Portals and KM

Implementing Enterprise Micro-messaging with Yammer at Océ

A few weeks ago I spoke with Samuel Driessen, Information Architect at Océ, about their enterprise micro-messaging experiences. Océ is a leading international provider of digital document management technology and services. Samuel is located in the Netherlands and his responsibilities include both the information architecture for structured data in applications such as PLMS and SAP and the unstructured content in places such as email and knowledge management programs.

I really like this dual role. It makes so much sense to have these two information sources under the same architectural leadership. Usually knowledge management and IT data management are siloed, limiting the effectiveness of both. This is the first time I have seen this and I commend the vision of Océ. This excellent concept could be a separate blog post but the story today is about their micro-messaging experiences.

Samuel said that part of his role is looking for opportunities for taking Web 2.0 social media inside the organization. They have tried a number of formal pilot programs. Some succeeded and others were dropped. He decided with micro-messaging that he would not try a pilot program but simply start and lead by example. This is similar to what I learn from John Hovell at ManTech.

Samuel looked at several programs and selected Yammer. He was already on Twitter and spoke with several colleagues who were also tweeting about his choice. They were the first to join him on Yammer.

One Yammer feature that helped spread usage is their profile feature. As you fill in the profile with your email and the email of those who are over and under you in the organizational structure, invites are automatically sent out. If these people sign up then invites go to those who are connected directly to them. Samuel said he got more compliance with the profile completion in Yammer than in knowledge management systems because of the simplicity of the form.

The low barrier to entry helped expand the number of users. The intuitive and attractive interface also helped. Samuel said that there were only about 15 to 20 people using Twitter in the company when he introduced Yammer. Now there are over 250 Yammer users. This usage has also increased the number of Twitter users. Some people had been reluctant to use Twitter because of its public nature. After they saw the value from Yammer, they extended their micro-messaging to the Web with Twitter. Yammer gave them a secure and walled place to first try micro-messaging and see its value. Samuel said he has seen the same migration with blogging, as people have started a blog inside Océ and then added an external facing one.

Samuel welcomes all new Yammer users and follows them. He sends them a PowerPoint introduction to Yammer that describes what it is, why use it, and how to use it. I think this is an excellent move. Samuel also engages with their messaging. He finds several types of users. There are active ones and those who start, stop, and then come back. Here are also those who mainly read messages. This is typical in all social media but even the readers can see better what is happening in the organization. Yammer’s email alert feature for messages that address them often lures back people in the conversation. It is also a feature you can turn off if you get too many of these messages.

The most active users have integrated micro-messaging into their daily work routine. They write about what they are doing and ask questions about their work while they work. Samuel has found that everyone who participates is very helpful and polite. There has been no bashing. He is collecting examples of where micro-messaging helped the organization.

For example, someone Yammer-ed she was setting up a wiki somewhere. She worked in a separate building from Samuel and he asked her through Yammer if she was using the corporate platform. She didn't know it existed and went on to use that platform. She said it saved her two weeks. He has also received regular calls on things he micro-messages about and he calls others based on their messaging. Participants often find people working on the same issues and help each other.

In another example, someone wanted to share files with a colleague working in South East Asia. Some one in IT saw their Yammer message and responded with useful solutions. In another instance, someone was researching a topic that Samuel and several colleagues had already explored. He was able to send documents that reduced the research time. There is a common theme about the benefits of simply being more aware of the activities in an organization.

We discussed the ambient awareness that Yammer brings. People are able to extend their understanding of the daily work efforts with in the firm. They can start to see patterns, as I recently discussed with Tim Young, CEO at Socialcast, another enterprise micro-messaging provider.

Now Samuel is looking to find a short term project within the firm, such as an upcoming technology week, and encourage the organizers to use Yammer as the tool for conversations around the event. I think this will be a great way to showcase the benefits of a focused discussion in a collaborative tool, rather than the usual email.

I asked about any obstacles and Samuel said there are two primary ones. First, many people do not understand why you would want to share what you are doing. They see micro-messaging as a toy and a waste of time. I can understand as it took me a while to really see the value and this occurred only after I starting using it after the prolonged encouragement and nagging of many virtual colleagues.

Second, there are security concerns. They are using the free, hosted version of Yammer as part of their initial micro-blogging experiment. While it is much more secure and private than Twitter, someone could hack into it in the same way they could get into Gmail. Samuel reminds people that they send somewhat private messages through Gmail. He asks people not to share really sensitive company secrets and he monitors usage to make sure this does not happen. He advises people that when they want to provide the details of their ideas, point to a blog or wiki that is behind the firewall. Even without the security concerns, I think this is a good practice to use micro-messaging for alerts and blogs or wikis for details.

There are options to get more security as Océ can move to a more secure paid version of Yammer and/or bring it inside the firewall. Samuel has been monitoring the Web to see if there are any reported security issues with Yammer and has found none so far.

To address the understanding issue, Samuel often gives presentation to the firm on his information architecture efforts and includes micro-messaging in them. He also works with the company Communications group. This group is really interested in social media and has a number of Yammer users. The Communications group is helping to promote and explain Yammer to the company.

Samuel has written two blog posts himself on this topic (see Implementing Enterprise Microblogging with Yammer and Why Microblog in the Enterprise?) In the second one, Samuel made the observation that it would be nice to have one platform for internal and external (micro)-blogging. Now, they have to constantly switch between the two, cross-post, etc. He hopes the number of platform will be reduced to one in the coming years. This is a good wish.

I really appreciate Samuel’s sharing of his experience. It is an excellent example of micro-messaging adoption practices. I look forward to hearing more about how their efforts progress.

Painting of Train Depot at Crawford Notch, New Hampshire

Here is an 18" x 24" acrylic painting of the old train depot at Crawford Notch, New Hampshire. It is no longer used for trains, but as an information center near the Appalachian Mountain Club's Highland Center in Crawford Notch New Hampshire. Like the painting of the bunk house I posted yesterday, I simplified the scene to contrast the geometric structure of the building and the flowing nature of the mountains. I also focused on the relationships of tone and color in the different objects with the strong atmospheric perspective present due to haze and sun shine. This was painted directly viewing the scene through an upper story window at the Highland Center over several days.

Painting of Hiker's Bunk House Crawford Notch New Hampshire

Here is a 18" x 24" acrylic painting of the hiker's bunkhouse at the Appalachian Mountain Club's Highland Center in Crawford Notch New Hampshire. I simplified the scene to contrast the geometric structure of the building and the flowing nature of the mountains. I also focused on the relationships of tone and color in the different objects with the strong atmospheric perspective present due to haze and sun shine. This was painted outdoors viewing the scene.

More TV and Web Convergence during Last Year's Oscars

Here is some interesting data from last year’s Oscars harvested through Nielsen’s “Convergence Panel” – a sample of homes in which we measure both television and Internet in the same households. A study was done to monitor the people in the panel who were simultaneously following the Oscars on live television and over the Internet. They found that:

More than 1 in 10 people (11%) watching the Oscars this year did so while logged onto the Internet. This is nearly four times greater than the normal rate of simultaneous usage they observe.

While there was some expected surfing to places like IMDB for more information on movies, the true winner of the night was Facebook. People who used Facebook during the broadcast used it for an average of 76 minutes. This compares to a little more than 30 minutes on average for MySpace, and just a little more than 20 minutes for the major portals. People who used Facebook while watching the Oscars watched about 50% more of the broadcast than the average Oscar viewer.

