Collaboration 2.0

November 5th, 2009

The Enterprise 2.0 Value Propositions Agenda

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 8:26 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Conference, E2.0, Susan Skrupski, Oliver Marks

Time is Money: Where’s the Beef?
The now biannual US ‘Enterprise 2.0‘ conference is a wrap, but disappointingly there is still little business understanding of what the term means or what the value propositions and benefits are. The general 2.0 suffix is well understood by technology enthusiasts but in the world of the enterprise - or small and medium sized businesses - it’s still hard to deliver an understandable and memorable Enterprise 2.0 elevator pitch proposition between the 40th floor bar and the hotel lobby.

The Enterprise 2.0 conference was co housed with VoiceCon at San Francisco’s Moscone’s center and the unified communications/telecomms crowd attending that event, in my admittedly small sample, had little idea what E2.0 was all about. This is a major problem. Dennis Howlett posted an entirely reasonable ’smell test’ - ‘Enterprise 2.0: what a crock‘ back in August here on ZDNet and failed to find much in the way of compelling business propositions. You can bet that Dennis’s view is kindly compared to most naysayers, who in North America might bellow ‘Where’s the Beef?‘, having been brought up on clear advertising propositions like the brilliant 80’s Cliff Freeman Wendy’s hamburger TV ad that question is from.

Vendors pay large amounts of money for their booths, people fly and pay considerable amounts of money to attend in an appalling economy, but the succinct value propositions they are ultimately looking for and which will drive market growth are in alarmingly short supply. The good news is this is a rapidly evolving space which will definitely be an important pillar of competitive advantage for post recession business growth, so long as value is identified and unlocked.

Putting my cards on the table, I’m a consultant with lots of internal experience making collaboration work inside large organizations both as an employee and as hired hand: our goal is to make money as a result of helping companies make large profits due to enhanced collaboration efficiencies. I’m heavily involved with the Enterprise 2.0 conference as an advisory board member.

The reason for a conference like E2.0 is to grow the market for vendors and the associated community in the space by demonstrating business value. The ‘what’s in it for me’ value proposition - the ‘where’s the beef?’ question - is unfortunately highly contextual. The executive business strata level I operate at is not interested in the mechanics of how you deliver value, they are interested in what that value is, when it will arrive and how to measure it.

An analogy I sometimes use for collaboration using Enterprise 2.0 is a commercial restaurant. We open tonight expecting 500 customers: we have a menu of 8 possible entres: 2 fish, 3 meat, 2 seafood, 1 vegetarian. A commercial kitchen’s tools and technologies are analogous to hi tech collaboration  - you could do all sorts of brilliant things in and with it but the goals tonight are those tasks. So why is that guy over there cooking spaghetti on his own stove and talking loudly about what a great chef he is with his colleagues? If it’s your restaurant you’ve got plenty to worry about - is there enough Salmon?, will the rain mean slow trade?, what’s going on with the plumbing? - without dealing with the washing up guys who have gone freestyle as chefs with the ingredients.

This comparison may run counter to the knowledge of Enterprise 2.0 sophisticates, but it’s a common fear from business users assessing the value of trying E2.0 techniques, and an example of the outsider’s perspective. A solid E2.0 strategy will drive to execute explicit business goals enhanced by practical new methods. Taking into account legal, compliance and enhancing existing software (and extracting additional value from it) are all vitally important considerations.

The E2.0 space is still dominated by kitchen sales and chefs, with relatively few enterprise scale restauranteurs showing much interest, to continue that analogy.

Collaboration comes from ‘co-labor’ and that is the heart of the enabling E2.0 technologies, but organizing that labor with evidence of improved results is arguably the achilles heel of E2.0 as a movement. My colleague Sameer Patel and I ran a track tightly focused on extracting business value from an executive perspective. We started with a three hour workshop which followed a journey from collaboration concepts, through selling the business idea roadmap to management, through launch and into user uptake strategies. The other three sessions were ‘Collaboration at Scale’ with Cisco SVP Alan Cohen and Cordys Chief Strategy Officer Jon Pyke, where we explored the challenges of large scale interaction, A session on ‘ Lowering Customer Service Costs Via Social Tools’ and a final panel on Launching Winning Products in the Market: How Social Software Improves Your Odds which focused on innovation. I’ll drill down on these sessions, as I’m sure Sameer will also, in a separate post - our intent was to reach some cumulative conclusions.

