accelerate innovation with enterprise collaboration software

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Accelerating Innovation with Enterprise Collaboration Software Innovation is a creative and evolving process. For enabling it you need a network of professionals with different skills, active knowledge sharing and determined goal oriented teamwork. In most cases it is not rocket science. It is about ideas, productive collaboration and continuous flow of hands-‐on improvements. Lumo Research, the company behind award winning enterprise collaboration and innovation solution LumoFlow, has gathered the six best practices of accelerating innovation with enterprise collaboration software. Discover the latest trends and learn in practical terms how companies and networked organizations worldwide are benefiting from online collaboration.

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SENSE OF COMMUNITY Organizations are getting more global, distributed and network-‐oriented. At the same time providing a sense of community, a feeling of being a member of something larger on a mission, is getting more challenging. Especially in cross-‐organizational projects the driving team spirit and flow is often not as high as it should be.

Sense of community cannot be enabled only with the strategic visions or improvements in human resource management. For individuals the challenge is much closer to everyday activities, such as sharing a passion towards daily work or feeling succeeding together. How can information technology help companies to overcome these issues?

Participant’s personal investment in work depends very much on how committed he or she is to the team or community. In cross-‐organizational collaboration there is often no clear connection to other team members through shared history or social events. Creating a proper connection requires a lot of social interactions and communication on many levels. A kick-‐off event is always effective, but what happens between the events and meetings?

One positive sign of an effective working community is humor. Quick phrases, slogans and shared symbols are coming out while working together under a healthy pressure. Humor is not only about jokes but also about how people speak to each other. We send emotional signals all the time with our faces and gestures. That is why in the written

discussion people have significantly bigger risk to start arguing compared to face-‐to-‐face collaboration. Only one misunderstood message and a promising idea is pushed down.

In virtual teams people don’t have the luxury of seeing each other all the time. How can they succeed without major conflicts? Proper online collaboration solutions provide great variety of tools for different types of interactions. Social feeds keep people aware of activities close to them. Instant messaging gives possibility to ask questions informally and response if something doesn’t feel right. Transparency allows everyone to participate or just follow what others

are doing. Smileys, thumbing and many other simple “virtual gestures” provide quick ways to show emotions.

“ One positive sign of an effective working community is humor. ”


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If collaboration tools support our natural way of working together, the possibility of creating a strong sense of community has a good foundation. With an effective community it’s easier to start creating new innovations and business opportunities. Actually, some studies have shown that a virtual team can be more effective than a traditional team if on top of everything else the humor and small social interactions are well supported. ENGAGING EMPLOYEES Creating an online community doesn’t take months anymore. Large corporations have connected thousands of employees just within a few days from the initial technical implementation. The question is how much does this type of community actually improve the company’s performance. One thing is for sure, if

the system that is meant to support the community is not used it cannot help you. It is important to assure that people are engaged to use the solution to the purpose that it was supposed to fulfill.

Modern social media platforms encourage people to connect and share information very actively at the beginning. Connecting people is important, but there are still many other challenges to be counted. Quite soon people may realize that nothing really changed. Only the humorous email messages and coffee table discussions have been boosted with social feeds. After the first excitement people get bored and the world goes on as usual. Question is not about committing your employees to use social tools but engaging them to manage their work more effectively with carefully selected tools.

If the tool doesn’t solve significant problems in everyday work it’s too easy for users to become passive and stop following the social messaging. And it is a self-‐feeding phenomenon. A brand new social media platform is dead or used to the wrong purpose before you know it. This has made many decision makers think critically about social media in enterprises overall. There is a need for large

social networks in enterprises, but when you think about your organization’s goals it’s not an absolute value itself. What is the problem to be solved then?

“ After the first excitement people get easily bored and the world goes on ”

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To create sustainable value for both company and employees we should look more into everyday work. All big changes start with the small steps. Achieving targets begins by removing obstacles, or more practically speaking, user’s frustrations in daily activities. This is the key to engagement as well. Obstacles are usually the most obvious and self-‐evident ones. You don’t have to be a scientist to understand how we spend easily most of our day using search engines, browsing document folders, finding the right person or just thinking where to search next. Missing information is truly one of the biggest frustrations in our work; it has been shown in many research studies as well as in practical situations.

With social tools you can quickly share your question and see if anyone can help you. Usually there is always someone who knows more. And if this someone doesn’t know the answer, he might know where to search next.

