A new year is starting…with the usual prediction challenge. It does not matter if these predictions become true or not, that anticipation is confused with taking one’s dreams for granted : predictions are a part of the landscape and even those who don’t take them seriously expect them. So I’m trying to play the game one more time.

First, let’s be clear on what prediction means. Even if I’m happy with what I “predicted” these last years (understand “I was right”), don’t expect to find anything revolutionary in the next lines. What we usually call predictions is nothing more than common sense (or lack of). Predicting the iPhone en 1990 would have been a prediction. Prediction the need from bringing social into the flow of work in 2009 was only common sense. Rather stating the obvious.

What leads us to a very important point. As long as one is lucid and clearly understands that, even social or 2.0, the real point is enterprise and business, with all the constraints and context that comes with, it’s not that hard to identify where things will block and what concerns will arise. Finding how organizations will decide to respond is much harder. Anyway each one will respond in its own way depending on its culture, its culture, the courage of its executives when it will come to make strategic decisions. Because of all that, we’ll surely see much more diversity than before in social business approaches…

So, here are the trends I seen for 2012.

1°) Budget : from technology to organizational transformation

Before being about people or technology, that’s a matter of money. Technology, accompaniment, internal efforts… And we all know that in 2012 money will fall from the sky and anyone will be able to spend it on any shiny initiative. Or not. So it all depends of a strategic choice for enterprises facing crises : getting ready for the crash or finding the winning way out.

Finding the winning way out may mean many different things. One of them could be keeping the investments and even making more efforts because it’s “now or never”. Another could be of not changing the amount but the allocation. I recently mentioned a survey saying that HR seem to refocus on organizational transformation to the detriment of some other points. I read another one, about services budgets, saying something like “less software and integration, more on building new business and organizational models”.

The most meaningful choice will on whether to favor technology or its usages. It seems that the second may win or at least not being the least considered part of the job anymore. Such arbitrations will be key facts to understand 2012.

2°) A more operations-driven approach to social dynamics

Some of us have been discussing this point for years but it seems that things are becoming more mature now. In 2009, anyone talking about a social approach to business processes was considered as an heretic. Today things seem to be converging and enterprises are more ready to listen and understand to such discourses that make more sense for them. Or maybe the disciples of the “Care Bears Social Church” have given up and admit that the word process was not a blasphemy anymore.

So, the job is not about keeping the old organizational structure and adding a community layer on its top, out of the flow of work, but :

1°) Bringing  social into the flow of work even it means fixing the flow to make it agile and adaptable

2°) Jointing flows of work and out-of-the-flow community approaches to ensure all the efforts will contribute to value creation. If not, the final conclusion will come quickly : communities = unproductive silos…and once again we’ll have missed a great opportunity to improve things.

But being aware does not mean acting accordingly. Even if a consensus forms on such an approach, it will take time to implement it because it needs organizations to put their hands in the organizational mess and out of age processes. That’s what the “E20 = E1.0+communities” was designed to avoid. Unsuccessfully.

Depending on the choices made in each organizations, we’ll see forks forming in the the social business world. And, in my opinion, one of them is a dead end.

Behind this point lies something deeper…that’s my third point.

3°) Adopting one’s future instead of adopting social

We’ve been talking about “adoption” for ages. Even if I can understand it, it did not take much time to see the limits of such an approach. It’s like saying “that’s new, you may not see the interest but you have to love it and get used to live with it”. It sounds like having to deal with something exogenous. Adoption being about how not to reject a transplant.

There’s another approach, much about a wide and deep corporate project. What challenges for the next year ? How to create more value, more efficiently ? How to make resilience a part of the corporate DNA ? One thing leading to another, if enterprises start to design their organization accordingly, in terms of management models, processus, HR models etc… social won’t need to be adopted but it will grow and spread naturally. Do you want to design an enterprise adapted to its challenge and tool it accordingly or try to make new practices and tool fit in a mould that’s not designed for them and in which they make no sense ? Overlay or structural integration ?

In short, do you want to adopt the social approach or adopt your future, social being only a consequence. What I also mean is that there is not one social model that fits any organizations. It has to be designed to fit specific cultures, needs etc… Organizations that understand they’ll have to design a whole global model for their own purpose instead of copying what they can see elsewhere will be more likely to succeed in their transformation.

The answer to this question will take you on one or the other of the ways that will follow the fork I mentioned above. Enterprise projet or social project in the enterprise ?

4°) Integrating instead of adding

That’s a three dimensions challenge : on technology, organization and people.

These last years, many enterprises have ran many projects, most of time without much coherence, what lead to building stacks. Stacks of technology with no connection between them or with the previously existing ones. Stacks of rules and processes, often contradictory, while making things more simple was the best way to efficiently handle exceptions. Stacks of constraints, exhortation to adopt new behaviors depending on the context.

This lack of coherence weights on projects and does not help to make sense of anything. The consequence is known : less engagement and motivation over time, even unproductivity. Maybe cuts in budgets will have positive impacts. Rather than rushing ahead without properly addressing the problem, organizations will have to learn to make the most out of what thet have and is often wasted or under-utilized.

We’ve seen above, that instead of adding a social part to people’s work, organizations should invent a model that joints in a logical way both the structured and unstructured parts of work, formal and informal ones. It will be the same for technology since, as Bill Ives noticed, it seems that, instead of adding new technology layers, organizations seems to start investing on integrating the existing ones better.

Integration will take place on many fields :

• the organizational one, by replacing adoption by redefining and redesigning roles, tasks, activities and flow of work.

• the human one, by making HR policies more coherent (evaluation, reviews, goals, incentives, competencies location and management…)

• the technological one, by integration the business and social layer, with the help of new standards as we can see in the “social business framework”.

5°) Customer first ! But for how long ?

I hear more and more voices complaining on how social media budgets are allocated. There’s a lot of money available to look nice on Facebook but almost nothing in comparison to transform the organization in order to deliver as promised. Unfortunately we can see few signs that improving the organization through the human and organization will get more funds than social soliciting projects on Facebook or elsewhere. Looking nicer will still more important than executing better…but for how long ?

