Technology Behind Business examines trends and analyses key IT concepts. Each week an expert panel focuses on one type of technology or strategy, explaining its use without the jargon, outlining the pros and cons and providing tips for all types of businesses. The panel in this episode included Felicity McNish from Woods Bagot and Gerhard Voster from Deloitte.

You can watch the entire panel discussion on the Sky News Website.

It is actually challenging to define KM quickly in a way that is both understandable to people new to the topic but that will also satisfy those already familiar with the idea. There are of course those who like to grandstand and declare KM is dead or never existed in the first place, but personally I still think the KM concept has a role even in the era of social software.

But what does KM looks like today? There are a number themes in Social Business Design that resonate particularly for me, some of which I hinted at during the panel:

• The Connected Company – encouraging us to understand the nature of large, complex systems, and let go of some of our traditional notions of how companies function.
• The Shift to Systems of Engagement – the importance of focusing on non-transactional systems.
• Data-Driven Business Improvement – the role of ambient sharing, dynamic signals and various other types of indirect or weak ties between people in networks.

Related ideas are also reflected in the themes highlighted by the other panelists:

• Felicity McNish from Woods Bagot (who were recently recognised with a 2011 Asian Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise (MAKE) Award) talked about the importance of mobile access. This really points to the concept of addressing “place” in the people, places and things model of KM.
• Gerhard also mentioned Deloitte’s use of social media internally as part of its approach to KM. Similarly, both across Dachis Group and within the Headshift | Dachis Group team itself we have been long term users of social software for collaboration and KM. A great deal of our collective knowledge is readily available thanks to the flow of social tools, but we recognise it doesn’t entirely remove the need to deliberately create opportunities for learning, building social capital and knowledge sharing.

The key commonality here is that knowledge management isn’t (and never should have been) just about information or data management; but neither is it dominate to such related disciplines.

Incidentally, I wrote about the future prospect of mobile knowledge management back in 2005, for Image & Data Manager magazine. I said then:

“While the business use of such software may not be immediately clear, the growing interest in social networks, communities of practice and the use of narrative and storytelling techniques within organisations will generate demand for a new generation of KM tools that help employees to record events and facilitate serendipity using tools that are familiar and intuitive.”

Hmm. Sound familiar?

If you are interested in understand more about the intersection of knowledge management and social business design, take a look at some of our case studies – many of them include elements of knowledge management and social learning.

Before we went into the examples I wanted to get across what we at Headshift | Dachis Group think Social Business Design is, the kind of challenges organisations face when becoming social and the kind of things they need to think about.  So I started with the definition we use and simply riffed off that to cover those points.

Social Business Design is the intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process and culture.  The goal: improving value exchange among constituents.

INTENTIONAL CREATION
There has to be some intent behind the drive to become social. It won’t just happen spontaneously, you need to put in some effort to get to where you want to be. The days of build it and they will come never really existed and in the competitive environment of social media and the time constrained environment of the Enterprise won’t ever exist. Like any change management process you need to have a vision for the future, a plan to drive that change, measures to make sure you stay on track and a reason for doing it in the first place.

DYNAMIC
Things change. Everything about social business, from the macro to the micro level, is changing. Technology is changing, user needs are changing, the content running through your activity stream is changing. You need to get used to it and you need to be able to use it to your advantage. Adopting Agile development methodologies help with the technologies, learning that you don’t need to read everything and that you can rely on ambient awareness helps with the content.

SOCIALLY CALIBRATED
Everything you do will be checked, referenced and gauged by people and groups against a set of standards that are constantly shifting. Release a platform that people like and they’ll flock to it (Facebook). Release one they don’t and it’s a different story (Google Wave/Buzz). Put content out that is useful, informative and has value and it will be rated, ranked and liked as it is pushed in front of more eyes. Put content out that isn’t so great and watch it get calibrated on the lower end of the scale.

SYSTEMS, PROCESS AND CULTURE
You can put a great system in place to support collaboration and networking but if no-one wants to collaborate or network then you’ve probably wasted your time. Any transformation into a social business will require a balance approach to all three. Implement systems that are a delight to use. Consider people before process. Work with people’s intrinsic motivations.

