According to a recent Gallup Poll, about a third of all U.S. workers are dissatisfied with either the recognition they receive, their chances for promotion, or the amount of money they earn. Worse, seventy-one percent of American workers are "not engaged" or "actively disengaged" in their work. 

Since most of us cannot change the economy, I’d like to focus on what we can do at work instead.

I’m going to share a few strategies garnered from my discussions with Michael Wu, Lithium’s Principal Scientist, and author of The Science of Social.  And I am going to make you a promise.  If you follow these strategies and and act on Wu’s insights, I believe you’ll minimize dissatisfaction amongst the rank and file while increasing worker productivity.

Sounds too good to be true?

I know it sounds fluffy, but there’s some real science and empirical evidence behind the strategies. My hope is that it will motivate you to start changing how your company stimulates its most important resource. Your employees.  

Motivation Science and Worker Productivity

What motivates people?

Wu believes it has a lot to do with intrinsic motivation, “Dan Pink wrote about autonomy, mastery and purpose. But there’s another and it’s called relatedness. Scott Rigby is a researcher for motivation. He found that autonomy, competence, relatedness and reasons are essentially the four intrinsic motivations for people. That relatedness is actually what a lot of people just call social. It’s the social facilitation and the social competition.”

Strategy #1: Intrinsic Motivation, Place People in their Proper Positions

Do you have salespeople that seem to gravitate to Marketing? How about the CTO that is often found late at night programming new code to solve simple problems. Problems best left to the junior staff.  Perhaps there’s a mismatch in what they are currently doing, versus what really interests them. 

Wu suggests we figure out what motivates people intrinsically by letting them self-select, “People’s intrinsic motivations are fairly stable. They don’t change from day to day. They do change over long periods of time, but overall they’re pretty stable. You essentially have to let them perform a lot of things and let them choose what they like to do. That’s autonomy. Giving them autonomy to choose what they like to do.”

I know it’s not easy to simply throw away the old human resources playbook. But increasingly, not placing people in the role that intrinsically motivates them is not going to work. It doesn’t matter that the individual had a career path in Sales. If she is passionate about Marketing, then you must find a way for her to be involved with Marketing.

Sorry, this is the price you need to pay for a happier, engaged and ultimately more productive employee.    

Strategy #2: Work Needs to be More Like a Video Game

Most video games give the player enough autonomy to select his own path.  It’s not a linear path to success, but a series of choices the employee makes to reach a goal.  Sure the goals and objectives need to be defined by the company, but give people real choice and feedback along the way.

Wu expands on the importance of feedback, “You need to show an employee’s progress and give them rapid feedback. Typically this requires tracking and analytics. You need to track everything they do that’s relevant to their job. For an engineering organization, you may want to track how many lines of codes they submitted then compare it to their colleagues.  You need to provide specific, rapid feedback every time they check in. There’s also some long return performance metrics. Over a long period of time, a quarter or a year, you also want to be able to track their performance.”

Most people like video games because they are receiving rapid feedback (usually a score) about their performance. Better, the score increases when the player is closer to the goal, and may even decrease if they stray too far from it.

Wu emphasizes the point, “I can’t imagine playing a video game and not receiving a score until the game was over. That would be kind of a weird feeling.”

Why can’t work be more like a video game? We’d all enjoy it more.

Strategy #3: Gamify Employee Training

Muhammad Ali used to say that, “I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’"

The problem is that most of us hate corporate training and tend to tune out.  The drab, preach and memorize training methodology, is losing our attention to social media, television, blogs and other more engaging media.

Employees then become demotivated and less likely to follow procedure and thus don’t become champions. 

The antidote? Wu likes to cite an anecdote about Microsoft’s Ribbon Hero 2 as an example of combining training with gamification: “Microsoft made the training tool for the Office Suite into a game. It’s actually a serious, educational game,” Wu explains, “Ribbon Hero tracks all the features you use and then recommends a feature and challenges you. Suppose you are trying to write and publish content to the web using Microsoft Word. It will challenge you and ask, ‘Do you know that you can better format and convert graphics for web formats?’”

Once the task is complete, the game rewards the user with points or badges.

To make training more engaging and more motivating, provide training experiences that reward people for accomplishing the right tasks correctly. 

The brutal truth is that you’re wasting money on training consultants and internal support employees that are following the old playbook.  Spend that money instead on designing intelligent training systems that work.

Strategy #4 The Technology Choices Your Company Makes Impacts Success at Work

We have many technology choices at work. Some we like and some we dislike intensely.  Do you monitor the use of them in your company to determine efficacy and adoption rates?

Have you ever noticed how fast Yammer is adopted in most organizations? It’s easy to set up and use, anyone can participate, and the discussions are broadcast to subscribers in order to maximize distribution.  In turn, anyone can comment or post their own message to the organization.  No friction, no permission. 

Conversely, most project management systems are difficult to set up and use, require extensive training, and as a result, only a handful of people use them.  

Wu describes the need for gamification in business tools to create critical mass and engagement, “A lot of times the way we work is heavily dictated by the technology choice that a company makes. It changes the way that people work. I think an important aspect of that is for  technology vendors to infuse gamification principles in their technology to drive a social facilitation, a social competition which is related to aspects of motivation.”

You see, your technology choices can make your employees collaborative or solitary. The wrong tool choice can lead to apathy, while the right choice can launch your company to new heights. And that’s something worth investing in.

Strategy #5 Reward Failure, Expect Better Results

What if I told you that with one policy change, you can completely transform your organization while increasing employee engagement?  Would you listen or show me the door?

Employees rarely take unnecessary risks because of the fear of failure. ‘Failure’ and ‘loss of employment’ have become ‘cause and effect’ in most organizations. Yet in order to innovate as an organization you need to fail.

Fail by brainstorming new ideas. Fail by conducting myriad experiments. Fail by testing concepts with customers, thought leaders and visionaries.  Eventually, the organization learns from those failures and develops something remarkable.

Wu underscores the situation by highlighting how employees feel today, “Right now in big corporations, part of the reason that people don’t take the opportunity to self-actualize (Maslov’s highest level of need) is because they’re afraid to fail. They’ve been so entrenched in this kind of environment that punishes failure that they’d rather not take that chance.”

Bluntly, afraid to fail stifles innovation and creativity.

If you’re a Manager of people, change the rules. Encourage people to try new ideas, let them know it’s okay to fail (without retribution). Psychologically, your employees will open up new reservoirs of creativity and will share it with the group. In turn, the group will either make the ideas better or suggest new ideas instead.   

Either way, you win. 

In the Future, Companies Will Work Like the Movie Industry

The future, according to Wu, is about finding work that we enjoy: “It’s hard to find the jobs that place people into a mental state that psychologists call flow.  Flow of work that people enjoy. Most people are pushed into a corner to do routine things that they hate to do.”

Wu believes the future workplace will work like the movie business, where self selected experts participate as needed: “Every single movie that’s been produced works in the following way. You gather the right people, people who have the specific skill you need – the lighting specialist, the makeup artist, the actors, the film crew – you put them together, they work on this project and once they’re finished they disperse.”

For me, it’s hard to tell where the future workplace is headed.  I do know that the five strategies Wu highlighted above should be implemented today in order to reverse the dissatisfaction trend. 

Study them, better – implement them. Take the opportunity to be a leader while improving your organization’s effectiveness. 

