Accenture Webinar Follow-Up: Q&A with Tom Barfield (Part 2)

In our recent webinar with Tom Barfield of Accenture, he explored how the company takes a comprehensive hire-to-retire approach for capability development through social learning. In Part 1 of this blog we summarized the viewers’ answers to the question “what imperatives or challenges are causing you to consider a social approach?”

In Part 2 of this blog, Tom graciously took the time to answer many of the remaining questions we did not get to during the live webinar. Here they are by category:

Adoption

Q: How do you define connect, contribute, and cultivate from a measurement perspective? And can you share specifically how you would put people into the 3C categories?

Tom: The table below summarizes the metrics that are aligned to each of the three C’s. Each person receives a total score which is made up of a possible 100 points for each of the C’s. Any one metric may be worth 10-30 points.

Connect	Contribute	Cultivate
Subscribe to e-mail digest	Contribution posted to KX as contact	Respond to Discussion
Download content in the KX	Post Discussion Question	Comment microblog, contribution, video, blog, idea
Vote Idea (KX or Grapevine)	Create Blog	Edit Wiki
Member of a Community	Create Microblog
Rate	Create Idea (KX or Grapevine)
Complete People Profile - bio, photo, additional skills	Create Wiki
Visit an Assets tab	Create Bookmarks
Visit one.accenture.com	Download of content on the KX by others
	Blogs viewed by others

Q: What period of time is used to measure the 3 c's (a month, week, quarter?) How often do I need to contribute to be counted as such?

Tom: Today we run our scoring process after each quarter. Most elements are based on activity during the quarter, but there are some exceptions. For instance, in Connect, if you complete your profile and subscribe to the email digest once, you will automatically continue to receive points in the future. 

Q: How do you address the fear factor (e.g., where someone sits on a painful lesson learned rather than publicizing it for all to learn from)?

Tom:  An excellent question – and one I admit we haven’t completely solved.  From a learning perspective failure has much to teach. I don’t expect that our people proactively share their lessons learned - individually. I do see more of that openness, however, in responses to questions (ex. “I tried this approach and it didn’t work”). I think we do a better job at capturing lessons learned more formally through our offering owners – who are responsible for specific solutions. As we implement these solutions we are able to learn from our mistakes which are then baked back into our offerings for future delivery.

Another type of fear factor can come from general sharing. There can be a hesitancy to share because of a belief that their point-of-view or insight needs to be perfect. One of the ways we try to address this is by encouraging our leaders to be natural in their communication style – lose the formality, spelling mistakes are OK. We also encourage our leaders to engage in conversations – even if it is simply saying “Thank you” - to a post that was made. 

Management

Q: Do you still find the need to have a "librarian" to manage taxonomy, tagging, and findability of the data? Or are you 100% organic in terms of management of the knowledge?

Tom: The Social Learning team I lead is responsible for providing taxonomy management governance; interestingly we have just started an internal debate on my team about the value of taxonomy vs. folksonomy (I believe both have a place in our world). The main purpose of taxonomy and tagging is of course to help improve the findability of content. 

From a content perspective our biggest challenge continues to be search quality. In this past year we have formed a small Search Center of Excellence team whose sole responsibility is identifying and implementing approaches to improve search quality. This can be through search relevancy tuning or improvements to managing our content. I expect that we will start seeing the fruit from this team’s work in the next month or so.

Q: What is the curation overhead? Do you invest in resources directly or expect the end users to do this work?

Tom: We have a central team who are located primarily in India that helps us with the management of content, metrics, and site maintenance. We are also in the process of expanding the responsibility of this team to include community management. Approximately 70% of the content that is contributed is harvested from our client teams vs. posted by end users. We focus our content harvesting on the most strategic content areas where content gaps have been identified. 

Technical

Q: Are you using any product for gamification? Or is it custom software?

Tom:  We plan to use the Spotlight module provided in NewsGator Social Sites.

Q: Do you use FAST for SharePoint for search?

Tom:  Yes

Q: The e-mail into a community to post a question is interesting. How is that enabled?