IMPROVING VALUE EXCHANGE AMONG CONSTITUENTS
Don’t be selfish but make sure you’re selfish. A reliance on people being selfish is the quickest route to collective benefit. You need to understand what you want from becoming a social business and make sure you get it. You also need to understand that people aren’t going to do anything for free, people are selfish. You need to provide them with value, be it free product, be it information, be it directions. You need to understand what is of value to you, what is of value to the rest of the ecosystem and then make it meet in the middle.

These points may seem very basic, even obvious, to those of us who do this every day; but you would be surprised how many organisations or consultants do not consider these points before they begin.

What did I miss? Any other key elements you think organisations should consider?

Sid.

This was originally published on the Headshift | Dachis Group blog.

If you haven’t watched these videos already, they give you a glimpse at what is coming:

• Introducing Timeline — a New Kind of Profile.
• A New Class of Social Apps on Facebook.

Looking at these two new elements together, really what Facebook has done is brought the concept of lifecaching to the masses.Lifecaching as a concept isn’t new but through its massive user base, development platform and the accessibility of mobile computing, Facebook presents users with means, motive, and opportunity to make this happen on a scale that other start ups and researchers can only dream of.

Josh Catone on Mashable points out that Facebook’s all encompassing vision won’t be great for those who need to fill in that timeline retrospectively. And there is also no doubt that some users won’t be happy with these changes, but the number of users with Facebook accounts and the way it is increasingly embedded in the everyday Web means that really we’ve have reached a tipping point that would require a mass exodus to make a difference to the direction Facebook is taking us in.

One of the most interesting changes coming from the new and extended version of the Open Graph (used to enable the new features you see in the videos above) is that the vocabulary of the “Like” is being expanded. Based on a user -> action -> object model, Facebook provides the following examples:

A running app may define the ability to “run” (action) a “route” (object). A reading app may define the ability to “read” (action) a “book” (object). A recipe app may define the ability to “cook” (action) to a “recipe” (object).

Facebook has already linked up a number of social media apps to integrate using this new method. If you are a brand or organisation you should be thinking now about both what these overall changes mean for not just your overall Facebook strategy but also more tangibly, how will you take advantage of this new vocabulary in the apps you existing apps and future apps. For innovators, the new Open Graph is in fact a platform for socially integrated services and products.

And if you are working on social intranets and apps inside your organisation, Facebook has just provided us with a vision of where workforce collaboration is going next once we really interconnect business systems and users through workplace social networking backbone.

Hold on to your seats, everything could be about to change again.

Slightly adapting Gandhi’s famous words, I would assert, Gen Y will fuel the change we are in the world; particularly in the world of business.  I’m not alone in my feeling – 82% of Gen Y worldwide believe “[Our] generation has the power to change the world” (EURO RSCG).

Such optimism, I understand, is characteristic of many generations before us, and their contributions to the world of business should not be underestimated. However, now it is Gen Y’s time to shine and we are introducing new expectations and skills to the workplace.

Our general drive to learn, rejection of the status quo, and desire to connect, if enthusiastically embraced by businesses, will fuel the cultural and systematic changes fundamental for businesses to become more social businesses.

Before I go any further, I feel it is prudent to make clear this discussion is not about one generation “getting social” or “being more social” than another.  I believe that relates to a mindset more than anything else; besides, the Telegraph has already been so bold. Rather, I will posit Gen Y will be the driving force of social business adoption. The sheer size of Gen Y entering the workforce globally underscores the inevitability of my hypothesis, given some of the research-backed values of Gen Y.

In Singapore there are over 400 thousand Gen Y employees in the workforce.  In America, there are over 40 million in the workplace, with another 30 million to come. In China, 200 million people are between the ages of 18 and 30.  In Turkey, 70% of the population is under 35.

Gen Y in Asia and around the world must be the most greatly anticipated leaders of social business tomorrow. It is only a question of time. I would suggest that those businesses who leverage our desire for feedback, innovation, and connection will have a head start and competitive advantage over those who wait for the inevitable.

Obviously, to make this case I have to generalize a little, but research is on my side, pointing to the facts that Gen Y has some shared values.

