I’m heading to Europe in March to attend and speak at IntraTeam Event 2010, the annual Intranet conference in Copenhagen. While global warming won’t be on the agenda, lots of intranet and collaboration topics will be! I am presenting a pre-conference workshop on User Adoption Strategies, and conference keynote on Frameworks for Evaluating Collaboration Tools. I’m really looking forward to it. Will you be there?
As part of my preparation for the workshop specifically, and in relation to a variety of other projects more generally, I am doing a lot of work around user adoption strategies for collaboration tools at the moment. User adoption is the essential stage whereby you put an intentional focus on encouraging people to adopt the new collaboration tool — Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, Microsoft SharePoint, Atlassian Confluence, Yammer, Central Desktop — as part of improving the way they work. There are many user adoption strategies that can be used to this end: over-the-shoulder watching, classroom training, real-to-life narrative scenarios, exemplar stories, and more.
So, I have a request to make. I’m looking for input from you about how you approach user adoption for collaboration tools at your place of work. I have created a survey on user adoption strategies—it will take you 10 minutes to complete. Would you be willing to share your experience with me please by taking the survey?
“The end has come.” Recalling Gandalf’s deep resonant voice in The Lord of the Rings seems like a good way to start this, my last Messaging News blog post for 2009. The end of the year is upon us, the holiday season is but days away, and then after the end of year celebrations, we’ll get back to the office for a new year of challenges and opportunities. Before going any further, I’d like to express my thanks to you for being part of the Messaging News family during 2009. I hope that all of us here have kept you suitably informed about current happenings and opportunities in the messaging and collaboration spaces, and that as a consequence of our work, your work has been easier.
In anticipation of writing this blog post, I have been casting my mind back over the happenings of the past 12 months, looking for the “most significant happening” in the collaboration arena. I haven’t reviewed my blog posts, either here or on my own Web site. I haven’t trawled back through copies of the Messaging News magazine. I haven’t posed the question to online or offline friends … I’ve just contemplated.
So what did I conclude?
- Was it that SharePoint kept on growing by leaps and bounds? No, that wasn’t it for me.
- Was it the new energy that Cisco is planning to throw around in the collaboration space in 2010? No, not that.
- Was it something to do with Google? No.
The most significant event for me in 2010 was observing the adoption and use of Twitter. The technically correct explanation of “saying what you’re doing or thinking in 140 characters or less” has been enthused with people all over the world sharing observations, sharing links to blog posts and articles, engaging in conversations with others, reaching out for help, forming groups around shared interests, telling jokes, goading others publicly, and a whole lot more. Talk about huge opportunities for serendipitous discovery! It’s become the new place to communicate, coordinate and collaborate—in some ways—with other people. If you’re not there, you’re missing out on a lot of insightful conversation and banter. Head over to twitter.com; you’ll find me there as @collabguy.
So the year has — or is about to — end. I have some big projects on the books for 2010; what are you looking forward to?
I was supposed to have written a blog post for here a couple of weeks back, but life’s been busy. I had a very enjoyable, albeit exhausting trip to Singapore, leaving New Zealand on the Tuesday and getting back on the Saturday. On the Wednesday evening, I presented to a knowledge management group talking about the linkage between collaboration and KM, with topics that won’t be strange to readers of Messaging News. For example, I talked about the three levels of expertise location, something I wrote about here a long time ago. I also discussed some of my current work around the Four Foundations of Organizational Collaboration (see my blog for more). What struck me the most was the post-event comment: “You have spoken about things tonight that these people have never heard.”
Following Wednesday was Thursday, as is usual, but this Thursday brought with it a full-day workshop based on SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration. My hosts in Singapore had gathered over 50 people to spend a day thinking about using SharePoint for collaboration — from the business, technology and people aspect. Needless to say, I was exhausted after the day. I made some notes early the next morning about what I’d do differently next time, and one of those thoughts was amplified by an attendee in a subsequent email. She wrote saying, “More details, and more trending” information would be useful. The area where this was particularly key related to the governance session.
In Chapter 4 of SharePoint Roadmap I outline a decision process for making governance decisions related to using SharePoint for collaboration. I think it’s the right approach, and I deliberately laid out a process rather than a set of templated answers because it’s critical to get people in a firm to work through a process of governing, rather than having something which they lightly embrace without the thinking and discussing. Anyway, it struck me after the workshop that there is a role for giving templated answers — to a degree. People are really interested in what others are doing in relation to SharePoint governance, and so I decided to kick off a new project. It’s called the SharePoint for Collaboration: Governance Themes Workbook, and it will greatly expand on the ideas in Chapter 4.
