Portals and KM

KM World 2014: Some Useful Sessions: Thursday, Nov 6

KM World 2014 will be held in Washington DC at the Grand Hyatt from November 4 to 7. It is great event. I used go regularly and highly recommend it to anyone interested in helping workforces perform at their maximum levels. There are many useful sessions including the ones described below.

On Thursday, November 6 the session, KM Enterprise Adoption: How to Make It Stick! will be led by V. Mary Abraham, Co-Founder, Broadli Inc. Above and Beyond KM, Jean-Claude Monney, Chief Knowledge Collaboration Energizer, Microsoft Services, Microsoft, Stan Garfield, Community Evangelist, Global Knowledge Services, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited Author, Implementing a Successful KM Programme; Founder, SIKM Leaders Community, Deirdre Walsh, Jive Software. The sessions is described as follows: Many companies are quick to adopt a KM transformation program but few have managed to make them stick. KM adoption experience is facilitated and discussed by three KM practitioners from Deloitte, Jive, and Microsoft. Tips and lessons learned are shared as practical take-away recommendations. Don’t miss this one!” I would agree there a great group of presenters.

Stan Garfield also offers the following session on Thursday, Practical Social Media Tips, “We are all familiar with social media, and most, if not all, of us use Facebook, LinkedIn, and/or Twitter. This interactive session includes a variety of tips shared by our seasoned KM practitioner such as using daily themes, Twitter chats, live tweeting, mentioning people, Twitter lists, integrating Twitter with LinkedIn and Google+, Facebook communities, using LinkedIn connections, Google+ Hangouts and Communities, Google Sites, Foursquare, Quora, SlideShare, SharePoint, Yammer, Pinterest, Storify, About.me, and Divshare. Attendees can participate by sharing their favorite tools and techniques. Grab lots of ideas for using social tools to engage your community and provide lots of tools for collaboration.

KM World 2014: Some Useful Sessions: Wednesday, Nov 5

KM World 2014 will be held in Washington DC at the Grand Hyatt from November 4 to 7. It is great event. I used go regularly and highly recommend it to anyone interested in helping workforces perform at their maximum levels. There are many useful sessions including the ones described below.

On Wednesday, November 5, Katrina B Pugh, Academic Director, Columbia Univ Info & Knowledge Strategy Masters Program AlignConsulting leads the session: “Knowledge Is the Business.” It is described as follows:

The new frontier for knowledge practitioners is just that—the frontier, the edge, the face of the organization. As Tom Stewart and Pugh have written, “Knowledge is the Business—In leading knowledge-driven businesses, knowledge is what customers buy. Whether that knowledge is built into a product (e.g. a ‘smart’ phone), sold as knowledge itself (e.g. research reports), or embodied in people (e.g. a legal counselor), the customer is aware of it, pays for it, and judges it in making a buying decision.” Knowledge-driven products are everywhere, and success rides on a mix of business acumen and knowledge-integration skills—an ability to see a market possibility and to drive knowledge into product. Pugh discusses results of studying knowledge-based innovation, looking for two things: What made it competitive? What skills and processes did knowledge leaders bring to bear? She shares insights for sustaining a competitive edge and common differentiators, such as reducing transactions and search costs; providing access to inaccessible data or people; educating the customer (e.g., on regulation, market patterns); integrating with customer workflow; decision making processes; and helping customers improve their social capital, assets and attractiveness.

That afternoon, Lesley Ann Shneier, Alumni Knowledge and Social Media Coordinator, World Bank Group 1818 Society, runs the session, When Knowledge Walks Out the Door. It is described as follows: “Many enterprises will lose, in the course of the next few years, a large part of their workforce (an estimated 76 million Baby Boomers) while a new generation of employees will arrive. Steps can be taken to avoid losing the organizational expertise, along with the corporate memory, of retiring employees and to ensure knowledge transfer to new employees. Malaison explains the 10 essential stages involved in creating the memory of an enterprise using 2.0 tools in order to transmit critical expertise. In the second presentation, hear what the World Bank alumni did when challenged by World Bank Group president Jim Kim to capture, curate and share their vast development knowledge with current staff. Alumni and retirees gathered to figure out just how to meet this challenge. A working group determined they could offer just-in- time trouble-shooting, project advice, mentoring and case studies—all pro bono. Social media played a role, even though many retirees were not that computer-savvy. Hear what they did, the lessons learned, and critical success factors to engage and involve former staff and to encourage current staff to draw on “old” knowledge.”

KM World 2014: Some Useful Workshops

KM World 2014 will be held in Washington DC at the Grand Hyatt from November 4 to 7. It is great event. I used go regularly and highly recommend it to anyone interested in helping workforces perform at their maximum levels. There are many useful workshops including the ones described below.

The workshop “Flexible & Agile Workstyles & Processes for the 21st Century Organization” will be held from 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m on Tuesday, November 4^th. Be sure to vote that day. A number of the presenters are good friends. They include: Susan Scrupski, Change Agents Worldwide, Joachim Stroh, Change Agents Worldwide, Catherine Shinners, Founder, Merced Group, and Carrie Young, Talk Social To Me.

The description reads as follows. “The Future is already here and evenly distributed among the global members of the Change Agents Worldwide (CAWW) network. This half day workshop shares their secrets: how they work, their values, how they adopt/adapt/ exapt new ways of working with their global team. A team of Change Agents discusses leading organizational concepts such as: new models for organizational design, the power of self-organization, social and organizational network analysis, and more. They’ll talk about the cornerstone of what makes their networked organization work: transparency, trust, authenticity, and a culture of sharing and cooperation. The CAWW network exemplifies how social and operational integration yields iterative improvements in responding to customers, working collaboratively with partners, and creating value in the marketplace. The workshop also talks about what supports their work: SWARMS, Pods, Cookie Jars, Green Rooms, and other new processes based on agile and self-organizing principles.”

In the afternoon Catherine Shinners and Carrie Young continue with the workshop, “Enterprise Social Networking: Business Case, Adoption, & Engagement” from 1:30 to 4:30. The description is as follows, “Social and collaborative technologies are key to empowering employees to transform the way they work, interact, and engage, enabling companies to catalyzing product and service innovation and deepening customer insight and relationships—in essence redesigning the way business is done. At the same time, an enterprise social network is inherently “human,” allowing people to be people by facilitating with technology the informal social connections that already thrive. Implementing an enterprise social network can also mean rethinking workplace practices and a need for new governance models, leadership skills, and transforming the way we communicate. No matter where you are on the path of integrating “social” into your organization, this workshop helps you understand the key elements of an enterprise social networking initiative, from business case development to ROI and value-measurement principles to cultural and organizational readiness, through use case development, leadership skills and engagement, social network analysis, governance strategies, and adoption planning and ongoing engagement. Get a comprehensive view of key planning elements and useful tools that have worked for organizations big and small since 2009. Targeted toward executive sponsors of social initiatives, community managers, and technical leaders of social product portfolios, this interactive workshop gives you the key elements to develop or improve your enterprise social networking initiative.”

 

Measuring the Full Impact of Digital Capital

I hope you are having a nice summer. This is McKinsey week on Portals and KM as I look back at what is happening in new technology. The first two posts this week covered Accelerating the digitization of business processes and Reinventing IT to support digitization.  In addition to meeting customer needs buy reinventing IT, companies also need to cover the topic of this third report, Measuring the full impact of digital capital.  Otherwise how are you going to measure all that is happening?

McKinsey noted that about a year ago the US Bureau of Economic Analysis released, for the first time, GDP figures categorizing research and development as fixed investment. It joined software in a new category called intellectual-property products. In our knowledge-based economy, this is a sensible move that brings GDP accounting closer to economic reality. It is sometimes that the knowledge management people have been talking about for over twenty years. I am amazed but not surprised that it took so long to recognize this.  

There is a broad mismatch between our digital economy and the way we account for it. The report notes that conventional accounting treats these most IT capabilities as expenses and not as company investments. This means that their funding isn’t reflected as capital. Since the amounts spent aren’t amortized, they take a large bite out of reported income. Spending on those capabilities sometimes should be treated as capital, though, since they can be long-lived. Viewing IT investments in the new digital world as assets rather than additional areas of spending requires a new set of management and financial lenses. It is time to move out of 19^th century industrial revolution and into 21^st century digital transformation. 

Reinventing IT to Support Digitization of Business Processes - McKinsey

Here is another McKinsey report that complements the one I discussed on Monday,  Accelerating the digitization of business processes. They recently discussed - Reinventing IT to support digitization.  They write that, “more connected consumers, automated processes, and sophisticated analytics place unprecedented demands on IT functions. Many companies are struggling to cope, and they seek to deliver on new demands by adding piecemeal elements to their existing operations. Yet what’s really required is the reinvention of IT entirely.” However, this is not an easy task. I have found that there is too usually much vested interest in maintaining the fiefdoms and processes that support current IT management.

The increased digitization of business processes more sophisticated technology, greater IT delivery efficiency, and, most importantly, “digitization means that IT must prepare for much greater business engagement and oversight from senior management.”  This last requirement is fundamental to any IT change but even more important when it comes to the transformation of business processes. Do not start with the technology.

McKinsey offers seven elements of a reinvented IT function. These include clear, central business leadership on digital business, agile development and rapid releases, rapid innovation architecture supported by stable services, and high-quality integrated data. To achieve these goals you need to combine a start-up mind-set with enterprise accountability and make IT a top business priority. There is much on the report on how to make this happen. 

Accelerating the Business Digitization Processes - McKinsey

McKinsey recently issued a useful report - Accelerating the digitization of business processes. The growth of efficient online businesses has raised the expectations of customers for service and product quality. McKinsey reports that, “many traditional organizations can’t meet these expectations. As a result, attackers born in the digital age can swoop in and disrupt the market through rapid delivery of digital products and services combined with advanced algorithms and full access to information.”

They go on to add that, “To meet these high customer expectations, companies must accelerate the digitization of their business processes. But they should go beyond simply automating an existing process. They must reinvent the entire business process, including cutting the number of steps required, reducing the number of documents, developing automated decision making, and dealing with regulatory and fraud issues. Operating models, skills, organizational structures, and roles need to be redesigned to match the reinvented processes. Data models should be adjusted and rebuilt to enable better decision making, performance tracking, and customer insights. Digitization often requires that old wisdom be combined with new skills, for example, by training a merchandising manager to program a pricing algorithm. New roles, such as data scientist and user-experience designer, may be needed.”

Sounds like a great opportunity for consultants. I hope that it goes beyond that to not only enrich the consultants but also help the consumer and employee. I have seen great successes and failures in the drive to improve business processes through technology. McKinsey offers some advice that I agree with. First, start at the end state and work back. Second, Tackle the end-to-end customer experience. I would also add to include the end-to-end employee experience and make sure it is aligned with customer needs.  The report goes on to offer some useful advice. 

New Study: Top Charities Master Visual and Social Media

Nora Ganim Barnes and The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth recently conducted an in-depth study on the usage of social media by the top charities and nonprofit organizations in the United States. The study was conducted using the 2013 Philanthropy 400 list.

They found that 98% of the charities studied are using at least one form of social media. Most use several.  Eighty-one percent link their social media to their homepages, providing immediate access to all their outlets. For these successful nonprofits, YouTube, web video and video blogs are the tools of choice for communicating with their constituencies with 97% using some type of video to help inspire their audience.  Facebook enjoys popularity with 92% using it and Twitter is used by 86% of the charities studied.  While these three platforms have strong usage across many sectors, it is interesting that nearly 3 in 4 of these nonprofits have boards on Pinterest and half are posting on Instagram.  

In contrast, studies on social media in the business sector (Inc. 500 and Fortune 500) show much lower levels of usage of these particular tools even though their usage is increasing dramatically each year.

A common measure of effectiveness on Facebook is the number of Facebook Fans an organization has.  National Public Radio enjoys over 3.6 million fans on Facebook, over a million more than the second place US Olympic Committee.  The Humane Society, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, the Wounded Warrior Project the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the others listed below, all enjoy over a million fans on Facebook.

A new metric was added to Facebook in October, 2012.  “People Talking About This” is the number of unique users who have created a “story” about a page in a seven-day period. On Facebook, stories are items that display in News Feeds.  People Talking About This is an important metric because it emphasizes interactions beyond an initial Facebook Like. Pages that create posts that fans enjoy will benefit. When people interact with pages in ways that generate stories, pages reach an audience beyond their existing fan base. Again, National Public Radio leads the way with over 500,000 engaging with the organization on Facebook.

I recently saw that three of the six most wealthiest men made most of their money through Facebook, Larry Page of Google tops that list. I hope these four men are putting some of their fortunes into these charities.

Twitter followers provide an important metric both internally and externally.  Of the organizations studied, the Metropolitan Opera Association and the Wounded Warrior Project have the most followers, both with over 96,000.  Charities and nonprofits were asked about all the different ways they provide content to their constituencies.  Eighty-nine percent of those studied write their own original content for their platforms.  Nearly half report gathering it from other sites.  Sixteen percent purchase content for their platforms.

Thanks to Nora Ganim Barnes and The Center for Marketing Research for providing more useful insights on the use of social media. 

The Digital Workplace in the Connected Organization – Part 2: New Features

Jane McConnell, Netstrategy/JMC, has recently published her excellent annual report, The Digital Workplace in the Connected Organization. Jane conducted her 8^th annual survey of organizations and had 314 respondents. Here are some of the highlights of the results. The full 198 page report goes into great detail on the findings and how they impact the organization. I was pleased to receive a review copy of this valuable document. The report can be purchased online at this site. This post covers some of the new features and my prior post summarized the highlights. There are three main new features this year.

The Digital Workplace Scorecard is based on nine dimensions of the digital workplace model Jane offers in the report. The three main categories are: capabilities, enablers, and mindset and each is further divided in three dimensions. The Scorecard provides a self-assessment tool that should prove essential to building a roadmap for establishing a digital workplace that plays an essential and strategic role in the organization. The scores are calculated based on several hundred data points from responses to online survey questions. All participants privately receive their own scorecard and can benchmark themselves to the rest of their industry. All industry scorecards are published in the report.

This year, the digital workplace is put into the context of the organization. It provides an understanding of how the digital workplace impacts and is, in turn, impacted by organizational processes, structures, leadership, culture and mindset. The survey covers these points in addition to traditional questions about people capabilities, mobile services, finding expertise, and sharing knowledge. 

There are twenty-three "In practice" cases that are developed in more detail than in previous years. Organizations included in these cases stood out during Jane’s data analysis process of the 314 organizations that responded to her survey. They were chosen as examples because of high scores or because their comments and examples are relevant to challenges many organizations face today. 

The case studies and other data show that the “digital workplace helps organizations enable their customer-facing workforce, helping them interact with customers in real-time with up-to-date information. An effective digital workplace facilitates fast reaction and proactive initiatives when an organization is faced with unexpected events such as environmental emergencies, challenges from competitors or global market shifts.”

I highly recommend this document to who wants to stay competitive in today’s market and who desires to attract and retain an intelligent workforce.  

