White paper Part 1. The Zero . company TM. Your business technologists. Powering progress

Transcription

1 Z White paper Part 1 The Zero company TM Your business technologists. Powering progress

2 The Zero company TM On February 7, 2011, Atos CEO and Chairman, Thierry Breton, publicly addressed the challenges organizations face as a result of data explosion, the rise of online social networking, and changing attitudes and behavior towards work. In answer to these challenges, and indicating that the amount of being sent and received has become unsustainable, Mr. Breton explained his ambition to eradicate all between Atos employees. Atos will call on advanced communication applications as well as new collaboration and social media tools in place of . The ambition is for Atos to be The Zero company TM within three years. In that time, the company will look for innovative solutions to provide a more personally relevant, direct, and cost-effective way for employees to communicate and collaborate with one another. This whitepaper is the first in a series covering the Zero TM concept. More will follow as the journey to reach the end goal progresses. Four whitepapers are planned, which will be loosely coupled to Stephen Covey s seven habits of highly effective people 1. This approach has been chosen because the use of is all about habit. About the Authors Edited by Jan Krans, Executive Business Consultant at Atos Consulting, Lecturer at The Hague University and member of the Atos Scientific Community, The Netherlands (jan.krans@atos. net). Also based on contributions from: William Rice, Business Development in Telecom, Media & Technology Manager, global Portfolio Manager for Telco Enabling Solutions at Atos and member of the Atos Scientific Community, the Netherlands (william.rice@atos.net). Mischa van Oijen, Data Center Architect at Atos, The Netherlands (mischa.vanoijen@atos.net). About the Atos Scientific Community The Atos Scientific Community is a network of some 90 top scientists, representing a mix of all skills and backgrounds, and coming from all geographies where Atos operates. Publicly launched by Thierry Breton, Chairman and CEO of Atos, the establishment of this community highlights the importance of innovation in the dynamic IT services market and the need for a proactive approach to identify and anticipate game changing technologies. Contents Introduction An explanation of what is covered in this whitepaper and a preview of what future whitepapers concerning Atos The Zero company TM ambition will include. The Nature of The evolution of and how overload has come about. Statistics pertaining to the specific case of overload at Atos are also given as a background to the company s Zero TM initiative. All about Requirements: The Architecture The process used by the architecture project team to define user requirements for a new platform to support a new way of working without . Start with the End in Mind; Envisioning a Future Without A description of how the new solution based on Enterprise 2.0 technologies would act within the different ways that people use ; namely as a filing cabinet, production line, and communication genre. Conclusion: A New Story has to be Told A recap of the background to Atos decision to become The Zero company TM and a call to action for other companies also suffering from internal overload. 1 S. Covey, The 7 habits of highly effective people, restoring the character ethic, Free Press, New York, Your business technologists. Powering progress

3 Introduction This first whitepaper uses Covey s first two habits as a guiding principle. In relation to habit 1, be proactive, Covey states, your life doesn t just happen. Whether you know it or not, it is designed by you. If life is replaced by inbox, Coveys words imply that people are responsible for their own overload. The first step in this whitepaper is to gain a clear picture of the phenomenon via a short scientific journey that provides insights into the nature of . Second is an exploration of the magnitude of information overload caused by , whereby reference will be made to recent studies. To verify whether these results are relevant to Atos, a short survey was conducted within the company. The survey was based on a validated scale of overload and enriched with some general questions regarding experience. The results show that Atos definitely has an overload problem. To achieve Zero TM, action is needed. To undertake action, a change management strategy is required. The main building blocks for that strategy derive from Watzlawick s theory regarding first- and second- order change processes. First-order change will focus primarily on what can be done now, with no major impact on current ways of working; however this will not be enough. Serious change is needed, a secondorder change process, which must be begun with the end in mind (habit 2). This big change mainly relates to the architecture track within a Zero TM program. The actions taken and planned within this program form the core of this whitepaper. The main challenge is how to create an enterprise social network which will support the Zero TM ambition. Habit 3, put first things first, will guide the second whitepaper. This paper will be dedicated to the actions which can be implemented within a relatively short time scale to support the Zero TM ambition, the so-called first-order change processes. These processes will pave the way for the realization of an enterprise social network as presented in this paper. The second paper will cover the techniques and methods individuals can adopt to realize inbox zero and make better use of by using etiquette. To prepare the next step, from zero inbox to Zero TM, a clear picture is needed on what the ingredients are to build a true social driven organization. The third paper will focus completely on change management and will present insights on how the Zero TM program copes with resistance to change. The guiding principles in this whitepaper will be habit 5, seek first to understand, then to be understood and habit 4, think win-win. The last whitepaper will be about the synergy effects (habit 6) between Atos and its clients/ partners by adopting the Zero TM approach. It will also cover how a process of continued improvement is embedded within and between organizations. In the words of habit seven; how to sharpen the saw. The main challenge is how to create an enterprise social network which will support the Zero TM ambition. Your business technologists. Powering progress 3