Here’s an example. One of the governance themes related to using SharePoint for collaboration is what drives site creation. Who is allowed to create a new team site for collaboration, under what conditions, and with what approval approach, if any. If you are “governing” SharePoint then you will be able to articulate the approach you are taking (eg, “Wild West” … anyone can create a new site, at any time, in any location, for any purpose, with no approval), as well as why you are taking that approach (“because we want SharePoint to be highly responsive to the needs of users”). The Wild West approach is a valid approach, but it comes with some major risks — chaotic site sprawl, redundant and overlapping sites, and more. Again, if you’re governing SharePoint properly, then you’ll be able to articulate the risks, and the mitigations you have put in place.
Back to the Workbook. As I said, I’m writing up each theme — and there are at least 10 — when using SharePoint for collaboration. I’m including much more detail that was in SharePoint Roadmap, as well as survey data into what others are doing. If you are using SharePoint for collaboration today, could you please fill out the Site Creation Rights survey? It would be great to hear about your approach. To learn more about the workbook, check out my resources library.
As I said, much has been going on. Perhaps next time I’ll tell you about the recent Cisco Collaboration Summit, its major announcements, and my analyst report on what they’re up to. But that’s a topic for another day.
In his review of my latest book, Thomas Duff wrote that I stayed “firmly on the ‘soft-skill’ ground”. That got me thinking about the commonly accepted labels that we put on things.
If it’s a product, or it’s hardware, then we’re told to call it “hard”, maybe because the product feels hard when you touch it. If it’s to do with the business and people aspects, then the commonly accepted label for that is the “soft stuff”. Perhaps that’s because human flesh is soft to the touch, the business benefits are not always tangible ‘whack-you-in-the-face’ kind of things, and a lot of it has to do with ideas, concepts and ways of looking at things. So it’s the opposite of “hard” or “soft”.
And, yet, perhaps we have the wrong end of the stick.
In other commonly accepted language, we call something “hard” when it’s difficult and requires special attention – in time, via experts, or in effort expended. In this language set, the opposite of “hard” is “easy” – and if it’s easy, then pretty much anyone can do it (or quickly be trained to do it). It doesn’t require too much attention and care, and generally speaking, is going to work out okay. It’s easy. Forget about it. Just go for it. It will work out. It’s easy.
Various researchers and analysts tell us that the success of collaboration systems is only 10 percent attributable to the technology, and 90 percent attributable to the culture, human factors, business strategy, and related items. Most collaboration projects that fail, don’t fail because of the technology per se, but rather how it was introduced into the business, that the culture rejected it, that people refused to use it, that it didn’t represent a big enough change, and so on. This makes me wonder: are we calling things by their wrong labels? Perhaps at the very beginning of a collaboration strategy project, it’s time to call the “soft” things “hard” (as in difficult), and the “hard” things “soft” (as in easy).
Next time you’re talking about an upcoming new system implementation, watch the words you use to describe different parts of it. What are you calling “hard” that’s actually “easy”, and what are you calling “soft” that’s actually “hard”?
I attended an eResearch workshop in New Zealand this week. The focus was on how researchers are using advanced research networks—basically really fat pipes, access to high performance computing resources, processor- and memory-intensive compute jobs, and more—to do better science. Collaboration was a big theme during the workshop, with “collaboration” being thrown about left, right and center. There were a couple of excellent presentations on how the new capabilities were enabling the re-thinking of work.
But…the biggest roadblock to getting researchers to embrace “new science” is how to get them to understand what’s possible. In other words, who bridges the divide between the people doing science, and the people offering new technology and resources to enable science to be done in new and different ways? For example, one researcher asked “Does this mean I can email a 1TB file to a colleague now?” Apart from blowing up the email server, that’s not the idea—instead of sharing snapshot-in-time data, new science involves near real-time access to the same data by multiple people in multiple geographical locations. There were some ideas discussed about how to span this divide, from new training courses to individual mentoring.
At the conclusion of the workshop, I spoke to the moderator and observed that this is the greatest challenge in the collaboration tools world more generally too. As an IT manager with a SharePoint for collaboration implementation at his firm, he nodded in agreement. He commented that standard IT operations shops are not geared up for doing much beyond keeping the infrastructure running. They aren’t resourced to span the divide. They don’t have the people skills to span the divide. They don’t have the inner motivation to span the divide. And so he’s building a new and separate team to work with the business people in his firm to provide direction, advice, and on-the-ground assistance about how SharePoint can help them in their work.
As I walked away from the workshop, I reflected on what he’d just said, and realized afresh that that was basically the advice in SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration around governance. You’ll find this in Chapter 4, but basically you need three groups to make SharePoint work: a strategy and steering group to set strategy and direction, a SharePoint technology group to do the IT stuff, and a business impact group to work as internal consultants to business groups to help them understand the possibilities. This is a similar structure to what Intranet strategists recommend for making Intranets work too, and from the eResearch workshop, it’s a rising idea there too.