Tom:  This is native functionality included in NewsGator Social Sites. Questions or insights that are posted with #hashtags cause the system to identify any community or users following those #hashtags and routes the question/insight to those communities and individuals.

Rollout

Q: Can you talk more about the integration between social learning and formal learning programs?

Tom:  There are several areas of integration:

• Organization – We have an organization known as Capability Development responsible for working with areas of our business to understand their skill and knowledge needs. Based on these needs, Capability Development will develop a strategy to meet the performance goals.  This strategy incorporates a combination of formal and social learning approaches.
• Governance – Members of Capability Development (including the Chief Learning Officer) are a primary component of the Social Learning Steering Team that I lead which helps me set the vision and priorities for our social learning investments.
• Technology/Innovation – While our Social Learning system (called Knowledge Exchange) and our Learning Management System (myLearning) are separate technology infrastructures, the teams driving these systems work together in developing the visions and requirements of each system. 

Q: Do you find it works best to organize groups/communities around skill sets (e.g., project management) or industry sectors or product offerings?

Tom: Yes, yes, and yes. Those are all examples of categories of communities that are provided. I wouldn’t say that one is better than the other. Our main categories of communities are Industry (ex. Banking), Business Function (ex. CRM, Strategy), Technology (ex. Testing, Technical Architecture) and Offering.  We also have informal social communities (ex. Running, Gamers).


Thank you Tom for taking the time to answers these great questions submitted by our webinar viewers! Again, if you missed the webinar, you can watch the on-demand version anytime.

As you can tell Accenture has a quite impressive and innovative social strategy where they invest heavily in making sure their employees benefit from social tools like Microsoft SharePoint and NewsGator Social Sites. To find out more about how NewsGator can guide you in the right “social” direction, contact us today!

Support Spontaneous Collaboration with a Sphere

Collaboration and internal group communications are often spontaneous; a quick brainstorm of ideas or an ad hoc clustering of people focused on a topic or problem. For this type of agile collaboration you don’t need a long-term, full-scale community with full document handling capability – you need a Sphere!

NewsGator Social Sites 2010 lets users quickly pull together a public or private group using distribution lists or active directory groups. Tapping into SharePoint audiences, Sphere users can easily gather the right group of people as followers to be part of the conversation – without the need of involving IT.

Since Spheres are all about agility and being flexible in a fast paced environment, simple administration of ownership is vital and easier than ever. A Sphere administrator gets a new tab in the management user interface providing them with the ability to change the ownership of a Sphere as needed. This new admin feature makes a Sphere more able to fulfill its intended function – empowering a workforce with more internal mobility whereby creating a collaborative environment that moves as quickly as your business.

To find out more about how NewsGator Social Sites and its Sphere feature can help you enable a more nimble, collaborative workforce, please visit www.newsgator.com.

Are there instances when self-created and administered breakout groups like Spheres would make sense for your organization?

OppenheimerFunds Webinar: Follow-Up Q&A Blog

If you attended our recent webinar with Codey Fredenhagen and Colleen Bridges of OppenheimerFunds, you know their corporate intranet, called MyOFI and built on SharePoint 2010 and NewsGator Social Sites 2010, has grown virally throughout the organization. We had so many questions from the audience we weren’t able to get to all of them during the webinar. Fortunately, Codey and Colleen were gracious enough to take the time to answer the rest of them via this follow-up blog. Here they are:

Rollout

1.  How do you or did you measure adoption and collaboration? Do you use any specific tools or strategies?

a.  We have developed specific SQL queries that export the data out of the database and then report in Excel.  We are taking the basic metrics at this point (e.g., how many events by type week over week, how much event activity per Community).

b. We learned at the NewsGator Collective user group meeting, however, that these might not be the best measures. Some companies are using metrics around how quickly information was found, measuring the perception of speed gained in finding knowledge and the increase in collaboration.  We are looking at how we can best measure this in our environment.

