Based on my experience, I understand where Forrester’s management is coming from. Forrester makes their money by curating information and social media poses a threat to its core intellectual property. How? By shifting points of value creation and capture closer to $free. So why on earth would the firm want to encourage their proprietary value-creating assets (i.e. analysts) to support and accelerate the shift? Implementing a policy to protect IP value is a smart move by management.

However, smart marketers know that not all consumers are created equal. Same goes for Forrester’s readers: some prefer syndicated research reports, others phone inquiries, and some favor in-person interactions. Professionally-affiliated, personally-managed blogs – let’s call them “perfessional” – provide an additional engagement channel for employees to support business goals, on consumer-friendly terms. Social media policies must provide flexibility from an employee perspective that permit perfessional engagement – otherwise, companies risk missing a business opportunity.

Here’s where Forrester’s decision appears to fall flat: in its quest for control of employee social media publishing, the company limits both risk AND reward. This is the point that most social media discussion has focused on. Ultimately it’s a business decision and Forrester’s to make, but case history shows that perfessional blogs like Jeremiah’s, Bruce’s, and mine help build both personal and company brands.

I think there’s a more difficult point here for Forrester – some condition in the company’s current culture drove an insider to leak the information to SageCircle. This signals internal dissonance and the uncomfortable but likely fact that malcontent employees need to separate from Forrester. When you’re playing poker, exchanging your cards as the round plays out is just part of the game. Only time will tell if the new policy is a success or failure, based on business results – but again, a smart move by management to protect core IP in the reality of an evolving social business landscape, instead of clinging to purist social media ideals.

Companies must implement policy to manage social media participation and let’s face it – the devil is in the details. To be effective, a social media policy must be tailored to a company’s strategy, culture, process, style, industry, competition, technology, and most importantly – customer needs. You can’t just copy and paste a policy you find on a wiki; you’ve got to understand how policy and guidelines play critical roles in supporting social business.

After the presentation, I met the guy during a smoke outside (he was smoking, I was just chatting with a colleague) where he said in all honesty that this was not going to fly with his client. Why is that, was my obvious question. He explained that his particular client suffered really hard from the economic downturn and didn’t invest anything anymore in technology related projects. He argued that this makes sense because the company was in the process of mass firing people, so how could they justify spending money on technology transformation projects if it couldn’t even pay its own employees?

I have to admit that as an external consultant, you are not always realizing the daily sorrows and worries that a company and its employees have. You’re often parachuted in, firefighting on a project, start up something, but after a relatively short time you leave again to your next engagement. However, this situation was so real. The account manager was genuinely concerned about the faith of his client.

Keep on moving like a shark

I kept on and off thinking about that one particular case for a while and the Aha-Erlebnis came a little later after coincidentally hearing about the fact that several shark species need to keep on swimming, otherwise they die.

Does this hold for companies as well, or more specifically for this particular client? Is the approach from the executive management to stop almost all investments and focus on the reality of today, rather than tomorrow (since there might be no tomorrow) a good or a bad thing? Will this “stop swimming” cause the death of that company, as it will do for a shark?

Internet driving competition in traditional markets

In order to better understand the background of this particular business (sorry can’t disclose exactly what market it was in), you need to understand that it was in a very very traditional market sector. A certain type of service that existed already far before the first computer was around.

As with many other sectors, it regarded the rise and ubiquity of the Internet as a big threat for its business. You can say the same for the music, movie and newspaper industry.

But is it really a threat, or is it an opportunity?

I’m pretty sure that the average music and newspaper executive that grew up before the Internet era, is convinced that it is a threat. Look at the way certain big newspapers are closing off all content behind a pay wall, or how fiercely the music industries hunts down downloaders.

But let’s be honest with each other, how much innovation have we seen in the above-mentioned industries? Decades long, we’ve seen very few innovations happening that were started or pushed by these industries. You can almost say that they had a monopoly in their market and all of a sudden their biggest fear is not a competing newspaper or a record label, no it’s… innovation itself.

In a liberal economy, we stimulate competition because that drives innovation. If you only have one supplier in a market, that supplier has no urge at all to keep improving its services and products. Why should they? It’s not that its customers are going to buy from another non-existing competitor.

So, is the Internet – and actually technology in general – the big driver for innovation in those markets? You’d think so, yet they still fight fiercely against it.

“Wait a minute…”

… I hear you saying, “what about all those bands that don’t get money because people download their music, and what about the loss of income for the record label?”

Very valid points, but what if the whole concept of “record label invests and pushes artists in the market and gets money for it” is outdated? What if that system we know already for decades became obsolete? How can these bands still earn money then?

Well, what about the mineworkers in coal mines? What about them? In a short time span, the industry moved on to other sources of energy and coal became obsolete.

I’m just trying to explain here that it’s not because we know something is working already for decades, that it will be relevant for an eternity. ESPECIALLY if that particular business or industry almost refuses to innovate.

One piece of advice: never fall for the trap of feeling comfortable in your success. I’m not that old yet, but I did see some successful businesses come and go in a matter of a few years, because they failed to keep on going for that extra mile.

Oh, and regarding how bands can earn money… In China, the place where they invented copying as it seems, they’ve been quite creative with this. Several artists actually explicitly distribute their copied CDs in markets almost for free. This gives them a better chance of being heard by people and they get their income from sponsor deals and performances. So, as you can see, the music industry CAN adapt to changing market conditions and be very innovative in their delivery model!

Stop becoming obsolete

Now, to link back to the story that started this blog post: what about the account manager’s client? In hindsight, I should’ve said to provoke a discussion: “well perhaps they just deserve to become graciously obsolete then”.

Knowing the account manager, he probably would’ve slapped me in the face and yelled “help me getting this client back on track, stupid!” and I would’ve secured a nice new gig

One of the key mistakes that almost all of these “being threatened by becoming obsolete” companies make is the lack of focus on… people. I said it before, and if necessary I will repeat it every single day: BUSINESS IS FUNDAMENTALLY HUMAN!

That is a key message in our Social Business Design philosophy: your employees, your customers and your partners are human; treat them with that respect and dignity. The moment you start only focusing on your products and forget that it is actually the people that bring you these profits, you are becoming obsolete.

So, tell me. Do you want to succeed or survive?

Ping me on lee.provoost@headshift.com or http://twitter.com/leeprovoost to help your company becoming a social business.

This post originally appeared on the Headshift blog.

As social media marketing becomes more mainstream, more and more people are asking for real evidence that these activities generate a positive return on investment (ROI). Measuring ROI isn’t just a problem for social media marketers – it’s a problem with the marketing industry in general. No one can demonstrate, beyond a doubt, that the £30 million television advertising campaign company X ran last year caused the 5% increase in year on year sales rather than low interest rates, the good weather, or some other external factor. Sure, the industry has come up with all sorts of qualitative and quantitative measurements for marketing ROI, but these measurements do still require at least some suspension of disbelief.

As I’ve discussed here before, during the 20th Century, production and service delivery became profit, rather than consumer, focused. What this means is that product and service offerings are now frequently devised on the basis of their potential profitability, not upon genuine consumer needs. In this situation, marketing is an essential activity as it helps to create a market for products and services that most of us otherwise would never realise we “need”. And when consumers have to be convinced that they need something, some are likely to be disappointed as they realise that those products and services don’t, actually, meet their requirements – that’s where after sales support and PR come in.

The vast majority of marketing and public relations activities, if you really sit down and think about it, probably contribute very little to society other than jobs in the industry and, those involved in that industry might argue, generating the sales required to sustain economic growth. They’re not, however, activities that are really central to much of anything, at least not as those industries are configured today. This doesn’t have to be the case.

I know a lot of skilled, creative, thoughtful people who work in marketing and public relations. They are natural communicators, skilled at creating positive messages about brands, listening to consumers and audiences, and providing helpful responses where appropriate. These are skills that can be deployed so much more usefully – and measurably – within a more socially calibrated business.

Several of the panel members touched, briefly, on the idea of using social media for business transformation. Marshall Manson from Edelman said that although social media can be transformative, giving the example of Dell, most of his clients aren’t asking for that – they just want a social media campaign. Robin Grant, too, mentioned how Eurostar shifted it’s approach, following the recent problems with cancellations due to trains stuck in the Channel Tunnel, from trying to explain what had gone wrong to trying to help people get home.

In both these examples, the shift has been from getting the message out, to listening, engaging in conversations with customers, learning from those conversations, then providing better products or services based upon those conversations.

Many marketing and public relations people are familiar with social monitoring tools and techniques of engaging on social networking sites, content sharing services, blogs and forums. The problem is, at present, most businesses that undertake these activities deploy small, specialist teams that effectively act as a blockage between audiences and consumers “out there” and business processes behind the firewall.

StyleSignal, one of the companies represented on the panel last night, has turned this sort of thing into a business: they monitor what fashionistas are saying online and provide trend forecasts for their fashion industry clients, allowing them to react immediately with new styles and designs.

Yet it’s possible to do even more by integrating social tools into core business processes: invite audiences and consumers to co-create innovative product and service offerings, bounce ideas off them, let them get their hands on and provide early feedback about new products, involve them in marketing, encourage them to assist other customers – essentially, involve them in a range of activities which have a known cost, but also a measurable ROI, to your business.

Sticking, for a moment, with the fashion industry, let’s talk t-shirts. Say you’re a t-shirt company. You invite people to submit their own designs to your site, potentially with incentives such as a design competition, free products, or a revenue sharing agreement. Marketing people come up with this sort of thing all the time, but keep reading, because here comes the measurable ROI. You know that it usually takes you 5 people days to create a new t-shirt design, and this has a known cost to your business. Each time a design contributed by a member of the public goes into production, you have reduced your cost base. Perhaps you don’t even need to employ designers anymore (boooo!). Before you print up any of those t-shirts, you put the designs on the site and let people vote and comment on them, effectively doing your market testing and helping refine your offering. Then, once you do print the shirts, the person who designed it, and people who pro-actively took an interest in voting for it or helping improving the the design, will feel a sense of pride and ownership in the resultant product. They’ll probably buy it themselves – because they actually want it – and send links to their friends, add it to their facebook wall, post images of themselves proudly wearing the design on flickr, etc. This is exactly the idea behind Threadless, which is a great example of a business that puts the consumer community at the very centre of everything they do – they’re a social business.

Not everyone has the desire, or skills, to engage directly with members of the public, but marketing and public relations professionals tend to have these skills in abundance. Social tools offer opportunities for those with these skills to do so much more than protect a brand’s reputation or sell stuff – it offers the opportunity to be at the centre of a transformation in business critical processes. The result will essentially be the same – brand reputation will be secured and more stuff will get sold – but it will, at last, also result in directly measurable ROI that doesn’t require any suspension of disbelief at all.

