bye for now

good day

thank you

Thanks Frank!

You can also contact me and ask questions via Frank.Leistner@4fifa.de. Bye now. 

great chat

thank you.

Thank you very much Beth for hosting and facilitating. Cheers!

I hope everybody has a great rest of the week. Cheers!

It's worth a look! And don't forget, I'll be drawing and sending a copy to one lucky participant.

Thanks!

Or lookup my Name on Wiley or Amazon, there you will find both books. Mastering Organizational Knowledge Flow and Connecting Organizational Silos. 

Hey this was great fun. 

More on all of this can found in the book. See http://connectorgsilos.ch

Few meeting have detailed notes. Even fewer are available. Good point. 

Any last thoughts before we sign off Frank? Where can people get your book and find you?

Thank you so much!

I'd be curious to see the breakdown at this company! Thanks Frank.

@GeorgiaCougar - you might be missing out on cross-group learning though, and who writes the meeting reports? Where are they? Can you ever look at history of those?

Thanks Frank and Beth.

Beth this was very interesting. Thank you Frank

@bethSchultz It depends on what you mean by use? Often there is about 90% people that might be less active, more on the consumingend , 9 that are regularly active and maybe 1 that are really really active, but the trend is more interesting than the sheer numbers. Even if only 10% of people get value out if it, But you can drive that up with the right marketing. At SAS it was definitely higher

I'm not convinced we need any ESN solution. Stuff that is private we get together and meet about. Lots of meetings but the folks try to stay on topic and they don't drag on.

While Frank is answering the uptake question, looks like we're heading into the top of the hour. If anybody has any last questions or comments, post them now!

facebook is popular among employees here

linked in has a little usage

no ESN here

Or I can just look up all posts with a given tag, which will again give me a string of content, posts, questions answers and more all along a dynmically created dimension.

I'm curious, in your experience, what percentage of employees -- knowledge workers let's say -- actually use their ESNs?

@bethSchultz, as for Business Processes. In my experience all processes where you need to research or get a fast answer to a question where you don't know exactyl the audience is a clear case to be posted, also discovery, which could be bound to a given busproc or more generally as a daily activity. I can follow people, groups or topics, which help in that case

That's interesting Frank

When I press the button on my PC and the coffee holder slides out, why can't it have hot coffee on it already? Oh... And don't reboot or your coffee spills.

But you could have a project team that has a private group and it is a global client so you bridge the silos, but keep the information in the group. It is just a lot more dynamic than old-style silos

How should we be thinking about an ESN in terms of business processes? Which ones can be much improved by using an ESN, for example? 

That doesn't mean that there is information that should not be spread universally

The Silos often exist in vertical fashion between departments, countries, buildings etc... it is a lot about bridging thoese where you can't meet at the coffee machine.

@GeogiaCougar Yes, you still need security layers in that case, most ESNs do have some type of private groups or private messages still

good question georgiacougar

What I am saying is that if you got those features all in one place it might make it easier, but it can work also with multi-channel as most of us have to live with still

Different levels of employees know different things. How do you protect knowlege without introducing the silos into the ESN

@bethSchultz good point, ideally you would have those all at hand, And if you can launch all those facilities from one place great, but if not, it is not dramatic to ask somebody to just have a skype call or pick up the phone if you think that it benefits the conversation you just had in the ESN

If an ESN is really all about breaking down silos -- or at least in large part about that -- it would seem it ought to facilitate many kinds of collaboration, like shared desktops, and video calls, etc. Or is that not hte case?

:)

How open people are depends on the company culture, but if you want to make it a success. those that think they should police it, should be called back to be very careful, otherwise the benefits definiteyl head down

same here

Ah, I was wondering!

Oops, I of course ment NOT in relation to individuals, but more general on topic streams.

FYI, I wouldn't say anything negative!

You should be careful with making it another intranet. It is a conversation engine for the whole organization, so if it becomes another marketing engine it will move away from that goal. 

in relation to individuals? couldn't that get kind of dicey from an HR perspective?

And would employees really be honest with their sentiments on a company platform?

I try again. Sentinment analysis in an organization is tricky. what you might do is analyze trending topics  but in relation to individuals.

i'm still interested in the sentiment question ...

