Using social technologies to aid communities

Communities of practice, as Tom Stewart once put it, “are the shop floor of human capital, the place where things get done.” So how can shop-floor technology best support, enable and, yes, even stimulate behavior change in communities?
During 2006, eight companies spent a total of seven days together in a cross-industry “learning consortium” organized by TFPL, which focused on how to maximize the value of communities. The consortium drew together international organizations with deep experience of communities including companies such as Unilever, BT, Schlumberger and ABN Amro.

At each meeting, the member companies shared their stories, tools and practical experience, working as a mini-community in their own right, addressing the topics which were most important to them. One such topic was that of the relationship between technology (including Web 2.0 social technologies) and communities. This article identifies some of the opportunities and the challenges that technologies present to communities. Handled correctly, can they engage communities to create value? Handled poorly, do they have the potential to disenfranchise communities and even destroy value?

 

Tomorrow’s corporate tool is today’s internet tool
Whilst we are all familiar with the uptake in blogging, both for personal and now corporate use, active participation levels for some social technologies (wikis, for example) are low, often left to a minority of activists. Jimbo Wales – the “face of Wikipedia” – frequently states that the vast majority of Wikipedia is actually written by a few thousand people. Extending this level of participation to the corporate environment would equate to two or three people creating and editing the content for a company with 100,000 employees. Hardly a radical democratization of information management – it sounds more like a traditional intranet portal stewarded by a small team from employee communications – actually more “Web 1.0!”

 

Engaging on an enterprise level
For organizations to enable real change through this technology, a far higher level of participation is required.
Paul Iske, head of KM for ABN Amro bank, sent a questionnaire to all staff that included the following two questions:

• What proportion of your talent, ideas and experience are used in your job?
• What percentage of your intellectual capital do you use?

The survey results came back with the response that 70 percent of staff felt that only 15 to 20 percent of their intellectual capital was being used. With 100,000 staff around the globe, this amounts to a significant amount of untapped potential for any organization.

So how do organizations tap into all of that employee potential, getting beyond the “handful of activists?” This is where the role of communities of practice (CoP) comes to the fore, mobilizing employees with a common interest or professional passion for a particular topic. Such communities tend to persist though organizational changes, morphing to accommodate mergers and acquisitions. Communities provide a concentrated group of active practitioners together with the level of self-policing required to exploit technology, whether traditional information sharing applications or social media. The way in which communities are designed and governed has an impact on their approach to technology. Consider two examples drawn from the consortium members – Unilever and BT.

 

Unilever’s story
The definition that Unilever uses for their CoP is as follows:
A CoP is a recognized and explicitly empowered group of key experts that are the custodians of a well-defined knowledge domain that’s key to the achievement of the company strategy and the attainment of business benefit.
This means that within Unilever, a CoP is tightly organized and can be positioned somewhere between the structure of a project team and a community of interest.

 

Four founding community pillars
Starting with the strategic business objective (“why should we invest in this community”), each community is organized around four pillars: deliverables, people, operations and leverage.

1. Deliverables: What will be the output of the community? Annual plans are created describing the activities and deliverables for that year. In addition to the deliverables of the community, special attention is paid to the deliverables for the participants (“what’s in it for them?”).
   

2. People: Who should participate in this community? The size of a community is limited to 15-20 participants, where the participants (and their managers) are expected to allocate at least 10 percent of their time.

3. Operations: Defines the way of working. Specific tasks and roles are identified, both within the community and in the environment of the community (champions, stakeholders, sponsors). Also, the frequency of meetings, when to have a face-to-face meeting or just a virtual meeting, decision making, what application to use to share and collaborate and so on are topics that are a part of the community plan. In most cases the community decides to use those tools that are already available such as the Unilever Portal (Plumtree), LiveLink and in some cases Lotus Notes. Microsoft Outlook and shared drives are also popular ways for managing the information. The focus of these tools is to support the way of working of the community rather than the communication of the activities and results of the community to the target audience. Although tools also play a role here, the way the results are communicated and embedded in the organization is through the fourth pillar.

4. Leverage: Is the value that the community added to the business of the community. Performance indicators are identified and measured. Successful leverage only can be achieved if the community participants are able to get the results implemented in their own environment. This requires the commitment of all the sponsors, stakeholders and champions involved.

In a two-day training session, the community activists (leader, coordinator) are trained in organizing their community according to these pillars and in the way the available tools can be applied and tuned to what the community members are already used to.
In short, at Unilever the main focus is on the organization of the networks: having all the stakeholders, champions and sponsors engaged. Tools play a supporting but limited role in achieving the community’s objectives.

