infoarch

How to help others become digitally literate?

2013-05-01T11:00:00.000+02:00

In my previous post I asked my readers how they help other’s understand the potential of new ways of working? How can we teach and show others what digital literacy is?

I wanted to share one idea I use to teach others to work out loud. What I always try to do is relate to the primary processes of the organization or, even better, to the primary work processes of the person I’m helping. He/she is working in a certain way and used to that. For instance, he uses email to send around documents and get feedback on them. Or he sends out an email to a group of people to get ideas about a certain topic. Starting there I ask that person what he/she likes about working that way. And what he/she dislikes about it. Then I ask how he/she thinks the dislikes could be solved. My experience is: most people don’t think they can be solved. They just cope with the issues and carry on. If this is the case, I show them how I do the same job with a certain tool. I tell them why I work in that way and why I like to work that way. And I stop there. In most cases they say: I didn’t know there were tools like that, could you help me get/use them as well? In some cases they continue to work they way the way. And that’s OK. I can’t force them to work in another way. I just hope they remember there is another way and try it some other time.

Digital Illiteracy

2013-04-29T10:30:00.000+02:00

Some time ago my friend Ana Silva wrote an interesting post about a very important topic: digital literacy. Please read her post (and the comments). The main point of her post is that we should not assume people get the internet or get social media and will start working out in the open by themselves. Some do, but many need to be helped. We have to teach them, step-by-step, to be digitally literate. This is hard work.

I’ve written about this topic quite a bit as well using a different term: ‘personal knowledge management’. How do we become more productive working out in the open and using the new (and old) social concepts and tools?

As I wrote in a comment on Ana’s post, this is not a small issue. Recently the Dutch newspaper I read (nrc.nl) ran an extra section of the newspaper about ‘searching in a smarter way on the internet’ (Dutch: Slimmer zoeken op internet’). Very interesting stuff with all kinds of tips & tricks to improve the way you use the internet. But what struck me is the economic implication of digital illiteracy. The University of Twente published a study “Ctrl Alt Delete” and they found that 5.3% of our work time is lost due to digital illiteracy. That’s 10 billion euro’s per year in The Netherlands alone! That’s a lot of money. And there’s a lot of work to do.

Talks about gamification, money and the future of work #socialnow

2013-04-26T13:30:00.000+02:00

This is my final post about the SocialNow conference 2013. In this post I’d like to share some highlights from four talks. Two were about gamification, one was about money and one about the future of work.

Gamification

The presentations about gamification by Andrzej Marczewski (of Cap Gemini) and Paulo de Carvalho (of Vodafone) were very interesting. I really enjoyed how these presentations were placed back-to-back. Andrzey gave a general but very good introduction to gamification. He talked about the what, why and how. I really enjoyed how he also talked about cheating and gamification.

Paulo talked about his experiences with gamification inside Vodafone. He gave a detailled overview of how they applied gamification to certain business processes and how they deeply thought about the right metrics and incentives for the game to be useful.

Costs

Ana Neves gave a short presentation about the cost of social tools in the enterprise. Don't focus on the license fees only. The Total Cost of Ownership for Social tools is just as important as for other tools. Even een free internal tool is never really free. And make sure you pay attention to adoption costs as well. I liked how Ana also addressed the cost of not implementing social tools inside your organization.

Future of work

Stowe Boyd gave the closing keynote at the conference about the future of work in a social world. He made some really interesting remarks about the shift from collaboration to cooperation. I was planning on sharing my notes about this talk, but just saw Ana Silva has a good blogpost summarizing Stowe's talk. So, please go ahead and read her post!

Concluding

The SocialNow conference was very interesting. I thought is was even better than last year. This was due to a great panel (Ana Silva, Phil Hill and Pedro Custodio). They did a great job asking questions to the vendors and opening up the discussion with the rest of the participants. The participants had great questions as well. It was a true learning experience for this reason. There were deep and fundamental discussions about all aspects of internal social design, features, implementation, adoption, etc. Great stuff!

Furthermore I see some disappointment in the field. People have been at the break of the Enterprise 2.0 field are evaluating the past year's and wondering what the future of the enterprise 2.0 and social business market and practice will look like.
Most organizations doing internal social hardly every have one platform with all the functionality. Because the SocialNow conference is built around vendor presentations, I'm wondering how we can bring this fragmented (and more realistic?) world in the conference. Could it be that some vendors should team up and do a presentation together?

And once again we see innovation happens on the edges. Some vendors 'simply' copy the good social tools on the internet and make internal versions of them. But there are also vendors that think differently and challenge the status quo of tools and... business.

I really enjoyed SocialNow and hope to meet you there next year!

Enterprise 2.0 tool vendors at SocialNow #socialnow

2013-04-26T10:00:00.000+02:00

Now for some highlights from the vendor presentations in my second post about the SocialNow conference.

Foulders has not been launched yet, but presented their concept and tool at the conference. They want to start where the users are: their email inbox. And most people have multiple inboxes. So they provide a super dashboard over all your inboxes and help you organize the tasks that come out of your email. They use language technology to help the user quickly and efficiently organize emails in tasks and folders.

Podio was at the conference for the second year. I didn’t hear anything new with respect to the product. There will be a big update to the product in the very near future. Podio is still an impressive product that wants to help us overcome email and make spreadsheets better. Spreadsheets can easily be turned into open and smart Podio apps to improve collaboration and communication around them.