I don’t know ANYBODY that takes the public transport for 25 years just to wait for the moment that he/she can buy that car. Why? Well you do need to go from point A to point B, so you just need something that does that job if your budget is bit limited. You settle for a solution that works NOW, something that does the job, gives you value for money and you settle with the fact that it is a little less glamorous than the Ferrari…

Over time, when you start to settle down and kids come there is a chance that you value other things in life, like a big house with a garden. The Ferrari is off the plan.

Sounds simple?

It sure does, so why don’t we take this very simple life approach and apply it to adopting Enterprise 2.0 systems in large global corporations then?

Awaiting the Walhalla

I’ve seen large global corporations not having a business collaboration platform because they have a hard time aligning all their business units who are each using their own tools. Or there are so many different views of what needs to happen that it takes ages to reach consensus. The larger the company, the more widespread and the more independent the different business units, the more likely this will happen.

What would you prefer?

1. Not having a business collaboration platform at all for three years, with the risk that after three years you get something that only partially fits your needs, or
2. having a business collaboration platform now, that has a high value add to your particular business unit, with the risk that in three years there will be 6 to 8 different platforms in your 100 000-people company?

Or let me rephrase it: do you want to drive a Fiat now, or don’t drive a car at all and wait several years for a Ferrari that might never come?

Gimme a Fiat please

“All good and well, but Lee, didn’t you say earlier that we should also focus on platform consolidation as a good manager?” – I hear you rightfully saying. Yes, my suggestion to go for the Fiat, does have the implication that over a couple of year’s time we might end up with several platforms. From a pure IT cost point of view a dreadful option because it will cost much more to keep eight different platforms up and running instead of one to rule them all.

But how much business value does it bring you? Or rather, how much do you lose each day by not having a proper collaboration, communication and knowledge platform? I’d say that in most cases the business benefit of having multiple platforms that work, outweighs the higher IT cost.

It’s only a problem if you let it be one

And there is even better news: multiple knowledge repositories/silos don’t necessarily need to be a problem. What do you think that Google is doing? They are indexing a gazillion knowledge repositories all over the web and trying to make sense out of it. In my previous post I’ve argued that we should start to rely on smarter software and better hardware, well here’s exactly why. With the proper software from vendors like System One, Inquira, Autonomy and some others, we can index those knowledge silos and take it to a whole new level.

These search++ (++ because it is SO much more than just search) solutions index everything and cross-link all the data in your organisation and do tons of voodoo things: entity recognition (it recognises dog, but also that Labrador is a dog), similar content (ideal for searching for instance similar contracts or project initiation documents), enriching content (mashing different internal and external data sources), translations, etc

So, shall we just give up?

Does that mean that we can happily give up the ideal world scenario? Not at all! Keep in mind that I urge you to strive for Walhalla, however in my posts I try to point you to some (temporary?) solutions that will help you bridge the time needed to reach Walhalla. Solutions that might sound inefficient or weird at first sight, but that will give you direct business value.

An approach you could take is to identify which ones of those 6 or 8 platforms are really successful, identify the usage patterns and user stories. Run some workshops and do some stakeholder interviews. Genuinely understand what our business users need and want. Then see if you can consolidate systems, move communities to other platforms, migrate data, etc.

Be careful with this: pick the right battles, on the right moment. It makes sense that if you have an extremely successful platform and community, that you don’t just migrate them away for the sake of migrating. Also, focus on good opportunities like when you need to upgrade to a newer version of the particular platform.

It’s a never-ending story

So when is your job finished? Most likely if you are working in a large knowledge-intensive organisation, I’d say: never. Nowadays, everything changes at such a rapid speed, that also the needs of the people in your organisation and the organisation itself changes at a rapid speed. The perfect solution you are adopting today might not fit your needs anymore in two years.

Knowledge management, collaboration and communication are not an end-goal. They are just supporting you in doing your business more efficient and effective. Your business changes over time, and so do your Enterprise 2.0 systems.

Need some help in a pragmatic approach in starting with business collaboration or Enterprise 2.0 solutions in your organisation? Drop me a mail at lee.provoost@headshift.com.

This post originally appeared on the Headshift blog.

These trends in personalization and consumerization of enterprise functions have been at the centre of our thinking from day one. Pete was quick to point out that this isn’t just a trend in IT, but across entire organizations.

That said, I have been doing a lot of thinking on this impact that personalization of the enterprise has on IT, and there are a few concepts that I think will gain a lot of traction in the coming year. When I first wrote about Twitter in the enterprise, I knew we were still far away from mass adoption, and we still aren’t there, but there is one trend that I feel equally as certain about, 2 years later.

The Enterprise App Store

You probably have as much app-store fatigue as I do. They are everywhere in the consumer world. Iphone applications, Android, Google, Blackberry App world and more.

Users are making a habit to use task-specific applications and they are becoming more accustomed to only needing to look in one place to find them. These consumer app stores have also served to provide new distribution channels for independent developers who are willing to share a piece of their profit with the app store provider.

From Enterprise Provisioning to User Provisioning

Enterprise App Stores do exist, and they have been around for even longer than consumer app stores. Force.com, Intuit Marketplace and others like Get App are providing cloud-based application provisioning to enterprise customers with unified provisioning, user and policy management. This model only addresses a small part of the emerging need for users to select their own preferred applications however.

Future application provisioning will need to focus less on broad enterprise deployments which try to solve many problems at once, and will instead need to focus on deploying platforms which enable more targeted applications to be supplied.

These applications could take the form of:

• Enterprise enabled iPhone, Android or Blackberry applications
• Adobe AIR desktop applications
• Web apps

among others.

There are a lot security and infrastructure related concerns that come to mind with a Personal Enterprise model of application delivery, but trends such as consumerization and new employee expectations will force enterprise IT providers to respond.

What other trends do you see as a result of the emerging Personal Enterprise? How realistic are these concepts in the short term? Will employees continue to circumvent existing platforms to enable collaboration on their own?

Why is that? Well it does make it easer for us mortals to grasp the vast amount of data that is around us. Think about the early days of Yahoo! that used a directory approach and manual work to build a whole categorised database of web links.

But then cracks start appearing in our approach. Familiar with the “in which folder am I going to put this email?”-problem? First of all you start to have a gazillion folders and then the problem pops up that an email can belong to two different folders. After a while you start to wonder “where the hell is that message that I filed?”.

Social Networks and Cloud driving the change

As a technologist, I also understand the underlying technical reasons why we want to normalise and categorise data. You first start with “objectifying” your view of the world in an object-oriented language like Java so it is easier to program and maintain those systems. This is persisted in classic row-column structure in a database where you create different tables for different data concepts. You have the student object with its properties stored in the Student table and course object with its properties in the Course table. Now you can create meaningful relations between the two and develop your software accordingly.

When your application starts to get a huge load, you will either spend an awful lot of money on expensive Oracle cluster software or you will use concepts like sharding to split databases to keep it performing. But still, you stick to your normalized Student and Course table structures.

An approach that started to get traction in some of the successful internet startups was the concept of key/value pairs. While not a novel concept at all, it got more popular because we started to get more and more websites that couldn’t cope with the amount of users. The idea is that you don’t normalise data in Course and Student tables, but you just have a key and an associated value combination in one huge table. This approach scales extremely well because it can be easily spread over a cluster of machines. Google’s BigTable uses this as well as Facebook’s Cassandra. It became more “mainstream” with Amazon’s introduction of their SimpleDB that has this key/value concept, as well as Microsoft’s key/value storage in Azure.

SSD discs to the rescue!

The only problem is… that developers have been so brainwashed with the relational row/column concept that the average corporate developer had a hard time grasping this key/value concept and building meaningful apps on top of it.

Both Amazon and Microsoft have realized that and have added a relational layer on top of their key/value data storage engine. This means that the vendors can use key/value for achieving extreme scalability, but they let developers interact through a relational model interface. (It does create a performance penalty, but negligible for most users I think).

But still, even this key/value approach requires that you are modelling your apps and data in a particular way. What if we didn’t have to do ANY effort at all? What if we could just take the vast amount of data we have in our company, dump it on a disc and just being able to find meaningful information AS IS? Yes, we do have the Google Appliance for that, or Microsoft Enterprise Search, but they are merely indexing in a batch process and storing the results in a cache. What if we want a real-time extremely fast search that gives you on the spot information regardless of the data structures?

That’s exactly the gap Oracle wants to fill with their Exadata v2 server. Consider it as a beast of a server, crammed with more than a terabyte of Solid-State Drive (flash) discs that has your data fully stored, it’s fairly comparable with having ALL your data hot in memory, ready to be queried.

Can you grasp the opportunity this presents us? We can achieve real-time search inside our enterprise on vast amounts of unstructured data!

Be like the kitteh

This is again an example that we shouldn’t limit ourselves by the current state of technology. In the past 10 years I’ve seen again and again that eventually, technology will catch up to make things possible that we couldn’t do before.

Most people will quote Einstein and say “imagination is more important than knowledge”, I’d rather tell you to be more like the kitteh at the right. I’m pretty sure that one day, he/she will be able to fax itself to the Burger King to get some delicious “cheezburgerz“.

Impact on Enterprise 2.0

So how does this relate to Enterprise 2.0 I hear you asking. Well, I argue that we shouldn’t lose too much time and effort on meticulously categorising and tagging information and knowledge across all the different systems we have. This is because I believe that it is almost a lost cause anyway: it doesn’t scale and it’s often not the quality you want.

My point is that the tools and technology we get to our disposal are advancing at such a rapid speed, that we slowly start to reach the point where we can rely on software and hardware to do this boring heavy lifting for us.

I shared my view in a previous blog post that knowledge should be a happy by-product of your daily work, however this creates such a vast amount of information that this overload creates a problem on itself. Having intelligent software that can make sense of this, automatically tag it and categorise it, automatically make relationships and assumptions, would dramatically increase our efficiency.

At Headshift we’re doing a lot of research on helping companies staying ahead of the pack and we’ve been looking at software solutions to more intelligently and automatically manage your knowledge as described. It seems that now we finally have the right hardware innovations to make it even juicier…

This post originally appeared on the Headshift blog.

I love Apple products.

Apple makes beautiful, elegant, simple to use, powerful hardware and software/services.  This is obvious to almost anyone and yes, in case you were wondering or had a doubt, I am a biased unabashed Apple fan.  You can run whatever rig you want in our shop, but everyone is on a mac.  I have been using the products for years and will continue to do so as long as they make them.  My life is better, my work is easier and more productive because of Apple.

We will see yet another example of this in action with the release of some new Apple products.

