My Lotusphere speaking experience

I presented at Lotusphere with one of the Lotus Connections product managers, Ted Stanton, on Sunday. It was a Quickstart, which is code for a firehose of information, including market drivers, demonstration, and best practices for infrastructure deployment and business adoption.

During the second session, I was talking about the need to enable federated repositories in WebSphere Application Server 6.1 before installing Lotus Connections.

Only, I said “federated suppositories.” I have no idea why. It certainly woke up the audience.

And, of course, the entire session is recorded, so I’m sure this will come back to haunt me at some point. There goes my political career, eh? (<— Look, Canadian influences are taking over!)

Tags: lotusphere

Connections is like the global lunch room. Beehive? Global cocktail hour!

I’ve recently been explaining Lotus Connections as a global lunch room. It’s where you can share the stuff you’d normally share over lunch in the company cafeteria, but through blogs, social bookmarks, community forums (R2), personal file sharing (R2 or Quickr 8.x, not sure, so don’t ask me), etc. instead.

Beehive, an internal IBM Research application that feels like Facebook, is more like a global cocktail hour. It’s where you share information and ideas about work initially, but then you slowly digress into talking about movies that scare the crap out of you and your favorite types of beer.

I had a recent conversation with a pal of mine who explained Beehive this way (and I paraphrase):

You know when you see some little kid in a game arcade playing Skee-Ball for the first time? They see all those tickets spit out, and their eyes just go wide. WOW! Now, you know those tickets aren’t worth much – they’ll maybe get you some plastic trinket or two – but that kid will keep throwing those balls until their arm falls off, just to get more tickets. That’s what Beehive is like.

I’ve given up trying to explain the business value of Beehive (to IT people!), and I’m just having fun in there. The by-product is that my colleagues get to learn way more about me than they’ll ever learn in the lunch room.

And maybe knowing more about me is the best way to form an even deeper trusted working relationship with me. Benefit? I’ll help you before I help the other guy or girl.

Hmmm…

“Global lunch room” engenders trust between colleagues.

“Global cocktail hour” engenders friendships in the workplace.

Or maybe I’ve just had too much honey to drink.

Tags: facebook, beehive, lotus-connections, ibm, research

SharePoint My Sites: It ain’t just about profiles, people.

Many, many, many customers are enamored of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2003 My Site’s extensive profiling feature. This is because a popular business need is, “Help me find experts more easily.”

Not familiar with My Sites? Check this out:

Yes, anything stored in an LDAP, a directory, or some other personnel data store can be automatically brought forward into My Sites, just like you can in Lotus Connections Profiles. It uses the Business Data Catalog to accomplish this, similar to how Lotus Connections uses Directory Integrator to bring data into the Profiles database and synchronize it with its sources, which is included with the Connections license.

And yes, a person can choose whom they share each individual morsel with – check out the right side of the pic. What, however, would be the point, since I’d be inclined to just lock my stuff down to the people I already trust, who probably already know what I know? But, that’s another blog post. Maybe it’s just a nod to the command-and-control cultures of old-school hierarchical organizations (my god, I work at IBM, and I typed that with a straight face!)

This is an email I just sent in response to a customer’s request.

Here’s the story I always tell to people who put their faith in some huge profiling system alone:

There are Seekers and Contributors in any organization.
Seekers are always searching for an expert in something. They love extensive profiling systems, because it enables them to locate people who they think are experts in a particular topic. Once they locate them, they email, instant message, or call that person for assistance.

Contributors hate filling out profiling systems. Why? Because it means yet another email, IM, or phone call, asking for their expertise. And if they are a true expert, their collaborative plate is already overflowing. They ask, “What’s in it for me? What benefit do I get from completing an extensive profile? All I see is just more people wanting my already-spoken-for time and energy.”

The result? The real experts never fill out their profiles, never keep them updated.

What we’ve found at IBM (Note: there is no definitive research supporting the following, only anecdotal evidence):

After almost 10 years of from-the-executives, repetitive, consistent pressure, only 60% of all IBM profiles are kept updated. (Note that Lotus Connections Profiles is the productized version of IBM BluePages, which has been around since 1998.) And that’s even with an automated email sent out every 3 months to remind people to update their profiles, plus a visual progress bar indicating how complete or incomplete a user’s profile is, plus people’s first-line managers constantly reminding them to update their profile.

This top-down-only approach doesn’t cut it. A bottom-up (or, bottoms-up, if you’re drinking), grassroots approach must accompany it in order to achieve success.

Once we gave Contributors the choice about how to share their knowledge and experience, we found that they were more likely to contribute using these social options, since they realized that the result would be fewer emails, IMs and phone calls asking for their basic expertise.

