Diner Menus and Collaboration Platforms

Being a native of New Jersey I have fond memories of the classic Jersey diner. The kind of place that had a 20 page book for a menu, that served everything from breakfast to burgers to seafood (generally a goodFlickr - wallyg idea to avoid diner shellfish) all the way to full roast turkey dinners.  Throw in a generous helping of Greek, Italian, and even Mexican selections, and the customer likely had about 500 different items to choose from.

Someone not familiar with the New Jersey diner can get a bit overwhelmed and surprised with the sheer heft of the menu and almost dizzying array of choices. Page after page of choices, even at 3 AM.

Lately it seems like the options to the Human Resources Technology professional in the area of internal collaboration platforms is starting to resemble a Jersey diner menu.  Every day I think another web-based solution to support employee collaboration, communication, improve productivity, and otherwise turn your organization into a high performing, 'social' organization. And while I generally agree that these kinds of solutions are really the future for collaboration for many organizations, the sheer number of solutions that are currently available have to be confusing and a bit daunting  to the average HR professional.

A starting point for many investigating these solutions is the famous Gartner Magic Quadrant document. These documents attempt to give a relative ranking to a fairly large number of vendors in a given market, along with some basic information on the solution.  The current Magic Quadrant for Social Software can be found here. But the problem with the Magic Quadrant is that its inclusion criteria skews towards the larger vendors, and consequently the ones that tend to sell to the larger customers.

The many, many start-ups and smaller vendors, (many offering fully functional collaboration platforms for very low costs, even free) are not included by Gartner, and are generally ignored by many other major analyst firms. So if you are an HR Pro at a company of say less than 500 employees, (which by the way outnumber firms larger than 500 employees by about  333-1), then you are pretty much on your own to navigate this complicated and ever expanding space.

Just in the last few months alone I have checked out (among others) Brainpark, GroupSwim, Sosius, Central Desktop, Obayoo, Socialcast, Injoos, Spinscape, Conenza, and Neighborhood America.  All have interesting solutions, and all could be the right solution for a small business, but for the HR Pro, navigating this complex and crowded market has to seem kind of overwhelming. There are simply so many options and choices here that it can be difficult to determine just what solutions are best for a particular organization.

If you find yourself at the diner in Jersey the recommendation is easy, order a Taylor Ham, egg, and Flickr - feralboycheese on a hard roll, you won't be disappointed. If you are a small business looking for a new collaboration solution, well, order a Taylor Ham, egg, and cheese on a hard roll, and be prepared for quite a bit of research and exploration.

Worlds are colliding, Jerry!

Last week I posted a question called 'Ask the Tweeps', essentially wondering where folks are turning when in need of information and expertise. As you would expect, the answers were pretty mixed, people rely on internal co-workers in many situations, and turn to their external networks for 'new' or 'different' questions that may not have in-house sources of expertise, or if they are interested in more diverse or alternate perspectives.

This is altogether natural and expected, and I think understanding the 'mix' of expertise and information requests in an organization could certainly become an important part of a company's talent management efforts. 

Just how often are our employees reaching outside the organization for information and advice?

What kinds of things are they asking?

Do we really have that knowledge in-house already, and our employees just don't know how to find the right person or resource?

And finally, how might the organization capture and leverage employee's external connections for longer-term organizational benefit?

Should they even try?

Lately a number of collaboration and information platforms that are designed to better enable employee communication and knowledge sharing have started offer at least some insight to these questions by  incorporating 'external' sources of content like Twitter updates, Delicious bookmarks, and FlickR images.  Solutions like Socialcast, Obayoo, and to some extent Socialtext all offer the organization the ability to combine or mash-up classic 'internal' content and communication with heretofore 'external' data that has been traditionally viewed as private or personal in nature.

Conceptually, this makes sense.  If knowledge workers find a great website that helps solve a problem, it should be bookmarked for others in the company to potentially leverage.  If an image on FlickR helps to explain a concept, then it would be great for the rest of the team to know that it is available.

But while the 'blending' of internal content (discussions, status updates, documents) with external content (Twitter feeds, RSS feeds from blogs, Delicious, YouTube. etc ) can make sound business sense, I wonder if many employees are prepared and comfortable to open up in this way.

These new collaborative tools try to help organizations exploit what everyone knows is going on: employees rely on external sources to accomplish their tasks. But will employees be willing to more fully open up their private and personal worlds to others in the organization.  Will they need to create dual accounts on these external sources, so that their 'company' Twitter feed can be shared with the organization and their personal Twitter feed can be kept private?

Worlds are colliding more and more each day.  It may not be as easy as it seems for organizations to take advantage, just ask George Costanza.

Ask the Tweeps?

A knowledge worker in search of information or answers to specific issues or problems has several possible alternatives at their disposal to attempt to find the right answers, and solve their problem.Flickr - Thomas Hawk

Options:

1. Ask an internal colleague

2. Search the available company information databases or systems

3. 'Broadcast' a question to numerous other internal colleagues, or even the entire company

4. Google it

5. Leverage 'external' contacts, via e-mail, phone, or social networking

Lately, it seems like more and more I am turning to my 'external' networks, usually my Twitter friends, when I have a question, issue, or am looking for some opinion and feedback on issues that are not 'inside' in nature.

