Portals and KM

Results from 2012 SharePoint Study: Value is a Work in Progress

Vizit, maker of SharePoint collaboration and search tools, recently conducted a study: SharePoint Study: Insights into Content Use and Collaboration. There were 1100 participants who were responsible for SharePoint in their organizations. I thank my friend Marc Anderson for pointing it out. The key findings include the following.

Less than 50% of SharePoint content is actively used each month. Yet 41% of organizations store over 100,000 documents in SharePoint. At the same time many of these documents are not considered “corporate knowledge” as most organizations store 25% or less of this knowledge in SharePoint. Only 28% of SharePoint content is being authored or edited versus simply stored for reference.

Users are most often looking for specific content within a file and not an entire document. This makes the ability to access and share content via social tools critical for success. Over 60% of respondents said that users often email SharePoint files as attachments. Social tools would do a better job here and 71% say it is important to access SharePoint through social tools. However, few are offering this option as indicated below.

They also found that 31% of organizations have a social effort underway and 46% plan to deploy on with the next two years. Increased collaboration is a top goal for social initiatives and users frequently need to share content in social conversations. The majority of organizations deploying social initiatives use no success measures.

The key barriers to use include: lack of awareness that a document resides in SharePoint, search and navigation difficulties, and the time it takes to download and upload documents (see Overcoming the Potential Chaos in WAN SharePoint Deployments)

These findings are similar to other studies I have seen and make sense. It seems that SharePoint is often used as a dumping ground for documents of all types that are often not crucial to the organization. With the barriers to use mentioned above 41% of respondents said that content use is a disappointing number from an ROI perspective.

The study argues that to increase content use, administrators have to focus on these barriers they’ve identified—the first being simply making people aware that the content they need is in SharePoint. Administrators can use a combination of education and publicity. More importantly, they will need to change users habits so SharePoint becomes part of their work processes. However, only 21% of organizations currently integrate SharePoint into work processes. Much needs to be done here as this integration is critical for both SharePoint and for other social tools to provide real business value. 

They also found that 45% of organizations will upgrade to SharePoint 2013 within a year and an additional 23% will do it within two years. The main goal of this deployment is to support collaboration and 65% of organization use SharePoint alone as their collaboration platform. The most widely used additional tools are Yammer at 19%, Newsgator at 10% and Jive at 4%.  For those not planning to deployment SharePoint, lack of executive sponsorship and lack of perceived user demand are the top reasons.

This study shows that there is much work left to enable SharePoint to support the goal of the connected enterprise; the one that McKinsey has shown provides real value and predicts will provide even more value in the future if done right. 

harmon.ie Connect Integrates with SharePoint

I have covered harmon.ie before (see New harmon.ie for Office 2013 Simplifies SharePoint Access in the Cloud and Elsewhere and harmon.ie Mobile Brings SharePoint to the iPad). Now harmon.ie® has created a way to bridge the gap between Apple and Microsoft to create a unified social user experience for the enterprise across the iPad, iPhone and desktop with harmon.ie Connect™ for SharePoint. This new capability can unify the collaboration experience, wherever people spend their workday - on email and mobile devices.

Today workers often collaborate with colleagues in the office via email, which they can supplement with SharePoint, IM, unified communications and other social apps. This use of many disconnected apps can make the process difficult and unwieldy. Then, when employees leave the office, the experience can become even more messy and disorganized.

With harmon.ie Connect for SharePoint, document and social information from all sources appear in one window with a consistent user experience, in the office or on the road. For example, users can follow important documents directly from email or their mobile device. Any changes made on one platform immediately become visible on the other.

IDC MarketScape noted in its report, “Worldwide Enterprise Social Software 2012 Vendor Analysis,” that, "The ultimate goal of enterprise social software is to support a business' ability to surface information in real time and in context in a way that enables a broader business system of relationship. Customers will continue to demand broader and more specific collaboration scenarios that tie together internal and external constituents, deliver sophisticated insight into user behavior on the network, and extend seamlessly across mobile form factors."

To address this issue harmon.ie Connect for SharePoint has announced that they offer users the following capabilities: 

• Same Activity Stream across the Desktop and Mobile Devices – Any action performed through one harmon.ie interface is immediately reflected on the other ones, thus providing users with a consistent user experience. For example, simply connect to SharePoint sites or follow documents on the desktop and these become available on SharePoint for iPad. No setup or configuration is needed.

• Enterprise-ready iPad - harmon.ie makes the iPad enterprise-ready so users can securely edit and share documents directly from the iPad.

• SharePoint Mobile Enterprise Solution –harmon.ie offers at full SharePoint solution for mobile and desktop. Users can work in the office and on the road and not miss a beat.

• Distribute and Provision Apps – harmon.ie Connect support mobile device management (MDM) for distribution and provisioning of mobile users.

This integration makes a lot of sense to me and is consistent with the trends I am seeing across the social platforms. 

Wrike Provides Mobile Project Management

Many studies are showing the rise of mobile computing on both tablets and smart phones. For example, Forrester reports that by 2016, 375 million tablets will be sold globally and 760 million will be in use. In comparison it took PCs 20 years to reach that install base. Now 81 percent of firms expect to support tablets for employees. IBM projects that the revenue from this mobile commerce should rise to $31 billion by 2016. Wrike's own survey found that 80% of people work remotely at least a couple of hours per week.

To address this trend Wrike has launched brand new native apps for iPhone and Android to make quick and easy social project management available on the most popular smartphones. There is also a browser app for mobile platforms. The new mobile apps are free for all Wrike users.

These apps are more than personal productivity tools. They serve as a collaboration system to get members of distributed teams in sync. With the help of the new apps, iOS and Android users can access their tasks and projects on the go, monitor work progress, discuss issues in real time and accurately track working time. Wrike already had apps for iOS, but the new one provides much richer experience. They have designed the latest apps to look, feel and perform close to what their customers get when they use the full computer version of the project management software.

Among the most important features, Wrike's new mobile project management apps allow to view, schedule and share assignments on the go, create new tasks, check work updates in the Activity Stream, discuss work in real time and use the built-in time tracker. On top of this functionality, Wrike's native apps for iPhone and Android provide several handy mobile-specific features, including task reminders and push notifications.

This is a good move as tablets and smart phones sales now top PCs. I expect more software firms to make similar moves. 

Asynchronous Transparency Shifts Enterprise Conversations Away from the Oral Tradition

Each new advance in communication and learning technology has expanded the possibilities for communication, knowledge capture, and distribution. In each case it took a while to understand the possibilities and the implications. Much of sensitive communication with most enterprises occurs through direct person-to-person conversations, or at least through emails. Even users of email are becoming more aware of how public they can be. Now with the increasing use of social media, asynchronous transparent conversations are on the increase. What does this mean? The invention of the phonetic alphabet around 700 B.C. made enabled a number of unforeseen and unintended capabilities.

In the pre-writing oral tradition, the conditions for the preservation of ideas were mnemonic. To promote memory, instruction and knowledge preservation made use of verbal and musical rhythms; however, these rhythms placed severe limits on the verbal arrangement of what was said, as in Homer, and the need to memorize used up cognitive energy that otherwise could have been devoted to learning and innovation. Because of the heavy memory load, the epic poets did not actually memorize content verbatim; they created new versions from a set of possibilities as they went along.

The concept of an original version that could be preserved did not evolve until after written text. This was critical to the development of modern science, plays strong roles in many academic and legal matters, and is essential for many forms of instruction. In many ways, the epic poets, chief knowledge distributors of their day, made up the details as they went along and most likely keyed off their audience for direction and context. Text made available a visual record of thought, abolishing the need for an acoustic record and hence the need for rhythms. Greek thought changed and such works as Plato’s “Republic” are described by some scholars as an attack on the oral poetic tradition of knowledge distribution (see Eric Havelock’s “Origins of Western Literacy” or his better known “Preface to Plato”).

It you have an accessible visual record of thought it becomes transparent and can take on a life of its own, independent of your original thought. It needs to be carefully composed to convey your intended meaning to multiple audiences without you there to have a clarifying dialogue. If you are more skillful in the speaking, you can better spin your thoughts to fit your audience. You can look for reactions and make adjustments. If you converse better in writing you are composing thoughts that need to stand outside their immediate context and you have much less control over their interpretation.

I have seen a number of people within large enterprises showing great hesitation about the transparency that social media offer. When we hear privacy issues raised we should also look for concerns about being successful in literate communication.

 

Changing Minds Inside the Enterprise

There is a lot of talk about changing leadership styles in response to shift from tangible to intangibles assets becoming the most significant source of value to enterprises.  In addition, McKinsey has shown that the lower the decision making in an organization, the higher the operating margin. All of this calls for new leadership models where top down authority is no longer the best operating model.  

The balance of influence and power has long been a leadership issue. The most effective leaders have always led by influence and example and not by power. The social enterprise just makes this all more transparent. Research on leadership indicates that great leaders are those who share a vision that compels others to follow, rather than those who rule by power (Gardner & Laskin, – “Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership”). See also Howard Gardner’s more recent book on Changing Minds.

Here are some pointers from Changing Minds. This list can serve as a useful checklist of what to include, and be conscious of, in an attempt to change another’s mind (as opposed to simply doing a power play).

Reason – is there a logic employed, have the pros and cons been addressed?

Research – is there data to support the position?

Resonance – do we have a good feeling about the person attempting the mind change and/or does the new position feel right to us – can we connect emotionally with the mind changer?

Redescription – do we employ different ways to present the argument that build on each other?

Resources and Rewards – while rewards are useful, if only rewards are involved the result is more likely to be a temporary behavior change and we will revert to the prior position when the reward is withdrawn and not undergo a real mind change.

Real World Events – the context for considering the new position, such as the dot com boom and then the subsequent bust, can put it in a better or clearer perspective

Resistances – we need to be aware of, and address, possible obstacles to the mind change.

Real mind change is generally a slow process that involves all these factors, even when there is a sudden tipping point that takes us over to the new position. The tools for social business can accelerate things but also expose any attempted short cuts.

 

Social Business Advice from 1994

I am old enough to remember when 1984 was the distance future and now 1994 is the distant past. Here are some words of wisdom from Tom Davenport that certainly apply to social business in his 1994 HBR article, Saving IT’s Soul: Human-Centered Information Management. Here Tom presents a manifesto for building information systems that focus on how people use information, rather than machines. He suggests that human centered information management should:

1. Focus on broad information types

2. Emphasize information use and sharing

3. Assume transience of solutions

4. Assume multiple meanings of terms

5. Continue until desired behavior is achieved enterprise-wide

6. Build point-specific structures

7. Assume compliance is gained over time through influence

8. Let individuals design their own information environments

While these are general points that many of us might agree with today, they were more innovative at the time, the early days of knowledge management. They remain even more relevant today, especially the last three points. You need to focus on specific business problems. You need to gain engagement and compliance through influence rather than power and you need to have extensive user involvement in designing social business solutions.

 

harmon.ie for Office 2013 Enhances SharePoint Access in Cloud and Elsewhere

I have reported on harmon.ie before (see harmon.ie Mobile Brings SharePoint to the iPad and harmon.ie Provides Social Email to Help Drive Enterprise Collaboration Adoption), and they are building on this work to now offer version 1.0 of harmon.ie for SharePoint – Office 2013 Edition. It is one of the initial offerings in Microsoft’s new Office 2013 app store for Outlook. I spoke with David Lavenda of hamon.ie, who discussed this latest move.

According to Lavenda, the new plug-in for Office Web Apps (OWA) provides the same integration of SharePoint collaboration and social capabilities in the cloud-based email client as they do on the desktop. So harmon.ie’s newest product provides a user experience that is consistent across the Outlook desktop and Web clients, as well as on iPads and iPhones, enabling users to perform collaboration tasks such as uploading a document to SharePoint using drag-and-drop and replacing attachments in outgoing emails with SharePoint links with a single click.  Below is a sample desktop screen of harmon.ie for SharePoint.

Here is a sample screen for harmon.ie for Office 2013, v 1.0.

And here is iPad screen for harmon.ie Mobile.

I mentioned that integration is a recurring theme I have been hearing in the market for good reason. Social software does not realize its value unless it can integrate with traditional work apps like Office and SharePoint. Now harmon.ie offers the glue that connects SharePoint to these widely used Microsoft products, bringing collaboration to workers, where they work.

It takes about 30 seconds to download and install the desktop version from their Web site and the mobile version from the iTunes store. All of the integrations are then immediately put in placevia an automatic install. Once you register your SharePoint site and enter your credentials, you’re good to go.  Gone are the days of laborious systems integration efforts.

In addition to integrating SharePoint collaboration functions, harmon.ie adds social capabilities such as an activity stream from SharePoint to follow documents and people. This capability is not in SharePoint but is part of what harmon.ie brings. Its client-side analytics will also suggest new colleagues to connect with based on who you are working with, what documents you are sharing, and even your Outlook email activity.

This is a great move and I am sure it is welcomed in the SharePoint world. 

 

Presenting KM Vision Session at KM World 2012

I will be attending KM World again this October in Washington DC. I have made all the DC sessions and many of 16 other sessions, including the first three in Santa Clara. The 16th annual KMWorld Conference will be held on October 17 – 19, 2012 at the Renaissance Washington DC.

This year I am co-leading the session, What’s Your KM Vision?, on Wednesday at 10:15AM. It is part of a track that is designed to promote more conversation. They are discussion stream with a roomful of colleagues at roundtables that focus on a series of topics of interest to KM practitioners. My co-leaders are Stan Garfield, Community Evangelist, Consulting - Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited & Author, Implementing a Successful KM Programme and Kent A Greenes, Founder - Greenes Consulting GWU, CSUN, Army War College, KMPro, TCB.

Our session builds off a SI/KM Forum discussion on February 2012. Stan asked this question to the KM leaders community he leads: “If knowledge management is working really well for an organization, what does it look like, and how does it work? Please reply with your vision for the ideal state, with as much specific detail as possible to avoid high-level generalities.” A lively discussion ensued. This panel shares the highlights of that discussion and the views of each of the panelists and solicits the ideas of the session attendees.

I hope you can attend. I will also be reporting on many of the other sessions in this event with primary coverage appearing on the AppFusions blog, Connecting the Enterprise.   Here are my notes from KM World 2011 and KM World 2010. 

Why It is Critical to Overcome Failure in SharePoint WAN Deployments

This is the conclusion of a six part series, Robust SharePoint Performance in the Emerging Distributed Enterprise: Turning the Potential for Chaos into the Means for Success, sponsored by Certeon.  

Addressing responsiveness for collaboration applications like SharePoint is not an option. Business users have increasingly high expectations and expect IT to deliver. Realizing the benefits of the networked enterprise documented by McKinsey and others is now a competitive necessity and this effort cannot fail because of poor applications performance, especially when it affects so many people.

This potential for chaos will not go away: it will only get worse with the projected rise in SharePoint usage. According to Bill Gates, SharePoint is the fastest-growing server product in Microsoft’s experience, and his goal is to have SharePoint available to all workers in much the same way that Office is the standard personal productivity suite. Microsoft is well on the way to making this happen, currently adding some 20,000 SharePoint users a day.  IT departments need to prepare for this pervasive presence by making SharePoint WAN-worthy, or they will face a massive user revolt.

To exacerbate the situation, the dramatic rise of mobile communication for collaboration, as noted by Forrester and others, and the resultant further increase in WAN traffic, can make matters even worse for SharePoint performance. For example, Cisco forecasts that in the next five years, IP traffic generated by Wi-Fi and mobile devices will increase from 45% to 61%, exceeding wired IP-generated traffic. It is imperative to address and fix the SharePoint WAN performance issues now, to help make users more productive and thereby positively impact the enterprise top and bottom lines. 

This concludes my six part series on Robust SharePoint Performance in the Emerging Distributed Enterprise: Turning the Potential for Chaos into the Means for Success. If you want to start at the beginning go to the first post, Overcoming the Potential for Chaos in WAN Sharepoint Deployments. 

How We Can Overcome Failure in SharePoint WAN Deployments

This is the fifth of a six part series, Robust SharePoint Performance in the Emerging Distributed Enterprise: Turning the Potential for Chaos into the Means for Success, sponsored by Certeon.  

There is an answer to the SharePoint WAN performance issue. Organizations can overcome WAN performance limitations and avoid major productivity losses, massive user revolt, and reactive unplanned investments to fix them. According to Gartner, adding a third party WAN Optimization Solution can improve SharePoint response times in a WAN environment by up to 10 times, and in some cases reduce bandwidth requirements by up to 95%.

