11. helping HEROes collaborate

BBVA is exactly the kind of company that needs collaboration most.

Starting as Banco de Bilbao in 1857, BBVA grew into a global financial powerhouse, the second-largest bank based in Spain, with over one hundred ten thousand employees in thirty countries and 47 million customers. Global financial companies aren’t known for being nimble; they’re known for the internal communication challenges they face.

But BBVA has made collaboration and innovation priorities. When I (Josh) visited the company in 2008 and 2009, I spoke to large and engaged groups of executives in a modern technology center, housed within a renovated old building called the Centro de Innovación, or Innovation Center. The “new within the old” model that describes this building is also a fitting symbol for BBVA and its department of innovation and development. Fernando Summers is head of BBVA’s innovation and knowledge management group, a department that must not only come up with innovations, but also stimulate innovation and collaboration among the bank’s diverse worldwide staff.

At the center of this initiative is BBVA’s Blogsfera, an internal blogosphere visible only to employees, which has grown to five hundred blogs and fifty posts a week in the last two years. There are personal blogs, shared departmental blogs, and blogs convened just for projects; any employee can create or comment on any blog. The purpose is pure and simple information sharing. When BBVA’s human resources department became worried about potential abuse in the blogging area, Fernando came up with a simple solution—no one could contribute anonymously; all participants had to log in with their BBVA email. In two years there have been zero abuse problems, because people who blog and comment under their own names in a company forum are unlikely to behave irresponsibly.

The BBVA blogosphere was an attempt to expand beyond the forums and static information tools that BBVA had already implemented—to create something at the same time more personal, more dynamic, and less formal. To get an idea what happens in BBVA’s Blogsfera, let’s look at an internal blog by Carmen Benito, a thirty-year veteran employee in the bank’s risk department. Fernando says that within the bank, the risk department is perceived as “a dark department, on the back side” of the loan activity in the bank. To retail bankers and others writing loans, the risk department’s thumbs-up or thumbs-down decisions on loans and investments are sometimes mysterious. In this environment, especially amid the dangerous economics of 2009, Carmen wanted to communicate how the bank sees risk, so she started a blog called Pasión por el Riesgo (Passion for Risk).

True to its name, Carmen’s blog took an innovative approach to describing risk, including the risks that come from the bank’s portfolio of equity and loan investments—a hot topic given the pressure diversified banks are under. Tapping into Spaniards’ appreciation for great food, she used this “recipe” to communicate how the company evaluates and manages risks (the original was in Spanish, of course, and we’ve included just enough in this excerpt to give you an idea of the style):

In posts like this, thirty years of experience unspooled in a very human display of blogging, and the rest of the bank became smarter about a key topic for any innovation the bank comes up with.

The BBVA blogosphere goes beyond personal blogs and knowledge sharing. More and more executives within the bank were becoming interested in a fashionable concept in 2009—launching a BBVA-branded mobile operator. Virgin Mobile is an example of this arrangement, called an MVNO or mobile virtual network operator, in which a company with a highly visible brand supplies the marketing while a mobile operator like Sprint or O2 supplies the actual mobile and billing infrastructure. BBVA created an internal shared blog around the topic, with multiple contributors from a virtual team that spanned geographies and included strategy and technology staff. By commenting on each other’s posts, the working group surfaced issues and cited information from elsewhere. This activity culminated in an in-person workshop, where attendees familiar with the issues from each other’s blogging and commenting activity convened in one place.

In the end, BBVA decided the time was not right to move forward with the MVNO, although they continue to collaborate to keep an eye on this market. Their collaboration had revealed that the project, while sexy, had significant drawbacks for now. Innovation is great. But collaboration, with the right tools, helps companies see better when a HERO’s innovation actually makes sense.

people and information: the two key sides of collaboration

HEROes work at the speed of empowered customers. They need tools that let them collaborate at the same speed.

In the HERO-powered business, speedy and effective collaboration is about finding people and information. The interesting thing about collaboration systems, like BBVA’s blogosphere, is that workers use people to find information, and information to find people.

