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Sustainability might not be sexy, but life depends on it

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Sustainability might not be sexy, but life depends on it

I’m at Hannover Messe 2019 for the first time, courtesy of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.  It’s not as big as CeBIT was, but it is still a huge conference with over 20 halls of exhibitors, covering everything from Industry 4.0, integrated automation, the digital factory, industrial supply, research & technology to the digital workplace.  HPE are in hall 6, the home of digital manufacturing.  I’ll be telling more stories from here around AI, automation, IoT, edge computing and a whole lot more, but on the first day I met with Chris Wellise HPE’s Chief Sustainability Officer.  

Chris Wellise, HPE’s Chief Sustainability Officer

When I’m speaking at events I’ll often ask the audience who amongst them was born on or before 1974, because those of us that were have been alive while the population of the planet has doubled, and as humans have been around for 200,000 years, that rate of change is staggering.  We live in exponential times, and Chris is full of eye-watering quotes and statistics on a topic that ins’t particularly sexy, but our lives and the future depends on it.  Chris says that as a large scale manufacturer:

“HPE produces 7 servers, 13 networking devices and 80 TB of storage every 60 seconds!”  

That’s 5 million units a year, all which generate data, and all of which need energy and resources in their creation.  Chris suggests that by 2030 most people will have 15 devices, all generating data because “everything computes at the edge and everywhere”.   He’s seen research that suggests we will run out of gold by 2030.  Yikes!  

You don’t have to have watched The Blue Planet to recognise the effect of what we are creating and then throwing away is doing for all of our futures.  Chris believes that sustainability is key.  We have to power the digital economy in a new way, and recognise the energy and resource constraints we need to work around.  Chris believes we have to move towards the circular economy.  To be able to do more with less.  We have to think in terms of applying our technology to disrupt the status quo.  We need smart manufacturing approaches to remove resource leakages.  

HPE have been rethinking design for environment since late 80s and they are one of only a few tech companies who regularly talk about what they are doing and why, rather than it just being a topic in the corporate social responsibility section of the website.  This thinking is necessary as the numbers are so big.  There will be 8.5 billion of us by 2030.  We’ll have 21 billion devices connected and sharing data by 2020.  By 2060 we will be need to be extracting twice the raw material that we do today, unless we can think differently.  We are running out of our planet at the same time that some people don’t even accept that global warming is real.

The HPE approach is to think through every product and design for its end of use.  They can “upcycle” and reconfigure equipment for a new customer within 48 hours at their renewable technology centres in Erskine, Scotland, and Andover, Massachusetts.  The products are, on average, 89% remanufactured to be sent on to a new customer with the remaining 11% responsibly recycled.  HPE have a vast shared supply chain servicing more than 150,000 customers, helped by over 170 suppliers, and then delivering products to 140 countries.  Chris says that they think about how they can have a sustainable influence on that massive supply chain in terms of greenhouse gas targets connected to the science of what they are doing, all in line with the Paris Accord on climate change.  It’s a call to action for our industry.  The current trajectory we are on is not sustainable.  

The other concept Chris talks about is “data landfill”.  He suggest that only 6% of data we generate is actually being used, and so the other 94% is wasted data that we have used energy, raw materials and production capacity to generate (for no added value).  How do we close that gap?  

Here’s Chris at the show following our sit down, talking with me some more around the sustainability topic:

Chris Wellise talking HPE’s approach sustainability with David Terrar for IT2

I’ll carry on the discussion in a follow on post, taking the sustainability thinking through to HPE’s customers using IoT, AI and data analytics technology to change the dynamic and reduce the waste.  Like I said at the start, sustainability might not be a sexy topic, but our future depends on it! 

Check back here for more content like this, and contact us if you want to find out more.

Disclosure: HPE paid my expenses for the trip to HMI 2019 as part of their influencer programme.

Enterprise Digital Summit London in tweets and photos

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Enterprise Digital Summit London in tweets and photos

Here is a first taste of the story of last Thursday’s Enterprise Digital Summit London in tweets and photos. Our aim is to put on London’s most enterprise oriented event on digital transformation, helping organisations change mindset to deal with the incredible technological and competitive pressures of the 21C world of work. Here is the day from the audience’s perspective. We’ll publish posts, an event report, videos and more photos soon:

This gallery of photos below are all taken by our friend across from Germany Ellen Trude:

More content coming soon.  If you want to find out more about our approach, or you need help with your digital strategy, then please contact us.

 

SMILE London Workshops 2016 – Enterprise Social Networks and more

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SMILE London Workshops 2016 – Enterprise Social Networks and more

Back on 12 May, Marc Wright of Simply Communicate kindly invited us to join in the latest version of his Social Media Inside the Large Enterprise London Workshops. The new format has 4 time slots each with 3 choices of workshop, so you could attend 4 out of 12. They covered a varied set of topics and case studies aimed at giving practical advice and helping large organisations in their journey with internal social collaboration and social media communications. Speakers included our good friends Luis Suarez on adoption (and adaptation) of these tools, Faith Forster talking about her product Pinipa and making projects more engaging, and Michel Ezran over from France to present the latest version of Lecko’s annual research report analysing what is the best collaboration & social toolset. This is the second year we’ve partnered with Lecko to extend their research in to the UK and make their report more International. There was an interesting mix of sponsors, a good venue, good food, and enough time between sessions to catch up with friends and do some networking. One important aspect – some good bean to cup coffee machines were on hand to put this a cut above the average event on caffeine delivery!

The content was a mixed bag – some very good sessions, and some not so. There are some key themes that we noticed aggregating what we gleaned from the various talks:

  • The increasing importance of tackling mobile, but the the solutions aren’t fully there yet
  • Tensions and differences in approach between out of the box solutions and the bespoke developed enterprise social networks
  • A difference in mindset between those companies that are using Sharepoint at the heart of their office infrastructure, and those that aren’t
  • The importance of linking collaboration to legacy systems and business process.

ELSUA at SMILE London 2016One other strand from various discussions at the event – quite a number of organisations are using Yammer but reckoning they are having problems with adoption. Something to explore later, and I see Marc has already promoted a simply yammer workshop to address that issue.

Some of the sessions used the MeeToo app on your smartphone for real time polling and chat. I didn’t see much use by anybody of the messaging, but bringing in the poling to some sessions was a good addition to making things more interactive. A note to self on this – if you do this kind of Q&A poll, make sure you’ve thought through the answer options fully.

