Portals and KM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2013 Global Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) Winners

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

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

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

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

Tweetzup Creates a Blogger Page

Going into 2014 I remain very much a part of Darwin Ecosystem and excited about our latest offering, Tweetzup. The Darwin’s organic temporal curation engine improves Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ranking by including in real-time collections of correlated tags (Keyword Memes) from current tweets -- You have seen them in action on our tweetzup.com and TheEnergyPulse.com sites. Here is a post on Darwin Ecosystem’s Keyword Memes™ Drawn From Tweets.

Now they have introduced a Blogger Page. It allows you to follow topics that you are interested. I created a page for the hash tag #nola – for my home town New Orleans. It is hash tag I follow in Tweet deck but is hard to get an overview as tweets flash by. With Tweetzup you can see and explore trending topics. Below is a screen shot of the hash tag on December 6. The major topics of that day centered around the re-trail of NOPD officer David Warren in the shooting and subsequent cover up of Henry Glover’s death. This makes sense. This real life event was also part of the story line in the excellent HBO series Treme. 

For more information, please contact our CEO, Thierry Hubert, directly as we are seeking strategic clients and alliances to bring this next-generation SEO improvement innovation to the market. You can reach him at [email protected]. 

Big Data Analysis Continues to Grow

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

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

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

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

All Types of Cloud Usage Continues to Expand

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

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

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

Research: Social Software Appeals More to Older Workers

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

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

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

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

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

The Growth of Personal Cloud Storage

I keep reading about more uses of the cloud and it all makes sense.  Now it is moving from the business world to the consumer world.  Although aspects of the cloud have long been in the consumer world also.  As Brandon Butler writes in Network World, Gartner predicts that 1/3 of consumer data will be stored in the cloud by '16. Social media sites like Facebook are the near-term repositories for cloud-based data storage, but other vendors will have opportunities to grab consumer market share, Gartner predicts

Now only about 7% of personal data is stored in the cloud. However, Gartner researchers note that the ability for consumers to capture data on their smartphones and tablets, using cameras and video recording devices, will drive the data storage requirements beyond the capacity of a personal computer hard drive or an external hard drive. In addition, the arrival of technology allowing data to be automatically uploaded to the cloud, supports their predict that 36% of consumer data will be stored in the cloud within four years.

Brandon quotes Gartner principal research analyst Shalini Verma, "Cloud storage will grow with the emergence of the personal cloud, which in turn will simplify the direct-to-cloud model, allowing users to directly store user-generated content in the cloud. As storage becomes a part of the personal cloud, it will become further commoditized. Therefore, online storage and sync companies need to have a strategic rethink about their future approach."

One vendor to take advantage of this trend in Carbonite. Carbonite provides online backups for your personal computer. It works in the background when you are connected to the Web but not using a Web application so as to not reduce performance. I spoke with David Friend, CEO of Boston-based Carbonite in 2008. He got the idea when a series of mishaps occurred in 2005. David looked into the market research and found that for consumers and small businesses only 3% do a good job of backing up files. When people have to actively do something like export files to an external hard drive, they generally do not do it. So he and his partner, Jeff Flowers, designed an online backup service that works in the background with the price point of $50 a year for unlimited storage.

David said they have now backed up over 3.5 billion files and are adding 32 million files a day and this was 2008. The company had double digit month over month revenue growth for the past 22 months at that time. I see their ads on TV now and I am sure they are continuing to grow. I still use an external drive for back up but I may add the cloud for redundacy. 

 

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. 

 

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. 

 

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?

 

Future of Cloud Computing Survey - North Bridge Venture Partners

I am now moving to a summer schedule of three posts during the busienss week (Monday, Wednesdasy, and Friday) but will continue the two fun ones on the weekend as it is the summer. I am going to be travelling a lot but will be connencted most of the time. 

North Bridge Venture Partners has released the results of its second annual Future of Cloud Computing Survey. The research was supported by 39 industry collaborators, including Scribe Software. The 2012 survey captures current industry perceptions, sentiments and emerging trends in cloud computing. A total of 785 participants, spanning industry experts, users and vendors responded to the survey. This was an increase over the 417 participants in last year’s survey. The majority of respondents were in the C suite, while line of business and IT managers were next in line with about equal rates.

The results indicated that companies are increasing their trust in cloud solutions, with 50 percent of respondents confident that cloud solutions are viable for such mission critical business applications as e-mail and CRM. The top reason for adopting the cloud was scalability, with 57 percent of companies identifying it as the most important driver for cloud adoption. Business agility was ranked second in the drivers for cloud adoption, with 54 percent of respondents focused on agility.

The primary inhibitor to adoption remains security concerns in the growing cloud marketplace with 55 percent of respondents identifying it as a concern. It was followed by regulatory compliance (38%) and vendor lock-in (32%).

The majority of respondents (53 percent) believe that cloud computing provides a lower total cost of ownership and also creates a less complex IT workflow. At the same time, over a third of respondents (38 percent) claim no impact on IT hiring as a result of cloud technologies.

This is part a growing body of research that supports the growth of the cloud. The report concluded that investment is rocking but there is still work to do. There is six times more spending on SaaS as compared to other software. 

 

TIBCO Upgrades tibbr with GEO and Other New Capabilities

I have covered TIBCO before (see: TIBCO Spotfire Brings Self-Service Data Analysis to the Enterprise with a Social Twist). Recently I spoke with Ram Menon, TIBCO President of Social Computing about their upgraded social business offering. TIBCO has been a leader in making the digital world connect for quite some time.  So when they turned to social business software connectivity was naturally a sweet spot for them. It is also essential for social business to work as I have written several times (see for example, Maybe Enterprise 2.0 Is About the Technology).

So Ram and I were of the same mind from the start. If you need to get work done, then you need to have all the resources together and connected. As Ram said, in the enterprise it is not enough to like and share, you have to act. I could not agree more.

TIBCO launched tibbr, a heavy duty and secure social platform a year ago and is approaching 1M users at companies like Macy's, KPMG, and shipping giant OOCL. Now they are adding a number of new features. There are five guiding principles in this effort. First, you need to be able to have users get started right away and it needs to be easy to use. The consumer Web has set this expectation and reduced budgets demand it. Gone are the days of six month IT projects and extensive employee training programs. Here is a sample user’s view of tibbr.

Second, tibbr provides the option for cloud technology or on-premise installations. You need to be able to provision the service quickly. They were able to get 19,000 MGM employees up and running in a single afternoon. This doubles down on the first goal.

Third, context has become king more than content. They have introduced subject filters to their activity streams so you take out the fire hose effect. You filter on customers, customers in North America, government customers in North America, etc. so you can adjust the level of granularity to see just what you want.   

Fourth, the system adheres to the way people work. They found that 63% of tibbr users operate on a mobile basis so they support all mobile devices and the latest version 3.5 had HTML5.  They are also integrating video conferencing. While they find that many people are migrating their work from email to tibbr, you can still post and receive tibbr content through email for those holdouts. Here is a sample mobile screen for a grocery store.

Fifth, you need to make IT happy. So they have focused on such issues as compliance and risk management. They also offer an on-premise version for the same price as the cloud version.

Next I ask Ram about the tibbr GEO function. Ram said that with tools like Foursquare you have to check in. This is not likely to happen in the enterprise. So they turned the consumer ‘check-in’ model on its head for the enterprise. Tibbr GEO is turns physical places into data hubs that can immediately stream important insights relevant to that specific place. Instead of checking in to a location, the location checks into you – and brings you the relevant information, helping you discover important insights and work faster wherever you are. 

tibbr GEO gives companies the ability to tag important places, whether in the enterprise or as part of the extended enterprise. As tibbr users approach these places, they’re automatically presented relevant in-stream information. The airline industry is a good example. An airline gate agents can get notified of all the relevant information as they approach the gate.  You can see personal information, changes in schedules, catering updates right from your mobile phone as you arrive at the destination. Here's a link to a useful tibbr geo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1p3ugA55T8

I really like what they are doing, especially the five principles, the use of filters for the activity stream and the creative way they have applied location specific information. I look forward to seeing what is next.

 

 

 

Novell GroupWise 2012 Offers Enhanced Collaboration Capabilities

I have written about Novell products before, including Novell Pulse and Novell Teaming, and was pleased to recently speak with Kari Woolf, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Novell GroupWise and Dean Lythgoe, Director, Product Management, Novell Collaboration Solutions. The first question I had was the relationship between GroupWise, Pulse and Teaming.

The answer allowed Kari to explain how they have regrouped their collaboration product line. GroupWise is the individual collaboration tool that includes email and other features. Novell Vibe is the new name for their team collaboration tool, replacing Teaming and has new features. The most important capabilities of Pulse were added to both GroupWise and Vibe and it is no longer a separate product. They also took the very important step of completely integrating GroupWise and Vibe.  Here is a sample screen showing the integration of Groupwise and Vibe. 

There are two additional products in the collaboration suite. Novell Data Synchronizer handles mobile connections and third party integration such as CRM systems. This is a critical capability because, as I have written several times, you need to be able to integrate the new school social tools with the old school enterprise apps for enterprise 2.0 to really work. (see for example: Integrating the Interactions with the Transactions). The other tool is Novell Messenger and it handles IM and presence. It comes with both GroupWise and Vibe. 

Kari also shared some interesting data (provided by Osterman Research) that shows that email is still quite prevalent. The average worker spends 134 minutes a day on email, 61 minutes on the phone, 28 minutes on SMS and other related tools, and 11 minutes on social networking tools. This covers a little less than half the workday. It makes sense but I spend more time on Twitter and it is usually in short moments of “found” time. I also think that those who work at home, like me, are more likely to want this virtual outreach.  

GroupWise 2012 and Vibe 3.2 are client/server apps and with hosted options available through third parties. The GroupWise Vibe integration allows for search queries with results from each, live Vibe data in email messages and embedded Vibe workspaces in the GroupWise folder list. GroupWise also provides icon badges for emails from such tools as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Vibe. There is also Skype integration providingclick to call, presence, and embedded SMS. This is a very useful feature. Below is a sample Skype screen.

There is also an improved Web version of GroupWise as more clients have requested this and you can see the screen below.

Novell has long had support for smart phones including iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, and Symbian. Now they have web templates specifically designed for the iPad to take advantage of its tablet features. You can view and select folders, compose and read: mail, appointments, tasks, and reminders. There is also calendar and name completion.  Below is a sample iPad screen.

I like what they are doing in both reorganizing their product line in a way that makes sense and their focus on integration that is essential. The seamless move between email and the team collaboration platform will make collaboration very efficient. 

 

eXo Provides Cloud Workspaces to Enable Flexible Social Intranets

I have covered eXo before (see Benjamin Mestrallet, eXo CEO, Looks at the Social Enterprise). Recently, I had a chance to speak with Benjamin again about their latest offering. He said that the goal with eXo Cloud Workspaces is to provide an easy-to-use social intranet so work teams can start to collaborate in a fully functional space.  He feels that there is a gap between simple activity stream-based tools and the full-function enterprise collaboration platforms, including their own eXo Platform 3.5. So they are now offering eXo Cloud Workspaces to fill this gap. Here is a sample home page screen.

eXo Cloud Workspaces offers out-of-the-box social intranet features for small teams that can be scalable to meet the IT needs of the enterprise. For the last eight years, eXo has been selling its comprehensive on-premise collaboration platform to large organizations. eXo Platform 3.0 added social intranet features to that collaboration platform, then eXo Platform 3.5 added low-level features that enable the delivery of hosted services, such as Cloud Workspaces. eXo can now meet the needs of large enterprises, as well as the needs of smaller firms that want a low-cost, on-demand social intranet and collaboration service. For small firms that eventually need more capability and want to go inside the enterprise, they can easily migrate from Cloud Workspaces to eXo Platform 3.5 on-premise or in a private cloud. Here you can see a sample screen from the enterprise wiki as mentioned below.

eXo Cloud Workspaces (Beta) is a fully-functional, cloud-based service hosted by eXo. It offers a full range of social intranet and enterprise portal features, including:

• Content Management System features, including the ability to store, share, version and organize documents.
• Built-in collaboration tools, including an enterprise-grade wiki, discussion forum, and shared calendar components.
• Social network components, including the ability to create/follow activity streams, create work groups, and more.
• Embedded integrated development environment (IDE), enabling the ability to develop, customize and extend the social intranet capabilities on the fly (and with one-click ease-of-deployment).
• Secure mobile access to documents, activities and apps from iOS and Android-based devices. Below are some sample mobile screens.

