Tag Archives: blogging

GonzoBanker is amazing, again.

I’ve been a casual reader of GonzoBanker for some time. I think I first got hooked in with their amazing summation of a bank boardroom discussion of Generation Y. So funny and insightful, and it reminded me of a few painful meetings I’ve attended in my short banking career.

Then, more recently, I fell in love with their prophetic piece on the demise of the banking industry. This article actually gave me great hope because so many people (including execs) at Vancity were emailing the link around. Great to work at a place where so many get it.

But today I’m commenting on their newest article, Web 2.0: It’s Not Just for Customers Anymore. The article makes an excellent case for banks to begin using social media, like blogs and wikis, internally as a way for staff to become more comfortable with and aware of these tools before embarking on a public-facing web 2.0 project.

One of the things that’s been interesting for me working at Vancity is the focus on the branch employee experience. I am very head-office-centric. I work at head-office and that’s where I see decisions getting made. But the majority of the employees live in the branch system. It’s what keeps everything running, and is the real centre of the company – where the action is. And yet there are 50+ branches, so it’s a hard world for people to feel connected to each other, share ideas and collaborate. It must be a very disconnected feeling, working out at a branch in Abbotsford, far away from any other Vancity branch, or head-office.

This problem is even greater with big banks. It must be hard to keep up any sense of cohesion amongst employees in such a fragmented, fractured work-place. This is where the future of the intranet comes in – allowing cross-company, inter-employee collaboration, idea sharing, building and communication. Hierarchies need to get flattened (what, a bank with hierarchies?) and everyone needs a voice at the table.

The writer of the GonzoBanker article, Cornerstone Senior Director Tripp Johnson does an outstanding job of putting down the reasons why banks should be using web 2.0 internally:

  • Most employees already know how to use this technology
  • The tools are easy to use
  • Blogs, wikis and/or RSS feeds provide a coherent, consistent way to find, share and leverage information
  • The tools are FREE!

He also provides many reasons why the vast majority likely never will:

  • What the hell is a wiki?
  • We couldn’t determine a tangible, quantifiable ROI
  • Bank executives wouldn’t know what to do all day without committee meetings
  • Leveraging the collective intellectual capital of our organization is something HR makes us say; we don’t really mean it
  • We have comment boxes in all our break rooms where employees submit their ideas on a regular basis
  • We don’t really want our staff collaborating; they might actually come up with new and disruptive products and services

A great article. The main thing I love about GonzoBanker is that they’re on the inside pushing for change and innovation among their peers.

PS: Oh, and I’m not just talking up this article because they unexpectedly linked to my blog as an example of industry folk who use social media (but thanks for the link-love, Tripp)!

A final reflection on BarCampBankSeattle.

I have been reviewing my notes and trying to write some coherent posts about BarCampBankSeattle to sum it all up. I’m finding that a tall order.

So much of the weekend was about the relationships, the dialogue, the intense collaboration, that it doesn’t do the experience justice to write it out.

I think I captured some of the key takeaways pretty well on NetBanker, in my latest guest blog post.

Have a look and please shoot me a comment there.

Why BarCampBank?

One of the interesting things about coming to an event like BarCampBankSeattle is trying to explain it to people who have no framework with which to contextualize it.

What’s a BarCamp? Why a BarCamp for banking? Why not just have a regular conference? What are you doing down there in Seattle? Why on Earth would a grown man go to Banking Camp?

It’s only now struck me that with new tools emerging to allow for greater online collaboration, whether you’re talking about BaseCamp, Facebook, Del.icio.us, LinkedIn or Second Life, the needs for in-person collaboration is changing. For people who are not using these new tools, nothing has changed and therefore they don’t need new ways of interfacing with their peers. But for those of us who have embraced these new tools and found that they have significantly improved their ways of collaborating and working together, we want our real world events to change too.

Along comes BarCampBankSeattle. I wouldn’t be interested if a traditional conference was organized this way because you’d be in a room full of people who want content served to them, just like people who are used to traditional web experiences (the irony of a term like “traditional web experience” is not lost on me) want content served up to them. They aren’t used to co-creating and collaborating.

So the idea of BarCampBank – that the right people are here and the right things are being discussed – really works because the people who have opted in to this process are all on the same wavelength when it comes to collaborating and working together. The guys at Trabian are leaders in this space, because their employees live in different cities and still work together through tools like AIM, Twitter, blogs, Facebook, BaseCamp and so on. So a loose, informal heavily collaborative event like BarCampBank makes perfect sense to the people who are here because we want new models for in-person meetings that fit into our new working relationships.

The penny dropped and it’s amazing to be here.

I’ll format my thoughts properly and post some content this week – I promise.