Portals and KM

Forum Corporation Blog Provides Thought Leadership in the Learning Space and More

The Forum Corporation blog offers some excellent content on such topics as learning, leadership, collaboration, enhancing customer experiences, and accelerating strategic execution. It is a collaborative effort by a number of the Forum team members. The Forum Corporation began in 1971 and it “helps senior leaders execute innovative, people-driven solutions that accelerate business growth, corporate change and overall performance.” I have known and respected Forum for some time as I competed against them in the 1980s when I was with Spectrum. See my post, Useful Guidelines and Metrics for Speeding Up Your Organization, for a review of their recent book, Strategic Speed: Mobilize People, Accelerate Execution.

Recent posts include, Why is it so hard to create a great customer experience? by Jane Marham Weinstein that makes a great organization structure point.  Customer experiences, whether viral or physical, generally require an end-to-end process that involves multiple departments. If the organization is structured around these different departments (e.g. marketing, customer service, order fulfillment) it can be like the blind men and the elephant with each department having a different, and incomplete perception or the customer. However, if the organization is structured around the customer experience, it can have a more accurate picture of the customer and provide a better and more coordinated customer experience.

The VUCA Future – Are You Ready? by Steve Barry describes the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous business environment. I have heard of complex adaptive systems for some time but this was a new term for me. Forum interviewed futurist Bob Johansen for his thoughts on VUCA and what lies ahead for business. Bob said that the term VUCA was coined at the US Army War College that is the graduate school for future generals. In a VUCA world the best leaders have vision, understanding, clarity, and agility.  Clarity and agility were two of the leadership characteristics promoted in Forum’s new book, Strategic Speed: Mobilize People, Accelerate Execution. The world is changing and leadership skills need to transition to adapt. The complete interview provides many useful insights.

In the post, New Motivation Theory in Business: n Lrn?, Jocelyn Davis builds on David McClelland (need for achievement, need for affiliation, and need for power) to offer a fourth motivation, need for learning. People moved by this trait “would have a strong need to collect and synthesize new information, to reflect on their experiences, and to master new skills.” I would certainly fall into this category so it makes sense to me.  Jocelyn goes on to compare these n Lrns (to use McClelland’s notational style) with those primarily motivated by the three original traits. 

For example, someone with the power motivation (n Pow) would be motivated to teach for the ability to influence while a n Lrn person would be motivated by what they could learn from the experience.  In contrast, someone with the affiliation need would be motivated to teach by the possible relationships they could establish. Of course, there can be more than one of these traits within an individual but one or two are often dominant.  While Jocelyn notes that there does not seem to be experimental evidence for this trait, it makes intuitive sense.  If you have employees with the n Lrn trait, then you need to make sure they are properly motivated in their work.

This is just a sampling. There is much more by additional authors. I would encourage you to explore if you are interested in the learning, leadership, organizational development, collaboration, and other related fields. 

Cisco Announces Second I-Prize Winner

I have been covering the Cisco I-Prize for several years and continue to be impressed with this initiative.  I spoke with Sharon Wong, the Director of Business Development for Cisco’s Emerging Technology group to discuss the conclusion of the second I-Prize. She said that the first one validated the desire for teams to work together on innovation on the global scale and they learned how much people really like to collaborate (see Cisco Announces I-Prize Winner and Results of Their Global Collaboration).  So this time they provided greater collaboration support through Cisco tools including the following four.

Cisco Show and Share, a social video community where contest participants can record, edit and share video; comment, rate and tag interesting content; and use speech-to-text translation for video search and viewing.

Cisco Pulse, a search platform that dynamically tags content as it crosses the network, allowing contest participants to accurately locate and connect with the best available experts and information on a particular topic.

Cisco WebEx™, an online meeting platform for audio and Web conferencing that enables users to share documents and desktops in real time.

Cisco TelePresence™, an immersive, virtual meeting experience that combines real-time video, audio and interactive technologies to give people in distributed global locations a wide variety of face-to-face collaboration experiences.

The program was divided into the following four categories:

The future of work: Use the power of the network to bring together customers, suppliers and associates to propose solutions that will change the way companies and organizations do business. 

The connected life: Showcase technological advancements that will dramatically improve living conditions and culture. This category will require people to envision a life of seamless connectivity. 

New ways to learn: Create innovative solutions that will transform when, where and how people learn.

The future of entertainment: Devise next-generation solutions that will change how people play.

The I-Prize event is targeted at those outside the organization as they already have programs to encourage contributions from employees. However, employees can participant in the various ways to comment on and rate the entries.  Cisco introduced an IP point system to this second contest to create an ideas market. The ideas market was build on the Spigit platform, a product I covered on this blog before. Participants received IP points when they registered. They could invest these points in ideas. There was a cap on the number of points you could invest in any one idea to prevent gaming the system. As strong ideas emerged, the investors’ points became more valuable. Participants also got more points for their participation in the process and they could invest these.

A leader board allowed people to track ideas and their points. You could also follow the point progress for people. This transparency increased involvement as I have seen in many situations. In the first contest there were 2,500 participants and 4,000 comments. In the second one there were 3,000 participants and almost 12,000, comments. Many participants said the leader board was very engaging and they followed it on a frequent basis.  I like this idea and it showed that Cisco listened to participants.

The event was organized in three phases. In the first phase, which lasted three months, the 3,000 people submitted over 800 ideas. These participants came from 156 countries. They could use video for submissions and commentary.  In the second phase the field was reduced to thirty-two teams from twenty two countries. Eight of these teams were picked through the IP point system, the top two in each of the four categories advancing. The Cisco team picked the other 24 idea teams.  A team of ten Cisco managers monitored the leader board process.

 In the third phase nine finalist teams presented their ideas to Cisco using telepresence. These nine teams were composed of people from 14 countries on six continents.  The wining team received a $250,000 prize. Like all participants they retained the intellectual property rights and Cisco licensed their idea for an undisclosed sum.  The team was composed of five students from Mexico: Darius Lau Castro and his teammates Lizett Michel Gallegos, Claudia Alexandra Vargas Prieto, Guillermo Antonio Araiza Torres and Juan Rodrigo Huerta Manning. You can see the announcement on the left with members of the winning team on screen. 

They proposed an online “Life Account” to create a physical and virtual platform that facilitates connectivity along with smart objects, people and information. Life Account collects data about its users through devices that capture information both from the users’ activities in the physical and virtual world. This data is then aggregated to generate a virtual profile that understands habits and behavior patterns to conveniently blend the physical and virtual world for the user.

The winning idea from the first contest also came from students and it was directed at effective energy management. You can see a photo of the announcement of the winning team on the left. The winning team contained two Germans and a Russian. It was led by Anna Gossen, a computer science student at the Karlsruhe University in Germany. The other members include Niels Gossen, a computer science student at the University of Applied Sciences in Germany, and Sergey Bessonnitsyn, a systems engineer from Russia. They were looking at ways to use the network as the platform for visibility, manageability and, ultimately, optimized control of energy-consuming systems. It has now been folded into Cisco’s energy management offering.  Two of the finalists from the first contest made it to the finals in the second year.

I think this is a great example of crowd-sourcing with a clearly define process and the right supporting collaborative tools. It continues to improve. I look forward to seeing what changes they may make to the next competition. 

Making Raw Milk Mozzarella in Western Massachusetts

I often write about my food experiences with my friend and food writer, Don Lesser who lives in western Massachusetts. The Pioneer Valley is a center for great local produce and food and Don covers this on his blog, Russelnod.  I encourage you to explore it.

