The user interface isn’t that important you know. It’s just an internal intranet application that will be only used by our employees. Just focus on the business logic and make sure that everything is locked down for security.”
It’s unfortunately something that I heard over and over again in my previous client engagements as a systems integrator and solutions architect. Somehow, when we are talking about IT applications for employees, all of a sudden user interface and user experience don’t matter.
A recent tweet from Rena Patel, from Capgemini’s UK PR team, states the obvious: “Internal employees are also clients.”
Workforce collaboration vs. customer participation
So far, the social software industry has often separated social engagements in roughly two flavours:
- The “inside the firewall”, internally focused Enterprise 2.0 or Workforce Collaboration.
- The consumer-, externally focused Social Media or Customer Participation.
I see in my current client engagements at Headshift that this artificial boundary gets more and more blurry. To what extent is an external customer community different from an internal employee community?
Think about it, they serve similar goals:
- Drive efficiency across the company, whether that is time, people or money
- Drive self-service to lower burden on support staff
- Quicker access to expertise to solve your problem or answer your question
- Create a feeling of bonding with other community members and the company
… and they often suffer from similar (potential) problems:
- Low community participation
- Cost of running the community is too high, compared with the benefits
- Lack of attention from senior people in the company
So why is it then that we don’t put the same effort and value in social software / community solutions for our employees as we do for clients? Why is it that we want to have the best for our own children, but not for our own employees?
A user-centred focus approach
Many companies that are experimenting with introducing social collaboration tools for their employees start with low-budget, under-the-radar projects and it often starts with putting a software package in place and see what happens. There are roughly two outcomes of this:
- Users see a real benefit of the tool and at a certain pointthe amount of participants reaches a tipping point and the adoptionrates explode.
- The projects doesn’t get enough traction for a long period and just becomes a black hole
In both cases you have a problem, the former is a luxury problem, the latter is a sad reality for many projects. So, how can you safeguard yourself from the above-described problem, without breaking the bank?
The first and most obvious question you should’ve asked yourself before starting this Enterprise 2.0 project (heck, you should ask it before doing ANY project at all): “what does the user want?”. This can be done by running a workshop with some business stakeholders and (most importantly) end-users from the field, and can be further extended by stakeholder interviews.
Bottom-up vs. Top-down approach
Knowing what the user wants is quite crucial to tackle both problems. If you know what your users want, you can more easily control the growth of your community and steer it in the right direction to speed up the tipping point in a controlled and more predictable way.Knowing what the user wants, helps you better understand why certain things don’t work or intervene when your community lacks adoption.
Depending on whether you are a “bottom-up”-evangelist or a “top-down”-believer you might or might not agree with what I just said. I’m a big fan of macro-economics and the theory of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. However, I’m realistic enough to see that thislaissez-faire approach works very well in an artificial text-book environment, but when applied in reality it has certain “issues”.
At Headshift and the Dachis Group, we are a strong believer in the intentional creation of such social environments in companies. This means that we strongly believe that the user is central and that they drive the success of the community (bottom-up), but that having a good and strong community management (top-down) tremendously raises the quality and success of your community. A very famous example is the SAP Developer Network, led by Craig Cmehil (@ccmehil), which is a prime example of a thriving collaboration community.
Business is fundamentally human
As the very famous Cluetrain Manifesto states “business is fundamentally human”, so we need to stop treating employees as “resources” and start seeing them as clients with their own interests, desires and drivers. Once we made this mind shift, perhaps making the business case for focusing on user experience for internal intranet tools is more easier to make…
Enjoy the end year festivities and all the best for 2010. My motto for the coming year will be: “Humans For The Win!”
I’m glad Headshift forces you
to write blogs!
Yes, “them humans” usually lose in the trade-off between functionality, time and money; the three drivers of projects. Then again, projects are a means and not a goal, which has also been forgotten
You make a great point here. I’ve been telling people for years that B2B, B2C, SOA and ESB are nothing else than just extending business functionality outside an application’s borders
I love “social” because it’s all about humans. No wonder people are having a hard time finding a business case for E2.0, as it indeed is Social Media Paid For Dearly (coining that acronism as we speak LOL)
Oh well, SalesForce managed to get people excited over paying $50 per person for Chatter, who knows what’s next?
Humans for the win indeed. But: anything labeled Enterprise… or …Architecture will prevent the real democracy needed for that. As long as we IT people struggle with delivering anything because we underestimated it, the User always loses first when it’s time for ye olde trade-off
I completely agree about the importance of a user-centred approach. But I would take it even further:
This isn’t always the right question to ask. It’s often better to ask “what does the user need?” But we can do better still by not just relying on what people say they need but also observing them and working with them to get a rich understanding of how they work and the nature of the organisation they work in.