Organizations must consider Wan Optimization/Application acceleration solutions that provide the following:

• Network Optimizations with traffic prioritization and link usage optimization

• Application/SharePoint-specific optimizations with object handling and page rendering acceleration

• Robust Data reduction through data compression and data deduplication

• Security through the ability to optimize SSL traffic

• A virtualized solution  with support for multiple hypervisors

• Support for smaller offices through virtualization or  Windows-based solution

• Management through centralized management and deployment wizards

Different paths lead toward success in different situations:

• For existing deployments: Try a pilot with a select group of users or a specific sub-application to get feedback on the user experience and measure the performance improvements. Roll out more widely if the pilot is successful.

• For new deployments: Include WAN Optimization/ Application Acceleration in the planning process.

There are a couple of categories of available solutions to address the WAN optimization/Sharepoint Acceleration issue:

Software-only, hardware and hypervisor agnostic solutions like those provided by Certeon.

or

Physical Appliance-based, proprietary software/hardware solutions like those provided by Riverbed.

In my next, and last, post in this series I cover: Why It is Critical to Overcome Failure in SharePoint WAN Deployments

 

 

Why We Often Overlook Application Performance During Deployment

This is the fourth of a six part series, Robust SharePoint Performance in the Emerging Distributed Enterprise: Turning the Potential for Chaos into the Means for Success, sponsored by Certeon.  

Why has application performance over Wide Area Networks been overlooked, when it is so critical for success? As we deploy enterprise applications, we generally look at issues like user friendliness, available features, and integration with business applications, along with the human issues associated with adoption. I have written about all of these factors on a number of occasions, but have been remiss in acknowledging the full range of user-experience attributes, especially in a distributed environment and specifically over the WAN.

One reason for overlooking performance issues is that these symptoms are only now emerging with the widespread increase in SharePoint deployment in distributed environments over WANs. It is always difficult to predict how patterns of SharePoint usage will evolve within organizations because the valid metrics that drive network decisions are rarely available. Too often SharePoint is simply added onto the existing network infrastructure without any serious analysis of the potential impacts. Then when problems arise, the wrong levers are pulled in an attempt to find solutions.

In addition to considering uptime or capacity issues, we need to concern ourselves with "click to work" application performance: the time it takes to open files and start using them. Application users, especially the new generation of users in the workforce, expect real-time performance. As we think about ways to increase adoption we need to consider this new generation of workers and look through a new lens.

In my next post on 10/1 I cover, How We Can Overcome Failure in SharePoint WAN Deployments.

Looming Danger: Failure of WAN SharePoint Deployments

This is the third of a six part series, Robust SharePoint Performance in the Emerging Distributed Enterprise: Turning the Potential for Chaos into the Means for Success, sponsored by Certeon. The remaining parts of my series will appear on this blog over the next two weeks.

The mix of SharePoint users’ requirement for instant access, coupled with the global distribution of the organization leads to a major  dependence on WANs and often leads to disastrous user experiences.. Effective collaboration can become the victim, and this can destroy the many benefits of the networked enterprise.

As previously noted, the potential for failure lies in the fact that many of today’s enterprise applications, including SharePoint, are built with a centralized architecture that performs much better in a LAN environment. Documents and pages can include Web Parts, style sheets and images that can slow down the downloadtimewhen accessed over a WAN, due to inherent WAN latency issues. A 10 to 20 minute document download , across multiple team members, leads to a huge amount of downtime . Downtime is unacceptable when seen on our tangible assets, so how can it be acceptable for the intangible asset that drives the value of the enterprise?

Downtime frustrates users and leads to a return to file sharing through email. Even more destructive, disappointed users may seek alternative solutions among the new breed of free content-sharing tools available on the Web. Employees can easily use alternatives solutions like Dropbox, Google Docs, Microsoft SkyDrive, and many other smaller, less well-known options. When use of non-sanctioned alternatives to SharePoint becomes widespread in an organization, serious issues such as duplication of effort, increased errors, inappropriate sharing of confidential documents, lack of version control, and lack of centralized backup and recovery can lead to severe security and control issues. This was already seen in mid-2012, when Dropbox admitted that hackers had compromised some of its user accounts. And security issues are by no means unique to Dropbox.

In addition, unsanctioned migration subverts standards for content management, creates a proliferation of content silos, and drives further enterprise content chaos. When users cannot get their job done efficiently using the tools provided, they seek alternative methods to help them work. It is virtually impossible for IT to stop the use of alternatives without addressing the core issues associated with inadequate user experience. System performance is a critical issue that must be addressed as part of the deployment. It may actually be more important than many of the features that currently have IT’s attention. 

In my next post I cover, Why We Often Overlook Application Performance During Deployment

SharePoint's Potential: Enabling the Networked Enterprise

This is the second of a six part series I wrote, Robust SharePoint Performance in the Emerging Distributed Enterprise: Turning the Potential for Chaos into the Means for Success, sponsored by Certeon. The remaining parts of my discussion will appear on this blog over the next two weeks.

McKinsey reports that creating a networked enterprise that effectively supports collaboration is both a significant opportunity and a competitive necessity in today’s business world. A myriad of benefits can be found in the connected enterprise that makes use of new tools (such as SharePoint). For example, from the results of a 2010 McKinsey survey, 77% of respondents said these new tools increase the speed of access to knowledge; 60% found reduced communication costs; 44% experienced reduced travel costs, and 40% achieved increased employee satisfaction. Similar findings were noted in McKinsey’s 2011 survey.

In addition, these surveys noted a correlation between higher operating margins and “a willingness to allow the formation of working teams comprising of both in-house employees and individuals outside the organization.” Effective distributed access to content needed for collaboration is key to facilitating this work and realizing the benefits.

These results are consistent with the rising percentage of business value derived from intangible assets, primarily people, as opposed to tangible assets such as equipment, buildings, etc., as reported by Juergen Daum. In 1982, 62% of enterprise value was found in tangible assets and 38% in intangible assets. In 1999, the enterprise value found in tangible assets had decreased to only 16%, with an increase to 84% in intangible assets. The increased value that intangible assets now provide to the enterprise underscores the conviction that productivity is driven by connecting people and information.  Freeing employees from restrictive information silos fuels the growth of wealth within organizations.

The shift to today’s more social enterprise requires a balance between control and collaboration. SharePoint is a tool that can meet this requirement.  As evidence, the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) reports that collaboration is the strongest driver of SharePoint adoption. This finding supports the view that SharePoint is primarily a user-oriented collaboration system with the included secondary value of providing document management. This differs from traditional systems that act as a vault to place files for a variety of compliance and process management use cases.

By supporting the growing need for content sharing and collaboration, the SharePoint platform is quickly becoming the heart of the enterprise. It has emerged as a market leader in the content and collaboration market and is on its way to becoming Microsoft’s first $2 billion business. Several factors drive this advance.

First, SharePoint is included in the Microsoft Office stack, and is available to IT organizations at a lower cost than many traditional content management tools.

Second, business users see incredibly robust capabilities on the Internet at large, and therefore continue to expect more and more from their internal, organizational systems. To succeed in today’s environment, businesses see the need to leverage their data. These businesses must effectively access, share, and centrally manage their data. They must collaborate and provide access to their data from an increased use of rich media. Users expect these baseline capabilities, and SharePoint is increasingly seen as the technology of choice by IT departments.

Third, enterprises are starting to move away from complex, rigid and difficult-to-implement document management systems, towards more flexible, user-controlled systems. SharePoint is a multipurpose platform backed by a common technical infrastructure that addresses this trend. It combines searchable document and file management resources ideal for collaboration and social networking. SharePoint’s functionality and resources also encourage the migration of collaboration away from the inefficient use of email systems overburdened with attachments to a central repository where all validated team members can easily find, view, and update and retrieve  the latest version at any time. This gives SharePoint an advantage over traditional IT and compliance-centric document management systems that require more technical development skills and support.

The increasingly distributed nature of today’s business world has created a highly decentralized work environment, with employees moving from large centralized facilities to remote, branch sites or even home offices. This also drives the need for enhanced support for collaboration. Forrester reports that only 45% of the US information workforce works solely from a corporate office, and anticipates that percentage to shrink. In a related study, Forrester also found that 66% of North American and European workers already operate remotely. Moreover, new policies are enabling many employees to work from their homes and accessing necessary applications over the Internet. Reuters reports that one in five workers worldwide telecommutes and this number is increasing. Forrester predicts that in 2016, 63 million US information workers will telecommute at least part-time.

This expansion of distributed work, coupled with increased collaboration requirements, drives the need for tools such as SharePoint, and an increased use of WANs to support them. Network usage, including WAN usage, has moved from a store-and-forward mode (typical of email systems) to real-time 24/7 direct access to content, data and applications.

However, the increased use of WANs raises potential obstacles to SharePoint success. I will cover, the Looming Danger: Failure of WAN SharePoint Deployments, in my next post. 

Overcoming the Potential Chaos in WAN SharePoint Deployments

This is the first of a six part series I created, Robust SharePoint Performance in the Emerging Distributed Enterprise: Turning the Potential for Chaos into the Means for Success, sponsored by Certeon. The remaining parts of the series will appear on this blog over the next two weeks.

The past 10 years have seen many changes that profoundly affect how businesses operate. A critical business necessity is now the ability to collaborate on an enterprise scale at the employee, business partner, and customer level. Supporting these interactions effectively is a competitive differentiator (see for example, McKinsey - The next revolution in interactions). At the same time, virtually every business and government organization has become distributed, stressing its ability to collaborate across different geographies, time zones, and even cultures.

These changes create extraordinary opportunities to increase productivity by  taking advantage of content, collaboration, and communication technologies. Recognizing this, Microsoft has made major investments in SharePoint, its content and collaboration platform. That platform has matured into an enterprise application that is currently experiencing rapid deployment (see, AIIM - The SharePoint Puzzle).

While SharePoint is fast achieving dominance, one major challenge stands in the way of it realizing its full potential: SharePoint’s centralized architecture often  results in long file and content transfer times for distributed organizations that depend on Wide Area Networks (WANs). 

This discussion covers these performance concerns, their origins and implications, and offers a potential path for success.

Although a deployed platform can meet users’ functional requirements and performance expectations, lack of application and system responsiveness can lead to chaos and  an ineffective workplace due to its negative impact on productivity and the resulting user complaints. All this can lead to a low platform adoption rate. This can cause chaos for enterprise IT – and potentially dangerous practices from a legal, regulatory and security perspective – as frustrated users take flight to the many alternative Web-based collaboration options now easily available.

Complaints from disappointed business units and users often lead to quick-reaction fixes that result in unplanned expenditures. Some companies increase bandwidth then and discover that the solution does not address the core problem.  Microsoft  recommends decentralizing application deployment, which creates a host of other management, administration, and usage issues.

This descent into chaos can be avoided. The solution is under IT’s control and can be managed by simply making improved user experiences (including those created by better system performance) a key part of the implementation plan. This series covers in part five a means to turn the looming potential for chaos into a path for success.

The next post in this series (9/24) covers: SharePoint's Potential: Enabling the Networked Enterprise. 

 

Spigit Provides ICON as a Free Crowdsourcing Platform

I have covered Spigit before (see Spigit Provides Version S3 as Market Matures for Idea and Innovation Management and Spigit – Enabling Enterprise 2.0 Innovation Through Market Games). I recently spoke with Shail Khiyara, Chief Marketing Officer, and Hutch Carpenter, VP of Product about the free ICON offering. Spigit’s overall company goal is to drive business growth and customer and employee engagement.  Spigit brings your community - employees, customers, vendors - together on a comprehensive social innovation platform, and connects people who have questions with people who have answers.

It is designed to make full use of the good ideas across an enterprise and help companies then implement those ideas by using traditional workflow to connect the right ideas to the right person at the right time. To do this it provides business context and relevance to the crowdsourcing concept.

This is an important concept as the value of companies is increasingly found in the good ideas of their employees. For example, in 1982 38% of the market value of S&P companies was within their intangible assets, the ideas of their people. By 1999 that number had grown to 84% and I am sure it is still growing. The key to creating wealth in today’s economy is tapping the expertise within enterprise, as well as getting ideas from partners and customers. This is the task that Spigit addresses and I have been a fan for several years.

Spigit allows companies to solve specific problems by tapping into the expertise of relevant groups in a focused manner. As Shail said, up to 70% of the cost of an organization is now its people. Organizations could maximize this investment and drive higher rates of engagement which would lead to business growth. At the same time much work needs to be done here as he also pointed out that up to 67% of employees are disengaged from their work. Engaging them in meaningful ways to contribute and become a part of the solution is an excellent way to improve engagement.  What once took managers and corporate hierarchy can now be done in the context of a community.

Spigit has launched ICON as a free service to promote the use of mass crowdsourcing with the purpose of innovation and growth. It combines best practices and knowledge gained from delivering Spigit’s solutions to the market. It lets employees connect with their entire organization by posing questions and challenges and getting immediate feedback from coworkers. They showed me a demo. Here is the home page.

Across the top of the screen is a serious of questions or challenges. You can decide which ones to take on. Contrary to typical voting mechanisms every idea in ICON gets equal assessment as coworkers and employees engage in a pair-wise comparison game of selecting this one or that one. The solutions the crowd finds valuable then bubble to the top of the leaderboard. There is room for comments and the forced choice method allows for more precise comparisons. Once you decide between one pair, a new one comes up to further refine your perspective. Over time you get a rank order of answers for an individual and for a group. Here is the question page.

There is also a gamification aspect as users can earn points and top leaderboard status by posting challenges, voting, commenting and “gifting.”  The screen also shows the top answers, the top experts (people most active), and the question activity. The latter is an activity stream for a question so you can track what is happening. The system is dynamic and is constantly being updated based on new input. As an idea moves to the top, an alert is sent to the activity stream. You can also see who is voting and when this occurs.

They have also announced a Yammer integration. For Yammer users looking to take advantage of ICON, Spigit utilized Yammer’s open APIs to build this integration, which publishes activity stories such as new ideas, challenges, votes and comments in Yammer’s Ticker in real-time. Yammer users can also log into ICON via the Yammer Connect button, using their Yammer credentials to bring their Yammer identity, profile information and corporate social graph with them. If a user has not yet created a Yammer account, it will prompt them to do so.

I think this is great idea to make crowdsourcing more accessible at a time when it is much needed. For now the free version is seen as a possible lead generator to their more comprehensive commercial offerings. They may add a premium version of ICON in the future. 

 

Good Advice on Content Marketing

I was pleased to be involved in the creation of a useful guide, How to Kick-Start Your Content Marketing - A Seven-Step Approach to Delivering Success, developed by Skyword. They engaged a number of experts in the effort including my Merced Group Partner, Catherine Shinners.

As the report notes, “content marketing is a more subtle approach than other, more traditional, marketing efforts. While the ultimate goal is to drive increased revenue for companies, content marketing is more focused on delivering information and advice that enrich people’s lives.” However getting people information that is useful to them can be complex.

This report outlines seven steps to make content marketing successful: define objectives, develop content strategy, establish process and technology, prepare site, cross promote POE, and measure, learn, optimize.  I was honored that they began the first step with some words from me. “You need to start with defining your business objectives and build your program and metrics around those goals. If you are not measuring against business goals, the whole effort is meaningless.”

This requirement applies to many initiatives, but it is also the one most often overlooked when we start to use a new technology or approach. We get focused on the new tools and forget why we want to use them. They define a common set of objectives for content marketing to get you thinking including: generating leads, increasing site ranking, increasing conversions, branding and engagement, and providing information.

The second step begins with sound useful words from Dave Kerpen, Co-founder and CEO at Likeable Media. “Think about the content that will be useful, valuable and/or entertaining to your customers and prospects. It’s not about you, it’s about them.” Know your audience is the first item on the strategy checklist. Then you determine the type of content, define and own your keywords, and more. There is useful detail around each item with best practices for each step.

There is an interesting graph comparing the number of views for news versus “evergreen” or non-time based content. They showed how the number of hits for news was significant the month it appeared and then dropped off sharply as to be expected. The amount of average hits for evergreen content builds over time. It passes the news in the third month and keeps growing. I have often found this to be the case. In most years on my blog, the majority of the top ten most visited posts are not from the current year, but prior years.

Content marketing is not for those do need a quick return. It requires patience and time. The report concludes that, “Companies that have launched the most successful content marketing programs understand the need for a systematic, long-term approach in order to provide relevant content consistently and efficiently.” I highly recommend this guide for those who want to undertake a content marketing effort. It is available as a free download. 

Garden of Good and Evil in the Cloud

The cloud is rising with the enterprise and the Forbes post, From Annoyance to Harmonizer: Cloud Computing's Maturity Curve, documents some of the issues in this rise. They reported on a new survey of 350 CIOs and IT managers, sponsored by Host Analytics.