Don recently wrote about making raw milk mozzarella and I had the pleasure of tasting the output. Below is a picture of the cheese with local fresh tomatoes and basil that what we shared.

I used have raw milk as child when I visited my cousin’s diary and fruit farm in Oklahoma. She taught me how to hand milk the cows and then we would sample the results. It is good to see more raw milk cheese generally available.  You can also get raw milk from certain farms in western Massachusetts.  Check out Don’s post to discover the process he used for this great cheese.  It is much better than anything you get in a store.  

 

A Wall of Four Micro-landscape Paintings

Here are four in the series of micro-landscape paintings created by focusing on details in a cloth.  They are 16" x 20" acrylics. 

 
 

The Cloud Keeps Getting Bigger

The IT Channel Planet reports that Gartner has predicted SaaS revenue within enterprise application software market will jump up 14 percent over 2009, based on convergence with cloud computing models and diminished security and availability concerns among business customers. I heard about this through George Dearing on Twitter.

Three of the growth markets are project and portfolio management (PPM), content, communications and collaboration (CCC), and customer relationship management (CRM). These are all areas I continue to cover on this blog and the AppGap as they are key aspects of enterprise 2.0. It is encouraging to see these numbers,

It is interesting to note that the collaboration market exhibits the most noticeably disproportionate SaaS adoption rates range from 4 percent for enterprise content management to 82 percent for web conferencing. However, I have seen that most collaboration platform vendors are offering a SaaS option. I think this will continue to grow. 

Jackbe Releases Presto 3.0 and Opens Enterprise App Store

A few months ago I covered Jackbe’s preview of this release (see JackBe Provides Enterprise Mashup Platform on the Cloud and Previews Presto 3.0).  Now it has become available and I spoke with John Crupi, CTO and Chris Warner, VP of Marketing about their new 3.0 release.  Two of the main additions are a platform for creating internal Enterprise App Stores, as well as a robust visual toolset for creating secure Enterprise Apps.

First, we discussed the Enterprise App Store.  This is modeled after the very successful and well-known iTunes store but it takes the functionality inside the enterprise as a means of governance more that a commercial distribution channel. I like the use of the App Store concept, as people are very familiar with it. The platform allows enterprise consumers of apps a single source that is well organized and searchable. It also offers the creators of apps a central place to share their efforts within the enterprise.  Here is a sample App Store screen.

There is an App Store Manager responsible for ensuring the Apps have function, documentation and work as advertised. . The review and approval process provides central governance that can be very useful given the ease in which apps can be powered by mashups.  This is a way to avoid the potential chaos of too many apps and redundant apps. You can better get the right apps to the right users with some degree of vetting along the way.  The apps can be out-of-the-box creations, as well as templates requiring further customization.  Here is a App Store Manager screen.

The App Store has an area called ‘My Apps’ where users can place and organize the Apps they want and use. They can provide comments; tag and share the Apps. This information accelerates the ability for other users to find and use the Apps they want. Here is a sample My Apps screen

JackBe has also upgraded their development tools with this release. Their new visual tools make it easier for non-developers to create enterprise apps and deploy them to enterprise destination like portals, SharePoint, iGoogle, and mobile devices. Presto 3.0 includes enhancement to Wires, their visual mashup-making tool, Mashboard, a new App assembly and wiring tool, and Mashup Sites for SharePoint, an advanced SharePoint add-on that mashes SharePoint Lists and publishes Apps as SharePoint WebParts.

They showed me some apps created with these new tools. One set were developed by a non-technical marketing person and covered the World Cup. There was an amusing comparison of goals per capita and goals vs. GDP for the competing countries. These applications took minutes to create without programming using publically available data.

I especially liked the new Mashhboard that allows users to group or link apps along a workflow. The creations can run on any browser, on the iPad, or even within Excel. The approach is to make everything simple: creation, distribution selection, and implementation.  Mashups are one of the key building blocks of enterprise 2.0 and it is nice to see these new features to streamline the process. Here is a Mashboard screen.

JackBe will also be making a cloud-based Developer Edition of Presto 3.0 available to all members of its Mashup Developer Community. Registration in the Community is free and includes tutorials, samples, and support forums. 

What is Next for Desktop Productivity Tools?

According to a new Forrester report, The Next Wave of Office Productivity by Sheri McLeish with Matthew Brown and Joseph Dang, Microsoft Office continues to dominate both in the enterprise and at home to no surprise. However, changes are affecting enterprise productivity strategies, such as Web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, and the consumerization of IT. Many enterprise workers use products like the iPhone and YouTube at home and they have expectations at work for similar functionality either through these tools or enterprise versions. As a loyal Mac. iTunes, and iPhone user who is still attached to Office, I was interested in where all these tools are going and appreciated getting a review copy of the report.

The report indicated that though most enterprises have long-term plans to continue using Office, alternative productivity tools will remain in the mix by leveraging the tools employees access for do-it-yourself technologies, such as those through mobile devices and the cloud. These evolving productivity tools will help enterprises transform to a fit-to-purpose approach to productivity, establishing the foundation for the next wave of productivity that's focused on aligning tools with employee needs. In the words of the report, “The next wave of productivity will see today’s innovations dissolve into expected features, creating integrated touch points for content-related activities tailored to fit a business purpose or workforce segment.”

They pointed out that the recent recession has driven interest in free or low-cost alternatives to Microsoft Office and has slowed upgrade plans. In the past year OpenOffice.org has seen a modest uptake by enterprises and is now supported by nearly 10% of the organizations Forrester surveyed. Similarly, cloud-based email from providers like Google is finding traction as a lower-cost alternative to Exchange. I covered the email wars recently (see: Email Wars Heat Up in the Cloud). Google’e move caused Microsoft to drop its prices.

Another factor is the growing interest business process integration and automation, another topic I have discussed here (see for example: Building Enterprise 2.0 into the Product Development Process). As enterprises increasingly use collaboration platforms like SharePoint and the best of breed players, they will (or should) increasingly seek to integrate business content and processes in an effort to move from simple content storage to content workflows. I see this as what needs to be done to really make use of the enterprise 2.0 approach and tools. In a similar way, the only successful KM efforts were aligned to work processes.

There is much more in the report and I found it very useful.  For example, the majority of people surveyed as a background for the report viewed alternatives to Microsoft Office as complementary, rather than replacements. In this light, many tools, including Microsoft Office 2010, are adding social computing capabilities. Other tools such as those from Google, IBM, and Novell are moving in the same direction. 

The Learning Layer Has Potential to Push the Envelope of Enterprise 2.0

 Here is an interesting concept that is well articulated in a new book, The Learning Layer by Steven Flinn.  Recently, I had an opportunity to speak with Steve about this marriage of aspects of Web 2.0 and artificial intelligence (aka adaptive systems) that can have useful applications within the enterprise.

Steve is the CEO of ManyWorlds, a firm that conducts R&D in the area of next generation systems and business processes and provides practical applications of this work to organizations. He was an executive at Royal Dutch Shell where he held  a variety of positions including Chief Information Officer and Vice President of Strategy and Strategic Alliances. Steve has a background in economics, mathematics and computer science.

Steve noted that use of personalized responses based on user behavior has been pervasive on the consumer Web through such things as Amazon’s recommendations.  However, this technology has been applied much less within the enterprise.  He feels that this is ironic since behavioral information available within the enterprise  can generally be much richer than out on the Web. You have a more clearly defined set of users and many more interactions to data mine, along with more related teams who collaborate and generate more behavioral data.  I would certainly agree with the difference in the quality of information on user behavior and also add that many Web 2.0 applications such as wikis work better within the trusted environment of the enterprise. This seems to be another case.