Another new tool to SocialNow is Wordpress with the P2 extension. Wordpress isn’t a new tool, of course. It’s an impressive and widely used platform. The P2 extension makes it very easy for organizations to set up an internal social networking, microblogging and document sharing platform. I really like Wordpress with P2, but I’m biased, because we have developed intranets based on Wordpress and P2.

Xwiki was at SocialNow for the second time. Xwiki is also, like Wordpress, an open-source platform. I saw some new things in Xwiki that I hadn’t seen before. One, you can drag-and-drop documents to wiki and it has a document viewer so you can view the document without having to open it, this also works for video.

Secondly, they add ‘track changes’ and commenting features to wiki’s. So it shows edits and comments in the way you see them in MS Word for instance. As an owner of the page you can accept and reject changes.

Evernote for Business presented their concept. If you know Evernote, you know Evernote for business. The pricing is pretty steep: 10 euro per user per month. They focus on small and medium-sized businesses. I like they way they clearly said who the product if for and who it isn’t for and what kind of things work in Evernote and don’t. For instance, for task management they pointed to other kinds of tools.

Sharepoint revisited SocialNow, but with a different approach. Last year, Microsoft had just acquired Yammer, but it was unclear what this would mean for the Sharepoint platform. Now it (slowly) is becoming clear. This year’s presentation was ‘only’ about Yammer and hardly talked about Sharepoint. Newsgator was not mentioned at all. It was said that Yammer will be the social layer for Sharepoint. And they are working on integrating Yammer with Sharepoint Online and Office365.

Spreadd was at SocialNow and clearly improved it’s user interface. I like the bold way they address modern knowledge worker issues. Do users really search for stuff or would they like to get things pushed to them, do users really maintain their profile or should it be done automatically? Spreadd integrates all the services employees use and publishes the information that changes to an activity stream (taking the security controls into account). Spreadd has not officially launched but is being tested by a large organization.

Zyncro is an interesting internal social networking platform with all the features you would an internal social platform has. I didn’t see any new features compared to last year. But the language detection and translation functionality is impressive and smart. I’m going to look into Zyncro more deeply in the near future.

Yoolink was a new vendor at SocialNow. They are a French internal social network vendor. They also have a mobile version and support SSO. Interestingly they also provide a collaborative whiteboard, so employees can share drawings and make them together.

The vendor presentations are the core of SocialNow. All-in-all I think the state of internal social technology is impressive. I like the way some are really trying to innovate on the edges while others try to provide Facebook- and Twitter-like functionality inside the organization. I do wonder though how some position themselves with respect to other vendors. For instance, Yoolink and Zyncro are interesting platforms, but how do they compare from Jive and Sharepoint/Yammer? Is it price, company size, features? Zyncro for one acknowledge they currently are fit for mid-sized and smaller companies. And Yoolink says they do not (want to) compete with Jive.

One thing that continues to surprise me in vendor presentations is how many struggle to really relate to the situation of the customer. In this case Cablinc. Many mention the situation of Cablinc in the first part of the presentation and slide to a regular presentation marketing the product and features. And furthermore, the vendors hardly tell Cablinc what value they will be getting from using the platform. I know the presentations have to be short, but still.

Notes and learnings from the SocialNow conference 2013 #socialnow

2013-04-25T22:13:00.001+02:00

The 2nd edition of the SocialNow conference was held in the beautiful city of Lisbon. As you may remember SocialNow is a unique conference. The conference is organized by Ana Neves of KnowMan. The conference is about helping organizations compare and choose internal social tools. Several Enterprise 2.0 tool vendors have to present their tool relating to the situation of a fictitious company and its issues with collaborative project work and topic-based knowledge sharing. The program is complemented with keynotes from leading experts in the field. I really enjoyed this edition of SocialNow and thought it was even better than last year. I’ll share my notes and learnings from the conference in several posts. This is post nr 1. BTW: You can find a Storify by Paul Corney of day 1 and day 2 here.

Challenges

Emanuele Quintarelli kicked off the conference with a talk about the challenges of the social enterprise. As with many experts in the fields his talk was not "happy clappy". Internal social media and enterprise 2.0 has been around for some time now and the results are not all that positive. Even though several extensive reports by for instance McKinsey and Gartner show internal social can offer considerable affordances for organizations, Emanuele wonders what this really means for organizations trying to move forward with internal social. Do these studies really help them make their first or next steps?

Emanuele shares some facts and figures of what is really happening in organizations. Like:

28% of the knowledge workers actually use collaborative tools monthly.
Gen x is the largest group of users not Gen Y.
64% of the organizations are not measuring anything w.r.t. internal social.

So, it looks more like a ghost city than a lively community. 50% of the social initiatives fail… By why do they fail?

Emanuele goes on to list several reasons why Enterprise 2.0 implementations fail. Primary reason is lack of purpose and support of the implementation with community management. Another reason is a lack of focus on people and the way they work. Emanuele stresses we should also pay attention to the negative things humans do like hoarding knowledge.

OK, but how should we start or proceed? (I bundled some of the points Emanuele listed separately.)

