Author Archives: Stuart McRae

Social Collaboration in Government

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A while back I wrote a blog post on Social Business in the Public Sector where I discussed a keynote presentation John Swinney, Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Finance, Employment and Sustainable Growth, made at Public Sector Digital Scotland, where he:

… clearly set out the need and the promise of the digital age. To move from government programs that are what they are, and either match a citizen’s needs or don’t, to delivering the personalised services that each individual citizen requires.

I was reminded of this listening to him present the keynote at ONE Public Sector Scotland last week, where he discussed progress made, the importance of enabling public sector workers to be empowered to do the right thing for the individual in front of them, and the need to become “relentlessly person-centred”.

In my social business masterclass later in the day, I tried to visualise this concept. Pre-digital, government programs were “one size fits all”:

But in the digital world, the citizen should be able to select exactly the services they need from a menu on offer:

However, you can only go so far down this path through technology, by providing a single front end that unifies services – or even by integrating back end services to smoothly move the user from one web site to another to deliver a coherent user journey that takes the citizen to what they need without them having to understand the internal structure of the government agencies providing it. To truly deliver an exceptional citizen experience, you need the government agencies involved, or more accurately the employees within them, to collaborate seamlessly as well.

 

This isn’t just about coordinating applications across the government web sites. Or even simply about aligning policies and procedures across government departments. Rather the issue is that: not only does the public not care which government department, agency, or public sector body is providing the service they need, but they want to be able to access the knowledge and expertise of public sector employees without worrying about which bit of the government pays them.

The good news is that responding to this desire not only produces more effective government services, it can also create more efficient ones. Initiatives like the Government Digital Service and G-Cloud have made good progress in reducing the cost of public services while improving their effectiveness. Now it is time to take things to the next level. To move beyond common web sites and infrastructure to start to integrate government employees into a single ecosystem of public servants focussed on better servicing the needs of the citizen.

This isn’t a new concept, like it is in some commercial companies where competition not collaboration is embedded in the culture. Collaboration is natural in public services, but what is needed is a focus on exploiting the latest social collaboration technologies to create an environment where expertise can be reused instead of replicated, knowledge can be shared as a by product of users’ day to day activities, and inter-departmental collaboration can reduce the cost of delivering services.

Cross departmental collaboration, cross agency collaboration, cross public sector collaboration – and, indeed, collaboration beyond to include local government, the third sector, delivery partners and small & medium enterprises who can help to service the citizen’s needs. The first challenge for government was integrating services – the next is integrating people.

In IBM, when we think about how public services can be taken to the next level we build stories about how cross government collaboration could save costs and change the lives of citizens. Could we help departments respond to freedom of information requests faster and at lower cost? Could we make it painless for a citizen to complete their tax return? Could we make it easier to claim benefits by removing barriers while reducing the chance of fraud? Could collaboration between local government social services, the police and school teachers save the life of a child?

Now that would be something to be proud of.

 

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Driving Social Adoption by Understanding the Power of Habit

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Thanks to Mark Fleming for recommending The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg to me earlier today, and reminding me of Charles’ TED Talk on the topic.

I often talk about the key to social collaboration adoption being changing people’s behaviours, so it is important to remember that most behaviour is driven by habit. Changing those habits is often the biggest challenge in social adoption.

As the video shows, when employees are carrying out habitual processes, doing what they always do, the are effectively asleep as far as actively helping the company achieve its goals is concerned.

In his book (though not the video), Charles talks about how Paul O’Neill, when he was appointed to be the new CEO at Alcoa, focussed on changing employees around health & safety and in turn was able to drive the other changes to processes necessary to transform the company.

So, when you are building a social adoption plan, don’t just think about the behaviour changes you need employees to make, but think about how you are going to help them to change the habits that drive their current behaviour.

Video Interviews on Social Business published by IT Pro

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The IT Pro web site recently posted three short videos in which their group editor, Maggie Holland, interviews me about different aspects of Social Business:

These complement the Special Report IT Pro published recently with IBM on Are You A Social Business.

