At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston earlier this week, vendors and their platforms took center stage as the nascent market for social computing software continued to heat up. Technology is a key enabler – BearingPoint’s own firm-wide wiki is a good example – but keeping a close eye on the workforce issues tied up in Enterprise 2.0 is important. After all, the Gen Y crowd is part of the reason wikis, blogs, and social networking turned corporate in the first place.

How can companies engage Gen Y and take advantage of their collaborative approach to work?

Don’t Stop Doing That

Believe it or not, your firm’s under-30 employees already brought an enterprise-class set of collaboration and social networking tools with them the first time they walked through the door. Their massive social networks, seemingly effortless adaption to new technologies, and innovative, collaborative approaches to corporate life need to be encouraged and fostered. Properly structuring the role of the IT department is crucial here - asking Gen Ys to throw their choices about technology away, and return to the knowledge worker mainstays of email, documents, folders and taxonomies, will leave them alienated and disengaged.

Respecting a Gen Y’s ways of communicating and collaborating is a step forward-looking managers need to consider taking. During the conference’s Next Generation Workforce panel, this became clear; and as one panelist put it, “Companies realized that encouraging diversity of race and gender in their organizations was valuable long ago – they will come to realize respecting the different ways their staffs choose to communicate is equally valuable.” Failing to do so – through aggressively blocking social media sites, IM and discouraging blogging will leave Gen Ys feeling as if you aren’t respecting their value, and drive them to organizations they think will. This is something that’s important to consider, as corporations begin to depend on Gen Ys to take over the roles of retiring boomers.

Process This

Twitter, Facebook, and Googleish search isn’t all that the next generation of your workforce expected when they joined your company.  Gen Y engagement was central to what panelists saw as the success of future organizations – these future leaders typically join organizations believing they can change the world, and build the same “community” at work that propelled them through college. But alas – under-30 employee satisfaction is typically higher than any age group during their first month on the job, but falls through the floor after just a year, ending up lower than all other employees.

What happens? Employees realize that they’ve run face first into a wall of bureaucracy and carefully engineered process.  Their intangible assets, like their social network, their ability to be efficient processors of information and generators of insight, can’t be effectively tapped by their employers.

Companies have spent years and billions of dollars investing in IT systems that support and improve business processes. Processes are often woven into the hierarchy of the organization. But Gen Y employees value flat organizational structures, free form collaboration, and strong community as the most effective ways to further their goals, not carefully orchestrated process.

Giving Gen Ys the flexibility to innovate in at work, be creative, and bypass traditional processes is critical to making them successful in your organization (and keeping them from jumping ship). Process efficiency is not the end all and be all of your company – take advantage of the opportunity that Gen Ys bring to become more innovative and collaborative – use these intangible assets as a way to push your organization forward. An independent research firm’s recent analysis shows that companies that can successfully monetize intangible knowledge assets can drive profitability. Companies that don’t can hit a wall when further process efficiency is no longer achievable, and innovation from disengaged employees is not forthcoming.

What’s Next?

It’s possible that the entry of Gen Y into the workforce will mark the end of process-centric IT and business, and the start of Enterprise 2.0 – companies oriented around collaboration and community, and the technologies that allow for that to occur. Companies that pick up on the value that Gen Y brings to an organization will be more competitive, and innovative, in the future

Most importantly, E2.0 foreshadows the eventual transformation of IT from the people who provide your desktop applications to the people who run the machinery that keeps all the user-provisioned, in the cloud apps talking to one another. We all know utility computing is the future - where does IT fit? It becomes a provider of shared services, provisioning user profiles and authentication out to cloud apps selected by end users. Moving to this model will let IT focus on what it does best, and let users focus on what they do best - making their own decisions about what technologies work best for them.

“They can learn to listen. Listening to each other is core to our culture, and we don’t listen to each other just because we’re all so smart. We listen because everyone has good ideas, and because it’s a great way to show respect. And any company, at any point in its history, can start listening more.”

- Eric Schmidt Reveals Google’s Secret

So it’s not just the fact that Google has a bunch of people with “145 IQs”. There is something more - decisions are collaborative, and not the exclusive territory of the CxO.

What makes this level of collaborative decision making possible? Enabling technologies are naturally important. But, an open management organization that’s conducive to dialoguing with staff is even more key. Achieving this in modern enterprise is where things get tricky. What Enterprise 2.0 technologies make possible, Management 2.0 should embrace.

To start, I’d suggest organizations try the following:

• Look at areas of your operation where embracing employee input is critical to a successful outcome. Innovation around internal processes, products and service offerings immediately comes to mind. Create islands of managerial flatness here, supply enabling technologies, and create incentives for participation. Enabling technologies here might include an innovation market, like Spigit.
• Break the ice by putting management on the same footing as employees. At my firm, we’ve had a positive experience using the commenting and discussion features of Confluence to allow employees to post questions, and inviting the VPs to answer. The resulting knowledgebase is a searchable way for future employees to get up to speed.
• Give employees a voice: Give any employee who so chooses the ability to blog internally. It’s quick, cheap and an easy way to make employees feel more connected and less alienated. It also gives management a new insight into the ebbs and flows of communications within their organization. The blog post that has 100 + comments and has been read by thousands might be worth listening to.