Also more than 100,000 messages were sent via Twitter during the broadcast - that’s more than 400 message per minute, or nearly 7 per second. Tweets came in from all over the world in a range of languages. It was a true world wide event and yet the content reflected what you might find in conversations in the average living room.

I wonder what will happen during this year's Oscars. I discussed the possibilities earlier in the post, Twitter Takes on Television Making It More Social. It seems that twittering about TV while watching is not limited to the Oscars. Darren Waters in a BBC blog post, TV becomes social again, discussed how, “Last night I was watching Eurovision with Twitter running on my
laptop. In real time, my Twitter friends and I shared comments and made observations about the event as it was happening. Twitter was being used to extend the experience of watching the event together, but also for people to share links to sites with backstory, or explainers etc.”

The possibilities are interesting. In fact according to the Wall Street Journal, Verizon is working making Twitter feeds available on TV screens to its FIOS subscribers. What is next?

Taking Out Last Analog Component to Most Business Processes with EchoSign's E-Signin

Not having a fax machine always causes issues when people need my signature so I was interested to learn about EchoSign. It provides electronic signature capabilities. I discovered that while this is a very useful function, there is a far more significant advantage with this capability than I first considered which is why I wanted to share this cross-post from the AppGap.

I spoke with Jason Lemkin, CEO at EchoSign, who explained that there are two parts to the product and these are contained in the name Echo and Sign. Sign refers to the electronic signature capability and Echo refers to the ability to then use this digitalized signature for the life cycle of related business processes. These combined capabilities take out the last vestige of the analog world from the electronic enterprise and allow taking the entire business process to the cloud, or at least out of the physical world and the need to handle physical objects. I am going to look at both of these capabilities starting with the signature.

The electronic signature feature allows you to complete a sale or other business transaction without a physical object that you need to fax, mail, or otherwise exchange. This greatly simplifies these transactions for both parties. For the seller or sender, interactive, drag and drop input fields let you build each contract to fit the unique needs of transaction. When sending a document for signature, you can simply select input boxes such as ╥signature,╙ ╥initials,╙ and ╥date signed╙ and place them throughout a contract wherever acknowledgment is desired. This drag and drop capability is web based and works with all browsers. Existing Adobe Acrobat and other PDF forms are automatically converted to HTML forms on the fly. Once the HTML forms are signed, EchoSign converts the executed agreement back to PDF format for archiving and storage. Senders can also quickly create and share document libraries for frequently used documents from many sources including Google Docs and Zoho Writer. Here is the setup screen for the sender.

For the signer the EchoSign Signing Wizard offers a step-by-step guide pointing out where a document needs to be initialed or signed, or isn╒t signed correctly or completely. When required, you can also sign biometrically with a stylus or a mouse ╨ or on an iPhone or Blackberry. Jason sent a sample document for me to sign. I could type my name and it appeared in the signature field and could also use the cursor to draw my signature. I got the document back in PDF form with a history of the transaction: when it was created by Jason, when it was email to me, when I viewed it, when I signed it, and when it was emailed to me and Jason for our records. This leads to second major benefit area, the after signature processing, sharing, and archiving or as the name implies, the Echo. Here is a sample signed contract.

This is where I got the major ╥aha╙ over the benefit. Records handling and archiving has become largely electronic which provides significant benefits and cost reductions to firms. The signature has been the last remaining vestige of the analog world as I mention up front. Now that vestige goes away opening the complete life cycle of transaction to electronic storage, either on premise or in the cloud. You can now get RSS alerts of all aspects of a contract, email alerts as I did on the status, reports can be generated real time on contract status. It allows for the transparency of enterprise 2.0 into the contracting process. Here is a sample home page for the sender that provides a dashboard of transactions.

The full benefit of electronic records management was not possible as long as a physical object was involved. You could scan faxes but that is time consuming and it not likely to happen for high volume, low revenue transactions, but nowthis manual step is removed. A light blub went off for me when Jason, said you could have your boss counter sign and order his iPhone. See sample below.

Electronic signatures could be transformational and EchoSign is now used in over 100 countries. Here is a blog post, E-signing Across the Globe, and in 2013, that Jason wrote talking about the possibilities and the potential legal issues to address. The other issue is Web access. EchoSign is expanding its mobile device capabilities to address the large part of the world that accesses the Web through this means. It will be interesting to see where this goes.

The Twitter Book: Great Resource from O’Reilly

I was pleased to receive my review copy of The Twitter Book by Tim O'Reilly, Sarah Milstein. The O’reilly site describes it this way: “This practical guide will teach you everything you need to know to quickly become a Twitter power user, including strategies and tactics for using Twitter's 140-character messages as a serious--and effective--way to boost your business.” I would agree. This is an essential manual for anyone who wants to make the most of Twitter.

Now I was a reluctant follower of Twitter as I described in my Thoughts on Twitter and Business for Enterprise 2.0 Conference. First, I made a confession. I used to make fun of Twitter. I compared the endless stream of 140 character bits to Luis Borges' Library of Babel where, as the Wikipedia conveys his work published in 1941 conveys that, the "order of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless. Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the inhabitants believe that the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent thought. This glut of chaotic information was leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. But somewhere there was a book, the Crimson Hexagon, that contains the log of all the other books and the librarian who reads it is akin to God."

TweetDeck was the Crimson Hexgaon to make sense of the stream of tweets and The Twitter Book provides that function for Twitter itself. My copy is full of post-it tabs. It gets you started, explains search on Twitter, provides tips on getting the right followers and coaches you on how to provide useful information through your tweets. The format is a page of text across from a page of useful illustrations.

The final chapter discusses Twitter for business. The headlines here are: listen first, have clear goals, integrate with your other channels, start slow and build, coordinate multiple accounts, make sure you can be found, retweet your customers, and post mostly NOT about your company. These are all things I am trying to do on my own Twitter account (@billives) and that of one of my ventures, Darwin Development Corp (@darwindev). Pick up a copy if have not already.

Socialcast Moves Toward Providing a Unified Activity Stream with Its New API

I recently wrote about Socialcast’s new broadcasting capability with Marcia Conner of Pistachio Consulting (see Socialcast Adds Broadcasting Capability to Enterprise Microsharing). A few days ago I spoke with Tim Young, their CEO, about a broader set of issues, the role of dedicated micro-messaging tools in the enterprise.

After Twitter showed wild success on the Web, a number of firms, including Socialcast, produced micro-messaging tools for the enterprise. This was a good move, like the enterprise social bookmarking and social networking tools that followed del.icio.us and Facebook, especially since tools for the broader Web are not designed to meet enterprise business needs. Now a second wave has occurred as many enterprise collaboration suites are integrating micro-messaging into their platforms (see Rise of Micro-messaging in Enterprise Collaboration Platforms). They have made micro-messaging a feature rather than a product.

So I asked Tim about the role of micro-messaging products after this new wave. He responded by discussing a new direction they are taking which make a lot of sense. Socialcast would like to become the unified activity stream across the enterprise. The problem with activity streams within a collaboration suite or other applications is that this can then create silos. You can end up wit multiple disconnected activity streams.

Tim said that studies have shown that the average worker can handle three to four tools. However, now the average workers uses around ten tools. They do not need to go into several of these to see what is going on within each. The vision for Socialcast is to facilitate an aggregated activity stream that goes across the enterprise, eliminating the need for to look within different applications. This can be dome through XML, APIs, and to a less efficiently through RSS. Their vision enables micro-messaging to change from an application to a platform.

They are already to do this in their firm as they can poll activity within their third party wiki and have it feed their Socialcast instance. They have deployed this capability to a number of large organizations. Several of these have more than 50 applications feeding into their Socialcast stream. Here is sample screen from their desktop application.