4 The Nature of Workplace communication has changed a lot over the past 50 years, due in large part to the introduction of networks and electronic communication systems. People and information are easier to access than ever before, and organizations are now thought of as networks of individuals, as well as formal hierarchies or location-based entities. One of the applications which radically changed the way people work (together) is . It was only decades ago that people were working in offices with large filing cabinets and getting used to as a means of exchanging information. Today, the world has changed dramatically. Almost everyone uses a mobile device for communicating with others, offices have changed into open working environments; however, is still very much in use. has become ubiquitous; it is no longer some program launched in order to check for new messages, as in the past, instead has become a large part of the daily routine. Ray Tomlinson, a programmer who implemented the system on ARPAnet that allowed to be sent between users on different hosts connected to ARPAnet, could likely never imagine this when he sent the first in late This initial session consisted simply of a number of test messages sent between machines. According to Wikipedia, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. However is no longer solely a solution for sending and receiving messages. Ducheneaut and Watts identified three metaphors to describe how is being used 3 : ``A filing cabinet: People manage and access archives as a personal knowledge system. ``A production line: People collaborate with others to accomplish work tasks. ``A communication genre: is used in organizational settings to carry out group work. In 2005, Bellotti et al. concluded, software is poorly suited to support the collaborative quality of task and project management, which results in people suffering from overload 4. Later on in this paper, metaphors will be used to describe the inefficiency and misuse of in certain situations. The original definition of overload was first coined by Whittaker & Sidner 5, who looked into users personal information management habits. They suggested that the software used to process , the client, has been overloaded with more functionality than it was originally designed for; a simple communication medium. Ducheneaut & Bellotti take the overload concept further and describe clients as being used as habitats, where they are the main interface to a user s workload 6. Functionalities where clients have been suggested to be overloaded include information management, file transfer, personal archiving and filing, task management and delegation, collaboration, decision making and voting, contact management, maintaining contact relationships, reminders, notifications and automated messages, auditing and calendaring, and appointment and time management. A second definition of overload relates to the user having a subjective feeling of being overloaded with more complex processes triggered by messages than they are readily able to manage. Dabbish and Kraut use the term strain 7. A survey showed that one in five UK workers spend 32 days a year managing 8. Another survey showed that 25 percent of the average corporate worker s day is spent on -related tasks. In comparison, the time spent in personal meetings accounts for about 14 percent of the typical day at the office, and phone conversations occupy just nine percent 9. When managers were questioned about the need to constantly respond to s, 48 percent reportedly found this stressful, and in organizations with more than 500 employees, this rose to 54 percent, indicating that employees in larger companies are struggling to deal with higher volumes of . This survey shows that while remains the most commonly used collaborative tool in the workplace, with 97 percent of respondents agreeing with this, it is often overwhelming or misused, leading to (avoidable) workplace stress 10. Although it appears that is being made a scapegoat for all that is not well in the world of business today, obviously this is only part of the story. The larger picture is of a changing world, with changing technology and changing ways of working in which becomes less relevant. has become ubiquitous; it is no longer some program launched in order to check for new messages Ducheneaut, N. and Watts, L. A., In search of coherence: A review of research., HumanComputer Interaction, Vol. 20:11-48, Bellotti, V., Ducheneaut, N., Howard, M., Smith, I. and Grinter, R.E., Quality Versus Quantity: -Centric Task Management and Its Relation With Overload., Human-Computer Interaction 20, 1/2, , S. Whittaker, S and C. Sidner, overload: Exploring personal information management of , in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors, Computing Systems, N. Ducheneaut and V. Bellotti, as habitat: An exploration of embedded personal information management, Interactions, L. Dabbish and R. Kraut, overload at work: An analysis of factors associated with strain, in Proceedings of the 20th Anniversary Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Statistics Report, , The Radicati group, Your business technologists. Powering progress

5 Atos and Overload Do the overload figures also apply to Atos? To provide a substantiated answer to this question a survey was conducted within several communities within the organization based on the work of Hogan and Fisher 11. Their paper introduced a scale for measuring overload, based on research done by Neustaedter, Brush and Smith 12. The scale can be used not only to judge the degree of overload within a population, but also to examine how overload in and organizational behavior are correlated. Hogan and Fisher s overload scale contains eight questions and respondents answer using a five-point scale, from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Several questions were added, including received/sent and how much time was spend on on a normal business day. overload is more or less a result of people s habits. The results show that about 68 percent of respondents receive more than 50 s a day and 39 percent send more than 25 s a day. How many s do you receive on an average business day? How many s do yousend on an average business day? 7% 7% 21% 47% 32% 32% 54% Between 1 and 50 Between 50 and 100 More than 100 Between 1and 10 Between 10 and 25 Between 25 and 50 More than 50 On the topic of the time needed to process , 32 percent of respondents need more than three hours a day to handle and another 41 percent spends between two and three hours doing the same task. How much time do you spend on on an average business day (including filing, searching and deleting)? 4% 32% 23% Less than an hour Between 1 and 1,5 hours Between2and3hours 41% More than 3 hours 11 B. Hogan and D. Fisher, A Scale for Measuring Overload., Microsoft research, C. Neustaedter, A. Brush and M. Smith, Beyond From and Received : Exploring the Dynamics of Triage. Proceedings of the CHI 2005 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM Press, Your business technologists. Powering progress 5