While on the topic of IT Pro, they have a couple of relevant articles on this topic on their web site in which I am quoted: Going social: implementing a social business strategy and The importance of compliance in social business.

Much of this content is also available through the Cloud Pro web site.

Social Business Trends for 2014

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Traditionally I use the journey back from IBM Connect to put together a blog post based on buzz at the event to forecast key trends for the year(s) ahead (take a look at my 2012 and 2013 predictions and see if you think they worked out – most of them continue to be major areas of focus).

So, following on from the review of 2013 that I wrote on the way out to Orlando, here are the new themes that I expect to dominate in 2014:

Social Business Design

Social Mail: The most exciting new announcement at Connect 2013 was IBM Mail Next. Until now, the infusion of social collaboration into the mail client has built out from the mail box. It has taken the form of sidebars, business cards, links and embedded experiences that seamlessly take the user from their mail to adjacent social content. IBM Mail Next reimagines the inbox in terms of the conversations you have having with other people and the actions and projects they are part of. By thinking about the context of the conversations, rather than the mechanism of the email messages, and by applying analytics and task management capabilities to help you keep track of your different activities, IBM Mail Next offers a user-centric tool for managing collaboration.

Social Intranet: IBM Mail Next is browser or mobile app based, and is part of a broader trend to move all forms of collaboration, from collaborative document editing to real-time multimedia meetings, into pure browser applications that are also surfaced as mobile apps. It has become clear that users prefer to do their collaborating from mobile devices, so this aiding the transition to a post PC era whilst significantly reducing desktop support costs (one of the biggest parts of the IT Budget). Indeed, bring your own device is rapidly showing that users would like to choose their own tools, and where organisations embrace this they can improve the user experience at the same time as reducing costs. All of which makes the Social Intranet increasingly the core of enterprise IT: a single integration layer that provides role based, personalised access to applications, content and processes to each individual user via a browser or their mobile device.

Social Ecosystems: But in today’s world, an intranet isn’t enough. Modern enterprises can’t deliver what they need to through internal collaboration alone. Companies need their ecosystem of suppliers, partners and channel to deliver their brand value, and close collaboration with those organisations is critical to success. So just as the mobile trend is challenging the traditional concept of the corporate firewall, since most of the devices that need access to it spend most of their time outside of the firewall, so the need to provide access to applications, content and processes by external parties is forcing organisations to question their approach to the enterprise perimeter – and in the process giving them the opportunity to position Software as a Service (SaaS) as a natural extension to their intranet environment as part of a hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Social Projects: But this trend towards external collaboration with your ecosystem cannot be addressed by simply throwing open the gates to your network. What organisations need to do is define specific projects to deliver identified business value and then design a solution to address them. This is very different from the way IT traditionally create enterprise-wide infrastructures – but again, Hybrid SaaS comes to the rescue, avoiding the need to spin up new server infrastructures but instead reusing integration that has been done with SaaS services to create a model that accelerates return on investment by deferring costs until business value is realised.

We are also seeing a revolution in the way we design these projects – no longer thinking about the data and applications you have available and how can they be delivered to the users, but thinking about the user journey required by the multiple actors within and outside the organisation to execute a required process to deliver maximum business value. Implementation is then about putting together those user journey (by integrating content, applications and processes from the intranet, leveraging the service oriented architectures of the last decade and cloud services of this decade) and delivering them through compelling browser and mobile app experiences using open, standards based integration.

Users will access many of the processes delivered via these social projects from their new social mail environments, the social intranet will integrate them with the resources needed and the participants will not just be internal but spread across the whole social ecosystem – as a result driving new levels of personal and organisational productivity by making business processes easier, faster, cheaper and more satisfying to use.

Social Business in 2013

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The last year has been pivotal for Social Business as organisations shift from being concerned about the issues that the new Social, Mobile, Analytics & Cloud (SMAC) technologies raise for their IT strategy, to accepting that they are irreversible and adapting strategies to accommodate them. The question is now when and how each organisation should embrace them.