We Are Social ESN case study

I watched Peter Furtado of Simply Succeed and Emma Cumming of We Are Social talk through the launch of their SHIP enterprise social network (ESN). We Are Social are a great story of a UK social media marketing agency startup. Founded by 2 people in 2008, they now have over 600 people across 8 countries and count major brands like Adidas as their customers (We Are Social were responsible for their #bethedifference campaign). Emma told us they weren’t practicing what they preach and using social media consistently internally. Skype was their first client and they use Skype a lot themselves, but they had siloed groups, and knew that knowledge was getting lost, never to be found again. They put together a steering group for governance, and set up a virtual task force of about 10% of the company to make a new approach work. It was the task force who decided on a name for their ESN, chose a particular platform, and put together a plan for launching it across the company. They called the network The SHIP which comes from the company’s core culture and values – social, honest, inspiring, passionate. They put together a fun home page and a whole set of launch material using ship and nautical themes to tease people before the launch, and then encourage people to join in – using the kind of ideas they usually sell to customers, but on themselves – an excellent story. The SHIP network has groups, activity feeds and great search capabilities. During the launch phase they emphasised the importance of people completing their profile, adding a proper avatar photo, and adding their skills and languages. Finding native language speakers to help on projects is now much, much easier across the company. Emma said they have 631 people on the SHIP and on average 80% of those access it once a week. 30% of those are engaging every week, with 15% contributing – those are good numbers. They use it to generate ideas for a new brief, to work on projects, to communicate across the organisation. One of the founders, Robin, got actively involved in the launch and early adoption and it’s clear that commitment and leadership from the top is a factor in making this kind of network successful. That means you have to sell the value to top management to get them involved early on. One of the unusual things they did at launch was to use targeted Facebook advertising, selecting for people who said they worked at We Are Social – I think thats a very neat, cost effective idea. Peter Furtado, who was called in to help them launch, talked about the Simply Suceed approach of putting 60% in to planning and identifying the business case, 25% in to planning the launch and the rest of your time and resource in to drive adoption within the community. The particular social business platform We Are Social used was Telligent (formerly Zimbra) with custom development from an outfit called 4 Roads to get the look and feel they wanted, integration with Google Drive and the like.

OOTB platform for SharePoint & Wiggle ESN case study

Brighstarr sesson at SMILE LondonNext I was off to see Martin Perks and Hannah Unsworth of BrightStarr. They are an experienced SharePoint developer and consultancy who have developed an out of the box ESN solution that sits on top of SharePoint called Unily. There are an increasing number of this kind of platform within the Microsoft ecosystem. Martin talked of the rise of the platform approach. In the past there might be a 24 month project to develop and launch an Intranet. In today’s environment we just can’t wait that long, our business might have changed completely in that timeframe. Added to that we are inundated with choices for sharing content, sharing documents, or different ways of instant messaging. He talked about pressure on the bottom line to get results, and the rise of mobile and the smartphone. He talked of custom IT projects being dead, team sizes having halved, and a significant decrease in a solely IT-led approach. He suggested build time has dropped by 79% in 5 year and that 80% of companies have the same requirements for an internal social network in any case. Hence the creation of an “out of the box” solution, branded as Unily and already an award winner (their customer DORMA was one of Nielsen Norman’s 10 Intranet Design Annual Award winners of 2016). Martin suggested budget is still with IT and not internal communications and so there can be a battle of wills where nobody knows where the Intranet project sits. Actually that is because it needs to be owned by everyone, and not just by IT or Comms. Brightstarr’s Unily supports this approach by creating an easy to use digital workplace with all of the required ingredients to help employees connect, collaborate and be more productive in their jobs. It provides a staff centric view to show that person the news that’s relevant to them and where they can contribute. Martin talked about mapping the requirements of communication, productivity, collaboration, knowledge, (and importantly) value over time. He agreed that it’s not just about technology and that the project has to be maintained, managed and led properly. Hannah talked about an agile approach and 4 week sprints developing the functionality. I found it interesting that the language and terminology leans towards the world of the programmer. They talked in terms getting things done in weeks not months and then introduced a customer to tell his story. Panos Mitsikis talked about implementing Unily at Wiggle. Interestingly, he described himself as a SharePoint developer. Wiggle, is a sports retailer, started back in ’99, who focus on triathlon – cycling, swimming and running. They outgrew an Intranet based on WordPress and realised that were spending too much time inside email communication. They needed a one stop for consuming information for each employee to surface what they care about. There are just under 500 Wigglers, as they call themselves and on a bad day, only 80% of them use the new ESN. It’s been designed to be employee centric, giving them important news, announcements, and videos with the aim of empowering them. It highlights trending documents, and they host events, or highlight sponsors They wanted an easy way for everything to be in one place, and so all the most commonly used apps are on a single page. It helps them form teams, manage projects, build communities, or follow external sites and blogs. So far they have around 45 project sites and every department has its own community. putting the site together took 4.5 weeks from start to finish with just Panos and plus two experts from Brightstarr.  They suggested that you shouldn’t be so precious about your requirements, and with this speed of implementation and success I can see why. They’ve decentralised content management and they suggested that Uniliy makes it much easier than vanilla SharePoint for creating that new content. The CEO was project sponsor and that was another key to success. The system handles multiple languages, supports everything Microsoft Office365 supports. You access Yammer from a social tab so you don’t even have to leave the platform to use that too. They carried out an aggressive campaign over a 3-4 week period to get everyone on board. Because Unily is provided as a Cloud based SaaS solution, it came with features Panos didn’t even think about, and Panos didn’t need any IT involvement to get it off the ground.

@ELSUA on Adoption/Adaptation

ESUA Final TipAfter lunch I joined the Luis Suarez session on adoption, or rather adaptation of social collaboration tools. Luis was relating his long experience in this field from his time in knowledge management, famously living inside IBM without email, and most recently as one of the best independent consultants in the social business space. He talked about identifying the business problems, making sure you have a governance model in place (that should be guidelines, not rules) and building a solid library of use cases. He talked of the importance of enabling your early adopters so that they can be effective champions and change agents. He offered ideas around education and enablement. A regular theme in any of Luis’s talks is highlights how 87% of the workforce is disengaged, and in this session he quoted figures country by country with the surprising fact that Costa Rica has the most engaged employees! On governance he told the story of the IBM Social Computing Guidelines, created in 2005 by employees on a wiki page – actually it was the prolific bloggers who, in 2 weeks, created something that was subsequently checked by IBM communications and legal but not changed. That 2005 set of guidelines became the blueprint for many of us! He talked about working out loud, and leading by example. About removing “reply all” and attachments from the mess of email and content trapped in the inbox. About asking open questions and shifting the mindset from knowledge is power. He believes finding experts in your organisation is the number one use case! He suggested we need to become people centric organizations, not document centric. He worried about the need to nurture early adopters because so often we don’t have budget to do it properly, so we need to crowdsource the help. He talked of giving them a sense of purpose to help them transform the way people work. He explained how he believes the narrative matters and his dislike for the term community manager, preferring to use facilitator. His final tip was:

“Get started! Stop thinking, start doing! (today!)”

