The best answer to these questions has come from doing a significant amount of research in exception handling and management in the enterprise. I’ve had the pleasure of participating in the Deloitte Center for the Edge workshops, lead by John Hagel (who writes a phenomenal blog for the Harvard Business Review alongside John Seeley Brown, whom I’ve taught with at UC Irvine’s MBA program). These workshops have taken the idea of exceptions out of the realm of software programming and brought them into the daily workflow of everyday employees. Now, when clients ask about ROI and practical applications of social networks, we respond with our findings from our own clients as well as what we’ve discussed at the Center for the Edge.

What does exception handling mean for companies and employees? A practical definition is the time that employees – both management and front line workers – spend managing the non-routine tasks that must be addressed even though they occur outside the realm of standard daily business operations. It’s the things that just come up and disrupt someone’s workflow, requiring special time and attention.

Examples from our client base include:

• Unexpectedly low inventory of specific book titles at online retailers
• A company’s email domain is blacklisted suddenly

Other examples in the enterprise include:

• Order placed for discontinued product with no direct replacement found
• Quality Assurance finds a product defect, resulting in a manufacturing hold
• Sales Team processes an order for a new client with special requirements
• Customer support requested for a discontinued product

All of these everyday issues are common, and yet we haven’t found a way to easily mitigate both the issue and the time it takes away from our other work. You see, when an exception happens, we have to step away from our PowerPoint, stop typing an email, or exit a meeting in order to take care of it. Routine work stops. And, our modern reliance on technology to find, aggregate, and alert us to these exceptions has made the task of managing them more burdensome than ever before. Systems that manage exceptions provide the enterprise with vast amounts of data points that have become overwhelming for employees to handle. The applications that we rely on for managing exceptions still rely on process owners to make decisions and respond to the issues. The result is a workforce that isn’t dealing with exceptions well at all. According to Protivitti, decision-making and related actions around exceptions occur slowly and ineffectively for a variety of reasons, such as:

• Deaf Ears – Messages requesting action on an internal control issue languish in e-mail boxes and on voice mail systems
• Burnout – Process owners grow weary of repeated requests to address exceptions, even as they are in the process resolving them
• Erroneous Exceptions – Communication breakdowns between internal audit teams and their operational partners result in identification of too many “false positives” – exceptions that should not be classified as exceptions at all.

The communication breakdown around the alerts can dramatically affect how these exceptions are managed. What if the email alert for an exception goes to the inbox of an employee on vacation, or is sent to a terminated employee because the system was never updated? This could lead to months of time before any follow-up to the alert is even initiated. Even if the email is sent to the correct person, this could involve significant back-and-forth that creates an information silo.

Unfortunately, we can’t just sweep exceptions under the rug. Many exceptions often require swift response, as they are customer-centric or affect the bottom line. In fact, it’s easy to tie certain exceptions to company KPIs such as profit, customer satisfaction, customer retention, and employee productivity. The low inventory at our client’s online retailer? This directly affects the client’s profit, as not enough inventory means not enough product sold. A severe customer support issue is equally important, affecting both satisfaction and retention of a company’s most important asset – its customers. It’s clear why companies must focus on exception management, then. But until now, there hasn’t been a clear, efficient way of tackling this challenge.

The answer is an enterprise activity stream – a social network that talks directly with exception handling systems while simultaneously allowing employees to collaborate on the solution. Enterprise social networks already eliminate knowledge silos and enable open communication across all levels of the enterprise. Adapting exception management applications to utilize this collaborative arena can eliminate many of the decision and communication issues related to limited communication methods currently used, like email. Alerts can now be seen in a community of operators who handle these exceptions, allowing for a collaborative effort, in real-time, providing faster resolutions. They can be accessed via mobile phone, or at home via the web. Visibility into exceptions is now more widespread, making finding the answer easier than before.

Social networks in the enterprise create a permanent “home” for these exceptions to live where users can communicate and collaborate around the answers. Exception management through social networks gives management clear insight into the resources needed for handling these exceptions. Viewing or monitoring the interactions and necessary actions taken to resolve these exceptions can lead to better implementation, revisions or training on these systems, and increase productivity throughout the enterprise.

