Community Equity
I wanted to make you aware of the Innovation Blog in which host Hal Stern interviews Peter Reiser on the concept of Community Equity. You can access the conversation at Blogtalkradio where you also find other interesting conversations on the social media topic or download the podcast via iTunes.
The basic idea of “Community Equity” is to measure contribution and participation of individuals in a community. I believe this is extremely HR relevant as from the Human Resources standpoint it can help putting the right people to the right projects or into the right jobs (skill management!), motivate people to get the best out of them, to collaborate and learn from the community and finally most importantly reward them! There is much more detail to this that Peter explains on his blog like the Tag Equity which shows the real value of a tag not just how much it has been used by relating all the different aspects of contribution to a specific tag.
I really think these features can help a lot building communities and systematically using knowledge and skills in an enterprise context. As there is a lot of mathematical algorithms and complexity to this it has been patented but is available opensource.
Very interesting will be how the usage of social equity can evolve by mashing it up with semantic web technologies. We would then talk about concept equity. Some of our guys are contributing to the EU KIWI project subtitled "Collaborative Knowledge Management, powered by the Semantic Web”.
As a side note Nielsen Norman Group published an interesting report on the usage of Social Software on Intranets in which Sun participated as one of 14 companies which were interviewed. You find a summary here.
Posted at
04:40PM Sep 29, 2009
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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State of Enterprise 2.0
Updating myself a bit on the Web/Enterprise 2.0 buzz over the past week. You only need to look for it and you find the numbers 2.0 everywhere. Still since I touched on this topic here the first time in November 2006 it did not loose but rather gain traction. The trend towards Enterprise 2.0 started beginning of 2006, 3 years from now. It is persistent and no one should have any doubt that the future is going in that direction. Although talking to people in some businesses it looks like the notion of Enterprise 2.0 is only rarely understood or known outside of software and tech companies.
The benefits are huge. Companies who are under pressure to innovate at ever accelerating rates do not have a choice. They need to rely on their employees' potentials and therefor encourage a bottoms up approach for idea generation. Simply networking with colleagues across the globe and structuring knowledge in Wikis leads to huge productivity gains. Additionally with deploying Web 2.0 software the companies' intranets can be made attractive again very easily at lower cost, also because employees themselves are maintaining it.
The entry barrier for companies to join probably is that Enterprise 2.0 is not only about deploying software, it requires a culture shift to an open company that empowers employees. Managers and Executives are responsible for creating the framework and then need to purely focus on leadership, motivation of self directed knowledge workers, nurturing communities, etc. Bertrand discusses the 6 guidelines for going Enterprise 2.0 by McKinsey on his blog.
Also the Hamburg public-private-partnership Hamburg@Work which supports the growth of new media, IT and communications technologies and companies in the city has put Enterprise 2.0 on the title of it's latest edition of “Always On”. Two companies in Hamburg are mentioned as having fully embraced the concept of Enterprise 2.0 and these are CoreMedia and Qype. CoreMedia even created their own in-house Twitter as we did in Sun. Although both are software companies there is the internationally operating Hamburg-based mail order group Otto which created internal forums and wikis as well as an external fashion blog.
Posted at
11:19PM Mar 17, 2009
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Sunprise 2.0
Time to give an update. Lot of things happened. Sun announced a major restructuring back in November 2008 and I am very positive that we will come out of this as a much stronger company.
Although times
are difficult we keep momentum with our Enterprise 2.0 strategy. It
is really worth going to Peter's
blog and have a look at what happened mainly with our internal
collaboration tool SunSpace. Formerly the main users were our
technical presales employees and it was known under the name CE 2.0.
100
days after launch in July 2008 we had a dramatic increase of
registered users to 20000 Sun employees. Actually now we are at more
than 25000 (which is more than 70% of all Sun employees). Sun Space is a socially-enabled community, part Facebook,
part wiki, part forum and part document-sharing destination. It
allows users to create their own social networks and profile pages,
then join communities on a range of topics. But it is a lot more than
these simple words can describe, a lot of interesting widgets and
features, Peter described them extensively.
