Transparent Office

Transparency, not Anarchy

In a recent post, ZDNet blogger Dennis Howlett asserts that Enterprise 2.0 is a "crock." It's a smart and thought-provoking post, which has elicited equally smart and thought-provoking replies from Andrew McAfee, Thomas Vander Wal, Larry Hawes, Gil Yehuda, and others.

I think Dennis's argument is wrong. But it's interestingly wrong, which is a very good thing. (There's a special place in heaven for interestingly wrong arguments.) Rather than tackle the' entire argument, I'll focus on my favorite part. Dennis writes:

Like it or not, large enterprises - the big name brands - have to work in structures and hierarchies that most E2.0 mavens ridicule but can’t come up with alternatives that make any sort of corporate sense. Therein lies the Big Lie. Enterprise 2.0 pre-supposes that you can upend hierarchies for the benefit of all.

The problem with this provocative sentiment is that Dennis doesn't understand the difference between transparency and anarchy.

He's not alone. Dennis has picked up on the unfortunate fact that a lot of Enterprise 2.0 rhetoric has a man-the-barricades, throw-the-bums out flavor. That's particular true on Twitter, the blogosphere, and industry conferences, where the most outspoken advocates--Dennis's E2.0 mavens--dominate the conversation. If you listen closely, you can hear La Marseillaise (or is it just Les Miserables?) playing on the hotel muzak.

But when you look at real Enterprise 2.0 implementations in real companies, a different story emerges.

Companies are not using blogs, wikis, social networking, or micromessaging to upend hierarchies. They're not trying to introduce anarchy to corporate America. They're not fighting a moral crusade to free the downtrodden knowledge worker from the tyranny of the org chart. But they are using these tools, and using them to good effect.

Successful Enterprise 2.0 practitioners have learned that it's a mistake to radically realign accountability within their organizations. They respect, preserve, and even reinforce the roles and responsibilities already prevalent within the organization. If your job used to be to manage Tech Support in your company, then guess what your job is after your company adopts Enterprise 2.0? You guessed it: managing Tech Support. That responsibility is still on your shoulders, just as it was in the old days.

The difference is that Enterprise 2.0 gives you and your team information and relationships that help you accomplish the things for which you are and remain responsible. You can see who is working on what, even when you're on different continents. You can access relevant information from other departments. You can quickly put your fingers on documents otherwise lost in the bowels of your email in-box. You can see and discuss in public the issues that your colleagues are already grumbling about in the company washroom. These are good things, and companies are adopting them because they're good business.

When Dennis says that "Enterprise 2.0 pre-supposes that you can upend hierarchies for the benefit of all", he is confusing transparency with anarchy. Put differently, he's confusing information access with decision rights. (For more on the difference, see McAfee's The Great Decoupling and Ross Mayfield's Decoupling Decision Rights and Decentralization. Andy and I also talked about it a couple years ago in a memorable panel discussion at Razorfish.)

Enterprise 2.0 pools information, so that workers can benefit from enhanced access to their colleagues and their colleagues' work. That's transparency. But Enterprise 2.0 does not pool decision rights. Embracing Enterprise 2.0 does not mean that workers can assume decision rights that formerly belonged to others. That would be anarchy.

But fear not, oh champions of freedom and enlightenment, all is not lost! Enterprise 2.0 can still free you from the chains that oppress you!

"Hierarchy" is a pejorative term, often used to suggest that senior decision-makers are ignorant, out-of-touch, or otherwise unqualified for the responsibilities the organization accords them. The more transparent an organization is, the less likely that problem is to occur. Open, ongoing conversations with staff, customers, and channel partners make management better-informed, less isolated, and more engaged with what's really happening in the organization and the marketplace. It's easier to focus on what really matters, and harder for managers to succumb to yes-men and wishful thinking. And it's easier for staff to understand management decisions, even when those decisions are controversial or unpopular.

When decisions get made in a transparent organization, we don't call it Hierarchy. We call it Leadership.

