Driving adoption of Lotus Connections

Enterprise social software is gaining practical currency now as analysts' auspicious forecasts begin to be realized with the first wave of early adopters. This new class of software taps informal interactions and relationships among workers with complementary interests, skills, and knowledge, offering new ways to engage the collective intelligence of organizations towards achieving business ends. As such it represents an evolutionary advance in collaboration as a means to higher productivity and competitiveness.

The industry's first integrated suite of enterprise social software, IBM Lotus Connections, became available in June 2007. Featuring five Web 2.0-based components - Profiles, Blogs, Dogear (social bookmarking), Communities, and Activities — Lotus Connections provides a full palette of capabilities that help people find expertise and information and build new relationships based on business needs. Since coming onto the market, sales of this product have continued to be robust. And now there is a growing body of deployment tips and best practices new purchasers can employ to promote steady adoption and productive use of these tools in their own environments.

If you are thinking about bringing Lotus Connections into your organization in future or have already purchased it and are planning how to manage the introduction to your user population, read on for tips about getting started.

Good planning can help you build initial adoption of the tools in Lotus Connections to yield business benefits quickly, and then to widen adoption of the tools steadily throughout your user base. You can think of the planning in three main segments: 1) Identifying goals for the deployment; 2) Piloting the applications being rolled out; and 3) Defining an adoption strategy for the wider community.

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Goals should be business goals, not just usage goals. That is, they should target specific business advantages that use of the new tools might be expected to yield because adoption of this software has to be driven by business need and culture - the technology alone cannot drive it. Any task, activity or process that can be accelerated, enriched, made more productive, cost-effective or innovative by people sharing what they know could be a suitable focus for goal-setting. Some examples might be to:

• Enable employees to locate expertise and information on topics they need faster
• Facilitate increased communication across teams, business units, geographies while reducing the burden on email, which is not designed to be a many-to-many communication platform
• Stimulate creativity to generate new ideas for products, services and go-to-market strategies
• Improve ability to respond more rapidly to customer needs and inquiries
• Reduce rework and improve quality of people's delivery materials
• Decrease the learning curve for new employees
• Make better decisions, knowing they were vetted by experts across the organization and reflect past experience

Goal-setting can of course be an iterative process, and there will be short-term and well as long-term goals. One way to approach the first round of goal setting is to think about groups of people in the organization who may be particularly well-suited to participate in a pilot, because the choice of a pilot audience can influence the selection of initial goals. You may want to identify your pilot population first and then mutually agree on the goals with them instead of doing it the other way around.

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An organization may choose to introduce just one Lotus Connections component at a time to its users, or several or all at once. In any case, there should be a plan to pilot the component(s) first within particular functions or teams to identify challenges and best practices native to your organization.

Choose the audience
In choosing a pilot audience, consider groups with a need to create deeper working relationships and knowledge sharing. For example, these could be people involved in researching technology or market trends, people tasked with generating new product or service proposals, or people involved in cross-discipline interactions. Some likely groups might be R&D, the sales community, geographically dispersed engineering labs, or for a cross-discipline situation, call centers with engineering, or marketing with product management. The choice of a pilot audience can suggest goals specific to the mission of the group.

Not everyone has to be an active contributor
In setting expectations for the pilot, it is important to realise that not everyone needs to be an active contributor. Analysts have identified a pattern of 90:9:1 where 90% of users are lurkers/readers, 9% are active participants, and 1% are early adopters and evangelists. If only a small number of people are regular publishers of content in the blogs, bookmarks and communities, there is still a large potential benefit to the rest of the organization who can learn of best practices, opportunities and knowledge resources they would otherwise not have encountered. Thought leaders create content in blogs and communities, which lurkers and readers benefit from while also increasing the social value by linking, commenting and tagging.