 

 

The Digital Workplace in the Connected Organization – Part 1: Highlights

Jane McConnell, Netstrategy/JMC, has recently published her excellent annual report, The Digital Workplace in the Connected Organization. Jane conducted her 8^th annual survey of organizations and had 314 respondents. It was first done in 2006 and is a comprehensive and highly useful document for anyone working in digital media within the enterprise.  I was pleased to receive a review copy of this valuable document. The report can be purchased online at this site. The 198 page report goes into great detail on the findings and how they impact the organization.

Jane begins by pointing out that, “the digital workplace is much more than technology. It is a blend of Capabilities, Enablers and above all, Mindset - all essential perspectives in how organizations work.”  In organizations that are effectively using digital technology, there are new virtual structures such as communities. “Cross-organizational communities are playing a long-term strategic role as custodians of knowledge, thus complementing traditional hierarchical structures. “

In addition, new processes such as crowd-sourcing, “Internal crowd-sourcing is now deployed enterprise-wide in over half the Early Adopters who report “transformational” or “significant” impact on their organization.”

Successful early adopters are operating within an open and participatory leadership model. These early adopters report a much higher rate of top management as a “driving and active” force in their digital workplace initiatives. They also have organizational cultures that are more open and based on teamwork. Top managers, as well as Communication, IT and HR managers, are more “open and participatory” in their leadership styles and ways of working.

The vast increase in workforce mobile services is also transforming business processes. Jane found that, “Mobile services for the workforce will be deployed in 30 to 40 percent of organizations by the end of 2014.”

The top two strategic drivers overall for the digital workplace are “increasing organizational intelligence” and “gaining efficiency and cost-savings”. The first is number one for early adopters. It makes sense as these innovators are often attracted to initiatives that increase their effectiveness. The second is number one for the majority of organizations who more often wait to be attracted by bottom line results.

It is interesting to note that physical workplaces are slowly evolving toward more “non- territorial” workspaces, encouraging the flow of ideas and information among people.

I highly recommend this document to who wants to stay competitive in today’s market and who desires to attract and retain an intelligent workforce. This is the eighth year Jane has conducted new research and published her report on the findings and recommendations.  In my next post I will review some of the new features in this report. 

2013 Global Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) Winners

Here is more tech for this first week of the year. Teleos, in association with The KNOW Network, has announced the 2013 Global Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) Winners. I have covered this award in the past. This award always brings back memories. The Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) award has been around for some time. Back when I was with a large consulting company and involved in our knowledge management practice, I spoke at the awards meetings in London several times.  These were the days of better travel funding and the relatively early days of KM. I am pleased that this award is still around and still relevant.

 Here are the 2011 Global MAKE Winners. Apple was recognized as the Overall Winner of the 2011 Global MAKE study.

The 16th annual Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) studies began on April 15, 2013. The 2013 MAKE research program consists of the Global, Americas, Asian and European studies, as well as national studies for Brazil, China, India and Indonesia. This years winners include: Apple, Amazon, IBM and many others.

Successfully managing enterprise knowledge yields big dividends. The 2013 Global MAKE Winners trading on the NYSE/NASDAQ showed a Total Return to Shareholders (TRS) for the ten-year period 2003-2012 of 22.8% – 2.3 times the average Fortune 500 company median. The Return on Revenues (ROR) for the 2013 Global MAKE Winners was 12.3% – 3.8 times that of the Fortune 500 ROR median. The Return on Assets (ROA) for the 2013 Global MAKE Winners was 9.8% – 4.6 times that of the Fortune 500 ROA median. 

Why IT Should Embrace BYOD Rather Than Get Run Over

Happy New Year. Here is a tech post to start 2014. Prohibition does not work. People will do work around if there is a desire for a service or product. This applies to many things. Prohibition in the US proved this for alcohol as it simply led to the movement of organized crime into the market. I have heard the same thing happen when the UK tried to add a tax to cover the health costs of tobacco use. Organized crime found that smuggling cigarettes was more lucrative than drugs.

This has been the case with enterprise IT on a number of fronts. If you try to deny social media use, people will find a work around.. If you fail to provide adequate ways to share files, People will flock to unsecure solutions like Dropbox. BYOD is another classic case. The article, BYOD Movement Requires Management, Not Resistance: 10 Reasons Why, articulates why this new trend should be embraced, not resisted. It is better to en actively engaged in a new movement that, as BYOD has become “an irresistible force that has actually made an impact on the vast majority of companies in one fashion or another.”

Social Software is Enabling the Old “to-do” List to Make a Comeback

I have long used to-do lists, although mine have always been on paper. I recently read an IDG article, 'To-do' software makes comeback, welcomed by enterprise IT, that covers how social task management applications are on the rise. They cater both to project leaders and team members are on the rise.  This makes sense. I have already written about Putting Social Media to Work and Integrating the Interactions with the Transactions. Even closer to this theme is my post, Giving Social Media a Good Job. In this post I commented on Luis Suarez’s writing, Social Task Management - When Social Business Got Down to Work.

What is the reason for this rise in task management? Enterprise social software helps people collaborate on projects, but is not particularly good for assigning and tracking who is responsible for doing what by a specific date. So in the “past two years demand has risen for a new type of collaboration software that combines enterprise social features with functions for leaders to plan and supervise projects and for team members to track their tasks. It's known as social task management (STM).”

This new breed of apps is a great addition to the social software suite. The transparency of social software encourages accountability which, in turn, encourages productivity. Now the social task management takes this accountability and likely productivity, a step further. 

Is the CIOs More Important Than CEOs in Driving Business Transformation?

Forrester recently concluded that the CIO was more important. As we read this news, we should keep in mind that Forrester is a primarily a technology analyst firm whose major buyers are CIOs and those in their staff. However, I do see merits in their claim, as well as some concerns about it. It is partially based on a survey of 101 North American and European respondents involved in s a business transformation project in the past three years. This research revealed that 29 percent of respondents believed the CIO to be the most important figure in terms of supporting and driving business change. This was the highest amongst the C-suite, and followed by the CEO who was seen as most important by 24 percent of respondents.

It also makes sense with the rising role of technology in business transformation. I think that most people would agree that CIOs are more important than CEOs in architecting the transformation. CEOs should be more important for setting the goals of the transformation. Forrester VP and principal analyst Marc Cecere was quoted as saying, ““After the strategy phase, 80 percent of the work and activity falls under the role of the CIO, so a strong role for a CIO is a given.” However, I think this alignment of resources might be a mistake. In my experience the success of a transformation is directly involved in the amount og employee input in its design and the amount of resources assigned to the people side of the change. There needs to be a balance. I also do not agree with those who say transformation is 90% a people issue.

Asking the right question is often the key. I do not think it is matter of who is more important. The most important question is rather: are all the C-level executives working together to achieve the transformation? It is not a matter of one being more important than the other. Asking that question can take us done the wrong path. I am sure this was not Forrester’s intention and I am being a bit picky to make a point.

The CIO role has come a long way from being generally under the CFO because technology was used to manage the finances to having technology a key part of most work. Technology has moved from a focus on transactions to interactions. Supporting collaboration is now the key. This collaboration needs to be modeled by the c-suite. 

Big Data Analysis Continues to Grow

The use of Big Data continues to get headlines. At times its use is controversial but regardless, Big Data is here to stay. Here is some data, reported by eWeek, to support that claim. IDC reveals in its 2013 Worldwide Study of HPC End-User Sites that two-thirds of high-performance computing sites are conducting big data analysis as part of their HPC workloads. The research also finds that HPC sites using co-processors and accelerators more than doubled during the past two years.

The demand to handle Biig Data is driving several industries including hardware, as well as analysts and software. The proportion of IT sites using co-processors or accelerators in their HPC systems climbed from 28.2 percent in the 2011 to 76.9 percent in 2013. This is quite significant. Earl Joseph, IDC's program vice president for Technical Computing is quoted, "The most surprising finding of the 2013 study is the substantially increased penetration of co-processors and accelerators at HPC sites around the world, along with the large proportion of sites that are applying big data technologies and methods to their problems."

The report also stated that, “an unexpected finding reveals that 67 percent of the HPC sites perform big data analysis on their HPC systems, with 30 percent of the available computing cycles devoted on average to big data analysis.” This does not seem surprising to me given the thirst for Big Data by industry and governments.

I wrote about the growth of cloud services earlier this week. This applies to Big Data as well. The report also indicates that the HPC sites using cloud computing to handle part of the HPC workloads climbed from 13.8 percent in 2011 to 23.5 percent in 2013. Public and private cloud use was split among the sites in 2013. Hardware vendors are benefiting from this surge. IDC said the study confirmed its supply-side research finding that storage is the fastest-growing technology area at HPC sites.

All Types of Cloud Usage Continues to Expand

This seems like an obvious headline but here is more data to support what seems intuitive. Computerworld recently provided the results of a survey of 1,358 CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, ITworld and Network World readers. This rise is slow however. Only a slightly higher percentage of respondents overall now say they will move a majority of their IT operations to the cloud within the next five years: 29% compared to 27% in 2012.  This may be because the readers report that it remains difficult to demonstrate that the cloud actually lowers IT costs.

The use of public cloud services is growing. The percentage who say they will limit their cloud activity to private clouds (18%) or to using software as a service (7%) is declining. Large companies, with 1,000 or more employees, are somewhat more conservative about the public cloud than are small and mid-sized companies, with less than 1,000 employees. This makes sense, as the smaller companies do not want to invest in the infrastructure for private clouds. The majority of companies of all sizes (59%), are still working to identify IT operations that are candidates for cloud hosting.

Looking more closely, 69% of respondents report having data, applications or infrastructure deployed in a private cloud compared to 59% utilizing a public cloud. In addition, the average percentage of companies' IT environment in private clouds (28%) is double that in public clouds (14%).  Looking ahead, the adoption of all three types of cloud models should rise during the next 18 months, and the gap between usage of private and public clouds, particularly, will likely narrow. The Computerworld survey respondents anticipate that by mid-2014, private clouds will encompass slightly more than one-third (36%) of their IT environment, while about 20% of the IT environment will be deployed in a public cloud.  

The Further Integration of Cloud Services

This is the start of other tech week on this blog. While the PaaS (platform as a service) market is currently smaller than both IaaS and SaaS segments of the cloud computing industry, Forrester says this technology could be one of the most important cloud-based services for businesses moving forward. In volume it will likely remain smaller as it is focused on the developer community. However, the impact will likely grow.

More specifically, IaaS offers infrastructure for companies to get on-demand virtual machines, storage, databases and other services. SaaS provides a cloud-based version of an application.  PaaS offers an application development platform for building and hosting customized applications that are tuned specifically for an enterprise’s requirements.

The SaaS vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce.com see the opportunity and are getting into PaaS. They are incorporating PaaS functionality into their services according to Forrester. This applies to both more general vendors like Amazon and niche verdors like Salesforce.com. The Salesforce.com continues to expand its “niche.” Their Force.com platform offers a means for workers with little coding experience to create applications and workflows that integrate with its core SaaS CRM offering.

It is a natural thing to blur the lines between tech services. It is also a good thing as it enhances the integration required to really make enterprise 2.0 work.  The cloud is growing. Forrester estimates that this year 30% of enterprises will use some form of public cloud computing offering. Integrating cloud services is a good thing. Appfusions offers PaaS servcies to intergate enterprise apps such as IBM, Atlassian, Jive, and others. 

2013 Fortune 500 Expand and Branch Out in Social Media: Google+, Instagram, Foursquare and Pinterest

Nora Ganim Barnes and her colleagues at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth have released another of their very useful studies: 2013 Fortune 500 Are Bullish on Social Media:
Big Companies Get Excited About Google+, Instagram,
 Foursquare and Pinterest. For this work they looked at social media use by all 500 of the 2013 Fortune 500 companies. The types included blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, Google+, Foursquare and Instagram were added for the first time this year.

I always find their work especially valuable as they have been doing this research for some time and have a longitudinal set of data for comparisons. Here are some recent ones: Social Media Continues to Increase in the 2012 Fortune 500 and Blogging and Twitter by the Fortune 500: A Longitudinal Study (2011). In the 2011 Fortune 500 they found a leveling off of blogging with only 23% hosting a public facing corporate blog.  However, things changed in 2012 as 28% hosted public facing blogs. This surge continues with their latest iteration showing 34% of these large enterprises creating and sharing content through blogs.  Consistent with this is the fact that in 2013, 79% of the Fortune 500 blogs are kept current, take comments, have RSS feeds and take subscriptions.

This was the largest increase since 2008. They concluded that, “signals the return of the online in depth conversation, thought leadership and original content development that was popular a decade ago with early corporate adopters of blogging like IBM and Ford Motors.” I first hand that this is a goal for IBM and supports their strong move into social business (see; My IBM Connect 2013 Session Notes: Complete Listing).

These large firms are twice as active on Twitter as 77% of the Fortune 500 have corporate Twitter accounts with a tweet in the past thirty days. This represents a 4% increase since last year. These 387 corporations with corporate Twitter accounts come from 72 of the 75 industries represented in the Fortune 500. They also found that those companies ranked higher in the 2013 Fortune 500 are more likely to adopt Twitter than their lower ranked counterparts, following the same pattern as blogging.

Facebook presence is also prominent with 70% of the Fortune 500 on Facebook., a 4% increase since last year. Other social media tools are also being used extensively. There are now corporate YouTube accounts were found in 69% of the 2013 F500. This is a 7% increase from last year. Pinterest accounts are found in 9%. Google+ accounts are operating for 35%. Instagram and Foursquare accounts are operated by 9% of the 2013 Fortune 500.

The researches conclude that these results show “an interest in experimenting with new tools.  Only Google+ shows evidence of a significant number of open, but inactive, accounts.  In every other case, there is current activity and vibrant engagement of their audiences.  The use of blogging, after years of low and stagnant adoption has continued its steady move forward with over 1/3 now providing original content and using their blogs to promote causes, establish thought leadership and to better understand their target markets.”

I am very pleased to see an increase in blogging were more in-depth and interactive conversations can occur beyond what the other, more broadcast media allow. Thanks to Nora Barnes and her team for another piece of useful data. 

Games, by Themselves, Will Not Increase Employee Engagement

Here is the beginning of another technology week on this blog. There is a lot of talk about the lack of employee engagement and some talk about gamification software abd practices as a means to increase involvement.  Jonathan Feldman has a nice article on the topic in Information Week, Employee Engagement: Management Snake Oil Won't Help.

First, here the definitions as provided by Jonathan. According to Gallup, an engaged employee will "work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company" as well as "drive innovation and move the organization forward." A disengaged employee is "sleepwalking through their workday, putting time -- but not energy or passion -- into their work" while the worst kind "undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish."

Now the stats: 71% of employees aren't engaged. (Gallup), only 10% look forward to going to work every day (Maritz Institute), only 19% are satisfied with their jobs (Manpower). Does this matter? Well, highly engaged employees are 26% more productive than those who aren't, and their companies earned 13% greater returns over a five-year period (Watson Wyatt WorkUSA). Jonathan also notes a significant increase in earnings per share (147%) among the companies in the top decile of engagement (Gallup).