More time is needed to replace make-up programs with a comprehensive approach that will joint internal and external activities and consider that execution is at least as important as branding. But 2012 may be the turning point. Things may change as budgets shift and social business projects not considered as a part of the social media stuff anymore but as organizational projects that deserve their own (and well sized) funding.

Anyway, some organizations already get it well and will increase their advantage.

6°) The year of culture !

This will be discussed in some future posts but something is sure : no transformation happens without strong leadership and culture. When one lacks and the second is weak, we often see projects that aim  at changing without taking the risk of changing and the golden rule is “ohhhh, we can’t to this is our company”. 2012 will be the year of judgement since organizations will need to arbitrate under the constraint of smaller budgets. Only the projects relying on a strong leadership and culture will survive and move forward. Expect lots of breakage.  These projects will certainly come back later with a new approach but, unfortunately, their project won’t be about anticipation anymore but survival.

Conclusion

No one knows what choices will be made but organizations will have to make meaningful ones in 2012. I mentioned some possible logics here. Between the brave choices deserved by a real enterprise project and “no-choices ” caused by a poor understanding of what’s at stake, social business projects will diverge more and more. Last step before the final collapse of window-dressing ones and the generalization of the rational/pragmatic/business driven approach.

I also think that we’ll discuss a lot the “adopt social vs adopt your future” as it will become more and more obvious that social business is more about transforming the DNA than transplanting a new body.

The purpose of internal communication is to deliver the corporate message, to inform employees. The purpose of employees is to do their job. One of the enterprise and managers’s biggest concern is to prevent key resources wasting, people’s time and attention being one of them.

The way internal communication, employees, managers and the enterprise try to meet their goals, each of them paying very little attention to the others’ concers is quite funny to observe from an external standpoint. It’s more worrying from an internal standpoint.

Communication communicates, everywhere it can, where it has the more chances to meet their audience. So, logically, on the intranet when internal communicants makes anything to be sure their message is well placed, occupy most of the screen. A little bit like brands fighting to have to best place to display their ads in cities.

Messages are hierarchized in a way that’s logical for any headquarters person : the most important is the corporate news, then branches news, then business units new etc…

As for them, employees focus on what matters to them. To such and extent that, when an intranet is mainly dedicated to corporate communication, the first thing the do is to close the window that automatically opens when they launch their browser because it’s been used as a mandatory home page. They focus first on what’s related with their word, then their close environment, then what’s happening elsewhere in the organization and, last, the far and neutral corporate message. In short that’s exactly the opposite of the way internal communication is hierarchized. There’s another funny side : when internal communication says something that really matters for a given employee, the employees seldom manage to find the information.

Hence surprises when one have a look at the “transformation rate” of corporate news even if they are pushed on employees’ homepages. Wide broadcasting, mandatory display…and few reading.

Managers can have a different analysis : communication tries to capture employee’s attention, what is resource they try to protect from any distraction that’s not immediately useful and productive.

In the end it seems that the goals of the ones are contradictory with the goals of the others and that the success of needs the failure of the others. But, from a global standpoint, it’s essential to reconcile all parts. Yes, employees should focus on their mission and businesses need to deliver their message and news because it improves engagement, understanding, situational awareness etc… But is it possible to find a balance ?

Balancing the situation would be a good thing since we can see so many people complaining about a situation when the ones speak and the others say “I’m not listening, I’ve got a job yo do” in which everyone is a looser.

A beginning of an answer relies in four words : sense, split media, context and spreading

• Sense: employees do what makes sense to them. It determines their “path” on the intranet, what they read or not, the tools they use. In other words, putting a message under their eyes does not mean they will read it. It even generates frustration and dissatisfaction if it makes their browsing more painful, makes them scroll to find what they were looking for.

• Split media : if portals will still be the point of aggregation of an intranet that’s being made of more and more different tools, the zone dedicated to internal communication will only be a zone among many others, its content management system a tool among many others. Between business tools, social platforms, enterprise app strores, the internal offer is growing and employees will give preferential treatment (attention) to what makes sense to them. Logically, the percentage of time they’ll spend on corporate news will decrease. Except if they have reasons to go there.

• Context : I’ve been talking about the need to bring social contents in business applications for a while. The reason is easy to understand  : putting this knowledge and networking potential in the context of work, of people’s mission. That will be the same for internal communication : that’s not because it’s being hosted in a central point that it can’t be distributed elsewhere. Maybe in business applications when it makes sense, surely into social platforms. Why not having some corporate content suggested on the side of a page when it relates to the topic of the community, the ongoing discussion ? A smart way to relevant targeting.

• Spreading : when an intranet successfully articulates corporate communication, business applications and social layers, rather making the most of it and use employers as relays. Many “new gen” intranets allow readers to rate contents, even corporate ones. Why not going further and allow them to share a content they found interesting with their internal network ?

In fact, internal communication is in the same situation as traditional medias when the social web took off a couple of years ago. Before they used to protect their contents, forcing readers to start their navigation on their page, pushing content. Today they make their content sharable, easily linkable on any network and try to make them (or links to them) appear on pages internauts visit, depending on the context of the page.

We can also easily compare the situation with TV. Before, what was central was the show and channels used to sell the “available brain time of their audience” to brands. Today, digital recorders remove ads from show, we can enjoy VOD without commercials and, most of all, no one was watching commercials. People using the “ad break” time to get a drink in the kitchen…or do something else. Replace “show” with “work” and “ads” with “corporate communication”….. Conclusion : would you want the commercials that make sense, that people like, watch on youtube and share on facebook or the one during which people go to the bathroom ?

We got confirmation at the last international intranet managers conference in november in Paris; What did some speakers say ? “In our company, end users say ‘stop spamming us with corporate content that are useless for us and prevent us from focusing on our work” or “people moved from the intranet to our recently launched social networking platform because the intranet was too much about corporate communication”. What’s interesting in the second case is that this acknowledgment helped them to find a new balance. That’s also one more reason to bring social platforms in the intranet and not use them as standalone tools.