This is exactly the tool we are now using with our global HR Business Partner community. We created a place to share best practices in a structured way. In my opinion one of the most important things in our world of knowledge workers today. We developed an initial best practices taxonomy out of which someone posting a new practice needs to choose where to fit their own. Then a template helps to put some standard and structure around each of the practices posted which makes the process very easy. Finally attachments and/or links can be added.
The benefits really are obvious: enabling reuse of knowledge shortens our „time to client“, learning is fostered as is building our global community of HR Business Partners. We even have it in our job descriptions: „Collaborates across the function to effectively leverage in-house expertise in aid of solving client issues“. On top of all that people will learn to use new technologies! We are actually in the middle of rolling this out officially and starting to drive participation. I am just about to join the community leaders community....We're really taking a big step ahead in direction of HR 2.0!
Read this entry from Peter for a summary on Sun's Enterprise 2.0 activities. It is worth having a brief look at the white paper „The Estuary Effect“ which describes what we are doing from blogs, wikis, forums to socially enabled communities.
I also want to reference my former blog entries on the value of social networking for the enterprise and for HR (including a brief presentation) and Enterprise 2.0/HR 2.0.
Posted at
07:18PM Mar 08, 2009
by Volker Seubert in Sun |
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Alumni Networks
More reading on social networks brought me to the term Corporate Social Networking (CSN) and SelectMinds, Inc., a CSN solutions provider, apparently coining this term. The results of their first annual client benchmarking study done last year, which examined the financial contributions of CSN solutions to a cross section of its client base of 60 leading, global organizations revealed that a better connected workforce through CSN technology can yield significant financial contributions to organizations. Key benefits noted included productivity contributions, retention contributions, new business opportunities and leverage to re-hire former employees!
The latter is an interesting fact. Let us just collect some of the benefits of keeping former employees connected with the company. These relationships are a source of business and employee referrals including the possibility to re-hire them. Social Networking tools are ideal to build an alumni community and integrate it with regular employees. In that way their knowledge can be more easily accessed which could play a major role with retirees.
But the fact of having more direct access to this population with the intention to re-hire them seems to be the most attractive by far as rehires are quickly up to speed when they come back. They bring a huge motivation with them as they experienced that the grass is not greener elsewhere. They came back because they learned to value the company culture more. And in consequence they are more successful than the average employee, get promoted more quickly and make their ways through the organization. Not to mention the obvious: hiring cost for this population is much lower!
Another aspect where Social Networking can bring value is “Relational Onboarding”. The Human Capital Institute found that the quicker new hires establish relationships the more productive, the more satisfied and loyal to the organization they are!
The business network Xing had a conference on alumni networks already in 2006. More information can be found in the SelectMinds White Paper “Increasing the density of connections to power business performance” which can be requested on their webpage.
Posted at
07:22AM Jan 21, 2008
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Networks versus Matrix
Shortly after I put my last entry online I read another McKinsey article (Harnessing the power of informal employee networks) from November 2007 which even more explicitly positions the formal network as a new model against the matrix organization.
There were some interesting elements that were put forward contributing to the dysfunction of a matrix organization going back to history. Matrix organizations worked well until the late 1980s because they were used sparingly and did not greatly confuse the hierarchical lines responsible for the success of the companies. As the work environment became more complex with the demands of globalization more matrix roles were created as many different perspectives needed to be integrated.
This led to more interactions and decisions to be handled overwhelming the matrix manager. Also the amount of knowledge and information exceeded personal capacities of any individual. In order to work horizontally across an organization employees found themselves confronted with searching through poorly connected organizational silos for the knowledge and collaborators they needed.
McKinsey did a study which discovered how much information and knowledge flows through formal networks against how little through official hierarchical and matrix structures.
So very simply a formal network can be established by splitting up the matrix inherent dual line reporting to one solid line remaining and the more functional oriented line substituted by a formal network that through better knowledge flow and quick relationship building is for instance far better suited for best practice sharing.
