The more i work in the social intranet, the more complex my information flow gets
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I presented these slides at the Social Connections VII conference in Stockholm 13 November 2014, a conference arranged by the IBM Connections User Group, but sponsored by IBM as well as by local and international Partners of IBM. The topic is about the challenges I meet when trying to shift my work to be performed on the social intranet as opposed to the old email-way, and the changes in tools that would help me overcome many of those challenges.
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The more i work in the social intranet, the more complex my information flow gets
- 1. The more I work in the social intranet, the more complex my information flow becomes Peter Bjellerup IBM Social Business Global Center of Competence
- 3. So what? Peter Bjellerup @thesocialswede
- 5. Discipline and tools • Batch process the inflow • Keep an eye on the buzz • Ridiculously stubborn • Sort by a mail rule • Notifiers • Permanent internal OOO “Post on my board instead” + Activities, of course MailMailInbox UpdatesConnections Notifications Connections Notifications Peter Bjellerup @thesocialswede
- 7. Peter’s wish list • More Me and We. Less They • Integrated stream of information from ALL channels – TO all channels? • With simple/smart/powerful filtering and prioritization • Even better search • Tagging, not folders – Some help by analytics, maybe? • Integrated with tasks and my most important work tools Peter Bjellerup @thesocialswede
- 8. Intranet, we thought they would be Mats Bark et al, 1997, sid 20 Focus CommunicationTransaction Known/Stable Unknown/Fluid Context I need… Can somebody help? Sure! I’ve run into the same challenge Peter Bjellerup @thesocialswede
- 9. Thank you for your attention http://ibm.co/bjellerup www.thesocialswede.com Twitter: @thesocialswede LinkedIn Learn from mistakes, preferably those of others. Stupid mistakes are those you repeat Peter Bjellerup @thesocialswede
- 10. Thank you for your attention http://ibm.co/bjellerup www.thesocialswede.com Twitter: @thesocialswede LinkedIn Learn from mistakes, preferably those of others. Stupid mistakes are those you repeat Peter Bjellerup @thesocialswede
Editor's Notes
- These slides were first presented at Social Connections VII in Stockholm on 13 November 2014, albeit in a Swedish version The audience consisted primarily of representatives from organizations having are being about to implement social intranets, the majority being based on IBM Connections. Making such platforms available to your employees enables employees to communicate freely, to share content, updates and bookmarks widely or within self-managed communities, both in plain view of all colleagues or with restricted visibility and access, to comment, to rate and to notify each other of interesting contents. It is like bringing the features of a wide range of popular social networks and peer-to-peer tools we know from the public space into one collaborative environment, within the firewall; networking, updates, comments, file sharing, blogs, wikis, bookmarks, forums, communities, ideation, crowdsourcing of ideas and priorities – all in one. However, it’s hard for many to let go of their old habits, often including a great portion of shuffling email and attachments forth and back, which does create problems for us who try to shift into using the social intranet capabilities as the backbone of our work
- A well functioning collaboration culture in an organization has some common characteristics of communism, Karl Marx style – both are theoretic utopias requiring everybody to WANT to join in. But we all know this is not the case. We saw it almost exactly 25 years ago in East Germany. And we experience it daily in our work, I believe. For a long time, we will have to deal with people who insist on sending email to large groups of people, often with heavy attachments that blow out mail quotas to pieces, with digital ghosts, with those who never get back online since they have turned off notifications, those who ask about everything (via email, of course) and find nothing themselves and those who don’t share their knowledge and experience since they believe that is the way to protect their position. Maybe you also feel that the more people you have managed to convince of the value to collaborate and work transparently, the more stiff-necked are the remaining luddites?