In short, instead of communication for oneself and occupy the space, the challenge will be about communicating for and with employees.

That’s a multi-step challenge for internal communication :

• the message : messages that make sense (don’t talk about you but about what people care about…like brands are starting to do on the web). Messages with styles and format that make the message more enjoyable, understandable.

• the media : there will be a central point were information is published but a hierarchized and split distribution. Hierarchized depending on employees’ concerns (the employee of a subsidiary has interests that are not always the same as the HQ team…both matter but not in the ame order). Split, because if the original message is in an identified and classified container, copies, aliases, links to it will have to be spread all over the enterprise “digital universe” according to context (semantic matters here).

• the very role of internal communication : moving from a self-sufficiency model (the system works for its own purposes and is message delivery machine, telling the work is done because all spaces are occupied) from a shared value model (the message targets employees’ needs, communication delivers value to both employees and the organization).

Complicated ? Not that much. Needing to reinvent oneself et one’s mission ? Certainly. Impossible ? At Dassault Systemes internal communication now happens only in communities. Too extremist ? The last release of IBM’s intranet moved the internal communication message away from the center of the homepage to replace it with a “connect and share” feature that tells people what’s happening in their network, communities, workgroups… The corporate message have moved to the sidebar.

To be successful tomorrow, communication departments will need to find their place in a decentralized and contextual digital universe. Those who’ll refuse the change will spend their time generating what managers and end users call a disturbing noise. A situation where everyone will be a looser.

Among the corporate departments impacted by the emerging new ways of working and the tools that come with, communication departments are in front line. We often talk about HR, management (middle or not), considering, even wrongly, that their job is to do a top-down business and that they have nothing to do in 2.0 things. This is a huge mistake because they are often in charge of driving things that go beyond their dedicated field without having been prepared for that or are been told that the brand new social intranet 2.0 is coming and that they need to find their place in. In short, as I had to witness these last months, even when they have the power, communication departments are often left alone in this change process.

They have to quickly face a challenge that’s both clear and complex : position themselves, their business, strategy and operating models in this new environment that is coming, whether they want it or not.

Some jumbled hints….

• What role ?

The role of a communication department is to ensure that the corporate message is broadcasted to employees and is understood by them. This is something that won’t change.

• What field ?

With the next generation of intranets coming, the game field is becoming much wider. And communication departments are wondering how they’ll drive all these things. Their field will stay the same (corporate message), the social networking part being more for people in charge of collaboration, business units and teams. To quote a sentence I recently heard : “ok….the range of the tool is wider…I need to find what my zone is and what I have to leave to others because even if I own the intranet, a part of it is out of my competences and goals”.

That doesn’t mean that a smart communication department should not use the social networking part in a direct (sourcing) or indirect (virality) way.

• What operating models?

This is a domain where things are moving fast, for two reasons. The first is that the coming of new intranets combining traditional communication tools with social networking ones makes new things possible. Second is that’s a good news because the way things used to be done was not relevant anymore.

Broadcasting a message does not mean putting it in front of employee’s eyes to consider the job has been done. First because it does not mean the message was read. Employees attention being limited, if the message does not meet a present need they move to something more important. Then because reading the message does not mean understanding it. Last, the message could be of no interest for some people today but become essential tomorrow. What makes new way of operating necessary.

First, why remove a message when another one comes ? Haven’t you heard about the long tail ? That’s not because something has to be said that what was said before becomes irrelevant, useless. Instead of removing let the archives accessible and when employees will search  a matter not only they’ll find this content but a “like”-like button will help them share it with their network.

The “like” is the bridge between corporate communication and social networking. It will help those who have read your message to share it with their contacts that did not (or did not want) and will pay more attention to it if a trusted person says it’s worth. Doing this you add virality to your toolbox. Before you could only force a message on people’s home page, now you’ll be able to use your readers as promoters and reach people who seldom have a look at what you say.

Note that with these two systems you’re discovering two concepts that are quite new in internal communication : longer lifecycles for you content and better broadcasting through virality.

Now comes the problem of having the message understood. It needs feedback and conversation mechanisms. “What ? People will be able to react to corporate contents ?”‘ Why not. In fact they’re alreay doing but in you back. The question is to know whether your goal is to display the message or make sure people get it. More and more organizations are doing things that way and no one has died…

• A new granularity ?

The 2.0 thinking suggests more closeness between the sender and the receiver. Many organizations did not wait for the 2.0 era to provide specific contents by brand, business unit in addition to central communication. What’s new today ? Easy to use tools makes it easier to decentralize part of the production of content without needing specific trainings. The “like” I mentioned above helps information to flow across silos : my business units publishes something on one of our internal initiative, I’m proud of it and like it…so my contacts out my BU are informed…and it may even give them new ideas for their own needs.

• Sourcing

One of the problem of organizations wanting more closeness and being in touch with what’s happening  “on the ground” has often been to find relevant things to talk about, most of times using a network of correspondents. As seen above, it’s now easier to help “locals” generate their own contents. But it’s possible to go further…by looking at the social side of the intranet, the social network. Each employee being a potential contributor, it can the place to go to know what’s happening “on the ground”, what interests people, to grab information, rework it and share it at the corporate level.

I even know organizations starting to listen to external communities where they talk about key topics and use these conversations to find new ideas, new contents. Others are wondering whether, when a community emerges internally and gathers the attention and interest of lots of employees, there’s an opportunity to have a similar external community to share on this matter because it proves it’s something that makes sense for the whole organization and is close to its values. Here, broadcasting and sourcing are melting and lots of synergies can be developped.

• Concepts to be redefined

Some words lead to conditioned reflexes. For instance communication is one to may, top down and controlled, the intranet is “owned” by a department and is a place where corporate ads messages are broadcasted. Some words have to be learned again and that’s the opportunity to wonder what they really mean now. For instance :

- communication : today, work is becoming communication. Everyone communicates. Communication becomes BE2 but also E2E so the old rules only work for a small part of the information being generated and shared. If giving up control on communication makes people uncomfortable, then change the words and use new ones that are less connotated.