There is an emerging acceptance that sharing knowledge across organisations will increase their ability to deliver more effectively on their business priorities – and that better tools than email are needed to raise users’ productivity and leverage the organisation’s talent effectively. Have you noticed that job roles with Knowledge Management in their title have suddenly started changing to say something like Social Media? The question now is which tools and platforms best address this need and how to introduce them.

Companies that would have said, only a couple of years ago, that their strategy for mobile was Blackberry, and that it wasn’t going to change any time soon (well, apart from some senior executives that were allowed to connect their iPads to the network – in an echo of the way Blackberry penetrated enterprises by winning the hearts and minds of senior managers), are now making bold statements that “Bring Your Own device is our strategy.” It’s just a question of when and how.

Similarly, Big Data and Cloud have become acceptable technology choices and organisations are working on their IT strategies to figure out how they fit and where to prioritise them.

Social Business is rapidly moving from the latest fashion fad to business as usual. But does that work? Can organisations successfully adopt collaborative ways of working without changing their command and control hierarchies, and their competitive organisational structures and employee compensation schemes? Can the commoditisation of the users access point and shift to user selected and managed devices be reconciled with traditional “locked down” IT management? How will employees and customers privacy concerns be addressed when using analytics to derive information from every fragment of content they produce and every conversation they have? How will we change traditional views of enterprise security management and confidentiality regimes when, not only is the data being stored in some Cloud service somewhere, but we are pointing powerful analytics at it specifically to find new insights while providing transparent access, as far as possible, to all employees from the privately owned devices in their pocket, so they can use it to increase company profits?

Or is it true that social business technologies are disruptive, and therefore will disrupt current enterprise structures, processes and policies as they are adopted. Is this an inevitable part of becoming a Social Business?

Here is my favourite graphic from 2013:

It makes the point that social business is primarily a cultural change, with significant organisational and operational implications, but one that can only be made if it is supported by the right technology. It’s a bit like the cultural shift from the Internet being something you used when sitting at a desk in front of a PC, to something use while walking down the street. It took the right package technology (initially the iPhone and App Store, then it’s smartphone siblings and their ecosystems) to enable that shift to “suddenly happen” – even though the 3G networks and devices with similar capabilities (for example Nokia’s Communicator range) had been around for a while without catalysing the change.

As a sweeping generalisation, I see companies that use a proper, integrated Social Business platform from the leading vendors are generating successful adoption of the cultural and process changes they are looking for, while those that think that can make this transformation with tools they already have, or legacy technologies that just offer document sharing and communications, are failing.

Proper social platforms are built from the bottom up to facilitate effective collaborative working, have deep embedded social analytics to surface the information users want and can integrate with existing business applications through open standards to add value to existing processes. They are not, primarily, a content platform (indeed they should be able to integrate with and use the content platforms an organisation already has in place), rather they are a platform for building relationships between employees (and between employees and partners or customers), and for discovering experts and knowledge (whether that knowledge is in a document internally, or externally, or exists only in someone’s head). They are people centric, not document centric, collaboration platforms.

In 2013 we also saw the start of change in the market. Social business discussions had previously been focussed in two areas: Marketing, to engage externally via social media, and IT, as a better collaborative infrastructure than email. Now there are enough proof points of the value of social business techniques to get attention from all parts of the business: from the sales force to customer support, from HR to financial planning, from procurement to catering.

So Social Business technology vendors will tell you that 2013 saw the rise of Line of Business (LoB) as the key influencer in purchases, rather than IT. Sometimes signing the cheques (especially for cloud based services) and sometimes driving IT’s procurement priorities. This has implications for how technologies are acquired, since LoB are project based whereas IT are focussed on infrastructures for use across the organisation.