Socialcast has just announced a further step in the direction by providing more support for their vision. They now offer an API that allows developers that use Socialcast to build native clients on top of it. In addition to supporting extensions of Socialcast by other developers, this bi-directional API makes it easy to integrate with other enterprise applications for two-way communication. For example, an HR group can send out a Socialcast alert about a new benefit package and allow employees to click on the alert to enroll.

The Socialcast API is a REST API for interacting with messages and comments. It supports BASIC AUTH authentication and is secure using SSL connections. The launch of the API comes at the request of several clients that want to build applications that fit into their workflow. Now that is another good idea. Socialcast has created a developer API community on Get Satisfaction for developers who would like assistance or to provide commentary. Here is sample screen for their recent freemium launch.

There is more and this is where the possibilities get really interesting. One advantage of a unified activity stream is that executives and employees can start to see the activity patterns across the organization. However, if there is a lot of activity this can be overwhelming. Socialcast is working on developing intelligent filters to help make sense of this activity. Now we are talking about a way to look into the work activity and see what is going on. This is enabling one of the real promises of enterprise 2.0 and all the social interaction data it creates. I look forward to seeing where this goes. I think Tim has provided an excellent response to my initial question and firmly established a place for micro-messaging as an application, rather than simply a feature, by turning it into a platform.

How is SaaS doing within Large Enterprise Collaboration?

The Q3 2009 Forrester Wave™: Collaboration Platforms by Rob Koplowitz is out. It looked at eleven providers in the enterprise collaboration space. There is a lot of useful information there. I was struck that Central Desktop was the only pure software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering in the group. It has a focus on small and medium businesses, as well as enterprise departments. Forrester writes that Central Desktop, “is attractive to organizations and departments that are looking to deploy quickly and easily without IT support. To that end, Central Desktop may lack some higher-end enterprise capabilities, but it’s likely that those areas of functionality are not of interest to its target market. “

Other providers in the group have a SaaS offering but I do not know the percentage of revenue that comes from this option. It would seem that the big players are not betting on the cloud and/or the larger enterprises are not ready for it to handle their collaboration needs. Now on one hand these large enterprises are more equipped to handle on-premise solutions. Perhaps the are more risk adverse or have more conservative IT departments. The cloud is certainly more attractive to the small to mid-size firm as a quick and cost effective solution as Forrester notes.

Does this mean the title of this post should be “What is SaaS Doing within Large Enterprise Collaboration?” Personally, I do not see cloud–based enterprise collaboration as an oxymoron. I just think it may take time as I think it makes sense. I do know that the cloud providers that I speak with are doing quite well in today’s economy, as firms are looking for cost effective solutions that reduce upfront costs and long-term commitments.

Finding the Best Fried Clams on Cape Cod

This post comes form Steve Carter's Dive of the month for July 09 with permission. I have enjoyed his reviews before and was pleased to see this one that he pointed out in response to my post on My Favorite Cape Cod Beach - Cahoons Hollow Wellfleet MA. It is a great following to my post on The Battle of Essex Fried Clams – Woodman’s versus Farnham’s. What follows are Steve's words.

"For the past 50 years my family has spent a couple of weeks every summer on Cape Cod. This past month we enjoyed the yearly pilgrimage as brothers and sisters from Washington, Colorado, New Hampshire, and Vermont joined nieces and nephews and their broods from places far and wide. We have always stayed in Wellfleet, a small fishing village on the outer cape. While there is a bit more traffic on Route 6, and several houses and commercial buildings have been turned into galleries, not a great deal has changed over the past five decades. We share great memories and look forward to many more. You might be asking what the heck this trip down memory lane has to do with food. Well, here we go.

Over the past several years I have designated one day as “food day” when I will take a few nephews on a day trip to hit as many restaurants as possible. We normally have a theme such as oysters, clam chowder, scallops, and so forth. The goal is to eat in as many joints as possible and then rate the places. This year was the year of the fried clam. Now you have to understand that just about any dive worth its salt on the cape has fried clams. The clam we look for is the soft-shell clam. Wellfleet has some great clam flats and the native clams are some of the best around. The deal is that they have to be whole belly fried clams – no clam strips allowed.

I don’t drive to Wellfleet without a stop at Arnold's. Now Arnold's isn’t in Wellfleet (it is on the outer fringes of Eastham), but it has been the home of some excellent fried seafood for over 33 years. I have seldom been disappointed and I figured that this would set a high standard. I am used to waiting in line, giving my order, finding a seat to nurse a favorite beverage and wait for my number to be called. The anticipation is heightened as tray after tray goes by with huge lobster rolls, savory scallop rolls, tasty clam chowder, and some of the best onion rings on the cape (thin and greasy). I heard my number called and went to the counter for my fried clams and onion rings. No tartar sauce for me, just the taste of a full-bellied fried clam in a very light batter. I am afraid that for the first time Arnold's let me down. Many of the clams had more batter then belly. The order seemed to be a mix of strips and full-bellied clams. Arnold's always runs a bit on the greasy side of the spectrum, but they outdid themselves on this day. I had enough grease on my tray for a quart of biodiesel fuel. Arnold's had indeed let me down on this rainy day.

Next stop was a new restaurant in Wellfleet on the site of the old Captain Higgins restaurant. The place is beautiful. An open format with an open kitchen. The Pearl sits right across the street from the town wharf. One can have the best view of Wellfleet harbor by sitting on the rooftop deck. This place, though not a dive by a long shot, appeared to have a real chance. A very comfortable place to watch the day go by. I ordered the fried clams from a waitress who was a seasoned pro. I waited for the food for a bit longer then normal, but the place just opened in May and I am sure they were still working out a few kinks in June. The clams looked great! With that said, I am sad to say they were overcooked and had the consistency of overcooked calamari. I will give this place another shot, but will leave the fried food to the pros at a clam shack. I was 0 for 2.

Next stop was P.J.’s Family Restaurant. A fixture on Route 6 for many years, it has walk-up service windows as well as inside seating. The atmosphere is pure cape, with a mixture of locals and visitors. Everyone feels welcome, as the Reeves family strives to make you feel like part of the family. I ordered a full-bellied clam roll and settled into a booth with my vanilla shake. It wasn’t long before my number was called. Again, the clams looked great – golden brown with just the right amount of batter. I ate the biggest one I could find and I knew at once I was no longer skunked! This was a fried clam to love: a batter that didn’t overpower the clam, and a clam that had the taste of the fresh Wellfleet harbor. I was in heaven, and my faith in Wellfleet fried clams was being restored in a diner filled with kids celebrating the last day of school.

Not willing to stop at only one winner, I headed on down the road the ubiquitous Moby Dick. This place has all the ambience of a tourist trap, but I have had many great fried meals sitting out on the covered porch. I walked up to the counter and gave my order to a person who was undoubtedly enjoying his first day on the job. I ordered a clam roll and an Arnold Palmer. This place is a bit classier than the typical shack, as they actually bring the plastic tray with your order right to your table! It wasn’t long before I was staring down another clam roll. I am glad to say that Moby’s didn’t let me down. A bit heavy on the batter, but the clams were perfectly done and had great body and taste. I was on a roll!