Shared Value: Feedback

First, feedback – timely and constructive feedback – is noted to be highly important to us, members of Gen Y.  Why shouldn’t it be? We have a very high degree of what MTV nicknamed “’like-a-holism,’ a kind of addiction to feedback”, and we’ve grown up with chat platforms and other instantly gratifying forms of communication and entertainment. In an MTV study “Millennials, Decoded”, 60% of Gen Y demanded immediate feedback for text messages, and when it came to Facebook chat and the like, the statistic moved closer to 100%.

Specifically in the business context, over half of Gen Y want theirmanagers to be a coach or mentor and 65% of Gen Y workers consider it moderately or extremely important that they be provided “detailed guidance in daily work” (compared to 39% of Baby Boomers). Furthering this distinction, Forrester offered a contrast to Gen Y’s desire for constant feedback in the workplace to Baby Boomers desire for a performance review once a year, if that.

A couple of reasons cited for this desire for feedback have been to serve as a confidence booster and as a loneliness remedy. The point remains – it’s important to close the loop with Gen Y because we want to adapt from feedback accordingly.  We want to learn and continue learning to excel on the fast track of businesses success.

How is your business organised to take advantage of Gen Y’s desire to get and offer feedback, thus keeping them engaged in their work?

Shared Value: Innovation

Gen Y is comfortable and willing to challenge the status quo. Just check out INC’s “30 under 30” to see some of the clever things we have come up with and pursued on our own. Can you imagine what we could do with more resources, if our best ideas were pursued? We want innovation to be part of our working culture! 84% of Gen Yprofesses to be very ambitious, and vow to go the extra mile for a company’s success. Further, when asked to rate our greatest strength, Gen Y in China, the US and India, rated creativity ahead of any technical proficiency or intellect as their greatest strength (EURO RSCG)!

To make the distinction between the generational attitudes about innovation, Forrester noted Baby Boomers believe a certain group of employees are tasked with being innovators whilst Gen Y believe anyone can be an innovator and its part of their responsibility to themselves to innovate.

How is your business enabling Gen Y employees to pursue new ways of working, and participate in new business ideas? In other words, are you encouraging us to work outside our job description sometimes?

Shared Value: Connectedness

Gen Y has an expectation to connect and communicate when we want, with whomever, anywhere and anytime; more likely than not online. A Euro RSCG study found that “social networking sites are the main way over half of Gen Y stay connected with friends.”

A quick diversion here about connectedness; it’s a good time to take a shot at the stereotype of Gen Y’s carelessness in sharing online. In the aforementioned MTV study, Gen Y were found to be increasingly prudent and conscious about what we are presenting about ourselves in social media.  According to “Millennials, Decoded“: “The sheer speed and dexterity of this self-curation [of Gen Y] is remarkable to behold. Ninety percent told us it’s important how others view them and their reputation on Facebook, so they constantly and fluidly shift between chosen identities in order to present their best selves and lives… [and] a full one-third of respondents said that they not just sometimes but always modify their photos before posting online”.

As one of my colleagues said,  “Businesses that manage connections will survive. Businesses that facilitate connections will thrive,” which informs the idea that for Gen Y, work colleagues become personal friends. Corroborating this, nearly half of Gen Y surveyed in a Harvard Business Review study shared that having a network of friends at work is very important.

The point is – it’s important to facilitate connections for Gen Y employees because it helps them overcome information silos and knowledge hording, as well as motivates and excites them as part of the organisation.

How is your business facilitating connections between people within the company, in real time?

Conclusion

As these characteristics are perhaps not mutually exclusive, I would like to speak to the implications of businesses harnessing Gen Y’s desire for feedback, innovativeness, and connectedness together.

Smart employers are recalibrating their systems, process, and culture to get the most out of Gen Y.  Ernst & Young instituted an online “Feedback Zone,” and other organisations (i.e., Facebook) are simply using technologies like Rypple to facilitate the exchange of real-time feedback. GE has created an internal social networking site, MarkNet, to allow its thousands of marketing professionals around the world to work together, regardless of their location, job level, or discipline. Google has 20% time, which enables engineers to explore their own ideas 20% of their working time, and Best Buy has platforms like Idea Xchange to tap sales associates insight and ideas!

This is not to say the aforementioned businesses have made these changes for Gen Y exclusively, rather they have recognized the value of them for their leading Gen Y, but also for their broader constituents.