The importance of Company Culture & EY case study

For the final segment I chose Lawrence Clarke, one of the founders of Simply Succeed, with Steve Perry, EY Community Implementation Leader. They were using EY as a case study and talking about how your social intranet holds up a mirror to your business culture. How your business culture ends up defining the ambitions of your social intranet. Steve talked through what they were trying to achieve with EY’s collaboration community in terms of understanding, engagement, satisfaction, recognition and openness. He talked about the levels of culture and artefacts in terms of the organisational language being used, the physical structures and decor of the places and the stories, ceremonies and rituals. Lawrence used the Zappos culture book as an example. Zappos is the successful online shoe retailer, acquired by Amazon in 2009 although it still operates independently. I have to agree that they are a great example in this context as their early investor, Tony Hsieh (pronounced Shay) who subsequently became their CEO says:

“Our number one priority is company culture. Our whole belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff like delivering great customer service or building a long-term enduring brand will just happen naturally on its own.”

Lawrence went on to spend some time talking about their shift to holacracy as an organisational structure. Actually I believe that’s a distraction, as it’s well known they are having problems with it, and anyway their core culture that created their success was in place well before that shift in management approach. He talked about the most important elements in managing culture being what leaders pay attention to, how they react to crises, how they allocate rewards and how they hire and fire individuals. Steve talked about the importance of how people are recognised and incentivised, how the rewards systems is created, and how visible and effective people are. He highlighted some of the issues around ensuring metrics that can’t be gamed wth an example where people were renaming documents to post them 10 times to improve their contribution statistics. You have to think through the behaviours you will trigger. They finished with an interesting contrast of the culture of Regus, the serviced and virtual office company, versus a startup competitor coming along to disrupt them called NearDesk. They pointed us to Regus Sucks, a review website created by angry ex-regus customers, along with employee reviews for Regus on GlassDoor. NearDesk is being crowdfunded as a pure digital business many of the 500 investors are customers. We’ll watch the progress of these two with interest.

So a good event, some good case studies, and the new format seemed to work well. We’ll be blogging some more about our key take aways and conclusions, and looking forward to doing more wth our friends at Simply Succeed & Simply Communicate.

BrightStarr session photo courtesy of a Bastien Le Lann tweet

Of organizational Operating Systems, Frameworks and Flows

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Of organizational Operating Systems, Frameworks and Flows

The Paris edition of the Enterprise Digital Summit is coming together for next month. Bjoern posted recently on the conference’s key themes with some great links to ideas around platforms, the elastic enterprise and machine learning, but he also talks about the company’s operating model and operating system, and that triggered some thoughts around terminology that connected with conversations I had with Dave Gray two weeks back (and last year!), and that connected with conversations I had with Sigurd Rinde this week (and over the years). Connections in context over time.

Kongress Media at CeBIT 2016-765x300

I have a problem with talking about the “Operating System” for the organization. I realise that in dealing with the new digital landscape and new business models, our organizations need to change. Dramatically (but we know change is really difficult). Traditional hierarchies and command and control just aren’t effective any more. Management isn’t working! White collar workers in the typical business seem to be busier and less productive than before. How can we fix that? What is the solution? If it’s upgrading the organization to a new Operating System then that feels like an industrial, command and control based solution to the problem. It’s thinking of the the new paradigm in terms of a kernel and drivers, connecting hardware and software, to be tested and debugged. It’s like thinking of the brain as just an electrical circuit. A collection of 90 billion neurons, each one connected to a thousand others, passing electrical signals. But that brain supports the mind which thinks and feels and imagines and has subjective thoughts. More than just electrical circuits.  We need to think organic rather than mechanic or engineering.

Now to Dave Gray. As well as his soon to be published Liminal Thinking book that I blogged about last week, Dave has work in progress following on from Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Design books, with his Culture Mapping sessions – I recommend you take a look at his thinking on this. When Dave talks about this, or does a workshop, he often says that culture is like the Operating System of the company, but then he usually goes on to talk about changing and nurturing it in terms of gardening (explained here). In his talks he’ll often quote Louis Gerstner, from one of Agile Elephant’s favourite books (Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? – from 2002 – it’s part of the reason behind for our name):

“Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization’s makeup and success — along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like… I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.”

Although Dave uses operating system as shorthand, I prefer his more organic explanation and definitely agree with his focus on organzational culture.

There is plenty of talk about how the traditional hierarchy of most organizations is reaching its limits. There is talk of flattening the management structure and self organising and we reference companies like W. L. Gore, Valve Corporation (Steam) and Semco Partners. These are great examples, but I worry over the way some people talk about these and Holacracy without fully understanding the scale of the rules and methodologies that underpin it. I hear people discussing Frederick Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations book and the pursuit of the Teal Organization. My concern is over being too prescriptive with our solutions. At Agile Elephant we believe there are no “one size fits all solutions”. Every organization is different and at a different stage of evolution in the new digital landscape, and so we believe there needs to be more focus on the activities and behaviours and characteristics that work, rather than striving for a particular system that might.

That leads me to my Enterprise Irregular buddy Sigurd Rinde and discussions which will result in a series of posts including this one. In our catch up call this week we talked about where the classic organization is, and where the modern organization needs to be. He told me how positively people respond when he talks about white collar productivity and tells them (in words which I stole and used above):

“Management isn’t working!”

In our conversation he added more names to the list of companies that aren’t using a traditional hierarchy like Patagonia, Buurtzog, Handelsbanken and Zappos. Then we talked about Zappos and his discussions with them and their problems in changing to Holacracy. However, the most powerful thing we talked about is how organizations spend too much time thinking efficiency when they should be thinking effectiveness. Business is all about getting the work done and the work is a flow. Most of our organiations have vertical application silos – ERP, CRM, Email, HR, Document Management and more. Then we are adding enterprise social networks like Jive, or extra collaboration tools like Slack. The digital workplace is getting more complex.