Launch E2.0 Broad, Then Go Deep

In my previous post, I argued that companies should Skip the Pilot for Enterprise 2.0 applications. The argument, which came out of my own experience with hundreds of implementations, is that small-scale pilots are not representative of the way companies use collaborative tools at scale. As I put it there, "Scale is the oxygen that feeds collaboration."

The post was controversial. You can see the comments on both my personal blog and on the Socialtext blog. Many people agreed with me. Others trashed my advice to skip the pilot. But even those who trashed it agreed that small-scale collaborative dynamics and large-scale collaborative dynamics are different. They defended pilots on purely pragmatic grounds of risk mitigation. It's just too risky, too scary to launch on enterprise scale until you've proven adoption and value with a small group.

Chris McGrath and I have been going back and forth on this point, and his last comment summarizes his position nicely:

"How is E20 ever going to go mainstream if it requires massive deployments? I'd hate to be the person that convinces their company to make a million-dollar leap of faith, only to have a full-scale rollout languish."

Well shucks, I wouldn't want to be that person either. And you don't have to be. Skipping the pilot does not mean you have to be reckless or risk your career on an all-or-nothing Enterprise 2.0 deployment. The best launch approach ratchets down risk without artificially narrowing the scale of your launch.

Enterprise social software isn't one application. It's a range of collaborative modes that includes blogs, wikis, micromessaging, personal dashboards, collaborative spreadsheeting, and social bookmarking. As Ross Mayfield shows in his post The Power Law of Participation, these different modes have different adoption profiles. Some modes of collaboration have a really low threshold of participation: It's very easy to get started on them because individuals don't need a ton of engagement to find them useful. Other modes of collaboration have a really high threshold: Users don't see the point unless they invest a lot of time learning and using the tools.

Historically, Enterprise 2.0 implementations have focused on collaborative tools fairly high participation thresholds: blogs and wikis. That's not by design, it's by default. Until recently, those were the only Enterprise 2.0 tools that showed potential for high-value business use. Since these activities required a lot of engagement, we smothered our pilot participants with training and encouragement--which forced us to keep the pilots small.

Today, Enterprise 2.0 participation is a whole different game. At the "low threshold" end of the curve, we have low-engagement tools like social messaging (internal "Twitter"), social bookmarking. By leading your implementation with these low-threshold tools, you lower the risk of implementation while still launching at the scale required for success.

The results can be exciting. My company, Socialtext, recently held a webinar on micromessaging for a major financial services company in the Midwest. We didn't position it as a comprehensive Socialtext training. We just focused on Signals, our social messaging component. We were blown away by the response. So many people dialed into the webinar that we--no joke now--brought down the company's phone system.

The webinar itself was energizing (at least until the phones went dead). The group was super-engaged. People were actively creating profiles. They uploaded pictures. They sent signals razzing each other about their pictures. They tagged each other's profiles. And best of all...they signaled about what they were doing at work.

Signals was not just a useful tool, it was also a stepping stone that helped participants move to the right on the Participation curve (see image above). As participants started to get the hang of Signals, many started to ask about Socialtext's other collaborative features: What are workspaces? How do I use the Dashboard? How do I look up an individual?

After the webinar was over, a number of users wanted to go deeper by creating wiki workspaces to collaborate on tasks, projects, documentation, etc. We scheduled follow-up time with them to understand their collaborative needs and build tailored solutions.

This story describes a launch approach that simultaneously achieves seemingly conflicting objectives:

• Launch quickly and cheaply, without investing a ton of time or money in training and content creation.
• Achieve scale by inviting lots of people.
• Minimize risk by making participation opt-in rather than mandatory
• Generate active participation through interactive launch events that don't require a lot of training or engagement from the new user.
• Deliver deep value by following up with local champions who want to invest time and effort in more robust, group-specific forms of collaboration.

So let me ask the question one more time: Why do you need a small-scale pilot?

Enterprise 2.0: Skip the Pilot

Get out your pitchforks, I'm about to commit Enterprise 2.0 heresy.