Carmen Benito is an interesting person. You might know her, or hear about her from other people at the bank. You might follow her blog because she and her perspective—and the unique way she expresses herself—interest you. By finding her, you learned about risk. You started with a person and ended up with information.

Another way people find information in collaboration systems is through search. If you are interested in risk, you can search BBVA’s blogosphere and find Carmen’s blog. Then you might find Carmen, and ask for her help. You started with information and it led you to a person. Search is key. As Fernando Summers explains, “The usefulness of the information lies in the ease of access. Searches must be high quality to give better access to the knowledge behind them … Otherwise, this collaboration becomes a source of information without added value.”

But while the links between people and information are important elements in the design of a collaboration system, they’re not the most important elements. In fact, what typically makes or breaks a collaboration system doesn’t have to do with its design, or even its content. What makes the difference is the plan companies use to roll it out—the cultural elements and the HEROes who create it. That’s the lesson to learn from IBM and its Blue IQ Ambassador program.

CASE STUDY

how social adoption helped IBM’s Blue IQ catch on

In 2008, IBM Software Group senior vice president Steve Mills wanted to teach IBM’s sales teams how to be more productive using collaboration tools. Salespeople were frustrated by how much time they spent seeking people and information. Some said they spent at least half their time just looking for stuff, searching for experts to put in front of clients, chasing down the answer to a client question, or locating the right information to complete and win a proposal. If the next salesperson needed similar information, she was stuck; the knowledge wasn’t shared.

Steve hoped that IBM’s own Lotus Connections product, an internal social network that includes profiles, blogs, comments, search tagging, wikis, activities, and microblogs, could solve the sales teams’ problems. But salespeople are a hard audience to win over—they focus on immediate results. Steve gave Gina Poole the job of convincing the salespeople to use the sharing tools.

Gina was a good choice. She had spent over fifteen years in a passionate quest to help people at IBM to communicate and collaborate better. She pioneered IBM’s Internet marketing in the 1990s, launching the developerWorks program, a community of a million or so developers centered around open standards technologies and IBM products. She launched “grass roots marketing,” an early form of social media marketing, building relationships with external Web communities that drove 25 percent of developerWorks’s traffic. And she ran IBM’s University Ambassador program, in which thirty-five hundred IBM staffers volunteered their time in local universities and colleges. When Steve came to her with the challenge of winning over IBM salespeople to the new system, they decided to use the idea of ambassadors again, only this time within IBM instead of in universities. They christened the effort IBM’s Blue IQ Ambassadors.

Gina’s success came through a pyramid of people.

She started with six full-time Blue IQ staffers. She identified highly visible IBM bloggers and wiki volunteers, people who were backers of the new social tools and influential with other IBMers, and hired six of them. These six people would have to drive change through four hundred thousand employees at IBM. She knew they couldn’t do it alone.

In the process of recruiting, though, she had turned up a hundred people who were fans of the new way of doing business. They became the core group as she built an ambassador program. She was seeking people who not only believed in the new tools, but intimately understood how IBM people did their jobs.

Then, with the help of the one hundred fans of the idea, she recruited twelve hundred Blue IQ volunteers from all functions in the company, all around the world, and asked them to be her ambassadors. Her hundred fans helped spread the word; she provided the ambassadors with motivation, recognition, and membership in an exclusive club. She empowered these ambassadors to help with recruitment and training of other sales staffers. Volunteers started with existing success stories, then added their own narratives of success. Gina’s team provided a community, a place to share ideas, concerns, and success stories, tools to teach, and what Gina calls an Enablement Plan, a specific and tailored program of activities to bring a team along.

Finally, Gina implemented a program of “social adoption.” Here’s how it works. Her ambassadors, using training and materials from the Blue IQ program in fifty countries around the world, conduct one-on-one meetings to connect with IBM sales staff who are looking for help. Blue IQ ambassadors also host one-to-many Lunch & Learn sessions to bring local success stories into the light of day.