Sig talks in language that we Elephants like. He talks about getting the work done as value creation. This core purpose generates a sequence of activities – a flow. Like water it requires a framework to be useful. Now there are three basic ways you can move water around:

  • In pipes – that’s the industrial approach, creating a complex system of flows with fixed connections, joints and valves, and more pipes to connect to the next system – like too much of the business application software we use.
  • In buckets passed hand to hand – how much of our day to day work feels like that, with work slopping over the edges on to the floor and not getting to where it needs to be?
  • Along a riverbed – water finds its path – there may be rocks, branches and obstructions that change the flow, but water finds its way around them, and we can work on the riverbed to remove the obstructions, or the river banks to shorten the course.

RiverBed

So when it comes to looking at company organizations at the Enterprise Digital Summit Paris, I’d prefer us to be thinking in organic rather than machine terms. I want us to be thinking about the things that work rather than the particular system deployed. Above all I want us to be thinking about frameworks and that riverbed and how we can make the value flow more effectively.

photos courtesy of Kongress Media and Sigurd Rinde

“Are you saying the map’s wrong?” – “Oh dear, yes!” – an example of Liminal Thinking

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“Are you saying the map’s wrong?” – “Oh dear, yes!” – an example of Liminal Thinking

Earlier this week I met with Dave Gray and he gave me an advance copy of his new book, and then I went to his talk at Postshift on Wednesday night. He talked Liminal Thinking, so what is that?

You might know that I am a huge fan of The West Wing (and Aaron Sorkin’s writing in general). There is a great sequence in the episode “Somebody’s Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail” in season 2 when people and causes get the chance to pitch to White House staff for attention and funding on “Big Block of Cheese Day” (a day which recurs a number of times in the world of West Wing). One such team from the Organisation of Cartographers for Social Equality are pitching the idea of a government initiative across the school system that would change our maps and atlases from the Mercator projection of the World to the Peters projection. The argument is that stretching out the longitudinal lines so they are parallel at the north and south poles (back in 1569) to help navigators on ships, and so that the map fits on a page rather than a globe, actually skews the relative representation of the size of countries, and reinforces centuries old European Imperialist thinking. Those countries in the First World nearer the North Pole look unnaturally large – for example Greenland looks massive and similar in size to the whole continent of Africa when in reality its area is only one fourteenth of the size of that continent. We compound this incorrect filtering of land mass reality by putting, say, the UK on a page in the Atlas, and then Australia on the same size page, when actually that country is over 33 times the area of the UK. It’s why we Brits just don’t get how big the place is! The cartographers on West Wing argue that the maps influence our thinking in terms of World priorities and prejudices. The Peter projection (which should really be called the Gall-Peter projection) gives a much fairer representation. You have to see the look of incredulity on C. J. Cregg’s face as she looks at the new reality and says “what the hell is that!?”. Then when they suggest a North-South inversion of the new map (because there is absolutely no reason why North has to be at the top of the page), she just freaks out completely! This scene and the story behind it is a perfect example of Dave Gray’s Liminal Thinking approach, as described in the new book and at Wednesday’s event at Postshift’s offices in Shoreditch.

First sample the map presentation scene:

Liminal Thinking is the art of creating change by understanding, shaping, and reframing beliefs. The dictionary says liminal is an adjective relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process, or occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold. As Dave knows, things happen at the edge, in the boundaries, in the spaces in between.

At Postshift in a sort of fireside chat, Dave related that he actually started out writing a book on agile software which morphed in to something different along the way. As he interviewed people for the book he realised there was a larger story than just talking about an agile mindset for developing software or technology more quickly and efficiently. If you are talking Agile, then Dave reckons Amazon ticks all the boxes, but their people don’t tend to talk or go on the record much about how they do what they do. He interviewed people who have to be agile in their thinking, like soldiers on the front line of the World’s trouble spots, or humanitarian aid workers in similar conflict zones. They have to maximise their ability to adapt yet still exert a level of control, and that’s agile. But in talking to them Dave realised that effecting change is connected with people’s beliefs. People in organisations who want to change things often don’t have the power, or the authority, or the budget to do what they want to do. Dave thought through how he could help that kind of change – and Liminal Thinking is what addresses that question.

Dave built a a sort pyramid of layers of thinking from reality, experience and attention, through to something that is “obvious” – what Dave calls you, me, everyone – see the diagram below.

Dave_Gray_obvious_stack

He quoted a neuroscientist called Zimmerman who says that our brains experience 11 megabits of information per second, but actually we can only take in and understand 50 bits per second. How do we open our minds to process more or different? Dave related stories in the book from the Vietnam war where the USA viewed the conflict in terms of the domino theory and the rise of communist China, without looking at the history, the fact that this was a civil war and that most Vietnamese actually hated the Chinese anyway. The wrong beliefs and the wrong frame of reference, and so the USA could have avoided that war if only those in charge had stepped outside of their bubble, and reframed their beliefs.

We talked Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Iraq conflict. Dave talked about the stupidity of self validation, and the difficulty of anybody taking on board something that is truly new. If it’s really new, it will make no sense to you because it falls outside of your current frame of reference. Actually you have to test stuff that falls outside of your “bible” and expand your experience. Dave believes that moving the needle of experience is the most powerful thing! Of other needles, he said that so much of our thinking is like a stylus on a record (we’re going retro here, remember long playing records and singles?). We hang out in the same network friends, and at any given moment there is a way we act – that’s culture. But Dave believe’s the problem of culture is his autopilot and your autopilot, and a well worn groove – a routine of doing the same things the same way, which we need to break. He related another story about someone who changed their life completely simply by parking in a different place in the company car park – that small change triggered a new, different chain of events for him leading to a new job and more. Beliefs are true only because we make them true. The key message here is shut off your autopilot – do things differently.

Dave told more stories about soldiers and special forces in Iraq, about his biomedical engineer brother, or about groups on the two sides of the abortion debate coming together to try and verbalise the opposing argument properly to the other side’s satisfaction. They didn’t change their core beliefs, didn’t find compromise but they did find significant common ground in the welfare of children and family. We talked about organisations using the carrot and the stick and the problems that certain incentives embedded in a corporate culture can cause, making the employees feel like lab rats in a maze, looking for the cheese. We talked about the issues around making change, around the power of the negative often outweighing the possibilities of the positive.

