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Transcript: Bearingingpoint
Aaron Strout:
I'd like to welcome today's special guests. We do have two of them. Normally we do one, but from what I understand Nate Nash and Jay Hariani work as a team. They are from Bearingpoint, the well-known consulting firm. Nate is a manager in the emerging markets sector at Bearingpoint. Jay is a senior business consultant. Welcome, guys. Thanks for joining us today.
Nate Nash:
Thanks, Aaron, how are you?
Aaron Strout:
Good. So, I know we were supposed to do this podcast originally at the Enterprise 2.0 conference last week. Unfortunately, we weren't able to connect, so we're doing it via the phone. Not quite as fun. But why don’t you guys start telling us a little bit about who you are, what your backgrounds are, and then maybe you could talk a little bit about what the emerging sector – what your group focuses on at Bearingpoint.
Nate Nash:
Absolutely. My name is Nate Nash, and obviously I'm a manager at Bearingpoint and been working in the emerging market sector now for about four years out of my roughly six-year career at Bearingpoint. Typically we focus on providing technology solutions to international development projects funded by the USAID, World Bank, the UN, things like that. And as of late we've been really interested in weaving Enterprise 2.0 and kind of the tenants around social media into our existing projects. We're also pitching in to lead or assist on internal Bearingpoint Enterprise 2.0 efforts as well.
Aaron Strout:
Great. Jay, would you like to maybe chime in, talk a little bit about your background?
Jay Hariani:
Sure. My name's Jay Hariani. I'm a senior business consultant here in the emerging markets sector as well. As Nate said, we focus mainly on international development projects, a lot of international work. Recently we found Enterprise 2.0, sort of stumbled upon it on a project and ended up deploying Bearingpoint's Enterprise Wiki, which was our first sort of Enterprise 2.0 project. So, that was how we got sort of started on this, and now we're looking at ways to weave Enterprise 2.0 into what we do with our clients, specifically around the government 2.0, helping government use Enterprise 2.0 technologies to better engage their constituents. So, that's what we're working on now.
Aaron Strout:
Now, tell me you guys work for a big company. My father actually worked for Bearingpoint a little while a few years back. Sometimes in big companies – I came from Fidelity Investments – it's not always the easiest thing in the world to get some of these 2.0 tools to roll out, to get them to embrace this concept of openness and collaboration. I think everyone in theory likes the idea, but particularly when the rubber hits the road and you have to get the compliance folks in place and there's a scary, "What are our clients going to think? What are they going to say?" how have you guys gotten over that and maybe talk a little bit about how you got this rolling within Bearingpoint and what you're seeing so far; how much adoption are you seeing in the company?
Jay Hariani:
Sure. I think to start the best way to describe how we got this project moving was, first off, we had visionary sort of very open to new ideas CIO. He was instrumental in allowing this project to move forward. Nate and I were able to sort of cultivate it as a rouge, underground project for a good amount of time but to really see the adoption skyrocket and get the infrastructure we needed to roll this out to 18,000 or 17,000+ folks we needed executive buy-in, and we got that, luckily, through our CIO.
So, I think that's key, aligning the stakeholders, as we like to think of it. Consultancies is important. You need to get legal, HR and IT all sort of in alignment in order to make these things move forward. Part of that is understanding the limits of the bureaucracy, understanding what those different corporate services groups want from the project and making sure they get it. At the end of the day, we're all here to push the organization forward. We all see Enterprise 2.0 and open collaboration as something that's tremendously valuable to the business we do and our clients, and it's in everyone's best interests to see that occur. So, I think that initial alignment's important, and once you have that you can push forward and move on to some of the more fun stuff.
Aaron Strout:
Good.
Nate Nash:
To add on what Jay said, there was an element of sort of personalization and community associated with this viral sort of adoption method that was different and I think stood out from a lot of the traditional IT projects that had come down through corporate, and we really tried hard to not only implement a tool that enabled a community, but to actually grow a community that wanted their sort of existing business processes to be enabled by that tool, and that led to slower I think adoption but much more sticky, which we're very proud of and we think is great for the implementation.
Aaron Strout:
That's very helpful. Thank you for chiming in with that. Now, I have a quick question. You guys keep a blog which looks like it's outside of Bearingpoint, but you certainly reference the fact that you work there. It's called E2Oh. It's the letter E, the number 2 and then O-H dot com. Talk a little bit about this, and how much does the organization embrace this? Is this something that you guys do on your own as a side project? Does the content get reviewed by your compliance? Part of why I ask this is not because I'm trying to be invasive, but again, I think a lot of companies deal with this issue of how do you do it, who talks, how do they talk, where – is it done outside and inside. Give us a little insight into that.
