Promote Collaboration in large Enterprises

After a good break where I had the opportunity to discover other cultures, I’ll come back to that, I found an interesting challenge at my return in the office. One of my clients want me to present on how to promote collaboration in a large enterprise that has grown through acquisitions. I point this out as each of the business units has its own culture, making things a little more interesting.

Many large companies are actually confronted with this problem and although many have tried most have failed of really getting things going. The first issue is that each business unit is ultimately measured on its results. When things get though, as in the current environment, business units have a tendency to focus on their own objectives, ignoring anything else. And one can argue that, ultimately, collaboration will give them more benefits than working in isolation, it does not matter, they focus on their own objectives. Dave Packard used to say “Tell me how you are measured and I will tell you how you behave”. He is absolutely right in this. It’s all about measurement and the associated incentives. So, you could say, lets change the measurement and reward everybody on the company successes. Yes, that would work, but would dilute responsibilities. Who is responsible to maximize the revenues from each of the business units.

Developing the incentives to ensure maximal revenues for each business unit while maximizing collaboration, taking advantage of the “power of the portfolio”, is really an art. It consists in establishing measures and rewards that include both aspects. The use of balanced scorecards may help in this process. But there is another element to take into account. It is not enough to incent teams to work with each other, its also important to ensure they know of each-other and can easily find the appropriate resources to collaborate with. Particularly in large enterprises grown through acquisitions, this is absolutely not trivial. One approach I have seen in companies is the use of a “buddy program” where employees from different business units help each other understand the workings and culture of the other unit. It works effectively to integrate an acquisition for example and it helps harmonizing the cultures.

A more intriguing approach to finding the right resource in a large organization I have seen lately is a program from HPLabs, called WaterCooler. WaterCooler is a social networking tool focused at helping employees find the right resources (information and people) to address a particular problem. It aggregates shared internal social media and cross-references it with an organization’s directory.

As I progress with the preparation of my presentation, I’ll share some more thoughts with you. Feel free to share yours with me. We may be able to find the approach that helps companies to break down the Chinese wall they have between their BU’s.

Web 2.0 and the Enterprise

Late last week, I received a message pointing out social networking had no place in the enterprise. Indeed said the message, Facebook, Twitter and the others do not add any value to the enterprise. Well I choose to respectfully disagree with that comment. Indeed, enterprises should increasingly look at the Web 2.0 space and how it can help them in running their business. There are two main reasons for this:

• First, a new generation of employees are entering the workforce. They are called the Y generation, and have grown up using SMS, Instant Messaging and others. They are all over Facebook, share photo’s in Flickr, video’s in Youtube etc. For them, e-mail is a dinosaur. Whether we like it or not, they are integrating their experience in their business communication in the same way they do privately. If you are interested, a very good case study in the February issue of  Harvard Business Review describes the phenomena
• But there is a more immediate need. In many global companies, travel is severely restricted. But the business needs to go on, and the need for collaboration is not diminishing. Actually, I would argue that the increase in volatility in the current markets only increases that need. Companies have to find new approaches and tools to collaborate virtually.

As pointed out by Dion Hinchcliffe in his blog  entry “Using Web 2.0 to reinvent your business for the economy downturn”, the deeper implication of web 2.0 for the enterprise are often overlooked. The drawing on the left comes from an older entry, but is still very relevant. Listening back to a definition of Web 2.0 given by Tim O’Reilly, I really like the concept of “the user adds value”. Indeed, where in traditional environments you have the producer and the consumer, web 2.0 gives everybody the possibility to contribute. And is that not what we want from a collaboration perspective. To my knowledge, very little research has been done around collaboration tools and what approach to take for what type of business process. Companies need to collaborate all the time, being it for forecasting, sales & order planning, product design or any other critical process.

This brings us back to generation Y. We should take advantage of their arrival to train the organization in the use of such tools to improve collaboration and productivity. If we don’t do that, chances are that they will continue using their favorite tools and expose company information on the internet. I was talking to a client the other day and he pointed out to me he had spent the morning in their local office. He had seen one of their young engineers typing frantically into IM. He was ready to go to him and point out that private conversations did not have their place in the office, but fortunately asked his employee why he was using the tool. As it turned out he was reviewing a beta version of a new software that was being developed by the central IT team in Eastern Europe, and sharing in real time his remarks with the developer who happened to also be an IM fan. My client told me he was happy he had asked first, before beating him up. Now, this scenario is a nightmare for many CIO’s as security cannot be guaranteed. Unfortunately, they do not provide any other means to achieve the same results. Web 2.0 is a tremendous way to harvest the knowledge of the enterprise, increasing productivity and streamline approaches. It is completely under-used, but could be of such a great help in the current downturn. So, what are we waiting for?

Are IT departments pushing collaboration in the cloud

I was intrigued earlier in the week by a comment made by one of my friends who is doing a lot of work in the collaboration and knowledge management area. He told me about the difficulties he had with the IT department and the lack of support he got for the collaboration tools we use. He made the comment “its like if they want to push us to the cloud”. That actually got me thinking. Indeed, IT departments don’t look at collaboration and knowledge management environments as being critical applications, and in times where budgets are down, where resources are reducing, the first things for which support is reduced are these. Does this actually make sense in a business environment where companies are globalizing, travel budgets are reduced and collaboration increasingly becomes important.

As the number of “Generation Y” workers (born between 1975-1995) surpasses the baby boomers, the social networking literacy increases drastically. With the IT departments not providing the appropriate support systems, the tendency is to use the social networking tools instead. Unfortunately in the current circumstances this exposes enterprises to three key issues:

• First, the level of security of most of the on-line collaboration platforms, at least the free ones (the ones most people turn to), have not been audited. This potentially exposes company confidential information to the world and may result in competitors getting hold of key information early
• What happens in the cloud is completely outside the company's control and makes Sarbane-Oxley and Basel 2 compliance difficult to prove
• Third, this now puts key company information in the hands of a third party that might be subpoenaed to release the information to court without the agreement of the owner in case of a court case. Legal departments see this as a nightmare scenario.

In a cover story, titled “Innovation meets Collaboration”, AT&T describes some of the issues related with internet based collaboration, pointing out though that the gap between the companies that take advantage of the internet and the ones who don’t is widening.

As IT budgets reduce and employees look outside the company for tools to collaborate, it is mandatory that a clear approach is taken and that all implications, including security and legal ones, are reviewed prior a decision is made. Many employees today are not aware of the implications and threats caused by moving documents and confidential information to the internet. I do not advocate the status quo, but rather to approach the problem with eyes wide open. Moving forward, companies will have unhappy surprises, just make sure it is not yours.