Back to blueKiwi. In last month’s update to our Enterprise 2.0 vendor evaluation research, we said “blueKiwi’s offering lies between the social platform Socialtext wishes to offer, and the ever-enticing notion of a modern replacement for email.” Done with explaining the acquisition rationale.

References+ ist eine Web-Anwendung zum weltweiten Austausch von Wissen, Erfahrungen und Best-Practices innerhalb des Siemens-Intranets. Nicht die IT-Anwendung als solche, sondern die derzeit ca. 8.100 Mitglieder umfassende Nutzer-Community bildet den Hauptfokus zum effizienten Wissensaustausch. Im Sinne von „Social Networking“ möchte References+ Siemens-Mitarbeitende über organisatorische, hierarchische und geographische Grenzen hinweg vernetzen und diese zur direkten Kommunikation untereinander animieren. Es kann beobachtet werden, dass der dadurch initiierte Wissenstransfer nicht nur über die Anwendung, sondern auch parallel dazu über rein bilaterale Kommunikation stattfindet.

.. zur Aneignung von #Wikis im JCSCW

"wurde der rote Faden in diesem Beitrag mehrmals umgeschrieben, bis (fast) alle Wünsche der Gutachter restlos erfüllt werden konnten. Zusammenfassend wurde dieser 40 Seiten lange Beitrag bis zum Erscheinen nämlich insgesamt fünf Mal intensiv begutachtet und ebenso oft durch uns überarbeitet (inklusive Verfassung von Gegendarstellungen als Antwort auf die Gutachten). Der Beitrag hat daher auch alle Akzeptanz-Stati von "major revisions requested", "conditionally accepted" und "minor revisions requested" erlebt und überlebt."

Business patterns of repeatable behaviour and consistent use of methodology or tools Technical patterns of business enablement through provision of platforms Integration patterns that exploit rampant connectivity, API and SDK model Agile patterns that embrace iteration and enable constant innovation Customer experience and UX patterns that redefine business models purely from the perspective of the customer/user Ecosystem patterns that both map and enable the complex systems of business without borders

The recent survey on social business that MIT Sloan Management Review conducted in collaboration with Deloitte clearly indicates the growing importance of social business across all industries over the next three years. The survey asked respondents whether social business was unimportant, somewhat unimportant, neutral, somewhat important, or important to their business. The following chart shows just those who answered “important,” cut by industry type.

Ex­plo­ra­ti­on und Pro­mo­ti­on Zie­le der Ein­füh­rung von So­ci­al Soft­ware En­t­er­pri­se 2.0 ver­sus Wis­sens­ma­nage­ment: Ge­mein­sam­kei­ten … … und Un­ter­schie­de

"Da die Plattformen nur das Verhalten der Mitarbeiter im Unternehmen transparent abbilden, ist es notwendig, das Unternehmen und seine Mitarbeiter besser zu verstehen, um die Einführung und Nutzung daran zu orientieren. Dabei ist die Kenntnis der Arbeitspraktiken, aber natürlich auch der Unternehmenskultur, also des Rahmens, in den diese eingebettet sind, notwendig. Aus diesem Grund spielt der Einführungs- und Veränderungsprozess eine enorm wichtige Rolle, denn dabei geht es um die Einbettung des Werkzeuges in das soziale und organisatorische System – diese Tatsache wird leider in den meisten Projekten zur Einführung von Social Software nicht verstanden oder unterschätzt."

Einführung einer Social Business Lösung und der Ansatz von Hansen Im Rahmen der Einführung eines Social Intranet oder einer Kollaborationsplattform kann der Ansatz von Hansen an drei Stellen eine wichtige Rolle spielen:
1. Beseitigung der Search- und Transfer-Barriere
2. Change Management
3. Veränderungen messbar machen

Real time collaboration Like Google Wave, Rizzoma allows you to manage communications across distributed teams in real time. Everyone always has the latest version of the document, and everyone sees changes as they happen.