The Learning Layer approach takes this personalization several steps further. Not only are personalized recommendations provided to individual users based on their behavior and the behavior of others, but the system feeds these recommendations back to itself to continuously adapt on an automated basis. Steve said that the technology is currently available to do this, it just needs to be properly applied.

For example, a system managing content might make recommendations for related content based on a user’s profile and actions.  Using the Learning Layer approach, it would also keep track of all user behavior and feed this back into the system on a regular basis. The relationship between two sets of content may become stronger or weaker depending how it is currently being used.  The same logic can be applied to the connections between people to see the ebb and flow of connections.

The approach can be applied to work flow and here it gets even more interesting in my opinion. Just as old school knowledge management created more direct business value when aligned to business processes, I see the same thing happening here.  Let’s take the example of a property casualty insurance underwriter. After the system takes in enough actions to be able to differentiate the skill level of users, it is ready to go.

Now if an underwriter with no experience in underwriting laundry mats, for example, starts to work on one the system recognizes this. It also knows the steps that an inexperienced underwriter should take when working with laundry mats and provides these process steps. It can also recommend a person who is slightly more advanced than the user who can offer guidance. If the user has middle level experience, then the process steps can be tailored to that level. In the meanwhile the system is observing the ongoing user behavior on an aggregated basis and making adjustments in the proper process steps for everyone at all levels.

The technology is around to create this type of system. I can see the value and wish I had this capability when I designed knowledge management systems for underwriters in the early 90s.  Call centers that deal with complex topics would be another great target area. You need to have enough complexity to warrant this type of intervention and then enough users to generate useful data for the system to apply.

We also discussed the concept of learning value that Steve raises in the book. He took the concept of value of information from decision analysis and applied it to learning. In decision analysis people calculate the value of having certain information to help with decisions. The same concept can be applied to learning.  When undertaking an activity there is the direct value and the value of the learning derived from the undertaking. This often translates into the amount of uncertainty that can be eliminated by the new knowledge and its effect on actions. Steve noted that learning only has real value if it changes behavior (i.e., decisions).  If people will still do the same thing regardless then nothing is gained. That sounds simple but it is often overlooked.

I like this approach. I think it does extend the possibilities of enterprise 2.0. If we can create data rich environments through the transparent interactions within enterprise 2.0 then we have expanded the learning opportunities. Then if we can use this expanded learning to better guide individual behavior we have taken it a notch further. Now if we can turn this learning back on the system to auto-generate changes within the system itself, we have taken things another step further.  I think the data gained from the transparency of enterprise 2.0 is a large piece of the value. Here is an approach to make better use of this transparency.  

Traditional Intranets are so Nineteenth Century

Oscar Berg posted a useful piece on why traditional intranets fail today's knowledge workers that I want to bring to your attention. I heard about it through Twitter and Marcia Conner. Oscar starts with some useful stats on the increasing amount of knowledge-based work. He writes that a study by The Work Foundation estimated our workforce has 30 per cent in jobs with high knowledge content, 30 per cent in jobs with some knowledge content, and 40 per cent in jobs with less knowledge content. I think the numbers are higher for knowledge work but this is still a lot.

Oscar notes that knowledge work is less predictable and repeatable than traditional industry work. Move over Fred Taylor. He adds that the structure of knowledge work typically emerges as the work progresses. I would add that it is very context dependent and this argues against the concept of best practices, at least the static kind.  This makes it hard to know in advance what knowledge you need.  This means that you need to place control over knowledge access in the hands of the worker and not the system. It argues against scripted solutions.

Most traditional intranets do not provide the flexibility for knowledge access that knowledge workers require.  As Oscar writes, “most of today’s intranets primarily consist of pre-produced information resources which are intended to serve information needs which can be anticipated in advance. They aim to serve people who perform predefined and repeatable tasks.” This is so nineteenth century.

Now in the twenty first century we have the potential to address these needs through a social intranet (aka enterprise 2.0).  This is more than a simply adding collaboration tools. As Oscar writes, “It equips everyone with the tools that allows them to participate, contribute, attract, discover, find and connect with each other to exchange information and knowledge and/or collaborate.”  Ahem.

I have just given you the highlights. Hopefully this is enough to make you want to read Oscar’s complete passage.

 

 

Micro-Landscape Painting: Blue Grey Number 1

Here is the fifth in a series of 16" x 20" acrylic paintings. They are all created by focusing in on a detail in a folded napkin to find mini-landscapes. 

 
 

HBO Focuses on Post-Katrina New Orleans

 I do not often cover TV shows on this blog but I do write a good bit on my home town, New Orleans. You can explore these posts through the New Orleans category in the right side bar of this blog. I really appreciate the coverage that HBO has recently brought to the city.  I watched the series, Treme, three times. First I saw each episode twice as it appeared and then went back and watched the whole series over again.  I think it is the best production I have seen that was originally produced for television but I may be biased on the subject matter. It showed the strengths and weaknesses of the city in a balanced way that made me want to move back. In my mind the strengths far out weight the flaws.

Now Spike Lee has returned to New Orleans to see how the ambitious plans to reinvent the Crescent City are playing out in the all-new, four-hour documentary, If God is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise. He finds a “patchwork of hope and heartache in a story that is book-ended by a pair of momentous events — the historic 2010 Super Bowl victory and the disastrous British Petroleum oil spill — that changed the history of America’s most unique city once again.” The HBO film debuts in two parts on Monday, Aug. 23 (9:00-11:00 p.m. ET/PT) and Tuesday, Aug. 24 (9:00-11:00 p.m.).

The man in the poster is Lionel Batiste who is with the Treme Brass Band and was also featured in the HBO Treme series. My friend Paul Tamburello met him and the band in a recent trip to New Orleans. To see pictures of the 79 year Lionel dancing at the Candlelight Lounge see Paul's post: The Treme Brass Band Lights up The Candlelight Lounge. 

I was in New Orleans at the time Spike arrived. See Men in Dresses Celebrate the New Orleans Saints Going to the Super Bowl, Brief Explorations in New Orleans Live Music 2010, and Images of Support for the New Orleans Saints in the Super Bowl Today for three posts about this trip.

This film continues the story of the rebirth of NOLA, begun in Lee’s epic, Emmy^®- and Peabody-winning 2006 documentary “When the Levees Broke:  A Requiem in Four Acts.”  I really liked that first effort. In this second film, “Lee documents the successes and failures in the ongoing efforts to restore housing, healthcare, education, economic growth and law and order to a battered but unbowed community, alongside the city’s storied ability to celebrate life with unmatchable ebullience.

I will be sure to see this show more than once. I also heard that HBO has signed up for a second season of Treme, a wise move. Lee’s film shows that there remains much to do in the rebuilding of the city. “A lack of affordable housing is one of several serious ongoing problems faced by the city’s poor, especially the primarily African-American residents of the devastated Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard’s Parish.  The four large public housing developments have been shuttered, and rents have soared, with the average fair-market value of an apartment rising from $578 in 2005 to $881 in 2009.  Only 38 percent of the private homes destroyed in the hurricane have been rebuilt.” The Treme series showed this unnecessary closing of public housing that was done more for political reasons that any damage suffered by the projects.

 
 

 

MindTouch 2010 Provides Intelligent Product and Services Documentation

I have written about MindTouch several times (see for example: MindTouch 2009 Provides Enhanced Development Platform for Rich Collaborative Applications). I recently spoke again with Aaron Fulkerson, their Co-Founder and CEO, on MindTouch 2010. First we set some context for this latest release.

