“8 Steps for Achieving World-Class Collaboration” Webinar Recap

In NewsGator’s webinar with Bob Hackett, VP of Information Services at Weston Solutions, we take a look at how WESTON’s Vision 2015 aligns with John Kotter’s 8 Step Process for Leading Change and achieving world-class collaboration. If you missed the complete webinar, click here to watch the on-demand version.

Step One: Create Urgency

For change to happen, the whole company has to want it. For WESTON, this includes building collaboration as a key element and participating in the World Wide Intranet Challenge benchmarking survey.

Step 2: Form a Powerful Coalition

It’s important to convince people change is necessary by encouraging strong leadership and support from key members of you organization—like WESTON’s Overall Steering Committee (including CEO, CIO, CFO & Senior VP Marketing) and Portal Advisory Group.

Step 3: Create a Vision for Change

A clear vision makes it easier for everyone to understand why you’re asking for their participation. WESTON’s vision involves the Portal being the first stop personalized gateway to all people, information, tools, and applications by 2012.

Step 4: Communicate the Vision

For best results, the vision should be communicated often and powerfully, in order to keep it fresh in everyone’s minds. WESTON’s communication includes a Senior Leadership Presentation, Annual Leadership Meeting, and continual intranet and e-mail updates. Bob says a powerful message to employees included “stressing the benefits of commenting, liking, and building a repository” within the portal.

Step Five: Remove Obstacles

After creating a structure for change, remove obstacles that inhibit empowering the people you need to execute your vision. For WESTON, this meant exploring solutions for native SharePoint 2010 and integrating NewsGator. Training for team sites is a significant part of removing obstacles. Bob says “training requirements include about two hours for site owners and six hours for site admins.” Bob also explains the importance of communicating with offices in ‘Taiwan, China & India” to ensure everyone knows what important acronyms like APAC and LAM means.

Step Six: Create Short Term Wins

Have results your staff can see within a short time frame. WESTON’s Early Adopter Program led to 1,000 profiles in the first 90 days.

Step Seven: Build on the Change

Real change runs deep. For WESTON, long-term change came with the two month “Anchoring the Portal”, community outreach, and portal minutes. In encouraging users to utilize microblogs, Bob said “If users see value in it, they will do it. We continue to try and show them this value.”

Step Eight: Anchor the Changes in Corporate Culture

Change should become a core aspect of your organization. WESTON utilized Quick Start Guides, webinars and employee incentives to make this happen. When asked about culture change in document management, Bob said the most important elements were “getting people to use SharePoint instead of their hard drives, sending links instead of putting information in e-mails, keeping documents current and relevant, and storing information in one location but linking as needed.” This also included some customization of the SharePoint 2010 portal, including “placing a global header on every page.”

Now that you have a good overview of how WESTON applied Dr. Kotter’s 8 Step Process for Leading Change to their social initiative, check out the on-demand webinar for a much richer explanation as well as a helpful Q&A session at the end.

Enterprise Social Networking Objections and Objectives in 2012

Over at InformationWeek’s terrific Brain Yard site, David Carr has an interesting piece looking at “10 Enterprise Social Networking Obstacles.” The article builds off 2012 predictions made by business strategist Dion Hinchcliffe, specifically that social would still be facing an uphill struggle in the enterprise this year. David does a nice job of keying in on objections and issues that we at NewsGator, as a pioneer in truly enterprise-scale social computing, have a wealth of experience in overcoming.

While individually interesting, the objections David lists tend to break down into a couple of categories: cultural and technical.

On the cultural side, objections break down to management perception issues and concerns centered on user adoption. Businesses tend to be top-down hierarchies seeking to drive productivity and improve overall business performance. Given this, there would seem to be little inclination at the management level to introduce technology that would reconfigure established reins of control or, worse, introduce a potential time sink that took workers off task.

But look closer at that management imperative. The real goal is not control, but productivity improvements that drive the bottom line. Smart businesses understand this and have learned from past technology adoption cycles – think of the early days of e-mail or instant messaging in the enterprise – that an earlier embrace is ultimately better for the bottom line. We’re seeing companies focused more on a “how do we do this right?” approach to social, rather than dawdling on “do we need to do this?”