My question to you is : Who do you turn to when you are in need of information, or insight?

Do you find yourself asking your Twitter, Facebook, or other 'external' contacts more or less than your co-workers?

Are your 'external' contacts more important and vital to your success than your co-workers?

And finally, what should organizations be doing (if anything), if indeed many employees are relying on external contacts and social networks for answers and information?

Let me know your thoughts.

Have an Idea?

One of the benefits of writing an HR Technology blog is that from time to time I get alerted to new products in the HR Technology space.  Recently I heard about, and had the chance to try out Kindling, an online solution for capturing employee ideas or suggestions, a mechanism for other employees to vote up or down submitted ideas, an approval process for ideas, and finally a way to allow employees to 'volunteer' to work on approved ideas.

I took Kindling for a quick test drive, assisted by Ben Eubanks from the Upstart HR blog, (thanks Ben for helping out).

Step 1 - Submit an Idea

The first step in the process of for an employee to submit an idea. The process is incredibly simple, they enter a title, description, tags, and optionally an attached file to their idea.

Other employees can also add comments and questions to ideas, so a conversation and dialogue can form around any individual idea.

Step 2 - Vote on your favorite ideas

Once some ideas get submitted, each employee is allotted 10 'Votes' to indicate which ideas they like. Votes can be all allocated to one or two ideas, or they can be spread around many ideas. But an employee can only use 10 'votes' at any one time, once an idea is approved or rejected, they can 're-claim' any voted used on those ideas. 

It is a simple concept really, ideas that receive the most employee votes are popular, and potentially deserve some managerial review for possible implementation.

Step 3 - Approve ideas

Once ideas are submitted and voted upon, the system administrator can 'Approve' or 'Reject' the ideas.  Once an idea is approved or rejected the votes for those items are released back to the employees and can be re-used on new ideas.

Step 4 - Make it happen

The last step in the Kindling process is for an employee to 'volunteer' to make an idea 'happen'.  This can mean different things to your organization, but essentially the idea is 'assigned' to the volunteer as this point.

Pricing

Kindling offers three subscription levels, $49/month for up to 40 users, $99/month for up to 100 users, and an 'Enterprise' level that has negotiated pricing for more that 100 users. All plans offer a 30-day free trial. Some additional features that are offered are e-mail digests of idea related activity, RSS feeds, and simple usage reports. 'Enterprise' users can also map a custom domain and implement custom skins for integration with a corporate look and feel.

Value Proposition

Kindling offers a tight set of functionalities in a clean, simple, and easy to use manner. Capturing employee ideas for new products/services, for improvements on existing processes, or for ways to cut costs or improve productivity are all potential uses of an idea platform.  The additional features of employee voting and commenting on ideas helps to foster a sense of inclusion and openness.  Basically, platforms like Kindling provide a modern and enhanced view of the old company 'suggestion box'.  If your organization is interested in trying to more effectively harness the ideas in the workforce, and to give your people more of a voice and a view into decision making, then Kindling may be worth a try.

Trapped in a Box

The company organization chart.

Every company has one. There is an entire class of software applications to help companies generate them, (my favorite is OrgPublisher from Aquire), and maintaining them and making sure all the correct names are in the correct boxes and the lines are all connected properly can be a full-time job in larger organizations.

In some organizations the chart is sort of a sacred document, informing managers and employees of crucial information like who is in charge of what, how many folks do job 'XYZ', and who might be the likely successors for a given person if they were to move to a different position, or leave the organization.

But organization charts, can be limiting, and can effectively 'trap' individuals and teams by defining them in too Flickr - Stefannarrowly drawn roles. If the culture of the organization is not inherently 'open' or 'collaborative', then the chart is a tool that can also serve to maintain separation in the organization. If your position on the organization chart is Web Designer reporting to the Marketing team, then you do web design work for marketing, and may not typically get much exposure to the web designers that work on the company's internal sites or intranet, as the responsibility for those functions falls elsewhere in the organization.

With the growing popularity and increase in the easy availability of tools and technologies to facilitate collaboration and communication, it seems very likely that many medium to large organizations have multiple, and isolated activities underway to explore and deploy these kinds of tools.

A mid-sized organization that I am familiar with has at least four different wiki platforms deployed in various parts of the organization. These are all set up, maintained and administered locally, and some are successful and some are not. But even the successful ones do not really have much of a chance to impact or influence the broader organization, chiefly because of the culture and the strict adherence to the organization chart. The company does not have the ability to 'break free' from the constraints of the chart, and individual local administrators of these wikis are not allowed or encouraged to work with other parts of the organization to share information and potentially work towards developing a solution that may benefit the organization as a whole.

It is actually very ironic that the recent availability and relative ease of adoption of tools to promote collaboration are bringing to light the lack of collaboration across this organization.

The number of tools for collaboration and communication are growing everyday, but if the organization still clings to the org chart, like construction crews cling to blueprints when erecting a building, then in many cases the full potential of these tools will never be realized.