There's an orthodoxy in Enterprise 2.0 circles about how you're supposed to run an implementation. The orthodoxy goes something like this: Start with small-scale pilots, define your business objectives, watch the pilots closely, evaluate their success, make a go/no-go decision. (A good recent articulation of this view is in Chris McGrath's recent post on 8 Tips for a Successful Social Intranet Pilot.)

As far as I can tell it's what everyone thinks. In fact, it's what I used to think. Unfortunately, it's dead wrong. The orthodoxy is wrong for a very simple reason: Size matters. By constraining the size of your pilot, you significantly alter the way your company can and will use the tools.

I'm not opposed to pilots for most enterprise IT solutions. Companies like to pilot new technologies with small populations before they roll them out enterprise-wide. That approach makes a lot of sense for transactional systems like order management, project management, purchasing, ERP, and so on. By piloting with a small group, you reduce implementation risk. You get a read on the value of the solution, and you get feedback which you can use to make modifications while those modifications are still relatively easy and inexpensive.

But social software is different from traditional IT. Traditional IT enables individuals to carry out well-defined, highly standardized transactions. Users go into the system to process transactions--to transfer funds, purchase supplies, track inventory, etc. The nature of these transactions, and the system's ability to enable them, doe not vary much according to the number of people using the system. Whether 100 people are entering orders or 10,000 people are entering orders, the transactions themselves doesn't really change. What that means is that a representative small-scale sample is an accurate predictor of adoption and value at full scale.

But Enterprise 2.0 tools are different from traditional IT systems. Traditional IT enables transactions; Enterprise 2.0 enables interactions.

Interactions and transactions have completely different scale economics. When we use Enterprise 2.0, we're not transacting with a system; we're interacting with other people. An interaction is a connection between two or more nodes in a network. And as Metcalf's Law famously states, the more people there are in that network, the more interactions each individual can have with his or her peers, and the more value that individual derives from participation in the network.

When companies pilot Enterprise 2.0 tools with small subsets of their organization, they're not testing collaboration with a representative sample. An artificially constrained pilot is always a poor representation of post-pilot collaboration, because the range of potential interactions is so limited. The value delivered to each individual participant is exponentially smaller than it would be at full scale, and the ways that people will use the tool are different.

That doesn't mean small-scale Enterprise 2.0 pilots can't succeed. They can, and many do. But even when pilots succeed, they have limited ability to predict how the organization goes on to use the capabilities once they are rolled out enterprise-wide. Pilots typically fall into the lower left-hand corner of the Social Software Value Matrix: improve existing interactions within existing silos. That includes things like project team workspaces, departmental workspaces, and technical knowledgebases. When organizations really embrace Enterprise 2.0, however, they almost always play in multiple sections of the Value Matrix, launching solutions like collaborative intranets, ideation portals, private extranets, Those solutions, almost by definition, require scale.

Scale is the oxygen that feeds collaboration. That's why collaborative tools like Facebook, and Twitter have taken off so spectacularly on the public web: With over a billion people on the Internet, the opportunities for interpersonal interaction are unbelievably high.

From a practical standpoint, this has a counter-intuitive implication: If your E 2.0 pilot is struggling, don't shut it down. Make it bigger. Open it up. Invite more people. Tell them to invite even more people. That's the only way you're going to find out the real behavior and the real value.

If you're just starting to launch Enterprise 2.0 tools, throw the doors open wide. Invite your entire company, or as much of your company as you're allowed to invite without waiting for an act of God or Congress. Give them fun, easy ways to start contributing. (My personal favorite is microblogging.) Ease them into deeper forms of collaboration like wiki workspaces. And support those users who come forward with good ideas on how to use the tools.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying you shouldn't have clear business objectives. I'm not saying you shouldn't subject your Enterprise 2.0 implementation to critical evaluation. I'm not saying you shouldn't learn from your users and incorporate those learnings into your plans. Those are all good and important things to do. But you can only do them if you're piloting the tools in a way that you'll really learn from: at enterprise scale.