“Read my blog.”… “Check out my bookmarks.”… “Look at my activity templates.”… “Read my community forum.”

…became the new ‘RTFM‘, if you will.

Now, once Seekers find an expert via Profiles, they are able to consume some of their knowledge and expertise without disrupting them. The nature of the remaining email/IM/phone requests from Seekers were about their deeper experience, their knowledge that will always remain tacit.

In effect, Contributors sharing their more ‘basic’ expertise online enabled Seekers to accelerate whatever collaboration they further required from Contributors.

Zoom!

How did we do this?

We accomplished this by giving Contributors the ability to:

• share their important sources of internal and external information via social bookmarking, which are automatically associated with and are accessible from a user’s profile, as well as via a RESTful API. Also, Seekers can discover experts simply by subscribing to a particular topic from the social bookmarking service – no need to go through a profile first.
  
• share their experiences and expertise via an internal Internet-style blog service that enables not only individual blogs, but team blogs, and offers all blogs on a single website for easy browsing, searching, and integration with other applications via a RESTful API, also automatically associated with and accessible from a user’s profile. Seekers can discover experts simply by subscribing to a particular topic from the blog service – no need to go through a profile first (but you can if you want).
• share their experiences and expertise via Communities that are automatically associated with and accessible from a user’s profile, as well as a RESTful API. Seekers can discover experts simply by subscribing to a particular topic from the community service – no need to go through a profile first (but you can if you want).
• share their “good practice” about human processes through Activities and Activity templates, which, of course are automatically associated with and are accessible from a user’s profile, as well as a RESTful API (seems to be a theme here). Seekers can discover experts simply by subscribing to a particular topic from the activities service – no need to go through a profile first (but, of course, you can if you want).

For a wonderful (and short) education on this very thing, view: When social networking meets knowledge management

Final Thought:

Don’t just give Contributors a profile to fill out, that only enables them to list their skills, projects, etc., and that requires Seekers to use email/IM/phone – and social capital – to gain Contributors’ deeper knowledge. Give them the ability to actually share what they know through many social software choices, so that more Seekers can acquire that knowledge with fewer emails/IMs/phone calls, which degrade the Contributors’ productivity.

Tags: sharepoint, mysites, lotus-connections, profiles, choice

What *is* it with R&D people?

IBM’s R&D people – at least the ones I know – are cool. I say this in part because they have no problem with sharing their ideas, their useful information sources, and some of their research findings via IBM’s various social software tools. Plus, they value the ideas and information sources of the larger IBM population.

In short, IBM R&D people “get it” when it comes to looking beyond their departments and divisions for innovative concepts, and creating trusted working relationships with we non-R&D folks.

If only my customers felt that way.

I just presented to a company’s R&D group at the Lotus Executive Briefing Center in Cambridge, MA, USA (I’m there about two or three times a month, singing the Connections love song to various customers).

Here’s how it went:

Me: [shared research findings about the four archetypes: Lovable Star, Incompetent Jerk, Competent Jerk, and Lovable Fool, then explain that social software can help you find more Lovable Stars, and avoid the Jerks] then… “At its core, social software is about generating trusted working relationships. It’s about looking beyond your immediate network for innovative ideas.”

Them: “It’s about getting the information from the Jerks without having to interact with them. That’s what I want.”

Me: “Uh… ok. You’re describing the old method of KM. Where experts were expected to input their expertise into a database so that others can find it and reuse it. [nodding heads from the audience] The problem is that this method makes knowledge sharing an extra chore, and many people simply stop doing it. The knowledge becomes stale because it’s not kept updated.” [thank you, Luis Suarez, for educating me through your blog about this!]

Them: “Yes.”

Me: “Uh… um… but social software isn’t just about sharing knowledge in a software tool. It’s about connecting individuals in a way that allows them to not only share explicit knowledge, but to form trusted relationships so that TACIT knowledge is shared on a continuing basis.”

Them: “But, that only helps one or two people. I can’t search for that. [Gia’s thought bubble: No sh!t Sherlock. That’s the point.] I need to apply metadata to the information so that I can perform sophisticated searches on it. Our GOAL, Gia, is to discover knowledge so that we can create new knowledge from it. And we can’t do that if all this knowledge you’re saying gets input into social software isn’t structured.”

Me: [WTH?!?] “okaaaay…”

Them: “Look at Wikipedia. It’s structured, it’s social, and it works.”

Me: [I cannot believe this guy] “Wikipedia isn’t social networking software. Putting up a website and giving the world Editor access isn’t true collaboration, unless those people actually WORK with each other, TALK to each other to create the knowledge together.

