Rowan's blog

How have digital interactions improved the way you work?

As part of the work around the digital transformation of IBM, I was asked to record a two minute video, answering two questions:

1. How have digital interactions improved the way you work?

2. How might they be made better?

 

I thought I'd share my answers with you, outside the IBM firewall. I would love to hear answers to the same questions from people in other organisations - feel free to answer the questions yourself as a comment below.

 

1. How have digital interactions improved the way you work?

I couldn’t do my job without the ability to interact digitally. I am part of the IBM corporate digital team but I am located remotely – on the other side of the planet in Sydney, Australia. (IBM's Corporate HQ is located in Armonk, New York.) A colleague made the great point, in a 2 minute video from her kitchen, that digital frees us – we are no longer bound by physical location. To me, this means I can do a job that I love, while living with my Australian husband and our two golden retrievers in Sydney.

A lot of people ask me how I can do a corporate IBM role from here. Well, I can receive emails from Armonk as fast as anyone else!  I can beam up presentations to people’s computer screens all around the world in real time via Smart Cloud meetings (Lotus Live). Our team meetings occur via video, so I get to ‘see’ the team I’m part of.  I don’t get to chat with my team mates around the water cooler, but I do chat with them on Twitter and I comment on their blogs – and that allows me to build rapport and strong working relationships.

So digital gives me freedom in terms of location - but it also gives me more choice. Instead of having to engage with the people in one physical location, I can engage with the people, the content and the ideas that interest me from anywhere in the world.

I can pick a subject – identify the keywords and find active groups of people – or constituencies - who are talking online about that topic. I think this has huge implications for how we learn, influence and collaborate.

2. How might digital interactions be made better?

While there is value in improving the technologies that allow us to interact digitally, I believe there are huge potential gains from using existing technologies better. We could put a lot more rigour into how we use digital to interact internally and externally, through better integrated planning. I could talk on that for hours, but my time is up.

 

Thank you for listening!

11.11am on 11th of the 11th, 2011

This minute comes once every 100 years. I'm going to take this minute to remember the conflicts of the past and pledge to do what I can to contribute to a more peaceful future.

Will you join me?

Source: timeanddate.com

 

 

Agile Progress - an experiment in driving open, collaborative, sustainable progress

The seven billionth human will be born today. This population level is currently unsustainable. Whose responsibility is it to regulate human population numbers - and solve other problems facing humanity and our planet? Is it the responsibility of governments? Of organisations? Of individuals?

Population is a complex topic that relates to individual choice, education, standard of living and other factors. Aren't all the big areas we humans want to see progess in* the collective responsibility of all of us; individuals, organisations and governments?

*E.g. the topics from the Worldometer statistics page: Population, Government & economics, Society & media, Environment, Food, Water, Energy, Health.

Today, individuals from around the world can collaborate with each other - and with organisations and governments - to solve our greatest challenges and drive ethical, sustainable progress. We have the technologies: Web 2.0 has provided power to the people.

What if we each participated and followed a process like this:

1. Each participant signs up to participate voluntarily (for this experiment, via the form below). Each participant selects a topic they are knowledgeable about and willing to contribute towards.
2. Secure an overall Program Leader leader for each topic, plus Project Leaders to neutrally facilitate collaboration and project management on specific project efforts (not implement activities).
3. Project Leader to gather a team of voluntary participants (enlist more participants where required, communicate the overview and process).
4. Each Project Leader to work with the participants that volunteered to collaboratively develop wording an ethical, sustainable vision for the future of that topic. This would become their Project vision. (Note: Multiple topic>visions would require multiple Project Leaders - many different projects may form under one topic, each with their own vision.)
5. Each Project Leader coordinates wording, with participants, of a SMART* short term goal (outcome) to work towards - in line with the collectively defined project vision. This could take the form of a ‘user story’, a step used in agile development process. View Agile Alliance video, ‘Agile in a nutshell’.
6. Each project team that defined a vision and an outcome collectively participates, with whatever resources and influence the leader, participating individuals, organisations and / or governments can muster, to work towards implementation of this outcome, coordinating efforts using collaborative software. Together their efforts form an Agile Progress project.
7. The project team reviews their progress against the SMART* short term outcome developed in step 5. Team leader notes and communicates learnings.
8. Wrap back to step 5. Iterate over time for continuous improvement in progress toward vision developed in step 4.

*SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound

By working together in project teams, each contributing our individual actions, skills and resources to the collective effort and mobilizing other individuals, organisations and governments, perhaps we could drive open, collaborative, sustainable progress in these important areas.

I’m keen to set up the functionality to enable the creation of Agile Progress projects, as an experiment, then involve more people. We can iterate over time, based on feedback and measurable outcomes (optimise the concept and individual project efforts based on what works / what doesn’t work / the trial of new ideas). I’d like your input and participation. If you’re reading this, you qualify!