2.  Can they tell us more about the Change Management group?  What was their focus and what type of resources made up this group - HR, Communications, etc.?

a. The Change Management (CM) Group is comprised of Corporate Communications, Project Governance & Delivery, SharePoint Development, Corporate Training, Marketing, Legal and Compliance.  It’s a team of about eight people for a 2,000 person employee base.

b. The CM Group is primarily geared to address “social” collaboration. Their goal is to teach about and introduce people to a new way of getting information to others that need it. The group initially focused on how to drive adoption and awareness, but now is more focused on communicating the value of “collaboration.”   

c. The CM Group was absolutely vital to making the implementation of MySite and Communities a success. You need to build excitement across a diverse group – the CM Group is a cheerleader as well as a fighter when needed. In our functional groups it was crucial to have people that could cross those boundaries easily and effectively. It’s imperative to keep the CM Group diverse and positive. 

3. Did you perform any formal usability testing? If so, what types of insights came from that research? Did any customizations come from that research?

a. When it came to our corporate intranet site makeover, MyOFI, we had an experienced User Experience Team work through how best to lay out the site. It has really paid off. Finding information on the site is far better than it used to be. 

b. Also, the need to incorporate a consistent branding across all the sites was a key component to getting enterprise acceptance. Our previous efforts were not globally branded and it gave people an excuse to avoid an application that didn’t appear to be “corporate sponsored”.

Adoption
4. How are you educating users on E2.0 in general (i.e., why is E2.0 important vs. how to use Social Sites)?

a. There has been a tremendous amount of senior leadership campaigning and promoting the use of E2.0. We hold several demo sessions (Lunch-n-Learn, Tech Dojo, etc.)  We have seeded the community with some evangelists that were early adopters and believers in the medium. And we have specifically done some targeted training about when to use email, IM, blogs, and social (NewsGator). 

b. Education is probably the most important aspect of the implementation. You need to reinforce that it is okay to use this medium to communicate and promote its use. It has been a major shift for our company to communicate in this manner. 

Results/Benefits
5. How are you making the jump from social to business? In other words, what do you think will be the most productive use of this tool in your business environment?

a. It really has been more about the business and much less about the social. We rolled this out as a business tool to be used for business communication. This set the tone. It wasn’t introduced as a “water-cooler” substitute – more as a tool that would enable others to more easily collaborate. People recognize that “social” is effective in a business setting because people get what they need faster and more effectively than other means.

6. Is your implementation purely social or have you formally embedded any business processes (i.e., moved from some previous process to the Social Sites platform)?

a. We didn’t have any previous internal social application, so this was our initial foray into the space. We set the tone as “business only.”  All the business processes are embedded into MySite, the Intranet, and Communities. We found people are too busy trying to do their jobs; that just “social” was not worthwhile. The activities they perform are about getting work done. 

Governance
7. Do you let anyone create a Sphere in Social Sites? Or, do they have to request it and have someone with elevated privileges create it?

a. Spheres are available to anyone to create and manage – unlike Communities which are set up through an approval process to ensure people know the commitment that they must make for the site.

8. What are you putting in place to govern video? File format? File size? Raw/edited? Centralized videographers or does everyone gets a camera?

a. Video hasn’t taken hold too much. We do limit personal MySite storage and each Community also has a limit of 5GB. We can increase that if there is a reasonable request.

b. The governance of video falls under the strict electronic usage policy that we have established. 

c. We have installed some professional video components that comprise the main intranet site. These are managed by our Corporate Communications group and are professionally edited and produced. This was a large investment and commitment on the part of our Corporate Communication teams and it has been very well received. 

Management
9. Who maintains and monitors the social communication at OppenheimerFunds? Is it HR, IT or Corporate Communications? What challenges are you seeing, if any, with this?

a. All social, email, and IM communication is monitored by our Compliance department.

b. Surprisingly, there have been very few issues around the implementation of MyNewsfeed. We have more challenges with “lurkers” and encouraging them to contribute on the site instead of just consuming. 

Compliance
10. What technology does OppenheimerFunds use for archiving and retaining SharePoint content to comply with FINRA regulations?

a. Previous to installing NewsGator’s Newsfeeds, we had installed the company’s 17a-4, retention product. This tracks all of the “social” traffic and routes it to a searchable archival and monitoring solution.  The SharePoint content is also retained in an off-site backup that is archived for seven years. 