6 Within Atos, 73 percent of respondents spend on average more than 25 percent of their work time on activities. This raises the question of how do the respondents handle their inbox and if there is a feeling of overload. Seventy-four percent of respondents agree they get too much and almost 80 percent agree they are spending too much time on processing . And when attending more meetings than usual, about 82 percent have trouble keeping up with the inbox. When processing , 58 percent agree too much time is wasted on getting rid of unimportant messages. As a result, 72 percent agree handling cuts into time they would rather spend on other tasks. Some respondents can perhaps learn from others; 30 percent of respondents are satisfied with their handling strategy, however, the overall conclusion of the survey is that overload is present within Atos. Why there is a Problem with overload is more or less a result of people s habits. is the old and reliable Swiss army knife that has been used for decades, because: It is fast; It is cheap; It is universal; It is simple to use; It is asynchronous; It requires relatively low effort. For a long time it worked just fine with as a Swiss army knife, but it is getting out of control, leaving employees overloaded. However, that overload is basically a result of inefficient work procedures. According to the metaphors introduced by Ducheneaut and Watts, if is used as a personal filing cabinet for knowledge management, by making folders for different topics that archive each relevant in its appropriate place, then a walled information silo is created. If an important project is sent to ten people, eleven people will perform the same action; archiving the in the right folder. Not very efficient and not effective from a corporate viewpoint, because access to the information in the is restricted to the people who received it, new members joining the project will not have access to that information. Another good reason for organizations to find alternatives for the as a filing cabinet is staff turnover. Last year, the average staff turnover in the UK was 13 percent 13. That means that every year about 13 percent of the knowledge systems built by individual employees in the corporate system are literally trashed when they leave the company. 6 Your business technologists. Powering progress

7 When is used as a production line to accomplish a certain work task by collaborating with others, the inefficiency becomes even clearer. Take the process of collaborating on a document using , for example. Team member A creates the first version of a document, attaches the document to an and sends it to all team members for feedback. Team member B uses the track changes feature, team member C places all remarks in an , and another team member uses the highlight function. Team member A then has several versions of the same document and the challenge to combine all feedback in a new version, which will be distributed again for a new review round. Just after the second version of the document has been sent to the team, team member D sends comments on the previous version of the document. Team member A then creates a new version including team member D s remarks and distributes it again to all members. This process goes on for a while and when the team meeting is held and the document is discussed, some members turn out to have an old version. Document management systems can help in this process, but they are not really built for team collaboration. Considering as a communication genre, entails entering the world of cc s, ping-pong, and puzzles. This metaphor focuses on the way s are written and how their audience is selected. If is wrongly used in this respect it could cost companies more than $16,000 per employee per year according to research from Dr. Tom Jackson 14 of Loughborough University (UK). puzzles refers to how much work a recipient must undertake to get the context of the . Too often, the subject line of an does not summarize the content very well. For example, an with a subject line deadline discussion doesn t clarify the content of the , the recipient has to read the message to get the context. A better subject line would be Recommend we ship product C on April 25. Concerning the body text of an , a wellwritten will give the reader the full context at the beginning of every message. But most of the time this doesn t happen, especially for recipients copied in later on in a discussion. To understand the subject fully, the recipient has to scroll through the whole thread. This occurs mostly because s are written from a sender perspective and not from the receiver s point of view 15. Many people are also cc d on a lot of s and for many of these s they probably wonder why they were ever addressed to them at all. Worse still, when other recipients hit the reply all button they get even more irrelevant s and there is no way to opt-out. The result of the general misuse of the cc functionality is an evergrowing inbox. To conclude, the main reasons for overload are: 1. The client software is used for too many different business functions. 2. The use of other existing tools, which can take the load, is fragmented, and the business processes to support these are not well developed. 3. There is a lot of poor practice which contributes to too many s which take too much time to manage. 4. Embedded values and behaviors reinforce silo working by using . Shifting Gears: Our Approach to Zero TM A Zero TM program has the active sponsorship of the senior management as well as of volunteers who have a strong belief in the ambition and are highly motivated to achieve it. The first step is the development of a change management vision on how to accomplish the Zero TM ambition. To shape such a vision, a solid view on change management is needed. The scientific basis for this vision was found in the work of Watzlawick who differentiated between first-order and second-order change processes 16 : ``First-order change is doing more or less of something already being done. First-order change is always reversible. ``Second-order change is deciding or being forced to do something significantly or fundamentally different from the way it was done before. The process is irreversible; once begun, it is impossible to return to the old way of working. The result of the general misuse of the cc functionality is an ever-growing inbox T. W. Jackson, S. Lichtenstein, Optimising communication: the impact of seminar- and computer-based training, International Journal of Internet and Enterprise Management Vol. 7, No.2 pp S. Robbins, Tips for Mastering Overload, Harvard Business School, P. Watzlawick, J. Weakland and R. Fisch, Change: Principles of problem formation and problem resolution., Norton, Your business technologists. Powering progress 7

