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Roadmap for enterprise 2.0 implementation : start small and move fast

One great insight taken out of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit, held end october in Frankfurt, is the roadmap to implement deeper collaboration dynamics within an organisation.

Anthony Poncier, a French consultant working for Useo, has recognised skills and experience in the implementation of enterprise 2.0 projects within big corporations.

According to Anthony, the implentation of social communication and collaboration tools within a company would better start with small pilot project. But after some (positive) experimentation, the company should speed up the process.

“At Auchan, a major French retail group, for instance, the fishmonger departement set a collaborative/information sharing platform with photos and videos, says Anthony Poncier. Thanks to this social tool, supermarkets had the capability to share best pratices in shelves management, fish storing, etc. Accordingly, Auchan supermarkets’ fish departments improved their presentation and arrangement. Eventually, fish sales have increased…”

Pilot projects will make the proof of concept. So, the management will be able to sell more easily the Enterprise 2.0 tools and principles to the rest of the organisation. Although the management should build a long term vision of where the company needs to go in terms of collaboration and 2.0 spirit, it’s better to move step by step and to seek for the support of early adopters and community leaders at all levels of the hierarchy.

“You need to find community leaders, tells Anthony. These leaders can be early social tools adopters [...] You can find roles for other members. In the meantime, you should spot the communities within the company, find their common goals and topics of interest. Highlight the benefits, for them, of social communication, information sharing and collaboration [...] You should organise events to facilitate integration, relationships, trust and exchange…”

Here bellow, the video interview of Anthony Poncier (in French)

Top management involvement

Though, stresses Tobias Brenner, another attendee at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit, you need the involvement of the top of the company in order to have 2.0 trickle down :

“Surely it would be wonderful, if the whole implementation process of Enterprise 2.0 would be a kind of grassroot development. But to be honest, without any top-down strategy, there will be no implementation. Especially if you prefer a holistic idea of Enterprise 2.0, you need the top-management on board. It is necessary that there is support from the top-management and help of the leadership. The whole process must be supported and maintenance of the implementing process should be secured. And if this is accomplished, I’m sure that there will emerge a kind of grassroot development. People will recognise the will of management, making enterprise 2.0 work. This will motivate them to be part of this development and as more and more people discover the arising opportunities of enterprise 2.0, the more people will join this development.”

Would Nokia face its current turmoil if it was an enterprise 2.0 ? Likely not…

“Nokia said it would delay again its flagship smartphone N8 model, hitting its shares on the day new chief executive Stephen Elop started at the helm of the world’s top cellphone maker”, wrote Reuters, a few weeks ago.

The year 2010 sounds like a hell story for Nokia.

The world number one mobile handsets manufacturer is still financially very sound. Though, the global market position of the Finnish company is eroding (30% in Q3, coming from 34% year on year).

In the end of this summer, Nokia’s management top has been reshuflled.
The company, once the most admired and profitable in the industry, laid off 1.800 people. It encounters very annoying delays in design and commercialisation.

Nokia missed a number of critical steps, during the last couple of years, especially :

• the move to the new generation of smartphones
• the open applications service plateform
• tactile screen handsets

Surprising enough, though, all those ideas, today making the succes of Apple, HTC or even Samsung, had been investigated and discussed within Nokia’s teams, years before.

So, what happened ?

A lack of collaborative/open culture, a too tech focused approach

Juhani Risku, a former Nokia executive, responsible for Symbian’s design user experience, wrote a recent best-seller in Finland : Uusi Nokia (New Nokia).

“Altough Nokia remains one of the best companis on Earth for its logistics, manufacturing, sourcing and R&D, a risk-averse bureaucracy has grown up that stifles innovation – it makes progress slow or non-existent, writes Risku, in the book. The company is the obsessed with data gathering. Turn to almost any page on the website, and you’re invited to fill in an questionnaire”

“I had about 5,000 innovations in front of me – a huge portfolio. And many, about 500, were very good. But there’s a huge approval process. When the people and designers and product specialists get their own strategy it’s first of all, a bit old. There’s a four month delay, so the strategy reflects the business situation four months ago”

“Nokia’s product portfolio is made of phones, each with minuscule differences to other similar units, that wouldn’t look out of place in a phone catalog from 1997″, writes Fast Company magazine, commenting Risku’s book.

“This strategy, adds the magazine, has served Nokia well in delivering cheap low-power phones to the world’s poorer nations. But its lack of innovative, game-changing phones at the high-end of the market. Nokia is bogged down, suffocated, and squashed by its many layers of management.”

So, how can you fix Nokia ?

“Gut the management structure, injecting some vitality and speed to the way new projects proceed from concept to reality”, seems to think Juhani Risku.

Would enterprise 2.0 be one solution for Nokia ?

Back from the E20 Summit in Frankfurt, we can definitely think so.

1. Information and idea management

The issue at Nokia is not data collection. The company, according to Risku, funds and buy a lot of studies in many fields (anthropology, marketing, etc.). However, the Finnish company is struggling with its ability to digest information and use it in a proper context. The collected datas should support the idea generation and idea killing process within the organisation, not (only) be used for months-long validation procedures…

Social tools, information sharing culture and communities, some key aspects of the Enterprise 2.0, could help Nokia better to filter and to let the relevant information find the right persons in the organisation, at a proper timing.

2. Speed up decision process

Furthermore, Nokia is trapped in its own organigram.  The decision process is far to long in an industry where changes happen in months.

