Portals and KM

JackBe Presto Provides Self-Service Business Intelligence on a Mobile Basis

I have writtten about JackBe several times over the past few years and watched their evolution from a mashup provider to using their technology to support a new wave of business intelligence (see for example, JackBe’s Presto provides Real-Time Intelligence with a Focus on the Business User). What originally started as an enterprise mashup platform has now evolved into a real-time business intelligence platform that connects directly to live data sources and delivers information through Enterprise Apps and Dashboards as needed by business users. I recently spoke with Chris Warner, VP of Marketing and John Crupi, their CTO, about their latest release of Presto which focused on smartphone and tablet users.

Chris talked about the rise of mobile in general and with business intelligence in particular. One analyst puts the current use of mobile for business intelligence at 8% of total use. Gartner now claims that by 2014 a third of business intelligence will be accessed through mobile devices. If they are including tablets in with mobile I can see this happening.  Chris said that this increased use can take two forms. It can be a new channel for current users and an opportunity to reach new users with new apps. He hopes that the latter occurs, as it is a great opportunity.

Chris gave me an example. A data center operation manager, who supports several centers and is constantly on the go, needs to be able to monitor what is happening at these centers without having to log into a desktop or even lap top computer. They need a mobile tablet to get alerts, check on performance levels and respond to calls for support. They need a mobile operations dashboard. There are many people who do have operational responsibilities who fall into this category of need.

GE Aviation is one of JackBe’s  clients using Presto for data center monitoring. GE Aviation has been working with Presto over the past year and half and has been very successful. They attribute some of this success to being able to develop Apps at a much more rapid rate than with previous technology solutions. For example, “A request came in from senior management asking for an additional App to be developed after the majority of the solution was implemented, ‘the project sponsor was able to send a last minute requirement to their developer and the was App built and deployed in less than 24 hours’ Normally, this would have taken them several weeks due to all the politics and policies GE has in place for their BI environment.

Chris predicts that operational dashboards, in general, will be one of the killer business apps for tablet. Other examples include agencies within the US Dept of Defense that use Presto for situational awareness, Smartronix uses it for budget performance management within its government clients, and Qualcomm looks at real-time program management KPIs. This all makes sense to me. Here is a sample dashboard on an iPad.

Chris went on to say that business intelligence is under going a renaissance and taking new forms. I would agree and it is the new forms that are driving the resurgence. First there is big data as the volume of content expands. Part of this growth is driven by user-generated content through social media. There is also an increase in the quality of analytics and focus on predictive measures.

Looking at social media there is some structure present through metadata. For example, Twitter has hash tags and location. You can look at volumes and tagging to see where spikes occur around topics. This and other sources now allow for real-time intelligence so business users can get information while it is still relevant to their decisions.

So support this new wave of business intelligence software needs new capabilities. Chris outlined three components of these requirements. First there are live connections, second, self-service assembly, and third pervasive apps. You need to get information immediately from multiple sources. Users are increasingly expecting self-service in all that they do and finally, you need to be able to publish and use apps anywhere. This latter requirement is where mobile comes in.

Chris and John showed me some components of Presto that address these issues. One of the features that I especially liked is the ability to preview what an app looks like in desktop mode, smart phone portrait and landscape views and tablet portrait and landscape views. You can see a close up of screen that shows these options below.

Here is sample screen optimized for a smart phone in the landscape view.

Creating apps is done through visual mapping and making selections from drop downs. Below is you can see an app being developed. I really like their ease of development and ease of use.

Mobile users are starting out expecting self–service. Most of them go out and get their own devices and do not wait for their firm to supply them. These same people are not going to want to wait for IT to set up their business intelligence apps. I think that Jackbe is making some wise moves to not only go into mobile in a significant way, but also to enable self-service for users as part of this offering.

 

 

 

Moving Your Web Site into the 21st Century

Geoff Bock provides a useful look at what firms need to do to make their Web sites relevant to today’s Web users with is article, Beyond the Web page: Broader Web strategy a must for business success. He sees 2011 at the end of Page-oriented Web sites. Geoff notes, “enterprises can no longer afford to maintain their digital presences simply as collections of Web pages designed for full-screen browsing.” This is because “we now expect a level of interactivity and immediacy in our digital experience that far outstrips the capabilities of the page-oriented Web to deliver.”

So what needs to be done? Geoff suggests that we start with the customer experience and work out from there. This is always a wise move. Start with business use cases and not the tools. One way to do this is to get more granular with your content segmentation. Geoff suggests offers some examples: a “news article,” a “music album,” a “marketing plan” and an “instructional video.” These provide a more business oriented approach and set the stage for the required metadata. For example, a news article is a text file and has such fields as “headline,” “byline,” “body,” “image” and “subject keyword.” A music album is an audio file and has such fields as “title,” “artist” and “genre.”

This makes a lot of sense and opens up many possibilities including common elements across content types such as byline for a new article and artist for a music album. Getting the right level of granularity for metadata is one key element for a successful content strategy. You need to make content accessible and targeted for search engines and people. You also need to set content for the semantic Web by making it understandable to machines. Geoff sets some of the conditions for making the Semantic web work.

 

 

 

Why Apple Needs to be More Like IBM

Mark Fidelman wrote a very spot on article recently, Why Every Company Needs To Be More Like IBM And Less Like Apple. I will not repeat it here and suggest you go to his original. However, I do want to add my own perspective that is driven by both industry observations and personal experience with both companies. Apple created one of the more memorable Super Bowl Ads in 1984.  It portrays IBM as Big Brother controlling the mindless masses and Apple coming to the rescue.

Mark writes that this ad “does not represent today’s IBM – or Apple for that matter.” I would add that the roles are now completely reversed.  As Mark notes, IBM is successfully fostering an open culture within its 400,000 employees and the 8 million participants in the IBM developer network. IBM is looking at new ways to better understand the conversations that are occurring within these groups and to continuously support transparency (see Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Innovation Lab Tour).

I have also heard from a trusted source that with Apple’s policy a developer who works on Apple iOS is not allowed to work on another mobile operating system unless certain conditions are met. So many companies have to maintain separate development units for such systems as Apple iOS and Andriod. Apple has consistently supported closed systems and IBM has supported open systems for quite some time.

I did work for both Apple and IBM in the 1980s as a service provider. This was the white shirt and tie IBM and the jeans and sneakers Apple. However, the IBMers, were, as they are now, very friendly, open, and seemed to lead balanced work lives. There was an openness to new ideas and a wide range of personal interests. I had less exposure to the Apple people but they seemed to work very long seven-day weeks and their job was their life. I grant this is just an impression and I could be wrong.

Now I remain a fan of many of Apple’s products. I find the employees in their stores to be very helpful and they seem to be empowered to go the extra mile for customers.  As a disclosure, I am writing this on a Mac, own an iPhone and an iPod. I use iTunes all the time. I hope they do not take them away from me for writing this. IBM has also allowed me to attend Lotusphere for the past two years so I have a better understanding of what IBM is doing. Here is a summary of my notes from the 2011 Lotusphere and here is a summary of my notes from the 2012 Lotusphere.

But what will happen to Apple now with Steve Jobs gone? My advice to Apple it to reinvent itself as IBM did and develop an open culture and an open product strategy.

Mark titled his article, Why Every Company Needs To Be More Like IBM And Less Like Apple. I would add Apple to the list of companies that need to be more like IBM. 

 

harmon.ie Expands Its Social Email Offering to Include Lotus Notes

harmon.ie provides a cross-platform suite of enterprise collaboration products designed to boost user adoption of dominant enterprise collaboration tools. These include bringing central components of SharePoint into Outlook so people can collaborate on documents within their main flow of work. I covered hamon.ie earlier this year (see: harmon.ie Provides Social Email to Help Drive Enterprise Collaboration Adoption). Their new Notes edition now enables Lotus customers, many of whom have deployed SharePoint, to bring SharePoint functionality into the email environment for Notes users, without a costly migration to an all-Microsoft platform. For example, this cross-platform strategy enabled utility company American Water to integrate SharePoint and Notes rather than budget an additional $3 million to change its 7,000-user Notes implementation. Here is sample Notes screen that shows the harmon.ie documents pane, with presence for the latest SharePoint document modifier and document ratings visible within Lotus Notes.