Es gibt einige Argumente, die auf den ersten und vielleicht auch auf den zweiten Blick stark gegen die Einführung eines Firmenwikis sprechen. Jedes bedarf einer gesonderten Betrachtung im individuellen Unternehmenskontext. Einige sind klassische Strohmänner, andere beruhen auf Missverständnissen oder Vorurteilen, wieder andere sind nicht so einfach von der Hand zu weisen und müssen ernstgenommen werden. Grundsätzlich gibt es Unternehmen, für die ein Wiki tatsächlich nicht das richtige Werkzeug ist, sofern sie nicht bereit oder in der Lage sind, etablierte, konservative Strukturen und Prozesse zumindest zu durchdenken. Im Zweifelsfall ist es in solchen Unternehmen durchaus sinnvoll, weiterhin auf klassische Kommunikationsmethoden zu setzen. Eine Wiki-Einführung “von unten” ohne die Unterstützung des Managements oder gar gegen seinen Willen ist erfahrungsgemäß ein sehr schweres, wenn nicht unmögliches Unterfangen.

Alexander Stocker kommentiert und ich schließe mich an ;)

"Ich schließe mich grundsätzlich der Beziehungs-Sicht an. Dennoch sollten Technologien/Plattformen beide Arten von Beziehungen (stark & schwach) unterstützen.

Die E20-Diskussion um die Unterstützung schwacher Beziehungen ist grundsätzlich nicht neu. Sie resultiert (so vermute ich) auch daraus, dass starke Beziehungen ohnehin unterstützt werden, sowie aus der Sicht von Granovetter, dass es Sinn macht, schwache Beziehungen zu unterstützen. "

Theory #ftw :)

While IBM may not be the first to market, the least expensive nor the easiest to install/configure/manage, one thing they certainly do well is articulate the business value of social business. Every marketing message, product demo and customer case study is focused on why and how organizations need to transform themselves into a social business to remain competitive. My mantra for a while now has been to stop talking about "being social" and to instead focus on "getting work done" and IBM appears to be on that path.

Why we need to rethink systems thinking in Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business.

The tactical way in which you locate or engage with your advocates may vary based upon the type of community (employee, customer, product support, etc.), but the principles I’ll describe below can apply to either type of community.



What are Community Advocates?
What Advocates Do and Why You Need Them?
First, advocates can share in Community Work.
Second, advocates can increase your community reach and word of mouth promotion.
Third, advocates can be a powerful front line source of end user and member support.
Fourth, advocates can help you prune and curate community content.
Finally (although the list could go on!), your community advocates can be a trusted source of user feedback.
What’s the Bottom Line?

by Claire Flanagan

The foundation for social organization transformation is culture and leadership. Process and technology initiatives are certainly important and play a vital role; but without a change in organizational behavior it will prove meaningless. Change starts from the top and it’s the leaders that are responsible for facilitating this change.

What’s keeping other companies from following their lead? Many executives recognize that social media is powerful, even if they still wonder in the back of their minds whether it’s just a time sink. Yet, even when they decide that there is potential, these execs get hung up on trying to figure how to apply social technologies to their companies, how to engage and empower their employees to participate.

Here’s the trick with social business: Focus on people and culture.

Technology solutions will be applied to management challenges in time. Market forces make it nearly inevitable.  It remains to be seen if they’ll be effective without management interventions that consider the culture and human side of the equation.  It’s important to allow for new roles and ways of thinking to grow organically within an organization as a foundation for this transition.

Our collaborative discovery sessions with clients reveal patterns to the environmental needs of major organizations. We’ve found that is helpful to share with clients a list of socially calibrated attributes that may prompt internal evaluation and change.

How does your organization compare with this list? Are you ready to make a transition to managing a socially calibrated organization?

The W3C Social Business Jam is an online conversation among leaders in business, government and technology about the current state of social business, the future role that social technologies can play in improving the bottom line, and how social technology should evolve in order to support business objectives. A primary objective of the Jam is to cooperatively explore key trends and concepts in social business with an eye towards how social standards can facilitate business goals. The Jam should produce a better understanding for participants of how businesses are using social technologies and the challenges they face integrating the technologies into their existing environments.

the way the social tools are changing the way we work, by making it more open and transparent, and pulling it out of closed and opaque systems, like email, document management tools, or business applications. He makes the case that pulling work out of the shadows of these pre-social technologies and bringing it out in the open changes everything

