Full Circle Associates

Panel: Collaborative Workspaces: Making the Transition.

Live blogging caveats apply. It was interesting – this wasn’t so much about workspaces but work culture!

Jessica Lipnack, moderator, CEO NetAge Inc.

David Wires, the cool lawyer guy

MikeWing, VP Strategic Communications, IBM

Tor Eneroth, Culture Manager, Volvo IT

54 far flung teams surveyed

86% teleconferencing

83% used virtual workspaces

33 Videoconf

50% IM even when banned

Tor

• Finding the individual perspective on how we change to new ways of working.
• We don’t talk of changing behavior with our spouses. Why with our co workers
• Iceberg metaphor, 10% above, 90% below. Objective on top, subjective below the water line. We spend 80% of our time above the water. 80% of the problems are beneath the surface. Make the soft things hard.
• Establish a better understanding of these subjective things, of the values. The individuals/people.
• Have set up a group of people, cultural ambassadors trained in transformation, cultural transformation, on how to change mindset. 50 tools. Field book, Adapting and aligning to the ambassadors who are thought leaders and facilitators to create critical mass. Change has to happen in the organization, not the head office.
• Challenge; our “father” is coming into the kitchen saying we need a new behavior of virtual work. A new mindset and way of behaving. Built up the tool with Jessica and Jeff. It is very thin. The key elements. Then train the ambassadors and others. Handbook is appetizer.
• Curve of transformation. Aware of what we are thinking about. Then understanding, then acceptance. The first, cognitive part. Managers think materials, presentation. Then in the middle, the values shift. Leading that this is good for me. Attitude. Then finally applied and transformation. The essence of training ambassadors on this journey.
• We think differently. More global in our way of working. Attitude and behavior change.
• Jessica: Often we start by throwing tools. We think from a technology perspective. It is exciting to start from the human perspective.

Mike Wing, IBM

• IBM produces a lot of technologies, people on podiums talking about the stuff we create and sell. I’m not going to talk about that. Going to talk about IBM’s trip.
• Not a perfect example. How do you get people involved? History. Legacy systems. Business and cultural issues.
• IBMs use in participation in electronic networks. Been living in them for 20 years. VM system in the early 80’s built on the main frame. IT was a remarkable thing. Prof system. Globally distributed form of email, IM, news system, VM fora (newsgroups).
• Culturally IBMs issue has not been the transition from physical forms of collaboration to online collab. That happened 20 years ago. The issue is the love affair for proprietary robust systems.
• Shift now to more open, less controlled environments. Started an intranet in the fall of 96 and grew rapidly in usage and trust. Began seeing ratings in the research as the intranet as a trusted, widely used source of communication. Equal to or better than manager and co worker as trusted source of information. Comfort with platform. Self conscious effort to provide truthful, current, useful information even when it was painful.
• Benefit to IBM was company’s near-death experience in the early 90’s. On the verge of going out of business. That focused attention and open the organization up to a kind of serious questioning, radical experimentation.
• Scorecard – quarterly earnings time, provided information on how IBM is doing in competitive situations, even when not doing well. CFO’s remarks to street. How each division was doing with respect to targets, all in one place, visible to everyone. Some people didn’t like the idea of being disintermediated from “their people.”
• Gerstener – guy in charge of Europe was not letting the CEO’s notes out to “his people.” Gerstern said they are IBM’s people, not his. They did not like them going over their heads. Sharing your grades is tough. Started to have a clearer sense of how they were doing. Helped counter the insularity and siloed nature.
• The killer app is the directory. Useful, credible on – time information. Easier to do technically than culturally.
• You want to empower individuals, not departments. You want to empower activities and initiatives, not organizational units.
• You should tackle your biggest problems head on, enterprise wide. Those biggest problems are your friends. It will engage people. This is not just productivity and efficiency. It is a great deal more for that.

Jessica

• Long time company who has found ways to tackle the biggest problems using tools and approaches, now David, from the legal profession.

David Wire

• Toronto trial lawyer for 20 years. Used to have cases with players in the city. Now they are around the world. More information, more complex, requires more digestion. Different systems, languages, customs. Wanted to be faster, better cheaper and be a better lawyer. A winning lawyer
• To do that had to go out and experiment. Lawyers are just transitioning to technology.
• Only that which is measured matters.
• It has to work the first time, it has to be insivislbe and reliable. And secure
• Professionally, if it don’t work, they will go back to old habits and call it a dumb idea.
• When it works, it pulls together diverse people where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
• When started looking for technology, was on case where client was trying to finance an innovative technology, found a lender that required a huge collateral. The money went into an offshore bank in Dominica. With chat lines, SEC filings, reverse look ups, searches, put together the bits and pieces. Put into a system, then traded with FBI, Treasury. As the information accumulated, found more information. There is both advertant and inadvertent collaboration. You put stuff on net, I’m looking for it. Inadvertent.
• At the end of the day closed the bank and president of bank went to jail and recovered money for client and helped change offshore banking. Never left Toronto. Winnowed information, traded, and turned a loser case to a winner.
• Power of information. Had a letter from the president of bank explaining why he had not given back the money. Found it on website. Called to ask for the letter because it was different. Paid $15 bucks. Someone else had to pay 25,000 to find it.
• Keep the junk out
• Stale info is archived
• Make current and make it report out every day on case status
• Mobilized 150 people to advocate for a policy change, hold law makers accountable by capturing responses and eventually changed legislation. Power of information. The right information focused into a beam, it’s a laser. In my business, I’m looking for lasers.
• Last war story. Had a client, one of 11 children, parent’s died, property in China and Canda. Kids started fighting will. 4.5 million spent on litigation. It has got to stop. Court ordered mediation. Put all info on website, beneficiaries and lawyers. Had 7 day mediation in Hong Kong with fully informed parties and settled the case. Implemented with the collaborative site. Right information, right people, right time so people can take advice and measure alternatives.
• Collaborative thinking – having the authority and right information. To the extent you use them, feel free to share it with the people that count. Only that which is measured matters.