Dave believes everything starts with experience. How we should focus on people’s emotional needs, and how we need to create an environment that makes it safe for people to express themselves, as so many people hide their real emotions in the work environment. He went on to suggest we get distracted too much by the stuff we disagree on. About how the biggest barrier to a leader changing is that even when they talk the talk, they aren’t aware that they’re not really changing their behaviour. The higher you are in an organisation the more insulated you can get from reality, and you should be constantly asking – what is my bubble?

Dave talked about the amygdala, the lizard brain responsible for our fight or flight response that still has so much influence on why we do what we do. When Dave works with a new group or new organisation, he asks them “how can we help you design this organisation so you are jazzed to come to work each day”. What can we do to help us make this company great? What works? Who is doings awesome things in spite of the environment and the circumstances?

Dave talks about belief being the stories in your head, and ended the session confirming how vital stories and story telling are to the process of change. A great session. Thanks to Lee and the Postshift team for facilitating the talk. I’m halfway through the book, enjoying it (and Dave’s drawings) and looking forward to writing a review here soon.

Top image captured from Dave’s website, and diagram from his Liminal Thinking book

8 Strategic Building Blocks to enable Digital Transformation

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8 Strategic Building Blocks to enable Digital Transformation

This is the blog post version of my lightning talk at this year’s Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT Paris. My script for 43 slides in 10 minutes, PechaKucha style, and I finished ahead of time! My purpose was to do three things:

  • Spend five minutes giving the Agile Elephant view of the current complex and disruptive digital landscape. There is a wave of change affecting every business and some key issues to be understood that are driving the need for digital transformation in every industry, every style of business.
  • Then spend another five minutes presenting 8 strategic building blocks to enable transformation, with the emphasis on practical things you can do, and specific areas or factors that your organisation needs to address.
  • Lastly, leave you with a core message that is vital for the 21st century enterprise.

First I need to start with this quote from Alvin Tofler, well known author of Future Shock:

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

the_elements_of_digital_business_2015That idea of continuous learning is a taster for the core message, but highlights the dramatic changes that we are living through. Let me start by trying to explain the digital business landscape. We’ve been talking about it for 20 years. It was back in 1995 that Nicholas Negroponte collected together his articles for Wired in to the book Being Digital and talked of moving bits and not atoms. That is the basis for the digitisation of business that we have been living through for two decades. It affected the world of media and retail first, and then the music business and the film & TV business, but now it’s reaching every part of the business World. Fast forward to 2012 and Marc Andreesen wrote about software eating the World, and then last month my friend and fellow Enterprise Irregular Dion Hinchcliffe used this graphic to explain the complexity and many ingredients of Digital Business.

The one thing that is certain – your business model is under threat. Some smarter, more agile business is aiming to sneak past you and take your market. What are you going to do about it? Well, there is a great saying that necessity is the mother of invention. That means that when your back is to the wall, you will find a way to make it happen. Well I want to subvert that phrase and turn it in to the mantra:

“Reinvention is the mother of necessity.”

To explain the current, disruptive business landscape we think of it as a Digital Enterprise Wave. You can ride it, or go under! There is a set of economic, technological and human factors including an ageing population in the OECD countries, outsourcing, offshoring and low cost manpower in Eastern European, South & Central American, or Far Eastern countries. Add to that we can begin to access almost everyone, everywhere in our connected World, and then add entrepreneurship, crowdsourcing, and our millenial generation which is growing up digital. Together these provide the ideas underpinning books like Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, or Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. That’s the foundation of the wave.

Next comes the triple disruption of Cloud, Social and Mobile. For the last 5 or 6 decades we lived with Moore’s Law driving ever increasing computing power and a technology disruption every 5-10 years. We moved from mainframes, to minicomputers, to the Personal Computer. Then we networked PCs together, then we had the era of client/server computing, leading to the first version of the World Wide Web, followed by the dot-com boom and bust leading to a more interactive Internet that we called Web 2.0 for a period. During each of these disruptions large companies failed and new companies emerged from nowhere. Smart businesses thrived and made use of the new paradigm at each transition, but others couldn’t live with it and failed. However we’ve never had more than one technology disruption happening at the same time…. until now. Now we are living through a time where all IT is moving to the Cloud, at the same time as the explosion of Social Media, at the same time as the shift to Mobile. Most of the world is connected on mobile phones, and a significant proportion of us are walking around with the Internet in our hands with smart phones, iPads and tablets. The confluence of cloud, social and mobile changes everything – technology can now form a major component helping just about any type of business you can think of. We’re not in Kansas any more… this forms the middle layer of the wave.

But there’s more!  We have emerging technologies – the Internet of Things, Big Data and the associated Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and 3D Printing.  We are in the early stages of each of these, but each one of them has the potential to change things dramatically yet again. For example, when 3D Printing comes of age, the World’s supply chain will suddenly be disrupted. Predicting even the near term future of how these things will develop is incredibly difficult. These emerging technologies form the top of the wave.

All of these interrelate and combine to form what we call the Digital Enterprise Wave and they present a formidable challenge for every type and sector of business.

In the face of the Wave, business as usual has little or no future. Legacy systems of record won’t be able to cope with these new demands. Adding a dash of social on top of your conventional apps won’t cut it either. You will have to think differently. We need Digital Thinking for this Digital Transformation – that’s where the 8 building blocks come in.

But before we get to that, let me quote our great hero of business management Peter Drucker:

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence – it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”

Next I want to highlight a book from 2013 by Jaron Lanier called “Who Owns the Future?“.  It looks at the impact of this digital disruption we are experiencing.  I tried to find one sentence from the book which encapsulates its thesis:

“At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for $1 billion, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?”

Lanier’s book highlights some key sociological and business issues around our new connected 21st Century. The way companies are now valued, the new business models and the way we are using increasing levels of technology is squeezing the middle class more than any other demographic. If content like news or music or films are “free” how do the writers and artists and their surrounding industries survive?  Those changes were just the beginning as new “sharing economy” companies like Uber and Airbnb are demonstrating.   Added to that there are what Lanier calls Siren Servers who want your data, and provide you with “free” services in return. We want those services, but if we don’t pay for them, suddenly we have become the product. This is the technology landscape and business world in which we are trying to find customers, create value, reduce costs and make a profit.

Yet another dynamic is what our friend Professor Vlatka Hlupic of Westminster University calls The Management Shift, in her book of the same name. She has researched companies who have been tackling these big shifts over a number of years. She references more than 20 companies using her approach and leadership model. They are from small to large, in various sectors and include a FTSE 100 Company. She has categorised their management styles in 5 stages or levels from Traditional to Emergent. The smart, successful companies have an emergent management style characterised by an unlimited mindset, strong team cohesion, unbounded culture, inspirational leaders, a strong sense of purpose, and a passion for the work. These are the characteristics we need in our 21st century leaders and managers.

