collaboration – Page 2 – Agile Elephant making sense of digital transformation

February 14, 2014 By David Terrar

Agile Elephant goes Enterprise 2.0 in Paris

The Agile Elephant team attended Kongress Media‘s Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris on Tuesday & Wednesday this week – I was speaking on a panel on strategic engagement and running a workshop session on project management and governance. Alan Patrick and Janet Parkinson will each be blogging their own thoughts, but this will be the first of two posts from me. It will be an introduction to both the topic and the event, followed by my conference report as part 2. We spent the two days at the World’s oldest business school, ESCP Europe in Paris, talking enterprise 2.0, social business and open business… OK, what’s that all about then, and why should you be interested? Let me start by explaining a little of the background.

Where to start? Back in May 2006, Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School started the wider use of the term Enterprise 2.0 as a kind of business oriented evolution of the web 2.0 term that was around at the time. He defined it as:

“Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.”

At that stage, the emergent tools were blogs, wikis, forums, document sharing, RSS feeds, microblogging and activity streams.

So the term has been around for over 8 years, but during this current decade the concept has evolved, and people have started to use the terms social business and social enterprise instead. This is problematic as the term social enterprise had already been coined by Professor Muhammad Yunus to mean a business with a social rather than financial purpose. That didn’t stop Salesforce, in 2011, branding their major customer and partner events with “Welcome to the Social Enterprise” and even trying (and failing) to trademark the term. Their definition of a Social Enterprise was one where social tools like Salesforce Chatter are used to connect and collaborate in new ways inside as well as outside of the organisation. These social tools, and there are many of them, can provide a very different platform for teamwork compared to sending files by email, which is the default collaboration approach in most organisations, albeit occasionally modified by having some sort of shared drive or intranet as the file repository. By 2012 Salesforce had dropped the term, but their shows declared “Business is Social”.

We’ve also used terms like knowledge management, corporate social networking, social collaboration, or social media in business. Social Business should not be confused with the term Social Media, although it uses social media channels. Social Media incorporates social networking, blogging, microblogging, forums, user generated content, crowd sourcing, RSS feeds and more. All of those communication channels might be used in a Social Business approach, but it will involve other social collaboration tools along with a major change of mindset and culture for the organisation. A culture of openness, sharing and collaboration that goes hand in hand with today’s digital disruption. It’s the antithesis of the old, corporate, command and control hierarchy where knowledge was power, and you were motivated to hang on to information, a valuable currency to keep private for your own use.

Enterprise 2.0, Social Business – part of our current problem is that neither of those terms work well, but the actual concept they are trying to describe can add real value to the bottom line in any organisation.

The Summit had some great speakers – Dion Hinchcliffe from Dachis, Rachel Happe of the Community Roundtable, Dan Pontefract of Telus, John Mell of IBM, Emanuele Quintarelli from Ernst & Young, Bertrand Duperrin of NextModernity, Lee Bryant of Postshift, and Luis Saurez just starting his journey having left IBM only days ago. It was a packed agenda covering:

Success factors for social workplace adoption
Key drivers for leveraging social value generation & business transformation
Best practices for enhancing business performance and employee engagement
Visions for future work & process organization

The event was sponsored by IBM (who have the Connections platform), SAP (with their Jam platform), Jive and a number of other players – Sitrion, Bluekiwi, Xwiki, NextModernity, Lecko. There might be over 100 social business platforms on the market, some of them are very good, but the players you’ll come across more often with the larger customers or number of implementations are IBM, SAP, Jive and Yammer from Microsoft.

It was great meeting our friends across from USA and Canada, as well as meeting all of the key European social business practitioners in one place and learning from some great customer case studies. Janet Parkinson, Alan Patrick and I were contributing to the tweet stream at #e20s and flying the Agile Elephant flag. All of the tweets, tweeters, blogs and photos from the show so far have been collected together by Jim Worth (and the crowd) in this wiki. Everyone will add links over the next week or so as we all catch up. Bjoern Negelmann & Thomas Koch, the organisers, and their team did a great job of putting on a very valuable social business event. Right at the end Bjoern grabbed me to ask me my thoughts about the hackathon case study I had just presented on behalf of my team, along with my key takeaways from the conference:

My part 2 conference report is here.

February 3, 2014 By Janet Parkinson

Thesis 2 – Business has become a Social Object

Why do we need a Manifesto?
We’ve been talking about applying social tools inside business since 2006 or before and we are no where near realising the potential for real social collaboration to make business more effective. We need a roadmap to set us on the right course, we need to think differently and to change culture. The Agile Elephant Manifesto encapsulates our blueprint for making Social Business work in thirteen theses. This post is the second in a sequence of 13 which explains each thesis in sequence.