Projects often are not large or important enough to justify the purchase of an entire enterprise infrastructure, and that has led to a recurring theme in discussions with IT as they discover that the company is all ready running 4, or 5, or 10, different social business platforms for different projects (some in cooperation with IT, some independent but with acquiescence of IT, and quite a few without the knowledge of IT). Not only is this causing increased financial costs, but it also creating silos of knowledge and reinforcing exactly the sorts of barriers within the organisation that social collaboration is trying to remove.

This trend is also driving one of the characteristics of the age of Social IT. Big, enterprise wide, mega-projects, fully costed (and with all the risks taken out) are no longer seen as the way to succeed. Rather the right approach is to start many, small projects and evolve them, accepting the innovation risk of failure and investing in and developing the projects that prove they can deliver real value to the business. The mantra is that of continuous proces improvement, not wholesale process reengineering.

This is leading to organisations starting to put a strategy in place of acquiring an enterprise infrastructure which can start small and grow, hosting the evolution of divergent existing social projects, and being used as the platform for new ones. It is starting to require organisations to rethink their security policies and integration architectures to allow projects run on external cloud platforms, so as to avoid large, up-front investments (even if they could afford them – simply creating a large project drives behaviours and metrics which are ill-suited to the sort of agile, collaborative organisations that innovate successfully and outpace their competition).

Integration is key here. Not just with existing content and applications, but also across different solution domains. For example, it is increasingly becoming clear that the separation of marketing’s social media activities from internal social collaboration platforms has negative consequences. Organisations are realising that they cannot get benefits from their social listening if they cannot effectively communicate the insights it generates to the employees who need to understand them (and act on them). This requires internal collaboration with the employees that can take advantage of the insight to improve the company’s products, services and processes – and who knows where in the organisation they might sit?

And anyway, enterprises are starting to realise that external social engagement isn’t just something just a skilled social media team do. More and more of their employees are present on social media already and they understand that they can use interactions through social networks with their customers, partners and suppliers to do their jobs better and deliver better business results.

Gartner calls Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud a “nexus of forces,” which encapsulates the idea of synergy between them – the sum is greater than the whole. But look back previous waves of related technologies – like the Internet, the World Wide Web, email and laptops, that enabled nomadic workers, new corporate structures and globalisation. That wave of change was also synergistic with wider trends (e.g. affordable mass air transportation, 24 hour satellite news and the dominance of free market capitalism) to drive significant business changes – and with them broader cultural changes.

All of which set the stage for what came next: social media, always on mobile employees, vast quantities of unstructured data and utility computing available at low cost in the cloud.

Today’s vision of social business won’t be frozen in time and gradually adopted by all organisations – it will continue to evolve as each organisation adopts it, as each vendor evolves their offerings, as each entrepreneur brings a new idea to the market, and as each individual user provides feedback on what they are using, to contribute collectively to innovation in the space. The rate of change shows no sign of slowing down.

In the early 1990’s I worked for a company (Soft-Switch) that had great success connecting corporations’ separate, siloed email systems together. By the end of the 90’s that business didn’t exist. Not only did most organisations run only one enterprise email platform, but SMTP integrated the remaining systems seamlessly with each other and with applications.

Social Business platforms are still at the maturity level of those early 90’s email systems. They have a lot of evolving to do. There will be a lot of consolidation I the market. So businesses need to invest at the enterprise level with a social platform that will survive (and IBM is clearly the market leader).

I asked above whether Social Business will disrupt current enterprise structures, processes and policies? I think it is starting to do this already in some companies (like IBM). The interesting question is whether it will deliver on its promise and give those companies enough of a competitve edge that the rest will have no choice but to follow their lead.

Talent on tap: how social businesses identify leaders

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Talent on tap: how social businesses identify leaders

Earlier this year, I published the article linked above on the Personnel Today web site discussing the role of social collaboration in identifying future leaders, developing them and realising their potential.

A source of frustration for many current leaders is their inability to communicate corporate strategy to every employee and engage them to align what they do every day with those goals. At the same time, succession planning and capitalising on talent is a priority for many businesses today.

