Using Social Media to Manage by Objectives

The New York Times recently ran an interview with Mark Pincus, the C.E.O of Zynga. It's an interesting interview. Pincus talks about the importance of employees feeling like they're in charge of something: everyone should be C.E.O. of something. He also talks about hiring people who are still hungry for success and managing people by asking them to articulate a few key objectives for the week.

Regarding his method of managing, Pincus says:

John Doerr [the venture capitalist] sold me on this idea of O.K.R.'s, which stands for objectives and key results. It was developed at Intel and used at Google, and the idea is that the whole company and every group has one objective and three measurable key results, and if you achieve two of the three, you achieve your overall objective, and if you achieve all three, you’ve really killed it.


We put the whole company on that, so everyone knows their O.K.R.'s. And that is a good, simple organizing principle that keeps people focused on the three things that matter — not the 10.


Then I ask everybody to write down on Sunday night or Monday morning what are your three priorities for the week, and then on Friday see how you did against them. It’s the only way people can stay focused and not burn out. And if I look at your road map and you have 10 priorities for you and your team, you probably don't know which of the three matter, and probably none of the 10 are right.


I can look at everyone's piece of paper, and their road map shows every item you were going to do and your predicted results and actual results, and then the results are in red if you missed them, yellow if they're close and green if you passed them. I think road maps are a great principle just for managing your life. It keeps everybody focused, and it lets me know what trains are on or off the tracks.

For me, the phrase that leapt off the page here was "piece of paper." Sure, one could track all these objectives on paper, but I think it makes more sense to post this information on blogs or wikis, where the objectives would be visible to all and where tagging could be used to tie individual objectives to larger departmental or organizational objectives. In other words, instead of using paper, use Jive or MindTouch or Thought Farmer. That makes the objectives amenable, too, to importing into BI tools or simple graphing tools sometimes included in these platforms. And if some objectives are sensitive or confidential, role-based access controls could be used to make them visible only to authorized managers.

There's been lots of talk about how social media platforms help workers share information and expertise. The oft-cited example is a worker discovering which colleagues in other departments have relevant expertise. Social media platforms help people discover and nurture such connections.

I hope that in the coming years, more organizations realize what powerful tools these platforms can be for strategic planning: for collecting information for use in strategic plans and for disseminating and tracking strategic objectives. Let's use these platforms for sharing information up and down the organization, as well as across, and for making strategic objectives visible and understandable to all.

Two Strategies for Putting Enterprise Social Media within Everyone's Reach

When Jive Software recently announced its new SBS platform, Dennis Howlett at ZDNet raised the issue of user adoption: in many organizations, it's difficult to get users to contribute content to social media platforms. Usage patterns typically follow a 1/9/90 rule. About 1% of users contribute heavily. Another 9% contribute periodically, while 90% of users lurk, reading content, perhaps, but not contributing any content of substance.

How can social media platform vendors overcome the 1/9/90 habits of the crowd?

One approach, which most vendors are taking, is to make the platform interface richly featured and easy to use. These vendors hope that rich features will spur the creation of rich content, which in turn will make enterprise 2.0 dashboard indispensible—that is, the dashboard will become one of the few windows users always keep open on their desktops. These vendors are taking other steps, too, such as offering consulting services to train users and inculcate useful social-media habits.

Another approach, complementary to the first, is to use widgets to embed social media platform interfaces in Web applications, such as Gmail, that are popular with users. Social media start-up Socialcast is following this route.

This second approach makes sense. Certainly it can't hurt to put access to the platform . If my Socialcast interface is right there in Gmail, I'm more likely to post something to it, perhaps in response to something I've just read or sent in email. I don't have to switch windows. The gadget lowers the amount of work, including context-switching, I have to do in order to use the software.

Socialcast has widgets for a few major applications available now. Many more coming soon in their next release. I look forward to seeing what they come up with and how their user community responds.