- contributor : it used to be a known and defined person who has the right to communicate on the intranet. On intranets 2.0 everyone is a potential contributor…but not at the same place. Social network for anyone, corporate zone for professionals.

- intranet : it’s not anymore the place where the enterprise sells its message to employees. It’s a place where people meet, a place where they work, a place where knowledge is shared… In short, organizations will need to learn to stop acting like advertisers to act like shareholders.

- …..

• What to do with the technology side ?

Talking about an emerging field, where not everybody is very mature, it may be useful to make sure that the chosen technology will help to make the most of the new paradigm. If not, the situation will look like a change without benefits…in one word : regression. The key part of the system is the link between “social” and traditional. It’s not only about showing both in a coherent way, integrated in a nice portal. That’s the less anyone can do. I’m talking about synergies and interoperability. The fact that a content “liked” on the corporate side is shared on the social side (don’t tell me it’s impossible…or change your provider), the fact people have a global search engine that indexes everything regardless to the source and allow people find information, people or documents that are relevant by performing only one search… are essential to such synergies.

• From broadcasting to animation

I already mentioned the difference between broadcasting a message and making sure people understands it. Communication departments can also go on the social network and use its community capabilities to provide education and make people more aware in addition the the corporate words that are supposed to be more neutral. Each media is good at one specific way of delivering the message. One is used to inform, the second to interact, explain with the relevant attitude.

• New formats

The emergence of social networks in the corporate land is the right moment to think of new formats. For lots of enterprises, video is already obvious. It’s also possible to think of completing the heavy, controlled and neutral corporate communication with lighter, shorter and viral things that would not have their place on the traditional corporate communication but would be nice on microblogging or on more granular intranets.

This were only “raw thinkings”‘ but I hope they could help those who have to find their way in our changing organizations. Just look at the key points and wonder “what does it mean to me, what can I do with it” : viralizations, sourcing, granularity, format, information lifecycle, animation….

I’d like to say a few words about what seems to be one of the biggest misunderstandings about enterprise social networks : their part in the corporate communication field. Since social networks are communication tools and, as such, are often managed by the communication department, there are at least two reasons for organizations to try to use this pipe for their corporate communication. What is not always successful and causes headaches.

Let’s make some things clear before starting :

• Social networks are tool allowing communication, or rather exchanges, between employees. Ok, any CEO can have his blog on the network but it’s  to have a more human voice and a less formal way of delivering his message and does not prevent the organization to keep a more formal way of doing things. The farer someone is from the top of the pyramid, the weaker the tie is between the media the person use and her position. Social networks are media for people and spread their voice regardless to their position. Proof : anyone can move to a new position and keep his media, even the CEO…

• Corporate communication is, by definition, a top-down activity that aims at evenly delivering the same message to a given population. What does not preclude to be able to start a discussion…or not.

In short, one is E2E (employee to employee) while the other is B2E (Business to employee). In the first case, people are speaking for themselves, in the other the enterprise is speaking, sometimes through someone’s voice. Even when someone speaks in the same of the enterprise because of his position, he gets the right to speak not from who he his but from the position he his while, on enterprise social networks people have the right to speak because they are employees.

Of course, corporate communication needs to become more human and conversational to improve engagement, to explain things, to get feedback… and so what ? The one does not preclude the other at all.

As a matter of fact it’s possible (and in fact it happened) to see a C-Level person using the network in such a bad and inappropriate way that he should have used the old intranet and the newsletter instead. On the contrary, nothing prevents from giving a new impulse to corporate communication, allowing comments, ratings and even the “like” that will give messages a second life and favor their spreading through people’s activity streams. This can be done on any intranet platform provided there’s a real will to do so. So, the future of corporate communication is not a matter of new platforms but of improving what’s existing, making it more social.

I mentioned the word “headache” above. That’s what often comes when an enterprise pays too many attention to a trendy buzzword and thinks that a new platform will solve all the problems. It often happens when the project is given to the communication department, because driving an E2E project when one is BE2 by nature is counter cultural and often makes the department in question go beyond its remit. What causes a couple of issues :

• BE2 vs E2E : even when, with some ruse, the organization manages to move the corporate communication to the social network, problems come when they try to stimulate the use of the tool for day to day business purpose. So they have to teach managers, business lines and , in the end, allow that 95% of the conten will come frome employees. Possible but complicated, even if an adhoc team is raised, because it’s hard for such central departments to let the baby live his own live after having brought him into the world.

• Embodiment : on a social network, people speak for themselves, not because of their position. Steve Smith, CHRO, can be in one’s network but being friend with “Human resources department” makes no sense and is even confusing. Some executives manage to handle the situation quite well but it’s illusory to think that any exec has the right mindset to forget who he his and what’s written on in business card when he interacts on the network. To end, for reasons that are easy to understand, mixing up people with positions my be dangerous…as well as some execs may need a new channel in addition to the corporate one to have different ways to deliver their message. Bottom lines : mixing channels is not a good idea.

In the end, maybe it’s the word “communication” that is misleading. We all think we know what it means…but do not use it for the same purpose. To make things clear, let’s agree (at least for this post) on a few things :

• Communication : activity consisting of delivering a message to a given population, in an uniform way. It belongs to the organization, its departments and targets employees. Takes place on the intranet, socialized or not.

• Exchanges : activity that consists of transmitting a factual information or a thought. It belongs to employees that are both senders and receivers. When an exchange looks like communication it’s often because the sender has a kind of authority and tries to makes his message more human, personalized. They take place on internal social media, within a social networking platform (blogs, microblogs etc..) or within communities on these platforms. When exchanges happen to reach an assigned goal, it’s collaboration.