For the Boston June conference earlier this year Stowe Boyd and I organized the ‘Open Enterprise 2009‘ research and award, which was won by Booz Allan Hamilton’s Hello environment, after extensive discussions with a broad cross section of the space. Susan Scrupski has done a marvelous job since then in setting up the ‘2.0 Adoption Council‘ (whose pin badges and cloth bags seemed to be everywhere at the conference) and awarded an internal evangelist of the year award to Claire Flanagan, who is CSC Sr Manager Enterprise Social Collaboration.

(The 2.0 Adoption Council is a private community of internal Enterprise 2.0 evangelists inside enterprises who have 10k+ employees)

At issue for me, as we touched on in my video discussion with Andrew McAfee yesterday, is that middle ranking employees dominate the conversation on an operational level around the enterprise 2.0 event. The conversation is valuable and needed, but as I’m acutely aware it takes a strong constitution to embark on change management (at more levels than most people realize) inside an organization without clear understanding and strong air cover by and from execs. The ‘chefs’ are frequently brilliant people performing at a very high level but at risk from politics and lack of well defined overarching business goals to drive towards. Read the rest of this entry »

November 4th, 2009

Andrew McAfee & Enterprise 2.0 conference

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 10:59 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: McAfee Inc., Enterprise 2.0, Conference, Oliver Marks

A very busy week in San Francisco at the inaugural West coast Enterprise 2.0 conference, which has proved very successful so far.

I’ll write a longer post after the conclusion Thursday, but for now here’s a brief video discussion between myself and Andrew McAfee about his new book, ‘Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges‘ which is finally available, and the conference.

We discuss the strengths of the event - the evangelists and middle ranking employee success stories - but also note the need for impressing on senior ‘C’ suite decision makers in organizations the business value of these modern ideas and associated technologies.

My track with Sameer Patel this week ‘Selling the Case for Accelerating Business Performance with Enterprise Collaboration and 2.0 Technologies‘ is intended to assist employees with making the internal case for budget and resources to roll out collaboration initiatives, and has been well received.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this fast moving space has changed and hopefully grown by the time the June 2010 event in Boston is held…

November 1st, 2009

Corner of Bar vs Corner of Library: The Twitter Conundrum

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 12:54 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Twitter Inc., Marketing Research, Marketing, Oliver Marks

On the eve of a couple of international Enterprise 2.0 Conferences, I’m revisiting in this post a core concept about the fundamental dichotomy of behavioral patterns around marketing people and business operations people.

As a general rule the people running the strategy and tactics of companies rely on a trusted cadre of advisors and keep their cards very close to their chest: their decisions have implications for internal head count and of course external competitive advantage.

Successful marketing people seem to work in the opposite way - they seem to know everybody and can work a room like their life depends on it.

Where the operations person may be deep in strategic thought in their library, the marketing person is likely to be at the corner of the bar at the watering hole of the moment, schmoozing multiple acquaintances new and old.

(Business operations people, I’m about to mention Twitter but please keep reading, and don’t roll your eyes into the back of your head like that).

For 2.0 technology conference goers who are paying attention it’s easy to see how these admittedly stereotypical extremes would react to modern communication tools such as Twitter and collaboration products.

The average Jane in the street however has little concept of all this as she goes to work with a laptop full of documents she needs to email out as soon as she gets online.

The mainstream media buzz around the usage of Twitter is heavily torqued towards the marketing Joe above.

i covered this topic back in June with a post titled ‘Collaborative Networks vs Social Networks‘ about the problems those two groups solve - they are very different.

(The tsunamai of inanity you can get hit by daily on Twitter is outside the scope of this post and to be fair a conceptual achilles heel for any business user).

