Links for this week (weekly)

  • Today, business users are responsible for more information from more sources, and find they need to coordinate and respond to events in each application. The IBM Social Business Toolkit provides a single stream of business information that can be analyzed and personalized for each user.

    As I said, the idea is to take all your existing apps (and even those from 3rd party vendors) and merge all the activity and information across those existing silos into a single, unified view (or stream). So from this:

    tags: socialbusiness socialbusinesstoolkit IBM activitystream API

    • Today, business users are responsible for more information from more sources, and find they need to coordinate and respond to events in each application. The IBM Social Business Toolkit provides a single stream of business information that can be analyzed and personalized for each user.

      As I said, the idea is to take all your existing apps (and even those from 3rd party vendors) and merge all the activity and information across those existing silos into a single, unified view (or stream)

  • “For years, book after book and article after article have praised Google as a citadel of innovation. They have lauded the incredible corporate culture where employees are treated like entrepreneurs. They have waxed lyrical about the staff’s freedom to spend 20 percent of their time on whatever they feel like going. It’s portrayed as a brilliantly innovative place with the brightest of the bright. New ideas are bubbling up all over. Writers have glowed with delight as they watched this wonder child become the star of the stock market.”

    tags: google innovation management focus goal customers customersneeds needs customersatisfaction

    • The reality is somewhat different. The truth is that Google gets 95 percent of its revenues from a single core business—ads from searches.
    • Gmail is popular but makes little money. Apart from Android, Google has produced a series of flops like Google Wave, Google Buzz, and Orkut.
    • The Google experience confirms a management fallacy that is still widespread: if you recruit the best people and give them the freedom to create, they will generate ideas and businesses that make money. The reality is that giving employees—even brilliant employees—freedom to do what they want results in guess what—in the employees doing what the employees want, not necessarily doing things that will necessary generate business and ideas for the company.
    • What all successful innovative businesses have is a tight focus on what would delight their clients
    • That’s the world where Google now resides. It has become a large clanking, hierarchical bureaucracy, with a lot of bright people cooking up ideas that might be fun and interesting to them, but don’t for the most part generate successful businesses.
    • Delighting the customer requires a shift from an inside-out to an outside-in focus. This is increasingly a requirement for business survival.
  • tags: strategy CEO leadership report study creativeleadership customerrelationship operatingdexterity operations complexity customers

  • “So what is ‘business-like’, what have conversations got to do with it, and how can the use of the social web tools help?”

    tags: conversations enterprisesocialsoftware collaboration km innovation trust

    • Personal

      The first level of benefit from using any social tool is to the individual. As most managers who blog at work discover, having a reason to record what we do, and why, can be a very effective use of the 15 minutes or so it takes to write the occasional blog post or forum contribution. Pausing to reflect on challenges and your responses to them may seem a waste of time but as A.A Milne once wrote ‘Winnie was sure there was a way of coming down the stairs without his head banging if he could just stop his head banging long enough to think of it’.

    • As people are discovering in their social lives, the little bits of information shared in Facebook can build a feeling of proximity and trust. Why would this not help build shared values and trust in the workplace?
    • Tactical

      Let’s take two activities that take up the bulk of a manager’s time, meetings and report writing. Meetings come in for a lot of criticism, and there are those who would say they are a complete waste of time, but done well, and with a little help from social media, they have their place.

    • A lot of managers’ time is taken up with writing memos and reports but how often do these actually get read? We fill the available space due to conventions of content, spend endless time formatting, and then file the documents away in knowledge repositories. But how much benefit do we really get from all of these activities?
    • In contrast the nature of social tools encourages brevity and conciseness. The haiku-like discipline of Twitter’s 140 characters could have all sorts of benefits in the workplace. Trying to capture the essence of an important change in a well written blog post, that then gets virally linked to around your organisation, brings influence never attained by that word doc buried on a server somewhere.
    • Strategic

      Most corporate strategies are written by small groups, or even external consultants, and rarely involve the wider organisation. Using a wiki is a very powerful way to approach strategising. Being able to pull together the document in front of a wide group of people and to do so overcoming geographical and time constraints allows for a much more flexible and distributed process.