Focus on people and communities. Connect to communities as living organisms. Community management is very important. It’s like an iceberg: not much is visible, lots is behind the scenes. It’s building relationships, back-channeling, planning, etc. Co-design is the single most critical factor to success. And respect fear people (can) have. “Change is not death, fear of change is death.”
Focus on change (management), helping people to work better. ‘Technology changes, humans don’t’. But is this is really true? Adoption is not the end goal, but important. Success is about the majority, not the early adopters.
Start from the business. Embed social in the flow. How do the social enterprise initiatives relate to business? Define goals.
Try, fail, evolve. Work in pilots!
The social enterprise is more about meaning than money. Think about how you reward employee for participating.

One last thing, says Emanuele: be human and have fun!

Should Foursquare head into the CRM-market?

2013-04-17T10:03:00.001+02:00

Some time ago I wrote about the usefulness of Foursquare. At that time I shared I use Foursquare for fun, but it’s not really useful to me.

Just recently something popped up that does show Foursquare is useful to me. Part of my work is to visit customers and potential customers. Some of the customers aren’t ready to do business with us at the time I visit them and ask me to come back later. So, after some time, I visit them again. Of course the company I work for has a CRM tool, but it’s a pain to go to that system before you visit the customer to check when you were there the last time and what you discussed. I usually just look up my notes stored somewhere on my iPad.

But it is useful to know when I was there the last time. When I arrive at a customer I check in to Foursquare. And what does it say? ‘Welcome back! Last time you were here was in <date>.’ The interesting thing is the conversation with the customer almost always starts with: ‘Good to have you back, when was the last time we met?’ Foursquare helps me answer that question.

Which makes me wonder. Isn’t Foursquare a great CRM tool? Isn’t Foursquare the perfect place to store (and share?) information about customers? Currently this is not possible in Foursquare. You can share a tip, which is public. Not good for customer data. But if you could, Foursquare could not only say ‘welcome back’, but also tell you what you discussed the last time you were there.

Does this make sense? Curious to hear your thoughts.

A World without Email by @elsua #intra13

2013-03-18T15:38:00.003+01:00

We started out the workshop with sharing who we are and how we cope with email. Surprisingly most says they cope with email quite well and don't experience email as a huge issue. But all would like to use email in a better way and get others to do so as well. All participants have some kind of collaboration tool inside their firewall (not saying it's used well or not).

Luis Suarez finds many high-level manager balk when they hear the word 'social', so he uses 'open' more. He stresses that email is a great way to share information. Which is true, says Luis. But you must add: in a silo. And his 'war' on email is not about killing email but repurposing it.

Luis asks why colleagues of the partipants are reluctant to use (internal) social/open tools:

time
no big value
loss of control
relevance of information
convenience
availability
security
resources
governance
no fame
what's in it for me?
over-sharing
extra tool
not business critical
etc.

So, why do people send email? The participants came up with the following list:

thank you's
cover you butt
to do's
attachment
meetings
reminders
answers to questions
notifications
follow-up
bacn (notifications from social networks)

So, how can we get ourselves and others to stop doing the above with email and shifting it to open/social tools. First, spend 5 minutes of your time educating someone how to use a file sharing tool (to stop sending around attachments). Thank people on their social profile instead of sending a thank you-email. Thank them publicly. Move status reports to blogs or wiki's. Move your to-do's in email to a public space or public task management tool telling others you're working on it, also allowing others to collaborate with you. Wiki's are great to share the agenda of meetings and the minutes, instead of emailing them. For gathering feedback, use fora or blogs. Ask question on social platforms so others can chip in and you'll be defined by the potential pool of experts.
What are the benefits of doing this in open/social platforms? We didn't have a lot of time to go into this. Luis advises us to define these benefits personally and show what how this helps us in our own work.

Luis wraps up his workshop with two tips that lead to 80% less email:

apply the above-mentioned use cases
stop responding to email today

Intranet as digital workplace by @markmorrell #intra13

2013-03-18T12:04:00.000+01:00

First of all we should be clear what a digital workplace is. Mark’s definition of a digital workplace is: work is something you do not a place you go to. In a digital workplace you can:

work from any location or while mobile
have the same or similar online experience
collaborate, search, and complete tasks online
choose what tools you can use to do this
feel comfortable whenever you are using
feel comfortable whenever you are using it
be confident you can use it when you need to
have a better work/life balance

The real difference between the intranet and the digital workplace is that you can get work done with a digital workplace. It's not just a content and publication platform, but a place where you can get work done. It's collaborative, it's task-focused.

So, how do you develop a digital workplace strategy? Mark shares several points with us:

it should align with your other strategies
is wider than an intranet strategy
is for the short, medium, and long term
has a governance framework (Mark: 'everything should be managed')
people who will create, support, and make it happen ('this is the hardest part', says Mark)

What steps can be made to work towards the digital workplace:

develop a proposal for a digital workplace
show the benefits to be gained
get it approved...... and funded!
have a steering group (focus on strategy, not implementation with them)
agree on roles and responsibilities
have standards, training, guidance (e.g. with vid- or podcasts)
coordinate IT, HR and property management

During the workshop the participants worked on these steps and shared their approaches.

Mark blogs quite a lot about the benefits of digital workplace strategy. He shared some benefits during the workshop, such as:

shared performance objectives reduce risk of conflicting priorities
help decide top priorities to implement

Benefits of digital workplace are:

BT employees took fewer sick days and were 20% more productive
a study by the Emerald group at BT showed their work-life balance improved, even though they worked longer hours
the BT Agile Worker program save 6000 pounds per worker

Mark also pointed to reports from other companies about the benefits they are getting from the digital workplace.