I’d also like to recommend Leading Digital by George Westerman, Didier Bonnet and Andrew McAfee. It is one of the best books published around the digital business topic in the last 12 months. It has a wealth of good case study examples and categorises the topic in two dimensions. One is your company’s digital capability – the “what” of using digital technology to transform the business, and the other is your leadership capability – the “how” of successful transformations, where managing the change is much more important than the particular technology involved.

Putting all of these aspects together tells the story of the complexity of the Digital Enterprise Wave that we are facing and the resulting business turbulence that we need to surf through. How do we do it? We believe there are 8 strategic building blocks that you need to invest time and effort and resources in to enable successful digital transformation. Let’s go through them.

Culture

Peter Drucker supposedly said Culture eats Strategy for lunch. In truth your company strategy is very important too – this isn’t an either or situation. However, in transformational change the company culture is a vital factor. Successful companies have a strong identity. The founder knew their “why”, their reason for being, the core purpose of the venture they started. He or she may still be involved or they passed on the values to the new leaders, in to a set of behaviours and beliefs (or maybe they didn’t). In carrying out digital transformation you need to work with the company culture to enable change, or begin to change the culture in the right direction if it isn’t aligned to the digital shift that you need to take. In all of the companies we’ve with worked with, or the case studies we’ve seen, culture is one of the primary building blocks.

Leadership

To transform your company you need strong leadership, but it has to be the right kind of leadership. The digitally savvy companies have leaders with vision who promote a mindset encouraging teamwork, explaining their purpose with clarity, and promoting an environment of openness and sharing. The particular organisational structure that you have is less important than getting the culture and leadership to encourage the right behaviours of your managers, team members and other stakeholders. You should be looking for the emergent leadership characteristics we discussed earlier at all levels of your organisation.

No One Size Fits All

There are no one size fits all solutions. Every company is different. Every company has legacy systems, to a lesser or greater extent, that you’ll need to work with because that’s where the current, vital business data and intelligence resides. There aren’t any panaceas, or a particular social & digital business platform that has all of the answers and works well for most types of business. Actually there are a plethora of platforms, from complex to lightweight which are usually very good at a few things, but not so good at others, and as of today none of them do all of the things you’ll need. In any case you will need to integrate to data in existing systems and link the new digital approach directly to existing business processes. You need to assess the business, look for where you can generate most value, and plan to adopt new platforms and system enhancements accordingly.

End to End Solution

You need to think in terms of an end to end solution. Adding a social business platform or new digital business components on top of existing systems can provide some help, and even give short term benefits in key areas, but to really transform you need a holistic approach. We use the McKinsey 7s framework because it’s been tried and trusted over decades. It works. It covers both the hard factors and the soft factors of your business. You assess the business in terms of Strategy, Structure and Systems, and then Staff, Skills and Style, as well as looking at the Shared Values (which these days is increasingly called culture) of the company to get a complete picture. Following this approach leads us to consider all of the factors you will need to address to add value, find efficiencies and make a real difference. You don’t have to use this particular framework, there are many others you could use, but you must think end to end.  Focusing on organization structure, or people, or culture, or systems on their own is not going to work.  Focusing on one bit of the value chain won’t either.

Continuous Reinvention

In the 80s and 90s we focused on quality management and quality circles and talked continuous improvement.  For digital transformation we want you to think Continuous Reinvention.  As we said before, your business model is under threat.  If you aren’t thinking about new business models you are in danger of losing out to a smarter, more agile competitor.  Innovation has to be at the heart of your approach to your business.  You should be reinventing the business and competing with yourself to do better, and then rethinking again.  I started this post with that quote about learning, unlearning and relearning – you need to open your mind and think Continuous Reinvention.

Get Creative

In a world where there is a perception that information is free, new ideas are the weapons that add value.  In a world where your competitors can harness cheap resources, or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk online crowdsourcing marketplace, or Artificial Intelligence to automate processes, how do you compete?  All of these techniques started with the particular skill of a person and that skill has been automated or sent to the lowest cost of production.  Somebody made the first widget or carried out the first translation, and then their process was automated.  To compete you need to change the game with new ideas and different thinking.  You need to get creative.  But creativity shouldn’t be confined to some product design department.  It shouldn’t be a one off, quarterly or annual brainstorming event.  We are living in, arguably, the most disruptive time of technological change ever – we’re living with the Digital Enterprise Wave and it’s getting closer!  The last comparable time was the early industrial revolution, and that wrought huge transitions.  To compete you need creativity to become an everyday thing in your company, applied to every part of what you do.  You should encourage it and make it part of the DNA of your company, but also recognize that not everything will work.  Your approach needs to involve experimentation and recognize that some of the ideas will fail, and that’s perfectly acceptable, because others will succeed.  Innovation and idea generation should be an acceptable part of everyone’s daily work-flow.  To do that you need to be promoting thinking skills in your company. You need mechanisms in place to encourage people to speak out about doing things better.  You need tools to help you capture those ideas and the creativity of your workforce. Look at the smart companies – that’s what they do.  Change your approach and get creative.

Balance – Inside and Out

If you look at the material on digital transformation from a lot of the key consultancies, service providers and analysts you will see a lot of talk about the customer experience, omni-channel marketing, digital touchpoints, and customer facing use of digital tools.  All that is important but you have to get the balance right.  Your transformation approach needs to look inside the company as well as out.  You need to be enhancing the experience and the digital journey of not just the customers, but your employees, suppliers, partners and other stakeholders that support your business too.  We use the term “business as a social object” – unless business is as fluid as the outside world it will flounder.

Design Thinking

It’s not enough to optimise your current business.  The best way to survive the future is to invent it yourself.  For effective Digital Transformation you need to encourage Design Thinking.  Some of the building blocks we’ve already covered are key components in that mindset, but you need to pull them together in your end to end approach. Wikipedia says Design Thinking is defined as combining empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality in analyzing and fitting various solutions to the problem context.  It is a formal method for practical, creative resolution of problems and creation of solutions, with the intent of an improved future result.  You need to apply that thinking not just to the product, but to all of the processes supporting your company.