- A couple of luddites, who cares? Does it mean anything more than some frustration? YES, it actually prevents us from reaching our full potential, efficiency and effectiveness
- It prevents us from switching away from the obsolete push culture to the pull of social business. Instead of switching from ploughing through frustrating and overwhelming quantities of messages others think we should have and force us to handle to getting served with what we want and need from the sources we appreciate……. We get stuck with both!! As long as we are occasional users of Connections we can get away with it, but when we start relying on the collaboration tools as the basis for our work routines it starts to get difficult: When notifications from all groups we are drafted into, drowns the information we really need When people use Communities as mailing lists, spamming us through “Mail to Community” When we don’t get any response because others don’t keep tabs on their information flow (or – even worse – have switched off notifications) When the switch from mail to updates turned into mail & updates & notifications & chat, within and across firewalls and across devices?! When it’s no longer about dressing up on the surface. When we’re talking about the core of how we get our work done. How do we do then?
- I get along reasonably through a combination of discipline, plug-ins and configuration: I batch process the inflow of information through setting aside time slots in my calendar, for myself – with reminders, but available for meetings I use a mail rule to separate ordinary email and Connections notifications – so I can discriminate either way (“filtering”) In combination with Notes configuration and the Connections Notifier plug-in to flash a notification upon arrival of new email or when someone reaches out specifically to me or responds to my updates In addition, I persist in steering my communications to Connections. I respond on boards when someone emails me and have set a permanent, internal out-of-office message asking everyone to post on my board instead, explaining why it is in their interest to do so But we can’t expect Average Joes to go to these lengths. And if not even communism managed to force everyone to want to join in, we can hardly hope to succeed with force either
- The more people joining in to collaborate and the more they do it, the greater the advantages, for all. But, as stated before, so does the flow of messages of all kinds as well. The tools I usually can work with in trying to get people to want to come on board the collaboration train are motivation (carrot – preferred, but also the stick) and training in a wide sense of the word. But the greater the possibilities we offer and the easier and simpler it is to use them, the smaller the effort I have to put in to reach a better result. The right hand side of the balance is all about tools and integration So what is needed from the tools to support a true switch to become the new core, the spine of our ways of working?
- This is how I’d like to see my tools for information management change to make it easier for me to make the big shift, to move my centre of gravity from email to social: Increased focus on me, the people I work with and those I prioritize. Less on those who are obstinate about dumping information and tasks on me across the fence without first checking if I’m ready to catch I want all the inflow in ONE place, at least on each side of the firewall. Maybe also to be able to send everywhere from the same, one place But for that to work, I need very powerful filtering and prioritization of the inflow, across many more dimensions than today. Imagine, for example, to have a consolidated stream of all email, everything from Connections and all chats, and to be able to select to view only stuff from people you work with in a particular activity! This wish of mine probably requires a substantial portion of analytics to make it easy. Because it has to be easy on the verge of simplistic Search can always be better! Why do we keep sorting email in folders while we use tags when collaborating in Connections?! Start using tags in email too. Maybe adding some analytics here too to generate intelligent suggestions, as when we Bookmark in Connections, maybe And finally, integration with my work tasks and tools. In the information flow, the activity stream and in the interface
- When my wish list starts coming true, we will take a big step closer to what we all are working towards, really: Intranets the way we thought they would be Compare with this book by Mats Bark et al from 1997: Following this concept, the intranet will merge with the corporate organization structure and IT-architecture to become an integrated enterprise system, an infrastructure that is the framework of the entire internal and external activity of the enterprise. But, thinking of how critical ERP and similar systems are for companies, I would like to moderate his statement somewhat, based on the chart bottom right. We use ERP systems when we work on transactions in an environment with known and stable variables and processes. When we come across change and uncertainty, we need to communicate and search for information and help. That’s the sweet spot of our social intranets, especially if we have integrated them with the most frequently used functions of the ERP and similar systems.
- Peter Bjellerup is a social business consultant, working for IBM since early 2005, nowadays in the Global Center of Competence for Social Business, a team of “flying doctors” supporting sales, solutioning and starting up engagements covering the different aspects of social business. While Peter’s customary focus is internal, the team at large works with the full range of the field, from social business strategy, policy and process review and redesign, social media marketing, social customer service, social intelligence and analytics (both external and internal), all of which usually involve some or a lot of change management for social business. Before joining the client-facing CoC, Peter has worked internally in IBM on social intranet adoption.