""Immer mehr Unternehmen werden ihr eigenes Know-How und ihr eigenen Ressourcen rund um Social Media aufbauen – eingebettet in eine gesamtheitliche Public Relations." Also genau dort, wo es nur in Teilen hingehört ... Es ist richtig, dass in den letzten Jahren eine "Professionalisierung" der PR stattgefunden hat - wobei ich das eher als (Ver-)Akademisierung bezeichnen würde. Kurz: Social Media müssen zwar ein Teil jeder PR-Strategie sein, sie umfassen aber deutlich mehr als das, was die PR abdecken kann: Marketing, Sales, CRM, Kundenservice, Innovationsmanagement, Wissensmanagement und last but not least Enterprise 2.0 (also innerhalb einer Organisation)."

Summary A few years ago we launched a “microblogging” system called Yammer at Capgemini. Yammer is a private and secure enterprise social network that allows colleagues to hold conversations, read posts and actively collaborate with co-workers in real-time. It is contributing to the collective consciousness of the 25,000 people who subscribe to it, a consciousness that is continually shifting and updating, as those people constantly learn and share new experiences.

Namen sind ja eigentlich nicht wichtig - sondern die Inhalte, Diskurse und erweiterten Nomenklaturen die sich daran anschließen. Stimme dir aber ganz zu, wir sollten den originären Social Business originär verwenden. Und ja, es braucht einen vernünftigen Metabegriff für die (social business) Veränderungen in Unternehmen die wir sehen ... Persönlich fand ich den Enterprise 2.0 Terminus niemals schlecht, auch weil er sich schnell als eine Art mentaler Shortcut etabliert hat (und hey, es gab da auch Bücher mit dem Begriff im Titel), dies geht aber nicht so weit dass ich mich in Begriffsdiskussionen verwickeln lassen möchte.

how smarter work is all about finding new ways of getting the job done in a much more effective and efficient manner, but at the same time with an end-result that everyone else, regardless of wherever they may well be in the world, can benefit from, reuse, apply, and continue further with their learning activities, because, at the end of the day, which is my favourite part permeating throughout the whole story, work is all about learning, learning while at work.

Clients are interested in collaboration and have lots of adoption insights. We’re starting to see interesting case studies from clients. In addition to reporting excellent returns on their investments, clients shared qualitative feedback, such as stories of pilot groups who couldn’t imagine giving up the tools. Successful clients used executive support, communication plans, mentoring, metrics, incentives, role models, and other techniques to help people make new forms of collaboration part of the way people worked

IBM are in the process of putting together an amazing toolkit that will allow developers to build some petty amazing applications.  These tools are not unique to IBM Lotus Notes.  They can be used in conjunction with all the IBM social clients such as Connections.  These tools also support open standards allowing them to integrate with other products and services.  This also means the skills we develop building IBM social business solutions can be more easily ported to other platforms.  Most of us know how great a development platform Notes has been over the past 21 years.

The best thing that IBM can do is to convince customers that they have the tools for the future of what IBM calls "Social Business". (You did notice that the term 'Social Business' means something else to the rest of the world?) That success is not a given. In this country companies are not yet sold on "the cloud" and even less so on "enterprise 2.0/social business". I am sometimes involved in these discussions and pilots often end up as "Wohlfühlprojekte", which means you do them if you have time and money to burn.

Your point about SharePoint adoption is right on. But the way to get people to really adopt SharePoint is to allow them to use it without having to change the way their daily workflow, and today, business users spend their time in email, not next generation social software.

HR represents a rich area to apply social media to business processes. For inspiration, I first turned to the work of my long time Web friend, Gautam Ghosh, who recently wrote a guest column on Social media and HR. In this sound piece he outlined ways that social media can address the HR areas of recruitment, learning and development, compensation and benefits, HR processes, and employee engagement. I will not repeat Gautam’s examples here but offer some new ones from a Bitrix client, a large mental health agency in the US.

What have you done lately to help increase the creation of ideas within your organization — have you helped to tear down the walls rather than build walls?

most security breaches are caused by people, and our best defense against them is knowledge and awareness. That said, I think it's just as possible that there will be increasing awareness of the cost implications of too many restrictions over sharing information, which is the point I'm making above.