Google has already lost a lot of search queries to Facebook, because people prefer asking from their friends where to eat on Friday night or what are currently the best shopping places in Berlin. Asking from friends is much

faster than surfing through the endless search results. Above all, people trust their friends more than anonymous web pages. This same phenomenon is now also happening in enterprises as well. BECOMING CO-‐CREATIVE Sharing ideas and transforming them constantly into new innovations together with network of varied stakeholders is often referred as co-‐creation. In other words it’s about being creative together across boundaries. But creativity doesn’t come out by forcing. Instead of

spending time on seeking and managing new innovations, organizations should lower the barriers to let the new innovations grow from the business that that they do every day. That is why co-‐creation is not a platform or a process. It’s more about a flow and well-‐organized ways of working together.

In the book “Power of the Co-‐Creation”, the creators of the co-‐creation framework Venkat Ramaswamy and Francis Goulliart explain that to become a co-‐creative company change must start from inside. First steps are taken with employees within the organization

“ Google has already lost a lot of search queries to Facebook, because people prefer asking from their friends ”


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before expanding the new methods to customer or partner collaboration.

Top executives, business managers and key employees are full of ideas that they like to share. Yet too many times seeds of new opportunities are lost in endless discussions, emails and stored PowerPoint presentations. Implementing new ideas should start already when the flow is on it’s best, not weeks after losing the edge of the excitement.

Especially in large organizations the problem is not that people would spend too much time on wrong ideas. It’s more about how people don’t dare to implement their visions drawn in presentations. There are many reasons for that. Perhaps one is too busy, another is afraid of change and the third one is simply avoiding the responsibility. These are the issues where online community can help.

You may have a great vision. Instead of pushing forward on your own, why not to gather quickly people who can help you to implement it? It doesn’t have to be as formal as launching a new project, but just an initial act to get the right people interested. First comes the passion and then comes the innovation.

Enabling the constant flow of co-‐creation requires a seamless

environment for managing the innovation processes and daily work. Every company has their own obstacles, such as lack of proper communication, bureaucracy or difficult-‐to-‐use IT systems. These among many other issues easily kill the flow. Collaboration solution that supports connecting people, sharing ideas, and

working together must be easy-‐to-‐use and intuitive. But to support innovation, the solution must also provide goal-‐oriented processes for delivering results. IMPROVING PRODUCTIVITY Social media services have been adapted to enterprises with a very obvious key difference compared to consumer solutions such as Twitter or LinkedIn. Instead of maintaining your social network of friends or colleagues, the objective above all is to be productive together. Productivity has many faces. For one it means making more money with less resource, another one sees it more from the perspective of creativity. But in business it always ends up to serving your customers better ways.

When looking at the bigger picture, we can see what happens when organizational structures are changing from hierarchical to network oriented. Old fashion measurable processes are managed with technology while people

“ In software solutions most common productivity issues relate to poor usability. ”

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above processes have started to work more agile ways. The question in this new agile world is how to control productivity on the long run if there are no exact models to measure and improve the success level?

During last decades enterprises have learned a lot relating to process oriented working methods. Businesses run on a network of processes. It is a good basis to start building something new as well. After all, working in a social network is not really so unstructured; constantly changing workflows are just more difficult to manage. No matter are you managing your work with lightweight workflows or well defined processes, the most important question is how to repeat the success and how to get rid of less productive activities.

In software solutions most common productivity issues relate to poor usability. Let’s take an example of a seamless work. You may have a good idea growing from an online discussion. You want to add it quickly to the meeting agenda. During the meeting there might come out some action points to be implemented. From these action points grow a new target with the roadmap. You may need to hook other people to work on it. They start sharing documents and commenting the following activities. By the time more employees and perhaps partners and customers are getting involved.

What if this all could happen in one seamless online workspace? People and information could be connected with easy navigation. Discussions, ideas and activities could be well connected for more effective working. When introducing new people to the projects, they could see the whole flow from the upcoming deadlines to the

very first discussions without having a full day hand-‐over sessions. Everyone’s effort and ideas would be there to be found and the project could already plant a new seed for next opportunities. That is what we call a seamless workspace. Unfortunately in most enterprises IT environment is not like this. COMMITMENT TO BUSINESS You want to produce supreme service, make it better and let your customers give a great value for it. All improvements in your social collaboration environment must support this basic fact. That is why social collaboration software should be

tightly connected to the strategic business goals as well.