Thank you Codey and Colleen again for taking the time to answer these additional questions! If you miss the webinar, you should check it out!

Webinar Recap: How Nalco is weaving social into the fabric of their business

In NewGator’s recent webinar with Dan Flynn, Knowledge Management Manager at Nalco, we explored how McKinsey and a corporate study showed a need for a more robust set of tools for tiered services and for a higher quality knowledge system, inspired a three-prong community strategy for weaving social into the fabric of their business.
 
An Ecolab company, Nalco selected SharePoint 2010 and Social Sites 2010 to power their social and community activities, search functions, and mobile enterprise. As the platform began connecting people with content and other people, Nalco decided to focus their efforts on four areas:

• Libraries for explicit knowledge
• A social element including communities
• A search center
• A mobile component

The Power of Communities

The goal was to foster a culture change around knowledge access. Nalco discovered that communities with strong leadership and good reasons to exist thrived, while other communities with a lack of focus and leadership tended to flame out.

Nalco developed governance through previous experience, benchmarked learnings, pilot results, and consultant input. This included using the “Thou Shalt” model and dividing community types between those with clear business objectives, and those without. Nalco also identified several community success factors including:

• Strong leadership and sponsorship
• Business alignment
• Adequate resources and defined roles
• Engaged members
• Clear deliverables and activities
• Development of trusted relationships
• Standard collaborative practices
• Technology support
• Motivation and recognition
• Community measurement

They use a Health Check process on a quarterly and yearly basis as an effective way to keep communities focused and thriving. The Health Checks also serve as a roadmap to leaders.

Check out the full webinar with Nalco to learn more about their pilot process, three-prong community strategy, “Thou Shalt” process, benchmarked learnings, routine community Health Checks, and how their biggest advocate on the executive team has helped drive change and reinforce the business value of social throughout the organization.
 

Eight Reasons Enterprise Social Software Makes Sense: #7 Intelligent Activity Streams

In today’s digital age, the art of personal efficiency is constantly evolving. Day planners and palm pilots have become nearly obsolete, replaced with faster, sexier tools that encourage rapid information consumption, utilization and sharing.  Everyone wants to know what’s happening NOW and what will be happening 10 minutes from now.  Needless to say, it can be hard to keep up with what’s important and act on what needs to happen. 

Using a social software feature like activity streams is an important part of tracking what’s happening NOW – in your business, with your colleagues, in consumer social media…but keeping track of it all is a fluid affair.  You can literally consume every minute of every day processing the information.  How do you pick out the important bits to use or share?  Fortunately, NewsGator Social Sites 2010 can help in a number of ways. By implementing intelligent routing, filtering and visualization, and recommendation engines, NewsGator cleans up your activity feed – based on your filters and settings - delivering only the information you need.  Just as useful are recommendation engines and intelligent routing. By analyzing your online behavior, in particular, the content you are reading and searching most often, recommendation engines organize and prioritize posts specifically for you, while intelligent routing makes your network more efficient and adaptable.  Keeping your activity stream lean and relevant ultimately improves your productivity. 

After all, who needs just another tool adding to the confusion?  Don’t we want to simply remain current and share relevant information with colleagues?  Leave the passé, wannabe gadgets in the closet; just clean up your activity stream.

Subscribe to the countdown via e-mail, RSS, or Twitter. Or, keep watching for next week's #6. Ask a Social SharePoint 2010 question and we may feature it in our next post.

A Special Thank You to Strategic Knowledge Solutions

The 2012 NewsGator Collective User Group Meeting took place a little over a week ago. The entire agenda was jam packed with case studies, networking opportunities, and hands-on learning experiences and it’s been wonderful to hear the continued positive feedback from attendees about how much value they were able to take away from the event.

New to the Collective this year was a full-day Social Boot Camp - a highly-engaging, interactive workshop focused on turbo-charging attendees’ social initiatives. The workshop was facilitated by Dr. Mike Prevou and Mike Hower of Strategic Knowledge Solutions using a participant-centered, wisdom-of-the-crowd approach.