Do you have stories to tell about employee motivation? Have you tried gamification techniques?

Please share your own ideas in the comments below.

(all images are creative commons from Flickr and are linked above)

I can’t help but laugh at the TechCrunch gang’s corporate ad hominem last week. It seemed more of a personal attack than any real attempt to provide a product review. 

TechCrunch didn’t merely reproach their building mate, they reprimanded them. Stranger, most of the article really didn’t say anything at all, because they were not talking to us. They seem to be too entranced by TechCrunch.

I have to agree with Alexia Tsotsis’s dating analogy when referring to their relationship with Yammer, “Everyone knows someone who dates a girl that they’re not particularly into but for some reason they haven’t made the move to cut ties.”

I imagine Yammer feels the same way. I imagine how they want to respond in public but as the more mature party, they’ve taken the high road.  I imagine if they were to have responded, the retort would have gone something like this:

SUBJECT: “Let’s Just Be Friends”

How do you manage a relationship with a gang of Sybils?

You’re practicing the kind of journalism that psychologists refer to as Dissociative identity disorder. You love us, you hate us, make up your many minds.

Your behavior is like the boyfriend that is obsessed with us on one day, and then is slashing our tires the next.  The guy that sends us flowers in the morning but prank calls us at night.  The girl who claims she “needs her space”, but later stalks us like prey.  

Your Jekyll and Hyde routine seems to be triggered by random, dissociative acts or simply for the computer-game fun of it. It’s hard to tell which.

As you may know, Mark Twain once said: “character may be learned from the adjectives which she uses in conversation”, which is telling given the number of times the word ‘sucks’ is used in your article. He should have added that, in order to properly judge ones work, you must have undertaken the responsibility yourself.

So let’s add up and compare the tangible contributions to society and business.  We have millions of users around the world collaborating, sharing and creating new products using our software. 80 percent of the Fortune 500 are using Yammer to break down communication barriers to surface and improve on ideas. We’re facilitating real connections between a company’s suppliers and partners from Brazil to Russia to India to China in order to strengthen relationships across cultures and geographic boundaries.

And what are you creating? How are you benefiting society? Are you working for or against it?

But, to be disappointed, you must first have an expectation of something good and this is your journalism we’re talking about. You seem to be acting like the snob who snubs for the sake of snubbing.  Or that we missed our protection shakedown payment and your making us your public display.

We’re left to wonder if Fred Wilson’s warning is coming true, that after Michael Arrington and a few others left, the media powerhouse would lose its swag.  After pondering the issue, Wilson closes his thoughts with, “But I’m not terribly worried about it. The TechCrunch audience, including me, will find new sources of news, information, and entertainment elsewhere if that’s what needs to happen.”

But hey, let’s let bygones be bygones, alter egos be united, hurt feelings be forgiven – in fact, let’s just be friends.

I was thirteen years old when I first saw it on TV.

An army of blue-gray drones march in lockstep through a long tunnel into an auditorium filled with more drones dressed in futuristic, grey drab. All eyes are transfixed on a big-blue image of a man speaking from a theatre-sized screen, extolling the virtues of its ‘Information Purification Directives.’ Suddenly, a woman in orange shorts and a tank top runs into view carrying a large sledgehammer. She spins to gain momentum and hurls it at the image, causing a large explosion.

Confused, I turned to my dad and asked what this was all about. He said something like: “Well, IBM is being portrayed as a Socialist company that controls minds and stifles creativity, and we’re supposed to reject that.”

The TV scene was from Apple’s 1984 Superbowl ad, and it was a clear shot at Big-Brother, IBM. Apple portrayed itself as the small, underdog hero and IBM the Orwellian, thought police.

But this does not represent today’s IBM – or Apple for that matter.

Today’s Big Blue is the antithesis of Big Brother. It’s ‘Big Open’. A transparent, nimble, collaborative organization known more for listening and engaging customers than for dictating to them. While ironically, some say Apple now resembles Big Brother given their propensity for tight controls.

And that’s why IBM — not Apple — represents the future workplace.

While Apple has been wildly successful, IBM’s Social Business is much more attainable and sustainable than what Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky describes as Apple’s genius led, culture of fear. For the genius is always, as Benjamin Disraeli and later Peter Drucker predicted, succeeded by a “lieutenant of Marines” who understands the business but nothing else. So the company is only left with an innovation vacuum.

In IBM’s social business culture, the genius lies in the 400,000 employees who are free to create circumstances that enable their associates to build on each other’s ideas. Its genius lies in fostering innovation through co-creation with its employees, suppliers, partners and customers. Remove one genius, and there are thousands more in the network to fill the vacuum.

Bottom line: IBM’s Social Business is creating real shareholder value. Allow me to make the case.

<Click here to see large Graph>

Two years ago, had you invested $10,000 in IBM, your investment would be worth over $14,000 today. That means in just 2 years, IBM has created over $60 billion in shareholder value. To put that in perspective, that’s more than the total market value of Hewlett Packard.

The company has been so successful it attracted the world’s most successful investor, Warren Buffett who has long avoided investing in technology stocks. Buffett felt IBM’s management had done “an incredible job” and subsequently accumulated more than 64 million IBM shares, which represents a stake of 5.5 percent.

Another sign of success is how IBM’s competitors are reacting to it. After Oracle missed its latest revenue expectations, Business Insider’s Matt Rosoff wrote about Larry Ellison trash talking IBM. That’s usually a sure sign of fear.

IBM has been so successful in its last few years, that it’s outperformed the S&P 500, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Google and Oracle. Among the world’s largest technology companies, only Apple under Job’s stewardship has outperformed IBM. But without Jobs at Apples helm, where would you invest your money?

Is IBM’s Social Business the Reason for IBM’s Success?

To hear IBM’s Vice President, Sandy Carter’s perspective, IBM’s social culture is partially if not directly responsible for IBM’s success: “Our employees use social computing tools to foster collaboration, disseminate and consume news, develop networks, forge closer relationships, and build credibility. As a result, they’re better informed and prepared to take action on behalf of IBM.”

Carter also likes to cite an IBM Business Value Study where companies that use social business tools outperform the non-social group (in terms of EBITDA) by 57 percent. She takes it a step further to say that, “If you’re not transforming your company into a social business, plan to be out of business.”

I believe IBM’s Luis Suarez agrees with Carter, citing how the 8 million strong IBM-run developerWorks customer community is helping IBM technicians improve IBM’s products: “It’s a rich innovation ecosystem with a direct channel of communication between customers and developers on how to fix IBM products and make them better.”

Leading By Example

Work creates a unique social bond – it is the interface between people, technology and culture. Work’s social bond must also evolve. It must responds to market conditions and customer demands. There isn’t a large company that does this better than IBM.

It may be too early for some organizations to come to grips with social business as a strategy. They are stuck in a corporate dystopia, ruled by the equivalent of an Orwellian inner party which condemns individuality and transparency as thought crimes.

But I’m having a great deal of fun with the knowledge that we’re watching a near-extinct species: the command and control organization. I understand how a business historian must feel when she observes a corporate anachronism; much like the giant music publishers, unaware of the digital disruptors that built new business models and ultimately forced the publishers to play by the new rules.