• Collaboration : exchanges that happen within a given population in order to meet a goal that has been assigned to them. It can take place in spaces that can be either workgroups, communities if having the necessary features to manage a project (in other word, not only conversation features). In the future these spaces will be more and more tied to business tools.

Both are forms of communication but those who are the better at managing one are confused when asked to manage the others.

Maybe this will help to understand that even if the social approach is here to stay, it can impact many kind of interactions and many kind of tools depending on the pursued goals. That does not prevent the three from combining : the individual profile will be more and more the way to expose the directory, social spaces will be more and more tied to business tools and the corporate message can start its journey on the intranet before being broadcasted by employees on their own activity streams.

To end, while everybody agrees on the unavoidable convergence of intranets and “social”, it does not mean that social networks will replace intranets for everything. Being lucid on the mission of a communication department should lead to a specific and highly socialized space highly connected to the social network, the whole contributing to the famous “social intranet“. At least for one reason : it makes it easier for them to get the point, makes things easier to change…better something realistic that can be put at work shortly than a scary ideal that scares people and in which they don’t understand their role.

PS : Social networks are a way to do “social” but social is not limited to social networks.

Communautés, Communication, communication-corporate, communication-dentreprise, intranet, intranet 2.0, réseau social, ugc, user

Many things have been said on the famous generation Y. Most of all that this generation, used to simple and efficient tools won’t accept a work environment that looks rather like Jurassic Park and will lead the fight against IT depts found guilty of opposition to change and refusal to listen to the actual concerns of end users.

Members of this generations are now well established in organization and being to have management positions. The time for a first assessment has come. Are Yers the revolutionists we were told they were or, like in many other fields, did they become more consensual than expected (and sometimes feared) and put up with their IT environment without complaining ?

Forrester recently issued a study called “What Gen Y really thinks about your IT department” which conclusions speak for themselves.

• Yers are getting older and reaching senior positions. Now they can start changing things from the inside instead of complaining.

• They feel that their personal equipment is better that what they’re given at work but are not more likely to bring their own at work than the elder generations.

• They’re quite satisfied with the tools they’re provided with at work…and are even more satisfied than the elders.

• They see IT departments as partners rather than enemies :

So, what can we say about those numbers that won’t, in fact, surprise many people and only confirms the gap between how Yes have been oversold and what can be seen on the field ? Many possible answers, one not precluding the others.

• They adjusted to the workplace and fitted in the corporate mould while getting older, having more responsibilities to assume and discovering the constraints of real business.

• Yers are not tech-savvy, sometimes even less than Xers. They’re more involved with the content of work, the way people, work and collaboration models  and usages than with tools. Conclusion : the tools they’re given fit well with their current context and what they’re asked, with how organization actually work and collaborate. If Yers had a fight to lead, it would rather be about management, organization and the content of work instead of tools. Maybe the limit of the consumerization if IT is the one of corporate usages.

• IT depts are not as corny as it’s commonly said and are adjusting to today’s world.

Your opinion ?

Before, everything was clear : communication in the enterprise was the job of a dedicated communication department who decided what people needed to know and didn’t care about how employee reacted to this information. Today, this department is not the only source of information and any employee, team, unit will have its own voice.

Please notice that it’s a significant improvement. For what I can see, 2 or 3 years ago, most of the communication departments were more likely to fight against this uncontrolled form of information broadcasting while, today, most of them seem to have understood they need to share the power. That doesn’t mean they are very comfortable with this new challenge, what is is quite logical, but they’re now trying to find how to go with change rather than block it. Remember that it’s not obvious at all for a traditional BE2 team to support an E2E approach and that, instead of criticizing them, helping them to deal with this transformation is a more constructive approach.

It raises two questions : the first is about the place of the communication department on a socialized intranet and the second is about controlling the global information flow.

• The place of the internal communication team

The discussion on deciding whether official communication has to melt into the social world and communities or not is not close to its end and I doubt there is a one-size-fits-all answer.

It’s established that the content shared by the official communication teams will be socialized. It means that it can have a life cycle outside of its original container : be shareable into communities or social spaces of any kind, be like-able, retweetable, commentable etc…

But a question remains : should this message be delivered in official containers or into communities or social spaces. Today I can see both happening…in fact rather the first case, the second being harder to get because of the weight of legacy. However, it does not matter where the content is provided it’s socialized. And, about deciding whether the message should be carried by the corporate department or its members, my answer is in one of the above mentioned links.

• Information control

There’s a concern that quickly appears on the way to face these new flows of information, both in terms of quality and quantity.

Of course, official communication will remain under control from both standpoints. What what about the rest ? This questioning as a survival of any traditional communication team concerns but, more globally, the concern of any enterprise or team driving such a projet and having to think beforehand the impact of change on employees. There’s in fact no doubt that this transformation will have deep impacts on employees and may make them very uncomfortable, make them lose their landmarks.

In the beginning of the social media era the answer was simple : “let people do…users will find their way alone….as they do on the web”. An easy answer that was obvious from people carrying a break approach (in fact I myself believed it could work) but that did not survive to experimentation. First because the maturity level of the average internaut toward mastering flows is more than uncertain and his uses more basic than expected…most of all in we put this in perspective of the disparate population that crowd the workspace. Then because the social filter, the theory according to which the group is filtering information for any of its members has not been workings untill know, except for a small groups of savvy people.

But the concept of filtering will remain essential. Back to the starting point, to the old world where information was filtered and broadcasted and users were passive receivers ? Not. If filters are needed, the improvement will be on their location : before filters were at the publication level, now they should be at the receipt.

For communication teams, it means that filtering kinds of content that is not under their responsibility…is not their responsibility. What does not mean that, if this team is involved in the global project, they cannot suggest to implement relevant filters. Relevant filters will rely on both people and technology, one compensating the other’s weaknesses.

- human filtering : anyone, at his own level, when dealing with information, should contribute to qualifying it for others. Such a system relies on two pillars : knowing how to move in a world of information and the concept of trust/reputation associated with sources and people. These two points are an impressive stake in terms of training because these capabilities will soon become as essential as being able to use a word processor while very few employees are comfortable with this new context today. It’s also a little bit about enterprise curation.