I recently spoke with David Lavenda of harmon.ie to learn more about their latest moves. In addition to the Notes capability, harmon.ie has also integrated several instant messaging tools including: Lotus Sametime, Microsoft Link or OCS, and Cisco UC. These expanded capabilities allow harmon.ie to become an aggregation platform operating within the email environment, whether it is Outlook or Notes. You can now see an activity stream within the email client.

I think this both adds substantial efficiency and draws many more uses into the social software usage. This has been their experience. For example, the multi-national firm ABB more than doubled their SharePoint usage after implementing hamon.ie to further engagement.  Prior to this, their employees had to log into 6 to 9 separate communication and social apps on their desktop. Now they can do much of the same work within the email client, where people spend most of their workday.

David showed me how it works, including some of the new functionality since we last talked. They have now added a people tab to go with their document tab in the right side bar that sits along with the email interface. This people tab allows you to see colleagues and what they are doing. It also suggests potential new colleagues based on several factors: who you email, who you connect with through other channels, and who you share documents with. You can add these new colleagues to existing groups or start new ones. Temporary groups is the main way work gets done now and harmon.ie makes it is easy to start and stop groups. Here is a sample screen showing the people tab.

Here are some of the other new capabilities in their latest version beyond suggesting colleagues, harmon.ie 3.0.

• An activity stream providing both document and people status updates, marking the first time that this information is available in a multi-threaded activity stream format.

• The ability to open documents as well as view detailed user profiles from the activity stream, allowing users to perform these tasks without leaving the email interface. This reduces context-switching distractions that decrease productivity and collaboration, as well as inhibiting SharePoint usage.

• One-click phone, chat, videoconference and/or email connectivity to colleagues from the activity stream, including support for Microsoft Lync/OCS, Lotus Sametime and Cisco UC, eliminating the need to change windows to initiate communications.

 harmon.ie will be soon announcing plans to provide the ability to integrate Connections into Outlook and Notes. Like their SharePoint capability, this will allow a tighter integration of social business capabilities with email.  I think that this approach of bringing new social capabilities to email, where people do most of their work, will greatly speed to adoption of social business. I know that I still sometimes use email with attachments as a collaboration platform, but if the social tools are inside email,then there will little need to resort to using old school attachments. harmon.ie has also seen this play out with numerous clients. They plan to continue to enhance this offering and I look forward to seeing what is next. 

 

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Summary Listing

Here is a listing of my notes on Lotusphere 2012 that have been posted so far. I was very pleased to be back again after last year with support from IBM. I think that IBM has made great progress in furthering social business in ths past year. I have a few session notes to do and will add them to this list rather than do a new post. Here is a complete listing of my notes from last year’s Lotusphere 2011.

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Opening Session

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Monday Morning Press Q&A

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Mobile, Bring Your Own Device

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: IBM as a Social Business

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Customer Conversation – Russell’s

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Opening Session Tuesday

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Innovation Lab Tour

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Opening Session Wednesday

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Social Business for SMBs

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Music Industry Social Evolution

Why Apple Needs to be More Like IBM

 

Photos of Lafayette Opelousas Louisiana Area

Here are some photos of the Lafayette Opelousas area. I have already written about the music and food of the area.  In this post I want to simply share images from the beautiful farm country and the some of the towns within it. You can click on an image to enlarge it.

I followed a guide provided by the St. Landry Parish Visitor Information Center that showed the scenic byways.  The last three images are zydeco greats from a mural in Opelousas. I was fortunate enough to see Clifton Chernier and Boozoo Chavis live before they passed. I have a number of music videos with Buckwherat Zydeco and hope to see him live some day.  

                                                    

 

Eating Great Cajun Food and BBQ in the Lafayette Opelousas Area

I have enjoyed Cajun food for a long time and even learned to cook a good bit of it myself. See for example, Making Brown (Country) Jambalaya and Making a Great Gumbo. So I was excited to be going to one of the home bases of Cajun cooking in the Lafayette Opelousas Area. Here is what I found. It did not disappoint.

On the way I went to Houma where my father used to take me fishing in the 50s. I ate lunch at A-Bear’s Café, 809 Bayou Black Dr., Houma, LA, 985-872-6306. I had a shrimp sampler with shrimp gumbo, fried shrimp, stuffed shrimp, and shrimp cakes, along with red beans and rice.

   
On my first night I went to Prejean’s, 3480 NE Evangeline Trwy, Lafayette, LA (337) 896-3247 that has live Cajun music. I had crawfish sampler – crawfish bisque with a nice thick roux, fried crawfish tails, crawfish corn bread, crawfish etouffee, and corn pie. Everything was wonderful.

     
The next day I had lunch at Soileau in Opelousas, LA on the recommendation of Herman Fuselier at the St. Landry Parish Visitor Center.  I had shrimp gumbo, shrimp creole, and fried shrimp.

     
For dinner I ate at Randol's Restaurant, 2320 Kaliste Saloom Rd, Lafayette 337-981-7080. It also has live Cajun music. I heard Terry Huval & The Jambalaya Cajun Band. I enjoyed 3 lbs of boiled crawfish in a spicy boil. I almost finished them. They were really good.

     
In the morning I sampled some great food at the Savoy Music Center Cajun Jam I reported on last week. Great food was shared. There was some hot boudin sausage, pecan pie, red velvet cake, and hogshead cheese. I probably do not want to know what is in last item but it was delicious and I had more.

     
The next day I ate lunch at The Taco Sisters 407 Johnston Street, Lafayette. I had a smoked fish taco and a smoked shrimp taco. They were amazing.

   
For dinner went to the Pont Breaux Cajun Restaurant, (formerly Mulate's), 325 West Mills Avenue, Breaux Bridge. They had live Cajun music. I had shrimp gumbo and baked duck with rice dressing. I could not get enough of it.

   
The next day I went to 2Paul's Radically Urban Barbecue, 2668 Johnston St. Suite C-4, in Lafayette. I had the sampler with ribs, brisket, sausage, pulled pork, fried potato chips. It was moist and as good Cue as I have had anywhere. They were really nice and let me stay after they closed to watch the Saints game until the Saints had the victory well in hand. 

 

 

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Music Industry Social Evolution

This is another in a series of my notes on Lotusphere 2012. I am very pleased to be back again after last year with support from IBM. These notes cover a session on Music Industry Social Evolution with Broadcast Music Inc. or BMI.

Kevin Forbes is the BMI enterprise architect.  Mike McReady is the IBM business partner working with BMI from Prolifics.  Kevin came from healthcare into the music business. BMI is one of three performing rights organizations in the US. Most countries have just one. It is a very complicated business. They provide royalty distributions. They track music performances and pay royalties based on data.

Being in the music business is highly social, both inside and outside organizations. They are trying to revamp the entire IT enterprise for BMI. They are just getting started and are three months into it and plan to take five years. They are changing the entire platform. Growth had outpaced existing infrastructure.  Things are working but they want to perform better and drive down costs.  There are now a lot of silos with little reuse. They are taxing their systems with too much replication between the scenes.

The vision is supporting collaboration inside and out. They want to target the right information for right user by role. One goal is SOA and to build core functions as services. Mobile is another key strategy and they want to deliver more mobile apps. They are using IBM Connections, Websphere Portal, SameTime, and Mobile Portal Accelerators. They are using IBM Rational tools and Tivoli for service management. Here is an interview I did on Rational with Gina Poole (see IBM Rational Offers Collaboration and Innovation within Software Development)

They are implementing the entire WebSphere back end for integration. They are using Rational for software management. They use Netezza, SPSS, and Cognos for business intelligence. It is a complete overall and they plan to take five years to complete it.  Here is an interview with Mike Rhodin on the IBM acquisitions strategy including Netezza, SPSS, and Cognos. Kevin presented a complex diagram of all they are doing.