Here also is a sample of the shared calendar feature.

It comes with REST APIs for two-way integration with enterprise apps. This is a critical feature as I have often written about (see Integrating the Interactions with the Transactions). There is also an online development tool – eXo Cloud IDE that allows developers to create apps in the cloud without having to go through traditional IT channels and backlogs. The integration can be extended beyond simple connections to create mashups with tools like Salesforce.com. For even more complex integrations, Cloud Workspaces-based sites can be easily migrated from the eXo cloud to a deployment of eXo Platform 3.5 on premises or in a private cloud setting. Here is a sample IDE screen.

eXo Cloud Workspaces will be initially offered as a free application. You can sign up at their site (www.cloud-workspaces.com/). This free application will also remain available. At some point, a paid premium version will also become available with more storage and other capabilities. I like what they are doing and will be exploring Cloud Workspaces further.

 

 

 

 

State of Customer Data Integration in 2012

In February 2012, Scribe Software surveyed 300 business leaders and channel partners to uncover opportunities and challenges associated with customer data integration. “The State of Customer Data Integration in 2012” report contains input from C-level executives, business analysts and IT engineers, and systems integrators and consultants who design and implement data integration for their enterprise clients.

In summary, Customer data integration can play a critical role in addressing operational challenges in sales, marketing and customer service. It increases CRM systems’ adoption and satisfaction. Yet, many businesses lack a solid framework for planning and implementing CRM and other systems integrations that would be most beneficial to their business and have the greatest operational impact.

Cloud systems are less integrated than on-premise: 33% of businesses operating within cloud-only environments report their systems are not integrated compared to 9% for those who operate fully on-premise. Although 40% of businesses report increased investment in customer-facing systems in 2012, they still have a long way to go to – only 15% report full integration among their systems. Third-party systems integrators are key to CRM integration success - businesses using them see less risk and greater cost savings than those that tackle integration projects without an outside partner.

It was interesting to that CRM is main focus customer-facing enterprise systems (100% adoption), followed by Business Intelligence (BI) (72%) and Sales Force Automation (SFA) applications (56%). Surprisingly, investment in Social CRM (46%) precedes Marketing Automation (30%) and Customer Services application (27%). The reported under-deployment of Marketing Automation and Customer Service systems is likely due to these functions increasingly being included as part of the CRM systems. I would have to agree with this conclusion, as I cannot see only 27% of firms with customer service apps. This possible integration is an interesting fact in itself. I have seen it operating in the marketplace.

The main challenge as reported above is that, “many CRM systems remain an island in the business. Integration should be considered a key part of any CRM or customer facing system initiative to get maximum operational benefit and return on investment.” Integration across the enterprise between old school enterprise apps and new school social ones is the key to creating the connected enterprise. Application like CRM are the systems of record and the new social tools become the systems of engagement driving up usage and benefit, But this benefits will not occur without greater integration. This free useful report points out a major gap that needs to be addressed within enterprise architectures and adds some useful ROI data related to CRM data integration. I recommend taking a look at the results if you want to get full value from your CRM investments.

 

 

WebDAM and Box Collaborate to Streamline Digital Asset Management and File Sharing

WebDAM Solutions, the cloud-based digital asset management (DAM) provider, recently announced a technology collaboration with Box, the content-sharing platform, to provide streamlined digital asset management features to Box users. I have written about Box before (see Box.net Updates Interface and Becomes More Social).

I spoke with Ron Selvey, Marketing Manager at WebDaAM to get background on this move.  Ron said that Box has adopted a great strategy of integrating with best of breed complementary apps. They paired up with WebDAM to establish a two-way integration capability. This offers Box users even greater efficiency when managing rich media files. It gives them streamlined workflow and automates many steps. As more firms are using rich media, especially marketing communications companies, this is a good move.

Now you can send files into Box for collaboration and into WebDAM for workflow tasks, such as approvals. Box users can easily open, edit, share, and save collateral from WebDAM or send files to WebDAM for control over marketing assets, rights management, conduct batch conversions, quick browsing, search, and automated sharing of marketing collateral (brand assets, images, graphics, videos, sales collateral, presentations, and more). The integration also provides a path for WebDAM’s marketing users to send content for real-time collaboration with Box users despite different systems, applications, and departments.

Both Box and WebDAM offer user-friendly interfaces, simple-yet-comprehensive features, and anytime/anywhere access to content so this should be a benefit to the rich media process. This move is consistent with the larger trend of increased application integration, especially between systems of engagement and systems of record. The WebDAM App for Box is available to both WebDAM and Box users — starting today.

 

 

Cisco Expands Its Cloud Collaboration Strategy

I have written extensively on Cisco’s I-prize efforts (see Cisco Announces I-Prize Winner and Results of Their Global Collaboration and Cisco Announces Second I-Prize Winner) but have not yet had a chance to look at their enterprise collaboration efforts.  So I was pleased to recently speak with Murali Sitaram, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Cloud Collaboration Applications Technology Group (CCATG), to discuss Cisco’s cloud collaboration strategy. It includes leading enterprise cloud applications for web conferencing (WebEx), instant messaging (Jabber) and enterprise social software (Quad) but goes much beyond that.

Murali began by noting that we have entered the post-PC era. It is not longer a single operating system on a single device. Now there are multiple smart devices, many mobile, that have more capabilities than the PCs of a few years ago. There are also multiple operating systems and thousands of apps that you can download from the cloud through app stores. This is occurring both on the Web and within the enterprise where BYOD is spreading. Now we have mobile devices, social applications, visual media, and virtual storage. This has certainly transformed the challenges faced by IT departments trying to keep up with their user’s requirements.

Cisco’s strategy in this post-PC world is to deliver collaboration on any device, anywhere and at anytime. Key to this strategy is a cloud offering that can deliver these services over any network and support all of the popular PC, tablet and phone operating systems that users bring into the workplace as a part of the “BYOD” pheonomenon.

Murali introduced a useful collaboration quadrant (see image below). In the upper left is Communications where Cisco a market leader.  It has 37% of enterprise voice, 52% of telepresence, and 45% of SaaS webconferencing, leading each of these three categories by a significant margin.  They are also the number two SaaS service with 5.8 million registered hosts worldwide. In the upper right is the People side with social capabilities and identity management. This is an area that Cisco is making some serious moves. It is the right direction as people, rather than documents, are becoming the center of collaboration and the means to create connections within the new social enterprise. As Murali expressed, it now more “who” than “what” than shapes communication.

In the lower left is Business Processes such as CRM and ERP. Here Cisco is taking an integration and partnership strategy. In the lower right is Information Management where they have also adopted with same integration and partnership approach. This makes a lot of sense. Build on your strengths in communications to add social and other people related capabilities that are a natural fit and extension of communications. Then, do not re-invent capabilities where there are plenty of strong partners to work with and where new options for integration are opening up with increased API functionality.

As part of their move into the People quadrant, the next generation of Web Ex is designed for the complete meeting cycle. It offers a centralized meeting space to streamline items before, during and after a meeting – from meeting agendas, presentations and notes shared during the meeting to follow up actions and meeting recordings. The solution that now supports HD video is interoperable with Cisco TelePresence and supports two-way video on the Cisco Cius, Apple iPad and Apple iPhone. The solution also supports a set of common APIs that can integrate third party applications such as CRM offerings. There is also integrated calendaring and scheduling.

Cisco has also expanded its collaboration platform, Quad with a comprehensive set of features. There are profiles and you follow people with a single click. There is an activity stream and watch list capability and you can share comments and ideas. You can create rich content with micro-blogs, wikis, documents, and videos. Real-time collaboration is available and recordable for future use. Backend applications such as calendaring, document management, and custom enterprise apps are accessible. You can search for experts and determine presence. Mobility is supported for both smart phones and tablets. Here is a sample Quad screen.

All of these features provide a totally integrated user experience taking email down to the role of a relatively minor player as the rich nature of communication options, including presence and the ability to switch quickly to real-time communications, provides a much richer set of options. You can even bring email into Quad if needed.  

To supplement these communication capabilities Cisco is offering a new freely downloadable Cisco Jabber Web browser plug-in that lets companies and developers embed UC collaboration capabilities into any web-based application. The kit is highly customizable, and with just a web browser, users can connect, communicate, and collaborate with presence, IM and click-to-call or click-to-video capabilities within line of business web applications or general purpose, public-cloud web applications.

One example of Cisco’s new approach to collaboration can be found at Virgin Media that recently announced they are deploying Cisco Quad, Cisco WebEx, Cisco Unified Communications as part of its Flexible Working Initiative. By putting people and not the device at the center of collaboration, Virgin is now able to support a more flexible work environment. People can co-work from a variety of office locations or from home. Virgin Media’s employees will now be able to collaborate and work remotely with video calls and shared documents from the device of their choice: PC, laptop, tablet or mobile phone.

I like what they are doing. As Murali mentioned, people, rather than documents, are becoming the center of collaboration. Cisco is well positioned to make its strength in communication more social to address this shift in how work is being is done in the connected enterprise. I plan to speak again with them to take a deeper dive into the specifics of the relevant products offerings.

 

 

2012 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium Will Occur on May 22

The ninth annual 2012 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium will occur on May 22, 2012 The theme is to “Explore Piloting the Untethered Enterprise. There will be over a dozen keynote presentations and interactive panel discussions from business executives, technologists, and academics. Some of the questions to be addressed include: How you can manage data for your organization's success? How do you take advantage of mobility and social tools? How to drive to the right enterprise architecture?

The Symposium will take place Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 7:30 am – 7:00 pm at Kresge Auditorium, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA. Also the Symposium’s Innovation Showcase will feature 10 early-stage companies that are providing useful IT solution.  These ten were selected from a much larger number of applicants. It is a great event and I recommend it. I attended the last two sessions but have an out of town commitment for this year.

Here are my notes from 2011 session.

My Notes from 2011 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium: Academic Keynote Panel

My Notes from 2011 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium: CIO Keynote Panel

My Notes from the 2011 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium: Collective Intelligence and Social Networks

My Notes from the 2011 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium: Enterprise Analytics = Business Values

Here is what I wrote about the 2010 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium.

The 2010 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium Notes: Enterprise 3.0?

The 2010 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium Part Two: Solving the CIO Paradox

The MIT Sloan CIO Symposium Notes Part There: Positioning IT as an Innovation Engine

 

 

Tweet Jam 2012: The State of the SharePoint Community

Yesterday I sat in on the Tweet Jam 2012: The State of the SharePoint Community (#SPJam) hosted by Mark Fidelman (harmon.ie), It was sponsored by harmon.ie. There was a group of invited panelists but anyone could participate. The panelists were:

John Anderson (Bamboo Nation)

Ant Clay (21 Apps)

Dave Coleman (SharePointEduTech Ltd)

Bjørn Furuknap (USPJ Academy)

Michael Greth (SharePointCommunity.de)

Richard Harbridge (Allin Consulting)

Scot Hillier (Scot Hillier Technical Solutions, LLC)

Mark Kashman (Microsoft)

Michael Lotter (B&R Business Solutions)

Mark Miller (Fpweb.net)

Jacob Morgan (Chess Media Group)

Joel Oleson (Church of LDS)

Veronique Palmer (Lets Collaborate)

Lee Provoost (Dachis Group)

Eric Riz (Concatenate, Inc)

Bil Simser (FortisAlberta)

Paul J. Swider (RealActivity, LLC)

Dux Raymond Sy (Innovative-e)

Marwin Tarek (SharePoint4Arabs.com)

Jeff Willinger (RightPoint Consulting)

Andrew Woodward (21 apps)

Chandima (Knowledge Cue)

Mark asked a question and everyone responded with the question identifier such as Q1 in the tweet. Here are the first four questions and what I thought were some of the more useful tweets. Since I was copying them real time you do not get the authors unless it was an RT, so apologies to them. Many were from the panelists. I thought that this was one of the better tweet sessions I have attended.