8 The key differences associated with first-order and second-order change processes are presented in the following table 17. First-order change Adjustment within the existing system Doing more or less of the same thing Generally reversible Non-transformational Not much new learning No fundamental shift in values or behavior Old story can still be told Second-order change Change of the existing system Trying things outside the box Generally irreversible Transformational Requires new learning Fundamental shift in values or behavior New story needs to be told If Atos employees have to use to communicate with the outside world, they should do it in the most effective and efficient way. First-order change is change that is consistent with prevailing values and norms, meets with general agreement, and can be implemented using people s existing knowledge and skills. Changes of the first order are the changes which can be made within the existing system. Although first-order change will contribute to less time spend on , and less information stress experienced by mastering the inbox, Atos must remember the ambition: To become The Zero company TM. A more radical view of the nature of the problem is needed to achieve that goal; therefore the Zero TM program also needs to implement second-order changes. The drive for implementing second-order changes to overcome overload is on the one hand the CEO s decision to stop all internal traffic in Atos within three years and on the other the as yet unconquered growing inbox itself. A change becomes second-order as soon as a paradigm shift is needed. Second-order changes require that people learn new approaches as they question existing values and norms, and they require leaders to work far more deeply with staff and the community. Second-order changes can disrupt people s sense of well-being and cooperation, and as a result can disturb the cohesion of the organization. But in the case of Zero TM within Atos, respondents to the survey support the radical second-order change as stated by Atos CEO. Skeptics will say that respondents have simply given the answers expected of them; however, there is a real willingness to change and belief that strong measurements are needed to overcome current overload. Do you support the Zero TM initiative? 8% 0% 23% Yes Yes, but... 69% No opinion No The perfect strategy to reach Zero TM is a mix of first- and second-order changes. The first-order changes will be a fertilizer for the second-order changes, as well as a necessity because Atos external environment will still rely heavily on . But if Atos employees have to use to communicate with the outside world, they should do it in the most effective and efficient way. The best way to 17 A. Singhal, N. Rao and S. Pant, Entertainment-education and possibilities for second order social change, Journal of Creative Communications, 1: Your business technologists. Powering progress

9 establish new behavior is to start changing now and practice the new, desired attitude first internally with Atos colleagues. Within the Zero TM program, this should be addressed by change management and an initial quickwins track. The goal of this track should be to create awareness of the need to reduce the volume of communication and to enable people to adopt appropriate behavior, as well as use the alternative tools that are already present. Attention will be paid to etiquette and a number of courses will be developed to encourage a smarter way of working with and better usage of existing tools. These are interventions aimed at improving employee effectiveness with regards to communication, collaboration, and knowledge management. See Box 1: Principles of effective behavior. The program s second track should be aimed at introducing business processes that will help reduce traffic. To achieve this, social network analysis will be used to identify patterns of work as they occur via , both in formal processes as well as in informal communication, by analyzing two aspects of work: Process flows and communication patterns between people. This will provide the insights required to help employees change from old to new ways of working, and will form the bridge to the second-order track: Change management and the introduction of an enterprise social network solution for a new way of working. This track will be further explored in the following chapter. To monitor progress made, a KPI track should also be put in place to aggregate the appropriated numbers related to the Zero TM ambition; measuring how many s have been sent internally and externally, with a distinction made between s with and without attachments, and the usage of alternative tools. Box I: Principles of effective behavior There are many techniques for making the most of time. Most people process in a dumb manner most of the time. They live in the inbox, use as the number one tool to do the job, any job, without questioning whether it is the right way to get it done. Some behavioral principles apply to usage and becoming aware of these principles can help in the reduction of traffic, and consequently overload. Below are some tips (behavioral principles) for making more effective. For more information on techniques like these, search the Internet for Getting Things Done (GTD) in combination with For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction: Newton s Third Law of Physics also applies to For every sent, there is a reaction. Reply, forward, etc. In practice, this translates to the Principle: The more sent, the more will be received. 2. is patient, the user should be too: This is actually a benefit of the store-and-forward technology on which is based. An addressed to someone will actually patiently wait until they decide to look at it and act. People should take advantage of this. There is no need for notifiers, no need to check every five minutes. Only users force themselves to do that. should only be opened a couple of times a day, and then processed immediately. Actionable 3. Read every only once: And then immediately decide what to do with the message: Do it (if it takes two minutes or less), delete it, delegate it, file it, or put it on a to-do list or calendar to do later. The GTD scheme below provides a graphic representation. 4. is not one tool to serve all needs : Even though has become today s main communication platform, it is not the best platform to serve all communication and collaboration needs. Other, better alternatives exist to serve various kinds of interaction. 5. cc-ing is like spamming: Unless someone explicitly asks to be copied in on a message, don t use the cc function. There are more effective ways of escalating issues than the cc function too. cc means nothing more than for your information (FYI), and people don t (or shouldn t) act on copy. Indeed, more and more people have automatic rules to filter out cc s. People should only be informed of something it they need to be and only relevant messages should be sent, and that includes consecutive messages to ones they were cc d on. Using bcc has a very sneaky feel to it and should never be used Respond (<2mins) You ve Got ! Task Archive Read Later Your business technologists. Powering progress 9