I headed back toward the town wharf and pulled in to Mac’s Shack. This establishment is in the site of the Olde Helpee Selfee Laundry, the site of many rainy day trips to the Laundromat. It is now an interesting seafood restaurant featuring very fresh fish and some pretty good sushi (so I am told). This is a great place to sit outside and watch the traffic crawl up Commercial Street. I ordered the fried clams and didn’t wait long for a plate full of great looking specimens. I have to admit I also ordered some steamers, as the fried food was starting to play tricks with me. These fried clams were a bit upscale. You know when you get a plate with parsley on it that you are not in a true dive. I chose to ignore the parsley and had some pretty fair fried clams. While the clams were full-bodied, for some reason, they lacked the taste I had enjoyed at P.J.’s and Moby’s. Maybe the grease wasn’t greasy enough. Whatever the reason, I enjoyed the steamers much more then the fried clams at Mac’s

It was a great day on the outer cape as we enjoyed the fried clam challenge. I would have to rate P.J.’s number one on this particular day, followed by Moby Dick, Mac’s, Arnold's, and Pearl. It was great to see the dives still serving up great fried fruits from the sea. Next year I may try the clams at Bookstore, Catch of the Day, Beachcomber's, Winslow’s, Duckcreek Tavern, or some other Wellfleet haunt when I venture out on my food day at the cape."

Thanks, Steve. I will be sure to stop at P.J.'s on my next trip.

P.J.’s Family Restaurant, 2616 Route 6, Wellfleet, MA 02667, (508) 349-2126 11:00 AM – 10:00PM (April – October)

For a change of pace - here is some great fried calamari from Stonighton, CT at Skipper's Dock.

Painting of a Woman Sitting in a Brown Chair #2

Here is a 20" x 24" acrylic painting of a woman sitting in a brown chair. It is the same view as Painting of Woman in a Brown Chair posted on August 1. here you see the full view in a quick sketch that took less than an hour.

More on Web TV Convergence: A Counter View

Yesterday I posted on some Google moves that might impact TV and Web convergence. Here is another view Matt Richtel tries to put a damper on the topic with his New york Times article, What Convergence? TV’s Hesitant March to the Net. Matt pointsout that you find the Web on almost all the screens we use today except perhaps the biggest one in our lives, the television. He writes that there is movement by chip makers to spur a new generation of TVs with full browser capability, like a personal computer. Intel released its own TV-centric chip in October 2008 and many other semiconductor designers and manufacturers are following them. However, Matt adds that television manufacturers such as Sony and Sharp do not seem to want this TV and Web convergence to occur. They claim that people are not ready for this. I find that hard to believe.

Matt speculates that television viewers do not want Web viruses to infect their TV during the Super Bowl, a valid point. He adds that TV viewers are used to a passive relationship with their TV and would not want to have the active involvement the Web brings. I think most people would welcome it. He also writes that TV manufacturers do not want to added cot of adding TV functionality to an already thin margin activity. Perhaps so but that is punishing the consumer. Let them decide.

For these reasons few TV manufacturers are using the new Intel chip. I think the winners will be the ones who do. TV makers risk losing control of the process if they do not figure out a solution soon enough. Perhaps cable boxes will allow for a work around. There is hope as Gordon Campbell’s new company, Personal Web Systems, is now shipping its first product, a $150 adapter that will attach to televisions to make them fully Internet-enabled. They are reducing the technology included in the TV adapter device into a single stamp-size semiconductor that would enable full Internet access in TVs in more developed markets. I see promise here.

Google’s Purchase of Video Compression Provider On2 Moves it Closer to Desktop TV

Google recently purchased video compression provider On2 Technologies for about $106.5M. As Gartner’s Andrew Frank writes, this is a “relatively small sum in the heady world of Internet valuations, for a company that’s been steadily losing money on less than $20M in annual revenue.” However, they have an interesting technology and the On2 purchase may be the clear signal of the plans Google has to enable video beyond the computer, taking it out of the home office and into the living room.

Google appears to want to be a player in the future of television. They must believe that video distribution to TVs and mobile devices will evolve to be more like the Web, Google favorite playground. So far in video, however, Google has admitted that profit from YouTube has proven more elusive than originally thought.

YouTube has been slow to get off the computer and penetrate home television, where the real money is. Working with microprocessor designer MIPS Technologies, Google has already positioned Android for set-top deployment, while also raising its involvement with addressable TV advertising with pioneer Visible World.

Andrew Frank outlines three things benefits form the On2 purchase:

First, Google gets some important embedded infrastructure through On2. It brings a wealth of online video distributor relationships who have been licensing its technology for some time, including Adobe, whose Flash platform continues to power the majority of online video Sun Microsystems, whose JavaFX platform is embedded in the infrastructure of most standard advanced television platforms.

Second, it’s important to Google’s home television goals that the public Internet continues to develop into a reliable way to deliver high-definition video to TVs in a “net-neutral” way: in other words, without cable, satellite, or IPTV telcos charging for quality of service or otherwise limiting video access to screens.

Third, as Google moves to balance control of video standards among companies that include Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe, ownership of On2 gives them leverage to ensure its platforms (Android, Chrome browser, Chrome OS, Apps and Gears) include native video capabilities that are independent of control or licensing by any of its potential competitors.

See Frank’s post for more details. We look forward to see where this goes. A player like Google can certainly make things happen.

Prescient Digital Media Study Finds Social Media Becoming More Mainstream on Corporate Intranet

Toby Ward recently sent me a copy of the Intranet Global Survey that I participated in. Toby is the CEO of Prescient Digital Media. The headlight quote was encouraging, “Employees want to work for progressive and innovative organizations, and expect 2.0 environments from employers of choice.” The study included input from 561 organizations of all sizes from across the globe and the results reveal rapid adoption of social media on the corporate intranet in the past year.

The breakdown of specific types of social media on intranets include: 47% have wikis (10% have no plans or interest), 45% have blogs (11% have no plans or interest, 46% have discussion forums (9% have no plans or interest), 37% have RSS (12% have no plans or interest), 23% have podcasts (30% have no plans or interest), and 19% have social networking (20% with no plans or interest. I am not sure which is better the high numbers who have already adopted or the low numbers with no plans or interests. The study concluded that an organization without Intranet 2.0 tools, or plans to use them, risks being out-flanked by their competition.

Many of these initiatives have been accomplished on low budgets, 46% have spent $10,000 or less, 35% have spent between $10,000 and $100,00; and 19% have spent $100,000 or more. However, remember these numbers come from organizations of all sizes. The sample found that 61% have more than 1,000 employees; 32% have 6,000 or more employees; 39% have less than 1000 employees. So many of the large organizations have still managed to implement with a small financial investment to date.

Of those organizations that have not implemented Intranet 2.0 tools, lack of a business case (30%), executive support (33%), and IT support (31%) and internal policy concerns (27%) are the top barriers. The study adds that business cases do not need to always have hard ROI and other dollar-driven targets, but a clear need must be established.

The use of intranet 2.0 is relatively new as only 15% of the firm shave had them over 2 years and 355 have had them less than a year. The study concluded that few organizations have had these tools long enough to perfect their use or achieve critical-mass acceptance. At the same time, firms have spent relatively little time evaluating tools as almost half have spent than less that three months at this tasks.

The major uses cases for intranet 2.0 tool include: employee collaboration (77%), knowledge management (71%) employee engagement (53%), and executive communications (35%). This is useful information for those who see enterprise 2.0, in part, as a realization of the promise of knowledge management and as adding better collaboration to a firm’s capabilities. On the other end, cost control (14%) and cost savings (19%) are a low priority for most organizations in adopting intranet 2.0 capabilities.

Despite the common wisdom that executive involvement greatly aids adoption, the study found relatively little executive involvement as 57% of executives have never contributed content or have done so infrequently (less than once per month) and only 11% of organizations have executives that contribute content on a daily basis.