    • Innovation: Innovation tends to come about because people are disaffected with the status quo and decide to do something about it. However we don’t normally give people a place to express this dissatisfaction and make it hard for them to summon the wherewithal to do something about it.
    • Effectiveness: Once you decide what to do about it you have a wonderful platform on which people can muster their resources to work together to improve things and develop new ideas.
    • Collaboration: Those involved in this process learn about each other and how to work together, in many cases without even needing to have physically met. Trust can be built up online in ways that might surprise those more used to face to face communication and relationships can be maintained more readily by those not sharing the same location or who come from different organisational groups.
    • All of what I have described above is deceptively simple – and yet has the potential to transform our working lives. The challenges are not primarily technical but rather individual and cultural. Having the temerity to put your hands on the keyboard, say what you know or think, and pressing save – sending your words out to potentially the whole of your organisation – is scary. Coming to terms with the speed and effectiveness of everyone’s ability to share and learn from each other will challenge many of our current management practices. But for those who are willing to get their hands dirty and have a go the possibilities are truly endless to do more, with less, and have a lot more fun doing so.
  • “I am very pleased to be back after ten years. The Wednesday morning keynote focused on the “Future of Social Business” Speakers include: Charlie Hill, Distinguished Engineer and CTO, IBM Collaboration Solutions; Kristen Lauria, VP of Marketing and Channels, IBM Collaboration Solutions; Chris Dziekan, Cognos Office of Strategy Executive; Mike O’Rourke, VP of Rational Strategy and Product Delivery; Mike Winter, Arichitect and Development Manager of Enterprise Content Management; and Irene Greif, IBM Fellow and Director, Collaborative User Experience.”

    tags: socialbusiness enterprise2.0 BI knowledgeworkers knowledgework IBM Cognos personalbranding onlinebranding reputation humanresources analytics sentiment sentimentanalysis casemanagement processes collaborativeprocesses culture

    • Mike Winter discussed content management challenges providing context to documents.  Knowledge workers need agility but only 11% said they have a good case management and 40% have difficulty making adjustments in case based work. So IBM developed Case Manager as a single place to coordinate case associated content and align tasks for better case managemen
    • Case Manager is part of the transformation to more social content management. This reminds be of the early work process aligned KM work I was involved with in early 90s using Lotus Notes and adding social aspects to business processes with tools of the day.
    • Rational Team Concert, creates a collaborative environment across the development life cycle by integrating Connections.  It uses Web 2.0 dashboards to allow the team to see what is happening now with all the team members. IBM is benefiting from this approach internally. There are cycle time reductions by over 30%.  Software reuse is over 50% and there is a component cost reduced of 50%. I remember that our team hand built similar dashboards in our early 90s KM work with Notes. Today it is both better and easie
    • Now Charlie made a prediction. Increasingly your online branding will become a metric in HR in such areas as hiring, promotion, and compensation
    • We will see a transition form static business process and to more collaborative processes that evolve using real time analytics.
    • Irene continued to say that we need an integrated view of data: physical, social, and enterprise.  They are now looking at sentiment inside the company to understand issues with products being used inside the company.  Looking inside and outside the company requires different analytics. For example inside you can use email. A new research project Crowdsourcing Squared is using location integrated with our data. They also found that people in some countries are more likely to ask questions in a status updates than others.
    • They are also working to put context in communication and making it easier for non-native speakers. Also, they are making other changes to accommodate different cultures. Irene predicted that we will see any difficult cultures within companies
  • “To fully enable a social business, IBM announced new software to help organizations socially enable their business processes using the most successful mobile devices—including tablets—such as RIM’s BlackBerry and PlayBook, Apple’s iPad and iPhone, the multitude of Google Android-based devices and Nokia handsets. IBM also rolled out software and services to help businesses embrace the social business models through cloud computing, including a technology preview of IBM’s cloud-based office-productivity suite. And IBM shared plans for the next release of its social software portfolio to enable social business, including a social business framework for software developers. The question that remains, however, is whether IBM can become the Facebook of the business world, or at least the provider of tools for it.”

    tags: ibm socialbusiness vendors enterprisesocialsoftware socialbusinesstoolkit socialbusinessframework enterprise2.0

  • “Lotus GM Alistair Rennie announced IBM’s Social Business strategy. The conference motto was “Get Social. Do Business.” In a private conversation, Rennie called Monday “day one” for social business.