Enterprise 2.0 flattens the pyramid, bringing quicker decisions and more reactivity, though with a double check brought by the collective intelligence embed in the company.

3. More disruptive innovation

Nokia was, sometimes, stuck in an engeneering mindset. Technology had the first word, rather than having a more diverse set of inputs driving the group’s actions. Nevertheless, unless Nokia’s engineers achieve a real technological breaktrough, dribbling the competition with a two year advance, strategic moves remain expectable.

Again, the Enterprise 2.0 approach could balance the “hardware” focused culture thanks to the transversal discussions and collaboration initiated between people with different backgrounds across the whole the company. This increased diversity should ignite more original ideas and disruptive innovation.

As we heard at the E20 Summit, companies such as Renault, BMW, Hypoport, Telecom Italia, Danone, Auchan,… are slowly embracing this shift. Thanks to new social platform,

Why not Nokia ? But maybe is it already the case ?

How BASF is becoming a more collaborative company thanks to social networks

In 2008, BASF, one of the world biggest chemical company, started with the implementation of connect.BASF, a social online platform for BASF employees.

After a few months of trials, the company made the official launch for the whole BASF group. Three months later, 11.000 employees registered their profile. More than 750 communities started.

Some communities can support the management of a specific project. Others gather experts in a given domain who discuss hot topics of the day in their field…

“The variety of communities that came up could never been expected”, told CheeChin Liew, enterprise community manager of BASF, during the Enterprise 2.0 Summit, in Frankfurt.

Connect.BASF helps employees to develop their personal brand within the company. The platform increases the sharing of informations, makes the process more fluid. Eventually, thanks to this set of social tools (made out of profiles, wikis, blogs, chats, …), the collaboration between people should increase, no matter who they are or what is their hierarchical position in the company.

The experience led at BASF seems very promissing for other multinationals of that scale, as a way to bypass inner hyper-bureaucracy

After all, who said elephants can’t dance ?

Towards the leader 2.0

Richard Collin: “Enterprise 2.0 is the enterprise model of the future”

Jeremy Rifkin: “We are more and more connected in our biosphere as we are in the blogosphere”

“Enterprise 2.0 is shifting from buzz word to reality for a growing number of companies”

Stuart McIntyre is a British consultant, expert in the Enterprise 2.0 concept.

“Enterprise 2.0 is not anymore a buzz word : it is becoming a reality in a growing number of firms, says Stuart McIntyre. Today, collaboration, knowledge sharing practices via new internet tools (a.o. social softwares) are helping companies to improve their productivity and, above all, their innovation capabilities, in their day to day live”.

“However, Enterprise 2.0 is not only a matter of using online social tools, underlines the consultant, who was speaking at Blug 2010, a IBM Lotus conference in Brussels. Enterprise 2.0 needs a cultural shift, new behaviour and the support of the leaders at the top of the organisation. Involve the leaders is critical in order to turn a traditional firm into a true enterprise 2.0. It is a managerial challenge”.

If Enterprise 2.0 can drive innovation up, it won’t erase the R&D department, though.

“Nevertheless, a company should evaluate the cost of not tapping into the ideas of the people working in other departments within the organisation, either be it the marketing, sales, HR or finance units...”

Opera: “Cloud computing is not enough. The web of things will have a greater impact…”

Facebook is taking over Google : it sounds like the Web is becoming truly social

Everybody has noticed it. It is no anecdote :

Facebook has taken over Google as the most visited website in the US.

(source : http://www.sneijers.net)

There is no reason to believe the trend is to weaken. As far as Facebook keeps growing (above 400 millions users nowadays), the biggest social network in the world should soon takes the crown of world n°1 website off the head of Larry & Sergey’s search engine.

The web is already social, and Facebook sets the pace

As a matter of facts, the shift has occured, yet. The web is truly social.

Whereas Facebook grows in size, the social network remains far in the shadow of Google in terms of revenues. Those could reach 1 to 2 billions dollars in 2010,… twelve less than the latter.

Though, Facebook runs in the tracks of its forerunner. The Facebooks ads service sounds like a terrific, very accurate, advertisement tool that could become very popular in the years to come.

Moreover, today, lots of discussions, conversation, content sharing or news posting take place directly on Facebook. Companies have skipped the stage of setting up their own blog and rely solely on a Facebook page and/or Twitter account for their digital marketing.

Google Social Search and the race to catch up with the social web

So far, Google hasn’t lost the game. Despite its backfire in China, the search engine remains strongly armed.

However, recent initiatives induce Google is in a defensive position.

The company had to strike a financial deal with Twitter in order to index its content in its search results. Google has been challenged by internautes regarding the instant search.

Recently, Google announced a number of move toward more social search and actions. Not always succesful, so far.

Social network Orkut has hit in a limited number of countries.

Google Buzz hasn’t been a very big hit, useless to say.

With Google Social Search, the company of Mountain View is touching its core business.

The service, still under beta version, demonstrates how the social web is now taking the lead as opposed to the historical web.

Google Social Search relies on the social graphs the company has an access to, via Gmail and other logged in tools.

Hereby, though, Google implicitely recognize that social recommendation is more relevant than its search algorithm.

There, it is not sure Google is in a better position than Facebook…

Nowadays, people need to structure knowledge by themselves

Alma Whitten, about privacy and information usage on and by Google

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