SharePoint 2010 includes a lot that is new and improved on the collaboration side, and the people I speak with at organizations are very keen to get their hands on the new capabilities. As with any technology, features and functions are merely opportunities for doing work in a different way, so IT organizations and departments need to create strong engagement strategies for exploring fitness to task with their business department clients. Once opportunities for improving business activities have been identified, they then need to cultivate various user adoption strategies to ensure that the hoped-for-value translates into delivered-value. 

“Based on his experience in creating, leading, and managing communities and communities programs, both inside and outside of organizations, Garfield defines and describes 10 principles for successful communities. He offers real-world examples and discusses tools while emphasizing key themes: Communities should be independent of organization structure; they are different from teams; are not sites, blogs or wikis; community leadership and membership should be voluntary; communities span boundaries; need a critical mass of members; start with as broad a scope as is reasonable; need to be actively nurtured; and more.”

If you have been a regular reader of this blog, you would know how, by now, and every so often, I get to talk and share further insights around one of my favourite Web sources for learning on a wide range of topics available out there at the moment. One that surely doesn’t leave people standing still; quite the opposite… Inspiring, provocative, insightful and enlightening are adjectives that come to mind when talking, of course, about TED Talks. Well, earlier on this week, I had the opportunity to watch one of those presentations that would surely fit in with that profile and that, if you haven’t watched it yet, would probably manage to wow you big time, just as much as it did for me. Indeed, I’m talking about Jason Fried‘s recent “Why work doesn’t happen at work“. Have you watched it already? No? If you think that work is something else than what you have been told all along, or have been doing all of this time sensing it just doesn’t feel right, this would be one Talk to watch! No doubt it won’t leave you indifferent!

It’s a rather short, but amazingly inspiring, presentation, that lasts for a little bit over 15 minutes, put together by Jason himself, where he comes to question, with some incredibly accurate and rather solid descriptions, the true nature of work and that one of what our traditional office environment has been all along and; how it, perhaps, needs to start thinking about changing some of the dynamics and key concepts behind the traditional physical office space.

Of course, while watching the video, I couldn’t help taking a few notes that resonated quite a lot with my overall experience as a knowledge worker who moved from a traditional office environment back in 2003 and who today is a full time mobile worker, spending most of the time working from his home office or travelling, and who wouldn’t have it any other way at this point in time. Yes, that’s right! Read further on and you will see what I mean … Watching Jason’s speech I just couldn’t help nod time and time again in agreement with everything he said about how we may need to start shaping up how we view work, and, most importantly, how we execute work, whether at a traditional physical space or remotely, because, apparently, the way we have been doing it all along hasn’t been the most effective so far. And he is right. Here is why …

Jason starts up his presentation identifying three different areas related to work, which I thought were rather interesting: Room (where does work happen for you? At the office, at home, travelling, at a customer’s, at the airport, you name it); Object (basically, what we produce) and, finally, Time (When does work happen? Early in the morning, throughout the day or in the evening, on the weekends, etc. depending on how productive we may feel at those times). With that intro he moves on to claim that at the traditional office, the physical space, we no longer get to do work, but, instead, we have work moments.

We seemed to have moved into work in chunks, being constantly exposed to interruptions that could come from various different places. Now, this is something that I could certainly relate to. Back when I used to work from a physical location it used to take about 5 hours to commute to work (Back and forth), so typically I would have to get up really early in the morning to arrive at around 9:30am at the office, and as soon as I would get in I would be getting exposed to those work moments. My boss would come in, asked me to go with him for a coffee (to catch up or just chit chat at the coffee corner, or water cooler, whatever term you would want to use…), spend a few minutes talking to him, then I would go to my desk and right as I am sitting down to start my work, colleagues would come around to talk, once again, or go for another coffee. You know, the usual stuff you do with work colleagues when you first see them at the office in the morning…

From there onwards one thing leads to the other and before you realise, it’s lunch time. My lunch time. So by the time I could go and sit down at my desk to start doing my work it would be after 1pm in the afternoon; then meetings and conference calls would kick in and before you knew it off it goes your entire work day dedicated to stuff you probably could have done without just that day. But then you go on and keep working, before you go back home, because there are a number of tasks that need to be finished and you know you can’t leave them behind, just like that. So you end up doing a whole bunch of extra hours, just because of those interruptions giving you back only a few work moments. Does that situation ring a bell? I bet it does, specially, if you are one of those knowledge workers who still gets to go the traditional office. So here is a question for you… when does work happen for you in that scenario?