This in fact is my key takeaway from 2011. That old business must evolve into Social Business. That companies need to be social internally and externally. That business leaders need to create and foster a culture of collaboration and transparency, without retribution. That social organizations outperform their non-social competitors. That rapid innovation is the key to future business success.

That is IBM.

Don’t believe the world’s businesses are going social?  Take this recent declaration from CapGemini’s Managing Director, Global Head of Practices, Didier Bonnet when discussing Social Business with me: “We’ve actually repositioned the entire practice around digital transformation. So for us it’s not just changing one service offering; it’s our entire focus globally for our teams to deliver and to sell.” He came to that crucial decision after MIT and CapGemini interviewed over 160 executives throughout Asia, Europe and North America and discovered that businesses are digitizing. 

CapGemini’s decision was further supported by Andy McAfee, MIT’s Principal Research Scientist for Digital Business, view that, “analog companies eventually are going to get swept aside by digital companies. It’s my firmest belief about the future of business.”

While Bonnet and McAfee are careful to avoid the S-word, “social” in our discussions because for most executives it still equates to happy hour, social technologies are an important aspect of their research.  Bonnet explains, “it’s becoming a powerful and common word so we’re not fighting it anymore.” Indeed, executives are still terrified of their employees wasting time on social activities, but the visionaries are embracing social as a competitive differentiator.

Here are 5 major reasons why:

#1  The Company’s Innovation Culture is Weak

Does your product or service trigger a yawn or a smile? Are you producing products that quickly resonate with your target market?  Do you have a list of hundreds or better thousands of customers that will buy anything you create?  Instead of expensive and generally worthless focus groups, a true Social Business provides a digital platform for employees, partners, suppliers and customers to give input on new and existing products. 

#2 The Competition has a Rich, Vibrant Community of Customers – Some of them Yours

We are present again at one of these significant turning points in communication – just like how the telephone revolution, email revolution, and internet revolution helped business better communicate with their customers. But now the revolution is about building online communities to connect with customers to foster loyalty, trust and engagement.  Those companies ignoring communities will soon find their customers moving to better neighborhoods. 

#3 Increasingly, Consumers are Engaging Brands with Mobile Devices

“We saw two companies in the same sector – insurance in this case – create mobile applications but with two completely different outcomes. The first company tried to simply replicate information found on their website. But the other company took an end-to-end approach and was able to get their prospect to sign a contract on the spot because he had access to all the back office information,” said McAfee giving just one example of how mobile is a competitive differentiator.

Companies will need to quickly adopt a mobile strategy that fits their own set of business use cases in order to keep up with how customers are making purchases. 

#4 Integrating Digital Information is Allowing Companies to Gain Global Synergies While Remaining Locally Responsive.

‘”We saw some really good examples of people in hotels and entertainment companies, for instance, where they integrated customer data from their CRM system, with data from social media, with location based mobile data to start recommending offers,” McAfee explained to me when referring to a best-in-class example of how companies can integrate data for increased sales.

I’ve been struck by how few companies understand the power of integrating data on a single technology platform.  We’ve all experienced a customer service call where we have to dial in our personal information only to have the data disappear once a live agent jumps on the phone.  This is but a small example of the overall problem that most companies have.  The role of the digital leader is to now meld all of the bits of information they have about their customers and to create better experiences and sales opportunities. 

#5 Companies Need a Social Business platform for a Common View of Customers and Products

The MIT and CapGemini report states that: “The most fundamental technology need for digital transformation is a digital platform of integrated data and processes. Large successful companies often operate in silos, each with their own systems, data definitions, and business processes. Generating a common view of customers or products can be very difficult. Without the common view, advanced approaches to customer engagement or process optimization cannot occur.”

For me, the big takeaway from the report can be summed up as follows.  While social interactions are fundamentally a human function, organizations need a digital platform (like SharePoint, Salesforce.com, Yammer, SocialText or Jive) to facilitate social interactions on a global scale. Here as Peter Drucker liked to say, “neither technology or people determines the other, but each shapes the other.”

For our purposes, the technology enables the social interaction, but the social interaction shapes how the technology is used.  Each feed off each other until the organization becomes more effective. 

But why haven’t more companies jumped on the social bandwagon? According to Bonnet: “One of the key findings in the study was that one of the main barriers to achieving a successful social transformation – 77% of the time was lack of skills. Lack of social media skills, advanced mobility application skills and so on and so forth.”

Still, one-third of the companies they surveyed have an effective digital transformation program in place.  The other two-thirds need to quickly get their act together or risk falling behind. Perhaps this is why CapGemini is one of the first top tier consulting firms to change course and build a social business practice.  Indeed, who could blame them?

Every time I see an anti-email blog post or even more amusingly a company that issues a zero email policy, I’m always reminded of one of my favorite Einstein lines,  “"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the the universe."

You have to admire CEO Thierry Breton of Atos for taking a very public stance on the issue, telling ABC, “We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives,” he goes on to say, “At [Atos] we are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organizations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution.”

Thanks Mr. Breton but in our universe that is infinitely stupid.  Let’s see, comparing digital email to environmental pollution when your own company is selling even more digital solutions that are contributing to the problem is pure lunacy.  They pay this guy €2.5 million Euros a year to come up with this stuff.

Breton later clarified that his zero email policy only applies to internal situations and not external, to which the rest of us are left scratching our heads and wondering how external emails will be handled internally.

Imagine a customer sending an email into an Atos imposed, email black hole, where the customer is seeking answers to their questions.  The Atos employee then cuts and pastes the email into the Atos intranet and hours later the Atos employee presumably receives an answer from another employee.  The Atos employee then cut and pastes the answer back into the original email and sends it back to the customer.

But the customer isn’t satisfied with the answers and wants clarification.  So she sends another email back to Atos with documents, images and a link to a video describing her issue.  Since email is banned, the Atos employee needs to cut, paste and upload the media to the Atos intranet and the process continues until resolution. 

Remember Breton’s environmental pollution analogy? Ironically, this situation creates even more digital pollution and human capital waste. To further emphasize how absurd Breton’s solution is, my friend David Lavenda of harmon.ie explains, “Another problem with this strategy is introducing another tool for internal communications, while continuing to use email to communicate with the rest of the world – it’s a total non-starter.”

Breton’s policy depends on accepting the false premise that email is inherently tied to information overload and that by killing it the problem will rectify itself. In reality, it doesn’t matter which communication system you use, there will always be information overload if it isn’t managed properly. 

The kindest interpretation of Breton’s policy is that he is trying to fix a problem we all have in the enterprise; which is how do we manage all of the information coming at us? The harsher view is that Atos is unable to effectively manage information and their executives are taking extreme, unproven measures to somehow control it.

The zero email policy isn’t really a policy at all.  It’s a fantasy.  A fantasy made particularly ridiculous by the fact that Atos is in the information technology business and should know better.  The idea that a large organization is eliminating the only means of a communication technology that easily and efficiently enables any user to communicate with anyone else in the organization because of information pollution, is the operational equivalent of abolishing mobile phones because they produce noise pollution.  

I’m afraid Breton is confusing his information overload symptoms with its assumed cause: email. But email is not the cause, it’s only a vehicle for information.  He can find convenient scapegoats for his own information problems, and let his company’s policies escape the blame. But disconnecting email rather than making it more effective is a folly that deserves our scrutiny.

