From Ross Dawson

E2.0 Implementation Framework

A centrepiece of our [Ross'] recently launched Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report is an Implementing Enterprise 2.0 Framework…… download the Implementing Enterprise 2.0 Framework pdf, which includes references to the relevant chapters for each of the action steps. Some of the chapters referred to are available for download from the Implementing Enterprise 2.0 downloads page.

Great stuff, thanks Ross.  We hope you will come and talk about this at KMWorld 2010, Nov 15-18, Washington DC.

The HBR Management Tip of the Day today is from Marshall Goldsmith (author of What Got you Here Won’t Get You There — must reading) about succession planning - a hot topic in the information profession.  I’ve always referred to the need for succession “management”, but Goldsmith refers to succession “development”, & he’s right.  Managing an organization’s succession does have to be a whole process which must be managed, & the emphasis really is on people’s development to enable them to “succeed” in every sense of the word.

Here’s an inter-mingling of Goldsmith’s & our tips for succession development & management; much of our experience has been guided by Rothwell’s Effective Succession Planning.

1. Determine Future Requirements: Recognize that strategic planning, staff planning, & succession management are all inter-related & highly dependent; you can’t move forward (strategic plan) without the right capabilities, competencies (staff planning) & management (succession management). PLUS - how can you determine staffing & leadership needs Call it what it is: succession management or succession development - it doesn’t matter which, just don’t call it succession planning, since the focus shouldn’t be on the plan, it should be on how the organization is ensuring ongoing leadership, management, capabilities & success.

2. Commit: Senior management or the board must buy in to the overall process be supportive of it as on-going, not a one-time “here’s the slide deck” event.

3. Assess Current Requirements & Skills: As with anything, start with where you are - know what you have - a plan is all about moving from where you are to where you want to, or need to!, be.

4. Appraise Performance: Make sure people have agreed-to performance expectations & that they receive regular feedback about how they are doing to keep progressing.

5. Identify Potential: Now……here’s the kicker. Many organizations haven’t really defined what potential “is” — nor have they discussed career plans & perceived potential with employees.  If we want people to move into various positions, especially leadership positions (which, like it or not, is usually what succession management focuses on), then the organization has to be clear regarding how potential is assessed & that employees know this, and know what their current potential is assessed. Eww….. I’ve seen this be the trip-factor for senior management. But don’t let it be.  It’s a very valuable exercise for management.

6. Create & Implement the Development Program: Not just the training program - but a multi-faceted, realistic way in which people are going to be able to grow new skills, mindsets, approaches through experience — secondments? projects? “acting” positions?

7. Recruit, Hire, Place: Use the succession management and staff planning to go after the right kind of current & future talent that’s needed.

8. Evaluate: And know how you’re going to evaluate it when you start out — agree, at the start, on “what success will look like” for the succession management process, and then assess it to see what’s working & what, in the light of the strategic alignment needs to be tweaked.

9. Keep it simple & stay realistic: This is from Goldsmith - & he’s absolutely right.  Although the 8 steps outlined may seem daunting, they are pretty logical and basically simple.  And how else are you going to manage the management progression, keep & encourage talent, and ensure you have the right capabilities?

One last thing about succession management is, as I said above, it usually focuses on management positions.  Remember, though, that there are other non-management yet critical expert positions that need to be included; a gap in these positions is as crippling to your organization as any leadership role.

“Adopting technologies without a strategy results in wasted time & effort”.  How many times have you said this?  Check out KMWorld 2009 keynote speaker Charlene Li’s slides.   Some great tips.  Her theme, “the future of business requires a holistic approach to adopting and integrating emerging technologies” is the same message Rebecca and I use with our clients –  Organizations have to have a big detailed picture of where they are going before the strategies to get there can be put in place.  And that’s way before technology, people and other structures are put in place.

I love Charlene’s slide of 4 focus areas surrounding the client: enterprise strategy, customer strategy, leadership & management, innovation & practices.  Her tips, which I think apply more broadly than just tech planning:

* Leaders must let go of control but not relinquish command, create sandbox convenants to allow risk taking, creat a culture of sharing & model it

* organizations must connect to customers on their own terms, develop internal processes to connect with customers in real time, integrate the customer voice across the whole enterprise

* enterprises must allow all units to pilot new technologies & processes, design process scenarios around user roles, invest in innovation

* to innovate, organizations must fail fast & fail smart, inject fresh external thinking, enable safe places where mistakes and learning is encouraged.

I am sure you will enjoy her presentation on Wednesday November 18 in San Jose at KMWorld 2009. In the meantime, on the KMWorld 2009 conference blog yesterday I pointed to a podcast of Charlene Li. Check it out too!

I just watched Citrix’s webinar that they co-hosted with workshifting.com and gotomypc.com on “Thinking Outside the Cubicle:  The Evolving 21st-Century Virtual Office”. It certainly wasn’t a good webinar, but I did stick through most of it because I’m so hungry for anything that looks at how people are working, are going to be working and the organization implications of working from anywhere.  My forecast is that in the next 5 years we won’t be searching for the right label for this (is it workshifting? working remotely? virtually? off-site? outa-sight?), because it will be so normal and built in to our work processes and organization norms. Telecommuting (yet another term) has increased 39% since 2007 in the US — and it will keep on growing.  The best nugget out of this webinar was a quote from Ted Schadler, an analyst at Forrester Research, who says this evolvement “will force firms to expand their digital footprints, harness social software, crisply define their culture and examine their real estate and energy policies.”

Yep - and as the social software improves so that people can truly collaborate, seeing and hearing each other in such high-definition that they can sense when someone’s getting agitated, more organizations and more individuals will embrace working from wherever.  Particularly as those employees born after 1985 come on board; organizations in which employees can work from anywhere realize that the most productive workplaces, especially for younger employees, isn’t about control — it’s about clear expectations, flexibility, respect, responsibility and technology that supports work processes.