Driving social adoption also means doing internal consulting. The core team and some volunteers do what Gina calls a Blue IQ Jump-Start program, with Blue IQ Ambassadors serving as internal consultants to a sales or technical support team. After sitting with teams to understand what they are trying to accomplish, the ambassadors build an Enablement Plan with the most appropriate tools and activities. The ambassador then stays in touch with the team until the adoption is well under way. Now the team is another force for adoption of the program.

Gina keeps her ambassador volunteers motivated with awards and recognition. The ambassadors vote each quarter on the ten most valuable ambassadors, who then get a gift certificate, recognition, and a personal letter from Steve Mills. Gina also created an executive virtual forum so these winners can interact with IBM executives. Every ambassador gets visibility and experience and establishes him or herself as an expert in social media.

Did it work? IBM has accelerated its pace of sales productivity, innovation, and profitability. Profits were up in 2008 and 2009, two very tough years for the technology business. Productivity improvements like the Blue IQ Ambassador program helped.

Today, two-thirds of IBM staffers around the world use internal wikis, and the other tools are almost as popular. The cultural transformation of the sales organization, from information hoarders to information sharers, is well under way.

All it took was a pyramid of HEROes: one leader, six staffers, one hundred fans, twelve hundred ambassadors, four hundred thousand employees.

sharing systems need the right plan and the right execution

Your company may be very different from IBM, but if you’ve got at least two hundred people working with computers on their desks, you and IBM probably have more in common than you think.

Like IBM, your people are probably duplicating efforts and failing to get the most value they can from sharing information. Your HEROes may feel empowered, but they need resources to act. And while a system like IBM’s Blue IQ can help, as you can see, it’s not so easy to get people using it.

While intranets, SharePoint document repositories, and sharing systems are all the rage right now, collaboration systems often fail to attract workers. In fact, for every company we see with an active set of employees collaborating, there are three with dead, rarely used intranets. The IT department may put up a SharePoint server, then wonder why it isn’t getting much use. Or there’s an initial rush of interest around a project, but then it dies down.

The problem with collaboration systems and technologies, regardless of what form they come in, is not the technology. It’s inertia. People like to keep doing things the same way they always have. For the most part, that means email. Email isn’t a very good way to collaborate, and it’s really poor at solving the obstacles that HEROes face as they build projects together, but email has inertia, and inertia is a powerful force.

For a collaboration system to transform the way people work—as Blue IQ did for IBM, and the internal blogosphere did for BBVA—it requires more than support from IT or a push from management. Both IT and management need to work to reduce the effort that workers must put in before they can use the system. Those workers need to see results quickly. And the system must be built to spread success rapidly. From observing hundreds of companies that have succeeded—and failed—at rolling out collaboration systems, we’ve identified five recommendations that can maximize your chances of success. They depend on culture at least as much as technology.

build collaboration systems that extend existing tools

Take a close look at the set of tools people are already using at your company. Your collaboration system must work with that.

For example, at BBVA, the blogosphere project followed an earlier project called Infobook, a repository of documents that people already used. It was also integrated with the work login and ID that BBVA employees already used.

Tools that connect with smartphones, enable simple photo uploads, or function like Facebook, Twitter, or Wikipedia tend to be popular. Anything complex enough to require an explanation is far less likely to succeed.

Of course, the most important element of extending existing tools is integration with email. Any tool that requires abandoning email will fail—instead, collaboration tools should work with emails, providing notifications when things get updated, as Yammer does.

And people in different groups need to use the same tools. If you want to avoid a Babel of incompatible tools just when things seem to be taking off, IT should standardize the sharing tools. For example, at Intel, different teams can use different tools—blogs, forums, wikis, and so on—but the IT group has ensured that they all work off the corporate directory and they all plug into the search engine. Because search and identity are standard, people from all around Intel can count on utility as they connect with the company’s sharing tools, and on support when they build their own.¹

make sure anyone participating gets value instantly

It’s easy to see the value of collaboration systems once everyone is using them. But that’s not how things get adopted. The complex “knowledge sharing systems” that preceded today’s collaboration tools mostly failed, because their benefits became clear only after everyone had joined and contributed (the classic chicken-and-egg problem). Instead, individuals adopt the system one at a time; at first, only a minority will be using the system. It follows that each adopter should get value as soon as she signs up.