Q1 -- was whether the SharePoint community was still relevant. There were many yes answers and few if any nos. Here are some additional substantive responses beyond just yes.

Q1) One of the great things SP Community brings is the 'innovation in between.' Community makes real platform real and open. #SPJam

Q1: Absolutely! Thousands of new comers every year, the community motivates them to do better. #SPJam

@jacobm Today the community is very effective sharing tech knowledge, now the community needs to emphasize the business use case #SPJAM

@VeroniquePalmer Definitely! I'd be lost with out those willing to share their expertise #spjam

RT @jacobm: Q1 there's a difference between understanding SP as a tool vs understanding how to use it to improve business #spjam

Q2: How do we build a stronger, more effective community (bring in new leaders, speakers, etc.)? (prefix with Q2) #spjam

RT @jacobm: Q2 I think for starters it would be great to have a central community network so we know what's out there, does exist? #spjam

Q2 #SPjam Provide more unique content to the community and focus on topics

Q2 #SPJam There are natural entry points into the community (UG's, writing, forums). The community then decides what/who provides value.

Q2: One approach is specialization by customer vertical, like ShareFest2012 for pharma #SPJam #Q2

#spjam #Q2 Need to break out of our three groups methodology of Dev, Pro, User. Our community should be wider.

Would be great to have a singular location for community resources #SPJam

Q2 #spjam Decentralizing resources. If you have 'one big' resource that aint Microsoft, you get competition, clutter, noise, ego, etcetc.

Q2: Chesborough:"not all the smart people work for you, so you better go find them, connect to them, and build upon what they can do” #SPJam

Q2) #SPJam innovate in numbers and diversity. Embracing crowd sourcing leads to so many unplanned good things.

#spjam Q2 New users become participating members of the community when they see how vibrant it is & how much help ppl give each other here

Q3: What Microsoft/SharePoint developments will affect the community? prefix your (prefix your answer with Q3) #spjam

Q3) #spjam Microsoft's interjection into the community will be an issue. Indirect support of user groups and gatherings is more appropriate.

SPJam #Q3 Trend of integrating SP with other social platforms will widen the community and attract people from different backgrounds

Q3) How about using SP to promote the SP community? #SPJAM

Q3 Microsoft requesting only MVP's speak at bigger events is a community killing move. IMO #SpJam

Q3 Microsoft requesting only MVP's speak at bigger events is a community killing move. IMO #SpJam

Q3 ....having mobile connectivity to #SharePoint is a game changer, Windows 8 Tablet facilitates this! #spjam

@rharbridge Microsoft community awards is on the 'no' list of things to do... We don't need more MVP programs. #SPJAM #Q3 #SPJAMQ3

@rharbridge Microsoft community awards is on the 'no' list of things to do... We don't need more MVP programs. #SPJAM #Q3 #SPJAMQ3

Q4:How can we introduce systematic improvements 2 companies as they progress thru the SharePoint Maturity model? http://t.co/RU0TUUwu #spjam

Q4 requires you view the maturity model first if you haven't seen it already http://t.co/t9wX9B0q #spjam

Q4 #spjam An increased emphasis on training for business users.

Q4 #SPJam - many times it's just making them AWARE that there are places to evolve/mature to - #evangelism and sharing knowledge

Q4 With any maturity model governance and a plan come first before infrastructure and code. Get your house in order upfront. #SPJam

Q4 Love the maturity model, we've adopted as part of our working models with clients, its a hit #SPJam @Sadalit

Q4) Today too much focus on SP infrastructure, More focus on USER ADOPTION is required to make enterprises more successful #SPJAM

#SPJam #Q4 I've never worked in a place that neatly fit into one of the Maturity "phases" - all have had components of several levels

SPJam #Q4 maturity model like any standard -- use it as a point of reference, adopt what makes sense. it is not end all, be all

RT @conniewinch: MT @SPS2010 Wondering out loud if anyone of consequence at @Microsoft is listening to #SPJam comments <YES they are

SPJam Q4 Encourage all users to provide feedback, early and often. Listen to and act on to those users' concerns, early and often

Q4: Think more about staffing & training that will be required earlier in the process, rather than as an afterthought #spjam

understanding resistance is also crucial, community needs to know what these areas are and to help solve #spjam

Q4 A good SharePoint architect/guru/guy/gal knows when *not* to use SharePoint. Listen to them. #SPJam

#SPJam Q4: we have too much academic governance guidelines/articles/whitepapers - we need more case studies/lessons learned/stories

 

 

 

 

 

 

IBM Connections Conversations - 3: Analytics + Social

This is the third of a three part series on IBM Connections, their collaboration platform. I recently had an extended conversation with Suzanne Livingston, Senior Product Manager for Connections. I have covered Connections before (see for example, Looking Closely at Lotus Connections) but it had been a while since I took a detailed look. In my last post I looked at some of the themes and features in the next release. In this post we will look at the new analytics capabilities, as well as the advantages of being able to work both inside and outside the enterprise through the same platform.

In the next major release, Connections will offer an enhanced dashboard to monitor adoption and community vitality.  It will provide key usage indicators from Connections services and page views. The metrics will look at people, participation, and content. For example, you will be able to see such items as  top contributors, number of unique visitors, new members, and much more.

There will be a starting collection of metric reports but then community managers will be able to choose more from numerous options that can be implemented by the system administrator, IBM’s Cognos is providing this capability in the background. If you want to go even deeper you can do custom work within Cognos itself, specifically Report Studio. For example, you can get further data beyond who is participating to what is their geography, department, job function, and other profile attributes specific to your organization. All of this data can help better understand how adoption is working and what needs to be done to further it. You can create custom reports or modify existing ones. You can drill down and do data slicing on time dimension, Connection component dimension or up to 3 different "filters" you can specify about a person's profile (Geo, Role, Dept being the default ones).

What is exciting here is the integration of social capabilities and analytics. For example, a marketing professional can now gain real-time access to data that highlights patterns and consumer sentiment related to marketing trends. They can adjust campaigns on the fly. But what is even more interesting is the ability with a single click, for professionals to react to these new insight by automatically creating a social network, on the fly, bringing together experts across geographical and market intelligence topics to work together and to respond to these insights.

The ability to take insights from consumer facing communities and bring them inside for internal conversation on how to respond shows one the advantages of having a platform that serves both communities inside and outside the organization. Another is the ability to align messages across these communities so employees are in step with customers and their insights. Suzanne said that the market interest in Connections  has shifted from usage dominantly inside the enterprise   to a combined focus of inside and outside the enterprise. I think this is a big advantage over single purpose platforms.

McKinsey has offered data to support this advantage of using social media both inside and outside the enterprise (see: How social technologies are extending the organization). They found extensive benefits for using social software inside the enterprise (e.g. increasing speed to access knowledge, reducing communication costs, and increasing speed to access internal experts) and outside the enterprise (increasing effectiveness of marketing, increasing customer satisfaction, and reducing marketing costs). However it was the fully networked organizations, the ones who used social business both inside and outside the enterprise that gained the most. For example, the fully networked organizations had almost twice as such integration of social aspects into the employees day to day work and a greater improvement in benefits.

I see the new capabilities within Connections covered in these three posts to further support this integration of social into business. Companies that adopt these approaches should be the winners going forward.

 

 

IBM Connections Conversations - 2: Overview of Next Release

This is the second of a three part series on IBM Connections, their collaboration platform for social business. I recently had an extended conversation with Suzanne Livingston, Senior Product Manager for Connections. I have covered Connections before (see for example, Looking Closely at Lotus Connections) but it had been a while since I took a detailed look. After covering Connections 3.0 as I discussed in my last post, we covered aspects of the next major release.

There are three main themes addressed in this next release of Connections: the evolution of the social platform, enhanced communities for teams, and more capabilities for business to consumer use cases. The common underlying theme is the movement from Connections providing a suite of applications to becoming a comprehensive social business platform with tighter integration.

One of the enablers of this tighter integration is the use of Connections with the OpenSocial Foundation,  a standards board that IBM  and other firms such as Microsoft, Google, Atlassian, and Jive collaboratively develop or utilize. Here is the list of OpenSocial adopters. The Wikipedia defines the OpenSocial Platform as a “public specification that defines a component hosting environment (container) and a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based applications.” This effort is designed to give social tools the ability to work together, a wise move.

Looking more closely at the three themes, the social platform evolution is designed to address the need to streamline work, provide anytime, anywhere access, prioritize important content and filter out distractions, and offer a consistent integrated collaboration experience. The enhanced community capabilities for teams add new features to address team use cases. This includes support for the need to share and collaborate across a group of people, to support different groups with different requirements, and to develop and manage shared documents across teams. The business to consumer capabilities accommodates the need to build social communities to enhance loyalty and revenue, to understand what works and gain insight from trends, and support openness and choice. Here is a sample Connections dashboard.

One of the major advances on the social platform evolution is the enhancement of the activity stream. I really applaud this move as I see the activity stream becoming the glue that holds the social enterprise together and make it run efficiently. To this end IBM has made its Connections activity stream open to third party apps. For example, an approval request from an SAP application can be placed into the activity stream and acted upon without leaving the activity stream. This is the type of capability that will truly enable the connected enterprise. Here is a sample activity stream.

IBM has contributed this embedded experience capability into the OpenSocial Foundation so others can use it. So to be more specific you can take an item from a backend system, such as the SAP tracking order I mentioned, and place it into a side bar within a Connections activity stream. There it can be worked on and the results sent back to the backend system without the user actually having to go there. The capability has opened doors for IBM to make stronger connections with other members of Open Social such as Atlassian.

IBM wants the activity stream to become the central workplace and I fully support this concept. You can have both manual updates like Twitter or auto-generated updates such as the SAP example. It is light years ahead of email as a central workplace and you can even bring email and calendar from Exchange or Domino into Connections. You can work on emails within Connections just as you can back-office tasks like SAP. It is becoming truly capable of being the central work place of the enterprise but with a social twist.  You can even give feedback on items through the ”like” feature and follow conversation through hashtags. Because of the embedded files capability you can also display images right in the activity stream unlike in Twitter. Here is sample screen with email inside Connections.

In my next post, which will appear tomorrow, I will look more closely at the analytics that is coming with the next release of Connections

 

IBM Connections Conversations 1: Review of 3.0

This is the first of a three part series on IBM Connections, their collaboration platform for social business. I recently had an extended conversation with Suzanne Livingston, Senior Product Manager for Connections. I have covered Connections before (see for example, Looking Closely at Lotus Connections) but it had been a while since I took another detailed look. We began by discussing Connections 3.0, released in 2011, that has expanded features to support communities.

This community support includes video and photo sharing and support for idea generation, including Ideation Blogs. It also provides the means to better manage a document library for communities through integration with IBM Enterprise Content Manager and IBM FileNet.  Community moderation is offered and communities can manage their documents within Community Pages. The document library services are provided through Quickr for Websphere Portal. This allows security setting, users, and groups to be synchronized between Quickr and Connections.

Expanded mobile capabilities are provided through IBM’s Social Everywhere mission, which has been a major part of each release since Connections 1. You can upload photos and videos from your phone. Now you can get native apps as well as hybrid ones through  a mobile browser. You can access all of your Connections data from mobile browsers or through free native apps. You can download native apps from the major app stores such as iTunes, Andriod Market, and Blackberry App Worlds.

IBM created a version of Connections specifically for the iPad that takes advantage of the new capabilities that a tablet offers over a smartphone. This includes editing while maintaining the gestural navigation found in both devices.

On the Web facing side, Connections 3.0 continues to support Websphere Portal 7 and 8 beta with better integration with the portal. This enables more robust use of Connections for external communities. With this release you can have community page portlets with blogs and profiles. This gives you the option of using Websphere Portal as your website UI but with Connections capabilities built in. You can also simply use Connections as your Web interface. The Spanish Red Cross is one example of this move. Connections 3.0 is offered through the cloud and on premise.