We’ve worked virtually for a 100 years - ok, for 16 years, and we worked well with colleagues and clients all over North America. But since the advent of webcams and screensharing (even yuuguu.com - it’s free - terrific), my productivity has increased dramatically.  “Seeing” someone and being able to work on documents together? Fabulous!

Another REALLY interesting tidbit from this session was that those organizations pushing forward with telecommuting don’t talk about it, or “come to the podium” at conferences about their strategies, technologies and results related to employees working outside a formal physical structure. Hm….interesting. Maybe because, as the speaker said, telework highlights and provides solutions to “deficits” in the work processes.  Things that were tolerated “aren’t” and can’t be in telework — things must be explicit and “made visible”.

In terms of what technology is critical for productive telework? Remote access to the files is the NUMBER ONE, even higher than instant messaging.  Understandable.

If you’re interested in this, contact me - & have a look at The Future of Work: Flexible Work - Rhetoric & Reality.

SLA is 100!

It must have been a very interesting world in 1909.  Here are three immediate (to me) organizations celebrating their centennials.  The Special Libraries Association, an organization representing 12,000+ librarians with specialized collections and services in corporations (law firms, banks, pharmaceuticals, manufacturers, hospitals, ettc) around the work, celebrates their centennial this year.  The Toronto chapter of SLA is having a gala to celebrate next month — I’m very excited about attending.  The association’s 100th annual conference is being held in June in DC (where SLA’s HQ has been for many years, including when I was President in 1995/6).  Should be a great event starting off with keynote speaker Colin Powell.

And now we are into ice hockey NHL playoffs and the Montreal Canadiens are 100!  Check out the many jerseys and logos from their past.  I am not a Canadiens fan but I certainly respect their longevity and strength over the years.  It will be interesting to see what’s in their future.

Leons is a furniture store in my area and it is 100 years old too.  Quite a history.  I was most impressed that the current CEO went across Canada celebrating with all the employees.  Nice.

Ever since Bill Drew pointed me on Facebook (FB) to this article, The Underwear Theory of Social Networking, it has been bothering me.  It features a guy who does not want business colleagues as friends on FB.  He’s dropping them.  He feels LinkedIn is a better place for his business communications.  Andrew Conry-Murray says on an InformationWeek site:“Here’s the mental picture I’ve created for the Big 3 social networking platforms I use.

LinkedIn is a suit and tie. It’s a conference room for business meetings, and people tend to be on their best behavior.

Twitter is a sports coat and jeans. It’s the hotel bar at a security conference or trade show. Technically I’m still at work, but there’s alcohol. The industry chatter, shop talk, and self-promotion gets salted with gossip, mild flirting, and swear words. You might even see a fight.

Facebook is boxer shorts and a T-shirt with burrito stains. It’s the couch where you sprawl out to watch “Family Guy,” eat Phish Food straight from the carton, and leave your socks laying around.”

And, now I’ve just read about employees being fired for their comments on FB. We know that people have always had less than flattering things to say, and do say it in many ways, what’s different about this media?  Anyway, I like what C. G. Lynch had to say on CIO’s Web 2.0 Advisor site,

“Transparency (with good, bad and ugly information) ultimately betters your organization and keeps it honest. Social technologies enable that transparency, and punishing employees for passionately engaging in conversations about where they work is a backwards way of thinking.”  Same thinig Don Tapscott said about transparency in his book, The Naked Corporation, a number of years ago.  Same thing Clay Shirky said recently at the FASTForward 2009 conference.

So many wonderful interviews from FASTForward ‘09 participants by Josh-Michele Ross in the form of videos.  Check out his coverage of analysts, researchers, CTOs & CEOs, authors, speakers and more.  And also the twitter feed from the conference.

Don Tapscott, keynote at FastForward09, built on an his earlier books, Growing Up Digital, Wikinomics, and others as he talked about how a new generation is driving an age of engagement which aligns with the conference theme: Engage Your User.  He talked about his new book, Grown Up Digital, about how disagrees that the net generation or digital natives (also known as millenials and Gen Y) is the dumbest generation (especially check out out Don’s YouTube video on this site) , and about how this generation is a powerful force for change in our world.  He gave lots of examples including a digital native who has a year’s worth of one week jobs, and a 6th grader who went after financing for his business Playspan.  I loved how he talked about the net gen attitude: work=collaboration=learning=fun – that’s the kind of workplace we all should want to see.  And also his caution to organizations who do not allow the use of social tools like Facebook to be accessed.  Here’s something you can use if your organization is one of those:  I won’t go onto Facebook during work time or on work computers if you don’t expect me to answer company emails after hours or on weekends.  Nice!  Check out more info about Don’s talk and book, and also here, on the FastForward Blog.

The first FastForward conference since Microsoft purchased FAST Technology for 1.2 billion opened with lots of light an music and about 1,000 attendees from 29 countries.  It reflects a strong commitment, vision, and roadmap for search.  Today, Microsoft released information about new search products:  FAST Search for SharePoint which is the old FAST ESP tuned for SharePoint available at lower cost through SharePoint enterprise user-based licensing (a simplified package based on per uers licensing) that will be availalbe with the release of Office 14.  However, for those who want to get started right away, Microsoft will provide a licensing bridge for SharePoint clients, ESP for SharePoint.  Another new product, FAST Search for Internet Business, which will also be released with Office 14 and then roughly annually going forward, includes interaction management to help drive revenue for users, content integration and  simplified licensing.  For more info on these new products, check here.

Interesting to see that CMS Watch is using different modes to convey their 12 predictions about the content management landscape — an article and a YouTube production — which notes significant changes for 2009 according to their research: