These organisations haven’t suddenly found a corporate conscience, they are still aggressive, quarterly driven, often American companies with shareholders to answer to. This is part of a deliberate strategy to compete in the modern world. The idea is that if you give away something that your competitors see as core business, you destabilise the market, and make what you charge for more valuable.

Sun giving away Solaris, and IBM supporting Linux, destabilises Microsoft as it devalues and commoditises Microsoft’s core offering, whilst moving the differentiation toward hardware and services.

Open sourcing geological data moves the mining industry away from hoarding data to focusing on how you execute against that data, an area in which Goldmine believes it has a competitive advantage.

Pharmaceuticals can stop spending money on the leg-work of research, and compete instead on the execution of delivering quality products to market at affordable prices as quickly as possible.

This trend, should it continue, is going to effect a profound change in the nature of the workplace and the type of people companies will look to employ. Organisations will differentiate and compete on adding intellectual capital above and beyond what is publicly available, rather than try to milk a trade secret or cash-cow such as the Coca-Cola recipe. This will require more and more “knowledge workers” – people who don’t follow an administrative business process to do their jobs but rely on their experiences, professionalism and networks to add value to their organisations – or, as recently described by Thomas A Stewart,  ”someone who gets to decide what he does each morning..” (thanks to Jessica Twentyman for finding me the source!)

Organisations need to trust these professionals, they will not be in the office from 9-5 every day. These are exactly the sorts of people who thrive on their personal networks, they are the people who you go to when you need to know what’s going on. Social software brings the same level of productivity increases for these people as type-writers and then word processors did for a previous generation of workers. It takes their natural propensity to connect, to share, to add value and extends it in the same way the internet extends our access to information.

It won’t be enough to hire knowledge workers to survive and thrive in this recession. Organisations will have to change their business practices to take advantage of their abilities, and provide them with the tools to be effective. Word, Outlook and even Sharepoint won’t cut it. They will need custom built social platforms, or products such as Confluence, Jive, Socialtext and Lotus Connections.

This is not a technology driven change. These tools are a response to a new way of organising and operating companies, breaking free from 1950s management theory and production lines to treating people as individuals who get things done by independently and autonomously adding value through their networks. Organisations need to embrace the business change first, and look at the software second. Otherwise the competition will gain a significant competitive edge, whilst you’re worrying about the ROI of the investment in the latest “it’s like Facebook, but…” product.

The recent MPs expenses saga has shown an interesting case study in common sense vs business processes. When judged by whether or not their expense claims were against the rules or not, hardly any MPs have been found to have acted inappropriately. The public derision to this excuse shows that following the rules is not enough, there should have been enough common sense to know that these claims were wrong, and should not have been made, irrespective of whether they were in line with the rules.

Now it seems a new set of rules will be drawn up – however, this is unnecessary. All that needs to happen is to retain the one rule, that expenses should be “wholly, exclusively and necessarily” incurred to perform their duties – and publish all expense claims on-line. Knowing that the information is publicly available will motivate the MPs to claim only what is appropriate, irrespective of the rules.

Openness within organisations is a key factor in behaviour, it motivates people to make the right decisions, whether in terms of executive pay (as we are seeing in the publicly owned banks), company strategy or engaging in difficult conversations with the public (eg big oil).

Complex and convoluted formal business processes, as well as the expensive enterprise software required to “enforce” these processes may be required for regulatory reasons, but do not forget how simpler, social solutions (such as putting all MPs expenses on-line) can generate better results, at a fraction of the cost.

1) We’ll be focusing on using social software inside the firewall for private, secure collaboration, rather than going over topics that have been done to death such as how you can use Facebook and Twitter to promote your brand.

2) We’ll focus on real case studies of large, conservative and often regulated organisations (such as law firms) who have found real value in using these tools day to day, rather than blue-sky theory.

If anyone based in New York is interested in hearing about internal use of social software from expert practitioners in the field, I strongly recommend you attend. You can register by getting in touch with Christoph via email (Christoph@headshift.com) or Twitter (@Christoph)

eating:

poker:

bocce:

and recovery…

From Rome, we then travelled up to Villa Pignano for the wedding. Photos cannot do this place justice:

and Raffaella and her team did an amazing job of making all 60 of us feel welcome and making it an amazing day:

From Tuscany it was off to the Diva resort in the Maldives. This was an amazing place, the staff were unbelievably helpful and the facilities and food were wonderful. This was the view from our villa:

There were 5 or 6 bars and restaurants with views like these:

and some spectacular sunsets:

For our last two nights, we upgraded to a water villa, which sit on stilts in the sea, about 200 metres from the shore. This was the view from our room – with steps down into the sea!

It was an absolutely amazing holiday – and I managed not to check email the entire time!

And now… back to Enteprise 2.0…

For those that are interested, the stag do is going to be in Rome, followed by a wedding in Tuscany then honeymoon in Maldives. I promise to post photos when I’m back!

Have a good April everybody!

They are also often misunderstood, many fail to understand that profiles do not require regular maintenance or updating, and can stay current and relevant with very little effort on the profile owner’s part. This is a scenario based on Jive Clearspace (although Socialtext and Lotus Connections have very similar functionality) to show how rich, social profiles can help people do their jobs.

Here is a sample profile for Gia. Most of the content is automatically generated as Gia uses the intranet in the flow of her daily activities, rather than having to manually keep the profile up to date. Fields such as Twitter account name, expertise, phone number and photo are manually added. The vast majority, however, is automatically created, keeping the profile fresh and up to date without any effort from Gia herself.

Let’s assume I was trying to find someone who could help me with user adoption of the intranet. Perhaps my team is not using the intranet as well as I think they could.

In the bottom right hand corner of the profile we see a list of similar people within the system. This takes into account all of Gia’s activity, her blog posts, comments, discussions, tags etc. This is highly useful if Gia was exactly the person I was looking for, only to find they were on holiday, off sick, or otherwise unavailable. Immediately I can see other people who might be able to help.

Further down the profile, I can see Gia’s recent activity. Gia does not have to remember to add this, it is automatically added to her profile.

I can see that she has recently been contributing to topics around a “Watercooler”, the owners of intranet platforms and has recently been visiting clients. I can tell that this is recent activity, so Gia is clearly active within the community, and I can also see that Gia has created discussions, as well as simply replied to them.

I might wish to see all of Gia’s content, which I can do by clicking on “Gia Lyons’s stuff”.

Here I can see other topics, blog posts and content that Gia as contributed and created, and can judge whether it shows her to have the expertise I am hoping for.

On this page, and on Gia’s main profile page, I can see the tags that Gia has used to tag content on the intranet. I can clearly see that Gia has tagged items with “user_adoption”. These might be people, external websites, articles, discussions, wiki pages or blog posts of interest to her that she wanted to be able to find again quickly but it is a great resource for me. If I click on that, I see all the content that everyone, not just Gia, has tagged with “user_adoption”.

The second post from the top is a discussion on reputation points, and whether or not they help or hinder intranet adoption. If I am struggling with user adoption this is probably something I have thought about, and if not it should be, so immediately I have found something of value. I also might want to check out Ted Hopton’s page, to see if his profile is worth looking at in more detail.

At the top of the page, I can reduce the amount of content if I was only interested in blog posts, or only interested in people who had been tagged “user_adoption”. I can also see which additional tags have been used to tag “user_adoption” content. If I were to select enterprise_2.0 for example, I would see all content tagged with “user_adoption” and “enterprise_2.0”.*

Here I can see two articles by Steve Golab and Niall Cook. These two articles might be helpful, equally I may wish to go to Steve’s or Niall’s profile and start to look at their activity as I did with Gia.

I have very quickly found a mixture of content and people relevant to my query, with very little effort by myself or Gia or others involved. I may end up making connections with Steve or Niall, and find we have common interests within the organisation and work together. None of this would have been available to me in a traditional knowledge management or intranet system. The key is that the subject matter experts such as Gia, Niall and Steve had to do very little to create the social data that helped my search. As they found content and people, they simply tagged it or them (a very low touch activity), mainly to help them find the content again. As those tags are shared I benefit in the social capital being created.

* you might notice that there was also an enterprise_20 tag, as well as enterprise_2.0. This is an important point, you should consider software that suggests tags as you type them, to stop this from happening. Your community managers should also spend some time looking to aggregate tags where it makes sense.

“Many who deployed SharePoint, thought it was going to be the bridge that delivered Enterprise 2.0 and a solid platform for social tools in the enterprise is summed up statement, “We went from 5 silos in our organization to hundreds in a month after deploying SharePoint”. They continue, “There is great information being shared and flowing into the system, but we don’t know it exists, nor can we easily share it, nor do much of anything with that information.“

The overriding message that we are hearing is that Sharepoint is a good document management / file sharing system, especially in terms of Vista / Office / Outlook integration. There’s no reason why you can’t add social tools on top of it, but don’t look to it as a social software platform in its own right.

Two major new pieces of functionality are wikis and file sharing. I was initially somewhat sceptical as IBM’s wiki offering in Quickr is poor, but fortunately it seems to have little to do with the Connections wiki. A “wiki” in Connections is actually what would be called a “Space” or “Workspace” in Socialtext or Confluence, it is a set of pages with a hierarchical structure with parent and child pages for you to share and collaboratively work on content. Changes can be tracked and contrasted, and the pages are ‘objects’ within Connections which can be tagged, commented and rated. Similarly, files can be uploaded and shared, allowing you to point people to Connections rather than having to email attachments.

A welcome feature is that as well as being standalone components, both files and wikis can be placed into Communities. In fact, almost any Connections component can be embedded into a Community, making a Community almost a sub-set of a Connections instance, with its own homepage, widgets, wikis, files, blogs, forums, activities, feeds and bookmarks (and, of course, people) as well as custom widgets. The link goes both ways, for example if a Community had a blog which you discovered independently, there is a link to the community from the blog, where you would be introduced to the Community and find all the other related resources. This represents a slight philosophical change of direction from Connections 2.0, which was 100% person-centric. Connections 2.5 feels just as Community focused as it does Profile focused. This seems to move Connections more towards Jive Clearspace’s approach, which (given its forums background) has Groups at the heart of what it does.

Connections 2.5 also introduces an Updates homepage, very similar to Facebook’s News Feed. There are useful enterprise features, such as the ability to follow tags, a colleague who may not want to follow you (such as a CEO) and some implicit filtering to show you updates to blogs or wikis to which you have contributed. Twitter/Facebook type statuses have also been added.

A big win for Connections is in its mobile access. Clearspace has email-in as the mechanism to contribute to Clearspace on the move, and Socailtext has this feature as well as a lightweight mobile version of the wiki which is somewhat uninspiring (and does not include any of the people-related social features). Connections is looking to provide customised web interfaces for the smartphones (including the iPhone) and RIM is developing a Blackberry Connections application so that someone on the road can quickly find the person they need to talk to to ask a customer question – even if they initially aren’t sure who that person is. iPhone/Blackberry users will find Connections 2.5 by far the easiest enterprise social software platform for use on-the-go.

One of the potential problems for Connections is areas of overlap with other areas of IBM Software. If I want to share a file, should I use Lotus Quickr or Files in Lotus Connections? Should my wikis sit in Quickr or Connections? What if I still use Domino.Doc? Organisations need to think very carefully about the use cases they are looking to support, and making it clear to people which tool should be used for which purpose (Headshift, of course, would be happy to help with this).

IBM Connections has always been a fascinating product, in that it is the only social software platform available from a “traditional”, conservative, IT provider worth considering. Its competitors (Clearspace, Socialtext) etc. are more what you would expect from a social software vendor, smaller, nimbler, more quirky, and focusing exclusively on social software.

Here lies a final area of concern – timing. Connections 2.5 is currently set for “Summer”, and some organisations would not consider deploying until the first fixpack has been released. Clearspace already offers support similar to wikis and files, and Socialtext Signals is ahead of what Connections 2.5 will offer in terms of status updates. IBM has a track record, however, of catching up and eventually passing the competition (as per its WebSphere Application Server and Portal products), and if you want the re-assurance that the IBM badge brings, and especially if you are looking for mobile support, Connections 2.5 is definitely for you. I’m particularly interested to see what new use cases emerge out of blogs, wikis etc. sitting stand-alone as well as being embedded within a Community, and how one helps the adoption of the other.

If anyone is looking to get started with Connections (either with the current version or a beta of 2.5) please get in touch with us at Headshift. We’d love to take a closer look at how it could help your business.

The basic principle behind Signals is simple. You update it with a status about what you are working on using messages of under 140 characters. From my Socialtext dashboard below, you can see Signals in the top left. You can also see that peoples’ Signals also appear in the “My Colleagues” stream in the top middle widget as well.

You can see two examples of using Signals here. First, I can see that Lars has just met with John from Acme corporation. I may know John, or I may have another contact at Acme. Lars’s update allows me to realise that Lars and I may share contacts, and it would be worth catching up with him to see if we can share knowledge about our contacts. A formal CRM system might not capture this fact.

You can also see Livio asking a question about finding some content for a proposal. This is a powerful use case of Twitter that applies also to Signals. Instead of searching around a shared drive, or re-inventing the wheel, I can quickly ask if any standard proposal material exists, and find the person who knows about the content, as well as the content itself. Linking me with the original author of the content gives me access to context as well as content, which increases my ability to re-use existing material.

You can also see I have the option of displaying updates from people I am following, or everyone within my organisation. This can be a useful filter, depending on the task I am trying to achieve.

So far, so like Twitter. There are two additional elements that stand Socialtext’s implementation apart. The first is when I am editing a wiki page. As my mouse hovers over the save button I am prompted to add a summary which will appear as a signal, as shown below

Having the prompt appear as the user hovers rather than clicks is an excellent UI development. It reminds the user as they save a document that they can Signal, and makes it as easy as possible for them to do so. It also remains unobtrusive, if someone just wants to save they can do so, without an annoying popup reminding them about signaling all the time. If people were had to click before the dialog appeared, it would have been cumbersome and counter-productive.

The final feature Socialtext have implemented is Socialtext Desktop. This is an Adobe Air client that runs on your machine, showing you Signals and other updates from Socialtext without you having to log in, receive email updates or monitor a news feed. It lowers the barrier to using social software is a similar way Twhirl or Tweetdeck has done for Twitter. As with those Twitter clients, you can update as well as receive updates from your colleagues. As well as Signals it can also show who has commented on and edited documents that you are watching.

Whilst other social software platforms have status features, none have put them in the context of a user’s existing workflow in the same way as Socialtext. By prompting people to Signal as they save documents, and allow them to receive and send Signals immediately without having to log in to a website should drive up adoption significantly, as Twitter clients have done for Twitter.

If you are interested in taking a deeper look at Socialtext, or some of the other enterprise social platforms that are available, please get in touch with Headshift!

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