Last week, I received the sad news that the social software PoC (Proof-of-Concept) at a customer in the West coast has failed. For all vendors involved!!I have to say that I'm pretty disappointed, but not surprised. Tried as we might, the customer didn't want to follow our recommended practices. Reasons for the PoC to fail became clearer as I read the explanation from the customer. Let me give you some background first.
Now, I wasn't heavily involved in the PoC, but assisted on an as-needed basis. My teammates on site kept me on the loop as needed. The PoC was led by the organization's IT department. There was a sponsor from the business side, but it seemed, in my opinion, that their feedback was not considered at any time.
There were 4 vendors participating in the pilot and all systems were deployed as-is and "thrown" at over 200 users. The users were given no instruction on how to use the system. They were simply given a URL and a survey with over 20 questions: "Did you like this? Did you like that?, etc". Is there any surprise all vendors failed in this scenario? Not at all.
Looking at the 10 Principles for Social Software Adoption, I don't see that this company followed them. One of the users' complaints was that the system didn't provide valuable information. I don't think that's a surprise given the system wasn't properly populated with data. Think about it... if you go to a social site and it's empty.. Would you like it? I remember when I first joined Facebook I was loner and didn't really use it since my friends were not there. For the longest time, I only had 10-20 friends
. Even my wife, who's a graduate from MIT didn't find it cool for a while! But as more people joined, I was hooked!Additionally, the customer was considering and making the 4 vendors compete in their best of breed areas.. i.e. profiles vs blogs vs communities vs social bookmarking etc. They even tried integrating all of them to provide a "better" user experience, but the user experience was the biggest complaint from end-users.
So let me throw out some recommended practices for a social software PoC (Mike Stopforth blogged about this earlier too):- Identify business goals - In order to measure the success of a PoC, there needs to be a goal to be met. Define it (e.g. improve communication with blogs)
- Choose your audience - Needs to be people who need to share knowledge (e.g. R&D, development, etc)
- Choose your evangelizers - These will be your salesmen. They already exist in your enterprise. Who do people go to most often for answers? That's who you need. Or you can use Atlas for Lotus Connections to find out. Have them start populating the system.
- Conduct a pre-assessment - Ask your audience how they accomplish, today, their day to day tasks such as finding people, finding collateral, keeping up with topics, etc.
- Get input from evangelizers - Based on the enterprise's culture what should be deployed first? How should it be deployed?
- Train your evangelizers - so they can train others...
- Conduct a post assesment - After a reasonable length of time, figure out what worked and what didn't, fix it and keep going.
- Integrate with other tools - Is your enterprise mobile? Deploy the BlackBerry plugin. Do they mostly live in a portal? Deploy the Connections portlet. Make sure that employees can access Lotus Connections from where they work! Hey, it's all free, so you might as well!!
How about you? Have you had any successes / failures deploying social software? Any that you want to share with us?
I like the eight steps. It's something that Gia Lyons mentioned too at one of her presentations at LotuSphere this year (so it must be true :)
ReplyDeleteHi Winch,
ReplyDeleteYup! I actually got those recommended practices from a presentation that she created and shared internally in IBM. Isn't social software great??!! :)
Furthermore, her presentation was even more detailed. She had 12 recommended practices. From those, I chose my top 8... I wanted to choose the top 5, but they are all so good, that I couldn't limit it to just 5!
I tried to find a post to her external blog which talked about this, but didn't find it :(.
I agree in some areas, and not in others. Some basic training was needed, yet letting the users explore and find the one easiest to navigate, understand and use is important. It is one of the many reasons you don't stay on a new social network right now.
ReplyDeleteInforming them that they are looking at framework and usage, not for tons of info is important. They cannot expect the site to be fully populaetd for a POC.
Integrating many of them together made no sense, since they would not exist in their company that way.
Apparently the company had some predefined idea of what they wanted in social networking (or maybe none at all) and none of the products hit the mark with the users and PoC teams
@Ido Oh that's an interesting point: "Setting the right expectations with your PoC audience"!!!!!
ReplyDeletere: integration, the customer's IT department really thought that integrating the best of breed of each vendor would create an awesome consumer-like experience like Facebook/MySpace. The problem? During the PoC, each vendor's system was running independently from the other (except ours which we integrated into Confluence and Sharepoint). And, worse, each had its own UI; they weren't branded to look like one. End-users complained about that a lot.
you say - "if you go to a social site and it's empty.. Would you like it? I remember when I first joined Facebook I was loner and didn't really use it since my friends were not there....But as more people joined, I was hooked!"
ReplyDeleteI TOTALLY agree with this point and even if @idonotes says that a POC should look at the framework and usage, i strongly believe that somehow, part of the PoC experience should be getting a grip on that social aspect of the tool. At my company we did a PoC for a social software tool and it had no data, so it was really not that cool, and we just dropped the social software idea all together.
Just food for thought...how can the PoC reflect that? Be creative!
btw, i love your comic, i can totally see my husband or kids saying that!!
Hi chica!
ReplyDeleteThanks for stopping by! I am really glad that you liked the cartoon. Your husband sounds like a very cool guy!!!
The challenge with a PoC, in my opinion, is its positioning. Typically, a technical PoC environment is a throwaway platform.
Now, with social software, there are two options: a) a technical PoC (i.e. does the product meet our technical needs re: integration, features, etc) or b) a business value PoC (i.e. does the product really work in our enterprise with our employee culture) ?
If the PoC is of type (b), then we really need to follow the steps outlined in this post. We need to identify 5-10 evangelizers who will load the environment with data and will promote the environment internally with their co-workers. Since evangelizers tend to be leaders in their areas, fellow co-workers will tend to follow.
If this happens, viral adoption will eventually happen...
A POC with an empty social software environment indeed is a challenge. i have to think about that (for Lotus Connections people could just start with importing their existing bookmarks)
ReplyDeleteI find this article about adoption great too:
http://strange.corante.com/archives/2006/03/05/an_adoption_strategy_for_social_software_in_enterprise.php
Hmmm, the url isn't displayed correct. I meant this article
ReplyDelete@winch,great article!! Thanks for the link!!!
ReplyDelete