On one hand, 37% of respondents reported they have been asked to take ownership of cloud solutions that were purchased by the business without IT’s input. In addition, data integration is a problem cited by 67%, and 39% have issues in locating where the data may reside. On the other hand, 92 % say adoption of the cloud is good for business and 67% agree that the cloud can help IT deliver better systems for less money. It turns that despite complaints, IT is the leading area of the business employing cloud computing.

They go on to note the selection by end users of their own cloud services can result in chaotic situations. Then IT has to clean things up. However, there is a realization that in the long run, it’s more productive to let users develop new ideas and innovations with this expanded control.  The longer an organization works with the cloud the fewer concerns it has about loss of IT control and security.

The business often starts off trying to work around IT, then the business urns the work over to them. The loss of visibility and control over applications is a problem that lasts for a while with 21% of the new sites running into this issue. It spikes for the next few years as 35% of companies with 1-5 years’ experience have this problem. However by the time the company has been wit the cloud for more than five years, these concerns drop back to 22%.

It seems that the answer is to get IT and business involved together from the start and not have these issues simmer and bubble up. 

 

eXo Extends Cloud IDE - Cloud-based Development Platform

I have covered eXo before (see Benjamin Mestrallet, eXo CEO, Looks at the Social Enterprise and eXo Offers Cloud Workspaces Enabling Flexible Social Intranets). eXo is a user experience platform-as-a-service (UXPaaS) company that supports developers. Recently, I had a chance to speak with Benjamin again about their latest offering.

Benjamin covered their new integration of Google App Engine with their eXo Cloud IDE.  He said that they started the eXo Cloud IDE project back over a year ago 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 with over 20,000 enterprises with up to 5 developers each. You can develop a Java app online and deploy it as a PaaS. Here is a sample debug sequence. First, an inspect screen.

Then a debug screen.

The addition of support for the Google App Engine opens up a world with thousands of apps and hundreds of thousands of developers. Benjamin said that they picked the Google App Engine environment as it is the dominant platform and will drive significant traffic to their site. Google wants more people to use the Google App Engine, and eXo Cloud IDE makes it easier. Benjamin said that there has been a big increase in traffic with a number of developers spending five hours per day or more on the service. Prior to this, two hours a day was generally the high end of time spent on their service. Below is a sample Google Apps Engine support screen.

There is a strong trend to take apps from the desktop to the cloud. Benjamin said there is a corresponding trend to take app development to the cloud. This makes a lot of sense as it cuts off development time and costs. It also facilitates easier collaboration between developers. Linking a Google App Engine account to eXo Cloud IDE is a simple process that takes only seconds. There is no need to download and configure separate tools. In all, a developer new to eXo Cloud IDE can create a new project, connect to GitHub, debug and deploy an app directly to Google App Engine — without leaving the browser — in less than five minutes. Here is a five-minute video that shows how easy it is to deploy apps to Google App Engine. With every recent survey showing significant increases in movement to the cloud, this move makes a lot of sense. It is free.

 

Treating People as People, Not as Tasks

Here is another thoughtful article on what should be the top management theme of this decade. It is also a good follow on to my post on Labor Day. Hopefully it gets resolved in this decade. Louise Altman, Partner, Intentional Communication offers us - Humanizing Workplace Relationships – People Aren’t Tasks. The tag line is the most significant concept. I recently re-watched an excellent video produced by the BBC in 1997, Intellectual capital: The New Wealth of Nations. It made the same point. The film portrayed the industrial revolution as a plague on people where workers were treated as mere extensions of machines.

Now the percentage of tangible assets in the corporations in the S&P 500 has shifted from 66% in 1982 to 16% in 1999 and likely continues to fall (see Juergen Daum, Intangible Assets and Value Creation). In its place is the rise of intangible assets as the creators of wealth. These are mostly the ideas in people’s minds. Yet, as Louise points out many organizations are still managing people as though the wealth was created by tangible assets, machines, and people are just servants of these machines.  The wealth now comes from treating people as human assets and releasing their creativity to enable innovation and new wealth in organizations. McKinsey found in 2010 that the lower the decision level was in the organization, the higher operating margin. Top down authority is the enemy of profits.

Top down authority is also the enemy of employee engagement and so many studies show high levels of workplace disengagement. What would you want to disengage your most powerful creator of profits?  In the old days, no manger who think about turning off the production line machines and yet they often do this to today’s creators of wealth.

Many organizations still persist in old ways. Louise quotes, Tim Leberecht, “There appears to be a fundamental chasm between individual human behavior – which is expansive and multidimensional, ranging from the rational to the wildly irrational, sentimental and unpredictable – and the design of organizations, rational, practical, results oriented and engineered to perform consistently.” 

I hope this issue does get resolved in this decade for the sake of the emotional, physical, and financial health of the world.

 

 

My New Role with AppFusions

I am pleased to announce my new role working with the AppFusions team on the re-launch of their blog, Connecting the Enterprise --technologies and people daily. It is an “ongoing resource and viewpoint from AppFusions on the value of connecting business and engineering systems.”

AppFusions provides application integration connectors for a variety of vendors such as Atlassian, IBM, Jive, iRise, Box, GoogleDocs, Dropbox, UserVoice, Alfresco, and more in the hopper. They also closely collaborate with their partner Contegix for turnkey hosted and integrated deployments for their customers. AppFusions' connectors can play a major role in realizing the great cross-system efficiencies and potential when bringing engineering and business systems together (Enterprise 2.0).

Off-the-shelf integration solutions can enable serious breakthroughs in establishing essential Enterprise application connections quickly, and efficiently.

I am excited to be connected to AppFusions as I have great faith in both their mission and the industry potential to finally capture the opportunity of Enterprise 2.0. They believe, and I agree, that business information and process management should be handled by a collection of systems that make up an integrated whole.

To make this happen, connectivity is the key driver. It is the glue that makes real work happen. It brings the benefits of social systems to work processes, as I have covered a good bit on this blog (for example, Putting Social to Work, Integrating the Interactions with the Transactions, and Giving Social Media a Good Job).

Establishing modular system architectures in the Enterprise – from the same vendor or many vendors – from engineering to QA to marketing and the executive office – integrated systems provide greater flexibility, while also allowing an organization to pick and choose the best-of-breed systems for its purposes.

There are reasons for purpose-built systems, and a collection of many is stronger than a single-rigid system, especially if you can connect the strengths (data and workflows) of the different systems with common use case connectors vs. getting on an endless customization path.

AppFusions integration connectors bring together engineering and business systems. They bring together workflows, data files, and information between Enterprise systems for your collective purpose-built Enterprise 2.0 corporate solution of many systems. They allow companies to quickly and cost-effectively create the needed connectivity without going through the old-world pain of massive, costly, and time-consuming integration efforts.

The AppFusions blog will become the vehicle to tell this story and provide use cases demonstrating the essential nature of connectors. I will be doing interviews with many of the AppFusions partners, as well as providing industry commentary. Ellen Feaheny and others on the AppFusiosn team will also be providing a variety of posts. I invite you to check it out and look forward to my ongoing participation. Here is my post today, Doing Well by Doing Good, Humanizing the Enterprise. Here are some of the posts that I have provided so far:

The Business Value of Application Connectors

Summary of 2012 Boston Enterprise 2.0

Atlassian Makes Significant Moves into the Enterprise Market

Jive’s Platform Enables Comprehensive Enterprise Integration

Contegix Provides Total Cloud Care with Direct Managed Hosting

UserVoice Enables Customer Engagement through Online Support and Feedback

AppFusions’ Integrations of iRise® Visualization with Atlassian JIRA, Confluence

 

The Disconnect Between Management and Employees Runs Deep

Happy Labor Day. Here is a relevant message. I recently read an article, Are You Using Social Media as a Management Crutch?,  that focused on the different perceptions of Management and employees on how effective social media is. According to a survey conducted by Deloitte, 41% of the executives participating in the study believe social networking helps build and maintain workplace culture while only 21% of their employees agree.

It quoted Punit Renjen, Chairman of the Board of Deloitte. "Social media is a useful tool, but not when it's used as a crutch that allows leaders to appear to be accessible... when really, they are not." The survey goes on to report that 45% of executives feel social has a positive effect but only 27% of employees feel the same way. In addition, 38% of executives feel social media allows for increased management transparency; only 17% of employees agree. Some employees feel that face time is most important and some social media efforts by managers take away from this face time.

However, it you look further at the results you see some confounding trends. It adds that executives rank tangibles like competitive compensation (62%) and financial performance (65%) as the top factors that influence culture. While employees have a different view say intangibles such as regular and candid conversations (50%) and access to management (47%) rank higher than compensation (33%) and financial performance (24%).

So the firms surveyed have a basic and fundamental disconnect between managers and employees that may influence the social media results. If the employees already have a disconnect of such traditional issues as what supports a strong company culture and makes employees happy, then they are likely to see social media as just another way to distract they and paper over their discontent. I would not blame social media for this but the rotten preexisting culture of the companies surveyed. 

 

IBM Picks Up Kenexa To Enhance Social Business Initiatives

IBM has acquired Kenexa in a cash transaction for around $1.3 billion. I know about a bit about Kenexa as they acquired OutStart, a company that provides learning, mobile, and social media services. I helped Outstart with their blog for about a year prior to the Kenexa acquisition in January of this year

This move by IBM enhances its ability to support clients in adopting social business capabilities by gaining actionable insights from the enormous streams of information generated from social networks every day. This is one of the big opportunities that the transparency of social media provides. IBM has made a number of moves in this direction in the past (see IBM's Mike Rhodin on the Convergence of Social Business, Analytics and Commerce: Part One) and this latest effort is consistent with this direction.

Kenexa provides recruiting and talent management solutions through both Cloud-based technology and consulting services. It complements IBM's strategy of bringing relevant data and expertise into the hands of business leaders within every functional department, from sales and marketing to product development and human resources. As their announcement stated as a result of this synergy, “clients will be able to attract and develop the right skills to build the right teams, for the right projects, the first time.” IBM sees a big opportunity to apply advanced social business and analytics capabilities to front line business operations and I would agree.

Kenexa has approximately 2,800 employees and operations in 21 countries worldwide. The company will be integrated into IBM's Software and Services Groups. IBM has made more than 25 acquisitions the past three years, and closed eight acquisitions in 2012. Here is more on their adoptions strategy (see IBM's Mike Rhodin on the Convergence of Social Business, Analytics and Commerce: Part Two).

The adoption of social business technology is fueling the growth of big data and generating both the opportunity and the need for analytics in the enterprise. A recent global IBM study found that 57 percent of CEOs identified social business as a top priority and more than 73 percent are making significant investments to draw insights into available data. The survey also indicated that 70 percent of respondents cited human capital as the single biggest contributor to sustained economic value. This is consistent with the rise of intangible assets as a major portion of wealth within corporations.

 

JackBe Expands Real-Time Operational Intelligence with its New Offering

I have covered JackBe several times and watched their evolution from a mashup provider to using their technology to support a new wave of business intelligence (see JackBe Presto Takes Self-Service Business Intelligence Mobile and JackBe’s Presto provides Real-Time Intelligence with a Focus on the Business User). I recently spoke with Elizabeth Edwards, CMO, and John Crupi, CTO on what they are seeing now as they continue down the path of providing Real-Time Operational Intelligence.

John said that customers continue to want to have real-time dashboards that collect operational intelligence from multiple sources and bring it together for increased efficiency and effectiveness. Data center monitoring is one area where they are seeing real growth in their offering. You can see a sample data center monitoring screen below.

Data centers have become more core to organizations and maximizing efficiency is key to getting the investment returns that the shift to the cloud offers. In the past, data center mangers never had a holistic view of what was happening as the data was often all over the place. Here is another data center sample.

Another growth area is remote monitoring. This can be monitoring turbines, large engines, smart grids, data center storage, and even Twitter feeds. They used the term; M2M or machine-to-machine monitoring. The goal in their efforts is to provide more self-service for business users. JackBe Presto allows a tech savvy business person to create and set up dashboards that aggregate data from multiple sources. The goal is to allow the business side to do 80% of the work and leave the 20% of real tough stuff to the IT guys. Below is another ruse case – cyber risk threat monitoring.

They see their offering as part of the third wave of BI. The first was traditional data warehouses followed by a focus on data analytics. Now there is growing interest in real-time and big data. I asked John about big data as it is one of the buzz words de jure. He said that customers think of it as going beyond traditional data warehousing to look at the massive amounts of unstructured data. JackBe sees it as another data source they can aggregate. Most big data tools operate in batch mode but soon these sources can be connected to real-time data feeds to see new discoveries. The aim is to add a layer on top of existing tools, applications and information sources to bring the data together in interactive dashboards and deliver it where the user needs it – in SharePoint, portals or mobile devices, not replace these tools. JackBe adds the real-time operational component to existing organizational BI portfolios.

There will be a new release in the Fall with more self-services capabilities, more KPI builders, more attractive dashboard layouts, and increased ability to handle social data. The barriers between operational data and KPIs need to be reduced and that will be part of the next release. They have three big areas of focus: SharePoint, portals, and mobile. I look forward to seeing their next release. 

 

Crowdopolis Covers Comprehensive Range of Opportunities

I have written about crowd-sourcing a good bit on this blog including a whole series on Cisco I-Prize (e.g., Cisco Announces I-Prize Winner and Results of Their Global Collaboration and Cisco Announces Second I-Prize Winner) and well as reports on some of the vendors (e.g., Spigit Offers Release S3 to a Maturing Market and Another Enterprise 2.0 App Goes Mobile - Brightidea Innovation Management).  So I was really interested in some of the latest moves in this space as I read as I read Catherine Shinner’s comprehensive report on Crowdopolis LA - Or How Work Will Work.

As she reported, the Daily Crowdsource hosted Crowdopolis at USC's Davidson Center on Thursday, July 19. It was a fast-paced, day-long event, that showcased crowdsourcing as a growing force in changing the structure of work. It presented new business models, around creating high impact relationships with customers, widening and accelerating innovation opportunities, and streamlining business processes.  I urge you to read her complete coverage but wanted to both bring it to you attention and offer a few comments.

Crowdsourcing offers a number of potentially transformative moves including putting efficiency in innovation, building and enhancing expert communities, allowing for micro-work efforts over widely disperse populations, and basically rethinking the way work is done. Catherine offers great examples for each of these. I wanted to share a story about micro-work efforts over widely disperse populations that I participated in a few years ago.

After hurricane Karina hit my home town of New Orleans many people were out of touch with their family and friends and had no way to know if they survived or where they were. The government had failed to set up a common missing person database. As a result, hundreds of siloed web sites gathered hundreds, and probably thousands, of entries about missing persons or persons who wanted to let others know they’re okay. The problem was the data on these sites had no particular form or structure. So it was almost impossible for people to search or match things up. Plus there were dozens of sites

To address this need a few people in Cambridge MA put a central database together in a few days. It was called the Katrina PeopleFinder Project. They asked for volunteers to help with transferring data from the hundreds of sites to this common one. It was possible for a few people to set this up but they needed a crowd to pull off the data transfer. This was a perfect crowd-sourcing micro-task project and it worked.

The organizers went to the Web and recruited tens of thousands in a few days. I started working on this. There were good instructions and a non-technical person like me could do it. You took data from one of many separate databases and added it into a central one. There were several benefits in addition to a single source to find people. You took databases with different formats and put them into a common format so searches and sorts can work better. Also, many entries have multiple people and we created separate records for each individual.

It was concrete way for people to help remotely as you had time. There was wiki admin front end and you took 50 records at a time. It was a wonderful example of creating micro-work tasks in a crowd-source environment. The work gave also volunteers a closer personal look at the displaced people. It let you see who was looking for who and the status of this search. Some of the individual stories emerged. It is small thing to do but you saw the names of people directly impacted by Katrina and hopefully helped a few people find others or get notified of the status of people close to them.

These same principles are being used for a variety of tasks, For example, as Catherine reported, both Amazon Mechanical Turk and the Finnish start-up Microtask use a process of parsing out mini-pieces of work to a distributed work force.  Microtask conducted a joint project with the National Library of Finland to index the library's archives in order to better enable web search of those resources. To help decipher and validate the library's archives, Microtask created an online game, Digitalkoot and with a voluntary workforce that engaged in the game, completed 5.2 million microtasks in the first 9 months of the project. There are many tasks like this one and the Katrina People Finder Project that lend themselves to crowd-sourcing. I can only see it continue to grow and can be a great way to engage people in solving problems remotely at a pace they can manage. 