As always, the Apple haters will pick apart the device and examine each component as if they were commodities and complain about the under-powered processor, or lack of battery life, or missing firewire port or choice of network partners or undersized storage…  They will complain bitterly that they don’t understand what the big deal is.  They will say the products are overpriced and that you can get them cheaper.  You can get the commodities cheaper, but herein lies the rub; its not about the commodities, its about how they are packaged and integrated into a much larger ecosystem of hardware, software, services, applications, developers, distribution, marketplaces and content.  In each of these areas, Apple doesn’t have to own every facet of the system, they just have to provide or facilitate value exchange.

We are about to see Apple place itself in the middle of several business ecosystems with its elegant hardware and software/services, and provide an easy to use experience for participators.  The funny thing is that many of those critics still don’t get it.  It’s not only about the elegant hardware or simple to use and understand software (based on Apple’s rock solid unix based OSX), it’s about Apple’s ability to insert itself into the middle of an industry or business ecosystem, innovate, and provide/extract enormous value —  which they do flawlessly.

Apple’s relatively frictionless marketplaces for value exchange provide an expanded business operating environment, different from any previously imagined. Especially in the business of digital.

Let’s take a look at what we get as users of Apple products and why the Apple ecosystems are hands down market leaders and will end up transforming the industries they touch.

Lets talk about content

Magazines and Newspapers

The Apple tablet will likely provide digital distribution and a seamless marketplace for the dying magazine and newspaper publishing businesses with a built in monetization model for subscriptions, pay per play, or advertiser supported consumption.  If the print organizations can get their cost basis down fast enough they may find a highly profitable global marketplace for short form literary content with a rich user experience delivered through the iPad.

Gaming

Again, the Apple tablet will likely provide digital distribution and a seamless marketplace for touch or controller based games with a built in monetization model for subscriptions, pay per play, or advertiser supported consumption.  Moreover this industry is already well established and generates more revenue than all other entertainment media forms combined.  The iPad will provide an opportunity to bridge an app store model for more game developers to monetize their efforts with a seamless distribution and gameplay environment.

Movies

Apple will yet again provide digital distribution and a seamless marketplace for HD movie content and a built in monetization model for subscriptions, pay per play, or advertiser supported consumption wrapped in a beautiful and elegant movie delivery vehicle perfectly suited for portable viewing experiences.  As we’ve seen with the iPod and iPhone (where people said no one would be willing to watch movies on a tiny screen), the fact is that they will and they do by the millions with the new Apple tablet.

Books

The Apple tablet is a perfect eReader.  It will provide a rich color reading experience combined with yet another seamless marketplace for digital books to be purchased and downloaded. I’m certain you will be able to sample some of the book content before purchasing and moreover I think, like the app store for developers, the Apple bookstore will provide a richer monetization model for authors while at the same time providing for a global distribution platform for existing publishers.

Music

Apple is already the largest retailer of music on the planet.  They are also by far and away the largest seller of music players in the market.  While the music industry is still trying to protect the relics of its past, Apple has stepped in and figured out a way to sell more music to more people and expand the opportunities and options for music creators, sellers, and buyers…  I’d expect this to continue to be the case.

Photos, Video, and other personal content

The democratization of the tools of self expression will continue to expand the universe of content manifesting people’s creativity and ideas.  Apple provides the most easy to use suite of personal creation tools ever created.  More people document their lives, share memories with family, and utilize Apple’s tools to create, produce, edit, and share their personal experiences than ever before.

Lets talk about applications and marketplaces

The Apple tablet will, like its sister the iPhone, have a robust and expansive application development environment with a widely distributed and easy to use SDK (software development kit).  This has enabled literally thousands of developers to develop thousands of applications, thereby making the hardware exponentially more useful because of a committed and properly incented army of developers providing meaningful and useful applications and utility to go along with the rich array of content married to hardware and software.

The app store and iTunes enables a frictionless marketplace for developers and content providers to monetize their creations and the Apple tablet, iPhone, iPod, and iTouch platforms provide a rich deeply installed global distribution platform.

Lets talk about the supply chain

Apple has become a very efficient master of its supply chain and distribution.  Although core to the heart of the business, from online purchases and customer support forums to the Apple stores and genius bars, to chip and component manufacturers and assembly, to software development and release cycles across the software line, Apple’s ecosystem of supply chain and distribution is a core (but only one component) to its success. The supply chain is enabling the hardware and software component of the ecosystem to get product to market and enable the rest of the ecosystem to function.

Lets talk about the cloud

Don’t underestimate the importance of Mobileme, Apple’s cloud based storage, application, and synchronization environment.  This online service allows a person to access most basic apps from any PC or iPhone (soon to be Apple tablet) in the world including calendars, email, address book, photos, and what will certainly be other apps as they become available.  More than that, Mobileme allows for the seamless synchronization of all your Apple devices so that they all have the most updated versions of all of your information all of the time.  Mobileme is the glue that allows me to have my stuff anywhere I want it on any device I choose.

Its about the ecosystem

Any one of these components are somewhat interesting on their own, but only Apple brings them all together in a seamless, broad and far reaching environment that combines hardware, software, applications, services in the cloud, content and B2B and B2C marketplaces into one rich, elegant, useful, and valuable user experience ecosystem.

Without a doubt there are interesting product announcements on the way. Apple has always been loved for its products, but in today’s networked economy it’s Apple’s understanding and strategic use of an expanded ecosystem that will continue to drive its power in the marketplace and will allow it to dominate and transform the media and technology landscape as we know it.

Social technologies are enabling all companies to expand their ecosystems, listen and gain insight from a variety of new areas, and participate and engage with exponentially larger ecosystems of constituents with the potential to drive enormous value in countless new ways.  Let us know if your organization is ready to discuss how to approach harnessing the power of your ecosystem.

Find out how Dachis Group can help your business worldwide. Send email to moc.puorgsihcad@seiriuqni, or download our fact sheet and contact us.

Fear of the unknown is an issue for any company engaging in social for the first time. Companies wonder: “What are people saying about us? Are their comments positive or negative? Will our efforts to engage be looked upon favorably? Do we even want to know? Is social even relevant to us, or is it just a fad?”

Unfortunately, ignoring the conversations that are already occurring doesn’t mean they will go away. Listening provides an opportunity to dip your toe in the social pond. In fact, we recommend that companies have a firm grasp on their social media landscape before jumping in to any social effort. Listening is not only a low-risk way to begin, but also a way to mitigate the overall risk of engagement. It is better to know what is being said about you and be prepared to respond accordingly.

We recently finished an engagement with a client that operates in a regulated industry. We conducted a thorough analysis of their social media landscape and recommended several ways to move towards becoming a more social business. To learn more about our process and recommendations, download the full case study.

If you are interested in learning more about your company’s social media landscape, please contact us. We would love to work with you.

Increasingly, we are seeing organisations who have been using Confluence as their wiki platform look at IBM Connections as a wider social networking tool. We’ve already looked at one integration point, adding Confluence wikis to Connections communities, and were disappointed with the results. This becomes especially tricky now that Connections ships with its own (rather good, actually) wiki component in version 2.5.

There is one point of integration, however, which works well. One of the strengths of IBM Connections is its profile system, based on IBM’s internal corporate directory. This has been designed to be extended to other platforms, so you can access Connections profile information from other applications. Within Confluence, linking names to Connections profiles works pretty well. Whenever someone’s name appears in Confluence you can still access their Confluence profile, but also access details of their profile and contributions in Connections. This is shown in the screenshot below but we’ve also put together this video showing Confluence integrated with the Connections business card.

If your organisation has been using Confluence for a while, pushing Connections information into the flow of users’ existing workflows can be a powerful tool to increase engagement and adoption.
Please get in touch if you would like to understand more about integrating Confluence and Connections, or any other social platforms.

Many thanks to Luis Benitez for invaluable information to help get this working!

This post originally appeared on the Headshift blog.

Why don’t they understand that social media can help us work more efficiently? Those stupid corporate drones! I want to get it more widespread in the organisation but every time I hit this frustrating wall!

Sounds familiar?

It’s a frustration I’ve experienced myself and I see it often recurring during client engagements where some people inside a large organisation see value in adopting social software (whether it is client-facing social media or Enterprise 2.0) and they are trying to get more widespread acceptance. Their enthusiasm often drives the adoption of these tools but at a certain point it hits a wall because the legal department, PR or corporate IT starts to ask questions about this successful “under-the-radar” product that violates numerous “company policies”.

So now you’ve reached a point where you have to sell this social software inside the organisation. And here’s the point where many people crash and burn and see their efforts vaporising.

I’ve been studying this “phenomenon” for quite some time and what you see is that super enthusiastic people are going on and on about the benefits of social software but get frustrated about those “irrelevant” questions from for instance the legal department.

Very coincidentally, I read the book “Life’s a Pitch” which explained that there are two kinds of pitches in life: one where you want to get a yes and one where you want to avoid a no. THAT is exactly the key take-away to solve our problem in efficiently selling social software inside our organisations!

When you are selling Social Media or Enterprise 2.0 inside your organisation, it is very important to understand what kind of pitch you are doing. Are you going for a yes or are you avoiding a no? That choice will depend on your audience. If you are pitching to your CEO or chief strategy officer, most likely you will go for a yes approach. You want to make them enthusiastic about all the potential how we as an organisation can disrupt the market, how we can accelerate innovation, etc. etc. There you have to bring your A-game and throw in your charms where applicable.

Unfortunately, many people fail because they haven’t anticipated the “avoiding a no” pitch. You don’t need to convince the legal department how we can sell 40 % more or how we can achieve 20 % more efficiency. That is not their task. They are extremely good in protecting the company from lawsuits. So the approach to avoid a no here is to try to understand what keeps a corporate lawyer awake at night? Try to identify what potential legal risks a company has when adopting social software. Can they be sued by their employees? Can sensitive information leak to the public? Identify each concern and try to reassure them with very valid arguments why they shouldn’t worry about it and what you are going to do to avoid these messy situations. Be completely open and transparent, pro-actively point out the potential dangers and tackle pre-emptively their concerns.

Same story when pitching an “avoiding a no” to your people who are concerned about the brand and PR. Their main tasks is not to worry about huge sales, their worry is the company’s professional brand and reputation in the market. Identify what kind of potential PR or brand disasters can arise and pre-emptively tackle them with valid arguments and solutions.

And that is the key to selling social software in your organisation. Everyone is focused on selling the benefits and ROI, but it’s mainly risk-mitigation that will help you avoiding the big frustrating corporate walls.

Need some help in pitching? Drop me a line: lee.provoost@headshift.com.

This post originally appeared on the Headshift blog.