The 8 Building Blocks of Digital Transformation - Agile Elephant

And finally – the Core Message

So these are the 8 building blocks which you need to work with to create a coherent, holistic, end to end strategy for the digital transformation of your organisation, but I would highlight one of them as the core message, the most significant change of mindset that you need to address, and that is Continuous Reinvention.  The successful 21st Century organisation needs to be thinking differently, and then rethinking continuously to stay ahead of the competition.

Continuous Reinvention – to survive change needs to be a constant.

A new strapline for Agile Elephant – innovation | digital transformation | value creation | (r)evolution

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A new strapline for Agile Elephant – innovation | digital transformation | value creation | (r)evolution

Businesses need to be constantly evolving. We believe in continuous improvement. We believe that it doesn’t matter what type of business you are, your business model is under threat. In today’s digital business environment change is a constant and you have to deal with it. It’s Darwin’s theory of evolution for business – only the fittest, or most fit for purpose survive. Recently people have taken one of our Agile Elephant business cards or come to the web site and said “yes, but what do you really do?” So we’ve had a rethink and we’ve just changed our company strapline – for the header of our website and for what’s on our business cards, so that it encapsulates what we do in 4 things:

innovation | digital transformation | value creation | (r)evolution

First we’re about innovation. Innovation is applying new ideas, new devices, new processes – finding better solutions. We believe commercial creativity is vital. We believe fostering new ideas should be part of part of a company’s daily DNA.

What we do as a business is digital transformation. Take a look at our explanation of the Digital Enterprise Wave. A smarter, nimbler competitor is angling to use new digital and social tools to take your market, your customers. We can help analyse where you are in the digital landscape, help you take stock, decide where to start, where digital tools can really help and then take you on a journey to become digitally competent. But that’s not enough – then we help you put the necessary leadership in place to master the digital topic and make it work for you effectively.

Going digital can only be effective if it leads to value creation. You need an approach which increases your revenue, improves profitability, helps you keep more of your customers, gets products to market quicker or reduces your operational costs – it has to be about doing what you do better and about adding to the bottom line. Take a look at these survey results from Capemini Consulting and MIT Sloan Management from their report “How digital leaders outperform their peers in every industry“. They split the surveyed organisations, all larger that $500m turnover, in to 4 categories, with the most digitally savvy being called the “Digirati” or digital masters. Companies in that most advanced category generate 9% more revenue, create 26% more profit and have 12% higher market valuation than the rest. Becoming a digital master works.

In taking you on this journey we believe in evolution not revolution. We believe many consultants and practitioners talking about “digital” and “social” focus too much on a grass roots revolution to change the culture in organisations. To dismantle hiearchical structures and recast the way of working for the new world. We don’t think that sort of revolution is productive. We believe any structure of organisation can become a digital master with the right core competence and the right leadership. Even huge companies like IBM can empower their employees and change, and using social tools helps them do it. We believe the Elephant can dance, but we don’t need to break it to make the changes.

innovation | digital transformation | value creation | (r)evolution

To find out more consider coming to our conference next month – The Enterprise 2.0 Summit London, or contact us to start talking sense about digital.
 
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Salary Transparency: The Cultural Dilemma

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Salary Transparency: The Cultural Dilemma

Buffer , a social-sharing app and site, recently announced that as part of its strategy towards workplace transparency it has decided to open up every single employee’s salary on its website:

“Its salaries formula, used to calculate what each worker will earn as they join the company, has become more nuanced and is being emulated by startups such as Groove and CustomerIO, says Gascoigne. Buffer also plans an “open equity” program where everyone knows how shares are divided…  It takes a certain kind of person to work at Buffer, Gascoigne says, listing traits such as empathy and gratitude – in addition to being very good at the core job skills…  “The percent of people who were a good culture fit was a lot higher after all the media coverage of sharing the salary of every person on the payroll,” he said. And of workers turned off by it, he says, “it scares the right people away.”  Qz.com

The question is whether the move towards workplace transparency should include transparency of salaries and what the implications could be.  Will this eventually become normal across businesses around the globe or is it just a fad?  One year ago I wrote about this question and doing an update today has highlighted some interesting developments in a country which has had some level of salary transparency since 1863 – Norway.

Cultures and  Transparency

A country’s culture usually dictates what is considered acceptable in its society and what is not.  Certainly the UK culture regarding salaries has always been – until now at least – a pretty taboo subject – even amongst the best of friends.

Last February I compared the UK’s attitude towards this with Norway where at the time anyone could go to the Norwegian mainstream newspaper Aftenposten’s website and with one click check out the norwegian tax list which shows a large proportion of the country’s tax payers’ details including their annual income, tax paid, value of investments and date of birth. For those in the UK this would seem a gross intrusion into private lives but for norwegians they have never really had much choice – tax and income records have been publicly available since 1863.  This transparency dates back to the deeply rooted Norwegian culture which prescribes egalitarianism, collectivism and conformity as values to be protected and practiced by its citizens – Janteloven (Jante Law).

Until 2001 the norwegian tax and revenue list was openly available but only via the tax office in paper format, therefore it was an effort to go and search through it.  But in 2008 the government made the list available to the media enabling newspapers such as Aftenposten to give instant online access to all via a searchable database on their websites. As Channel 4 noted in 2012:

“Jan Omdahl, from the tabloid Dagbladet, wrote at the time: “Isn’t this how a social democracy ought to work, with openness, transparency and social equality as ideals?” However a poll carried out in 2007 found most of his countrymen disagreed: just 32% thought the list should be published, while 46% were opposed…  What some see as an honest commitment to fairness is for others, an invasion of personal privacy, and a licence for what the Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet described as “tax porno”…”

As if this wasn’t bad enough it was Dagbladet who in 2009 even offered their readers the chance to automatically check and compare the income of their Facebook friends and to offer the service as an iPhone application – leaving Trine Skei Grane of the green party Venstre to comment how:

“We took part in opening up the system, but now the principle of openness is totally out of proportion”  BBC, 2009 

So even in a country where salary transparency was generally accepted people do have their limits.  The ease of availability and what can now be done with personal data proved to be a step too far. When I wrote my post last year the media still gave direct online access to tax and salary details – but following much controversy the Norwegian government has now stopped access of online information via the media – you now have to enter the Tax Administrator’s website to find out the information instead:

 “Today, the tax assessment for 2012 laid out, and we can probably immediately seek to arrive at what neighbors, friends and colleagues in income and wealth and what they paid in taxes. Certainly, the search has become more complicated since one must now enter the Tax Administration’s website and log in with MinID to access the information. But despite the fact that one can no longer use the readily available search engines on the newspapers’ websites, the search activity still great. The IRS reported, for example, that in 2011 was over 700,000 users conducted 13 million searches on the tax rolls for 2010…  Knowing that your neighbor can see what you earn, prevents any cheating. If there is a large gap between income and living standards observed that consumption of cars, boats and cabins, a risk being suspected of evading income from taxation. Such suspicion means lost reputation in the family and community, and some also possible to call phoning the Norwegian authorities.’  Aftenposten, October 2013, translated by Google Translate

The Norwegian government holds the view that the ability for everyone to check out their neighbour’s details easily through the internet must be a positive thing as it leads to less tax cheating and reduces the shadow economy…

Interestingly Valve who are adopting the ‘radical transparency’ approach recently introduced the holacracy model by eliminating the typical corporate hierarchy and have a stack ranking system where staff working on the same project rank each others’ technical skills, productivity and other contributions which helps determine who gets paid what – so salaries are, to a certain extent, open.  Professor Oswick of Cass Business School warns that it could go awry were the firm to face a financial setback:

“Peer-pressure is a fantastic way of organising a business,” he says. “And so long as everyone is well paid people don’t mind being in the bottom earning quartile.  But as soon as resources become more scarce, then competition increases, which creates conflicts, which creates tensions, which creates hierarchies, which creates concern about relative positioning.”

And bear in mind that this scenario could occur when employee salaries are known by only those within the company let alone being displayed openly to the public.

So perhaps ask yourself again – it may seem quite cool to some, but is having your salary details made available on your employer’s website really what you want?

 

Agile Elephant – What’s In A Name?

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Agile Elephant – What’s In A Name?

Ever since we started the team have been explaining to people the various elements of our company name.  Some of the ingredients of the Agile Elephant are mentioned around the site, but I thought the fuller explanation deserved a post of it’s own.

We ran a sequence of social business events that we branded the Patchwork Elephant, but when we were thinking of a name for our new company we decided to upgrade to agile.

WHY ELEPHANT?
Elephant 2There are a number of layers to the elephant:

  • For most enterprises today we believe the shift to Digital, transforming the organisation and changing business model is the Elephant in the room!
  • We also use the Indian subcontinent parable of the Elephant and the blind men.  Each one feels the Elephant and “sees” something different – one thinks it’s a snake, one a fan, one a wall, one a pillar, one a tree branch, one a rope – the digital transformation, new ways of working and social collaboration topics are complex and people see them in different ways from different perspectives.
  • We wanted to echo the great ideas from three books:
    • Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s excellent When Giants Learn To Dance which even back in 1989 talked about the demise of beuracracy and hierarchy in business.
    • Louis Gerstner’s Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? – the 2002 book which described his successful turnaround of a giant of the technology industry.
    • Charles Handy’s The Elephant and The Flea from 2001 – part autobiography, partly a book on the changing nature of employment, and of the small independent going up against or working with the giant corporation.
  • We see the Elephant as a metaphor for the significant mass and associated inertia in a typical medium or large organisation.  They can be slow to change.  We believe they can become at least as nimble as their smaller, newer competitors, but only if they adopt new thinking, new styles of leadership and a different, more open culture of teamwork and collaboration.
  • We also need to tackle this complex, big issue of Digital Transformation in easily digestible chunks – eating the Elephant one bite at a time.

WHY AGILE?
Photo owned by questionforthekeeper - follow the linkPeople say Agile Elephant – surely that’s an oxymoron?  To that I say, if you’ve seen an Elephant in the wild up close and personal, you’ll know how agile they can be!

As well as highlighting how we can make business, the Elephant, dance, we ourselves need a more nimble way of working too.

We want to move away from the traditional cascading waterfall approach for these kinds of transformational projects.  We are Agile.  Instead we believe in an iterative, distributed approach to managing projects and getting the job done with lean efficiency.

We need to consider ways we can make our organizations become more adaptive.  We need to change how we think about change.  An Agile approach is fundamental to the new mindset required, for achieving better results, and faster.  Agile underpins all of our thinking.

So we are the Agile Elephant and we would love to be working with you and your company!  Contact us to find out more or start a dialogue with us around the possibilities of the new Digital landscape.

Key factors for Strategic Enablement

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Key factors for Strategic Enablement

Here is the panel session that I took part in at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris this week, on 11th & 12th February 2014.  We were discussing the key factors for strategic enablement of enterprise 2.0, social business, and social collaboration in organisations. Emanuele Quintarelli set the scene presenting a survey of Italian firms. Then the discussion, moderated by Bjoern Negelmann, was between:

  • Emanuele Quintarelli – Digital Transformation Practice Leader, Ernst & Young
  • Luis Suarez – formerly Social Computing evangelist, IBM Software group
  • Dr. Chee Chin Liew – Enterprise Community Manager, BASF SE
  • David Terrar – Founder & CXO, Agile Elephant
  • Simon Levene – Senior Strategy Consultant, Jive Software

There was actually some tension between the speakers, resulting in a great discussion.  The tension is between the likes of Emanuele and myself who want to lift the argument to real, hard, business numbers and metrics that the executives in the C-Suite can understand in a business case, versus Luis and others at the conference who want to focus on the culture change required in the workplace, on improving employee engagement, the move to knowledge sharing, open business and collaboration, with use cases that are effective.  Both are important.  But to accelerate things, it’s my belief we need cold, hard business logic combined with the inspiration to change to open business.  Listen to the discussion and you decide.

Here are a few key quotes I’ve lifted out of the dialogue:

“7 out of your 10 colleagues don’t give s#%! about what you do today!”

“need more doing than talking”

“go back to the core nature of how work gets done”

“how can I help you today?”

“but first of all we need to make it clear to the business where is the benefit”

“does management agree or recognise social as an enabling tool for more engagement and to solve the problem of the fundamental (financial) crisis?”

“not happening yet because we are talking about collaboration, we are not talking about measurable business benefits”

“the majority of people in this room are believers in this thing”

“it’s up to us as a community to get out there and communicate it better to the average business person in the street

“it’s all about use cases, if you come up with a list of top 10, 15 use cases of how people work and socialise them”

“break a silo, and you go in to openness and transparency”

My post setting the scene and introducing the show is here, and my conference report will follow shortly.

About Us

Agile Elephant is a new kind of consultancy designed to help companies embrace the new digital culture of social collaboration, sharing and openness that is changing business models and the world of work.

Contact us to find out more!

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