The Five Forces of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption

What makes individuals and organizations embrace Enterprise 2.0? There's a friendly but sharp ideological debate playing itself out on Twitter, the blogosphere, and in conference breakout sessions.

I think it's confused.

On one side, there's a group--I'll call them the "Kumbaya Crowd"--who believe that a spirit of altruism, sharing, and teamwork for the common good are what drive use of blogs, wikis, microblogging, and social networking. For the Kumbaya Crowd, E2.0 adoption is all about culture. They fret about how to create a "culture of sharing" inside companies. They bemoan the lack of such a culture in most organizations, which they see as venal, greed-rewarding places which reward the cutthroat and punish the generous.

On the other side of the debate--I'll call them the "Gecko Group" after Mike Douglas's famously slick-haired, greed-praising character in the '80s-epitomizing film Wall Street--who believe that Enterprise 2.0 adoption is all about creating personal incentives. According to the Gecko Group, we should accept the fact that employee behavior is driven by personal profit-seeking. We should even embrace it. Companies run on personal greed and ambition. If you want people to use Enterprise 2.0 tools, then make it worth their while by tying it to personal profit.

The Kumbaya Crowd and the Gecko Group share a common picture of what motivates individuals. They both think it's all about maximizing personal profit. The difference is that the Kumbaya Crowd wants to change employee motivations, whereas the Gecko Group wants to harness personal profit motive to drive adoption.

It's easy to see why the Kumbaya Crowd and the Gecko Group share this picture. It's the picture that classical economists tell us drives all rational behavior. According to the economist's model, rational decision-makers are constantly optimizing for their own profit.  The Kumbaya Crowd and the Gecko Group have simply taken that concept and applied it to Enterprise 2.0.

There's only one problem: People don't really work that way.  As Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein argue brilliantly in Nudge, human beings aren't "Econs"--the idealized profit-maximizers at the center of the economic theory. The behavior of flesh-and-blood people is driven by a complex range of motivations, of which personal profit is only one.

Looking at personal motivation in the workplace, I see five fundamental forces that shape why we do what we do:

1. Learning - Having new experiences, getting exposure to new situations, acquiring new skills
2. Impact - Seeing your efforts translate into results
3. Recognition - Getting personal kudos, building your personal brand or reputation
4. Camaraderie - Interacting with other people, being social
5. Compensation - Base pay, bonuses, and extra rewards

To influence Enterprise 2.0 adoption, these are the forces to harness. It's not about a simple trade-off of selfishness v. altruism; it's about crafting a compelling value proposition in terms of learning, impact, recognition, camaraderie, and compensation.

The good news is that, as measured against these dimensions, the Enterprise 2.0 value proposition can be quite strong.

1. Learning - These tools are all about learning real-time from your colleagues, and learning a better way of working
2. Impact - The tools make teams and individuals more productive. You will get more done.
3. Recognition - The tools increase the transparency of personal contribution, and is a great way to build your personal reputation or brand. (BTW, don't be surprised if you get a call from the CEO thanking you for your contribution.
4. Camaraderie - Online collaboration, social networking, and micromessaging are a great way to stay connected with the colleagues you care about, even when you're not physically co-located
5. Compensation - Engagement and contribution will factor into your performance evaluations; this is part of what we pay you to do.

I'm not saying that every company must use all five forces to generate adoption. The mix varies by company, by department, and even by individual. But anyone who is looking to roll out Enterprise 2.0 solutions should examine the full range of forces and think about how to harness each.

And please, let's save Kumbaya and Geckos for the Great Outdoors.

What Grandaddy Taught me about Information Flow

My grandfather never used computers, and he died when "wiki" was still just a word in Hawaiian. But in a single comment he taught me all about Enterprise 2.0.

Grandaddy (known to the rest of the world as Phil Plesofsky) was a mild-mannered, old-school stock broker with a boutique brokerage firm in Chicago. He wore pin-stripe suits so conservative that once he accidentally bought the same suit twice. His television idol was Fish, Abe Vigoda's character on Barney Miller. When the office eventually installed computer terminals on all the brokers' desks, Grandaddy tolerated his grudgingly, as if it were an uninvited relative who refused to leave but couldn't be thrown out.

