Social learning networks for collaboration

1. Social learning networks for collaboration Angie Wilcox 3 June 2011

2. Sydney Cancer Centre & the Chris O’Brien Lifehouse at RPA

3. Case studies in the Health industry by Headshift Who are Headshift? As the world's largest social business consultancy: • They help organisations make the most of social technologies to engage people in learning and improve business performance Social Business Strategy and Consulting: • Cultural change management, training and education Workforce Engagement: • Workforce collaboration and engagement strategy • Knowledge sharing, collaboration and social intranet service design and development • Change communications strategy, program development, and execution 3 Case studies in the Health Industry (Case studies in health, 2010)

4. National Health Service (NHS) South Central Primary Care Trust Alliance User adoption and engagement • User adoption and culture change was predicted to be the biggest hurdle to project success. “How can we get people to use a new system and not make it seem like another time-consuming chore in their busy work day?” • Headshift worked with the client on an engagement strategy, initiating pilot projects and discussions on the platform and making sure new users were encouraged through workshops and ongoing online support.

5. NHS Collaborate • The benefits of building a pilot systemHeadshift built a pilot system to explore how collaborative social tools would work for the health care community. This allowed us to gauge the potential uses and proved that the community is willing to embrace the technology if they perceive it can help them achieve their personal and collective goals.

6. Patient opinion As a start-up, Patient Opinion sought to address communication gaps between carers and patients in the health care system, with the ultimate aim of improving NHS health care provision. The NHS already had a number of reporting and rating systems in place but this formal ‘performance’ data seldom recorded the real experience of patients and carers. Headshift built Patient Opinion from scratch. The main interface aggregates the latest country-wide opinions alongside blogs, reader commenting and feed aggregation. The challenge for Headshift was to ensure the system was easy to use for a broad range of web users.

7. Applied to Lifehouse Change issues – • New EVERYTHING • We don’t have free access to the workforce • Diverse workforce • Patient (customer) at the centre • The current intranet site is heavily used so is a great platform to start from • Diverse workforce which currently interacts mostly within their own craft group • Hierarchy / power relationship • Why change fails – it is inevitable that mistakes will be made, but knowing what people REALLY think can help determine corrective actions.

8. Considerations – social learning networks for collaboration • Need to understand our audience. (Missing, lurkers, actives and champions) This can be kicked off through our clinical and patient workshops and with on-line support prior to their transition to Lifehouse. • Self-service/access. Social software is effective as a platform for worker communication and self-expression. Employees can update pages, comment, link, tag, and start collaborative conversations with other workers without the need for assistance of any kind. Not all staff have access to a personal computer – need to provide physical spaces, tools, open access. • Education and rollout. One advantage is that as a “new” workforce, we have the opportunity to induct all existing SCC staff transferring into the “conversation” by introducing them to the tools as part of their entry into the organisation. We will be using videos of organisational theatre, case studies and patient research which we hope will make for compelling content. • Leadership and culture. Our leadership team have set organisational behaviours that can be used as a context for embedding social learning. Collaboration, respect, and discovery. Also, some of the fear or resistance to the change can be addressed through access to transparent, un-moderated feedback.

9. Benefits – social learning networks for collaboration • Social networks amongst workers – profiles, expertise, grapevines, connections, followers, communities, tribes, creating a safe environment for sharing. • Healthy information ecosystem. A social intranet can effectively break down data silos and connect enterprise information together into a deeply interlinked ecosystem. It is not about the tools, and it’s not about replicating how we currently communicate on e-mail. • Better knowledge retention and reuse. Naturally, when daily work is far more social and observable, it leaves behind artifacts to reuse along with the identity of those that created it. It is imperative that we look at inspiring a few key champions to start the threads of conversations.... That includes our patients, partners and our workforce. • Observable work – iterative collaboration and sharing, transparency, conducted in social environments, interactive blogs, wikis, artefacts, participation, anyone who is interested can contribute/collaborate and it allows new hires to learn more quickly. • Social business intelligence – what the organisation knows and who knows it, self document ideas, decisions, processes etc; continuous access to workers and their interactions with each, customers and business partners.

10. Reference: Case studies in health, 2010, Headshift Ltd, London, UK, viewed 05/31 2011, <http://www.headshift.com/our-work/category/sector/health/>.