So how to fix this? More money is not the answer, although I am sure no one would object to it. Remember, these studies look at well paying professional jobs, not the increasing number of low wage work. For example, according to InformationWeek’s IT Salary Survey research, the five job factors that matter most to IT managers have nothing to do with compensation. Those job factors are their opinion and knowledge are valued; they're involved in setting company strategy and determining goals; their job is important to company success; their job is challenging; and they relate to the company culture and values.

Jonathan concludes that these shortcomings are “rooted in outmoded ideas about power and authority, rooted in bureaucratic organizational structures that have been around since the 1800s.” I could not agree more. However, it also seems that real interest in the well affair of employees and the responsibility toward the general public good has continued to decline in all but a few large firms. There is much too much money spent on trying to twist legislation to corporate benefit. This money would be more wisely spent to address the five issues listed above to both further engagement of employees and, as a welcome byproduct, the general public good. For example, I think if more employees are involved in setting company strategy, the more likely this strategy will be aligned with the common public good, which in the end, also creates more markets for company products, as well as greater engagement. This also applies to the ability to relate to company values.  We are now at the highest levels of income discrepancy in the history of our country and our environment is a great peril.  I think that many firms are shooting themselves in the foot with too much self-interest. Having more employee engagement in decision making is one way to address these issues. 

Research: Social Software Appeals More to Older Workers

Paul Leonardi, a professor of communication at Northwestern University conducted a carefully controlled experiment to determine the extent, if any, that social software can improve employee content discovery and relevant expertise location. A major credit card company was implementing an enterprise social networking tool called A-Life. The company wanted their 15,000 employees to have a better sense of who their colleagues were, and what they were doing, in order to reduce inefficiencies.

Leonardi persuaded the company to let him to perform to test the effectiveness of the social networking tool through quasi-natural field experiment. He decided to compare two demographically similar groups within the company: marketing and operations. Before the tool’s implementation, the groups were questioned about whom and what their colleagues knew. “The rationale for asking those two kinds of questions is that knowing who knows what is really important, but in many cases, even if we know who knows what, we can’t get to that person directly,”

The marketing group was given access to the social software. For six months, this group conducted much of its routine communication through the site instead of through email or in-person interactions. As predicted, after six months marketing group who used the enterprise social networking site improved their ability to find information by 31%. They also improved their ability to find people who knew the person with information by 71%. This improvement occurred despite the fact that employees sent, on average, just one message on the site per week.

Leonardi did not find that use of the social networking tool differed based on someone’s role in the organization. Ironically, he found that use instead differed by age: younger employees across the company were generally more skeptical of the tool. Leonardi explained that the younger employees, “would say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be posting things my boss would see.’ … On the other hand, the senior employees didn’t have that same concern. For them, the technology was another mode for communicating about work-related matters.”

I often hear in conferences that social software appeals more to younger workers. The older workers “do not get it.”  I always object to this whenever I hear it, usually to strong support from the audience for my position. The argument is that this group uses it in their daily lives so they will expect in their work life. This research found just the opposite. It is only one piece of research but it certainly pokes holes in the idea of providing social software to appeal to the younger generation. 

IBM Offers Analytics to Help Clients with Workforce Transformation

IBM now offers new Big Data analytics software and services solution to help organizations build and maintain their global workforce. Developed by IBM Research scientists, the software enables businesses to analyze massive amounts of data shared by employees. This can be used to uncover work-related trends that can be used to build and preserve more productive work environments and minimize attrition. One of the potential big benefits of social media is its transparency. It is nice to see capabilities to make good use of this transparency.

With IBM's new workforce analytics services, HR can gain a real-time view into thousands of data points shared by employees via corporate surveys, commonly available employee data (demographics, performance reviews, salary, years of service, etc.), as well as data shared on internal and external social media platforms. As a result, companies can read the pulse of their organization to improve retention, performance and morale. They can also use analytics to understand what drives job performance, or how employees feel about a new company policy or advertising campaign.

While this might be thought of a “big brother,” it is a capability that offers many benefits. The main issue here is trust and that applies regardless of the capabilities a company has to look at its employees.  For example, by collecting information shared by employees such as their skills and career aspirations and pairing this with HR data, companies get a more complete analysis of their workforce, how each person is connected, their influence on each other, how they work together and more. At the same time, companies also gain a more accurate view of their organization while identifying their most critical talent. Decisions will be made, why not provide the decision makers with more accurate information that heresay or content that is filtered by middle management with its own agenda.

According to IBM’s CEO Study of more than 1700 chief executive offers, 71 percent of executives surveyed cited human capital as their greatest source of sustained economic value. It is nice to see this recognition. It is human capital, not physical capital, that drives profits in today’s economy. Some of the new capabilities include the use of text and visual analytics software that can automatically extract and display over one million pieces of anonymous unstructured data derived from employee surveys, including millions of employee comments collected annually through surveys. It also scans Human Resource Information System (HRIS) data broken down by employee demographic. An easy-to-read dashboard then visualizes findings via a sentiment "heat map" of trends broken down by employee segments. This does not target individuals but looks at the workforce as a collected group.

Another capability is a data-driven approach to understanding attrition patterns within a business. The IBM solution applies predictive analytics software to enterprise HR and CRM data, and social data. Then it identifies high-attrition “hot spots” within the company. With this information it determines key drivers and specific actions to retain critical talent. If done right, this actionable data can used to make more effective and satisfied employees. 

SAP and MindTouch Work Together to Enhance Customer Experience

This week I will be looking again at new technolgies. MindTouch now has a partnership with SAP so its offering is used to complement SAP cloud solutions, including SAP Cloud for Service and SAP Cloud for Social Engagement, to provide customers self-service with an integrated help system that offers the latest and most relevant product information. A major area of concern for companies with large customer bases is the consistency and quality of the information a company provides.

MindTouch solutions aggregate product data from different information silos to distribute the most relevant, accurate and up-to-date product information to a wide spectrum of users, ranging from employees to customer support agents to end-user customers. For example, it can use content from Facebook, Twitter, CRM agents, websites and other communities to create a comprehensive profile of the customer’s product history. MindTouch then delivers this information through a variety of channels, including call centers, the Web and mobile devices.

This aggregation helps companies gain a deeper understanding of their customers’ needs so they are able to provide a delightful service experience while reducing response times and minimizing ticket generation. Service agents are also able to help customers take advantage of up-sell and cross-sell opportunities at the right time.

We have come a long way since I first got started in call center support work. In the 1980s, call center agents said they often learned about their companies latest offers form the customer who called after seeing them on TV or in the newspaper. Providing more effective call center support can offer significant financial benefits. In the late 1990s telecom looked at the ROI on its upgraded call center agent knowledge system. This that used it had three times the cross-sell rate, greatly reduced call escalations to managers, fewer repeat call son the same issues, and other improvements.

 

Now solutions like MindTouch’s offer multi-channel distribution of relevant and up-to-date product and customer information to both agents and customers. It also provides enhanced customer intelligence gleaned from MindTouch tools and analytics, which helps drive marketing, product and customer experience initiatives to better serve customers. This would have seemed like “Star Wars” in the 20^th century. Now we have these capabilities thanks to partnerships like the one with MindTouch and SAP.  

Dan Pontefract’s Flat Army: A Review

Flat Army: Creating a Connected and Engaged Organization is an excellent new book by Dan Pontefract  It “arms you with powerful tools for overcoming resistance to change and creating a culture of collaboration, engagement, and employee empowerment.” The book offers an integrated framework integrating collaboration, open leadership, technologies, and connected learning. It provides useful ways to flatten your organizational pyramid and engage with your people in more collaborative and productive ways without undermining management’s authority.

I have known Dan Pontefract and his excellent work for several years through his blog.  He is the Head of Learning & Collaboration at TELUS (www.telus.com). Dan is responsible for the overarching leadership development, learning and collaboration strategy for the company. Here he implemented the strategy set forth in this book to make significant changes in the 40,000 person organization.

The organization writes on its blog. “Thanks to the remarkable efforts of Dan and his team, we’re moving beyond traditional models of learning and leadership at TELUS towards more of social, informal and participatory framework.” This is a goal that all organizations should be aiming for in today’s market conditions and opportunities. The useful ideas in the book will help you achieve these goals.

He explains the title as not a reference to war but to a medieval Latin term, armata, used first in 1533 to depict a fleet of things moving together. He further explains that the essence of an army is “a group of people striving, leading together to achieve a common goal.” This is what you want your company to become. For most large organizations that I have seen that would require a complete transformation. Almost every one I have observed is a group of people, each after their own agendas, even if it conflicts with the overall goals of the organization.

I really like historical contexts. Dan also offers the origins of the concept of hierarchy. The term dates back to the 14^th century and it combines the Greek terms for “holy” and “ruling” or head priest. By the 17^th century the terms was linked to church organizations. Now it has spread to military and business use. The origins thus provide almost all power and intelligence to top of the hierarchy.

Dan also notes that the Industrial Revolution cemented the link to the hierarchical approach to management. Fredrick Taylor called this “scientific management.” It rose to influence in the 1880s and 1890s within the manufacturing industries. Its peak of influence came in the 1910s but it often was badly received by workers. The Wikipedia reports an interesting story from that time, as well as the image of Taylor. 

“Under Taylorism, workers' work effort increased in intensity. Workers became dissatisfied with the work environment and became angry. During one of Taylor's own implementations, a strike at the Watertown Arsenal led to an investigation of Taylor's methods by a U.S. House of Representatives committee, which reported in 1912. The conclusion was that scientific management did provide some useful techniques and offered valuable organizational suggestions but it gave production managers a dangerously high level of uncontrolled power. After an attitude survey of the workers revealed a high level of resentment and hostility towards scientific management, the Senate banned Taylor's methods at the arsenal.”

Despite this negative reaction many aspects of hierarchical and scientific management remained in place. We have all seen them. Dan provides some interesting examples.

Now new tools open up communication up and down the different levels of the organization. This cross level communication was often consciously blocked by middle managers or just got lost in the chain of command. Now company conversations can be out in the open for anyone to take them in and join. Collaboration tools can turn Taylorism on its head so learning goes up and down the enterprise and the whole structure is flatted (image of Taylor from Wikipedia). I would certainly agree with Dan’s views here. However, precisely because of this transformative change in communication it takes a cultural change to work. This is much of the content in Dan’s very useful book.

He writes how leaders can reverse the traditional heirachical leadership model and become a connected leader. He defines open leadership as, “the act of engaging others to influence and execute a coordinated and harmonious conclusion.” If you can harness the thinking of the entire company to solve problems, you will be creating a much more effective organization. There is much value to be gained from this connection. For example, McKinsey found quantified benefits from the connected enterprise in both 2010 and 2011. Now they have doubled down on their forecasts for the business value of connectivity. See my post, McKinsey Projects Business Value of Social Business at a Trillion Annually, for a look at the bright side potential of the connected enterprise.

If you want to unlock this value for your organization, Dan’s Flat Army should be on your reading list. 

Three Questions About Knowledge Management

I was recently interviewed for the Simplicity 2.0 blog by Sharon Fischer and Kylie Sobel of The Economist Group.  The topic was knowledge management and I liked their questions. The results were posted on May 15 on the blog – see 3 Questions With Bill Ives About Knowledge Management. I will not repeat the post here and encourage to go to their site to see it.

The blog is dedicated to helping finding the right tools you need to simplify the way people work as well as more efficient and simpler work processes. This is an important task in today’s increasing complex work place. The good news is that there are new tools that can simplify work processes but they will only be effective it they are integrated with these processes

Newsgator Integrates Social Software into Core Work Process

I have written about NewsGator on a number of occasions (see for example: NewsGator Enhances its Social Sites 2010 Platform for SharePoint). I recently spoke with their new CEO, Daniel Kraft, as well as Stefanie Lightman who runs marketing and corporate strategy. NewsGator is a long time Microsoft partner for enterprise social on SharePoint with millions of active users of its Social Sites offering. Now it is moving beyond SharePoint to reach other work processes. To set the foundation for this new strategy they interviewed hundreds of customers and dozens of senior execs.

When asked how can NewsGator make social more useful, they were told to integrate it into work processes. This was already happening for some work with their SharePoint integration. SharePoint is not really social software but a system of record, in this case, documents. NewsGator provides a system of engagement to go with this system of record and make it really social.

Now they are expanding beyond SharePoint to other systems of record that tie in with an expanded sets of business process. NewsGator is preparing to create an even more robust social platform that taps the entire Microsoft ecosystem, as well as other enterprise-spanning applications. So they are now connected with such systems as: CRM, ERP, and HR through such products as SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, and MS Dynamics.  This is a wise move and one I have written about before (see for example: Putting Social Media to Work and Giving Social Media a Good Job). Here is a sample Social Sites interface.

Daniel mentioned that transactions systems such as SAP work fine as long as the answer to a process action is: yes or no. It is the exception handling that can bring productivity to its knees. This is where social can provide a huge productivity boast. If you take an exception into the social space, collaboration can be more efficient. More importantly, you have a record of the issue and the solution. This can be both reused to reduce the pain next time. More Importantly, it also serves as a diagnostic for where changes need to be made in work processes or peak demands anticipated. Below you can see a sample workflow request.

 

Social Sites can work with the enterprise apps in two ways. First, you can bring a transaction into Social Sites and work in this environment. You can also have a Social Sites activity stream appear as a notification bar within an enterprise app such as SAP.

Social Sites also works to support the individual worker who faces the huge increase in incoming content. They offer intelligent filters to help determine what is really important.  People have different personas depending on which projects they are working on or even the where they are in a business quarter. For example, as Daniel mentioned, a sales person will be taking a board view of the market for potential prospects at the beginning of the quarter and then zero in on a few highly qualified prospects as the quarter comes to a close. Here is a sample sale enablement screen.

NewsGator has also greatly expanded their mobile offerings to bring in all the social capabilities. Now an employee can do all their processing on their smart phone or tablet and not even have to deal with a traditional computer. See below for a sample mobile screen shot.

Getting employees to make productive use of the social capabilities requires more than installing software. The real benefits come when it impacts work processes. This requires changes in the way work is done. NewsGator also worked with their customers to create an adoption framework that they offer on an Open Source basis. It covers people engagement, business alignment and technology enablement.  

These are all great moves and I can certainly see why Social Sites is meeting new success. McKinsey has predicted huge productivity boosts from the connected enterprise. Social Sites is certainly a way to realize these projected gains.

 

Social Business Has More Work to Gain Real Satisfaction

Prescient Digital Media has released its latest useful report, Social Intranet Study. They interviewed participants in 651 organizations. Social media is becoming widely adopted as they found that most organizations (71%) have at least one social media tool available to some or all employees. The most popular social media tools are instant messaging, blogs, discussion forums, wikis, and user commenting. Here is my post on their excellent 2011 study.

However, the average respondent organization gives their internal social media efforts a failing grade.  This can be a result of insufficient investments in both tools and adoption efforts. Prescient Digital Media found that failing grades show a direct correlation to investment where the average company spends about $10,000 or less on their internal social media (intranet 2.0).

