 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley with another post collab talk tweet jam Summary and interview and I'm here today with Eli. Hey We've tried to I've tried to get a line a number of these and it's never worked out with our schedules But it works, but it's a bad hair date or a bad pajama day or it's a meeting immediately Well, this is it was a good topic and I know that goes back for both of us with our share point routes and kind of everything else It's a it was a You know as I expected it. We had a great dialogue some a bunch of Microsoft people on there I know they were really interested in question number seven. We'll come back to that but the topic today was Where the list here? Oh, yeah. Oh the need for community management and governance Let's try to find the exact word a guy. Yeah precisely. Yeah, and the governance and community mix I mean today the conversation Was really about managing all communities not just your social communities. So it was an interesting slant Why don't you introduce yourself first? Let's start there. Sure. Hey, my name is Eli. Hello world And I'm coming at you from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I'm a solution architect. I freelance and Predominantly with clients in Toronto, Ontario, New York and New Jersey So in the coven world, it's been much more focused on Canada and Toronto, of course but in past I Developer roots as far back as ASP net help get a group called the ASP insiders going years and years back and From there moved over to SharePoint and now office 365 now Microsoft 365 on power platform You know, there's a large group of folks that are in the community that I just kind of put in that bucket of kind of the Decade I've known people for about a decade Right kind of you know from those those events for some reason there was that I think it was SharePoint conference 2009 where I like the majority of people that I still interact with week after week But all got to know each other at that event. So and even yeah, that's it's right because there was this group at about 07 just before the launch of SharePoint 2007 And I'm trying to remember was that the end of 0607 where it was I was I was at Microsoft when that happened So is that those first two SharePoint conferences that were there in in the Seattle area, but as an employee So right and and I'm thinking of the one that was you know, where we went across to City Hall to have lunch You know, there were maybe a few hundred people there It was mainly sales and marketing but was really before the modern Era so to speak and then the next year it all exploded because devs were added to this thing and suddenly it wasn't Sales and marketing it became a heavily mailed demographic Unfortunately, and we're finally happily seeing that starting to shift back again, but yeah, it's true It was that time and it's it's getting along 12 13 years is you're saying today It's been nine years of collab talk, right? Well, you know, it's interesting too is that in the so as an employee I didn't do a session at the SharePoint conferences. I was over helping run the hands-on labs both times But in internal people that had no kind of the Microsoft your ecosystem, so they do their internal conference it used to be You're ready the ready event. I don't know if they've rebranded things, you know since then But I did presentations as an employee With Joe Olson and with Mike Watson with Bill Bear Largely around governance so funny back in 2006 seven and eight that amazing. Yeah It's just is crazy. So well, let's jump in so question number one How important is it to actively manage community activities within enterprise collaboration? and I mean my thoughts here. So a little bit of background is my answer to sometimes take There's an awesome book Called organized for complexity. I'm just going to shill for this fellow Nils flagging That really redefines how I look at Organizations, you know, it's sort of how do I understand in order to react to and inset good processes and governance for what they do in in the book is Three influential networks that you need to be aware of you have your org chart Which is really exists for compliance and governance. It's reporting its checks and balances It's making sure that reports get filed and regulatory compliance happens Then you have your value chain where the work actually gets done This is your product. These are the groups that are closest to your customers and Those communities are incredibly important because sometimes, you know working with a lot of pharmaceutical organizations We're much of their sales will be external, you know, their companies just set up to they handle sales for this anyway, however you deal with them, it's It's both a community outreach and that Edge of your organization that communicates out very important communities and it's not a difficult match And then you have these social groups your influencers and this decides how people are going to react to change inside the company And that's what I really thought the focus of today was about was these communities Let's let's let's say these these user communities and so it's super important not only to recognize them But especially during COVID now and work from home the one group that gets shut out of these because you know the org chart is about Regulate regulatory and compliance and in metadata and The sales group is trying to struggle on with the value chain But it's the social groups and how people are going to react to changes how they're going to react to work from home How they're going to react to tools whether they're going to resort to skunk works and slack or whether they're going to use teams and so It's it's super important It's it's it's it's every important because it's the one group that you can so easily miss missing this last year and in this Well, it's interesting some of the other questions were to get into some of the you know thoughts on best practices things around it I think that there's there's a lot