To set this up, I’d like your feedback on:

1. The ‘Agile Progress’ concept. Please view and edit this simple first draft of the concept incl.: Who, What, Where, How on Google Docs. 
2. What topics you feel most knowledgeable / passionate about (in form below). This will provide important information to help determine where to start.
3. Which free, scalable collaboration tool(s) would best meet the requirements listed on Google Docs? (I use some of these tools, but don't have visibility across all options.)
4. What challenges do you foresee - and what solutions might overcome them?

Please provide your feedback on items 2, 3 and 4 via the short form below:

Name:

Email:

Topic of interest:
Human population
Government & economics
Society & media
Environment
Food
Water
Energy
Health
Recommended tool(s):

Challenges & solutions:

 

This idea is in early concept phase. It excites me, because if it can be made to work, perhaps we (individuals, organisations and governments) could define shared visions and work towards open, collaborative, sustainable progress together. I’d appreciate your feedback – via the form fields above or by leaving a comment below. My next steps will be guided by your input.

I am seeking others to collaborate with to develop/modify the concept.

 

The Power of Open: 2.0 Public, Private and Community Sectors

In September, the Open Government Partnership formally launched with a series of high-level meetings highlighting the transformative nature of open governance.
 
Events included a day-long multi-stakeholder discussion, "The Power of Open," that brought together governments, civil society, industry leaders, academics and the media in a series of panels and networking events. The launch page states, these were “focused on the role of openness in improving responsiveness, fostering accountability, creating efficiencies, promoting innovation and growth, fighting corruption, improving performance, and capturing dispersed knowledge in support of smarter policies.”

As part of this, Eight nations (Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, United Kingdom, and the US) formally endorsed a broadly-worded Open Government Declaration, all of them openly asserting that their goal is to achieve “greater prosperity, well-being, and human dignity in our own countries and in an increasingly interconnected world.”

This is something I feel incredibly hopeful about - I see increased 'Openness' in the public, private and community sectors as a huge step towards ethical, sustainable, agile progress. Last year I had a (somewhat radical) rant on the need (and possibilities) for crowd-sourced democracy here.

Watch President Obama’s opening address from the meeting, along with comments from multiple countries:


Highlights:

• The UK has ambition to be the most transparent government in the world. Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, gave an extremely articulate speech and call to action (at 46:59).
• Rakesh Rajani, one of the civil society representatives used his moment well.
• President Obama's closing remarks included a pertinent comment on the challenge of being a human being in a position of power.

Read Susan Crawford’s detailed blog post on the topic, including how you can get involved in the US: http://scrawford.net/blog/

In the private sector:

• The power of the consumer is well known and is being leveraged in the marketing space ('Customer-made' became a trend back in 2006).
• In the B2B space, collaboration between internal and external experts, prospects and clients is becoming commonplace too.
• In large organisations, 'jams' are providing opportunity for internal crowdsourcing, for example, IBM's ValuesJam in 2003 gave its workforce the opportunity to redefine the core IBM values for the first time in nearly 100 years.
• These initiatives have generally been led from the top.

The community sector now has the power to lead and drive big change from the bottom up:

• Nathan Winograd made San Fransico the first 'no kill' state for shelter animals in the United States and went on to make the same change in other places (see 01.45 in video).
• A different example of community leadership is the collaborative, bottom up, coordinated research effort of the distributed http://occupyresearch.net project. Anyone can participate. A team led development of the wiki, which describes itself as "an open, shared space for distributed research focused around OccupyWallStreet / OccupyTogether". They are sharing ideas, research methods, tools, datasets, with a view to writing, analysing, discussing, codesigning new tools, and otherwise developing theory and practice together.

 

So, becoming more open (and finding ways for people from all sectors to collaborate on shared interests, beliefs, ambitions) is perhaps inevitable, since everyone now has a voice and anyone can drive change.

I see two keys to smooth progress in this area - the exact two challenges mentioned in my previous post; imagination and leadership. Scalable technologies have emerged that permit collaboration top down and bottom up. The question is, can a leader find constituents including experts who share interests, beliefs or ambitions - and lead them to;

• define a shared vision that represents ethical, sustainable progress (a 'win' for all constituents)
• and then work towards it in a coordinated way?

The project leader and participants would need imagination and leadership (internal and external) to commit to the possibility of a shared vision and to willingly, consistently collaborate and coordinate with each other over time to achieve win/win progress.

If you’re interested in hearing what OpenGov experts and enthusiasts have to say, feel free to follow this OpenGov Twitter list.

Lets hope the power of 'open' culminates in constituents with expertise collaborating to drive ethical, sustainable progress more transparently and democratically in all sectors.

