Care to share?

In thinking on the conditions necessary for a vibrant and valuable online knowledge sharing platform or enterprise social network, it seems that the following three components all need to exist for sustainable, meaningful, and reproducible success:

One - Contributors

People have to want to contribute, and they have to be given all the needed time, resourFlickr- clappstarces, technical training necessary to that end.  Some of the top barriers to individual team members from contributing have to be assessed, and strategies implemented to better enable contribution.

Some of the most common barriers are technical ('I do not understand how this software works'), cultural ('Why would I want to share this information with anyone else?'), and fear-based, ('I am not comfortable posting content for the entire company to see').

Two - Consumers

Two - People have to be willing to ask the questions, usually in a public manner.  This is very different than the way they typically have sought information in the past, a face-to-face discussion,  a private phone call, or a personal email.  Publicly posting a question on a company forum or wiki page potentially exposes the employee to embarrassment, and some studies have suggested that the desire to avoid looking uninformed or incompetent to be a powerful inhibitor of both asking questions as well as providing content.

But clearly if there are not enough 'seekers' of knowledge and information in the community, the platform becomes more a stagnant content repository and less an active community.  The simple asking of questions should generate helpful answers, and once people have seen that the community members do indeed provide

Three - Comments (and ratings)

People have to be willing to rate and evaluate contributions, and to have their own contributions also evaluated.  Great content needs a way to get 'surfaced'.  Users must have the ability to provide comments, vote up or down, and give ratings to the content that is contributed by the other members of the community.  The best content then becomes easier to find and those contributors get recognized by the community as experts, and sources of insight.

When any of these are missing

Think about what happens in absence of any of these requirements.  Obviously without a significant number of employees participating in generating content and sharing their expertise, the community will stagnate quickly, people seeking information and answer will quickly give up, and the entire project will be dispatched to the dustbin of IT or HR failures.

If not enough employees go to the community to seek answers, then contributors will quickly lose interest and enthusiasm for creating content, and eventually the community will simply house some basic, static type information, and not much else.  The process of users asking questions of the community serves two purposes. One, to get the user the anwser he or she needs to their issue, and two, to serve to generate more discussion and collaboration that often leads users to actually create new sources of knowledge.

Lastly, if consumers and contributors are not comfortable or honest about evaluating content on the community, then as the volume of contributions grows, it becomes difficult for information seekers to find the 'right' answers, the 'best' contributions, and the 'experts' in the community. Not all contributions and contributors provide equal value to the overall community. The community becomes a much more effective tool when the best content and expert members can be easily identified.

In some future posts I will go into some detail on how some of the barriers and enablers for all three areas describes above.  It is important for organizations to think about these three requirements as they consider and deploy software for community building and collaboration.

Shareflow - A new tool for collaboration

So by now unless you have been under a rock for the last two months you have heard about Google Wave, the upcoming tool from Google that promises to radically change the way people collaborate by merging or mashing up content (web pages, images, documents, social networking, etc.).

But Google Wave is several months away from launch, and if you are anxious to get a feel for a Wave-like experience, perhaps you should give Shareflow a try.

What is it?

Shareflow is a tool for collecting updates from team members and organizing them in a live stream, called a 'Flow' that similar to a Twitter stream or a Facebook page. Short updates, links, or attached files most typically sent via email are the types of updates that will be captured in a Flow.

These Flows can be shared to unlimited participants by using a simple 'Invite' link, and once the new user follows the extremely simple registration process they can get straight to collaborating on the Flow.

Also, since offering an alternative to email collaboration is a prime use case of Shareflow, each flow has a unique email address that Flow participants can use to forward or copy emails right in to the Flow.

What's so cool about it?

But where the tool shows its strength, and earns is comparisons with Wave, is when multiple participants in the Flow are collaborating in real-time. Keeping the flow open and 'live' so to speak lets you share information and comments with the other members of the flow in a neat, seamless manner.

Folks can scroll down the Flow to see how information or concepts were developed.  While it does not offer the dynamic 'replay' capability that is promised in Google Wave, this ability to collect and make available the history of a stream is far superior to a typical email centric work process.

The embedded Google Maps capability is really neat, simply type in an address, an the Flow auto-generates a Google Map on the spot.  Additionally, Sharefow provides RSS feeds of each flow, enabling easy subscription to flow changes and additions in a feed reader and sends an optional daily e-mail digest to Flow participants. Finally, in a really cool feature, Shareflow enables drag and drop from your computer right into the Flow, simply highlight some content with your mouse, and drag it into the Flow and it automatically creates a new 'item' in the Flow.

Who can use this

I see a few obvious use cases for Shareflow; a group of students collaborating on a research project could set up a Flow for all members to share articles, links, and other content as part of the data gathering process.  People trying to organize or plan an event could leverage the platform in this manner as well. Since the Flow 'owner' can invite anyone to participate in the flow, project teams can easily collaborate with customers, prospects, or contractors on projects, without having to grant access to all of their flows to external users. Even an individual gathering ideas for a blog post or article could easily set up a flow to capture notes, ideas, etc in a really easy, lightweight manner. Really any time a give and take, or a simple exchange of ideas and comments needs to happen, a Flow might be a great solution.