They have links between SameTime, Connections, and WebSphere both inside and outside the organization to build a more social business. On the business intelligence front they have a lot of data about music use across the world. They are tying Netezza, SPSS, and Cognos together for this analysis and looking to provide real-time data analysis of this music use data.

They will tackle the plan by segments of the architecture based on business priorities or are core dependencies for the architecture.  They will use the wikis in Connections for their teams to do work. Rather than building their own collaboration infrastructure and have to continue to update it, they are using these IBM tools so they can focus on the vision.

They have restructured the development teams to avoid silos while giving specific responsibilities. One of the challenges is running the business while this change is underway.  There are nine work streams: portal team, IBM agility at scale, Rational, Quality Center, Business Analytics, InfoSphere, Center of Excellence, Enterprise Architecture, and Program Management.

They opened it up for Q&A. How does the social part unfold?  Kevin said the development is about high collaboration. One use case is using social to find best development team members for each task. They have some external social uses cases but these a secret for the moment.  

I asked about what the end users do with the tools they have described. BMI has about 10 million songs and tracks their performance.  Licensing is tricky. There are rules and regulations. Ownership of copyrights changes a lot through things like divorces. Examples of tracked performances include YouTube TV, radio. Their BMI end users need to track all of this.  Whenever a song is played on a radio station a royalty needs to be paid by the station. Even when a song is used on YouTube a royalty needs to be paid. It seems like these external facing tracking use cases are the most interesting but that is what they cannot talk about at the moment. However, the complexity is certainly apparent. Things need to be transparent and accessible. For example, anything stored in an email is potential lost revenue. I look forward to the time when they can relive these social use cases. 

 

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Social Business for SMBs

This is another in a series of my notes on Lotusphere 2012. I am very pleased to be back again after last year. It covers “Social Business for SMBs,” (Speakers: IBM Clients - The Law Offices of LaVan & Neidenberg, Czarnowski, and others).

Ed Brill hosted the session. IBM has been a provided to SMB for a long time. Now the analysts say it will be a 7B market for social business. Cloud will be big in the SMB market for both cost and staff savings.  Roxanne is CIO from the Fashion Institute in the Los Angeles area. They have 1200 employees and 78 IT people. Ken  LaVan is from law firm LaVan & Neidenberg. They represent Vets for disability claims and this is a very good cause. They are in Fort Lauderdale.   There was also John Roling from The Chicago trade show firm, Czaronowski.

Roxanne said they use a lot of IBM products. They have several WebSphere portals. They use Rational now and will start a pilot of Connections soon. Ken said they are growing the firm and found they had too many different apps. They have spent the past two years getting entire business into a unified IBM software platform. The trade show people are big on mobile and have a BYOD policy. They are using a lot of IBM mobile products including video chat.

Roxanne said their students and employees are pushing for more social tools and also BYOD. Ken said their goal is to make sure people are productive and take a very social approach that is different from the legal industry in general. They use SameTime for quick exchanges. John said once they rolled out BYOD the mobile adoption rates shot up. They are half Android, quarter Apple, and quarter Blackberry.

Ed asked about the role of business partners for SMB. Roxanne said having a trusted partner is critical. These are co-creative relationships. Kevin said the partnership was critical for close support and John said they have a trusted partner to supplement their own efforts. Roxanne invites IBMers and partners in for timed presentations and sharing. They also do conference calls with multiple partners for idea sharing. John said they know the relevant IBM people on Twitter and they can ask questions from these people, usually getting quick responses.

Roxanne was asked about the concerns over going with one vendor. What about best of breed? Roxanne said they like the integration with a single vendor and will go with IBM even if not top rated on that app as long at it is near the top. So far that has been the case.

It was asked about social technology use. John said they have a pilot for Connections scheduled. They have 450 desktops and thought they might be too small for Connections but with their 15 different locations it is now important for these social capabilities and Connections now comes into play. They have been using SameTime a lot and the mobile access was huge.

Trade shows manage Facebook pages for themselves and their clients and public facing blogs that have driven traffic. They also tweet and get feedback through this channel.  Roxanne said they have college Facebook pages, as well as teachers doing blogs. They are looking at Cognos for sentiment analysis of this social activity.  The law firm has several blogs, as well as Twitter and Facebook. This drives about 20,000 new people looking at Web site and they get about 800 leads from this traffic. It was a big investment at first but the rewards are great. Roxanne said they use YouTube and students have created videos.

The law firm has about 120 employees with a two person IT department. They look for ease of use and management. They blog a lot, giving advice to Vets. They are developing XPages for clients to look at just their own content. The ability for remote wiping was raised. The law firm was unaware of this but the others do it.  

I asked about wiping out email from an eDiscovery and compliance perspective. They pointed out that the data is still on the server, not on the individual device. Of course, but I did say this was likely a naïve question. The law firm said they installed analytics to decide on what clients to take on as part of an intake wizard they developed with IBM and they have doubled their new clients. By making business operations more efficient they grew clients by four times and staff by three times. Lotus Notes is their main collaboration tool.

Ed asked what they have heard this week to help SMB? Roxanne was impressed with the activity stream as the glue to pull everything together.  Also, the ability of Notes to be viewed through a browser will be great. John also said the activity stream and all the things you can do with it. I agree. The activity stream is especially useful for small businesses as I have directly experienced. In my own case even working with the group of four people in the same city but different locations, I found that social tools and especially an activity stream is a big time saver and takes a lot of stuff out of the siloed hallways of email. It was a useful session. 

 

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Opening Session Wednesday

This is another in a series of my notes on Lotusphere 2012. I am very pleased to be back again after last year thanks to support from IBM. The Wednesday general session included: “Social Business Technology,” Keynote Speaker: Manoj Saxena, IBM General Manager, Watson Solution; and other speakers including Tim Berners-Lee, Director, World Wide Web Foundation.

Tim Berners-Lee began the morning. The web was supposed to be about collaboration and social business was wrapped up in this original idea. The IP internet protocol was developed in 1969 so you did not have to think about the machine. Tim was in Geneva in 1989 thinking about interconnectivity to allow things to be shared through http and url. Today when you are on a Web site you will find that you are interested in more than documents but the event or context. For example, a calendar can be private and shared. This is part of the new wave of linked data through the semantic web. It means that the data is out there so the computer can understand it unlike simply putting documents up. You can see relationships. You can see context because the computer can.

Linked data allows you to compare data from different parts of your life or your business. Then you can share data so everything gets richer. Google Maps allows you to put things in context. You can also see timelines and learn from them. Space and time are two big dimensions. There is also personal identity. While there are privacy issues there is lot we can learn. People are more exciting than locations.

Social is not just a bolt on. It should be a part of what you are doing. The ability to include social adds much richness and power.  You can overcome silos but having granular security is key for it for it to work, as there are times when you do not want to make things open for good reasons. Tim thinks all this social stuff is really exciting. It is about empowering the person but also about empowering the computer to do much more.

 
Manoj Saxena came next. He led the Watson team. I have to say that I played against Watson at a Forrester event. I won the first question and so decided to quit while I was ahead. I am sure my lead would have been gone quickly. Watson leverages $6 billion in annual R&D investments and over $14 billion in analytics acquisitions. Watson can process 200 million pages in three seconds. It started in 2006. It is now focused on commercialization and is looking at healthcare. I talked Mike Rhodin about this last summer (see IBM's Mike Rhodin on the Convergence of Social Business, Analytics and Commerce: Part Two)

Ninety percent of the world’s data was created in the last two years and it is mostly unstructured. Watson looks at both structured and unstructured data. Half of IBM’s customers say they do not have the information to make decisions. Watson can look at the unstructured data. Customers are now eager to use Watson. It understands human language.  It generates hypothesis based on evidence, and adapts and learns. Watson so does probalistic applications rather than limited to deterministic applications.

They are applying Watson to healthcare. It is a huge market. Medical information is doubling every five years. It is hard for docs to keep up. Now 20% of diagnoses are likely wrong with bad consequences for both life and costs. Watson is not making decisions but giving the doctor better information to make decisions. It can go through a structured process that can also make use of unstructured data. It can build a confidence model for a diagnosis.