- technological filtering : human filtering has its limits and the capability of each one to play his part is one of the biggest. Human need help and this help will come from technology. How ? By separating the wheat from the chaff. By suggesting relevant information, people, communities in the context of one’s work. By structuring and priorizing the content of activity streams that will surely replace email clients in the future (I said clients…not emails…). By being able to tell anyone : “if you should focus on 10 things…here are what you should read”. No surprise to see some vendors working hard on analytics and include a BI layer in flows management and, at a global level, working on improving the way huge amount of unstructured data are processed to make it “edible” for employees. This approach also need tools to learn from people’s actions and habits. What is sure is that, while the purpose have long been to make sharing easier, no organization can afford not paying attention to what vendors have in their roadmap to make information processing easier in a near future. If not, beware of information jams !

However, is somethings is changing, it’s the place of the filter. It used to be located prior to publication, it has now to move closer to the receiver. It’s not anymore about what one can publish or not but what one will receive. That makes a big difference. It’s all about relevance in context.

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Most of today’s intranets, those that are beginning to look really outdated, are often being criticized by users because they don’t help them to access relevant information and resources. Hence the wish to move to a social intranet (or intranet 2.0), thinking that allowing more user generated content will fill the gap by a better sharing of “field” information.

If this value proposition of the next generation of intranets makes sense, the keen interest for “social things” may turn heads away from core issues. Anyone who observed intranets in “transition phase” these last months must have noticed one thing :  increasing information sharing from field people solves part of the problem but intranets don’t make things findable today with the current amount of content, there are few chances things will improve in the future.

Bottom line : before thinking of socializing intranets (or at the same time), it’s essential to think about search engines. Specialists will find I’m laboring the point but the fact is this point is often underestimated.

A good search engine, when used smartly, helps to do many things :

- first, it helps to find contents. Not necessarily because people know the exact title of what they’re looking for but because the engine can understand the meaning of things.

- then, it finds things inside documents. When an intranet is made of thousands of things to .doc or pdfs people needs to download it’s vital. Building the intranet of the future does not mean neglecting documents of the past : they have to be, finally, made findable.

- we can also rely on the engine to link different kind of contents. It can be used to suggest relevant communities, documents and people within any other tool (CRM, BI….). Vital when it comes to linking social and business.

- building an unified search. It’s not acceptable, today, to have as many search engines as there are tools. Is it a user-centric attitude ? Search may be global and users may be able to get, with a single request, “official” content, user generated content, user profiles etc… Legacy existing content should also be indexed (Notes bases, ECM, shared directories etc…) because life was existing before the new intranet.

Thinking the social part of the intranet means thinking the whole intranet. Thinking that tags and tool-specific search engines, as powerful as they can be, will solve all the problems is a mistake. Intranets need a global search strategy that is at least is important as the question of content organization that will never be perfect and is destined for failure as the mass of available data will be skyrocketing in a near future.

We know that one things that’s peculiar to intranets 2.0 is to make exchanges possible everywhere, on any subjet. We hear, and for good reasons, that intranets are getting networked. But does it means that they’ll become social networks. I don’t think so. As a matter of fact, networks put people on the same level, regardless to hierarchy while this situation may not be desirable in all conditions.

The difference between a social network and a traditional intranet is that, in the first, people represent themselves while in the second they embody a function. Let’s take the example of John Smith, head of communition, and Jenny Jones, a new hired junior who just joined John’s department.

On the traditional intranet, when John speaks, it’s as the head of communiction. His words are the words of the organization, he’s delivering a kind of truth (at least a corporate one). In fact he does not always sign with his name because it’s the department that’s speaking and, even if John may leave tomorrow, the words have to stay. That’s a situation where a person temporalily embodies an impersonal reality. Tomorrow, John may either leave of get a new position within the organization while the department, that has been existing before him, will still extist after him. In some ways that’s a role that’s lent to hum by the organization and he has to return it in good state when he leaves..

If John speaks on the social network, people will, of course, have in mind who he is when they’ll discuss with him. But, on the network, he’s John Smith before all and embodies his own ideas. He can join discussions, share his opinions but, unless he comes to make the corporate message clearer, he represents nothing but himself. Such a person that “goes down” to the network is respected because of his position but will need to go further and contributes “as himself” to gain recognition form all users. Moreover, on the network, he can join discussions about anything that interests him and is not locked into communication issues.

Confusion may be risky and misunderstandings worry organizations. So, thinking that the organization will officially communicate on the network does not look relevant. When John speaks on the intranet, his voice his the voice of the organizations, when he’s on the network is rather looking for conversations, insights, ideas. He can ever use the network to discuss and listen before making a decision.

The case of Jenny is even more interesting. She publishes on the “‘official” part of the intranet but never in her name because she only edits and shares texts that are validated by the hierarchy. The “authority” of her texts does not rely on her position but on her role. Once on the network, what she says only have as much legitimacy as the recognition she’s given on a given topic, based on her previous contributions. What has nothing to do with her position.

Two kinds of authority, two roles but one person. Being able to distinguish the one from the other is essential.

One may make me remark I recently said that even the official part of the intranet should be open to comments and discussions. I still belive it should. My point here is not about “socialization”, but about making people’s voices clearer. Depending on the context and the nature of the message, people will not react the same way, with the same voice, as diplomatically.

We can also try to find subterfuges, like saying that “Communication Department” or “Innovation” department, are members of the network as if they were real people, what would help them to exist regardless to the person in charge. We can also notice that on Facebook, some people have one account for their friends and one for their business contacts. But I don’t think this would respect the spirit of what we’d like to achieve.