The problem with email is that it’s too successful a solution. So successful that people use it for things that it’s not intended for, but use it anyway due to its ease-of-use. As I’ve covered rather extensively, solutions like Yammer, SharePoint, Jive, Socialtext, Salesforce.com, IBM Connections, and SAP Streamworks are fantastic solutions that work with but do not intend to replace email. 

The creators of these technologies recognize email for what it is, a simple yet powerful communication tool that is part of an effective social business.  

P.S. I sent an email to Atos asking for an explanation. Presumably it’s buried In their intranet somewhere.

The world’s largest gaming company is going through a remarkable transformation into a Social Business. Electronic Arts understands that today’s technologies, unlike those of the past decade, are no longer limited to the individual.

They impact everyone. Impact that’s revolutionizing the way customers communicate. Impact that is forcing companies to listen, to learn, to adapt, to change its infrastructure and culture in order to stay competitive. Impact that is causing considerable anxiety in the C-Suite.

I first met Electronic Art’s (EA) Bert Sandie at a recent SharePoint Conference in Anaheim. His self-appointed title ‘Director of Technical Excellence’ stood in stark contrast to the trendy Angry Birds shirt he was wearing. But the more you talk to Sandie, the more you notice how well these ambiguities somehow support one another.

Electronic Arts Social Platform SnapShot

Is EA a Social Business?

When asked if Sandie considered EA a social business, he was quick to respond, “Externally for sure. If you think about what we do from a consumer perspective There’s a lot of discussion inside EA, then after some deliberation, it’s delivered externally and direct to the consumer. Our goal is to constantly answer the questions: How do we understand our customers better? How do we interact with them? It may sound easy, but it’s very challenging to do in practice.”

For EA, this isn’t just a theoretical matter. They put it into practice to improve the bottom line. Each game has a community manager that learns from its players through personal conversations. But at a point where most companies are satisfied, EA takes it much farther. Sandie explains, “We do a lot of analytics. We study how people are reaching the page and how they consume and interact with our content. We also watch what they download. It all helps improve the user experience.”

Still EA wasn’t satisfied and wanted to learn more about their customers, “There’s also deep telemetry and analytics on any online game. So we want to see if people are playing a certain feature, how long they’re playing that feature, which character did they play, which costume did they pick, which helmets do they like, you name it, we measure it,” explains Sandie.

Sounds a lot like EA’s own reality version of The Sims to me. Find out what people want, create it then insert it into the game. By serving demand, consumers are happy and EA profits. An excellent example of how Social Businesses can increase revenue by tuning in.

But is EA an Internal Social Enterprise?

So does EA apply these same social concepts with their employees? According to Sandie they are just beginning but cautions, “because we work in so many countries, we are careful around privacy and we have offices especially in Europe and Canada.”

But, then, what are they analyzing? Sandie explains, “We collect a lot of analytics through some proprietary tools we built on top of SharePoint 2010. More than people might imagine. We look at how many people, fill in their profiles but we also look at how many people view other people’s profiles.”

But why? Sandie answers, “So inside EA about 50% have filled in complete profiles. Everyone has a profile by default. A standard profile gets pulled from HR, active directory data. What’s more interesting is something like 85%+ employees look at other people’s profiles regardless if they have a profile themselves. So they obviously want to find other people and find information about them. Yet they might not necessarily have filled in their own profile which is really interesting.”

It turns out completed profiles build deeper relationships. It’s a kind of Match.com for the company’s employees. Looking for an animator, just search the profiles and find your match.

This is the core of creating an effective social platform that supports the social enterprise. Create critical mass on the platform by first persuading people to create profiles and personalized content. Then, persistently encourage employees to contribute work related content. But be careful not to censure employees. In fact, encourage debate as long as it remains civil.

Sandie illustrates a typical situation on EA’s more mature social platform (SharePoint), “So if a team just put out Madden Football, we’ll do a deep dive with the Madden team. We’ll get them to write articles about what they did and the marketing behind it. They’ll explain how they designed certain features, new technical things they used and what cool art techniques they applied. We like to highlight that stuff in order to seed the platform with valuable content.”

EA On Best Practices

Sandie likes to set the bar high. So his best practices may be stretch for some, just right for others. Naturally, it’s wise to decide for your organization the appropriate level. “I know I’m a bit of a perfectionist so I always try to set the gold standard for people to follow. I like to show people the gold standard for how to make a great video, article or illustration. We’ve also built templates for users to add images, diagrams or external content,” Sandie explained.

He also advises employees not to write 25 pages of content. Instead, shorten the article or whitepaper to five to seven pages. “People will read 5-7 pages, add images, show screenshots if you’re trying to show a part of a game or a piece of art or a technique or the tool. Put some links in it to other additional information. Those are all just best practices on how to write a good knowledge article that will help people,” advises Sandie.

In regards to content ratings, Sandie advises you follow Facebook and only use the ‘thumbs up’ button. Sandie emphasizing the point, “Internally you do not want thumbs down. I’ll give you my perfect example why people don’t want thumbs down. A new employee starts in the company – they are junior, maybe a new graduate. They write a really good article for other new grads and for whatever reason some cynical veteran is giving it thumbs down. Will that new graduate ever write an article again?”

Perhaps not, but will that graduate ever receive constructive feedback to improve her skills? According to Sandie, EA has enabled comments for that type of feedback. Sandie is probably banking on EA veterans to be more diplomatic in the comment section.

EA Lessons Learned

When EA first presented what they had done on SharePoint to Microsoft, the reaction was, “you guys built this on SharePoint?” Certainly a surprise since the site lacked any major 3^rd party social apps, Sandie added, “but our goal was not so much about the technology, we cared that it was usable, it was aesthetically pleasing and it was functional. It did all three of those things.”

Sandie then went on to explain why it’s crucial to roll out a social platform in phases, “Even if you have a sophisticated audience, do not roll out the kitchen sink and all the bells and whistles at once. Even a sophisticated audience cannot absorb it all – so hold back stuff. Even when they are saying they desperately want it, they can’t take it all. It’s too big of a change initiative. They’ve got to learn pieces of, introduce pieces of it and then introduce the next piece.”

Of course, like eBay, EA started with an exclusive invitation to participate, “We started with an email that said, ‘Hi, you’ve been selected out of 100 people; you’re the elite squad of people we trust to use these types of tools. We want your feedback. You’ve got one month. We’ll be updating the site every day in real-time with feedback so have patience.”

But once the social business platform is in place, Sandie recommends companies hire a curator to manage content and help make internal communities more active. “You do need a curator. If you don’t have a curator I think you’re going to struggle. People are willing to do it but you still need a curator to go help them,” Sandie emphasized.

To Summarize…

It’s clear EA is leveraging social business principles both internally and externally. They’re also using social methodologies in the products they are shipping to understand how their customers are using their games. While a different approach is needed for all three scenarios, EA is becoming a more effective organization by understanding how to strategically participate in each.

eBay’s going social. Its protagonists are building the next generation social platform called the HUB, to increase employee engagement, collaboration and effectiveness. It is instructive to follow the evolution of their strategy in response to the growing chorus of eBay employees who were demanding social tools, or had already snuck them in.

On first impression, Ramin Mobasseri eBay’s Enterprise Portals Solutions Manager and Maarten Sundman a SharePoint Architect and Developer appear to be an unlikely team. Both men speak in different languages: Mobasseri ‘business’ and Sundman ‘tech’. Yet both were equally determined to create a people-centric platform for eBay’s 18,000 employees.