Faster resolution management of these exceptions will also help keep key performance indicators reporting positive results for the enterprise. This adaptation of social networks and the activity stream produces measurable ROI on social network’s role in the enterprise. Where better collaboration amongst employees isn’t currently seen as measurable ROI, integrating social networks into exception management can yield measurable results. Better, faster and more responsive management of these exceptions will measurably show against key performance indicators, demonstrating the ROI of implementing social networks in the enterprise.

NEW Polling Feature:

Any employee can now create a poll in the network, allowing voting and collaborative decision-making on employee ideas. The goal of this feature is to make shared ideas meaningful and actionable via real-time feedback from colleagues. Socialcast polling provides a fast, easy way to make critical decisions or launch brainstorming sessions that accelerate the resolution of problems or ideate on new products or services.

To create a poll in your community, click the “Poll” link to load the Poll configuration box. Results are displayed inside the original Poll post. This feature is only available on premium deployments.

NEW Private Messaging Feature:

Socialcast now provides the ability for employees to send private messages to one another for confidential information sharing. When a message isn’t intended for general visibility, a private message offers employees using Socialcast the chance to communicate directly without having to leave the application.

To send a private message, click on the new “Private Messages” button in the upper right-hand side of your screen. Enter the name of the person you want to send a private message to, enter your message, and then click the “Send” button.

This feature is only available on premium deployments, and must be enabled by a community administrator.

ENHANCED Analytics Dashboard:

Socialcast has completed several new feature enhancements to our dashboard of administrator analytics that will provide deeper insight into your community. The following data is available for all administrators to view:

• Revamped analytics dashboards now appear in the top of the admin panel
• Helper tips have been added for easier data analysis
• Dashboards will include metrics for all types of messages posted to the network, including status updates, questions, likes, comments, polls and private messages
• Web logins can now be viewed over various time ranges
• The Groups dashboard shows the number of public and private groups created
• A detailed engagement tab has been added to give administrators a better sense of activities occurring in the community
• Uploaded files are now tracked over time

One strength of Rails that keeps getting better as the team grows is the practice of convention over configuration. If you’ve had the experience of opening up an unfamiliar Rails application, then you can imagine the benefit for new employees: you know exactly where to look for different pieces of functionality. That means that new developers spend their time learning the application domain, understanding how we’ve gone outside the box with Rails and getting up to speed on our development practices rather than trying to understand how we’ve organized our source code. It’s also beneficial for experienced developers since we have a common set of expectations around how a Rails project should be organized. Imagine asking five experienced Java developers to design a structure for a new Java web application. If you had anything less than five spectacularly different results I would be shocked. This is not so with Rails.

The overall brevity of Ruby and Rails code is also increasingly beneficial for a large team. We’re not immune to merge conflicts but they usually happen in our CSS, javascript and, well, good old schema.rb. Over the years, some files have grown larger than I’d like, but our largest three model files weigh in at 914, 670 and 375 lines. Top controllers are at 407, 301 and 297 lines and longest views are 355, 313, and 259. While this isn’t the epitome of brevity, I’ve seen much worse.

The Socialcast team also benefits from the excellent plugin support with Rails. Not only are there a large number of open source plugins available, but these plugins provide patterns and inspiration for creating your own plugins. We use custom plugins to handle common concerns such as file attachment handling, input scrubbing, and security validation. Depending on plugins for code reuse means that new areas stay consistent with the rest of the application. A minor nitpick is that our vendor/plugins folder is a mish-mash of first and third party plugins and you don’t see at a glance which ones we’ve built ourselves and which ones we’ve integrated from third parties. Fortunately, this situation has improved as many external plugins are now packaged as gems. The senior Rails engineers on our team have all built multiple plugins for internal use thanks to the ease of getting started and integrating the plugins into the application.