MindTouch was first released in 2006 as an Open Source wiki-based platform. The initial goal was to attract users and this has been achieved with over a l million users in hundreds of thousands of installations. In 2008 MindTouch began to sell support subscriptions. Then in 2009 they released a commercial version that sits on top of the free Open Source core. They discovered that many users were building product and service documentation with the MindTouch platform.  These strategic efforts were used to engage potential customers, retain them, and increase cost savings through greater self-service.  The decision was made to create MindTouch 2010 to provide greater capability through an intelligent platform for this growing use case.  I think it was a wise decision.

As Aaron describes in a recent Forbes article, The Evolution Of User Manuals, product and service documentation has evolved from a tactical cost center to a revenue generating strategic tool. The advent of online documentation has learned with this transformation.  Now you can apply SEO to the documentation to proactively attract potential customers and MindTouch has done this. You can also track their pathway through the documentation to determine their areas of interest and offer appropriate solutions, another area that MindTouch supports. 

Aaron writes that some companies that he has spoken to report that their documentation brings in over 50% of qualified leads. He also notes that in his own company receives 70% plus of our site traffic from organic sources, and our documentation generates more than half of our overall site traffic. In addition, over half of their lead generation is driven by our documentation.

I can certainly believe this as I have seen similar results. This applies to both self-service documentation and that which supports call center reps. For example, is one company I worked with, the reps who made full use of the supporting product and service documentation were three times more likely to cross sell, moving from a below industry average achieved by the non-users to an above industry average for the documentation users.

MindTounch 2010 has enhanced three major areas to support this major use case. It now provides new capabilities for authoring, discovery, and curation of strategic content:

To support authoring MindTouch 2010 offers a multi-user, XML-driven editing platform that supports all rich media types. Users are able to publish in-a-click from commonly used desktop tools. The Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) ensures data portability. They also offer templates and Aaron walked me through some of these. A tutorial template not only provided short cuts but also offered good instructional format suggestions.  Here is a sample opening page offering templates.

 To support discovery MindTouch 2010 publishes content in a web-based format, dynamically generating navigation from content semantics and including effective search engine optimization tools. The enterprise-ready Adaptive Search engine delivers increasingly high quality results by learning from your users’ behavior.

Content curation is great new capability. To support this MindTouch 2010 introduces some targeted curation analytics. Customers can analyze their documentation by quality, aging and customer behavior in aggregate or by specific topics.  You can use out-of the-box reports can create custom versions. Here are two sample reports covering aging and rating..

Aaron showed me a few client examples. Autodesk provides CAD software. They had a large user base. So they provided a MindTouch powered set of educational services. Based on participants’ interest, they now can cross sell through the educational materials.  The pilot was very successful and now they are rolling the offering across all products. This is a clever approach.

I like what they are doing. It is a great example of a company listening to its users to identify an expanding market opportunity.  They not only listened well but also provided some useful new capabilities to serve this use case.

 

Enterprise Email Wars Heat Up in the Cloud

I recently received a review copy of a useful new Forrester report, Four Giants Compete For Your Cloud Email Business by Ted Schadler, that has a cost breakdown of cloud-based email services from the four leading vendors- Google, Microsoft, IBM and Cisco - and indicates that Google and Microsoft are in the lead for customers. Here is a good overview in Ted’s words from the executive summary.

“Google jumped into the enterprise email market in 2007 with a $50 annual subscription to its cloud email service and turned the market upside down. Microsoft quickly re-evaluated and repriced its Exchange Online offering to $5 per user per month; IBM launched LotusLive Notes and iNotes for $5 and $3, respectively; and Cisco purchased PostPath and opened its WebEx Mail offering with a 5 GB mailbox for $5 per user per month. Each of these big four collaboration vendors has since beefed up and clarified its road map for cloud email and collaboration services. Their email offerings are rapidly approaching feature and price parity — at least on the checklist items.”

Since I became an enterprise of one in 2004, I missed these most recent corporate email wars. My last employer moved from Notes to Outlook but Google had not yet turned the market upside down. Now both Google and Microsoft have bundled in their Web productivity apps, something that IBM and Cisco do not. Cisco allows you to use Outlook.

Over the next five years, Ted writes, enterprises will be re-evaluating their email strategy and partner. For vendors, it will be a tough five years as companies pick a messaging and collaboration partner for the next decade. Ted gives a nice way to estimate your total email costs that appear to be significantly cheaper in the cloud. However, there are migration costs to get there.

Forrester also expects that email will improve it gains features that improve usability and functionality such as: “analytics to perform triage on messages; collaboration features to make it easier to act on a message; in-message widgets to pull information relevant to the message; pushbutton publishing to a team wiki; messages, activities, feeds, tweets, etc., in a single inbox; and so on.”  This is good news and another alignment with the enterprise concept that suggests it is becoming standard. Many of the collaboration platforms already allow you to use them within an email client so this is going in the other direction but likely focused on the tools offered by the email provider. 

PBworks Provides Customer Relationship Collaborative: CRC

PBworks has now launched its PBworks Customer Relationship Edition, which extends CRM solutions such as Salesforce.com by offering shared online workspaces for collaborating with customers and prospects throughout the entire customer lifecycle.  I recently spoke with Chris Yeh, VP Marketing at PBworks about this new offering that they refer to as CRC or Customer Relationship Collaboration. This new term indicate support for collaboration with customers rather the management of them through CRM.

This platform allows for customer communication to more easily move out of the traditional channels of email and telephones to a more productive and transparent collaboration platform.  Now organizations have been using wikis and other collaborative tools for some time to set up shared space to communication with customers. It is one of the more common use cases that go across organizational boundaries. I asked Chris what is different with this new release.

He said that they have recognized that customer collaboration was one of the stronger uses cases of PBworks so they have designed the PBworks Customer Relationship Edition to optimize for this activity.  There are four main new capabilities.

The first is automated custom workspace creation.  The average company may have hundreds or even thousands of customers every year.  Customizing and personalizing each of those workspaces could take a considerable amount of time.  The Customer Relationship Edition automates that process by allowing you to specify "variables" in your workspace templates that are replaced with specific values when a new workspace is created.  For example, your presales extranet template might include "Client Name," "Company Name," and "Account Rep Name" on various pages.  When you create a new workspace for working with a potential customer, you simply fill in those three values up front, and PBworks automatically makes the substitution on any page on which they appear. Below is a sample branded login screen for a workspace.

The second key new capability is customer engagement monitoring.  One of the most frustrating things for any salesperson or account manager is not knowing if the prospect or customer is engaged in the relationship what actions they are taking.  PBworks provides this knowledge by tracking prospect and customer activity for you. It looks at several things: whenever a customer logs into their workspace, PBworks sends you an alert; whenever a customer views content or downloads a file, PBworks records the action. You can view customer activity as part of the overall activity stream, or filter out all distractions and review it in isolation. Below you can see a sample activity notification.

Third is the ability to set up common spaces to make information easily accessible that you want to share across all customers. This allows you to update this information once and provide secure access from every individual workspace you set up. Each customers can only see the there activities and not what the others customers are doing.  There is an associated chat feature with common repository but only people on the same team can see and engage in a chat.

In addition, there is also the ability to customize workspace templates to make it easy to adjust certain types of information while keeping other content constant.  You can create a PBworks workspace from within Salesforce.com and populate it with existing data from Salefcore.com. Then you can launch the workspace form within Salesforce.com. Below is a sample screen showing some of the customization features.

