The Rise of the 3rd Generation Organisation

The impact of the physical workplace on how we organise is a fascinating topic. For example the transformation of factories thanks to electricity and electric light changed how they operated. Modern offices, in the shape of skyscrapers, are an example of another development that has also affected how we manage. However, both the modernisation of factories and the creation of the modern office primarily depended on overcoming physical constraints to create physical structures. This in turn helped to define structures for work that we became familiar with in the developed world during the last century (lets call them 2nd Generation Organisations).

As the digital era continues, my impression is that intangible features are playing a greater role in defining the workplace environment and creating what I would call 3rd Generation Organisations. One trend that is starting to show what a 3rd Generation Organisation looks like is the shift towards Activity Based Workplaces (ABW):

As the name suggests the work space is organized by spaces designed to support specific activities… This loosely structured physical workplace is supported by work practices that facilitate it.

Note the relationship between space design and how work happens – this is more than simply creating a pleasant office space to work in and shouldn’t be confused with hot desking or hoteling either. I recently had the opportunity to see Commonwealth Bank’s Activity Based Workplace, built out on the edge of Sydney CBD. Its interesting to see how in practice IT plays a defining rather than supporting role in making their Activity Based Workplace possible.  In fact, urban planning consultants Urbis advise that:

During the 1990s, wi-fi didn’t exist, so flexibility was limited. Now, a successful [Activity Based] workplace must consider the IT environment to deliver productivity gains. ABW is fundamentally linked to technology and any ABW project will require significant investment in IT as well as the fitout.

The benefits of ABW appear to be a combination of soft and hard benefits:

• Employee engagement (better collaboration and productivity).
• Savings from more efficient use of space, less use of paper and lower building running costs.

Of course implementing an ABW is no easy task for a large organisation – it requires capital and motivation to make the change. Yet at the small end of town co-working spaces are becoming popular too, like Hub Melbourne. Just like their larger enterprise counterparts they are also enabled by access to mobile, social, Web-based and cloud information technologies.

It is easy to doubt the transformational impact of information technology in the workplace – including social software – but equally we shouldn’t ignore the symbiotic relationship to the physical workspace. It is the combination of the two that will actualy create a deeper systemic change to how we organise and will allow 3rd Generation Organisations to emerge.

End of the viral adoption road for social business software?

Yesterday, social software maker Yammer announced it has raised $85 million, bringing its total funding to $142 million. Not shabby for a company with an estimated revenue run rate of some $30 million. The real questions though are what happens next, how does it compete with the likes of Chatter, can it remain as an independent software company or will what it does become part of the fabric of new software going forward?

via zdnet.com

Great post and analysis by Dennis Howlett (no, that’s not a typo) where he talks to Adam Pisoni, co-founder Yammer, and discusses where Yammer goes next, which I think also has broader ramifications for all social business software vendors.

One of the big take aways is that there is clearly a big shift within Yammer from a company focused on promoting a viral adoption model towards one which is focused on a more sophisticated active change management and system integration. This has actually been evident for sometime, with lots of community management 101 content coming from the Yammer team and obviously plenty of add-ons appearing that enable better integrating with enterprise systems.

A try-before-you-buy model is perfectly reasonable and isn’t entirely unique to Yammer, but while this approach does lower the barriers to entry in reality the software costs are only one part of running a successful pilot or proof of concept (and its worth considering that Jive, IBM Connections, Newsgator, Socialtext etc are being deployed to the enterprise without a freemium model). And as I’m sure Deloitte is finding, flicking the switch on 200,000 global users was the easy bit but replicating success at that scale is whole different order of magnitude from their initial deployment to their Australian practice.

However, overall this is a good thing and reflects my experience of working with organisations where the random, organic approach hasn’t worked (regardless of the platform). But it should also be a wake up call for people who’ve been champions of the viral adoption approach who should realise this is actually quite damaging for some organisations.

Dennis also raises some good points about where solutions like Yammer sit from a vendor management and technical architecture stand point. Personally I think these questions are worth discussing although I don’t believe we can jump to any conclusions just yet. After all, this is a different software marketplace (as we’ve pointed out).

To Dennis’s points I would also add that I think the main danger to Yammer is that it becomes a bit like SharePoint, which is extremely popular but poorly deployed by many. I wonder if “Yammer Governance” will become a hot topic in the near future like “SharePoint Governance”?

