Selbstorganisation in Unternehmen und Erfolgsfaktoren der Beratung

Die Diskussion rund um den ROI von Social Software für das Projektmanagement hat sich mittlerweile in Richtung grundsätzlicherer Fragen gedreht. Ausgangspunkt meines zweiten Kommentars war die Argumentation von Matthias Schwenk mit bewusst einfachen Lösung Social Software zum Einsatz in Unternehmen zu bringen, um später Lösungen Schritt für Schritt von innen und nicht nur von einem externen Berater entwickeln zu lassen:

[…] “pädagogisches” Ideal wäre es, die Betriebe setzen Social Software zunächst eher experimentell ein und erkunden so deren Potenziale. Läuft alles gut, entdecken die Menschen im Betrieb im Lauf der Zeit von allein, was noch so alles möglich wäre und entwickeln die Systeme weiter bzw. bauen neue auf.

[…]

Der einzelne Betrieb soll ja auf Dauer nicht vom Berater abhängig sein, sondern sich die Kompetenz selbst erwerben. Das ist mir insbesondere bei den mittelständischen Betrieben wichtig, die nur wenige Hundert Mitarbeiter haben.

Worauf ich das hier kommentiert habe:

Es tut mir leid, mit deiner Argumentation habe ich mehrere Schwierigkeiten, insbesondere an den Nahtstellen von “Bedienbarkeit und Einfachheit” und dem Verhältnis zu Unternehmensanforderungen und -nutzen. Das sehe ich etwas anders, ich plädiere ja auch nicht aus “Berateregoismus” für eine ergebnisoffene Anforderungsanalyse und Auswahl aus dem “Werkzeugkasten Enterprise Social Software”, sondern gerade weil so nachhaltig erfolgreiche Lösungen entstehen können.

Dass der Startpunkt noch für längere Zeit und in den allermeisten Fällen “Pilotprojekt” heißen wird ist klar und vernünftig – ich empfehle meinen potenziellen und tatsächlichen Beratungskunden auch nichts anderes. In einem Pilotprojekt können die Chancen und Risiken sehr schön und in einem kleinen und überschaubaren Rahmen erprobt werden.

Dazu kommt dass in diesen “Experimenten” neue und angrenzende Einsatzpotenziale und -arenen entdeckt und evaluiert werden können. Was wiederum den Berater freut, der dann die Skalierung und Übertragung vorbereiten und begleiten kann …

Es geht nicht darum (komplexe) Lösungen zu verkaufen, die Kunden in die Abhängigkeit führen. Auch wenn der “sich selbst überflüssig machende Berater” von oben nicht viel mehr als eine platte Marketingfloskel ist – jeder Berater hat gerne Folgeaufträge – ist hier also wichtiges enthalten: Nur zufriedene Kunden empfehlen den Berater weiter und machen Projekte aus “Pilotprojekten”, entwickeln gemeinsam mit ihm Konzepte für neue Einsatzarenen oder überlegen wie die Lösung in andere Größenordnungen und Unternehmensbereiche übertragen werden kann.

Einfache, leicht bedienbare Lösungen haben dabei viele Vorteile – und Usability im Verhältnis zu Leistungsfähigkeit beschäftigt mich (und andere) durchaus. Zu einfach dürfen die Lösungen aber eben auch nicht sein, metaphorisch gesagt ist ein Hammer ein sehr einfaches Werkzeug, kann aber fast nur fürs Nägeleinschlagen gebraucht werden und wird langfristig nur wenig Freude machen …

Beim Einsatz von Social Software in Unternehmen muss es also mehr um skalierbare, flexible und erweiterbare Plattformen – wie bspw. hier in Olivers Konzept angedacht – gehen. In der Folge sollte Beratung rund um Enterprise Social Software vielfältige Konzepte (und Werkzeuge) beherrschen, um dem Unternehmen anforderungsgerecht und passgenau Lösungen anbieten zu können. Vielleicht sollte sich die Rolle des Social Software Beraters nicht darin erschöpfen den Unternehmen neue (IT-)Werkzeuge anzudienen, sondern auch strategische Beratung rund um das Enterprise 2.0 umfassen (“Wikipatterns, success factors and consulting“)?

Coming up: Web 2.0 Expo Workshops and more …

Hey, Berlin is packed with interesting web 2.0 folks, and obviously most of the people from the BarCamp stay the extra days too. And while I really enjoy discussing and mingling, organized discussions in workshops have benefits too. So I’ve decided to spend my monday checking in ‘an out of a couple of workshops

Monday morning I will start off attending Stowes workshop on Building Social Applications

Despite the widespread adoption of social applications (social networking, file sharing, instant messaging, and blogs, to name only the most well-known) creating applications that foster social interaction is hard. It is altogether too easy to approach application development from an information management mindset and miss the greater social context: people interacting to accomplish personal aims, exploring their identity through social groups, and working in online marketplaces. It is these three contexts – personal, group, and market – that form three complementary and distinct tiers of social applications. Users may opt to use an application for very personal reasons – signing up for a web filing sharing service to transfer a file to a colleague – but they become consistent users, and invite others to use the application, because of the social dimension: how well does the application support the users’ needs for social integration?