of overlap between the first couple questions So this is the second one is where do you draw the line between lockdown and Completely open in managing enterprise collaboration because that's a lot of companies almost treat it like it's it's a switch It's either you know, let everybody do whatever they want or completely locked up and and usually my experience is both are wrong I would say on the open end of the spectrum But there have to be some you know governance policies and procedures in place I mean the thing about value chain, especially I mean, it's where you need the most openness and the most creativity because this is your product This is your response to customers. This is where people need to to pivot on a dime and respond to changing conditions And so for those people you don't want a bunch of governance around creating new sites You want emergency measures act inside the organization so that with COVID hits and tomorrow we have to lock down and work from home We can adapt and at least have a plan for it So so and then you have that regulatory group that says yeah, we need to have DLP to make sure that we aren't leaking secrets and and DLP turns out to be a fantastic tool and not only for those you know regulation of compliance, but just whether it's a swear index or You know what other other kinds of controls you want to put on this It's a tool that I don't think people understand how powerful it can be for that Well, I think this it's applicable here and you talked about too it kind of goes back to your earlier point and like knowing your audience knowing the community Nobody really not that I saw maybe I missed something, but nobody really talked about some of the differences between Internal only versus hey, we've got external folks in there. So that's where that really stands out is Hey, are we talking about sensitive topics? Are we you're talking about intellectual property like who's actually in this space? Who's aware? That's one of the things I love that that while it adds more You know things to the user interface like it within teams, but where I know it's very clear when I'm participating in Conversations or I join a channel or something that it's clear to me that there are external people that are involved there And I see that in outlook now So that 100% we know how to how did to you know? What standards to hold ourselves to and these visual cues that we you know to learn to put in in place in SharePoint sites You know, this is external you're dealing with public you stated things And so what you can reveal or or or disclose it becomes different than what we do on internal only sites Back to that idea of having you know this this edge communities that are talking to customers and put and and and and your pipeline And understanding that you know, maybe whether it's NDA Covers the content with the something else you need you need at least to have in mind exactly who your audience is And what's appropriate for the thing and make that clear I very much believe in this you know custodian model of if I let my owners understand What's appropriate then I've delegated much of that and I only need to deal with problems as they arise and have A have a system for that what I talked about they like the guide rails I love that idea of the guide rails as somebody else had shared one of the tweets About like bowling with the guards up just because you've got the guards up on the side Doesn't mean that you're gonna hit a strike, you know, it keeps you from going in the gutter Yeah, but yeah, I like question three again overlap here But you know what should Community management and governance look like within enterprise collaboration I was hoping to get some insights into what people are actually doing boots on the ground within their organizations You know, but so what what should it look like? Yeah, I mean, it's gotta start with the governance It's got to start with the policies and you know What absolutely needs to be constrained and what doesn't and for what doesn't make it as open and as free as possible Get rid of the guardrails. We you know going back 15 years in early SharePoint sites very large, you know fortune-tend company and wanted an approval process and Very quickly It became obvious that it was just getting in the way of work and they wanted to just spin stuff up And so we got into this idea of pre-creating sites and I'd ask forgiveness not permission Basically so that if something was reviewed in the first week and deemed inappropriate, you know or redundant You could roll it back But what people do what they're going to do and and it becomes Monitoring and management and less so let's constrain what they can do out of the box, right? Yeah, let them let them let them get into trouble and if something goes wrong, you don't have to name names but make those Failures public so that everybody else can learn from them, right? I used to use it an example and people didn't like it But I I would say it's like training a puppy. You can't go in like come home. You've been gone all day find that your your Puppy has you know gone to the bathroom in the middle of the living room and then go find the dog and smack it You've got to kind of like catch the dog in the act of doing that and then you know kind of Like no, no, no and like that and then redirect it and redirect the effort around it But it's yeah, so people didn't like that. I remember I used that when I was managing a team There's like so we're puppies that are wedding Like no, yeah, not exactly my my curb You're right, but you know and it's and it's the other analogy I had that was very much in line with that was you know share point was the best dog show in the world You know, it's the best dog and pony show where everybody looked at the window and said I want that dog But then they took it home and quickly realized it doesn't know how to fetch the paper It doesn't know how to do things the way we do them around here It doesn't know where the pad is right like you have to