1 – The connected organization with its challenges in the fundamental change of information work culture and the deriving needs in providing a new style of leadership (vs management). Based on this anchor the attendants of the session elaborated on the following subjects:

• Running projects in decentralized organizations and the need to ensure synchronization and ability to collaborate beyond professional and geographical borders.
• Measuring by objective puts a challenge on current managers since a new style of management and guiding subordinates is required. The role and thereby the required managerial skills (or rather leadership skills) of a manager is rapidly changing.
• Students running interdisciplinary projects as part of the academical education – using tools such as Dropbox, Facebook and Collaboration Free/Shareware to stay connected.
• X-geographical collaboration requires awareness of a common denominator for generations at the workplace, used tools (user maturity) and cultural differences that have to be taken into account.
• Knowledge has to be made available to the entire organization even if the actual creator or “owner” of the piece of knowledge might currently not be available (eg in another time zone).
• The continuously increasing agility and change of companies makes it more or less impossible to know and understand everybody’s role, function and expertise. Therefore a company needs services to quickly determine the right person or expertise instantly…independent from proprietary knowledge about “who’s doing what here?”

Two very interesting side notes were made as well:

• A connected organization has to be willing to adapt to leadership that isn’t formally/structurally enforced. It’s not just about selecting the people one wants to follow but actually about sticking to it and be willing to be led.
• People and managers (both!!) are in charge of making sure that information workers will be able to concentrate on one thing at a time and ensure delivery quality for their work. Opportunities to get involved and the increased variety of communication channels shouldn’t turn into utter distraction.

One participant actually summarized the situation pretty well: corporation have to develop from “knowledge organizations” (people work based on their skills) into “continuously evolving and developing organizations” (people understand and continuously improve the way of combining individual skills to a more powerful whole).

2 – Mobile work will put people in charge. Being responsible for the own performance as well as making sure that one individual does not turn into a barrier for the team due to mobility and absence is essential for the success of a mobilized information workforce. The awareness of responsibility and the fact of being accountable for it will be the challenge for the employee – the ability to let go and actually trust in the ability of employees to operate professionally in the provided new freedom will be the challenge for their leaders. Essentials of the conversation were

• Mobile work 2012 (Laptop & Mobile) have to turn into proper mobility concepts (Mobile work 2015?). They have to incorporate business app environments, device independence (as a starting point for BYOD) as well a working mobile device management that allows users to seamlessly connect to the corporate environment without hassle (eg VPN).
• Balancing work and private life in the context of mobile work will be as much of a challenge for employees (being aware that 24/7 simply doesn’t deliver excellence) as it will be one for managers and leaders (provide certainty that a 24/7 presence is neither expected nor incentiviced). Private and work time will start blending IF the protagonists are willing and able to manage the new situation and deliver more value for BOTH sides of the coin…

Here are my (German) notes and the summary of my session…

Bridging companies and customers
An increasing number of companies is rolling out services to connect their customers with the organization. Either for the purpose of service or for going after improvements and innovation the wall between corporation and customer seems to become less solid. Particularly successful seem to be the endeavors in which corporate leaders (aka C suite) are involved as sponsor and in which they acknowledge the multi-folded value of such an initiative.

Increase value and involvement with internal services
The tendency was clear: modern intranets have to be value adding workspaces, whereas today most portals still serve the purpose of information distribution and corporate communications. Servicing the right information at the right time to the right user in order create real work support is an endeavor some companies have started to pursue. People in charge are much more conscious of the importance of (unfortunately rarely executed) renovation work for information architecture and taxonomies. Otherwise the automation of digital services to become situation aware work tools will always experience data quality (= findability) as the major limitation. ‘Rubbish in, rubbish out’ is understood – at least my most protagonists.

Consciousness for active change management
Guiding employees through change with marketing style activities or dedicated advocates and community managers is really fashionable now. Just throwing a piece of IT at employees hoping that the majority of them will catch it and find some reason behind has been identified as a ‘no go’ – in particular by the reps of IT departments I was able to speak to. That management has to get involved and play an active part in the change and execution process is definitely perceived as a key success factor.

Asking the right questions
What’s still challenging is the way of figuring out the right starting point and how to bridge vision and reality. Throughout the conference I had the feeling that user and challenge centric thinking is still overruled by the quest for the right tool. It’s functionality (e.g. microblogging) that is introduced to employees – not a service that resonates to a particular challenge and thereby automatically makes its use obvious to employees. The tendency however, is definitely a move towards more user focussed approaches.

Summing it up: the future for information and knowledge workers looks brighter than three years ago. As soon as companies have overcome their internal blockage that only ERP projects can be funded with three digit millions the future will be even brighter. To unleash the potential that’s currently buried in the heads of talented people and network drives new ways for information distribution, retrieval and enrichment have to make their way into organizations. Getting some inspiration from social and commercial media seems to be a good idea because a lot of references at the conference were made in that direction.