Why Social Business?
We don’t mean the Professor Muhammad Yunus definition of a business which has a social rather than financial objective. We do mean a business adopting social tools and a different, more open and collaborative approach. We’ve been using terms like Web 2.0, Office 2.0, Collaboration, Knowledge Management, Enterprise 2.0, Social Enterprise or Social Business. Social Business is probably the best term currently, but the language is of minor importance compared to the real objective of changing business culture to add value.

2 of 13 – Business has become a social object

It’s our belief that although business has always been social, it is now becoming a social object and we need to foster and facilitate those networks to add both tangible and intangible value.

Business as a Social Object: Social networks are acting as platforms for individuals to coordinate all the activities businesses used to do. The collaborative economy is now making headlines. Companies like Airbnb and Uber which rely on trusted parties are completely bypassing traditional hierarchical capitalist business models. Airbnb has risen in 6 years from a concept (dreamt up by 2 people when they rented out their apartment floor for the night) to a social platform which will potentially become the world’s largest hotelier within the next year. We believe that many – even all – markets could become just nodes in this social mesh – business is becoming a social object.

World as a Social Market: Social networks will allow any capacity to find any demand. Transaction costs will be minimised between buyers, sellers and information holders as the cost of bringing buyer and seller together falls to insignificant numbers. Ronald Coase predicted this in the 1930’s. The size of the firm in the case of a supplier to Airbnb is nothing more than your spare room and an internet connection.

Trust and transparency: We foresee that trust and transparency will be maximized. Any business which tries to limit transparency and remain opaque or tries to create arbitrage where there is none will find it difficult to compete and maintain their strategic position.

Regulation: The social mesh will become part of the infrastructure – just like the Internet itself has become part of the infrastructure. Over time, this mesh will be regulated – infrastructures always do. Regulation will be complex and we need to ensure that the regulations introduced have society’s best interests at heart.

You control your network: The sheer scale of the mesh will be vast and we will need tools to navigate it. Some tools will come from the infrastructure but we imagine that some will come from yourself. Think VRM , the concept of tools being created for individuals to manage and control their own data, allowing access only to those to whom they give permission. We imagine that we could all own our own smart systems with data controlled by ourselves – like owning an electric appliance which you plug into the mesh. It could source the relevant data, barter the deal and present the options in order of importance, then automatically make all the necessary arrangements for you. The opportunity for profiteering in these transactions would be minimal.

Utopian dream?: May be. It would rely very much on total trust and could go very wrong in bad hands. Be prepared for the shadows.

“The Future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed” – William Gibson, 1993

You can find the full Manifesto here, and contact us if you want to find out more.

Thesis One

Thesis Three

February 2, 2014 By Alan Patrick

Don’t blame the workmen (and women), blame the tools

Interesting piece on the BBC blog in 2012 (how did I miss it…) by Holly Goodier about their research on Social Engagement – essentially the old 1/9/90 (1% writers, 9% commentors, 90% readers) was partly a measure of the difficulty of access to the technology. As technology has made it easier to write and respond (think Twitter et al) the picture has changed:

The model which has guided many people’s thinking in this area, the 1/9/90 rule, is outmoded. The number of people participating online is significantly higher than 10%.
Participation is now the rule rather than the exception: 77% of the UK online population is now active in some way.
This has been driven by the rise of ‘easy participation’: activities which may have once required great effort but now are relatively easy, expected and every day. 60% of the UK online population now participates in this way, from sharing photos to starting a discussion.
Despite participation becoming relatively ‘easy’, almost a quarter of people (23%) remain passive – they do not participate at all.
Passivity is not as rooted in digital literacy as traditional wisdom may have suggested. 11% of the people who are passive online today are early adopters. They have the access and the ability but are choosing not to participate.
Digital participation now is best characterised through the lens of choice. These are the decisions we take about whether, when, with whom and around what, we will participate. Because participation is now much more about who we are, than what we have, or our digital skill.

Through these insights they developed a new model of digital participation: The Participation Choice (see graphic at top of post). The link above also takes you to the video of Holly’s talk on the subject.

Although this is more a “Social Media” piece of research, the lessons for using similar tools in a Social Business setting are clear – the tools can drive the level of engagement well, or badly.

To reverse the old saw, if the implementation is poor, it may actually be the tools that are to blame, not the workers.