There is much more and you should look at the report. You can get a free summary or purchase all the details. I think the findings are very supportive of the concept of enterprise 2.0 as a reality and, at the same time. Show some of the things that need to be done to increased adoption.

Jakob Nielsen Takes on Enterprise 2.0

Jakob Nielsen is a guru on intranets. He recently posted an extensive piece on Social Networking on Intranets that addressed adoption issues for enterprise 2.0 so I felt the need to cross post from FastForward. Thanks to J.B.Holston at Newsgator for pointing it out to me. It is a summary of the key findings from a study of 14 companies in a much larger 168 page report. It begins with the subtitle, Ready or Not, Here Comes Enterprise 2.0, which sort of captures his approach. Jakob portrays enterprise 2.0 as something that younger workers are pushing on enterprises. If you go to slow you will lose good younger workers and if you go too fast you will run risks to overall corporate culture.

While I think there are many more reasons to implementing enterprise 2.0 than appeasing younger workers, Jakob provides some very useful findings and suggestions. For starters, he says that companies must cede power to the people. Actually that was my paraphrase of what he said but he did say that command and control no longer works for corporate messaging. He added that, “enterprise 2.0's power is not about tools, it's about the communication shift that those tools enable.” I would agree.

Jakob also found that frontline workers are driving the vision in the companies he studied. While I think a bottom up approach is quite good and aligns with the power to the people philosophy, companies should be more proactive to combine bottom up with some strategic top down direction. A thousand point so flight might be going in diverse directions. To back this up, Jakob said, “a uniform finding across all of our case studies is that organizations are successful with social media and collaboration technologies only when the tools are designed to solve an identified business need.” Some top strategic direction might provide a focus on the critical business needs. Having said that, I would not suppress the bottom up guidance, just blend the two.

I really liked this suggestion, “While some users will eagerly adopt community features for their own sake, others will be skeptical and need guidance. One successful approach is to avoid advertising the new tools as new tools. Instead, simply integrate them into the existing intranet, so that users encounter them naturally.” This exactly what we did in 2004 when we swapped Word doc attached to emails for a blog to support an executive task force at a large hospital. The docs were not told it was a blog, but rather simply a new tool to support their sessions. This stealth approach was especially important in 2004 when blogs were seen as the domain of teenagers and geeks. The docs were won over by the increased functionality the blog offered (see Collaborate for Success: Great Resource for Physician-Hospital Collaboration).

Another useful suggestion is to “avoid burdening users with double work. Don't, for example, force users to update their profile or photo in both the traditional employee directory and a Facebook-like social connection tool.” This should not be hard to do with most tools but it can be overlooked. He also said it is “important to budget something for community management — not to control the conversation, but rather to guide it. Designated community managers should serve as facilitators and moderators.” This is an old knowledge management best practice that is even more important today (see KM Stories: Part Four – Gaining Support at All Levels).

Jakob concludes with the caution, “when you consider that successful adaptation of Enterprise 2.0 tools requires the organization to change its ways, it becomes clear why these projects don't happen overnight.” He adds that it seems to take three to five years for “social intranet projects” to take hold. There is much more in the summary. I am sure the 168 page version offers more insight.

AIIM Industry Watch on Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0

AIIM recently published a useful study on Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0. It provides more encouraging news for enterprise 2.0. It finds that business take up of enterprise 2.0 has doubled in the last year. This supports the study from Toby Ward I recently posted on (see New Study Finds Social Media Becoming Mainstream on Corporate Intranet). According to this AIIM report, there has been a significant increase in the understanding of how Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs, forums, and social networks can be used to improve business collaboration and knowledge sharing.

The survey was taken by 789 AIIM members between May 11 and May 26, 2009. Over half of organizations studied are now considering enterprise 2.0 to be "important" or "very important" to their business goals and success. Only 17% admitted that they have no idea what it is, compared to 40% at the start of 2008. However, only 25% of organizations are actually doing anything about it - but that is up from 12% in the previous survey. The numbers are lower than the Toby Ward study but the trend is the same.

This study found that Knowledge-sharing, collaboration and responsiveness are considered the biggest drivers. Lack of understanding, corporate culture and cost are the biggest impediments. IT departments are by far the strongest users, with 68% using Enterprise 2.0. In contrast, only 6% of organizations are using it throughout the business. This is interesting as the Toby Ward study that IT was one of the biggest obstacles. It might reflect a different audience mix with the organization in the two studies.

I was interested to find that 71% agree that it’s easier to locate “knowledge” on the Web than it is to find it on internal systems. This is actually a big improvement over what I found in the past few years. Taking a cue from Andrew McAfee I would ask every audience that I presented to on enterprise 2.0 this question. Would all those who find it easier to find information on their corporate intranet than the Web raise their hand. No one every did this for me and Andy reported the same results at the time.

More work needs to be done in the governance area as only 30% of companies have policies on blogs, forums and social networks, compared to 88% who have policies for email. I think that such policies are useful. On the other hand, the study found that while almost all companies would not dream of sending out un-approved press releases or web pages, less than 1 in 5 have any sign-off procedures for blogs and forums. I think these sign-off policies are counter-productive and good general policy guidelines reduce the need for any sign-offs.

There is much more including a lot of detail on personal use of social media by the participants. I recommend looking at the complete study. It adds to the growing body of research supporting the emergence of enterprise 2.0, at least in terms of tool adoption.

Photos of Vineyard Haven MA Part Two: Sunny Day

Here are pictures taken on a sunny day in the Martha's Vineyard town of Vineyard Haven by ferry. It followed the rainy day seen in yesterday's post and was the best day of the week or perhaps the month.

Photos of Vineyard Haven MA Part One: Rainy Day

In early June I went to the Martha's Vineyard town of Vineyard Haven by ferry. It rained the first day as you can see below. The fist picture shows the harbor as we approached. The next day the sun came out as you will see in my next post. I used to come here a lot in the 80s but had not been back for quite a while.

NewsGator's Social Sites ™ Brings Comprehensive Enterprise Social Networking to SharePoint

I have been a fan of NewsGator for some time as they were my first RSS reader in early 2004 (see Finally, I’m Scanning the Web through NewsGator) so I want to share my interview from the AppGap. I then spoke with Greg Reinacker, their founder, in June 04 about their early enterprise use (see NewsGator’s Movement from Aggregator Application to Enterprise Platform) and his blog was included as a case in my business blog book. So I was very pleased to see that they have greatly expanded their offering beyond RSS to a comprehensive suite of social networking tools. Last week I spoke with J.B. Holston, their President and CEO, and Ashley Roach, Product Manager,about their comprehensive offering.

NewsGator has always been close to Microsoft as their RSS reader integrates with Outlook. After they moved more broadly into the enterprise social networking space, Microsoft asked them to focus their application suite on making SharePoint a better social computing platform. They continue to closely work with Microsoft and have already enhanced Social Sites to work well with SharePoint 2010. They maintain their RSS capabilities for non-SharePoint users [apr1]but Social Sites is primarily targeted toward SharePoint. I think this is a good choice given the very large number of SharePoint implementations. It is often the de facto social computing platform in many enterprises. NewsGator’s Social Sites greatly enhances SharePoint’s ability to maintain this position.

J.B. and Ashley walked me through the many components of Social Sites that can be integrated with SharePoint. Their customizable Social Networking Framework enhances the SharePoint “My Site” experience and provides a number of Facebook-like features behind the firewall. We looked at Ashley’s version that you see below.

