One of my observations is that over the last 4 years over half the vendors have remained fairly constant in the quadrant. This means there are some mature offerings out there in the market, but there is still room for plenty of competition in this space. After all, Yammer didn’t appear on this Magic Quadrant until 2012, and then it was acquired by Microsoft for US$1.2B!

Some other additional highlights about this year's Magic Quadrant, that I don't cover in my original post:

• As you know, I've also been tracking cloud-based solutions like Google and Salesforce, so its interesting to see them both appear (or reappear in the case of Google) this year.
• I'm also pleased to see Newsgator back on the map - it would actually be helpful if Gartner also weighted vendors by their SharePoint-integration capabilities (although that might also mean separating Yammer from SharePoint/Office 365 for the time being).

But for solutions like Novell, Cisco and OpenText, can any one point me to any case studies from Australia or the APAC region?

Why is user adoption of new workplace information technologies - such as SharePoint - so difficult, yet people appear to have no difficulty learning how to use Facebook or Candy Crush?

I'll be talking about:

• What is user adoption? And should we even be talking about "users" and "adoption"?
• Is it really about the technology or more about getting governance and business culture right?
• How can you make sure people use new technologies when they are introduced?

But don't wait until the night - if you've got a question or comment about user adoption or my talking points, feel free to ask them here!

Its no surprise that a story about Activity Based Working (ABW) appeared in Fairfax newspaper's IT section - after all, ABW is underpinned by the right information technology.

In this instance, the Australian federal Department of Human Services (DHS) will trial ABW with 110 staff in a Canberra office. A range of supporting technologies will be deployed that include a practical mix of wireless networking, follow-me printing and voice-over internet protocol (VoIP).

The UK government is also apparently interested in using technology to support flexible working (often called a "digital workplace"):

"The British government's chief technology officer, Liam Maxwell, told IT Pro the flexible working strategy would be underpinned by mobile and collaboration technologies, with cloud services critical to its success."

However, while ABW and flexible working are related and could conceivably be implemented in tandem, they are in fact very different strategies. Both strategies require significant cultural change, but ABW has the potential to change organisational architecture through changes to the physical architecture. Or as one person comments:

"Changing the furniture is an improvement. Real change would mean altering bureaucracy to semi-autonomous teams."

Its worth bearing in mind that Veldhoen+Company actually define it as a "Platform for Transformation".

This clearly represents a challenge for government organisations and other similarly conservative institutions, particularly if they want to avoid creating cynicism about their motivation for ABW as simply a cost saving measure. In this respect I think there is also a strong argument for supporting ABW with social computing technologies that go beyond the 'hygiene' requirements of wireless computing. If ABW really is a platform for transformation, then we should also integrate the use of transformational information technology at the same time.

"The phrase ‘digital disruption’ is quite a misnomer because no technology truly disrupts unless it disrupts what we do and how we do it, not just what we do it with. This then begs the question: Is technology disrupting us or are we disrupting with technology?"

Cross-posted from the DISRUPT.SYDNEY and Ripple Effect Group blogs.

From the Ubi Interactive site:

"Can I use any surface? Yes, you can- as long as the surface is visible to the depth sensor camera in the Kinect. You may want to make sure that the surface is neither too absorptive (such as some of the Plasma screens) nor reflective (such as some glass material). During the initialization, Ubi will let you know if it works with the surface."

and

"to avoid shadow during interaction, you may want to use a short distance projector such as Epson PowerLite 1776W or Sharp PG-D2870W"

Yesterday I noticed what might be best described as orphan 'zombie' or 'ghost' posts had appeared in my archive. I'm not entirely sure how long they've been there but despite my best efforts I've been unable to remove them.

I've asked for help, but since scriptogr.am is free and clearly marked 'beta', I'm going to patiently wait to see if the issue is resolved. In the meantime, please ignore any odd posts you see in the feed!

Last year, Nancy Dixon presented what I think is one of the best overviews of the state of knowledge management today, where she explains the 3 eras of knowledge management:

She describes the 3rd era of knowledge management as being focused on using collective knowledge to:

• Address complex issues.
• Create new knowledge.
• Grow innovation.

The enablers and processes for 3rd era knowledge management involve cognitive diversity, transparency, convening, joint sensemaking and crowdsourcing. The overall theme is one of organisational learning, in comparison to past themes in 1st and 2nd era knowledge management about employee productivity and capability.

This doesn't mean that the issues addressed by 1st and 2nd generational knowledge management aren't important or worth addressing, but as I've written (PDF) I think we did processes like information management a disservice by labelling them incorrectly as KM.

As well as being an enabler for 3rd generation knowledge management (what Dixon calls 'idea management'), social software can also improve both information management and experience management. However, while KM is not dependent on social software or any kind of technology, I do believe that KM at scale is hard to achieve without it.

And yes, it goes without saying that I don't think KM is dead.

When: Tuesday 6th August, 8am to 9.30am

Where: Jasper Kitchen at the Jasper Hotel, 489 Elizabeth St, Melbourne VIC 3000

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Jasper Kitchen, at the Jasper Hotel, serves a decent coffee (and breakfast if you need it) and should provide a warm escape from winter weather outside. They also have a nice long bench table that we can sit or stand around!

If you're planning on coming along, add a comment below and I'll keep my eye out for you.

Investigating the implementation of a enterprise social network, called A-Life, at a credit card company, he found that after six months those who had used the enterprise social networking site had:

• improved their ability to find information by 31%.
• improved their ability to find people who knew the person with information by 71%.

These impressive statistics reflect what Leonardi considers to be a low starting point but highlights the impact social tools can have in an organisation when they fill a collaborative vacuum. Perhaps also counter intuitively (but not surprising), he also found that younger employees "were generally more skeptical of the tool."

A-Life was based on Jive Software. Jeffery Treem, a co-researcher with Leonardi, provides more detail in this presentation (PDF) at Collaborative Organizations and Social Media 2013 about A-Life from the perspective of understanding the barriers to use of 16 people in the marketing division (out of a total user base of 15,000).

They interviewed the group before and after the introduction of A-Life - overall participation by this group in the first five months was actually very low. Treem associates this resistance to three factors:

1. Accountability as a Professional.
2. Accountability to an Unknown Audience (the perceived risk of being mis-understood - see below, about the 'leaky pipe' metaphor).
3. Accountability (relevance) to Organizational Role.

One of the key lessons from this case study - which I've also see in my own experience over the years - is the importance of:

• Not just using change management in an implementation, but actually allowing future users to participate in the design and selection of the solution. Organisational culture can otherwise eat the virality of social tools.
• Tools must be integrated at a workgroup and team level into local work practices and nomenclature (i.e. talk about KM or collaboration if people are uncomfortable talking about social media).

This applies as much to ESM today as it did to KM and groupware implementations in the past.

Moving back into theory, in a literature review (PDF), Leonardi, defines ESM and calls out two key distinctions from past technologies - visibility and persistence:

"there are at least two affordances provided by enterprise social media that make them distinct from other communication technologies commonly used in organizations: They provide people visibility into the communicative actions of others and the visible traces of those communicative actions persist over time. Because ESM afford the visibility and persistence of communicative actions, they expand the range of people, networks, and texts from whom people can learn across the organization. Consequently, one of, if not the most important, outcomes of these affordances for organizations is increased opportunities for social learning."

Leonardi and Treem, define these and two other 'affordances' in more detail:

1. Visibility - Allows workers across levels to broadcast messages throughout an organization.
2. Persistence - Displays information across time so that it may be confronted and used by individuals who are not present for the original act of communication.
3. Editability - Ability of actors to spend time crafting and tailoring a communicative act before entering it into a technology and making it available for others to view.
4. Association - Ability to establish links or relationships between individuals or content.

If you are familiar with Andrew McAfee's SLATES model, this is similar but I think the concept of Persistence is a useful addition - this is particularly relevant when considering the overlapping role of ESM as a system of engagement and a system of record. The one thing I think missing, which I talk about in my equivalent model of 'affordances' is the idea of using ESMs to gain insights & analysis based on activity and information in the network, however Leonardi does recognise the opportunity for social analytics (see below).

He outlines a number of dimensions - as potential areas for academic study - that he categorises using the following metaphors:

• Leaky pipe.
• Echo chamber.
• Social lubricant.

These metaphors can be applied to four business processes:

• Social capital.
• Boundary work.
• Attention allocation.
• Social analytics.

He provides a matrix of proposed advantages and disadvantages for each.

I quite like Leonardi's idea that enterprise social software creates "leaky pipes for organizational communication". However, the literature review suggests some challenges with that model:

• A tendency towards communicating more abstract information (so meaning is reduced).
• The risk of increasing information overload through greater visibility.

Personally I think there are some limitations in these viewpoints because it focuses on direct information sharing rather than indirect opportunities that functionality such as rich user profiles, group memberships and recommendations provide. A good enterprise social software platform should also provide users with tools to help them filter the volume of activity that is visible to them.

In another paper (PDF), he writes that:

"With the swift development of new communication technologies the particular social media we use today are not likely to be the ones we use in the future. We have argued, herein, that an affordance approach, which focuses attention not on any particular technology, but on the types of communicative practices that various features afford, is much more likely to have staying power because it builds theory about the relationship between technology and communication without foregrounding one concept or the other."