To be specific, the five most popular social media tools are instant messaging, blogs, discussion forums, wikis, and user commenting:

• 76% of organizations have instant messaging.
• 75% of organizations have blogs.
• 70% of organizations have discussion forums.
• 67% of organizations have wikis.
• 67% of organizations have user commenting.

The investments have been very modest. Most organizations spend little or nothing on their enterprise social media tools. This may explain the lack of satisfaction. Many organizations that implement social media tools spend less than US$10,000:

• 47% have spent less than US$10,000.
• 30% have spent between US$10,000 and US$99,999.
• 23% have spent US$100,000 or more.

Prescient Digital Media found that executives and employees alike are less than thrilled with their enterprise social media. To be specific:

• The average rating of internal social media by their host organization is 4.5 out of 10
• Only 22% of organizations rate employees' satisfaction with Intranet 2.0 tools as good or very good.
• Only 17% of organizations rate executives' satisfaction with Intranet 2.0 tools as good or very good.

I do not see this as an failing of social business but a failure in how it has been used in most organizations. As I have written many times, for social business to succeed it need to be integrated into work processes (see for example: Putting Social Media to Work and Giving Social Media a Good Job. That is not going to happen on these limited budgets.

 

Governments are Leading Many IT Innovations

This week I am back to covering emerging technologies and their practical uses. I have been seeing some innovative social business efforts from government for some time so this post, Governments Are Out Front in IT Innovation, was not a surprise. It mentions President Obama’s campaign to see innovation in IT, ranging from its use of big data to open source technologies. On his first day in office, the President also pledged to make the federal government a model for open data. It will take time but there is progress. The use of big data by his re-election campaign to target get out the vote efforts  remains a model for this space.

Innovation is also happening at the city level. New York has its own chief digital officer.  The article writes, “cities and states are not only making use of open source tools, they’re also walking the open source walk by participating in open source communities and contributing their work back to open source repositories such as GitHub.”

It goes on to add that, “in addition to releasing data that citizens can use, governments are increasingly making themselves more available electronically to help them fight crime, by predicting where crime is likely to occur.” I have seen the IBM ads on this type of effort. It makes a lot of sense. Below is an excerpt from a post I wrote after attending Lotusphere 2011. I t shows another innovative effort by government.

Tracy Hackshaw, is the Chief Solution Architect for iGov for the government of Trinidad and Tobago. Tracy discussed how the government is using social business for more effective e-government efforts. There are 1.3 million people in Trinidad and Tobago. A main goal is to increase the engagement of these people with their government and have them more satisfied with what the government is doing. They often look for what the people want and more interaction was a request.  Another was the simplification of information, which became another goal.

Within the country there is a high percentage of access to mobile phones so this was one channel they focused on. They wanted the user experience to be similar to what was offered on computers. One popular example was maps with the location of government offices and transit information on to reach them. Another was the reporting of such things as broken street lights or potholes in the roads. They have reduced the time that these issues are reported.

The different government agencies were each providing their own siloed source of information. So they consolidated this to offer a single, consistent point of access.  Different agencies could collectively created content that they shared with the residents. They also built in more interactivity to get greater feedback. They wanted the government to be more accessible so they created interactive town hall sessions.  They have achieved a 90% satisfaction rating from the residents and this is remarkable for government services. As you will see, each of these cases in their own way demonstrates the value of social business but, of course, I was already convinced. It is nice to see these tangible examples. 

Moxie Software and Microsoft Partner to Enhance Customer Service Capabilities

In November, Moxie and Microsoft announced a partnership to pursue a joint go-to-market strategy to offer Spaces by Moxie within MSFT Dynamics CRM. (See – Moxie Integrates with Microsoft Dynamics CRM).  In March, Moxie announced full integration with MSFT Lync to further strengthen their contact center capabilities. I recently spoke with Tara Sporer, VP of Marketing at Moxie software and Nikhil Govindaraj, VP of Products, to discuss the significance of these moves.

As part of the partnership, Moxie Software will provide Microsoft Dynamics CRM with comprehensive, multi-channel and knowledge base solutions for delivering superior customer experiences. Offered on premises or in the cloud, Moxie Software’s Knowledge Spaces™, Email Spaces™, Chat Spaces™, Web Self-Service Spaces™, CoBrowse Spaces™ and Social Media Spaces™ are now available to work with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Below is a sample screen of Dynamics with email.

Spaces by Moxie enables Microsoft Dynamics CRM customers to provide differentiated and personalized customer experiences at scale. The combined solution allows customers to use Microsoft Dynamics CRM as the single source of truth for all customer and interaction data.  This ensures accurate data by allowing agents to update Microsoft Dynamics CRM while on their Moxie desktop. Moxie becomes the translation layer and Dynamics serves as the layer of record.

Microsoft Lync is their unified communications offering. It currently does not connect to Microsoft Dynamics, but now it can through Moxie so this is a very helpful addition. Lync provides integrated voice, IM, screen sharing chat, and more. Lync currently cannot do intelligent call routing, but Moxie can. Moxie can intercept the call, evaluate the needs and route the call to the person with the most related experience. This person then will have multi-channel response options. Below is a sample screen of Dynamics with chat.

 

Contact center agents can now have a single agent desktop that seamlessly works with multi-channel interactions to contact and case records within Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This ensures accurate data by allowing agents to update Microsoft Dynamics CRM while on their Moxie desktop. They can now automatically search the knowledge base from within the case record for faster case resolution. 

Agents can also publish information from the case record into the knowledge base as knowledge articles to improve effectiveness of the knowledge base. This is a critical capability as it allows an easy way to keep content current without placing a heavy demand on agents.  I am sure it must increase compliance with putting upgraded content into the knowledge base.  I have seen the benefit of a god knowledge base on call center agent performance many times, accelerating performance on a variety of measures such a first time call resolution and cross-selling.

The integration of Moxie with these two Microsoft products rests on a shared foundation as .net apps. Moxie can leverage a company’s existing Microsoft infrastructure and reduce the need to purchase high-end call center services. As a result, Moxie is targeted at the mid-market and this makes sense.

The resulting integrated customer response system provides control over customer experiences regardless of what channel they engage the company. It also providers multiple self-service options and has complete mobile integration. This is a good move, as customer connections will increasingly occur through mobile channels.

This move also takes the call center out of the silos than many operate within. Now Moxie’s collaboration capabilities can be engaged to handle escalations. It puts Moxie in the center of connection between Microsoft Dynamic and Lync. This is a nice place to be and I can understand the positive customer response to this move. 

Data is Made to be Shared

As reported in Information Week, a survey, Fostering a Data-Driven Culture, by the Economist Intelligence Unit indicates that executives who feel their organizations handle data collection, analysis and sharing well are also more likely to feel that their companies outperform their industry peers.

Specifically, 75.5% of those who indicated their organizations were "substantially ahead of peers" financially also said data collection was "very important/essential" in their organizations. In contrast, half of the executives who ranked their companies as "substantially" behind peers in data collection also indicated their organizations were "somewhat" behind financially.

I think that is it not just collecting the data but sharing it is key here. The report noted some interesting results in this issue. There is a double curve as smaller organizations believe in wide sharing, but sharing tends to tighten as companies grow and data-governance rules are applied. However, with really big companies data sharing opens up again.  The new digital workplace allows this sharing to occur, even in the largest organizations making them in some ways as nimble as the small ones.

In general there is a positive feeling for data usage on the job as 84% said "most to all" employees should work this way. Data is an asset that grows in value as it is used. The more people who see it the more valuable it becomes and more ideas can be generated from it.  You also need to educate workers to get the most from the available data. The research indicates that companies that invest in training for data skills perform better than their peers. Now that is a good finding that makes sense. 

Bloomfire Provides Comprehensive Knowledge Connections

Bloomfire is a relatively new offering in the knowledge management space, founded in 2010, that is meeting a need that has remained with us for some time: how do you connect people with the knowledge they need to accomplish their work tasks? This need has been made more acute with the advent of easy-to-use knowledge tools on the consumer Web. For the past few years, workers have become accustomed to accessing better knowledge tools in their personal life than in their work life. The goal of Bloomfire is to provide tools to close that gap. I spoke with Craig Malloy, CEO of Bloomfire, to get an overview of their offering.

Craig provided some stats on the knowledge-sharing problem. Knowledge workers spend up to 30% of their working day looking for data and only 44% of corporate users can find the (internal) file they’re looking for compared to 86% of similar internet users. I can relate to this as I have often asked audiences at knowledge talks to raise their hands if they can find content easier on their enterprise systems than on the Web. No one has ever raised their hand.

There are also issues with enterprise learning systems. Craig showed data that said more than 70% of important job-related knowledge comes from other workers or learning on their own rather than employment-related courses. I have seen more extreme stats that showed that 90% of knowledge came from informal sources. Bloomfire, unlike many social business systems, combines learning capabilities with social networking, content management, and cloud-based file sharing. I like this move.

There is great opportunity here as McKinsey has projected nearly a trillion-dollar market opportunity around creating better-connected enterprises. The convergence of social features, mobile capabilities, cloud storage, and new content tools, creates a compelling stage from which to address these benefits, which is where Bloomfire plays. Their mission is to “help businesses create, capture, display, save, and share information, connecting people who have knowledge with those who need it.” Through application integration, Bloomfire wants to be the “primary location to access relevant content, and the primary communication channel for noticing, collaborating, deciding and acting on information and knowledge.”

Bloomfire has successfully acquired more than 220 active customers to-date and raised $18 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures and Austin Ventures. Their two main use cases are social knowledge creation and sharing, as well as delivering social capabilities to enhance sales enablement. They integrate with popular CRM systems, such as Salesforce, to address the latter and have designed an easy to use a system designed for individual work groups, rather than enterprise wide implementation. This simplifies the adoption process and enables business users to gain quick access to Bloomfire’s capabilities. You can see a sample of their home page below.

The essential elements of the newest release of Bloomfire include a multimedia content engine, a social engagement system, an analytics dashboard, and enhanced iOS app and new Android support. The content generation includes co-authoring, drag and drop file management, and intelligent search. The social engagement features include Integration with LinkedIn so users can bring in their profile and not have to re-create profile information. There is also recognizing and mining expertise and recommendations. 

I was impressed by the comprehensive nature of Bloomfire’s analytics feature, including the ability to indentify content that provides the most benefit, as well as the content related activities of community members; there is also a “hands on the buzzer” measure that tracks the average time it takes to get an answer to a question. Craig said that their current time for internal use is two hours. Here are some sample analytics screens.

With the new mobile capabilities you can stash content on your smart phone by storing what you would like to read later and save it locally to your iOS device to  retrieve and view anytime, anywhere, regardless of connectivity options. Bloomfire will also release a full-featured mobile app for Android devices in Q2 2013. You can see a sample mobile interface below.

Bloomfire focuses on content management and knowledge sharing, rather than activity streams. There are notifications of several types and a notifications tab within the interface.  It also has strong capabilities for handling video as the team has deep experience in this space. You can see a sample video handling screen below.

I like the combination of features and the clarity of their goals and messaging. I can see why Bloomfire has attracted strong attention in a short time. I wish had these capabilities within a tool when I was implementing knowledge management systems a few years back. 

Wrike Provides Mobile Visualization of Project Schedules on an Interactive Timeline

Wrike offers on-demand, online project management and collaboration solution that helps both co-located and distributed teams work together in real time.  I have written about it several times before (see Wrike Provides Mobile Project Management). Here is Wrike’s Andrew Filev presenting a demo at IBM Connect 2013. Wrike integrates with IBM Connections to become more social.

Wrike's product vision is based on the innovative "work graph" model, connecting all work in one central hub that is comfortable to manage and navigate. Adopting the features of the "social graph" to the project collaboration space, Wrike allows users to bring together as many projects as they need and work on them in a scalable environment.

Wrike is now offering a dynamic Gantt chart as part of the latest version of its mobile apps for iPhone and Android smartphones.The mobile interactive timeline, one of the core planning tools that project managers rely on, inherits the key functions from Wrike's web app. Even when they are in the field, users can easily browse project plans from a bird's-eye view or in more detail, and quickly adjust them with a few taps. Just like on the Gantt chart in Wrike's web app, mobile users can reschedule tasks by dragging and dropping them, convert them to milestones, and change other details, for example, assignees.

Ready for installation from the App Store and Google Play, users can also, in three easy steps, configure Wrike's free mobile app to receive push notifications of project updates. As with the software's web-based version, schedule changes are readily visible in real-time to all team members.

 

Do You Know Outstanding Social Business Leaders for 2013?

The Brainyard is seeking Outstanding Social Business Leaders For 2013. They are looking for introductions to the best of the best, a new set of Social Business Leaders to be announced at June's E2 Conference in Boston. In 2012, they honored Bonobos, Cemex, Ford Motor Co., McKesson, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, TD Bank and Unisys. Chris Laping, the Red Robin CIO we named our 2012 Social Business Leader of the Year, joined me for an onstage interview at E2, and it wound up being one of the top-rated events at the conference.

I think this is a very useful effort as the conference could use more business cases and fewer consultant sessions. This is not a criticism of past conferences. When enterprise 2.0 was new there was a real need for thought leaders to provide a vision. Now that it has been around a while, we need to hear more from organizations on their successes, challenges, and lessons learned.

As Jane McConnell reported in Digital Workplace Trends 2013, adoption and deployment remains a challenge. She found in early adopters resistance tends to come from middle managers while in the majority it comes from senior management. I think this is because in the early adopters the senior managers have bought in so things are starting to change and hitting the middle management resistance. In the majority things have not progressed far enough for middle managers to really worry. Jane also found that, “adoption lags far behind deployment for the social capabilities that empower individuals and self-organizing communities and challenge traditional hierarchies and roles within organizations.”

Let’s get more organizations on the stage to share what they have learned to help the rest of us. 

 

JackBe Enables Business Intelligence to be More Accessible and Robust with Recent Moves

I have covered JackBe for a number of years and like their evolution from a mashup engine to making use of this capability for bringing business intelligence to the average business user (see for example, JackBe Expands Real-Time Operational Intelligence with its New Offering and JackBe Presto Provides Self-Service Business Intelligence on a Mobile Basis). I spoke with John Crupi, their CTO, and Sandra Hamorsky, Director, Product Marketing about their latest moves.

Presto 3.5, their latest release, provides business users with direct access to real-time KPIs and analytics through ease of use features, allowing them to move quickly without the need for IT support. This enables users to assess the business impact of changing conditions as they happen. Sandra gave a great example, a dashboard for hardware stores to best serve their customers during a storm situation. In this case it was Hurricane Sandy. Sandra had recently joined JackBe and saw the need to help hardware stores as she was having trouble getting the right tools in preparation for the storm.

This is a good example of a highly important support tool that is urgently needed quickly but will only be used for a short period. It is not a good candidate for a long wait for IT to produce something. So Sandra developed a dashboard in 45 minutes to help stores track the storm using the new DIY features of Presto 3.5. You can see the results below.