Marketing people need to create awareness, and that particularly includes themselves. Having a zillion Twitter followers is a currently a fashionable badge of honor and evidence of being the most connected guy in the global bar.

The operations gal, on the other hand, is much more circumspect about who she gives her business card too, and by extension what the utility of Twitter is.

A successful enterprise 2.0 collaboration environment that’s delivering value across a large organization is likely to be carefully segmented into ‘need to know’ chunks of information served up by your user name and password (beyond general information of course).

In marketing meanwhile any publicity is good publicity, including behaving like a fairground barker online (Twitter is the new TV home shopping network for these people, complete with the trademark gushing insincerity and energy levels).

It’s not hard to see from these comparisons why enterprise 2.0 as a whole can be a confusing concept for most people to grasp. It’s therefore very important for good marketing people and sophisticated operations gurus who have their information antennae tuned to demonstrate intelligent use patterns that are genuinely useful in business (ie they improve efficiency and awareness and make money).

The photo caption of this English  ‘the power of tweets‘ story says it all: ‘AA Gill’s column about how he shot dead a baboon to get a sense of what it might be like to kill a person caused a minor Twitterstorm‘.

I mean seriously, if you weren’t a Twitter user and couldn’t see any value in it for you, wouldn’t that line alone make you make a mental note to avoid at all costs: career death, etc?

Too much free time, naval gazing, hedonism and stream of consciousness don’t play out well in a recession, but demonstrating business value does.

Let’s make sure we focus on delivering that and avoid the regrettable egofest excesses of the last year or so with marketers confusing lightweight tactical viral marketing with heavyweight business strategy.

October 28th, 2009

Jive hits SBS 4: SharePoint in Rear View Mirror

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 11:28 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Microsoft Windows Small Business Server, Mobile, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Corp., Collaboration, Groupware, Content Management, Productivity, Enterprise Software, Software

After last week’s announcement of SharePoint 2010 by Microsoft, with a scheduled arrival date of second quarter 2010, Jive Software announced their ‘Social Business Software 4‘ yesterday at their San Francisco ‘Jiveworld‘ event.

It was interesting to contrast the huge Vegas Microsoft unveiling with this far more customer centric occasion - one of Jive’s signature characteristics is their close ear to the ground for what their customers need.

Today’s Jive event was part celebration, complete with a wonderfully creative ‘keynote’ performance by slam poet Rives, video DJ’s at breakfast time and a degree of pride on stage for how far the company has come.

Having just secured another round of funding to ‘double down’ on development, and with major releases planned at six month intervals over the horizon, Jive are a company on the move.

The reality is they need to be, because SharePoint 2010 is going to grow from an 800 pound gorilla to an 8000 monster over the next couple of years and beyond. Jive and other vendors need to be fleet of foot to stay ahead of this juggernaut, staying ahead of the curve with innovations and agility.

This latest release acknowledges the increasing presence of Microsoft in the space with the ‘JiveConnects’ module (which is DocVerse) that turns Microsoft Office into a fully web enabled collaboration tool seamlessly accessible and synced through SBS4. Word, Powerpoint and Excel can now be shared in real time and simultaneously group edited, with tracked changes and intelligent, controllable merging.

The Jive internal rich text editor now allows cut and paste of Office document components - whether we like it or not Microsoft’s ubiquitous document formats are part of our daily lives, and these two advances help to simplify personal workflow.

Mobile - with iphone and blackberry applications, are an important component of the SBS4 package.

“The explosion of social networking onto the mobile phone scene has demonstrated what is possible when you allow people to stay connected, regardless of where they are. Now, mobile workers can connect and collaborate with colleagues participating in critical business conversations, anytime, anywhere.” said Jive’s SVP of Products Christopher Morace.

This of course varies by device, with the iphone offering the richer experience but the poorer cellular service.

There’s some general structural improvements in SBS4: Improved content organization and presentation capabilities, user interface and workflow design, and behind the screens performance, administration, and scalability tweaks and additions.