He said they are approaching Watson with excitement and humility. They want to try to understand what doctor’s real needs. So they are partnering with healthcare organizations. Cancer is a disease that we can do much more work on. Doctor and patient communities are both growing. They are looking at beyond healthcare to financial services and government applications.

Now Andy Miller CEO from Polycom, a leading in communication, came up to talk about collaboration and the cloud. He talked about video communications. Video can now be delivered in many channels and is not limited to a room. Polycom is trying to make video pervasive. They are now offering it through the cloud and through mobile for all sizes of organizations for B2B and B2C.

He started with healthcare where 80% of hospitals and top phrama companies are using Polycom to flow medical information. This allows for remote diagnosis and treatment. At the same time 80% of top universities use video for better education and it is growing at a very fast rate. The US military is using video for command and control. Video can be on a helmet to allow for command to better see what is happening in the field.

Top auto manufacturers are using video to determine issues on the assembly line. Entertainment companies are using video to reduce time to market for productions that are created in disperse locations.

There are five trends in the use of video.

Younger generations werebraised on video and expect it

Mobile device proliferation - 64 million tablets now 320 million by 2015

Network readiness - #G and 4G and wifi – they are ready to facilitate the bandwidth

Social connectedness – 800M on Facebook and 140M video chat in 2012

Cloud delivery – large investments here

Now the session moved to a panel with the three speakers. Tim said that net neutrality is important and we need to stop SOPA. Ahem. These laws not do respect human rights. There was much applause. Manoj said there will be new opportunities but they will require new skills. You need people who can bridge the divide of generations. Andy talked about the digital divide between generations from looking at email vs. text messaging etc.

Manoj said they are getting many ideas for how Watson should be used from dating services to childcare. They are looking at information intensive industries such as financial services.

Tim said we need people who understand they new technologies and can stay current. Andy said that now firms should use existing applications in place to add video capabilities. You should understand requirements and look for new uses. Manoj said that you need to educate your organizations on the possibilities, Move forward in an incremental manner and then share successes.  Andy said there is a level of investment to put in the infrastructure for video but then leverage it fully for very little additional cost.

Tim said the semantic web is important as people start to connect you can get disruptive change. You need to be the first with this disruptive change to fully benefit. The cultural change needs to overcome those who hoard their data. You also need to go beyond black and white differences. People need to learn from each other and see the other’s perspective. 

 

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Customer Conversation – Russell’s Convenience

This is another in a series of my notes on Lotusphere 2012. I am very pleased to be back again after last year thanks to IBM’s support. These notes cover my individual interview, Customer Conversation – Russell’s Convenience with Raymond Huff, Russell’s Convenience. 

Ray began with an overview of Russell’s Convenience. They are a convenience store chain that only locates in large buildings of over 600,000 square feet and are usually on the first floor. They have stores in Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Hawaii. Ray is located in Denver. They are an IBM shop with Notes, IBM services and servers. Recently, they have been using Lotus Live (aka Smart Cloud for Social Business) to become more social and get great financial benefits in the process. 

Russell’s has used Lotus Live to help dramatically reduce the costs of a major remodeling campaign they have undertaken. They are doing a significant upgrade of their stores. This can be a complex process because in addition to the architects, contractors and other normally connected with this type of process, they also have to involve the building landlords and others who have a stake in what is going on in the front of a very busy building. This involves both the look of the store and the hours of construction.

Their agreement with IBM for Lotus Live involves not only an attractive price per user per month but also the ability to invite guests such as those involved into the construction effort to have access to the system at no additional cost.  Ray also said he was very impressed with the interest that IBM showed in his relatively small organization. They invited him to an all day seminar with other company presidents a few years back to go over the benefits of social business. In preparation IBM took a look at his business at no charge to him and came up with a number of useful suggestions for using social.

Looking at the current construction effort, they were encountering a lot of extra costs. A last minute crisis would a occur with landlords and Ray or a staff member would have get an expensive last minute air ticket to deal with it first hand. Communication with contractors was not always received and there were some costly change orders to undo unwanted work. Everything was also taking more time.

With Lotus Live all of this changed, they went from over 20 change orders to under two. They were able to schedule site visits well in advance to secure cheap flights and eliminated last minute visits for trouble shooting.

How did this occur? With Lotus Live they could simply put the latest information on the site and invite the stakeholders to see what was the absolute latest. There was no confusion over allowable construction hours. There was no confusion over the latest plans. The stakeholders knew to go to the Lotus Live site and trust what was there over what they had in their hand. They looked there before placing a call and it was there 24/7. This saved a lot of money in travel costs and change orders, more than paying for itself.

Now Ray said they are looking to new uses of social business. Operations people use it to communicate with software service providers in the same way the construction effort is going. Successes in one store are quickly communicated to other stores in all locations. For example, one LA store had great success with a breakfast burrito and now others are trying it. They are also using it to better handle customer feedback and minimize the impact of complaints. They have always been very responsive to customers but now they have an additional channel to handle this and share experiences across stores to avoid repeating any issues of concern.

Ray said they are looking to use SameTime for direct interface with staff and partners. I think this is a wonderful and very concrete example of the power of social business. 

 

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Opening Session Tuesday

This is another in a series of my notes on Lotusphere 2012. I am very pleased to be back again after last year thanks to IBM’s support. The Tuesday general session included: Keynote Speaker: IBM Senior Vice President, Software Solutions Group, Mike Rhodin; and other speakers including Wendy Arnott, TD Bank; and Bill Taylor, Author & Founding Editor, Fast Company.

Mike Rhodin began by recapping yesterday. Michael Chui from McKinsey came out to discuss their research on the connected enterprise. I have written about it (see - McKinsey: Social Business Software Continues to Improve Organizational Performance).  They have been studying technology in the enterprise for the past ten years and have done their current survey series for the past five years. They found a recent jump in micro-blogging and other social capabilities. The adoption is across industries.

    
Mike asked about micro-blogging. Michael said your need a business strategy connected to it. At the same time there is n bottoms up adoption. Some use it for sales, others for different reasons. You need to identify where benefits occur and then try to scale that benefit.

Mike asked whether it is one tool or an aggregation of tools. Michael said there is great variety. The benefits include increased access to knowledge but also things like decreased time to market. There are a great variety of benefits.

Mike pointed that over 90% of companies are getting hard ROI benefits. But you often have to start with a soft ROIs and then get the hard ones.  The fully networked enterprises, using tools inside and out, are getting more benefits on either side of the firewall than those who work only on one side of the firewall. I used the old term firewall but I think that concept is also changing as the McKinsey data indicate.  

Michael said that there are interconnections between different uses of social tools across an enterprise. This plays out in analytics and seeing where results occur. There is more than sentiment analysis as you can also turn employee actions into useful content and data. You can mine what people are doing to learn from it. It is a better way to create a knowledge base than old school knowledge management. This was also why I first got excited about the opportunities for social media in the enterprise back in 2004 (see An Enterprise 2.0 Poster Child in the IT Department).  Mike said that now you create a corporate asset of the accumulated knowledge. Michael said you can also reach outside the enterprise.

Michael found that some of the networked enterprises back slip. He concludes that work needs to be done to ensure success. You need to embed social in the work flow to get results.  Ahem (see Putting Social Media to Work).

Mike noted that becoming a social business requires a cultural shift, Wendy Arnott  from TD Bank Group came out next. I thought she would bring Regis along but I guess he had other plans. They have 85,000 employees, some working at home and on the road. They focus on their retail strategy and have become the 6^th largest bank in North America. They are trying to weave social into everything they do. This is a challenge as an early adopter in a highly regulated environment. But to win you need to change the game. They saw that their customers are actively involved in social media. So they established a social media team to listen and respond.

They decided to open on Sundays and this was first in Canada. Their employees were less excited at first. They involved employees in the process to understand their concerns. At the same time many employees were positive and helped shift the culture to see this as a source of company pride. In another example, a person at small remote branch came up with an idea that spread across the enterprise and social media amplified it so it got recognized and adopted.