Top performers need to learn quickly to advance their careers. It’s no longer acceptable to wait for our next performance review, often months away, to get critical insights on how we can improve. Managers often forget about important advice and it’s usually too late to do anything concrete about what we do hear!

We need constructive feedback and coaching much more frequently to excel in today’s fast-paced business environments. A quick comment or simple kudo, such as Nice job!, can be just as valuable as more thorough advice on what we can do to improve.

This is what top performers I’ve worked with thrive on – a more interactive, social dynamic at work in which they can be faster at:

• Course-correcting
• Identifying their strengths and opportunities for improvement
• Sharing useful insights and advice with team members

Alternatives to traditional performance management are out there. Oft-quoted and much respected Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer describes the requirement clearly: “Encourage managers to have frequent, ongoing conversations with their staff about performance.”

It can be challenging to get people talking regularly and about the right things. To create effective dialogue, we need to make it easier to adopt the social behaviors of top performers:

• Getting useful feedback and advice from the people they work with
• Giving feedback to help their team improve
• Doing collaborative 1:1 coaching to align their team and get results

There are a number of simple ways to encourage these behaviors, including:

• Make it quick and frequent – brief exchanges increase participation and relevance compared to lengthy surveys, meetings and reviews
• Make it easy to engage through existing tools – including mobile devices and email
• Provide a way to share anonymous feedback – this helps overcome traditional barriers, such as management hierarchies

Making it easy to participate is the first step in creating a constructive and hiveminded work environment. Together with improving focus and alignment, it will give people at all levels within the organization the ability to take control of their own development while also helping their peers, employees, and managers grow.

Lotusphere is known as the conference where the collaboration strategy for the rest of the year is communicated. Today, in the opening keynote address, IBM announced its plans for continuing to drive its Enterprise 2.0 platform, Lotus Connections, forward.

Lotus Connections, IBM’s flagship Enterprise 2.0 platform, will be incorporating numerous new features in the coming months. There are several new capabilities that are worth noting.

During the keynote, IBM reviewed the new features that were added into the latest offering of IBM Lotus Connections v2.5. The audience was also reminded about IBM’s big win with Panasonic dumping Microsoft and moving its 300,000 employees to the IBM-hosted collaboration solution LotusLive. Some of the features that wow’ed the audience were the new iPhone access, the new personal file sharing service, and the new capabilities in community spaces that provide for more targeted collaboration.

Enterprise 2.0 Where Your Eyes Are

IBM believes that it’s essential to bring Enterprise 2.0 capabilities to the users instead of trying to bring users to new Enterprise 2.0 platforms. For that reason, IBM architected Lotus Connections around SOA principles and has created plug-ins so that the Lotus Connections platform is accessible from Microsoft Sharepoint, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Powerpoint, Windows Explorer, Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime, WebSphere Portal, RIM’s Blackberry, Apple’s iPhone, and Nokia’s S60.

At the keynote, IBM set forth its vision for what’s next. First, it’s going to be easier for end-users to find and invite colleagues to join their network. Additionally, it’s going to continue building deeper integrations with other enterprise applications such as Microsoft Sharepoint. A pain point that has been echoed by many Sharepoint users is that Sharepoint creates silos and doesn’t do a good job of promoting knowledge re-use. IBM’s platform fills this gap and will continue to create deeper links between Connections and Sharepoint to break down those silos and create a unified knowledge source. This means that users browsing Sharepoint will have seamless access to Lotus Connections data (experts, communities, bookmarks, wikis, microblogging, etc). Similarly, as those users are browsing Lotus Connections they’ll be able to access data in Sharepoint such as file repositories.

Second, IBM also announced that it’ll be creating deeper links into WebSphere Portal. Most organizations that deploy a portal spend time and effort in making it a destination for its employees. By ’socializing’ the portal, organizations will have a sure way of attracting users and keeping them engaged. At the same time, the end user benefits because they only have a single user interface to learn and use. They will no longer be required to jump back and forth between disparate applications to effectively collaborate.

Mobile Continues to Improve

Another welcomed announcement was the brand new native Blackberry applications that provide native access to Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr. Mobile access to an Enterprise 2.0 platform is key for end-user adoption according to IBM. What’s interesting too is that the applications were built entirely by RIM and since RIM hasn’t done this for any other Enterprise 2.0 platform, it validates IBM as a leader in this field.

And speaking of links, IBM also re-iterated the importance of not only engaging employees for internal collaboration, but involving external users as well. Therefore, IBM will be adding some features to create safe social customer communities which increase loyalty and revenue. This will allow IBM to compete more strongly in the B2C segment, which is growing faster than the B2E segment.

A new kid on the block

As Bob Dylan states “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and so does SharePoint. Microsoft is going to release this summer their next version of the much-anticipated new SharePoint platform, called 2010. That didn’t stop us from working with the beta already with clients and to be honest, I kind of like it, and here are my main reasons why:

1. The Lego approach: SharePoint 2010 is an incredible fun box with Lego bricks, providing you with almost everything you need to get your Enterprise 2.0 platform going. It has native support for ratings, it has Facebook-wall-style webparts, it treats tags as first-class citizens (on same level as people) and many more of these goodies. And yes, they promised that in 2007 as well, but here it actually works well.
2. It has grown up: one thing that Microsoft lacked so far was to have a big pluggable enterprise-grade integration platform that could compete with the IBM WebSphere, SAP Netweaver and Oracle Fusion Middleware from this world. Looking at the integration capabilities SharePoint 2010 (and the rest of the 2010 stack) offers, it seems that Microsoft is betting hard on SharePoint being whispered in the same sentence as WebSphere or Netweaver.
3. Microsoft “got” it: continue reading the blog post till the end and I will come back to this point.

From Portal to Business Collaboration Platform

Nowadays, the big hip thing to revive your career or business is to slam the social tag on your business card and off you go. A couple of years ago, the juicy word on your business card was “portal”. Everyone wanted to have portals, everyone wanted to work on portals, heck I even suspect there were people that wanted to become a portal. Basically, if you were an IT manager and not thinking about having a portal in your company, then you were doing something wrong.

SharePoint 2007 was happily thriving in that era and many companies had the platform, just because they needed a portal. Why? I have no idea, and I bet many people can’t answer that question. Or show the ROI for that matter. How many multi-million portal projects have been in companies, just to discover afterwards that there was very little usage and adoption by the employees.

Since portals are not hip anymore, SharePoint 2010 is branded as the Business Collaboration Platform, which I’m quite happy for because it tells us a bit more what you can do with it: collaborating.

The Social Network becomes the intranet

So why do we need a portal, or a business collaboration platform, or an intranet, or whatever you want to call it? Three usage scenarios are often recurring: communication, knowledge management and self-service.

One of the things we believe in at Headshift (next to the excellent geek&poke cartoons of course) is that the traditional approach of portals or intranets is broken. Given the situation of large global companies, the traditional approach doesn’t scale very well, and people are lazy (or to call it politically correct: too busy).

People are too busy to spend time on carefully crafting knowledge artefacts, upload them in the right sub-sub-directory, tag them with the appropriate keywords and add descriptions to them.

Maintaining an intranet site with thousands of content pages for communication and self-service, all carefully divided in sub-sub categories doesn’t work out very well either. Content get outdated at a rapid speed and people don’t find the right information.

That is for instance why the indexing and search approach from Google triumphed over Yahoo!’s initial directory system, or why Google’s GMail approach is so successful with the tagging and searching instead of the folder-based approach of traditional email systems.

The thing we strongly believe in is that knowledge is produced as a (happy) side-effect of the daily work you are doing.

A collaboration platform! My kingdom for a collaboration platform!

And that is exactly why SharePoint 2010 is such a compelling platform. It integrates extremely well in the tools you use daily for your work: Outlook email client, Office Live Communication (unified communications), Exchange email server, Office suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc).

SharePoint 2010 acts as the interesting social glue that brings everything nicely together that you are used to work with, and steps it up a few notches. You can use the blog for communication, but the articles can be published from within Word. You can have discussions in the forum, but you can do that from inside your Outlook.

Microsoft really nailed it this time

I promised earlier that I was going to come back to my third reason why I like SharePoint 2010: “Microsoft got it”. I still stand with that statement, but the (unfortunate?) side-effect of Microsoft getting this Enterprise 2.0 platform right, is that it’s actually an unfinished product.

When you take SharePoint 2010 and just drop it in your enterprise, chances are likely that it will enjoy the same low adoption rates as your previous Enterprise 2.0 platforms. Why? Microsoft realized that there is no such thing as one platform that rules them all.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in your company is thinking that you can put one platform in place that will automagically work for everyone. Different projects and business units have different needs. One has an emphasis on communication, the other one on document collaboration, the other one on expertise finding, etc.

That’s why SharePoint 2010 is an unfinished product. It allows you to carefully look at what you need in your company and customise the product accordingly. A process that often does take a lot of time and effort. People are funny animals. They’re not easily put in pre-defined boxes and their behaviour changes over time. And so does your Enterprise 2.0 system.

Where’s the juicy stuff?

We’re currently doing some pretty interesting client work around SharePoint 2010, but I have the feeling that there are still some cool use cases that we haven’t thought about yet at Headshift. Especially in the area of fusing the internal Enterprise 2.0 with the external customer-facing Social Media. We see a blurring boundary between what’s inside and outside the firewall where content and people are pulled into both directions.

Drop me a line on lee.provoost@headshift.com or send me a tweet @leeprovoost to exchange some ideas!

“Content and data are everywhere. People are creating and curating content like never before. As data storage becomes cheaper, businesses are storing, archiving, and mining more data than previously possible. The increasing openness of APIs and data portability make more enterprise data available for both consumers and employees to consume. Free flow of data also allows business partner relationships to be readily analyzed and optimized.” (Emerging Opportunities in Social Business Design)

Filter Failure

With large corporations storing more and more data (be it for compliance, regulatory or internal mining purposes) in their Enterprise 2.0 (and overall IT) systems, we have the danger of getting big data silos or disparate solutions. To make matters worse, they are often stored locally in systems that are owned by different business units with different purposes. So, imagine that you have invested a lot of money and effort in a knowledge management system, just to realize after 3 years that it does not suit your needs anymore and you need something else? If you have a couple of thousands of files, it’s still quite manageable. However, if you work in a very knowledge-intensive organisation, three years of data might have accumulated into several hundreds of gigabytes of data. Good luck with that migration.

Then go through a merger with your competitor or launch a whole load of new products or services and try to gain consensus and consistency across these disparate solutions.

With the increasing importance (and increasing amount) of data floating around your organisation, it becomes more and more important to think about open standards for data interoperability. Accept the reality of the day that a lot of your data is stored in silos. What we need to think of now is how we are going to make this data step-by-step accessible so that we don’t need to do tedious and error-prone data migrations when the system doesn’t cope with our demands anymore.