There are inventory checklists, along with the probable impact on supplies for each store, weather forecasts, a Twitter feed on the storm and other relevant data sources. This was all very useful as Sandy brought rain to the East and snow to the Midwest. I know these transitions from personal experience as I drove through the entire length of Sandy moving my belongings from Cambridge MA to New Orleans (see Driving Through Hurricane Sandy To New Orleans).

With Presto 3.5, business users can easily create real-time operational and key performance indicator (KPI)-driven apps and dashboards such as the one above that combine data from many live enterprise and social media information sources. John said that they had learned from customers that their IT departments were often not able to keep up with the demands of business users. Once the IT security, governance and protocols are in place - users can take advantage of Presto's self-service capabilities without having to go back to IT every time  they want to create new real-time apps and dashboards.

Presto 3.5 extends its user-friendly interface to include new options to create dashboards through drag-and-drop, to add custom visualizations as easily as plugging in the view, and to customize Presto with a customer’s own logo and colors. There are also pre-built KPIs.

Once created, all Presto dashboards are portable with HTML5 apps that run anywhere, including SharePoint, portals, websites, tablets and mobile phones with the same look-and-feel of the native device. Presto 3.5 also has enhanced security for mobile devices and a more secure single-sign-on experience for social media sites. This includes support for OAuth, used by many social media sites, including Twitter and Facebook. It allows you to combine social media with your enterprise data securely. The interface adapts to multiple devices. You can see the tablet and smart phone interfaces below.

John also covered their latest news, the collaboration with Terracotta to provide better support for the use of Big Data using the Terracotta BigMemory, capability. Big Data is an in-memory solution that delivers performance at any scale. The JackBe-Terracotta collaboration provides compatible tools and a platform for real-time Big Data analytics with:

• Real-time Big Data visual exploration, using in-memory analytics
• Analytic snapshots for instant visual trending and KPI insights
• Apps that visualize live and historical enterprise data mashed with Big Data
• Dashboards that business users can easily assemble quickly and share, with no programming

John said that Presto 3.5 with Terracotta BigMemory can make use of input from Hadoop, as well as other data sources including, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, and Windows Azure. Users are able to construct and make use of data directly from multiple sources without having to set up and feed a data warehouse. This is a huge time and cost saver.

John feels that analytics are the killer app for both social media and Big Data and I would agree. Putting the creation and use of business intelligence apps under the control of those who understand and need them is the key for adoption. JackBe is making great moves in this direction. 

eXo Announces Plans for eXo Release 4.0 and Codenvy

I have written about eXo, the user experience platform-as-a-service (UXPaaS) company that supports developers, several times before (for example see: Benjamin Mestrallet, eXo CEO, Looks at the Social Enterprise and eXo Expands its Cloud IDE Cloud-based Development Platform).  Recently I spoke with Patrice, Lamarque, VP of Products, to catch up on their latest moves. We discussed two main things: the release of Codenvy and eXo 4.0.

We started with eXo 4.0. It is an open source, enterprise-class, social collaboration platform. There are several goals with this release. First, eXo want sot make social collaboration a utility so IT can easily embrace all collaboration within a single platform. They want it to be simple and affordable, as well as business centric. These means there are application connectors in place through APIs to make it enterprise ready so the total cost of ownership remains low. Standard APIs such as JCR or CMIS are complemented by a set of APIs to program against your organization model, spaces, activity streams, polls, posts, wikis and more. For example, you can access Sugar CRM content within eXo. In addition, Sugar CRM activity can show up in the eXo activity stream and acted upon without leaving eXo.. Finally, they want it to be user oriented with an intuitive interface to foster engagement and adoption. The home page is seen below.

Features include: document management, portal, calendar, mobile capability, forums, answers, dashboards, wiki, spaces, tasks, and social networks in a cloud-based offering. The social features include: user profiles, connections, and activity streams. The Spaces feature allows you to create collaboration workspaces for teams or projects where you can share documents, tasks, events, wikis and more. Spaces can be open or closed, private or public and space administrators can manage members and the applications that are available. You can see a sample Spaces screen below.

The Dashboard feature allows each user to create their own customizable dashboard. Gadgets help to track metrics, feeds, status and analytics. The product has a large set of gadgets but you can also install any open social gadget. A large set of gadgets are also available online. The dashboard is available through the mobile applications. The Tasks feature allows you to capture work items super easily as tasks. Tasks can be created from anywhere, anytime. They can be scheduled in your calendar and reminders will be sent to you. You can also track other people’s tasks via activity streams. You can develop gadgets and REST services and deploy them in the platform.

With the Documents feature you can upload files easily, preview them, share them and edit them remotely via WEBDAV. Advanced document management capabilities are available such as versioning, metadata, advanced search and digital asset management. You can also build accessible websites with different content types and site structure. A powerful back office lets you classify, search and publish content very easily. A sample document management screen is seen below.

 

Based on the open source GateIn portal framework, eXo Platform has all the flexibility of an enterprise portal framework: portlets (JSR 286, WSRP), gadgets (OpenSocial) and content can be aggregated in a secured and customizable way.  A powerful graphical user interface composer that requires no technical skills allows you to compose portal pages by picking up a layout and pulling in apps and content.

There is also Unified Search coming soon. It will allow you to search any type of content using a single interface, including documents, events, tasks, posts and articles. Any content can be found with the clear and powerful search application. A quick search-ahead helper field shows the most relevant results and a more advanced search with advanced filtering lets you go further.

If you already manage user accounts in an enterprise directory such as Active Directory or Open LDAP, eXo Platform can integrate with it for authentication or user profile attributes. Advanced capabilities even let you use groups in eXo or leverage several directories at the same time. The eXo Platform works with your single sign-on system thank to its support of solutions like CAS, JOSSO and OpenSSO, and its support of standards like SAML. The eXo Platform is built using enterprise-standard tools such as Java EE, WEBDAV, CalDAV, JCR and CMIS to maximize its interoperability within the applications already available within the information system.

There is strong mobility support with native iPhone, iPad, and Android apps integrate easily and securely with your eXo instance. Below are some sample mobile interfaces.

 

There are a variety of pricing options including a freemium option. I think that eXo has put together a compelling offering for enterprises of all sizes to engagement in social business. The eXo 4.0 platform will be released at the end of April.

We also discussed Codenvy, a spin off from eXo that has received $9M in funding. Codenvy was announced on February 26 and it is the business now handling their eXo Cloud IDE offering. It was started with the objective to make developers more productive in building and deploying cloud-based apps. It targeted the Java environment and has support for a wide range of PaaS environments, including Red Hat OpenShift, Salesforce Heroku, CloudBees, and VMware Cloud Foundry. eXo Cloud IDE has exceeded their expectations so they created this new business unit to handle its growth.

FileMaker Offers Database Development for iPad, iPhone, and More

FileMaker is a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple, Inc. It provides a comprehensive Platform used to design, build, deploy and manage data-driven business solutions for Mac, Windows, iPad and iPhone and the web. I spoke with Ryan Rosenberg, VP of Marketing, to get a better understanding of the FileMaker Platform. We also discussed how companies are using the Platform to create custom business solutions for iPad and iPhone and Ryan demonstrated some of the ease of use features of the environment.

Ryan said that FileMaker Pro is the number one database on the Mac OS and number two on Windows behind Access. They have shipped over 18 million copies of FileMaker Pro. In fact, the Windows market is their largest. FileMaker apps can be expanded to thousands of users. It is designed for business apps. FileMaker Go for iPad and FileMaker Go for iPhone, the leading iOS databases, are both free on the iTunes App store

They also develop Bento, an entry-level personal database software for solo businesses owners, which is available on the Apple App store and Bento 4 for iPad and Bento 4 for iPhone available in the productivity section of the iTunes App store.

Ryan said that over 500,000 copies of FileMaker Go have been downloaded so far and that most of these deployments are found within small, medium and large organizations. He gave the example of the Austin Texas Convention Center that I know well from last year’s SXSW. The crews that set up booths can make adjustments on their iPads by drawing the modifications and these changes are communicated automatically to the central admin people. I can see the benefit of this. Now they need to help with the registration process as it took several hours and long lines at the 2012 SXSW. Ryan also mentioned another great use case, the Benetton stores. Here clerks carry iPads running FileMaker Go for iPad and can check inventory without having to go to a backroom. I imagine this is a common use case inn many stores, or will become one.

Ryan showed me a coffee shop solution that allows you to create custom coffee grinds through a visual interface. He also showed me a driving test sample solution that allows the tester to check off an applicants progress and diagram incidents on a traffic grid. This latter one eliminates a lot of paper and makes record keeping much more efficient.

You can also integrate mobile solutions into existing enterprise and departmental systems and then make updates. Ryan showed me how you can make changes in the desktop version and have it immediately appear in the iPad version. Data updates can go in both directions back and forth from field sales people and the home office, for example. You can also manage and secure solutions using
 industry-standard authentication. There is no coding required for solution development so the business users can do self-service and not rely on programmers.

FileMaker is a complete Platform for creating, deploying, and managing data-driven business apps. Design is key for iPad and iPhone solutions, as the expectations are high. FileMaker includes flexible design tools that let developers take total control of the screen. You can create an attractive product configuration display, an inviting registration screen for an event, a useful executive dashboard, or a comprehensive facilities management App. FileMaker also features native iPad and iPhone clients so you can deliver the full native iOS experience.

On the business side, FileMaker has a powerful framework based on a full-featured relational database model, with integrated workflow, business logic, searching, sorting and data validation. The framework includes many features to take advantage of the iPad and iPhone such as on-device charting, report generation, PDF generation, email integration, printing support, signature capture, location support, camera support and more. Ryan showed me how to make an update where sales over a certain profit level appear in red. It was done in seconds and communicated to all connected devices immediately. You can see the process in the two screens below.

 

Ryan also showed me how to set up a signature capture field within an app. You can see the process in the two screens below.

If you need help, an extensive third party ecosystem has evolved with more than 1,100 consulting firms worldwide in FileMaker’s Business Alliance of independent FileMaker database developers offering customized database development and  training.  The company offers developers certified training. There are also hundreds of 3rd party tools and frameworks for the FileMaker Platform providing integration such as with popular accounting packages, enabling point-of-sale credit card transactions, delivering vertical application frameworks and more.

There is also the FileMaker Technical Network, with over 30,000 active members.

FileMaker products are available in 17 languages

I was very impressed with the capabilities, ease of use and support. I can see why FileMaker is so popular.

 

 

Review of Digital Workplace Trends 2013: Part Three – Selected Details

As I wrote in the first part of this series, I recently received a review copy of Digital Workplace Trends 2013 by Jane McConnell. Jane has conducted the annual surveys since 2006 and published reports every year since 2007. My last post begin to look at some of the details in the report. The report is over 150 pages long so I will only scratch the surface. You can purchase the report through its web site, www.digital-workplace-trends.com. As I wrote, if you are serious about making the digital workplace happen in your organization, it is a good move to obtain a copy.

I was pleased to see a section on Process in the report. I think this is key to getting real value out of the digital workplace. As I wrote, it is integrating the interactions with the transactions and tying the social to business process where real change will occur. A post by Andy McAfee that made a similar point. He, in turn, quotes a post by Laurie Buczek, The Big Failure of Enterprise 2.0 Social Business. “Culture will change as a result of the pervasive use of social tools.  Lack of cultural change is not social business’s biggest failure.  The biggest failure is the lack of workflow integration to drive culture change.”

Jane found that there is much to do to solve this challenge. She reported that, “very few organizations have embedded social capabilities into enterprise processes. However anecdotal evidence suggests that social integrated into processes can successfully change the way people work.” She offers a lot of detail on to make this happen.

In the investment section, Jane reported that, “mobile is the priority area for investment for 2013-2014, with enterprise social networking and information architecture also at the top of the list.” I think that information architecture is a top priority. In addition to addressing the important people issues (so they are open to connecting and willing to step out of organizational silos), there are some essential technology ones, it is also necessary to get the applications connected so conversation do not occur in technical silos. As I wrote in Putting Social Media to Work, to be effective these systems that support interactions have to be integrated with the systems of record that support transactions. The social tools also need to be integrated with each other or companies are simply creating more silos of disconnection and benefits are not realized. Application connectors are a major key realizing the business benefits of the digital workplace.

Having said that technology is critical, so are people issues and Jane has a section on Change. She writes that, “resistance to social collaboration comes from perceptions about lack of business value and waste of time.” She also found in early adopters resistance tends to come from middle managers while in the majority it comes from senior management. I think this is because in the early adopters the senior managers have bought in so things are starting to change and hitting the middle management resistance. In the majority things have not progressed far enough for middle managers to really worry. Jane offers a lot of useful content and case examples on making change happen.

Jane appropriately concludes with a section on finding your direction.  She states that no journey is the same. However, there are some common directions to take. She encourages organizations to build a digital mindset and start with a big picture and use it to bring the diverse initiatives together. You need to focus on capabilities and not tools and define governance based on “freedom within a framework.” Always think integrated. There is much more. This is a very useful report.

 

 

Review of Digital Workplace Trends 2013: Part Two – Selected Details

As I wrote in the first part of this series, I recently received a review copy of Digital Workplace Trends 2013 by Jane McConnell. Jane has conducted the annual surveys since 2006 and published reports every year since 2007. My last post provided an overview and this one dives into some of the detailed findings. The report is over 150 pages long so I will only scratch the surface. You can purchase the report through its web site, www.digital-workplace-trends.com. If you are serious about making the digital workplace happen in your organization, it is a good move to obtain a copy.

The report is organized into eight sections: transformation, mobile, social collaboration, process, experience, investment, change, and finding your direction. Transformation is going to happen and Jane found that most organizations are moving to the digital workplace concept but at different speeds – only 3% believe it does not concern them. I think this transformation will equal the significance of the industrial revolution and the related thinking of Fred Taylor but reverse many of its impacts. Collaboration tools can turn Taylorism on its head so learning goes up and down the enterprise and the whole structure is connected. The large can become nimble, as IBM has found out. Jane found that “early adopters differ from the majority of organizations in that their senior managers play an active role and are often the driving force behind the digital workplace.” Jane offers a number of excellent case examples in this and other sections.

Jane found that 2012 was the year mobile became a strategic priority for the digital workplace with 41% of organizations planning investment next year. The mobile initiatives tend to be focused on the needs of senior executives, those on the road and the field workers.  While this makes some sense, I think that everyone is a mobile worker now, even those with a desk. They often use their mobile device rather than their desktop one, even in the office. I imagine that there are few mobile workers without a mobile device. Jane did find that BYOD is widespread in the early adopters, with over 70% permitting or tolerating it. The others are catching up. However, as I mentioned in the last post, the mobile services offered today are limited in scope, with only 20% of organizations providing task-based or collaborative capabilities. The opportunity for value and competitive edge is very high here with these low numbers.

Jane found a wide range of social collaborative capabilities in place, with a high increase in interest in the past 12 months.  This corresponds to the work of Nora Barnes at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts who has also been looking at the business use of social media over the past few years. For example, Nora found that now 92% of the Inc. 500 are using at least one of the social business tools she studied such as blogs, and networks.

