The latest tech tool? People power.
How social networking can transform the CIO into a superhero
By Alan S. Cohen, vice president enterprise, Cisco
Workers unite! Cohen says social networks can empower employees. Photo: Cisco
I recently spent a few days with 100 of Cisco’s (CSCO) top customers, Chief Information Officers (CIOs), representing a range of industries – private and public and geographies. These folks are often the unsung heroes of their organizations, enabling employees to perform great technological feats while helping management wring huge cost savings from their budgets.
During our time together, the conversations focused on how work has changed: from local to global, from centralized to decentralized, and increasingly, from live to asynchronous or even virtual.
In the past 20 to 30 years, our customers’ organizations have invested tens of billions of dollars in transaction systems – from ERP to email – to reduce latency and inefficiency in value chains. This considerable investment underpins the heart of the “Six Sigma,” process-driven revolution that became the ultimate strategy for operational excellence. However, today we’ve reached the zenith of transactional gains.
So, from where is the next wave of innovation and productivity emerging? Allow me to posit a simple answer: from people.
For most companies, people represent an untapped asset – a resource that becomes especially important for companies that must grow their business without adding personnel.
This means that corporations must design a cognitive stimulus plan based on employee contributions, and business must embrace some admittedly unusual notions about how, where and when work occurs, and how employees collaborate. Some of these notions recently arrived from the Web 2.0, social networking realm.
There is definitely something going on at Facebook: you do not add a subscriber base the size of the United States in a few years unless there are benefits to the community (Facebook added over 50 thousand new users in the time it took me to write this blog).
The sea of changing perspective on social networking struck me during our CIO conclave. Some call it social computing. We at Cisco simply call it collaboration. Our customers recognize the critical nature of social networking as a component of collaborative business processes.
But collaboration in the workplace also requires careful integration and regulation to enable success.
No one advocates that employees post personal pictures of weekend activities in lieu of working. It is time, though, to recognize that community is at the heart of teaming and teaming is at the heart of workplace collaboration. And collaboration is where we find innovation and operational excellence, by tapping into knowledge at the source: from one functional group to another; from one business unit to another; and from one company to another – as partners in a distributed valued chain.
We need variety, a notion at odds with the predictability advocated by Six Sigma. Actually, in his speech on “consistency,” Mark Twain effectively made this case:
“I am persuaded that the word has been tricked into adopting some false and most pernicious notions about consistency – and to such a degree that the average man has turned the rights and wrongs of things entirely around and is proud to be “consistent,” unchanging, immovable, fossilized, where is should be his humiliation.”
To be sure, for social networks to become the next great tool in the CIO’s daring arsenal, they need to evolve. They need to be secure. They need to integrate into corporate information systems. They need to support work processes that deliver business results.
Collaborative social networking would benefit from rich voice and video systems, something that current consumer offerings lack. Often, a text message does not contain enough context.
Finally, management needs to view collaborative social networking differently. As Morten T. Hansen notes, in his excellent new book, Collaboration, they must oversee the adoption process and change culture to achieve positive results.
To some degree, every aspect of information technology is in transition: cloud, virtualization, collaboration, and consumerization. CEOs want more and CFOs want to spend less. I could go on and on with challenges for the CIO. But what about the people who actually use all this technology, day after day, to get their jobs done? What are they telling us about how they want to work?
The millennials, the largest presence in the workforce, are already “black belts” in virtual communications and collaboration.
Is the new CIO super power enterprise social networking? Or is social networking the kryptonite? I see a cape in the sky. (A bird? A plane? A CIO!)
Cohen is vice president, enterprise, at Cisco Systems, the San Jose, Calif.-based maker of networking equipment.