Innovatie in de 4de dimensie, de 4 ruimtes van KM door @pauliske #4ruimtes

2013-03-15T12:09:00.002+01:00

Volgende spreker is Paul Iske over 'Innovatie in de 4de dimensie, de 4 ruimtes van kennismanagement'.
Net als de vorige spreker Pierre benadrukt Paul dat de wereld wordt steeds complexer. Hoe blijf je bestaan in de wereld? Hoe pak je een rol in deze wereld?
Het vraagt om Agility. Paul laat een leuk voorbeeld van agility zien aan de hand van dit filmpje.
Veel organisaties komen snel terecht in routines. Routines zijn een deel van leren; je kunt zo dingen sneller leren doen. Maar het kan ook beperken. Je mist dingen als je niet de moeite neemt om even buiten je routines te kijken.
In deze tijd wordt er van ons gevraagd om de snelheid van ons leren te verhogen. Want we leven in een tijd waarin de snelheid van het leren, sneller gaat dan de verandering.
Innovatie is dan het proces om (bestaande) kennis toe te passen in een markt/omgeving.
Een omgeving bestaat uit 4 ruimtes:

social space
virtual space
physical space
process space

Het klimaat is ook belangrijk voor innovatie. Leadbeater heeft 9 condities benoemd voor creativiteit, leiderschap en innovatie:

diversiteit
selectie
imbedding
co-evolutie
ontleren
verstoring
eenvoud
verspilling
timing

Er is geen schaarste aan kennis. Het gaat erom wat je met die kennis doet. Als je aan mensen vraagt welk deel van hun kennis ze gebruiken (op het werk) dan blijkt dat het bijzonder klein is. Het hoeft geen 100% te zijn, maar wat meer zou veel opleveren.

Belangrijk bij innovatie is samenwerken vanuit verschillende perspectieven. Samen kijken naar een probleem op verschillende manieren. Uit onderzoek blijkt dat op deze manieren doorbraken worden gerealiseerd. (Heet ook wel 'open innovatie' of 'collaboratieve innovatie'.)

Maar je kunt nog een stap daarvoor innoveren. Dan weet je eigenlijk helemaal niet wat je wilt, maar door partijen bij elkaar te zeggen kun je 'combinatorisch innoveren'. Op basis van serendipity komen mensen/organisaties tot combinaties die vermarkt kunnen worden. De basis vraag is dan: Wat zouden wij samen kunnen doen?

We zijn hier ook mee aan de slag gegaan aan het einde van de keynote: gewoon met je buurman kijken of er raakvlakken zijn om samen te werken.

Ontwerpen van organisaties door Pierre van Amelsvoort #4ruimtes

2013-03-15T11:10:00.005+01:00

Vandaag ben ik bij het lustrum congres van de DutchOpen KM. Het DutchOpen KM en een netwerk van kennismanagement ervaringsdeskundigen die regelmatig bij elkaar komen. Het netwerk bestaat 10 jaar en het leek ons goed om dit te vieren met een congres over de ‘4 ruimtes van kennis management’. Ik zal mijn notes van de dag delen in een aantal blogposts. Ik schrijf live, dus let graag niet teveel op de zinsbouw en typo’s.

Eerste keynote spreker is Pierre van Amelsvoort. Zijn keynote gaat over ‘Ontwerpen van organisaties’.

Pierre neemt ons mee in de veranderende wereld van organisaties. We bewegen van de focus op efficiency naar kwaliteit, flexibiliteit, innovativiteit en nu service/duurzaamheid. Dit is niet en-en-en. Dit wil niet zeggen dat jouw organisatie alle deze stappen moet zetten.
Belangrijk om naar organisaties te kijken vanuit het begrip 'regimes'.
Een grote ziekte in organisaties is het opknippen van organisaties in functies/fragmenten. En dat groot perse beter zou zijn.
Volgorde van organiseren is P > B > S: proces, besturen en systemen.

Betrokkenheid van medewerker bepaalt kwaliteit van het werk, weten we al lang. Maar wat doen we daarmee?
Pierre’s antwoord is: organiseren met mate en zorg voor ruimte voor diversiteit en coleur local. Zoekt naar de menselijke maat van samenwerking. Dat heeft volgens Pierre ook met de grote van organisaties en groepen binnen organisaties te maken:

8-12 mensen is een goed team, kleiner dan dat heb je onvoldoende diversiteit
40-50 mensen in je hoofd hebben voor een community.

Hierarchie is goed, om richting te geven aan mensen. Maar hierarchie moet altijd wat toevoegen, vooral het tijdsperspectief. De functie van hierarchie is het nemen van beslissen, niet administreren.

Het is belangrijk om meer te organiseren op basis van vertrouwen.

Bij veranderingen in organisaties moet je sturen op mensen, cultuur, structuur en systemen. Vooral bij vaste, bureaucratische regimes naar een flexible regime, moet het ‘disruptive’ gebeuren.

Comment therapy

2013-03-11T15:04:00.000+01:00

No comment... :-)

Is working from home always better?

2013-03-08T16:02:00.000+01:00

There's been lots of talk in the blogosphere about Marissa Mayers decision to tell Yahoo! employees to stop working from home. Hey, even Yahoo! employees were/are discussing it on the web.
James Robertson wrote up a nice post about this decision and also pointed to the fact that Google seems to be like-minded to Yahoo! when it comes to working from home. Also interesting is what he says about the implications of this kind of news for 'the digital workplace'.