definitely dog whispers World that made it look So easy in every demo makes it look so easy and then and then you have to give the hard reality the company that No, you really are a strange and unique snowflake, especially unique snowflake. Sorry, and we really are gonna have to have some You know, it's not all out of the box We can't just do what your competitor is doing and implement that here because you're a different organization with a different value chain with a different You know set of you know sales principles and a different culture if you want to get into that But but again culture really comes back to what what's acceptable around here? Well, the fourth question was again is strong overlap here But what are your operational governance best practices for Microsoft 365? So again I always like to ask these questions that are kind of these broader Philosophical questions and then I'm you know, sometimes I'm like, what are your actual tactical? I like how are you doing this? So what are your best practices in your order with clients? And I just saw a great one yesterday It came through the LinkedIn channel. Maybe it even it was a Jeff Tipper to comment But it was really about You know, let's use my analytics in a positive way to Help take the pressure off of these employee 360s, which are you know, relatively falling out of favor, but you know, even better Is to lead people towards this other information that they have? Let's let's see what people are doing. Let's manage and management doesn't have to be constrained It can be monitor It's the best madest managers stay out of your way and when problems happen They come in and they help you clear the rocks, right? Right and that just means You know the way that satya talks about following trends on Yammer This is the pulse of the organization and if something comes up that needs attention This is where that first appears and it's it's it's it's the same for all of the Microsoft cloud technology Use it to follow the trends to monitor and and and manages people not with always with policies and automation because this tendency to automate every workflow in every process ignores the human side of it that that people get frustrated with because now I have this big Complex process imposed on me and I just need a place to do the work and somebody to keep an eye on it to make sure I'm not getting stuck. Yes, but you like listening to people listening to your employees That takes a lot of effort It does Yeah It's funny like I said, but been doing the tweet jams for nine years now. It's One of the things that I love about it is it's kind of exactly this It's it's a great way to seek it like what are the trends that people are saying like does it validate some of my assumptions or my Experiences or you know it or am I just completely like that doesn't sound at all like what I'm experiencing What are we doing right or what are we doing wrong, right? It's usually more the case That's what I say. I mean like the features where I hope this goes is People talk about maturity models every now and then and how to turn from a reactive organization to a proactive organization, right? And using the data and I think the best thing that we can use are the tools that are already there to do that monitoring maybe it is DLP to sense or or or Cognitive analytics again, this is jumping ahead a little bit, but it all overlaps Let's talk about sentiment analysis in in in making that an easier job for the managers who need to do that But stay out of the way in the meantime and let people do their work Well, and I think to add on to that so and we got in a little bit of a discussion later and You know Eric Overfield is giving me a hard time. I'm on a panel later with them today But about Automation and how much that you can go and automate and I use the example of like Tagging well, we used to ask our end user to go and tag and nobody ever did the tagging or they didn't do it, right? And so we should automate needs like oh, yeah, how that that just solved everything like no It doesn't 80% you still have the 20 but it's better than asking employees to do all 100% of that So you monitor you've got DLP. You've got other level of automation sentiment analysis all those kinds of things What's happened to community? You still then need to have you know surveys You know talk to people have conversations ask about what's working. What's not working Have those feedback loops in place have Anonymous submission of issues of questions You know a feature request that kind of stuff and then the third side of that I You know and passionate about is having a transparent change management process. So people see we heard you Hey, we disagree with you on these things. This is why we can't do that Here's our compliance conversation back and forth, but for the things you requested of these other seven of your ten Here's the state of Change of these things we're trying to implement immediately a couple things and that is so critical when when people and I use this Was the I shared this Buckley is them out there With with Daryl Webster. I said it's something I've a phrase I've used when people are involved in the process. They're more likely to support the process only consult the people you don't want to push back And everybody because everybody you don't consult is going to push back that's that's that's the way it happens, right? Right. And so yeah anyway, so there's a facilitator. I'm not a designer you know in many states I was just thinking about taxonomy design and and how successful they can be also and They're they're in those workshops I just facilitate the solution people come up with their own and then they own it and that's the magic of it and Any groups that you don't include and management will say oh after three We know exactly what we want to do and of course we do but if we don't talk to groups five six seven Those are the ones that are going to push back right your experience the same Exact same thing and it lessons learned