Remember, as you learn what this value is, to think about two kinds of people using the system: those seeking information and those contributing information. Both must get immediate benefits.

Seekers want information. Everybody who uses the Internet knows how to find things: search. So your information portal needs to have a search that’s excellent, and works just like Google. To start, it helps if there’s a core of information worth searching, like BBVA’s Infobook.

The contributor’s point of view is different. The contributor, like Carmen Benito at BBVA, wants to share information and insights. A site designed to encourage this sharing must make it dead easy to set up and share content. Setting up a blog at BBVA is as easy as setting up a blog on the open Internet. What kills these sites is approvals, or anything else that gets in the way of posting quickly. Sharing sites work best when the impulse to contribute leads immediately to a contribution.

Here’s how this works at IBM. On the Blue IQ sharing site, it’s easy to “tag” searches and content with relevant terms. This yields an immediate payoff for both types of contributors in searches. People who contribute content and tag it spread it more quickly by making it easier for others to find. And people seeking content are more likely to find what they’re looking for. Result: one in five IBM employees now tag searches or content, because the payoff is immediate.

dedicate people to the rollout

As you saw from Gina Poole and Steve Mills at IBM, you don’t get transformational benefits without spending money on people and programs to sell the initiative. The seven full-time staffers and twelve hundred volunteer ambassadors for Blue IQ are a lot of people to dedicate to social technology change management, but we’ve seen the same pattern at other companies—spreading HERO projects takes resources.

Amazingly, the best way to find resources may be to look at their activities on the open Internet. Sogeti is a technology services company based in Europe, with twenty thousand people in fifteen countries. Michiel Boreel, the CTO, found four hundred socially active employees around the world by looking for Sogeti mentions on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. When he wanted to launch TeamPark, an internal social technology platform built on IBM’s Lotus Connections, he reached out to this group. Two hundred of them immediately volunteered and are now the core evangelists for social technology adoption inside of Sogeti.

Here’s another example of how it takes people to spread technology inside an organization. David Michael is CIO of a business unit at London-based United Business Media Limited (UBM), a media company that publishes magazines, runs media Web sites like TechWeb, and puts on trade shows like the Enterprise 2.0 conferences. They write about social technologies—could they use them internally?

It sure looked like a slam dunk. “We built a secure wiki to support a CEO offsite where the CEOs of our independent business groups were getting together,” David explains. “And they loved it. Social technology became a big theme of the offsite, to use it to cut across organizational boundaries and transform our business. For the first time, they had a place to go to get the same information at the same time and exchange ideas. It was a terrific thing.”

But when UBM tried to expand this to the rest of the organization, with blogging, wiki, and community, it failed. “We had basically zero usage,” David says. “It fell off a cliff.”

David tried again. He changed the technology platform to Jive Software, because it included community features, not just a wiki. And he hired a full-time community manager named Ted Hopton. Now remember, most customer communities have community managers. But in our experience, most internal employee communities don’t. That’s part of why they don’t catch on—nobody’s responsible.

Ted applied his unique qualities to evangelizing the community. Not only did he know how UBM worked, he was “incredibly sociable, willing to pick up the phone and sell it to employees,” as David describes. In Ted’s words, “one-to-one conversation is so critical. If we can help just one person understand how to use the wiki and get excited about it, then they become an evangelist to spread the word throughout their division … I spend a lot of time answering inquiries and explaining.”

David Levin, the company’s CEO, was a supporter and made internal information sharing a corporate priority for 2010. And Ted made connections. As he says, “Every division head knows me. Usually they’re happy to talk, but sometimes they’d rather not see me coming. They know I’m going to bug them to figure out how to make the wiki work in their business.”

