Tip of the Iceberg

Category musings
This post is the result of a dual inspiration: ISW's fascinating new offering, Kudos Badges for IBM Connections, and Lisa Duke's excellent article on the Social Business Insights Blog, "User Adoption - The Final Frontier of Social Business". If you'd like background on where I'm coming from, check out both before proceeding.

Lately all the talk is about "social" (which I'd like to remind my readers is an adjective, not a noun... unless you're referring to a specific gathering or party), but many have pointed out that, for those of us in the collaboration space, this concept is not new to us. We've been "social" in our use of software for decades. During my participation in GBS College (more about this in a subsequent post), it was obvious that this notion is not new to the incoming generation of employees either. They've spent the past few years sharing their personality on YouTube, broadcasting snippets of their lives on Twitter, and creating, strengthening, and renewing social connections on Facebook. Nobody trained them to do this... they just do.

And this, I feel, is what is being overlooked by many organizations looking to become a "social business", as well as some (including IBM) who are hoping to profit from those efforts.

Long ago, there was this thing called MySpace. Lots of people used it. I used it. Then Facebook came along. I can't remember the last time I logged in to MySpace. The tool itself is not what drives and maintains adoption; if a better tool arrives, people will use it instead. Understanding how to use a tool is not the key to adoption; if a user wants badly enough to use it, they'll figure it out. The key to adoption is cultural need.

Everyone who uses Facebook - all 800 million of them (as of the time of this writing) - have a reason. For some, it's simply the easiest way to stay in contact with people they already know... for many of these, it's replaced email entirely, as Facebook's internal messaging features suffice. For others, it's a way to forge new social connections by discovering people who share common interests. If my news feed is any indication, some just use it to play games. But for each, the tool meets some cultural need. If it didn't, they wouldn't use it. In fact, many Facebook users use it grudgingly... but they continue to use it because the perception of that cultural need still exists. I'm among that group: when Google+ initially went live, I had planned to defect, as it seemed it would be less annoying than I find Facebook to be. However, it hasn't yet reached a critical mass that allows me to use only that tool instead. As a result, I now only log in to Google+ when I receive a notification from it... the rest of the time, I continue to use Facebook.

For social business tools to gain adoption sufficient to provide true value, they must meet a cultural need that already exists.

At GBS, it is instinctive to use Connections. The most obvious reason is that we're an IBM Business Partner. We're not going to recommend a software solution to our clients that hasn't already proven to be successful inside the boundaries of our own firewall. We use Domino for email and many of our internal applications. We use Connections for internal blogs and wikis, and on my team, Activities has proven extremely useful. The less obvious, but arguably far more important, reason it just makes sense for us to use Connections is that the very soul of our company culture fosters social engagement. When I empower others by sharing my knowledge and insight, management notices. I am seen as adding more value when I distribute information than I would be if I simply hoarded it. We seek out ways to make each other more powerful and reduce duplication of effort by maximizing the sharing of our expertise. If Connections didn't even exist, we would find another way.

In contrast, at least two of my former employers maintained the opposite culture: hoarding knowledge was fundamental to job security. I survived at least one round of layoffs (and, in all likelihood, several) purely because my employer recognized that they'd already terminated everyone else who understood my job. If I had invested time and energy sharing my knowledge with my coworkers, that not only would have been viewed as a wasteful distraction from actually doing the work, I would have been viewed as comparatively expendable. That didn't sit well with me, and it's the primary reason I left.

Another facet of this that extends beyond simple professional survival is the notion of fulfillment. At heart, I'm a trainer. I love seeing the twinkle in someone's eye when they learn something new, particularly when they're energized by the possibilities, the implications of what they just learned. It's why I love attending and speaking at conferences. It's why internal training is among my favorite job responsibilities. I'm happier as an employee when I know that someone now understands something that also excites me because I was willing to share it with them. One of the many reasons I'm more content than ever in my career is that GBS welcomes this instead of punishing it. It's a key reason why we started the GBS College program last year and grew it this year.

GBS knows that social engagement is fundamental to our organization's success. Nathan and I have a long-established pattern: one of us gets some wacky idea, the other expands it into some insane goal, and then we try to make that goal a reality. That's how most of our open source projects, such as Decepticon, Medusa, and the XPages SDK got started. But sometimes the result is something like Transformer. The AppBuilder technology some of you may have seen last week at Lotusphere started out the same way, but in a sense, for me that's even more exciting, because it wasn't us that took it to the next level. We developed a proof of concept a couple years ago, but an entirely different team picked it up off the shelf, dusted it off, and made it awesome. But that didn't happen in isolation; we continued to share ideas with them that eased their efforts and helped them push the technology in exciting directions. And it goes both ways: lessons they learned are finding their way into Transformer as well. If our CEO only dictated from above what opportunities we will pursue, and how, not only would this type of communication not occur, these technologies would never even have existed. Instead, any employee's idea might be the seed of future success for GBS.

In summary, if employees aren't secure in the knowledge that their expertise, ideas, and feedback are welcomed and valued, you can train them all you want on how to use the social software you just installed, but they still won't use it effectively, if at all. They may even see the tool's arrival as a threat to their professional existence... this decade's "efficiency consultant". Conversely, if social engagement is already threaded into the very fabric of your organization, your employees will find a way to keep that engagement active and vibrant, whether or not you provide them software that fosters it. Connections will simply make them more powerful in doing what they already find culturally instinctive to do.

Finally, happy belated Squirrel Appreciation Day.