A clear owner of such a network is needed and the scope of activities need to be defined to avoid network overlaps. Most interestingly the article talks about a “servant leader” in this role as this individual is not a boss but a facilitator of interactions between members, responsible for the infrastructure (which requires a budget!), training, incentives for participation and contribution. So enough possibilities to influence the performance of the network to be held accountable for it. Very clearly these networks need to exist outside the hierarchical decision-making processes within the company.
All the value can be accelerated by having many different networks exist in parallel. Then there would be an effect of cross fertilization through employees being part of multiple communities.
I believe success is dependent on the buy in of the senior management of a company as structures need to be provided meaning serious investment is needed and on the other hand on the “servant leader” who needs to be charismatic and experienced in motivating employees to collaborative behavior.
Value of Social Networks
Recently I put together a few slides about the benefits of social networks to update our team. As you know from some of my former entries I strongly believe that Human Resources professionals need to get on top of this trend as it is touching many different HR related topics: organization consulting, change management, communication, learning, team collaboration, compensation, retention, motivation, leadership requirements...
Here are the slides, let me briefly go through:
What is Web 2.0? - Starting off with a brief explanation: The phenomenon of Web 2.0 appears to me as two fold. On one hand all the people participating via blogs, videos, etc. contributing, sharing and voting. On the other hand new technologies that make it easier and more comfortable to find information and consume information. This reminds the Sun Microsystems vision statement on the next slide: “Everyone and Everything participating on the Network!”
Use of Social Networks – Coming to the core, describing purpose and resulting benefits of using social networks in a company.
Concept of Social Capital - How to explain that Social Networks are so beneficial? They add value because they increase the social capital of a company and more social capital increases productivity through higher levels of collaboration.
Communities of Practice - One type of Social Network that is in the focus for being used in a business context. It is a Social Network based on knowledge sharing and learning and has already been looked at before the social revolution with Web 2.0. Call it a classic.
Improving Organization Performance – Visualizing how Communities of Practice increase social capital and finally increase organization performance.
21. Century Organization - Taken from the McKinsey article I mention in one of my blogs putting into perspective nowadays work environment. McKinsey talks about establishing formal networks, meaning nothing else than specific accountable social networks or call them communities of practice that leverage out many of the disadvantages of today's prevailing matrix organizations and provide an ideal background for knowledge workers to give their best.
What is in it for HR? - Play a role in increasing the intangible company value that makes up more and more of the overall company market value, some say up to 80%! Provide mechanisms to motivate and retain the 21. Century workforce of predominantly self directed knowledge workers with innovative recognition models based on collaboration and participation goals that can be measured. And build appropriate leadership capabilities to motivate collaborative behavior!
For a practical example how to measure read Peter Reiser's blog about community equity showcasing one of our internal examples of a social network!
Posted at
09:38AM Jan 09, 2008
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Aspects of Enterprise 2.0
In a recent article about Enterprise 2.0 I discovered some interesting aspects on the effectiveness of social networks: companies using external collective intelligence to drive their innovation. In March 2000 Canadian gold mine company Goldcorp Inc. put 400MB of geological data on the internet which described a 200 square km sized area. Under the name of "Goldcorp Challenge" everyone could do data analysis and give hints about potential gold prospects. The community identified 110 spots out of which 50% were not known by the company before and finally at 80% of these gold was found. Over $500.000 were paid as prizes.
What made this idea so effective is that not only a lot of people worked on the problem but it were people with many different backgrounds, not only Geologists, also Army Officers, Mathematicians, Physicians, all of them using different techniques to solve the problem. The more people contribute and look at a problem from different angles the higher the probability to find a solution.
There are web based communities matching top scientists to specific R&D challenges, like Innocentive used by Procter and Gamble. They cut their own investment in product development by 50%. There are other examples of how to reduce service cost by delegating queries to "Service Communities" in which two thirds of them were solved by users helping themselves.