Effective social applications bring people into the foreground by making the social dimension intuitive and natural, and integrating information flow into the social. Information architecture must take a back seat to social architecture.

This workshop explores the principles of successful social applications, and presents a Social Architecture approach to model new – or remodel existing – applications. Examples of well-designed and successful social applications – including Flickr, Last.fm, Facebook, and Upcoming.org – are explored in the search for general characteristics and recurring design motifs. A number of badly designed sites are contrasted with “well-socialized” alternatives.

The workshop includes two group activities to explore the application of the approach in small team settings.

And if I get the chance, I will also try to get into this workshop by Scott Hirsch, founder of Management Innovation Group (MIG):

Be Like the Internet – Collaborative, Disruptive, Networked!

After five years of working with major telecoms and media companies to understand where to play and how to win in a business environment that seems to re-invent itself every few months, we’ve come to learn what separates the companies that succeed in the networked economy from those that have been left in its wake. The key to identifying the strategies and business models that withstand the next wave of disruptive hype requires getting honest about the real assets you bring to the table and finding ways to work with the network instead of fighting the changes it represents. This means explicitly changing the way you work and collaborate to set direction, scope opportunity, and build capabilities to rapidly assess business changes and react to them … or choose not to react. Whether you’re from a large corporation or a consultancy (or even a start-up still searching for a business model), this workshop will provide new frameworks and mindsets that you can immediately put to use to understand your opportunities in a web2.0 world.

The state of Enterprise 2.0

Dion Hinchcliffe analyzes the state of Enterprise 2.0, collects some of his learnings and introduces a new visualization:

  • Enterprise 2.0 is going to happen in your organization with you or without you.
  • Effective Enterprise 2.0 seems to involve more than just blogs and wikis.
  • Enterprise 2.0 is more a state of mind than a product you can purchase.
  • Most businesses still need to educate their workers on the techniques and best practices of Enterprise 2.0 and social media.
  • The benefits of Enterprise 2.0 can be dramatic, but only builds steadily over time.
  • Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t seem to put older IT systems out of business.
  • Your organization will begin to change in new ways because of Enterprise 2.0. Be ready.

and

State of Enterprise 2.0

Nothing extraordinary in here, yet these are nice heuristics to play and design implementation efforts by. While these heuristics don’t make our lifes easier – changing “state of minds” is harder than experimenting with nifty tools – they can surely help in planning our adoption strategy and organizational change management efforts:

[…] to get the full benefits of the Web 2.0 era, we must begin adapting our organizations and their information and IT resources (with suitable enterprise context) to this network-oriented model […]

Web 2.0 is gaining traction in the corporate world …

is this really reality? Now, I’ve been collecting and compiling some serious stuff on Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 adoption lately, some of them are worth pointing out … especially given a discussion I’ve had lately and that was revitalized today.

There’s this HBS Case on How Wikipedia Works (or Doesn’t) and the related discussion (“Wikipedia in Pinstripes”), that handles a lot of the adoption challenges social software has in the enterprise:

[…] Wiki is another experiment in how to generate more collaboration inside companies, but I’ve seen mixed results. It can be as simple as “We’re having an office party, please sign up on a wiki page, and tell us what you’re going to bring,” to “We’re going to run this project, bring in all your knowledge assets together, and then we can self-organize.”

What Wikipedia has shown is that self-selection is critical. Peer review is critical. So there is a challenge for firms that are used to managing employees and allocating the resources in a very top-down kind of way. Now we have a technology that enables self-selection, transparency, openness—how does a manager or management deal with the technology? Do they implement it in a way that’s true to the spirit, or is it top-down? And, again, there are some very successful examples and some not so successful examples.

59 categorized pieces of knowledge management

Lucas McDonnell has revised his pieces of knowledge management into five larger buckets: Issues, Processes & Methods, Related Skills & Disciplines, Technology, and People:

59 categorized pieces of knowledge management

It’s a good thing to cluster these topics, ideas and concepts into broad categories, and this new visualization can easily serve as a starting point for deeper discussions. Now, when discussing social software related issues in the realm of knowledge management you’ll have to explore and examine all five categories, it makes small sense to prioritize or sequentialize them a priori, but the actual pilot projects must of course place its implementation efforts (and bets) on parts of this “opportunity space”.

Email is easy to write – and to misread …

Just a short (research) note, this article by Daniel Goleman in the New York Times sheds more light on the issue of communication problems and mistakes: “E-Mail Is Easy to Write (and to Misread)“, namely by stressing the growing importance of social neuroscience in explaining all the shortcomings. This is a neat update to my past ponderings (in german) on communication via social software in the enterprise, so I recommend that you check it out:

[…] social neuroscience, the study of what happens in the brains of people as they interact. New findings have uncovered a design flaw at the interface where the brain encounters a computer screen: there are no online channels for the multiple signals the brain uses to calibrate emotions.

And pay attention to Clay Shirky:

[…] put down little roots of face-to-face contact everywhere, to strategically augment electronic communications.