February 1, 2014 By Janet Parkinson

Business as a Social Object

“Could business become nothing more than a social object, with individuals collaborating via social networks, doing what businesses used to do?”

I put out this idea last September at our Patchwork Elephant Conference about what the future could hold for Social Business. Our first conference was hosted 4 years ago when the term ‘Social Business’ hadn’t really been coined – how rapidly things can change.

With this in mind I talked about the possible future of social + business and how, if you take an idea that can seem totally unthinkable and unacceptable, it can become thinkable given the right ‘window’ of time. This is based on the Overton Window theory that there is a narrow ‘window’ when a range of ideas will be accepted by the public. If you take a ‘way out there’ idea which appears completely unthinkable, then push it as far as you possibly can then sometimes, given the right ‘window’, that idea eventually becomes thinkable and acceptable.

Here are 2 concepts which could be possible in 40 years time. They may seem pretty unthinkable – but can they become truly thinkable if pushed to their extremes?

“What if businesses became nothing more than a social object – that’s to say that social networks would be used simply to coordinate all activities that businesses used to do?”

“Nanotechnology will destroy the present social and economic system – because it will become pointless” (James Burke on Radio 4 PM, August 2013)

James Burke was a famous BBC reporter on Tomorrow’s World in the 1970’s and chief presenter for the BBC’s coverage of the first moon landing in 1969. In 1973 he was asked to predict what life would be like in 20 years time – that’s 1993. Back in 1973 the only computers around filled floors and there were very few. There was no internet, no email, no mobile phones.

He predicted that:

Storage of personal information in databanks would be accepted – at least by the young
People would realise that the sharing of information would help organise society better
Computer aided learning systems would provide children with their own plug in superteacher
300,000 computer terminals would be in use by the year 2000 providing forecasts on the effects of management decision making

There were in fact 146 million computers by 2000 so his timescales were a bit inaccurate but he did well. Yet in 1973 most people viewed these predictions as totally unthinkable.

So when Burke last year suggested on Radio 4 PM that in 40 years time “Nanotechnology will destroy the present social and economic system – because it will become pointless” this may sound unthinkable, but it’s probably worth thinking about…

Burke believes that it may be possible that in 40 years time we could all own personal nanofactories which could reproduce stuff on a molecular level. It should be possible to make virtually anything – for virtually nothing. All we would need, he says, is air, water, dirt, and acetylene gas (for carbon) and we could manufacture virtually everything – from gold, food, our utilities or even a house.

We could, he suggests, become entirely autonomous!

This does sound really unthinkable – but perhaps this isn’t quite so far out there as it sounds. Take the current trends of everything becoming smaller, cheaper and networked – like 3d printing and the internet of things and push this out over 40 years… Machines are already working at the molecular level – the University of Manchester has recently built one which they’re planning to modify to build penicillin.

The Endgame: Radical Abundance

So what’s the endgame with all this? Radical Abundance! The latest new new thing that’s just about to hit us and is being pushed not just by Burke but by others like Eric Drexler too.

So assuming that we could produce everything we needed, what could this mean for business? Here’s a possible snapshot:

Production: whether goods were made at home or locally on demand it could mean that large scale manufacturing would be knocked out
Transport: if there were no goods to be moved around the transport industry would be under threat
Consumer facing businesses selling goods: would have serious problems
Sales & marketing: what for if there were no goods to flog?
Business support services: would dwindle
Finance: a lot of the current financial system is based on betting on firms

Is this all becoming thinkable to you yet? Or at least more thinkable than before you started reading?

So let’s now return to my original concept:

“Could business become a social object with social networks acting as platforms for individuals to coordinate all the activities businesses used to do?”

Following on from Burke’s predictions perhaps now this idea doesn’t seem so far fetched. We only have to look at the current and quite sudden rise of the collaborative economy (another term which wasn’t really known 4 years ago) to see how companies in this space such as Airbnb and Uber are seriously challenging traditional business models.

Here are the beginnings of business models being redefined with individuals collaborating via social networks and relying on trusted parties, bypassing traditional hierarchical capitalist models. Platforms are being used by crowds to do what businesses used to do.

“The Future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet”

William Gibson‘s “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet” now springs to mind. Let’s take the social platform Airbnb to illustrate what we mean. Founded in 2008 by Brian Chesky and his roommate when they charged visitiors to sleep on their apartment floor, Airbnb has risen within 6 years to arrange 10m stays in 550 000 rooms in 34,000 cities and is likely to become the world’s largest hotelier within the next year.