Their mobile app was launched and employee feedback helped refine it before it was launched with customers. They have a saying, believe in the value and not the problem. They were able to listen to objections and shifted the focus from risk to opportunity the help make the cultural changes. Social media was involved in this transformation.

Wendy offered five keys to success:

Leadership commitment matters – always on any change

Dedicated social business team- you need stewardship

Greta partnerships – get all stakeholders at the table

Get into the weeds – with business teams and showcase successes

Engage employees – they will become great advocates.- they developed champions who played a major role in adoption

At TD success was defined as a great employee experience. One challenge was a single sign on and the solution was a combination of business and IT efforts. A second challenge was content integration and much progress has been made here also.

Mike introduced the co-founded editor of Fast Company, Bill Taylor.  He said he was going to cover strategy innovation and leadership, rather than technology. We are in the age of disruption. You need to be original. Strategy as advocacy. Winners stand for important ideas.  We lived in a world where the big guys win. Now the smart can take form the strong by redefining the stakes of competition.

This is the promise of social business. You can make people passionate but you need to give them something to be passionate about. How to become the most in a new area is the key to success. You cannot be in the middle of the road. It is the road to nowhere.

He gave an example of the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit. It has become one the crown jewels in American healthcare. They won the Baldridge award for total quality and improvement.  They build a new hospital from scratch so they decided to redesign everything including the role in the community. This is their West Bloomfield Hospital. It is built to look like a resort. You check into your room from home over the Web. A person meets you to help with the details. There is great food and people pay good money for them to carter their events. The hospital is more like a great hotel. They wanted to create a way to provide a sense of comfort so they recruited a person from a high-end hotel to deign the experience. It worked because they took an original approach.  They now have 50,000 applicants for their 2,000 nursing jobs.

Bill said that instead of thinking about what keeps you up at night you need to think about what gets you up in the morning. I like this switch and try to do it in my own life. Success today is more about passion that the numbers. What is the emotional contract you are making with your customers? What holds your colleagues together? Social tools can enable this connection.

Next he talked about USAA. They restrict their market to military and their families. They are number one in customer service every year and they win IT awards also. They have 13,000 customer service people. Much of their training is in cultural changes. When you are hired you get 10 weeks training in San Antonio. It simulates a lot of things that military personnel encounter so you can see what your customers experience. Every day ends reading letters to and from soldiers in the field. They want to emerge employees in their customer’s experience. It creates bonds with customers and between employees. Bill said it is not just what separates your from the competition but what holds you together as a team.

As I listened I was thinking he is great is speaking in sound bytes. The Twitterers must be having a field day. I say this as a compliment. He wrote the book, Practically Radical. He also mentioned a top shoe designer who has invited customers to help design shoes and they have become the best sellers. He calls this open source footwear. It is great example of involving customers. He closed with the idea, “You need to learn as fast as they world as changing.” (52 characters – good Twitter feed).   It was a high energy morning session with excellent content. 

 

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Mobile, Bring Your Own Device

This is another in a series of my notes on Lotusphere 2012. I am very pleased to be back again after last year thanks to IBM’s support. These notes cover the Monday individual press session, Mobile, Bring Your Own Device, with Rob Ingram, Senior Manager, Mobile Communication Strategy, IBM.

Rob said there are three parts to IBM’s mobile strategy: collaboration for end users, mobile apps for consumer Web sites, and security and device management including such issues as VoIP.  In the past 12 months they have released many apps for end user collaboration. Now they are announcing extension to Connections. There is also Traveler for Andriod and Sametime meetings on mobile. They are making it easy to turn Domino apps into mobile apps.  They are not trying to do it all themselves and are also making it easy for third party developers to cerate mobile apps for Domino.

IBM now has a “bring your own device” mobile policy. There are now two ways to get mobile at IBM. First there is the existing corporate deployment on Blackberry and about 30,00 employees have this. After piloting a BYOD policy they are releasing it for the general population. They will endorse two operating systems, Apple iOS and Andriod.  This will allow hundreds of thousands of employees to participate. They are using Notes Traveler to deploy email. You go to the internal company Web site and find a url and download the mail client for your phone. It will install what is needed. You just set up your password and are good to go.

IBM has several security features. First, there is the password that is encrypted. Then the content itself is encrypted. Finally, they can remotely wipe out all the business content while preserving the personal content of a user. There are tens of thousands of users now but they expect the number to grow significantly now that it is generally available. They are also starting a pilot for SameTime for BYOD with same goal of getting everyone involved.

Rob said that you need separate apps for iOS and Andriod if you are doing them as native apps. In fact you need separate development teams, as Apple does not allow developers who work on iOS apps to work on Andriod ones.

HTML5 allows for cross-platform apps but they have to be Web apps and not native ones. They do have a new capability that allows for hybrid apps that have a native app on the outside and HTML5 on the inside. These are easier to develop than pure native apps. However, pure native apps will have better UI capabilities such as gesture response. Rob said that he advises clients to think about the business issues first before deciding on native, hybrid, or pure HTML5.

Rob said they tried an HTML5 version of SameTime but it did not work so there withdrew it. There was too much to go through for an IM app that was constantly used. However, for less used apps, a hybrid app may work fine.

IBM is making a major move in mobile. Rob said they are doing it more by actions that announcements or promotions. Here is a complete listing of my notes from last year’s Lotusphere 2011 including what they said about mobile then. 

 

 

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Monday Morning Press Q&A

This is another in a series of my notes on Lotusphere 2012. I am very pleased to be back again after last year thanks to IBM’s support. These notes cover the Monday morning press Q&A with Mike Rhodin, IBM Senior Vice President, Software Solutions Group; Alistair Rennie, IBM General Manager, Social Business; and Jeff Schick.

Mike Rhodin began by putting the opening session in context. The underlying message in the opening demos was the seem-less integration behind what was seen in he demos to bring the components of your workday on the device you want. They have built this on an open standards platform. He added that they are just getting started. This is part of the journey toward higher value through software and services that IBM started ten years ago. They do not want to be in the consumer business but to help their clients achieve more success in this space and others.

Jeff Schick came up next. He talked about the power of the activity stream with the ability of others to write to it.  The embedding of apps into the activity stream allows you to work in one space. The email integration is also in the same theme. By bringing into enterprise content management into social allows for ad hoc collaboration within work processes. The mobile capability extends all of this to the device that is getting increasing use. Analytics can support decision making at the point of need. The IBM Smart Cloud for Social Business involves a re-branding for consolidation of messaging.

Questions began. Does mobility affect business outcomes and are they using analytics for this question? Mike mentioned how they are gathering analytics on the evolution within eCommerce. They have added new statistics on mobile in ecommerce and whose products are most successful. The amount of mobile online shopping had increased significantly. Most data has focused on what is happening on the Web and not yet on use within the enterprise. Mike added that analytics is getting embedded in everything and the mobile is becoming the access point of choice. So there will be more work here.

Next question was on adoption issues. Alistair mentioned some of their new partnerships with service providers such as Dachis Group and institutions such as the one with San Jose State announced last week.

The next question was from two Chinese groups about security. How do you combine external and internal content in a secure way? Mike talked about their work with scalability and security with access control as they built their social networking platform for the enterprise.  You can make things open or closed with a granularity of security.

Alistair talked about Notes Social edition. It will be easy to install. You do need both Connections ad Notes if you want the integration of the two but then can also work separately. It was asked if they will just consolidate on one platform. Mike explained that there is no mail server in Connections, it is integrated with Notes for this.

Alistair said that while you do not want to do business work with consumer Web tools such as YouTube, you will want to connect between business tools and consumer Web tools for particular tasks. IBM is focusing on making these connections fast and easy. I agree with both points.

Sentiment analysis was the next topic. Alistair said part of the challenge is to understand the right questions and who to ignore and who to pay attention to. A guy with 12 different mobile devices running at the same time asked about the next new thing and what will IBM support. Mike said it will take hard work to stay up and they have done 42 new releases in the past year.