10 All about Requirements: The Architecture A New Way of Working to Create the Zero TM Requirement Document Within a Zero TM program, the architecture project team faces the challenge of defining user requirements for a new platform to support a new way of working without that would also improve productivity and efficiency. Normally a project team would start with a brainstorming session with a few stakeholders to identify key requirements, prepare a document, send an with meeting request, and attach a key requirements document. During a meeting, the document would be approved and interviews with key players planned. After all interviews had been carried out, the requirements document would be updated and progress reported to the project members involved. They would receive the different versions of the document by and progress meetings would be held until the requirements document had reached its desired state. The Zero TM requirements document could be created using the single-order process as described above, but the project team can also take a different approach and apply a secondorder process to create the document. In this case, the team should select a set of informal and formal tools which were already in existence. These tools could do the job of creating a requirements document for a new solution, which would support the Zero TM ambition. The toolset includes an online micro blogging platform, an online mindmapping tool, a wiki, and a document management system. With these tools the team was able to complete the task without or formal face-to-face meetings, involve more people in the process, and deliver the end product in less time that would normally be required. At Atos, the requirements document finished in 2.5 weeks and included input and assistance from more than sixty people. At this point, the first was sent to the members of the steering committee with a link to the document. They were impressed by the speed and quality of the result, as well as the lengthy list of contributors, resulting in an unanimous positive decision and a go for the next phase in the project. More about the process can be found in Box II: Creating a requirement document without . Box II: Creating a requirement document without . Open communication at the water cooler The first step is to gather and involve people in the process of creating a requirements document. What is the right tool to reach as many people as possible who would be interested in participating in the project? Normally, the water cooler would be the ideal spot to drop the question and get input. So at Atos the requirement question was dropped at a virtual water cooler, Yammer, an enterprise micro blogging service just like Twitter, asking people to participate and indicate which functionalities they thought should be part of the solution. Within a couple of days, more than thirty people were involved and adding requirements. There was clearly buy-in from Yammer members who were interested in the topic (the future end users of the new Zero TM solution) and the process was taken to the next level by organizing an asynchronous online brainstorm. From conversation to structured brainstorming All input received via Yammer was organized into principal groups and subgroups, and visualized in an online mindmapping tool called Mindmeister. The link to the mindmap was posted in the requirements thread on Yammer, inviting people to contribute to the mindmap. In a few days, the mindmap grew enormously, people were editing it at the same time and working together on certain branches of it. Also, the basic structure of the mindmap was changed, creating an even better overview of the requirements gathered. After a few days, when activity was declining, the Yammer community was asked if the requirement mindmap was a good basis to actually start writing the requirement document. Positive feedback led to the next phase. Community writing in practice The mindmap was exported as a Rich Text Format (RTF) document and imported into the enterprise wiki (Confluence). With little effort, the mindmap was transformed into a wiki structure with a parent page, several subpages, and sub paragraphs. One of the main strengths of a wiki is version control. There is only ever one version of the document, which is visible as a website. When the edit button is hit, the website is transformed into a document. Hit save and the document becomes a website again, adding a new version number to the wiki page in the background to enable roll-back functionality. A message was posted on Yammer inviting people to participate in writing the document together in the created wiki space. After less than a week, more than 60 people had contributed and commented on the requirements wiki and the created document was ready for rating. The wiki space was exported, resulting in a requirements document in pdf format. Define quality of the work done To define the quality of the work done, Atos Scientific Community s whitepaper approval process can be used. This procedure works as follows: All members of the Scientific Community are committed to do peer review and rate whitepapers. The document is only published if it receives a rating above 3.7 on a scale of 5. If the score is less than 3.7, additional work has to be done and a second review round starts. The same process was applied to assess the quality of the requirements document. It was uploaded to the corporate document store LiveLink, which has a function to rate content, and all involved co-workers were invited to review and rate the requirements document. After a second round, the document was given an average rating of a Your business technologists. Powering progress