 

Novell Vibe 3.3 Includes Seamless Integration with Microsoft Office

I have been covering Novell for some time (see for example, Novell Teaming Brings Kempinski Hotels into Enterprise 2.0 and Novell GroupWise 2012 Expands its Collaboration Capabilities).  On a recent call I spoke with Tracy Smith, Senior Product Manager, and Julie Jones, Product Marketing Manager about the latest release of Novell Vibe.  Tracy explained that Teaming was rebranded as Vibe, aspects of Pulse were added to it and Pulse is no longer a separate product.  The Vibe offering is an on-premise version, as 99% of their clients are operating on-premise.  Their current strategic direction is to focus on existing Novell customers with GroupWise, Open Enterprise Server and ZENworks and providing increased services to them.

They are offering new releases of Vibe about every six months. Version 3.3 offers integration with Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010 as one of the major enhancements. You can open and save Office documents, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, using Vibe as the backend server. This integration provides rich additional functionality to Office users.

A Vibe dashboard can now be added to Office apps that brings in Vibe features such as version tracking and history. You can add notes and easily go back to earlier versions of documents in case the new version has mistakes or goes in directions you do not want. All modifications are versioned. There is also an activity stream, “What’s New,” so that if you are in Vibe, you get updated of any changes to documents that you have access to. These features help people work on documents together since a live comment stream aids discussion and decisions about content; each user can edit a file and be notified when another person's edits are available to preview and merge; and the group can see document history and compare versions.

You can also make use of the metadata within Office.  For example, you can see the social profile in Vibe of the document owner or any contributor, as well anyone who provides input on a comment thread. The comment stream is accessible to everyone working on the document or connected to it.  You can also lock down a document if you want to prevent further changes.

The latest release of Novell Vibe also includes Vibe Desktop, which enables users to easily access and sync files offline. Users simply download Vibe Desktop and can then connect and sync any folders and files from their Novell Vibe system to their desktop. They can then access these files offline, with any changes automatically syncing between their desktop and Vibe once they are back online. The Vibe Desktop is available for Windows now with a Mac version coming in the next few weeks.

People often adopt social tools at different rates. The flexibility to work in Office with Vibe features or directly in Vibe allows those who want the comfort of familiar tools to stay within them. While Novell Vibe 3.3 is independent, it works with any standard email system. It includes tight integrations with Novell GroupWise 2012, giving users access and interaction across Vibe and GroupWise content from one place, bridging the gap between personal and team productivity to make people more efficient throughout their work day. They have also upgraded their mobile UI and added apps for Android and iPhone to simplify access.

Another feature is the ability to dynamically create groups based on LDAP directories. There are also workflow improvements and they have simplified the template to better work with tablets such as the iPad. Now you can more easily see functions like your calendar and tasks. Novell has added a table of contents to their wiki.  The release policy is to not require customers to upgrade with each new release, as all releases within a major version, such as the 3.0 series, are compatible.

I think these are all good moves. Integration is an increasing theme and is certainly necessary to make the enterprise social. The new social tools need to connect to the traditional enterprise and productivity tools such as Office if real work is to be accomplished (see Integrating the Interactions with the Transactions). I look forward to seeing the ongoing evolution of Vibe.

 

Social Software Market Keeps Growing

A number of large and small companies are making big bets on social business through acquisitions like Microsft’s purchase of Yammer and IBM’s extensive acquisition strategy (see IBM's Mike Rhodin on the Convergence of Social Business, Analytics and Commerce). Many firms are also investing in product enhancements and product integrations. Predictions by IDC support the moves as it expects compound annual growth to exceed 40 percent between 2011 and 2016.

Michael Fauscette, lead author of two IDC reports, is quoted, "We're seeing good strong growth from the major players in this market and that'll continue for quite a while." Customers spent $767.4 million on the products globally in 2011, and will spend almost $4.5 billion in 2016, according to IDC's "Worldwide Enterprise Social Software 2012-2016 Forecast." Because of their potential for sharpening employee communication they're becoming important tools for "decision support" and productivity across most industry verticals, according to Fauscette.

However, there are factors that will work to slow down the momentum. These include: concerns about return-on-investment, security, regulatory compliance and intellectual property protection, as well as the involvement needed from IT departments to deploy and integrate the software. The latter one is a key concern in my opinion.

For social software to really work and provide value, the integration with enterprise apps is critical. Some firms are building in this integration into their products (see   ). Others, such as AppFusions, are building connectors to enable these necessary integrations without heavy lifting from IT.

IDC also ranked the top vendors from a revenue perspective in a different study, "Worldwide Enterprise Social Software 2011 Vendor Shares." Tops by far was IBM with $105.4 million, followed by Jive Software ($65.3 million), Communispace ($60 million), Telligent ($42.7 million), and Socialtext ($34.5 million). Rounding out the top 10 were Mzinga, Lithium, Yammer, NewsGator, and VMware. I guess Microsoft was feeling left out so they picked up Yammer. It is also smart of IDC to not count SharePoint as social software.

It will be interesting to see where this market goes but I predict that integration will be a major theme over the coming years. 

 

Beware: BYOA May Rival BYOD as IT Issue

There has been a lot of discussion about the BYOD movement (Bring Your Own Device) where people are getting their own smart phone and/or tablet. Well, I think the complementary to that may be just as big. This opinion is not based on any research, just a number of conversations I have had recently.  Now I am certainly not claiming to be the first to raise the issue of people bypassing IT to use apps from the consumer Web or elsewhere, I am just suggesting a label to help focus the issue and put it parallel to BYOD. I Googled it and did not find anything. So maybe you first heard the term here?

One example is when IT invests in an expensive document sharing system and employees use Google Docs on their own instead. Yammer got some of its early users this way.  One problem becomes security but another is the chaos that can result from the uncommon data structures of the different tools. I think IT and even business unit leaders need to be worried here. I could raise more difficulties than BYOD. However, just like BYOD, you cannot really legislated this away. Employees can vote with their digital “feet” if you do not give them the tools they want. They best solution is to involve employees in apps decisions and deployments. This has always been a best practice but it is even more important now. 

 

Badgeville Integrates with IBM Connections

I have written about Badgeville before (see Badgeville Provides Cloud-based Gamification Behavior Platform™ and Expertise). Recently I spoke with Chris Lynch about their integration with IBM Connections. I was especially interested in this as I covered Connections extensively (see first of recent three part series - IBM Connections Conversations 1: Review of 3.0).

Chris began with some general thoughts about Badgeville to set the context. He said that one of the biggest challenges in implementing enterprise social tools is changing old behaviors and I would agree. There are many silos within large enterprises and social tools are increasingly being implemented to break down these silos. But the task remains to get people to actually change the way they work and use these tools. It is too easy to stay within familiar email, for example.

Chris said that social software implementers have recognized the need to map to business processes. This is something I have written about considerably (see Giving Social Media a Good Job). However, Chris said this is not enough. He gave the example of a large consulting company that implemented Yammer to break down silos. As I know from personal experience, cross-group communication is essential in this environment to share best practices. But how do you change 20 years of learned communication behavior?

The firm, working with The Behavior Platform (Badgeville’s core product), created a simple mobile app that allowed people to share the “who, what, and where” about a conversation.  People received points for participation, and earned contextually relevant rewards for location and content. Through the Badgeville for Yammer integration, those achievements were then published into the Yammer stream. Managers who saw this offered praise to those who received those achievements and others saw this praise. There is nothing like public praise from management that drives behavior in this environment. Everyone could see that Yammer participation was valued by management, so even the hold-outs jumped in as well. With gamification, the rewards occur on an ongoing basis and are cumulative to encourage ongoing participation. These rewards are not a one-time thing that is soon forgotten. Chris says this is an example of what Badgeville is calling Behavior Lifecycle Management – where gamification plays a critical role. Here is a sample Badgeville screen.

With Badgeville you can also pair rewards with contextual behaviors to drive engagement. For example, sales best practices are often hard to get out of busy sales people, thought it’s a common goal of social software platforms to capture it. A reward system that encourages this and offers public recognition through a leaderboard, a key game mechanic, can turn the trick as sales people are often very competitive.

This sales best practices example is one of the ways that Badgeville integrates with IBM Connections. You can also reward participation in the wikis, blogs, for voting, contributing to ideation forums and other aspects across any department. You can decide on both the behavior and the context to reward. Since the desired behaviors vary from company to company, Badgeville offers the ability to set your targets and context. You get Achievement rewards that can be combined to get a higher level Mission reward for a desired collection of behaviors. You can have many leaderboards within and across different groups.

Another feature in the Connections integration is reputation management. Reputation is earned through high value behaviors, rather than merely being attributed to what people say they’re good at doing. This earned reputation then travels with a user, both across Connections communities, and to other enterprise systems being gamified by Badgeville. So if you are level 5 expert on a topic, your comment in an activity stream carries this designation. Here is a sample reputation management screen.

A product launch being managed through a social software platform like Connections is an excellent use case for Badgeville’s behavior platform, since multiple groups and multiple behaviors need to be involved for success. Each group has different behaviors to reward and it is useful for each group to see what the other is doing. For example, the marketing people need to see that the sales people are properly trained on how to introduce the product to customers.

Badgeville offers companies a way to get value form their IT investments by encouraging and rewarding participation. The ROI for Badgeville is actually increasing the ROI for a firm’s IT investments. In one case, a company saw a 600% increase in internal blog posts after Badgeville was implemented.  This makes sense to me. With some studies showing that up to 67% of employees are disengaged with their work, targeted rewards can be a useful and effective way to drive up the level of engagement for the benefit of everyone.

Other key metrics Badgeville reports center around employee engagement and training completion:

• 2,000% Surge in Social Sales
• 60% in Employee Engagement
• 250% Growth in Training Compliance

 

Standards Can Help Put Social Software to Work

Customers spent $767.4 million on social software globally in 2011, and will spend almost $4.5 billion in 2016, according to IDC. That is a better than 40% growth. However, one of the factors that will work to slow down the momentum. is the involvement needed from IT departments to deploy and integrate the software. Dion Hitchcliffe, address one critical means to address this integration issue in his post, Enterprise Social Networks Need Open Standards.

Dion writes, “social media in general has proliferated so extensively now that there are often a half dozen or more social apps that we use every day in our personal lives, in the workplace, or both. But they usually have quite limited interoperability when it comes to our identities, data integration, and inter-social network user experience. Thus, our work in them is fragmented and siloed, limiting their reach and value. Standards would greatly help with this.” I could not agree more.

He goes on to note that with the rise of the app store, IT will move more into on-demand and disposable world. This will make the shelf-life of applications shorter. There must be a way to “easily and simply achieve continuity as the social foundation beneath us shifts and changes. Open standards make it possible to swap out obsolete and outdated social components, move our data over as necessary, and keep working with as little disruption as possible..”

He also points the need for social software to be part of the enterprise application architecture and connect with traditional work apps in a central way. This is a topic I have written about extensively on this blog and certainly support all of his points. I see open standards as one of the critical success factors for social software to enable social business. 

 

The Evolution of Email

I first covered my friend Luis Suarez move away from email in 2008 – see Luis Suarez Frees Himself From E-Mail’s Grip and Much More. At the time Luis wrote in the article, Giving up on Work e-mail - Status Report on Weeks 15 to 20, “Instead of responding individually to messages that arrived in my in-box, I started to use more social networking tools, like instant messaging, blogs and wikis, among many others.” He added however, “I never gave up my work e-mail address, because I still need it for some work-related activities — for example, for one-on-one discussions that are too private and confidential to discuss publicly.”

This still holds as Luis recently talked with Kate Bassett about his take on life outside the inbox – see Thinking outside the inbox ‘improves team work’.  Luis sates that he is not trying to get rid of email although but to reduce its power over our lives.  Thus power can be oppressive. I saw a study that found half of respondents checking their email in bed, starting at around 7:09 AM and 68% check email before 8 AM. It also effects the evening as 38% at the dinner table. 69% can’t go to sleep without checking email and 40% do so after 10 PM.

The rise of social business can greatly reduce the use of email for things that are better address in the transparency of group collaboration. To facilitate the transition many of the vendors are integrating their tools with email. You can work within the email client and have content go directly into the social software for more efficiently distribution and comment. The reverse is also possible as content created with the social tool can be automatically sent out through email. See for example - Harmon.ie Provides Social Email to Push Enterprise Collaboration Adoption. 

These are all good trends. However, let’s hope we use the efficiency of the social tools and do not become slaves to them as many have done with Facebook. 

 

OpDemand Simplifies Cloud Management

OpDemand is a Colorado-based startup that aims to improve ease of use for cloud developers. They announced General Availability of their cloud infrastructure management platform in April, which allows software development teams to leverage raw cloud infrastructure without being overwhelmed by technical complexity. More recently, they announced an upgrade to the platform that allows developers to collaborate and share management capabilities within the cloud environment.

I spoke with Gabriel Monroy, CTO and Joshua Schnell, CEO to get more details on what they are doing.  I discovered right off that they and their third co-founder, Yoni Gorelov, are fellow Tufts graduates. We are just a few years apart.  They have picked a robust field, as I see new studies on the growth of the cloud almost daily.

There are several ways to get involved in the cloud from SaaS on one hand, where you turn everything over to a provider to IaaS on the other side where you take a good bit of control and responsibility yourself. With IaaS you still use a cloud service provider like Amazon but you take control over the set up and management. This control offers more flexibility.. However, the responsibility part can be a challenge for many IT shops who do not have the skills to handle it. Gabe saw this first hand at his work and the three of them saw the business opportunity this gap presents. I would certainly agree that this is a smart move and a good place for a startup.

More specifically many IT organizations lack: a repeatable system for provisioning workloads, automated configuration management, tools to overcome cloud complexity, cloud optimized workloads, and processes for fully automated environments.  To address these issues, OpDemand provides proprietary orchestration technology that dynamically assembles and disassembles complex infrastructure blue prints. There is also automated configuration management with a simple and intuitive interface. I saw the interface in action and can attest to this.

They showed me how you can set up a Clojure application. With a few clicks it was ready in about 5 minutes. In the pre-cloud days, a similar set up would take 2 – 4 weeks including time to procure hardware. Even in the cloud days, an IaaS implementation without OpDemand would take 1 – 2 days of reading manuals, hoping they are accurate, and a strong set of related skills. OpDemand was so easy even I could do it. You can see the interface below.

There are other significant benefits. They have a Stop button. This feature can be very handy and save a lot of cost as many cloud instances are used to develop and test apps. They do not need to be running all the time racking up service costs.  However, the stop and re-start process without OpDemand is so complex that most, if not all, development teams simply leave the service and cost meter running all the time. With OpDemand, you just click the Stop button and it stops. Then you click start and it starts up again.  Below you can see a sample screen indicating which apps are running and which have been stopped.

There is also an activity steam, labeled Events, where you can see auto-generated status updates. You can also share environments to facilitate collaborative management among a team of developers. Josh said that sales have grown rapidly since their April launch and I can see why. They question to me for a development team is: why not?

 

Competitive Intelligence System Success Factors

I remain very connected to Darwin Ecosystem and follow their blog. One post offered some advice I wanted to expand on here. Nicholas Herold wrote the post, 8 Qualities of a Successful Competitive Intelligence System. He began by pointing out the fragmented way many organizations go about competitive intelligence.  Even need a competitive intelligence system is used there can still be issues of finding the right stuff at the right time and noticing the outliers that are predictors of critical market shifts. Nicholas lists eight qualities that you should look for in a competitive intelligence systems to reduce the risk of missing what is truly important. They are found below with some comments added.

1. Monitor unique topics of interest – you need to be adjust what you are looking and focus in on clearly defined areas to discover what is happening with precision

2. Operate in real time – this is critical, otherwise you will be a follower, rather than a leader.

3. Be independent of sources – you need to be able to pull in multiple sources and not  be tied to a few that n might bias what you art e looking at

4. Be human centered (rather than allowing algorithms to determine relevance and importance, the experience and knowledge of the human is utilized),=. This is one of the most important. Tools like Google decide for you what is important and arrange content according to their viewpoint.  The person needs to have clear visualization of what is happening so they can scan it and make intelligence decisions on what to drill down on.

5. Eliminate the noise – you need filters to get rid of unrelated content

6. Display emerging patterns – good visualizations of changes in the topics of interest helps you discover trends that may impact your decisions

7. Simplicity – allows for the human to use the tool effectively. Many complex competitive intelligence tools require too much expertise in the tool, putting distance between them and the expert on the content of interest.

8. Speed – this is enabled by both simplicity and real time content aggregation

These all capabilities we build into the Darwin Awareness Engine™ For information about how Darwin can improve your competitive intelligence system, see our CI White Paper: Darwin Awareness Engine and Competitive Intelligence.

