A short walk brought us to the Microsoft head office in Australia. The building was suitably high tech with an overhead 360 degree screen displaying various Microsoft wares in the foyer, a break-out and kitchen space complete with an Xbox (something for the refurb?) and the meeting room was dominated by a 84 inch interactive Surface Hub (imagine a 2 metre wide tablet…)
The presenter, Scott Ward from Digital Infusions, gave a fascinating and information rich talk about the role of social media in organisational innovation. (So rich that I will have to chunk up the notes…) He started with an observation of how ubiquitous the social media scene has become in the last ten years. Two photos at major events at the Vatican in 2005 and 2013 show how mobile technology has become so common.
Ronald Burt at the University of Chicago has published on the advantage of social networks in organisations and Scott’s thesis is that the emergence of social media tools is a powerful way to build the links between silos of people and knowledge – and the interface between those silos is where innovation occurs. Although Scott’s social tool of choice is Yammer (part of the Office suite of applications, hence why we were at Microsoft), he emphasises that the tool itself is a secondary consideration to the policy and effort required to build a healthy social network. He has seen many organisations decide they want to ‘go social’, launch an application on their staff and assume magic would happen without further effort. It didn’t.
To understand the impact of an enterprise social network on innovation (and why social networks are more important than technology), Scott built on the ideas of Laurence Lock Lee and Cai Kjaer to consider the three modes an enterprise social network can be used: explore, engage and exploit.
The explore phase is about creating, as Scott put it, ‘a marketplace of ideas’ where ideas are free to emerge, have others contribute, and spawn new ideas. It can be chaotic and challenging, but it is critical that ideas are dealt with openly. The most innovative ideas are most likely to emerge at the intersection and links between clusters of silos of knowledge, so brokering and developing those connections is critical. He provided an example where the CFO in a large consulting company announced a new travel acquittal policy (basically ‘reconcile all your receipts’). One, rather blunt, comment on the company’s social network from an unhappy staff member triggered hundreds of similar replies – and ideas for improvements. The CFO and the Executive Board recognised a sore point and rather than shutting down the conversation in the social network, they used it to engage the frustrated staff, explain some of the broader constraints and build a better policy and procedures.
A key learning here is that frustration is a critical factor in innovation and needs to be acknowledged and embraced. From the frustration with the current state comes the energy to make changes.
In the engage phase a bit more rigour is applied. Obviously there are only limited resources and only a few ideas can be worked on at a time. There are numerous ways to pick ideas for development. There was an example of a top-down approach where a large telecommunication company’s executive used the enterprise social network to ask their staff for their top 10 frustrations (they received 800+ responses and the audience were happy to suggest more…). They sat down for a planning day with printed lists and highlighter pens to collate, prioritise and action the issues (apparently a big chunk of the problems were solved within a month when the executive engaged and drove the necessary changes – which is a key learning to be covered later…).
In the bottom up approach there are dozens of ‘idea management’ applications like ideocial and Spigit that enable the crowd to contribute their ideas and show support for others. You may recall that the Department of Finance trialed the APS Innovation Hub last year where users could contribute ideas for innovation and also ‘invest’ in proposals via a virtual allocation of funding.
Scott stressed it is vital to also use the social network to keep updating people on progress and decisions – even if it is an explanation of a larger constraint preventing a desired change or why an idea isn’t a priority for development at this time. There is nothing as dis-engaging as someone seeing their idea disappear into a dark void never to be heard of again.
The exploit phase is around using the social tool to implement and maintain the innovation. One example was a company with the innovation of posting all IT service requests on the enterprise social network – in part to provide transparency to the request and response process. Resolutions for 80% of the requests are now actually resolved by staff outside of the IT department – the discussion was that a lot of IT requests are often more related to administrative processes. This approach also gave the company a record of the issues and solutions, the IT department could monitor how the company systems were being used (for instance, they could see where people were working around a back-end issue that itself could be resolved), and it also acted as an escalation filter directing IT staff toward the more complex issues that needed their specific skills. (The resulting discussion did raise some very intriguing ‘future of work’ debates. It may be pointing to a way for an organisation to self-organise in the most effective way, but how does this align with the classic measure and manage approach to work? That’s a whole topic of discussion for another day…).
Another example involves large organisations with multiple business units spread across the globe often have financial performance issues. The innovation trend is to make the financial data more accessible across the whole organisation and, with a bit of gamification in mind, create a league table of financial results in an enterprise social network. According to Scott, the result is the business units self-organising using the network to discuss the financial results and what they need to do to improve. (Recognising performance metrics come with their own issues and you have to be careful to measure what matters.) What if the financial results were openly available at section or project level in your organisation?
Next I’ll write more about how Scott’s ideas on how to implement an enterprise social network and just where does the time come from to use it?