Jane found that the transformative capabilities are those with the highest gap between deployment and adoption. These include commenting, user- generated content, crowd-sourcing and social networking. They are disruptive because they challenge traditional roles and hierarchies in organizations. Yet I would add they are exactly the initiatives that will provide the most value.  Like all of the sections, the one on social collaboration is full of useful details that I will let you find in the report. This disruption impacts all of the efforts as Jane found that while early adopters have significantly more deployment, they still struggle with adoption. In many cases, even where social networks are deployed, they are not yet actively and broadly used. I do not see this as a shortcoming of the digital workplace, and a call to return to the old ways, but rather a challenge that the winners will overcome.

Let me digress with a story. When my grandfather was a country doctor in Oklahoma before it was a state, he would drive his horse and buggy for hours doing rounds. When he was finished and exhausted, he would throw the reins over and the horses knew the way home. Then he bought the first car in the county. Part of the deal was that the salesman lived on the farm for two weeks teaching him how to run and maintain the new machine. However, he kept falling asleep at the wheel and the car did not know the way home. Fortunately the roads where still related to the old means of transportation and the car would just stall in the wagon runts. He was ready to go back to the horse when he got the idea to teach one of his daughters to drive the car. She cam along and took over when he got tired. We need to figure out how to get along with our new technology, because, like the horse and buggy, the old technologies days are numbered.

This is enough for one post. I will finish my coverage of the selected details in my next post.

 

Review of Digital Workplace Trends 2013: Part One – Overview

I recently received a review copy of Digital Workplace Trends 2013 by Jane McConnell. I have seen prior reports and was very impressed so I was pleased to get this latest version. I am going to review it in several posts since the 150+ page report deserves this type of coverage. I met Jane at KM World. She has 14 years of extensive hands-on consulting experience with intranet and digital workplace strategy in large, global organizations.  Jane has conducted the annual surveys since 2006 and published reports every year since 2007. Data for this report was collected in the fourth quarter of 2012. The findings are based on an online survey of over 100 questions with participants from 362 organizations around the world, from a wide range of industries.

The report indicates that, “the top two goals of the digital workplace - rated equally important - are “organizational intelligence” and “efficiency and cost savings.”  This corresponds to McKinsey’s 2012 Projected Business Value of Social Business at a Trillion Annually. In 2010 they reported, Enterprise 2.0 finds Its Payday where they found significant quantified benefits from the business use of social media. Similar results were found in 2011.

Jane writes that the digital workplace is a work in progress with different dimensions, not all equally mature. They include managed information and processes, structured collaboration, social collaboration and a mobile dimension. She adds that it is transformative and I would certainly agree.

Jane makes several predictions. First, 2013 is the year where mobile takes off. She found that 60% of organizations consider mobile to be important and have already made “significant” or “some” investment. Last year the figure was just under 40%. There is still much to be done here as Jane found that 45% of organizations offer either no mobile or simply access to email. Only a third offer “basic services,” such as calendar, directory and news. An even smaller number, 20%, have provided mobile access to work tools for collaborative, HR and other task-related needs. This is where the real value that McKinsey talks about will occur.

Jane also found that, “adoption lags far behind deployment for the social capabilities that empower individuals and self-organizing communities and challenge traditional hierarchies and roles within organizations.”  She adds that enterprise social networking is deployed in 70% of the early adopters and 35% of the majority. However, it has not reached a critical mass of usage even for many of the early adopters.  I think realize that the change to social business is going to happen. As I saw recently at IBM Connect 2013, IBM is betting the company on it and I think that is a wise move.  But most organizations still do not really know how to do it.

Leading the resistance to change are the middle managers, not the senior officials but that has probably been the case since the Roman army. Jane found that the most effective change driver is “colleague and peer” behavior. At the same time many senior managers have embraced the reality of the digital workplace. I think one of the threatening aspects of the digital workplace to middle managers is that it shortens the distance between employees and senior management, taking out the gate keeper and filtering role that many middle managers play. However, companies are going to have to deal with this as middle managers are the backbone of the organization and change will generally not happen without their engagement.

The report is organized into eight sections: transformation, mobile, social collaboration, process, experience, investment, change, and finding your direction. I will cover some of the details in my next post, Review of Digital Workplace Trends 2013 – Selected Details. You can purchase the report through its web site, www.digital-workplace-trends.com. If you are serious about making the digital workplace happen in your organization, it is a good move to obtain a copy. 

Enterprise Social Networking Mindshifts by Catherine Shinners

My Merced Group business partner, Catherine Shinners, has published a useful series on Enterprise Social Networking Mindshifts. As McKinsey has shown there is a lot of value to working with social tools and processes. Yet, as Catherine notes, according to a report released by Ovum last week, there's only about a ten percent (10%) adoption rate in organizations.  In the series she provides useful ways to make creative uses of social networking and increase adoption. I will let you read what she wrote and not repeat it here. Take a look.

Here is the list of posts in her series

Enterprise Social Networking Mindshifts #1 - Think Community

Enterprise Social Networking Mindshfts  #2 - Why Community Matters

Enterprise Social Networking Mindshifts #3 - Managing Social

Enterprise Social Networking Mindshifts #4 - Working Social

 

My IBM Connect 2013 Session Notes: Complete Listing

Here is the complete listing of my notes on IBM Connect 2013. I was very pleased to be back again after the last two years thanks to IBM’s support. Here are my notes from 2011 and 2012 

 IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Opening Session

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Monday Morning Press Q&A

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Four Major Trends Shaping Social Business in 2013

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Creating a Smarter Workforce – Panel

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Tuesday Opening Session

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Reinventing the Inbox – Ed Brill

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Wednesday Opening Session

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Getting Social in the Cloud – Rebecca Bulsan

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Social Business Goes to School

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Innovation Lab

Here also are several recent posts on IBM.

IBM Global CMO Study: Highlights

Social Business – What Works and How: Highlights of IBM 2012 Social Technologies Study

IBM Connections 4.0 Expands Its Social, Integration, and Analytic Capabilities

 

IBM Connect 2013: Ed Brill on Reinventing the Inbox

This is another in a series of my notes on IBM Connect 2013. I am very pleased to be back again after the last two years thanks to IBM’s support. Here is a summary of my notes for 2012 and 2011. These notes cover the Monday Press Session: Reinventing the Inbox with Ed Brill, Director, Social Business & Collaboration, IBM.

I first meet Ed Brill in person at the 2011 Lotusphere. He remembered our phone interview six year earlier when I was collecting cases for blog book. Here is that interview: Blog Cases from 2005: Ed Brill on IBM, Collaboration, and More. Ed said he liked the case as it showed that he was talking about social before the term was commonly used. I would certainly agree that he was ahead of most people in using social apps.

Before I get into the session I want to mention, Ed’s excellent new book, Opting In: Lessons in Social Business from a Fortune 500 Product Manager. I had a chance to preview the first few chapters. As I wrote in response to this preview: Opting In is an important book that takes social business beyond external marketing to provide practical guidance on how to drive significant business value through enhancing human interactions within the enterprise. McKinsey's research has demonstrated many quantified benefits here and Ed shows you how to realize them. I look forward to reading the rest of the book.

Ed runs product management for messaging, collaboration, and unification. The two big new things this year are improvements to existing apps through Social Notes 9.0 and IBM docs.  Ed said that email has become dysfunctional and needs to be transformed. Adding social capabilities will greatly increase its efficiency and I would certainly agree. Some of the content that used to be in broadcast emails has already moved to social apps for good reason. But there needs to be changes to email itself. This is happening in several ways.

There is embedded experience so that email alerts can come into other apps you are working on. You can respond to the email without leaving the other app. Another major change that is coming is to use analytics to prioritize your mail so the most relevant messages come to the top of the email inbox, replacing the simple chronological order that has been standard for some time. There could be several different types of filters for this prioritization such as skills, team membership, location, or relevance to a project you are working on. Ed said that one challenge will be getting people to trust the prioritization.

Within IBM as an organization, Connections has replaced the portal as the first place people go. Now you can have mail within Connections so you do not have to leave it. There is also a discovery engine that teaches people how to use the new features. One capability I really like, is the ability to act on a message directly. For example, you might get a request from HR in an email that requires using an HR app. You can respond to the request directly in the email without having to go to the app.

We talked a bit about activity streams as they also have this embedded ability to respond to requests from apps. Email and activity streams are now two parallel communication channels. Activity streams are for public information, as many people can see them. Ed said they can be useful for discovering new information. Email remains the channel for private communication. It is still necessary but some of its uses have moved to better tools. Here is a list of features for Notes 9.0 from the IBM product page.

• Provides an easy-to-use, single point of access to everything you need to get your work done quickly, including business applications, email, calendars, feeds, and more.
• Lets you tailor your work environment with widgets that bring social communities that are important to your job, both within the enterprise and across the Internet, right into your peripheral view.
• Enables you to work with people right at the point of context with social tools weaved into the work experience, allowing you to pivot to the tool you need, such as business cards, presence awareness, instant messaging, and more.
• Helps you quickly locate the people and content you need through integrated access to social tools from IBM Connections and IBM Lotus Quickr® software, including profiles, activities, team places, and content libraries.
• Offers advanced replication technology to enable you to work with email and applications even when disconnected from the network.

Sometimes changes to becoming more social can have unintended consequences. For example, Ed mentioned a CEO who started a blog to more directly communicate with his workforce and allow for two-way exchanges that email messages did not promote.  Employees were so pleased to have a communication channel with the CEO that many comment threads got pushed into topics unrelated to his post. So he set up a second app, called the Speaker’s Corner, to allow for these comments. This allowed his first blog to stay more on topic.

Ed said that Notes use remains very active. In fact, many clients who let their Notes licenses expire are coming back. The added social features are one driver of this re-engagement.

IBM Docs also has integrated social features. You can open a document and invite others to collaborate on it in real time. In traditional word processing you designate a file name and place it in a file structure. It is document oriented. IBM Docs is more people oriented. You open a document and place in a location such as a team workspace within Connections, not an abstract file structure. Then others can be invited into this workspace. I see this people orientation as a great improvement and one of the shortcomings of MS Word and SharePoint. IBM Docs can work in the cloud as IBM SmartCloud Docs is a cloud-based office productivity suite, which allows users to simultaneously collaborate on word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents. Here is a sample screen.

Notes can also be in the cloud. IBM recently did a study on the cloud and found that organizations – both big and small, across geographies and in virtually every industry – are embracing cloud as a way to reduce the complexity and costs associated with traditional IT approaches. Almost three-fourths of the leaders in their survey indicated their companies had piloted, adopted or substantially implemented cloud in their organizations – and 90 percent expect to have done so in three years. And the number of respondents whose companies have substantially implemented cloud is expected to grow from 13 percent today to 41 percent in three years.

There is also extensive mobile support including client and clientless (HTTP, browser based) access options and seamless network connectivity as you roam. There is optimized network utilization to reduce data transmission and connection costs. Notes Mobile Connect also supports a wide range of device types - mobile, desktop, laptop - for security-rich connection into business infrastructure. It is nice to see that Notes in alive and well and entering the social age. This move should ensure its longevity. 

IBM Connect 2013: Tuesday Opening Session Notes

This is another in a series of my notes on IBM Connect 2013. I am very pleased to be back again after the last two years. Here are my notes from 2011 and 2012. Bob Piccano, IBM General Manager led the opening session. The theme was the rise of social business - moving from liking to leading. These notes are real time so please forgive any typos. 

    
Bob Piccano opened the session. He mentioned that this was the 20^th year of this conference.   He has moved to a new post leading the big data efforts across IBM.  He introduced Adam Klaber, Managing Partner, New Markets, who is working on big data among other things. IBM is moving from systems of transaction to systems of engagement. This has major transformation implications. I have written about this concept a bit (see for example, Integrating the Interactions with the Transactions and Integrating Transactions and Interactions: A Fable).

Adam said that customers are leading the conversations that define brands. Partners are interacting to accelerate business value. Employees are using social media in all aspects of the their lives, including work. Organizations are crowdsourcing ideas to bring better solutions.

Adam mentioned the four Is: Interact, inform, integrate, and innovate. Each builds on the other. This shift is enabled by technology supported social interactions. They are releasing a study on how companies are moving forward in social. Over half of the organizations are shifting their investments to social technology. They are also looking at the cultural change. IBM is doing more than technology but also helping with the social change.

They have formed a cross-disciplinary group on front office transformation and a center of competence in this space. He moved to client examples in healthcare, retail, and government. He began with healthcare,

Dan Pelino came out to discuss healthcare. There is now a huge increase of people getting healthcare benefits in the US.  Thirty million new people are coming into the system. It is the largest single change for any industry. It will change everything including the use of technology.

Dan began with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. I was a subscriber of this Blue Cross for years when I lived in Cambridge until I recently moved back to New Orleans. Bill Fandrich the CIO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts spoke. They have been dealing with universal coverage since 2006 when Massachusetts passed the first laws in this area. When they started today’s smart phones were not in the market, yet these devices are now the primary ways members access their benefits.

There is now a new paradigm, out pacing Moore’s law on change with growth of over 45% per year. The real question is whether they are getting insights from the massive amounts of data or is this just an expense. There was now coverage for 411,000 uninsured residents and only 1.9% remain uninsured. They are the glue that connects members and providers. They look at all the touch points in the process.  They keep a 360 view of their members to provide better care at less cost. They want to provide more personalized health care. I have received calls on some of the issues he raised.

Next, Maree Foti, HR manager at David Jones, a department store in Australia, They have 36 stores with 8,000 employees. They are the older department store still on their original name.  They started a working group to have more two way communication with employees. They need a platform with two-communication, anywhere, anytime while complimenting existing infrastructure. They have started a pilot of IBM Connections with 1,000 employees. They have 65% take up in three months. There are also behavioral changes.

Usage is strong with 64% access the system several times a week. More than 55% believe it will enhance two-way communication. The top three benefits; Increased knowledge of the firm, more direct link to leadership team, and a greater sense of community and collaboration. Her three top tips: bring the platform to life for users, focus on content, content, content; and engage champions at all levels of the business.  Moving forward their focus in changing to find ways to obtain business benefits. They want to create platform for social business.

Dan next introduced the government example. Municipalities affect how we live so better participation in good for everyone. Jeff Rhoda, General Manager, IBM. We are all touched by government. The issues that have been discussed all apply to government: big data, collaboration, analytics, cloud, and mobile. For example, police can use analytics to predict where crimes will occur to prevent them before they happen. I have seen the TV commercial about this.

Dan introduced Mike Van Milligen from the city of Dubuque to discuss how they engaged citizens to help with local challenges. They have come back from population loss to create a growing community that is sustainable. They use smarter technologies to give new information to citizens and business to save money. If you give people the right information, they will make smarter decisions. Water was the first example. Thee hundred volunteer households were given a portal looking at water use. It resulted in a 7% reduction in water use and 800% increase in water leak detection. The also did a smarter electricity study with over 1,000 participants. They received a 4 - 7% cost savings in electricity. Over 70% took actions to converse electricity. The state officials in Iowa to look for sate wide use. Next they are wrapped a smarter travel study. They are developing better bus routes.

