Moderator - Rob Preston, Editor in Chief, Information Week
Speaker - Toby Redshaw, Corporate Vice President, I.D.E.A.S., Motorola
Toby: We had a KM system where you can put information in if you had a password and could remember where stuff was and the password. Turned on wikis 4400 blogs and 4200 wikis. Didn't even tell anybody, just turned it on. Plus forums and FAQs. There is a community that has the collective knowledge of the last twenty years of the company. This accelerates the clockspeed of the company. We are implementing Baynote and Scuttle for folksonomy. I thought it would be utter crap, Arlo Guthrie doing IT, but it actually works, seeing heat maps and accelerating discovery and learning. Widgets, social networking with Visible Path. The key is that it just has to be so easy to use for adoption. Don't train, advertise it, did have to explain scuttle a little bit. The higher up you go in the heirarchy the less it is used, a good thing, the real work is elsewhere.
Oliver: What I see is a bit of a dichotomy. The marketing and communication departments, the lines of business are excited about these tools. But IT has a lot of fear. They look at these tools and think they are decentralized, emergent, not easy to control and my employees are doing this anyway. The command and control thought, keeping CIOs up at night. They learned a lot of lessons from IM, where employees used it anyway. A lot of companies say we can't lock it out, lets figure out how to do this. For those who are bringing it in, it is in an experimental phase. Far less common that you find someone that says lets change things. At Motorola you have cool tech that rolls out under the covers, something common, but it limits the potential impact.
Mike: Coming from the unified communication space, WebEx acquisition, getting into collaboration and deploying it ourselves. We want to give people more immediate access to their experts. A huge amount of growth in real time collaboration, moving people beyond the phone. A ton of inefficiency needs to be driven out. Integrating people, processes and data and making the communications a core part of the effort. Moving from an ad hoc deployment model to a multi million dollar initiative to redo our Intranet. Making it easier to build communities of interest, from mailing lists that overwhelm. Chambers is talking all about collaboration, for our organization and our customers.
Toby: You have to have a small team to do this. One manager and four people. The actual information is driven by 250 knowledge champions, selected by the community. A badge of honor to be a champion, shepard the wiki. I get calls that say, did you know we have 4000 blogs, are they doing anything bad? Yeah, probably. Can we control it? Yes, give me 400 people to monitor it, but it will kill it. They schedule a meeting and I don't show up and life goes on. I don't beat competition through better buildings, companies are human beings solving problems, driving opportunistic events by working with dumb stuff like buildings and cash. Its like Chess. You move once, I get to move twice. Who do you think will win? That's what a community platform gets you.
Oliver: To some extent the security question is paranoia, but all security is paranoia. Stealing a laptop is a bigger risk than email or blogging. External blogging means that with a big organization, someone is, and in regulated industries it is a serious issue. Adoption is happening in your enterprise whether you like it or not. In a survey, leaders estimated 20% were using these tools. Those making no investment had about 3-8%. Need to give guidelines about what is appropriate. SaaS lets a business unit leader get my entire group up and running for $20 on Socialtext, for example. Without involving IT. I have a lot of faith in Socialtext that they are a secure service and not losing data. But you have to have a story if it runs up the chain through IT to explain it. The final way is frankly Sharepoint. Have to put policies in place.
Mike: Cisco is really trying to change the way we work. We are moving to collaborative communities at all levels towards the goal of growth. We have people with deep expertise that are difficult to locate. The mandate Chambers gave to IT, which has done a great job, yet there are ways to better respond to users needs, so they are investigating Enterprise 2.0 and how to integrate it with communications. From the bottom up perspective there are wikis across the organization, they aren't integrated and you have to support it yourself. Wiki is a much better way for managing projects, such as a product launch that is a massive cross functional effort.
Toby: I was a young guy once. A quick comment, not to pick on Motorola because they are a competitor. You have to build it as a platform, with freedom to use, because if it gets big it will be out of control. Needs to be searchable, enable migration. But to answer the question, you can't tell people not to multitask. The old school pre web people were actually some of the biggest adopters. Super simple to use and really useful. These are people with greater knowledge and more to gain by using these tools. In some places, I don't know, Kentucky, it may not be that way. But we found the adoption curves were pretty much even across the age groups. 40+ a little more usage, but the closer you get to real work, the more it is used.
Oliver: some workspaces are earlier adopters and cultures for new technologies. At Northwester Mutual, their employees are mostly older, 33% retiring in 5 years, and they are struggling with this. In youth, 77% are creating content, but at 41-50 only 21% do. Even people who are reading, there is a group of people who don't even participate in this way. You are dead on with the knowledge champion role, the evangelists who can show people the way. One or two people you have the propensity to adopt start using them, and to better effect, and the guy next to them sees and copies so he is not at a disadvantage. The stealth launch needs support for the spread, for the evangelists, but having someone see how it is valuable to them in their business context is the real goal. Asked a law firm and they said the older lawyers weren't jumping on these tools, as they were with Blackberries initially, now he can't pry them out of their cold dead hands. Need time and familiarity, and the right to fork.
Toby: hard to measure the results. Old school companies built campuses for a reason, discovering people by bumping into them which indirectly helps projects. We see this happening 10k times a day. Inside IT we are seeing the cycle time on delivering product and getting stuff done really ramp up. A little medium is the message going on. I see less email, which is the worst thing going through an enterprise.
Oliver: really hard to measure. Same with email or a portal, a soft ROI. Hard to put saving five minutes a day into dollar terms. And it takes a leap of faith. At the same time it depends on the installation. One company that rolled out wikis, took a legacy database that tracked IT standards, said we can put it all in a wiki, have every IT employee update it on their own when things change. Moved two people off of the project and on to something else.
Toby: you can tell lots of stories like this. Before and after with a sales wiki: borrowing materials, building a pitch, find the 12 people who worked on something like it before. People in logistics see four red things in a dashboard, click on them to the wiki. I say cycle times are down 12%, they say that's great how did you measure this? I made it up, but it was based on the best information available.
Oliver: Employee surveys are a good approach. Surface anecdotes.
Mike: (Ross: honestly, I think Cisco will have more to talk about when it comes to results, without defaulting back to unified communications, by next year)
Toby: The question how do you help people understand how to search and tag appropriately. We have 2600 users on Scuttle, but a bunch of people who look across tags. All of it is a simple one page description of how you do it, if you need more it is not the right solution. I stole a rule from the CIA: if you can't feed the team in two pizzas, get someone off the team.