Rails provides us the flexibility and simplicity that allows us to focus on the end product – the Socialcast software – more efficiently and quickly. Most importantly though, I’m still having a lot of fun working with Rails on a large, growing team and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

We’re excited to have Monica lead our development efforts as she brings web-scale experience to our successful platform. Her evangelism of activity streams on the consumer web will significantly enhance our capabilities with an enterprise focus.

Additionally, Monica’s intricate understanding of the Open Graph Protocol, originally developed at Facebook, will further our leadership in mapping and exposing the Corporate Social Graph. The Open Graph Protocol is a set of standards first developed at Facebook that enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. With most conversations in the enterprise occurring around Corporate Social Objects such as documents, customer profiles, and projects, the Open Graph Protocol will allow Socialcast to surface additional context about these critical business nodes in real-time. Now, Socialcast will be able to connect employees not only to their areas of interest, but also to relevant information that will help them work smarter and more productively. Our support of the Open Graph Protocol will transform enterprise collaboration from a web of documents into a meaningful web of people and intelligence.

Monica’s experience at MySpace and Facebook brings a more intricate understanding of the consumer web to Socialcast, allowing users to better understand and use our enterprise-level social software. As the consumer web is being modeled based upon people and their interests, Socialcast is developed with the idea that the corporate environment can benefit by the same contextual associations. Monica’s experience and ideas will blend the consumer web and best practices in the enterprise, serving as the base for many of our new and innovative features to be announced at the end of Q3 2010.

At its core, a meeting is a gathering of people designed to allow collaboration on a specific topic. Webster’s defines a meeting as “an act or process of coming together.” However, this simple definition doesn’t capture the intricacies and expectations of meetings in the enterprise. Like email, people are “cc’d” into meetings when they don’t really need to be present. According to a Microsoft survey, employees globally spend an average of 5.6 hours a week in meetings. 69 percent of participants feel that these meetings are unproductive and unnecessary. Not only is the mental cost of these meetings high, they also affect a company’s bottom line. These weekly 5.6 hours of unproductive time is like giving each employee 12 additional days of paid vacation per year. In fact, Group Vision estimates that Fortune 500 companies waste an estimated $75 million per year in meetings.  The numbers clearly make the case that meetings are costly beyond their value.

Holding fewer meetings each week doesn’t seem to be the answer to the challenge. Office Team asked 150 senior executives if they thought company meetings would be more productive if banned one day a week. Only 13 percent of executives surveyed felt with any confidence that meeting productivity could improve if they limited the frequency of meetings.  Artificially reducing the opportunities for employees to connect isn’t going to solve the problem; each meeting has its nuances and participant personalities that cannot be reigned in by simply enforcing an arbitrary time limit. Few have read “Robert’s Rules of Order” to understand the way to participate in a meeting. Therefore, the solution is finding alternative ways of disseminating information, collaborating, debating, and sharing ideas outside of the boardroom. Our traditional approach to meetings, like many other traditional business practices, is due for a fundamental change.

There is no definitive answer to this challenge, but there are options that companies can employ based on their culture and communication needs. One option is a private social network used for asynchronous communication and collaboration, which gives the benefit of discussion without stealing everyone’s time all at once. A second option is more formal meeting training and a technology “blackout” for companies who do determine that meetings are required; more structure and fewer interrupting cell phone calls may create a more conducive environment for productivity. Dozens and dozens of additional options exist. However, it is clear that meetings are not going away, but in their current state they cannot continue.

What is the answer at your company? How are you handling unproductive meetings? Are there alternatives, or will meetings have to change to better fit the current, schizophrenic state of technology and communication?

Sources: CIO.COM, GROUPVISION.COM, ALLBUSINESS.COM, SHIRLEYFINELEE.COM, EXAMINER.COM, INC.COM

The first revolutionary shift began with the widespread adoption of the telephone in business during the early 1950s. Between 1951 and 1956, nearly $82 million was spent developing telephone communication infrastructure from New York to San Francisco and Europe. The result was that businesses now had access to technology to communicate across the country with the transcontinental microwave line, or across the world via the transatlantic cable. At the same time, while the telephone itself had been around for many years, it became an everyday tool for most corporate employees during this time period. This gave them unprecedented access to colleagues, clients and more. The business telephone represented instant vocal communication that could be used by anyone, not just telegraph operators. It was the first piece of communication technology that could be a substitute for face-to-face interaction.

The next wave in business communication came to be with the fax machine in the 1970s. The power of this new tool was its ability to instantly transfer documents from business to business, giving companies the power to exchange written information without having to wait for the mail or a messenger. The fax used the massive telephone infrastructure built during the previous 20 years, only requiring businesses to purchase the fax machine. Crucial information could now be sent across the country instantly, making business move even faster than before. No longer did an employee have to rely on vocal communication to get his or her work done – collaboration could occur with everyone knowing what was written on paper.

The next and most significant change in business communication came from email in the 1990s. It was the first shift that was completely digital in both information delivery and content. Email brought about a new form of social interaction. Whereas the phone mimicked face-to-face communication, and the fax machine enabled document-based collaboration, email enabled instant written communication with the click of a button. Its speed, simplicity, cost-effectiveness, and instant gratification for information-consumption made it quickly become the standard enterprise communication tool.

Now that it’s the year 2010, we’re experiencing the next 20-year shift. Email is still going to be crucial for business communication, but it has also worn out its welcome; 20 years of use has allowed an entire global workforce to learn how to use, abuse, and manipulate this tool so that it’s become a necessary evil to contend with – not simply a marvelously fast and useful way to share information. It’s time for a new communication platform to take center stage.

In 2010, we have now entered the era of the Activity Stream. Enabled by the advent of the internet and our constant consumption and sharing of information on the web, activity streams in business expose the flow of what’s happening across places, systems, and people in the business. This real-time social application takes the speed, innovation and simplicity of each of its predecessors, acting as a communication and collaboration powerhouse that flattens companies and makes colleagues in the virtual world feel real. Activity Streams fundamentally change how companies do business, unlocking the vast amount of information generated by everyday operations and making it instantly available across previously rigid boundaries. Activity Streams humanize every business process inside a company, adding a social layer to data and opening up real-time collaboration.

According to Gartner, “By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams…” The social layer that activity streams bring into a company can fundamentally change how a company does business.  In real-time, activity streams can:

1. Provide real-time communication and collaboration, creating a flow of knowledge and ideas
2. Flatten a company and make all employees feel more real
3. Allow employees to share ideas and tell people what they think
4. Help employees get quick answers to questions, while sharing the valuable information with others

The next communication shift is happening, just like it did 20 years ago.  The enterprise is now social, real-time, and shaped by what we’re doing on the web in our personal lives. For the next several years, we can expect these trends to continue molding how employees interact at work and communicate with their colleagues. And, while our previous business communication tools will never fully disappear, we can expect to see new tools continue to revolutionize communications every two decades. For now, the power of activity streams will dominate how we work, giving us better, faster access to information in order to do our jobs more efficiently.

Sources: Gartner, Nielson, PEW, The Wall Street Journal, PrivateLine

New Socialcast Features

New Social Business Intelligence® Date Selection Capabilities
A new date selection tool has been added to Socialcast’s exclusive Social Business Intelligence® (SBI) suite of analytics. Now, administrators can easily pull data from convenient pre-selected time periods, or choose specific date ranges. This gives administrators complete control in selecting the dates for further analysis of their community’s activity.

Social Business Intelligence® surfaces the people, conversations, and topics in a community to measure the power of an organization’s collaborative efforts. This tool allows community administrators to discover the most important topics and conversations being discussed by the community. Social Business Intelligence® is a Premium feature available in the Premium Hosted and On Premise (Behind the Firewall) deployments. To add this powerful suite of analytics to your Socialcast community, click here.

Post Messages Into Any Group Regardless of Membership
This new feature allows all community members to post topics, questions or comments into public groups that they are not members of. Now, a user from the sales team can ask a question or post a comment inside the engineering group without having to become a member. These messages, once posted, will appear in that user’s home stream, allowing them to participate in the conversation further. The goal of this feature is to allow users to access experts in a field, making Socialcast a more powerful resource for knowledge-gathering.

• Broadband data speeds have reached 90 percent of business establishments
• Wireless broadband is available in all major metropolitan areas
• Mobile voice services have saturated all industries
• Mobile and wireline prices have dropped rapidly with the elimination of usage charges and ubiquitous “unlimited” plans
• There has been wide adoption of subscription-based services such as voice over internet protocol (VoIP)

The surfacing of the mobile workforce has changed the way many brick-and-mortar companies conduct business. No longer do the walls of the company indicate the boundaries of communication.  For example, companies often strategically place key personnel in remote locations to provide a personal touch to customers.  The ability to reach-out to a company’s customer base first-hand, while seamlessly communicating with corporate headquarters, extends customer interaction beyond company walls.  Companies also frequently permit telecommuting, allowing employees to be virtually present yet physically remote. The result is a truly mobile workforce that makes getting work done faster and more efficient thanks to technology.

According to Insight Research Corporation, the mobile workforce would not have been possible without these essential certain elements converging and becoming available:

1. Mobile Services: Both wireless and broadband services
2. Devices: Cell phones, PDAs, notebooks, and wireless cards
3. Service Control: Management of wireline, wireless, office/remote access in a seamless service offering
4. Enterprise Applications: The business processes that are automated through mobile access
5. Business Application Platforms: The foundations and interfaces for building enterprise applications over a converged wireless and wireline network

With extensive advances in business communication infrastructure and mobile technology, companies are now promoting the expansion of their mobile workforce.  Cited in a study by the Telework Coalition:

• 89 of the top 100 U.S. companies offer telecommuting
• 58 percent of companies consider themselves a virtual workplace
• Only nine percent of employees work at headquarters
• 67 percent of all workers use mobile and wireless computing

This data shows that the mobile workforce has quickly become more than just a buzzword, but actually is now a reality for a majority of employees.

Additionally, the definition of a “mobile employee” continues to broaden with rapidly changing technology and services. A mobile worker used to be just the business traveler, sent on planes and trains to conduct business before the weekend approached. But today, every employee has the potential to be mobile. Empowered by devices like the iPhone™, iPad™, and Android™, these mobile tools offer huge productivity benefits with real-time information exchange and increased efficiency for every employee.  According to a study by Pew Internet, employees at businesses using mobile technology are seeing a major improvement in work efficiency:

• 80 percent say that mobile technologies have improved their ability to do their job
• 73 percent say these technologies improve their ability to share ideas with co-workers
• 58 percent say these tools have allowed them more flexibility in hours spent at work

These improvements in work efficiency have suddenly released a paralyzing kink that has limited the free flow of information in the communication pipeline. However, despite the vast improvements that have been made, companies and employees are realizing that the mobile workforce isn’t nearly as empowered as it may appear on the surface. The reason? Critical business applications used every day were never developed for remote or mobile access, making them void of a mobile layer or interface. They are completely inaccessible to the mobile workforce, only available to those back behind the confines of corporate headquarters. Employees working at home, from a hotel, at a client location, or even on an airplane are unable to access valuable information from ERP, CRM and accounting software, for example (cloud-computing applications excluded, of course). Now, despite tremendous infrastructure improvements, the flow of critical information from these behind the firewall systems to the mobile workforce is kinked, causing delays and inefficiency. These business applications are inherently missing a layer that untangles the knots and lets information flow freely. It’s the one disadvantage of being a mobile employee – you’re left in the dark without access to the information needed.