What do you think?

Why Australian companies need to become Connected Companies

The Reserve Bank of Australia has been critical this last week about the depressed attitude in industry towards the state of the Australian economy. Like the rest of the developed world, there is obviously no way Australia can entirely avoid the competition of cheap labour overseas or the impact of global financial markets. But there is also a risk that Australian businesses use this as an excuse – research published last year highlighted that only a small proportion of Australian businesses are employing progressive management practices. This wasn’t some wonky marketing survey, but a piece of serious research highlighting that:

“high-performing workplaces are up to 12 per cent more productive and three times more profitable”

In a related piece of work, my Dachis Group colleague Dave Gray has been looking at what characteristics define long-lived, successful companies. He was shocked to find that the life expectancy of large companies has fallen from 75 years in the 1930s to only an average of only 15 years. Dave’s conclusion is that these companies are collapsing under their only dysfunctional weight. Right now, the logical reaction in some businesses to this “weight” problem is to downsize and outsource. Others on the other hand are embracing this challenge (that 12%).

I come into contact with some of those progressive organisations primarily from a technology perspective, although some are also attacking it from a broader social business level. What is interesting for me in this process is to observe that here in Australia, unlike say the US, our issue or need for concepts like Enterprise 2.0 isn’t so much about overcoming dominant command and control structures; rather we need to embrace social technologies so we can:

• Use them as a force multiplier that allows local companies to punch well above their weight in a global economy (social technologies are fantastic levellers).
• Enable these companies to turn ideas, insight and innovation into action more effectively (great idea, but what are you going to do with it?).
• Engage staff so that they voluntarily maximise their own productivity and professional development (carrot, not stick).
• Deliver better products and more personalised levels of customer service (get people to buy Australian because its simply better).

In our government too there is an opportunity that has been mostly missed to date in the Government 2.0 conversation about enabling those inside government and those involved with service delivery to use these same technologies to also work more progressively. This is a missing piece in a puzzle that has spent more time focusing only on the veneer of citizen engagement through social media.

Of course, I’m not claiming that social business tools like software for workforce collaboration and social intranets trump the global and local financial and economic factors faced by Australian businesses. I’m simply saying don’t ignore the evidence about how to be more productive and profitable. When wrapped up with the right implementation approach, these tools provide a critical technology platform for helping this to happen.

Rimino: A concept for an attractive, invisible and more integrated mobile experience

“The mobile experience we have today is basically designed for tech-savvy businessmen,” says designer Amid Moradganjeh. This is a mistake, he thinks. There is another group of people out there, a bigger group. They have an “average digital life,” meaning that they don’t have to process hundreds of emails a day while running from meeting to meeting. While many of them do have a rich digital existence on the desktop, they see little need to stay fully connected when they go outside. One explanation for this is that smartphones simply haven’t become cheap enough and that, inevitably, we’ll all come to own one. Moradganjeh wonders if for many people an iPhone/Android smartphone is too complicated and too much power. For his thesis project, he engaged in a program of research and speculative design which resulted in Rimino, “an attractive, invisible and more integrated experience.”

Rimino – A Human Touch on Mobile Experience from Amid Moradganjeh on Vimeo.

via fastcodesign.com

The Rimino concept might not be exactly right, but shows why thinking about user experience design from the perspective of different users is so powerful.

The impact of Android in Australia on companies developing mobile apps

James Dellow, a senior consultant with social business advisory firm Headshift, said local companies and consumers were more focused on Apple than in other markets such as Europe and the United States because Australia was still a little behind the mobile adoption wave.

“In some respects it’s also more straightforward to put your apps on the iPhone platform because there are a lot more choices with Android,” he said. “Apple has a closed system whereas Android is a bit messier.”

Despite this, Mr Dellow said Android usage among Australian consumers had grown during the past year and predicted it would continue to become more popular. This meant companies were being forced to revisit mobile strategies.

“The big challenge in a smaller market is that companies are nervous about having to support multiple apps,” Mr Dellow said.

via afr.com

I was quoted in the Australian Financial Review this week, discussing the adoption of Android in Australia and its impact on those developing apps for smartphones and tablets.