 

Giving Social Media a Good Job

One of Luis Suarez’s several commentaries on the Boston Enterprise 2.0, Social Task Management - When Social Business Got Down to Work, provides a very useful set of tasks that can help integrate social media into work processes. This is an issue I have been discussing here (see for example - Putting Social Media to Work and Integrating the Interactions with the Transactions) but Luis takes the argument to a more precise level by giving social media an excellent job.

Luis writes, “It's time for social software to begin to discover the path of how it can embed itself into our day to day workflows with much more effectiveness and efficiency, by focusing on those common tasks and activities we keep repeating on a daily basis, but that, in some cases, generate a bunch of business pain points for which social networking tools could be that aspirin to get rid of the headache.” He goes on to add, “empower employees to become smarter at what they already do at work, with perhaps a lot less effort involved altogether!”

I could not agree more. Luis offer a term from Alan - Alan Lepofsky - Social Task Management. This is a great concept. I offered a use case for it from the past, Integrating Transactions and Interactions: A Fable, but was not smart enough to call it what it really is as Alan does.  Luis adds, “Social Business will become a corporate reality as soon as it starts understanding, and fully embracing, how it needs to mix and mingle with our day to day workload, i.e. tasks and activities.” This is a great job for social media. Luis goes on to articulate this concept with greater depth. I think his post is required reading so I will repeat any more here. 

 

Boston E 20 Notes: Interview with Cisco’s Raj Gossain

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. During the event I interviewed Raj Gossain, VP Product Management on their go-to-market strategy.  They have released a lot of new functionality, as well as some smart re-branding.

The new capability are part what's now called Cisco WebEx® Social (formerly known as Cisco Quad™) and build upon existing offerings that help employees share knowledge, find experts and information and form effective virtual work teams. With this release of WebEx Social, Cisco is introducing the following capabilities:

Cisco now provides integration with WebEx Social and Microsoft Office that enables workers using Word, PowerPoint or Excel to jointly edit and post updated documents, presentations and spreadsheets back to WebEx Social.

Email no longer has to be a siloed application. With enhanced e-mail integration, workers can stay in e-mail clients such as Microsoft Outlook while also creating and posting updates to WebEx Social.

Cisco is introducing mobility enhancements to the WebEx Social iPhone and iPad client that will give workers the ability to transition from social networking to real-time IM, Web conferencing and voice calls directly from their mobile application.

With new browser-based video calling, people can seamlessly escalate to a high-definition (HD) video conferencing session, without going to a separate application. These sessions are compatible with a wide variety of video endpoints, including Cisco TelePresence®, IP video phones, mobile and soft clients.

They are also offering flexible deployment models: With this release, customers will have a choice of deployment models. WebEx Social is available as an on-premise (WebEx Social Server) offering, partner-hosted (through Logicalis, ACS and Alphawest) and a Cisco-hosted cloud-based solution. 

I noted to Raj that while all of these great efficiencies in synchronous and asynchronous communications can lead to tactical improvements, I wanted his views on how they can be used for strategic transformation. He replied with three main themes.

First, one of the major trends is the mobile worker and decentralized, disaggregated enterprise. WebEx Social is designed to support this transformation in how enterprises operate. It enables flexible working and gives the worker access to the company activities and culture with an immediacy of interaction and access as if they were co-located. There is the ability to participate in explicit and implicit communities of interest and practice. Through activity streams, you can subscribe to topics and individuals and gain access to information and expertise. So the first major theme is bringing the organization together virtually where physically it has been dispersed.

The second theme is breaking organizational silos. Many firms are still managing the organization in very hierarchical, siloed information and interaction flow. Hierarchy helps to manage certain business processed but can be a real impediment to the demands of market acceleration and globally engaged work group. Collaboration is a non-linear, iterative, people process. It involves exchange, and worked-empowered course-correction.

Up until recently many software vendors have focused on automation of those repeatable process, HR, ERP, etc, that operate in hierarchies. But now 85-90% of corporate assets are intangible. It is a whole new game. Accelerating innovation is where collaboration can really add value. I added that's kind of productivity on steroids - innovation in the day-to-day work context. 

Raj continued that WebEx Social allows you to stay on top of topics and relationships to your day job. It is a mixed model, you have conversations, you check data and are able to reduce the distracting context switching of your modalities.

I agree, and for companies where decisions were made at the lower level of the hierarchies, the higher the operating margin (see McKinsey report 2010). WebEx Social empowers tools actually empower them to do it.

Raj said this is how you flatten the enterprise with collaboration tools like WebEx Social.

The third theme is scaling and capturing knowledge. You can now connect knowledge, scale knowledge beyond old school confined networks and have new people with common interests discover each other and interact. Raj said that now you can more easily create knowledge and knowledge capture is inherent to the collaborative process.

Raj said that the new capabilities are along these 4 vectors:

How do you bring social into the contexts people are working in every day - WebEx Social helps broaden participation by enabling employees working on mobile devices, email and personal productivity applications to easily engage in social collaboration with their colleagues.

How do you maintain and advance your leadership in integration? In addition, flexibility deployment is a hallmark of Cisco's overall collaboration strategy. The tools can used on premise or hosted through partners, or the Cisco hosted cloud.

There is more simplification with a user experience cleanup, streamline, enhanced flow. They are also bringing social to where people work as you can see from the new integrations with tools like Microsoft Office. Now you do not to have to worry about how to get hold of a person, just click to connect by video, telephony and chat.

Raj said that their customers are asking for integrated suites - integrating these workloads - IM, meetings social are all part of a unified offer. This market direction builds on WebEx leadership in meetings business. It is the number two cloud provider for business applications. They understand what it means to run a secure application. There are 6.5 million users that are licensed to host a meeting and 31 million people a month attend a WebEx Meeting. There are also 3 million mobile downloads and I ma sure this is growing. 

Raj offered some sample use cases of WebEx Social impacting productivity. One is arming the sales teams. To better collaborate on an RFP. What if you have a complex customer RFP and you are a member of a distributed organization. You have two weeks to prepare a comprehensive response to the customer. In the old days it was fire an email out to 25 people and pray. You had no visibility into what the progress has been made and who's involved, lots of follow up and redundancies.

Now with WebEx Social you can create a post and share it with an initial list of 25 people with the RFP document, maybe a spreadsheet and allow those people to share it with appropriate people, and now you have an activity stream that shows you where it is in the process, new information that's been brought in. You've got transparency, visibility and you've captured all the knowledge that's been involved in the process. You've got a more comprehensive artifact and you can share it with other sales teams. 

Raj offered another example - his own staff meeting. He can post the staff meeting agenda. All staff can edit the post and you're not wasting time on disseminating information you're focusing. People do not have to engage in information updates at the start of the meeting and everyone can be up to speed and ready to solve problems at the start.

The world is changing and business tools like WebEx Social enable companies to move towards the promise of the connected enterprise. I like the improvements and the more streamlined market positioning.

 

 

Moxie Offers Free Desktop Sync Capability for Moxie Spaces

Moxie provides a comprehensive platform for the networked organization through its Spaces by Moxie™ suite, which includes Collaboration Spaces™ internal collaboration, and other customer Engagement applications for external communication. I have covered Moxie before (see Moxie Announces Spaces to Enhance Customer Engagement and Moxie Provides a Social Workspace Through Employees Spaces).  I recently spoke with Tara Sporrer, Moxie's VP of Marketing, and Nikhil Govindaraj, Moxie's VP of Products about their new desktop sync capability.

They provided a demo, as that is the best way to see how this new functionality works. The desktop sync capability provides the ability to work offline in the Windows desktop environment. Then you can share your work with others as you go back online. You can re-sync whenever you are online. The process can be scheduled by the user in terms of frequency. You can see a desktop sync in action below.

There are three organizing themes: People, Groups and Projects as you can see below.

There is also a drop zone where you can place materials that you want to share and then decide later how you want to share it. I like this feature as I am always thinking of stuff to share but do not want to interrupt the flow of work to do the actual sharing. I also sometimes later decide later how I actually what to share it.

They have also integrated Moxie with Outlook. This is another component of Desktop Sync. It transforms traditional email threads into social discussions in a collaboration platform. Users can create new discussion topics directly from Outlook, or start with an existing email and create a discussion around it. When sending or reading emails, users can also view any recent activities inside Collaboration Spaces of the email recipients, providing up-to-date social context. Users can also post status updates directly from Outlook. You can see a sample screen below.

With this integration you can move emails into Moxie to start a discussion on a collaborative platform much better suited to conversations than the tangled and overlapping email threads that often emerge. You can see below how you can create a discussion in Moxie's Collaboration Spaces directly from Outlook.

I like these two complementary moves. They both provide added flexibility for working with social tools that will certainly increase adoption. They also allow social features to be embedded where real work is done and not be a separate isolated application. 

 

Summary of My 2012 Boston Enterprise 2.0 Notes

I was pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. Below is a listing of the posts with my notes.

Boston E20 Notes: Organization Next Workshop: Bridging the Participation Gap – Networks, Learning, and "Play"

Boston E20 Notes: Building an Online Community from Strategy, Planning, and Launch to Effective Engagement and Adoption

Boston E20 Notes: The Iceberg Effect of Community Management

Boston E20 Notes: Got Numbers? Community Metrics and Analysis

Boston E20 Notes: Social as a Layer, Not a Place: Are We There Yet?

Boston E20 Notes: The Post-2.0 Era: Social in the Context of My Work

Boston E20 Notes: Design Considerations For Enterprise Social Networks: Identity, Graphs, Streams & Social Objects

Boston E20 Notes: Designing Social Applications

Boston E20 Notes: An Expert Look Into the Technology Behind Social Business

Boston E20 Notes: Inventing Management 2.0

Boston E20 Notes: Building a Unified Communications and Collaboration Roadmap

Boston E 20 Notes: Interview with IBM’s Jeff Schick

Boston E20 Session Comments: Humans vs. Computers

Boston E 20 Notes: Interview with Cisco’s Raj Gossain

Boston E20 Session Comments: Humans vs. Computers

There were quite a few posts on Andrew McAfee’ s keynote at the recnet Boston Enterprise 2.0 conference where he argues that machines are getting smarter than people.

Big Data' Changes Everything, It's Time to Race With the Machines #e2conf

Day 3 of Enterprise 2.0: Race with the Machine #e2conf

Enterprise 2.0: Uncomfortable Truths About Big Data

Before we bow down too low to our new masters I would say “it depends.” As Don Norman argues in Things That Make Us Smart it is time for us to adopt a more human-centered perspective and to insist that informational technologies enhance and complement human cognitive capacities rather than undermine them.

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson wrote, “It is the unforeseen that causes the greatest disturbance, not the expected.” One of the skills that people have over computers is knowing where to look next and to quickly see anomalies. If you dumb down a task you will likely take away the person’s ability to see the unexpected.

Most external algorithms and machine driven intelligence rely on rules and predetermined taxonomies that can hide the unexpected. People-centric tools can enhance our natural, and perhaps evolutionary, cognitive abilities to notice the unexpected.

IBM’s Watson has demonstrated that you can build a machine to handle some level of cognition. However, this takes considerable effort. Watson was built and trained by a team of experts over a number of years. It uses math algorithms coupled with semantic analysis to allow it to understand a natural language question and determine the probability that its answer is correct. 

However, Watson is good for a very specific task and it is not perfect. The years of training may make it better than most, if not all, humans in playing Jeopardy. Although there is a debate as to whether it was really faster reaction times that caused its victory. Regardless, Watson will fail against humans in most of the other tasks we face every day as we just have too much flexibility in our processing power. 

We sometimes underestimate our abilities. Recent research by Martin Hilbert (USC) and Priscilla Lopez (Open University of California) noted that all the computers in the world combined have just recently reached the processing capacity of one person. They wrote, "the 6.4*10¹⁸ instructions per second that human kind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second."

So the issue is not whether computers will outpace people but how the two can work together. Computers are very good at doing boring tedious, repetitive tasks that drive people crazy at a rate and scale far beyond what people can do. This frees people up to do the more complex and interesting tasks.

 

Boston E 20 Notes: Interview with IBM’s Jeff Schick

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. During the event I interviewed Jeff Schick, VP, Social Software at IBM. Jeff and I have spoken before and he updated me on some of their recent moves. I also attended his keynote the next day.

Jeff started by discussing some of the issues with social business. Social software is generally intuitive so people of all generations can use the tools. The challenge is building a thriving and engaged community that takes advantage of these new tools. At IBM they are looking at how to get value quickly from the new tools to encourage the success of these communities. Social business is not just about small incremental improvements but it holds the potential for transformational improvements in the business. IBM can provide skilled people to help with social business implementations and gaining engagement.

I asked about use cases and Jeff said to start with a business process. I could not agree more. Look at what people do and what you want to change. He gave an example through the work they are doing at TD Bank Group. TD is using IBM enterprise social networking software to improve employee collaboration, information discovery and sharing. With a global team of 85,000, TD employees across North America can now easily find experts, get answers to questions, recognize accomplishments, share ideas, and communicate and collaborate across geographies.

More than 4,500 blogs are spreading across the bank, and almost 4,000 Communities have been formed. Those numbers keep growing daily at TD. 

It’s still early since TD launched Connections (November 2011 in Canada and January 2012 in US), but the bank is starting to see a number of positive outcomes to drive business value across the organization.  Connections is helping to: build stronger, more connected teams, increase collaboration, improve communication – they’ve already seen a reduction in meetings and email volume, all of which ultimately impacts TD’s bottom line and employee experience.

Here are a few specific examples of ROI that TD is realizing: 

Better Communication, Time Saved: Senior district leaders need to continuously coach, motivate and lead their sales and customer service teams across each of their 10-15 branches. Connections is being used by some district leaders to provide recognition and business updates. Previously recognition and business updates were filtered through branch managers in email, meetings or conference calls. Now through direct communication in IBM Connections, one hour per week is saved on the process of providing recognition and business updates. Instead of going through the extra step of communicating through the branch managers, information can be sent directly to the teams via Status Updates, Board Posts and Community engagement.

Productivity Increased: Field Marketing Managers (FMMs) plan community or market specific events to drive business to TD branches/stores. In most cases market or community events such as branch/store openings can easily be replicated in a different region through minor local adjustments. There was a reduction in duplication of efforts by FMMs from Maine to Florida through sharing information such as event plans, promotional materials and lessons learned within their team Community.

Better Communication: Colleen Johnston, TD’s Chief Financial Officer, needs a direct line not only to her organization but also to the Women in Leadership initiative she leads. Through using a forum on Connections, Colleen was able to hold a live conversation with employees across TD on the topic of ‘Women in Leadership’ on International Women’s Day. There were 181 questions, answers and comments during the one-hour interactive conversation. These employees gained insight and advice directly from one of TD’s most respected leaders. The conversation continues to be available for others to benefit from.

Jeff went on to discuss the need to align internal processes such those described above with external efforts with customers and business partners. This is one of the reasons I like the term social business rather than enterprise 2.0. For example, IBM looks at relevant content on Facebook and LinkedIn and brings it inside the enterprise to analyze it and develop responses. They also look to leverage social content with their business partners.

Jeff mentioned the TD Bank Group social application in his keynote the next day.  He also introduced a manager from LeasePlan who talked about how they are building the “corporate brain” through IBM Connections. They did a pilot with 3 business units to  test cultural differences and engagement among their global employees.  There was so much demand and buzz around Connections, they had a waiting list to join the program and senior management was encouraged to move ahead with a full deployment Using English was an option to encourage people to contribute in their own language to encourage participation. 

Adoption was a main focus at LeasePlan. They made participation optional and created a promotional video. They called the program LinkedPeople. They had testimonials from a variety of employees in different roles and different countries.  They respected cultural differences. They intentionally used people who were not native English speakers. Everyone has a profile to let each person find the right colleague for their own question.  He showed an example of question and response. One goal is to socially enable business processes. He noted that the corporate brain has grown while he was talking.

Jeff came back and talked about integrating social technology with IBM Watson.  He demoed a community focused on healthcare that was connected to Watson. People could ask healthcare questions to Watson that are either simple or complex. This is a great application for Watson. 

 

Boston E20 Notes: Building a Unified Communications and Collaboration Roadmap

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes - This is another of my notes. There will be more to follow. I attended Irwin Lazar’s workshop - Building a Unified Communications and Collaboration Roadmap".  Irwin is Vice President, Communications Research, Nemertes Research. Here is the session description for the workshop:

“During this interactive workshop we'll walk through the components of a successful unified communications and collaboration workshop. Using benchmark data gathered from hundreds of companies we'll show you what works, what doesn't work, and what are the key criteria for evaluating success. We'll discuss how to address organizational and management strategies, how to extend collaboration services to remote and mobile workers, how to cross company boundaries, and how to implement new collaboration methods with respect to budgets and the installed base of platforms.”

