How to Benefit from Improving

Business Communication

Ashish Belagali© Acism Software Private Limited, Pune, India

Twitter: @Ashish1IT @kommbox

Introduction: Ashish BelagaliIntroduction: Ashish Belagali

IIT Bombay: B. Tech 1992, M. Tech. 1995Experience in software making, management, leadershipHeads Acism Software Pvt LtdLeads POCC. Ex-BNI, TiEInterests: Music, Nature, Spiritualism

AgendaAgenda

1. Motivation

2. Business Communication Roundup

3. How to choose a tool

4. How to implement

5. Antipatterns

MotivationMotivation

Communication is OmnipresentCommunication is Omnipresent

Consequently, an improvement in communication may affect many areas of your organization positively.

PerspectivePerspective

Communication Improvement

Communication Skill Improvement

Communication Process Improvement

- Well discussed- Many consultants available

- Evolving area- Not well understood- High potential- Sustainable impact

Communication System UpgradeCommunication System Upgrade

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- Enriching – opening new possibilities- Impacting our lifestyle- Competitive advantage

Email is Badly BrokenEmail is Badly Broken

Many organizations have people who receive 100+ emails everyday. How much productivity can we expect from them?- Context switching time- Fatigue- Sheer amount of time wasted

Theirry Breton – Atos CEO (2011)““[E]mail is no longer the appropriate tool. It is time to think differently.”

Peter Allan (2011)“Mr. Breton pointed to a recent study by the business watchdog ORSE, which reads: Reading useless messages is terrible for concentration, as it takes 64 seconds to get back on the ball after doing so. Poorly controlled, the e-mail can become a devastating tool.”“‘The deluge of information will be one of the most important problems a company will have to face,’ said Mr Breton.”

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Communications are Always Communications are Always HOTHOT

KnowledgeManagement

CustomerRelationshipManagement

Project Managementthru Collaboration

DocumentSharing

Enterprisecollaboration

TaskManagement

Enterprise 2.0 /Enterprise social

Expert AdviceExpert Advice

Example: Enterprise 2.0 Market Size estimations- Gartner: 945 million (2011) → 2 billion (2016)- Cisco CTO: 34 billion- IDC: 1.6 billion- Forrestor: 4.6 billion- MIT sloan grad: 110 billion

Experts differ widely

Deloitte (June 2013): Over 90% of Fortune 500 companies will have a partially or fully implemented ESN by the end of 2013

McKinsey (Nov 2013): Rate of adoption in industry is far lower.

..and often go wrong

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Why?Why?

Jacob Margan and Wendy Troupe explain:

“If you asked ten executives to define Enterprise 2.0 or Social Media or Social Business, you’d probably get ten different answers,”

“Right now, we’re in the early stages of this category and people are just not sure about the potential. “

“Social Media and Enterprise 2.0 are still very new and part of an ill-defined space — a space whose internal boundaries remain fuzzy. “

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Grand SuccessesGrand Successes

For long proponents put forth great arguments in favor of using ESNs. However the benefits were perceived mostly as intangible.

However, Andrew Borg published research findings of 629 companies (Nov 2013) which show impressive numbers. ⚓

Grand FailuresGrand Failures

CIOs voted Enterprise Social Tools asthe most overhyped technologyof the year 2013.

Chris Heuer (Oct 2013)

“it is time to proclaim that Social Business is dead, or at least dying before our very eyes.”“The words Social Business have not struck the right chord with leaders. The movement has failed to earn their faith, trust and budgets in a significant way.”

Gartner (Jan 2014)

80 Percent of Social Business Efforts Will Not Achieve Intended Benefits Through 2015

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Why the Diversity?Why the Diversity?

Diversity

Some get it Some don't

- Understand the space- Map tools to their needs- Manage the implementation

- 6 Antipatterns

Bertrand Duperrin (Jan 2014)

“Focus on philosophy, not technology.”

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Motivation of This TalkMotivation of This Talk

Email is broken. The challenges are real.

Great benefits await you – if you manage to dodge failures.

It is not hard to get it. - No rocket science

We need a different mindset to deal with it.

Let's cut through the hype and use common-sense – that's what successful companies did.

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Business Business Communication Communication

RoundupRoundup

Business CommunicationBusiness Communication

HO

Branch1 Branch2

External world

With external world

Within branches

Internal to a branch

Tools to Fix EmailTools to Fix Email

What They Are

Attempt to fix email system where it appears to be broken.– Following a path of least resistance

Sometimes, it's about imposing some rules.

Sometimes, it's about adding intelligence.

Tools

GmailShortmailLimiting number of recipientsGroup email idsMS Xchange, Mithi, Zimbra

Document Sharing SystemsDocument Sharing Systems

What They Are

Ability to share documents with others.

Not all documents have the same access rights.

Documents may be versioned.

Tools

DropboxGoogle drive

Task Management SystemsTask Management Systems

What They Are

Focus on improving the accountability through giving better task management infrastructure and views

Central unit is a task, tracked by status, due date etc.

Tools

AsanaTrello

Project Management thru Project Management thru CollaborationCollaboration

What They Are

Project Management systems which help you track project progress through collaboration – as opposed to traditional hard approach.

Central unit is a project -- within which tasks, discussions and schedules are tracked.

Tools

BasecampActiveCollab

Knowledge Management SystemsKnowledge Management Systems

What They Are

Create a long term knowledge asset for the organization.

Let employees create knowledge content and classify it based on taxonomies. Emphasis on knowledge curation.

A continuous challenge is converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and encouraging people to share it.

ToolsVaried

Customer Relationship ManagementCustomer Relationship Management

What They Are

Catering to communication needs of marketing / sales.

Maintain a database of leads / opportunities at various stages, and communicate with them.