    The importance of Rennie’s announcement was reinforced by the IBM brand presence and by presentations from IBM senior vice president Mike Rhodin and IBM senior vice president of marketing and communications, Jon Iwata. I believe that for IBM, social business is a strategy on par with its e-business strategy in importance and transformational potential.”

    tags: ibm lotus socialbusiness enterprisesocialsoftware empowerment vendors

      • Empowering employees to respond to the needs of empowered customers. (This is what our book Empowered is about.)
      • Listening to the market conversation using social listening platforms. (That’s the subject of our book, Groundswell.)
      • Engaging with empowered customers using every tool at your disposal: mobile, social, video. (This is also what our book Empowered is about.)
  • “In 1974, 3M scientist Art Fry came up with a clever invention. He thought if he could apply an adhesive (dreamed up by colleague Spencer Silver several years earlier) to the back of a piece of paper, he could create the perfect bookmark, one that kept place in his church hymnal. He called it the Post-It Note.

    What you might not know is that Fry came up with the now iconic product (he talks to the Smithsonian about it here) during his “15 percent time,” a program at 3M that allows employees to use a portion of their paid time to chase rainbows and hatch their own ideas.”

    tags: 3M innovation casestudies openinnovation

    • How is the program implemented? In Beinlich’s telling, workers often use 15 percent time to pursue something they discovered through the usual course of work but didn’t have time to follow up on. And even that depends on other factors — how closely managers keep tabs on projects, for one. What’s more, 15 percent time is extended to everyone, not just the scientists (you can hear the cheers in marketing), the idea being: Who knows where the next Post-It Note will come from?
    • Still, it’s a rare perk at most companies, technical or not. For starters, it’s expensive. 3M invests more than $1 billion in R&D alone; 15 percent of that starts to be a sizable outlay.
    • Many companies have tried to emulate the ‘20 percent time idea’ but failed because they remained conservative about supporting the new ideas,”
    • Once a year, about 200 employees from dozens of divisions make cardboard posters describing their 15 percent time project as if they were presenting volcano models at a middle school science fair. They stand up their poster, then hang out next to it, awaiting feedback, suggestions, and potential co-collaborators
    • Paid personal time is, of course, just one way to help a company innovate and, given the expense, it’s not best for everyone.
  • “Earlier this week I attended the UK launch event for just another Twitter style microblogging tool for the enterprise like Chatter or Yammer or Signals inside SocialText. This one’s called tibbr. Some people would have been underwhelmed and said “so what?”, but I got excited – I can see some huge potential here, and I’d argue that every enterprise should be taking a serious look at this product. Let me try and explain.”

    tags: tibco tibbr enterprise2.0 microblogging enterprisesocialsoftware

    • This is about moving away from being trapped inside your inbox, sharing documents and files by email, which means that as soon as they are sent you are out of control with multiple copies and “who’s got the latest version?”.  To avoid that we use things like blogs to support conversations around an idea, or wikis to collate, develop and share information, people profiles to help you find the expertise within an organisation that you need to do your job, or microblogging tools like Twitter and Yammer for more efficient team communication.
    • I got excited when Salesforce Chatter came along, because that provided a family of collaboration tools on the same platform as the business system that could be easily integrated with the standard applications, as well as integrating with any new processes you might need to create on their Force.com  development environment.  For some companies where the Salesforce’s application suite and available partner products are a good match, this will provide a good fit, but not every company will want to change all of their systems to this one company solution
    • It sits like a business oriented Twitter or Facebook “hub” over the top of all of a company’s systems, taking feeds from in house business applications from SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Saleforce and others, as well feeds from external social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, or also from external news and blog feeds that might be relevant for the company’s personnel.  They have APIs for configuring further feeds and apps, but the crucial factor is that they have the security and policy management in place so that this data can be properly surfaced and managed in the controlled and secure way that an enterprise needs.    
    • I can chose to follow everything on a whole topic, or maybe I’m only interested in a few of the sub-topics.  TIBCO are trying to address the problem of signal to noise ratio with this filtering approach.  All of this new collaboration data might just add to the information overload, but if I can filter things properly I’ll be able to discover just what I want to see, and get alerted on topics that are important to me.
    •  TIBCO’s opportunity comes from their agnostic approach to applications.  They’ve got 25 years experience of linking to most of the technology stuff that a big corporation uses.  They can provide a collaboration layer that is easy to use for everyone, but which is like a symbiotic plant with roots growing across the enterprise in to all of the existing applications, along with the ability to reach out and connect to more.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Head of People and Business Delivery @Emakina / Former consulting director / Crossroads of people, business and technology / Speaker / Compulsive traveler
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