The PBworks Customer Relationship Edition is a nice addition for several reasons. First, it makes it easier to set up and operate one of the most common use cases for collaborative platforms. Second, it is a great example, of a vendor listening to its customers and acting of capabilities they request. I can see more examples of customized collaboration platform editions targeted at high value use cases. 

Is Your Social Media Usage Tactical or Strategic?

There was a revealing poll put out recently by the Smart Blog on Social Media. It asked: Does your company have a formal, written social-media strategy? Here are the main results:

No, but we’re getting around to it 32.73%

No, and we probably won’t write one anytime soon 27.64%

Yes, and it’s really useful 20.00%

Yes, but it’s not that relevant to our daily operations 12.36%

 We’re not using social media 5.82%

  We paid a consultant to come up with one for us, but we’re not sure what it really means 1.45%

I like the honesty of the last one. However, why would a consultant create a social media strategy for a company rather than with them. In the latter case, it would be understandable and perhaps more useful.

More than 60% of the 320 SmartBrief on Social Media readers who took this poll say their company is using social media without a strategy.  I read that social media is seen as a fad by many people and firms. In this case, why would you have a strategy? On the other hand why would you want to invest time and money in something without making sure it aligns with your business goals and supports them. I would side with the latter view.

I have helped a number of firms over the past few years with their blog strategy and, more recently their Twitter efforts.  Some come to it with a strategic outlook. Others start out tactical and become more strategic as the they reflect on what they are trying to accomplish and the resources required. A few stubbornly remain tactical.

I think this poll reflects the nagging immaturity of the social media field. However, like many other efforts, those with a strategy will win out. I heard a politician on NPR talking about political passion.  He compared it to fire. If it is guided and focused, fire can heat your house and cook your food. It not guided, it can burn your house down. The same holds true for social media as we have a seen many times. 

My Favorite Tweets for August 1 - 15 2010

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 will repeat this once or twice a month depending on volume.

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.

Also see the Darwineco favorite tweets.

Is Twitter for Business Even Worth the Trouble? http://bit.ly/bzN7HU good points via @SBoSM Aug 14

How to Participate in a Twitter Business Chat http://bit.ly/cujKSk via @SBoSM  Aug 12th

good post on 7 Steps for Building a Community on Twitter http://bit.ly/azyiod  Aug 12th

RT @elsua: [Blog] Personal Knowledge Management by @hjarche http://bit.ly/asTaYS / #pkm #kmers #blueiq > PKM remains important  Aug 12th

@joemckendrick Plenty of Angst About Enterprise Web 2.0 Security: Anything New Here? http://bit.ly/doW15F Aug 11

The Evolution Of User Manuals by @roebot and @mindtouch http://bit.ly/cq10rZ > great pts Aug 11

RT @bhc3: Designing idea mkts for social innov communities http://bit.ly/cerS9n by @nabhulous Aug 11

Why you need a social media strategy, not a Facebook strategy http://bit.ly/9Cj5Yp via @SBoSM > good pts Aug 11

RT @SBoSM: Poll analysis: Do you really need a social-media strategy? http://ow.ly/2o9Ay Aug 11

great points from @elsua: 10 Reasons NOT to Ban Social Media In Organisations http://bit.ly/a9BxPp  Aug 10th

Google vs. Facebook: Drawing the battle lines http://bit.ly/bw4lJ0  Aug 6th

50 Tips Granny Never Told You about Twitter & Social Media Etiquette http://bit.ly/dtiWRQ  Aug 6th

RT @SameerPatel: RT @gyehuda: @deb_lavoy. Collaborative Culture, or the Real Enterprise 2.0 http://bit.ly/dCsmq5 +1 +1 more  Aug 5th

RT @LawyerKM: NYTimes: Tapping the Wisdom of the Crowd http://nyti.ms/aa0Cck law firm example.  Aug 5th

Tom Davenport on BP's KM decline and its consequences http://bit.ly/9Gy02J  Aug 5th

via @lehawes: @deb_lavoy redefines Enterprise 2.0 in way that emphasizes everything but tools. http://is.gd/e1nBJ #e20  Aug 3rd

by @nancymdixon The Three Eras of Knowledge Management http://bit.ly/9TPJEG  Aug 3rd

Extensive List of over 30 Enterprise 2.0 Case Studies and Reports http://bit.ly/d8LML5  Aug 3rd

via @gyehuda: @jacobm: What Buyers of Enterprise 2.0 Solutions Need to Consider Before Making a Purchase http://bit.ly/9Dujm7  Aug 3rd

Death of the Phone Call http://bit.ly/8Xx9ca Wired Mag Aug 3

The Sad Truth About Best Practices http://bit.ly/dmWosK Aug 3

RT @marciamarcia: 6 Social Media Digital Trends You Should Not Ignore http://bit.ly/9WOX6l (by Jeff Bullas) HT @VMaryAbraham  Aug 2

RT @mahims: RT @mashable: Social Networking Dominates Our Time Spent Online [STATS] - http://mash.to/2jIbH Aug 2

good B 2 B blogging tips http://bit.ly/cP8e5p via @SBoSM  Aug 2nd

RT @DearingGroup: Raleigh station is first with application for “connected TVs” // http://bit.ly/aXdSJ5  Aug 2nd

RT @socialmedia2day: A Socially Networked Company Makes for a More Human Workforce http://goo.gl/fb/aqvxH #sm  Aug 2nd

Is Google Watching You? New Plugin Will Let You Know http://bit.ly/b94TBq via Smart Brief  Aug 2nd

Florence Griswold Museum of American Impressionism: Interiors

In early 20^th century Florence Griswold opened her boarding house to artists searching for a quiet country retreat where they could rejuvenate their spirits and find sources of inspiration. The group was known as the Lyme Art Colony and Miss Florence's boardinghouse became the center of Impressionism in America. Now the Florence Griswold Museum provides a look at how they lived and what they did. I was recently there and here are photos of the interior. There were murals on many of the door panels. In my last post I covered the exterior. 

                                  
 
 
 
 

Florence Griswold Museum of American Impressionism: Exteriors

In early 20^th century Florence Griswold opened her boarding house to artists searching for a quiet country retreat where they could rejuvenate their spirits and find sources of inspiration. The group was known as the Lyme Art Colony and Miss Florence's boardinghouse became the center of Impressionism in America. Now the Florence Griswold Museum provides a look at how they lived and what they did. I was recently there and here are photos of the exterior. Tomorrow I will post my photos of the interior.

                                    
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

eDiscovery Integration Remains a Challenge Despite More Market Consolidation

According to Forrester's Brian Hill, recent mergers and acquisitions in the eDiscovery market can benefit organizations wanting to mitigate legal risk with a mix of disjointed applications as long as they do their home work (see eDiscovery Market Consolidation Continues Its Steady March). As usual, organizations must separate marketing hype from actual functionality, especially in the area of end-to-end process capabilities. While integrated advances can provide concrete benefits and help rationalize application infrastructure, it's important to look at these in the context of a broader eDiscovery strategy.

Such strategies should identify technology gaps and costly process integration points. Then enterprises need to request more eDiscovery application integration. Even then you cannot expect to end up with a single provider.  The report notes that recent survey results indicate that 60% of records management stakeholders and 57% of message archiving users perceive “synchronizing eDiscovery, records management, and archiving efforts” to be a challenge.

In theory the transparency within enterprise 2.0 should support greater eDiscovery capabilities but there is still the tendency to create even more silos. Cross platform capabilities need tor receive a greater focus.  The report offers some useful guidelines for enterprises as they navigate this space.