By focussing on building employee networks and relationships to create an engaged workforce, social businesses create an environment where a new breed of Social Leaders can emerge with a high level of insight about how the business works, and an ability to influence and lead that goes far beyond what was possible before using typical management hierarchies.

Mobile Web or Mobile App?

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When discussing mobile, the question I most often get asked is “should I build a mobile app, or is a mobile web site enough?” The answer is (almost) always “both, but for different purposes”.

Before we explore that, we should consider why a mobile interface is so critical. The number of smartphones+tablets being sold outnumbers the number of PCs and the number of smartphones sold in the UK exceeds the number of conventional mobile phones. This is a symptom of he fact that, for many demographics (such as the youth market, or large segments of the developing world), the mobile device is becoming the primary access mode for the web.

Certainly, from a personal perspective, the Smartphone is the primary way I access a range of services, from weather to travel & maps, from social networking to music & video content. But more than that, because most of the traditional news and company links I receive come via Twitter or Facebook, and I access those services almost exclusively from my iPhone, it is an effort to relocate the link to a PC browser. Furthermore as my primary browsing device at home is the iPad on the sofa, I am increasingly ignoring any web site that tries to force me to walk over to my desk and wake up the Macbook. We really are moving into the post-PC era.

So you can imagine how frustrating it is to click on a link in a Tweet or Facebook update, and be presented to a complex screen full of tiny print on my smartphone. I thought hard about whether I wanted to pick on one example here, especially when there are so many of them, but sites talking about the importance of good mobile apps are asking for it (sorry, @usertesting)…

That looks like a very relevant Tweet. Let's follow the link….

Oops! If you can't read the text, it says “Mobile apps and responsive websites are looking – and working – better than ever…” Unfortunately that doesn't include their mobile web site.

The reality is that Gen-Y (and many other people) no longer have the patience for this sort of web experience. Their reaction is “it doesn't work” rather than “I need to go and open this link on a PC”. So, if you are thinking of launching a Twitter campaign, or creating a Facebook page for your brand, you had better be making your web experience responsive, so it automatically adapts to mobile devices.

Yes, this does require rework – which is all the more reason why you need to choose a portal platform, like IBM's Customer Experience Suite, that will let you easily exploit future extensions to the digital experience with minimal reworking. Then, at least, you will be ready for holographic, 3D, immersive web experiences – or whatever comes next (smellyvision, anyone?)

So, our first key lessons is that making your web site responsive is a must (I chose the theme for this blog because of its responsive design – it is actually more readable on an iPhone that a PC browser), so prioritise the move to reponsive web site design today.

Earlier this year, at the IBM Exceptional Web Experience conference in Berlin, I listened to Jyske Bank talk about their journey to create a mobile friendly website. Their key conclusion? Going forward they have adopted a “Mobile First” srategy (as scaling that up to a full site is easier than dumbing down a complex web property). A user who doesn't have (or doesn't want) a PC will not accept a user interface with only half the functionality. Anyway, in some ways the mobile interface is richer, with has location awareness, a camera, plus the user is willing to share more personal information via it, and soon finger print authentication too.

Actually, I was talking to a customer recently whose vision for their next generation intranet home page looked like the iPad home screen. Not so much the set of icons for apps (though that was seen as familiar to the users) but the concept that the user can choose the apps (icons) and lay them out according to their needs, then open them as they need them (this is very different to the traditional concept of portlet page designed for the user's role base on assumptions about the users needs – the predecessor of the rather hideous Windows 8 tile interface – but rather something simpler and less confusing for the person in front of the screen).

But, to return to the original question, does that mean that if you have a mobile web site you don't need a mobile app? After all, iOS has always been happy to store a link on your home page as if it was an app. Mobile frameworks like PhoneGap let you access local services like location and the camera from your mobile browser application. Isn't that enough?

