Yammer it up

Today we had a mini-crisis with our application that lets Student employees self-register for an Employee Self-service account to view their Payslips, sign up for direct deposit, and view other personal information online. The existence of the problem became known to me when I received an e-mail with the relevant details.

The specifics of the problem are not important, but it was sufficiently complicated that from report to resolution I received a total of 17 e-mails from four different people in less than one hour.

A total of six people were copied on the original e-mail, so in classic e-mail fashion as everyone who jumped into the issue kept checking 'Reply All' every time the web of the e-mail trap spread and spread.  And of course, each message itself got longer and longer and larger and larger as all prior messages were appended to the next message.

So in total we ended up with 102 distinct e-mail messages, with the entire content of the original message included in full on each and every message.  That must be some great e-mail that we now have 102 copies of it stored on our server.

And all this because across the organization, no other collaboration tools are widely used.  Sure one or two of my HR colleagues uses IM to contact me, occasionally we open an IM chat room.  I have started a wiki that only has been used my me and one other colleague (although I suspect he is starting to give up).  

I claimed my organization's domain on Yammer - which would have been the perfect tool for all this dialogue.  Almost all of the 102 emails were a sentence or two. And other folks who may have been of assistance may have seen the exchange, impossible in e-mail if they were not included from the start. So far only three others in an company of 3,000 have signed up. And two of the three are the HR folks who just IM me anyway.

So many tools are so far superior to e-mail for collaborative work and problem solving, why am I not able to get my organization to see that?

Any suggestions? Because I am not getting the message across.

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Walls

I know of an organization that does not want their IT folks who support the enterprise HR and Payroll systems to have IM clients installed on their desktops. The reason for attempting to place a wall between them and the people they support? 

photo credit - FlickR -Joriel "Joz" JimenezThe IT development manager is afraid that the HR and Payroll end users (who are all IM users), will directly contact the IT staff with questions, issues, problems, rather than following the established protocols of sending all issues and requests to the IT manager first, who then by some shadowy process assigns out tasks one at a time to the development staff.

Prohibiting IM use by the IT staff doesn’t make any sense, and anyway with services like Meebo, Twitter and Yammer, as well as web versions of the other major IM environments, isn’t even practical or enforceable anyway. But putting that aside for a minute, let’s consider some reasons why organizations would choose to operate this way.

1. A need to ‘control’ workers rather than ‘manage’ an organization – in today’s world this is really not sustainable for too much longer. Staff will tire of this arrangement, turnover will increase, and positions will go unfilled as the ‘buzz’ on the environment starts to spread.
2. A general lack of a collaborative spirit or said differently, an environment where problems are either ‘your problems’ or ‘my problems’ never ‘our problems’. It seems like too many IT departments want to spend quite a bit of time making sure that IT isn’t ever blamed for things going wrong or things not getting done.
3. Lack of the correct tools and technologies to enable better collaboration between the ‘real’ users and the IT staffs meant to serve them. This is the area that is most interesting to me, and an area that I try to focus on in my HR Technology class. Wikis, Zoho applications, internal social networks, Ning, heck even Facebook can all be utilized in one way or another to better foster and enable collaboration across the organizations.

The truth is that the walls and barriers will come down anyway. Banning IM use is folly, would an organization also remove telephones, e-mail or talking?

Smart organizations should be making efforts to increase openness and collaboration, not the other way around.

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Flowgram

I made my first Flowgram today. 

Flowgram is a web-based tool for developing demonstrations with narrative that can include web pages, videos and photos.  The Flowgram tools allow you to explain your concepts, web pages and photos.  Potential uses include training type demonstrations, adding depth and context to 'flat' content such as photos, or creating a more interactive way to describe web information.

Here is the results of my first efforts at Flowgram, it is a very brief overview of our faculty wiki:

Honestly, I found the tool fairly easy to use, but I do wonder how much value I can realize from it in the context of my class.  I do not think I would assign my students any type of project that would require Flowgram.

Anyone else seen or tried this out?

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Welcome to Wiki

Today we launched the RIT Human Resource Development Faculty wiki (internally we are using the term Community of Practice).  Access the wiki at rit-hrd.pbwiki.com (by invitation only, if you are an RIT HRD faculty member send me an e-mail if you did get not your invite).  We envision the wiki as a resource and tool for faculty to share best practices, learn from each other, and get to know each other a little better as well. 

This project was started by I comment I made back in the spring to Professor Donna Dickson, after receiving one of her 'Dear Faculty, here is some information you may find useful' e-mails. My comment was simply, 'I wonder if a wiki would be a better way to communicate that type of information', as well as provide a collaborative, dynamic, knowledge platform, you know all the classic benefits of wiki. 

Once I set up a brief demo using the awesome PbWiki product she jumped right in and supported the project.  Over the summer we met several times to discuss the goals for the wiki, the basic structure, and some ways to give us the best chance for adoption and success.

Here is the what the home page looks like - really clean, simple, and easy to navigate, hallmarks of PbWiki (click the image to see it in full size).

I am a huge proponent of wiki technology, both in the classroom and out as an enabler or platform for enhanced collaboration, knowledge sharing, and improved productivity.  I could post on and on about wiki, but for this post, I am content to acknowledge the HRD wiki launch and also say thanks to Professor Dickson for her support and enthusiasm. 

And also thanks to PbWiki which I recommend highly.

The wiki will only be as good as the contributors, and I am confident that our group is just the type to embrace the Community of Practice.

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If you don't like Twitter, what about Yammer?

Just launched this week, Yammer.  What the heck is Yammer?  Well, think if it as a semi-private version of Twitter. Yammer has all the features of Twitter (mini-blog type updates, choosing what users to follow, integration with SMS and IM), but with one major difference.  'Tweets' are generally viewable by any Twitter user. Any one can follow you on Twitter.  Making your Tweets private is possible, but most users don't bother. 

Yammer creates mini-networks of users sharing the same e-mail domain. That is only users with authenticated @acme.com email addresses can follow and see the updates of other folks from the Acme Company.  So it effectively becomes a mini-Twitter just for the people in your company.

Yammer has a couple of other features currently missing in Twitter, an easy way to view threaded discussions and the ability to 'follow' a hashtag or topic instead of a user.  Yammer also offers companies the ability for more robust administration capabilities for a fee of $1 user/month.

Many people I have talked to never could grasp the value of Twitter in the enterprise, (too many 'I just woke up and I'm tired' posts) may see more meaning in Yammer, where at least you know that all the traffic is from your own organization.

A couple of quick ideas as to how an HR department could use Yammer:

• An HR receptionist could Yammer questions to the entire HR staff with quick queries to help handle phone calls and walk-ins more rapidly
• A recruiter could send a link to a revised job description for feedback before an advert is placed
• HR service staff could update in/out times to make sure there is adequate coverage for special circumstances and events.
• Floating a new company benefit idea, 'We are considering offering Pet Insurance this year.  Who would be interested in that?'

What other uses of Yammer can you think of?

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