The modular approach allows SBS4 to be set up for Marketing & Sales, Employee Engagement, Innovation, and Support, with particular emphasis placed on ‘Market Engagement Solution’, which combines ‘buzz monitoring’ metrics tools with internal and external collaboration tools which enable a unified ’social media marketing strategy’.

The new bridging module gives controls and capabilities to pull high-impact content from the public conversation on the web inside for team discussion and collaboration, and then responding to customers by posting all or part of the discussion back to the public community.

All these shiny new features are excellent advances and Jive’s rapid pace of innovation is impressive. But as is the case with all enterprise vendors who have been iterating for a few years, there are now customers who deployed way back on 2.0, customers with heavily customized branched environments who can’t upgrade and the various pilot programs that can’t get traction inside companies for political and other reasons.

The price you pay for running a user conference is hearing concerns and grumbles (and of course there’s a value to that also for all parties) and I heard a few of those today. Kudos to Jive for putting the event on and also running their various user collaborative sites to both enable dialog and to monitor the pulse of their users.

October 27th, 2009

John Hagel on Real Time, Social & Mobile Web

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 2:00 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Web, Mobile, Channel Management, Web 2.0, Marketing, Internet, Oliver Marks

3 short video clips full of insight from John Hagel

Real Time Web: Exception Handling

Social Web: Tacit Knowledge

Mobile Web: Early stages of value propositions in integrating physical and virtual worlds

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Also of interest regarding the mobile web: Mary Meeker’s slides from last week’s Web 2.0 Summit (you may want to jump to slide 28 for start of mobile discussion)

October 26th, 2009

Accelerating Business Performance: San Francisco & Frankfurt Enterprise 2.0 Conferences

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 11:21 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Performance, Use Case, Enterprise 2.0, Conference, Oliver Marks

Next week sees the inaugural West Coast iteration of the Enterprise 2.0 conference, which is also an annual June event in Boston on the east coast. Sameer Patel and I will be running a track throughout the event which is focused on Selling the Case for Accelerating Business Performance with Enterprise Collaboration and 2.0 Technologies.

This is an important period for Enterprise Web 2.0 technologies; outside the technology enthusiast bubble, hard questions are being briefly asked (by those with time to consider the value of this) in the business community.

‘What’s In It For Me?‘ is the hard nosed question budget owners not unreasonably ask when use cases are proposed for adopting any new ideas and associated technologies.

From grandiose propositions to re-engineer entire businesses to highly specific work flow point solutions, there needs to be demonstrable benefits in order for time and money to be allocated with the expectation of increasing business performance and ultimately profit.

This is true of any business plan and not just the topic of this specific post, Enterprise 2.0.

If you’re an employee you may have experienced the adrenalin rush of preparing a proposal to the business with a defined need, budget and head count request.

Concepts, ideas and frameworks can be very exciting but nothing focuses the mind more than knowing you’re in front of the big wigs in an hour’s time on a Monday morning, having spent all weekend going through your presentation with butterflies in your stomach.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re validating the need for - and business value of - a million dollar machine tool, purchase and integration of software, or a foosball table for the break room. The powers that be want to hear why you are putting your reputation on the line to back your ideas.

Enterprise 2.0 isn’t an easy sell - modern web technologies are highly experiential and many of the executives you are selling to spend minimal time in front of computers. Most of their conversations about IT revolve around large scale, security controlled alphabet soup infrastructure - CRM, ERP, accounting and HR systems, and when they do communicate over the internet it’s usually by email.

In this executive climate effusive enthusiasm for adopting a set of ideas doesn’t cut it, but demonstrating business value may do. Sameer and I will be running a three hour workshop next Monday which aims to work through use case justifications, which we hope will be of value for those wanting to lobby for budget for specific business needs and utility.

The San Francisco track runs through the conference with a session each day, and we hope to present a hard nosed look at business reactions to value propositions. I will be keynoting the following week at Enterprise 20 Summit in Frankfurt Germany with similar material.