One of the things I like about the discussion is that we have to rethink why we like/dislike working from home. And that's one of the things I miss in the discussion about tele-work. Of course commenters rightly wonder what this Yahoo! statement means with respect to trusting employees to decide for themselves where they can get their work done.
However, isn't it also OK to discuss what the pro's and con's of tele-work are. Is working from home always the best way to go?
In my experience with working from home, some types of work are great to do from home and some are great to do in the train or at the office. I know from talks with others that my experiences relate to many. For instance I find it very hard to write reports and read longer documents and books at the office. There are simply too many disruptions there. I know this does not go for everybody. But isn't this something to discuss. Along with things we personally have to get done, there are also joint task we have to get done together. How are we going to get that done when working from home and/or the office?
As Mark Morrell says in a comment to the above-mentioned post (I'm rephrasing him a bit): in the end it comes down to trusting employees to decide when and where they can get things done. Sometimes this is at home, sometimes this is at work. True. My point is: we decide this for ourselves and we decide about this together with colleagues.

I'm curious what your thoughts are on this topic. Please share them as a comment.

Reasons to come to the Intranet Conference 2013 #intra13

2013-02-21T17:32:00.001+01:00

On March 18 and 19, 2013 the next edition of the Dutch Intranet Conference will be held. We hope to meet you there! But let me give you some idea of the program and main topic of the conference.

In the intranet space lots of discussion is about choosing the right technology and selecting and providing the right features for your organization. Also, we talk about intranet governance. What is the right governance model for my organization? How can we keep our intranet interesting and vibrant?

Soft skills
What I hardly hear is the skills intranet-related people need to do intranet right? What skills does an intranet manager or owner need? For this reason we thought we’d focus the keynotes on this topic: the skills of the intranet manager and more specifically, the knowledge worker. Because that’s what most modern intranets are for: to support knowledge workers in their daily work.

Keynotes
We invited 3 keynote speakers to give their view on this topic. These are:

Euan Semple: The internet has tremendous influence on organizations. Subsequently this also changes the way we look at intranets. Euan will share what he thinks is changing in organzations and what it means for intranets.
Luis Suarez: What skills does the modern intranet manager need to do his/her work? And what skills does the knowledge worker (the intranet manager’s customer) need to work in a productive way? Luis will share his vision and experiences on this topic and give practical tips to improve the way we work and subsequently improve the intranet.
Steven van Bellegem: The intranet can be seen as a conversation between the business and technology. How do we make these two connect? The intranet itself can be seen as a conversation platform. How do intranet managers create interesting and relevant conversations? And why are conversations so important inside the company? Those are some of the questions Steven will address in his keynote.

In all these talks we hope the conference participants will get practical insights for their daily work, which they can act on. We think we have chosen excellent keynote speakers from which we all can learn.

Breakouts: BYOD, mobile, gamification, and more
On the conference day there will also be 3 rounds of breakouts with 10+ topics to choose from. These breakouts won’t be focused on the soft side of intranet only. We set up a nice mix of more traditional and more modern intranet topics. Just to mention two modern topics: the Rabobank will be talking about how Bring-Your-Own-Device works in practice and what it means for intranet. And a large telecom company will be sharing how they use gamification on their intranet to increase engagement.

Pre-conference workshops
The day before the conference we have 4 pre-conference workshops about topics that are pretty hot. Mark Morrell will give a workshop about the digital workplace and Sharepoint intranets. Luis Suarez will talk about his (and your) battle against email. And Euan Semple’s workshop is about getting hands-on with social intranet.

You’re invited!
The company I work for, Entopic, has organized this conference for several years now. We’re proud to say it has become the largest intranet conference in the world. Of course most of the participants come from Holland and Belgium. But, over the years more and more participants from other countries have joined us as well. So, we’d love to welcome you all to this conference. Not only the keynotes, but also the pre-conference workshop and several breakouts will be in English.

I hope this give you some idea of what this year’s conference is about. If you have any questions, please leave a comment and I’ll get back to you soon.

Under pressure

2013-02-15T19:51:00.003+01:00

How do you feel when you’re under pressure? Can you get things done then? Can you think? I was wondering how you cope with pressure, because I’ve been very busy lately. So busy, I hardly have time to blog (and tweet)… Which is not good.

In the past I’ve written about how important slack is for work in general and specifically for social stuff, like blogging. We need time to reflect and think things over. Time is needed to write things down and publish blogposts about what we do and think. What I find is that when slack leaves my time schedule, I have a hard time keeping up blogging. However important I find blogging, it’s one of the first things I stop doing. So, how important to me is it really, I wonder? Should it be part of my weekly time schedule?

However, on the more positive side, you may know, I use the ‘Getting Things Done’ methodology to stay efficient and effective. I’ve been under pressure many times, but I never let go of GTD. It really helps me plan my tasks, get my tasks completed on time and define realistic deadlines with myself and clients.

So, is that the way to go? Should I just ‘manage’ blogging in the same way then? It would be interesting to hear how you plan your social stuff.