Here is a complete listing of my notes from last year’s Lotusphere 2011. 

 

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Opening Session

This is the first in a series of my notes on Lotusphere 2012. I am very pleased to be back again after last year thanks to IBM’s support. The opening general session included: Keynote Speaker: Alistair Rennie, IBM General Manager, Social Business; and other speakers, including Kurt De Ruwe, CIO, Bayer; and Premier Healthcare. These notes are real time so please forgive any typos. 

The session began with a very loud and good rock band, Okay Go. Alistair Rennie then started things off. The celebrity guest was Michael J. Fox. He talked about Back to the Future. He talked about don’t play the result and just be in the moment and act and react. The movie was about possibilities and the unexpected.

  
He also mentioned he loved Bobby Orr growing up as a Canadian hockey fan. Good choice. He played on a celebrity team against Bobby Orr in a celebrity vs. old timers game at the Boston Garden. In the game he scored against Bobby Orr without realizing that Bobby had told him that he would let him do it before the game. He was so awed metting Bobby Orr he had not heard what he said before the game. Michael said that had he remembered it was a set up he felt he would have messed it up.

He talked about learning he had Parkinson’s disease.  At first he tried to play against this and then decided he should just live his life and let people know about it. He realized that he could further the conversation about Parkinson’s. He started a foundation to support those affected by it. My father had a rare form of it that was untreatable so I have been through the process of this disease as a family member and appreciate his work. Michael said the 75% of people with Parkinson’s are on a social network now. He did a Chuck Berry move as he existed the stage.

Alistar came back and started about social business. He said that there is some hype about social media. He defines social business as an application of social tools to business processes. What is new is not social but the platforms to support it and establish a sense of trust and transparency, have the content persist so they can be reused and shared.  Discovery, sharing of new ideas and improve forecasting effectiveness. McKinsey said there a positive correlation between use of social tools and business margins.  I see social business, to quote Tom Lehr, as doing well by doing good.

He said that with transformations, the winners do not only come out ahead but change the game. He also said that the technology does matter (I agree and have written about this recently – see Maybe Enterprise 2.0 Is About the Technology) but there is more and I agree with that also - Looking Deeper into Getting Social Business Right.

He said the email needs a make over.  He also said the content management tools are currently designed to store content at rest. But content needs to be put to work. Social we need social content management that fits in with work processes.

Going beyond technology there are people issues, leadership, and change management. Social business is not an IT project or a management edict. A new role is a community manager. Here is a shameless plug for my new business partnership centering, in part, on this role (see Joining the Merced Group to Offer Social Business Consulting Services). I promise no more of these.

He asked Ron Noval @lotusrockstar to come up as a representative of the Lotus Champions group. Jejf Shick then came up to introduce a demo of IBM Connections Next. Suzanne Livingston showed us the activity stream within it.  There are embeded apps to integrate multiple apps into a single place. Suzanne showed multiple examples of integrated with third party apps like SAP and Trilog. This is exactly what needs to be done to make social business work. We need to integrate the old school systems of record with the new school systems of engagement.  Many kudos to IBM for this approach. You can also see the most active members of your community and the most popular content. There is also real time group video. She showed a nine-part window of her team members. It is a very robust activity stream with extensive integration capabilities. This is how social business will get traction.

They have also integrated Connections with Outlook, as well as Notes.  There is IBM Docs that allows for collaborative editing in the cloud or on premise. Content needs to be active to have value. Agreed.

Now Ron came out to show mobile capabilities. There is Notes Traveler. He showed it on an iPad and featured a lot of new SameTime capabilities. It has gone as long way from 2000.

Larry Bowden talked about the Web experience. A demo was offered on how Web site can be modified and resized the fit screen real estate. You can make significant changes from a mobile device and interact with your team on these changes. These was a wonderful integration between the market facing Web site and the internal comunities. This is why I prefer the term social business over enterprise 2.0, as it covers both work within the enterprrise and on the Web. 

Sandy Carter came up and talked about the exceptional benefits IBM clients are getting such as Royal Bank of Canada and the city of Warsaw, Poland. Social is the new business model. IBM offers workshops for this transformation. She introduce Denise from Premier Healthcare Alliance. She talked about innovation within the healtcare industry and what they are doing. The biggest source of mistakes in healthcare is the handoff of data. There is a lot of room for improvement here that can both save lives and reduce costs.

Now a demo was shown on how social applies in Lotus and Domino through Notes Next. The activity stream from Connections is on the new Notes page. You do work on social tools without having to leave the email client. I think that this approach of bringing new social capabilities to email, where people still do most of their work, will greatly speed to adoption of social business. I know that I still sometimes use email with attachments as a collaboration platform but if the social tools are inside email then there will little need to resort to the old school attachments. There was a lot of applause to the integration of new capabilities with Notes. Later this year there will a new Social Notes edition more tighly integrating Connections and Notes. These are all the right moves. 

Trilog Group won the award for open social innovation. They won an award last year. Mike Rhodin came out to talk more about social business and the cloud. I did an extensive interview with him this past summer. Here is part one - IBM's Mike Rhodin on the Convergence of Social Business, Analytics and Commerce: Part One. It covers some of the issues he talked about here. He also announced Smart Cloud for Social Business that offers even more integration of capabilities. After discussing social business at GAD, the German bank, the award for delivering better social results in the cloud was given to Applicable Ltd. 

I think IBM has made significant progress in social business since their strong start last year. I look forward to getting more detail this wek and hsaring what I learn here. Here is a complete listing of my notes from last year’s Lotusphere 2011. 

 

Joining the Merced Group to Offer Social Business Consulting Services

Social business has great potential and I have shared much of my excitement over its opportunities, as well as ideas for its success on this blog.  I am now pleased to announce that I have joined with Catherine Shinners and the Merced Group as a partner. The Merced Group provides business strategy, program design, and implementation services to companies and organizations on social business efforts. The services we offer include: online communities, enterprise collaboration, social media marketing, as well as product marketing and management.

I have been doing some consulting over the past few years on an informal basis, along with my other activities, and this move provides an organization and channel for my consulting going forward. I also plan to get more involved in consulting now, putting into practice all that I have learned in the social business space, both inside the enterprise on the Web.

I chose to partner with Catherine because we have complementary skills and she has an established practice in the social business space. Catherine brings both collaboration expertise and a technology background to bear in her practice. She has helped clients successfully position and market new products, build authentic customer relationships through online communities and create compelling online user experiences for productive collaboration. She writes the Cathexis blog.

Catherine has been based in Palo Alto for the past 23 years and has held senior director level positions in product management, product marketing, business development and marketing at such firms as: WebEx, Tandem, and Compaq.   She developed new lines of business in enterprise software for internet infrastructure solutions for the financial services and telecommunications market, led go-to-market efforts for Web-based business solutions, identified and structured business and technology partnerships and successfully launched Web 2.0 and SaaS online services for collaboration software. 

One of her recent Merced Group projects was the creation of a community strategy and management of the ongoing program of a strategic, global corporate social responsibility initiative that engaged a select executive management clientele in the education sector.  It currently has close to 2500 member sin over 100 countries. The online community program (www.getideas.org) provided education leaders a collaboration environment to advance 21st century innovation and transformation in education and received a 2011 Computerworld Honors Laureate award in the collaboration category.

I will remain connected with Darwin Ecosystems and a part of the team. I am also continuing my support of the OutStart blog and Twitter efforts, and providing software reviews on the AppGap blog.  I am excited about this new direction and look forward to writing more about it as it evolves. 

 

Taking in Cajun Music in the Lafayette Louisiana Area

I have enjoyed Cajun music and food for as long as I remember. Despite growing up in New Orleans, I never made it west of Houma. So I made sure to take the time when I went to New Orleans this month. Here is what I found with the music. The food will be covered next weekend.