There seems to be an idea that Enterprise 2.0 technologies and associated design constructs need to be adopted by businesses who will then see the light and the value; the world doesn’t work like this except in the case of animal shelters - if the cats and dogs get lucky.

Humans generally don’t spend their hard earned money unless they really need something and see the value in it. When you’re discussing with risk adverse execs accelerating business performance by implementing significant change management to get people to work more productively with next generation tools, you’d better have your ducks in a row or you’ll be shown the door and the next nervous proposal deliverer will be ushered in…

-

Mitten appears courtesy of SF/SPCA

October 22nd, 2009

Jigsaw Pieces Can Be More Agile Than Platforms

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 11:10 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Software-as-a-service, Microsoft SharePoint, Compliance, Box, Content Management, Collaboration, Groupware, Software As A Service (SaaS), Enterprise Software

Box.net, the little company that likes to tweak Goliath Microsoft’s nose with digs at Sharepoint - the billboard above is near Microsoft’s silicon valley digs -  announced an alignment with Salesforce.com CRM earlier today. Nothing earth shattering here at first glance: it makes perfect sense for both sides and extends the simple to use but clever palette of options Box provide for their users.

What struck me today was the rapid pace at which platforms both large and small are forming in a week Microsoft unveiled their Sharepoint 2010 compendium of complementary business products.

Scale is the key here: there is a huge difference between enterprise integration using ‘connector’  technologies such as StoneBond whose ‘Enterprise Enabler’ allows users to ‘Migrate, Integrate and Manage (MIM) data regardless of where it may live’, from Sharepoint, SAP etc and the needs of Box’s clients.

Stonewall Kitchen, a creator of specialty foods, is a featured Box client, and has grown from selling jams and vinegars at Maine farmer’s markets in the early nineties to eight retail stores, postal catalogs, a strong web presence and thousands of wholesale accounts. Sounds like a great business and it’s not hard to see why box.net would feature them as a reference client.

Hands-on small and medium business owners use services like Box because their browser based ’software as a service’ (SaaS) approach means they are always there if needed (assuming they have internet connectivity) without the overhead of enterprise software.

Once businesses reach critical mass however they often get into compliance and security issues which require more formal enterprise software. This is where the Sharepoints and SAP’s of the world come in, along with content management systems that satisfy regulatory and legal concerns. Open source enterprise content management company Alfresco now offers full governance, retention and compliance to US department of defense 5015.02 for example.

As businesses grow departments get larger budgets however, and it’s not uncommon in this era for enterprises with industrial strength ERP and compliance technology as their backbone to also use services such as Box at a departmental level, on the local budget’s credit card.

Because of this the battle for who the key connectors in the value chain are - the companies who are the central jigsaw pieces - is getting hotter, as value is demonstrated.

The enterprise mothership model - Oracle, SAP, IBM, Microsoft - is under attack from well defined modular SaaS components. Salesforce is interesting in this context because it is also well on its way to being a mothership player: Japan Post for example relies on the Salesforce platform for tens of thousands of users and many mission critical applications.

The differentiator is their ability to quickly and seamlessly integrate with a company like Box if a client needs it, but to also provide light weight agility as well. This is enormously powerful, and in the case of the Sharepoint CRM/Box alliance allows salespeople in the field - who may already be using both services separately - to have fully integrated connectivity from their browser.

The result of this convenient all-in-one-platform of services to the salesperson - and in this case the company could be Stonewall Kitchens or Japan Post sized - is to get the best of both worlds in one place. Business platforms and the interoperability between them are changing fast.

In truth, Box’s digs at Sharepoint are probably to get attention, because the reality is they are in somewhat different markets. The options open to business software users are pretty rich right now, and much depends on size of business and specific needs. Cost effective agility is there if you look, and with it enhancements to collaboration between business units, partners and individuals.