Connections 3.0.1 can  also be used for compliance purposes. All Connections posts, comments, blogs, etc. are logged instantly and available for eDiscovery.  IBM works with their partner Actiance to provide this capability.  There is real-time content monitoring, a keyword blacklist, and granular policies to map compliance requirements by user type. Alerts can be sent when posts contain blacklisted words. Mail security can be invoked before posting to avoid such things as SEC violations.

This collection represents a solid foundation for the evolution of Connections through the next major release of Connections that I will begin to discuss in the second post in this series which will appear tomorrow.

 

 

The Value of Writing Things Down

Here is an interesting bit of research. Kevin Purdy reports in, The Pen Is Mightier Than The Phone: A Case For Writing Things Out, that “a Forrester Research survey of business professionals found that 87 percent of them supplement gadgets with paper productivity, and 47 percent thought their personal and company efficiency would improve with better note-taking.” Now I have always valued writing things down. That is why I have posting on this blog daily since May 2004. While much of my blog writing remains electronic, I also use paper a lot. I still do paper to-lists. I prefer to read paper books. While I blog events on my laptop, I take interview notes on paper.

I am a very visual person and also draw and paint so I am attracted to the feel of working with paper. The article another good point as Kevin wrote that, “The role of paper is “changing from information recording and archiving, to a more temporary role of containing transient information,” says Jenny Englert, senior cognitive engineer at Xerox, in summarizing some of the research her firm is doing on the future of work.” I find this also. When I take interview notes on paper, I transfer them to electronic form for both distribution and storage and do not keep the paper. Of course, I am careful to recycle the paper. There is also something to stroke over a completed task on my paper to do list. When it has many crossovers than undone task I usually throw it into the recycle bin and start another.

I am not sure there is a systematic reason for me to choose paper over electronic. Now electronics are required for distribution. However, I used to keep paper calendar and saved them every year. Now my calendar is electronic and I do not tend to go back in time any more. In same ways paper was better since I always had the calendar with me. Now I have to wait to confirm appointments to get back to my laptop. Of course, I should just use the calendar on my iPhone since it is usually with me. The smart phone may replace a number of paper-based tasks but it will be less likely to replace paper note taking. 

Some one should do a systematic study of paper versus electronics. Every communication medium has it strengths and limitations. The cuneiform of Sumer and Akkad used a wooden stylus on wet clay. The tablets were then baked. While lasting for millennia with no degradation, they were not very portable, and transportation was difficult. Pieces of pottery were also widely used for letters, accounts, and even homework, but they were not much good for lengthy texts.

It was not until the development of papyrus that real literary and academic works could easily be recorded and transported. This technology was used by the Greeks and Romans from the 5th century BC until the 8th or 9th century AD. It was superseded by parchment beginning in the 4th century AD. Both of these new media were easier to store and transport than the clay tablets but they were also more susceptible to the fire of invading armies.  Now we have lost hard drives, the need for electric power, and often the need for connectivity to the Web.

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Customer Conversation – Russell’s Convenience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Mobile, Bring Your Own Device

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Monday Morning Press Q&A

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Can Sentiment Analysis Be Effectively Automated?

Listening to the voice of the customer is a major initiative for many companies. Sentiment analysis is a growing component of the tools to assist in this effort. Sentiment analysis is defined by the Wikipedia as “the application of natural language processing, computational linguistics, and text analytics to identify and extract subjective information in source materials.” It is getting a lot of hype and there are conferences and events springing up to cover this buzz. Brand awareness is one of the major use cases.

However, sentiment analysis is also attracting its doubters. Peter Knoblock writes in the Smart Data Collective, Sentiment – A Potential Mirage on the Data Horizon. He writes that social media is relatively new and, as often happens with new technologies, people tend to implement old methodologies when trying to interpret this new type of information. He continues, “a common mistake is people try to turn social media data into quantitative information. The most common trend is focusing primarily on what is positive and what is negative.”

Automated Sentiment Analysis is Only a Piece of the Brand Awareness Puzzle

Peter notes that while positive and negative sentiment can provide a form of brand awareness, it is only a small piece of the puzzle. And this assumes that the sentiment was properly understood by the machine. We will come back to ask this question again.  But assuming the machine got it right, Peter asks some useful questions including: what is driving positive comments and what is driving negative comments? What are the themes surrounding the conversation? What types of terms keep showing up in conversation? What types of events or statements drove an increase in activity? He adds that looking at the themes and terms within your data can give you a richer brand awareness experience.

Can a Machine Really Understand Sentiment and Its Relevance to Brand Awareness?

Machines can be taught to understand words but what about context? There ha sbeen some progress in this space but more likley needs to be done. Someone could be happy your brand is tanking. They could be sad your competitor is having trouble. They could be angry that people are angry with your brand or they could be pleased with this turn of events. Then there is sarcasm or is that was I was just doing?  

I have heard that sentiment analysis tools take a stand only on a minority of content they scan. Often return some form of “not sure” as the result. To be fair, it is still in a primitive stage. Most vendors will acknowledge that there is a ways to go. Machines are good at going through masses of content to uncover things for people to look at. People are still best at determining meaning.

I have to admit that I have not used a sentiment analysis tool so I could be missing something. What has been your experience with sentiment analysis? 

 

SpringCM Upgrades Mobile Capabilities and Offers Enhanced Support for Salesforce.com

SpringCM provides a cloud based enterprise content management platform. It was founded in 2005 and I have covered it before (see SpringCM Goes Beyond Content Management). I recently spoke with Roger Bottum of SpringCM on their latest moves. SpringCM is set up to put content into the work process. They are also putting content wherever you need it with an enhanced mobile capability that now includes a version specifically designed for the iPad. This is a smart move as mobile enterprise apps are now on the rise with tablets and smart phones passing desktops and laptops in usage. Over 15 million iPads were sold in 2010 and the numbers are increasing. 

Roger said that they did a number of things to optimize SpringCM for the iPad. These features include a simplified screen that still provides the essential components. You can see a sample iPad screen below. They extended the simplification to provide an intuitive interface that does not require any significant training, similar to many consumer Web apps. There is some self-learning material to further support the self-service approach. They also made extensive use of the touch or gesture approach to navigation. The app is built in HTML 5 to take full advantage of mobile features. Finally, the self-service approach is brought to procurement. Once your company as set up things with SpringCM, individuals simply go to the SpringCM Web site and begin using the tool.

Next we covered the new free SpringCM solution to provide enhanced content management capabilities to Salesforce.com. I like their more to integrate with the most prevalent cloud based CRM system. I have written about how the newer systems of engagement need to integrate with the older systems of record for real progress to be made. This is a great example of these complimentary capabilities.

Spring CM began with some research into the needs of Salesforce users. Top issues cited by survey respondents include: 91% - having easier ways to add, access and edit documents within Sales Cloud Accounts, Opportunities and Campaigns; 83% - making documents easier to find and secure with folders; 81% - being able to search across all documents across Accounts and Opportunities using metadata. These request make sense when you look at how Salesforce works by itself.

Roger explained that there are now two main ways to load a document into Saleforce. One is to associate it directly to an account or opportunity. However, then it is not available for access through search across the system.  You can also put a document into the central repository and then it can be accessed through search. However, there are then multiple steps to associate it with a specific account or opportunity. There is also the ability to tag a document in Salsforce but this capability does not support a controlled vocabulary so people can put in any tag they want. This results in a more of folksnomy approach rather than a taxonomy and it makes systematic retrieval more difficult. Here is a sample screen showing Saleforce integration.

The free version of Spring CM for Salesforce takes care of these limitations. When you upload a document it can be automatically associated with an account or opportunity and be searchable at the same time. A controlled vocabulary is offered through drop down lists of possible tags. This allows Salesforce to go beyond CRM capabilities to also become a useful knowledge repository, but one that is part of the workflow and not a separate system. This is a crucial difference because it puts knowledge in the form of documents right in the middle of where work happens.

The content management capabilities in SpringCM can operate in the background. For example, you can click on a Word document in Salesforce that is being managed by SpringCM and it opens directly in Word. Then when you are done it is closed back into Salesforce with any related additional metadata added behind the scenes by SpringCM.

Since both Saleforce and SpringCM are cloud apps this integrated capability can be acquired through the Web in a few minutes, bypassing expensive system integration work. If you want more capabilities such as automated workflow with approvals for contracts, then you can upgrade to the commercial version of SpringCM.  SpringCM can also integrate with other systems of record such as SharePoint in the same way so that SpringCM works behind the scenes to bring greater capabilities to these systems.

Roger also mentioned that the latest integration with Salesforce involves Salesforce Chatter, their micro-blogging tool. Chatter allows for contextual activity streams within Salesforce, as well as standalone capabilities. You can now use the metadata that SpringCM creates to have more focused activity streams within Chatter related to documents. When a document is added or updated, an alert automatically goes out to the right people who are following the related account. Below is a sample screen showing Chatter integration.

These are two strong moves. The first move makes use of the new mobile devices to bring content to where you want it. The second move brings enhanced cloud-based content management capabilities to more traditional systems of record, especially Salesforce with the free version and also SharePoint with their commercial version.  

 

How is Mobile Supported on the Enterprise Level?

The rise of mobile communications is one of the major game changes in technology.  The amount of time spent on mobile apps has surpassed web browsing on a computer. There are 5.3 billion mobile subscribers (77% of the world population) and mobile devices have overtaken computers on Wi-Fi networks. Given these numbers, how are enterprise IT departments supporting their mobile users?

Forrester’s TJ Keitt tackles this question with his report, Does Your IT Department Support The Needs Of The Mobile Workforce? The data suggests that IT still has a way to go to meet worker expectations. They asked 4,985 information workers as part of the research. They found that on one hand, that the efforts that IT departments are helping to outfit employees with laptops are paying off: 51 percent of US information workers report using one during a workday.

On the other hand, both those who primarily use laptops and those who don't say that IT falls short in delivering computing and mobile device choices that best fit where and how they work. As part of this response while the majority of employees purchase the smartphone they use for work and foot the entire service bill, few are happy with this proposition. They would like for IT to providing a subsidy so they can acquire a device of their choice. I agree with this.

They also found that the workforce is becoming more mobile as only 45% of the US information workforce works solely from a corporate office. The provision of laptops has been significantly the past few years to accommodate these workers. Forrester divides the 55% who work outside the office into four groups: hypermobile professionals (29%) who have an office but work from anywhere, part-time telecommuter (11%), connected consultants (10%) and remote-based technicians (6%).

Currently these groups get different levels of support.  With Hypermobile professionals 69% use a smartphone at work and 36% have to pay for the phone and the service themselves.  With part-time telecommuter 29% use a smartphone at work and 49% have to pay for the phone and the service themselves.  With connected consultants 43% use a smartphone at work and 42% have to pay for the phone and the service themselves.  With remote-based technicians 37% use a smartphone at work and 59% have to pay for the phone and the service themselves.

While we are talking about smart phones rather than all mobile devices, it is still interesting to see how low these numbers are. It also seems that the higher paid employees are less likely to have to pay for their smart phone but then they are more likely to set or influence policies. I would guess that over 90% of these workers own some type of mobile phone. 

The workers who have to pay for their smartphones themselves feel under supported and I can see why. I think that enterprise IT needs to read the papers, listen to TV, and understand the mobile revolution is only growing. There is much more in the report, including data on laptops and collaborative technologies. 

 

Forrester on Enterprise Content Management Suites, Q4 2011

Forrester has release their report, The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Content Management Suites, Q4 2011, by Alan Weintraub with Stephen Powers and Anjali Yakkundi. It has the subtitle, EMC, IBM, OpenText, and Oracle Lead, with Microsoft Close Behind. The are doing this thorough enhanced ECM features in SharePoint. Forrester uses 66-criteria to evaluate enterprise content management (ECM) vendors. After those above came, Hyland Software, HP, Xerox, Allen Systems Group (ASG), and Alfresco.

The report notes that organizations are continuing to “grapple with an explosion of unstructured content.” There is also an expansion in the types of content: documents, scanned images, web content, rich media, email, corporate records, blogs, wikis, e-forms, audio, and video. They note that each content type brings its own editing and workflow requirements, and usually their own regulatory and compliance issues, making managing content increasingly complex and expensive. At the same time, information workers still want simple and easy-to-use content management tools.