6 years of blogging

2013-01-22T14:23:00.002+01:00

Wow, time flies when you're having fun, right? I was planning to blog about my blog's 6th birthday, but simply forgot because of some interesting (and more important?) work I had to do.
Six years ago I decided to start blogging! I remember the first time I clicked on 'Publish'. Man, was I anxious/curious/scared what would happen next. Actually, I still feel those sensations every time I blog. It is scary to share your ideas publicly and have them read, reviewed and scrutinized out in the open. But, in my experience, it has also always been great fun. I met lots of new people via my blog, I learned a lot from all the interactions on and around my blog, and it's a great way to structure my thoughts.
So, expect me to continue blogging in 2013! Last year the number of posts I published went down. You decide if that's good or bad. And if it says something about the quality of the posts. A big reason for less posts is the job I have. I've been very busy (and I'm happy to say so in these economic times). But I do plan to blog more. I want to blurt out more short thoughts and experiences I have. Of course I hope you, my dear readers, will enjoy them. Looking forward to hear from you!

My notes from the Internet Trends 2012 Update

2012-12-31T12:09:00.000+01:00

I find Mary Meeker's reports on internet trends very interesting. They're packed with interesting data and insights. I've been following her work closely. She recently published an updated overview of 2012 and I thought I'd share my highlights with you at the end of this year.

sheet 9: stunning slide showing shipment of iPads, iPhones and iPods over 10 years compared. This slides is old(er), but it just underlines the interesting times we live in
sheet 10: You thought the ramp up of Apple products is huge, well Android ramp up is 6 times that of iPhone
sheet 12: 30% of US adults own a tablet, less than 3 years ago that was 3%
sheet 17: mobile advertising is growing rapidly; $0.7 billion in 2008, $19 billion in 2012
sheet 18: 24% of online shopping was done via tablets on Black Saturday, versus 6% 2 years ago
sheet 20: we are in the midst of a huge change powered by new devices + connectivity + UI + beauty. Meeker highlights the effects for the pc, photography, phone, knowledge, navigation, news, note taking, content organization, magazines, cash registers, lending money, idea building/funding, recruiting, product design, etc. market (and we are still in "spring training", Meeker says [sheet 58])
sheet 24: very interesting overview of the market share of Microsoft compared to others. Used to be 96% and is now just 35%.
sheet 61: I like how Meeker digs deeper into the consequences of the internet by addressing what it means for our space, time and money and how we balance these
sheet 77: Meeker mentions markets that still can be opened, such as the time spent in cars and watching TV, education and healthcare.

And here's her complete slidedeck:

2012 KPCB Internet Trends Year-End Update from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Is our web slipping away?

2012-12-28T16:42:00.003+01:00

Sometimes I read a post that really gets me thinking. Anil Dashes' recent post 'The web we lost' did it this time. I think reading the full post is well worth your time if you're interested in where the web is headed. Two fragments from the post triggered me the most:

We've lost key features that we used to rely on, and worse, we've abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To the credit of today's social networks, they've brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they've certainly made a small number of people rich.

But they haven't shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they've now narrowed the possibilites of the web for an entire generation of users who don't realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be.

(...)

The first step to disabusing them of this notion is for the people creating the next generation of social applications to learn a little bit of history, to know your shit, whether that's about Twitter's business model or Google's social features or anything else. We have to know what's been tried and failed, what good ideas were simply ahead of their time, and what opportunities have been lost in the current generation of dominant social networks.

One of the things I really like about the web is that I know what it was like before the web was there and became so important in our lives. I can also remember the first steps 'web 2.0' brought us and how thrilled I was (and still am) about the next version of the web. After years in the internet and intranet version of the new web, I too am wondering if we're loosing it. I understand Dashes points to business models and what existing services are doing (building walls, cutting off integration opportunities based on RSS, etc.) as reasons for loosing the web. However, I wonder if we should ask even more fundamental questions. Web 2.0 and social media was about refinding our voice. More and more I see the services that helped us refind our voice are becoming less human (walling their garden, changing privacy settings, etc.). They're going against important statements from The Cluetrain Manifesto. And I see less and less people blogging and starting deep conversations (although I must say this is one of the reasons I love Google+). Monetization of services has become more important than the core values of the new web.

Or aren't we loosing it, but are we just getting started? Is it that the early adopters have to slow down and understand that the majority is just starting to understand the concepts and tools of the new web?

Just when I wondered if Dashes would share his ideas about rebuilding the web we lost, he posted his ideas. They are good ideas, even though they're focused on technology, design, funding, business models and the like. These could be good starting point, but as I just mentioned, I wonder if this cuts deep enough to really bring back the web we lost. What do you think?

UPDATE (5 minutes after publishing this post): My friend Ana Silva recently blogged about this topic as well, pointing to Dashes' post and other related posts.

Social Students?

2012-12-27T17:08:00.001+01:00

What social tools are young people using? As a (internal) social media advisor for several companies I'm very interested in the answer to this question. So, when I get a change to talk for students, I'm honored, but also very curious what they will tell me.

Recently I was asked to guest lecture for students at the Radboud University of Nijmegen. It's the university I went to years ago. I was asked to share my experience with using social media concepts and tools inside organizations. I basically used a shorter version of the slides I use for my guest lectures for a college, but spent more time on the conceptual, philosophical if you will, side of 'social'.
I also asked them which social tools they use and why they use them. What did they say? Here's what I learned (there were 40+ students attending my lecture):

None use Google+. Why? Nobody/none of their friends is there.
All except 3 use Facebook. The 3 that didn't use FB, just didn't see the value of using the service.
None of the students blog. Some said they didn't because they thought nobody is interested in what they have to say. Some said they wanted to but didn't have time.
There are no Hyves users in this class (Hyves is a Dutch social network).
75% uses Twitter. Most use it to consume information, not publish/share it.
They know Foursquare but don't use it.
All have a LinkedIn account, but don't use it. It's for after their student-life.