The firm, Freehling & Company, occupied one floor of a pre-war high-rise in the Loop. It was laid out as a single, open room with two long rows of desks where the brokers sat. A big board at the front of the room rolled stock prices as a tickertape noisily clacked out updates from the business news wire. Brokers submitted trades by sealing slips of paper in plastic cannisters, which were sucked through pneumatic tubes to the main office. (Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/molly/3077775845/)

One of the rituals of my childhood was visiting the Freehling office. Grandaddy would walk my brother and me down the brokerage floor, stopping at each desk to meet Irv, Norm, Jake, Stanley, and the other brokers (all men). They shook our hands, praised our grandfather, and told us how much we had grown since the last visit.

In the mid-80s, Freehling was acquired by a New York investment bank, who moved the offices to a brand new granite-and-steel high-rise on Lasalle. There was modern furniture and original art on the walls.

For the first time, the senior brokers had private offices.

When I visited the new office--a teenager by this time--I was impressed by the new offices. I complemented my grandfather on the big step up.

"To tell you the truth, I hate it," he replied.

"Why?" I asked in disbelief.

 "In the old place, when a broker got a tip about an upcoming earnings announcement or a CEO  departure, we all knew about it instantly. You could actually watch the information roll across the floorlike a wave, going from one desk to the next, to the next until everyone in the office was talking about it. Now we sit in our private offices, we close our doors, and nobody has the slightest idea what's going on."

That remains the best description of Enterprise 1.0 I have ever heard--which is why I still remember the comment over 20 years later.

Many of us today sit in the digital equivalent of Grandaddy's shiny, new, and very private office. We have powerful computers with big shiny screens and powerful tools for managing documents and sending messages. We have BlackBerries and iPhones. And in one respect, we're more connected than ever before.

But there's something missing. It's all private.  Sure we can email each other. Occasionally we even take the bold step of picking up a phone. But there's no ambient awareness. There's no serendipitous discovery of what a colleague is doing. There's no wave of information that rolls instantly down the shop floor.

Enterprise 2.0 is all about leaving the private office and returning to that big, open space with the wave of information rolling from one desk to the next to the next.

Twitter is the new CNN

CNN thought its biggest threat was FOX News. It was wrong. The competition is Twitter, and the competition is winning.

In 1980, CNN went live as America's first all-news TV network. It raised a fundamental question: Is there enough news worth watching to justify an all-news network? For years, CNN trudged along as an interesting experiment, more observed than watched.

Then came the first Gulf War. The first President Bush sent U.S. troops to battle on a scale not seen since the Vietnam War, and America became starved for news. Lots of news. From the ground. With live footage. Constantly.

The traditional network news couldn't satisfy our hunger for news of the war. Over the years they had whittled down their reporting staffs. And even with expanded coverage beyond the regular evening news, they just didn't devote enough air time to the war to satisfy the emerging hunger.

Enter CNN. CNN's enormous news staff and 24x7 air time for news suddenly became a major asset. CNN put reporters all over the region, who reported constantly on what was happening. Ratings surged. It became *the* place for news, because it was the only place to get the constant, immediate news from the ground that people craved. The Gulf War transformed CNN from interesting media experiment to "killer app".

Now it's happening again in Iran. Only this time, it's Twitter.

Iran's famously censored society makes it difficult for news organizations--CNN included--to operate there. The Iranian government has also been fairly successful in blocking local access to most websites that Iranians would typically use to share and broadcast information. Even CNN has been left behind.

But they can't stop Twitter.

Twitter's open architecture enables people to send and receive tweets via a range of other websites and SMS addresses. That makes it difficult for the government to keep up. And by posting under pseudonyms, Iranian commentators on the ground can build followership and credibility without disclosing their identities to authorities.