Building Constituency: A communications approach for open leaders

Mary Murphy, reporting from the recent THINK Forum in NYC, wrote:

“We’re living in a time where our need for strong leadership is intensifying and the leadership qualities we need are changing.”

In her blog post titled "We Need a New Leadership Approach to Make the Planet Smarter", she goes on to say:

“We’ve arrived at a juncture where the only barriers to building a smarter planet are imagination and leadership. We have to develop future leaders who have the vision necessary to make progress and the skills to lead companies and communities to that better place.”

“Observing Leadership Series client protagonists this year has helped us pinpoint three attributes that they share. They’re all systems thinkers who can look across complex and interconnected systems and see their way to a solution. All are able to build a constituency despite resistance to change and conflicting interests. And they all have the ability to cultivate an information-led culture to help solve what sometimes seem like insurmountable challenges."

 

Perhaps we need a system to cultivate this information-led culture to build constituencies: How about a 2.0 communications approach for open leaders to drive truly collaborative progress?

In the spirit of collaborative progress, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this...

Building constituency: a communications approach for open leaders

View more presentations from Rowan Hetherington

The evolving nature of how companies organise for social

Jeremiah Owyang from Altimeter Group recently posted results of a survey on how social strategy programs are organised.

How is IBM's social strategy program organised? I'd say it currently looks like this:

Based on the Altimeter Group graphic, my guess is we will see an evolution in the nature of how companies organise for social from:

1. 'Decentralised' or 'Centralised' to
2. 'Hub and spoke' or 'Multiple hub and spoke / Dandelion' to, finally
3. 'Holistic'.

Having said that, I don't believe social can be separated from digital as social is relevant to all digital content (and digital, in turn, cannot be separated from marketing, communications and support - in fact all functions that touch the client / customer). Changes driven by technology are necessitating change in (and integration between) each of those department structures, so I think it would be more holistic to look at the organisation of social in relation to those too.

Do you agree / disagree / see an alternate option?

 

ADDED 22 Oct 2011:

If you've read this far, you may be interested in IBM's journey:

IBM's journey to social business

View more presentations from Rowan Hetherington

Google, can you find my slippers?

I've been really busy lately. Not just like the 'busy' I was before.

I guess this is what happens when you set yourself a big mission at work, (which recently turned into an official global role) involving lots of o'seas travel, start a part-time post grad course and commit to moving house from Sydney to Canberra (for my husband's work).

If I have any available free time in Canberra, at least I will be able to entertain myself by suggesting to Canberians that polititians replace themselves with crowdsourcing (see my previous post). That should get some classic reactions ;-)

I have another idea on how to use the additional capacity of the National Broadband Network; augmented reality search engines. I've been complaining to Google for a long time that they don't help me find my lost horseshoes. Soon I will be adding plenty of household items to that list (e.g. the items hidden in box 38, located at the bottom of the pile of boxes in the storage room, waiting to be unpacked).

Given the world is becoming smarter with billions of data sensors in products, wouldn't the natural next step be to design tiny microchips (smaller than the ones designed to track rubbish) that could be placed on all your items (or inserted as part of manufacturing), then build an augmented reality app search engine to find them... Kind of like this app which IBM built for Wimbledon, but enabling us to find our kettles, misplaced iPhones, favourite slippers (which my dog likes to take into the garden) and keys...

Would this be useful to anyone else out there? Who do you think will provide this solution and how long do you think it'll be till we get it? Hopefully I will have had time to find my slippers by then...

 

Isn't it time we replaced political parties with crowd-sourced democracy?

ZDNet just revealed the Australian Lib's National Broadband Network (NBN) policy to be yet another half-baked, shambolic effort. Some of the background is in my blog posts from last year.

So much time has been wasted - as with almost all major government projects. The political system drives me nuts. So here is an alternate, half baked (but much broader) idea:

Why don't we create a new system for developing and managing Australian national projects whereby:

• Members of the Australian public who are qualified*, collaboratively co-develop policies/projects/solutions within their area(s) of expertise with the aid of neutral, monitored facilitation. *One idea would be to 'qualify' people via an online test, through which they must demonstrate balanced understanding of the points and history surrounding the issues.
• All the policy/project/solution initiatives developed collaboratively, nationally, could be submitted, presented and sorted by Australians via voting tools into a country priority list.
• The Australian public could then collaboratively vote in a Project Leader to implement each priority project (based on the leader's proven ability to successfully implement similar complex projects).

In other words, why don't we develop a system to crowd-source national policies/projects/solutions, so we can make 'politicians' obsolete?

Yes, that idea is half-baked - there would need to be a lot of detail ironed out behind how it could work... back-end infrastructure, privacy, making the collaboration & voting tools secure and facilitation neutral etc, but surely this is all possible now that we live in the time of the inter-webs?