 

Electric Gadget Inter-City Challenges

Retrevo does some interesting surveys that I have covered before. Their new Gadget Census study pits the following U.S. cities against each other to see who has the most consumer electronics per capita. This census was conducted online from March, 2010 through July, 2010 and received over 7,500 individual responses from Retrevo users distributed across gender, age, and location.

1. San Francisco vs. New York

San Francisco has more Online TVs (12% more)

San Francisco has more Mac OS computers (94% more)

San Francisco has more iPhones (23% more)

New York has 56% more BlackBerries than San Francisco

New York has 30% more iPads than San Francisco

New York has 34% more e-Readers than San Francisco

2. Boston vs. L.A.

Boston: 44% more BlackBerries

Boston: 43% more e-Readers

L.A.: 11% more iPhones

L.A.: 54% more Mac OS computers

L.A.: 24% more game consoles

L.A.: 16% more Blu-ray players

3. Washington D.C. vs. Chicago

Washington D.C.: 53% more Blackberries

Washington D.C.: 50% more e-Readers

Chicago: 23% more Macs

Chicago.: 45% more people streaming music

Chicago.: 66% more people with more than 3 TVs

So the East coast seems the winner in BlackBerries and e-Readers. The West coast has more Macs and iPhones. LA plays a lot of games and Chicago watches a lot of TV. Now I am counter culture as I live in Boston and have a Mac and an iPhone. 

Jimmy Fallon Continues to Link Twitter and TV and a new Potential for Innovation Management

I have been following the convergence traditional media and social media for a while and wrote about Jimmy Fallon in this context (see Social Media is Changing Late Night TV Landscape and Much More). Jimmy has now started his own hashtag: #whydonttheymakethat and solicited fan submissions, some of which made it on the air! Here is a link to a Late Night with Jimmy Fallon episode as Jimmy has some fun with this hashtag. He actually reads some interesting product ideas. While this has started as a humor stunt, there could be some crowdsouring potential here.

At a minimum it is another creative link of social media and traditional broadcast TV. He got thousands of tweets from his audience showing the power of TV to integrate with social media. The late night hashtag has become a regular part of the show. Some of these ideas were great and most were funny. Move over Cisco i-Prize and GE. 

I recently wrote that the convergence of TV and the Web is not waiting for the single box solution. Many creative efforts, such as this one are already occurring. I can see many business applications of Jimmy's approach. I would not be surprised if they are not already occurring. Have you seen any? 

SkillSoft Takes Learning Platform Further into Enterprise 2.0 with More Social Features

I have covered SkillSoft before as they were moving in this direction (see SkillSoft Introduces More Web 2.0 Features with SkillPort® 7.0 Learning Management System). Now SkillSoft has announced the launch of inGenius, a social learning platform layer that enables customers to securely enable their employees to find, create and share knowledge assets and expertise with their colleagues as they leverage the extensive SkillSoft library of on-demand learning assets. I was very interested in this new move so I spoke with Pam Boiros of SkillSoft about their offering.

Pam first went through several trends that helped to prompt them to make this move.  Learning has become more social and the interest in peer learning has increased. I certainly agree with these observations. I have always been a proponent of social and peer learning through such methods as simulation-based learning going back to the 80s. It is great to see the rise of social computing providing a much richer platform for this approach. 

There is also the move from learning as an event to learning as a continuous process. This was one of the reasons I first got involved in knowledge management in the 90s and now the line between learning and KM is becoming even more blurred for good reasons.

To address these trends and take advantage of the new capabilities that social computing and social networks can bring to learning, SkillSoft’s Books24x7 division introduced inGenius. It enables social learning by extending the value of expert information and infusing it with the knowledge and expertise of an organization’s own employees. Unlike many stand-alone social networking applications, inGenius is built on SkillSoft’s Books24x7 on demand content collections containing more than 25,000 titles -- digital books from leading publishers, analyst research reports, and white papers -- as well as 1,300 videos of thought leaders and practitioners. Below you can see a inGenius home page.

inGenius enhances SkillSoft’s core learning assets with a feature set that enables learners to leverage content assets as seeds of discussion and to add community content (“co-content”) including notes, comments and ratings that add a unique layer of context and relevance, specific to their organization. It further enhances the social learning experience with opportunities to build connections and allow sharing between learners. inGenius also enables learners to discover knowledgeable colleagues by searching social profiles. Here is sample profile page.

inGenius is a free add-on to the Books24x7 offering. People can set up their own profile with recommended titles and comments on works. They also have implemented the following model used by Twitter so people can see the activities of those they respect. The activity stream contains auto-generated updates based on activities such as adding comments, rather than manually created tweets. You can click on a link in the update to see the actual comment in the context of the relevant learning material. I think this is a good approach for their content focused approach. Here is a sample activity stream.

When you do searches for content you now get additional returns on the people who have commented on this content or recommended it, putting a great social context to search, another good move. The addition of social networking capabilities to a learning library makes great sense and SkillSoft has done a great job with this release.

 

Building Enterprise 2.0 into the Product Development Process

As enterprise 2.0 matures, its uses are getting more focused. I have been hearing more about it use in product development. Here is a timely Forrester report on the topic, Use Social Computing To Build Differentiated Product Development Processes by Roy C. Wildeman.  As the summary states, “in recent years, leading product development organizations have proven the value of greater cross- functional collaboration to harness contributions from across the business and bring great products to market. With the rise in Social Computing among consumers and enterprises alike, development teams are further seeking to transform how they collaborate both internally and externally in key processes like ideation, requirements management, detailed development, and aftermarket support.”

It makes the claim that “succeed in the future, business process professionals must expand their thinking beyond traditional product development solutions and start experimenting with new social technologies.”  I certainly agree. As another Forrester report (The HERO Index: Finding Empowered Employees by Ted Schadler and Josh Bernoff) notes, the more extensive and creative uses of social computing within the enterprise have often come from marketing. To be really competitive, companies need to embed social media and enterprise 2.0 throughout the organization and certainly in the product development area.

Forrester found three main opportunities exist for development teams to further innovate with enterprise 2.0. Note that Forrester uses the term social computing technologies and I am converting this to enterprise 2.0 to go beyond technology. The first one is to enable teams to better collaborate across distance or silos. The second is to bring in outside communities for product ideas, answers, and feedback. The third is integrate new services through social computing into traditional product offerings.

These all make sense. The second (aka crowdsourcing) as certainly got a big play in the press. I have a seen a number of R&D teams move from traditional reporting through email and attachments to blogs and wikis with great productivity increases.  One satellite radio firm had its first on-time and on-budget development effort when it switched to a social computing platform for project reporting. One of the reasons attributed to this success was the increased transparency and its effect on individual and team attention to quality. The MIT Sloan CIO found that using blogs for project reporting greatly increased his efficiency in program monitoring and team mentoring. The Forrester report has a great chart on how social networking expands knowledge capacity beyond the usual “Go-to” resources for project development teams that makes explicit some of the possibilities for improvement.

The report also points out some of the potential obstacles to achieving success in these three areas including concerns over intellectual property and security, as well as the potential chaos from too much unstructured information and the need for clear governance. It also suggests some useful ways to address these issues.  The report concludes with a set of recommendations for taking advantage of the opportunities within social computing. 

New Orleans In June: Great Series from Paul Tamburello

My friend Paul Tamburello writes the great blog, PT at Large in which he covers his travels, among other topics. Her recently went to New Orleans for a quick trip that produced a large series of posts. Paul packed a lot into this trip.  We had lunch afterwards and he related a bit more. We compared experiences with my January trip (see Images of New Orleans Neighborhoods 2010: Summary).