Locate your advocates
Hopefully, your pilot audience will include a number of naturally inclined early adopters. But early adopters are not necessarily advocates. To echo the terms in Malcolm Gladwell's popular book, The Tipping Point, you will want to identify the "mavens", "connectors", and "salesmen" within your pilot group.¹ These are the people everyone goes to when they need to know what's going on, who are "plugged in" to your organization and share what they learn with many, and who can persuade others to become active participants. For faster viral adoption, find the people who bridge between different business units, functional groups, and geographies — these are the "connectors." Once you identify your advocates, there are a number of ways you can enlist their help.

You can usually guess who some of your advocates are but, if you are piloting on a large scale, a more accurate approach called a social network analysis (SNA) will uncover advocates that you never knew existed. SNA is a set of methods that reveal connections among people important for information-sharing, decision-making, and innovation. Data for an SNA are typically collected by surveying a group of people and asking each to answer questions about their relationships with the other persons in the group. A complete SNA, from determining the range of questions to generating a final report, typically takes 6-8 weeks. For SNAs of communities larger than 300 people, an automated method for gathering this information used leveraging a solution called Atlas for Lotus Connections.² Atlas can quickly provide a visualization of your social network as well as subject matter expertise location and personal network visualization. IBM Software Services for Lotus (ISSL)³ can conduct an SNA for you, as well as teach you how to do it.

Show people easy entry points
Pilot participants might be encouraged first just to share their existing bookmarks in Dogear. This is a simple thing to do that requires little effort, but it ushers the user into a networked community from which further connections can naturally arise. Blogs can greatly accelerate the formation of dynamic networks across geographic and organizational boundaries simply by encouraging people to post comments. Blogs could start out as what executives and managers do now with regular memos or communications.

Activities by its nature will attract groups engaged in collaborative projects, and others joining an activity in progress can quickly get up to speed based on the materials already posted. Profiles are useful even if nobody updates them manually because the information in a person's Profile is presented from an underlying directory, like an LDAP, so that certain core information is always current. Of course, users should be encouraged to update their profiles with more and new information frequently, such as what projects they are working on, to increase the value of their profiles to others.

Your advocates can play a major role at this "getting started" stage. They can help by pre-populating the social computing environment before it is shown to others. And they can coach and assist new users as they first begin interacting with the tools.

Conduct a pre-assessment that aligns with business goals
In order to measure the effects of the new tools on how people work, consider gathering a baseline measurement so that the pilot's future results can be properly analyzed. Before they begin using Lotus Connections, ask your pilot participants questions about their customary ways of doing things, such as how they:

• Find information about people (such as title, reporting structure, contact information)
• Find people based on skills, background or area of interest
• Find information related to a topic
• Find others with a common interest or practice
• Keep up with a person or topic area
• Develop new relationships with others within the organization
• Improve personal productivity or knowledge
• Share experience with others

Results can then be compared with answers to the same questions down the road after users have gotten comfortable with use of the new tools.

Envision your target social environment
Brainstorm with your advocates and early adopters in the pilot about the most appropriate use of the tools for your organization. What user scenarios make sense in your organizational culture? What kind of content and personality do you want to encourage? People follow examples, so make sure early adopters and advocates understand what kind of content and social experience you want to promote. Use Lotus Connections and Atlas during this collaboration process for first-hand experiences with this new way of working. At this stage you can begin drafting realistic conduct guidelines based on your target environment.

Train and measure
Conduct a Train the Advocates session with your advocates so that they can teach others easily. During this session, ask them to "seed" the environment according to the vision you created in the previous step. Consider setting up lunch-and-learn sessions for end users throughout the life of the pilot. You might also institute an early adopter community using tools such as weekly phone conferences, a forum, a wiki, and Dogear and blog subscriptions. Regular checkpoints with the early adopters can be used to capture and share learnings from the pilot. Encourage these participants to blog about their experiences and exchange ideas on Lotus Connections.

After a 1-2 month period, assess how much the teams in the pilot have achieved in relation to the deployment goals. Use the same questions that were asked in your pre-assessment. If necessary, brainstorm changes to your organization's use of the tools to increase effectiveness. At regular intervals as well as the end of your pilot, you will then want to measure:

• Usage of Lotus Connections
• Changes in the enterprise social network
• Progress towards goals

IT groups may get challenged to move the environment out of the pilot and into production, and, without the success and impact measurements mentioned above, production will be a long road to nowhere.