I would like to close with the advise of our last speaker @d_ott: decentralize, simplify, advise & train…and be nice to your users.

I couldn’t agree more

In case you’re interested in my presentation at the conference on the future of information work at Tieto including the socialization of our own intranet…here it is:

I still remember the announcement and then the related work order of a larger IT player that intended to encourage (or shall I say force) its employees to use social channels instead of e-mail to distribute internal information. How far that company has succeeded with this endeavor I actually don’t know.

Even though I can understand that a clean cut seems to be a promising way to execute this transition I am not entirely sure that it will be very much appreciated by the individuals. Radical change isn’t favored by a lot of people. Whenever the ‘Big Bang’ is mentioned people tend to twitch…

Getting used to the new way bit by bit

On multiple occasions I have elaborated on the need of a step-by-step approach and on how to find the evolutionary phases of a digital workplace that fits the organization and its employees. From my perspective moving along people relationships and putting new ways of working in the closest context of the user will help the transition.

The beauty of this approach is that it won’t be affecting everyone at the same time. By introducing a replacement to e-mail in the context of close team work employees can get used to certain scenarios in which information is no longer distributed by e-mail. One scenario:

Scenario
Aligning sales force and offering development

Challenge
Ensure that sales teams are updated on the latest material and developments for offerings and related value propositions.
Enable sales teams to give feedback and enrich offering management and sales material based on customer and market feedback.

Approach
Establish a joint digital space for sales and offering representatives. Key services for the users:

• One-stop shop for the latest offering material
• Consolidated information flow from offering management to sales organization to promote and comment changes in material
• Structured feedback process from sales to offering management
• Informal whiteboard for both parties to exchange spontaneous ideas and collaboratively develop shared subjects
• Direct access to online communication and virtual collaboration channels including presence information
• Calendar for shared event planning (e.g. conferences)

Achievement

• No update e-mails (and attachments) for offering related material
• No cc-to-all-who-might-be-interested emails regarding customer feedback
• No never ending email strings on updates and discussion around new material (incl. attachments)
• No ‘sorry…I forgot to put you cc’ situations anymore
• Cross-border and cross-perspective development of offerings and related collateral
• …

This scenario is close to day-to-day operations (shared goals) and in particular the interdependencies between the both stakeholder groups. The benefit of maintaining a one-stop-shop from both sides is obvious and creates immediate value.

As soon as social and commercial media inspired techniques for information distribution, enrichment and retrieval are established, new services can be launched…e.g.:

• virtual sales case war room
• the offering development board
• pre-sales template factory
• social media inspired project room (actually another good starting point…)

Step by step e-mail volume will start decreasing. As long as people can be 100 percent sure that there will be only one single source where they will be able expect a specific piece information.

(c) Tieto Corporation 2012

Ergänzende Hintergrundgedanken
Strategiepräsentation: http://goo.gl/X7f5I
Opinion Paper:  http://goo.gl/1o9QI

Until now corporations have found various ways of putting people in groups with a common denominator. On a meta level the most commonly used ones are

• organizational structure (eg business line or team)
• hierarchy (eg management teams)
• profession (eg engineers or project management experts)
• subject matter/interest (eg mobile, ERP, solar power)

However, the groups formed by strict definition are facing the particular challenges of granularity and convergence. Especially when it comes to virtual spaces for information exchange and consolidation.

Dividing for example a group of subject matter or professional experts into smaller sub groups leads to less and less critical mass (equals activity) and on top of that a potential limited perspective on things. Collecting everything (eg documents, reports, best practice) under a large umbrella on the other hand leads to information overflow and lack of transparency – even though it would be beneficial if multiple angles on one particular subject could be found ’in the same place’. Old ways of structuring information in for example taxonomy based folder hierarchies resonate on that particular challenge. A continuously growing pool of information however, quickly leads to a loss of transparency and orientation.

Todays answer: (enterprise) search.

As soon as a pre-built system – that cannot be split up anymore without creating even less transparency – is getting to big corporations tend to throw a search engine against it. Unfortunately the saying ’rubbish in, rubbish out’ applies in particular to search results. Going through the effort of enriching information with a structured taxonomy, adding the ability for users to add social taxonomy and then calling it the foundation for search is rarely to be seen.

Even more challenging is the endeavor to encourage users themselves to apply both while creating content or uploading files. Simply because the answer to ’what’s in for me’ is difficult to be answered with ’a better search result’. A better search result is very subjective and dependent on the search/matching quality (search query, match of search term and corresponding taxonomic expression etc.).

The content cloud – relevant content around a tag is the new group

Another solution – and maybe a more promising – would be the option to offer a service to users that allows them to explore content in a new way. On one page users can see everything that is related to a tag (social or structured):

• documents
• people
• information in the intranet
• status updates and notifications
• workspaces (if the user is eligible to the content)
• ext. search results
• …

It’s is the content cloud around a tag. It’s the collection of everything and everyone that has a stake in the ’word(s)’.