So this makes me wonder: Thinking specifically about how to help people understand the possibilities of new technology, how do you deal with introducing new technology—collaboration or otherwise—into your firms, when people have to change the way they work?
A firm in Europe was recently considering the collaboration tools they made available to staff. The firm had a pilot implementation of SharePoint, and some people had trialed an internal, behind-the-firewall micro-blogging service (think “Twitter for the enterprise”). To drive a more strategic view of what tools to choose going forward, the firm commissioned an external consulting group to undertake an independent review of collaboration requirements, and then to recommend which tools to embrace. Once the consulting group completed its interviews and workshops, they wrote the final report and recommended SharePoint. The steering committee for the project was taken a back, and said “You have basically gone from a set of requirements to the recommendation to use SharePoint. What gives?”
My contact at the firm shared the final report with me, and asked for my input. I scanned the report, looked up the consulting group Web site, and immediately spotted the problem. I wrote back, “You chose a Microsoft Gold Partner to do the review, one with significant SharePoint experience and no relationships or expertise in other collaboration tools. It was a prejudiced recommendation from the very beginning. Of course they were going to recommend SharePoint; they were never going to recommend anything else.” Let’s be clear that the firm in this case hasn’t made a unique mistake; it happens all the time.
Hence the first rule of product evaluations: If you want a vendor-independent recommendation on collaboration tools, don’t chose a vendor-dependent provider to write the recommendation. They will recommend what they know best and what they would use to meet the requirements if the firm chooses to work with them going forward. And actually—that’s what you should expect from vendor-aligned consulting firms—such a response is normal and natural. In some situations, getting a vendor-aligned consultant to go through the analysis process and write the report is exactly what a firm wants, because it gives them an opportunity to see how the consulting group works, how well they dig into understanding the business, and how well they form productive relationships with people across the firm. If the consulting group is good at all of those steps, and they think the product they offer will meet the requirements, you have the foundation for a good business relationship going forward.
Equally, sometimes you really do want an independent review of the options, and a recommendation from an external expert about what’s the best product or service for your requirements. Key things to look for include deep product knowledge with the absence of vendor relationships, a policy about not doing vendor funded work, and a history of recommending a variety of collaboration tools from different vendors, depending on the circumstances. Two firms that I rate high on these dimensions are analysts CMS Watch and Burton Group.
So my question to you is: Where do you look for independent advice, and is independent advice about collaboration tools still important at your firm?
Last year the print edition of Messaging News ran A New SharePoint Resource, talking about Seamless Teamwork, my first book. The key point with Seamless Teamwork was to offer a book to the non-technology people in a firm; the business users that have to use SharePoint after the IT department is done with it. Seamless Teamwork helps in this regard by painting a coherent narrative about how a normal business user (and team) can benefit from SharePoint in a team project.
In a follow-up salvo, I have just written and published a second book on SharePoint. It’s another book on the business and human aspects though, rather than being a deep geek book. The new book is targeted at the technology people who have installed SharePoint and are wondering “what next?” The key point in my new book, SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration, is that having a nice shiny SharePoint implementation isn’t the point; doing business better is. It addresses the question of what the IT department needs to do to bridge the divide between what they know about the technology of SharePoint, and what the business groups need from the technology of SharePoint.
Consider a real example from a large U.S. firm. Before SharePoint was implemented, a business team had documents to work on together. They used email to share the in-progress document, with one person sending out the latest edition to the rest of the group, and then getting 10 copies back and having to collate the results. It is a way of collaborating, but it’s a friction-full and error-prone way! After SharePoint was installed by the IT department, the group started putting the document into a SharePoint document library, instead of emailing it around. But, rather than using check-out and versioning to eliminate document chaos, each member of the group continued to download their own copy of the document, and then each upload a new copy. In other words, they have new technology, but the outcome is the same: document chaos!
What’s the problem here? The business users haven’t been coached about how to re-imagine the way that work gets done given that new technology is available. They haven’t been taught about the new capabilities of SharePoint and how it can help improve the way they work. Most importantly, the group hasn’t made the decision to adopt and embrace that new way of working. But it is more than a technology change—the collaboration practice that has to change is that everyone on the team must be willing to open their comments and edits to everyone else while the document is still in progress.
It is for firms that are facing this kind of disaster scenario—spending a lot of money on new technology and yet getting nothing back for doing so—that I wrote SharePoint Roadmap. Hence my second book is “another SharePoint resource”. There are six focal chapters in SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration:
- Chapter 2: Discusses improving collaboration between people. This chapter talks through a number of models about how to think about this.
- Chapter 3: Talks about where SharePoint natually shines in supporting team collaboration, and how to address some of its shortcomings through add-on products.
- Chapter 4: All about governance. I argue that optimizing the technical governance of SharePoint isn’t enough, and instead outline what is required. I also propose a structure and decision process for making governance decisions.