This complexity means that for many organizations that cannot rely on a single platform even though that is the ideal. These organizations have are moving to a more content-centric approach with different solutions for specific types of content. Forrester now divides ECM products into four types: foundational, business, transactional, and persuasive.

The foundational ECM provides basic content management functionality including library services, basic workflow, search, and records management. The business ECM supports day-to-day workplace experience with compound document management, enterprise rights management, and team collaboration. Transactional ECM supports back-office processes with imaging, document output management, and business process management form the backbone of the transactional content technologies. Finally persuasive ECM supports content addressing external audience behavior through marketing, lead generation, and customer self-service. They note that examples of persuasive ECM include web content management, digital asset management, and document output for customer communications management. This all makes sense to me.

With this diverging field a number of role players are emerging that address specific niches. Add to this mix are open source, industry specific, and cloud solutions and the field is becoming more complex rather than narrowing. Then there is whole issue of making content sharing and content workflow more social. The report goes into great detail on each of the vendors. 

 

Forrester's Leslie Owens Covers Enterprise Search

Last month I attended Forrester's Content & Collaboration Forum 2011. The Forum explored what the “current demand for more portable, social workplace experiences means for your workplace strategy.” It shared the “latest trends in technology adoption and how firms forge better business outcomes from a more mobile, social, and virtual workforce.” I had a chance to speak one on one with Leslie Owens. She spoke at this event the next day and here are my session notes (Forrester's Leslie Owens on Harnessing the Voice of the Employee).  (Leslie’s expertise includes: enterprise search, semantic tools, information classification, and taxonomies and I have covered her work before (see for example, Forrester on Enterprise Search Trends).

We first discussed looking into the voice of the employee, the topic covered in her talk and recorded in my session notes above. I will not repeat the parts she covered in her talk. Leslie noted in our conversation that the enterprise is a bounded community. You know all about the participants who engage in conversations within the enterprise social media platforms. You know much more about them than the customers or prospects who participate in social media on the Web. I think that many of the applications of social media such as wikis and activity streams can have even greater value within trusted communities within the enterprise. In this case I am not suggesting that listening to the voice of the employee is of higher value than the listening to the voice of the customer. They complement each other. On some issues employee conversations may help better explain what is being discussed by customers and visa versa.

We also discussed the privacy issue a bit more. People objected to data mining emails because the expectation was that they are private.  Personally, I think this is mistaken assumption. They are certainly discoverable in a legal action. It is my understanding that most company email systems indicate that they can be monitored for inappropriate actions. However, emails are not immediately transparent to everyone so there is some expectation for privacy.

With social computing inside the enterprise the expectation is transparency. It is actually seen as one of the benefits. So looking at the voice of employee with better analytic tools is simply doing a better job of maximizing this opportunity and increasing the return on investment in social tools. It is doing what they are designed to do. People still need a secure place to communicate but permission levels can be established. There are also other channels outside social media. Privacy is important and there is too much invasion of it today but enterprise social media is the place for transparency within a trusted group, either the whole enterprise or a subgroup within in it.

We also briefly touched on some of the current trends in enterprise search. Call center support is one area of innovation. Custom searches for call center agents bring in relevant content from diverse sources. This is a much-needed improvement. I have done a lot of work with knowledge support for call centers. One agent in the UK said to me that one of the most important skills was the ability to engage the caller in amusing chat will you frantically searched through multiple databases for the answers to their questions.

This unified search is also extended to customer facing web sites (see for example; Coveo Customer Information Access Solutions (CIAS) Moves to Version 2.0). Here is an excellent report that Leslie and her colleagues did, Site Search Evolves from Technical Feature to Customer Touchpoint, and here is my commentary on the report - Evolution of Site Search.

There is also much work being done in federated search going across structured and unstructured data. Here is a conversation I had with Sid Probstein, CTO at Attivio, a firm focused on this issue. I started by asking Sid about the opportunity within enterprise 2.0 to take advantage of looking at the unstructured data to determine the pulse of the enterprise. Sid responded and also showed me a demo of how Attivio can pull unstructured content from product review sites on the Web and index it along with structured data from a CRM system. Here is an earlier review of their work (Attivio Tightly Integrates Structured Data and Unstructured Content for a New Approach to Information Access).

Leslie added that enterprise search is behind Web search on a number of issues beyond the voice of the customer/employee issue. Personalization and making effective use of past search behavior are areas where enterprise needs to catch up. There are great opportunities to provide more individual relevance within the enterprise. The rise of enterprise social media should help accommodate this need by providing more context to aid search engines, just as it is doing on the Web.

 

IBM Rational Offers Collaboration and Innovation within Software Development

IBM Rational is an open software development platform that supports sharing and interactions among software and systems design and development teams. Recently, I spoke with Gina Poole, Vice President, Marketing, IBM Rational. Gina has been with IBM for over 25 years. She began as a developer and has moved through strategy and operations.  Before her current assignment she led the IBM Worldwide University Relations and Innovation Program.

Gina began by noting that software development is a very social business and collaborative is key for success. It enables innovation, reduces risks, and drives down costs. I agree completely and it is the basis for the current forms of software development, such as Agile. To enable this collaboration on a continuous and comprehensive basis, Rational supports the entire software lifecycle. In the past the development life cycle was often disconnected and supported by siloed tool sets. Now Rational enables the integration of both people and tools across the entire lifecycle.

The integration of collaboration capabilities within the development tool set is aligned with IBM’s focus on integrating social business tools with work processes that I saw presented at Lotussphere this year. I agree with this move and think it is essential for enterprise 2.0 to become more than simply using disconnected Web 2.0 tools within the enterprise. Gina noted that this integration helps break down barriers because conversations are held within the common tool set. One group can easily pick up where another left off. This is especially important with global teams collaborating around the clock. It can also bring products to market faster. This collaboration can also occur beyond the enterprise. IBM DeveloperWorks has over 8 million members with over 4 million in action in any given month.

Rational offers products that leverage Jazz, IBM's open software development platform. Jazz.net is a community and online venue for open commercial development of Jazz-based products. It is a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform build using open specifications from the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration community (OSLC).  OSLC is an open community that is seeking to standardize the way tools share information such as requirements, tests, work items, change requests and designs with one another. Here are some of the components of Rational

Collaborative Design Management: Enables teams to integrate designs seamlessly with other development tasks and information, such as requirements, code, and quality management assets. This is achieved through a central design hub where designs can be stored, maintained, and referenced for future reuse, documentation and compliance.

Collaborative Lifecycle Management: Encourages cross-functional collaboration. It brings together IBM Rational Requirements Composer, IBM Rational Team Concert and IBM Rational Quality Manager in a unified development platform. New integrations between IBM Connections social networking software for business and IBM Rational Team Concert allow software developers to use social networking to find experts within an organization and help collaborate with stakeholders on software development projects.

Collaborative Development and Operations:  Enables organizations to reduce reworking projects through standardized processes and allows automation for deploying software. Existing development assets can be reused, regardless of whether they reside on the cloud or on-site servers. To improve the identification and remediation of potential problems and issues, IBM has developed an OSLC-based integration between the IT operations ticketing system, Tivoli Service Request Manager, and the development team solution, Rational Team Concert.

We next discussed Agile, which was first created to support co-located teams. Gina mentioned a successful experiment that looked at the use of Agile by distributed teams. Five university students from the US (Pace University), India (University of Delhi) and Senegal (Ecole Supérieure Polytechnique), the students used the IBM Rational Jazz community to build the mobile application and implement it in the classroom. The result of 9 weeks effort was “Target First Grade,” an application aimed to help school children in Senegal practice their math, reading and writing skills on a mobile device, with the results of each lesson being texted to both the instructor and parents.  Here are several screen shots of the application.

Here is a paper describing the project in more detail, Transitioning to Distributed Development in Students’ Global Software Development Projects. This effort has been expanded into the IBM Software for a Cause Program and a great service. I like what they are doing with Rational. It is a great example of putting social software to work by integrating it with work process and initiatives. 

 

Socialtext Continues to Focus on Workplace Integration

I have admired the capabilities within Socialtext for some time. It was one of the early enterprise 2.0 providers, well before the term was coined. They began with a wiki base and have added capability over time to build a comprehensive platform. A couple of years ago they added Socialtext Signals, one of the first enterprise micro-blogging tools. A wrote about them a year ago on this blog (see Socialtext Adds Micro-messaging and Goes Mobile). Recently, I spoke with their CEO, Eugene Lee, on their latest offerings.

Eugene said that when Socialtext Signals and its microblogging capability, was introduced in 2008 the focus was on integration from the start. They were likely the first to provide a microblogging capability within a collaboration suite and now many of the others have made this move. Socialtext wanted to enable more than water cooler chat. They wanted make it easy to create activity feeds with a specific focus like a project.

As I wrote in my 2010 interview with Ross Mayfield, it is fully integrated with the complete Socialtext platform. You can filter activities by people or the type of event. Events within other systems such as CRM tools can be included in the activity stream through the Socialtext REST API. This is an excellent feature as it can avoid the information silos that can develop with independent enterprise 2.0 tools. I recently added in a post, Putting Social Media to Work, this integration is what enterprise 2.0 needs to do to move beyond Web 2.0 in the enterprise.

The platforms that Socialtext can easily integrate with include SharePoint and Salesforce.com. These are good choices. In my view SharePoint, and other document management systems, should be treated like other enterprise applications of record in the same way as an ERP or CRM system is being treated. Socialtext can then help increase engagement with these systems. As Eugene said, it is people who do the work so you need to push social tools more into the workflow where people actually work..

Eugene added that organizations need to enable people who are not normally working in an enterprise app such as a CRM system to get involved to bring their expertise to bear on the issues at hand. I think this is great. It was the vision some of us had in the early days on knowledge management but did not have the tools for. Now you can bring issues form the CRM tool into Socialtext to generate more engagement and more focus. You can also attach metadata to the issue as it enters the activity stream, to instantaneously provide more context, and further enhance this focus.

This increased connection and engagement can pay dividends. Eugene mentioned how the customer service department of an accounting consulting firm has cut in half the time it takes to respond to difficult customer questions since implementing Socialtext. In another example, a UK railroad has significantly reduced delays in getting the right equipment to the right location by making the right people aware of the problems earlier.

Some firms are now deploying Socialtext as the start page on their intranet with Signals in the forefront. You can also add Google gadgets to the intranet through Socialtext. This deployment has increased intranet usage and made it more focused on work issues. Socialtext operates in a SaaS model with the ability to have private hosting within and outside the enterprise.

Socialtext 5.0 is about to be released. It  includes a simplified user experience, as well as several functional enhancements including a new editor, task management, page creation and tracking capabilities, as well as a theme selector that enables the administrative user to quickly and easily customize and brand their environment.

They also announced the availability of Socialtext Radar, a people recommendation engine that allows employees to create rich profiles by describing their experience, interests, passions and other configurable dimensions, and uses that data to identify the most relevant people to connect with and solve business challenges together in real-time.

I really like their focus on integration and their emphasis on connecting with work processes. It is great to see Socialtext continue to evolve in the right directions.

 

IBM's Mike Rhodin on the Convergence of Social Business, Analytics and Commerce: Part Two

This is the second part of my interview with IBM’s Mike Rhodin, SVP, Software Solutions, about their moves in the software space. We continued our discussion by covering IBM's smarter commerce initiative. This is an emerging market where the idea of “the educated consumer” has reached a whole new level with explosion of user generated content within Web 2.0.

Mike said that while they had sound offerings in the order capture area with WebSphere Commerce and clients like Macy’s and Target, they wanted to expand to cover the entire B2C lifecycle. He mentioned their acquisition of Sterling Commerce for order capture, order management, shipping and logistics. To provide supply chain optimization they acquired iLog. They also acquired Coremetrics for Web analytics of order tracking and Unica for automated marketing. Unica looks at what the next best action should be taken to drive sales as people explore a commercial web site. It can also be used in physical stores at point of sale terminals.  On the analytics side of this process lifecycle, Netezza was acquired to enable better visualization of data.