Should companies also post news articles, etc by internal writers?

sorry frank, sometimes that happens.

Frank give me some ideas on other content on ESN.

... It just swallowed one of my posts ... 

And again you can also do quantitative analysis in surveys - just be careful not to do it to often as people get survey fatigue...

Got it. Actually, our company ESN is called The Hub, too.

@bethSchultz hub is the name of the ESN, sorry should have mentioned that

Adoption and connectivity, mean time to post, length of conversations, aging of posts, ratings, and you can analyze the actual network and look at connectivity and the change in it.

#hubvalue -- i like that idea!

Any of those tags represented a story we could invest and push out again to show value

But usage is part of the bag. Another one might be connectity. At SAS we introduce a special tag #hubvalue to be used whenever somebody got real value out of an answer or post

keeping on the  metrics topic, so what kind of metrics should a company be looking at from its ESN?

@georgiaCougar Yes, that is the tricky part, that is why you need a balance of metrics. Adoption is good, but you will have to look at what is happening at the same time. So just usage doesn't tell you the full story. 

right point

Metrics can be viewed in such a way to mean lots of stuff. How do you get the correct interpretation?

@bethSchultz in the Philips case they were looking over time as to how quickly people got an answer to their questions, you can also correlate it to ratings at the same time

Metrics is a tricky topic sometimes. You have to balance hard measures with some soft evidence quantitative through questionaires. I.e. do people feel more informed, more connected

Re your Phillips example... can you explain more?

One case that might be a good example of hard evidence was the metric of time to an answer in a post, which is something that Phillips has been seeing in their ESN

Frank, do you have any hard evidence to share -- i.e., metrics -- showing, for example, faster time to decision making because a company has connected silos via an ESN?

All this comes back to research on Communities of Practice, which has been around for over 10 years, just that we see the benefits a lot more dynamically building in an ESN then in traditional CoPs, which might have formed around mailing lists

When you connect silos you also get experts closer that might have been isolated otherwise.

You'd need a culture of knowledge sharing to start with, I would imagine?

And if you get answers faster you make more progress and are happier (as a Harvard Study found on progress impact on knowledge workers)

I agree not everybody sees the same benefit from the start. But we saw that many people did get answers quicker from folks, they did not anticipate

@bethSchultz Well before we had some of those social tools in an unintegrated fashion, and people went to one or the other, but there was no cross-learning between different tools. The ESN turned it around and put the people in the center.

Frank -- you mention SAS and RedVentures. Do you have a before and after scenario to share. What sort of problems were encountered prior to the ESN breaking down the silos, for example. How did the business benefit when the company connected silos via the ESN?

The key is that the community manager really lives the community - so in the end once you have 100 or 1000s of users you will need a full time person after all, if you are serious

@georgiaCougar HR or Internal communcations are good starting points. 

We have an ESN here. I would say there are definitely communities of users -- by role and/or business unit -- that use it more effectively than others. Then every once in a while we'll see a push for more involvement on everybody's part.

Would you consider enterprise group messaging services like www.ivytalk.com to be a ESN?  

Another company is RedVentures out of South Carolina. They have bridged some silos that where there before as well, very quickly.

@Beth SAS is definitely doing that. The super-watercooler type of conversation engine is helping in bridging silos every day

@beth no I don't think you necessarily need a full person, but if the community is somewhat larger it should definitely be somebody where the activity doesn't get squeezed out to zero quickly. 

An extra hat for someone in hr?

I was just going to ask if you have examples of companies that use an ESN to their strategic advantage.

In the SAS case people were quite Social Networkin savvy already, that helped with the launch

interesting point

@bethschultz I think a certain openess to social media (as is maybe more so in technical oriented industries) can be a real help

Regarding "good community management" -- does that require a full-time position, in your opinion?

Frank do you find certain types of companies, or industries, that are better at using ESNs than others? If so, what makes them better at it?

And as for hidden cost. the biggest hidden cost is usually that folks forget the investment into good community management

In general some integration should be possible, otherwise it will be tricky to move some folks over to your ESN to use it more often

Tagging and the demensions that are created through the tags represent real big power to find and connect content

Fair enough, Frank -- re: tools!