You can see an auto-generated activity stream for both Ashley and those other individuals he selects that shows what people are doing within the system. You can select the sources for the stream, including external activity streams like Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. There is also a Twitter-like status field for individuals to write what they are doing or interested in as well as the ability to see the status fields of others you select. There is a lot of other content on the page as you can see and you have one-click access to this content or to relevant tags leading to more content. The profile page also displays recommended content, colleagues and all SharePoint-based feeds. You can see aggregated tag clouds, relevant/popular content and active users.

Communities are a core concept and feature. It is very easy to start one. You can see the page for a Media and Entertainment Practice Community below. There are multiple tabs that indicate some of the functionality: discussion, feeds, bookmarks, members, documents, wiki, blog, and ideas (innovation management which will be discussed more later). On the overview page you can see recent community actions, related communities, and community members, as well as related tags. You can discover communities through tags, search and recommended content.

The Innovation Management capability integrates the innovation management process with your enterprise social network. It enables employees to create campaigns, submit ideas, comment on ideas, vote for ideas, and manage a basic innovation life-cycle. Users can easily track innovation management with activity stream integration and the My Ideas web part.

There is a Profile Builder that is an on-boarding wizard. It helps new, transferred, or promoted employees to shorten their on-boarding time by both making it easy to create a new profile and then through using their profile features to expand their network. It uses a pop-up wizard to expedite a new user’s ability to create profiles, find communities, and connect with colleagues. Recommend tags (keywords) for employee profiles are provided to ease location of subject matter experts and to better understand the many communities within the larger enterprise.

You can see the first of the three-part profile builder process below. Step one is Tag Me, step two is Group Me, and step three is Connect Me. At each steps suggestions are provided based on the individual’s use of the system.

The system provides dynamic content discovery through public and private tags, search, and recommended content. Users also receive updates from colleagues and communities. Users can gain a better understanding of the work patterns in the community through seeing the normal content interactions. Extensive reporting helps generate this understanding. There is access to hundreds of data views for insight into users, groups, communities, tags, and feed activity. You can export reports for use with Microsoft Office Excel or any other reporting engines. In addition, you can share dashboard views and email summaries for quick access to business metrics.

The Knowledge Explorer seen below is another way to explore the relationships between content and between people and content. It is targeted to be available in Fall 2009. Primarily based on crowd sourcing techniques, topic-people relationships are established. You can navigate the topics that an individual is deemed an expert in using a tag cloud and a network diagram. Ultimately, you can then discover the related artifacts to that topic and person.. You can drill down through these visualizations to find the details beneath.

There is more and the user interface can be customized. You also have administration control over: both what features are made available, which ones are optional or required, and where they are placed. What this means is that you can choose to deploy on different SharePoint versions, and choose to enable the components of Social Sites depending on your company’s needs. For example, you can implement the Innovation Management functionality without exposing the other features. These features and components I have described all sit within SharePoint and make it a stronger player in the social computing market. This is a welcome addition to the SharePoint market, and through it to the broader enterprise 2.0 market.

We also discussed how many of the major implementation issues are around people and process, and not technology. NewsGator has made the technology simple but the rich feature set opens up a wide range of decisions about how best to deploy the tools and how they impact business processes. This has always been the case with new technology but it seems even more pronounced as the technology becomes simpler, on one hand, and, on the other hand, more powerful in the ways it effects the interactions between people. NewsGator’s Enterprise Practice Management group helps customers with these challenges by using their own social computing strategy process. It helps customers first define their business goals and then implement the technology features that best meet those objectives. I can agree with this.

Great iPhone Book – Best iPhone Apps from O’ Reilly

I recently bought an iPhone. Actually it was birthday present from my wife who wanted me to have a better cell phone as my ld one never worked right. O’Reiilly had sent me their book, Best iPhone Apps for review so I was now psyched to look it. I reviewed it with an experienced iPhone user, Thierry Hubert, who agreed with their picks while he was helping me set up my iPhone. Since there are over 50,000 iPhone apps to choose from, a little help is appreciated. Thierry really liked their picks and said he was going to get a copy of the book.

I really liked the format and the picks seem to make sense. There are quite a few useful categories and easy to follow format. I marked Air Mouse Control as a remote for presentations. Thierry said he uses it as well as Yelp for local dining recommendations. The book recommends Twitterrific for our favorite micro-messaging tool and Thierry agrees. Shazam allows your to let the phone listen to a tune and name it. Thierry says it works and George Dearing also tweeted to me that he got it to work. The there is Flight Track Pro for tracking flights. This will be useful to know when to pick up my wife at the airport.

I highly recommend the book. What iPhone apps do you use and recommend?

Yakabod Offers Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Best Practices

Yakabod has been providing knowledge management solutions since 2003, primarily for the US intelligence community to date. Their flagship product is the Yakabox™ Knowledge Network that I reviewed earlier on the AppGap (see Yakabod Provides Robust Knowledge Management with a Social Side). Like a number of enterprise 2.0 providers, they realize that many of the issues for a successful adoption of their offering are not technical and they have broadened their offerings to include adoption support. I recently spoke with Yakabod CEO Scott Ryser and Ian Bramson, Director National Intelligence Engagements about their experiences helping clients with adoption issues and the services they provide for this effort.

Scott said that their developers are able handle any technical issues for their clients relatively easily. The harder tasks come with the change management and other people related concerns. They have set up an adoption services group to support these efforts and Ian is part of this group. A significant part of the change management effort is to enable a shift in the collaboration mentality. Since a lot of their work is in the intelligence community, they have had to encourage users to share their work before it is finished so others can comment on it and gain insights in a timely manner.

Ian said they offer two principal types of services: organization culture readiness and implementation effectiveness. The culture readiness involves a variety of methods including interviews, surveys, focus groups, and working on site with their users for direct observation of the work environment. This is the type of anthropology I used to enjoy in my past life doing large-scale knowledge management implementations. They started doing this informally but it has now become a formal part of their offering with a developing set of methods and measurements. It is offered to the client as part of step one along with a pilot of their tool set.

Scott said their knowledge management tools work best when wrapped around a business process, and there needs to be a lot of personal contact to properly integrate the tools with the process. I could not agree more. In fifteen years I never saw a successful KM effort that did not do this. The culture assessment looks at such issues as the structure of the organization, the nature of the hierarchy, the empowerment of employees, the presence of a mentoring system, physical and virtual work environment, and the promotion and reward system.

They share their results in an honest and through manner with the client, no matter how sensitive, and try to get commitment to address any issues that might be obstacles to a successful implementation. They focus more on raising awareness and getting commitment to change than producing the change. Scott said that the organizations can best change themselves, if they understand their issues and have the determination to address them. Ian said there is a saying in the government that you “speak truth to power and let power decide.” Scott mentioned that they are at the beginning of this effort but they are collecting data. Once they have enough instances, they will be able to offer predictive statistics on what is essential for a successful implementation.

One of the issues they address is the collaboration dynamics in the organization. Are there opportunities for unstructured exchanges during business processes or is everything planned and structured? What is the speed of collaboration? How fast can people connect and what are the obstacles? Are there tools in place to support this collaboration? What are the information silos in the organization?

Another issue is the power of inertia. How fast can the organization change? Are they always re-organizing so employees feel that can ignore change? Are there frequent changes in leadership so employees feel they can wait out efforts? Are the employees savvy in social technology?