11 The way of working described above has been introduced as a training program within the change management and quick wins track and at several other places within the organization in relation to project management. It is being used for collaboration purposes, has had positive results so far, and has raised a number of questions: ``If Atos suffers from overload as stated above, is it because the tools facilitating working in a different and more effective manner are not available? The answer is no, based on the story above. ``So if some of the tools are already in place it is possible that Atos employees are not fully aware of their functionality, perhaps lacking the time to investigate because they are bound by current ways of working. For this reason Atos is now offering to train employees on collaboration tools and techniques. ``To take this a step further; is this the right solution to reach the Zero TM ambition? The Zero TM team think not, because if it is implemented at enterprise scale, Atos could be caught by what is referred to by John Golding from Harvard Business School as the 9x problem : «A mismatch of nine to one between what innovators think consumers want and what consumers actually want.» 18 Basically, the 9x effect says that a potential user of a new product will under weigh the benefits of that new product by a factor of three, and overweigh by the same factor the cost of giving up their current solution. Human beings evaluate new things relative to the status quo and are risk averse (the cost of a loss is exaggerated by the mind). If a new product is to succeed, it better be nine times better than the current solution, in this case . The working method described is a workaround for the symptoms caused by , but it does not tackle the root cause and is surely not nine times better than the old way of working. What Atos needs is a fully integrated enterprise social networking solution, not a collection of different point solutions, in order to be able to eradicate all between Atos employees. Enterprise Social Network Requirements can be sent to anyone within or outside the organization, but you only send s to people you know and who are in your personal network. To find a better alternative for to enable or streamline business processes while enhancing collaboration, a strong focus is needed on the use of social networks among people who share business interests and/or activities. This is the field of enterprise social networking which can be seen as a primary component of Enterprise Andrew McAfee describes Enterprise 2.0 as, «the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers» 20. Are there social software components in the requirements document? Before answering this question, the global structure of the requirements document should first be made clear. In this document, distinction is made between three main requirement groups: 1. Meta requirements: The most important requirements. 2. Basic functions: The functions present in the solution. 3. Generic requirements: Requirements applying to all functions in the solution. Looking at the basic function requirements gathered so far, which will be presented later on, the eminent social software components exist to meet these requirements and more. The new solution must be able to seamlessly integrate the different internal and external functionalities while fulfilling the meta requirements. If the solution is capable of this, then the 9x problem will be under control. The following meta requirements have been identified: 1. User-centric: All information and communication functions present in the solution place the user in the center of the virtual work environment. 2. Intuitive: If the solution is people-centric, it also needs to be intuitive, with no need for days of training to understand where to go to find or create what is required. 3. Ergonomic: The platform needs to be designed with the end user in mind; it should be a nice and clean looking environment to work in. 4. Ease of use: If it is user-centric, with good application ergonomics, and intuitive to use, users will get a natural work flow that supports their way of working. 5. Personalization: To support each user s way of working, personalization is key, users must have the option to easily configure their own workspace. 6. Speed: The system has to react fast, otherwise user workflow will be broken. 7. Sticky: It has to be fun to use the system and it should include built-in features which are inviting and encourage the user to explore relevant information. 8. Multi device: The platform is to support multi devices such as computer, smartphone, and tablet. The basic functions are all about the social software components, such as profiles, micro blogging, blogging, wiki, communities, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), tagging, social bookmarking, discussion forums, project management, dash boarding inside information and outside information, document collaboration, video, online collaborative mindmapping, group calendaring, ideation, workflow, plug-in capabilities, and integration with existing communication systems, like unified communication and . In other words, the new platform will function as a social integration layer on top of the existing application landscape to create social content. It will replace some existing functionalities, but also add new ones. In the next chapter, the basic functions of the requirement document will be considered by envisioning a future without Gourville, J. T. (2004). Why consumers don t buy: The psychology of new product adoption. Harvard Business School Note # Your business technologists. 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12 Start with the End in Mind; Envisioning a Future Without Suppose that all basic functions are present in one solution and that that solution is compliant with the meta requirements, how does that help in the realization of the Zero TM ambition? To understand how these technologies will support the Zero TM ambition, two major differences between the old way of working with and the new way of working with Enterprise 2.0 technologies have to be made clear. is closed communication; it only reveals its content to the receiver(s) and is onedimensional. In an Enterprise 2.0 world, open communication is considered the norm and content can have multiple dimensions. Another key difference is the fact is push technology, other people push content in your inbox, whereas the new technology relies more on a pull mechanism, i.e. relevant information will find you. An explanation of how the new solution would act within the three metaphors given; as a filing cabinet, production line, and communication genre is given below. as a Filing Cabinet Revisited In the situation, everyone has their own filing cabinet in which received information is archived in separate folders. These folders are usually separated into areas of work at hand, clients, and specific topics of interest. Because is onedimensional, conflicts can arise when s are archived in more than one folder. In an Enterprise 2.0 environment of open communication, group communities will replace private folders. Communities are the central information and communication hub for all sorts of topics. Within a community, all basic functions presented in the previous chapter are available. There will be work-related communities, for example projects, client-related communities, and communities for specific topics. In the case of Atos, all technologies will have to be supported. One of the main differences is that, unlike with , messages will be posted in a central community and not sent to individuals to create separate personal silos. In a community, everyone has access to the same information, but probably not all information is equally important to all community members. Using collaborative filtering will highlight what is important to whom, because the sender will summarize the content of the message with a few keywords. These keywords are called tags and every community member is able to subscribe (RSS) to a certain tag or combination of tags. All information present within the community can be tagged, whether it is a document, video, picture, or discussion, even people can be tagged. When new relevant information is posted to the community, subscribers receive a signal on their personal dashboard. This way of working allows people to pull relevant content into view, and as such the personal dashboard functions as the new inbox. It will be the integrated place where all information needed to accomplish day-to-day work can be found. Information of real importance is not saved on a local drive but bookmarked, ensuring it is always up-to-date, since the bookmark references the actual content itself. By using bookmarking in combination with tagging a personal knowledge management system is created. Users can even choose to share their bookmarks with the other community members. In Enterprise 2.0 terms, this is known as social bookmarking. Another differentiator is the way information is retrieved. When is seen as a filing cabinet, the natural way to find specific information is a folder drill down until the specific is found, but in the new system there are no physical folder structures, they will be dynamically created by searching for specific tags, content items and/or owners, which can be the user, all community members, or all members on the system. When a search is performed on a regular basis, the query can be bookmarked or saved in the personal environment. as a Production Line Revisited Looking at the production line metaphor in the light of an enterprise social network, a distinction has to be made between structured and unstructured business processes. Structured processes always follow a predefined workflow and in every step it is clear who has to do what. The who can be a certain person or a role associated with more than one person. The what is a specific work task or a decision. These structured processes are most often guided by separate workflows and/or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Because people are not logged into these systems all day, s are sent to alert people that a certain action is required on their behalf. These system s clutter up the inbox of the recipient; if smart, the user would create an rule that automatically moves the out of the inbox into another folder. The new solution will act as an integration layer on existing systems. In this case, the system s will be transformed into signals sent to the new platform, which will aggregate these signals and present them, by using data mash-ups 21, in the personal dashboard as a simple, attractive and meaningful interactive business process indicator. As the short case description about collaborating on a document with showed, is not the right tool to support unstructured business processes. In this case, it would be better to use a wiki, like the architecture and change management team did. A wiki is just a normal website, but it has two important buttons: edit and save. When the edit button is clicked, the website transforms into an editable document. When the user has finished editing, save is 21 According to Wikipedia data mash-ups combine similar types of media and information from multiple sources into a single representation. The combination of all these resources create a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source. 12 Your business technologists. Powering progress

