Month: January 2015

Why Facebook At Work is not the answer to workplace technology

 

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Last week Facebook At Work was announced, a new way for organisations to make use of Facebook as a way of networking staff.

The product will allow employees to join a network which could be connected to their personal Facebook account to help keep things tidy. Members of a network can message one another, share (but not collaborate on) documents, and so forth.

Sounds familiar? Yeah, because it’s what Yammer has been doing for years, and Slack more recently. And, whilst useful, neither of those products – or the gazillions of others in this space – have seen the workplace transformed.

Why is that? Largely because the change isn’t significant enough, nor does it provide the improvement in working that people are needing.

After all, despite all the talk over the years of collaboration, enterprise 2.0 and social business, the vast majority of people working in offices, at desks (the so-called ‘knowledge workers’) spend most of their time reading and writing emails and documents, attending meetings and making phone calls. That still hasn’t changed.

What most of the technology to emerge so far has really just been a case of improving the way these activities take place. Is sharing a status update on Yammer really that different from sending an all user email around the office?

After all, the current model of doing things – having networked computers on people’s desks that they use to communicate and write documents – goes all the way back to 1973 and the Xerox Alto. 41 years!

The future must surely lie not in new tools to help us do what we’ve always done more efficiently, but in new ways of delivering value in our work.

There are few examples of this, but one I think was Google Wave. A much misunderstood project which was very poorly marketed as a kind of consumer replacement for email, Wave would have been much better positioned as a platform for developing new workflows in the office.

So initiatives like Facebook at Work strike me as being rather cynical, to be honest. Surely nobody at Facebook really thinks this is the solution for a happier, more effective workplace?

What’s needed is some real vision around what productivity software looks like in the networked era. Not just pushing email into social networks, or putting office applications into the browser, but radically defining how knowledge work works.

The triumph of the nerds

If you have a few hours to spare, you could do a lot worse than to spend them watching the three episodes that make up Triumph of the Nerds, a 1995 documentary charting the history of the microcomputer industry.

From the Altair 8800 through the Apple II to IBM’s PC and the dominance of Microsoft, there are tonnes of lessons about what it takes to make technology companies succeed.

As I say, well worth a watch. Just to be helpful, I’ve embedded them below.

Part 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuBXbvl1Sg4

Part 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWylb_5IOw0

Part 3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjDofliudFY

Announcing #virtualgovcamp’s first sponsor – Jadu’s Spacecraft design agency

I’m delighted to say we have our first sponsor on board the good ship VirtualGovCamp, and it’s our friends at Jadu, who are promoting their Spacecraft design agency!

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Our approach to design is well considered and successful. One size fits all isn’t the way we work and we recognise every project is different. We start with a blank piece of paper and embark on a journey of discovery and work on the basis of being one team, focused on, and committed to collaborative success.

We are experts in understanding your organisation and your audience, helping you realise your desired outcomes. That’s our commitment, our passion.

Check out what Jadu have to offer on their website, or go straight to finding out everything about Spacecraft!

Learning from Marissa Mayer and Yahoo!

 

yahoomayer

I’ve just finished reading a book about Yahoo! and its current CEO, Marissa Mayer. A fairly slim tome, I got through it in a day on my Kindle.

It’s well worth a look for anyone interesting in how technology companies work (or in this case, don’t) and also how large companies can go around changing the way they work.

Overall, I think if Mayer is given enough time, she can make Yahoo! relevant again. It might not be in the shape that perhaps many of its investors would like, but it could once again be innovative and delivering real value to its users.

More on Yahoo! and Mayer by John Naughton and Jason Calacanis.

Here are my big three takeaways from the book.

There’s no fix for not knowing why you exist

Yahoo!’s well documented problem is that nobody knows what it is for. It’s birth was as a straightforward directory for the emerging web, something that is just no longer needed. All it has is a homepage that still has lots – although a decreasing number – of visitors.

Strategically, this is a killer. Not having a commonly understood vision makes it incredibly hard for an organisation to move forward, particularly during a time of change.

Before Meyer’s appointment, Yahoo!’s board had a decision to make. Was it a media company or a product company? They plumped for the latter, and appointed Meyer, who had a great track record in product development at Google.

Great start, but was everyone bought into the vision of Yahoo! the product company? Did they have the stomach for the fact that it would take years to move the company forward in that direction?

Undoubtably this is the biggest challenge at Yahoo!, and indeed any other organisation that has a problem identifying its reason for existence.

Stack ranking – no matter what you call it – is a bad idea

On her arrival, Meyer faced a problem – Yahoo! was overstaffed and had a lot of people who weren’t performing. Her solution was to bring in a performance review system that she had experienced at Google, and was used in other tech companies.

Here’s how it works. A manager sorts everyone on their team into five different rankings – from totally smashing it, to utter failure every quarter. These rankings over a period of time decide how big someone’s bonus is, or whether they even keep their job.

Sounds pretty standard. But where stack rankings differ is that managers have to have a certain percentage of staff in each ranking. So even if everyone on your team meets, or even beats, their targets, some of them will still have to be rated as failing.

This kind of thing can work well in the short term, in that it quickly weeds out those who really aren’t performing. Soon though, it starts to breed resentment, mistrust and a lack of collaboration.

The case of Microsoft’s use of stack ranking is a good example of how it can create a poisonous corporate culture.

Pitting employees against each other, no matter what the short term gains, is not the way to build a healthy, collaborative environment to work in.

Hiring is hard – but you have to get it right

Probably Meyer’s biggest failure at Yahoo! (so far) was the disastrous appointment of Henrique De Castro as Chief Operating Officer.

He joined the company with a huge financial package and when it didn’t work out, it ended up costing Yahoo! over $100m (!) for little over a year’s work.

A huge, costly, mistake and perhaps what makes it so bad is not the money wasted, but the time. The point of hiring De Castro was that it would enable Mayer to focus on product while someone else took care of the day to day media and advertising business.

For any organisation, hiring the right people is just so important. The people in an organisation forge its culture to a massive extent, and the time wasted, expense and sheer pain of getting it wrong can be incredibly damaging.

Shared CDO – looking for alignment

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A key role for any CDO in an organisation is looking for, and creating, alignment.

The obvious one in the digital sphere is looking for alignment between the organisation’s preferred outcomes, and the needs of the people who use its services or products.

Take channel shift as a fairly obvious example. The outcomes that a council wants to see are more people using cheaper channels to access services and interact with it.

The needs of the people doing this interacting are to have efficient, usable services that let them get the help they need with the minimum of fuss.

By aligning these two things, a strategist can easily plot a course where developing high quality online services gives both sides what they want.

Not aligning them, by focusing too much or even exclusively on the organisation’s outcomes, will lead to failure to achieve either side’s objectives – because even if people want to use online services, they won’t if they are poorly designed.

It is possible to think of alignment as a tool for making things happen. Within an organisation, there will be many different motivations and objectives. Senior leaders want one thing. Service managers another. As CDO, you will have your own.

Rather than trying to convince people to do things they don’t feel they want to, the better approach is to consider what their preferred outcomes are, and align them with your own.

Finding this alignment allows you to build a shared sense of purpose and mission, and will reduce the friction you get when people feel like you are trying to make them change against their will.

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