make it easy to work with files you have in your public, private or hybrid cloud solution.

I have been using LibreOffice 4.0 for quite a while now and have come to find the fact that it includes not only CMIS support but also WebDAV very useful, especially until the release of the Connections FileSync solution announced at IBM Connect in Florida earlier this year.

The first step in LibreOffice to getting this working is to switch on LibreOffice dialog boxes instead of using the operating system’s default dialogs.  Go to Preferences, LibreOffice, General and switch it on as shown in the red box.

Switch on LibreOffice dialogs in the Preferences

Switch on LibreOffice dialogs in the Preferences

Next, go to File, Open and when the dialog opens press the little selector button, shown in the red box below:

Selector button in File, Open

Selector button in File, Open

This is where we’ll set up the CMIS location, in this example for IBM SmartCloud for Social Business:

Add SmartCloud for Social Business as a location

Add SmartCloud for Social Business as a location

Give the destination a name, like IBM SmartCloud for Social Business.  Then choose CMIS as the Type.  In the Server Details section, under Server Type choose Lotus Live Files.

The system will default to the old LotusLive address.  Change this to https://apps.na.collabserv.com – all the rest of the URL should stay the same.

Next click on the little refresh button shown in red.

Challenge for user name and password

Challenge for user name and password

When you press the refresh button the Authentication Required dialog comes up.  Enter your SmartCloud user name and password.  Click OK.

Navigating your folders in SmartCloud

Navigating your folders in SmartCloud

You may be asked to supply a master password to store your credentials.  Do that, and then the dialog box will show your new destination.  Click on IBM SmartCloud in the Places box and give it a second or so.  You’ll see My Folders and My Files.  Double-click on My Files and SHAZAM!

File opened from SmartCloud by CMIS in LibreOffice

File opened from SmartCloud by CMIS in LibreOffice

Double-click on the file you want and in a few seconds it’ll appear.

Do your edits then File, Save to send your changes back.  Saving seems to take longer than opening.

For new files, select File, New from the menu bar as usual.  When you are ready, select File, Save:

Saving a file to SmartCloud

Saving a file to SmartCloud

Select IBM SmartCloud from the Places, navigate to the folder you want, provide a file name and press Save.  I found saving quite slow.

You can repeat adding places to provide links to, say, your own Connections environment or Greenhouse by following the same procedure,.

It may not be a perfect solution but will keep us going until Connections FileSync is released!

Filed Under: How To..., IBM Connections, IBM SmartCloud, Technical Stuff Tagged With: , , , ,

Social File Sharing with IBM Connections Desktop Plugin

February 12, 2013 By 2 Comments

An often overlooked aspect of the IBM Connections social business platform is its ability to integrate itself with many different parts of the working environment.  If you’re a Lotus Notes user you may be aware that there is an Activities sidebar.  Did you know, though, that from the Greenhouse catalog you can also install the Files and Status updates sidebar to make dragging and dropping files in and out of emails much easier?

Even if you’re not a Lotus Notes user, you still have some great options for making handling files social.  One of the best of these is the Desktop Plugin also available from Greenhouse.

It works on most flavors of Microsoft Windows and provides a file-server, tree-based view of the files you have access to across all the IBM Connections environments you might have.  For me, I use it to access the files in the Seric internal Connections instance and also Greenhouse.

After you have installed the plugin, you see the IBM Connections logo on your desktop and also in the list of destinations in Windows Explorer:

12-02-2013 20-08-53

Right click on the IBM Connections name on the left hand side to start the process of adding a connection to your system:

12-02-2013 20-10-52

In the URL field, enter the URL to your Connections implementation.  Here are a couple that I use which you might also benefit from:

  1. IBM Greenhouse:   https://greenhouse.lotus.com
  2. IBM SmartCloud for Social Business:   https://apps.na.collabserv.com

For your own installation and for IBM Greenhouse, I have found setting the Authentication Type to Basic works.  For IBM SmartCloud for Social Business, set the Authentication type to TAM Authentication.

