We participated in the Deloitte Center for the Edge Study, “Social Software For Business Performance: The missing link in social software: Measurable business performance improvements”.
Here’s a direct link to the PDF of the study.
The intent of this post is to give you some context and explanation of the performance improvements. I will attempt to convince you that social software really can be a key enabler to business performance. From page 4 of the PDF version of the study, we claim a 61% reduction in time spent on compliance activities through the use of Traction software.
What do we mean by compliance activities ?
For many, the word compliance means something like, doing what someone else told me that I have to do. For us, it is a bit more than that. It means having a governance framework, codified in policies and procedures, formalized in contracts with our internal customers, and tested regularly to ensure that we are meeting the expectations of the framework. Make sense?
How about...Have standards. Follow them. Improve them. Prove that you are following and improving them. Repeat.
Our internal framework also covers relevant external regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley Section 404. If you work for a public company, you know what I am talking about. In more detail, we:
- have an IT governance framework - like ITIL (ours is proprietary) - that sets standards and expectations about how an internal IT organization should be managed and how it should deliver services to users (aka internal customers).
- write policies / procedures / documentation to translate those standards into practice; we are supposed to continuously improve and update procedures as practices change.
- establish contracts with internal customers that engage the IT department to meet certain service levels, uptime, and project delivery obligations.
- work. We modify software, deliver projects, deliver support to end users. Where possible we work through the same platform where the procedures, agreements, and other documentation are stored.
- test the fact that the work is being done in accordance with our procedures. For example, does our software change management practice match our procedures? If we are doing it right, we can easily document and observe via references and hyperlinks that agreement / procedure / work product are in sync.
By consolidating this work in an enterprise social software platform, we eliminated 61% of the work required to maintain documentation, do tests, and inefficient waste time spent searching for information across 7 locations. 61% equates to almost two full time resources.
We tried previously to do this consolidation through other tools, to no avail. Why were we successful with Traction? There's something about Traction and social tools like it that enable outcomes that were never before possible. If you read the study, you learn that we experimented with applications of the tool until we found some that worked in solving a real business problem.
We can spend that productivity gain on project work, software changes, user support, and all of those other customer-facing things that our colleagues expect us to do as an IT organization. Individual IT teams that have not consolidated all of their work into our central group are applying these patterns and using the same tools.
Our case study also mentioned project management, but due to time constraints we didn't have the time to fully document those benefits in the case study. You can explore our presentations from E20 Santa Clara 2010 and Catalyst San Diego 2010 for more on that use case.
What's the big deal about all of this happening in social software?
A native hypertext platform is a huge enabler. You can upload Word documents to Sharepoint and link them to each other for sure, but it's just not the right tool for the job. But we're not here to bash MS Office in this post. What I will stress is that this is not about blogs and wikis and activity streams and all of that other stuff. It is about leveraging the the original intent of the web, and applying it to work.
Policies and procedures, to be valuable, must continuously changed to reflect real world conditions. They were not frequently updated when inside of our old "controlled document" repositories. Improvements in the real world can be captured real time in the wiki so that they can be repeated by others governed by the same procedure. Open browser. Visit article. Click edit. Edit. Save. History is tracked. Revert to an older version if needed. Repeat.
When we first started, only managers could update documentation. Now everyone in the department can - going from 7 editors to over 70. Do certain people own content? Yes. Does everyone else actually modify everyone else's stuff? Not so much. But they can, and it happens. It's part of our community of trust (see speaker notes for text) observable work pattern. We strive to make updates in real time, making the procedure capture what you do, with no unnecessary management overhead to approve changes. Here’s a typical article in our IS Manual wiki – shown is the edit history of a month-end processing procedure at one of our largest locations:
Note that this is not something we update once per year…it is more like once per month. In our wiki, content is alive. If you work with policies and procedures, I challenge you to leave a comment to this post and tell me how often your procedures are updated. Do they reflect current reality, are they even used? Do you have uncontrolled annotated paper copies roaming the hallways?
But they do not update themselves, these wikis! A wiki that is never updated is just as useless as every static intranet or controlled document repository ever implemented.
A comment is an electronic signature. This is a key insight that has saved us many, many unnecessary rounds of email and paper-signing rituals. It allowed us to bypass more rigid workflow / document management applications. We do authentication through our corporate Active Directory infrastructure. This is already used as an e-signature on several other internal processes and workflows in more transaction-oriented systems. So we figured, let's try it.
We have agreements with our end users regarding the services we provide and the systems we manage. We document approval by sending a link (by email, the horror), and the customer visits the wiki page and enters a comment that says, "I approve". So among all of the things that you expect to do within social software - long threaded discussions, collaboration, and all of that, why not use it as a lightweight contract management solution as well?
Working in the same platform as our procedures and documentation allows for some interesting things to happen, again, leveraging core hypertext / linking services. For example, we are doing a major system modification project, and one deliverable is to update the documentation for that system. We can associate a task from that project to the procedure in our documentation wiki. Depending on the context, I see that something needs to be done to that procedure.
- In the project context, I see a task pointing me to the procedure and calling for action.
- In the procedure context, I see a task on the procedure, referencing the project.
- In the user profile context, the assignee will see the task assigned to her, pointing both to the procedure itself and the project that generated the task.
- It’s the same content, the same base URL, referenced in 3 different spaces but all linked together.
I was told that our approach wouldn’t work in some highly regulated industries like nuclear power generation; but most of us don’t have to worry about that. It took us over a year to figure out an approach, and it is not perfect. Implemented properly, I believe that there’s a place for social software in your business processes, too.