Of course, everything should be done ta favor interactions and have less and less “unembodied” messages, but some compromises have to be found depending on the nature of the message, the person who carry it, its “legal” force etc.. Everything is social, everything can be discussed but it seems obvious that intranet needs a special section in order to clearly identify official contents and those that, even if issued by the same person,

Bien sur il faut favoriser les échanges et l’incarnation des messages mais il y a toute une gamme de compromis à trouver en fonction de la nature du message, de son émetteur (entité officielle ou personne), de son porteur, de sa force dans la “légalité interne” etc…. Tout est social, tout est discutable…mais penser que l’intranet ne peut se passer d’une zone “officielle” afin de baliser de manière indiscutable certains contenus me semble indispensable.

Many organizations are rethinking (or thinking or rethinking) their good old intranet that is obviously affected by the weight of years and wonder how to integrate the famous “2.0 layer” in what is supposed to be a social intranet (or intranet 2.0). But, even if the word are in every mouth it does not mean that the idea of what it exactly mean is clear. There are many options depending on the maturity of the owner of the project, the realistic nature of the roadmap he’s assigned, and the change tolerance of the organization. Depending on the context, some of these options will be more or less relevant.

In the previous paragraph I mentioned the “social layer”, what states that the 2.0 side is a new dimension of the intranet and not an isolated bubble. So, it’s not about building an intranet on the one side and a social network on the other side. Why ? For 90% of employees, using a social network at work is not a reflex and it the network is not close to the center of gravity of their work environment, there are lots of chances no one will use it. Moreover, social activities need stimulation and stimulation often comes from a corporate information, a business related data…in fact from sources that are usually on the traditional intranet.

I suggest that such an intranet relies on some pillars that are. :

Socializing information

What I mean by socializing information can  take one many forms :

- allowing users to choose the sections of the intranet he wants to read in particular and display them on his home page or a dedicated page.

- allowing users to share any content of the intranet with colleagues (via their internal “twitter”, in a community etc…) with respect of rights and authorizations. (But let’s be honnest = today, even without such tools, secret information circulates by email).

- allowing users to share external content and bring them in the internal flow, and let rating and curation mechanisms make it climb to the head of the organization or spread horizontally.

- allwing users to react to any content either where it’s published or by pushing it to a blog or a community to start a conversation.

- allowing users to promote any content by rating it, approving it (“like”) to make it more visible on the homepage or share it through one’s activity stream.

- allowing any corporate department to deploy on-demand microsites (with predefined templates) what makes corporate communication more granular and close to employees.

It’s the least any enterprise can do, most of all because it’s in the scope of the traditional top-down communication that will not disappear but needs serious improvements to become more user-centric and interactive.

Socializing people

Sharing, reacting, discussing and collaborating are good things…but knowing with whom is even more important. Of course, there are people we know and who’ll quickly join our “network”, but there are also all those we don’t know today but we will need one day. So, before telling users to connect and do things together we should make it easier for them to find and identify one another.

Everything starts with a rich profile like those we can find on any social network. It will made of official information from the traditional IT systems (position, hierarchical belonging, competencies…), employees being free not to display all of it, but also of information provided by its owner (past experiences, topics of interest) and even bu his colleagues (endorsements, tags…). Of course, the owner validates anything others want to put on his profile. Last, the profile also includes employee’s social activities : communities, blogs, wikis updates, shared bookmarks…

This information constitute a stream other users can subscribe to to follow the activities of one person in the same way they can follow a specific section of the intranet or the corporate communication. Anyone can choose what appears in his one’s own stream.

This rich profile should not compete with the official directory : it’s the directory. To be more precise, it’s were the directory is accessible to users. (Note to IT people : don’t forget to choose solutions that can sync with several directories at the same time : it’s very useful when there’s not a single directory and it shows a unified view of all your directories even if your standardization project is late…)

Empowering users in a E2E approach

The earlier points were about socializing what was already existing : official contents, documents, directories…The other part of the job is to deal with all the new ways of producing contents that are at the heart of the 2.0 phenomenon and are precisely what organizations want to make happen in terms of cooperation and collaboration. They already have all the tools they need for structured B2E communication (Business to employees) what is usually nothing more than a system that allows file sharing and task allocation. Now they have to address E2E collaboration (employee to employee) that starts and lives by employee and with employees. This is where blogs, wikis, communities etc…matter. They can be used to support structured work but, most of all , excel in emergent collaboration. So there must be space on the intranet where any person, team could start a community, create a blog etc… Please note that there’s a difference between a community which’s a space that can be tooled with blogs, wikis etc.. and using the same tools outside of a community. These are complementary approaches and thinking that everything has to happen within a community may prevent from making the most of some individual initiatives.

Of course, each blog, community, wiki should have its own privacy options.

Socializing business tools

Emergent collaboration is really very exciting but we have to keep in mind that it’s only a part of people’s work. They have to follow procedures, workflows, processes and, in this context, have to use specific business tools. Overlooking this point means overlooking the very reason of their presence in the workspace. Most of all, in nearly all cases, emergent collaboration starts with the need to solve a problem that happened in a structured activity. An important part of these tools can be improved in an intranet 2.0.

There are many ways to achieve this evolution :

- linking these tools to social spaces and tools as defined in the previous point. People following a process, dealing with a customer, can have a dedicated community, project blog or wiki…

- suggesting social information in business tools. For example, a sales person will get, in the CRM, suggestions to visit an expert community related to the product he’s selling, will be suggested product  experts or people who know very well their prospect or the industry of the prospect. These people will never had the idea of going in the “social galaxy” to find solutions to their problems but if the answer is only one click away from the problem it may be different.

- we can see the emergence of new tools allowing people to collaboratively create and refine processes and workflows so that employee will really own and improve by themselves what structures their day to day work. Really senseful.

- it should be possible to start an interaction from and around any business data or information. Once again I’m taking the example of a sales person in front of the screen of his CRM. On the page related to an opportunity, the sales person should not only be able to identify colleagues who can help but also to invite them to interact without leaving the tool. We can also imagine that the discussions will remained linked to the  record and will be searchable and reusable in the future in a similar case.

Since we’re talking about work tools, putting office tools (word processor, spreadsheets…) online to make sharing and co edition easier would also be a good idea.