Enter your user name and password for the service you’re configuring.  If all goes well, you’ll see a large icon appear in the Windows Explorer window:

12-02-2013 20-11-40

The Plugin recognizes SmartCloud and gives it a different logo.  Click on the Connections system you want to access, in this case Greenhouse.  You’ll see something like:

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These icons should be self-explanatory and give you access to your files wherever they may be throughout the Connections system you’re working with.  Particularly useful is the fact that the files contained within Communities can be accessed by drilling into the Communities themselves.

12-02-2013 20-16-05

Working with Files

Adding and removing files is as simple as dragging and dropping them from wherever they are on your computer into wherever you want them to go in whatever Connections environment you have set up.  It’s also really easy to use the right-click action in Explorer wherever you are to add files to Connections:If you already have a file in Connections which you want to access or work with, simply drill-down to it in the Plugin and then right-click.  The  context sensitive menu pops up:

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This lets you perform a wide array of functions, such as:

  1. Opening the file with an application on your computer
  2. Opening the file in a browser
  3. Uploading a new version of the same file
  4. Sharing the file.
  5. Seeing what the sharing settings of the file are:12-02-2013 20-21-32
  6. Locking the file to prevent edits
  7. Looking at the version history of the file:12-02-2013 20-23-40

Clicking on Properties shows the file properties dialog box which gives you enormous control of the file right from your Windows desktop:

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Adding a File

When you want to upload a file, you can, as describe above right click on it or drag it into the place you want it to go.  When you do this, the Plugin asks what additional information you’d like to provide for the file:

12-02-2013 20-24-41 12-02-2013 20-26-11

This lets you tag the file, decide who can see it, and control how they can use it once you’ve uploaded it.

Summary

This brief look at the Connections Desktop Plugin hopefully gives you a taste for the kind of control you can have over the files that your Connections, Greenhouse or SmartCloud for Social Business system gives you.  While it might not provide the most heavy-duty document management facilities you might find in the likes of Filenet, I have found that much of this is enough to provide a level of collaboration and control which lots of organizations have previously struggled with.

Filed Under: How To..., IBM Connections, Technical Stuff Tagged With: , , ,

Microsoft: Late to the Party Again

February 4, 2013 By 1 Comment

Microsoft recently published a white paper, “The new world of social collaboration” where they set out their vision for

“cultural, technological, business and industry trends that are driving social collaboration in the enterprise”

I invite you to have a read of it, if only for two reasons:

  1. To recognize the same facts and phenomena which IBM and others have been evangelizing about for a very long time;
  2. For the quote “Today, Yammer and SharePoint are connected through Web Parts and Open Graph capabilities. We’re developing deeper connections that will involve integrated document management, feed aggregation plus unified identity”

Their own graphic admits that “Today” they only have “Basic Integration”. “Tomorrow” will have “Deeper Connections” and in the “Future” there will be “Connected Experiences”.

I realize I am partisan in this argument, but I would like this blog post to stand as my testimony towards this fact: In Microsoft’s terms, IBM delivers the Future Today.

Please, dear reader, explore what Microsoft actually offers in the socially-collaborating enterprise against the announcements of REAL software made by IBM last week.

Filed Under: IBM Connections, Miscellaneous Tagged With: ,

How to use any blogging tool to write your IBM Connections blog

January 30, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Whilst at IBM Connect 2013 in Orlando I have been using my iPad for blogging, tweeting, and generally staying in touch.  Thanks to the fairly-stable WiFi throughout the event it’s been easy enough to broadcast updates to my colleagues and give them updates on what’s going on.

One area I have struggled, however, is in using the IBM Connections App for iOS to update my Connections blog in the office.  Currently it only supports plain text transfer of the blog article.  This is naturally a bit limiting and so I set about looking for something which would let me write blog entries using rich text or HTML.