Also interesting is the use of virtual worlds like Second Life or There.com in business context. Human minds are more attentive to interaction in 3 dimensional spaces and therefor in an enterprise these are currently used for communication (e.g. virtual meetings), learning (e.g. flight simulator), marketing (e.g. the Dell shop in Second Life or a virtual data center which can be used to explain the efficiency of complex products), product development (e.g. 3 dimensional models of a new car prototype) and for the control and simulation of business, production or logistical processes. Also Sun bought land in Second Life and was the first Fortune 500 company back in October last year to hold a press conference there!
The technology is there and is improving every day, just a question of time to see new business models popping up based on it.
Posted at
08:11AM Jul 02, 2007
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Distance Collaboration
Thinking a lot about virtual communities these days. With all the web applications nowadays it has become much easier that our minds connect quickly over large distances. Everyone is using email instead of the former letter. The next step is instant messaging. If you have your workgroup or your friends connected to an Instant Messenger everyone is able to see your online status. While knowing when the other is available you can then exchange information instantly.
The next level to foster distance collaboration, friendship or built a virtual team spirit is to connect on a social networking platform like Facebook.com. One glance at your profile provides all the information people need to get better acquainted with yourself: you can share your music, your photos, your interests, your blog, your online bookmarks. The ultimate state of letting your friends and colleagues participate in your life then is Twitter.com. Post "what you are doing" in a few words from the web, your mobile phone or your Instant Messenger to Twitter and your friends or the whole world will get informed about it. Plazes.com is another tool to connect. It can help not miss friends when you are by chance in the same Starbucks location surfing through the Net, starring at your screen not realizing the world around you. It provides your location to anyone who wants to see it and you can also update via text messaging.
So what is all that about, just time wasted? Working in virtual matrix organizations that span around the globe to accommodate ever increasing business speed and complexity collaboration becomes the buzzword of the 21st century. It is THE key skill for the modern knowledge worker and not imaginable without the internet. There are tons of online collaboration tools available that make virtual teams effective today. The social networking tools mentioned above may be seen as a fun factor but being member of different virtual teams I am already experiencing that many of them connect me well to some of my fellow colleagues. They substitute the live hallway talk but definitly also provide business value. There are more than 2000 Sun employees on Facebook.com. I am using instant messaging with the team of one of my clients and it is very effective. Many of the above mentioned tools could be integrated in a professional enterprise application. Something which we are currently driving at Sun.
Posted at
10:06PM Jun 21, 2007
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Web 2.0 Survey
I came across an interesting survey about Web 2.0 conducted by McKinsey in January this year: “How businesses are using Web 2.0”. Nearly 3000 executives from all over the world replied.
Web 2.0 is seen to consist of the following elements/technologies (referring to the article):
Blogs like this one, online journals or diaries hosted on a Web site and often distributed to other sites or readers using RSS (see below).
Collective intelligence refers to any system that attempts to tap the expertise of a group rather than an individual to make decisions. Technologies that contribute to collective intelligence include collaborative publishing and common databases for sharing knowledge.
Mash-ups are aggregations of content from different online sources to create a new service. An example would be a program that pulls apartment listings from one site and displays them on a Google map to show where the apartments are located.
Peer-to-peer networking (sometimes called P2P) is a technique for efficiently sharing files (music, videos, or text) either over the Internet or within a closed set of users. Unlike the traditional method of storing a file on one machine—which can become a bottleneck if many people try to access it at once—P2P distributes files across many machines, often those of the users themselves. Some systems retrieve files by gathering and assembling pieces of them from many machines.
Podcasts are audio or video recordings—a multimedia form of a blog or other content. They are often distributed through an aggregator, such as iTunes.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows people to subscribe to online distributions of news, blogs, podcasts, or other information.
Social networking refers to systems that allow members of a specific site to learn about other members’ skills, talents, knowledge, or preferences. Commercial examples include Facebook and LinkedIn. Some companies use these systems internally to help identify experts.
Web services are software systems that make it easier for different systems to communicate with one another automatically in order to pass information or conduct transactions. For example, a retailer and supplier might use Web services to communicate over the Internet and automatically update each other’s inventory systems.
Wikis, such as Wikipedia, are systems for collaborative publishing. They allow many authors to contribute to an online document or discussion.