 

BT’s story
In contrast to Unilever and other consortium members, BT’s approach to communities of practice is very informal. The organization provides the tools that enable employees to seek out and find other BT people with common interests, knowledge and challenges. It also provides the tools to subsequently facilitate the creation of communities from those connections to share common experiences and best practice and overcome challenges collaboratively.
So, while BT creates a fertile environment for communities to develop, the emphasis is on self-service and individuals taking the initiative.

 

Experimenting with the web revolution
BT has most recently been experimenting with a number of Web 2.0 or social media tools to facilitate the creation and operation of its communities of practice. One such tool is a corporate wiki called BTpedia launched last year.
The idea behind BTpedia is that anyone in the organization can publish or edit articles within it on any subject relating to BT or its business. Each article has an associated discussion page in which those interested in the subject matter of the article can share and discuss the content. The tool is rapidly becoming a valuable knowledge base to which any BT person can contribute and is also providing a platform that connects people with a common interest or skills from different parts of the organization. During the pilot or “beta” phase of BTpedia’s deployment, when there was little or no publicity about the tool, over four hundred articles were published and it was visited by over 11,000 individuals.

A key advantage of BT’s less formal approach to CoPs is that its community membership is fluid and changes in real time as members join and leave based around their own changing needs and those of the organization. This means that the BT community structure is completely organic and can change quickly to respond to rapid changes in the communications industry.
For this to work successfully, however, BT people need strong social networks and a reliable and constant flow of relevant, timely information to be able to contribute knowledge and expertise at the right time in the right communities. Social media tools are seen as key to providing what is, essentially, the lifeblood of the company’s organic community approach.

Customizing information flows
Really simple syndication (RSS) is also widely used across the BT intranet to allow its people to customise the information they receive. RSS feeds can be set up and read using a number of different mechanisms, from a standalone feed reader, through a personal portal called MyBT, to a desktop ticker tape. They’re also streamed onto a number of intranet web pages that act as information hubs.
For example, there are 37 separate RSS feeds available on the corporate news desk: this allows users to select the information they receive based around a number of different criteria, from news based around a particular geographical region to topic -based stories. Podcasting is also used to deliver more dynamic content.

 

A comprehensive social media strategy
To facilitate the creation of strong social networks, BT is trialling blogging and its own version of MySpace. A pilot blogging platform has been set up and any BT person can create and run their own blog at the click of a mouse, either as an individual or in small groups based around a particular topic or campaign. There are currently around 300 internal blogs on the platform being used for a wide variety of purposes. The BT pilot version of MySpace, called MyPages, is about to be launched and will allow anyone to set up a group of “personal” pages using a set of templates to highlight their work, skills and experience, or to request help in solving collaboratively a particular problem they face. MyPages offers a mix of social media tools including blogging and wiki functionality and is underpinned by RSS, allowing one BT person to subscribe to another person’s pages.
The ethos behind BT’s use of social media tools is that anyone in BT can say anything they like, but they will be held accountable for what they say. All the tools that BT has deployed that facilitate user- generated content are behind its single-sign-on application, making it impossible to contribute anonymously. The key challenge facing those responsible for governing these tools is to ensure BT people understand which tools are best suited to which purpose. While this happens naturally to some extent as users adopt some tools and reject others, preventing the unbridled proliferation of technology tools on the company’s intranet is seen as a priority.

 

Contrasting community development

As the cases of Unilever and BT demonstrate, different approaches are possible for both the management of communities and the exploitation of supporting technologies.

• Experimentation and adaptation: Provide a number of tools and let the employee or community decide which tools to use.
• Strong governance: The organization decides on the tools to use and the way to use them.

Regardless of which approach is selected (and many organizations will choose a position somewhere between these two examples), success will be determined by the culture and organizational context. In both the Unilever and BT cases, emphasis was placed on the integration of applications to provide a seamless, or at least a simple, environment for community members and leaders.
This simplicity and integration is important, as typically community members may spend only five percent of their day working on “community business” with community tools. It’s important that the technical environment makes it easy for community members to put this five percent to good use, especially as for many members, it may be a discretionary five percent that’s added to the end of a 100 percent day.

 

Engaging community members with technology

Despite their different approaches to developing communities and enabling them with technology, there was universal agreement from all of the consortium participants on one aspect – engagement. As with any change, whether emergent evolution or a planned initiative, engagement and involvement of the participants

are the key activities. The eight companies from the learning consortium shared their own recipes for successful engagement, creating the list of “top tips” (see sidebox, right).
As we consider how best to enable that “shop floor of human capital” and ways in which technology can enable and support it, we should never lose sight of the “human” dimension.