I started my career as a business analyst in a project manager Was it even if you're asked people like are these all your requirements is these are these all the outcomes that we're driving towards and building towards Then what happens is you get that first iteration of it? Then they go in and look at and be like I asked for all the wrong things So if you're not refining that design refining that model where you actually end up It might be very different. I always use it as an example The classic and important film Spaceballs, of course where they jump to plaid, you know that like that whole thing So basically the idea here is like two spaceships one chasing the other If you've got your calculation Slightly off a millimeter in your measurement No big deal if you're going a foot But if you're going into hyperspace you're in a different galaxy at the end of that process So you need to be adjusting your measurements throughout so yeah Visibility visibility visibility and process process process. I mean it's I said also today that it's really not about People want me to plan a solution. They want me to you know plan for launch and know what's gonna happen on day one It's like no, no, let's let's let's let's let's let's manage Let's let's make sure this is adaptable and adjustable whatever we design That's a process itself, right and we need to read redo that process every time, you know Every so often to make sure we still built the right thing, you know And it's not for day one because then you're out of date on day two, you know If it's content if it's such it's the process to create the process to So that people can follow the process and and everybody understands life cycle. They understand governance They understand how things change and not just how they work, you know I know this is a different topic entirely, but you know, there's the reason why you're management So you're not every you know good technical person should be people managers like it's a different art form It's a different skill set. There are brilliant facilitators Who can't manage their way out of a paper bag of a project? But get them up in front of a group of people and move everything along for that They're just brilliant at that and so yeah, but anyway different topic Well question five move it along here was how do you enforce corporate policies and content life cycles without? discouraging collaboration within the enterprise I Think it's a back that idea of you want your Train your custodians let them know it is delegate that task, you know help them understand what what what the way is Back in the site owner models It was very much about you know to become a site owner you need to take a little bit of a training piece and during that you snuck in your governance for how things should work in addition to all The SharePoint isms of how sites work. I don't think that's changed very much. You empower your people delegate as much of that as possible and Monitor so that you see when people are getting stuck and they need to bubble things back up You know keep my project management activities is Understanding roles and responsibilities. I think that's also true about whatever the container is the community that you're a member of Is knowing like what's the purpose of this thing that we're here for and then having owners in place You know to your point owners in place that knows when people are going outside of what the scope of what we're trying to do here And that you either redirect them or be like, you know, that should be included here and expand the scope and adjust there Yeah, I agree I put out the idea today that I mean we've written so many governments documents and in every conference has a government track You know that that largely becomes a dead document. We want these to be living documents, but They never get the ownership of That you want them to right, right? So what's the better way to do it? And it really comes back to people and trusting your people But then having again that monitoring the stuff that sits behind the scenes that act as those guardrails That that that keeps things in the general direction that you want them to swim, right? Well question six Slight departure in in theme. There's is what tips can you share about making enterprise collaboration more inclusive and increase all overall engagement because Inclusivity and that could be you know, however, that's defined and again with know your community but like I brought up the fact that How people are accessing the community versus mobile device versus browser versus native app It could be like hey are there, you know visual or audio needs with the community that you're serving and and so, you know How do you ensure again that you know, you are being more inclusive and how you're designing this community? maybe it's because I see companies that already have some critical, you know mass of Social groups and so whether that's a Group for women whether that's a group for buy and sell whether that's a group, you know with with bulletin boards Whether it's a group that it coordinates flu shots whether it's a group that coordinates training, you know It can it can move from the purely social into those business pieces and I find that the by getting people involved in in what you know social groups that get ignored those water cooler groups and the buy and sells Management doesn't love them because they aren't the governance. They aren't the org chart They don't seem to fit with that model They don't fit with the revenue generation and so I can't justify this as an income But they need to be served and people need to do this and I think that's where The more you can include people at the entry level It's free training for the business purposes and you and you empower people with on the tools To speak their minds and to form the the women, you know of our of Contoso You know experience group, you know, I think it even goes to you know when a lot of with Yammer and teams there's a lot of organizations