So maybe Gen Y gets a bad rap about how many times we are switching jobs (predicted to be an average of 15 in our lifetime)… but is it that we are switching jobs or that our companies aren’t retaining us? It’s a subtle difference but I feel it makes the necessary distinction from the problem being one of employees to one of businesses. I would argue it’s the latter. “Little direct feedback from managers”, for example, was cited as one of the top reasons Gen Y employees are leaving their job. Thus, businesses should begin to look at how they are addressing Gen Y’s desire for feedback, innovation, and connectedness to increase our job satisfaction, efficiency, and perhaps even gain a competitive business advantage. Ultimately, such businesses will most benefit from our contribution to realise the advantages of becoming a social business.

Supporting Slides

This item originally appeared on the Headshift | Dachis Group blog.

Whilst many things have been written about aficionados and early adopters, it’s critical to involve non-power-users for their insight into the maturity of a deployment. It’s those people that offer the most valuable and realistic view of adoption. Like slow-burning logs in a fire, they take some time to get going but eventually beam us through to a mature roll-out.

Is adoption successful when we have 6000 likes and 1200 posts?

Not necessarily. In my view, these are the sentiments of successful adoptees:

1. “I’m using this to get my work done”
2. “This is helping us get things done”
3. “Our function is improved now”

Whilst it’s tempting to measure at higher/macro levels, such efforts are generally fruitless. Imagine handing out a screwdriver to 10,000 employees and then trying to work out how useful the screwdriver is and how frequently it’s being used. It’s important to hand out the screwdriver, since the cost of not doing so is likely to be large.

All this assumes that your social software deployment is well-designed, with due concern for the situations in your business.

What are well-designed social software rollouts?

The maturity in use of a social software system is still open to consensus for rating purposes. Metric approaches have a certain vulgarity. Some don’t sound sensible – especially web-centric analyses like page views. Making social actions accountable to verbs, is something I’ve written about before – they would make metrics look trustworthy and close to business goals. We’ve even seen ROI-driven approaches that might lead to better processes.

The ultimate goal is process-oriented sociality where critical business processes have been transplanted/forked at points where theprocess is designed to get better through collaboration. The outputs of such business processes being “better” or “quicker” is then easily judged. Results should be more pronounced in companies operating with rigorous processes already.

Theories of motivation

Whenever you decide that an internal social software project has gone beyond a pilot, you need to foster understanding in the people who still don’t see any value. These people will have peers. Acolleague pointed me to the VIST theory of motivation which is linked to empowered teamwork. VIST is a model of a members’ motivation in groups. To identify missing components in the motivation of people who don’t use your system, consider the following:

• Valence – the subjective importance of team goals for individuals.
• Instrumentality – the perceived indispensability of individual contributions for the group outcome.
• Self-efficacy – the perceived capability to fulfil the tasks required in a team.
• Trust – willingness to rely on a person, group, event or process. This covers the expectancy of team members that their efforts will be reciprocated, and not exploited by other team members.

The recognition of this human connection is where the dominoes that lead to adoption begin to fall. It goes wide and deep, but it’s necessary to be an adoption practitioner. Make it known that colleagues are in the circle and attempt to re-configure how you relay motivations to adopt the system in groups. Borrow approaches from this great vision in marketing that led Apple into its’ epic Renaissance. You can create a movement that uses your system as a vehicle – but make it a grassroots effort, not an institutional ploy.

Alternatively, you could target groups on a situational basis with anenterprise app-store to support business processes, or it could be through “guerilla” exposure, which is more likely to get results. I favour the simple approach of exposure, since it nudges usage of your social system in context – replacing whatever was done before, and without prejudice. At first contact with your system, people will use the tool they heard was relevant to them.

Spreading the word

How can people “hear about” the thing that “everybody seems to be using” in a business? Despite our best intentions, my gut feeling is that it’s not too different to the way that people hear about celebrity gossip in the media. It’s centrally pushed through a medium you have chosen to read, or you find out verbally. Maybe you could offer an incentive – but be very careful as it shouldn’t be monetary. As we know well, game mechanics in social software can go some way to encouraging stickiness from power users and newbies alike. Don’t get too hung up on stickiness – it’s attention-seeking and more suited to public sites like Facebook where more eyeball time leads to more ad-clicks.