No matter where the information resides…

It’s a group without being a group. It’s a collection of information, documentation, knowledge, skills and expertise without the necessity to manually consolidate and maintain it. It forms when it’s needed and it vanishes when it has fulfilled its purpose.

Imagine it to be the hash tag on Twitter with more than just tweets being displayed in a pre-filtered steam.

Flavored with additional elements this service could solve multiple challenges:
- orientation for the new
- inspiration for the ones that are curious
- support for the ones that need help
- convergence for the ones that seek another perspective

It can be the foundation to create a new followership within an organization. People follow topics and thereby extend their network, knowledge and reach and maybe to become leaders for a certain subject due to the personal footprint in it.

Think about it…what’s in for you now? Transparency. Visibility. Relevance. A whole new set of opportunities beyond just a search result.

Use ‘time to burn‘ to start tasks, collect thoughts or get rid of administrative tasks though mobile services.

Make use of the variety of functionalities modern mobile devices offer by putting a metaphor around them and make users aware of all their options (simply because the engineer’s approach ‘here – these are all the things you can do with it’ simply never works with normal people).

Stick to the amazing model of mobile apps: simplicity. Extract specific actions from the complex bigger picture and make them easily accessible in an encapsulated environment (the app). Refrain from adding and adding and adding stuff…don’t start making things complicated again after you achieved simplicity.

A mobilized workforce needs new leadership. Presence won’t be an indicator of performance or commitment anymore. Employees have to take over the responsibility to think about the consequences of not being in the office and that they have to still make sure that their colleagues aren’t blocked by their absence. Leading a mobile workforce is challenging but at the same time extremely rewarding for both sides…

Check out the presentation here (sorry…German only for now)

On a more personal side note: If you are interested in getting the actually impression of the Generation Y (Digital Natives, Millenials etc.) you might want to get in touch with this one here…you will be positively surprised, inspired and you will have to change the picture in your head a bit @derjonathan

Come and join the session… My presentation will of course be posted here as well.

2012 M-Days Program

I quote: Context is king

1. Context can reduce process rigidity
2. Context can guide decision making, creating a more customized, precisely tailored process for the participant
3. Context can frame collaborative interactions
4. Context can help uncover and evolve complex process interactions that would otherwise remain tacit
5. …

(Source: 11/2011, Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2011/ Workshop ‘Designing Socially Enabled Processes’)

This evolution from “content is king” is nothing but consequent. The highest quality content is totally worthless if provided in the wrong situation (=context).

The strange thing is: value that IT services provide to users through contextually relevant information is acknowledged by commercial media for over 10 years already.

• Buyers of this book have bought these other books…
• People, your contacts are connected to
• Restaurants in the vicinity of your destination
• Related news to this article
• Search Engine Marketing (SEO/SEM)
• Behavioural ad targeting and content management
• …

It seems only logical that a digital workplace that continuously adopts relevance and context driven content distribution and match making. Bringing people together with relevant (or even contextually matching) information and connecting them based on profiles, preferences and behavior cannot be rocket science any more. Too many commercial and social services have already created the blue print for effective content distribution management (e.g. Google Plus as one of the latest but tremendously growing services). Google circles probably even contains the most straight forward approach towards managing roles & rights – a major challenge in today’s corporate CMS and DMS solutions.

Business IT has to understand that in distributed organizations and continuously changing (work) environments employees require a new quality of support. Mobility and diversity of workplaces even add on top of this requirement. To unleash individual productivity and value creation workspaces have to literally “understand” their user (think of Siri in the new version of iPhone) and – in an ideal world – pro–actively deliver all the related and relevant pieces of information and expertise that could be valuable in the particular situation.

Refrain from just replicating platforms and care for the people!

In order to match the available intelligence in relevance and contextual matching it is essential to really understand the processes and requirements of the employees. Just copy/pasting potentially successful platform to “fake” the same experience and the digital workplace will only work in very rare occasions (I am not saying that it cannot work at all…). Information overload and the fear of “getting even more on my plate” is a frequent response of future users when they get in touch with intelligent support systems for the first time – at least if the concept is introduced to them in the early phase. This fear has to be addressed in two ways:

• Components and functions have to be selected carefully and (in terms of the roadmap) resonate on the most important challenges and roadblocks in the context of information and knowledge work
• The actual change management for collaboration and work culture has to guide and support employees in taking advantage of the new opportunities.

Context is the new mantra for the digital workspace. We should embrace it and steel with pride from social and commercial services that have been able to attract and retains hundreds of millions of users and generate billions in revenue and profits – for business there’s probably a similar potential buried within the very own corporation.

Visit the conference page here…