Irwin’s firm does a lot of research and he provided results of this work through out the session. They did interviews with 240 organizations and conduct in-depth conversations with senior IT professionals. They looked at 16 verticals and the participating companies ranged from fewer than 250 employees (13%), 250 – 2500 employees (29%, and over 2500 employees (58%).

He defines a road map as a statement of technology direction for the next 3 – 5 years. Then you turn it over to the architect to design and build it.  He showed a sample road map covering 60 months. It included technologies, funding sources, and other necessary requirements. He showed several samples with different visualizations and areas of focus. Then tend to be complex to read in a single slide.  Below is a sample chronological road map.

Their research finds that the more business involvement in IT projects, the higher the success. This has been my experience also. It is good to have someone deeply involved in the business going back to IT with the functional problems.  Having multi-disciplinary teams are essential. If work is done in silos it will create problems and overlap. About 60% of companies they surveyed have a business IT liaison role.

What is collaboration? – Anyway you work with someone else: video, voice, messaging, social computing, document sharing. The latter is often forgotten. About 50% of firms said Sharepoint is their social platform, their document sharing system.

In one case study the primary tools for collaboration: 100% email, in person next, video conferencing, and at the bottom – social media. Social networking was still low on the priority list.

Unified communications is often defined differently. Now it is the integration of all collaboration tools through any device.  He provided an UC reference architecture (see below). Deployment now: voice – 100%, IM – 79%, 75% web conferencing, cell phone integration 65%, on demand video 57%.

Organizational challenges are much bigger than the technical ones, especially with the lack of cross-functional communication.  So many different groups are looking at different tools raising many issues. Integration of tools remains a big issue despite what the vendors claim. Firms picked this as the biggest challenge – 58%.

UC&C Road map – Voice: Issues, own or outsource, who is right vendor, dedicated servers or virtualized, soft phone or desktop phones, how to support analog, SIP trunking, and how to support voice messaging.  Most firms that take out desktop phones put them back quickly.  But some have successfully done this. There is a shrinking of VOIP deployments. It is very expensive to rip out a working phone system. There are infrastructure costs. Also, BYOD has affected the issue, as people are less interested beyond their device.

Hosted IPT has increased a bit from 12% to 18% are using it and more are evaluating but a large number have no plans.  Many traditional VOIP vendors are hardware centric and expensive so there are challengers. Some (25%) are evaluating MS Lync to replace traditional phone system.  Microsoft said you can do it with what you have and it was 5% last year and now up to 12%. However, the results are mixed.  Some users do not like replacing a phone with a headset. If you are ahappy Microsoft user across other apps then you are more likely to try it.

When asked when you plan to switch to a new phone system. 52% had no plans, 18% planning for 2011, 10% evaluating, 7% planning for 2012, 6% planning for 2013. Question: Are you virtualizing UC application servers? 37% no plans, 20% evaluating, 16% using now, 20% planning for 2011, 5% planning for 2012. The key challenge with UC and virtualization is that the processing power is not there locally and some stuff has to go back to the data center. 

Big issues in unified messaging are the legal issues. The lawyers want voice mail and email separate for archiving and compliance simplicity. These issues often arise after deployment.  They do not want executive status to be transparent. They do not want voice mail stored. There are also Federal rules on electronic communication that need to be interpreted. 

UCC Video roadmap: Percent of employees using desktop: 80% of firms have 0 – 10% with video capability while 15% have greater than 50%. Users do not seem to want it and network administrators fear the bandwidth issues.  However, about 50% of firms support extranet video and 40% hare planning on it and only 4% have no plans.

About 35% are using streaming video,15% are planning on it. The integration of consumer devices with enterprise video is on the rise as 41% said it is very important 17% say it is important. One trick is getting users to use it correctly.

Some integration issues: who owns the desktop? How do you manage a multi-vendor solution?  Big vendors are Cisco, Microsoft, Google, and IBM.  There is a lot of competition between Cisco and Microsoft. Google is ramping its enterprise offerings but there is still concern about Google as an enterprise SaaS vendor.  Concerns about Google are highest amongst conservative IT cultures. About 50% of companies are evaluating desktop office apps as a service.

Issues for IM/presence integration: vendor selection, integration, extranet, and mobile.

Most companies (88%) are using web conferencing. However, while it started as an ideal SaaS app, many firms are bring it inside to bring costs down. Some have saved as much 90% of costs.  If you have over 2500 employees it can pay to bring it inside. You do need to create ways to bring in outside users.

It is hard to quantify the social computing investment. There have been some mistakes made in usage of consumer tools such as Facebook. He showed a social computing architecture (see below).

Many companies are using social computing but very few have an enterprise wide strategy. This makes integration very difficult.  The Cisco Quad (now WebEx Social) strategy with integration their communication tools makes this easier.  IBM Connections has capabilities here also. Over 90% measure soft metrics on social and 3% measure quantified metrics. When marketing is the driver of social more firms see social as a success as people are still thinking of social more in external facing terms.

Another big issues is private vs. public access. Can people use Facebook?  Some companies are very open on this and others are against it as a distraction. One company found that Facebook was the highest used application in the enterprise. However, if you block it people can take out their smart phone. The use of guidelines is a better strategy than blocking. There are privacy issues, financial regulations, and e-Discovery (SEC). There have not been test cases on the financial issues but they will be coming.

Their research is consistent with others that only 10% are user and 90% are lurkers. Most companies do find social to be useful.

Ten steps: take ownership, establish policy, engage compliance function early, formal education program, strong password management, content monitoring and logging, education, selective blocking of content, routine audits and review of logs, and regular policy review.  

 

Boston E20 Notes: Inventing Management 2.0

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. This is another of my notes for this year. There will be more to follow. I attended panel session - Inventing Management 2.0: Radical Yet Practical Insights to Becoming a True "Social Enterprise" led by The Management Innovation eXchange (MIX). Here is the session description:

“The Social Web holds clues for how to improve our organizations, making them more resilient, inventive, and engaging. Imagine overcoming the limits of "Management 1.0" to create organizations that are large but not bureaucratic, focused but not myopic, specialized but not balkanized, efficient but not inflexible and, best of all, disciplined but not disempowering.

"Management 2.0" is the focus of a "hackathon" run by The Management Innovation eXchange (MIX) in partnership with Saba and the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. Since its launch at E2 Santa Clara, the Management 2.0 Hackathon has grown into a far-flung collaboration project involving over 850 progressive management practitioners, technologists, and thinkers from around the globe to explore ways in which the principles of Web 2.0 can serve as inspiration for transforming how all organizations will be run and managed over the next decade. The best of their thinking is now ready to share, consolidated into a few management "hacks" — blueprints for organizations of the future.”

The concept was to rethink what management looks like. It is a continuation of the conversation started last November.  The panel was led by Chris Grams. Mary Woolf is part of an organization that is using some of the hacks that have come out of MIX.  Nyla Reed works for the Educe Group and Dave Mason is from Mozilla.  

MIX is the Management Exchange was started by Gary Hammel and others who feel management is broken because traditional management was created in the machine age when people were treated as parts of machines. A management hackathon is a collaborative effort to re-think management.  They began in November and had over 900 participants from around the world. They developed 60 mini-hacks. These were narrowed down to 20 management hacks.

They started by discussing what is wrong about management. Then they moved to what is right about the internet that could be applied to management. They had 12 principles: trust, speed, serendipity, and others.

They did five sample hacks.  Dave described how he worked with the company that made Girl Scout cookies which was very different from his past experience in Open Source IT.  He wondered how a group can brainstorm ideas and then give them to a completely different group to see what new things come out. They converge the two groups so the two groups can learn from each other.

Nyla worked on a hack, embracing skills 2.0. She said there is a real need to have a specific organizational mindset and culture. They looked at how you move toward this culture. So they redefined the skills needed in the workplace. They started with five skills with a 20 question assessment. Then you take the skill that you already excel at and do something with it in your organization.

Chris talked about stealth hacks where you just do it and do not seek approval. They look at within the organization where they have too much freedom and places where the do not have enough freedom. They looked at the balance of freedom and accountability. Then they had employees and managers exchange freedom and accountability.

The next hack was to look at processes and open them up. They begin with little and less critical things and then they worked up the importance level.

The next hack was to say that all rewards are based only on what you have done in the past year to see who is contributing now and not just riding on past efforts.

Mary talked about finding natural leaders and seeing who are the most connected people in the organization but are not recognized for this. They created a leader meter to gauge this. Another hack was open contributions by the hidden hero. This helps to focus on the idea and not the person who came up with the idea. The third was a tweet store to share ideas. It is a simple idea that is powerful at the same time. Gary Hammel says that hacks need to be both radical and practical.  

 

Boston E20 Notes: An Expert Look Into the Technology Behind Social Business

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. This is another of my notes for this year. There will be more to follow. I attended session - On the Back-End: An Expert Look Into the Technology Behind Social Business led by Patrick Stokes, Chief Product Officer, Buddy Media Here is the session description:

“These days, social media means big business. All of the world’s leading brands are producing powerful programs through social marketing, and are connecting with millions of consumers on a daily basis. When one thinks of social marketing, they often think about what they see on their home feeds: engaging wall posts, campaigns and promotions, interactive games and more. But what powers all of that to work?

In this presentation, Patrick Stokes, Chief Product Officer at Buddy Media, will share expert insight into the back end of how to power enterprise social marketing that works. Patrick will share the power of the NoSQL movement, how to choose a database system that works, and why modern technologies are the way of the future. Don’t speak tech? No problem! Patrick will provide an exclusive view into the back-end of social media technology, with simplified language that even non-engineers can understand. Specifically, attendees will learn.”

Patrick introduced Buddy Media as a collection of products that drive social marketing. It was started in 2007, the same time as Facebook. They started building app connected with it. They realized that brands wanted to be on Facebook but there was not a good way to do this. The early efforts were not that successful or scalable. Salesforce has acquired them recently. They are going to build a social marketing cloud and aligned it with Salesforce.

ConversationBuddy is a publication tool that allows brands to publish content to social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. They aggregate good and bad responses so that companies can react to them. The apps includes approval queues, seeded content, filtering.

ProfileBuddy is for micro-sites to work with Facebook and YouTube. Conversion Buddy was built to track results. All “shares” are tracked to individuals and want happens as a result of their activities. They can see the “shares” and the sales. They can see the ROI of shares and what products to showcase based on what is generating shares.

Dashboard provides analytics and insights. It is built for individuals rather enterprises such as agencies. BuyBuddy manages the ads on Facebook. It allows for very focused targeting.

Patrick next went into the underlying technologies. They are powerful but there are technical and legal limitations. You need to understand your goal and tailor it to the individual network as people act on Facebook different that Twitter. There are also so many legal issues to consider.

Most people do social poorly and it leads to short term lifts. You need to focus on your product and focus on your goal: more users, sales, impress your boss?  Facebook promotes passive sharing but that may not help the individual and stuff gets on your time line and you may not want it there.  Socialcam gets a lot of hits as a result but they do not last. People figure this out so they uninstall it or do not click on the content. The Washington Post saw a great rise in clicks with a Socialcam app but then they was a big drop off as people saw what happen.

Patrick said before you do social make sure your product does not suck like Socialcam that annoys users. Ask if adding social will improve the user’s experience. Ask if adding social is going to take advantage of your users.  Spotify works because it enhances the user’s experience to discover music although some people do not like the sharing part.

Technology behind this: authentication. First, you need to create an app that can make requests to an API with a key and secret password.  There are several apps that support this. You need standard schema and a consistent implementation for client libraries. If you opt in and get “valet” keys, this can be one way but there are limitations. Oauth is the tool that does this but Patrick feels it is rubbish. 

Another technology: REST – Representational State Transfer, This is how data is communicated between server and client. It is built on top of HTTP which makes it an architectural style like SOAP.

Streams are the best technology. Twitter uses it and as it the only one doing it now. You do not have to make calls to the network. There is high throughput and near real-time access to underlying data layer on social networks.

Facebook tracks you through their social plugins and can see whatever you do on the internet unless you turn off your cookies but this causes other problems. You can see everything about any Facebook users. But then this is what people are putting on their pages so it is public already.

Remember to build what your users will let you get away and not more. Be careful not to violate the Facebook terms of service and other legal issues. 

 

Boston E20 Notes: Designing Social Applications

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. This is another of my notes for this year. There will be more to follow. I attended session - Designing Social Applications " a panel session led by David F. Carr, Editor, The BrainYard.  The panel included: Ellen Feaheny, CEO, AppFusions, Mark Weitzel, Director, Platform & Ecosystem; President, OpenSocial Foundation, Jive Software, and Michael Weir, CEO, Sparqlight. Here is the session description:

“Part of becoming a social enterprise is understanding what makes social applications work, both for purposes of selecting commercial applications and for designing their own. Most organizations will adopt a commercial or open source enterprise social platform rather than trying to create their own, but they still will face the challenge of adapting it to their environment and integrating applications that predate the social software era.”

David started the panel and set the vocabulary for the conversation. They talked about applications beyond marketing and inside the enterprise.  They also talked about apps embedded in the enterprise or apps embedded in a public social network. They discussed what makes app social? Embedding an app in an iFrame doesn’t make it social. What business apps are the best situations that can work in a social context?

Ellen discussed a chart on common need use case integrations driving platform E2.0 adoption.  There are many system platform types, many E20 system flavors, and common needs/use case integrations.  Ellen started AppFusions from the business use case perspective. They have been building integrations for common use cases that can be reused to cut costs.

Brian said Sparqlight wraps social software around workflows. He is the principal author and the CEO.  It brings in Yammer, Google apps and other tools. His tool allows you to understand a person’s work behavior and what they excel at, etc.

Mark works for Jive and is President of Open Social Foundation. One of the key things they recognized early on is the need for a real component model for the delivery of SaaS based apps. He feels that Open Social is the best thing out there for this purpose. It is standards based.  They put a market infrastructure around this so you can pick an app and get it installed right away like an iPhone app. But it also allows for IT controls in case you need to take out an app that is a problem. Mark said they wanted to invoke apps within Jive in an easy way wherever you are and put it into the flow within the activity stream.  Open Social is now in the cloud version of Jive and will be coming to the on premise version by the end of the year.

Brian said that enterprise apps used to be isolated compared to social apps.  Ellen said that want makes an app social is the notifications and things that bring your attention. She is working with Atlassian and IBM on social integration.  She found common use cases so decided to build reusable integrations to cover these cases.  This is good idea and should save a lot of time and money in implementations.

Mark said a good social app connects people and supports collaboration. You can understand the details within workflow so disconnected people can connect around common issues. It brings a new level of agility. You get dynamic realignments based on the transparency within the social apps. You need backend intelligence to leverage an understanding of what is happening within an organization. 

Ellen said the old world contained file servers and documents that were passed around. This is still the case for many organizations. To have the documents embedded in the workflow and activity stream puts them in your face. Things are done much faster and no one can hide and documents do not get hidden.

David asked how many in the audience are in IT. The answer was around 50%. The rest were in scattered areas. Ellen mentioned how Jive can use LinkedIn for directory updates and that is a good use case for public and enterprise apps.  Mark said you want transparency so setting up private groups in Facebook does not solve this issue. Ellen added that Facebook is minimal in collaboration versus an enterprise app.

Mark said Open Social was started in 2008 for the consumer world by Google, MySpace and others. At the same time enterprise vendors like Jive looked at this effort and adopted it as a means for delivery. They added capability for enterprise use.  Since it evolved in the consumer space it is more like an open source effort.  This was an interesting panel that discussed a critical issue. 

 

Boston E20 Notes: Design Considerations For Enterprise Social Networks: Identity, Graphs, Streams & Social Objects

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. This is another of my notes for this year. There will be more to follow. I attended session - Design Considerations For Enterprise Social Networks: Identity, Graphs, Streams & Social Objects led by Mike Gotta, Senior Technical Solution Marketing Manager for Social Software, Cisco. Here is the session description:

“Organizations can improve how employees connect to co-workers by understanding the influence design has on participation within social platforms. This session examines key social networking building blocks and how design practices should accommodate multiple networking strategies as employees seek to mobilize their connections to satisfy different work and professional needs. Attendees will gain a better understanding of social networking technology found within social platforms; insight to the cultural aspects of social networks, and how social networking strategies help people cultivate relationships and build social capital they can later leverage to achieve work and professional goals.”

Mike provided a vendor neutral view of design considerations. Social networking has been around since the 1600s but now the new tools allow you to see the social networks. There is a lot of business value and benefits to the organization.  The trick is getting beyond the high-level benefit possibilities to realize them. He showed some of the architectural capabilities that relate to social networking.  You want to integrate the existing enterprise apps and the data and content within them.  You also want to link with business processes, as well as deal with compliance and other issues. Then you want to play this capability over any device.