Their approach can best be described as a test-and-learn methodology. Mobasseri explains, “We believe in taking small steps,, [starting] with a proof of concept. It’s easy to learn from 1,000 people. It’s much easier to make mistakes with 1,000 people rather than with thousands people.”

Their goal with employees was to not to force them to drop their existing cloud-based social tools, but to try and integrate them into the collaboration Hub. That way, all of the information centralized rather than trapped in cloud-based silos.

The Playbook Summary

Technology	SharePoint (the Hub), Newsgator, Yammer
Primary Adoption Strategy	Pilot the Hub with a 1,000 Tech Savvy Elite, learn and then roll out to next tier.
Most Important Lesson Learned	Incentivize users to fill out their profiles.
Most Unique Feature	The Hub aggregates and unifies a user’s external social network, then allows the user to cross-post information to social networks with one click.
Benefits	Improved employee retention, collaboration and transparency expected
Social Business Strategy in 5 Words	Test, learn, measure, revamp, repeat

How eBay’s Social Business Program Started

Interestingly, the proliferation of eBay employees using a cloud-based micro-blogging solution from Yammer set off IT alarms and spurred them into action. Employees had brought in Yammer without IT approval or involvement. In this landscape, Mobasseri, Sundman and the rest of IT knew they needed act or risk being viewed as non-strategic. They wanted to support the business units, they wanted to be involved and they were going to do something about it.

In reality however, the team lacked the budget and power to build a social platform to support the company’s move to a more social organization. Not having any official support from the executive team, and only the CIO’s tacit approval, Mobasseri and his team worked around executives who were roadblocks, and went directly to mid-level management to gain their support.

“What we did was go to a number of directors and people who really wanted this social thing and wanted to participate. Some of them even volunteered to pay for the software, partially, which was great. We then developed an internal Stakeholder’s Analysis model. In it, we classified people as being ‘for us,’ ‘against us’ or ‘neutral’ and assigned power scores to each of them. In the end, we were looking for the person who loved our project and had a lot of power. Fortunately, we found him. His name is Alan Marks. The rest was easier,” said Mobasseri.

eBay’s Adoption Strategy

In testing their adoption strategy, Mobasseri explained, “We tested it with 1,000 people from various groups, backgrounds and digital skill sets, and not just the tech savvy elite. They were very, very interested in this tool because they believe in the social learning phenomenon.”

True, a pilot program that focuses on a select group of people is an adoption best practice, but eBay took it a few steps further. “We also ran a campaign called ‘Scrub the Hub’. We gave people incentives, like Xbox’s, just to enrich their profiles. Why? Without a rich profile, what can you get in a social network? Not much,” said Mobasseri.

My Favorite Quote: “What is a trip to Hawaii to a company? For some companies this makes sense.  Why not? You gain a million dollars in productivity for a $10,000 investment.” (Ramin Mobasseri, referring to a practice of incentivizing users to fill out their profiles)

Another way of looking at it is to imagine a Facebook without faces, background info, or personal context. The site becomes useless, like a shadowy Cheers bar filled with anonymous characters ‘who don’t want anyone to know their name’. Without the human element and context, social platforms are unlikely to flourish.

When I asked Mobasseri how the program has worked out, he explained, “The numbers of profiles has quadrupled, but it’s still not where we want it to be. To qualify for an incentive, some people went and just put smiley faces in their profiles. But it’s getting better. There is communication. We have to continue telling people, ‘Go ahead and put things in your profile.’”

Why eBay decided to use SharePoint (The Hub) as its Social Platform

It’s becoming increasingly evident that building a social platform as the hub of all social and document activity is an important step in enabling an organization to go social. But eBay didn’t want just any platform. They wanted a robust, state-of-the-art platform, figuring it would accelerate its usage; thus making the organization more effective.

In describing their decision to use SharePoint and Newsgator, Mobasseri didn’t believe the out-of-the-box SharePoint platform to be sufficient, “So we evaluated some other social networking tools like Jive. We played around with Yammer, as I mentioned. We tried Ning and Chatter as well. But NewsGator just kept rising up to the top of our scoring. So we decided the social networking tool for eBay was going to be NewsGator built on SharePoint.”

According to Sundman, eBay also chose SharePoint because of its ability to easily integrate tools from other vendors (typically through SharePoint web parts). If the tool can’t be integrated, Sundman elaborates, “we then aggregated the content within the Hub. That way, they can see the activity streams from various social networking like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or whatever tool that’s not supported by SharePoint natively.”

Sundman went on to explain how eBay will be the first company to allow its users to post and receive updates from the intranet to multiple internal or external networks at the push of a button.

While a beneficial and significant timesaver, integrating data from people’s external social networks accelerates a discussion about who then owns the employee’s social data? In most US organizations, the company has the rights to all content and messages on an employee’s computer. But I’m not sure this rule holds when an employee’s external social network is being used for business purposes.

Lessons Learned

In any endeavor involving organizational change, opportunities are missed, mistakes are made, and the right decisions only later become obvious. Against this backdrop, I asked Mobasseri what he would have done differently, given the chance.

“We currently don’t have a mobile device management solution, but we’re working on it. We want to see our social sites via the iPhone or the Blackberry, but it’s not going live for a while. We think in 2012, we will actually roll out the mobile piece,” explained Mobasseri.

“The other lesson learned was around the various browsers that were coming up short in SharePoint 2010. Because at eBay and PayPal, we’re very tech savvy, and people use Chrome on the Mac. But SharePoint is a Microsoft product. It doesn’t always work on Chrome. Some of the stuff does and some of the stuff doesn’t. So we built a browser capability matrix. In it, we highlighted what worked, what kind of worked and things that didn’t work at all. Those are the things that we should have known beforehand,” lamented Mobasseri.

Summing it all up…

Yes, it’s true that in our era of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, employees are able to side-step enterprise IT and use cloud-based social tools to get their job done. That’s been a good thing — so far. But ultimately corporations are in business to solve problems for their customers, so employees need to be working from the same playbook.

So whether you are a corporate salesperson, accountant, paralegal, vice-president or IT professional, you can be the next leader who steps up to the plate and creates your company’s social playbook, designs the plays to have impact, and builds a team to deliver it. These people are called visionaries. Visionaries like Mobasseri and Sundman who don’t just dream about creating a social business. They find the means to create one.

Note: eBay went live with the Hub on 11/11/11

H.R. 2930 appears to be just another US Congressional Bill winding its way through the system. Yet I can imagine most Professional Angel Investors recognize (or should) the bill and its potential impact on their livelihood.  The House has already passed it with a 95% majority. It’s now on to the Senate and possibly the White House.

If the bill passes (watch the latest Congressional Bill Progress), you can say good bye to the Professional Angel Investment Community as we know it today.

Here’s Why 

H.R. 2930 or the “Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act,”  would provide companies the ability to raise up to $1 million (US) to fund projects and companies. The bill will ease fund raising restrictions and regulations on both companies and investors.   So if you are a start up in need of an early round of financing, you no longer need to ask friends and family, you can ask friend of friends or their extended network for seed capital. 

And that’s where companies like Kickstarter will have an advantage over Angel Investors. 

