I’m in Amsterdam, at Orange Business Live 2010 – An event Orange Business Services runs each year, looking at the challenges and changes in the communications space. At the pre-event evening event one thing that really struck me was the value in networking and networks. Not just the global data networks that have been built (and many of which Orange Business Services run), but the human networks that drive business, and the value of person-to-person communication.
The activity of meeting industry peers, exchanging ideas, and sharing experiences and challenges, is an intensely valuable one. It’s an interesting time for the CIOs here. While there is conversation about the place of machine-to-machine communication, the bigger buzz was about building the “human network” within the business, enabling people across the globe to work as if they were standing side-by-side.
Business agility is a key theme here. The speed of change today is phenomenal, to borrow an example from Helmut Reisinger, Senior Vice President Europe, Orange Business Services: ”Days to a million” is shrinking. Apple took 724 days to sell a million devices with the first iPod, 74 days for the first iPhone, and just 3 days for the iPhone 2. Business has to move faster, react faster, make decisions faster. That means getting information around the organisation more quickly, but meaningfully.
“Gen Y” is becoming an increasing percentage of the work force, brining with them new expectations about connectivity and communication. A new generation of IT users is coming into the work place, and for them their first experience of IT was their mobile phone. It’s something that’s true from India to Europe.
From a SocialOptic perspective, this is not news. Milestone Planner has always been about building human networks with plans and people as nodes in that network. We’ve seen how rapidly human networks build, and how effectively information travels when it traverses across social graphs (human networks again!) rather than org charts. What is news it quite how quickly the shift is happening. You can see it in people’s faces as they interact with the blogging team. There’s curiosity, and less caution, about understanding social computing and what it can do for business.
Data networks’ value is in supporting the human network, and the most valuable software is that which joins the human network to the global network. Now, I might be a bit biased in that, but I challenge you to tell me that that isn’t so!
Thursday’s Being-Social Mashup event turned into a focal point for recent thinking and discussion. I chaired a panel on “How Social Media is changing the way we communicate” with Andrew Davis, Chris Thorpe, Jamie Riddell and David Cushman. Of course, within that is the assumption it is changing communication (thanks to Mat Morrison for that question).
The general consensus was that we do communicate differently. Comms are more direct and real-time, and more public and discoverable too. It is also, arguably, more cautious because of that.
Milestone Planner gives us an unusual perspective, sitting both within businesses and across them. Early on we saw a pattern that the best external users of Web 2.0 and social media were also the best internet uses – or visa versa. It’s something that Lee Bryant of Headshift talked about at Being-Social, and has blogged about as well: Social on the outside needs social on the inside. Effective communication is as much a cultural thing as a technological one. Of course the right tools help, and can accelerate the cultural change – I guess we would say that wouldn’t we! Here’s what Lee has to say:
So, where does a business start? The good thing about Web 2.0 technology is that the adoption can be rapid. We’ve watched Milestone Planner spread through an organisation in a matter of hours. In the words of a number of Web 2.0 advocates: Forget the pilot, go for it.
Communication (and software) that spreads via people’s social networks moves fast. Being a really social business let’s you harness that to positive effect.
Last week I had the pleasure of being over at South by South West in Austin, Texas. Although its roots are in the music industry, it is also one of the largest digital interactive events on the planet. Web folks, designers, programmers, agencies and big brands gather to talk technology, business and betterment.
The session that most stuck in my mind was ”Do The Right Thing: Building Respectful Software”, hosted by Matthew Rothenberg and Gavin Bell. I caught up with Gavin at the Digital Mission stand later, which was a great chance to chat about his new book, “Building Social Web Applications” – available on Amazon UK,Amazon US, or O’Reilly. – and to talk social software.
Building web-based applications in a responsible fashion is much harder than it seems at first glance. From privacy issues, to sensible default settings, “doing the right thing” isn’t always that easy. The session was a useful chance to reflect on many of the recent changes to Milestone Planner, and where we go next, from the names used in projects, to how the RSS and calendar features work.
When we added RSS and Calendar support to Milestone Planner, we went for the most secure option available. Secure RSS feeds aren’t that common or well understood. We use them because we want to keep people’s project data as secure as we can. When you login to Milestone Planner, via the web, and choose a project and you will see an RSS Feed icon in the window. If your browser supports it, you will also see it in the menu bar. The first time you select the RSS feed, depending on your RSS reader, you will need to sign in again. From an application point of view, this is ‘the right thing to do’ as each one application uses a seperate copy of your user ID and password, so that you can control access by application. From a user perspective, it seem a little bit of a hassle, but from a security perspective, it is the right thing. The alternative is to leave RSS feeds open, or protect them via a ‘feed key’ which is publicly visible.
