We are now several weeks into our effort.
And we are spending the majority of our time and effort on behavioral and skills issues.
Having our behind-the-firewall platform available was like a powerful searchlight that illuminated the depths of these issues.
And I'm now frequently thinking that this is more of a social engineering project than anything else.
Old Behaviors Die Hard
The more people we talk to about this, the more the story is sounding familiar.
There's a perception that "the company wouldn't approve" of individuals participating in group discussions on an ostensibly open platform. Or, sometimes people express that their management wouldn't approve.
We're meeting other people who are simply uncomfortable about expressing themselves on a semi-public platform. They're afraid that something will go uncontrollably wrong with what they've said, or how someone uses their words against them.
Lots of 1990s command/control/process thinking, e.g "who approves blog content before it gets posted?". "Who controls who can see what?". "How do we make sure only authorized, approved content makes its way to the platform?" and so on.
This is going to be a long journey. I'm glad we've started, but I have some new help ...
Enter Human Resources
I don't know whether I mentioned this before, but -- early on -- I got a sponsorship commitment from EMC's HR management to help with the proficiency aspects of social media across EMC.
They were idea for two reasons: first, they're collectively extremely passionate about this stuff, and secondly, they've demonstrated that they can bring broad proficiency to large numbers of individuals.
The provisional leader -- Jocelyn M -- kicked off her first team meeting last week. I was one of the opening speakers -- they gave me about an hour to sketch out the overall strategic problem, identify some of the key issues, and attempt to answer a whole slew of questions.
Most of these people were HR people (but not all of them) so the dynamic and the social cues were a little new to me, but -- overall -- they seemed to be passionate about the topic, and appeared to be able to make forward progress.
Jocelyn is creating an online community on the platform to coordinate the team, solicit input, etc. etc. Again, we're using social media techniques to solve social media problems.
Closing The Proficient User Gap
It's great that they're doing this. At some point, I would expect a "proficiency matrix for social media" for individual contributors, team/project leads, first-level managers ... all the way up to executives.
I'd expect some sort of curriculae to support this, plus all the usual soft reinforcements HR uses to encourage participation and engagement.
I don't expect anything to happen too quickly here, but -- if we're going to make substantive change across a large number of groups -- we'll have to think in terms of a journey rather than an event.
Closing this "proficiency gap" is turning out to be key. People look at the platform. They're impressed with the potential. Their minds race with how this could change things not only in their own world, but across the company.
Maybe they log on to the platform, maybe they look around a bit -- and it usually stops there.
I struggle for an analogy here. Maybe it's the ultra-proficient mobile device user. I know people who've got the most powerful mobile devices backed by all sort of services and add-ons. They know how to use the technology, and use it effectively. I'm sure there was a ton of work and behavior change getting everything to work the way it should.
Me? I just use my phone for phone calls and emails. Nothing too exciting.
And There Are Other Voices
We are hearing from the "pure theoreticians" who dislike our choice of platform -- why isn't there more functionality?
We ask people to write down their ideas for a community prior to starting one -- why can't anyone start any community they like at any time?
We've set up a safe space behind the firewall -- what's up with that? What are you, paranoid?
We patiently explain to them that we're trying to morph Web 1.0 skills into a pure Web 2.0 world. We think we need to take it in safe steps, rather than a big bang.
We're not trying to serve the needs of a dozen proficient social media users around EMC, we're trying to get the other 35,000 up to speed.
It's a business problem, not a technology problem.
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