When new people land on your well-designed social software deployment, you can often make a cup of tea and relax. The best part is the open-ended nature of social software. Discovery leads to usage. Simple things like editing a document or updating a status are done without friction. Using the tool in any way can lead to a cascade of affinity, if everyone tends to do it at the same time. You need to fan the flames of the network effect to some critical point, which is likely to be the most important aspect of such a system tipping into full-scale use. So the lesson is – don’t consider always doing a pilot first but give serious thought to a global rollout from day one. One of my clients did that for their social intranet with great results.

Ensure you are listening

The most simple things work. Advertise it with a context. Push usage through traditional, mobile and digital means. Most people will not interact, they find it useful to just view/consume. You will know when you’ve hit a wall when:

• Your initial assumptions were wrong and you need to re-jig what you deployed.
• You need to dive into specific teams and get the tool to fit their work pattern – or commonly, a work process. While finding out the details, try not to change the work processes of teams – they might realise and change it themselves.
• Some people don’t have any use for your social software (rare).

This is why you need to think about designing your adventure into a collaborative experience. You need to have a strategy and pick the brains of people who have done it before.

Cultural friction

As much as I want to say that some corporate cultures impede the use of social software (by nature or due to being a regulated/professional services business) – I don’t personally believe it’s true. It’s really about changing the mind of individuals and their peers, case by case. A colleague wrote a series of posts on the barriers to adoption in that sense.

In summary

People promoting social software internally are like entrepreneurs launching a product into a messy world. There’s no set paths that give you the best results. In time, as more organisations build a library of stories about how they became a Social Business, I look forward to tales that are rich with experimentation.

The process of people adopting internal social tools to constant use is the next frontier in Social Business. We don’t need to grab all the real-estate on the screen and take all the attention. We need to show it helps people get work done faster, better and easier. You will see this being reflected in an organic change to your business processes. Do this properly, and your company will endure.

This post originally appeared on the Dachis Group | Headshift blog.

I especially I like the way Dave compares what makes for successful companies and cities alike: strong ecosystems, strong identity and adaptability / active listening. These characteristics give organisms a kind of evolutionary potential, in my view, and this is a crucial ingredient for success that set them apart from machines, optimised to meet yesterday’s threats and opportunities.

There are good reasons why many large companies should continue to thrive in the Twenty-First Century, and many industries in which scale is necessary; but Dave points to something most people in large firms realise already, which is that ‘machines’ of this kind do not scale well:

The problem comes with scale. As the number of employees grows, the profit per employee shrinks. It’s a game of diminishing returns. Efficiencies of scale are balanced out by the burdens of bureaucracy. Divisions become silos, disconnected from each other. Overhead costs increase with size. The resulting need for control, and the inability to achieve it at a reasonable cost, is what eventually kills a business.

The conditions that led to the rapid growth and development of large corporates are no longer pertinent today. Global communications, logistics and management no longer require the process-driven management and compartmentalised structure of the railroad builders. But even more important is the fact that many of the low-hanging fruit of corporate scale have been picked already. As John Hagel points out, U.S. companies’ return-on-assets (ROA) have dropped steadily to a quarter of their their 1965 levels, despite rising workforce productivity, and it is largely the leverage of complex financial instruments that has masked this underlying decline in returns.

In a way, this reminds me of the British economist Will Hutton’s recent review of Tyler Cowen’s book The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better. Cowen argues that the low-hanging fruit of early Twentieth Century industrialisation have been picked, and the benefits of cheap land and rapid increases in education are plateauing. Instead, recent productivity gains have come from outsourcing and cheap credit. Hutton sees this as a slightly negative viewpoint, and makes the case that increasing innovation is the magic dust that can and will drive a new generation of business. Instead of deregulating and waiting for market forces alone to solve problems, Hutton suggests we should design markets and institutions that are geared towards accelerating and amplifying innovation, rather than just maximising short-term profit without generating value, as we have seen in banking.

So, if it is harder for large firms to break new ground and reach scale as rapidly as we saw in earlier periods of industrialisation, and if the corporate structures we have been using tend to result in lower productivity at scale, how can we help companies evolve into more adaptable, less expensive organisms, rather than the optimised-for-yesterday machines that are under such strain?