Saturday Jam at Savoy Music Center

The high point of the Cajun music experience was the Saturday morning jam session at the Savoy Music Center run by Marc and Ann Savoy. They have recorded a lot of CDs and I loaded up on a few at the store. Every Saturday there is a Cajun music jam from 9AM to noon. The music goes non-stop and players come and go but the number seemed to stay around twenty. Marc and Ann’s son, Wilson, has a great band, the Pine Leaf Boys, that I saw in New Orleans in 2006 at the French Quarter Festival. Wilson joined in for the last thirty minutes.

   
It is a small room and most people know each other as it is a regular community event but everyone was very welcoming to me. A lot of French was spoken. I sat next to Charles Guillory, who played the triangle and lives near by. He was generous with his time and shared a lot about the area and the players. One was in his 90s and others were in their teems or younger.

   
Great food was shared. There was some hot boudin sausage, pecan pie, and red velvet cake. Charles got up and brought back some hogshead cheese. I probably do not want to know what is in it but it was delicious and I had more.  The time flew and I will be sure to make this a must do event whenever I come back. The Savoy Music center is located at 4413 Louisiana Route 190
 just east of Eunice. Here is my friend Paul Tamburello’s post on it, Mardi Gras in Lafayette: A Cajun Jam at Marc Savoy's Music Store.

   
That afternoon I went to a Cajun music jam session Vermillionville in Lafayette, There is a session 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM every Saturday. Some of the players from the Savoy session showed up.  

Cajun Music Dinners

I had several dinners with live Cajun music. On Friday I saw Terry Huval & The Jambalaya Cajun Band at Randol's Restaurant, 2320 Kaliste Saloom Rd, Lafayette. There is a large wood dance floor but it is somewhat separated from the dining area by a clear plastic screen. I guess some people come just for dancing and others just for food. The food was excellent and Terry’s band was good.

  
On Saturday I went to Pont Breaux Cajun Restaurant, (formerly Mulate's) at 325 West Mills Avenue, Breaux Bridge and saw Jason Frey and his band. The band and dance floor were very connected to the dining area.

   

Cajun Music Hall of Fame

I also went to the Cajun Music Hall of Fame and Museum is a project of the Cajun French Music Association. The building is a one-room country store that dates from the 1930s. It contains such artifacts as a Model A electrical generator used to power microphones at country dances in the era before utility service reached the countryside. Irene Boone explained a lot to me including how this generator worked. She was very generous with her time. The museum has a display with mannequins of Joe Falcon, born near Rayne in 1900, and his first wife, Cléoma Falcon, born in Crowley in 1905, who together made the first commercial recording of Cajun music in 1928. In the center is Lionel LeLeux, who was a fiddler and fiddle-maker born in 1910 in Vermilion Parish. It is located at 240 South C.C. Duson Drive, a block east of the Liberty Theatre. Phone (337) 457-6534.

   

 

 

 

Taking in Zydeco Music in Opelousas Louisiana and More

Opelousas is the home of zydeco music so it was a great treat to visit in December. Whenever I went to New Orleans I took in the Thursday zydeco nights at the Rock N Bowl and have gone to many zydeco shows elsewhere but had never gone to where it all started.  As I drove through Opelousas I saw a mural that covered a number of the zydeco greats – see below. I was fortunate enough to see Clifton Chernier and Boozoo Chavis live before they passed. I have a number of music videos with Buckwherat Zydeco and he is coming to Cambridge soon so I plan to take him in here.  

   
Herman Fuselier has several radio shows that cover zydeco music and more In the Opelousas Lafayette area. His Zydeco Stomp program airs from noon to 3 p.m. Saturday on KRVS 88.7 FM. The show streams live on the web at www.krvs.org. The zydeco music starts at 8 a.m. on that station with John Broussard and Melvin Cesar. Herman also hosts Barbecue & Drink a Few (zydeco, blues and R&B) from 2 - 6 p.m. Sunday on KVPI 92.5 FM. Herman told me about two zydeco shows described below that I had not been able to find online. St. Landry Parish Tourist Commission publishes updates on local zydeco events.

Keith Frank and the Soileau Zydeco Band

Keith Frank and the Soileau Zydeco Band performed at Friday in the Events Center at the Evangeline Downs Racetrack & Casino in Opelousas. Admission was free. Keith was great. He did a high-energy non-stop two hour set and I bought his CD. You had to go through a 1000 slot casino and a good country and western band at the bar to find the dance hall around the corner but there was a good crowd and a lot of room for dancing allowing a few hot shots to really show off. 

Lil Nate and Leon Chavis at Slim's Y-Ki-Ki Opelousas

Lil Nate and the Zydeco Big Timers, along with Leon Chavis and the Zydeco Flames, played Saturday night at Slim’s Y-Ki-Ki, 8471 Highway 182, in Opelousas (318) 942-9980. Lil Nate and Leon, both in their 20s, are two of the hot young acts on the zydeco scene today. Nate is the son of Nathan Williams, leader of Nathan and the Zydeco Cha Chas. I have seen the older Nathan in Rhode Island and have several of his CDs. Leon is a cousin of the great Boozoo Chavis (see image from mural above). I saw Boozoo in Jacksonville FL in the late 90s. He passed in 2002. Slim’s is the oldest zydeco club around, owned and operated by the Gradney family since 1947.

 
Leon Chavis went first and was still going strong two hours later. He put more bounce (aka hip hop) into his songs as the set progressed and the energy increased. I love the long sets the zydeco guys seem to do. But it had been a long day and I had to drive back to Lafayette so he out lasted me and I did not hear Lil Nathan. I was curious and I went on the Web and found a great video Lil Nathan did when I got back. I look forward to his new CD that Herman mentioned on his radio show.

Geno Delafose and the French Rockin' Boogie at Whiskey Landing in Henderson

Whiskey River Landing hosts zydeco dance sessions every Sunday afternoon from 4 to 8 in Henderson. It is located on the swamp side of the levee for the Atchafalaya Basin and you can see the swamp through the windows of the dance hall behind the band. This afternoon Geno Delafose and French Rockin' Boogie played. They place was packed. The bar has a routine that they ring a bell if you give them a good tip and throw you in the swamp if you are bad tipper. Not a bad idea and I only saw bell ringing. I have several of his Geno’s CDs. The quality shot of Geno came from his MySpace page as the lighting was not good for photos that afternoon. Whiskey River Landing is located at 1365 Henderson Levee Rd, Henderson, LA 337-228-2277. 

         

My Favorite Tweets for January 1 - 12 2012

Here is another in a series of posts that provide access to my favorite tweets that contain links to useful information.  Some of these I did to link to things I found useful and others are RTs that I want to save for the same reason. Since Twitter archiving is an oxymoron, I am now going to post my favorite links for the month so they can be easily accessed later.

I spot tested the reduced shortened urls and they all should work. I hope this is also useful for you.  Let me know your favorite tweets for the month.

RT @dhinchcliffe: Google Ties Social Service Closer to Search Engine | @WSJ http://on.wsj.com/xA3s1M

Apple in the Enterprise: $19 Billion to Be Spent on iPads, Macs in 2012 http://bit.ly/z4Ai7V

Google's Schmidt says devices, apps need to be friends http://bit.ly/A4eYQR

RT @dhinchcliffe: RT @TheCR: from @peterkim: 101 Examples of Social Business ROI http://bit.ly/zJN2vZ

RT @eric_andersen: "Intellectual capital will be most important resource in 21st century" http://j.mp/x9mo9X

RT @SocBiz2day: RT @SocBiz2day - Future of Work Is Learning http://su.pr/7OGO6l by @elsua

Tim Tebow Pass Lands in Twitter’s Record Book http://on.mash.to/zNEadz > and trip to Foxboro

RT @socialmedia2day: The Only Way to Become a Social Business in 2012 by @pammktgnut * http://soc.li/OtzsBQW

RT @rhappe: links from conversation w @vanderwal & @gordonr http://bit.ly/ydUVOW http://bit.ly/AF9jKa http://amzn.to/AuMeq4 >GR8

Gen Y Traits in the Workplace Unveiled http://bit.ly/wusGUE

RT @NigelFenwick: A Look Ahead At eCommerce Technology in 2012 http://bit.ly/wwc2HB #CIO