Overall the way business strategies are managed and implemented has become more collaborative and co-‐creative. Strategies are not just fixed for the next five years at the time. Enterprises need to change more quickly and adapt to new challenges


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within their market. Therefore it’s extremely important to keep strategic goals all the time available and aligned with the lessons learned from daily activities.

Best signals are received from the everyday work you do with your customers. Your employees may have a clear message from the customer what is hot at the moment. Do you want to kill this new opportunity by saying it’s against your strategy or do you want to spread the innovation across the organization by developing the strategy towards customer need?

Large-‐scale enterprise resource planning solutions have already changed this rapidly. Just think how the most successful companies such as Nike or Seven Eleven manage to find the smallest trends across the world. They boost these trends with local marketing campaigns and collect the fruits within just few months before the trend is shifting to a new one. The trendsetters have become trend boosters, allowing consumers to decide what is in at the moment. The sales databases and product management must be very well organized with effective data mining tools when doing something like this globally.

In social collaboration reaching the right people at the right time can make a big difference. That’s why a simple transparency can get an organization closer to the truth as well. But we also have to remember that constant flow of new information easily frustrates people. Information anxiety is a growing problem, and we have to solve it by using effective ways to filter the knowledge. In social collaboration it usually means filtering the knowledge by the people whom you are connected with.

Business managers are working across enterprise with key employees. They have a great overview across operative functions and fresh ideas for new business opportunities. They also connect to executive level with strategic visions. Instead of sharing ideas once in a month in the formal meetings, there must be other ways to transform ideas quickly into innovations with the constant support of the members of steering groups and executive boards.

Ironically work of the executives and senior business managers is the most knowledge-‐driven and network oriented, while the level of using social collaboration tools is the lowest. Large social media platforms are implemented across enterprises while senior managers still collaborate with emails.

This fact should be taken in account when choosing new social collaboration tools. Twitter-‐style solutions provide too hectic feed of cryptic messages for people who are used to communicate with phone and email. That’s where many visionary social media consultants go wrong when providing their ideas to traditional industries. You don’t want to buy a spacecraft if you are looking for a good car.

Connecting executives and employees into collaboration that is driven by strategic goals can really pay off. It allows your company to become more co-‐creative and adaptive in constantly changing business environment.

“ Reaching the right people at the right time can make a big difference. ”

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NEXT LEVEL WITH GAMING Enterprise might have a good social collaboration ecosystem already growing, but the next question is how to make it better? How to activate the majority of people who are still mostly following the active part of the social network? One promising answer may come from less business-‐oriented technology solutions.

World of Warcraft, one of the most successful gaming platforms and online communities of all times, has millions of users. Many of the players haven’t seen the sunlight after getting addicted to the game. Why enterprise software couldn’t addict the people as games do? If you enjoy your work, a collaboration solution can maximize this pleasure by providing an active environment where you want to manage your work a day after day together with the people whom can help you to succeed.

After all, gaming concepts are not so new to us. There is a whole industry of consulting companies providing team building and management training events. Many of these services use gaming to improve organization’s performance. Challenge is how to adapt these and other promising concepts into everyday work.

The change is already happening. Gartner predicted at the beginning of

2011 that by 2015 more than half of organizations that manage innovation processes would gamify those processes. Overall this is not happening just in high level of modern innovation management systems. Look for example how customer relationship management tools provide different status symbols and bonuses to most successful sales managers. Or how project collaboration solutions provide quick dashboards and interesting overviews about the progress and targets in real-‐time.

If the information of progress and achieving targets can be shared instantly with proper visualization it already creates some competition between people and teams. This is a very simple but strong foundation from which the new platforms can be built naturally towards more advanced gaming concepts.

Actually, one of the biggest problems is that most of the information systems are built to alert if something goes wrong but the system stays quiet if everything is rolling to a right direction. While this is exactly when the system should encourage performing even better on the right track.

Effective collaboration solution reacts immediately when something positive happens. Active tools can enable the instant feedback and share success with other people who are working on the same goals. People are social and we like to share our success. It’s an excellent motivation factor that keeps us exceeding our targets again and again.

“ Why enterprise software couldn’t addict people as games do? ”


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LUMO RESEARCH Lumo Research Ltd produces award-‐winning LumoFlow online workspaces for collaboration and innovation. If you like to hear more about what enterprise collaboration software and accelerated innovation could do to your business, please contact us: Kristian Tanninen, Founder and CEO [email protected] Or visit our website: http://www.lumoflow.com/

accelerate innovation with enterprise collaboration software

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