As Dave points out, this is actually a very fertile area for the application of a more holistic approach to social business design, which offers us a better way of thinking about how we organise business, labour and value inside large firms:

… thanks to social technologies, we finally have the tools to manage companies like the complex organisms they are. Social Business Design is design for companies that are made out of people. It’s design for complexity, for productivity, and for longevity. It’s not design by division but design by connection.

Design by connection. Ecosystems + passion/strong identity + active listening and adaptation. These are not rocket science, but they are notable in their absence from much current business strategy. Incidentally, Dave Gray and John Hagel will be part of our Social Business Summit in London on March 24th, so why not join us (and other thinkers about the future of business, such as JP Rangaswami and Jeff Dachis) in what looks like being a very interesting discussion.

This post originally appeared on the Headshift blog.

These initiatives are often led by a small team, sometimes a single individual who is driven to help the company work a better way — a more connected, dynamic and socially calibrated way of interacting for business.

The business of transforming a worldwide organization is difficult.  If it were easy, it wouldn’t be as rewarding and meaningful.  It requires a large amount of patience, perseverance, and oftentimes, courage. We are asking a lot of our fellow corporate colleagues and executive leadership when we ask them to embrace working socially.  We are asking them to veer far from their comfort zone and risk more communication, more connectedness, and more transparency in the service of empowering people to do more with less.

In spite of this difficulty, repeatedly we have heard, “This is the most important initiative I’ve ever worked on in my professional life.” The prevailing operational mission at present is to succeed at catalyzing the “ideological reformation” at the root level of the organization that needs to take place before the real business value can be extracted, measured, and fine-tuned.

There’s something extremely inspiring about the people and companies who are leading the charge toward reinventing themselves to become social leaders within their organizations. As you read through these profiles, we hope you’ll come to appreciate that while all of these companies are still early in their process, they all are confident in the success of their long term goals.  Some are realizing early successes, while some are struggling. All are passionate believers that there is a powerful evolution at hand driving change in their organizations, an evolution towards Social Business.

You can download the first set of profiles on People in Progress here:

• Alcatel-Lucent
• Alstom
• Avery Dennison
• The MITRE Corp.
• Nokia
• Swiss Re

We will continue to track the progress of these adopters.

We’d love to hear your story in the comments, or better yet join the The 2.0 Adoption Council.

Join The 2.0 Adoption Council

If you are working to bring social transformation to your large organization, we invite you to join The 2.0 Adoption Council, an influential peer to peer knowledge sharing community made up of other large enterprise adopters who share your passion for opportunities and the difficulties and challenges associated with adopting Social Business inside large organizations. Membership is free provided you meet the eligibility criteria. More information is found on The 2.0 Adoption Council in the section on how to join.

We’d like to thank IBM and MIT’s Center for Digital Business for lending support and sponsorship to this series of cases and profiles. Special thanks to the @20adoption member companies who participated in the series: Alcatel-Lucent, Alstom, Avery Dennison, Eli Lilly, IBM, MetLife, The MITRE Corporation, Nokia, and Swiss Re along with other The 2.0 Adoption Council members providing anecdotal information.

IBM Social Collaboration Software

Market leaders are using social software to get closer to customers and to transform how work gets done, to accelerate innovation and more easily locate expertise. Organizations that establish a social business environment across their internal and external relationships are outpacing their competitors. IBM Collaboration Software empowers individuals within organizations to stay connected, current, and creative any where, any time, so great thinking doesn’t stay locked behind closed doors. IBM offers the broadest, innovative set of secure Social Software and Unified Communications services for creating Web communities, locating subject matter expertise, project collaboration, content and idea sharing. Quickly locate the expertise you need, no matter where it exists inside or outside of your organization to get the job done faster. Smarter Software for a Smarter Planet.

MIT Center for Digital Business

Founded in 1999, the MIT Center for Digital Business (MIT CDB) is the world’s largest center for research focused on the digital economy. MIT CDB has worked with more than 50 corporate sponsors, funded more than 60 faculty and performed more than 75 research projects. The center’s faculty and sponsors represent the leaders in Digital Business research, analysis and practice worldwide. Together with its partners, MIT’s Center for Digital Business is inventing the future of Digital Business.

FINRA, FDA, HIPAA, SARBOX and ITAR, are regarded as curse words in social media and workforce collaboration circles. People don’t want to say them. They don’t want to hear them and they really really don’t want the regulators to swing by for a “chat.” The outcomes created by this mentality are predictable: hesitancy when approaching new technology, over-engineered solutions that inhibit adoption and the pursuit of risky grassroots experimentation.

