Pretty big stadium, right?But what’s wrong with this picture?

THERE ARE NO PEOPLE!What good is an empty stadium?The action by the players in the field, the cheering of the crowd (and their ticket fees) is what makes the stadium come alive – and makes it worth the investment.Just like stadiums, for intranets it’s not a matter of Return on Investment, it’s a matter of Return of Use.

Just like your intranet, social or not, or your digital workspace.

If you build a new, great stadium, but leave the old one intact next door and still play the games there, how will you ever breath life into the new one?

No, you had better start encouraging, enticing or even coercing people to move to the new stadium.You can always start by moving the games to the new one….

What good is an empty stadium?

Peter BjellerupIBM Social & Smarter Workforce Tiger Team

…just like I keep encouraging my colleagues to change their habits, but having a permanent out of office message when they send me an email, asking them to post on my intranet board instead… and explaining why.

If you don’t challenge Business As Usual, why would anybody ever change?

And, as I think most of us agree, work is not a place, I intend to use the expression Digital WorkSPACE

So, apart from me trying to change the habits of my colleagues, what’s the context of work and communication where I come from? At IBM. Let’s have a look on the next slide:

What is normal and default for us 400.000+ working for IBM is still unusual and novel for many (but not all)

We are truly a global matrix organization. We have moved from having a very restrictive communication culture to being, and encouraging, very open communications. At IBM we offer services and solutions (often comprising software and sometimes hardware) to organizations – exclusively. As an individual you are rarely in direct contact with IBM, but rather through the services and capabilities we create for employees.

At IBM, remote teams is the default way of working. Remote is even the default way of managing. Waddayamean “office”?Since she took the reins as CEO in 2012, Ginni Rometty has used video blogs as her default way to communicate with all us employees. She has even gone so far as redefining how we create value for the company.

I often come across, in other organizations, the attitude that “How can I trust that you actually work, if you’re not in the office where I can see you?”, sometimes in disguise as less forthright statements, but still. At IBM, we left that behind us long ago. For us work is a matter of results, not location. If there is anything that is seen as a signal of “being at work”, it’s when you’re logged in on the chat service.

CEO uses video blog as default mode of communicating

Your value to IBM is not what you know, but what you share

Work, Networking and Digital Workspace @ IBM

Remote teams is default Work is what you deliver, not where you are

Chat presence = workingRemote management is default

We have a complete Enterprise Social Network platform in production since 2008, the same platform that we offer to clients, IBM Connections. It was born from the amalgamation of at least a decade worth of separate grass root initiatives which had become widely used internally.

Nowadays it is an integrated part of all communications and daily work for very many of us. It is integrated with our editorial communication channels and with some typical business applications as well.

We’re currently levitating towards the same cloud platform we provide to clients, from the original, dedicated on premise platform from which these numbers come. (so they exclude cloud)

Work, Networking and Digital Workspace @ IBM

Remote teams is default Work is what you deliver, not where you are

Chat presence = working

ESN and traditional intranet: coexistence and integration

+ some applications

581.000 Profiles

Remote management is default

Files (Oct 2016):4.3 mio uploaded

2.6 mio shared188 mio downloaded

Communities (Oct 2016):160K public318K private224K owners

Wikis (Oct 2016):269K wikis

4.2 mio pages

CEO uses video blog as default mode of communicating

Your value to IBM is not what you know, but what you share

For decades, companies and other organizations have tried to improve business through focusing on improving efficiency by “optimizing the machine”. Making production, logistics and routine transactions increasingly more efficient.But, the marginal benefit of yet another trimming of processes and organization is rapidly declining.In addition, all this trimming, slimming and optimizing has come with great costs. It has costed flexibility, agility and employee engagement.

It’ a bit like having built a great railway network… and suddenly someone launch flying cars.

Flying cars… or Über, Facebook, Spotify, AirBnB or Alibaba….

Machines and processes may be good, but agility, flexibility and innovation is a people thingAnd people don’t work the same way as machines do.

A key factor in all this is TRANSPARENCY, both in information and communications, but also regarding people and their expertise (where do I find someone who can help me overcome this challenge?)

Working with greater transparency, with the help of proper tools, offers a range of advantages to organizations and their employees. I have tried to summarize them into these:

AGILITY – Transparency boosts the capability of all employees to scout for both challenges and opportunities, transparently sharing their observations so they can reach “the right” people. And, for the right people to act and communicate the adequate response. For the employees, greater agility, could be that they freely can build their knowledge of new topics without having to ask for budget to attend training courses, simply by consuming knowledge and experience shared by others.

RESILIENCE – Getting knowledge and experience out of heads, hard drives and mail chains obviously makes the company less dependent on single individuals, who might leave the company, retire or get run over by a bus. For employees it might mean that they can dare to take on greater challenges, as they can leverage experience and help from others

EFFICIENCY – is the usual trigger for companies to start thinking about ESN and digital workplaces. “We need to break down the silos”, “We don’t know what we know”, ”We keep reinventing the wheel”. Of course, there are other aspects of efficiency to be gained. Like onboarding, for example. For the employee perspective, I simply ask how many of you have never been sitting, tearing your hair in preparing something, thinking “Someone must have done this before. If only I could leverage their work, I could be with my kids instead now” (or with my partner, at the gym, with the mates … your choice)

EFFECTIVENESS – In times of dramatic change, clarity of strategy and direction are paramount. In many organizations, those are communicated through the corporate version of Chinese whispers, permitting, maybe even encouraging messages to be distorted in transit through misunderstandings, differences in context and background or even hidden personal agendas. When you do a video blog, like Ginni Rometty, there is little space left for interpretation. And if people don’t get it, they can always ask for clarification through commenting. From the employee perspective, it’s often rather a matter of easily produce with quality, since when you leverage what others have done, instead of reinventing the wheel, you don’t need to repeat their mistakes and you can deliver with better quality, from the start.

ENGAGEMENT, INSPIRATION, INNOVATION – I am convinced that this is where the greatest long term gains lie. Greater transparency fosters greater engagement. Employees can inspire each other much more easily and the freer flow of information increases the occurence of the ”knowledge accidents” that have proven to be maybe the greatest source of innovation.

But, what is work, really. At least the kind of work when we don’t stand by a machine, producing goods?

Greater transparency adds value to both organization and employees

Agility

Resilience

Efficiency

Effectiveness

Engagement, Inspiration and Innovation

Some of us sell insurances, others manage risk, or contracts. Yet others focus on the fincances and streams of money. Yet others travle around, presenting to audiences like you.

I have attempted to find a general description of what we all do, but in varying proportions.

TRANSACTION – would be typically dominant in the financial department or in logistics; Receiving an invoice triggers a predefined process which you carry out with little variation. Or like whan many of us do our travel expenses

REACTION – would rather be typical in customer service. You really don’t know what will hit you, but there is a reasonably limited range of likely events, there are resources to use in dealing with them and some back-up for the exceptions

Which brings us to PRODUCTION (and non-routing transactions)

What is typical office work, really? How about a mix of:

Transaction(routine)

Production(+Non-routine transactions)

Reaction

• Processes• Triggers

i.e..• Service• Problem solving

Some produce contracts or proposals, others produce presentations, yet others produce requirements, process descriptions or instructions or….

When we do so, we usually do some THINKingAs ”no man is an island” is more true than ever, our production tends to involve a substantial deal of communication with others, often by mail or phone. Sometimes by chat (i.e. all tunneled channels, where the communication is only accessible for those actively involved.

Finally, we usually leverage some kind of INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL. Maybe a shared folder on the G-drive, maybe a team room or the email attachment supplied by a colleague. Whichever it is, it tends to be something static and often under some reasonably strict control of access and editing authority.

But what do we produce? And how?

Transaction Production Reaction

ArtefactsThink Communicate

Intellectual capital(documented/static)

But when we communicate transparently instead of in enclosed channels and when we default to open and regularly share the artefacts that are the result of our production endeavours, the accessible intellectual capital of the organization grows dramatically.

Our organization becomes increadibly much smarter.

Transaction Production Reaction

ArtefactsThink Communicate

Intellectual capital(documented/static + dynamic)Intellectual capital

(documented/static)

Through transparent dialogue and sharing,the intellectual capital is multiplied

Files

Looking at other much talked about platforms for enterprise collaboration and networking, they often to fall into one of two categories:

Some focus on documents and other typical office files, adding some collaborative features. Still, when you look closely, those collaborative features still gravitate towards collaborative production of… documents

Files Socializing

Others focus on socializing, rather. On continuous discussions in your network.

But what we really need is to get work done. Together.Presentations may be ever so neat and well managed, but, still, it’s the content that is the important. Not the format.Conversations can be incredibly inspiring, but how do we deal with documents, more permanent online publishing and other – more traditional – elements.

To get work done together, you need more.

Get work done together

Just a quick overview of other stuff you might need to cover your full needs of collaborating effectively. But let’s look at it differently, in a more structured way.

Files SocializingGet work done together

Team work(goal)

Communities of interest (knowledge)

Mail & calendar

MeetingsDedicated applications

Update flow

Task management

Ideation

Forums

Voice

Video

Irrespective of what kind of office, or knowledge work we look at we can generalize to us needing to “produce stuff, collaborate and find the right people to collaborate with. Plus we want to stay relevant or develop professionally.

We may work synchronously, in real time (top right) which often cause our calendars to bloat or explode, especially if we work across time zones.

Traditionally, the tooling focus has been in the top left corner – on mail and calendar (anybody who doesn’t think they get too many and too irrelevant mails?) and to produce, store and maybe share files.

In the bottom half we have more modern ways to work together; as team work bottom right and more transparently bottom left. Take a moment to ponder on how the benefits I listed earlier are distributed between what is generated by improved collaboration in teams or groups and what comes from working more transparently - Working out Loud

If you try to do this using dedicated tools, you can easily end up pretty confused regarding where you did what, how different tools work and which password to use where

There’s no single way we get work done together, though

Produce stuff, communicate,

collaborate with and find “the right” people. Professional

growth

Mail & Calendar

NetWorking & Collaboration

Team & CollaborationNetworking & Transparency

(Work out Loud)

File Share, & Sync

Synchronous – simultaneous availabilityAsynchronous – respond when you can

Conversations

Text

Voice

Video

Online Meetings

Benefits:Efficient collaboration and communicationReduced duplication and confusion

Benefits:Agility (transparency)Resilience (knowledge diffusion)Effectiveness (clarity in two-way communications)Engagement and Innovation (networking and accidental learning)

Therefore, IBM has collected ALL of this in ONE solution, IBM Connections which has been around for close to one decade and has been labelled the market leader the seven latest years (by IDC).

In line with what I have said earlier, IBM Connections centers on people; their relations, their experience and competences – technically: on Profiles and the activity log

But instead of features, I’d like to spend some time on characteristics that have turned out to be essential…

Our response to those needs has been the market leader for seven consecutive years IDC http://bit.ly/2funrkf

NetWorking & Collaboration

Networking & Transparency

(Work out Loud)

People & Expertise

* Connections Cloud S1

File Share, Online

production, simultaneous editing & Sync

Conversations

Text

Voice

Video

Online Meetings

Mail & Calendar

Team & Collaboration

VERSATILITY - As we’ve already established, one size doesn’t fit all. Collaboration can take very many shapes, depending on needs, the situation as well as on the context, maturity and experience of the people involved. You need to be able to cater for many of them or else you will leave your users scouting for supplementary solutions, perhaps from their experience outside of the organization

COHERENT – To facilitate the use of this versatile and extensive capabilities, they need to be coherent. Similar interface, logic and interaction. You don’t want a dozen of newsfeeds to keep an eye on, a dozen of passwords to remember

MOBILE – Our smartphones are our primary screen nowadays. If you neglect that fact, you’re sure to lose. But I’d rather be a bit more generalistic and call it PLATFORM AGNOSTIC

INTEGRATED – With each other, as I just mentioned, but also with more traditional editorial publishing as well as with the dedicated tools we all use in our daily work. At least, you’d like notifications from those applications to reach you via the same newsfeed (but to be easily distinguishable and possible to filter in or out) and hopefully regarding frequent interactions

APPIFIABLE – We’ve learned that there will always be needs to offer targeted, dedicated apps that are integrated. One example is our Expertise Locator which leverages Connections profiles, tags, descriptions and activities to identify people to help you with what you’re looking for

SAFELY OPEN – Since this environment is due to grow into a major pool of intellectual capital, you do want it to be secure, of course. But surely, it would be great to be able to allow external guests to collaborate, within limits and by invitation only, in the same way as you do with colleagues.