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Building on the insights gained as you move through your pilot, you can be looking towards the next phase of your deployment to a wider user base.

Expand and advertise
Begin expanding participation in the pilot. Ideally this will start happening organically - colleagues who are not officially in the pilot may begin using Lotus Connections tools based on their interactions with the pilot participants. When your IT organization is ready to scale up use of the tools, publicize the availability of Lotus Connections along with examples of best practice usage.

Here is another moment when your advocates can play an important role. Consider scheduling them to speak on division, department, and team calls. Ask them to demonstrate a 10-minute scenario with screenshots via a Web conference, to post screencasts of Lotus Connections along with their experiences, or to publish a podcast series ("How to Dogear," "How to Search," "How to Update the About Me") with small (30-60 second) bits of training information that can be consumed and used as needed. Perhaps they could announce local clinic or lunch-and-learn sessions. And you might want to highlight on the corporate intranet early adopters and advocates who go out of their way to enable others.

But, don't rely solely on your advocates for publicity. Use a combination of viral (word-of- mouth) marketing with more traditional mass-marketing approaches. Advertise your new social networking environment using traditional methods such as e-mail announcements and a feature story on your intranet homepage. Add a "Share This With Others" link at the top and bottom of them. Even if only half the initial readers forward the communication or tell one other person about your new social networking environment, you will have reached many more people than had you relied on just your group of pilot participants to spread the word.

Track the usage and value of Lotus Connections
Tracking the usage of Lotus Connections and identifying areas where teams rely heavily on a specific component such as Activities will help prepare your IT organization to support use of the tools based on the business needs of your organization. Again, conduct surveys that assess how social software has aided people in their work efforts. Remember, even if a person never contributes, they can still "use" the tools and derive significant value.

You can create additional value through integration of Lotus Connections with existing collaboration tools such as discussion forums, wikis and team site repositories. You might consider integration with your Human Resources portal, an intranet news site, an existing employee white pages or an internal Q&A application.

Clearly, you will also want to track the business value Lotus Connections is contributing to assess your return on investment (ROI). Here you will not be measuring use of the tools but how the tools are influencing outcomes. You might think about ROI across several dimensions, considering what each of the tools is contributing. For example, are these tools facilitating:

1. Faster task execution? Is it easier to locate the right person and get answers to questions in the context of work, to access best practices quickly in the course of an activity, to route and share information for resolving project issues or to track project status and next steps more easily?
2. Increased efficiency? Is there less rework on overlapping projects, improved compliance via use of an integrated set of tools versus disparate internet Web applications, or reduced time and costs spent on seeking expertise that is already available in the company?
3. Growth through innovation? Is there faster response to customer facing issues, increased visibility and valuation of new ideas, greater effectiveness of intra- and inter-company communications?
4. Empowerment of key resources? Is there better leveraging of expertise across the organization, increased preservation and protection of critical knowledge, faster development of high performing resources, improved retention of younger employees?

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The three phases of deployment elaborated in this article — 1) Identifying goals for the deployment; 2) Piloting the applications being rolled out; and 3) Defining an adoption strategy for the wider community — may then be repeated in further cycles if discrete components are to be rolled out separately or if the scale of the deployment calls for multiple pilots. With each phase and cycle, it is important to establish benchmarks at the beginning, to set goals, and then to measure at intervals to show how people are using the tools, how the organization is changing as a result of new and closer relationships, and the efficacy of these new ways of working towards meeting the business goals. Social computing has a definite place in business, and demonstrating that with factual proofs within your own organization will help advance recognition of the important role it can play.

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¹ See Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, October 9, 2006: "Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute"
² http://www.ibm.com/software/lotus/services/assets.html
³ http://www.ibm.com/software/lotus/services/