We went on to discuss what’s next. A big move that IBM is taking involves a transformational look at the use of computers with Watson. The traditional use of computers was to standardize things and allow the machine to consistently provide the same answer every time for the same transaction.  Watson is a system that you teach rather than program so its answers continue to evolve as it learns.  It will get better but it can also make mistakes. You teach it through a Q&A process. When Watson takes in new data there is a seven fold expansion in its memory as it is making connections between the new data and the old data.

This approach is much like more modern views of human cognition. The old behaviorist view modeled, in part after machines, was a simple stimulus response.  You filled the brain with new data and it responded. Piaget introduced the concept of assimilation and accommodation. You assimilate new information based on your existing cognitive structures. You also accommodate these structures based on the new information. There is a give and take process going on as you learn.

IBM is partnering with WellPoint for the first commercial application of Watson to help with medical diagnosis. They system wisely does not tell doctors what to do but offers them the top five probabilities for a diagnosis based on what is known about the patient.  It does not take over the doctor’s job but acts as a doctor’s assistant. This use is designed to both increase proper patient healthcare and reduce the cost of care by reducing unnecessary tests and procedures. This makes a lot of sense to me.

IBM's software business has become one of the fastest-growing contributors to IBM's profit. In the last decade, IBM Software profit has tripled, driving more than $9 billion in profits in 2010. With coordinated moves like those Mike described, I can see why this success is occurring. As Mike noted in his blog post, Beyond Collaboration: Becoming a Social Business, “it's one thing to create networks of customers, employees, or partners -- it's quite another to change the processes that run your business, to make them truly social.” It is this change that is required to put social software to work and move it from a useful utility to the core of a new way of doing business. 

 

IBM's Mike Rhodin on the Convergence of Social Business, Analytics and Commerce: Part One

Over the last decade IBM has driven a significant transformation of its business model as they shifted to higher value areas, improved efficiencies, and invested in a number of firms to fill out their portfolio of software offerings. They have acquired over 80 software firms since 2000. More recently, they are focusing a significant portion of their efforts on social business as I wrote about in my coverage of Lotusphere 2011. IBM’s most recent earning reports indicate a strong growth in demand for their Social Business offerings.

Recently, I spoke with Mike Rhodin, SVP, Software Solutions about their moves in the software space.  We also discussed the convergence of social business and analytics. We had a wide ranging discussion that I will cover in two posts, with the next one appearing tomorrow.

Mike began by diagramming the interactions of their efforts in analytics, social software, and smarter commerce. At the core is a three-way overlap where web analytics serves all three areas. At the intersection of analytics and social is sentiment analysis and content analytics such as that performed by Watson. At the intersection of social and smarter commerce is the creation of brand-aligned communities. Mike gave Moose Jaw outdoor products as an example where people are passionate about the brand and this passion is the foundation for an online community. Analytics will intersect here to offer a useful view of what is happening within the community.

We next focused on analytics in more detail. IBM projects $16 billion in business analytics revenue by 2015.  Business analytics software and services is a key contributor to IBM's growth with revenue up 20 percent in the first half of the year.  In the last 5 years, IBM has invested more than $14 billion in 24 analytics-related acquisitions. They have also dedicated nearly 8,000 business consultants worldwide to this space.

The Cognos and SPSS acquisitions helped extend their base for predictive analytics. In the predictive analytics space they are initially looking into two areas: financial performance management and risk. They augmented the capabilities within Cognos last year with the acquisition of Clarity to support automated regulatory filing. In the risk space they added OpenPages and integrated it with IBM's Tivoli brand. They now have eDiscovery capabilities through FileNet and support for legal hold requirements through PSS Systems. Another acquisition, Algorithgmics, also provides deep analytics in the area of financial risk.

We next stepped back a bit to look at what Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 brought to business. Web 1.0 demonstrated that the Web was ready for business. It showed that open standards could work and provided a language for the Web with Java. SOA was created and this supported the modernization of back office functions.

Now Web 2.0 took this further by bringing modernization into the front office. You now have Web apps that look at workforce automation and human capital management. For example, one internal IBM tool allows people to bid on work within their internal market allowing for greater utilization and a better fit of skills with job requirements.

Social tools are being adapted to created the connected enterprise and provide a useful and work related knowledge Web unlike the old style disconnected versions of knowledge management. I certainly agree with this need for connecting knowledge with work. The only knowledge management systems that I saw that were successful from the early 90s on were those integrated into work process. This was harder to do with Web 1.0 tools and so much easier with Web 2.0

To properly leverage the capabilities to handle the front office that Web 2.0 brings, IBM has built a multi-functional social business platform with Connections. They have gone beyond social networking to social business. Here is a blog post that Mike wrote on the topic, Beyond Collaboration: Becoming a Social Business. As I saw at Lotusphere, the capabilities of Connections are being integrated into other IBM software offerings to make them more social.

They are also developing situational workflow offerings, another good move. Two acquisitions in this space are PureEdge for secure XML forms and Lombardi for department level business process management software.  IBM is working on rounding out its software capabilities to cover many business capabilities.  They are also building an app store provisioning model to provide small business applets for the mobile business market.

We next went on to discuss their efforts in smarter commerce, as well as their next generation of computing, Watson. I will pick up these discussions in part two of this interview. 

 

Harmon.ie Announces the Top 25 Most Influential SharePoint Thought Leaders

Harmonie offers a cross-platform suite of enterprise collaboration products designed to boost user adoption of the dominant enterprise collaboration tools.  These include bringing central components of SharePoint into both Outlook and Lotus Notes. I have covered them on the AppGap (see Harmon.ie Provides Social Email to Help Drive Enterprise Collaboration Adoption).

Yesterday they released their list of the Top 25 Most Influential SharePoint Thought Leaders in Social Business Today. This is timely as the upcoming Microsoft SharePoint Conference runs October 3 - 6 in Anaheim.

Mark Fidelman of hamon.ie notes in his blog post that “since the demand to make SharePoint more social has increased tremendously over the past 12 months, our goal for the list was to identify the SharePoint thought leaders providing the best guidance for companies looking to increase their social and collaboration capabilities.” I am pleased and honored to be on this list.

I have been talking with a number of the software providers in the social business space.  It seems that many of them have recognized that SharePoint has a dominant and secure position in many organizations for document management. Many organizations have already invested a lot in their SharePoint implementation and will not let go of it lightly.

So these social business software providers are deciding not to compete with SharePoint but to acknowledge its presence as the document system of record. They are positioning themselves as the tool to make SharePoint more social. They are positioning themselves as an engagement layer that sits in front of SharePoint.

In my view SharePoint, and other document management systems, should be treated like other enterprise applications of record in the same way as an ERP or CRM system is being treated. At least that is how I would suggest that it be treated for firms that have already invested heavily in SharePoint or similar tools. The social tools then make these enterprise applications of record more social and increase engagement in their use. This is the goal of harmon.ie with its email integration capabilities, as I understand. I think this is a smart move. Of course, if there is no embeded document management system the field is wide open for many options.

Mark Fidelman’s post gives the details on the methodology they used to determine the list.  I think they are doing a great service with this effort. Despite being biased since I am on the list, I think it raises awareness that SharePoint can be made more social and that it should be made more social to increase engagement. I would only add that the other enterprise applications should be treated in the same way and I am encouraged to see many of vendors moving in this direction. Social tools need to be interagted into work processes to realize their potential and to avoid beconming isolated chat (see Putting Social Media to Work)

I will add in closing that we have designed the Darwin Awareness Engine™ so that it also integrates with SharePoint out of the box to provide visualizations of the conversations that are going on within SharePoint.  It can enable organizations to listen to the voice of the employee to use the term from Forrester’s Leslie Owens. It can also look at the conversations within most of the other social software tools, as well as those on the Web. You can find more about it at our web site and I will be writing more about our SharePoint connection next week. 

 

Should You Move Your Email To The Cloud?

I am attending Forrester's Content & Collaboration Forum 2011. Forrester notes that in five years, almost half of US workers — about 63 million people — will work virtually. I am already one of them. This will change everything in workplace IT support from designing workplace information strategies for collaboration, to delivering content experiences to people across channels, to engaging the next-generation workforce to serve customers better.

The Forum explores what the “current demand for more portable, social workplace experiences means for your workplace strategy.” It “shares the latest trends in technology adoption and how firms forge better business outcomes from a more mobile, social, and virtual workforce.” I attended the session, Extending Workplace Strategies To The Age Of Distributed Work - Should You Move Your Email And Collaboration To The Cloud? It was led by Christopher Voce, Principal Analyst & Research Director.

Chris asked the audience in the next 12 months: Who is keeping email and collaboration on premises? It was twice as many as evaluating options to move to the cloud. No one said that they are actually making the move or have already made the move. I would imagine that the email is more of the barrier than other forms of collaboration. This session focused on email. Chris’ data support that the challenge is email as over 90% of firms are now keeping email on premise while many other collaboration apps are moving to the cloud. Video conferencing is one of the most moved with less than 30% remaining on premise. 

The cloud can enable IT to focus more on business apps and keep email apps more up-to-date in terms of features. Another presenter noted that over 70% of most IT budgets are for operations and not for strategic business capabilities. There is also more cost savings, at least up front and likely for the total cost of ownership (but not always).

Email is one piece of the broader collaboration strategy. There are several alternatives to on premise: fully hosted, hosted supporting services (hybrid), and split domain (another hybrid). You can split off supporting services such as archiving. The split domain hybrid model means that some of workforce is in the cloud and some stays on premise for regulatory or other purposes. Pharma is an example here.

When you move to the cloud mobile device options are limited. However, despite the rise of mobile, US organizations are slowly moving to the cloud. Currently over 70% are on premise but in two years over 50% say they will move to the cloud for email. In Europe there is much less movement as these countries are more concerned about issues such as privacy.

What are the issues in the move to the cloud? First, there are significant investments in enterprise directories, sometimes to clean up patchwork solutions. The coexistence in the interim can be painful. Calendar is one area where this occurs. For this reason companies are moving to the “big bang” all at once approach to migration. Migration costs tend to run about .5 to 1.5 x annual fee per user. Part of the issue is how much data is carried over. Also movement to a new platform with training costs associated with it can raise the cost.

Lessons learned include the need to have representatives from all groups in your pilot. The use of communities and employee evangelists can reduce migration costs. Pick the natural helpers.  Issues that can slow things down: integration, security, SLAs, and legal terms.

How to do things right? Start with employee requirements (e.g., mail box size, archive requirements, SLAs, mobile). Segment employees if warranted. Then determine integration requirements. Conduct a cost requirements study. Forrester has a model for this. Discover external regulatory requirements and finally, determine internal security requirements.

There are many vendors that can host mailboxes. You do not have to limit yourself to the big names such as Google, IBM, and Microsoft. There are specialists, telecoms, and traditional outsourcers.

In short term run a pilot. It is easy. Also stop making any deeper ties into on premise email. Work with IT to determine the operational model for the move to the cloud. In the longer term, consider more than email. Do not over-provision based on your neediest users. Look into existing relationships for help. Are you already working with firms for other needs that provide this service? Time your move with an upgrade. All of this is good advice. 

 

Designing for Mobile Collaboration

Mobile collaboration is an increasingly important topic as two-thirds of the information workforce already work remotely, according to Forrester data. With the adoption of tablets such as the iPad and the proliferation of smart phones in the enterprise, that number figures to grow significantly. It is a matter of when, not whether that mobile devices exceed desktops. The new Forrester Wave™: Mobile Collaboration, Q3 2011 by Ted Schadler for Content & Collaboration Professionals offers some useful advice on how mobile collaboration requires a new app approach.

We are now living in a work everywhere world. I have noticed that even most small vacation inns have free wifi as a standard offering. Forrester notes that your most productive employees m now use four devices to get work done. This means that “client/server solutions with on-premises servers are inadequate, simply not responsive or agile enough for escalating user requirements and expectations.”

They note that mobile apps need to be designed to run well on any mobile device because of the proliferation of devices. With so many different mobile platforms and form factors to target, app developers will have to organize differently, code differently, and execute differently. In this new environment design skills grow ever-more important (and scarce). There will be new abstraction layers that separate presentation from interaction from back-end services. Teams now must design for mobile first.