Like CNN during the Gulf War, Twitter has become the best source of direct, unfiltered, real-time information from the ground. Events in Iran have catapulted Twitter from interesting cultural phenomenon to killer app.

As I write this post, the featured story on CNN.com is: Pregnant Mom's Stabbing Still a Mystery. CNN looks old, tired, and late--just like the network news programs it supplanted 18 years ago.

CIOs: It's Strategy Time

Most CIOs I talk to want to spend more time on strategy--not platform strategy or application strategy, but business strategy. The fun part of their job isn't about keeping the lights on or the servers cooled. It's about using technology to fundamentally improve the way their companies do business.

Strategic relevance can be a sore spot for CIOs. Although most line managers agree in principle that IT is strategically important, CIOs still struggle for a seat at the strategy table. Senior leaders in manufacturing and other operationally intensive industries understand the importance of IT. But in other sectors, line management has a hard time seeing IT as more than a back-office support function. That's particularly true in professional services, pharma, media, and other knowledge-intensive industries which traditionally create value through individual talent rather than operations.

Enterprise 2.0 is changing all that.

Managers outside traditional IT strongholds are realizing that wikis, blogs, social networking, micromessaging, and other forms of online collaboration are dramatically changing the way people interact with each other. Most of the early Enterprise 2.0 implementations were driven by non-IT experimentation. Use of Enterprise 2.0 tools has been heaviest in precisely those knowledge-intensive industries that traditionally discount the strategic value of IT.

As Enterprise 2.0 matures, we are entering a strategic phase. Companies are moving beyond their early, ad-hoc, unmanaged experiments, and trying to figure out how it all fits together--not just for an individual department or project, but for the company and its customers. As one client told me last week, "We've done more to advance the company's strategy today than I have in the past year."

If you're a CIO, your company is looking to you to show the way. How will Enterprise 2.0 change the way you do business? What benefits can your company realize? How will this change the way you collaborate internally? How will it change your interactions with customers?

This is a golden opportunity to move out of the back office and drive your company's business strategy. Are you ready?

The Winner is...

A lot of companies ask me whether contests are a good way to spur social software adoption. In my experience, contests can be very effective in generating buzz, awareness, participation, and enthusiasm. They can also be demotivating and marginalizing. It all depends on how you run the contest, and the right way to do it is counterintuitive.

The theory that many people bring to contests is informed by classical economic theory: If you want to motivate people to change their behavior (e.g., to blog, create a wiki page, comment on a thread, etc.), it helps to give them an incentive. The bigger the reward (or potential reward), the more likely people are to participate.

In my experience, it doesn't work that way.

I've seen companies run contests with relatively big prizes (e.g., a new iPod, a case of fine champagne), and I've seen companies run contests with small prizes (e.g., a $20 Starbucks card, a box of chocolates). In my experience, contests with small prizes are more successful than contests with big prizes. Small-prize contests generate greater participation, and that participation endures beyond the end of the contest. Large-prize contests generate a surge of participation during the contest itself, but that surge typically fades once the contest is over.

Why are small prizes are better than big ones? It's actually not that uncommon. There's a fair amount of academic research showing that rewards can actually negatively impact behavior. That's because participants start responding to the reward rather than the other social, moral, or personal incentives they may have felt before the incentive was introduced.

In one famous experiment, researchers found that local residents were more inclined to accept a nuclear power plant in their town if there was no financial reward than if they were "bribed" to accept the plant. In another experiment involving negative rewards, researchers found that introducing late pick-up fines at day care centers increased the number of late pick-ups, as parents stopped viewing on-time pickup as a personal obligation and started seeing it as a financial trade-off.  (Thanks to Barry Schwartz, who pointed me to the literature.)

These experiments support my own observation that social software contest are not successful when employees are motivated by a valuable prize. The wrong employees participate, their contributions aren't very good, and they drop off as soon as the prize is gone.