How do I get started?

Go to www.getshareflow.com and register. Shareflow offers a free plan that allows 5 active flows and up to 25MB of storage, and from there you can upgrade to paid plans ranging from $20-$80 monthly that both increase the number of flows you can create and upgrade the file storage limits.

I encourage you to give Shareflow a try, if nothing else to get yourself just a taste of what working with Google Wave might be like in the future.

Note : Thanks to Ben Eubanks from the UpstartHR blog who helped me do some testing and provided some good feedback on Shareflow.

Let the users help themselves

If you are in a mid to large size organization that has implemented either Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions, targeted Human Capital Management (HCM) applications, or really any enterprise-wide IT solution it will not have taken long to realize shortly after implementation you were faced with a rash of questions, issues, and problems that were discovered by the end users of your applications.Flickr - Jaydot

I know, you prepared detailed end-user instruction manuals, or even video tutorials.  You held numerous forums, demonstrations, and hands-on training sessions.  Maybe you even anticipated and posted a 'Frequently asked Questions' section on the company intranet.

You thought you had all the possible scenarios covered in your rigorous system and user acceptance testing.

But of course, once the system was subject to more widespread use, beyond the project team, conference room pilot, and the pilot department or division, you started running into issues, questions, bugs, and use cases that you had not anticipated, nor tested for prior to go-live.

And so, like in almost every major enterprise implementation before yours, you feverishly spent the first few days/weeks/months getting patches, updating user procedures, adding more and more items the the FAQ list, and generally fighting fires to keep the system running, and close the books/pay the employees/send the files to the bank, etc.  Honestly, even the very best implementations that I have worked on have to go through this insane stage, where the hours are long, the list of issues is enormous, and the light at the end of the tunnel seems very distant.

But eventually, the issues die down, the urgent problems are resolved, and soon, you as the implementor arrive at that place where you are sort of in limbo, kind of on standby. Not implementing anything new, because the organization is still trying to digest all the changes from the go-live, and still dealing with issues and questions from the user community as they arise.

After a while the questions and end user feedback starts to morph from 'This does not work' type questions, to 'Can the system do this' or 'I wish we had the ability to do that' type inquiries.  And typically as the system gets rolled out to more and more users and locations, and members of the project 'core team' either leave (in the case of consultants), or move on to other projects, the connection between HR or IT and the end user community tends to weaken, and at some point the questions, problems and issues start to increase.  Attrition, job rotation, and normal turnover all conspire against you, the 'super' users you could rely on may no longer be there, and soon you find your user guides, FAQs, and tutorials are not enough to keep up with the increased number of questions and issues.

And if you are like most organizations that I have been around, you respond by updating the manuals, FAQs, and tutorials. Maybe you hold more training sessions for the new users. You address the help desk calls one at a time, until you feel like you have stabilized the system once more. 

But what if instead of repeating the same pattern over and over again, of users finding issues, and asking questions of the project team or IT, you give them the platform and opportunity to help each other?

Instead of each individual question or problem  flowing from the user  to the central help desk, or support analyst, and back again to the user, usually via e-mail, what if you had the users enter all the questions in a shared question and answer forum, or even a wiki?

Larger organizations have hundreds, if not thousands of users, the chances are pretty good that most specific issues have been previously encountered by someone else in the user community.  Creating user forums with different sections for the various components of the application (Payroll, HRIS, Self-Service, etc.), that are accessible to all users, searchable, and monitored by the support team can be a great way to reduce time to resolution, lower support costs, and build a stronger, shareable body of organizational knowledge that potentially will also ease the transition of new users of the system. Additionally, you can include specific sections for enhancement requests, or for desired changes to the system or the underlying business processes.

This 'users supporting users' model has had quite a bit of success and publicity in the consumer spaces, most typically with tech goods and services like computers, home electronics, and popular consumer software.  Why not leverage the concepts with your internal enterprise users?

Have you deployed end user support forums for your community of users yet?  I would love to hear some case studies.

Social Network Analysis and HR

Note : I decided to include some content and discussion questions on Social Network Analysis in my HR Technology Class for the first time, and as I was writing the introduction to the topic, it seemed only sensible that I post it all here as well.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What is Social Network Analysis?

In the last 10 years or so scores of research papers and several books have been written on the subject of Social Network Analysis (SNA), which simply stated is the study of how information flows in organizations, with whom are employees most connected, to whom do they turn for information or advice, and identifies the roles individuals and departments play in the overall social network of the organization.

It is a way of quantifying the answers to questions like:

"When faced with a complex problem, who do you typically ask for assistance?"

"Who would you turn to when discussing a new or innovative project?"

 "Who are you most confident will give you accurate and truthful information?"

Why study Social Network Analysis?

Why is Social Network Analysis important for the HR professional?  To help answer that question, lets take a look at two charts.

First, the organization chart of a division of a typical company:

Source - Saba/HCI - Tapping the Power of Social Networking to Manage Talent

 And then the Social Network Analysis diagram for that same division. For example purposes, assume that this is an 'Information' network analysis. That is the connections in the diagram represent requests for information needed to perform a person's job requirements.

