Tad Staley's blog

Among experts who work on the important area of organizational behavior and development, there’s a model for evaluating corporate culture called the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI). A good description of the model and its application is available here.

An interesting evaluation model came out of the OCAI work, called the Competing Values Framework, which establishes two dimensions along which an organization’s culture can be evaluated:

• Internal focus vs External focus, or integration vs differentiation
• Stability vs Flexibility, of control vs discretion

“Intranet” is an outdated concept and word. Can it be rehabilitated with “Social” as its first name? There have been some excellent articles and posts recently that help articulate the evolution of enterprise Intranets especially as social collaboration factors are considered.

In a recent article entitled Why Social Networks Are Replacing Intranets (subscription required), Aragon Research makes the case that Social Business environments like Convo are increasingly being considered for corporate Intranets. We’ve definitely seen this trend among our users.

The underlying logic is that social Intranets are about connecting people who are trying to get real work done. They connect people to people, not just people to content. But simply adding an activity stream to the internal corporate portal does not make it more appealing (except for voyeurs) nor does it add additional value. At the heart of the trend toward Social Intranets is the interest in making collaborative capabilities more available throughout the enterprise.

The question is often posed: will social platforms improve communications within an organization? This is similar to questions about measuring the ROI of a new platform. The queries are completely understandable: why undertake a significant change without a clear sense of the value you can expect in return?

Good news reiterated today in a much cited and tweeted post. The actual report, from Gagen MacDonald, that is the source of this news came out in December, but a post on Social Enterprise Today, and a tweet by Dion Hinchcliffe brought it into full flower.

According to the report, the inexorable rise in enterprise adoption of internal social platforms continues apace. The report employs a variant on the typical name for the category - Internal Social Media - but the meaning is clear.

Here's the challenge: in spite of all the promise of social business networks to improve the way organizations communicate and collaborate, in this early stage in the development of the category, most internal networks fail to meet an organization's expectations. At the heart of the matter is that fact that, while the technology enables a vastly improved way to communicate and collaborate with your colleagues, organizations often stumble when it comes to changing old patterns of behavior.

In a recent report called Helping Information Workers Find The Value In Collaboration Tools, analyst TJ Keitt described a general under-utilization of social tools. In the article, Forrester research discovered that even among social software users, email is the preferred communication method.

It's not uncommon for a workgroup to include team members that are outside the originating organization. This can happen when you're dealing with external content providers, clients, partners, consultants or sub-contractors. Oftentimes, these kind of extended team projects pop up quickly, and you need to find a reasonable place to share files and other project content: graphics, documents, links, bios, schedules, etc.

Most internal systems present some difficult hurdles in these cases. If your organization is running SharePoint, it's difficult to authenticate people who aren't in the company directory. You can ask your IT department to add external people to the directory for the sake of the project but the request, if it's granted, might take weeks to be delivered.

Organizations are increasingly getting focused on employee engagement, which is simply a measure of an employee’s enthusiasm, energy and commitment to the organization and to the quality of his or her work. It has been referred to as an emotional state that measures employees’ attachment to their organization, willingness to perform, and sense of ownership for the process and outcomes for their work.

A recent article on Inc.com described the factors that drive what could effectively be called employee engagement. One of the eight items is Connection:

Employees don’t want to work for a paycheck; they want to work with and for people.

A kind word, a short discussion about family, a brief check-in to see if they need anything... those individual moments are much more important than meetings or formal evaluations.

We’ve been in the world of software long enough to realize that simply deploying a system, however grand and glorious its design and purpose, doesn’t ensure its success. We may be more optimistic with social systems - after all, they’re very fashionable and, in fact, social, so what’s not to like?

As solution providers, we often find ourselves deploying a system and then wringing our hands, hoping people will adopt it.

But the reality is that most internal social networks fail, not because the design was inadequate or the principle was unworthy. For one thing, there is inertia. Andrew McAfee has talked about the fact that a system has to be perceived as being ten times better than what is currently in use to justify the switching cost.

And of course, people are busy and entrenched in their own way of working - who has time to learn something new?

Engagement is the opposite of detachment; it is antithetical to the state of being removed or aloof. It implies conversation, caring, connection with others, not only listening but hearing, and responding appropriately.

The rise in popularity of the concept of engagement seems to map directly to the rise of social technologies, which provide environments in which engagement can happen on a broader scale. This may not be a coincidence, as social channels can actually remove the barriers to engagement that were the hallmark of the institutions of the recent past.