October 19th, 2009

SharePoint 2010 Vegas First Impressions

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 5:25 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Microsoft SharePoint, Impression, Content Management, Collaboration, Groupware, Enterprise Software, Software, Oliver Marks

Kirk J Koenigsbauer • Microsoft

Trying to write a blogpost about the SharePoint 2010 announcements today here in Las Vegas is like trying to summarize Microsoft in a few paragraphs. SharePoint, the fastest growing product in the company’s history, is also arguably the heir to the post billg empire. As foundational to the future of Microsoft as Windows, SharePoint is essentially a business processes ‘operating system’ that will work on or offline and aims to underpin all aspects of future business.

We’re talking here about a 64 bit system that will realistically be a buyable product around this time next year, after a beta roll out starting next month. (Office 2010, the venerable suite of desktop productivity tools, will be 32 or 64 bit. As Microsoft manager Kirk J Koenigsbauer discusses in the video above, hardware costs are so negligible these days that stepping up to the additional horsepower a 64 bit architecture gives the best bang for the buck.

Some initial impressions after this morning’s all encompassing laundry list keynotes, delivered by Steve Balmer, Jeff Teper and others in front of slowly spinning animated abstract spiders webs (I couldn’t help making the visual analogy of being drawn into the ‘magical unified infrastructure’, as Balmer described 2010).

For those of us with long memories, Microsoft announcing new products that work with REST in any browser point to a refreshingly open future. Cynics would say the 2010 generation of Microsoft products is the mother of all Frankensuites, with which you can create even vaster arrays of shared drives, and that once you’ve entered the .net walled garden you’ll never escape.

In fairness though, Microsoft are like all heavy hitters in the enterprise space. They have a huge customer base running on their products and committed to continue doing so, with all sorts of legacy issues and agreements in place to honor. Plenty of huge companies literally run on SharePoint in multiple languages internationally. Rolling out new products after listening to those customers needs may not appeal to the sensibilities of the Web 2.0 afficionados, but you can’t argue with the sheer scale of either this release or this conference.

Microsoft are rolling out SharePoint 2010 internally from a pilot of 5000 employees to all 100,000 this month and will release public betas next month. Like so many big tech companies, Microsoft’s DNA is baked into their concepts around collaboration, which are realized in their technologies. Like IBM’s Lotus Suite and Google’s competitive enterprise offerings, the reality is that customers are implicitly buying the ways these companies work internally for their enterprises.

The large partner universe around Microsoft - more on this soon - dilute some of this KoolAid, but only if end users chose to broaden their horizons. Against this there is strong evidence of much slicker interoperability between components across Microsoft products: cutting and pasting copy from Word into Sharepoint site designer and other seamless integration shows promise for the future.

The video above covers Groove, which shows such promise. My gut feeling is that Microsoft are really getting their act back together after the Vista fiasco and that this next generation of products, even if they do collectively feel like one of those holiday gift baskets of everything, are going to be a dominant force in international business collaboration.

There is plenty of room for complimentary technologies - and the connectors to hook them in - but once this next generation SharePoint supertanker sets sail it’s going to sit low in the water and won’t be getting out of anyone’s way. Agility by smaller players in the space combined with pathfinder agility will be needed to stay in the game.

There was a telling moment at the end of Balmer’s presentation though - after demoing Microsoft’s end to end business collaboration solutions he encouraged the audience to send him feedback….by email. Why hadn’t Microsoft set up a collaborative instance of SharePoint to capture,share and compare feedback?

October 13th, 2009

Saluting SAP & Oracle Communities

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 10:46 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Oracle Corp., SAP AG, Corporate Communications, Leadership, Strategy, Marketing, Management, Oliver Marks

This is a fascinating big enterprise week in the US, with Oracle Open World dominating downtown San Francisco (and making the taxi drivers very happy), and SAP TechEd running concurrently in Phoenix.

Oracle do a good job of putting Open World online and I attended last year, so this year I’m currently in Phoenix with the SAP community, while keeping an eye on Oracle news online.

Next week is the unveiling of Sharepoint 2010 in Las Vegas, and there are interesting parallels to that launch also.