that Lockdown immediately the use of emojis and stickers and and and I think that's even then it's just a especially with younger generations that are used to the various instant messaging applications and And texting and those kinds of things. They're just you know, you know It's a different language almost around it, but it allows some people to be much more expressive around the you know their involvement in a discussion and things around there and and I mean, obviously you want to have going back to those the guardrails the guide rails of you don't want people to be Offensive and be sharing things that are inappropriate for the workplace But if I'm you know responding back to people and giving a little thumbs up icon or a smiley face, you know or or as I use more commonly the straight face like kind of You know, you know that that Emoji, you know, right, but but use that to express it Just adds again that that other another layer to The the conversation that happens within a community a hundred percent people shouldn't have to you know If you seem slack use in the organization and you've locked down emojis and Jiffy Maybe that's why right and you're locking out millennials from from conversations What what's what's perfectly acceptable to some groups not so much for others and again, it's Keep an eye on what's going but stay out of the way of the work And then when something needs to be discouraged jump in and discourage it with a hammer, but Let let the conversations flow, you know, let people generate ideas and and and and be great How do you challenge them to be great? You have the places to where I can you know ID 8 and and contribute to here's how we can improve product Here's how we can make our processes better. Here's how we can get bureaucracy out of the way Here's how that workflow could be three steps quicker, right? And and and and really empower and encourage those voices and if that means anonymous Ways to do that do that all sometimes right. Yeah, sometimes well, that's why you know having the there's value in having that even that Just the anonymous employee Feedback just like that box that's in the cafeteria You know, it's a digital version of that right and and so well That's just like in managing people and getting feedback Sometimes, you know, if you have a room of 10 people three or four are going to be very You know vocal and and you know and you'll have some quiet people that you need to you know Maybe just two or three of you or maybe a one-on-one or you send an email and they share something back And it might be a day or two later after that So you have to you know realize that not everybody operates on the same spectrum And not everybody is comfortable in the same way of sharing their feedback. You've got to provide those multiple, you know mechanisms agree like and on so many of those sites that we gave say to the site owners the custodians to say Here's how SharePoint works. Here's how teams works It was very much a how-to and and and and less so a why and I think exactly that thing about teaching the same things as you Would teach your facilitators you know Pulled opinions out of the quiet people in the room because They're there there's geniuses the loud people. They just don't express it as easily So so, you know those same tools where we think of just how to use the platform Extend those to these other ideas and think Think of them as people not is how do I how do I train you so so so I'm automating my process through you That's not what it's about. That's not where you get the biggest games, right? Well, our final question here Eli What feedback would you give them to Microsoft product teams to improve the community management governance? So kind of a broad question that we have a few Microsoft lurkers So they're always interested in those questions the way that I stage those well in my feeling on that was Very much. Let's keep on extending these cognitive services to these other platforms. I think with social Conversations in general Sentiment analysis can be very powerful again for taking that pulse and and showing me where something is flashing orange or red And and and where it's flashing green and I can get new ideas and I can encourage those patterns in other groups Also great things to watch and and and we're talking about pattern analysis Which is something that the cognitive service is a great for, right? So I think there's some natural extensions that I hope we we start moving towards there and did you have any other? What were your ideas on that? I'm very curious. Well, I Especially it's a third party, you know those tools for these look I made it Yeah, I made a comment about you know, they look there's our you know both of our sponsors You my company at point tie graph, of course with it as analytics And I know one of the things that I always hear from John and edit tie graph Which is you know wanting expansion of the api's I hear that from my engineering team, you know There's there's always that that ask and I know but I think that it's you know increasingly cross workload being able to You know, that's where we third parties are already doing this But cross workflow and even you know, this is beyond Microsoft But cross cloud the ability to go and create and manage My users across, you know The multiple clouds it won't go get into name dropping of what those where I think those are But the reality is that there are very few organizations in the world That only operate within the Microsoft stack at every aspect of their business. There are other Providers out there with other solutions and they need to all talk and work together I think there's tremendous opportunity for partners and for companies to go and do custom work there I mean the other if we've got better api's around that if we well Here's the other thing I was gonna bring up. I think there's opportunity to go in and build some really cool things You know with the the all of the hullabaloo around the productivity score and Microsoft