13 clicked and the document becomes a website again. Collaborators receive a signal notifying them that the wiki has been edited. In this situation, everyone involved has just one version of the document, the most recent one. A picture created by Christian Rasmussen 22 (below) illustrates this. View Save Edit Send Receive Collaboration Save Receive Send Edit View Edit Wiki Collaboration View Edit In an Enterprise 2.0 world, open communication is considered the norm and content can have multiple dimensions. Intelipedia Edit Send Receive Receive Save View Edit View Save Send View Edit View Edit In most cases, creating a document is just one step in an unstructured business process. However, the new solution has to support the total collaboration process. How can the new solution support the project management cycle, for example? The first step is to create a community for a certain project, with a description of that project. Next, a wiki page is created and the project plan is written, using the procedure as described earlier on, which is then approved by stakeholders. More project members then come on board to help the project progress and ensure the right people are involved. Enterprise social networking solutions rely heavily on user profiles; it is a bit like the functionality offered by LinkedIn, but more enriched. The profile contains the following components: Enriched curriculum vitae with role description and tasks or projects fulfilled with time lines; all skills mastered properly tagged with availability; and all business activity performed on the platform. To find the right people for the job an advanced search can be carried by the project lead. The old phone and system could also work, but the new system provides a more objective approach. Another way for the project lead to find the right people is to post the vacancies in the new assignments offered community. Vacancies include a link to the project community and all different project roles are tagged with the exact skills required. People who have taken a subscription to these specific tags will be notified of a possible new challenge. If selected, new members join the project community. Within the community, a dedicated project space is created with project time lines, and where milestones and tasks are assigned to project members. Think of this as sort of real-time Gantt chart 23. In this way, the entire project work stream and current status is completely transparent to all project members. Progress is automatically aggregated from the project space to the project community homepage. Weekly project status reports, which the project leader produces, are not in the form of Word documents or wiki pages 24. In this case, a community project blog is more appropriate. If someone wants to follow the project progress, they can simply take a subscription. If the project manager posts a new blog entry, a link to it will appear on the project community homepage For explanation see: 24 Wiki pages are the right tool if several people work to together or when formal documentation has to be produced within the project. Your business technologists. Powering progress 13