- Chapter 5: Engaging with the business. Once you have a good sense of what SharePoint is capable of doing, you need to explore where and how those capabilities can used to do business better. This requires engaging with business groups and teams, and I outline a number of approaches.
- Chapter 6: User adoption strategies. There’s little point in doing all of the stuff we do with SharePoint if no one uses it! This chapter talks through a number of approaches to cultivating user adoption. Also within this chapter, I talk about the meta-message of my first book, Seamless Teamwork.
- Chapter 7: Getting started. The final focal chapter talks about how to get started. I propose that you play a game of SharePoint baseball, with base one being a pilot project.
In finishing, two things. First, to learn more about SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration, visit http://www.sharepointroadmap.com/ and download Chapter 1. It’s free, although registration is required. And second, I’d love to speak with you about what’s happening with collaboration tools and approaches at your place of work. Please drop me a line at michael [at] michaelsampson [dot] net if we can talk.
One of my long time favorite services—Evernote—has just implemented the first phase of its collaboration strategy. Until the last week of June, Evernote was solely a personal information management service, offering both a rich client for full online-offline access on various operating systems and devices, as well as a Web-accessible service. Even before the release of the new collaboration capabilities, Evernote was pretty fantastic:
the ability to have multiple synchronized notebooks
note items that could be tagged, for search and find
various smartphone clients, enabling auto-geotagging of photos and text comments…along with geographic-based searches of notes that were generated in proximity to a certain location.
text recognition in photos and pictures, so that you can search for a name or number in text and photos. Full-text search meet full-text-in-image search.
Phase 1: Shared Notebooks in Evernote Web
The June 25th update of Evernote added notebook sharing through the Web client. If you are paying customer (and therefore have a premium account) you can enable others to view and edit items in your notebooks; if you are not a paying customer, you can allow others to view but not modify your notes. In this first phase, all sharing is initiated and enacted within Evernote Web, not from any of the rich clients.
Here’s the Evernote video about the new sharing capabilities:
There are three ways that an Evernote notebook can be shared. It can be published to the world, and therefore accessible via a public URL that the user can define. It can be shared with a group of individuals, where each is required to log into their Evernote account. Or it can be shared with individuals, with no log in required. In this latter case, the notebook could be accessed by anyone knowing the address, but its security by obscurity. If you can find it, you can get in.
In phase 1 of shared Evernote notebooks, you can only initiate sharing and access a shared notebook through Evernote Web. Sharing cannot be started from one of the Evernote desktop or mobile clients, and after someone else has shared one of their notebooks with you, it the shared notebook will not synchronize into your desktop or mobile client.
Phase 2:
Although specific details, features and timings have not been released by Evernote, it appears likely that sharing will be baked into the desktop and mobile clients in phase 2. This would mean that a user will be able to designate a notebook for sharing from one of the Evernote rich clients, and also that any shared notebooks will be synchronized into their Evernote clients.
Analysis
Why am I writing about Evernote? Aren’t they merely a niche player in a crowded market? Here’s my reasoning, about why I find them interesting.
First, Evernote have played the “software plus services” strategy very well. The service is seamless—it works on the Web, it works on my Mac, it works on my PC, it works on my iPhone, it works on my HP iPAQ, and it can work on a BlackBerry. Regardless of what device you have at a particular moment, you can access all of your information from anywhere, and create new information that’s captured into your Evernote notebooks. The Evernote team have done an exemplary job.
Second, the introduction of sharing and collaboration is a natural extension for Evernote. What works so well on or at a personal level—the metaphor around notebooks and pages essentially—should extend up to a shared notebook and shared pages.
Third, while the extension into sharing and collaboration is natural, it is also fraught with some major challenges that Evernote will have to deal with. For example, you can currently only share a entire notebook, not a subset of the items therein. Will Evernote take the 37signals Backpack approach and enable sharing on a note-by-note basis? Equally, the power of Evernote as a personal information management tool is in its ability to segregate items into notebooks, but to permit a second approach to the re-aggregation of them based on metadata tags. Thus at a personal level, Evernote enables you to put the information into a note in a particular notebook, but then assign meaning to that note based on tags, which can then be linked in with items in other notebooks. The sharing and collaboration challenge is whether Evernote will permit the sharing of a tag, not a notebook. If a tag was shared, then an assemblage of items from multiple notebooks would be shared, not a notebook as such.
Fourth, and finally for this blog post, will Evernote embrace real-time joint editing and review of Evernote items? Today I can make changes in a note that are then synchronized to you. Will Evernote extend their offering so that you and I can share a notebook (or tag), and then work together on a note—simultaneously editing the same item, and seeing each other’s changes in real-time?
In conclusion, Evernote is already a must-have application in my tool kit. This first step of sharing has made it even more attractive, and future steps will only increase its attractiveness.
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