Word spread. Now UBM has hundreds of small communities and a dozen or so larger, business-transforming communities. The most active communities are ones involving technology change or business opportunity. For example, UBM is ramping up a new business hosting virtual events. This requires a lot of technology and a new business model, not to mention new ways of presenting content and driving attendance. The community of people with experience or interest inside UBM is helping to spread this to more parts of the company. Hiring Ted as community manager made all the difference.

solve 80 percent of the problem, then stop and listen

Shawn Dahlen learned this the hard way. Shawn is the social media program manager at defense company Lockheed Martin and the man behind the Unity project. He’s a HERO who put together a case and initially received $5,000 in funding to demonstrate how social technology tools could help engineers and client teams within the company’s Information Systems & Global Services (IS&GS) business area. (That initial business case has since spawned a system based on Microsoft SharePoint that supports the entire Lockheed Martin enterprise.)

What Shawn learned is simple. “You have to think big, but start small.” At first, Shawn thought that his original vision for blogs and communities would work for everybody. But it didn’t turn out that way. Not everybody wanted the cool extra features, and he realized a few things were missing. What Shawn and his team learned is that what worked for them didn’t necessarily work for other groups. Instead, they had to put the basic tools out there and start groups on one project. Once that succeeded, they learned to listen to what people really needed and to incorporate feedback on the fly.

In Gina Poole’s experience at IBM, “solve 80 percent, then stop and listen” meant introducing the capabilities, then listening carefully for what people are trying to accomplish, then showing them how the capabilities can help and getting immediate feedback. By applying this principle, her ambassadors have even brought ideas for new features like shared files back to the Lotus Connections product team.

build adoption socially and virally

Any useful collaboration system has features that allow those who love it to spread it easily. Like viral marketing outside the firewall, collaboration and innovation systems need viral elements that work within companies. The sequence is simple: I use it, I like it, I tell others, they sign up, they use it, they like it, and so on.

The simplest features of this kind integrate with emails. For example, Chubb’s Imaginatik application, described in the previous chapter, included a feature that would allow people to forward innovation ideas to others for review. This generated immediate interest from people who might not have heard about the innovation contest before. Deloitte Australia’s Yammer application can send updates and digests through email as well.

At Sun Life, the Canadian financial services company, two senior managers used a different tool from the groundswell: viral video. The VP of market development and the SVP for group benefits created a video with themselves as avatars explaining an idea contest to get people excited. The video spread rapidly and generated a rapid increase in participation. Around twenty-seven hundred employees participated and generated more than two hundred fifty ideas.

And at one pharmaceutical company we worked with, the company built the training materials for the sharing system right into the sharing tool. Twenty people worked on the rollout, which had to succeed where previous global knowledge management tools had failed. The team made learning about the new tools a priority, both with formal classroom sessions and distance learning options and a complete syllabus of instructions only a click away. With the teaching tools embedded into the platform, people will be able to support themselves and each other by sending links to the appropriate place.

management and IT must combine to support HEROes

In the previous chapter and this one, we showed how management and IT can live up to one part of the HERO Compact: providing resources to support HEROes. Systems that stimulate innovation and collaboration are important for two reasons: they help HEROes go from ideas to projects to successes, and even more importantly, they demonstrate that the company values HERO-driven innovation.

As you’ve seen in the last two chapters, these systems don’t always work. Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz, who has seen many of these deployments, explains: “The dream of Enterprise 2.0 is just that—a dream—unless companies can get people participating. IT support is not sufficient—we’ve heard too many stories from IT professionals who described projects’ failure to launch.” Management support is not sufficient either—an edict from the top to “collaborate more” or “use the new system” won’t make much difference. But when IT and management build and support a system together, HEROes are far more likely to participate.

Collaboration systems are just one place where projects can succeed only if IT participates, rather than blocking a project. In fact, in any do-it-yourself HERO projects, the potential for conflict escalates because they include technologies that, historically, the IT department has controlled.

In the HERO-powered business, this just won’t fly. IT must recognize it has a new job here—supporting these projects as a technology advisor and helping HEROes to manage risks, even when the IT department is not in control. In the next two chapters, we describe how IT can keep HEROes and their projects safe and secure, and how it can support HEROes’ projects.