By far the biggest investment is done or has been done in web services, then follows collective intelligence and peer-to-peer networking. For the rest more companies are planning to invest than have actually invested. The difference to companies already engaged is generally rather low in this segment with the exception of blogs and mash-ups which are currently not so much favored. 54% of respondents though plan to invest in mash-ups so this looks like the trend of the near future.
I also found the regional analysis interesting. China is the most advanced region to use (or plan to use) peer-to-peer networks, collective intelligence and social networks! North America is leading with blogs and RSS, wikis and mash-ups are most used in India.
The industry that will invest most in Web 2.0 technologies in the next 3 years is the retail industry followed by high tech. Technology is mostly used to interact with customers, suppliers and partners but to the biggest extent to manage internal collaboration with the two main areas knowledge management and product design & development.
Proof that Web 2.0 has a benefit to companies fostering multiple relationships. As Web 2.0 gets increasingly important HR needs to get familiar with the benefits of those technologies for employee engagement.
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Posted at
01:23PM Apr 16, 2007
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Web 2.0! Enterprise 2.0! HR 2.0?
Peter Reiser is really working on interesting stuff which he lays out in his blog “Web 2.0 applied in an Enterprise – a huge business opportunity”. He is using the case of Sun's internal Customer Engineering Web to describe how effectively set up a community or formal network within an enterprise. Let me pick this up and give some thoughts on why I think Human Resources needs to embrace Web 2.0 more. I even believe HR's involvement is crucial on a company's path to Enterprise 2.0. The article “The 21st-century organization” gives a lot of evidence on this and I will use parts of it in this entry.
I actually see 4 different benefits to using Web 2.0 mechanisms in and beyond the enterprise:
Knowledge Management: Employees contribute and share content via a network platform or portal that has all Web 2.0 features like tagging (which creates a folksonomy), wikis, search engines and voting in order to systemize the content and make finding content as well as contributing it really easy minimizing search and coordination cost.
“Knowledge workers” (also referred to as “tacit employees”) in many industries (e.g. high tech industry) account for 25 percent or more of the workforce. They undertake key line activities and are the innovators of new business ideas. Therefor it is key for the productivity and even innovation capabilities of a company to create an environment that motivates them to give the best.
HR can play a major role initiating these communities and platforms and implement the recognition model around it to secure motivation of employees to contribute high value content. Employees who are main contributors and highly valued could be voted by the community to become a member in a special group of employees who will have access to a set of benefits like being part of management teams as advisor, or have the possibility to pursue specific career paths.
Skill Management: Through active participation in the community employees will make their reputation as experts for specific areas. In addition every employee could be asked to establish a personal page which describes his/her experience in the form of tags. Then employees with specific experience could be found easily via search.
On the other hand the company would have the possibility to know if there were only one or two experts in a high demand area and could start initiatives building those missing skills.
Learning departments in most companies belong to HR, so this area is a key HR topic. HR and the learning organization should be the driver of implementing innovative Web 2.0 models to do skills management in an enterprise.
Communication: The most obvious element of Web 2.0 benefits for communication are probably blogs. Internally they can be used for information sharing and as discussion boards for new ideas. The web based communities foster communication amongst their participants integrating remote working employees and teams. They facilitate communication across organization boundaries. In times of an increasing matrix environment it becomes more and more critical to provide an environment for employees to gain more easy and comfortable access to information in order to participate in business processes.
HR has a crucial interest in good internal communication to create an open company culture, overcome organizational barriers and keep employee morale and motivation high. The internal communication function is mostly tied to HR.
Partner Relationships: It may not be obvious why internal communities should be expanded to external partners like customers, suppliers or resellers. There are multiple benefits: tie them to the company, keep them informed and give access to crucial information but also receive the benefit of more members participating to the community and sharing contents.
All of the above benefits are based on a community of actively participating employees or simply the benefit of established formal networks. HR can initiate these networks, can help formalize the role of the network within the organization, can make sure that an owner of a network is found and established, can develop incentives for membership, can create frameworks with standards and protocols that makes the network flourish.