These approaches are born out of hard-learned lessons, because let’s face it: collaborating in a regulated industry is hard. Regulations change, are enforced with different points of emphasis and are frequently incomprehensible to everyone except their authors. Our colleague Dion Hinchcliffe (@dhinchcliffe) has a great phrase for this: regulatory quicksand. Nonetheless, we can’t ignore the value that social technologies can bring to regulated industries. So, what’s the answer to regulated collaboration and social media implementation? Plan better and execute smarter.

The rest of this blog post will focus on a high-level methodology for the strategic implementation of social technologies in regulated environments.  The aim is to provide a framework within which regulated businesses can maximize social media and workforce collaboration tools in a compliant way*.

Framework Overview

The goal here is to create a simple, repeatable strategic process.  In a nutshell: start by building your business case, then identify your lowest compliant denominator, don’t miss the last responsible moment, and finally roll out to your workforce.

Build a Business Case

The first step is to establish a collaboration pilot in a controlled environment. Before you get antsy – this is not the same old advice to start with a ‘small pilot.’ The key difference here is the realization that even the most highly regulated business has processes that are just not that risky, but do offer high value returns on collaboration. The implication is that by identifying an internal area where risk of external data leakage is minimal and the fruits of collaboration would be valuable, an enterprise can initiate a much larger and more meaningful ‘pilot’ than otherwise possible.

For example, a financial services firm might identify expertise location as a key challenge in their trading operations. Knowing that the regulatory expectations are the same across the whole of the ‘trader’ job role and that information would be bounded by that department’s lines it becomes feasible to pilot ad-hoc information seeking tools like enterprise micro-blogging to aid in expertise and knowledge location.

Find the Lowest Compliant Denominator

The second step is to synthesize all the data captured from the pilot (you were capturing data right?) into a collection of requirements and outcomes for broader implementation. One of the odd nuances of social software is that the best use cases are frequently only discovered once the users actually have their hands on the tools. The key insights you are scanning for are lowest common denominators for compliance or, “lowest compliant denominators.” Say to yourself: “What is the lowest barrier we can set while facilitating collaborative outcome X?”

For example, the financial services firm we discussed earlier might find that their pilot revealed a mass of associate level employees asking questions that only more senior colleagues could answer with any confidence. This manual process might be a blessing in terms of knowledge transfer, but a curse because senior employees have better things to do with their time. The answer would be to maintain the emergent Q&A culture while also instating a better system for capturing and sharing institutional knowledge – perhaps a wiki. This need and solution might never have surfaced and been synthesized if not for the advanced ‘pilot.’

The Last Responsible Moment

There’s not a bad time to begin to plan for compliance, but there is a point where it is too late not to have done so.  Now that you’ve run your pilot and with metrics, survey results and anecdotes created a business case, you are no doubt postulating how the benefits of collaboration multiply across your company.  With the momentum and demand you created in the pilot, if you haven’t done so yet, now is the time to partner with HR & Legal to create a compliance map.

Employees and artifacts in your business have characteristics.  Characteristics are things like: geographic location, security training, department, job title, or government clearance.  A compliance map simply details which combinations of characteristics are off-limits.  As an example, US-defense industry employees have to abide by International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).  Employees without ITAR training (characteristic) should not have access to ITAR protected artifacts.  So, when an employee without ITAR training uses their company’s search engine, no ITAR protected artifacts should be returned.

Scale and Train

Once you have developed a compliance map, you can identify your boundaries and then roll out your solution as far as those boundaries allow.  Of course, sufficient technology will be necessary to scale as well, but you’ve likely charted that course before.  Linking departments together is technologically nothing new, understanding whether or not you can link them from a compliance stand point is.   Your compliance map gives you the advantage of scaling accurately and aggressively.

But, just as spell check doesn’t turn you into Hemingway, having a compliance map won’t turn every employee into a compliance officer.  Training employees on compliance issues is the ultimate fail-safe.  Where technology fails, humans should know better.

Conclusion

Regulated companies can be collaborative, but they must plan better and execute smarter than others.  For many companies looking to become more collaborative FINRA, HIPAA, SARBOX and ITAR represent reality checks.  However, these reality checks are not blanket cease and desist orders.  You can remain in the good graces of your legal and HR departments AND still bring effective and beneficial collaboration to your company by following the framework outlined above.  Of course, this framework will need to be customized for your company.  Reach out to us if you’d like some help.

For additional reading on this topic, check out Ellen Reynolds‘ case study on Managing Risk in Regulated Industries.

*One caveat to keep in mind is that this methodology presupposes a strategic executive commitment to adopting social tools and while it could work for a grassroots implementation the entry points into the process would be quite different.

The setup here isn’t that important other than to to say we were at the beginning stages of a new project and decided a brainstorming session was in order.  We found an empty conference room, a whiteboard and started to get our ideas down.

Social Business Design aside:  This conference room is what we commonly refer to as a silo.  A silo is anything (an organization, software…a conference room) that keeps information within its walls, making it hard for an outsider to discover what is going on behind them.  Tom and I were working alone, the rest of the company had no visibility into what we were doing.

Five minutes in to our brainstorm we were interrupted by a much more responsible group of colleagues who actually reserved the conference room for a meeting.  We packed up our stuff, white board included, and as there were no other conference rooms available, made camp in the hallway.  It’s important to note that this is really the only hallway that exists in our open floor plan office, so by default it is the highest trafficked hallway we have.

Social Business Design aside: A hallway is very much like a dynamic signal, a ‘dynamic information flow produced by constituents.’ As Tom and I were working in the hallway we were being passed by other employees with different experiences, expertise, points-of-view and tacit knowledge. Our activities were now visible to the rest of the company.

In the hallway we were being passed by colleagues.  They could see what we were working on and chose to either keep walking or stop and engage us.  We experienced both.  Within ten minutes, Tom and I found oursleves in a conversation with two colleagues each knowledgeable and experienced on the work we were doing.  Over the next 30 minutes we discussed our current situation, the vision and goals for the project, recent trends and developments and lessons learned from having ‘been there and done that.’  Afterwards, Tom and I literally went back to the drawing board to incorporate what we had just learned.

Social Business Design aside:  I mentioned that colleagues in the hallway would either keep on walking or stop to talk to us.  This is an example of a metafilter, ‘what’s important to one person may be meaningless to another.’   Those who wanted to participate could, those who had other interests could keep on going.  By being in the hallway (the dynamic signal) we were making ourselves visible to the rest of the company so they could decide to participate or not.

It’s impossible to compare the Dave & Tom-only project to the Dave & Tom + Colleague Feedback project (because the former will never happen) but everyone involved felt much better about latter: more input, more experience, more tacit knowledge.  We had engaged in communication and collaboration that resulted in a much more holistic approach to our work.  Our path forward became more clear, informed and actionable.

You might not have the collaboration luxury of working in the same office as the rest of your company, so this might not be your everyday experience.  The good thing is you don’t have to be in the same office to collaborate with colleagues.  There are fantastic tools available that will give your company all the virtual hallways, metafilters and whiteboards it needs.  But, tools are the easy part these days.  Your company is filled with smart people, gathering knowledge and insights every day…are you prepared to use them?

Knowledge work is aimed at turning information into something decisionable and actionable; too often reports, presentations, survey results are mistaken for such.  While they are a key part of the decision equation, they are not enough.  They don’t provide insight.  The only thing they’re good for on their own is filling repositories.

Knowledge, unlike the data and information contained in reports, is a living & breathing thing.  It can’t be put in your enterprise content management system.  It exists in the heads of employees (often referred to as ‘tacit’ knowledge), constantly being shaped by different stimuli: articles, blog posts, pictures, models, books, conversations with colleagues, etc…  Communication is the process by which this constantly evolving knowledge is applied on data and information to a decisionable end.  This process will generate insights on how to take advantage of the information you have gathered.  Unless the reports, presentations and survey results are subjected to scrutiny and analysis through communication, no insights are created and decisions are delayed or malinformed.

Communication is more than just a block of time on your calendar.  It’s an opportunity to  share knowledge, gain insight, make better decisions and create for your company a competitive advantage.

What does communication look like where you work?  Is it enabling the application of knowledge to data and information?  Where do your company’s insights come from?