Right, under that premise, Jason gets to share some rather interesting thoughts about how we have moved into a corporate environment, for all of us, where we seem to consistently lack long term periods of hard thinking. We just don’t have time for them anymore, because of those interruptions! Eventually, resulting in knowledge workers choosing alternative methods to carry out their work; whether they do it while at home, or later on in the office, once things quiet down a bit, or in a plane, in the car, at an airport, etc. etc. In these new environments, it looks like the distractions are minimum; there are still some of them out there, but they are not the same as in your traditional office. How many times have you called the office yourself to tell your boss you are going to be at home for the whole morning, so that you can concentrate on a rather hard and tough task you need to accomplish soonish? I bet more than once!

So why do we keep insisting then on commuting to the office, when we all know that we are not the most productive during that time, specially with those interruptions kicking in time and time again? Why do we keep insisting on measuring knowledge workers’ performance by their sheer physical presence, as opposed to the results delivered on tasks accomplished? Why do we keep on distrusting our knowledge workforce to do their job properly, when we know that in the first place we have hired professionals who know they need to be just that: professional? When are we going to start trusting them to be more responsible for what they do on a day to day basis? Isn’t it about time we shift gears, change our corporate chips and inspire an open, collaborative work environment where knowledge workers take more control, AND responsibility, for what they do … and let them do their thing?

That’s exactly the premise that Jason comes to question in his presentation. In fact, he goes even further! He comes to compare sleep and work as both being pretty much the same; in order to get a good night sleep you would rather prefer not to have any interruptions, because it will disrupt the sleeping phases you go through and you wouldn’t get the rest you deserve after a hard working day. Well, the same thing happens with work; in order for you to do a proper job about something, in order to get work done, it would work best if you wouldn’t have any interruptions. Yet, that doesn’t seem to be happening very often, to the point where he keeps questioning how can we expect people to work at the office effectively, if they keep getting interrupted time and time again? Quite an eye opener, don’t you think?

Well, it gets better, because, at this stage, it is when he turns things upside down a bit, stirring the pot some more, becoming a bit more provocative in the end, detailing what may well be some of the most typical examples at the office and how some of the main real distractions employees are exposed to, according to their managers, are social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. etc. going to the extreme of blocking them not allowing their employees to access them freely, when in reality it shouldn’t have to be like that! His notion of these social tools as our modern smoke breaks is terrific and rather descriptive of what we used to have back then when we used to hang out at the coffee corner, or water cooler, having a short break talking to colleagues before getting back to work. Things seem to have changed very little, don’t you think? We have just been moving away from that physical water cooler to a virtual one: The Social Web.

What’s interesting though from his presentation is to watch him talk about what he feels are the real problems; what Jason calls M&Ms (No, nothing to do with chocolate! hehe); what he refers to as “Managers and Meetings“. Apparently, manager’s job is that one of interrupting people at the wrong time; also perhaps calling up meetings when they shouldn’t. All of these are toxic, terrible, poisonous events managers do, because hardly any knowledge worker would eventually do that. According to him, and it is not the first time I have seen / read about it, meetings are very expensive to the business provoking those very same interruptions!

This is when it gets really fascinating in the presentation itself, because he comes up forward proposing some solutions as to how we could help our businesses reduce a large chunk of those meetings, and interruptions, happening while at work so that we can continue having a go at it and do what we need to do: work. He comes to propose that instead of scheduling a meeting people could start making heavier use of both traditional and emerging collaborative, knowledge sharing and social software tools to get the job done. Now this is something that some folks may consider silly, yet, in my own experience, it’s tremendously powerful and relatively easy to achieve.