Perhaps to your surprise, I’d argue that the data silo lock-in is not your biggest problem. No, the inability to intelligently manage and reuse this volume of content in a meaningful way is a much bigger danger that has a direct impact on your business. Filter failure arises when individuals are unable to synthesize and understand the vast amounts of information being generated by an organisation.

Where the problem used to be getting enough information, now it’s being able to make sense of it all. So in addition to filtering the underlying plethora of data and subsequent applications, you also have to be an inline translator. For anyone dealing with end users directly (e.g. a front line customer agent dealing with lots of applications), they will always speak in their own language and never that of your systems, applications or processes. More importantly, they have no reason to.

The interface is the product

But what exactly are we trying to solve here? Why would we even care about this problem? Just a Bunch of Stuff That Happens perfectly coined it in the following cartoon:

Even this is being kind – the average knowledge worker will use between 6 and 15 of these apps, we have experienced people using upwards of 30 because of these data silos. The typical enterprise application looks much like “Your company’s app” as shown in the cartoon. There is such a vast amount of data flowing around your company that you often end up with these kind of user interfaces. Instead of achieving the goal of bringing powerful information to the fingertips of the business end-user, it just confuses people. It just makes people unhappy and unproductive. For every new channel, (email, web, social channels, …) and for every new product, the quick answer is often to bring in a new additional application. This all adds to the complexity and mess on the knowledge workers desktop.

And just in case you would forget, an IBM Design tweet nailed it:

The end-user of your product doesn’t care what kind of data silos are laying underneath your IT system. They just want the information they need to do their work, but very importantly: taking in account the context of the work! Put yourself in the consumer’s shoes, your customer doesn’t talk to you in silos and certainly doesn’t want to be treated in silos. Have you ever called your bank, only to be passed to several different departments? We know already that Interactions aren’t Connected and ultimately we are still running processes as if we are in the industrial age – an assembly line of handoff after handoff.

This is the same as going to a McDonalds and asking for a ‘Happy Meal’ but being told to get a drink from one counter, a sandwich from another, fries from a third and the toy will be sent directly from Mattel – oh and you want a straw, napkins and sauce – there’s self service for that. More of a Meal than Happy! Not quite so fast or convenient food. What happens when the meal then changes, there’s a new toy, you add something else to the box – how is the existing process able to cope with changes easily?

Impact of data ubiquity

We have now identified the impact of data ubiquity:

1. the corporate IT department being challenged by huge data silos (lock-in) and disparate solutions with complex processes that rely on humans to be the integration layer
2. the business end-user dealing with too many different and complex applications and not being able to make sense of all the data (filter failure), subsequently not being able to deliver the process

In many businesses the delivery of an end to end business process relies on users accessing multiple software applications that combine to deliver the complete process. The result of this can be disjointed processes, mistakes, slow access to required information, no single customer view and ultimately a dysfunctional customer experience that the business users can’t impact.

So, the goal we’re trying to achieve is to provide business end-users Enterprise 2.0 systems with meaningful contextual information in a simple and elegant way – we like to call this fit for purpose!

Mashing it together

As a technologist, the first reaction would be to try to solve this data silo problem. (Let’s ignore for a second the old approach to create a monolithic repository, called the black hole, where we dump everything in.) How can we make it more accessible, can we wrap a web services around it, can we apply on a large scale the principles of Service-Oriented Architecture and Model-View-Controller, can we add an open data API interface to it, etc. That will most likely keep us busy for the next coming years. Wake up call: your customers are not going to wait two years till you have your internal issues solved. This approach also often instigates new shadow projects that proclaim to deliver tactical, quick win solutions whilst waiting for the ‘nirvana’.

As a business end-user, you’re faced with a proliferation of applications. A lot of time and money have been invested in building these, so… why not starting by reusing the useful bits of the existing apps to get immediate value?

This is the approach pioneered by Corizon. A user-centered focus approach, starting with the end users and working down – understanding the process in which they go through to complete a task, be it solve a customer enquiry in the front office or manage work in the back office – referred to as the user process. All too often, technology’s answer to a problem is upgrade to the latest version as it has all these new features. The problem with this is that this doesn’t necessarily resolve the original problems, complex process, too many applications.

Once the user process is clearly defined, we then (or can in parallel) look at working up – understanding what data & applications we need access to effectively and efficiently complete the defined user processes. We will now understand the pattern, what gets the most use, by who, how. This firmly puts the cross hairs on which applications to enable for reuse. Unlike traditional data re-use approaches, this approach enables the useful & required bits of applications, but also defines reusable UI and stores these in a library of reusable services.

Now we have two key elements defined, a clear user process and a set of reusable UI services. Corizon’s solution then allows you to mashup these to create the optimal interface, be it a standalone UI or consumed as a widget in your Enterprise 2.0 application. Adding new, or removing legacy applications becomes a much less complex task – the UI Services approach allows you to interchange these without affecting the interface.

Good is good enough

At first sight, this approach might sound a bit unconventional, but we’d like to invite you to an excellent post by Peter Evans-Greenwood (@pevansgreenwood) that talks about “The Price of Regret“.

Building the big, scalable perfect solution in the first place might be more efficient from an engineering point of view. However, if we make the delivery effort so large that we miss the window of opportunity, then we’ve just killed any chance of helping the business to capitalise on the opportunity. … Size the solution to match the business opportunity, and accept that there may need to be some rework in the future. Make the potential need for rework clear to the business so that there are no surprises. Don’t use potential rework in the future as a reason to do nothing. Or to force approval of a strategic infrastructure project which will deliver sometime in the distant future, a future which may never come.

One thing we’ve learned in this consulting business is that most of the times, good is good enough since perfection takes an eternity.

The industry in which he worked was very social and every day many new agencies from around the world gave him a call. One day an agency came calling and let everyone know they were social media gurus and could build the best campaign anyone had ever dreamed of. Moreover, these campaigns used social media and people who questioned their value were clearly not meant to be in marketing or management.

“I need to get me one of those,” thought the marketer. “If I can shift my budget out of traditional channels and get my customers to start selling to each other through viral marketing, I’ll be a hero.” And he awarded a huge project in advance to the gurus so they could get started right away. They set up a Twitter account and a Facebook group and seemed to be hard at work. They asked for an espresso machine and gluten-free snacks to keep them going and found users to follow and friend late into the night.

“I wonder how the campaign is coming along,” thought the marketer. But he felt a bit nervous when he remembered that people who weren’t qualified to be marketers wouldn’t “get it.” Personally, he thought he was in the know, but thought it’d be a good idea to test someone else instead.

“I’ll send my direct marketing specialist to see the gurus,” thought the marketer. “She’s a no-nonsense professional and knows how campaigns work.”

The direct marketer went into the conference room where the gurus sat surfing away on their netbooks. “OMG!” she thought and opened her eyes wide, “This all looks like spam to me,” but she did not say so. The gurus asked her to click around a bit more and asked if she could see the authority and influence that would be created. The marketer tried her best but couldn’t determine where any value existed. “Oh dear,” she thought, “what am I missing? I must be too old to understand! No, I can’t let anyone say I don’t get it.”

“What do you think?” said one of the gurus, while he clicked on a profile picture.

“Oh, we are certainly innovating here,” replied the direct marketer. “I’ll tell my boss that we are really driving the engagement with these initiatives.”

Now the gurus asked for more money, which they required for HD Flip cams, Bluetooth headsets, and an iPhone app, which they would need to take the campaign to the next level. They used these for their personal blogs, but they continued to chat with people through the Twitter account and on the Facebook group wall.

Soon afterwards, the marketer sent his web analytics guy to see the gurus and ask if the campaign would be ready for launch soon. Like the direct marketer, he couldn’t find any direct connection to value, either.

“Isn’t this a real early adopter methodology?” asked the gurus, showing screengrabs of the social media accounts.

“I’m from the digital world,” said the web analytics guy. “So it’s strange that I’m not getting it and I can’t let anyone know.” He told the gurus that the developing campaign was “killer.” “Definitely cutting edge,” he told the marketing chief.

Everyone in the department talked about the campaign and finally the marketer wanted a walkthrough himself, while it was still in beta. With his team, including the two who had seen the campaign at earlier stages, they went to visit the gurus.

“Isn’t it great?” said the two marketing specialists who had been there before. “You can see where customers will talk to us and we will be able to listen.” And they moused over the @username section of the site.

“WTF?” thought the marketer, “I don’t get it. Am I just a pointy haired boss? Do I still have what it takes to be a marketer in the 21st century?”

“Seriously,” he said to the gurus, “this will win us a lion, pencil, and a webby.” And the marketer’s entire department nodded their heads and advised him to shift his entire budget out of traditional channels in advance of a new product launch that was soon to take place. The gurus were put on retainer, made agency of record, and appointed “social media experts.”

The week leading up to the campaign and product launch, the gurus pulled several all-nighters, going through a case of Red Bull. People should see that they were having a sprint to the finish. They finally stepped away from their computers and sighed, “the campaign is ready for launch.”

The marketer and his entire department gathered in the boardroom; the gurus clicked through sites and said: “This is the YouTube account!” “This is the influencer outreach program!” and “Here are the Google Alerts!” and so on. “They are built on real customer relationships that could never have been created before; that’s the beauty of social media.”

“+1!” said the marketing department; but they really didn’t know what was going on.

“Are you ready to set these accounts to live,” said the gurus, “so we can start building your personal brand and speaking with customers?”

“Let’s do it,” said the marketer. “Aren’t these social media accounts so authentic?”

The department, who felt compelled to participate, had a dozen pre-drafted, legal-approved messages to post online in the different forums. The bloggers who received campaign-related swag from the company wrote flattering posts about the brand and its forward thinking nature. Nobody wished to post a negative comment, for then they might lose subscribers and followers. Never was a campaign more admired.

“But what’s the ROI?” wondered an intern aloud. The question, unpopular at first, soon became widely asked. The gurus attempted to dismiss this by claiming that anyone asking the question didn’t get it. “But what’s the ROI?” repeated the senior management team, in unison.

That made a deep impression upon the marketer, for it seemed that he should know the answer, but he thought to himself, “I just need to ride this out so I can jump to my next gig.” And the department participated even more fervently as they kept launching what they believed to be a consistently clear signal into the noise of multiple social media channels.

[end]

Adapted from The Emperor’s New Clothes

On March 18, SOMESSO and Headshift/Dachis Group will host Europe’s first Social Business Summit; an invitation-only event in the city of London, which is aimed at business and technology thought leaders interested in the future of social business design. This event will be part of a series including a summit in Austin, Texas on March 11 and one in Sydney on March 25, intended to engage with leading practitioners on three continents and provide a global view of the market.