Once you add a project feed to your RSS reader (or email client – both OS X’s mail.app and Microsoft’s Outlook can read Milestone Planner’s RSS feeds), you are good to go. You can choose to authenticate the RSS feed once or every time. The settings are controlled by your RSS reader, not Milestone Planner. Whenever someone updates a project, you will get an update via the RSS feed – very handy!
Calendars have their own interesting twist. When you click on the calendar icon in a project, it will fire the a calendar feed. This is a dynamically updated calendar, which you can sync to OS X iCal, Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird’s calendar or any app that supports the web calendar standard. Whenever a milestone moves, the calendar feed is automatically updated. Just like RSS feeds, you will need to login to the calendar feed separately. If you allow your calendar program to store the login details, you only need to do this once. Remember to set the calendar to auto-update – not all calendar clients do this by default. Even though the standard allows us to specify the default refresh time in the feed, sadly many of the Calendar applications tend to ignore this. That’s definitely not doing the right thing!
We have also added Gravatar support. If you have one, you already know what it is. Very simply, a gravatar is a Globally Recognised Avatar – a nice picture of you that can be used (in a project) to identify you. It is more recognisable than the email address on which it is based, and better represents the social nature of Milestone Planner. If you don’t have a gravatar Milestone Planner generates an icon for you, which you will see in the people bar at the top of the page. Setting up your own Gravatar is very straight forward.
We hope you enjoy the new features in Milestone Planner. Here is a request from us: If you see a place where you think we might have set the defaults wrong, or things could be better, let us know. Milestone Planner isn’t just a team-based tool, it’s a team effort, and we’d be very glad to have you on the team!
On Friday I had the privilege of speaking on a panel at Like Minds 2010 “Person to Person”, an event looking at the impact of Social Media, all the way from the media through to employee communication. We’ve enjoyed the onversations with organisers and founders Scott Gould and Drew Ellis, on the concepts behind person-to-person. The agenda included speakers drawn from across the world: Jonathan Akwue , John Bell (who leads Ogilvy’s 360′ Digital Influence team), Joanne Jacobs, Olivier Blanchard, Yann Gourvennec (of Orange Business serverices) and the inimitable Chris Brogan. In between taking notes and photographs, I caught a couple of clips of video that hopefully give a picture of the day:
It was a far cry from the ‘fluffy’ end of Social Media, instead the conversation was grounded and practical. It was fantastically well run, with a format that mixed presentations with panels, lunch-time discussions and theopportunity for one to one discussion. It even managed to highlight a number of local charities in the format. A huge amount came out of the day, but for this post I’ll focus on the things that most directly impact what we are doing here at SocialOptic. Much of the press coverage around social media has been on the consumer space, so it was refreshing to have a lunch hosted by Madlen Nicolaus of Kodak that focussed on social media in the field of Business to Business. With people like Stuart Baines of Futurity Media, Yann Gourvennec and Adam Tinworth around the table, ideas flowed. Three key bullet points for me were:
Think about your use case. Are you looking for new uses for an existing product, or new customers? They require different strategies.
Social media can be used to augment market research, but what people ask for and what they will buy are very different. The need for product management skills has increased, not decreased.
Is your business the right focus for building a customer community? Sometimes it is better to support an existing topical community and be part of that. Any one product is just a small part of a business person’s life.
Something that, for me, there isn’t enough discussion about is using Social Media inside of the business, and as part of the business processes for internal and external communication. I might have a slight bias (given that we see Milestone Planner as social software – Like Minds folks can try the pro version for a month on us), I think it provides one of the biggest returns for business. Olivier Blanchard’s keynote: ‘Integrating People-to-People’ did an excellent job of providing an integrated look at a potential operational framework for social media, which Olivier has blogged about here. I joined Oliver for a panel, moderated by Andrew Gerrard, with Steve Bridger, myself and Gabrielle Laine-Peters. It was interesting that, while we all have wildly different perspectives, our thoughts and conclusions were broadly the same. The key notes for me were:
The age of Social Media means thinking differently about who you hire. On the one hand, as I often repeat, we are all in PR now, and on the other, collaboration trumps management in an innovative business.