Wow – where to start? Bear with me as I try to build a foundation for trust and a case for believability of my points. For years I designed, wrote and implemented global transactional systems — both from a management consulting and systems consulting perspective, for two Big-Five consulting firms, and then as an director-level employee of SAP. Before that I taught Statistical Process Control (forerunner to Six Sigma) before it was widely adopted in the manufacturing industry. I also worked with Global Knowledge Management when it was first a hot item, and mobile computing before the networks were in place to support the vision. It is so frustrating to see articles like this that miss the real current situation with business, and the real business need, and gain some attention by throwing around some buzzwords like Web 2.0 and social networking. How can the latest "tech tool" be "people power" when this has been a key component of "leading" managerial thought for decades? Are our CIO's out to lunch? Social networking may be a piece, but it will more likely transform the CIO into a super jobhunter because it results in just another failed IT project. There is no debating that there are some benefits that can be gained by blogs, Twittering, videos, and social networking sites like Facebook. But they are along the lines of communication and marketing, and rarely innovation. And calling social networking ala Facebook "collaboration" is irresponsible and only contributes to the hype that leads to the ever-deepening "trough of disillusionment" that Gartner so aptly identified. Groupware is software that can enhance collaboration (with the proper education and processes around it), while Facebook is socializing and entertainment. Furthermore, to even imply that "… today we've reached the zenith of transactional gains" is laughable. How many businesses have implemented the full suite of ERP software that they've purchased? How many are handling more than 75% of their transactions electronically? How far has the promise of EDI and XML / Web Services taken us? How easy is it for people within a large enterprise to find others who have already done what they're trying to do, so that it is more efficient than just doing it again themselves? CIOs should be strategists and problem solvers and leaders of business change. They should also look at the history of computing for previously-identified problems and solutions (e.g. aren't SaaS solutions quite similar to timesharing systems from the 60's and 70's?), Ultimately they should be addressing "What are the problems that the business faces today and tomorrow, and how can technology (combined with managerial actions) provide a solution?" They should also be looking at the tools and technologies that are out there today (and used by their partners, competitors, and thought leaders in other industries) as well as identifying unmet needs for business solutions and technological advances that will provide competitive advantage. It's the business thinkers with IT and people understanding that will transform the organization. The tech guys throwing IT solutions at existing or imagined problems are the reason the best business CIOs are still battling for credibility. The high percentage of failed or late projects and budget overruns, as well as the IT organizations being perceived as impediments to efficient business — those are the things that Cisco should be assisting with — the fundamentals — through an effective standards-based infrastructure that supports the networking and collaboration needs of the enterprise without a huge expense in hardware, software, training, and staff to maintain a complex infrastructure. By the way — Six Sigma started as a quality system, which was driven by controlling the variability in the process (people, process, technology, measurement of key variables, etc.). It by no means is a process-driven revolution — it's just one advanced iteration of a necessary system to measure and identify the causes of imperfection (product or process) and to eliminate the variability that causes the imperfection, while establishing the consistency necessary to stop having to look extensively at the same causes for both new and old problems. At the end of the day, I think there were probably some very valuable insights that these 100 customers presented and discussed, as many of the CIOs I've worked for and consulted with have been very bright and highly qualified. I just have a serious concern for our future if any of these customers or Cisco employees came back thinking that Facebook was the next "killer app" for their business.
The author hits it right on the head….the real value in any company is the people. Their talents are resources are limitless and those company's that learn to tap the talents of their people, allowing them to express their ideas in a creative way will always succeed in any environment.
DrBillToth.com/blog
I agree that the workplace environment has changed and is changing fast with the proliferation of social tools like Facebook and Twitter. There is no doubt immense value in allowing people to contribute via these tools or any other Social Business Software coming up in the Enterprise 2.0 space as it leads to capture of all the thoughts leading to collective intelligence being built. It is a very large block of information from which key inferences can be drawn.
Combine this with SaaS as the business model and Cloud Compouting for infrastructure , you have a game changing proposition for enterprises.
I agree with the author's observation that capturing collective thought and extracting value from it will be a significant (and likely profitable) challenge. However, the straw man used to set up the discussion is flawed. In particular, I disagree with the author's statement to the effect that IT investment "underpins" the heart of the “Six Sigma,” process-driven revolution. Understandably, there may be a CIO bias at work here. But pursuit of process improvement does not demand IT "solutions", although some solution providers clearly have derived great benefit from selling large databases and applications to manage them. Rather, IT solutions tend to simply accelerate bad processes and highlight the errors. Process improvements need to be made before an IT solution is identified and implemented. The third statement in the same paragraph also an overstatement – "we’ve reached the zenith of transactional gains." There remains ample opportunities for gains in all industries. Transactional gains would appear to be the hope of many endeavors with many billions at stake. Consider, for one example, the government subsidies supporting investments in electronic medical records. Let us as taxpayers hope that billions of dollars in gains remain achievable.
the question to me is, do the people get used by other people and the technology, or do the people use the technology to stop using one another.