tracking, you know, like that information Which fundamentally was people that didn't understand what it what it is and how it's used to the first place Thinking the worst, you know, hey, I can't believe this being tracked be like, what do you think? analytics reporting tools do Right and you know not not that people can't go use information in the wrong way and you know look there are managers It's really if there's a manager that is looking in see I see that you had 57 Messaging requests that came to you last month that you didn't respond to in less than three days You're a crappy manager like what are you doing? That was the weekend and we had Monday off as well I mean, you know, right. Yeah, but he many many cases for this and it's like it's an out-of-office lesson It's not a messaging or availability act. You know, it's it's a Yeah, I mean it would be curious to talk to marketing groups in that sense, you know and say, you know What kind of analytics are you doing in in our? Social media feeds and how can we turn that on our internal feeds to do something similar because it's not just, you know The sentiment it's all kinds of things that people are asking for it might be suggesting new product You know directions and such and those come from inside as well as without right and especially inside is you have people Again in those edge communities like sales and marketing that that observe what customers are doing that also see what's happening on the inside of the company and and can bridge that they would probably just as is well like to then influence back to the your product groups your product teams on You know, what are you guys talking about where we go in and this is a great idea That's that's a weak one, but how do they raise the ideas? How do they listen in on those conversations to understand the same way that they do on social media channels to understand customers? You know, it's funny how much things change and technology is advanced and and that we're I Find myself with because I agree with you on that But that's brings me right back to where I started entering this whole space that got me into collaboration technology in the late 90s was around project management and building decision support systems and trying to learn from the patterns in our Projects say what assets can be reused? What are the patterns as for a delivery team? That we're seeing frequently so that we can reduce the amount of time that it takes to take You know a solution to market or to to have a customer go live and kind of all those things that kind of learning that analysis We're looking. Yes. It's much more complex The volume of content. It's just amazing. It's incredible to think about compared to what we were doing 20 years ago but the The desire of the kind of information that we want out of our collaborations is the same Right and and again to come back to you even earlier Talked a little bit about maturity models And I think that this is also where Microsoft can really follow if if you know the the lowest levels on that totem pole are ad hoc solutions and then very reactive IT groups and I Reactive companies and then we get towards proactive and finally taking advantage of the information that we can gather Yeah, um, Microsoft. I mean, that's really what they can help with. I think companies need to realize Yes, if I add cognitive services, I probably still need to do some training. It's still some investment So much you can learn from like the history of Microsoft search by the way You know what i'm saying like oh, yeah Let's let's let's learn from the data right and and and use that to proactively guide things forward ongoing opportunity to learn from search and But you know, it's actually and you brought the maturity model That's something that so microsoft if you're aware of this you live it like so our good friend mark anderson led part of the effort and it's a community effort around Building documentation that's all up in docs at microsoft.com around the maturity model But that's a great place to go and look at for any company to see where where do I fit across the workloads? What do I need to do to improve? Because microsoft is very much looking at it in the same way like if our customers are kind of at these levels Here's the baseline How do we raise them up and that that's part of their Strategy with their their rnd with their product development and mic 2 which used to be ecm 3 and something that mark I think is building on and sort of using his inspiration for some of these maturity model things You have very good guides because not only do they help you scorecard yourself and where you are today I use the ecm maturity models with clients all the time, especially with knowledge management Yep, but they also provide the guidance on how do I move to that next step? And what kind of things can I look for to to get me there? But again, I think this is where microsoft can provide those tools to to make an organization to give them the information That's already being collected. So it doesn't become another initiative Um of a company. I don't have to build it. It's already there. I just have to Dedicate some resources to understanding how it works Training that dog for my own house And and and then letting it be a great dog, you know great to let it great to be in great service, right? Right Well, Eli, I really appreciate your time today. It's great to finally connect and and uh, see your face again someday Well, I'll be back up in Toronto and virtual hugs. Yes, of course. Yeah, we'll see you at some event But uh, anyway have great rest of the day and thanks everybody for watching All right, thanks. Have a great rest of your week people All right, perfect. Well, I'll have the edit. I'll probably have this up live tonight So I'll ping you via the socials when it's live and now I gotta go jump on a panel So I'll talk to you soon likely client call same thing. Thanks for the invitation and uh, glad I finally worked out Take care. Talk to you later. Bye