A formal network with specific areas of economic accountability can be used instead of a matrix structure as it often serves to attain the same goals with the difference (and benefit) of having to manage a community of self directed employees instead of a hierarchy. It makes working horizontally far more cost effective and takes tension out of the system. The performance management of self directed employees on the other hand is critical. To motivate behavior, measuring performance is more important than providing financial incentives to reward it. Metrics must be established and tailored to individual roles and people.
Overall, creating a state of the art environment will make employees feel more valued and does not only lead to higher productivity but also retains employees!
Posted at
09:41PM Mar 25, 2007
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Bookmarking 2.0
See the little at the bottom of this blog? This icon stands for del.icio.us, a website that manages your bookmarks online and more... By clicking on it you are able to save a bookmark for this blog entry to your del.icio.us bookmarks collection. It is a Web 2.0 site with all it's caracteristics like community building, sharing, tagging. You can build your network, meaning sharing bookmarks with others, subscribe to tags that help find the contents that you are interested in and the most basic function: manage your bookmarks online so that you have them properly organized (tags!) and available Anytime, Anywhere on Anydevice following Sun's motto: “The Network is the computer”. A really convenient form to manage the information overload of the century. Nevertheless the social networking aspect of del.icio.us is the most prevalent, the page subtitles: “ social bookmarking ”.
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Posted at
02:55AM Dec 03, 2006
by Volker Seubert in Personal |
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Web Economics
I just thought about the economic impact of the web evolution, trying to remember what I have learned years ago during study times. Also if this was not a lot it is still fun to have some thoughts about it!
It is evident that Market transparency is drastically improving with the web evolution. Being one of the elements of perfect competition which economists generally use for their theoretical models, it significantly contributes to enforce a free market economy. As a result the price will more strictly follow supply and demand.
Let's think about what consequences Recruitment 2.0 could have for companies. Differentiation between “ companies to work for” and “companies not to work for” due to their reputation in the market will grow with increasing transparency through web information. Consequently the demand to work for companies that have a good reputation increases to the extent that employers in that category have an overflow of talent to choose from.
Could this mean that for them the price of labor would drop? We already know companies today who have a compensation philosophy targeting lower market rates because they constantly have a huge talent pipeline based on their image as an employer. Would that gap get bigger? From an economic perspective the price (salary) should fall until the over supply will again exactly match the demand. Can this really be applied to human labor and corporate compensation schemes? Maybe the next generation will accord a higher priority to a fun working environment and is ready to compromise on their salaries?
On the other hand companies with a bad image would have to pay high premiums to attract people. Would that mean that employees who want to maximize their income need to go work for less attractive employers to get higher salaries?
I have no fears for Sun. Our motto is “sharing”, being open, having open standards, open software, we have an open culture inside and are even encouraged to take it outside by blogging (as you see this web page is a blogging page explicitly for Sun employees!). Our CEO Jonathan Schwartz promotes openness daily. I really enjoy working for Sun Microsystems!
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Posted at
03:41PM Nov 10, 2006
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Recruitment 2.0
I came across an interesting article today about how Web 2.0 will profoundly change recruiting as a result of the next generation's behaviors (My Blog is my Resume).
The author states that due to the web addiction of the new generation the access to them needs to be redefined. Recruitment over the web will even increase with a focus on actively looking for new employees in user forums, on social networks, in niche sites or finding them commenting on blogs.
They will not trust any nice marketing messages about company culture but check within their social networks built in the web to verify information. Most possibly they will come across bloggers from that company who will give them better insight than any corporate webpage could ever do. Information cannot be restricted, if a company's work environment is terrible people will learn about it.
This new generation will expect to be judged by their ideas, not their experience. Resumes will become irrelevant. Companies are expected to search the web reading their blogs and those of coworkers referring them and having vouched for their intelligence and work ethic. View this discussion on Robert Scoble's blog.
This maybe a trend in the US today and usually it comes over to Europe after a while. Populations with highly technical skills generally are the first to adopt. So this means we need to adapt our recruiting strategies for software engineers very soon!
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Posted at
10:23PM Nov 07, 2006
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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