My resolution was to “listen to more talk radio”. (I know, I know…far from earth shattering. But listen, when you start about 25 degrees south of “somewhat informed”, any news will help.) And in keeping my resolution, I had the chance to hear Don Tapscott interviewed on NPR about the applicability of Web/Enterprise 2.0 for government. Thanks to that interview, and a rising demand from clients, I have decided to start a series of posts focused on the specific applicability of Enterprise 2.0 for the government organizations I have worked with either directly or indirectly.

I mused earlier on transparent international development work and am happy to see what I believe are some excellent steps in that direction from the Millennium Challenge Corporation. As a baseline, I think MCC has done an excellent job in adding functionality to their website that fosters a sense of transparency as well as enlightens taxpayers to the challenges of development work. One of the most interesting additions in recent months is the posting of the models used to determine a significant funding driver, the Economic Rate of Return. Additionally, the CEO Blog and Poverty Reduction Blog provide insight into the complex and challenging work of executing billions of dollars of international aid with a staff capped at 300. External stakeholders are waving the 2.o flag and sharing MCC content for the world to see. I believe MCC’s web property is fast becoming a popular and effective way to not only educate, but engage constituents from many perspectives. At the very least, odious SEO jockeys think so.

MCC has undoubtedly made strides toward the Gov 2.0 goal line, but I posit that more can be done. MCC can and should engage the international development online community to not only increase awareness, but to harness their collective intelligence in addressing difficult challenges. The blogs and ERR models are a great step forward, but it is almost transparency for transparency’s sake. Use that transparency to foster a community that not only talks to you, but more importantly, interacts with each other to solve your problems.

• What if instead MCC’s blogs expressed various internal perspectives and gathered external feedback on something like Google’s lobbying to include ICCR obligations in their funding determination?
• What if MCC publicly embraced a pre-existing development professional social network, another development agency, and a professional services firm to orchestrate insight around common problems from otherwise disconnected perspectives?
• What if MCC implemented an idea market for to determine funding priorities of US taxpayer dollars or innovate on solutions to what must be the daunting challenge of breaking new ground in the development world?

With private sector examples of the value of crowdsourcing like the Goldcorp Challenge, it is easy to see the potential crossover into Government 2.0. As a government corporation with an emphasis on operating like a business, MCC is well positioned to realize those same benefits for US taxpayers.

What can government leaders can do to improve the situation?  For starters, mandate transparency. OMB publishes a list of high risk IT projects, innovative state governments are making their project performance dashboards publicly available and some government agencies are publishing their project’s failure analysis out to their constituencies. Work to open a dialogue about ongoing and past IT projects at your agency, and allow any staff member or the public to participate. Create a citizen community that allows your project staff to interact directly with members of the public that might be impacted by your project. The technology to build these types of communities is getting more sophisticated.

Your government agency should consider exposing the inner workings of its projects to the public; show them what they are getting for their money. Make your internal IT teams sweat a little, transparency will help to focus them on project success. Most of all, transparency can help better align project stakeholders. When all of the actors in a project - political appointees, staff, contractors and taxpayers - share in the same information, better decisions will result, and the outcome of the project will be closer to its original objectives.

But, there’s no reason to wait until after a project has failed to begin uncloaking it - start early in the process with a public project blog or wiki, that allows both project stakeholders and the public to provide feedback on the project’s goals and progress. If you take this approach, bad projects are likely to fail earlier, and good projects will attract the positive attention they deserve.

What Intellectual Ventures does might seem obvious – pay some luminaries to collaborate and, naturally, genius will flow forth. But what’s more important then who was invited to these innovation sessions, is that they were invited at all. Cross domain collaboration is uncommon – just look around your organization. How often does HR interact with IT? Marketing and R&D? Infrequently, at best.

To enable innovation, managers must allow staff with divergent perspectives to come together in the pursuit of a shared objective - in the case of Intellectual Ventures, generating novel patent applications and then licensing the resulting portfolio. But, for your organization, enabling innovation is just as important – allowing all its members, regardless of which silo in which the org chart claims they reside, to innovate is the clearest way to move your organization forward, more closely align it with the marketplace, and realize critical efficiencies.

Gladwell’s central thesis is that innovation and discovery do not necessarily come from geniuses, but are “…products of the intellectual climate of a specific time and place.” Intellectual Ventures realize that by allowing people with vastly different backgrounds and expertise to look at the same problem, by creating an atmosphere conducive to innovation, discoveries inevitably occur.

Geniuses still have a role, but they are often people who prove particularly adept at harnessing the available information and using that as a basis for their innovation. “The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight”.

So the lesson is: “Insight (can) be orchestrated”. Want to create the right intellectual climate for innovation? Make each of your employees efficient insight generators? Allow them to connect, to discover one another, and to have insight into your organization’s activities.

This is where Enterprise 2.0 hold promise. Enterprise social networking tools like Sonar connect employees around themes and competencies. Wikis like Confluence allow staff from differing business domains to quickly see what each other are working on. Tie it all together with enterprise search, and the result is a connected enterprise, where all perspectives can be brought into the same virtual “room”. Create an environment like this, and watch innovation flourish.

Want more of my Management 2.0 rants? See: Adding Enterprise 2.0 to the Corporate DNA