They also look at the implementation profile for the particular effort. Is the organization ready for this initiative? Is there executive support? Is there a sense of urgency? What are the consequences of not doing anything? What is the leadership strength of the sponsor? What is the financial commitment? How good is the fit of the solution with the need? Do the targeted business processes allow for knowledge sharing? How relevant is the process to the mission of the organization? Do the targeted processes go across the organization (the broader the better)?

Another key area is what they call “winning the middle.” They realize that you need middle management support for the initiative to be successful. This is especially important with enterprise 2.0 efforts as they often allow information to more easily go directly from workers to senior management, bypassing the filter of middle management. They look at the role of middle management in deciding on the effort, as well as their support. How does success of the effort fit into middle managers’ accountability areas? How does it affect their advancement?

A final area we discussed was the adoption strategy. It looks at such issues as the presence of a project-related coaching plan for executives and middle managers. Do people understand the nature of the required change? Is there a user advocacy process? Can the plan adapt?

Scott and Ian said that they take the assessment results and fold them into the implementation planning process. They create a dashboard using the Yakabox that looks at the key issues raised in the assessment. They allow for a constant comment stream from users to make feedback transparent to everyone. They give the senior executives a direct view into the thoughts of the users. I like the fact that they are using their own tool to aid the implementation. This gets people familiar with the tool, as well as demonstrates its value.

Yakabod also provides customer advocates (Yakabod staff working directly with end users) to enable feedback and to provide assessments of progress on the change management issues. They also train their replacements by recruiting customer employees to address these issues.

Scott said that while they’ve been delivering services for a long time, they are just at the beginning of formalizing this offering. They realize that they have a lot to learn and will be refining their methods as they go along. I like this attitude. It will make them more successful in both the short term and the long term. This is an exemplary effort and I am grateful that Yakabod is willing to share their practices with us. I plan to check in after a while to see what else they have learned.

How do You Start Your Day? What do You Look at First on Your Computer?

The New York Times had an interesting article yesterday, Coffee Can Wait. Day’s First Stop Is Online. It starts with the description of a family where the husband wakes at around 6 a.m. to check his work e-mail and his Facebook and Twitter accounts. The two boys start each morning with text messages, video games and Facebook. The wife has even agreed to the four family members starting the day on four computers in four separate rooms.

Now for me it is: Online Can Wait. Day’s First Stop Is Coffee. I even set up the coffee pot the night before so all I have to do is push a button. I will also have breakfast with my wife before she goes to her office. Then I take my second cup of coffee to my computer as I work at home. I guess I am “so last century” according to the Times.

Then the question is what do you do when you get to your computer? I wonder if it varies for people who hit the computer before coffee and those who are more “traditional.” I used to look at my email first. Then I would check to see if my pre-scheduled daily blog post went up, as I sometimes would put in the wrong information and have to fix it. Now I tend to start Safari (to get at the blog), email, and Tweetdeck at the same time. Then I look at whatever loads the fastest but eventually get to all three.

The Times article said that, “Akamai, which helps sites like Facebook and Amazon keep up with visitor demand, says traffic takes off …at around 6 a.m. on the East Coast.” I do not start quite that early but usually get to my computer between 7:30 and 8:30. On Tweetdeck I notice that the Europeans are already tweeting of course, but most North Americans tend to start after 9 AM. So I try to do this also so someone will be around to read my tweets.

So how do you start your day? What do you do first when you get to your computer?

Allstate’s Social Media Experience with the Good Hands Community

I recently posted a two-part interview with Ben Foster about Allstate’s Good Hands Community. See:

Allstate’s Social Media Experimentation and Adoption Experiences Through the Good Hands Community: Part One – Background and Blogs

Allstate’s Social Media Experimentation and Adoption Experiences Through the Good Hands (SM) Community: Part Two Twitter and Summary

I want to share some highlights here. First, I like the way they set up the blogers on the Good Hands site. The content is not marketing focused, that content is available on other Allstate sites. It involves around four themes that they determined would be of interest to their community. The bloggers were recruited from Allstate who were already writing blogs or had interests in these themes. They provide content from their experiences.

Ben said that the biggest challenge was getting the right type of content that fit the themes and objectives of the site. They wanted it to be the right level of quality and be interesting to their readers. They did not say, “Write about anything you want.” They helped them focus on certain issues by posing questions raised in consumer research that they could address. This enabled them to write useful posts. They said to their bloggers, “Here are the issues people are concerned about. Here is the reason why. Here are some of the details.” They asked them to write content that helps people think differently about the problems. They asked them to write open-ended posts to encourage conversation.

I think this a really smart approach. They recruited people who knew the answers. They just did not necessarily know the right questions. They were able to motivate and focus them by giving them the questions and more background from research.

On the Twitter effort, Ben said that one thing that works well for them is to have multiple people involved. They each bring their own perspective: we each subscribe to different blogs, we talk to different people, so there is a broader perspective.

Ben said that social media provides another channel to connect with customers and other consumers and this connection is aligned with their strategic vision. They are able to hear from them their concerns, either directly or from others who are also listening to consumers. They also feel that social media are here to stay so we want to learn about it as much as possible so we will be better prepared to make effective use of it as the usage becomes more pervasive. See the links above for the complete interviews.

My Favorite Cape Cod Beach - Cahoons Hollow Wellfleet MA

I have been going to Cape Cod since the 60s when my parents got a Summer place in Chatham in 1964. Later I ran the Chatham windmill as a Summer job. I have been to most beaches on the Cape but my favorite is the Cahoons Hollow Beach in Wellfleet, MA. It has some of the highest dunes on the Cape and you can walk a few hundred yards away from the entrance and have the beach to yourself. there is also a greta seafood place on the beach. Recently I went back there in mid June and for most of the time had the place to myself. Here is what I saw. You can click on images to enlarge them.

Painting of a Woman Sitting Under a Yellow Fabric

Here is a 24" x 30" acrylic painting of a woman sitting under a yellow fabric.

My Fast Forward Posts for July 2009

Here is the monthly listing of my Fast Forward blog posts. I find it helps me with an archive and hopefully is also useful to you. There is a separate category for these summaries in my right side column on this blog. There will be more in August.

RightNow is Enabling Further Government Adoption of the Cloud

Social Media Policy Guidelines Can Encourage Use Outside Enterprise and Adoption Within

A 12 Step Program for Enterprise 2.0 Adoption

Euan Semple Provides Advice on Social Media Adoption

Allstate’s Social Media Experimentation and Adoption Experiences Through the Good Hands Community: Part One – Background and Blogs

Allstate’s Social Media Experimentation and Adoption Experiences Through the Good Hands (SM) Community: Part Two Twitter and Summary

Socialcast Adds Broadcasting Capability to Enterprise Microsharing

This post was co-written with Marcia Conner. It first appeared on Pistachio Consulting’s Touchbase blog. Marcia is an enterprise learning and social media analyst and a 20-year veteran of the enterprise technology market. She writes the Fast Company Learn at All Levels blog and is Senior Enterprise Strategist for Pistachio Consulting. I have great respect for Pistachio and we have started to do some work together in the enterprise space.

Social media tools have begun to migrate from the consumer web to the business web, sometimes facing outward, sometimes focused in. Just as public-facing applications need broad appeal, enterprise tools need to be designed for a defined organizational space to be effective (see Enterprise 2.0 is not Web 2.0 nor is it an Oxymoron). With the explosion of the Twitter market, some of these new tools are designed specifically for enterprise microsharing (sometimes called microblogging and social messaging). Although Twitter can be used within an organization, it was created for the broader web and does not have the functionality that appeals to enterprise decision-makers, seeking multifaceted tools.