Are most companies using actual CMS for these networks or just modifying something like SharePoint sites?

And a full run down would go way beyond this chat, I am sorry to say here are some compared http://bit.ly/Nqo46r

Can a skype between 5 folks all inside the business be thought of as ESN?

@karelsedlacek to your questions on tools. I have actually in my books focused not so much on the technology vendors, but more on the process and people sides, as that is where things usually fail

Frank -- you talk about ESN in the context of knowledge flow. Can you explain that some?

GeorgiaCougar -- they should still be there. The whole stream will be archived.

@noreen you need a real marketing plan with all types of efforts starting with blogs, videos and stations in the lunch room

I refreshed my browser and the older posts went away

@BethSchulz, yes, you have more control over it, I would say

Frank, does an ESN imply greater privacy than external social nets?

If there is a purpose, how do companies get the message out about the benefits of using the ESN?

It does actually make a case for a more integrated ESN approach (which could be in the cloud actually).

I'm just learning. 

But having people discuss business over all sorts of tools externally (ie. facebook, google+ and more) is of concern

I'm confuse about the value of most internal networks. Thet are not fun but purpose driven. What's the point for me to participate?

The cloud per se is not necessarily unsafe, we will see a lot more cloud

@georgiacougar as for your early qestuion around internal vs. external and sharing. I think you need to distinguis between using the standard apps and an ESN

Sure...

Maybe I could get started by answering the early questions some good ones there already as well

GeorgiaCougar -- this is e-chat only, no audio.

Frank, that seems pretty easy to understand. But do find confusion out there?

Where as external Social network is used by a range of organizations and individuals

Will there be any audio in the chat session?

I would define an ESN, as a social network that is primarily used by members of a given enterprise only

Perhaps a good place to start is with GeorgiaCougar's basic question: What is an ESN and what isn't an ESN?

Welcome everybody, Hi Beth

Hi Frank, welcome!

Hello everybody... yes, great to see those early questions

As soon as he joins us, that is... :-)

Hi all. We've got quite a few questions for Frank to tackle right off the bat! 

So what is ESN and what is not ESN? 

We'll be starting at the top of the hour, so in 10 minutes....

:)

pop quiz?

test

We are seeing an increase in private enterprise group messaging via email, app, and text. Communicating across all "channels", particularly interesting when communicating in and with developing markets.  Community orgs, secondary dispatch, biz continuity, support and workforce management applications. 

Frank, Can you give us a rundown of the what the top ESN providers have to offer, what the hidden costs are likely to be, and best for integration?  Yammer, Chatter, Mango Apps, Jive, SocialText, Saba,...

Thanks.

yes

Frank, what are our thoughts on this: 

If a Higher Ed College or University or mid size business has gone to for example google for gmail, chat, file storage, etc... How secure, searchable, or public is the information students, faculty, staff, employees, human resources, choose to put in the cloud? 

To me it seems obvious that Coorporate info words, photos, or videos (secrets if you will) that should remain private should not be mentioned on facebook, google chat, linked-in, twitter. 

Thanks Beth!  Looking forward to the Chat!

Hello to everybody. Glad to see folks looking forward to chatting with Frank. We'll be going live with the conversation at 2 p.m. ET. In the meantime, if you have a question you'd like Frank to address during the e-chat, feel free to drop it on this message board at any point. Frank will do his best to answer all questions during the chat.

Good morning.

EntSocQue

Hello

Hello to all :)

Here just a wee bit early..  *GRIN*

Eager to listen Frank.

Hello, I am very much looking forward to this conversation around ESNs and what their impact on organizational knowledge flows can be. Hope to see you back at 2pm ET tomorrow. 

Here's were we'll be chatting with Frank Leistner, author of Connecting Organizational Silos: Taking Knowledge Flow Management to the Next Level with Social Media, and former chief knowledge officer of SAS Global Professional Services. We'll be talking about why companies should care about using an enterprise social network (ESN), the value an ESN can provide -- especially in enabling knowledge flow -- best practices, and how to measure success. Join in the conversation; participants will be entered in a drawing to win a free copy of the book.