I still think contests are a good way to stimulate participation. Contests can focus an organization's attention on the rollout, and motivate new people to participate. But it's critical that the prizes have value which is modest or merely symbolic. By offering a small prize, you can make the contest interesting and fun, without introducing the negative side-effects of a larger prize. You have to give them something to win--not because they want the prize for itself, but because they want to win. (I'm reminded of the movie Trading Places, in which multi-millionaires Randolph and Mortimer Duke destroy their nephew's career and reputation over a $1 bet.)

So what prizes do I recommend? Here are a few ideas for modest gifts:

• A Starbuck's or comparable gift card for $15-25
• A nice box of chocolates
• Lunch at a local restaurant
• A bottle of wine

If your company is a little more fun-loving, you can even offer something on the campy side, e.g.,

• A Neil Diamond CD
• A cheesy trophy of some kind
• A dozen cookies hand-baked by the head of the department

Above all, keep the mood fun and playful. Remember, you're not appealing to people's greed. You're appealing to their creativity, their desire to have fun with their colleagues, and their drive for friendly competition.

The Social Software Value Matrix

Mom always told me, "It's what's inside that counts."

Companies are finally paying attention to how social media affects their business outside the company walls.  They recognize the extent to which Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and other mass-collaboration forums present both opportunities and risks. There is excellent thought leadership on the topic, including Wikinomics, Groundswell, and Jeremiah Owyang's blog, just to name a few.

Less well understood is the value of launching social software inside companies. Tapscott and Li/Bernoff each devote one chapter, late in their respective books, to "internal wikis" and the "internal groundswell". External collaboration seems to be the main course for them, while internal is only dessert.

There are good reasons why super-smart people like Tapscott, Li, Bernoff, and Owyang focus disproportionately on external collaboration. First, external is sexier. External collaboration has far-reaching consequences for a company's strategy, and even its business model. That's heady stuff. Internal collaboration, by contrast, is all about working across silos and accelerating decision-making. Only org geeks like me get excited about that. Second, external collaboration has an obvious business owner--the Marketing Department--and therefore an easily identifiable market for books, speeches, and consulting services. The market for internal collaboration is more diverse. It can be IT, the CEO, the COO, HR, Corporate Communications, or no one at all.

But let's think about that. If your Marketing department is driving collaboration and the rest of the company isn't participating, then all you're getting out of social media is marketing. Marketing is a nice thing, but companies social media generates much more value when companies engage on a deeper level. You want your Product people to have conversations directly with the people who use their products. You want your Support people to talk directly to the people they're supporting. You want your Salespeople talking directly to their prospects. It's not just about marketing, it's about mobilizing your company to interact continuously with the individuals who drive your company's performance.

As the CEO of a marketing agency put it to me, "How can we collaborate with our customers when we can't collaborate with each other?"

Collaboration requires a huge cultural and operational change for most companies, and a steep learning curve for most employees. They have to overcome their fear of transparency, learn new tools, master new lingo and communications conventions, internalize new ways of working, and change their daily routines.

It ain't gonna happen by following Ashton Kutcher on Twitter. If you want your employees to embrace social media, you need them to learn how to use social media for real work. Professional and personal interactions follow completely different norms and patterns.

The best place for your employees to learn professional social media is inside the company. Thomas Vanderwal was right when he told me that social media adoption is all about comfort. Most employees are intimidated by the openness and transparency of social media. By launching these tools internally--within teams, departments, divisions, business units, etc.--you acculturate your employees in controlled, comfortable environments. You can train them, educate them, watch them, and even (horrors!) let them make a few mistakes. Once your employees get used to using social software inside the company, it's easy and natural for them to expand their interactions to include customers, channel partners, and even the general public.

I think of Enterprise 2.0 adoption as a journey through a succession of benefits. I've illustrated them in what I call the "Social Software Value Matrix." The first step in the journey is pure operational improvement. You're not really changing the way you do business, just enhancing existing interactions within existing silos. Over time, the tools lead employees to interact in new ways, across silos. This creates cultural change as the company reinvents the way the different pieces of the business interact to create value. Finally, and most dramatically, companies can create new interactions with customers and channel partners. That's business model transformation, and it only happens when your business is ready for it.