SIMPLIFYING – which of course constitutes a challenge for something very versatile. It’s easy to simplify something with just a few features, but with capabilities, complexity tends to rise. Our cure to this dilemma is cognitive computing

Versatile

Platform agnostic

Integrated

Coherent

Safely open

Appifiable

Mobile

Simplifying

Since a very long time, IBM Connections has been peppered with advanced analytics, for example to suggest people to connect with and resources that might be of interest. Using much more faceted characteristics than the usual “you have friends in common”. Maybe based on you having liked or tagged the same person, being members of the same community, having commented the same blog etc

Currently, we’re busy developing and adding cognitive computing features to our collaboration solutions:• Obviously to help answering questions in the bottom, team and transparent parts of the graph.• But also to help you prioritize your mail and supporting you taking action by suggesting time slots or attachments

We’re about to simplify work, through cognitive computing

NetWorking & Collaboration

Networking & Transparency

(Work out Loud)

Synchronous – simultaneous availabilityAsynchronous – respond when you can

People & Expertise

Conversations

Text

Voice

Video

Online Meetings

File Share, Online

production, simultaneous editing & Sync

Mail & Calendar

Team & Collaboration

The first example was actually launched recently, at least to us and selected beta users: Watson Workspace. Currently it looks like a persistent chat for teams but with cognitive computing providing an optional summary of important recent events and tasks.

But enough about technology, the usual road blocks are human, not technological

We’re about to simplify work, through cognitive computing

NetWorking & Collaboration

Networking & Transparency

(Work out Loud)

Synchronous – simultaneous availabilityAsynchronous – respond when you can

People & Expertise

WatsonWorkspace

Conversations

Text

Voice

Video

Online Meetings

File Share, Online

production, simultaneous editing & Sync

Mail & Calendar

Team & Collaboration

Technology makes collaboration and transparency possible, and hopefully easy.But people are behind the changed behaviours, but in different ways depending on who we are

If your ambition is to go beyond a keen bunch of early adopters (and maybe a bit of early majority) and truly get the entire organization to change their ways, your leaders need to support, engage and be persistent

Finally, the value is generated by the many users making good use of the tools, changing their ways of behaving.Digital Workplaces have little to no ROI. What we can get is ROU – Return of Usage!

Let’s take a closer look at these changes

Technology makes it possible

Leaders drive the change

People generate the value

The most common obstacle is that the new way to work is thought of as “something to do on top of your “real job”.

Therefore, we need to redefine work to fit the digital age. And that sure is a task for the leadership team

The guys to the right probably have a work description saying “pull this cart with square wheels. And their performance assessment is based on X carts per day”

Successful use of a Digital Workplace boils down to ONE key change

Redefining work to fit the digital era

In Sweden we might think that Command & Control isn’t much of an issue, but I’m afraid to disappoint you.

How many times have you heard people expressing worries about what people might post to the network, others spending hours upon hours to define file and folder hierarchies and access limitations etc

Empower & Engage

Command & Control

Working openly and sharing is a bit like making investments in pension funds or similar. You know it pays off, usually, but you’re not sure exactly how well and when. Why not think the same way regarding our way of working.

Produce for Today

AND Invest for Tomorrow

Therefore, the leadership needs to modify appraisal systems, bonus systems etc, to value sharing and helping, to make investments in corporate growth.

Companies tend to distribute financial performance targets down the ranks, but the more visionary ones remain high level and aggregated. Like “break down the silos” or “we have to get more collaborative”

These are typical issues for middle managers.

“You get what you measure”

Measure what you want to get

A good place to start is leading by example. Talk won’t do. Employees will do what you do, not what you say only.If you want employees change their ways of working, leaders need to be prepared to change the way they lead.Leaders need to set the example, consistently, frequently and tangibly

Holding back on knowledge doesn’t pay off, we’ve learned. Sharing information give influence

Lead by example

Default to open

And finally, to motivate employees in all possible ways. Because that is what drives them.

Motivation

Motivation

Motivation