Just letting it happen
As I’ve noted previously on this blog, starting back on January 1st, one of my core day job responsibilities became the stewardship and continued development of IBM’s internal blogging infrastructure. I’m not what you’d typically consider a project manager but any stretch of the imagination but I have been tasked with moving things forward. Over the next year that’s exactly what I intend to do. What I’d like to do here, as the occasion arises, is document some of the lessons learned along the way. The first and most important lesson that I’ve learned thus far is this: if you want to build a viable, valuable social networking environment within the enterprise you simply cannot force it. You just have to let it happen and you have to be willing to let your employees run with it. Provide the tool, make it available, give them the freedom to use it, then step back and get out of their way. Don’t worry about short term ROI and don’t worry about the possibility of failure. If you deploy the tool and folks don’t use it, there’s a valuable lesson to be learned in figuring out why it’s not being used. If you deploy it and only a small group of people start to take advantage of it, there’s a valuable lesson to be learned in studying how and why they’re using it. Regardless of how it evolves, you’re bound to learn something valuable about your employees, your corporate culture, your own internal communications processes, the moral of your work force, etc. The goal you should be looking to achieve is not increased sales revenue or a measurable productivity increase. Instead, what you’re looking to do is capture the conversations that typical occur in the hallways between meetings, the short yet invaluable lists of todo’s that go along with any project, the random thoughts and insights that come to us throughout the day but usually end up getting lost somewhere between checking the morning email and the three hour long sales meeting.
Today IBM has what may very well be the largest corporate social networking environment in the world. We don’t know that for sure because there’s not a lot of great information out there about how many folks are actually using these technologies within the firewall. The stats are generally impressive, especially if you consider that use of the blogs, bookmarks and activities servers is entirely optional and there is no corporate mandate that Thou Shalt Blog or Thou Shalt Bookmark. Instead, a small group of people heard about it and started using it; they told some others about it and they started using it; then they told some others about it and they started using it… and it evolved from there. Thing is, I’m not sure that anyone has really figured out a way of measuring the tangible impact the use of these technologies has on our bottom line. What we do know is that the employees who are making use of them have generally found them to be far more useful than anything that’s come before and that there is genuine excitement about the new tools.
Just one final note about “failure”. One of the functions we added to our internal blogging server was a set of detailed statistical analysis routines so we can monitor the growth and evolution of the environment. The original implementation focused only on growth analysis: e.g. how many new blogs are there, how many new posts, etc. Missing from the analysis was any kind of analysis of “decay”, by which I mean the rate at which new people come into the system, spend a bit of time kicking the tires around, then abandon it. When charting the decay of a system, you either want the rate of abandonment to remain steady or fall off over time. An increase in the rate of decay means that you’ve either somehow screwed up and started turning users away from the system or they’ve found something that works better. If the rate of decay decreases, on the other hand, the system is obviously attracting users who are making regular use of the system. After implementing a decay analysis for our Blog Central server, spanning the course of time between November 2003 to December 2006, a subtle yet definitely noticeable convex curve begins to emerge in the graph. This is good. My goal in 2007 is to make that graph just a bit more convex.