QR Codes enter the education phase

mvia readwriteweb.com

The jury is still out on QR (or Action) Codes, but clearly we are entering a phase of not just randomly applying them but actively trying to educate users on how to make them work (23% have instructions about getting an app to scan the code and other information to encourage people to scan the code). That suggests a problem in itself, however if this is solved the next step will be to make the reward of scanning a code worthwhile.

Bear in mind I’m scanning the code with a smartphone or tablet, so from a user experience or service design perspective what and how do I as a consumer want to do next?

How DEC NSW teaches its staff about using social media in the workplace

via youtube.com

The Department of Education & Communities in NSW has published a range of materials during 2011 addressing various aspects of social media and how people working in this department can and should make use of it. Above is a video introduction to their internal microblogging tools, Maang.

Their social media policy has links to more resources, including an An introduction to Digital Citizenship for the workplace.

Does Viral Adoption of Enterprise Social Business Software work?

The short answer is yes, viral adoption can work BUT only in certain situations. This is my attempt to pin down some of the factors I’ve observed out in the field…

…these are the anti-patterns I’ve actually seen:

via headshift.com

Posted over on the Headshift | Dachis Group Asia Pacific blog.

A way of work, not just shiny new tools and fun

Kelli Carlson-Jagersma… social strategy team at Wells Fargo… [says they are]

…expending the bulk of its efforts on identifying use-cases for internal social networking tools and running small pilots in the enterprise to test different solutions and learn what benefits social can bring to the enterprise.

“It’s not so much focusing on the tools as the use-cases,” said Carlson-Jagersma. “What I mean by that is, what is this problem we are trying to solve? Unless we make it a lot easier for people to do their jobs, or create so much efficiency in the work they’re already doing, or somehow integrate communications, having a tool such as NewsGator or Chatter or Jive just adds more noise or something more for us to have to do. So, right away we’ve been taking a step back and looking at the use-case.”

One use-case Wells Fargo is considering is in the area of support centers. “With our service and support operations located all over our geographic footprint, we need to be able to collaborate virtually. We are evaluating current business processes and how can we use social tools to enhance collaboration–not replace what we’re doing, but make it more connected and even more efficient.” she said.

Carlson-Jagersma added that once the business needs have been identified, only then will her team consult with the business and pilot a social networking tool–or tools, because a combination of solutions is being considered–to implement companywide.

“I think of using social as a way of work, not just as a shiny new tool and something fun.”

via informationweek.com

Kelli Carlson-Jagersma from Wells Fargo talks about their need led approach to workforce collaboration and evaluating software options. Nice to see this approach being championed, although isn’t this how everyone approaches internal social business software projects?

Revisiting Grudin’s 8 Challenges for Collaboration Software

Microsoft researcher, Jonathan Grudin, wrote a paper back in 1994 that looked at eight challenges for groupware [PDF] – they were: 

1. Disparity in work and benefit.
2. Critical mass and Prisoner’s dilemma problems.
3. Disruption of social processes.
4. Exception handling.
5. Unobtrusive accessibility.
6. Difficulty of evaluation.
7. Failure of intuition.
8. Adoption process.

Its interesting to consider what the current generation of groupware, what today we call Social Business Software or “Enterprise 2.0”, has done to address these problems.

I think challenges 1, 4, 5 and 7 are definitely areas where we have seen improvement – primarily through the benefits of infusing the concepts of social software into the design of the technology solutions we want to use. All sorts of design patterns have come to the fore in recent years to make collaboration software more human-centred than ever before. Plus the accidental training ground of the World Wide Web means that more and more users are ready (if not demanding) a consumer experience inside the firewall.

However, I sense that right now we are looping back into old territory by considering again the importance of embedding the technologies into workflow and most of these challenges can only improve through iteration (sorry everyone, the goal of integrating collaboration technologies into the places and tools where people are actually working isn’t a new one).

But the Difficulty of evaluation and Adoption process in particular are likely to remain major challenges (Critical mass and Prisoner’s dilemma problems and Disruption of social processes are also closely associated with both). The evaluation challenge might be dealt with eventually through better analytics (Dachis Group’s Social Business Index is already starting to do this), but ultimately these challenges aren’t technology based:

• Organisations need to have a design mindset, in order to both implement and judge the success of such technologies; and
• We already have tried and tested methods available to support their use, we just need to use them!

If we can assume the software will continue to get better and better, moving forward why can’t we focus on getting the last few points right instead?