14 as a Communication Genre Revisited Taking the last metaphor, as a communication genre, into account completes the creation of a whole new communication and collaboration paradigm. In the world of , communication is not complicated, the user clicks new message, chooses recipients, types message, clicks send and job done. In the new situation, the user has to think which medium to use before even starting the communication and collaboration process. Below, this is related to the project management example. Normally, when project members have a certain task-related question or problem they will visit, call, instant message, or peers, other project members, and/or the project leader. If is no longer available, the other options remain and new ones arise: Micro blogging and discussion forums. Micro blogging is like Twitter, an open one-tomany communication tool for short messages, but micro blogging in an Enterprise 2.0 environment is different, it is fully integrated with all the other functionalities present. With no more , a project member could decide to post a status update, which describes the problem to the project team members by mentioning their names directly in the message itself and clicking post. Some team members may reply with useful tips, but after a short while the project member may receive the correct answer, not from a team member, but from a peer worked with previously on another project. Here is the main difference between communicating with or via an enterprise social network. People build internal networks during work and can decide to be virtually connected to each other. When a virtual network connection is established, they will be informed about each other s activities. In this case, the status update with a specific problem resulted in receiving the right answer from a peer outside the project. This is made possible by the leading rule in an enterprise social network; all information and communication is open unless, instead of all information and communication is closed unless, of which is the perfect example. Status updates can be posted to one or more persons, a community, or even to all people on the system. Indeed the question could also be sent to a group of peers using an instant messaging client, which in this case has not been added to the collective body of knowledge within the enterprise. Another way to get the right answer is to post the question in a community discussion forum related to the issue. In this case, people not in the sender s network, but who are interested in the specific topic, are able to answer the question raised. YouTube is now the second largest search engine on the Internet and entrepreneur Chris Anderson, the curator of the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, an annual event where leading thinkers and doers gather for inspiration, suggested in a TED talk that web video is changing the way people learn 25. If that is the case, why is almost all asynchronous business information and communication done by text and video and/or audio seldom used? The answer is two-fold; first, enterprise systems are not capable of handling video adequately; and second, employees are not used to video, they rather use a lot of text. However, every laptop and smart phone now comprises a camera and microphone, and good screen and voice capturing software is available on the market at a reasonable price. Which would be preferable (just a few example questions): ``A monthly from the CEO providing information about the state of the company or a video message? ``An with a PowerPoint file of the presentation missed during the last meeting or a link to a video recording of the slides with the actual audio? ``An with a manual explaining how a new piece of software works or a link to a set of video s explaining the functionalities using click through? Video is or will be playing a bigger role in business information and communication, because it can deliver more context to a message than just words, like voice intonation and facial expressions, and can therefore deliver the message in a more powerful and personal manner. This is why video is an integral part of a new solution where there is no place for . Because of the multi-dimensional nature of the planned enterprise social network, where all basic functionality will hook in to each other in multiple ways, not everything can be presented in this single whitepaper. The goal of this chapter is not to present a complete picture of the envisioned solution, but to provide an insight into how business cooperation is possible without the use of in the near future. The skeptic will say the presented approach will lead to a new sort of overload, and indeed it could, only now users will be in control of the information flow, because the new techniques are based on pull technology and not on the push method of . So if overload is experienced, it is a result of the user s own failure to filter. This new way of working also dramatically enhances the way co-workers can share knowledge and hone each other s skills while safeguarding the collective corporate knowledge base Your business technologists. Powering progress

15 Conclusion: A New Story Needs to be Told Up to now, everyone communicates, collaborates, archives, and builds their own personal knowledge systems by using and seldom asks the question, is this the smartest way to work? Before Atos started with the Zero TM ambition, awareness of overload was low in the organization; also, less attention was paid to improving normal co-working processes. Atos focused more on business process optimization using Lean, via better retrieval of knowledge through enterprise content management (ECM) systems, etc. As a result of the CEO s Zero TM statement, Atos refocused, as it saw that too much time was being spent on handling . This was backed up by the results of a short survey that helped initiate the discussion on how to tackle internal within three years. The Zero TM program team is leading the first steps in realizing this ambition. Organizations looking to gain greater control over overload are advised to take a look at the collaboration and communication processes within the organization; is there a heavy dependency on ? The likely answer is yes, which means the organization is probably in the same situation Atos was before the decision was made to start the Zero TM program. End Remarks and Followup This paper envisaged a new way of working without , offering just a glimpse into the future ahead. There are several pilots currently running to test which solution has the most potential to realize the Zero TM ambition. This pilot process, and the implementation and organizational adoption of a final solution will be described in the third whitepaper. The second whitepaper, which is scheduled to be published Q2 of 2012, will describe experiences and insights gained with all first-order change interventions, like inbox zero, better use of existing tools, etiquette, and the social organization phenomenon. To keep up to date, check the Atos Blog: blog.atos.net/ To recap, an organization should have a Zero TM ambition because: ``The current load is unsustainable for (any) business. ``Better ways to communicate and collaborate are available. ``The future workforce has different demands and works in new ways. Your business technologists. Powering progress 15

16 About Atos Atos is an international information technology services company with annual 2010 pro forma revenues of EUR 8.6 billion and 74,000 employees in 42 countries at the end of September Serving a global client base, it delivers hi-tech transactional services, consulting and technology services, systems integration and managed services. With its deep technology expertise and industry knowledge, it works with clients across the following market sectors: Manufacturing, Retail, Services; Public, Health & Transport; Financial Services; Telecoms, Media & Technology; Energy & Utilities. Atos is focused on business technology that powers progress and helps organizations to create their firm of the future. It is the Worldwide Information Technology Partner for the Olympic Games and is quoted on the Paris Eurolist Market. Atos operates under the brands Atos, Atos Consulting and Technology Services, Atos Worldline and Atos Worldgrid. atos.net Atos, the Atos logo, Atos Consulting, Atos Worldline, Atos Sphere, Atos Cloud and Atos Worldgrid are registered trademarks of Atos SA. January 2012 Atos, All rights reserved.