There was a time in my recent past where what Jason described was pretty much my day to day workload; long days of conference calls a[…]

That's why the promise of technology - "provide it, and they will use it" - has seldom been delivered in KM. "Provide it and they will use it" will work for natural acts, such as friendship, socialising, gossip etc. But not for unnatural acts. Just giving them smart shiny new technology (even web 2.0 technology) will not convince them to do something unnatural.

If social media has proved to accel­er­ate rela­tion­ships and knowl­edge of these rela­tion­ships, how can that infor­ma­tion be put to bet­ter use to sup­port all of human resources’ needs? Social tools can be used to man­age com­pen­sa­tion, ben­e­fits, acquir­ing tal­ent, groom­ing tal­ent, align­ing employee suc­cess with busi­ness suc­cess, match­ing like-minded employ­ees and cul­ti­vat­ing inno­va­tion within the orga­ni­za­tion. How can HR peo­ple lever­age social media to make their job more effi­cient and eas­ier to do?

To quantify the complete value of Google Apps including collaboration and productivity benefits, we enlisted the help of Forrester Consulting to measure the “Total Economic Impact” that a typical company can expect over three years, moving from legacy on-premises infrastructure to Google’s web-based solution.

Ich glaube, daß es weiter einen Posteingang braucht. Dieser Posteingang sieht aber ganz anders aus als der, den wir heute kennen. In dem Posteingang von Morgen laufen alle Informations- und Aktivitätenströme zusammen, die für den jeweiligen Anwender relevant sind. In der Zukunft werden E-Mails mit  Aktivitätenströme aus SAP oder anderen Tools in zusammengeführt in einem universellen Posteingang, dem Posteingang der Zukunft und der Zukunft von E-Mail. Statt von einem Posteingang zum nächsten zu springen, von E-Mail zu SAP zu BPM Tools und relevanten News, werden die Nachrichten und Aufgaben nicht nur an einer Stelle zusammengeführt. Sie werden dort auch direkt bearbeitet.

how the work necessary to coordinate outsourced IT work (specifically following ITIL best practices) it not well suited for implementation in a traditional workflow or BPM system.  The reason lies in the nature of the work processes:

I also wanted to ask if you’re seeing the same thing. In your environment, has the conversation about the business use of emergent social software platforms moved into the mainstream? Are uncertainty, fears, and inertia still holding your organization back, or are things different now? And if they are different, when did they change?

The social business category is quite difficult to track, in part due to the constant investment injections this room as provided. I provided my view of the entire category and presented the 7 major categories and 18 specific classes within the space, here’s a former blog post where I was laying out the stack, although this presentation supersedes the post.  Also, you’ll find a few snippets of enterprise buyer objectives for both internal and external, and I provided the attendees with recommendations on what I would do if I were in their shoes.

Social messaging offers much more than collaboration when individuals include their multidimensional perspectives in the Enterprise stream.

Fulkerson just may be on to something. One of the primary reasons that collaboration applications have been slow to take off in the cloud is because too many vendors want to build a platform for collaboration, rather than a platform for running various types of collaboration applications that ultimately need to be as varied as the scenarios they are deployed in.

Interestingly, these add-on tools were originally developed by Dachis Group to use internally, who then worked with MindTouch to bring them to market so that other businesses could use them. With many products now open source, and many applications now being extensible through the use of open APIs, we may see more organic partnerships happening like this in the future.

All those failing E2.0 projects, just how many UX resources were on those initiatives? There are some great E2.0 technologies out there. Most of them have major design issues. If the count of developers to design staff is not approaching 1to1, you may want to rethink your efforts. When you rely on technologists to design results, you miss adding the rich perspectives of other design disciplines

The reason for having four dimensions is to get away from the notion that growing maturity means all organisations have to follow the same linear path, for example getting communication right, then collaboration and only when that’s right pursuing employee services. Instead, we take a pattern-based approach , and use the metaphor of how markets have evolved to characterise them.

Yes, there are far too many well intended but inexperienced people out there trying to give enterprises advice.

I really like the idea of using a semi-formal, cross-functional team to shepherd multiple social initiatives, rather than creating another group in the organizational hierarchy to do so. It’s more in the spirit of social business and mirrors successful governance efforts that I’ve seen around other collaboration technologies that span organizational silos.