Mike said the lessons include:

• Incremental change is best
• Synthesize and analyze large amounts of data from unrelated and unstructured sources
• Reach people on through multiple channels

They are focused in creating sustainable model for cites under 200,000 where 40% of the US population lives. They revamped their riverfront. They have a population of 60,000 but 3 million live within a 100 miles.

Dan concluded the three part case examples and Bob came back to wrap up the morning session. He began an architectural discussion with systems of record. There are now machine-to-machine interactions. At the top end of the stack you have systems of engagement.  A big data platform links the two. Content is curated and made useful for analytics and subsequent decisions. They are releasing a new version of IBM social analytics, formerly known as Cognos. It will be available on a SaaS model. The platform allows big data can be used at the point of impact.  There is interaction data, attitudinal data, behavioral data, and more.  An airline manufacturer saved 36 million in shorter service calls, another client process 17 billion bits of data on a daily basis. They have now 300 business partners in this space and have released their Stored IQ product. 

IBM Connect 2013: My Monday Opening Session Notes

This is the first in a series of notes on IBM Connect 2013. I am very pleased to be back again after the last two years thanks to IBM’s support. Here are my notes from 2011 and 2012. These notes are real time so please forgive any typos. Alistair Rennie, IBM General Manager led the opening session which began with a very loud and good rock band. They said this was the earliest performance in 30 years. The band was They Might Be Giants.

Alistar asked if we were awake after the performance. This is the twentieth year of Lotusphere. In the next 20 years IBM is going to focus on how to empower people. I was at the 2000 Lotusphere with a client presenting one of the first SameTime and Quickplace implementations with Ryder.

He then introduced the actor, Joseph Gordon Levitt who started a web site, HitRecord.org, to promote creativity. You can upload music and videos. Then anyone can download it and build on the creation. This is to promote collaboration. One of the videos was “A man with a turnip for his head”. The moral was live with what you have and do not try to hide it. They have created a positive community around the site. This is counter to what happens sometimes in Hollywood. It was started by Joseph and his brother it started slow and positive. He rewarded good work, rather than trash stuff. It makes people feel good and willing to put their art on the site.

He also said much creativity is built on past work. So people need to let go of their sense of ownership, at HitRecord.org when you upload material, you give others the non-exclusive right to build on it. For example, “A man with a turnip for his head” was a poem. Gary Oldman read the poem and they took audio and put it on the site. Then he requested the community to make illustrations, then another request was made for an animated film based on the narrative and the winning illustration. Then he asked for music and that was added. 29 different people contributed and they contribute the profits to this group. They have about 150,000 members. At each step members vote on everything, including how much each contributor should get.

Alistair took a video of the crowd to contribute to HitRecord.org. He said “The site is a great living laboratory for collaboration”. He then talked about being a member of bike riding community. There is an online community to support their efforts and other riding groups. Looking at what others are doing, encouraging them to start performing better. Community plus competition can drive performance. Getting everyone involved is key. Connection is key. I would add that application integration is an important part of this connection.

The IBM Social Business Platform is now licensed by 60% of the Fortune 500. This platform was featured next. Sandy Carter and Jeff Schick demonstrated the social platform. Sandy said that social is a life style change. So IBM did both technology and a methodology. Now they have introduced a best practice adoption program.

Luis Benitez showed how a sales manager can be supported to run his team. He built a sales hub for his sales team community using out-of-the-box capabilities. Their content “gets social” to obtain the collective wisdom of their group. There is multi-way video for conversations available for laptops and tablets. Next, an interactive table top by Foresee, where you can see and manipulate the content through multiple means including drawing on the table. You can drag people into the team and then provide them with guidance. Luis next showed Notes 9.0 Social Edition that combines mail with social. Email messages can be made social. File Sync allows you to integrate with iPad, Mac, Windows, etc. IBM Docs will allow multiple users to edit docs at the same time.

Sandy said that an IBM study found 57% of CEOs believe social is a key driver. One senior exec said social revealed one company’s culture. Connections will have another release, as will SameTime. Everything will be available in the Cloud. They also have Adoption Services & Strategies along with Customer Council.

Bosch’s use of social was the next topic. Their CIO spoke. Bosch offers automotive, industrial, and consumer products. I had a Bosch dishwasher, washer, and dryer recently and they were the best examples of those appliances I have owned. They promote collaboration and diversity through a social business strategy. IBM Connections is their platform for this company wide collaboration. They started with pilots, but will open it to everyone soon. Community managers are key to success for this to work.

Craig Hayman next spoke about Steam-punk, a new trend. They found this using social analytics. Customer experience is more important than ever before. You need to turn them into advocates by listening for what they want and then acting on it. For example, 50% of customers are using mobile devices in stores.

Social analytics were demonstrated using a climbing gear company, Greenwell Sports, case example. I am very familiar with this space as my daughter is the Editor of Alpinist Magazine. There is a lot of gear talk in this space and much discussion on the Web. The firm using Facebook, Twitter, and other means to link back to the right gear on their site. It has resulted in huge increases in sales. They built a community around canyoneering with Connections.

ING is a company that looks at where abandonment occurs and built in remedies. Expedia and Shop.ca, did the same thing. Jeff Bowman from Caterpillar next spoke. Now customers often start online. This undermines their traditional face-to-face selling approach. So now they are adding social online to remain competitive.

Social recruiting was next covered to demonstrate some of the Kenexa capabilities. The applicant starts with an assessment. Then analytics are used to find the best match. Once selected an on-boarding portal streamlines the process. There are collaborative social learning experiences to share expertise. The many resources that are available are easy to find. Questions can have a video context to better explain what is needed and get better answers.

Mike Rhodin spoke next. He said it is the 11th time he has spoken here. Introducing Neil Armstrong was his best experience. IBM now works as social enterprise. I have interviewed Mike on a number of occasions and really appreciate his big picture thinking. He said that big data is allowing us to see patterns that were not thought of before. This is allowing businesses to transform and re-invent themselves. They can target individuals rather than simply segments. Mike said that analytics is key and I could not agree more. Social opens up content to be mined through analytics. Mike said analytics is the new language of business and IBM is investing heavily here.

Blog Cases from 2005: Ed Brill on IBM, Collaboration, and More

This is another in a series of case studies from people I interviewed in 2005 about their blogging efforts. Now as we move to 2013, I find it interesting to look back at the early days of business blogging. I will only include cases from people who are still blogging now. These cases have not appeared on this blog before.

I am pleased to be at IBM Connect 2013 today and thought Ed Brill’s blog would be an appropriate case to share. It is my third year attending the event formerly known as Lotusphere. Here are my notes from Lotusphere 2011 and Lotusphere 2012. I will be providing my notes from this year's session over the next weeks. 

I first meet Ed Brill in person at the 2011 session. He remembered our phone interview six year earlier. Before I get into the interview I want to mention, Ed’s excellent new book, Opting In: Lessons in Social Business from a Fortune 500 Product Manager. I had a chance to preview the first few chapters. As I wrote in response to this preview: Opting In is an important book that takes social business beyond external marketing to provide practical guidance on how to drive significant business value through enhancing human interactions within the enterprise. McKInsey's research has demonstrated many quantified benefits here and Ed shows you how to realize them. I look forward to reading the rest of the book.

When I spoke with Ed in 2005 he was the Business Unit Executive, Worldwide Notes/Domino Sales and had been with IBM Lotus for over ten years. He still has a senior leadership position at IBM and is now Director, Social Business and Collaboration Solutions, IBM. He is responsible for the product and market strategy for IBM's messaging, collaboration, communications, and productivity products, including Lotus Notes and Domino, IBM SmartCloud Notes, IBM Sametime, Lotus Symphony, IBM Docs, and other related social business solutions. Ed also continues to writes the blog, Ed Brill, Collaboration, technology, travel, and more.  The latest tagline also includes the word Chicago after travel.

Ed supplied an excellent summary of his blog experiences in a December 26, 2004 post, The blogging year in review. “When I started blogging a little over two years ago, I had little sense as to where the endeavor might lead.  I've enjoyed writing all my life, and initially, I thought that this would be little more than an online journal, gratifying to compose. In the first year in review posted in 2003, Ed said, “I didn't talk much about the professional aspects of blogging.  At the end of the second year, it is hard to consider much else.  For 2004 is when this blog turned a corner from outlet to focal point, from hobby to vocation, and from carefree to considered.”

Ed said in our 2005 interview, ”Some of that transition started the very week after I penned the 2003 retrospective, as I entered a time which was personally very intense, leading up to and beyond Lotusphere.  More of it happened during widely-watched blog world activities in the second half of 2004.  As I re-read all my 2004 blog entries over the last few days, it became clear that my blogging style has changed considerably in that time.”

This late 2004 post continues with an excellent summary of his activities. By then he had about 10,000 hits a day and was in the top 1% of Technorati ranked blogs. Ed reported that he initially began blogging, to have an outlet for writing about new products, market trends, competition, but also about general life -- travel, marketing, even family.  Ed felt that his original objectives for his blog have been met, as they were fairly narrow in scope. He added, “I've made blogging an integral part of my communications.” 

By the time we spoke Ed’s blogging objectives had evolved substantially.  His readership had become broad and diverse, but 90% composed of IBM customers/partners.  As such, Ed had to narrow the topical focus -- He mostly wrote about the collaboration software market the time, with occasional travel or other life tidbits thrown in.  The blog now had an impact on the market, so it was no longer simply a hobby for Ed.  Within that context, his revised objectives continued to be far exceeded -- reaching more customers than he thought possible, with more positive impact for IBM than expected.

Ed’s biggest challenge came when he went through a period of time that all bloggers do, where he felt like he was a slave to the blog.  Ed reported that he had the standard feeling that if he wasn't updating daily, he would lose the readership.  Ed had gone through "dry spells" where he didn't think he has enough interesting content.  

Ed found that his challenges were just a blogging maturity issue.  As the readership grew, and the technology used to read blogs (RSS) became mainstream, he didn't feel as much pressure from the blog.  He felt that, “RSS is a very "forgiving" technology -- gives readers more control over what they want to read, and gets me away from the "must blog to keep readership" mindset.”

Ed maintained good relationships with his communications and legal teams to ensure that any questionable content could be discussed openly.  Since Ed was, and still is, an official spokesperson for IBM, he has been "press trained" and is very aware of what is or is not appropriate to say in public.   

Ed advocated the need for companies to have some kind of open-yet-controlled policy towards blogging.  Ed commented, “Blogging is not a fad, and it can be incredibly advantageous to corporations.  There's a way to make it useful yet not porous.”

Whne we spoke in 2005 about half of Ed’s content was commentary on other web content -- usually press articles about IBM, Microsoft, and other major collaboration vendors.  Another 30% was original content about things going on within IBM or the market.  The remaining 20% was the human face -- travel adventures, new geek toys, people news.

Business owners can find a variety of useful information on Ed’s blog.  If they are a software consultancy, they might learn of new opportunities to leverage IBM software.  If they are more like a law firm or doctor's office, he believed his blog would be of less value.

Ed read the blogs of small or independent consultancies in his marketplace.  Ed found that their perspective wasn't always mainstream, but he usually learns of interesting projects.  He did find that in 2005 that too many of the small/solo consultancies in his field who blog, spend too much time straying off topic.  He felt that maybe that will change.

Ed enjoyed reading the blogs of his customers and business partners. Outside of that, he read a few blogs that are more general IT industry focused. During the 2004 election, Ed was quite addicted to some of the political blogs. In 2005 Ed also wrote for Chicago version of metblogs.com, a group blog about life in Chicago. I notice that the topic, Chicago, has been added to his own blog since the interview. Ed found this an interesting format, but he was not sure how broadly they were developing readership.

Ed offered the following advice to have for others in large organizations thinking about starting a personal blog?

1. Focus.  Make sure you have a topic or topics in mind and try to stick to them.  Stray too far a field and you'll lose readers.
2. Stay within the lines.  Blogging must still respect an organization's business conduct guidelines.  Don't disclose anything you wouldn't want to show up in the Wall Street Journal -- even un-attributed.
3. Remember that "lurkers" far outnumber those interacting with you on your blog.  What you write can echo far beyond who you think will see it, and lives forever in Google.
4. Watch for slang and colloquial expressions -- you are writing for an international audience.  
5. Measure the weight of your words.  I rarely make negative comments about my customers or partners, even when they do stupid things (and they -do-).  To say anything negative has a silencing effect on a much broader population.  Conversely, I have found that people take my recommendations more strongly than they deserve -- apparently a place on my "blogroll" is coveted, which I never expected when I started it.

I think his advice is still quite relevant. It is great to see that Ed continues to publish his blog despite what must be a very busy schedule. 

 

IBM Global CMO Study: Highlights

I am looking forward to attending IBM's Connect 2013 next week. Here is a relavnt post. In IBM's 2011 IBM CMO Study they interviewed more than 1,700 of the world’s most prominent Chief Marketing Officers – face to face – to find out what they feel is important for their success. These executives control many billions in marketing expenditures. IBM found that these CMOs “painted a picture of a marketing landscape in the midst of major changes.  At the same time that the average CMO is trying to figure out how the tsunami of social media – blogs, Twitter – is impacting the company brand, he or she is being asked by the boss – the CEO – to demonstrate the return on investment of marketing activities.”

IBM reported that while Investments in IT have long been the domain of the CIO, this is changing as CMOs increasingly impact IT investments in our changing social and digital world. For example IBM found that 82 percent of CMOs say they plan to increase their use of social media over the next three to five years. By 2017, the CMO will have greater control of the IT budget than the CIO, according to Gartner. Marketing budgets will grow 7-8 percent over the next 12 months, which is 2-3 times that of IT budgets. However, despite their growing reliance on technology and their soaring budgets, CMOs readily admit they lack the skills that IT requires.  According to the IBM CMO Study, while 79 percent of CMOs expect high levels of complexity in their job over the next five years, only 48 percent feel prepared to deal with it.  

They conclude that given the business realignment between marketing and technology, the CMO and CIO can no longer afford to operate on separate stages. To succeed, they'll have to forge a shared agenda to deliver business results through innovation and efficiency. Both sides need each other as never before. This alignment between business and IT has always been essential but it is even more so now.

There were fours key trends: data explosion, social platforms, channel and device choices, and shifting demographics. The world generates 2.5 quintrillon bytes of data daily. Over 90% of the world’s data has been generated in the past two years. CMOs struggle to get meaningful insights from all this data. Social platforms have put customers in the driver’s seat and require that marketing efforts become two-way communication.  The growing number of devices from smart phones to tablets is leading to the rise of mobile commerce. The revenue from this mobile commerce should rise to $31 billion by 2016. Finally, shifting demographics are occurring around the world from the expanding middle class in India to the rising proportion of Hispanics in the US. All four of the trends have a significant impact on the CMOs job.

To meet these changing demands, IBM has announced two web experience software suites, the IBM Customer Experience Suite and the IBM Intranet Experience Suite. The two software suites help CMOs and CIOs, respectively, better reach and engage with their audiences.