Data from a Straw

I originally wrote this piece after attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston in June. I'm just back from the Web 2.0 Expo in New York, and I see that the ideas still apply. So here are some thoughts on data integration and social computing platforms. -JB

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, there was a lot of talk about data. By applying Web 2.0 technology and practices—blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging, RSS, etc.—Enterprise 2.0 would transform enterprise IT infrastructure and foster the collaboration and knowledge-sharing promised by earlier technology practices such as knowledge management. In this new era, users at last will be able to find data easily and discover who else in the company has similar interests and pertinent knowledge. Through collaboration platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint and Jive Software Clearspace, data previously buried in email messages and PC desktops would be published on company blogs and wikis, where it could be found, read, and elaborated upon by coworkers and, if appropriate, by partners and customers.

The software companies creating these portals recognize that a lot of valuable data isn’t found in email or Words documents; instead, it's distributed across data centers and departments in databases and data warehouses. So the portal vendors talk about being able to access Oracle and SAP and other enterprise data sources, in order to pull this data into the collaboration platform.

But as I talked to vendors, I found their views of data access in many cases to be overly simplistic. Their premise seemed to be that all one needs to do is attach a connector to a data source and suck the data out, much as one might stick a straw into a paper cup and extract whatever concoction is sloshing about inside.

If you talk to data integration experts in data centers—or if you talk to security officers for Fortune 1000 companies—you quickly discover that the requirements for data access are much more varied and nuanced. It's rare that you’ll actually want to simply extract data and, say, stage it in an Excel worksheet on a server where it can be accessed by a homogeneous group of authorized users. More likely, you’ll want to apply access controls before the data even reaches a collaboration server, and you’ll need several different views of the data, based on business needs and permissions.

Instead of simply extracting data, it's more useful to think in terms of data access, data transformation, and data delivery. The tables below compare these approaches.

First, here’s the kind of straightforward data access that software vendors often talk about.

Table 1: Simple Data Access

Data Source	Data Access
Customer database	Post customer records as Excel spreadsheet for SharePoint

Next, here's a more realistic scenario, at least for organizations operating under security policies or industry regulations that mandate data security and data governance.

Table 2: Data Access with Support for Data Transformation and Data Delivery

Data Source	Data Access	Data Transformation	Data Delivery
Customer database	Query customer records, presenting only columns 1, 2, 5, and 7	Convert dollars to Euro	Post results to spreadsheet or Web page accessed by EMEA marketing group
	Query customer records, collecting columns 1-5 and 7-9	Add a unique ID to each record for use in this project	Post results to portal used by Private Client Group
	Query customer records, returning columns 1-4		Make this query executable for customer service agents working on the customer service portal

In enterprises operating with strict security and compliance controls, it's rare for data to be simply dumped from a database and made broadly accessible. Policy compliance requires tighter controls over data access (permission to extract the data from its source) and data delivery (the presentation of data to specific users).

Businesses—and software vendors—ought to recognize the critical importance of data transformation: changing, reformatting, or editing data to suit its particular purpose and audience. There's no point in delivering too much data, or financial results in dollars when they should be in yen, or raw data from three sources that end users have to combine for themselves through machinations with spreadsheets. In the real world of harried workers overloaded with information, data transformation is an essential capability for any effective solution for data management and knowledge sharing.

Just as Enterprise 2.0 frees workers from the clutter of irrelevant email messages, so flexible data access and transformation practices can ensure that the right users receive the right data at the right time. The goal should be to get everyone all the data they need—and nothing more.

Conclusion

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, it was obvious that software vendors of collaboration and community platforms have made clear progress developing attractive, usable front-ends. Now it's time to apply that same energy and thoughtfulness to developing the back end—data access, transformation, and delivery—in order to realize the full vision of business-ready data platforms for Enterprise 2.0.

Postscript: Since I wrote blog post back in June, SnapLogic, an open source data integration vendor and a client of mine, formed a partnership with MindTouch, an open source wiki company, to create a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution building on the kind of custom-tailored data access, transformation, and delivery I described above. In the SnapLogic-MindTouch solution (summarized with a diagram here), CRM applications such as Salesforce.com and SugarCRM are extended with collaborative dashboards based on MindTouch's wiki platform. The wiki is configured with SnapLogic data integration pipelines, enabling CRM users to securely access financial data and customer support records for prospects and customers. No tell-all spreadsheets insecurely posted on servers. Instead, a wealth of account-specific data is made available to authorized users.

I expect will see more partnerships like this one in the coming months.