Social business software is as much about people as it is technology. However, many companies that decide to go social to encourage collaboration end up conflating their business goals with technology requirements and parameters. This workshop placed a particular focus on helping attendees address this balance by determining and refining their business goals separate from the technology.

Prevou and Hower have a combined 30+ years in knowledge management (KM), organizational learning, and professional development. With their guidance, the Boot Camp covered a lot of ground: collaborative exercises, group discussions, and Q&A on social business use cases, governance, risk and compliance, measuring social success, best practices for community management, and overcoming challenges and barriers.

Feedback we received showed attendees found the interaction with peers to be invaluable. They were able to exchange and learn best practices that could be implemented immediately within their organizations. In addition, the real-world experiences shared during the Boot Camp helped attendees develop strategies to help identify the social business value within their own companies. You can’t ask for more than that from a hands-on workshop!

Suffice to say, Mike and Mike did a wonderful job and we’d like to pass along our sincerest “thank you” for a job well done!

Eight Reasons Enterprise Social Software Makes Sense: #8 Fluid Conversations & Problem Solving

NewsGator is counting down the top 8 ways Social Enterprise Software will enhance business in 2012 and beyond with our blog series dedicated to enterprise social software.

Enterprise social software takes the “hallway conversation” and brings it into the 21st century as new ways to connect people continue to evolve every day, helping to facilitate collaboration and innovation in ways not previously possible.

“Enterprise social computing, at its core is about working differently and making better use of all the people and ideas in a new way. What NewsGator brought was so much creativity and so many new social tools that made it easier for us to connect our people.” – Steve Brantner, Manager Learning & Communications at General Mills

#8 Fluid Conversations & Problem Solving

Allowing people to ask and answer questions within a community of skilled professionals is one of the quickest ways to drive the value of cross-enterprise collaboration - by helping people solve problems in real-time through ‘simply smart’ collaboration.

As an example: imagine you are a designer integrating multiple elements from marketing to IT to sales and need clarity on a new element’s functionality. With business collaboration software, you’ll be able to quickly tap into your colleagues throughout the organization to see what others are doing and how your solutions will impact their needs. This is how smart collaboration is increasing performance for organizations.

Once a question is posed, notifications go out to community members who can then provide answers. With Social Sites from NewsGator, you can:

 

• Ask a question via email
• Participate using mobile devices (no need for Internet connectivity)
• Launch a poll
• Attach files to questions and include files in responses
• “Like” comments to provide quick feedback
• Utilize IM, video and audio conversations with available co-workers
• Create communities or Spheres to gather like-minded collaborators
• Manage your social business network in real time with easily accessed dashboard tools

The world of work has evolved. Integrating social software for the enterprise into your systems will help transform your business into a more productive and efficient organization that’s ready to compete on a global scale.

Subscribe to the countdown via e-mail, RSS, or Twitter. Or, keep watching for next week's #7. Ask a Social SharePoint 2010 question, and we may feature it in our next post.

A Community Organizer for SharePoint Social Communities

One of the more powerful basic capabilities of Social Sites 2010 is the Communities feature, which creates a focused setting where both internal and external stakeholders can collaborate for a common, often highly specific, purpose. Social Sites 2010 makes it easy to create, join and recommend communities and now, we’re making it even easier to keep them organized.

In many organizations, communities develop a natural hierarchy as sub-groups develop, like for a multi-phased project. Keeping track of activities relevant to particular communities could be a challenge as the community structure becomes more complex. That’s where the Community Roll-Up feature in Social Sites 2010 comes in handy.

The community activity stream in Social Sites 2010 now has two settings: “Rollup Child Communities” and “Exclude Child Communities that are not followed.” The first setting causes events from communities situated at a lower level in the SharePoint site structure (the Child community) to be displayed on the activity stream of a “Parent” community sitting at a higher level in the structure. The second setting lets the community determine whether to display all sub-community activity or have it limited to only those SharePoint social communities being actively followed. There are no limits to the number of levels that can be rolled up and sub-communities with their own sub-communities (hey, it happens) can enable the feature to roll up events from those groups as they see fit.