Or are you? There is a solution to this challenge of information flow – Activity Streams. Activity Streams provide an otherwise non-existent layer of visibility on top of these critical business applications, surfacing relevant information to mobile workers in a mobile-friendly interface. Activity Stream software aggregates important information from these tools and make their data visible to mobile infrastructure in real time. Instead of requiring costly and often impossible upgrades to ancient databases or tools, Activity Stream software sits on top of these systems and floats relevant information to each individual user that needs it. It is a social layer that plays “middleman” between the mobile worker and the company system, passing information back and forth with ease. The result is a mobile workforce that can tap into crucial business systems with security and simplicity, further increasing productivity and efficiency. Now, it’s time for the next step – as companies increasingly promote and embrace a mobile workforce, layering on Activity Streams will become a crucial step to empowering these employees.

Sources: Gartner, Nielsen Wire, Pew Internet, WSJ, Insight Research Corporation

About a decade ago, my first “corporate” boss Jennifer gave me my first “corporate” responsibilities as an entry level PR employee at Nickelodeon. It seemed simple enough:

“When you’re done writing the press release, email it to me, and copy Blaine and MaryAnne.”

My eager, novice ears heard the instructions and I did just what I thought was expected – I emailed the release to Blaine (the Assistant), Jennifer (the Director and my boss) and MaryAnne (the VP). In that order. It was alphabetical, I thought, and probably the right way to get this information to everyone. To my boss, however, I had made the mistake of undermining her authority by failing to respect the reporting relationship via email.

I didn’t realize until later that day what a mistake I had made. As a new employee fresh out of college, I didn’t realize that there was a hierarchy to email communication. There are signals sent with every email that floats into an inbox – and the “to” and “cc” fields sometimes speak volumes more than the actual written words themselves. Like the nuances of grammar in the English language, where emphasis can be added for effect by slightly different placements of a comma or an adjective, the entire meaning of an email can be changed based on who is listed first in the “to” field, who is copied, and who is completely omitted. In email, meaning is derived heavily from how the corporate hierarchy is included and arranged.

The introduction of public, asynchronous communication systems into the enterprise has not only shifted how we communicate, but to whom we communicate. The question then arises – do the same rules of the communication hierarchy apply inside enterprise communities? Should employees always address higher-ranking executives before middle management when posting to a community? Should they “cc” or “mention” someone’s boss when offering praise inside the network so that the deserving employee is sure to be recognized? Overall, do we respect the traditional rules of email, or do we break free from them with the mentality that social communities are inherently different?

I argue that tools like Socialcast should continue to respect the corporate hierarchy and that users should be addressed with respect to their position. But every company is different – and this may not be the case across the board. What do you think? How does your company treat the addressing of employees inside social communities?

New Socialcast Features:

New “Helpful Links”

A new “Helpful Links” section has been added that allows companies to link to internal and external resources. The links are managed by system administrators, and enable relevant training and resource information to be available at any time inside the community. This feature can be accessed through the admin panel, under the “helpful links” tab. Once entered, the links will appear in the upper right-hand side of the main page for all users.

New Applications Link

A new “Applications” link has been added to the top of the Socialcast Community, providing quick and easy access to integration tools like Outlook, SharePoint, Blackberry, iPhone and more.

New User Profile Field

An additional field has been added to a user’s profile page to enter the name of his or her manager. This field helps communicate a company’s organizational structure.

Updated Group Directory

The group directory has been updated to show more information on the community’s groups. Now, the group directory displays the number of followers and messages in each particular group. A new and easy layout has been implemented, making selecting and joining public groups simpler.

“Likes” Initially Only Show for Users You Follow

Now posts that contain “Likes” only show the names of people a user is following. All other “Likes” from users that are not followed are aggregated into a numerical count, and can be viewed by clicking on that number. This eliminates the number of “Likes” shown under each post for large communities.

Keeping Comments Collapsed

When comments are collapsed and a user adds an additional comment, the message will no longer automatically expand to show all comments on the message. This helps users keep their place in the stream.

Updated Mobile Web Platform

Socialcast is also releasing a new mobile web version of the community. Android and other mobile platform users will have improved access to Socialcast communities via their mobile web browser. The mobile web version features many of the same capabilities as the web app, but is optimized for mobile devices. To access a Socialcast community on a mobile device, go to http://www.socialcast.com.