I was especially interested in his visit to Bullet’s Sports Bar to hear Kermit Ruffins. I have seen every episode of the HBO series Treme at least three times. Kermit is featured in a lot of episodes, including his Tuesday night at Bullet’s. Here is a listing of his posts.

New Orleans In June: Part 1 - Liuzza's Restaurant and Bar

New Orleans in June: Liuzza's Part 2 - Michael Bordelon's Storm Story

New Orleans In June: Liuzza's, The Dorseys, and Katrina

New Orleans In June: Kermit Ruffins at Bullet's Sports Bar

New Orleans In June: Rebirth Brass Band at The Maple Leaf Bar

New Orleans In June: Doreen Ketchens Captures Royal Street – great post about a street musician that I saw when I was there in January.

New Orleans in June: Mother's Still Serving Up Comfort Food

New Orleans In June: A Cold One At The Old Point Bar

New Orleans in June: The Spill Closing In On New Orleans

Gulf Spill Dispersants: Cure Worse Than Cause

Post script: Now Paul is back down in NOLA, lucky man, See New Orleans: August Steams On. 

Micro-Landscape Painting: Blue Number 1

Here is a 16" x 20" acrylic painting. I dropped a colored napkin on a table and then looked for interesting close ups. 

 

Workstreamer Enables Web Listening for a Broader Audience

There are a number of ways to monitor the web to see what and how you and others are doing. Many of these require more configuration than the average business user is willing to engage in.  Workstreamer is designed to address the need of users such as sales and customer service reps, supply chain managers, and others who what to easily track what is occurring and what is being said on the Web about specific companies.

I recently spoke with Hank Weghorst, Co-Founder and CEO and Suaad Sait, Co-Founder, about their offering. It is described as a "real-time business listening platform" that allows you to stop searching and start listening. They automate the listening function for tracking business information, not just social mentions of your brand.  So it brings in data from blogs, tweets, social networks like LinkedIn, contact directories like Jigsaw, finance sites, CRM services like Salesforce, and more. The results are presented in a stream of findings that can be expanded to drill down on specific companies. You can see a sample screen below.

Looking at the screen above from left to right you first see the user and the companies they are following.  Then you see the feed of detail as around each company. The waving line shows the varying amount of buzz. The numbers indicate the change in mentions from the day before. Then the company details are offered with icons linking to such sources as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Jigsaw (the business card site). The next column provides what they call the tone cloud. It is a tag cloud like visualization that shows the key themes emerging for each company and allows you to drill down to the specific mentions.

In the far right column you can see the other team members. Workstreamer allows the formation of groups to share information. They start with others in the same domain but then others can be added.  This team feature comes in handy as you can comment on results and these comments are shared with team members. For example, a sales manager can point out the significance of news items to the rest of the team or ask someone to follow up on a change within a client.  You can see a comment in the screen below

 

One of the things I especially liked was the capability of expanding the results through specific visualizations. For example, the numbers of job openings over time is presented in a line graph.  Details on executives from Jigsaw are displayed in a table. Each visualization is specific to the type of data covered. Below you can see a graph of job posting by a company in the midst of the stream of other news items. 

It is very easy to start tracking a company. Workstreamer has already added over million companies into their database and they continue to add more. So if you type in a name, they offer you instances to choose from. If the name is not in their database yet you can still start tracking it. I gave them the name of a very small local company and they came up with it instantly.  The goal is a one-click start and this appears very possible. 

Workstreamer does a lot of filtering for business relevance so you are not overwhelmed by useless information. You can also select to narrow results to specific content types such as news sites or social media.  In addition, you can connect Workstreamer to your LinkedIn and Salesforce.com accounts. They provide nightly email summaries of the top news in the firms you are tracking.

The current version of Workstreamer is free. They plan to remain free through 2010 to build awareness. The free version will always be available and always retain its features. In 2011 they plan to offer a fee-based premium version with additional features. For what I have seen the free version is quite robust and useful.  I am very impressed with both the ease of use and the usefulness of the data visualizations. I plan to give it a try myself. 

Portals Not Going Away?

Remember portals? I have heard about a number of cases where enterprise 2.0 collaboration systems have replaced portals. One firm even replaced their portal with Facebook and got a lot of PR for it. Is this a trend? I do not mean the Facbook part, just the E20 part.

Perhaps but a recent Forrester report, Portal Servers Refuse To Go Quietly, by Tim Waters found that portals are still popular in many circles. As the report summary cited, “portal server technologies continue to be widely deployed by enterprises. Although leading vendors are evolving portal servers into broad content and collaboration platforms, the core portal services — aggregation “on the glass” and user authorization for access control and personalization — remain the leading use cases. Newer alternatives, including open source platforms and mashups, are gaining ground.”

So portals may remain popular but they need to look over their c shoulders as the report also recommended that, “knowledge management teams should carefully evaluate their needs to determine if a portal server layer is appropriate.”  

Drawing for a survey taken in North America and Europe, Q4 2009, they found that 20% of the firms surveyed planned to expand or upgrade existing portal server implementations, 26% had already implemented and were not expanding while 15% planned to implement over the next year or longer.   

There were some concerns. Many users suffered from the complexity and the extensive customization effort. I have seen many of these drawn out portal implementations first hand.  They can be the darling of the solutions integrators looking for big time projects with ever expanding budgets.  The report offers a number of instances of similar outcomes. It also said that the majority of the users they interviewed were surprised by the amount of customization required.  I am not surprised at this finding as I have rarely seen a portal project come in on budget or time.

Downsized budgets can be an obstacle for new portal efforts.  The report found that many firms indicated that the move toward Lean and Agile development practices has encouraged them to reevaluate the rule of heavy handed portal servers. The report encourages knowledge management and IT people to be aware of the other options available. 

My Favorite Tweets for July 15 - 31 2010

Here is the twenty first 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 will repeat this once or twice a month depending on volume.

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.

Also see the Darwineco favorite tweets.

4 Business Blogging Lessons From Google's Chief Blogger http://bit.ly/cXEzjI July 28

RT @michellemanafy: Author of 30 books, including War of the Roses, thought ful post on e-readers and e-reading http://bit.ly/d5FOSs July 28

Why allow your employees to openly represent your firm online? http://bit.ly/d3T0yp via @SBoSM > cuz its smart July 27

The market IS a conversation – Why Kotex is winning vs Old Spice http://bit.ly/9X1W4P wise stuff from @robpatrob July 27

RT @DearingGroup: IBM's reorg shows shape of IT to come | Apps Meet Ops - CNET News http://bit.ly/cvnjYs  Jul 26th

Best practices for a killer corporate blog http://bit.ly/caqEGL  Jul 26th

RT @jbowles: RT @socialhr Cognitive Surplus and Social Business: Win-Win Strategy http://su.pr/32pSDI July 25

RT @DearingGroup: The Art of the Story http://bit.ly/97o2aA #iphone4 > nice one  Jul 24th

RT @marciamarcia: Reading: Why traditional intranets fail today's knowledge workers http://bit.ly/9ClrGd  Jul 24th

RT @GeorgeDearing: Gartner: global sales of enterprise SaaS apps will grow 15% to $8.5 billion in 2010 | http://bit.ly/9PhZLI | #SaaS

RT @GeorgeDearing: Why some media outfits still refuse to go online @TheEconomist | http://bit.ly/c5uOka Jul 23rd

How To Write A Social Media Press Release http://bit.ly/cMDV7F  Jul 22nd

RT @DearingGroup: YouTube launches music video discovery page // http://bit.ly/d02hDv\  Jul 22nd