The traditional way projects were run were: plan, build, run; and resources were released so that modifications based on use after deployment were not made.  The resources committed to the ongoing program should include design to avoid this problem. All work interactions should occur in a social network context. Now social in the context of my work is a big theme. The issue has been around a while but is getting more recognition.

It is important to think about the cultural aspects as cultural productivity is intersecting with work productivity. People are not aligned or engaged with their work. How do you get engagement? One way is to delegate authority. (McKinsey data supports that the lower the decision lever is in an organization the higher the operating margin). So you cannot just focus on the task but keep the broader cultural issues in mind. You need to not just design for the screen but beyond that to the person and the work and the culture. No reason people feel disengaged is that they feel that they do not belong. If you do not make culture involved do not be surprised if the app is not used. We need to design for the user and for the network effects.

One issue is identify. You need to let people construct their own identity. We have moved from assigned identity to claimed identity. In some organizations this goes well but in others people do not want to be found because they might get laid off or they do not see the reason for it.

Another issue is recognition and reputation.  This helps to identify expertise. Determine what ties you want to support within a network. Is it a project? Is it an interest? How long will the context be around?

Another issue is social objects. You take work items from a decision process and put it into an activity stream. How do deal with this? Ask a question or do a poll or something else?  What do you want to do with it? You need to create mechanisms and context for connecting. Who should provide input and where should it go? What relationships do you want to build and grow?

Another issue is activity streams. It will be as bad as the inbox if you do not provide filters or other ways to focus it and not let employees get fire hosed.  Activity streams are places to get information and a place to connect with others. It is not simply an information source. Think about the networking aspects.  You also want to see trends over time and be able to archive and access events over time. After activity streams have been used they could provide a greater history of how work is done. Activity streams are a new form of presence.

Another issue is social analytics.  You need to ensure algorithms are transparent and adjustable. You want the systems to make recommendations and allow people to understand what is happening so they can make recommendations. You need to be able to figure out how the algorithms work so you understand what is being generated.

What is next? How to integrate social into the work life of the employee? Neighborhood networks of people doing similar things can help. It provides context that is related to what you are doing.  Making networks mobile is another issue coming up. In summary, the project starts after deployment. It does not end there.  Platforms are not the end of the journey. Do not think “social everything.”  The four building blocks: identity, social graph, activity streams, and social objects. Great session. 

 

Boston E20 Notes: The Post-2.0 Era: Social in the Context of My Work

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. This is another of my notes for this year. There will be more to follow. I attended session - The Post-2.0 Era: Social in the Context of My Work led by Larry Cannell, Research Director, Gartner Inc.. Here is the session description:

“The widespread adoption of Facebook, the embrace of activity streams by business applications, and the success of smartphone applications have significantly changed information worker expectations since Enterprise 2.0 was introduced in 2006. Post-2.0 technologies are enabling the Social Online Workplace, a worker-centric yet social environment facilitating ongoing discussions that are seeded by messages coming from individuals, business applications, and collaborative tools.

This is an opportunity for the IT organization to get out in front of this change and start planning how to provide social infrastructure within an enterprise architecture. While the initial application of these new architectural components should be on improving worker effectiveness by enabling ambient awareness of activities within a sphere of responsibilities, the social online workplace can also become a powerful new knowledgebase.”

Larry had a great crowd for Thursday morning. He has been involved in collaboration for over 20 years, officially for the past 14 years. He feels that IT is needed more than ever and I certainly agree (see Maybe Enterprise 2.0 Is About the Technology). Innovations since 2006 since the E20 term came out: social network sites, smart phone and tablet apps, business apps using activity streams. I agree as activity streams are a core breakthrough in enterprise capability building on top of Twitter but going way beyond it. Larry said we are now longer copying consumer web social behavior. We are moving beyond collaboration for its own sake.

Enterprise social is moving into a primary IT environment and needs all the support IT can bring. Now the move is from app centered and now we can move to a people centered experience. Instead of going from one app to another now that the apps can be transparent in the context of the user rather the reverse. The real value of mobility is that it provides a user centered experience. This is a big change for IT.

What does the enterprise social experience want? Focus on the individual, leverage familiarity, acknowledge constraints such as security, policy, budget.

What is the new IT environment? Enterprise activity streams are pervasive. They provide a unifying experience for enterprise social suites like IBM Connections.  Business apps are starting to use the activity streams like Salesforce Chatter and tibbr. Now Oracle provides social network services. There are event notifications and exception handling and these can stimulate conversations.  The vendors see this as the potential to provide a consolidated activity stream across the enterprise (such as Microsoft’s interest in Yammer).

Larry offered a vision of the social online workplace with ongoing discussions.  It includes social messaging, collaborative content, and business apps, all connected.  This gives the person much more control over what is happening. The activity stream needs to be where you want to work and the device you want to use. It could be in a workspace, business app, or email. It needs to contextual.

The social graph offers new opportunities. This social activity is rich in metadata. The resulting social graph becomes a rich data set that is available through search or other means. Larry showed an example. Where suggestions for people to connect who are not yet connected or relevant content to someone’s current activity. The connections become a map of the social activity within an enterprise.

He showed an architecture where business apps that provide context in which people work. They are also sources of social data. Then aggregation services can collect the social data either passively or proactively. IT needs to help this to get this to work. Data needs to be cleaned up so it can be aligned. This is not always easy. APIs are not the total answer. There is much more to do and some heavy lifting by IT needs to step in for the long-term capability.

There is impact on other iT services including: email and IM, documents, portals, search, and business applications.  People lists need to be consolidated.  Files tend to be black holes for content. The movement from files to more group enabled and transparent space will be helpful to get content accessible.

There is also impact on search. The metadata creates facets that can enable filtering of activity streams. You can search on different dimensions such as people, communities, as well as content.

The impact on business apps includes contextual exposure through the activity stream and social graph. Security becomes an issue as who has access to the activity stream content is an issue. In whose activity stream will it appear?  

So what should IT do? Focusing on providing people-centered experienced. Move away from an application focus.  Look at how work is being done so you can help it and perhaps change it to be more productive.  You need to make people more efficient not apps more efficient, which has been the main focus for the past 40 years. Also IT needs to rethink priorities to make sure simplicity is personal and contextual. Make data available and reconsider the “need to know” security policies. It gets in the way of sharing and discovery.  

Make sure the user experience comes first. And see social as extensions of business processes and have line of business ownership. IT needs to provide leadership in the social software space and educate the business units on possibilities.  It is needed more than ever to enable people-centered experiences despite what Nick Carr wrote.  But it requires a different IT. Great session. 

 

Boston E20 Notes: Social as a Layer, Not a Place: Are We There Yet?

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. This is another of my notes for this year. There will be more to follow. I attended session - Social as a Layer, Not a Place: Are We There Yet? " led by The Kashyap Kompella, Analyst, Real Story Group. Here is the session description:

“As enterprise social collaboration efforts mature, enterprises increasingly seek to put these new capabilities "in the flow" of colleagues' daily work. Yet, most tools assume that social networking and collaboration will reside in a separate "place," often a siloed application that notifies you of new activity via yet another set of e-mail alerts.

 A growing number of vendors are seeking to address a new architecture that posits social and collaboration services as a "layer" that can be applied to diverse workstreams within the enterprise. Of course, social-as-a-service is much easier said than done. This session, led by a noted industry analyst, will offer a practical review of vision versus reality in this important area.”

Kashyap said that we are not at the social layer level yet but we are making progress.  He said his group covers content technology space as independent advisors.  He showed a large map of vendors based on a subway map. So far most enterprises have some social or collaborative efforts underway. However, the results have been mixed. The problem is that social software is treated as another box in the enterprise tech stack.

He asked how many in the audience have social software efforts underway. Almost everyone raised their hands. He asked how many have unqualified success and very few raised their hands.  One of the reasons is the clear objectives are often not in place. He showed an IT architecture with social in the mix like other capabilities such as ERP, CRM, etc. He said this puts social in a box where it is not effective

Social is supposed to help discover expertise across the organization and should not be put in a box in an architecture. Now social is one more system to check like email. When you have social as a separate island the transformative power of social is not realized. It needs to be part of everyday work.

Social as a layer in the enterprise: It should be a service, not a place in an architecture. Social needs to be integrated into the course of everyday work and not a separate thing to check. He showed the McKinsey data on the benefits of the connected enterprise. See 2010 report and 2011 report.  He said that some companies are falling back in their social implementations after the initial excitement.  Social drives more value when integrated well. I would agree. (see also - Integrating the Interactions with the Transactions and Maybe Enterprise 2.0 Is About the Technology).

He said you have enterprise platforms like IBM Microsoft, Oracle; social platforms like Jive, Telligent; social layers like Newsgator, Yammer.  The problem is that each new software thinks it is the center of the universe.  The social platforms are often siloed. How do we make social become a service or a layer?  You can use APIs and custom connectors. You can put system notifications and user conversation into the activity stream. But do not let users drown in the stream so add some structure. You need filters, rules, groups, and search.

He showed an example of Socialcast and Sharepoint. You can see activity streams within Sharepoint. There needs to be context. He showed Jira with custom connector that goes into Socialcast (see - AppFusions Speeds Software Development Through Integration of iRise® Visualization with Atlassian JIRA, Confluence). You can see conversations and act on them.  He showed tibbr integrated with Oracle Expense management as a social layer. I have written about this (see - TIBCO Enhances tibbr with GEO and Other New Capabilities).  He said that innovation is happening on the edges with the smaller vendors.

You want to add a “do’ button to the “like” button. For this to happen legacy systems need to be connected to social apps. 

 

Boston E20 Notes: Got Numbers? Community Metrics and Analysis

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. This is another of my notes for this year. There will be more to follow. I attended session - Got Numbers? Community Metrics and Analysis led by Jillian Bejtlich, Community Manager, Autodesk. Here is the session description for the workshop:

“For anyone working in community management, you’re well aware it’s not all about sitting on social networks all day chatting it up. Users and sometimes even our own co-workers are shocked to find out we are the ones pulling massive reports and trying to make sense of millions of data points. Who knew community management was so focused on mathematics?

As a member of marketing, communications, support, or whoever the community is run by, you’re probably accustom to being asked for a variety of metrics and ways to prove success, profitability, and efficiency. But where in the world do you start? This session will help guide you through some of the actual practices of putting numbers to work. We’ll go through some simple ways of creating valuable and easy to understand analyses, how to find something worthwhile in the massive data files, and ways of sharing your mathematical discoveries with others in easy and comprehensive manners.”

Jillian said numbers are your friends, but data analysts are needed. There will be 190,000 data analysts needed by 2018. Community managers need to have analytical skills. Jillian realized she needed to develop her analytical skills as a community manager. She said that many questions that managers are asked are actually numbers questions. You need to know where to start.

Jillian said she came from an engineering background where you are taught to think. She asked how you solve a community problem using techniques from a physics problem. There is known and unknown information and formulas to help us get from start to finish.  For example, what if you are asked is the community is fast enough in its responsiveness.  You need to ask a few more questions to clarify the question.  Who is the result for? Who is the question about? Who are the players in the formula? Who can help me find the answers I need?  Answer these questions first before you start to create the required report.

Then ask when is the answer due? Is there a relevant date range? Will this report be recurring?  Is this a one off the situation is quite different. If it is recurring be sure to notice lessons learned for the next iteration.

Then ask “how” questions. How will I get my data? How will I share my data? How will I verify my results?  Look to see how accessible the data is and will it be available on an ongoing basis.  Be sure to be able to share the raw data.

Then ask the “what” questions. What are my constants? What don’t I know? What is the end goal? What could go wrong and slow me down? What is the best possible outcome?

After asking the questions fill in the knowns, determine the assumptions, and determine the unknowns. So after the data collection what do you do next? You want to consolidate it. Narrow down the essential data and ignore the rest for the moment if related questions show up.  Then solve the assigned question. Be sure to double check for mistakes and consistency. They do happen.

Now create the report. Use visualizations and graphics. Then think before you share. Keep in mind who you are sharing the data with. Is there sensitive data? Will someone be doing further analysis? Is it a written report or a presentation? Will you get follow up calls on additional questions? Anticipate possible questions.

Four major take ways: First, before you start, make sure you know what your goals are. This will save a lot of time, effort, and embarrassment. Second, listen to your brain. If something catches your eye note it. It may be important. It may be useful later. Remember nine out of ten times your first guess is your right answer. Third, chill out when chaos breaks out. Be focused on the big picture and do not freak out over little stuff. There will be anticipated things. Fourth, focus on one metric at a time.

This was a really clear and useful presentation.

 

 

 

Boston E20 Notes: Building an Online Community from Strategy, Planning, and Launch to Effective Engagement and Adoption

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. This is another of my notes from this year. There will be more to follow. I attended Catherine Shinner’s session - Building an Online Community from Strategy, Planning, and Launch to Effective Engagement and Adoption.  Catherine is a Partner with me at the Merced Group. Here is the session description:

“Building and supporting community is a powerful way to build leadership relationships, connect with customers to improve service and accelerate innovation or transform internal organizational productivity. Yet sometimes organizations grab a packaged-off-the-shelf community offering and launch a site and find that it is not gaining the engagement and adoption that was hoped for. If you’re thinking of building an online community or have started on the path, but are not sure you have all the elements in place, this session will provide you with a roadmap to community strategy, planning, launch and early stage adoption, and engagement practices.

The session will guide you through a community strategy process that is aligned with the business strategy, identifying and surveying stakeholders, accurately assessing and clarifying the unmet needs of the community stakeholders to drive the user experience, content and programming plans. Using a case example of an online community for education leaders, the session speaker will outline considerations for staffing and resourcing a community, engaging constituencies through social media, marketing and communications efforts for adoption engagement, analytics and Key Performance Indicator development to assess health of the community.”

Catherine pointed out the changes in the conference that reflect changes in the importance of online communities. In 2007 there was only one session on communities and now it is a major theme.  She began with why communities matter from a strategic perspective. She showed some research that shows the change in relative asset base of S&P companies shifted from tangible assets to intangible assets. In 1982 38% of assets were intangible. In 1999 84% of assets were intangible and I am sure it is higher now. This is a major transformation. However, companies still relate to their workforce as though it was 1950 and focus on top down management build on running a company based on tangible assets. Now the value in companies lies in the ability to connect people to optimize their intangible assets but this is largely untapped. Communities are a major way to do this.

Now we have the networked enterprise, using McKinsey term. They found quantified margins gains in companies that were networked. There are many quantified benefits. There are many quantified benefits. First 77% said the tools increased the speed of access to knowledge, 60% said they reduced communication coats, 52% said they increased speed of access to internal experts, 44% found a reduction in travel costs, and 40% found increased employee satisfaction. For more detail see - Enterprise 2.0 Finds Its Pay Day – McKinsey and How social technologies are extending the organization.  

In last few years some companies have embraced external facing communities to extend their relationships with their partners and customers. She gave an example of a 21-year-old neighbor who learns everything to work on his car through an online community. Also, companies that use communities inside the enterprise can benefit. Companies often focus on solely on major efforts. Communities can help pick up the smaller, more incremental improvements to complement the major efforts.  Communities can be a low cost way to improve your business results on an ongoing basis.

Next she went over some community principles. First you need to bring your stakeholders into lifecycle of a community. Communities have a unique set of dynamics: These include: Participation, Collective Transparency, Independence, Persistence, and Emergence. 

Catherine quoted Philip Evans and Bob Wolf in the Harvard Busienss Review article, Collaboration Rules, “where trust is the currency, reputation is the source of power.”

Catherine offered a research-based community lifecycle: inception, establishment, growth, and maturity.  Each stage has considerations for growth stewardship and growth. You need active community management and executive leadership at each stage.

In stage one you need to engage and education your stakeholders: identify strategic business alignment: plan for inception & establishment; determine critical success factors and KPIs for early phases; and lay groundwork & infrastructure for growth and maturity phases

A key first step is to identify your business strategy and create alignment with community. Internal and external facing communities have different sets of goals. For example external; communities often look at customer engagement and revenue and internal communities look at productivity increases.

She next offered a community business model. Then she provided a sample community architecture. The main sections include: Community Management; Content and Events Programming; Social Media, Marketing, Communications; Platform UX, Analytics; Operations, and Governance.

Community management is a key component and this is a new breed of business management. This role remains vital throughout the four life cycles. Another role is expert curation. When you are creating a community you need to bring relevant content to offer value to the members to provide value and give them something to discuss and expand on.