Where Open World is the biggest yearly event for the Oracle community, combining product announcements with extensive training and sessions on a broad variety of topics, Tech Ed is all about the practical application of SAP technology and some philosophizing about the future. It is also one of several global TechEd events with the next one in Vienna Austria next month.

The video above is of SAP mentor and community advocate Marilyn Pratt, someone many SAP’ers will be very familiar with thanks to her great work with their communities. Prior to shooting this video I spent an hour with a group gathered to prep presenting a ‘BPX process design slam’ the following evening. The promo video they made and uploaded to You Tube below explains in a couple of minutes their project to help communities create sustainable power generation.

The broader group with complimentary skill sets have been collaborating internationally for months on this, as have many other groups, both SAP users and employees, presenting at the ‘Demo Jam’.

I’m one of the SAP blogger community invited to participate in this event and be briefed by senior executives, but it’s important to point out the vitality and innovation of groups like these. I heard several stories of SAP mentors flying long distances to pitch in and help colleagues, and of technical discoveries made through participating in collaborative projects which really helped SAP users back at their work installations.

As with Oracle Open World, no real revelations from the big guns, who typically say all the right things but are reluctant to get into specifics. This post is intended to salute the life blood of the software industry - the developers -whose spirit, innovation and ingenuity is being celebrated this week in San Francisco, Phoenix and next week in Las Vegas.

October 11th, 2009

Burnout - the Dangers of Remote Work Forces

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 11:30 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Team, Burnout, Team Management, E-mail, Process Improvement, Management, Online Communications, Quality, Business Operations, Oliver Marks

The problem is as old as work itself: you’re working as part of a team and seem to be doing twice as much  - or more - as your colleagues, yet no one seems to notice. It feels as though you’re carrying the weight of entire projects on your back and no one appears aware you’re a key decision maker and have done most of the heavy lifting, and you feel devalued. These and various other manifestations of work overload are difficult enough to resolve when you’re showing up to work in a single physical location with your management present.

The rapidly increasing prevalence of distributed workforces - you might be working from home or mostly on the road - can make demonstrating to those overseeing you the extent of your workload incredibly hard, and often even harder to resolve.

The result is burnout, and the impact of ‘always on’ work patterns in organizations of all sizes can ultimately have a significant negative effect on results.

It’s not just modern collaboration technology which is increasing the challenges of sharing tasks equally - unified and mobile communications and time zone shifts can have a devastating impact on morale in a new twist on an old problem.

Email is frequently the delivery mechanism of communication which raises the blood pressure, and is rooted in the old form postal letter, but now on steroids. In a tightly hierarchical organization, unrealistic orders can be delivered by email which can be time consuming to tactfully challenge and triage.

One of the great advantages of modern collaborative techniques, which can be enabled by appropriate technology if work flows are designed and utilized successfully, is to provide visibility into workloads and activity to help distribute effort more equally.

Ultimately this results in increased efficiency over time - but failure to use these powerful modern tools intelligently can result in the rapid burnout of key remote team members. This can have disastrous results for larger projects as these people become overwhelmed, resulting in illness, time off and frequently their leaving the company.

Part of putting the ’social’ in social business software is nurturing people, as good management should do, both at distance and at scale.

Geeky technology and entrepreneurial types pride themselves on a culture of jolt cola and espresso, all night coding and other physical excesses. While this will work for some, as any doctor will tell you it can’t last forever and there’s a physical price to pay. The cultural reality is this stereotype is a tiny percentage of the population who scare the rest of the world, who work to live, rather than live to work.

Designing viable work flows which make individuals feel valued and part of a team that’s pulling together equally, even if they have never physically met, is key to excellent management.  There’s more to it than that however. Individuals who feel valued and appreciated are far more likely to share information and insight with their colleagues, and to contribute and help each other more freely.

Conversely, isolated and overburdened individuals are far more likely to horde information and not participate in attempts to set up collaborative environments. These realities are fundamental to the acceptance and uptake of new ways of working and are far more important than the internal launch of shiny new technology objects to a harassed and overburdened team,with an expectation that software will magically transform people’s work practices.

image from despair.com demotivators collection