Let’s face it, the Professional Angel community is insular. They invest in each others deals, they invest in similar types of deals, and they invest in who they know.  Why? Because it’s safe and they have a legitimate need to protect their client’s capital.  But that has led to a lack of investment diversity and has created an investment “group think” that is limiting the potential of the community.

Conversely, sites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo enable people with a diversity of knowledge, skills and experience to fund projects and receive rewards for helping entrepreneurs. It’s called crowdfunding and it allows almost anyone to give money to an entrepreneur to complete a project.

In some aspects it’s like American Idol.  Because it enables anyone to vote (by making a prescribed monetary pledge) and become a fan of a project (by following it).  At the end of 30 days if the pledges don’t meet the minimum requirement as set by the entrepreneur, then the money is refunded to the investors.  If the project funding goals are met, then the project moves forward, but with an important added fan base.

Today on crowdsourcing sites, project funding ranges between $100 – $8000 and pledges a fraction of that amount. But if H.R. 2930 passes, you can bet crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter will quickly move into the business of helping entrepreneurs raise Angel levels of capital ($100,000 to $1 million) . 

So why will the Professional Angel Investment community die? Because, if entrepreneurs are given a choice between raising funds through an opaque, arduous and slow Professional Angel route versus a much more efficient, diverse and knowledgeable path, the latter will win ever time.

To further emphasize the point, I’ve also prepared a summary table which differentiates the options:

I understand the value, knowledge and relationships that most Professional Angel investors bring, but in the future, that value will be crowdsourced as well.  More on this below.

Case Study: KickStarter

Rather than speculate, I decided to invest in a Kickstarter project myself to understand how it all works. I chose an iPhone/iPad game called Stop Those Fish by Eye Interactive for three reasons.

First, I know the founder of Eye Interactive and he sent me an invite email to participate. Second, I could tell that Eye Interactive’s new game was creating buzz from my personal network which provided me with social proof (due diligence).  Third, his first game Zombi Samurai reached #3 on the charts making it one of the most successful games in the last few months.

I asked Jason Seldon, Eye Interactive’s founder why he decided to raise funds from Kickstarter versus taking a more traditional route through Angel’s or friends and family.  Seldon responded, “I believe Kickstarter’s value goes way beyond their stated value proposition of being a new way to fund creative projects. In addition to helping individuals and small businesses fund these creative endeavors, I believe it is also a way to generate tremendous pre-release buzz for a new product and to build a fan base prior to launch.”

Seldon continues,  “It gives early adopters a unique sense of ownership over a new product. In our case, project backers actually get their names in the game credits. So it really encourages a deep connection with consumers. In a sense, you are building a street team comprised of all of your project backers prior to product launch. These individuals can then serve as brand ambassadors to help make your newly launched product a success.”

What the Crowdfunding Critics Have to Say

If the bill passes, the first objection you’ll hear from critics in regards to crowdfunding sites is the opportunity for scam artists to commit fraud and place unsophisticated investors at risk of losing their capital.

My reply to objection # 1 is twofold.  First as we’ve seen with Wall Street, even sophisticated systems that are heavily regulated are subject to fraud.  In this case, several hundred billion.  Second, because sites like Kickstarter do their own background checks, make the process transparent, and allow potential investors to see who has invested (social proof), the risk is mitigated by a number of check points.  I’m not saying it’s fool-proof, in fact I am positive we’ll see fraud at some point, but the benefits of crowdfunding far outweigh the potential for fraud.

The second objection I hear is that new start-ups will lose the coaching and networking opportunities from a professional Angel investor.  In the short run, I agree with this objection. But in the near future, crowdfunding sites will overtake those basic functions and eventually crowd source the networking, intelligence and strategy aspect the Angels provide today.  More, crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter will enable virtual teams to sign on (think eLance meets Kickstarter) to help start-ups fill talent quality gaps.     

Who else will H.R. 2930 benefit?

Besides start-ups, crowdfunding sites, and mom and pop investors, companies like Angel List, and Bolstr will offer nearly anyone the opportunity to participate in an investment round. 

For example, if the Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM) start-up Nimble wanted to quickly raise a round of capital, Angel’s List could convert Nimble’s followers to investors by offering them a chance to participate in their next round of funding.  If the new bill passes, I suspect Angel List will provide a swipe your credit card platform to participate.   

As a quick aside, I’d like to touch on is the rich analytics and statistical information these crowdfunding sites can potentially track. Imagine giving start-ups the ability to see how many page visits, clicks, and conversions they’ve had to their page. More, who is referring potential investors to the page? Which segments of social networks seem to be supporting the idea the most? What is the sentiment of start-ups product?

That information could be used for a variety of purposes from improving the business idea to increased transparency. 

So let’s review…

• The Professional Angel community will quickly lose its wings if H.R. 2930 passes. You can bet on it.
• Sites, like Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, Angel List, and Bolstr will offer superior services through the crowd sourcing of funding, talent and the ability to organically build a fan base.
• These crowdfunding sites will eventually offer superior access to intelligence and strategy than professional Angels provide today.
• The crowdfunding process is much more transparent but potentially more dangerous than traditional Angel financing.  

Ok, now tell me what you think…

I typically like to provide context around discussions with industry thought leaders and Executives of the Fortune 500.  Yet some discussions should simply be left untouched and published as-is. It’s not a short article, but the insights around IBM’s journey to becoming a Social Business is remarkable and a must read for those that are in charge of the Social Business program at their companies. 

Key Learnings:

• When IBM experiments with new Social Technologies, 10,000+ employees try them out
• The largest experiment,  Beehive, our Social Voodoo. had nearly 90,000 internal early adopters
• IBM Communities can contain between 12 people and 50,000 people
• The Social Maturity adoption plan at IBM is itself evolving
• There are no reliable benchmarking metrics available for Social Business
• IBM measures a lot of engagement activity beyond adoption metrics

Key Questions Answered

• How important is adoption in becoming a Social Business?
• How to track adoption and engagement metrics.
• What impact is it having on IBM’s culture?
• Why Big Data will be important in becoming a Social Business.

#1 Fidelman: Rawn Shah, please tell us about yourself and your background

#1 Shah: I’ve been at IBM for probably 11-12 years now and in the early years I was a contractor. Before that, I was a journalist and I wrote for a number of different technology magazines like JavaWorld and LinuxWorld.  

My most recent book is, “Social Networking for Business”, which I started around 2006 when I was the Program Manager for the DeveloperWork’s community at IBM. The Developer site has about 9 million individuals and I worked as a Program Manager both on the content side as well as the community management’s side.

After that I joined this internal team where we are focused on trying to involve all the IBMers in all the different ways that they work in Social, including working in a Social collaborative environment.

Interestingly,w hen people jump on in IBM for a new project it’s in the tens of thousands. It’s not like a dozen people try it out. I think one of the largest experiments had about 100,000 people join in.

#2 Fidelman: Can you expand more on how IBM leverages communities?

#2 Shah: Those community scaled at, I think they’re about 20-30,000 communities. Some of those communities, I think the biggest one I’ve seen has about 50,000 members in it. Other communities go all the way down to like less than a half dozen.

For example, the IBM Software group community, which is under Steve Mills, our Senior VP. He’s the Group Executive of all the brands that we have; everything you see from the collaboration to the database systems to the Rational products to the Business Manager – everything that comes under there. They created this community to move away from standard portals of communicating information to everyone. So only from having a webpage to actually having a community that people can participate in.

