Behavior | | September 15th, 2009
I am beginning a project to investigate the connection between organizational culture and the effectiveness of implementing collaboration tools and social technology in an enterprise setting. I am actively in search of collaboration tool vendors that want to get a better understanding of how their customers’ behavior, attitudes and culture impact social technology deployment. I am also looking for organizations that are running into a behavioral roadblock in their efforts to deploy collaboration tools.
I hope to use the results of this effort to help advance the cause of enterprise collaboration.
Tags: organizational culture, project, research, Social Technology Tools
Value | | May 19th, 2009
The following is an article I wrote and was published on June 19, 2009 in the CED (Council for Entrepreneurial Development) newsletter.
Can Social Media Help my Business?
The news is teeming with articles and updates about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all the new social media vehicles.
You may find them compelling in that, “it might be interesting to get in touch with my old college roommate” sort of way. You may also wonder if all of this stuff can really help your business. The answer is yes…or no.
The thing to remember about all of these on-line tools is that they are just that, tools. Twitter is not a silver bullet. Having a Facebook fan page will not instantly improve your marketing. These tools are only part of your overall plan, and it’s essential to remember that it’s the concepts these tools represent that are powerful. The concepts of trust, transparency and simplicity, that define social media, can be the leverage points for transforming your business.
Improving social connectivity within your organization is the mechanism for facilitating that transformation. Deployment of social media tools is just one aspect of that process.
Improving the ability for people to connect within your organization will increase your operational effectiveness. Allowing employees and stakeholders to connect and interact freely, beyond traditional hierarchies, will lead to improvements in your organization’s ability to:
- recruit tomorrow’s best and brightest
- engage employees and get the added value of their discretionary effort
- manage your workforce, by being able to easily find the right people for the right role
- innovate
- manage key risk factors around projects
- educate and develop your staff, partners, vendors and customers
In the end, the technology associated with social media may be part of the solution for improving your operations. But for those tools to be effective, you have to first address your willingness to be transparent and authentic, the first steps in generating trust. Trust is the currency of social connectivity, without it, technology alone is kind of like a boat, which is often described as “a hole in the water, into which one pours money.”
Guest Columnist and CED member, Lee White, is the founding member of Decision 3D, LLC. Before starting his own company, Lee worked with GlaxoSmithKline for 14 years delivering innovative operational solutions and facilitating change initiatives. He established Decision 3D to help small to mid-sized companies envision and implement organizational improvement initiatives based on the concepts and tools embodied by the Social Web.
Tags: CED, Facebook, LinkedIn, Social Technology, Social Technology Tools, twitter
Tech | | March 12th, 2009
Sharepoint: Good or Bad
Thomas Vanderwal just posted his long awaited commentary on Microsoft Sharepoint. It is an intriguing and insightful reporting of what Sharepoint users have reported to him over the past couple of years. In a nutshell, Thomas’s final commentary is that Sharepoint does some things well, just don’t call it social software. In his own words:
SharePoint does some things rather well, but it is not a great tool (or even passable tool) for broad social interaction inside enterprise related to the focus of Enterprise 2.0. SharePoint works well for organization prescribed groups that live in hierarchies and are focused on strict processes and defined sign-offs. Most organization have a need for a tool that does what SharePoint does well.
The post prompted a rebuttal from Bil Simser. Bil’s main counterpoint is built around the idea that though Sharepoint is not excellent in all areas, it does integrate all of its functions, which is a plus. In his words:
SharePoint is a lot of things and like a lot of “suites” it does a lot of things pretty good. Some pretty good, some great, some not so great.
Bil goes on to discuss how a best of breed approach only shifts time and expense over to the integration side as opposed to initial development of an overall enterprise system.
Focus on Requirements Definition
The underlying thread in both of these posts is that understanding and delivering user needs and requirements is paramount in delivery of any system. For any organization to begin a conversation about what information technology it needs with a discussion of the technology itself is a recipe for failure. The discussion of solutions must begin with a clear definition of business objectives. The discussion of technology should be the last link in the chain of conversations.
Maybe Hugh says it best:
Tags: Collaboration, gapingvoid, requirements definition, sharepoint, Social Technology Tools, thomas vanderwal
Tech | | February 23rd, 2009
I have been in on the private beta for a new Twitter based service for the last couple of weeks, called MicroPlaza. The concept is very powerful. It looks at links in a twitter feed and groups all tweets with the same link together under that link. So it is a great way to see what links or topics are getting a lot of buzz. The cool thing is that you can filter based on:
- Public timeline
- Everyone you follow
- Any sub-set of people you follow!
In other words you can create very specific meme trackers based solely on the people you are interested in listening to. Here is a screenshot of a specific subset (called a Tribe in MicroPlaza) that I have set up.
This tribe is called “Social Enterprise”, where I follow, among others, @monkchips and @rhappe. You can see here that they have each recently tweeted with links.. This particular screenshot has the results sorted by time, but you can also sort by popularity.
This is an early beta release and there are a few UI issues that they are working on, but I expect those to be cleared up shortly. My understanding is that they opened up for public beta today. Try it out and let them know what you think.
As for me I plan on using it heavily. It provides the filtering of the information stream I have been looking for.
Congratulations to my friends @olivero and @slgavin for putting this together.
Tags: microplaza, Olivier Verbeke, Scott Gavin, Social Technology, Social Technology Tools, twitter
Tech | | February 17th, 2009
Stowe Boyd is a great proponent of the Flow App. He posted a a definition of what a Flow App is by drawing a comparison to Inbox Apps:
Streaming applications are involved in communication, and are displacing the email models that typified Web 1.0. We all known how inboxes (a la email) work: people write an email, address it to one or more people (or groups, in some cases), and then send it off. The email infrastructure delivers the mail to those addressed, who receive it in their respective inboxes:
- The inbox model is inherently private: the email is only delivered to a select group, and others cannot see it, even if that was desired.
- The reach of the email is completely determined by the email’s author, and it is made on a piece by piece basis.
- The ownership of the email shifts to the recipients when it is delivered: they have to delete, or file the email, which is no longer under the control of the author.
Flow apps work very differently:
- Streaming apps are inherently open: the premise is that users create and share information in the open. This is about supporting open discourse.
- The recipients opt into ’subscribing’ to certain people’s streams, so the decision about access to information is made by recipients, and this decision is general, not made on a post by post basis. I call this the ‘open following’ feature, meaning anyone can choose who to follow.
- The handling of the streamed posts does not transition to the recipients: it is still under the control of the author. Posts can be deleted, for example, or edited. And posts do not have to be ‘handled’ by recipients: filed or archived. They simply slide from the top to the bottom of the stream, and march into oblivion, without the recipients having to manage them at all. While an archive exists, it is managed automatically by the streaming application. Collectively, these features add up to an anti-inbox model
He goes on to describe two Flow Apps, Twitter and Staction in some detail.
As I read this post I began wondering if the “flow” Stowe is talking about is similar to the “information flow” I discuss on this site. My first reaction is that the flow I talk about is different than what Stowe is discussing. Now this in turn makes me realize that I need to be clear about what I mean by “information flow”.
Tags: flow apps, Social Technology Tools, Stowe Boyd