The best-known blogging tool for iOS which directly supports IBM Connections is Blogsy.  I confess, however, that I have always struggled with it because our Connections server uses a self-signed SSL certificate.  Blogsy seems to complain about this although I hope that by posting this someone will show me how to work around it.

So my quest continued and I discovered that there are actually lots of blogging applications for iOS.  One that I found was particularly good, and established how virtually any blogging tool could be used, was BlogPress.

In BlogPress, set up a new blog with the type “other”:

IMG 0070

Put your user name (email address) and password in.  Now for the clever bit (and this is the thing that works on any blogging app that supports the Blogger or Meta Weblog APIs:

https://yourservername.com/blogs/services/xmlrpc

When you connect, your credentials are used and a list of blogs for your account appears.  Pick your blog and you’re good to go.  Try this out with your favourite blogging tool and you should find that the current limitations of the Connections iOS app are gone!

Happy blogging.

Filed Under: How To..., IBM Connections, Technical Stuff Tagged With:

Bring Social to your Business Processes

January 13, 2013 By Leave a Comment

In January 2011 I attended Lotusphere and witnessed IBM’s entry in to the Social Business arena. It was a seminal moment for me, having been involved in IBM collaboration solutions for nearly 20 years. In my time I have seen collaboration described variously as groupware, document management, knowledge management, intranets and now social business. I am not saying that each of these solution categories are the same – they most definitely have distinct features and facets which distinguish them. I am saying, however, that each of these disciplines have a large common overlap.

So it was, therefore, with great interest that I saw the launch of social business with a critical eye. What was different about this compared to the many intranets I have been involved in building, or the groupware solutions I have created in Lotus Notes?

The fundamental difference between social business and ALL that has gone before in the collaboration space is that while a social business solution such as IBM Connections supports the collaboration features of its predecessors, it introduces spontaneous collaboration into an otherwise linear knowledge capture system.

In laymans terms, what I mean is as follows: An intranet, discussion database, document management system or similar is designed by us to hold information we otherwise wish to access in the future. We have agreed that we will use it to store that information and will, for the most part, refer to it when we are looking for something. These systems do not encourage the spontanaeity of discussion, commenting, referral or improvement. A social solution treats these as the bedrock and builds mechanisms for being better informed about what’s going on. It provides the capability to start a discussion thread on an individual atom of data.It encourages participation, knowledge-seeking and knowledge capture.

A social business solution stands in the gap between Systems of Record, such as an intranet or document management system and Systems of engagement like instant messaging, video conferencing and web-meetings.

Social Business connects systems of engagement and systems of record

Social Business connects systems of engagement and systems of record

It allows the knowledge which circulates in the Engagement to be fastened to the atomic level of data which resides in your organisation. It means that you can provide context, background and a snapshot of the mindet of the individuals involved in your business process at the time. Neither the Systems of Record or Systems of Engagement can do this.

Thus, given the time I have spent in this area, the announcement that IBM was getting into the Social Business area was a big deal for me. In the intervening two years I have witnessed IBM Connections go from being a collection of different projects in IBM into a single product. I have seen it move from being this close-flying formation of applications into a single cohesive system. I have also seen it mature from a ground-breaking solution which some people had difficulty understanding the purpose of into one which in my slightly biased opinion is the gold-standard for social collaboration in the enterprise.

Looking Forward

Thus, it is with great expectation that in a couple of weeks I will join the many thousands of other social collaborators in Orlando at IBM Connect. It’s a week of intense knowledge-capture. It’s a week of intense social activity and its a week which reminds you that you are part of something quite extraordinary.

Above all, however, I am looking forward to the next chapter of social collaboration: The previous chapter was about socialising your organisation to get at the knowledge which existed but remained largely unmined. The new chapter will be about driving real business advantage by implementing social business processes.

Socialising business processes means that your bridge between the engagement and record systems is complete. You can start to bring knowledge into your atomic data and build INTELLIGENCE from it. Your customers become part of your business in ways they have ached for over the years. You increase the motivation of your staff and start on the road to building the kind of business relationships money cannot buy.

