Last week I was back to doing what I really love doing – rolling up my sleeves and working with customers. I was pegged to lead a 2-day strategy session with Telligent customer Insurance.com with the goal being to help the client understand not only the technology specifics, but more importantly the ins and outs of making collaboration work inside the firewall. For a lot of us, collaboration has been that elusive fish, the one you and I can’t seem to find the right lure for, much less the right lake to fish in.
While few of us doubt that technology helps us expose some cracks in the collaboration nut, I bet more of us would agree that organizational challenges and cultural dynamics are what keeps us awake at night.
As ironic as it sounds, I spend less time these days discussing the technological implications of an internal collaboration initiative. The real discussions center around adoption, best practices, vertical strategies and sustaining the effort.
Insurance.com is a good example of a customer smart enough to know where to spend time and resources. After day one of our session, in which about half of it was a product refresh, the client team’s tech-related questions were almost non-existent.
Yeah there were the occasional integration threads and feature discussions that surfaced, but collectively the customer realized this had a helluva lot more to do with some hard decisions they needed to make than whether or not a particular feature was turned on or off. Technology is the enabler I shouted. Ok, maybe I didn’t shout, but I’m certain I got our point across.
A few other things we did to facilitate the session included asking each business unit how they intended to market (socialize) the collaboration effort internally. The question was literally,”What’s Your Pitch On What This Means To The Company?” This helped the group understand everyone else’s perspective and sparked valuable conversation.
It was immediately apparent how distinct the value proposition can vary from one line of business to the other. One of the important things to remember as you hear unique perspectives from your colleagues is to how to identify the recurring themes?
About half way around the room, we all began to agree that we were sitting in too many meaningless meetings, having to weather through too many reply-to-all threads, and generally challenged at finding the information we really need at a moments’ notice. Verbalizing the collaboration pitch also helped those of us leading the charge toward the unfortified battleground owned by ROI. We challenged each other to look at the business from the inside and agreed we should focus on the low hanging fruit that would provide the highest impact.
That was the segue into the next part of the discussion. an exercise where the line of business managers were asked to identify 2-3 processes they thought could be positively impacted by real-time collaboration and social computing practices. We spent about 15 minutes analyzing responses and listed them to be referenced on the white board as we went around the room.
You might be saying, hey, you’re the vendor, shouldn’t you be providing a few of those things out of the gate? Well yes, and we do. But more importantly, especially in a session like we’ve described, the goal is to get (you) the client thinking about the day-to-day workflows, information exchanges, and ad hoc processes that need reshaping. And it’s not always about being disruptive and eliminating existing processes or tasks, it has more to do with identifying the “gaps”. In our context, I translated “gaps” as the somewhat ambiguous areas within the business where collaboration tools might provide a quick lift — an incremental improvement if you will.
One of the other things we challenged the Insurance.com team on was how they intended to start the process of moving thoughts and interactions into the internal cloud — in this case powered by Telligent’s Evolution platform. Consistent with previous tactics, part of my intention was to get folks thinking about how they create work product, share knowledge or simply interact with colleagues.
The way we broke it down was two-fold. First, we agreed to identify the assets right under our nose, sort of a personal or line of business content audit. Not surprisingly, we labeled this stuff “existing” content. It ranged from old Word documents that needed new life to an archive of wiki-based content that’s been used on and off to improve employee self-service capabilities.
The point here is to look across the business unit and re-use the assets you already have as a springboard to get some lift from the newer collaborative environment. That doesn’t mean your internal discussion forums should be force fed things that weren’t read in the first place, it just means you can speed along the effort of seeding content where it makes sense.
The preceding sessions took us through most of the morning. Early afternoon we ended the session by recapping the most important decisions the client needed to make over the next few weeks. We also discussed what the transition would entail as we moved Insurance.com through the implementation cycle and how it would begin to engage with Telligent’s professional services team.
So if I had to summarize some of the things after a heads-down session like last week, I’d lay it out like this. Don’t let features drive your business strategy. Don’t try to re-engineer your culture around a toolset. Don’t begin any project until you’ve identified who will be your core group. Call them guinea pigs, a focus group or power users, it doesn’t matter. What matters is being able to tell them why they’ve been chosen to participate and how it helps them do their job more effectively.
As I headed back to Texas, all kinds of thoughts were racing through my head, not the least of which included some of the more thought provoking questions I get asked often, like “Why Telligent”. Honestly, a question like that gets easier and easier to answer every time I get the chance to roll up my sleeves with our customers.
I’d explain it this way.
Our job as a vendor is to make the technology transparent. Remember the notion of technology as the enabler? Well it’s just marketing speak unless you’ve had your knees skinned in the trenches. And Telligent has. In fact, we’ve run out of band-aids, but that’s OK. Remember this as a customer. Vendors should live and die by understanding YOUR needs.
And if they’re worth their salt, they become an extension of your organization, essentially allowing you to stay focused on your objectives.
At the end of the day, it has everything to do with working smarter and using the best of what social computing brings to the enterprise. If that’s too lofty for you, then set your sights on becoming a better collaborator, not just a better user of a vendor’s tool.