“What goes on BEHIND THE SCENES between the core members of Wikipedia editors is what I’m talking about. THAT is the innovative collaboration that occurs when trusted relationships flourish. People who are not co-located must depend on social networking software to discover one another, learn about each other, and use MANY tools to communicate (email, IM, phone, face-to-face, wikis, Activities, teamspaces).”

Them: [one guy has his arms crossed, leaning back with a frown; other guy has an ‘undecided’ look on his face; the one woman in the crowd is leaning forward, smiling, nodding] “Hmph.”

The crotchity guy gets up and leaves – he has an appointment (we knew about this from the beginning).

The remaining guy starts shooting darts at me about all the missing collaboration features of Lotus Connections Communities v1, then challenges me:

“How do you solve THAT problem? I can’t even collaborate in this.”

Earlier in our conversation, I had acknowledged these shortcomings and stated that our R2 plans remedy it. Twice.

Me: [internal eye roll] “Like I said, we don’t have it today. You are right. But, here is what we’re planning for R2.” [show them a screenshot and explain it.]

Them: [placated] “Ah, ok. But, we need to be able to apply metadata to all that unstructured forum content.”

Me: I trot out the fact that you can create your own forms, complete with as much metadata as you’re willing to impose on your people, in Quickr and Notes applications – they’re a longtime QuickPlace and Domino customer.

Them: “Yeah, yeah, we know what we can do today. I want to know how to do it in Connections.”

Me: [looking for a sharp stick with which to poke myself in the eye, since that would be more fun at this point] “This kind of feedback is what our development team would enjoy hearing. How about we set up a meeting?”

Them: “Yeah, sure. Ok.”

I’ve presented to four different R&D groups, and only one of them “gets” social networking software. The rest simply poo-poo the idea that anyone other than themselves could be innovative.

So, help me out here. How can I communicate the value of Lotus Connections to R&D teams? I’m not doing a very good job of it, and I need to get better.

Lotus Connections Is… People!

References to Soylent Green and “harvesting collective intelligence” aside, I’d like to hammer home the idea that Lotus Connections is all about people. Specifically, connecting them.

Too explain-it-to-me-like-I’m-two for you? Ok.

When customers talk to me about determining a collaboration tool strategy (this is a euphemism for “we need to either pick IBM or Microsoft for the whole collaboration enchilada” ), I insistently remind them that Lotus Connections isn’t really about “collaborating” in the sense that we usually mean it. When customers say “collaborate”, they typically mean “sharing information with a team or group of people I always work with in order to get things done.” And for IT folks, that usually translates to individual and team collaboration tools. From IBM, that means Lotus Notes, Lotus Quickr, Lotus Sametime, and/or Lotus Connections Activities, depending on the specific business requirements.

But, what customers are learning is that there is a lack of community-building tools in their organization. And strong communities are critical to forming high-performing teams again and again. Enter the other four Lotus Connections services: Blogs, Communities, Dogear, and Profiles.

Here’s how I explain it in many of my presentations:Whenever we form a team, the first thing we do is create a mechanism to collaborate. We jump to the bottom of this table without realizing all the effort that goes into forming truly effective teams!

Let’s start at the top of the table.

When forming teams, you typically have Seekers and Contributors. If you’re a Seeker, you need someone. If you’re a Contributer, you are someone.

The blue area displays the benefits of social networking activities.

Three factors are addressed with social networking:

• Awareness: If you’re a Seeker, social networking can help you answer the question: “How do I know who is out there?”. If you’re a Contributor, it answers the question: “How can I become more known?” Social networking software helps in both of these areas.
• Competence (Trust): If you’re a Seeker, you want to know if the person you found is competent – “Do they know their stuff?”. If you’re a Contributor, social networking software enables you to advertise your expertise.
• Benevolence (Trust): If you’re a Seeker, you want to know if this person will help you – “Are they nice to work with?”. If you’re a Contributor, social networking software enables you to develop your reputation as a trusted partner, and to show a little of your personality in some respects. This can give others clues as to how best to approach you from an interpersonal level.

And here’s an even better explanation from my colleague, Kathryn Everest:

One of the talking points on this slide that I use is the research on the importance of diversity in innovation. When clients go right to the “how do I collaborate” and don’t think about “who should be collaborating”, they are not enabling their workforce to expand their network – but rather giving them a tool to more effectively work with the “folks they know”. One of my key messages is about educating customers to educate their workforce that diversity can really help them come up with new ways (innovative ways) or new ideas.

Research on high performers tells us that high performers aren’t the people with hundred of connections (it is not a numbers game) but rather they are people who have a lot of reach and diversity in their network, and regularly add new connections to bring in new ideas and new perspectives. The “old boy/girl network” may be effective for some things – but not for innovation.

Tags: social-networking