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!

Tune in by tuning out: Mute Activity Stream Email Notifications

The information age mantra seems always to be: “more! faster!” In a social enterprise, activity streams are a prime example. They can get loud…fast – and there’s no dial to turn it down.  While volume and speed have their place, increasingly the real value in information is found in managing it - being able to tune in to what’s really important while filtering out the noise. Not everything requires a comment. Sometimes a glance is enough to give you what you need and you don’t need to be included in every contribution that follows. 

NewsGator Social Sites is making it easier to hone your social experience by applying intelligent routing and muting email notifications. Being able to fine-tune the activity stream silences the white noise, making it easier to stay focused on relevant content at the right time. Just click the “mute” link in your email notification to opt-out from receiving further notifications on a particular thread. Worried you might miss something?  When another user specifically @targets you, you automatically re-subscribe to the conversation and begin receiving notifications again.

Smart, relevant social interaction is sometimes as easy as clicking “mute.”  To learn more about how Social Sites is boosting company productivity and engagement globally, please visit www.newsgator.com.

Have you found less can be more in social information? Would a “mute” capability help you tune in?

“Hashtag Assistant” effortlessly enriches metadata stores and enhances information discoverability

Every lock has a key.  For enterprise content management and social collaboration, hashtags are that key.  Hashtags (#) mark important keywords or topics and make microblogs and questions & answers more visible, discoverable, and relevant in the activity stream. Hashtags unite users around common interests, topics, and projects, and encourage meaningful discussion and collaboration within an enterprise.

Ok, so hashtags are great, right?  But what happens when you get an overzealous tagger or someone who tags nothing?  Wouldn’t it be nice to have some smart suggestions? NewsGator’s latest “Hashtag Assistant” feature for Social Sites 2010 makes it easier to tag the right terms quickly.  Social Sites Hashtag Assistant suggests tags from the Enterprise Metadata Service as the user types.  Click on a suggested hashtag and it is automatically added to the post or question. To keep it simple for users and to ensure system performance remains high, only single-term hashtags are suggested — and of course, a user can still choose to create their own relevant hashtags as desired.

To find out more about how NewsGator’s hashtag suggestions feature can increase the visibility of important content within your organization, please visit www.newsgator.com.

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.

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.

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?

A vote for the social enterprise

Within any organization, collaboration is key. People want to engage, to be involved in the process, to share opinions and shape important business decisions. An idea developed alone can go a long way, but one shaped by consensus speaks for more and reveals more — enabling people across all ranks of the organization to bounce ideas off of one another, and to innovate and collaborate in a system that is more inclusive and more profitable.

Now, NewsGator has released its latest feature to facilitate internal collaboration. New to Social Sites 2010, “polls” enable users to cast their vote on important topics, share their own opinion, or just see what the rest of their connected world thinks.
Users can now set optional answers on a question, transforming the question into a poll to foster increased employee collaboration on important projects and business decisions. Users check the box corresponding to the poll answer they want directly within the Activity Stream.

After any one of the choices has been selected, the poll will re-order the display of choices from most-selected to least-selected options, providing a simpler way to measure opinions and evaluate responses to actions taken in the system. Also, to make poll results more accessible to the user, the activity stream now contains a specific polls filter, immediately displaying all public polls and all polls in private communities or spheres that a specific user is following. To see the polling feature in action, check out the short polling video on the NewsGator YouTube page.

Cast your vote. Choose NewsGator’s enhanced Social Sites 2010 computing solution and watch as “polls” and other new exciting features streamline your company’s internal processes, increase employee satisfaction, and boost overall company productivity. To find out more about how NewsGator can guide your organization towards a more profitable and collaborative working environment, please visit our website at www.newsgator.com.

Facilitate and Propagate Timely Corporate Messaging and Social Business Collaboration with Ghostwriting

In every organization, responsibilities pile up. It can seem impossible to prioritize everything and get it done on time. Anyone in a business organization can derive real value from improving their workflow and collaborating to get a message out.  Enter NewsGator’s latest “ghostwriter” feature for simplifying social enterprise collaboration on blog posts.

In many organizations, an employee may be asked to draft a blog post for someone else.  The writer will likely create a draft in a desktop-based word processing tool and ask the requester to review, edit, and approve the copy.  This exercise typically involves working several revisions of the draft through company email—opening and closing the publishing software over and over, weeding through several strings of messy email comments and tracked changes to enable organizational leaders to express their views in a timely fashion.

NewsGator’s ghostwriter feature simplifies this process.  When this feature is enabled, users can choose to save blog posts on behalf of another colleague.  When the draft is done, a notification email is automatically sent within the activity stream event to the appropriate person.  This feature tightens workflow, letting organizational leaders, or approvers, quickly access relevant blog content, voice their opinions, and make productive edits directly in the system. Once approved the post goes live as written by the approver so that employees see the content as coming from a notable voice in the organization.

This ghostwriting capability also makes blog posts and associated comments more accessible to all colleagues, increasing social enterprise collaboration and commenting on content throughout the entire organization. Adding a comment on a blog post creates an event in the activity stream, enabling users across all parts of an organization to easily view and interact with it.

NewsGator’s latest ghostwriting features make it easier for business leaders to provide timely input on company activities, while facilitating an interactive and content-driven social organization. To learn more about how NewsGator’s social enterprise collaboration ghostwriting features for Social Sites version 2.5 can help build and better engage your workforce, please visit www.newsgator.com.

“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.