Frankly, I think piloting this kind of approach, starting small and learning and refining it until it is workable on a broad scale would have to be worthwhile... Pretty much any system that focuses on developing an excellent end solution for the country would be better than having multiple competing parties made up of bipartisan politicians working on it?! 

What do you think?

(I have not missed the irony that we'd probably need the NBN to be in place to facilitate this kind of solution on a broad scale... ;)

Managing change in the digital environment

I don't often talk about my work on this blog, but initiatives at work over the past few months have renewed my interest in managing change, which I do want to talk about - and request your support with!

At work, my role is Digital Strategist / Leader for IBM, Growth Markets (officially within 'Brand System', working closely with Demand Programs and Market Management, which all sit within IBM Marketing and Communications). Back in June 2009 I started to work on overarching digital strategy guidance for the Growth Markets - and the business process management around it.

Digital: Strategic approach

An implementable strategy covering all Growth Markets would not produce optimal results, since the market conditions in countries such as China, India, Korea, Sth Africa, Russia, Poland etc are fundamentally dissimilar (incl. IBM prospect/clients use of digital tools, media and technologies). Also, local objectives are different in each country - in fact the breadth of IBM's offerings mean IBM's objectives are different for each audience within each country. So I created a 'Digital Planning Roadmap' which each country / Program team can follow to build a solid, locally relevant digital strategy & locally implementable plan.

The idea is that this digital plan should sit, embedded in the centre of the broader local marketing plan. Digital tools/tactics relevant to the audience in the market would be interwoven into the overall contact strategy for that audience. (I should add that this was already happening in many places, but a consistent approach had not been formulated.)

Digital: Business process management

Ideally, many parts of the business would be involved in the creation and implementation of a locally developed digital plan (because digital is relevant to many parts of the business). Therefore, the next step was to create a Cross-functional Digital Lead in each market. This person's role is to drive effective, coordinated use of digital in their market cross-function using the 'Digital Planning Roadmap' approach - and optimise their country's use of digital over time. Essentially, this person will be the 'Digital change agent' in their market.

A global 'Digital Community of Practice' has been set up to enable and support these individuals, utilising Enterprise 2.0 collaboration technologies (plus the good old conference call)! The objective of this de-centralised community is "to eliminate redundant efforts, to amplify learnings and best practices across IBM and to build the critical mass of talent and energy that will command more focus and funding".

The number of community members has passed 60 140 1,000 and is ever-growing - as is the wealth of experience, expertise and guidance the community members are able to share with one another. It has been very exciting to bring this to life and it is gratifying to watch the community start to develop its own momentum as community members use the forums to reach out to one another.

Why am I requesting support / information?

I just read Rawn Shah's article in Forbes: "Enterprise 2.0 Changes What Kind Of Leader You Need To Be". His article prompted me to write this post, because, while I think it is fair to say I meet his definition of "one of the new leaders" (not necessarily people with titles and management authority; rather ones who fuel group efforts to produce results), this is something I want to get better at. If you happen to be doing something similar, I would love to compare notes!

I am in my element when I:

• can work on a big game-changing opportunity (in this case, 'how do we embed Digital into the marketing mix to best effect, to meet our specific objectives')
• have the freedom to develop / sell the approach and 'rally the troops' (in this case, global as well as Growth Markets marketing teams)
• am facilitating the process (making things easy).

BUT I would not call myself an expert in large-scale organisational change management. I am hungry to learn more.

Long term, I'm keen to hone my leadership and change management skills so that I can make a larger impact with projects that involve digital (my area of specialty) and change management within IBM & the corporate world. I'd also like to be able to contribute in the area of animal protection (my other passion) / social issues.

I'm starting a Graduate Certificate in Change Management at the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) in Sept. Meanwhile I found a wealth of information on the topics of digital and change management (shared below)*. If you share my passion for this area and/or know of people, organisations, blogs, initiatives etc that I might be interested in, please leave a comment / get in touch!

Many thanks.

*Resources on Digital and Change Management (in no particular order):

• Presentation - Managing change in the digital environment (IdeaGarden)
  
• Lots of presentations on Change Management on Slideshare
  
• Groups covering Digital and Change Management on LinkedIn
• Ashoka (Innovators for the public)
• Ashoka - article on Games for change
• Games for change
• Altimeter Group blog
• Groundswell blog
• Drink Digital - talks
• Heart of Change (book) site
• McKinsey Quarterly
• Social change group on Vimeo (I created the group, please add relevant videos)!
• 'Tribes' by Seth Godin

Note: The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of my husband, my dog or any company including employers or clients.

How to start a movement (Hint: it takes two)

Interesting TED talk from Derek Sivers on how to start a movement (incl. the importance of leaders and followers). It's based on footage from a video you have probably seen on YouTube.

:-)