One of the initial players in the enterprise microsharing space is Socialcast who we have covered before (see Enterprise Microsharing Tools Comparison, Socialcast Brings Twitter Style Functionality into the Enterprise, and Socialcast Adds iPhone and Gmail Plug-ins).

Last week Socialcast released a priority broadcast message capability that gives designated participants authority to elevate need-to-know messages to a community in real time, separating this information from regular traffic and denoting its importance. Broadcast messages appear prominently in the network, highlighted with unique colors and triggering instant email alerts of a new broadcast.

This new capability was developed from customer comments and it is has been tested in over thirty companies. Organizations have broadcast emergency alerts, quarterly messages from the President, key promotions and congratulatory announcements; intermittent bursts relevant to everyone receiving the signal.

We like the idea of bringing important messages inside the microsharing environment because it reaches people where they are, through mobile devices and desktops alike. It also demonstrates leadership support and purposeful engagement with the tools. If done right, it may entice more participation from people throughout the organization because conversation happens around the broadcast within the stream, rather than in corporate email silos.

For this feature to influence the culture in 2.0 ways, it should be the content, not the sender’s seniority, that determines when this capability is used. It should broadcast important messages from those holding the corporate vision alongside those outside the executive suite. People at many organizational levels are privy to news that affects everyone and they should have the power to use it. Someone in the transportation department may learn of a roadway accident that will have an impact on everyone leaving work. An ad hoc speaker in the auditorium could be announced by someone in community relations or PR. An imminent change to social media policy could be shared by a member of the peer council no matter their department. They each have a real reason to use the system and should have a mechanism to do so. At the same time, it should not be over used or it will appear as spam.

Senior leaders should likewise demonstrate they are listening to what employees are saying. They should also post regular messages, not only broadcasts, showing they want to be part of the ongoing conversation with all levels of the enterprise. This will demonstrate real engagement and allow them to gain the full benefit of these tools.

Broadcasting is one examples of an emergent capability not appropriate for use on the broader web, that can work well within the enterprise. This feature would not even be relevant to Twitter because users have access to only one follower pool and the system depends on its distributed nature. In an enterprise you can have layers of participation and parallel systems for those who aren’t microsharing yet. This feature can provide a greater sense of community within the enterprise as all levels of the organization can now respond to breaking broadcasted news through a channel that provides greater collaboration than email. We look forward to more innovations like this one within the market as it adapts to the needs of the enterprise.

Paula Thronton’s Enterprise 2.0 Blogcast Series and Context of “Intent.”

My FastForward colleague, Paula Thronton, (aka rotkapchen on Twitter) has been running a series of post son FastForward were she summaries blog posts on the topic. Her most recent one was on July 31 (see E2.0 Blogcast: July 31, 2009) and it kindly linked to several of my posts. Even when she does not link to my posts, it is a great service ☺ or perhaps an even better service. Others in that post include: Smartest Guy in the Room vs Teamwork and Enterprise 2.0: We Got it All Wrong – a Cross-Cultural Misunderstanding, two useful pieces. Here are some others in the series from Paula:

E2.0 Blogcast: July 17, 2009

E2.0 Blogcast: July 14, 2009

Also look at her most recent regular post, The Context of “Intent.” She looks at two differentiating attributes of 2.0 are adaptation and emergence. “Adaptive systems rely on feedback loops for continuous assessment. Emergence is the result of self-organizing adaptation. The more fluid a solution architecture, the more readily it can adapt.” Paula goes on to look at a number of ways to research what is happening in your organization around these two themes. She closes with the question of whether an enterprise needs to be adaptive to work in the enterprise 2.0 mode. I would say yes.

There is along comment from Esteban Kolsky who praises Paula for offering a “blueprint that organizations will need to understand to start leveraging communities and social customers.” Enterprise 2.0 provides a wealth of social “data” as a byproduct of its use. We are only beginning to figure out how to harvest. The organizations that do this are truly working in the enterprise 2.0 space.

Enterprise Micro-Messaging: Standalone or Integrated with Comprehensive Collaboration Platform? Or Both?

This is a question I see discussed more often. Here is a post on the collaboration platforms that are integrating micro-messaging. What has been your experience? Is there a role of both approaches in parallel with different functions? Are there different adoption challenges?

Here is a set of comments from an email group that I belong to. I have dropped the names and the names of companies (to protect the innocent) and vendors as this is a general discussion that goes beyond individual tools.

First Commenter: “We’re really interested in using (micro-messaging tool) and have a few people on it already. BUT, it’s yet another user interface, another site, another URL for people to remember and interact with! It’d be great if someone would reverse-engineer the core functionality into (collaboration platform) so we can have micro-blogging functionality in the same collaboration system…”

Second Commenter: “I’ve heard the same comment from people internal and external to (our firm). There is a population that sees integration of microblogging with other collaboration tools as necessary for far reaching adoption.”

Third Commenter: “There is a powerful analogy with Instant Messaging here. Most IM systems are no longer standalone but integrated with email and other communications systems. Microblogging is a technical functionality / human activity that's part of broader set of technical functions & human activities rather than a standalone "thing."

I am not trying to pick on the standalone micro-messaging vendors here, and there are quite a few now with excellent functionality. Twitter works fine as a standalone tool out on the Web. How would you counter these comments to define the role of standalone tools inside the enterprise? The questions are about usage and not features. They are certainly not tool specific.

I do not want to compare tools here but rather approaches and I am open to the idea that there might even be a role for both in the same enterprise. I can see an integrated tool focusing on messages around projects and other tasks handled by the collaboration tool and the standalone tool handling more general conversations within an organization.

In fact, another comment raised some excellent issues with the integrated approach. I am glad to be more balanced here. There were even more comments but this is enough. It was a provocative topic.

Commenter 4: "As more and more vendors start implementing "Twitter-like" functionality, the more segmented and Tower of Babel-like the social landscape becomes. This is not so much of a problem with features that are bounded by the corporate firewall (such as office suites are and collaboration may be) or where interoperation standards have been accepted (such as email).

But it is a serious problem when you are talking about lightweight, highly social activities. Although it seems like a good idea to integrate it with your other communication functions, what if it gets integrated differently with two existing functions? What if email and collaboration both integrate microblogging? Unless you have a single vendor for all your apps, you are going to have a conflict. This problem is exacerbated by the expanding and fluid nature of people's social environment nowadays."

My App Gap Posts for July 2009

Here are my App Gap posts for July. In addition to the Fast Forward blog (see side bar for links), I am writing in another Corante blog, the App Gap, sponsored by QuickBase, The posts began toward the end of January 2008. In this case, I am primarily doing product commentaries with a few other things thrown in. Below are the ones for June. There will be more in August.

Rackspace 7.0 Provides Business Focused Email

Intrix Is Bringing Semantic Technology to Enterprise 2.0

RightNow Provides Web Social Monitoring and Analytics with Latest Release

Enterprise Microsharing Tools Comparison from Pistachio Consulting

Telligent Releases an Integrated Suite of Collaboration Tools with High Powered Metrics

Titus Labs Extends SharePoint Document Security and Marking

Alpha Software Provides Tools to Create Comprehensive Online Databases

Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Best Practices from Yakabod

Painting of Our Studio Sink

Here is a 18" x 14" acrylic painting of the sink in our studio. It is a quick sketch done in about an hour.

Painting of Woman in a Brown Chair

Here is a 18 x 24" acrylic painting of a woman sitting in a brown chair. It is part of the series on women sitting. See also Painting of Woman in a Pink Dress, Painting of Woman on a Stool, and Painting of Woman with Flip Flops.