ToolsSalesforceBitrixZoho CRM

Customer SupportCustomer Support

What They Are

Ticketing systems, which allow customers to raise tickets and internal team to access, work on and close those tickets.

Each ticket has a unique id, and status updates are made visible to the customers through email / portal.

ToolsosTicketZendesk

Enterprise CollaborationEnterprise Collaboration

What They Are

Let teams of employees collaboratively create documentation that is of use to the organization.

Employees are given ro / rw accesses to different parts of the collaborative documentation.

Tools

ConfluenceMediawikiGoogle docs

Enterprise Social NetworksEnterprise Social Networks

What They Are

Attempt to replicate the success of social media within an enterprise.

“Facebook for enterprise” approach

Tools

YammerJive

IntranetsIntranets

What They Are

Internal portal for employees enabling HR and communication.

Typical communications channels are email, chat, PM.

Integration with other enterprise tools.

Tools

Typically custom-built

Comprehensive ToolsComprehensive Tools

What They Are

A single tool usable across different purposes.

Possible either through extensive configurability or inbuilt flexibility.

The only contenders to take away the catch-all aspect of email.

Tools

SharepointKommbox

How to Choose a ToolHow to Choose a Tool

Understanding Your NeedsUnderstanding Your Needs

Communication is an important element of the organizational culture.

=> The communication styles, philosophies, expectations vary highly

- from geography to geography- from sector to sector- from organization to organization

Do you understand what will work / what will not work in your organization?

Small is BeautifulSmall is Beautiful

Choose a tool that is

- Not hard to configure

- Can assist in your immediate use scenario

- Can grow with you

Do not fall into the feature trap. Understand the philosophy of the tool.

How Many Tools?How Many Tools?

Using a single comprehensive tool has benefits vs using multiple special purpose tools

- Cost concerns

- Integration concerns

- Data fragmentation concerns

- User confusion concerns

Counterview

How to ImplementHow to Implement

Create ConsensusCreate Consensus

Organization-wide consensus of how the tool will be used.

Create champions in different departments.

Top Management SupportTop Management Support

Active Support from Top Management is crucial

You cannot leave it entirely to the employees. There needs to be a clear mandate about using the tool.

Adopt QuicklyAdopt Quickly

Experiment on pilot scale (optional)

Adopt quickly in the organization

A low-scale implementation has larger chances of failure.

Monitor & ChangeMonitor & Change

Champions to monitor the use and

benefits

Change the direction as warranted

Easy to make changes early enough.

AntipatternsAntipatterns

The “Feature-heaviness” AntipatternThe “Feature-heaviness” Antipattern

The CEO wants the organization to be cutting edge (sometimes due to the hype surrounding ESN) and a small group gets the responsibilty to choose the enterprise collaboration tool. The group creates a long list of features (wiki for something, discussion forum for something else, task management for yet another thing etc), and recommends a tool which is the most feature rich. The company ends up spending high amount of money in the product and expensive consultancy that is needed to configure the product.

Further, the organization finds it tough to get its employees use the tool because of its complexity (see the Confusion anti-pattern), and the implementation fails. Bertrard Duperrin warns organization against taking such feature-centric approach

The “Confusion” AntipatternThe “Confusion” Antipattern

The product features create a confusion in the minds of end users. For example, when a user wants to add a piece of knowledge, she gets confused whether she should create a discussion in the discussion forum or create a wiki page. In the absence of clear guidelines, the users would use their own discretion which will eventually lead to the “conflict” antipattern. The confusion would create a heterogeneous use of the tool and ultimately the exercise becomes fruitless.

The “Conflict” AntipatternThe “Conflict” Antipattern

CEO asks the employees to use a tool and the employees start using it. Many people from different departments try to figure out the tool and make the best use of it for themselves and their departments. When these efforts are not coordinated, expectation mismatch between the departments emerges after a while. If not corrected in time, this results in fragmentation in the way it is used and ultimately the whole purpose of using a common platform is lost.

The “Disinterest” AntipatternThe “Disinterest” Antipattern

The CEO asks a team to evaluate a product. Unless there is a committed product champion whose KRA aligns with the product use, the product remains unused. The people say they want to evaluate it, but they never find time to do so. Without a commitment from anyone and zero push from top management, the steam runs out.

Many times it happens because nobody wants to take the initiative. Everyone wants someone else to start, or maybe that the tool would bring about some magical improvements on its own. It doesn’t, and the implementation dies out.

The “Overuse” AntipatternThe “Overuse” Antipattern

With a zeal, a collaboration tool gets adopted. Everyone puts in a lot of updates and there is a lot of interaction. People are happy about the successful implementation and some examples of collaboration happening over the platform are seen as success signs. The conversations on the platform start slipping into a more casual mode, and signal-to-noise ratio starts going down. A realization slowly dawns that people are spending way too much time with the collaboration tool and they get less time for work. By this time, the tool is so much embedded into organization’s work patterns that it could be too late to return.

The “Misfit” AntipatternThe “Misfit” Antipattern

Some times, the failure is attributed to a misfit between the organizational culture and the tool. Many experts profess that the “social” effect needs a near flat structure in an organization, and no topic should be a taboo. Many organizations find it difficult or impractical to make these changes. Many times, the social principles seem to contrast with something that is deeply ingrained into the organizational culture.

When misfit occurs, the quality of discussions / updates that happen over the ESN is perceived as low, and they seem to help no one. For some time, companies push the implementation with the hope that something may come out. But eventually, in absence of any good benefits, the implementation dies. The two sides (one promoting change in company culture and the other opposing it) keep debating endlessly.

Questions?Questions?

Ashish Belagali

Email: ab@kommbox.comTwitter: @Ashish1IT @kommbox

LinkedIn: http://in.linkedin.com/in/belagali/

Happy Communicating!