The crucial success factors include: effective education of stakeholders, active executive sponsorship, proper resources for the entire lifecycle, metrics relevant to your business purpose, comprehensive governance, technology, and user experience needs to be attuned to your audience.

In stage two – establishment, you need to cultivate and facilitate along a spectrum of engagement, the active contributors, the passive contributors, and lurkers. You need to establish recognition to encourage volunteer engagement. There needs to be a regular cadence of events, programs, and communications. You need to refine resource requirements for growth. You need internal and eternal; advocacy, partnerships in place, and active cycle of engagement, analytics aligned with business purpose, and benchmarking along with active listening.  

She next offered a cycle of engagement where content is feed into the community; it is refreshed through conversations; social media is used for additional relevant content discovery, and the cycle is repeated.

Then Catherine covered the growth stage. Now the community needs to have a shared sense of ownership. There needs to volunteer programs and empowered leaders, and the UX and analytic evolves with sophistication of community engagement.

 

 

 

Boston E20 Notes: The Iceberg Effect of Community Management

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. This is another of my notes for this year. There will be more to follow. I attended session - The Iceberg Effect of Community Management led by Rachel Happe, Principal, The Community Roundtable and Jason Quesada, Digital Media Marketing Manager, UBM TechWeb. Here is the session description:

“Do you know what community managers really do? You may think they sit at their desks and chat online all day, and while that is definitely a part of it, community management is more than just tweets, likes, and pings. In many ways, what people see the community manager doing is just the tip of the iceberg. A big part of the job includes back channeling, internal evangelism, making connections, researching, tool management, measurement, collaborating with colleagues and conflict resolution. In this session, Rachel Happe of The Community Roundtable and Jason Quesada of UBM TechWeb will take you through the discipline of community management - sharing how to think about a community, why community management is important and why communities just don't manage themselves.”

Rachel began by discussing the iceberg effect of community management as much of the work of community managers is not visible. She defined a  community as a group of people with unique shared values, behaviors, and artifacts.  Jason manages a community that is focused on innovation revenue about their business of managing events. Community management is a different way of working. It requires people to opt into to their participation. Rachel asked for a show of hands and about half of the audience are community managers, equally balanced between internal and external communities.

Community management is a tighter interlinking of people with a shared purpose. Social media is more hub and spoke while community management is more like an interlinking web. Communities take a while to form and thus provide a benefit. Other initiatives usually show benefits sooner than communities because the effects take a while to appear. So sometimes they seem a failure before they seem a success.

Communities mature and change. There is a lot of unfinished work but once you get the behavior change, a lot of energy can be developed. So growth and benefits can lag and then spike.  She showed the Community Roundtable community maturity model (see State of Community Management 2011).

Community Management is the task of managing successful communities. Jason said the online community management involves a lot of content curation and being a connector between participants. People participate in communities if they get more value than they give. So you have to work hard to provide this value. This leads to the iceberg effect. So much of the initial work is evangelizing the community and this involves a lot of back channel work. Peer influence is much greater that authority management. So you are trying to organize peer pressure to get what you want. If you can effectively do this you get people on your side. 

Some community managers create content and others elicit it. Be careful to not shut down conversation by being too present. Jason said he does many things all day. He curates content. He checks industry related news for things of interest to his community to generate conversations. He checks to see if there are any unanswered questions. He does a lot of promotion and giving recognition to encourage participation. Also, he tries to meet face to face where possible to establish a connection.  Jason said when setting up a meeting, always include free donuts.

Rachel discussed the biggest risks of not having community management. One is a ghost town where no is talking. Once Jason started managing the community there was a huge spike in engagement and contribution. Another risk is too much disconnected content and conversation. Jason created a directory where people can find other colleagues with similar interests. This can focus conversations more along common interests. Jason also said to delete stuff that is to being used and it will clear clutter.

Also you can get drama central where some people just talk for the sake of it. There is also the circling storm where a potential problem is not attended to and it can become a crisis. Listen and respond to potential issues before they can become a storm. There so can be a situation where cliques form that creates a social barrier to others to contribute.

So what makes a good community manager? Skills needed include: good communication, ability to match brand’s personality, understanding of human motivation and use this understanding for constructive purposes. You also need to be able to resolve conflicts.  You need to have good judgment, empathy, adaptability, and self-awareness. Jason added that you need to have a sense of humor and love what you do.

Rachel discussed how to build a thriving community. Communities change and grow and you need to adapt to this and experiment. Sometimes ideas do not work at first but later work. You need to understand your community members. Jason looks at the usage reports and sees which people are contributing and thanks them and looks at those that are not and asks how can I help you get involved.

There needs to be good new content daily if you want people to come on a daily basis. A regular weekly reports or tips can cause anticipation and engagement. Be sure to be welcoming to get people engaged in the first week.  Then they are more likely to stay involved. Jason said that his firm does a weekly welcome of new employees, who they are, what they like. Rachel added: give new people things to do right away. Provide a guide. Be a connector. Foster conversation Jason mentioned a conversation he helped start in the community and innovation that spread globally.  Rachel said the manager can post things for other members that might be shy.

Be sure to teach the communities. Communities are about learning at their core. Jason said to do not call them training sessions because people will be passive.  Offer rewards and these rewards can come in a variety of ways. Jason said you get points for creating content and answering questions in his systems. They have levels of participation and encourage people to rise up the levels.  

Be sure to have rules. Encourage people who are passionate. Jason creates a task force for these people and even lets them run the community for a short period.  Be sure to stay on the topics of interest and expand on them rather than introducing off-topic content. Be sure content is related to the hot topics. Be sure to not ignore concerns. You need to at least acknowledge concerns.

Be multi-modal in your content to address they different ways people learn. Experiment here. Jason uses a lot of video, as his community likes the visuals. Pictures are also used a lot. Protect the community from disruption from people who want to take advantage of the community. Lastly, be human and have some fun and try new things. 

 

Boston E20 Notes: Organization Next Workshop: Bridging the Participation Gap – Networks, Learning, and "Play"

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes - This is the first set of notes. There will be many more to follow. I attended workshop hosted by Mike Gotta - Organization Next: Bridging the Participation Gap – Networks, Learning, and "Play".  Mike is now Senior Technical Solution Manager for Enterprise Social Software, Cisco. I attended another workshop he did in 2009 - Reality 2.0: Getting Started with Enterprise Social Networking - and found it very worthwhile. Here is the session description for this year’s workshop:

“Companies are becoming more reliant on their employee’s ability to thrive in a complex work environment where relationships, projects, processes, and business priorities are in a constant state of flux. Employees need to expect the unexpected – to “figure out” the best way to handle exceptions – to self-synchronize their work with the activities of their colleagues – to make decisions collectively rather than waiting on top-down direction from management. In this Organization Next environment, we are also operating in a economic period where the “social contract” between employer and “employee” is being transformed. Employees (whatever that term means in the future) must continually build and refine individual competencies, team work practices, and community relationships while becoming skillful at cultivating and mobilizing their professional and personal networks to meet the needs of their employer – as well as their own.”

Mike started by doing a overview of the conference and then introduced Josh Greenbaum, who said he is an industry analyst and his job is to be skeptical of new technology.  Engagement is one of the fundamental issues facing enterprise today. It will always be hard but it is even more important today. People are more and more looking at people as strategic assets.  

Talent management is a starting point for a discussion for how we work with people. Technology is not the answer and can be a barrier. However, we usually start with the latest technology and this approach does not work. So what do we do with people? Drew Rabin, Booz Allen and Phil Jackson, CIGNA came up next to join Josh. CIGNA is rebranding itself from a health insurance company to be a health services company and Phil is learning specialist. Drew is a Senior Learning Consultant at Deloitte.  

Drew said that employee engagement is often referred to having employees do more than is required. But there are many different definitions. Phil mentioned the generational diversity issues in engagement. Josh said engagement is often either what is done to or for employees. The right question is how do we make it a win-win situation? Drew said what is the difference between engagement and satisfaction. How do you get employees to adopt a business owner mentality that leads more to engagement than satisfaction. To get it to work it has to be mutually beneficial so the company and employee both feel rewarded.

Drew said that engaged employees are 20% - 30% more productivity so that is a win for the company. So what is the win for the employee? He referred to Daniel Pink’s ideas on this and the new construct of motivation for the employee. Josh asked should the engaged employee be more rewarded? Phil said it is not magical. Phil said he is in learning and studied it but most people in learning just fell into on the job. He tries to look at things holistically and not in simple behavioristic ways of stimulus and reward.  I would certainly agree with this.

Drew said he studied school systems on engagement.  The keys are recruitment, recognition, and retention. In a gamification system you can give people status and incentives through rewards.  In one IT company gamification increased engagement by ten fold but the engaged activity was done by one third of the people. Studies shown that about two thirds of employees are not engaged so the effort just got to the already engaged to be more engaged in through game stuff.

Phil said in most online communities 90% will be passive onlookers, 9% will be takers, and 1% will be actively engaged. So you need to work on the 1% to get them effective. Are the senior management involved is a key question here?  Drew asked how to do create fans, people who are actively involved and who are fanatical in a positive way.  Conflict creates engagement. You can get strangers involved in something they are passionate about. This is the goal in gamification but it is not the tool that drives success but finding these types of people.

Phil mentioned that peer learning has been around for a long time. The idea of competition is also an old one. What is different now is the relationship with your employer. People move around from company to company and have much looser relationships with their employer so engagement takes a different form.  He liked it when they introduced people profiles at Deloitte. (see my series on their implementation when I interviewed Walton Smith who led the effort - Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: The Series). Phil worked at home and got to know so many more people with similar issues and concerns. The technology made the connections but it only worked because it enabled what people wanted to do anyway.

Josh asked about the “big brother” issues in engagement. Drew said that first no one is anonymous.  He gave an example of GPS enabled ads that make use of personal data for personalized marketing. Phil said sometimes data security concerns for the company gets in the way of doing things.

Drew said they are looking a BYOD policy but the Federal government is their main client where security is a big issue. Employees have to give up some privacy rights when they get involved with BYOD. How can you protect security breaches?

Mike Gotta said we are used to designing IT systems for business process. How do IT people design for games? This is a new area. How can you develop specs to build these games. Josh said you have to build ROI into the process. Phil said the idea of ROI is difficult in the world of learning. Drew talked about ROE – return on expectations (of senior leadership). The front line manager is the biggest driver of engagement. People often do not leave their companies, they leave their bosses.  Josh said that in consumer marketing there is strong ROI data. This is the one area.

Julie LeMonie and Jim Kendall came up next. Julie has been involved in social computing and augmented realities for several decades. She said topics now trending are: more mobile, avatars getting more real, more interactive social, and co-location of teams going away. The majority of teams are now not co-located. There is now embedded video so you can be virtually co-located.

She has picked five uses cases: Using micro-blogging for ideation was the first. People tweet at conferences for idea sharing. You can use it within the enterprise also. Give people permission to type while you talk. Make sure people have access to their devices. Make sure you have micro-blogging available. Have trusted reviewers. Get the most senior speakers and let people comment on what they are saying.  Have a screen with slides and one screen with the live feed. Understand the culture issues. Use the “correction trick” by having people planted to say things that are left out on purpose.  Have people who already know the message reading the stream of comments on the message and picking out the good stuff. This seems to me like the old discussion treads.

The next two use cases were social gaming.  Gaming with crowdsourcing applied to hard stuff to solve problems. Microsoft did this for Windows7 release. They took a snap shoot of the screen in every language of the testers for their game. They allowed people for whom English is a second language to see a screen and use their first language and see English also. It became a global team building and saved millions in the release.

The second use case was to improve search relevance, another hard issue. They gave people a task and watched people doing relevant search and made adjustments based on their observations. It had all the game issues with leader boards, etc but no money. People got very involved.

Issues to consider when creating game situations: address real problems, require no specialty training, have no overlap with real job, ask for limited effort to contribute, and elicit engagement through good citizenship In the Windows 7 case, pride of country.

Jim talked about another use case. Jim said he was a skeptic on gaming. His company performs clinical trials for biotech firms. They do a lot of partnering in this process including independent investigators that they have to motivate. They are in a very regulated industry. They need to make sure investigators follow the right processes and regulations. They also need to make sure there is informed consent by patients.  The gaming had to contend with these issues.

They had clear goals. The first was to improve quality. The existing training does not work for most people. The game was to make compliance better. They wanted collaborative training for more engagement.  They simplified the experience after experimenting with it. They put context into the game, as many investigators would skip training thinking they know the content but often they do not. So these issues were put into the game. The cost of a clinical trial is about $1miilion a day so making them more efficient can make for big cost savings and also get the benefits of the drug quicker to market.

Julie said that recreational gaming is different than enterprise gaming. You want the enterprise game to be simple and not addictive so they do not spend too much time away from work but solve a problem and get engagement in solving this problem. You need an issue that the employees care about.  You also need to decide who should play and who should not involve. Some people are too busy or not relevant.

Another game was used to prune knowledge from a knowledge management system and the sunset issue in knowledge management can be a difficult one.

Next, Ben Brooks spoke. He runs the Human Care Performance group for Marsh. His company is a very conservative 140-year-old insurance firm.  The last decade was difficult for Marsh. He joined two years ago after this dark period and they were very risk adverse, even more than in the past. They needed to change to conversation from survive to growth and success.  The CEO declared the company was fixed so now let’s talk about growth. Focus on the best rather than the rotten apples.

They wanted to expand recognition. They did an inventory and found 56 recognition programs already in place but they were inconsistent. So another was not the answer but changing the culture was the requirement. The situation was that people only wanted to work with people they knew. In this case they were very collaborative but that they needed to expand this collaboration beyond known people.

They created March University. They found that only 10% of learning came from formal learning. Informal learning counts for 70% of learning. They wanted to focus on informal learning to burn off the organizational fog to make connections easier to find. They have a lot of deep knowledge but it is often not accessible. They also want it to be fun. They want people to get to know each other. They needed to deal with change management on tool use. Their motto was everyone Is a teacher. The question was what will you teach? They got a huge response. They wanted learning to be informal and atomized so your best performers will take the time to do it. They wanted learning to embedded in the work process. They also wanted learning to be social.

They wanted to source photos internally rather than paying a stock image firm. They got a huge response. It became a photo contest than got very high engagement.

They also launched a certified blogger program to teach people who to do it right and not simply develop policies and hope people will follow them. Good idea. They also found ways to get non-sales people involved in sales as experts by making to process more open. They focused on the 1% of active contributors, and also provide some focus on the 9% of passive contributors so they would give reinforcement to the 1%. They have raised the active contributors level from 1% to 4%. Visibility and recognition were the drivers. They found that people age 45 – 60 are most likely to be bloggers. They wanted to share their experiences.

Top ten takeaways:

Find a problem

Make learning covert

Go where there is energy

Create an engagement aligned with strategy.

Burn off organizational fog- create a hub for spokes

Cut the IT/HR/Social media crap – talk business

Make it easy and fun

Design a game and keep score – keep it simple

Treat colleagues like customers

Make everyone a teacher

 

 

 

Talking About Social Business with IBM at SXSW

Here is an interview that I did with IBM at the recent SXSW Interactive in Austin, IBM @ SXSW 2012: Interview with Bill Ives, a partner with the Merced Group. It was my first time there. Here is a link to a summary of my posts on the event.  I was asked about success factors in making social business work within the enterprise. I talked about the need for integration of both the tools and the people with business processes and added:

“And part of that is cultural and part of that is the thought process. And one of the reasons why I like the term social business rather than enterprise 2.0 is that it's both sides of the equation. And I've presented at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference several years. I did a panel on Twitter, I did a panel on blogs. And I had people in the audience saying, well, what does this have to do with the enterprise? And I was thinking to myself, and I think even said out loud, this is the problem with our mindset. You need to align what's inside with what's outside. And that's what social business does.”

I later added:

“Which gets to the one other point that I wanted to make about integration. And I've written some sort of intentionally iconoclastic blog posts about, maybe enterprise 2.0 is about the technology, because you go to these conferences and everybody says, oh, it's not about the technology. I was even on the panel where it says, you know, it's 90 percent people, 10 percent technology except people use the budgets in the inverse relationship. But what's key is you've got to get the systems of engagement, the social business, talking to the systems of record, the enterprise applications. And so you have to have that integration, and otherwise all you're doing is recording water cooler chat.”

I concluded:

“I think you have to be aligned with a business problem. I never saw a knowledge management system that was not business process aligned succeed. And when the social tools came out, I thought, well maybe this is the thing like, okay, you throw out at a wiki see what people do, so, maybe this is the case. And I've completely reversed that thinking. You've got to be able to align the enterprise social business tools with a business process and business process tools. And all that works together. So you have to be able to solve a business problem.”

Thanks to IBM for the chance to talk about these issues.