As the collaborative economy expands, it’s clear that it will impact various markets, potentially reshaping them as integral parts of the social networks we engage with daily. Social networks are poised to streamline the way capacity meets demand, across the spectrum. Functions once novel, like Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft, are now foundational, much like how AOL was once a gateway to the web experience, which has since become part of our ubiquitous digital infrastructure. Similarly, online markets are evolving, with rating services becoming essential. Top rated property brands, along with other businesses, may find it inevitable to integrate as nodes within this sprawling social mesh—becoming, in essence, social objects that are inherently connected through user interactions and reputations.

The World as a Social Market

Trust and transparency will be maximised, transaction costs will be minimised. The whole trend of these social infrastructures is to drop transaction costs between buyers, sellers and information holders so the cost of bringing buyer and seller together will fall to insignificant numbers. Ronald Coase predicted this in the 1930’s. He foresaw that the inevitable outcome is that whenever possible the size of the firm will be reduced to a minimum size rather than keep all the extra functions it needs today like finance and sales etc. The size of the firm in the case of a supplier to Airbnb is nothing more than your spare room and an internet connection. Ebay was a forerunner to this – but it’s becoming clearer that eventually all the world will become a social market. Any business which tries to limit transparency and remain opaque or is trying to create arbitrage where there is none will find it difficult to compete and maintain their strategic position.

Over time, this mesh will become regulated – infrastructures always do. Electricity, water, telephony all ended up as part of the utility infrastructure and this will be no different. The main problem for the individual will be the sheer scale of the mesh – we will need tools to navigate it. Some tools will come from the infrastructure itself but we imagine that some tools will come from yourself. This ties in closely with the VRM concept of tools being created for individuals to manage and control their own data, allowing access only to those to whom they give permission. We could imagine us all owning our own smart systems with data controlled by ourselves – a bit like owning an electric appliance which you plug into the mesh – that could source the relevant data, barter the deal and present the options in order of importance, then automatically make all the necessary arrangements for you. The opportunity for profiteering in these transactions would be minimal – regulation would be complex.

Yet this is a utopian view of the world. It would rely very much on total trust and could go very wrong in bad hands. In my next post we’ll look more deeply into the shadows of a potential future for Business as a Social Object.

January 28, 2014 By Alan Patrick

The Game Theory of Business Socialisation

Article in the MIT/Sloan review, about an interesting application of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game in the HBR Review, by a Stanford psychologist (talk about Ivy League linking…) Lee Ross and his colleagues:

Ross conducted a classic “prisoner’s dilemma” scenario with a group of participants. This scenario is one in which two prisoners each are given, separately, the options of cooperating with one another by staying silent, or betraying the other prisoner for a chance at freedom. The catch is that the benefit (or cost) of betrayal versus cooperation is determined by the choice of the other prisoner — that is, whether one prisoner’s choice is better or worse for his situation depends entirely on what action his counterpart takes.

The twist to this scenario was that the researchers told participants in one group that they were playing “the Wall Street Game” and in the other group were told that they were playing “the Community Game.”

The results were striking. When participants were told that they were playing the Wall Street Game, 70% of participants acted according to rational self-interest and chose to betray the other prisoner. When participants were told that they were playing the Community Game, however, 70% of participants chose to cooperate. The key takeaway is that a substantial portion of people decide whether or not to cooperate based on environmental conditions.

As the MIT blog points out, this has some interesting implications for Social Business meeting Corporate Culture:

The implications for how (and with whom) to deploy social business are profound. Companies that already exhibit the cooperative culture of the Community Game will benefit more readily from social business. Social business tools unlock the inherent willingness to collaborate and desire to cooperate embedded in the organizational culture. At the risk of putting too fine of a point on it, social business is the Community Game, where benefits accrue from cooperation and sharing information.

As MIT also points out, enterprises that exhibit the self-interested culture of the Wall Street game, however, may require a cultural shift before they can benefit similarly…and that this cannot be faked (a point we make in our 7S model of social business too). What this means for Social Business in agressive business cultures like investment banking is an interesting thought, if it – as we believe it will – proves to be a more efficient way of doing business.

January 22, 2014 By David Terrar

Jostling the hierarchy and the wirearchy

As we’ve been setting up the Agile Elephant, and pulling together our manifesto for social business, we have been having a dialogue about a company’s hierarchy versus the wirearchy – the networked connections that happen inside and outside any company, crossing departmental boundaries, crossing company borders, and completely ignoring the organisation chart on the wall. Wirearchy is a concept coined by our Canadian friend and social business thought leader Jon Husband. It reflects the connected world that we now live in, and it highlights the changes that social technologies are enabling in the way we work. Jon’s working definition of wirearchy is “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology”. That definition and those key words resonate with us.