Save the date and let us know if you wish to participate.

The use of social tools in business is now progressing from the experimental stage to the beginning of mainstream adoption. As with all transformational technologies, organisational culture change and technology adoption are closely related, with both influencing the other in subtle but important ways. We want to look ahead and consider the impact of social tools on the way we organise, structure and manage knowledge- and people-intensive businesses in the future, both internally and externally.

The relationship between technology and culture is an interesting one, and it plays out differently in the short-run and the long-run. We can see the increasing speed with which technological change bleeds into mainstream culture through the impact of printing, radio, the telephone, television and, most recently, the internet and social networking. Whether it is Time’s person of the year, or the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year, the influence of recent online developments is inescapable. But at a deeper level, more fundamental change is also happening, though less immediately visible, and over a longer time period.

In business, our use of technology is influenced by the way we work; but the way we work, and indeed the way we structure our companies and organisations, is also very much influenced by technology. The Twentieth Century corporation was partly a product of technological innovations in logistics, transport and communications. Those who could afford to exploit these expensive innovations were able to reap the benefits of scale associated with large-scale co-ordination of human and material resources.

But institutions can give longevity to ideas through codification into practice. So as the technological or economic constraints associated with our means of organisation fell away, companies did not always change their structure or practice in response. Fast-forward to the early Twenty-first Century and we face a mis-match between the affordances of the day-to-day technology most people use and the organisational structures they operate within, which have yet to adapt to take advantage of the way new technology changes how people interact and co-operate. This gap represents a huge business opportunity for those companies able and willing to adapt.

If, as Clay Shirky argues, the cost of collaboration is close to zero thanks to social tools, what does this mean for organisational design? Can we dramatically reduce internal cost structures by making better use of emergent behaviour inside the firm? If real-time data has the potential to transform service delivery, then how should organisations be structured to take advantage of it? These are just some of the questions that the adoption of social tools inside the enterprise are raising about the future of the firm. They touch on various aspects of technology, from enterprise architecture to user experience design; but they are also informed by economic theory, cognitive science, anthropology, psychology and organisational design.

Last year we outlined our thinking on how to apply social business design to the practical needs of companies. 2010 is set to be a very busy and interesting year for those of us who are exploring the impact of social tools, networks and concepts on the way we organise businesses and other forms of collaboration or collective action.

But we don’t have all the answers – indeed we don’t even have all the questions – and that is why we have decided to reach out to a mix of thinkers, practitioners and business people in knowledge- and people-intensive firms to help chart the next stage of this journey.

We will be announcing more details of the summit in the next few weeks. It will consist of at least 50% facilitated discussion, but there will be some great short talks too, and we hope everybody will go away with something useful. There will be a cost to attend, to cover the venue and logistics, but it will be worth it – promise But for now, please save the date and let us know if you wish to participate.

Social Business Design adds a new type of complexity to an organizational design exercise. In traditional organizational design exercises, it was paramount to identify both the current state and the future state of the organization, and then design a path to that final outcome. In Social Business Design we must identify not only the bounds but also the flexibility of the organization to adapt to new factors and to develop emergent outcomes.

When thinking about organizational design for Social Business, consider these factors

1. Integration of External and Internal ecosystems. What is the current and desired future level of interaction of the organization’s ecosystems? An understanding of the current and desired future sociality of the organization is critical.
   • How do you enable employees to interact and engage with customers and partners?
   • What tools do they need to do this, and what compliance issues do these connections surface?
   • Are there current reporting structures that inhibit this interaction?
   • How do you ensure that future reporting and management systems are enablers, rather than simply enforcement mechanisms?
   • How do employees currently utilize their social networks to accomplish their own goals?
   • What is the organization’s desire and “stomach” for ad-hoc processes and interactions? Is formalization and authority a core value or simply a necessary tool?
2. The ability to manage change. Change can be painful if it is mismatched to the organization in terms of scale, structure or intent. The organization and its partners must have the ability to design, manage and measure the changes being made to itself. This is often achieved through the use of both internal and external (consultant) resources. Before beginning a change exercise, it is important to understand what has come before. Take inventory of:
   • past organizational designs that went unimplemented. Is failure perceived as inevitable?
   • past change exercises and their perceived success or failure. What are the facts about change in this organization?
   • current IT capability. Can IT be an enabler of new processes and interactions?
   • current formal organization. How is the organization supposed to be structured?
   • existing and past influencers and decision makers. Who makes the organization tick today?
   • informal organization. How does the organization really get work done?
   • effectiveness of current management models. Are they being followed or enforced?
3. Matching strategy. Changing an organization in the absence of a strategic goal is not generally a sound path. Before re-designing an organization and implementing a change program, a strategy and set of clear goals are paramount to a successful organizational design.

Organizational Design and Change Management programs are tools leveraged by Social Business Design to help your organization be both more effective in your current market and to find new markets for your products and services. They are not however, ends in and of themselves. They must be used in concert with other Social Business Initiatives, such as strategy development, in order to be successful.

We’ve scheduled our summit for Thursday, March 11th which is the day before the SXSW Interactive conference begins in Austin, Texas. We’ve got some great speakers already confirmed, including Jeffrey Dachis, Peter Kim, Charlene Li, Stowe Boyd, Douglas Rushkoff, Lee Bryant, and Dion Hinchcliffe.

Our intention is to make this an intimate, focused, and valuable day for everyone. With that in mind, it is by invitation only. If you’re interested in attending, please send us an email at sbs@dachisgroup.com and tell us who you are, and what company you work for. The interests and roles of the attendees will shape the conference agenda and content, so please indicate your interest now.

Not only is it a compelling user experience, but it’s also become the basis of some very interesting virtual communities.   Amongst a certain subsection of teenagers, Tumblr has gone viral and is getting a significant amount of their online time – in fact, for heavy users, I’d say it’s overtaken Facebook as their “platform of choice”.

Stripping the platform down, I think you can identify six key reasons why Tumblr’s become so “sticky”.

Ease of use

As a microblogging service, it’s trivially easy to post content via the web interface.   There’s a simple rich text interface for text, as well as single-click post options for rich content like photos, audio and video.   There’s also some Tumblr-specific functionality like quoting existing posts, and embedding chat-like Q&A functions – but all of this is done through a very simple dashboard.   There’s the ability to personalise the appearance of your blog through themes, as well.   The content that gets created seems to lean towards the creative end of the spectrum from what I’ve seen – there’s a lot of striking photography being posted alongside the more angsty outpourings of stereotypical blogs posts.

Community

Although each Tumblr blog is a separate property – each one has a unique URL – they’ve very cleverly baked in some community functionality.   You can “follow” other posters Twitter-style so that their posts show up on your dashboard, as well as interacting with their content either by commenting or “liking”.  Liking seems an incredibly simple but powerful function to me – it doesn’t require the amount of effort that writing and posting a comment takes, but it allows you to flag to someone else that you’ve read their content.  Facebook have made this a central part of their user experience as well, and I think that it works powerfully in both directions.   As the author, I know that my postings are being read and assessed; as the liker, I’ve got a quick way of interacting with people without the overhead of a full comment.   There seems to be a trend going on here of enabling lighter-and-lighter touch interactions – responding to an email takes a large amount of effort compared with posting a quick comment, which is more effort than a simple “like” or “digg” or “vote”.

Recycling content

Reblogging is another facet where Tumblr overcomes the silo-like nature of most blogging platforms.   Reblogging content from someone else’s Tumblr is trivially easy, and is bidirectional – the reblogging shows up on the original post as well as on the blog of the reblogger.   By also bringing through comments that rebloggers make – and threading the responses – it turns a basic blogging service into something more akin to a forum; but without the topic-centricity that forums have.   This is something that has been tried many times through aggregated comment networks that attempt to connect many disparate blogs – Tumblr has an advantage in owning the core platform, but nevertheless it’s still a neat implementation of something that never really seemed to work too well previously.

Competition

Being able to create and publish your own content is incentive enough for a significant number of users, but Tumblr has taken a leaf from the book that Flickr wrote when they introduced tumblarity.   It’s a mystical calculation of popularity based on a “secret” algorithm – half of Tumblr’s users take it very seriously and spend time trying to reverse-engineer the calculations in an attempt to game it, while the other half profess to be above such sordid considerations and ignore it.

Whether you love or loathe this kind of ranking, to many it’s a compelling feature – particularly for the teenage Tumblr population.  Having an external metric of your “popularity” is something that seems to appeal to teenagers – and it’s made a richer process by the way in which tumblarity is also measured across different groupings of blogs – UK blogs, male bloggers, music bloggers and so on.

Reinforcement

Even the most elegant user interface and richest feature set is of little use if use is irregular.   A phrase I hear often from my own tame sample set is “keeping up with my dashboard”.  The flow of content from other bloggers, and the flow of their likes and comments, means that there’s a constant reason to check back and see what’s going on – and then post new content while you’re there.   It makes the site very sticky, to the point of overtaking other service like Facebook and Bebo for some users.

Bridges to the real world

The final piece of the usability jigsaw is the real-world aspect.   The sterotypical picture of bloggers are sad, pasty individuals who hide in bedrooms and don’t interact with the real world.  No doubt there are plenty of those on Tumblr, but there’s also a significant portion of users who DO interact offline, to the extent of meeting in real life.   Tumblr facilitate this by listing real-world meetups and providing schwag – stickers, name tags, badges and so on – that they provide free of charge.   Quite what the real world makes of gangs of teenagers descending on public spaces to meet face-to-face for the first time I’m not sure, but it’s a fascinating process to watch being organised by people who’ve never met other than online.

Having said all this, there are the standard questions of how Tumblr’s business model will fare in the long-term.  It’s a free service, it doesn’t carry ads, and there are no premium options that can be purchased.  It can’t be cheap to operate, either – bandwidth and hosting bills must be significant.  Ultimately this will probably be its downfall, assuming that it can manage to ride out changes in fashion – while Tumblr users are undoubtedly passionate about it, they’re also likely to be fairly fickle over the long-term.  But nevertheless it’s a fascinating case study for the kind of interaction patterns that make a service attractive to those kind passionate users.

This post originally appeared on the Headshift blog.

Here’s why:

• Devices. Mobile phones have been getting more sophisticated, as operating systems evolve, batteries live longer, and processors run faster. And it’s not just phones – netbooks have been hot and tablets will soon seize the spotlight.
• Applications. Thousands of applications available specifically for mobile experiences that aren’t the clunky WAP-based sites of old. These run on more sophisticated operating systems, given users familiar interface cues.
• Networks. 3G networks might be strained now, but that won’t be the case forever. AOL initially strained under the demands of dial-up, but end up thriving (and then missing the switch to broadband). Wi-fi hotspots have proliferated and you can find a network almost anywhere you go today.