The good news is that there are benefits to your company all along the journey. By collaborating more effectively internally, your company will achieve better operations, faster decision-making, enhanced innovation, and accelerated cycle-times. Getting there is indeed half the fun.

And once again, Mom was right.

Social Software Adoption: Why Law Firms Get It Wrong (and How to Get It Right)

I had a great conversation recently with Headshift's  Penny Edwards and Jon Mell. We were talking about social software adoption patterns in law firms--a topic over which a lot of digital ink has been spilled lately. Our conversation helped me connect some dots. I've blogged them here, and I also encourage you to check out the musings of Penny and Jon, both of whom are active on Twitter and their own blogs.

So here's my perspective on social software in law firms: Most law firms take exactly the wrong approach to social software rollout. They try to "chip away" at social software implementation by starting with "easy" use cases like know-how. In my experience, however, firms are most successful when they introduce social software right into the heart of their business: Client-specific collaboration.

Social software can deliver 3 main patterns of use and value to firms:

• At the most abstract level, there is general legal know-how: how to be an effective lawyer, how to serve clients, etc.
• At a mid-level of abstraction, there is practice-specific legal know-how: deal templates, legal opinions and perspectives, standard processes for due diligence, strategic perspectives on client industries and/or functional topics
• At the most concrete level, there is client-specific collaboration: collaborating within legal teams (internally, with clients, or with co-counsel) on specific projects and deliverables.

Most law firms introduce social software beginning with general legal know-how. The first decision-makers in a firm to "get religion" on social software are usually in firm-wide knowledge roles: CKOs, directors of know-how. They pursue general legal know-how because that's their organizational jurisdiction. It's the aspect of the firm's activity for which they are responsible. The more enterprising among them will partner with a specific practice or two, usually by tapping an obliging Professional Support Lawyers (PSL), to launch a social software pilot within a specific practice or two.

From an adoption standpoint, however, general know-how is usually a bad place to start. Lawyers are incredibly busy, and general know-how lies squarely above-the-flow of their daily work. Because lawyers lack incentives to contribute their knowledge to the rest of the firm, invitations to participate in social software implementations are often greeted with a polite "Thanks but no thanks."

A more effective place to introduce social software into law firms is at the most concrete level, with client-specific collaboration. We've seen this take a number of forms. One firm we've worked with is collaborating with co-counsel on a major piece of anti-trust litigation. Another is using social software to create information hubs for their largest and most strategic corporate clients. Still another is using social software to power lightweight virtual deal rooms which are more user-friendly than the virtual deal rooms retrofitted on top of their document management system.

These client-specific use cases are generating real, sustained adoption from the same busy lawyers who won't share know-how on blogs or wikis. What explains the difference?  Collaboration use cases appeal to the self-interest of the firm's partners. Partners are inundated with emails containing document iterations. Reconstructing a document's history from email threads is much more difficult than going to a single place where the history is laid it for you. Once partners see the value, associates and paralegals are easy converts as well. We're even starting to see clients getting in on the act by asking counsel to deliver documents via secure extranets.

Successful law firms will ultimately realize all three patterns of value: general legal know-how, practice-specific know-how, and client-specific collaboration. But it's client-specific collaboration, not know-how sharing, that is the lead "bowling pin" on adoption. When a firm starts using social software for its client-specific collaboration, its lawyers become comfortable with a new set of processes and behavioral norms: distributed publishing, linking, tagging, blogging, etc. These new behaviors open the door for these same lawyers to share their know-how at both the general and practice-specific level.

If you're a legal CIO or Director of Know-How, I'm advocating an approach that's probably different from the one you've been pursuing. To introduce social software in a way that will stick, you need to start by convincing your most daunting audience: the partnership. It doesn't need to be the entire partnership. What you need are a few partners willing to try social software because they recognize the personal value of streamlining client-specific collaboration. Recruiting those partners may cost you time in the short term, but it's the surest way to transform your firm.