The management-level question, “how do we do this right?” draws out a number of worker level issues and objections that made David’s Brain Yard list and we spend a fair amount of our sales and implementation cycles walking prospects and customers through them: How do keep a handle on how this thing runs? How do we organize and manage communities and their creation? How do we ensure this doesn’t become a gold-plated cyber ghetto all but ignored and abandoned? Conversely, how do we ensure that this doesn’t become a distracting time sink? Given the number, variety and size of our customer implementations – from small government agencies to large, multinational Fortune 50 firms – we have a wealth of experience to draw on, but it’s important to emphasize that the people asking these questions are typically looking for answers in order to advance, not derail, their social efforts.

On the technical side, again, the objections have a familiar ring. Business and government have been burned in the past by a rush to The Next Big Thing that leads first to an expensive integration nightmare and then to a fragile spider web of often duplicative and ill-fitting, maintenance-heavy “solutions.” Further, in today’s world of Internet-enabled business, the questions on data controls, governance and compliance go directly from legal to IT.

David’s fifth point – SharePoint – hits right where we live and thrive. He notes that Dion singled out SharePoint as a factor that has “often slowed down the move to more social tools for big companies in particular”. At NewsGator, we’ve been seeing more and more of the opposite effect and here’s why: SharePoint is a terrific platform for social. With the addition of NewsGator Social Sites, SharePoint becomes a seamless, leading edge social tool that checks off the list of objections cited in David’s piece, both cultural and technical.

SharePoint was built from the start as an enterprise system. Social Sites was designed from the ground up to run as a native managed service application on top of the SharePoint and Microsoft stack; no busloads of integration experts needed. This tight integration imbues Social Sites with SharePoint’s true enterprise scale feature sets that address other key technical objections to social such as control of data access, identity, scalability and connection with other enterprise systems. Other “more social” tools that started life as stand-alone, quasi-consumer point offerings focused in a single area, say, group chat, present a more complex path to these capabilities. Complexity is expensive.

In turn, Social Sites lets organizations easily turn their existing SharePoint investment into a highly manageable and productive social business solution with a feature set rivaling any other on the market. Because it seamlessly integrates with the day-to-day Microsoft tools that people already use to get their work done, Social Sites on SharePoint presents a lower barrier to entry for adoption right out of the gate. Its leading-edge, constantly expanding social feature set – from microblogging and activity streams to expert discovery, badging, and video sharing – help ensure that end users find their social enterprise experience as engaging as their Facebook time.

The past is often prologue. In social business, as was the case in the adoption of so many other enterprise technologies, organizations are looking to reduce complexity, increase value from existing investments and drive productivity to increase profits. We see these fundamentals pushing past lingering resistance to the move to the increased adoption of social business technology and putting solutions like Social Sites in an even stronger position in the coming year.

Lucky Eleven

NewsGator closed out the year with tremendous momentum! We were delighted to see our predictions for the market bear out, as more and more large enterprises moved to deploy a social fabric at global scale to drive innovation and competitive advantage. Our enterprise-class, lowest total-cost-of-ownership solution has become the enterprise social standard for the Global 2000 on the Microsoft stack.

Here are our Top 11 accomplishments for 2011:

1. We added 1 Million new paid enterprise seats worldwide.
2. Our fourth quarter was roughly as large as all of 2009.
3. We significantly exceeded our revenue, bookings, and profitability targets.
4. Yes, we’re profitable. 
5. The list of Fortune 1000/Global 2000 companies we added as clients with 10K+ seats is phenomenal. The NewsGator team could not be more excited about our global partnerships!
6. We more than tripled our Channel and Alliance partner eco-system.
7. We are Microsoft’s 2011 US Partner of the Year.
8. Global 2000 clients added from South Africa, Turkey, France, the U.K., Singapore, Indonesia, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Kuwait, Australia … to name a few beyond the U.S.
9. Six new NewsGator babies added!
10. Spotlight and Video Modules; Dynamics, Lync integrations; Glassboard launched; > 4 major releases of great, enterprise-class software throughout the year.
11. A gabillion awards won!