Mobile apps must be delivered as a cloud service. Forrester notes that latency is already a problem for distributed organizations and even waiting for email to upload or download to a remote site can be painful. I see this with my iPhone. For me this wait time is mitigated by the fact that I mostly use the iPhone to check for messages when I am killing time. It would be very frustrating in normal use. In addition, access to team sites and even the file system from a hotel room over a virtual private network (VPN) can be excruciatingly slow. Fortunately this is no longer an issue for me but I remember it well. Forrester states that the problem is the lack of capacity, bandwidth, and data close to the device. The solution is cloud suppliers with data centers around the world and points of presence in every major city. The cloud is simply better for delivering good mobile app experiences. I would agree.

Here is another perspective on mobile app creation from the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference. This session discussed three components that any mobile strategy should have, which includes deciding what goes mobile, understanding how to mobilize applications and services, and designing a framework for managing mobility. On a related note here are some thoughts from the 2011 mLearn Mobile Learning Conference.

 

 

Mobile Collaboration Moves Forward

I received a review copy of the new The Forrester Wave™: Mobile Collaboration, Q3 2011 by Ted Schadler for Content & Collaboration Professionals. In this research, Forrester evaluated the mobility strengths and weaknesses of 13 vendors in four collaboration categories - document-based collaboration, webconferencing, videoconferencing, and activity streams. Forrester limited the vendors to those with native apps on more than one mobile operating system with a cloud solution and market experience, which means vendors such as Apple, Microsoft, and RIM were not included.

Forrester identified:

Box, IBM, and Yammer as leaders in current offering, determined by how many smartphone and tablet platforms the product runs on and by scores for security, administration, and user reviews. 


These criteria include: smartphone and tablet platforms as well as the desktop and browser support. Additional criteria were security and administration features. They also relied on a neutral data source — Apple App Store reviews — to evaluate the user experience and popularity of the offerings. Good choice.

Skype, Box, Yammer, and Cisco as leaders in mobile strategy, determined largely by the vendor's strategy for cloud reach and the mobile app architecture (the balance between native apps and cloud services) as well as by the number of years with a mobile solution and the organizational commitment. This category included questions such as: “Does the company have a mobile app Internet architecture with the right balance between cloud services and local apps? Does the mobile development team report to a senior executive? How long has the company had a mobile solution?”

Skype, Cisco, and Google as leaders in mobile market presence scores, determined by the number of paying mobile customers, paying users, and downloads.

They evaluated only the mobile characteristics, not the collaboration category features. The main features were: funding status, enterprise readiness, platform support, and cloud reach. Forrester noted that email has been a “killer” mobile collaboration app since 1998 when RIM first launched BlackBerry. This remains the case as 87% percent of smartphone workers use email on their devices, and collectively they do 32% of their email on a smartphone. There is much more in the report on this fats growing market and I recommend it. 

 

Making Sense of Mobile for the Workforce

Forrester’s TJ Keitt recently provided a useful report, Demystifying The Mobile Workforce. This is an increasingly important topic as two-thirds of the information workforce already work remotely, according to Forrester data. With the adoption of tablets such as the iPad and the proliferation of smart phones in the enterprise, that number figures to grow significantly. It is a matter of when, not whether that mobile devices exceed desktops.

In this new research, Forrester defines the five types of information workers based on its data and provides a template for provisioning mobile resources to these employees. Forrester believes that IT can no longer take a one-size-fits-all approach to workforce technologies and must provision mobile and other information technologies based upon workforce segmentation. Instead of force fitting mobile technologies into an overall workforce framework, “ontent and collaboration professionals now must have a mobile-first mindset when designing workplace policies,” according to the report

“The bottom line is that if businesses are to smartly plan for and provision a mobile workforce, they need to have a firm grasp of what the issues are related to these workers, TJ Keitt, wrote in his post on the report, "Anywhere, Anytime" Work Means IT Must Provide The Right Technology, To The Right Person, At The Right Time.

The report provides data to support the five types of information workers and to demonstrate their technology preferences. The five types include: Back-Office Employees comprising 34% of the workforce: Hyper-Mobile Professionals constituting 33% of the workforce, Connected Consultants covering 16% of the workforce, Part-Time Telecommuters comprising 11% of the workforce, and Remote-Based Technicians. Who represent 5% of the workforce.  The report provides a matrix of communication use by each of these five types with some differences.

Each of the five types of users requires a somewhat different approach. The report suggests that we start by mapping use cases to workers’ responsibilities. Then assess the business process changes needed to encourage adoption as well as tap power users to help drive mobile adoption. You also need to provide training to workers who have not been fast adopters.  It also encourages organizations to streamline the number of devices workers use and, at the same time, extend mobile support to a broader set of workers.

There are a lot of useful suggestions in this report for what is a relatively new field. At the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston there was a mobile track for the first time.  Here is on example session: My 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes: Got Strategy? How to Capitalize on the Mobile Revolution.

If you are in the process of developing a mobile strategy I recommend this report. 

 

Traction Releases TeamPage Attivio Plus and Social Enterprise Web

I have covered Traction Software a number of times (for example, Traction Team Page 5.1 Moves Forward with Project Management Capabilities and Traction Introduces New Capabilities and Partners with Team Page 4.2). At E2.0 Boston 2011 Traction announced two major new capabilities. TeamPage Attivio Plus extends permission-aware search and faceted navigation to external Sharepoint, Documentum, File server, Exchange and other sources, fused with TeamPage content. Social Enterprise Web allows you to discover, discuss, tag, task and use external documents or database records discovered by search or selected with a TeamPage badge (a "Like" button for collaboration). This brings content of external "Systems of Record" into the TeamPage fabric for collaboration and action tracking using.

TeamPage Attivio Plus uses Attivio's AIE technology to provide unified information access spanning sources with deep content analysis. Internal TeamPage content and external source hits are shown as merged results in time or relevance order. Here is a sample of TeamPage Attivio Plus search results.

You can also use TeamPage's faceted navigation to drill down by selected source just as you currently can drill down by author, tag, key phrase, sentiment, etc. All external and internal search hits and faceted navigation are permission-aware, automatically showing just what each person has permission to see. External sources and access rules can be continuously and incrementally indexed, or updated on a specified schedule.

Social Enterprise Web is an integrated search and badging capability. With it TeamPage gains the capability to tag, discuss, task and share pages, documents and database records from external as well as internal sources. For example, a suggestion found in a customer email stored in Exchange, an issue with a new drug application filed in Documentum, or a comment on a legacy document stored in SharePoint, Lotus Notes, or the S: drive of a file server can be discovered, tagged, discussed, and tasked for follow-up action in TeamPage.

Here is an example of sharing a page (a weather report) from the Web on TeamPage.

Here is the shared item appearing on the Activity feed.

Using search as a lever to span silos and system of record makes their native content addressible and actionable in place without import or conversion. This is similar to the way search loosely couples content across many sources on the public Web, but focused on a business intranet. TeamPage adds: consistent authentication; permissioned-aware integrated search fusing TeamPage content and activity across external sources; indexing of siloed systems to share and use records that have no native Web interface; and indexing of tags, discussion and tasks in context to provide activity based navigation and search across all sources. For example, a content hit in a Word document stored in Documentum shows TeamPage tags, comments and tasks relating to that document

I also like what they are doing with Activity Streams as I think this is one of the most important features of an Enterprise 2.0 platform. Traction TeamPage 5.2 introduced new activity dashboards to make it simple to zoom into project activity streams to see related task status, edits, and discussion automatically drawn from the flow of collaborative work in any TeamPage space or context. TeamPage users also can zoom out to get a broad view spanning business activities using notification, faceted content navigation and search.

This directly addresses a problem that has generated a lot of recent discussion: How will people be able to cope with activity streams that contain lots of detail - important for broad awareness - without feeling overwhelmed and loosing valuable signals in the flow? Activity dashboards extend Traction TeamPage's ability to tag or task any page, post, status or comment on any item seen or created in the flow of collaborative work and communication. TeamPage has always considered things at the detail level with their permission levels. This approach to handling Activity Stream information is consistent with their design principles and shows how collaboration and action tracking can be embeded in the flow of work while avoiding overload.

 

NewsGator Enhances its Social Sites 2010 Platform for SharePoint

NewsGator recently launched Social Sites 2010 2.0, the next version of their flagship enterprise social computing software. Among other things, the new release includes enhanced community capabilities, architectures, and reporting functionality. NewsGator has also announced a new video module for Social Sites that supports enterprise learning initiatives and multimedia sharing. I have covered NewsGator on several occasions before (see NewsGator Gets More Mobile and Ramps Up Activity Streams and Analytics and NewsGator Offers Social Sites ™: A Comprehensive Enterprise Social Networking Suite). I recently spoke with Brian Kellner about their new offerings.

NewsGator is built to sit on top of SharePoint as a managed service application and does not operate independent of it. This still leaves them a majority of the market. They make SharePoint more social which is a very useful task. Brian showed me a useful architectural diagram as he explained the various components of the offering. I am providing it below and then I will walk through the different sections.

At the top are additional modules that can be added on to the core functions. Several of these additional (‘value added” in their terms) capabilities are new. I will start with the core features and then discuss the value added capabilities.

In my view the Activity Stream is one of the major components of an enterprise 2.0 platform so I am staring here. In NewsGator’s case it collects a continuous flow of events, content, and activities to provide users with relevant and timely information. You can filter all of these events including those from SharePoint, external social media streams (e.g., Twitter, LinkedIn), and other internal and third-party applications. The Activity Stream can be embedded in multiple places, which is a key feature from my perspective. Here is a sample Activity Stream.

Microblogging is one of the feeds into the Activity Stream. It provides embeddable threaded discussions that allow for various interactions including ability to comment, answer, share, rate, vote, and mark for follow-up. Other features include:  IM, and other third-party integrations, auto-updates based on user actions, two-way email integration, and notifications and digests.

You could also make the case that Profiles are the core feature as they provide a center of focus. NewsGator profile feature jump-starts adoption, participation, contributions, and collaboration with a simple profile-building coach to help your workforce create and maintain individual social profiles — their face to the organization. This is a good move.

Communities establish and cultivate a collaborative setting for your internal and external stakeholders. You can turn SharePoint groups into Social Sites communities of practice for projects and initiatives, or create places for colleagues to connect about common interests and best practices. Templates are available to kick-start your community planning. Converting to any of the NewsGator function from out of the box features is simple as they are Web parts and the change can be made with a mouse click.

Social Insights allow you to measure and track activity by community, type, and user. Easy-to-consume dashboards and monthly activity reports allow you to evaluate user adoption and participation levels. The transparency of an enterprise platform allows for increased metrics so this is a very useful function. The desktop client allows you to participate in the Social Sites environment without being inside the platform.

Brian also went over the new features at the top of the architectural stack. The Video Stream is a new feature that enables employees to quickly post and play videos in their Activity Streams for on-the-fly training, product demos, new concept explanations, customer stories, and other uses. You can see the interface for Video Stream below.

NewsGator just announced Spotlight - a badging, recognition, and expertise discovery module that is driven by measurable participation that allows users to be recognized as subject-matter experts and earn merit-based, electronic badges, while letting organizations quickly locate, recognize and motivate top performers. Here is a sample set of badges, as well as a sample expertise diagram that shows the relationship of people to a topic. The closer you are to the topic core, the more involved you are with the topic.

The Idea Steam provides many of the capabilities for innovation management than a number of standalone tools offer but it is integrated within the total Social Sites platform. You use it to gather, evaluate, nurture, and prioritize fresh, new ideas that can transform your organization. The Idea Stream capability supports the capture of input, feedback, and conversations from your customers, partners, and employees. Ideas can be submitted on the fly via the activity stream or via the Social Sites desktop, email, or mobile clients. The tool can be applied to a specific campaign or attached to a community on an ongoing basis.

NewsGator continues to enable RSS feeds through the News Stream module. This was its original capability and I was a user in 2004 (see my 2004 post - Finally, I’m Scanning the Web through NewsGator).  It allows you to streamline and structure enterprise communications. Integrated, secure social media monitoring from news sites, blogs, wikis, external social streams (e.g., Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), and enterprise applications are delivered where your employees need them.

