innovation – ITSinsider

What is Your Network Telling You?

I caught up this week with Cai Kjaer whom I’ve known via the social web as one of the founders of Optimice. We used Optimice at Change Agents Worldwide to map our core competencies within the network. I’ve always been a big fan of Social Network Analysis (SNA), and feel we are leaving a lot of actionable information on the table when we don’t observe what is happening organically within our networks. As just one example, ESN strategists spend a lot of time identifying who might be a good candidate to advocate for working socially, but a lot of this work is anecdotal, and champions are identified via word-of-mouth. Software can do this fairly easily once you map the activity on the network.

The Optimice team has launched an analytics tool, SWOOP, that may help large networks reveal intelligence that is not intuitive or otherwise obvious. The software platform is the result of over a decade’s worth of consulting mapping organizational networks. At present, the team is working with Yammer and Chatter networks, but they have plans to work with more large-scale ESNs.

For large enterprises that view the ESN as the foundation for culture change, quality improvement, and innovation, it’s more or less a no-brainer to employ a tool like SWOOP. Some of the ESNs already have fairly sophisticated analytics, or at least used to, last time I checked. But Yammer, in particular, has experienced explosive growth now that it’s free with O365, and the analytics are really weak. Something like SWOOP has not been available to its large communities until now, AFAIK.

The good news around this software is there is a lot of interest in introducing the power of SNA to large enterprises, but there hasn’t been an easy way to do that without expensive, complicated consulting. With SWOOP, at a low price/seat investment, you can immediately start “listening” to what your network is telling you. The power of SNA becomes more attractive when you can start identifying how your network can save you time and money. It’s not just eye-candy, in other words. Kjaer likes to say, “Collaboration is a contact sport.” So true. When you can look at connections cross-organizationally, and see data that reflects the role individuals are playing within their groups, you have a guidepost, a key performance indicator of sorts. Moreover, the ESN starts to take advantage of the potential for “emergent” behaviors that got the original Enterprise 2.0 champions so excited. (Myself included.)

I will be watching this area with much interest. I’ve already got some ideas of how SWOOP can make a difference among some successful ESN customers already. If you want to give the platform a try, you can sign up for the company’s free benchmarking tool. I’d love to hear your progress.

Opal Targets Enterprise with Purpose-Driven Social Apps

Enterprise platform startup Opal Labs wants to make Enterprise work more like a consumer experience. The Portland-based startup launched officially in October 2012. The founders had previously founded a digital agency, We the Media, where they served very large Enterprise clients. The exposure to Enterprise enabled the team to work closely with a flagship customer to create its first market-ready app. Opal Brainstorms was designed to enable workforce professionals to contribute unique ideas and collaborate on problem-solving. Completely SaaS-driven with a simple signup, employees and partners can get started in minutes. Built with user experience in mind, the Brainstorms app is elegantly designed with a Pinterest look and feel.

I stumbled upon Opal because the company recently teamed up with TEDxAustin to enable participants, partners, speakers, and the public to engage in conversations around this year’s event which took place this past weekend. George Huff, Opal Labs CEO and co-founder, spoke to me last week about the company. I asked him, “Why Enterprise?” He responded, “I want a business model that isn’t advertising. We started in Enterprise, and that’s what we know. We know we can have so much impact there– and we want to have impact.” Huff recognizes that just like cash flow is critical to a successful business, “idea flow” will secure its future. He wanted to key into the ideas and problems every company faces. He asks, “Who has problems in a business?” The answer, of course, is “everyone.”

Opal Labs is 100% bootstrapped with about a dozen employees. Huff says they have been making money for about a year with a solid portfolio of large enterprise clients. The company headquarters are in Portland and has a London-based subsidiary that serves a flagship client: ARUP. Pricing for Opal Brainstorms is $10/user/month with an annual contract, but the company will negotiate larger scale enterprise license agreements.

I’m looking forward to watching this company grow. With HTML5 and superb design skills, there is no limit to the problems Opal can start addressing in large Enterprise. You can find Huff on AngelList, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

The Secret to Successful 2.0 Evangelism is found in Social Intelligence

I was invited to speak at one of our executive client briefings last week. The theme of the “Executive Perspective” was examining the “Core/Edge Dynamic.” nGenera defines the “core” as the collection of processes, systems and infrastructures that have evolved over many years and effectively run today’s large enterprise. The “edge” is the emerging suite of Internet-based capabilities that promise a huge competitive advantage in the form of increased innovation, productivity and agility. My role, specifically, was to demonstrate how an “Edgling*” leverages social networking and web applications for personal productivity and innovative gains for the enterprise.

Part of the agenda included a talk by Gregory Berns, the Distinguished Chair of Neuroeconomics at Emory University. Berns’ soon to be published book, “Iconoclast” outlines how and why iconoclasts essentially think and behave differently than non-iconoclasts. In 2.0 evangelism, very similar to the role of an iconoclast, we’re attempting to change people’s behavior which Berns admits is difficult and uncomfortable. As a part of the lecture, we were given advance copies of Berns’ book. I was particularly drawn to his chapter on “Brain Circuits for Social Networking.” This chapter explains that in order for an iconoclast to be successful and sell a new idea, he or she must leverage two variables key to social intelligence: reputation and familiarity.

In my talk, although I was chartered to expose our clients to a “new way of web-working,” I found I was not connecting with the audience. For starters, as this was the first time I was before this particular set of clients, they had no idea who I was or what level of authority or credibility I had to present my ideas. Although my nGenera colleagues did a great job of introducing me and how I work, the clients had no firsthand experience with me, so they therefore (especially given the content of my presentation) met my ideas with skepticism. So I failed on the first variable, reputation, to sway my audience to consider a new way of working.

Secondly, the matter of familiarity delivered the final death knell to my chances of converting any new prospects to my scary 2.0 religion. For the most part, what we (edglings) immerse ourselves in daily on the social web is wholly alien to the way large enterprise management works. Many of our clients are not even in front of a computer most of the day. It’s a series of back-to-back management meetings and various engagements where they’re reviewing or preparing presentations in order to make decisions on operational issues that keep the company gears running. The suggestion to stay tethered to a micro-blogging platform was received as eagerly as if I had asked them to grow antennas out of their heads.

Of course, there is always the unfortunate possibility that I was just an awful presenter and that is the reason why the session did not go over well. (We did have a little Skype trouble…) Yet, I know how to read an audience, and it was obvious to me they just weren’t connecting with what I was trying to show and explain to them. In Berns’ book, he explains that in order for an iconoclast to effectively sell a new idea he or she must make the audience comfortable with the idea. In fact, there is neurological evidence that suggests the brain processes unfamiliar things as “alarming and potentially dangerous.”

I’m publishing this account of my experience to caution other evangelists to explore as many ways as possible to bridge the gap between what the client already knows and the richness of what you are trying to present. Our eagerness to spread the “good news” of 2.0 will continue to fall on deaf ears if we can’t make the story relevant and compelling in terms the clients can appreciate. Further, we need to summon our own courage to overcome their innate biological fear of change in order to truly unleash radical innovation.

*”Edgling” was originally coined by Stowe Boyd.