Social Media isn’t just about marketing, it is about all forms of communication, from customer service to facilities management. Tactical use of the technology can miss the major benefits.
Leaders need to give staff ‘permission to act’. Demanding that employees use social media, while punishing them for doing so, is never going to have a constructive outcome.
There is a long way to go in understanding how the use of social media is changing employees expectations around communication, and a huge depth of opportunities for the use of the technology. Like Minds provided a great framework to think about both of these and some steps forwards. I am sure it will be driving many of the milestone updates in our plans, and posts on our internal blog for a good while to come! Thank you to Scott and Drew, the attendees, those that watched on line and to the speakers and panellists.
Q: If you gave an infinite number of monkeys an infinite amount of time, would they reproduce the works of Shakespeare ? A: Now we have the blogosphere, we know that they won’t.
The Internet, or more specifically the Web that runs on top of it, has given hundreds of millions of people the ability to share ideas and thoughts with each other. We are seeing what that means in the public, consumer space, but what does it mean for businesses?
The panel was presented with a series of questions, followed by a Q&A with the audience, then a vote on the question – a kind of wireless quiz show for grown ups. I’ll go through the questions, with points from the panel that struck me, and a few points from my own perspective.
Does online social networking during office hours waste valuable working time?
This one is almost an old chestnut. Euan pointed out that we focus on social networking and social media, but don’t question other wastes of time like meetings that don’t come to a conclusion, or time spent writing unused reports. Then there’s the motivation problem, as Suw put it, if employees are wasting time on Facebook, you don’t have a social networking problem, you have an employee engagement problem.
Luis made the business case for social tools in the workplace: What about wasting time trying to find the right expert? He said that in IBM they found that it could take 2-3 hours. With social networks, they are able to find the right expert in less than 5 mins.
The questions from the floor were pretty supportive of social networking. I actually voted “yes” to the question, simply because the tools are used to waste time – there are employees who will make recreational use of social networking. That doesn’t mean that it should be banned or that the tools are a waste of time, rather that employee engagement should be looked at, and people taught how to use the tools professionally and productively.
Vote Result: 83 Votes with 47% Yes / 53% No.
Is email the best way to share information and ideas?
Luis obviously had a view on this one (Luis / @elsua is most famous for having spent two years working almost totally without email). He made the point that if you reply to emails, you only get more. He went on holiday and had only 4 emails when he came back. That sounds wonderful to me! Suw talked about the ‘interruption’ cost of email – after that ‘bing’ goes off, how long does it take to get back into flow state? We end up like little skinner rats, pressing on the lever (checking email) to see if something nice will have arrived for us with each press of the ‘check button’.
Email is seen as a proxy for productivity – if you get and send lots of email you must be busy – and Suw talked about how email is used by people to cover their rears. Euan argued that it is about self preservation – you need to learn to let things go.
Ask “do I really need to send this email?” – there may be a better way of doing it… …the more I hang out in email the less I get done for myself
Luis
I know from data collected for the Continued Communication research project that only a tiny percentage of users consciously choose what communications channel they use – people generally respond through the channel that a message was received by: calls with calls, emails with emails. This is one of the reasons we are building tools to keep people out of their inboxes. People prefer to use email, as they perceive it to “not disturb the other person”.
If companies allowed employees to “self-organize” would nothing ever get done?
A wonderfully provocative question, with suitably robust answers from the panel:
“It is not a situation of will anything get done, it is a question of when can we do this across the whole organisation?” @Elsua
Luis painted a very clear picture of how knowledge management is transforming the work place, while Jemima cited the example of The Tuttle Club as a self-organising collective. Suw pointed out that small groups can self-organise easily, large ones cannot. In the end the panel and the audience made a compelling argument against a yes/no answer – it seems to be a matter of individual, role and extent. Euan raised the topic up another level, asking if organisations are tolerant enough of failure?.. One of the characteristics of long-lived organisations is tolerance.
In the end the Vote Result: 80% no, 20% yes, but with quite a lot more abstentions than the other votes!
I think there were a few moments when the audience and the questions got themselves confused between yes’, no’s and double negatives, but it made for a vibrant debate, touching on the many issues that need to be thought through. Biased as I am (I’m featured in the book), I would highly encourage you to grab yourself a copy. Jemima’s writing style is wonderfully engaging and you’ll hear opinions from a broad selection of those active in the space, including Tim O’Reilly of all things Web 2.0 , JP Rangaswami of BT and Lee Bryant of Headshift.