Nate Nash:
Sure. We can't really talk about this with first mentioning that Paul Dunay is our director of interactive marketing here at Bearingpoint. He's been very open and encouraging in (1) developing corporate blogging policies that are flexible and we think very rational, and around that we decided that we're consultants. To quote Jay, "We're selling the wet wear," if you will. We're selling our minds. So, to establish sort of an online presence, a personal presence, if you will, that, again, connects ourselves with our clients – literally Nate and Jay with their clients is of some value. And it is not moderated by any sort of corporate function.
We do say, though, that the views expressed on our blogs aren't necessarily those of Bearingpoint, but this is sort of how we think, and we happen to work at Bearingpoint. We believe what it represents and establishes a viable sort of brand or personality sort of federated with the Bearingpoint corporation.
Aaron Strout:
Great. Jay, anything to add to that?
Jay Hariani:
Only that we think it's a no-brainer for consulting companies or professional services companies. I'm only a line on a proposal, and I'm only a self-verified CV or résumé to a client. But if I have a blog and I can demonstrate what we – what in the lexicon is referred to as thought leadership publicly in a way that's attributed to Bearingpoint and also attributed to myself. I think that's really valuable to the organization to have their assets to their consultants out there practicing thought leadership and showing some innovative new thinking around topics that are interesting to our clients.
So, we think that's it's opening a crack in the corporate façade but in a way that's extremely positive to the organization. Nate and I really believe in Bearingpoint. We want to push the organization forward, and we think this is a good way to show what's possible through public blogging.
Aaron Strout:
So, let me ask you a question. One of the things that community, social media, this whole concept of collaboration does is it breaks down some of these walled gardens, and it scares the hell out of a lot of consultants. It scares the hell out of analysts because of the fact that part of how companies get paid for their intellectual property and their knowledge and their smart people is by keeping that information inside. Now, it seems like you're to some degree at odds. Now, I totally embrace what you guys are doing, and I think it's wonderful, but how has that worked, and have you had some tough conversations? Obviously, having Paul on your side doesn’t hurt, and I've had the pleasure of meeting Paul. He actually does blog and do some podcasting for the We Are Smarter project where folks are listening to us now. Can you guys talk a little bit about that?
Jay Hariani:
Sure. It's also important to know that we weren't sort of the first folks to have to tackle legal and management concerns when it comes to exposing our methodology or exposing our thought process externally. There's a site which is really unique to Bearingpoint in many ways. It's called OpenMethodology.org. Bearingpoint is sort of showing the way here in open sourcing or allowing the entire world to have access to one of our pretty critical methodologies, so we've crowdsourced our information methodology, information management methodology via OpenMethodology.org.
So, it's worth taking a look at, and it's sort of allowed us to push past a lot of the internal hurdles that those folks in the information management crowd are already at.
But sure, to answer your question it is – it can be contentious. It can scare the living daylights out of corporate services folks. I think that as organizations become less hierarchical and more transparent over time this is something that's going to be raised again and again. And it helps to sort of set the policies, set the regulations right. We recently came up with a corporate blogging policy, so when we blog externally it is under the [inaudible] of something that our framework that's been laid out by corporate and legal. I think the organization has to have a consensus that these things are positive and that they will help grow value, build markets, etc. Once they've had that you can kind of turn the levers and get the gears to turn on the internal services folks to get things where they need to be. But that can be a process that I think should start with the organization wanting it to happen.
Nate Nash:
I would add to that too that one of the sort of key tenants that we used for some of our internal Enterprise 2.0 implementations and some of the stuff we try to relate to our clients is if your project is focused on ways in which it could possibly fail you've usually written your own destiny. So, while risk and compliance is very important, I wouldn’t say focusing on it all the time is going to lead to the most successful social media implementation. There's an element of how do we make this work, not how is this going to hurt us. If you can shift your mindset that way and still account for risk but move that way it's usually a bit more plausible.
We tried to push that sort of internally to say, "How is this going to make us better? How is this going to make us a better consulting firm," as opposed to, "How is this going to possibly pose risk to us?"
Aaron Strout:
Great. It's interesting that was a theme that came up a few times at Enterprise 2.0, and that was that while risk and legal have a job to do, and that is ideally they eliminate all risk, but we know that's rarely ever possible. So, the real key, if I'm hearing you guys correctly –and I tend to agree with this – is working with those groups and saying, "Where can we find the happy medium?" We can't eliminate all risk, especially if we're going to pursue social media, but where can we get us as comfortable as possible so that we're not shooting ourselves in the foot? So, we assume some risk, but it's risk that we do feel like is worth taking and senior management is comfortable. Am I capturing that correctly?
Nate Nash:
Yeah. I would say so. I think there's an element too, especially when you talk about if it is so that Enterprise 2.0 is specifically focused on internal social media, so sort of within the firewall, if you will, with that paradigm there's an element of trusting your users that seems to become quite foreign in large-scale corporate America. And I think social media and some of the Enterprise 2.0 concepts force or act as a forcing function to sort of encourage trust amongst employees. There's lots of reasons not to trust employees I suppose, and that's why you have some of the various policies in place now, but there's lots of reasons to trust them, and when you do trust them they really do start to drive more value than you thought that they might have otherwise.