A few months back Jon introduced me to Brad Palmer, not for any specific reason, but just because he thought we were like minded and should be connected. The wirearchy in action. Brad’s another Canadian, and founder of Jostle. Fast forward to this week and Brad was briefing the Agile Elephant team on what his social intranet platform can do. We’re interested in building up our knowledge of social business tools, and our first look made wirearchy jump in to our minds. Jostle has the most visual approach to showing the structures and networks that evolve in organizations that we’ve seen. Most collaboration products allow employees in the company to build up their profile so that you can understand key information, their skills and expertise and some of their work history. The good products will show you who works for whom. But we haven’t seen a product that shows the company’s org chart AND cross functional team structures as visually as Jostle, but it goes further than that.

The company organization chart always come in for a lot of stick – soon after it’s up on the wall, the noticeboard or a Word document on the Intranet it’s out of date, not completely accurate, and in any case it doesn’t show the real organisation. What would happen if the chart was alive? If the organisation chart was a living social network? That’s what Jostle’s People Engagement® platform gives you. Always up to date and showing the individual’s information with search and functionality to make it easy for others to connect to them based on skills and knowledge. It shows the formal connections of the company hierarchy, but allows people to create ad hoc work groups. They could be project teams, special interest groups, even social groups across and within an organisation. Combined with Jostle’s library functions it offers the possibility for the Intranet to become a repository of learned knowledge, to help connect all that “unstructured” data sitting in Emails and ERP and Excel. People can link easily and quickly across departments, the world and, most importantly, the business silos that grow up in even the smallest company, but are a real challenge to medium sized and larger enterprises. Brad’s explanation showed us how the product would massively reduce the internal time taken in an organisation to find people, find information, and find answers.
A focus on employee engagement, as Jostle has done, has direct business benefits with good outcomes for both employees and customers. Look at this material on the Harvard Business Review blog. Their findings show highly engaged organizations have double the rate of success of lower engaged organizations. John Baldoni reports that:

“high-turnover organizations report 25% lower turnover, and low-turnover organizations report 65% lower turnover. Engagement also improves quality of work and health. For example, higher scoring business units report 48% fewer safety incidents; 41% fewer patient safety incidents; and 41% fewer quality incidents (defects).”

These kinds of social business platforms improve the efficiency of knowledge flow and decision making in any business. In an information business, this would have a major impact on business effectiveness – increasing efficiency as the transaction costs are lowered. We believe there are great opportunities for companies to use Jostle and we’ll be exploring what it can do in the coming weeks and months.

January 16, 2014 By Janet Parkinson

Why Agile Elephant?

It all began 4 years ago when the founders of Agile Elephant put together an event for Social Media Week in London on the subject of Social Business. At that time the phrase ‘Social Business’ had not yet been coined – the concept of using social tools in the workplace to improve collaboration and enable companies to work in a more efficient and agile way was a very new concept. Social media, social monitoring and social tools were only just beginning to have a serious impact within marketing departments. We called the event the Patchwork Elephant because we recognised that ‘The Elephant in the Ecosystem’ was a huge arena, and that it was hard to get your head around easily and see clearly. It was very much ‘the elephant in the room’ – present, but at that time, being ignored by most.

Since then we have all been working within the social enterprise/business space as it has developed – assisting companies looking to integrate social into their end to end business systems and processes, social media marketing and monitoring, community building and looking to educate leaders about these new ways of working. Our Patchwork Elephant event last year ‘What next for Social Business?’ highlighted just how far Social Business has come in 4 years, but it also made clear how much more there is still to be done.

We decided that as a consultancy our Patchwork Elephant really needed an upgrade to become an Agile Elephant – ‘Agile’ being what companies need to become, ‘Elephant’ as, like business, it’s a pretty big thing to get to shift – but as this amazing photo of a climbing elephant shows if you understand them well enough and get the training right then agility isn’t a problem for either an elephant or a business!

Did you know that elephants have their own communication networks? They make subsonic calls that vibrate the ground, receiving calls through their feet and trunk by monitoring vibrations through the ground. This allows them to triangulate the direction of the elephant making the call by positioning themselves with several points of contact on the ground. It would appear that elephants are quite a bit further ahead of us in this social communication game…

« Previous Page

The Game Theory of Business Socialisation

Jostling the hierarchy and the wirearchy

Why Agile Elephant?

About Us

Subscribe to our Blog via Email

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

About Us

Subscribe to our Blog via Email