These three areas will continue to progress and if competition keeps prices in check, innovation will continue and we’ll be more connected than ever by the end of the year. We’ve seen interesting concepts in all three of these areas before, but today’s overall system has reached a point of maturity making the mobile experience useful, usable, and desirable.

And as consumers get more out of mobile platforms, advertising will follow suit and finally take off. Ads will now become part of the Apple and Google ecosystems, not standalone networks with limited reach.

Other things we’ll see:

• A new “hot” skill set emerges. Mobile expertise will be in highest demand with lowest supply – at least in the US.
• Another check box for integrated marketing. First you had to tack on a website. Then it was some social networks. Now it will be a mobile presence.
• More ways to love to hate advertising. The world is going to discover new ways to be annoyed by ads never previously imagined. Will location-based relevance save the day? I don’t think so.

Think back to surfing the web on a Treo 650 using Blazer via GPRS or a RAZR using WAP over EDGE…we can look back and laugh about this now. It’s likely we’ll be feeling the same about Safari on an iPhone 3GS/3G sooner than you think.

This idea site can be found at http://dachisgroup.ideascale.com.

Contribute your best ideas on this topic to the site, and choose a category from the list we’ve supplied. If we need some new categories, just comment below and we’ll get them added.

Vote for those ideas that you think are the best. Each verified user account will get 5 votes to cast.

Share via email or Twitter the ideas that you think have merit.

Discuss each idea that is proposed to persuade people to vote (or not vote) for an idea. Each idea has an area for a comment thread.

We’ve had about ten ideas posted so far, but we’re just starting to scratch the surface. The imperatives so far have been about lightweight knowledge sharing, self-organization, data integration, the role of privacy, and leadership. After a few weeks of comment and discussion, we’ll post the most highly rated ideas here on the Collaboratory. All of the content on that site are published under the creative commons.

You are invited to contribute, vote, share, and discuss social business imperatives for 2010!

The reason I bring that up is that in looking at better ways that an organization can operate, we often look at the current service delivery model. How are services shared, delivered and managed? Which functions and resources are centralized and which are distributed? Does centralization mean less flexibility? Does distribution mean less reliability? We look at services inside the organization through the lenses of People, Process and Technology.

This is a long way of saying: I’ve been thinking about “shared services” and how that concept is going to change very soon.

Then over the weekend JP wrote about the The Facebookisation of the enterprise.

JP’s dream is more than just the Facebookisation of the enterprise, he is talking about the personalization of the enterprise.

imagine an “enterprise” world where:

• You chose your own phone
• You chose your own portable computing device (which may be your phone)
• You chose your own desktop computing device (which may be your television)
• You chose the operating systems you put on these devices

In other words, the IT department had “lost control of the device”.

I’m not sure whether we need IT departments to “lose control” of the devices used for work, so much as we need them to “give up control” of the data that is available to whatever devices the user chooses. I think that the Personal Enterprise is one where the definition of “shared services” includes thinking about what the user provisions for themselves, not just what is given to them.

The personalization of the enterprise is already happening. It couldn’t be more obvious these days. People are literally carrying two laptops and two cellphones with them. Sit down in any meeting (although I notice this trend far more in the US than in Canada right now) and you can be sure that a handful of the people there will reach in one pocket for their Blackberry, and then they will reach in to another pocket for their iPhone.

How do Police officers coordinate and communicate while working? Ask some of them: More and more it is happening on their personal cellphones. The radios and dispatch systems provided by most police departments are insecure, lack privacy and have centralized dispatching.

So, where do you draw the line? Where is the walled garden and where are the open spaces? I think this is the trick, and where a lot of enterprises will get caught.

The Personal Enterprise (or the Facebookisation of it) is not about picking and choosing which services get opened up and which have controlled delivery, instead it is about opening up as much data as possible and creating an ecosystem that allows personalization to be developed.

We are now coming out of an era where IT delivery was more efficient when it was done as an end-to-end controlled process. I do not believe that has been anything malicious or wrong about how things have been done to date. Controlling the platforms, devices and information that the end user can have access to was simply more efficient: Laptops were expensive, so you wanted to do a volume deal. Blackberries and service plans were very pricy, and then you needed a “Blackberry Enterprise Server” on top of that, and that only really worked with a full on Microsoft Exchange server setup.

Don’t forget how much Databases (still) cost. Doing millions of transactions? You used to have just a few options. For some of your data those are still your options, but you can now deploy MySQL or Postgres at a web, departmental, workgroup and even personal computer level. So you have 4 of the 5 major database types covered right there with free and highly reliable software.

Lets also not forget how “standards” never really used to be standards at all. They were lock-in tools, and the vendors who supported them gave you just enough rope to hang yourself. Having DCOM flashbacks here. Now you can feel free to tell your vendor to bake that RESTful API in from the start, otherwise you are happy to have it built yourself.

Open the data and create incentives for developers and designers to create practical and beautiful things. Users will scream loudly, designers will listen and developers will build. Utopia perhaps, but not far away to be honest.

The thing that is standing in the way of the Personal Enterprise is that we believe that being complicated is a prerequisite for IT. The truth is however that the services that mean the most to end users are some of the simplest and need the least “engineering”. They are rich profiles, SMS (or BBM) messaging, Email, phone and document sharing.

The personalization of the enterprise is happening in communication first, and the sooner that IT departments can get out of the communication business and focus on data, then we will be in a much better place.

So many of my former co-workers and associates have said “I just don’t get this ’social’ thing. It seems like a real drag on productivity within a business and I can’t see how businesses can use it to increase productivity or business value.”

The belief that social tools allowed into the workplace decreases productivity is a major barrier to businesses adopting a “leaning-forward” posture towards what is largely already prevalent. There are over 900,000 blog posts, 5 million Tweets (messages sent via Twitter), and 45 million Facebook updates EACH DAY! Who do you think is doing this and do you think it’s only when they aren’t at work? Social tools are becoming woven into everyday life. My 12 year old son is a perfect example – he uses Facebook, Twitter, texting and email interchangeably to communicate with his peers – and even his teachers. True that you don’t want workers on an assembly line texting away or have your newest star employee updating their Linked-in with a Tweet about how drunk they were the night before… but, you do need to accept that there are new communication platforms that are blurring the lines between work and personal and that many of these tools can actually be harnessed to drive incremental value to the business. So starts the journey of what some of these tools are…

One of the easiest tools to adopt and see benefit from in my opinion is Yammer (ok, since it’s already being used by 50,000 businesses, this may be a known tool for many of you). Think of Yammer as instant messaging for a large audience – an audience that is defined and managed. Yammer can be deployed for a particular team within a business or for the whole business and doesn’t require IT to deploy it. At Dachis Group, we use Yammer to communicate directly with one another but in an open forum so others can see what’s going on. It is amazing how much this tool has cut down on email traffic and how much more efficient the interchange of information and ideas becomes. Few examples:

• Our CEO is traveling out to visit a customer and Yammers @particular person [for true neophytes to the social app language, you type @name in messages when it's being directed at that person, understanding that others can see the message as well] that he will meet him at the customer. Another employee sees that the CEO’s travel is taking him close to a prospect and Yammers back @CEO to see if he has time to meet with the potential customer as well.
• The Controller is billing out expenses for a customer and Yammers at a couple folks known to be working on the project however, the message is seen by two others who also had some time and expenses with that customer. The email solution to this would have been an almost blanket email to the practice group or a series of fowards through the team.
• An employee gets an unexpected call from a customer that is questioning the status of an issue they are having. While on the phone, the employee can Yammer out for any immediate feedback to use on the call with the customer. This also alerts other employees about issues/resolutions they may have seen to offer up.

With just these three examples, you can see how you can increase efficiency, collaboration, and results from this open tool. Yammer also allows for private messaging between employees should they not want their entries to be seem by everyone.

I do believe in a cohesive and well orchestrated approach to weaving social tools into the fabric of how business is done – some thought-leading businesses already see the value and are embracing the positive changes. Others are out there, like many of my friends, just trying to understand what this shift means. This entry highlighted but one of a hundred examples of what is out there…

Late last year, I coordinated a fun weekend project that went over pretty well called Social Media Predictions 2009. This year, reflecting a shift in where we see the space heading, Dachis Group launched Social Business Imperatives 2010.

As we wrap up 2009, I want to highlight some areas where our business will be focused in 2010. I could position these as predictions, but then I’d be stacking the deck because I know they’re already going to happen.

• A talent shortage. There are just not enough people out there who possess a deep understanding of social media combined with business strategy experience. In some cases, it’s not a lack of technical skills, but rather a lack of interpersonal acumen. On the flip side, this market void creates an opportunity for individuals who understand different functions, can navigate ambiguity in difficult political waters, and understand how to manage mission critical initiatives on a corporate level.
• Major social business strategy projects. You might not hear about any of these, because companies are putting infrastructure in place to support social business. There’s no need to tip off the competition by discussing what’s being built – these initiatives aren’t about creating short-term buzz; they’re about driving long-term profitability.
• Service provider consolidation. Lots of small companies out there “get it.” Fewer big companies don’t. As we roll into this maturing market for social business, scale is becoming the name of the game for clients and consultants alike.
• A shift in industry focus. The conversation about what’s next will come to rest on social business. We’ve been hearing about the same old proof of concept examples now for years – it’s time to figure out how to make social work for companies, not just individuals. A new wave of books will publish, but only a handful will be worth reading; many others will be sadly outdated and deliver DOA. Same goes for events – new gatherings and emergent outcomes, while others struggle to remain relevant.

All of these areas are related. If you are on the client-side, you may already be experiencing these issues; if not, then you may either have a window of opportunity or you may need to dig deeper into your competitive intelligence resources.

As for Dachis Group, we are actively hiring right now for the best professionals in social business. We’ve been working on strategy projects with major brands that will turn into the case studies of tomorrow. We are actively looking for companies that want to work with us closely to deliver social business design. And we’ll be convening our first annual Social Business Summit in Austin next March.

I guess if you don’t believe me, these might be predictions after all…but trust me on these.

The user interface isn’t that important you know. It’s just an internal intranet application that will be only used by our employees. Just focus on the business logic and make sure that everything is locked down for security.”

It’s unfortunately something that I heard over and over again in my previous client engagements as a systems integrator and solutions architect. Somehow, when we are talking about IT applications for employees, all of a sudden user interface and user experience don’t matter.

A recent tweet from Rena Patel, from Capgemini’s UK PR team, states the obvious: “Internal employees are also clients.”