I believe it is not. For two reasons. The first is logical and obvious – offline support. At the very least a mobile app which cannot connect to the server can make a phone call to the call centre so you can talk to someone – rather than giving the user no options at all. It can tell the user what to do now, if there is no wireless connection at all, and synchronise information like account and serial numbers or policy details.

The second reason is more subtle. It turns out that because the mobile device is such a personal, customisable, social device, users create an emotional engagement with it that is much stronger than they are ever likely to develop with a web page. But for this to happen the app has to be simple, intuitive and highly personalised within minimal configuration. All the things the PC has lost over the years and web pages find it hard to be.

So design apps that respond to specific user needs, create an engaged, social, compelling relationship with the user, and make sure they have a reason to return to them regularly. Otherwise they will be moved off the home screen and the user will forget that they are even there. That way, the app becomes a proxy for the user's engagement with your brand.

Oh, and one more thing. Don't design a smartphone app that doesn't adapt to the real estate of the tablet. It's real annoying to feel like you are being treated as a 5 year old when you have a device in your hands that, because of the touch screen and smart apps that connect you directly to people, content and organisations, feels even more powerful than your PC.

Similarly make your mobile web pages responsive to the dimensions and orientation of the screen – don't let them look like a simplified version for five year olds. That wont endear the users to your site.

So, the conclusion? Apps are “better” as they are lean and mean – but that likely means they are not sufficient. Technology typically starts that way, but gets complex and bloated over time as users keep demanding more features and marketing keeps looking for something new to sell. Fight it. Keep your apps simple because that's what users really want. Make them personal and engaging with an easy, clear value proposition, then users will keep coming back to them.

Web sites are good as they are comprehensive and do everything you could possibly want. Build a mobile web interface that repurposes all your services to be accessed in a mobile friendly way (and I mean all the services, ready for the day when there are only mobile devices). The web can accomodate the long tail of functionality, where the cost of implementing, and the cost of the user complexity in accessing it, isn't justified. It can seamlessly extend the functionality of your mobile app by delivering advanced functionality in a hybrid web app accessed via the mobile app.

But just because mobile apps and mobile web are different things with a different purpose, doesn't mean they should be implemented completely separately. Or even worse by different teams. They should use exactly the same back end services. Have a common look and feel, terminology and navigation. They should use the same user interface elements. That is one value of having a portal as a presentation layer for your web content – it front ends the services you offer in the same way as the mobile apps do.

So the portal layer needs to integrate with your mobile application development framework, providing common services to web and mobile users. Different presentation for different purposes, but with an integrating design and development team.

Most importantly of all, when you are designing for a user holding a smartphone or tablet in their hands, try to get inside their head. Understand what they are trying to achieve, Think about their context – not sitting at a desk but standing at a bus stop, walking down a corridor, or sitting in the back of a taxi. Use capabilities like location, camera, motion detectors and personal data on the device to contribute to an overall customer journey that will make your app, like their smartphone, feel more like an extension to their body and brain than a gadget they are using. Most of all, make the experience simple and satisfying.

Then let them bridge to the mobile web when things get complicated, rather than complicating things from the start.

 

Social Business can transform Public Sector

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Further to my last post on social business in the public sector, I recently published an article on the topic on the Scottish Policy Now web site. It discusses some of the frequent patterns for success in social business, and interprets them in a public sector context.

It is becoming clear to me that, while rapid viral adoption of social collaboration can deliver a quick return for organisations, the long term transformational opportunity comes from changing your processes – making them more efficient and more effective by using social, mobile, analytics and cloud solutions.

This diagram shows just a few examples I put together…

The potential benefits are real. Achieving them requires a cultural change to make organisations engaged, transparent and nimble by empowering staff to improve business outcomes, and process owners to be willing to change the way the organisation works to deliver better outcomes. But it also requires the right collaboration tools that encourage the desired behaviour and integrate with existing systems to allow process improvement without wholesale replacement of systems.

However just creating a new social knowledge silo which employees can choose to use or not as they please is not going to create this sort of transformation either – commitment and leadership from the top is critical.