Aaron Strout:
So, I'm going to ask a little sidebar question because I can't resist. I had checked out your blog at E2Oh, and I see your Twitter and your Dopplr badges there. I've got to ask what's in Birmingham? It looks like you're traveling to Birmingham in a week or so Nate.
Nate Nash:
Birmingham, Alabama is the nexus of all things Enterprise 2.0.
Aaron Strout:
That's what I've heard. It's really a hotbed.
Nate Nash:
That's where my parents live, so I'm going to visit.
Aaron Strout:
Not to get too personal, but I always – I like to keep an eye of Dopplr. For anyone listening, Dopplr, like Flickr, no E at the end, dot com is a site where you can go and log your travels so you can connect with other folks in the Web 2.0 space. It's for anyone really that – like I connect with my brother and sister that way, and if you happen to be in a common city at the same time then you can hook up for a coffee or a drink or whatever. So, I always like to see where people are going, and it's amazing some of the places that people end up.
So, the last question, and I know we've actually – I've asked you several questions along these lines. During these interviews I like to say for companies thinking about getting started with social media or community what are one or two things that maybe each of you can make a recommendation? We've talked about it already, and I think you've talked about some of the more important, and that's getting some of the internal folks comfortable with it and what you focus on. But maybe one prescriptive step for each of you for our listeners?
Jay Hariani:
Sure. I would say a good first step is realizing– at the end of the day, what is this technology going to do for your organization. Assume you're able to get a corporate blogging platform set up, assume you're able to get a corporate Wiki, assume you're able to give your employees a voice and they start to use that voice what's going to happen to the organization? Spend some time thinking about that and make sure your organization is comfortable with that.
We see the end state of Enterprise 2.0 as a more transparent, more open, more innovative, more collaborative organization, so if you want your organization to get there that's what's going to happen if your Enterprise 2.0 internal initiatives are successful. So, just think about that. That's now a technology change. That's an organizational change, and you're going to want that to happen if you're going to get involved in Enterprise 2.0. So, I think thinking about that before you start deploying technologies and making sure you want that for your organization is important.
Aaron Strout:
Nate, any recommendations from you?
Nate Nash:
Yeah. I would say that while there is sort of a technology element to a lot of this, the core where this I think differs from traditional implementations and what I think people should take onboard when looking to implement Enterprise 2.0 is that truly at the end of the day this is about empowering a community or enabling a community. In order to do that, having a leader or a project manager or even an advocate associated with the implementation that – without any technology at all enable or empower a community is really important. You need charismatic leaders. You need people who can engage on a – pick up a phone and actually talk to someone and make them excited about becoming an open and transparent organization. So, adding that in to your traditional making sure costs go up on schedule and kept in balance is critical for these sorts of implementations.
Aaron Strout:
Helpful advice from both of you, so thank you for chiming in. Jay, were you going to say something?
Jay Hariani:
I was. I think that, again, we're both saying approximately the same thing that we really see organizations shifting in a really fundamental way, and I think let's all be comfortable with that. Let's be willing to see what results from that. I think that'll be really interesting down the road.
Aaron Strout:
Great. So, I love that advice. My final question that I like to ask folks – and I'm putting you guys a little on the spot because I didn't give you a lot of time to think about this ahead of time – but I like to sort of find out who influences the influencers. So, if you guys could each read one blog and one blog only for the rest of your life whose would it be and why? Nate, do you want to start?
Nate Nash:
Sure. I'm a big Andrew McAfee fan, and I'm not sure I'm much of an influencer. I'm sort of more the influenced. Andrew McAfee's blog I really find a lot of value in.
Aaron Strout:
Well, you've got a blog out there, so you're influencing somebody, right, whether it's your parents or your brothers and sisters or whatever.
Nate Nash:
Yeah. The people I pay to visit it, yeah.
Aaron Strout:
Yeah. Jay?
Jay Hariani:
I recently started reading something called Daring Fireball, which has really sort of smarmy, Apple-centric take on technology and on enterprises. So, I don't know if it's the one blog I'd read for the rest of my life, but it's what's on the tip of my tongue right now.
Aaron Strout:
Well, it's a good one. Neither of those have been mentioned before. I'm particularly surprised with the McAfee because he was one of the speakers at Enterprise 2.0 really sort of seen I think as the father or at least the coiner of the term. We're lucky enough to ideally have a podcast with him coming up sometime in the next week or two. So, great recommendations from you both. This is where we wrap up, so I'd like to thank you both for joining us today, and I look forward to sort of paying more attention to what you're doing both on Twitter – I've started following both of you, and on your blog.
Nate Nash:
Great. Thank you.
Jay Hariani:
Thanks.
Fri, Jun 20 2008
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