Enterprise social has emerged; we are extremely proud to be at the forefront, and are committed to continuing to delight our clients and partners worldwide. 

Happy New Year, and we hope to see you at our 2012 Collective in March!

 

PS – Check out how to join our rock star team!

When They Say It, It’s Worth Listening To

McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm is a trusted advisor to many of the world’s leading businesses, governments, and institutions, and, now more than ever, an advocate of social tools. McKinsey takes seriously, “telling the truth as they see it.” A truth they’ve recently documented concerns the real value organizations gain by going social.

In 2010, McKinsey analysts found that the ability of companies to engage in more collaborative internal ideation enhanced organizational productivity. This year, their fifth annual survey asked over 4,200 global executives how organizations deploy social tools and the benefit they provide. The survey findings once again underscored the value of social tools, stating they “continue to seep into many organizations, transforming business processes and raising performance.”

The McKinsey survey reveals, “levels of reported benefits not only remain high when respondents’ organizations use social tools for internal purposes but have also increased among those that use them for communicating with customers and for integration with partners and suppliers.” Executives at internally-networked organizations seem to note the highest improvement in benefits from interactions with employees, while externally networking organizations gain most from customer outreach, according to the survey report.

However, despite this great potential for social in enterprises, there continues to be lingering resistance toward becoming fully networked; towards adopting both internal and externally facing networking tools. As 2011 ends, companies can still stand to improve their use and mastery of social technologies. Moreover, while the use of external (customer facing) social tools seems to have increased slightly over the past year, internal tools continue to suffer from neglect.

At NewsGator, we’ve seen our customers benefit from deploying internal social tools, providing capabilities that streamline collaboration and expertise discovery to create a more productive working environment.

How does NewsGator Social Sites increase internal collaboration?

NewsGator’s Social Sites 2010 allows for faster and more collaborative search integration, increased adoption among stakeholders, streamlined communication, improved employee recruiting and retention, and improved overall productivity. First, Social Sites Activity Streams collect an aggregate flow of relevant events, content, and activities from within the system, providing users with the right information faster. And to eliminate information overload, all streams can be easily filtered, enabling users to sort for specific sources or opinions for a given assignment.

Next, to streamline expertise discovery, Social Sites builds on existing SharePoint profile data, and rather than just making it easier to “mine expertise,” provides ways to cast a wide but focused net to a specific audience using familiar social tools such as hashtags.

Use a particular hashtag in a microblog post, and your comment will automatically show up in the Activity Stream of any colleague who has included that term on his or her user profile, making it easier to collaborate with the right people faster.

And for more focused collaboration, Social Sites communities provide an interactive setting for internal and external stakeholders, letting users convene around communities of practice and interests for projects, ideation, new initiatives, or even fun things at work.

Finally, with Social Sites Expertise, scoring can be based on what you DO, in addition to what you SAY you do. Drill into a particular topic and a graphical representation shows exactly who has the most knowledge, based not just on their self-stated areas of expertise but, also on an assessment of their behavior and other users' reactions to them. This capability enables increased confidence in collaboration across all ranks of the organization. Try and recognize these strong performers using Spotlight – a badging, recognition, and expertise discovery module. This value-add module is driven by meaningful, measurable participation, and allows users to shine as subject-matter experts and earn merit-based, electronic badges, while letting organizations quickly locate, recognize and motivate top performers.

The McKinsey survey reports what we at NewsGator have known for some time now: “When adopted at scale across an emerging type of networked enterprise and integrated into the work processes of employees, social technologies can boost a company’s financial performance and market share.” Moreover, “many believe that if organizational barriers to the use of social technologies diminish, they could form the core of entirely new business processes that may radically improve performance.”

At NewsGator we’re telling organizations to get on board now; make the move to social, and watch your organization transform in employee satisfaction and profitability. If you’d like to discuss how your organization can benefit from our enterprise social computing solution, please contact us today!