Interesting, I find. It's pretty different from the usage pattern I collected while lecturing at a college. To me the most worrying answer is the one about blogging. At college and university hardly anybody blogs. I usually point to my blog and tell them what it brought and brings me. I hope that inspires them...

What's worrying to me is the reason why they don't blog: because they conclude what they think and would share is not interesting to others. And these students will be paid to think in the future. Wouldn't it be great if these young people would share their thoughts with us? I think so and hope they will in the future. The big question is: how do we get them to share?

Emailing with @elsua?

2012-12-27T14:16:00.000+01:00

You all know +Luis Suarez, right? The guy from IBM, that live on the Canary Islands and has declared war on email. Well recently I wanted to get in touch with him to discuss an opportunity that popped up. Contacting him is easy, right? He’s all over social media. Just DM him on Twitter, send a message via Google+ or Facebook. LinkedIn will do as well. I thought I’d share how it went. Did I seduce Luis to hand over his email address to me?

But what to do if you want to send him a longer piece of text? Do you request for his email address? I was tempted to but refrained to ask because I knew I would be whipped by him. ;-) So I reached out to him via Twitter (direct message) and asked if we could call sometime soon. That was possible and we had a chat. But, still, I had to send him more information about the opportunity, about 10-15 lines of text. And I’m not going to chop this into 140 character messages. LinkedIn could work, but feels like email. I’m not connected to Luis in Facebook, so I couldn’t message him there either. So I left it up to him. And what did he choose? We had a one-on-one conversation in Google+. Which worked fine. There is no limitation to message link there. Although attachments can’t be sent, a link to it works as well.

This does make me wonder: this one-on-one conversation is basically email in a social network. The shift of email-like communication to social networks is evident and understandable. But does it really make sense to move this kind of conversation there? Isn’t this the sweet spot of email and basically it’s best use case. To use it for one-on-one confidential conversation? I could think of two good reasons to move these kind of conversations to social nets:

When we think the conversation might me opened up to a larger group later on. When the conversation has been held in the network where this group is, it can easily be shared with them.
When social networks instead of email is de central hub of the knowledge worker. For most people this is not the case yet (just relate to what application you open first in the morning when you start working…).

So, what do you think? Are there other reasons to communicate one-on-one in social media instead of email? And how would you have interacted with Luis if you wanted something from him?

By the way, Luis will be at the 2013 Intranet Conference (the company I work for is the organizer). He’ll be sharing his thoughts on the skills of the knowledge worker in a keynote and in a pre-conference workshop he’ll be talking about ‘a world without email’. You can register here!

Looking forward

2012-12-24T14:26:00.000+01:00

It’s that time of the year again when we look back and evaluate the year that has passed by so quickly. And lots like to make predictions for the year to come. I don’t want to share my predictions and my ponderings on the previous year. It has been an exciting year for me though. Many interesting projects, many interesting interactions with colleagues, customers and you. I moved from being a senior consultant to manager, visited interesting conferences, had discussions about and changes to the company I work for, etc. I’m just happy to have a great job, in times when many are looking for a job.

I would like to thank you for the previous year. For reading my blog, thinking about things I’ve shared with you and the interactions we’ve had here and elsewhere. I’m looking forward to 2013 and hope you are to.

I wish you and all your loved ones happy holidays!

I’ve seen the future and (part of) it’s Qbengo

2012-12-21T14:30:00.000+01:00

In the past I’ve written quite a bit about expertise location and knowledge mapping. Expertise location is about supporting people to find people with certain expertise they’re looking for. In larger and multi-nationals organizations this is a big issue. One aspect about expertise location is also finding out where the person is. This can be a static location (e.g. the person works in room 3, building 4). This is difficult enough, but it can be done as I wrote some time ago.

However, the workforce is more mobile than ever. Less and less employees have a fixed space they’re working in daily. They work in several rooms in an office during the week, they work from home, in the car, etc. Supporting expertise location in this context is even harder. In theory it can be done. I wrote about this as well. But I never saw a company actually connect the dots and make it work. Until recently.

I had the pleasure to visit Qbengo. Qbengo is currently focused on connecting people at larger conferences. You’ve been there: a large conference with many booths. You have specific questions and would like to have them answered, but finding your way to the right person and/or booth, is hard. Furthermore, you don’t want to walk by all the booths, because that takes too much of your time.

Qbengo has developed technology to support this process. They can quickly map out a conference location: the conference rooms, lunch area, booths, etc. By downloading there app you get access to these conference maps. But you can also register and connect with people and vendors there. When you set up a meeting with Qbengo you are subsequently helped to find that person or booth with turn-by-turn navigation inside the conference location. The cool thing is this also works in 3D. And this was exactly one of the issues I pointed to some time ago. For (expertise) maps inside organizations to work, you would need 3D-mapping technology, because most offices are multi-layered.

Qbengo is a start-up and a start-up needs focus. But you can easily see where I think they should and could go, right? Yep, expertise location for organizations. They have all the elements to make this work. This is (part of) our future and I think this is very exciting.

Why do we share?