I really like the collection of capabilities and they certainly enhance SharePoint. NewsGator has maintained a strong positive relationship with Microsoft so they can anticipate and plan their support for next steps within SharePoint. Since the NewsGator capabilities are Web parts, it is easy to swap out the native SharePoint version of such tools as micro-blogging for the NewsGator version. 

 

Many Levels of Business Intelligence

Rob Armstrong wrote an interesting post, What do you mean by BI?, on the Smart Data Collective in which he outlines five different levels of business intelligence along with the IT and user requirements for each. First he notes that he “like(s) to read an acronym backwards.  BI is not about business intelligence, it is about having enough intelligence regarding your business that you can make, and take, relevant, timely, and profitable actions.”  We would agree. Here are the five levels with the IT and user requirements for each in Rob’s words.

Level 1: “Basic Canned” Reports: - users have no ability to change the content of the report and receives latest version of pre-determined output. “Highly optimized by IT; Well defined by Users.”

Level 2: “Canned Ad-Hoc” – users target parameterized dimensions for pre-determined and pre-optimized reports. “Highly optimized by IT; users determine “typical” dimension blocks.”

Level 3: “Customized Canned Ad-Hoc” – users can define dimension boundaries and also determine columns or calculations that appear on the report. “Optimized by IT; KPI’s defined by users.”

Level 4: “Create your own” - user have free reign to determine the columns, dimension ranges, and even create new metric calculations limited only by their security access needs. “Users understand SQL processing and creation.  May also create temporary tables or store results.”

Level 5: Data Mining – in prior levels users are asking questions to get answers.  In data mining the “user is asking questions to understand what questions really need to be asked.”  “Users trained in data model and SQL practices.”

Let me add a sixth level:

Awareness Engine™ - users can set and explore topics and subtopics within a targeted set of content sources and discover new content beyond predetermined expectations in real time. There is no requirement for IT to be involved at all as it is a SaaS application. There are no technical requirements for tool use such as data modeling or SQL practices. The more the user knows about the content topics, the better they are able to optimize value from the tool by seeing the important anomalies. 

 

OutStart’s Learning Content Management System Automates Key Components of Content Development

I recently spoke with Mike Gregory about OutStart’s Learning Content Management System (LCMS).  As a disclosure I am helping OutStart with their blog and Twitter efforts. First, I asked Mike to explain the difference between an LMS and LCMS, as I have been familiar with LMS (Learning Management System) for some time. Mike said the similarity of terms can be confusing but there is a real distinction. He used the metaphor of a store for LMS. You can find learning content there and the LMS keeps track of usage. The LMS is the back office tool. A LCMS then is like a factory where content is assembled from component parts. This is different from the traditional artisan approach of hand building learning content one instance at a time. This agility in developing content greatly extends both the efficiency and effectiveness of content creation.

An LCMS provides for automating the development, management, maintenance, delivery and publishing of modular and personalized learning – including online, instructor guides, mobile, assessments and the ability to deliver training in different languages. This allows you to build content once and then easily repurpose it for multiple channels and branding. You create learning objects that can be put together in multiple ways. OutStart’s mobile platform, Hot Lava, is one of the many delivery channels that can be used (see OutStart’s Hot Lava Provides Flexible Mobile Communication Platform).

Utilizing an LCMS works much like object oriented programming to achieve great efficiencies in learning content creation and updating. This granularity also allows for better search capabilities, as well as better reuse. You create once and publish in many ways.  You update an object and then the content can be automatically updated in the many instances in which it appears. You can build content for documentation then take the same content and add classroom activities and instructor notes for ILT.  You can also take the same content and add simulation activities and quizzes for eLearning.

For all the efficiency gains, the real value is the increased learner focus that this agility permits. One of the main benefits of the modular approach is the ease in which personalized learning can be provided. You can customize learning content by role (e.g., sales vs. technical support) or give a test and them offer personalized content for each individual based on their results. Content can be provided in a variety of modalities and channels to meet individual needs.

To accomplish this learner focus, OutStart’s LCMS supports the entire content life cycle: development, management, maintenance, and delivery. First, you simply develop content once separately from the delivery vehicle so it becomes easy to use the content for different purposes, people, and devices. You can quickly assemble courses for modular material regardless of whether it was developed within the system or imported. The workflow and review processes are streamlined for rapid progress.

All content is tagged and stored in a central repository. This makes updating easy and eliminates the possibility of losing track of content. The ease of access facilitates changes when updates are required. The system also knows all places where a single bit of content is used and allows you to updates all these instances at once. Delivery is then device independent and flexible to support personalization.

The LCMS also works with OutStart’s social software platform, Participate (see OutStart’s Participate Supports the Social Side of Enterprise Work Processes). For example, while in Participate, you can do a search in Evolution to find modularized content for performance support purposes.

OutStart’s LCMS integrates with Microsoft office, enabling the ingestion of SME created or legacy content for reuse and repurposing. It also enables the assembly of a variety of native and external content, including Flash and other media, through a central repository. The LCMS can integrate with a variety of LMS’s, including the LMS that OutStart offers. Other core capabilities include configurable metadata management, review management, workflow, media management, search and re-use, enterprise class security, partitioning, data movement, and integrations. The OutStart LCMS is available as SaaS or On-Premise.

OutStart’s LCMS is well received in the industry and has won eLearning! Magazine's Readership Award for 'Best Learning Content Management System (LCMS)' in each of the last two years, and Brandon Hall's Gold Award for Technology Excellence

 

Qontext.com Brings Greater Context to Enterprise Collaboration

When Gartner named Qontext a cool vender in the context-aware computing space they wrote, “one of the holy grails in the collaboration market is the ability to embed collaboration services directly into business processes.” This allows you to “build the collaboration service directly into the business process and make historical collaboration content accessible from the application.” I could not agree more.  I have long been a proponent of this approach going back to building process-aligned knowledge management systems beginning in the early 90s. Now Qontext has taken the approach a step further with its pinning concept. I recently spoke with Samir Ghosh, Qontext, VP, Business Development & Strategy, about their capabilities.

Enterprise 2.0 is about making interactions appropriately transparent and accessible. Qontext has added a new capability to promote this transparency and access. They call it “pinning.” It is somewhat like tagging but different. Instead of putting a tag on an activity, you pin the activity to a record. It is the opposite of categorizing email, for example, where the receiver puts the tag or category on the item.  The pinning is done by the system as content is created to connect it to its context. Once an item is pinned, you can easily go back to the source and see all the accumulated context.

This is a great way to address the content overload issue. As more social content is created within the enterprise through the various tools, there will be a need to filter the fire hose. Qontext takes a different approach by allowing you to view contextually relevant information without having to determine manual filters.

Qontext can integrate or overlay any enterprise app, so this pinning can occur within the app, even across different apps and then viewed inside or outside the apps. Qontext can be integrated with such enterprise apps as salesforce.com, NetSuite, SugarCRM, LeadFormix, HRnet, LeanTaaS and Herald Logic. The integration can be done through a pop-up or directly through the app UI.  Here is a sample screen of Qontext operating inside NetSuite.

Here you can see pinned items in a NetSuite application.

Organizations can also use the Qontext suite as a stand-alone collaboration portal. It has a full suite of collaboration features such as document management, threaded discussions, bookmarks, status updates, video and photo sharing, polls, quizzes, slide sharing, surveys, blogs and wikis that operate in the cloud or on-premises.

Qontext also has an activity stream that goes across applications. I think this is a core feature for enterprise 2.0 apps.  Samir mentioned that Gartner predicts that by 2012 over half of organizations will be using activity streams. With their pinning concept, Qontext complements activity streams in an interesting manner.  Activity streams can provide an awareness of what is happening in the enterprise and pinning can give you better access to the context of these events.  Below is a Qontext activity stream within NetSuite.

Qontext provides a comprehensive collaboration suite. Their pinning concept appears to be an excellent innovation. It will be interesting to see how it gets adopted and how it evolves in both use and capabilities as this adoption occurs. 

 

Can Cloud Computing Elevate the Role of IT, Making It More Strategic?

Here is an interesting study by IDG that found that cloud computing is enabling a more central role for IT in shaping business strategy and driving innovation. The research polled 200 IT managers in the U.S. and Europe. The vast majority (96 percent) believes that the primary role of IT has changed over the past five years, and 71 percent feel the trend to continue over the next two years.  While 54 percent of the survey participants acknowledge the current value of IT is largely defined by its role as owner and operator of IT infrastructure, they believe within two years, the primary value of IT will become managing the IT supply chain. Half feel that the cloud is contributing to this change.

Looking further into the results, IT professionals believe cloud computing can accelerate agility (63 percent), innovation (58 percent) and collaboration with the enterprise (57 percent). Respondents also anticipate cloud computing will boost IT productivity (55 percent) and decrease the resources dedicated to IT support (40 percent). These changes will likely trigger a demand for more business and management experience in senior IT professionals. Nearly 70 percent of respondents feel an increasing number of CIOs and senior IT staff will have a business (as opposed to a technology) background in the future.

The nimble nature of cloud based IT coupled with the reduction in maintenance needs, should allow CIOs to focus more on business issues. However this transition will set up challenges. At last year's MIT CIO Symposium, panelists talked about the CIO Paradox. They have to drive innovation, manage risk, and control costs and these goals can be at cross purposes.  They often inherit costly legacy systems and then are told to go forth and innovate.  I wonder what the talk will be at the 2011 session. I am planning to attend and will be reporting on it here. 

 

Tablets in the Enterprise in 2011

Over 15 million iPads have been sold. I have seen many in action and my wife is about to get one. Perhaps I will get inspired also. This is not all. Competitive products from Google and others are out or on the horizon. People want to replace bulky binders with sleek tablets. That is my wife’s goal. Even more replace carrying laptops to events such as my friends Thierry Hubert and Luis Suarez. Tablets’ portability, convenience, connectedness and application portfolio make them very attractive.  Now they are being used beyond the office in fields including construction, manufacturing, and retail as they offer more than smart phones in many ways.

This raises a new support requirement for enterprise IT departments, as well as business units. An enterprise tablet strategy is in order and that is the task addressed by Forrester’s Ted Schadler with his report, Tablets in the Enterprise in 2011. In most cases, tablets.serve as a third device for most employees who still need the productivity tools of a computer.  In 2011, IT must work with other business units to determine what employees will use tablets for tasks and what they can do to help workers get the most from the investment in these devices.  

The reports mentions that at the beginning of 2010, 56% of North American and European enterprises already supported personal mobile devices, and this will likely hold for tablets over the next three years. Many of the tablets are purchased by employees but for them to be aligned to work tasks, IT must plan on how best to set up work data and applications.

One issue is adapting thousands of business applications to run well on tablets and smart phones.  Ted notes that desktop virtualization may be the answer.  By running client applications on a server or an employee’s PC, you can make them available safely through a virtual desktop. He adds that tablets may be the killer motivator to embrace desktop virtualization.

There is more in the report that addresses an emerging issue of importance. 

 

How Data Drives Effective Decision Making

The New York Times ran a story, When There’s No Such Thing as Too Much Information, by Steve Lohr, that covered some of the value of using data to help with business decisions.  The article began with the challenge and opportunity provided by the massive about of information we have today. If organizations are not swamped by the sheer volume, there is a lot of value to be gleamed from smart analysis of the content.

The article then focused on research conducted by new research led by Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Brynjolfsson and his colleagues, Lorin Hitt, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Heekyung Kim, a graduate student at M.I.T., looked at 179 large companies. They found that those that adopted “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity rates 5 to 6 percent higher than could be explained by other factors, including how much the companies invested in technology.

The Times article noted that Thomas H. Davenport, my former colleague and a professor of information technology and management at Babson College, made that point in his most recent book, with Jeanne G. Harris and Robert Morison,  Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results.

The drive to help companies find meaningful patterns in the vast amounts of content has created a fast-growing business intelligence (BI) industry. Major technology companies – IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft — have collectively spent more than $25 billion buying up specialist companies in the field.

The Times quotes David Grossman, a technology analyst at Stifel Nicolaus, “The biggest change facing corporations is the explosion of data. The best business is in helping customers analyze and manage all that data.”

We are very pleased to se these research findings and commentary as making sense of content overload and finding patterns within it is the goal of the Darwin Awareness Engine™.