Steve Mills now does quarterly updates and kind of regular updates onto the community himself and so does his Executives; his Executives do the same.

#3 Fidelman: Does IBM follow a Social Business Maturity Model?

#3 Shah: I gave a presentation at the Dachis Social Business Summit back in March on Social Business maturity. What does maturity actually look like?

So one of the topics was… People come to maturity and they think of it as large numbers of people using it. We already have large numbers of people. That’s an easy thing for us. What percentage of the company is using it? We look at that as an adoption maturity. You are getting enough of the organization participating in the environment. So that is one particular type of maturity, just in terms of adoption.

As we have grown over the last four years we’ve also been evolving our program. How do you actually run a program to do adoption? How do you run a program to engage people in Social Business? That program itself is achieving maturity. What kind of staffing do you need? What kind of topics do you cover? How do you present it? How do you enroll volunteers? What do you do with the volunteers? All of those is program aspect. So that’s a second aspect of maturity.

The deeper one is where you start looking across the fold of what is the quality of how people commit to each other? What is the quality of how people learn from each other? How do they organize into groups? How do you organize across the company into Social groups of different sizes with different purposes?

#4 Fidelman: How do you track the answers to each of these questions?

#4 Shah: All of those are different levels; they have their own independent levels of maturity. So you might be very well connected to organization and you might likely also be doing a lot of Social learning from that, but if you don’t have the infrastructure to support decision making or organization then you might not be as advanced with that aspect.

So these are what we call capabilities. Capabilities are things that individuals can do. So you can actually go out and share to provide that Social learning aspect. You can go out there and connect to people. There’s a second part to it which is quality. So if capabilities are verbs: to do something, then qualities are adjectives. You do something in an open way, a transparent way. You do something in an agile way. You can connect to the very slow process, go through a chain of command until you eventually connect to someone else or you can just jump out there and access it directly. That’s a very different nature of transparency. It’s also a different nature in agility.

#5 Fidelman: How is that impacting IBM’s culture?

#5 Shah: You have that level of comfort in an organization where anyone can approach anyone without repercussions of any sort. So organizations view that in different ways. Sometimes it’s not necessary that everyone have that level of transparency but imagine an organization like the Intelligence Agencies, right, and the Defense Industry. Sometimes you don’t want everyone to know who everyone else is in the organization. You don’t want them to know what’s going on in other parts. That’s part of your culture; that’s part of the design for your organization. At the same time you can still allow some bits of collaboration.

So the key qualities we look at are the same things you might have heard from Jeff Schick. We look for agility, nimbleness; we look for transparency, how visible do you make it? We look for engagement. How many people are participating? Not just in the environment but how many people are actually engaged with the company in this form? That harks adoption; that harks responsiveness – everything that you actually want out of your collaborative environment itself.

#6 Fidelman: I think the troubling aspect, and what most people want to know, is how are you actually measuring these things? It’s one thing to say you’re transparent but is there a benchmark? How do you measure transparency for instance?

#6 Shah: That was actually a very, very difficult aspect of that. The measurements are hard. We look at measurement in two ways. There’s metrics categories and then there are collection methods. So metrics categories – there are a number of different varieties of those. Things that describe the structure of network, things that describe the quality or influence of people there: brand awareness, individual reputations, things like that.

Then there are methods of collecting the data. You can do that from activity logs, right? There’s a data log from some service somewhere. You can do that from surveys that you put out there and you get opinions. You can do that from interviews and focus groups and data log visualizations.

Let’s put an axis there, two main axes of these things. One is that metrics are behavioral meaning it’s something that someone has done or attitudinal in Social analytics. Attitudinal means it is opinion; it is views; it is things like ratings. These are all attitudes towards the information itself. Both kinds can either be qualitative or quantitative. Quantitative metrics I think we all understand. Qualitative metrics are more on the variable scale.

#7 Fidelman: Can you provide an example?

#7 Shah: Let’s pick a case study. A case study is much more detailed but a success story is a simple anecdote about how somebody uses something and what they use it for and why it was successful or useful to them. So that is actually a very qualitative piece of information though it may have some quantitative data points for it. That is one type of metric with two different types of data collection methods behind it. A final slice that we do is demographics. It is all of the above and then you slice it by the different types of demographics that you’re interested in.

So some of the analytics work that I do for our group is primarily adoption and we’re looking at demographics across the company of what does adoption look like in China versus U.S.? What does adoption look like in Software group versus our Consultant services?

#8 Fidelman: How do you know that it’s going well? I mean you could see quarter after quarter increases but do you really know you’re being successful unless you’re benchmarking against another company or by placing a stake in the ground that you’ve placed in the future?

#8 Shah: That’s the benchmark standard issue. For us, we can use the demographic within organization to see which group is ahead of which other group. There’s no single hallmark of what is best but it’s a running count of who’s in the lead or who’s behind. That’s useful information as it tells us, “Hey, we need to put more effort into adoption in this part of the world, in this type of job role, this division, things of that nature.”

If you want to compare against other companies, other organizations… So inside our company we can compare between team, business units and job roles. So they can see if Sales are doing better at collaboration than Marketing or Developers or any of them. There are different Executives who are interested in that view.

So against other companies is more challenging. What we need to do is run a service with other companies where you ask a number of survey questions which you have identified as key indicators of employee engagement. Then, run that survey with many, many different companies. Armed with that information, they can now start creating an industry benchmark. We have had hundreds of sets of data from companies from this industry. This is where you stand relative to the industry. This is where you stand relative to your geography.

So if you really want to tell across industry, you need a sort of neutral fashion which is not based on the number of people, which is not based on the type of industry that you’re in necessarily. Right now tech industry folks are really high into collaboration and all of those things because they have the tools. It’s part of what they do. Collaboration, when you’re talking about Social Business, is more than just the tools itself. It’s the attitude; it is the view of how people in the organization work with each other. In that sense collaboration has existed forever, before we had computers. How willing are people to talk to each other in an organization? How willing are they to share information? We just look at it in the terms of Software tools making it faster, accelerating that medium itself.

It certainly opens it up and we call it democratizing the ability to exchange information. So now think of that in Social Software in that same context within a company.

You benchmark parts of an organization or even entire organizations and then basically you have to evolve it over time. You don’t say, “This company is a standard, everything else is measured against it.” It’s a moving target. It’s a constantly growing, evolving, changing thing. Does that make sense?

#9 Fidelman: Have you published any benchmarking studies yourself or anyone within IBM that I could link to or point to?

#9 Shah: We have published different kinds of information. So this information itself is new. We are still working on it. When we are ready with the full form, we’ll certainly go ahead and publish that. We have published other kinds of data which is the, like I was saying with the metrics, we have different views of metrics. Departments need different kinds of metrics so this is, again, demographics. The Marketing, we want a different view of metrics than HR or Sales.

There are two ways of looking at it. So first, we look at it from a programmatic way. So programmatic tells us about our program obviously but it also tells us about our primary constituents – and the different Sales groups. There are tens of thousands of people in there and we want to understand how the Sales group is doing versus another group like Development. We give that view to our Sales Executives.

