Social Collaboration at the heart of Knowledge Management (r)evolution

Why the former Knowledge Management was never be fully adopted by employees ?

Following a previous blog (here) summarizing how Atos internal Digital transformation has well evolved from ZeroEmail™ over Social Collaboration to WellBeingAtWork, I would like to explain a good side effect on how the Social Collaboration is disrupting the old Knowledge Management.

It’s time to unleash your Knowledge assets

Our Enterprises operates in a knowledge economy that is undergoing significant transformation. You can no longer have critical information locked into individual mailboxes, or folders and archives unavailable to your employees and stakeholders.

A good Social Collaboration, consisting of an Enterprise Social Network creates a global structure of so-called communities that should encompass all your organization, your markets, portfolio and your customers. All communities and knowledge should be globally available to your employees within a unique collaborative platform.

So why people are so excited about Enterprise Social Networks ? 

What I found within Atos after 5 years of promoting social collaboration are the following benefits:

- It’s improved team work and communication with more transparency
- It’s reduce internal emails overload and fewer meetings
- It’s accelerate peer support and knowledge re-use
- It’s share the Power of Knowledge (enterprise social technologies enable personal knowledge to become organizational knowledge)
- It’s work because employee daily business create context & audience automatically
- It’s work by connecting people (and no longer documents)

Knowledge Management versus Knowledge sharing

So whay so many old Knowledge Management solutions was not working and was not adopted ? Mainly because the KM governance :

1.         wanted to manage and control all the company knowledge
2.         defined knowledge as a transferable good, which is centralized provided
3.         required knowledge sharing without providing any audience

But we all like to share knowledge on the web (wiki, blog, social media…) for 2 reasons, if we get the right audience, if we can communicate and have social conversations with other people, if we get positive feedbacks from others (that promote ours status as expert).

Without that we are not motivated to share or to use within the old KM . Because we share knowledge when we have the right audience and purpose, that motivates us and create the right context.

Knowledge Sharing is …not a new knowledge management tools, no longer about storing knowledge on everything, but it’s about Knowledge just in time, that happens by connecting people in formal and informal networks.

Knowledge communities can also give to the “knowledge” a face and a name, accelerates the recognition and e-reputation of your staff.

To succeed the knowledge sharing and collaboration (r)evolution, you need a coordinated organization (communities manager & leaders), to adapt & simplify your technological landscape (with social as the entry point) and a new culture and team spirit.

Knowledge sharing depends on the habit and willingness of the knowledge worker to seek out and to be receptive to these knowledge sources. The right digital culture, incentives, and so on must therefore be present.

But not with a classic « change » culture but more with an « influence » culture by using ambassadors, influencers, collaborative leaders with visibility, by promoting success stories, by rewarding innovators and entrepreneurs , by changing the old KM habits …there is a lot to be done !

A social networks properly integrated and promoted will be adopt by many employees and can become your indispensable knowledge infrastructure of your organization !

Are you ready to unleash your Knowledge Capital by evolving from “management” to “sharing” ?

How the Atos internal digital transformation has evolved since 4 years

To summarize our internal digital transformation work we did the last 4 years at Atos, I wish to highlight the following 3 hashtags (well known on Social Media :)

#ZeroEmail 

By creating a strong sense of urgency such as “Zero Email™ ambition, desired by our CEO Thierry Breton in 2011, we alerted and stimulated in-depth enterprise cultural changes.

Atos recognized the first that emails overload was a key hurdle for collaborative transformation. And the replacement of internal emails with collaborative technologies has resulted in a profound cultural shift at Atos. 

The working culture has evolved from one based on hierarchies and command-and-control to a more open environment in which all employees and leaders can engage with each other more quickly and easily thanks to many online communities.

Atos Zero Email^TM initiative was very ambitious and we are still impressed with the way everyone within the company has responded to the challenge to radically change our way of working and the progress we have made together – in three years we have reduced internal emails by 70%  in average.  Reducing internal email is a great outcome from better use of collaborative tools and new behaviors.