Suggestion tools

I already mentioned this point in the previous paragraphs. It’s about being able to suggest to each user, depending on the tools he use, the people he follows, the spaces he contributes in, other relevant spaces, people, information.

It also needs a unified and standardized search solution. Users looking for something should be proposed “official” content but also people, bookmarks, communities, blogs. Of course, the search engine should be able to index and “understand” different kind of medias, not only text.

Some tools known as “analytics” or “social analytics” will also be essential in the future. Analyzing behaviors, interactions, history, they link all dimensions of information and work and will improve the relevance of the suggested information, will help people to save time. Analytics will help to turn the incredible raise of information production an opportunity and not a burden.

Activity stream

I said many times that it should be possible to subscribe or follow sections of the intranet, people, blogs, communities…. All these elements should be aggregated in a stream that can be filtered and refined. This stream should also include other sources : calendar entries, information from business tools (mr so and so closed $xxxx deal with such customer, has modified such things, your BI/sales report is ready…), emails, allowing people to act, react, share, answer from the stream. This stream is closer to be the future of email than social networks.

“Un-tools”

We all know that tools are only the visible part of the iceberg. But they can be either inhibitors or catalysts.What I mean by inhibitor is quite clear I think, but I would like to elaborate more of what I mean by catalyst.

Making people use such or such tool because the enterprise bought millions of dollars of licences and had to justify the spending should not be a goal. The purpose should be to  give people tools that help them to do their work as efficiently as possible and in a way that’s obvious and natural to them. They should have to think about switching from a structured way of working to an “emergent” one, wondering where to find a given information, how to handle, share and use the information they found, to break off to switch tools, to copy/past information in order to send/share it.

So, things and information that are relevant one to the other should be one-click away the one from the other, should it be information, people, tools, functionalities. The more all will be integrated the less effort will be needed to convince people to adopt new tools or behaviors because they will discover them intuitively, by themselves, without even noticing.

On the other hand, it’s all about a new vision of work, of human relationships, of the way to organize and share to get things done and create value. It’s a corporate project and the intranet is both a consequence and a lever but nothing more. The best, the most nice-looking, the most integrated intranet will fail if not aligned with an aligned vision. In other words : if all these matters do no sound relevant to you, if you don’t have the courage to adress them, stick with you old intranet. No one will use it but, at least, its cost as been recouped.

Around your intranet you need a corporate vision and project (in fact…build the vision first and the intranet second), there are lines and boundaries to be moved, behaviors and roles to be redefined, management and communications roles de be revisited. Information has to be seen as a living matter that has a life-cycle within the tool rather than an inert matter that has to be stocked and that will possibly fossilize. Your intranet must be the answer to an operational need and be seen as a solution to a problem rather than a problem that will need a solution. Change management should be a little about the intranet and mostly about the project and vision it supports.

One more thing…

It’s a global project so it has to be organized at such. It means that it has to be carried by a cross-functional team involving all the stakeholders. Once that said..

• Your favorite communication consulting agency can help you with your content strategy, the design (be careful : nice-looking is good but it should not be to the detriment of usability), but for the social/collaborative side of the project you need other expertise. Likewise those who can help help you to change the way work is done are not the best to help you with contents or user interface.

• On technology : choose open and robust technologies with open and powerful APIs in order to build a social layer that will be present all over all intranet. Avoid nice-looking and even powerful tools that connect only with themselves and make you (and users) prisoners of their interface and lock user into application silos.

• Don’t think in terms of solutions but services : does this tool provides the services I need to integrate into my intranet without making the tool appear.

• Don’t wonder where to stock information but how it will circulate, flow, spread and live.

• Don’t try to “expose” contents (in a display case, like in a museum where you can look but can’t touch) but make it available for users to use and reuse it as thy need.

• Don’t fall into the “everything UGC” trap. If anything should be socializable, there must be a clear difference between spaces where the organization speaks and those where employees speak in their own name. If not, the risks of confusion between words said “in one’s name” and words said because someone embodies the corporate voice may be a real risk.

• Forget the word social intranet or intranet 2.0. It’s an intranet. Period. The place where the whole organization can meet, exchange, work.

annuaire, API, blogs, collaboration, intégration, intranet, intranet 2.0, intranet social, portail, process, réseau social, socialisation, wikis, workflows

• 5 main trends  :

- the intranet is the front door of a “workplace web”. It’s not only a communication tool that serves the enterprise but a set of work tools for employees.

- It’s becoming more collaborative (even if the road is still long…)

- It’s becoming “real time” because of social networking or microblogging tools (used by more than 20% organizations either on a global scale on in pilot phase).

- It’s becoming mobile : more and more employees can access it from outside of the office and on mobile devices.

• Growing impact of social networks

Only 20% organizations that use social media try to measure the generated value and 50% plan to do so in the future. Those that measure see improvements in information sharing, faster decisions and problem solving,  a decrease in the volume of emails, and the emergence of previously unrecognized experts.

But the road is long : 4 years are needed for a full adoption. Moreover (but is it surprising ?) senior managers are not setting an example.

• 2 challenges for 2011

- establish an appropriate governance that will deal with bot collaboration, the intranet and the “social” dimension while involving all stakeholders at the highest level since it’s a cross organization global project.

- facilitate the “social” dimension that raises new questions on communication and collaboration strategies and turn all the mobilized energies into a clear business value.

Reading the report suggest that we’ve reached a tipping point. But the gap between leaders and the others shows that there’s still a lot of work to be done.

It’s clear that the intranet is still (too much ?) seen as a communication tool and even if the vision of a workplace place is getting stronger, there’s too little maturity in value measurement. Because strategies and governance models are still unclear ?

Anyways, this survey says a lot about the state of the art and the main tends, relying on many focuses on tools, usages, change practices with a systematic comparison between leaders and followers. 90 very rich pages that sum up a research that’s been conducted with 440 organizations.

I’ll focus on some key learnings in future posts.

Meanwhile, you can download an “executive snapshot’ or buy it  here.

Enjoy your reading !