Social Media DOs and DON’Ts: 8 Pivotal Tips http://bit.ly/9Ho8zY 11:57 AM Jul 22nd

RT @amcafee: ReadWrite Enterprise: "Social enterprise and cloud computing companies are here to stay." http://bit.ly/aDzYLw July 20

via @MeganMurray RT "@marciamarcia: ToneCheck: An Emotional Spell Check For Your Emails http://bit.ly/9WzYzp HT @db  July 20

Barbie Joins Foursquare and Twitter http://bit.ly/cH1rzt via @SMoSM  Jul 19th

RT @webtechman: 25+ Incredibly Useful Twitter Tools and Firefox Plugins http://bit.ly/doMDCy via @markjowen  Jul 18th

a ‘Social Employee Manifesto’ from @joemckendrick http://bit.ly/91dL6h July 17

Tweet Less, Kiss More http://nyti.ms/dupAaS NYT  July 17

companies rush to hire social media directors http://bit.ly/aYwmJo and then figure out why  Jul 16th

via @AdamNicholasB Survey: Twitter Users Are More Active In Their Real Life Communities http://bit.ly/9P9ksM  Jul 15th

Cisco's Doug Webster on social media marketing http://bit.ly/aLjIvl  Jul 15th

US Colleges Running Ahead of Business in Use of Social Media for Recruiting

A new study by Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson, Social Media and College Admissions: Higher-Ed Beats Business in Adoption of New Tools for Third Year, suggests that US colleges are studying the "rules of engagement" in the online world in order to increase their effectiveness at recruiting prospective students.  This is the third year of their data collecting on this topic.

The longitudinal analysis shows that colleges and universities continue to embrace social media as their adoption of blogging again outpaces both the Fortune 500 (22% have a corporate blog) and the fast-growing Inc. 500 (42% have a corporate blog). The latest research shows 51% of colleges and universities have an admissions blog for their school. It is not limited to blogging. My alma mater, Tufts, has prospective students send them YouTube videos.

There have been many reports of business looking through social media to screen out prospective employees.  They should look to schools to learn of more positive ways to use social media for recruiting.  Colleges are also looking at social media for screening purposes. There was an increase in social media use for screening in 2009 while a decrease in the use of search engines for the same purpose.

Social networking, the social media that was most familiar to college admissions officers in 2007 and 2008 is still the most familiar. Familiarity with social networking has jumped from 55% reporting they were very familiar with it in 2007, to 63% in 2008 and now to 83%. Fifty-five percent of admissions officers report they are very familiar with Twitter.

This familiarity extends to usage as 95% of college admissions offices used at least one form of social media in 2009. Social networking is the most common form with 87% of admissions departments using it. Fifty-nine percent have a school Twitter account and, as noted above, 51% have a blog. In addition, more admissions departments feel that social media is “very important” to their future strategy than Inc. 500 businesses (50% compared to 43%). Good for them.

The colleges are also looking at social media to see what is being said about them. Fifty-three percent in 2007 and 54% in 2008 report they monitored the Internet for buzz, posts, conversations and news about their institution. The latest research shows an increase of close to 20% with 73% of schools now monitoring their school name. I wonder how that compares with business.

Barnes and Matteson at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research have conducted a number of studies on social media.  See for example, Social Media in the Inc. 500: 2007 – 2009. This one is another useful addition to their work. 

My App Gap Posts for July 2010

Here are my AppGap posts for July. I am also writing in another Corante blog, FastForward (see right side bar for links), The AppGap posts began toward the end of January 2008.  Here, I am primarily doing product commentaries with a few other things thrown in. Below are the ones for July. There will be more in August.

SuccessFactors Acquires CubeTree to Extend Its Enterprise Capabilities

OpenSpan Automates User Processes

MarkLogic Launches Cloud-based Information Infrastructure

Central Desktop Adds Microsoft Office Integration

SkillSoft Adds Social Media Features to Learning Platform

Jackbe Offers Enterprise App Store and New Features with Presto 3.0

My TEDxBoston 2010 Session Notes: Part Three

 Here is the third part of my notes from the TEDxBoston that occurred a few days ago. I have heard a lot about TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) but have not attended before so I was pleased to see how it worked. Here are my notes from the third group of sessions. These are live notes, only slightly edited, so please excuse typos, etc. After lunch Muhan came back with two other musicians to perform another moving piece.

Next, Bill Staby covered how to harvest ocean waves for usable energy. Their initial application is using ocean waves to take the salt out of ocean water to produce usable drinking water.  There is a lot of wave energy available and globally 50% of the population lives within 100 miles of the shore. Ocean waves are also consistent and predictable. Wind energy creates waves but waves continue after the wind stops. Waves are stored wind energy and available in many locations. However, the cost is still high compared to other forms of natural renewable energy such as wind.  There are also a lot of regulations to deal with as the ocean is not owned by anyone.  The wave energy converters cannot be seen from the shore, unlike the issues with wind. They are doing pilot programs in South Africa.

Sapir Ng showed how his group is working to convert an abandoned subway tunnel in Boston into a cultural center and many other things. Susan Rodgerson discussed how she has involved kids in large-scale art efforts through Artists for Humanity.  Her group employs high school students who come to their center and make art for businesses. They pay the kids and also hope to generate over 40% of their operating budget through this work.

Scott Kirsner, discussed how we need a cultural revolution.  He began with the example of the art deco district in Miami Beach. I have been there several times and appreciate this effort. Scott next talked about how many New England college students leave the area after school or after they become successful. He wants to connect students with startups who stay here. He listed many successful examples of firms that stayed and grew, including the most successful IPO of 2009.

Scott listed several groups that support this concept of linking students with startups in the Boston area. One group he started links students with innovative companies. It is called Innovation Open Houses. Scott wants other companies to participate. He listed efforts at a wiki - neinnovation.com/students - to compile a list of participating companies. The site says, “We have a pretty simple job description here in New England: attract the smartest young people from around the world, and create opportunities for them to solve important problems and build big businesses here. It's just what we do.”

Connor White-Sullivan now provided a session on how the revolution will not be televised. Connor is a recent collage graduate from UMass Amherst. He conveyed how watching a TED session showed him how the Web has changed everything. So he wants to help use the Web for good. He showed a graphic that showed the separation of political values in the US into extremes. The political middle is very lonely place now. Connor, working with others, built a group to support greater interaction between people and the government and allow both sides of an issue hear each other. This site is called localocracy.org.

Frank Reynolds discussed the changing face of neuroscience. Frank taught himself how to walk after he was paralyzed when he realized there were no medical answers.  The doctors told him there was no recovery from his condition. So he studied neuroscience and spinal cord injuries. He got himself to walking again through his own research. Now he wants to provide this for others.  Frank discovered there were silos of information in his area. Scar tissue often covers over healthy tissue. With the right work, this healthy tissue can be recovered and people can recover.  They have been successful with monkeys and now hope to get FDA approval to work with humans.

As I wrote at the end of my part two notes, this TEDxBoston session provided access to a diverse set of themes, some are not directly related to the major themes of this blog but I wanted to share with you how a TEDx session flows.  The common theme is thinking outside the normal and creating innovation. I felt that the message across most of the sessions was that innovation becomes effective when it involves innovative way people are engaged with new ideas and technology. I think this is very related to this blog.  I was pleased to attend and will be looking at the TED site for more. 

Photos from Oak Bluffs, Martha's Vineyard 2010

Here is a set of photos of the homes and buildings in Oak Bluffs.