That depth of understanding of workflows and culture combined with clearly articulated user needs can help make software that meets a need and that will actually be used.
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by leeprovoost: Closing the gap between Enterprise 2.0 and Social Media http://bit.ly/8w2rs9 #Headshift
Great blog Lee – glad to see some of my twitter ramblings provokes thought. You raise an interesting concept of running workshops for internal employees; this is definately an area that can foster not only innovation from the employees but as you state – close the gap.
I think most organisations just expect employees to love their workplace or assume that they know what the employee wants. It’s worth remembering that the employee is a client from the minute they go to accept the job to the minute they leave the company: a bit like the welfare state; from cradle to grave.
@Martijn haha, yes i’m quite lucky that i get the opportunity and time to write down some of my thoughts in blog posts and articles. sadly, there is a backlog of posts, so slowly catching up… I would almost say that you can change your title from Enterprise Architect to Social Architect?
I do agree with your point that a project is a means and not a goal, even more, I think that long-running projects are not necessarily a bad thing. With companies changing continuously, it also means that our projects will continuously have to adapt. It’s an illusion that we can set up requirements for a project that will go live in 3 years. Perhaps, we should adopt this perpetual beta concept from the internet startups in our enterprise architecture world?
@Mike regarding your first remark, I had earlier today on Gmail Chat with @rickmans a similar discussion where he said that we need to extend the question “what does the user want”, with “… and why?”. He pre-emptively tackled my response by “a wisdom” I once told him:
“in the consulting world we often make the following mistake: when a client asks us to drill a hole, we consultants are often focused on which drill is the best fit at the lowest price, while our natural reaction should rather be why the client needs the hole in the first place”
so it is very important to figure out what a user wants, but even more to figure out why he wants that. that will lead probably to your remark why he needs it in the first place.
I am however a bit careful with the sentences “the user wants this” and “the user needs this”. The problem is, who is assessing this? Who judges whether what the user wants is really something he/she needs? A user can tell you that he wants a certain button in that color on a page, while a user experience designer says that he/she does not need that because it can be achieved much easier and quicker in that other way and the project manager denies it because it is too costly and time-consuming. Are the “experts” the one that will ratify the user’s want into a user’s need?
Thoughts?
btw +1 for the user observation, can be very powerful!
@ Lee I agree: if someone asks for an internal blogging platform, then you shouldn’t respond by asking “which one?”, you should instead ask “why?”. It may be that the problem that led to this ‘user want’ is better solved in a different way.
Interpretation of needs can be pretty subjective. I think it’s good to get lots of people involved: the user themselves, other business stakeholders and the people who will be implementing the solution. That improves the quality of both the interpretation and the solution. My feeling is that the more you can involve users and other business stakeholders in the process the more what you make will actually get used. Easier said than done though!
Lee, I’d say the integration of e2.0 & social media is more about cross-function business design and budgetary politics around it.
Viewed from a purely technology management perspective, closing the gap in the way you describe makes sense. At the end of the day underlying technology is same/similar on both occasions and integration could enable some interesting new ‘social’ business processes.
My guess is that questions of who is sponsoring the respective initiatives is the first hurdle that is preventing such an integration from happening: Enterprise-wide deployment of e2.0 tools is likely to be sponsored by IT, whereas Social Media is likely to be sponsored by someone like customer services or marketing. Sponsoring a single project from a combination of budgets is always painful and subject to lots of politics that can often prevent anything from happening.
The second hurdle is imho a relative difficulty of defining new business processes (even those that are not ‘social’) that span various corporate functions. Agreeing on the new ways of working across various company functions takes at minimum time & effort and I think most companies simply have not got to a point of spending this time&effort yet.
@Jiri, good point. It’s often a budget / political reason why there is a big split between social media and enterprise 2.0. however, I can live with that. I’m bit more upset that a lot of companies don’t seem to care much with what tools their employees are working. it’s quite common that employees use 5 or 6 different tools and each tool a total different user experience. And when you look at it, they often use such a small subset of the tools, that you could integrate it into one, add a nice workflow/process around it and it would tremendously raise the efficiency of the people.
as i said, why do we want to have the best for our children, but we don’t seem to care much about having the best for our employees?
Lee, a good discussion indeed. To Mike’s point – this reminds me of one of my favourite diagrams – it can be applied to almost anything. I posted it here… http://nigelwalsh.posterous.com/what-the-customer-really-needed
Key thing here – is listen and understand what the customer really needs!.