If you are attending Connect in Orlando please come find me. I’d love to have a chat.

Filed Under: IBM Connections, Lotusphere 2012, Social Business Tagged With: , ,

10 Easy Steps to Social Business – Step 5: Leaders Show the Way

November 8, 2012 By 1 Comment

Getting your executives to buy into the concept of a social business in most cases is something which they will either get straight away or not.  Those who are switched on to “modern” technology will not need much convincing that implementing social technologies in the workplace will improve communications and enhance productivity.  Those who don’t see the need for it, of course, require a little more persuasion.

I am not going to discuss the ways in which you might persuade your chief executive to engage in social enterprise, but rather try to offer some practical suggestions on how you might get the willing chief executive to take part.

However you arrive at their participation, they will most likely be nervous about stepping into a less controlled environment.  It’s a bit like them going to the local swimming pool where all the employees swim.  There’s no hiding!  You will find yourself reaching for the Governance criteria you set down earlier.

Tactics

My advice to getting them into the water is to let them observe for a while.  Get your enthusiastic evangelists publishing and propose that your leader checks in on these things.  With their permission ask a public question.  By that I mean something they will be happy to answer in public.  Encourage your other trusted evangelists to do likewise.  Use the fact that you have a team of enthusiastic users to vary the method of interaction.  Ask in a forum post for a suggestion, ask in a micro-blogging entry something else.

Make it easy for your leader to get into the water by making it easy for them to answer.  A couple of short sentences for the first few answers to things is all that’s needed.

Once you have the leader taking part, albeit on a light basis, we need to convince the leadership team that they too should look at taking part.  That team will only see value in doing this if they see the chief doing it.

The leadership team will likely be nervous about what their own areas of the organization are putting into the social system – they will be concerned that their dirty laundry might be getting washed in public.  Try to quash this concern.  Remember that a social business is one which is engaged and transparent (and nimble).

Show your leaders that by participating in the system and answering cross-departmental or cross-organizational issues their area of the business shows its value.  Remember – your value is in what your share – not what you know in a social business.

Commitment

Having a strong commitment amongst the leaders in the organization sets the tone, volume and enthusiasm for the use of the system.  Remember that in any organization the leadership team are essentially “celebrities” and when they post information or participate in the system the staff become engaged.  As an analogy to this, while many people consider the old-fashioned two-page memo from the chief exec setting out policy and priorities to be deadly boring, everyone reads it.  Everyone engages.  So to get the engagement, to cross the social chasm, you need your leaders to start becoming more transparent.

You can facilitate this slowly by driving engagement from your core Social Business team from below.  Encouraging the execs to take a more active role in forum discussions, making the technology available to them on their chosen mobile device and empowering the gatekeepers to your execs – the secretaries – are all good ways of driving top-down participation which in turn drives bottom-up engagement.

Later in this series of articles I’ll talk about using reverse mentoring as a technique for helping with engagement.  You should, however, consider preparing the ground by producing some executive training materials.  An executive handbook – amounting to a maximum of 5 pages of tips and tricks, some one-to-one time, and perhaps a presentation provided to them on paper or some other medium to help them get into the concept are all good approaches.  Above all show them that these are “special” materials – these are designed only for them.  They are intelligent people and like to be treated that way.  Give them the facts in tweet-size points.

Ask if you can check in on them from time to time.  If you get their approval then MAKE SURE YOU DO IT REGULARLY.  But not too regularly to avoid getting on their nerves.

I have put a link to a presentation I have used in the past to help brief execs and ask for their participation in the social intranet.  Please feel free to use it to help you.  Don’t just copy it and call it yours though!

The 10 Steps to Social Business is a concept developed by IBM. This article was written by me, Alan Hamilton, with the permission of IBM.

Filed Under: 10 Easy Steps to Becoming a Social Business, IBM Connections Tagged With: , ,
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