2012-12-20T16:07:00.000+01:00

Maybe a better question is: why do I share? I was wondering about this while reading +Oscar Berg’s post ‘Why do people share?’.
Oscar makes several interesting statements about sharing in his post. Like this one:

The act of sharing something tells our colleagues something about us and that we think and care about what they might be interested in. If what we share is relevant and valuable to them, they will understand that we have really tried to understand what their needs and interests are. Their trust in us grows.

And, citing from an MIT Sloan article about reputation and knowledge sharing:

Reputation also plays a role where rules or systems are unable to spur sharing. Because critical information is often held privately by individuals, workers often can choose to share or withhold such information in their interactions with colleagues without fear of sanction. That leaves reputation as a key motivator in any decision to share or withhold information.

Oscar also relates to the influence of culture on sharing. Furthermore, referring to another article, the content of what you share also depends on whether you’ll share it. People share content that will bring them ‘emotional communion’ and not all content is fit for that.

And at the end of his post he points to a post by Nancy Dixon in which see distinguishes two types of knowledge sharing. One is, in my own words, work-related, the other relation-related. Examples of the first are reports. Experiences are examples of the second. More interestingly, both types of sharing have different motivations. Only the second kind of sharing was done for personal benefit.

Interesting stuff, I think. I’ve been collecting articles about knowledge sharing and blogging about his topic for some time as well. It’s not an easy topic. And the above provide interesting insights, but only scratch the surface of this topic.

At the end of Oscar’s post I was wondering what motivates Oscar to share. I can’t talk for Oscar, of course, but I will share why I share. To me there is one big reason to share information and knowledge (as far as I know them now):
Share to learn: I share what I know and see with others because I want to learn. By wording my knowledge in text or speech in itself, helps me to learn. But I also hope to learn from the response I get from the person I’m addressing or that has asked me the question. I hardly withhold information from people. I will if I think that person does not respect me or will use the information in a wrong way.

I think I can unpack this general reason and distill underlying reasons from it. These are:

Share to show-off: to me there is definitely a show-off element to knowledge sharing. It’s not the most important one, but I do share to show what I know, read, bump into, etc.
Share to listen: an important part of learning to me is listening. So I enjoy what others are sharing, because it helps me learn. It also triggers me to share by posting things I find interesting and asking questions.
Share to remember: sharing information is also a way for me to capture things I find interesting. So I bookmark a link, tweet a link or statement, etc. In this way I’ve stored it for later use.
Share to be more effective: I share to learn and this helps me become more productive. Asking a question in my (digital) network, helps me find (partial) answers more quickly. Once I’ve written about something on my blog, I can refer to it later on. This makes more productive in the long run.

So, these are the reason for me to share. Do they make sense? What are your reasons to share?

Satisfying Knowledge Worker Values

2012-11-27T14:00:00.000+01:00

Bribing the knowledge workers on whom these industries [of the Information Revolution] depend will therefore simply not work. The key knowledge workers in these businesses will surely continue to expect to share financially in the fruits of their labor. But the financial fruits are likely to take much longer to ripen, if they ripen at all. And then, probably within ten years or so, running a business with (short-term) "shareholder value" as its first—if not its only—goal and justification will have become counterproductive. Increasingly, performance in these new knowledge-based industries will come to depend on running the institution so as to attract, hold, and motivate knowledge workers. When this can no longer be done by satisfying knowledge workers' greed, as we are now trying to do, it will have to be done by satisfying their values, and by giving them social recognition and social power. It will have to be done by turning them from subordinates into fellow executives, and from employees, however well paid, into partners.

This was written in 1999 by Peter Drucker (Beyond the Information Revolution). We still have long way to go...

What's the real issue with Information Overload?

2012-11-26T14:00:00.000+01:00

What's the real problem underlying information overload? Nathan Zeldes has been finding answers to this question for years. Recently he wrote a must-read post on the answers he found. There are all kinds of reasons we keep on using email in an unproductive way. But the underlying issue, according to Zeldes, is mistrust. To solve the information overload problem within organizations we need to address this "dark side" of overload. If we don't we'll never structurally solve the problem. Address this dark side and change the underlying culture, Zeldes advises.

I agree this is a way to fundamentally root out mistrust. But what if this is not possible? What if the company just doesn't see the problem and therefore does not want to spend time on this extermination process?
I think every person can start by settting an example. Be counter-cultural! Show how the way you use email is more effective and productive. It's the long bottom-up approach, but this road empowers you, instead of waiting and complaining until "the rest of the company" gets it and starts the "improve trust program".

Email integrated with Social Software

2012-11-23T15:59:00.004+01:00

James Dellow has a nice post researching the history of email and why email is so successful. More importantly he wonders what this means for social tools and their success. He concludes his post with the following:

Enterprise social software can also learn some important lessons from email:

We need interoperability between enterprise social systems.

Users prefer standardised interfaces.

It needs to be cost effective to own and operate.

Far from being a nemesis, email and enterprise social software are more likely to form a strong symbiotic relationship.

I've been thinkings and blogging about this topic quite a bit as well. I did research and product concept development on document management tools in the past. One of the things we said back then is: integrate document management into email. I think this principle still applies. I also think the killer social tools will be deeply integrated into/with email. For that reason I think Google+ has a good chance of winning the social game. People want one spot to do a lot of different things. They live in their inbox. To me the holy grail is to have a platform from which you can easily share content to email, to social nets, etc. Don't worry this will lead to less email, not more.