Q&A

• The success is also a factor of the desire for the outcome. The resolution.
• Disparity of information was the log jam
• Which level in the company was most difficult for transformation (for Tor)? Which part of the transformation curve. There are two dimensions of difficulties. We started with the management team. We didn’t know what we were doing, just felt it would be right. Now management is more behind and it is a problem again. Moving target. The cognitive part at bottom, middle attitude, top behavior part. The behavior part is the most difficult. How to connect from c to A to B. The top of the iceberg is the cognitive part.
• For management buy in, organize their support network before trying to introducing collaborative technologies
• The business need for working across boarders, that is how it was adapted. Not from the tool perspective.
• Technology – the nuclear bomb strategy – one has it, everyone else has to have it
• Technology – tied to bottom line. In some cases, technology can reduce the billable hours of a lawyer. If time is my inventory. Requires changing business model. New billing models. Faster and better, but not giving the whole thing away but prepared to share the savings.
• Some clients are demanding their lawyers use the tech. You can increase your profits and have revenues go up. Less expensive resources working on the problems.
• There is something in between a nuclear bond and the competitive market place.
• Collaboration becomes and issue when human capital issues come to the forefront
• Watch the external trends that force the use of the tool. What would have happened if notes were open and free in 1985.
• Stories of readjusting the balance of control and emergence to enable collaboration.
• IBM worldjams – 2001 – Values Jam. The moment I’d point to is the one described in the intro of the interview. We started the event. The question about position in the org and attitudes. It was like the old IBM was waiting by the phone and we called. Straw man of asking about values developed in a conventional way with a task force. Sam said this had to be done in a more distributed and democratic way. Start the jam. 15-20% that had been there 15+ years and went through the trauma, all the hurt and betrayal came out. There were some senior executives were on IM pinging me and others saying this has to be shut down. Sam, to his credit, said no, let it play out. What happened is other parts of the population came in, looked at this expression and said, “get a life.” It’s a company, not your mother. It has good and bad things. The discussion became more balanced. That moment, some people who thought this is no good. Palmisano didn’t watershed moment.
• Information is power. Power is authority and authority is money. If you change information distribution you threaten power and authority and you may get shelved.
• A legacy free, large software company that has embraced concept of small team, collaborative work. As observed, keep hearing about three projects doing the same thing. But management is not providing communication links, like an editor on a collaborative document, that is readable, not just information. That role of management was not happening because of distrust of any kind of control. The benefit of management to provide underpinnings and bigger picture. Any perspective on this?
• Sounds like a management system with a KM perspective. It was almost exclusively team based. That is not the only locus of information sharing. Look at Open Source and Web 2.0, wisdom of crowds. Maybe we need a different term. Discovering patterns and extracting value from millions of distributed nodes. KM was about control at the team level. That information wanting to be free beyond the team.
• The Open Source projects that have succeeded has often had benevolent dictator for life. Team based have often been hit or missed. A natural synergy between the benevolent dictator and the wisdom of the crowd.
• This notion of incentives. In business to be profitable, not just collaborate. Struck by JSB’s presentation about one of the forces driving collaboration is globalization. The need to work in a flexible, loosly coupled way with a network of suppliers. In the redesign of organizations, to what extent does globalization and the extended enterprise, interorganizational, ad hoc teams, etc., really the driving force of the future.
• Book by Nannery Slaugher, “A New World Order” – emergence of networks across national boundaries of legislators, regulators and lawyers. A new form of global governance that is not top down. Actually making policy, shaping and sharing information, next level down structure of governance and decision making. Happening in many spheres. Web 2.0 is not just about technology but how the world is changing.
• Tech change happens in spite of management, not because of it. Experience in large corporations as huge ocean freighters dealing with small fast boats aiming for them.
• Network effect and how do you convince senior management is a good idea. A tool is subversion. Go to the client. Ask for forgiveness, not for permission.
• Large telecon rolling out a Notes implementation to a sales force. Never had a laptop. Did training and the salesman would give the laptop to his secretary. That delegation of collaboration goes one step below the intended user. Some high level people are not keyboard oriented. Comfortable with voice and phones. Use tech they are comfortable with.
• You don’t have to define the problem as ‘rolling something out company wide.” Find a small number of zealots can do that. Find the ones who have “drunk the koolaid” who will rope in other people.
• What is the toughest thing you are finding with collaboration in your organization?
• Teams of engineers on one side, artists on the other. NASA in the middle. The deadline is firm. Has to get these people to talk to each other on a schedule. Document management everything challenging. They think very differently.
• When balancing business units have to create a conversational language that works for both, set some guidelines, then introduce collaboration platform. Have couch/counsel/interpreters on sidelines.
• Study: Can absence make the teams grow stronger. Problemmatic for team leaders till breakthrough. Take the most divergent, pair them and get them working on an intractable problem together. They tended to have breakthrough solutions. Then rotated the pairs.
• Two years ago, no collab platform, no doc management. All these artifacts all over the place. How much do we take from the old world into the new world?
• Use a product that allows full text search of all drives, all kinds of data sources.
• As needed
• What are the COPs around this area;
• Lisa Kimball – Groupjazz.com
• Howard Rheingold – Rheingold.com
• Collaboration online conversation –
• Now lots of specialized subsections, camps of interest. Need to keep on pulling these camps together. Like this conference. Keep these conversations going.