Source - Saba/HCI - Tapping the Power of Social Networking to Manage Talent

The key conclusion from the analysis of the SNA diagram is that while employee Mitchell occupies a relatively low position on the 'official' organization chart, she is central and highly connected in the SNA diagram. Many, many employees turn to her for information in the course of performing their jobs. Generally speaking, Mitchell is more more crucial to the overall efficiency and operations of the organization than say, Avery who is higher up on the organization chart, but on the periphery of the SNA diagram. This is just one, really simple example of the value and insight that you can gain from Social Network Analysis, but even this simple example is powerful, and helps illustrate the importance of SNA to the organization.

How can HR leverage Social Network Analysis?

There are several important aspects of Social Network Analysis that can be leveraged by Human Resources departments.

1. Organizational Design - If the SNA reveals a lack of communication and information flow due to too strict adherence on formal organizational hierarchy, some re-design may be in order to try and help facilitate more cross-organization communication

2. Succession Planning - SNA can assist tremendously in the identification of key employees, ones that either have a central, highly connected role in the network, or that serve as the primary or only 'connector' between different departments or offices. HR would likely want to take steps to insure that an adequate succession strategy is in place for these individuals, who are not necessarily 'high' on the official organization chart.

3. Job Description modification - sometimes SNA reveals certain individuals are 'too connected', meaning there are far too many demands on their time, and too many other folks in the organization looking for their insights.  Many times this leads to bottlenecks, that can disrupt the flow of information and ultimately detract from productivity. If this situation occurs, HR can assist in an intervention to modify the position roles and responsibilities, removing or re-aligning certain duties to promote a better balance, and hopefully reduce the information bottlenecks.

4. Training and Development - SNA can help identify and analyze the makeup of the networks of the organization's top performers.  It could be that the structure or patterns of high-performer networks could be replicated to others in the organization, potentially leading to increased overall personal and network effectiveness. HR can be instrumental in developing learning opportunities to help educate the workforce on these approaches that top performers utilize.

5. Internal Social Networking technology - Conducting a thorough SNA for an organization typically reveals areas that need improvement, either a need to increase collaboration and communication overall, desire for better inter-departmental processes, or more widespread organizational changes. Internal or corporate social networking technology is one tool that can be brought to bear to attempt to address these challenges.  Platforms ranging from internal microblogging, blogging, wikis, activity streaming, or more robust platforms that encompass all of these functions are becoming more common in organizations, and HR departments, armed with information from the SNA, should be in an excellent position to drive these efforts.

Additional Resources

If you are interested in reading more on Social Network Analysis, I recommend the following two books

The Hidden Power of Social Networks - Rob Cross and Andrew Parker

Driving Results Through Social Networks - Rob Cross and Robert Thomas

In addition, Jon Ingham at the Strategic HCM blog and Mark Bennett at Talented Apps frequently write on these topics.

The topic of Social Network Analysis, while not exactly new, is getting more and more attention, and new tools and technologies to assess and improve internal networks are emerging all the time.  It is an important area for the HR leader of today to become more familiar with, and to leverage in their quest to improve organizational performance.

Measurement and ROI

I read an excellent article earlier in the week on the Chief Learning Officer site on the inability of the traditional definition of ROI to adequately assess the importance and value to the organization of its employee's networks and the value that is derived from these internal and external network interactions, and by extension the technologies and processes that support these interactions.

The essential point of the article was that these network benefits are intangible in nature, do not 'fit' the classic ROI model (that was developed to understand how tangible activities like buying a new factory, or upgrading an assembly line) of measurement.  It really is a riff on the 'what is the ROI of e-mail' argument that is often used when folks are attempting to justify time and expenditure on new tools and processes designed to increase workforce collaboration.Flickr - Darren Hester

Can the organization really accurately estimate the ROI of 'increased network activity'? Does it even make sense to try?

Unlike the new industrial machine, that is built to precise specifications for productivity, output, and operating costs, it is just about impossible to predict how new technologies and processes for collaboration will be embraced inside the organization.  You may be able to apply typical benchmarks on participation rates and utilization statistics, but I have to believe its just about impossible to intelligently make an argument to senior management that a specific 'return' is likely to be generated, at least prior to the introduction of these tools.

In many ways organizations that embrace these projects, and the new ways of communicating, collaborating, and working that they introduce have to take somewhat of a leap of faith that there will be sufficient 'return' on the investment (which for all but the largest organizations is chiefly employee's time, the technologies that are most frequently utilized tend to be low cost, sometimes even free). It is very easy for management to constantly drive the focus back to the traditional 'ROI' measure, and it gives many leaders a convenient 'out' from having to address and show true skill and even courage. 

But just like communication and collaboration advances like voice mail, fax, e-mail, and personal and network computing all moved from experiments to critical business infrastructure mostly without any idea of traditional ROI, so it will be for social networking and collaboration technologies. The smart and leading organizations have already embraced this concept, and I do not think it long before these technologies also become essential components of the modern organization.