Now the second way of looking at that is rather than just focus on adoption,we’re looking at the capabilities of tasks. How are people connecting? How are people finding experts or expertise? We’re looking for expertise not necessarily just people. So it’s knowledge, it’s people, it’s all of the above.

Specifically,  How is that task, that’s one of those core tasks fit in the collective collaboration? How well is that going for the organization? Are people finding it easy? What are the different dynamics of that? Is it easier to do? Is it faster to do? Is it universally available? Is it actually responsive? Are they getting desired results? Is it integrated into the workflow? Is that something that people find easily that they don’t have to go think about it and jump off to a different point to go do it? How much of it becomes part of the process?

#10 Fidelman: Are you aggregating metrics across Connections, Notes, maybe mobile, any kind of Social stream actually and doing some kind of a global analytic research?

#10 Shah: Yeah so we do that primarily for the Software tools rather than the other mediums like the folks, mobile devices, things of that nature. So I developed a tool where we can look at it across our internal Connections environments and number of other primary collaboration tools that we have. What we do is we pick a demographic that we’re interested in. So let’s say Sales. We look at that population and all the different places that they’re interacting. We don’t use individual information itself; that really isn’t very useful to us.

We are looking for groups; we are looking for demographic units. Those units could be anything from looking at how China is doing versus how the U.S. is doing. How are people in a Sales Engineer role versus the Client Representatives doing in collaboration? What am I looking for? I’m looking for adoption metrics. I’m looking for how regularity. That’s a primary metric that we look for. Further, do they do this on a weekly basis? Do they do this on a monthly or quarterly basis or once a year or not at all?

We consider a weekly basis that means they’re really active. They’re doing something. They could be doing a daily basis. At that point I don’t think it really matters. Weekly is enough to tell you if they are actually part of the system itself, the environment itself.

#11 Fidelman: What are you using to measure that? Like a specific tool?

#11 Shah: We have the internal tools that allow that. They’re the same tools that go into our products as well. So SaND, for example, is a Social search system. It’s also a database engine in itself, a database engine of every kind of interaction that’s going on in the environments. They get down to the specifics of are people commenting versus are they downloading versus are they tagging and sharing? Things like that. What kind of action they’re doing, where they’re doing it and who are they doing it with, when are they doing it. Then we rollout that information. We’re not interested in any single person because there’s just too many privacy issues with that. Any individual is not important to us.

From a program function and an Executive role – they want to know how the entire group is doing.

#12 Fidelman: You’re not interested in finding experts, specific experts on specific topics then.

#12 Shah: No, we’re not necessarily doing that for the purpose of that. The SaND tool can actually do that just through the search. So you can type in a keyword and get experts for that.  The analysis that I’m describing is what Managers and Executives are interested in. Sure, you could show me a list of the top 10 experts but that’s not really what I’m interested in. I’m interested in how the entire population is doing.

#13 Fidelman: This seems to be a big data problem. I can’t see the average company being able to aggregate all this information, especially if you’re talking about email. Aggregating all the Social feeds that we talked about and eventually bringing in mobile and then doing some kind of analysis on it. It seems like you’d have to have a pretty powerful engine in order to process that information. How do you do it with IBM?

#13 Shah: I’m glad you brought that up because these are all big data problems. For us it’s obviously a bigger data problem with 400,000 employees. Think of all the possible networks in there and all the possible non-content that they produce. Others may not be as much but it just depends on the scale.

Now processing that volume of data can take time. Part of it that really makes it simple for us is the categorization of activities; that’s what SaND does really well. SaND also does the indexing of that which makes it easy to search. There are tools built on top of that which helps you visualize that like you can actually visualize Social network. I think we had that for several years.

For us, the even bigger data problem is sentiment analysis…

To be continued in Part 2 next week

They were not incompetent or anything; they had simply broken more pumps in the last year than any previous year the engineers could remember. Not the inexpensive kind, but the large 200 horsepower, $22,000 pumps used in geothermal power plants; each blew up in a  succession of preventable blunders. But then it got worse. They complained to management, suggested a solution, and management did nothing about it.

Details of the gross negligence still haven’t reached the Executives of Ormat (NYSE: OSA), which ironically, will serve as evidence for the purpose of this article.  That valuable, actionable information is being stockpiled and kept hidden from everyone else for a variety of selfish reasons. This fact stands as one of the most important symbols of why organizations large or small, need to become a Social Business.

To fully grasp the situation at Ormat’s Heber facility, one first needs to realize that, regrettably, this isn’t just circumstance or an isolated incident. Situations like these play out around the world in millions of companies. 

The reaction of Ormat’s employees, of course, is entirely predictable. Recognizing that things do not change despite overwhelming evidence to do so, employees become apathetic.  Their apathy exacerbated by managers either too worried about delivering bad news or too stubborn to recognize their new maintenance and control procedures are destroying pumps.  

As one Ormat employee who wished to be anonymous said, “If our executives knew what we knew, they’d start firing people.  Clearly, our internal communication is broken.”

Occupy the Board Room

Despite an ocean of evidence, Executives of most organizations are still choosing to ignore the call for social.  The reason, it seems, stems from an old command and control leadership formula that goes something like this:  information hoarding plus ambiguity, equals power and control.

And so stockholders get screwed, employee morale deflates, and the Company’s Board is left wondering why there are so many unforeseen disruptions that keep impacting the organization. When “management by crisis” is the rule rather than the exception, the Board must step in and taken action. 

But in most crisis, the Board rarely wants to participate directly. They are on the sidelines, representing the shareholders, asking questions, and in some cases, giving advice.  Alarmingly, most are not given access to employees and only hear a filtered version of events from management.

So, for how long are we going to accept the command and control corporate leadership structure?  A reality in business that is eroding shareholder value and employee morale. For existing businesses dominated by information silos, information opacity and downward channels of communication; the answer is that employees must demand the organization become a social business.   

And since their executives are not listening, they must take it to the Board. They must demand the Board ask the tough questions of management. Questions like: Why are we not utilizing social business tools than enable collaboration across teams, functions and departments? Why don’t we have a company-wide activity stream that enables employees to receive answers to their problems? Why don’t we give every employee the tools to be heard whether they are on the front lines or up in the executive suite?

The Board must recognize that people like to work within a social framework. For any business wanting to remain competitive, they must insist their executives create a structure that provides the means for people to be social.  To do that, they need to create a culture that makes it risk free to operate transparently. This means, they have to make sure that the company supplies the best tools, incentives, user experience and policies, that reward and drive the right behavior and does not punish it.

Impossible Dream or Future Reality?

So will this happen? How can we as employees, shareholders and board members make a difference? I suggest we continue to highlight examples like Ormat which over time will compel the Board to make changes. 

The good news is that Ormat’s GeoThermal operation is producing clean and green power. It’s operating with a large profit margin; which is even better news for taxpayers as we’ve given them a loan guarantee of $350 million.  Imagine if they were experiencing these types of preventable issues while completely subsidized by taxpayer money. 

In reality, the Social Enterprise is a struggle for most companies.  It’s about whether or not management will relinquish control of information and empower its employees to communicate and collaborate without unnecessary impediments. It’s about providing a culture of trust instead of one of fear. It’s about empowering the organization’s experts, regardless of rank or title, to get the job done.

And the struggle will confirm once and for all whether companies are serious about listening to their employees. That an open door policy is not just subjective, and employees are defined not by what who they know, but what they do.