 The new IBM Customer Experience Suite provides CMOs with the ability to manage and integrate all types of data on their web sites and then analyze it for deeper insight into customer buying patterns and sentiment. Web data has evolved today to include social media, videos, and web-based forms, as well as traditional enterprise data such as financial, customer and order data, and transactions.  The software suite pulls together IBM's enterprise portal, web content management, forms, and enterprise social networking software into a single view.

The new IBM Intranet Experience software brings the power of social and analytics capabilities to CIOs and lines of business employees to help organizations innovate and evolve their internal operations and communications. This solution pulls together company information and data, personalized content and news, and social media and analytics, enabling employees to connect, collaborate and access information at anytime, from anywhere. This is essential as according to IDC, employees typically see up to a 30 percent increase in productivity using social tools internally to complete their work. With unlimited access to any type of information on the Web, consumers expect this same level of information availability in their professional lives.

I like IBM approach to social business as it includes both internal employee aspects and external customer aspects, as well as the integration of the two. In the changing digital world this integration is critical for success. 

Moxie Integrates with Microsoft Dynamics CRM

I have covered Moxie Software™, enterprise social software provider, before (see Moxie Provides Free Desktop Sync Capability with Moxie Spaces and Moxie Announces Spaces to Enhance Customer Engagement).  They now have announced a partnership with Microsoft Corp. to pursue a joint, go-to-market strategy offering Spaces by Moxie™ within Microsoft Dynamics CRM. 

As part of the partnership, Moxie Software™ will provide Microsoft Dynamics CRM with comprehensive, multi-channel and knowledge base solutions for delivering superior customer experiences. Offered on premises or in the cloud, Moxie Software’s Knowledge Spaces™, Email Spaces™, Chat Spaces™, Web Self-Service Spaces™, CoBrowse Spaces™ and Social Media Spaces™ are immediately available to work with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. 
 Here is a sample screen of Moxie with Microsfot Dynamics.

The enhanced capability from this paring include:

• Single agent desktop that seamlessly works with multi-channel interactions to contact and case records within Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

• Automatic search of knowledge base from within the case record for faster resolution. 


• Ability to publish information from case record into knowledge base. 


• Proactive customer engagement on the website via rules driven chat and creation of lead/case records within Microsoft Dynamics CRM where appropriate. 
·         

• Accurate data ensured by allowing agents to update Microsoft Dynamics CRM from within the agent desktop. 

This seems a natural partnership. I have written about the need to combine the collaboration capabilities of the new social tools with the enterprise transaction and documentation apps such as CRM (see for example, Integrating the Interactions with the Transactions). The Moxie Microsoft CRM is a perfect example of this. I have seen a few other cases so far and think it will become a trend that others will follow.

Consistent with this trend, Yammer recently announced an integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM bringing internal collaboration to Dynamics. Moxie's partnership supports external/customer communications adding channels such as email, chat, co-browse, social media and also a knowledge platform to Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

BroadVision Offers Social Engagement Analysis Consulting Service

BroadVision has announced its new Clearvale Social Engagement Analysis Service. This service is designed to help Clearvale enterprise social networking customers better understand and measure how well the level and type of engagement occurring with employees, customers, and partners through the use of social analytics. I spoke with Richard Hughes, Director of Social Strategy at BroadVision to learn more about Clearvale’s social analytics offering. I always enjoy speaking with Richard. Here is one of our last conversations (BroadVision’s Clearvale Offers Integrated Enterprise Social Networking Platform).

Clearvale is an entirely new product built from the ground up with a focus on people. Richard began by going over the five main aspects of the Clearvale social business platform: fully featured enterprise social networking suite, a place for real work, a means to engage the whole organization, coverage for enterprise social ecosystem, and accessibility from any device and any time. 

I asked about how application integration is handled, as this is a topic of interest to me. It is also a capability that is essential to meet the middle three objectives above. Richard said that they have built widgets for immediate integration with Salesforce.com, SharePoint, and Outlook. They picked Salesforce because many of their use cases tie into an enterprise CRM system and this is the most prevalent CRM platform. They picked SharePoint because many firms want to keep SharePoint as their enterprise document management system and then have related conversations around these documents in Clearvale. They picked Outlook to allow people to shift conversations away from email and into a much better collaboration tool. These are three wise choices. They also allow for integrations with other apps through their open API so they have covered this requirement quite well.

Before we moved on to our main topic, Richard provided some context. Earlier this year they introduced Clearvale Social Enterprise Transformation (SET) methodology, a 90-day program for assessing readiness, planning, establishing, and refining a social enterprise ecosystem. The SET program is designed to help companies succeed with their social initiatives by combining social best practices, coaching, and a trial of the Clearvale platform.

One of the main benefits of social media is the transparency and subsequent data on employee behavior. However, it is often underutilized. BroadVision found that customers often needed more help in framing questions to take advantage of the analytic capabilities within Clearvale so at the 2012 E2 Innovate Conference in Santa Clara they launched their Clearvale Social Engagement Analysis Service. It is delivered as a stand-alone service or as a component service of the SET program.

This optional consulting service helps customers frame relevant questions and create reports to address the issues they are most concerned with. Here are some of the types of reports available.

• Social Reach - the breadth of interaction between members. Business social networks connect people but if members are not interacting with the content, they are not truly being social. Below is a sample social graph. Each person is represented by a dot. The size of the dot represents the level of activity. The lines show the paths of connection. In this case you can see a few central people and many unconnected ones. The data provides a road map for where interventions will be helpful.

• Participation Inequality - the extent to which levels of activity differ between different groups of members in the network. A successful business social network should encourage participation from as many people as possible so it’s important to know if a few very active users are compensating for a large number of inactive users.

• Inter-department Connectivity - the activity between different departments in the network. Good connectivity inside a team is important, however, high activity levels between other members outside their own department breaks down organizational silos for increased communication and collaboration. A sample screen is shown below

In addition to departments, these reports can be adjusted to show trends by other filters such as geographic locations as shown below.

 

I really like this capability as the reports go beyond simply counting contributions or comments to showing the relationships between participants within the enterprise. This gives a much clearer picture of the value received and where to focus further adoption efforts. Richard said that although this new service is delivered as a consulting engagement, the main objective to make Clearvale adoptions more successful, not simply to build consulting revenue. This is a good move for any firm offering social business capabilities as social platforms bring into play a new way of doing business. The tools are only the first step. The SET program and this new analytics consulting service will help firms take the remaining steps to succeed. 

Igloo Offers Comprehensive Platform for Social Business

Igloo provides a full featured SaaS solution for social business that bridges internal and external collaboration and networking. I recently spoke to Stephen Rahal on their latest moves.  They offer major product releases every 90 days and half of their new features are driven by customer input. Since they use the tool themselves, Stephen walked me through their own usage. 

Igloo strikes a balance between ease of use and configurability for the end user, while still meeting the requirements of IT.  Set up is easy as it integrates with Active Directory and provides a comprehensive means for application integration that I will cover later. It combines the file sharing capabilities of traditional intranets with the collaboration capabilities of a social business platform. There are activity streams, blogs, communities, events, wikis, polls, project workspaces, and discussion forums. Templates are available to use in configurations and the components are added through widgets so you can design your own system without any heavy IT lifting. There is also presence and profiles. Below is a sample home screen.

One of the features I like is the ability to separate activity streams from microblog chatter as you can see above. Many tools combine these two related capabilities and it can be confusing. In Igloo’s case activity streams are the auto-generated chronological records of activities around documents such as starting one, editing one, and commenting. Microblogging is the Twitter-like manual updates provided by users. Document sharing is enhanced by the activity stream notifications. Then anyone with access rights can see and comment on the document. This provides a much more efficient means than traditional email. You can see a document being shared and commented on below.

Project workspaces can have all the features of Igloo but they are devoted to a specific workgroup around an initiative. The leader can select the relevant components. One person can have multiple project workspaces to cover their different areas of responsibilities. You can see a sample project workspace below.

Application integration is key to making any social platform relevant to the business you need to be able to integrate the conversations with the transactions and incorporate these capabilities within workflow (see Integrating the Interactions with the Transactions). Igloo provides several means to this end. There are pre-packages integrations with widely used tools like Salesforce and SharePoint.

There is also an open API that can connect to tools like Microsoft Dynamics; Moodle, an open source learning management system; and other enterprise applications. You generally need IT support to enable these integrations but they are one-time tasks that take a few days or weeks in the most complex cases. To provide quicker integrations you can also embed a site within an I-frame but this is only useful when you simply want to present information without the interactions. The deeper integrations require the API.

There is a comprehensive widget library to help assemble the Igloo instance you want. Capabilities include blogs, search, RSS, calendars, forms, and wikis. They can be easily added or subtracted and arranged on the screen. Others can be reached through icons across the top of the screen. Some of the widget library is shown below.

Igloo has partnered with MicroStrategy for improved analytics. You can set up filters on factors such as time, projects, and people and then create reports. Analytics can look at activities, content, comments, and other factors. The next release will have even more filtering capability. The results can be made very granular and exported to Excel for further analysis. Below is a sample analytics screen.

There are gamification capabilities. You can also make comparisons between groups on metrics as shown below.

There is dynamic translation that currently works for English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. A participant who knows a language can confirm that they agree with the translation so others will know it is not simply a machine view. Mobile support includes cross-platform support for iOS, Android with future support for BlackBerry and Windows.

Igloo is being well received in the marketplace. The IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Enterprise Social Software 2012 Vendor Analysis said that, “Igloo had the best overall solution capability rating from respondents.” It has also has appeared on the Magic Quadrant for the past 4 years. I like the ease of use, the flexibility, and I can why they are getting these ratings. 

The Joy of Getting Disconnected

Happy Holidays. Time to disconnect. There have been so many surveys about the addictive power of social media and the need to stay in touch with email.  For example a 2009 study found that It found that their sample used social media in the car (over 35 – 9%, under 35 – 40%), at work (over 35 – 29%, under 35  - 64%), on vacation (over 35 – 41%,  under 35 - 65%), on a date (over 35- 9%,  under 35 - 34%), and after sex (over 35 - 8%,  under 35 - 36%).  More recent studies find the numbers growing. With email it is even worse,

The New York Times addressed this issue recently with, The Workplace Benefits of Being Out of Touch. Sounds good to me. The problem is that most of us feel that if everyone else is available 24 hours, then we have to be, too. The article quotes, Dalton Conley, dean for the social services at New York University and author of “Elsewhere” (Pantheon, 2009), “Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — if we’re always available, then we’re expected to always be available.”

However, the article goes on to say that companies are increasingly realizing that employees need to be disconnected from time to time and that “giving workers time to chill helps ultimate long-term productivity.” A survey of 1,600 managers and professionals and found that only 2 percent turned off their devices, even while on vacation.

There is a two-edge sword here. Having device to remote access allows for longer time spent away from your normal work place. I spent a month in Greece in April because I could be connected when I wanted to but I was disconnected for most of that time. Then I went to New Orleans for three weeks because of the same benefit. But you cannot stay connected the whole time or you might as well stay home. I also found that being disconnected for long periods of time opens me up to new ideas.

A few companies are recognizing this value as reported in the Times article. The Boston Consulting group is now giving team members a night off while others cover for him or her. You need to strike a balance here. The key is being in control. As someone who works part time, I now work online extensively for certain periods of time and then take whole days off and disconnected. While a full time worker may not be able to do this they can, and should take some nights and major portions of weekends away from electronic devices to participate in the real world.

Having written this post, I am going to reward myself with a long bike ride, but one enhanced by my iPod and leave my iPhone behind. 

 

Social Media and the Boardroom: Much Work Remains

Richard Levick recently wrote an interesting article in Fast Company, Social Media And The Boardroom: Critical Questions Directors Need To Ask. There is a convergence here of increasing responsibilities for boards of directors and the increasing power of social media. As Richard wrote, “from Sarbanes-Oxley to Dodd-Frank, directors have been subjected to new liabilities and new mandates for elevated levels of transparency and accountability.” At the same time social media has emerged from its niche marketing role to impact every company in many ways.

Richard writes, “Social networks are the venues where purchasing decisions are increasingly made, investment opportunities are increasingly weighed, and corporate adversaries--such as social activists and the plaintiffs’ bar--increasingly gain public support for their agendas.” Yet directors are often not looking at its impact. He reported on a study by Stanford University’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance that asked 180 top CEOs, senior executives, and corporate directors how they approach social media’s opportunities and risks.

There is an awareness of what social media is and its potential impact but few pay attention to it as 90% report a basic understanding of this now established fact. However only 32% of their companies monitor social media to identify risks and only 14% measure social media sentiment about their organization. It gets worse, as only 24% of senior managers and 8% of directors actually request regular reports on their company’s social media engagement efforts and stakeholders’ social media sentiment. Then about half of the respondents do not even collect this information.

These are people who use social media as 65% of use social media for personal purposes and 63% utilize them for business purposes. Of that group that uses social media, 80% maintain a LinkedIn account and 68% are active on Facebook. It is surprising that they cannot connect the dots. This is not rocket science.

If they do manage to take their head out of the sand or off their own Facebook page (note 350 million suffer from Facebook addiction), Richard offers ten useful questions for them to ask gathered from three PWC audit people: Catherine Bromilow, Chris Wood, and Neil Manji. I will not steal their thunder or Richard’s as he lists them with commentary but they all make common sense.

Basically, boards need to take a comprehensive look at all aspects of usage within their organization, including how they, themselves, are using social media and its impact on their organization.  Otherwise they will get some personal surprises and their organizations will fail. 

CIO Job Requirements 2012

Rob Preston recently wrote about What CIOs Want In Their Successors in Information Week. Rob talked with four CIOs in the U.S. about the attributes they're looking for in a successor.  First, they want multidimensional leaders. This makes sense as the IT scene is getting increasingly complex with a number of transformative trends such as consumerization, the cloud, and mobile.

Dave Bent, CIO of United Stationers was quoted, "They may be brilliant technologists, but without the business engagement and leadership skills, they will not make it to the higher level." I would agree that it is increasingly hard to make it on tech skills alone.

Even within tech skills, you cannot be a specialist. Another CIO, Jerry Johnson, CIO of Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, emphasized the breadth of IT experience required: software development, infrastructure, operations, architecture, and project management. This implies that future CIOs need to move around their department and gather a variety of skills and perspectives.

Customer skills are particularly important for CIOs at technology companies, where the CIO is often asked to speak on the products use within the company. IBM is a big believer in testing inside first, then releasing a product to the public. Of course, not ever tech firm has over 300,000 enterprise users to serve as a means to test and refine products.

This need to speak to customers can extend beyond the tech sphere. For example, Rob writes about Kent Kushar, CIO of E. & J. Gallo Winery, who is comfortable at wine-tasting events discussing vintages and palate taste zones. Not a bad job to have.

Future CIOs also need to be team players. Then need to be able to stand up as peers to others in the C-suite and be respected for their leadership skills. They also need have brought home a number of projects successfully. In addition, they need to be self-starters and be willing to take a stand on an issue even it is counter to the prevailing views.

I would add that CIOs need to understand the rising ability of the business units to go around IT if they cannot get their needs met. They need to serve as a leader but not a dictator or they will lose quickly. They also need to understand the power of social busines