RT @webtechman: Enterprise 2.0 Gamification: sharing rewards of achieving business goals http://bit.ly/wPwBca by @josheac

via @webtechman: 5 Use Cases for Social Media Management http://bit.ly/wSjKqg

RT @rossdawson: RT @gihanperera: 12 experts on key thought leadership trends 2012 http://ow.ly/8mKDQ

via @SameerPatel: Top 10 project management trends for 2012 http://zite.to/xVxFtv

RT @socialmedia2day: Altimeter Report Points to Need for Social Media Management Systems by @cksyme http://ow.ly/1gCW9T

Leadership Collaboration-Fostering Sustained Dialogue + Connectivity http://bit.ly/w7uco5 > g8 read by @catshinners

RT @NancyWhite: enjoying David Weinberg's new book, Too Big to Know http://amzn.to/xAG5Kx >need 2 get it

RT @dhinchcliffe: Enterprise Gamification Ready To Make Collaborative Dream Real http://ow.ly/8mW6l

RT @rossdawson: Great international comparative data on media, social media, and mobile http://bit.ly/rFHaaL

RT @rossdawson: RT @ariegoldshlager: RT @NewYorker:ncrowdsourcing cartoon of day: http://nyr.kr/xi8fU1

via @dhinchcliffe: Avoiding Innovation's Toll @WSJ http://on.wsj.com/wCzg57

RT @darwineco: RT @mfauscette: Eight Top Internet Firms Back Alternative To SOPA - http://goo.gl/jg629

RT @JaneBozarth: Orangutans use FaceTime to video chat with friends in other zoos. http://bit.ly/vZDFtx

RT @GautamGhosh: The Altimeter Report on managing social media proliferation http://bit.ly/wEskGF by @jowyang

RT @SmartDataCo: 2012 Tech Predictions by @alexolesker * http://soc.li/cKSSyOE

RT @NigelFenwick: Forrester's Top 15 Trends for Customer Service in 2012 http://bit.ly/xfKO8z #CIO

RT @dpontefract: from @elsua "Reflections from 2011 – A World Without Email – The Doc" http://bit.ly/yIUdeA

RT @socialmedia2day: Why the Social Funnel? New eBook from Awareness by @bostonmike * http://soc.li/6b7l73C

RT @mfauscette: Mashable's New Year Tech Predictions - http://goo.gl/n3BAV

RT @niallcook: another ex. of consumerization of enterprise IT: http://bit.ly/zTTVlr by @marciamarcia

Social Media: What to Expect in 2012 http://bit.ly/t9jnAJ

RT @darwineco: RT @CRozwell: WSJ article on big data and analytics from @MarkWeadon http://on.wsj.com/y4siSv

Google+ Is Going To Mess Up The Internet http://rww.to/xnQc7a

CFOs and Tech Chiefs Form a Bond to Scope Out Customer Needs http://bit.ly/zvjh36

RT @jbowles: RT @socbiz2day 5 Lessons Social CRM can Learn from CRM #socbiz #crm http://su.pr/5kHwqw

RT @larshaahr: 5 Reasons Why CapGemini Re-Positioned to Focus on #SocialBiz - http://goo.gl/VuP1I via @dhinchcliffe

Social Campaigns Give Long-Term Boost to Brand Metrics http://bit.ly/xutvcM

Old services meet new media: a tweeting cabbie's growing business http://bit.ly/xoVGZz

RT @SameerPatel: Why Enterprise Software Will Never Be the Same http://zite.to/AjqJdI #ensw #cloud

RT @rossdawson: 8 Predictions for SEO in 2012 from SEOMoz http://mz.cm/u99AIf

3 ways to effectively crowdsource your advertising content http://bit.ly/xNj9RA

What 2012 holds for social media http://tnw.co/sm8GjV

RT @darwineco: RT @dhinchcliffe: How Big is Big Data? by @ekolsky http://ow.ly/8gWkK #Analytics #SocBiz HT @gpach01

RT @darwineco "Data is new raw material of 21st cent" @TimBerners_Lee & @Nigel_Shadbolt http://bit.ly/wHfQDc

Social Media For The Enterprise: A CEO's Best Friend http://onforb.es/u6ltWT

RT @rossdawson: 30 Social Media Predictions for 2012 from the Pros http://bit.ly/w3pL29

RT @SameerPatel: Forecast for 2012: A Cloud-y Kind of Year http://on.barrons.com/uDegjv - Barrons. #cloud #saas

RT @darwineco: RT @dweinberger: Thomas Rogers @Salon interviews me on Too Big to Know http://bit.ly/tFGsKg

RT @webtechman: Interesting #mimdmap of Social Biz Intell + Info Topography bit.ly/sH87bh via @enterprise20il

 

 

 

Looking Deeper into Getting Social Business Right

Yesterday I offered some high level requirements for making enterprise social business work. In summary you have to integrate the new social tools with work processes and the traditional apps that support these process (see also - Integrating the Interactions with the Transactions and Maybe Enterprise 2.0 Is About the Technology). I am looking forward to the sessions and conversations about the next moves in social busienss at Lotusphere 2102 next week. 

Dino Hitchcliffe has gone into much more depth on this topic, as he usually does with useful results, in his post, Social business and enterprise usage: The lessons. He begins with data from the Forrester report I discussed yesterday on the huge growth predicts for enterprise social software, Social Enterprise Apps Redefine Collaboration. He goes on to note that selling licenses (or SaaS subscriptions) does not translate to adoption and usage.  He adds that social business is “often perceived as an optional activity and one that’s often not well integrated into how work gets done. Workers already have older (though theoretically less effective) ways of getting work done that they know, understand, and are thoroughly and culturally habituated to.” I do not doubt this and have even been guilty of doing it myself. I confess that I have used email with attachments as a “collaboration and content creation platform” because it is what I am used to and I still do it on occasion. 

Dion next goes into more detail on the lessons learned from enterprise social business so far, using the results from the recent McKinsey report as a foundation. I will not repeat all that he writes and urge you to read his original post for the details. However, I want to mention his headlines and provide some thoughts on each.

The first point is that adoption requires sustained effort. This should be obvious since we are talking about a new way of working, not just installing some software from the cloud. However, the hype from some vendors helps to mask this point.  The ease of use SaaS apps also can be deceiving. While the traditional systems integration needs may be less, the work process integration remains. For example, there are many new vendors that sit on top of SharePoint that claim to take care of many of the social needs that are not covered in SharePoint.  While you can buy instead of build some features you still need to integrate them into work processes. I like the way that IBM has already done some of this integration themselves, rather than relying on third party players, by adding Connections features into other work process oriented applications. Even here there remains some non-technical work to get the tools tied into the work processes. 

Next, Dion notes that while having a well connected enterprise is correlated with better operating margins, it is not correlated with being a market leader.  McKinsey feels that is because the market leaders are less motivated to change. Dion says this gives the challengers as shot at moving up. It reminds me of the old Avis line: we try harder since we are in second place. Keeping the first point in mind, they will have to try very hard to become a successful social business. The winners will be those who are willing to make this extra effort regardless of their market position.

Dion adds that, “there’s a strong sense that social business will imminently and fundamentally change organizations.” The McKinsey data from last year and this year fuel this assumption (see Enterprise 2.0 Finds Its Pay Day – McKinsey for 2010 and McKinsey: Social Business Software Continues to Improve Organizational Performance for 2011).  The assumptions of social business do make sense at a level most competent senior executives can understand. It makss sense that if you can connect the collective intelligence of the organization the business will only get better on many levels.  However there is long way from buying into this high level vision and implementing the tactical requirements to make these connections at the operational level.

Dion then closes with the point that, “technology and organizational constraints often hold back social business transformation." This seems just as obvious as the prior point.  If you are going to fundamentally change the way the organization does business, there will be opposition. It will come from those threatened by the change but it will also come from simple inertia.  This is why many people at recent conferences say, “it is not about the technology.”  I think this can be misleading because part of the change is within the technology and the IT department may be a major point of resistance. It is better to say, “it is more than the technology.” I think that is a subtle, but important distinction.