#SocialCollaboration

Reducing internal email was a “big plus” for employees who were suffering from email overload, from now Social Collaboration is our ongoing objective unleashing significant winnings by :

·         creating added value and more revenue

·         increasing project team productivity

·         accelerating our sales time to market

·         improving our customer satisfaction

·         generating collective innovation and ideation

We are taking advantage of a new connected team culture and our goal is to generalize this culture for all Atos current and future businesses.

Over the past 4 years, we have laid a solid foundation to now reap the benefits of our efforts and increasingly we are using the right tools for the right job; from our social business network blueKiwi to Sharepoint for document management, Lync for communication, online meetings and chat and e-mail for external contacts and formal communications.

In addition to the shared ambition to reduce our emails pollution, we have implemented many changes and internal communications initiative’s to address some confusions, middle management resistance or fears.

Our change strategy was mainly to :

1. Educate the organization about why we need to change and how culture is changed in order to gather support for cultural change across the organization (5000 managers completed dedicated training for leadership in a collaborative environment)
2. Develop a comprehensive communications and training plan that includes all the cultural levers that create change across the organization (we promoted company values in dedicated campaign and also fun training personas videos available here : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ2TzHPQDM9P65uRap2_PPqEqX-QYpxSm
3.  Enhance employee engagement, by applying effective change management principles by involving employees in the change process; (we record email addict testimonies stories to recognize their challenges and path to liberation)
4. Mobilize senior leaders to be accountable for the Collaborative culture they create in their areas with dedicated bonus targets (first target with their own social network usages and second target with their community health achievements)

The key success factor is especially to start with strong Change influencer’s network with support of few seniors’ leaders to create business exemplarity.

#WellBeingAtWork

As a consequence, we strengthened our Wellbeing at Work initiatives, because we saw positive correlations between collaboration benefits, employee engagement and digital cultural transformation.

For us  a truly Wellbeing at Work  go through cultural adaptation to digital attitudes like the rise of authenticity, transparency,  crowd-collaboration, flexibility , less bureaucracy, and an effective leadership by exemplary .

In this continuity, we are simplifying our leadership model to become more agile, customers communities oriented, fully networked mainly because high number of our knowledge workers are moving from a traditional pyramidal model to a collaborative networked community model with less complexity and more crowd collaboration

Today many analysts and experts recognized that Atos internal digital transformation has well evolved from ZeroEmail™ over Social Collaboration to WellBeingAtWork!

(see quotes selection below )

Our next challenge will be to succeed this move from a traditional hierarchy based organization to a collaborative, community led organization.

Honestly transforming towards a collaborative & networked enterprise is a long term marathon. Not really a “journey” without goal, but a kind of “relay race” in which we regularly welcome newcomers.

I will come back later to tell you how we will accelerate our mutation to the networked enterprise. 

Key Analysts and Experts recognition quotes :

From Gartner : 

“No Email initiative provides valuable lessons on driving big change through Social Collaboration. A cultural transformation of this kind and magnitude is very rare.  To prepare its workers and managers for this major transition Atos invested significantly in a communications, recognition and training programs.”

From Harvard Business Review : 

“Atos’s experience is evidence that an effective collaboration platform isn’t just a tool for communication, it’s a key to achieving smooth, integrated growth and competitive advantage in the knowledge economy.”

From Bloomberg Business :

“The Social network changed the method of working . It’s become more horizontal, less hierarchical. 

“Like other corporate social networks, BlueKiwi lets employees create online groups where they can exchange information or work together on projects. Co-workers can review one another’s documents and videos through the network and post comments on them there rather than generating a blizzard of reply-all messages.”

From Forrester :

“The Atos Zero Email program won the Forrester Groundswell Award for Excellence award in the Employee Collaboration category”

From PAC :

 « Atos ready for the real Digital transformation business »