With these capabilities, a community can keep its activity stream both comprehensive and relevant, helping members stay productive and avoid information overload. Also, because Social Sites 2010 runs as a native service on SharePoint, the new roll-up capabilities inherit enterprise-class security features. For instance, a member of a parent SharePoint community lacking access privileges to a sub-community will not see activity events from that group, regardless of rollup settings.

As social enterprise computing broadens and matures, new challenges, like dealing with the potential information sprawl of hierarchical communities, will continue to present themselves. NewsGator will keep your organization, and its SharePoint investment, one step ahead.

So, are you noticing a rise in community sprawl in your social enterprise? If so, how are you dealing with it?

Find out what’s really going on with an activity stream

Activity streams for business are increasingly busy places, so it’s a good thing they’re becoming smarter at driving content to the people who can best use it.  Although access to information provided through activity streams is wonderful, users shouldn’t have to wade through oceans of information to find what’s important to their job.  That is why NewsGator has taken a fresh look at activity streams with Social Sites 2010 and added some clever filtering and sorting options.  Rather than rely on traditional filters that are simply based on keywords, Social Sites 2010 Top News incorporates a truly intelligent filter that uses a learning algorithm to review your activities and understand what information is most relevant to you.  Based on what it learns from your activities, the filter selects and promotes to the top of your stream those Top News items - bringing the most relevant data to the forefront.

Social Sites 2101 also adds smart sorting to the activity stream to help users stay current.  While it is great to have things filtered properly so the most relevant posts are listed prominently, it is even better when the most current update to the stream is moved to the top of the conversation.  So now, not only is information filtered for relevance to each user it is also sorts by the time it was posted.

There is no better way to gauge the pulse of an active company than through activity streams for business.  Every department is buzzing with projects they are working on and sharing rapidly–expanding volumes of information.  With these new features NewsGator Social Sites 2010 is continuing to make sure employees can easily harness the power of the social enterprise – helping to boost their productivity and drive real business results.  

Do you get overwhelmed keeping up with the activity stream? How do you cope?

NewsGator Social Sites Activity Streams with Vizit Connector

You are here – Social Sites Activity Streams

GPS for the car is a vast improvement over printed maps. Both give you directions, but the GPS on (or in) your dash delivers the information visually, in context, in the moment. It’s actually similar to what NewsGator’s recently announced integration of Social Sites with Vizit does with social enterprise activity streams

Vizit’s NewsGator Connector lets users socialize documents in SharePoint; highlighting key passages and adding social footnotes that guide collaborators to important information, enabling productive, focused discussions. This creates amazing efficiencies when deployed through Social Sites Activity Streams.

Traditionally, resources linked into an activity stream simply pop a user out to another application and the wilderness of what may be a lengthy document. Like a scrawl of directions next to a printed map, it’s up to the user to figure out where the relevant sections are. Enterprise social is supposed to be more efficient than that and with Vizit integration into Social Sites, it is.

Vizit-socialized links posted into Social Sites activity streams not only allow the documents to be viewed within that same activity stream, but also direct users to particular paragraphs called out or footnoted by the original poster. This has two obvious benefits:  first, it keeps the collaboration activity streamlined and focused in one environment, rather than forcing participants to other applications and inviting inherent communication lags common with tools such as email;  second, it keeps the collaboration and comments focused on information deemed most relevant in the moment by the poster of the link. In this way, all people active in the stream can be sure they are not just on the same page, but the same paragraph.

Vizit’s ability to tap into over 300 different types of document formats and provide previews of their contents also gives Social Sites users a leg up when it comes to discovering information. Those visual previews mean no more blind-clicking into document after document in search of the right information — kind of like that GPS in your car giving you an easy way to see the nearby food and fuel options without leaving the highway.

Enterprise social is a vast and ever-expanding landscape. Social Sites and Vizit make it easier and more efficient to see where you are and where you’re going. How about you? Spending much time in the social breakdown lane, clicking and closing poorly organized document archives in search of the right information to share?