I can't agree more here. I've always tried to talk about social media (inside and outside organisation) using pattern language that moves with the technology, rather than being bounded by it. Pattern language also allows me to link capabilities to tasks and business processes, rather than focusing on making organisations social for their own sake.

Overall, I think there is a useful body of work forming here that contributes to how we implement enterprise social software in practice.

Investigating the implementation of a enterprise social network, called A-Life, at a credit card company, he found that after six months those who had used the enterprise social networking site had:

• improved their ability to find information by 31%.
• improved their ability to find people who knew the person with information by 71%.

These impressive statistics reflect what Leonardi considers to be a low starting point but highlights the impact social tools can have in an organisation when they fill a collaborative vacuum. Perhaps also counter intuitively (but not surprising), he also found that younger employees "were generally more skeptical of the tool."

A-Life was based on Jive Software. Jeffery Treem, a co-researcher with Leonardi, provides more detail in this presentation (PDF) at Collaborative Organizations and Social Media 2013 about A-Life from the perspective of understanding the barriers to use of 16 people in the marketing division (out of a total user base of 15,000).

They interviewed the group before and after the introduction of A-Life - overall participation by this group in the first five months was actually very low. Treem associates this resistance to three factors:

1. Accountability as a Professional.
2. Accountability to an Unknown Audience (the perceived risk of being mis-understood - see below, about the 'leaky pipe' metaphor).
3. Accountability (relevance) to Organizational Role.

One of the key lessons from this case study - which I've also see in my own experience over the years - is the importance of:

• Not just using change management in an implementation, but actually allowing future users to participate in the design and selection of the solution. Organisational culture can otherwise eat the virality of social tools.
• Tools must be integrated at a workgroup and team level into local work practices and nomenclature (i.e. talk about KM or collaboration if people are uncomfortable talking about social media).

This applies as much to ESM today as it did to KM and groupware implementations in the past.

Moving back into theory, in a literature review (PDF), Leonardi, defines ESM and calls out two key distinctions from past technologies - visibility and persistence:

"there are at least two affordances provided by enterprise social media that make them distinct from other communication technologies commonly used in organizations: They provide people visibility into the communicative actions of others and the visible traces of those communicative actions persist over time. Because ESM afford the visibility and persistence of communicative actions, they expand the range of people, networks, and texts from whom people can learn across the organization. Consequently, one of, if not the most important, outcomes of these affordances for organizations is increased opportunities for social learning."

Leonardi and Treem, define these and two other 'affordances' in more detail:

1. Visibility - Allows workers across levels to broadcast messages throughout an organization.
2. Persistence - Displays information across time so that it may be confronted and used by individuals who are not present for the original act of communication.
3. Editability - Ability of actors to spend time crafting and tailoring a communicative act before entering it into a technology and making it available for others to view.
4. Association - Ability to establish links or relationships between individuals or content.

If you are familiar with Andrew McAfee's SLATES model, this is similar but I think the concept of Persistence is a useful addition - this is particularly relevant when considering the overlapping role of ESM as a system of engagement and a system of record. The one thing I think missing, which I talk about in my equivalent model of 'affordances' is the idea of using ESMs to gain insights & analysis based on activity and information in the network, however Leonardi does recognise the opportunity for social analytics (see below).

He outlines a number of dimensions - as potential areas for academic study - that he categorises using the following metaphors:

• Leaky pipe.
• Echo chamber.
• Social lubricant.

These metaphors can be applied to four business processes:

• Social capital.
• Boundary work.
• Attention allocation.
• Social analytics.

He provides a matrix of proposed advantages and disadvantages for each.

I quite like Leonardi's idea that enterprise social software creates "leaky pipes for organizational communication". However, the literature review suggests some challenges with that model:

• A tendency towards communicating more abstract information (so meaning is reduced).
• The risk of increasing information overload through greater visibility.

Personally I think there are some limitations in these viewpoints because it focuses on direct information sharing rather than indirect opportunities that functionality such as rich user profiles, group memberships and recommendations provide. A good enterprise social software platform should also provide users with tools to help them filter the volume of activity that is visible to them.

In another paper (PDF), he writes that:

"With the swift development of new communication technologies the particular social media we use today are not likely to be the ones we use in the future. We have argued, herein, that an affordance approach, which focuses attention not on any particular technology, but on the types of communicative practices that various features afford, is much more likely to have staying power because it builds theory about the relationship between technology and communication without foregrounding one concept or the other."

I can't agree more here. I've always tried to talk about social media (inside and outside organisation) using pattern language that moves with the technology, rather than being bounded by it. Pattern language also allows me to link capabilities to tasks and business processes, rather than focusing on making organisations social for their own sake.

Overall, I think there is a useful body of work forming here that contributes to how we implement enterprise social software in practice.