Workforce collaboration vs. customer participation

So far, the social software industry has often separated social engagements in roughly two flavours:

• The “inside the firewall”, internally focused Enterprise 2.0 or Workforce Collaboration.
• The consumer-, externally focused Social Media or Customer Participation.

I see in my current client engagements at Headshift that this artificial boundary gets more and more blurry. To what extent is an external customer community different from an internal employee community?

Think about it, they serve similar goals:

• Drive efficiency across the company, whether that is time, people or money
• Drive self-service to lower burden on support staff
• Quicker access to expertise to solve your problem or answer your question
• Create a feeling of bonding with other community members and the company

… and they often suffer from similar (potential) problems:

• Low community participation
• Cost of running the community is too high, compared with the benefits
• Lack of attention from senior people in the company

So why is it then that we don’t put the same effort and value in social software / community solutions for our employees as we do for clients? Why is it that we want to have the best for our own children, but not for our own employees?

A user-centered focus approach

Many companies that are experimenting with introducing social collaboration tools for their employees start with low-budget, under-the-radar projects and it often starts with putting a software package in place and see what happens. There are roughly two outcomes of this:

• Users see a real benefit of the tool and at a certain point the amount of participants reaches a tipping point and the adoption rates explode.
• The projects doesn’t get enough traction for a long period and just becomes a black hole

In both cases you have a problem, the former is a luxury problem, the latter is a sad reality for many projects. So, how can you safeguard yourself from the above-described problem, without breaking the bank?

The first and most obvious question you should’ve asked yourself before starting this Enterprise 2.0 project (heck, you should ask it before doing ANY project at all): “what does the user want?”. This can be done by running a workshop with some business stakeholders and (most importantly) end-users from the field, and can be further extended by stakeholder interviews.

Bottom-up vs. Top-down approach

Knowing what the user wants is quite crucial to tackle both problems. If you know what your users want, you can more easily control the growth of your community and steer it in the right direction to speed up the tipping point in a controlled and more predictable way. Knowing what the user wants, helps you better understand why certain things don’t work or intervene when your community lacks adoption.

Depending on whether you are a “bottom-up”-evangelist or a “top-down”-believer you might or might not agree with what I just said. I’m a big fan of macro-economics and the theory of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. However, I’m realistic enough to see that this laissez-faire approach works very well in an artificial text-book environment, but when applied in reality it has certain “issues”.

At Headshift and the Dachis Group, we are a strong believer in the intentional creation of such social environments in companies. This means that we strongly believe that the user is central and that they drive the success of the community (bottom-up), but that having a good and strong community management (top-down) tremendously raises the quality and success of your community. A very famous example is the SAP Developer Network, led by Craig Cmehil (@ccmehil), which is a prime example of a thriving collaboration community.

Business is fundamentally human

As the very famous Cluetrain Manifesto states “business is fundamentally human”, so we need to stop treating employees as “resources” and start seeing them as clients with their own interests, desires and drivers. Once we made this mind shift, perhaps making the business case for focusing on user experience for internal intranet tools is more easier to make…

Enjoy the end year festivities and all the best for 2010. My motto for the coming year will be: “Humans For The Win!”

The Background

My friend Josh Baer is a serial entrepreneur, tech junkie, and aficionado of the social media channels. He enjoys the latest gadgets and technologies, from the fitbit to the Tesla. He’s also an angel investor in some 20 companies, and enjoys helping people with their startup ideas. Between his tweets, blogs, and public profiles, it’s really not hard to get to know his interests.

Recently Josh decided to sell two older pairs of Bose headphones. After they were listed on Facebook, he sent out a few tweets to generate interest in the headphones. The Twitter exchange:

Josh: is loving my first Hanukkah present from @amybaer, the new Bose QC-15 headphones.

Jotto: didn’t you just sell a pair?

Josh: That was @amybaer’s pair.

Jotto: I thought you might be trying to pull a fast one on us.

Josh: I’ve actually got a side business moving hot Bose headphones…

The Interest

Not long after the listing and the tweets, Josh sold one of the headphones for $165. And that’s when the call came from Bose security.

The fact that Bose cares about maintaining the integrity of their brand, and is monitoring the public social media channels puts the company in an elite group of companies that are keeping up with current technologies and consumer trends. So they’ve taken the first step, but that may not be enough.

Josh didn’t record the phone conversation, but wishes he did. The person on the phone identified themselves as the buyer of the headphones, and said that they were from Bose security. According to Josh, he was treated like a criminal. Why is he selling the headphones? Where did he buy them? Does he have the original receipt? Can he provide it to them?

He tried to reassure the Bose security representative that he wasn’t trafficking in stolen goods, and attempted to get him to see the humor in the situation, but was firm in his response that he has no burden of proof to Bose.

People, Process, and Technology

The reason I wanted to write about this here on the Collaboratory is because it’s a great example of how enterprises must focus on all three pillars in order to be successful.

Technology itself rarely solves business problems. Searching Twitter for keywords like “stolen” or “hot” and “Bose” produces a factoid and not much else.

The process appears pretty flawed. If the Bose representative had used a better process for investigating this issue, they could have saved $165 at the start, plus hundreds more in people’s time, overhead, and customer goodwill. A better process might take a more holistic view of the issue, looking at Josh’s bio, background, and the entire Twitter exchange between Josh and his friend. Given that context, a rational person would probably have moved on to the next case.

The people part of this equation is just as important. If you’re not familiar with the tools, not willing to do a little homework, and not very friendly when speaking with influential customers who are sneezers and routinely spend money on your newest and highest margin products, then maybe you’re in the wrong seat on the bus. When doing behavioral interviewing, are you looking for collaborative behavior, people who inherently share, and have emotional intelligence?

We’re happy to work with you as your business becomes more socially calibrated.

The project made use of Headshift’s existing framework for conducting extensive reviews of user behaviour, staff workflows and technical infrastructure, as described in the case study of a similar piece of work we did for the BBC.

The project included extensive research and analysis of existing customer community building activities already undertaken by the client, including:

• a thorough document gathering and review
• interviews with over a dozen members of staff, ranging from those engaged in day-to-day community management activities to senior stakeholders in a range of business areas
• observation of staff workflows
• interviews with current users
• analysis of usage data and creation of visualisations that help understand a range of user activities
• analysis of costs and cost reductions
• analysis of existing data collection, measurement, KPIs and analysis

We then conducted a gap analysis, comparing the insights gained in our qualitative and quantitative analysis with examples of best practice, documentation, research and other information gathered more widely.

The resulting output included a client specific handbook for building online communities (70+ pages) containing over twenty recommendations, various visualisations, sample documentation and more; around a dozen visual workflows; a high level executive report; and a community platform evaluation matrix with recommendations.

With regards to the community platform technical reviews, we found a number of recent studies that might be of interest:

• The Online Community Platform and Services Satisfaction Report
• Gartner, Inc’s 2009 Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace (free version)
• Forrester Wave Community Platforms (free version)
• ROI Found Here: Online Customer Service Communities (FASTForward Blog)

There’s also a useful tool, specifically for a quick and dirty comparison of discussion forum platforms, at http://www.forummatrix.org/

Our key recommendation, which combined both business strategy and technical considerations, was to move away from customer community building being a specialist activity undertaken solely by a small group of staff working in a silo of expertise, towards involving the whole company in both learning from customer engagements online and contributing, where practical and relevant, to customer focused community engagement activities.

Creating a customer community online is something that many consumer focused organisations are exploring or experimenting with. It’s important to have a comprehensive strategy in place to ensure that these efforts are sustainable, meet core business objectives, and effectively engage users.

If you’d like to learn more about how Headshift can help your business create and implement a best of breed customer community, have a look at our Quick Start packages or contact us.

This post originally appeared on the Headshift blog.

My question to him is “How come we’re not asking IT to change?”  Why is that we’re asking them to stay in their silo?  Isn’t that exactly what enterprise 2.0 is trying to eradicate?  If we’re look at the business side to be agile why are we not requiring the same from IT?  Why do we think that IT can not be flexible?

Well, I can only say that @thesiteman is completely right. What we would like to see is that the corporate IT department is as flexible and as agile as the business side. Why? For the fundamental reason that IT is there in the first place to ENABLE the business to do their job, preferably in a faster, cheaper and perhaps different way than without IT. That is a very important point that a lot of people seem to forget.

In defense of the corporate IT department

Taking in account one of the challenges that Social Business Design has identified, I still stand with my post:

New trends, no matter how revolutionary, must still overcome the limitations of the past before becoming fully adopted. In organizations, legacy systems and platforms, cultural elements, and governance requirements all work to limit the willingness to experiment and innovate. In order to meet these looming challenges, businesses need to fully understand the legacy structures in place within an organization and determine how to leverage these structures while implementing new processes to improve results.

So, while the ideal scenario is that the corporate IT department is very flexible and agile, the CIO has certain challenges to overcome first. Think about large legacy systems (e.g. old mainframes), multiple ERP instances across several business units (if you are lucky they are from the same vendor), a plethora of vendors and platforms, etc. One thing I want to emphasize again and again to frustrated business unit leaders: this is NOT because corporate IT department leads are not doing a good job. This situation happens naturally in almost every large global company that is the result of mergers and acquisitions and that is old enough to drag legacy systems with it. Knowing that there are often hundreds of man-years and tens of millions of investments in there, you are not talking about a greenfield scenario.

If you are the CIO of a large global company that suffers from the above scenario, you will consolidate the different core ERP systems, you will reduce platforms and you will define a uniform IT strategy that aligns all efforts, architecture and development. Not because that is so much fun (although I know people that utterly enjoy this), but you need to have these things figured out before you can fully support the business in their operations.

To give an example: if you are a large group company and each of the five business units have their own ERP system (not all the same vendor), how quickly do you think that you can get insight in what happens in the group? Most likely you’ll have to wait a couple of weeks to get the numbers from the previous quarter because they all need to run reports, align the results and consolidate it. In nowadays’ economy, what you really want is real-time integrated business intelligence. With a snap of your finger, you want to get insight in what happens now, not what happened 2 months ago.

Reconnecting Business with IT

Obviously, the show must go on. The company must bring new products to the market, the sales force must sell more and costs must be reduced. Since we can’t stop the operations of the company for three years, we need to find a temporary solution that allows gradual change of the IT landscape while keep on delivering value-added services to the business units.

In my previous post I have mainly focused on the reason why we should transform the IT department from a solutions provider to a solutions enabler, without going deeper in how we are going to reconnect the two. We need an approach for our IT and business architecture that allows evolutionary change in both the technical side of the organisation, as well as supporting changing culture and processes.

The way we are going to reconnect the business with the corporate IT department is a very well known problem pattern identified in the Russian problem solving thought framework TRIZ. Principle 24 tackles the problem where two surfaces are meeting with each other, causing an undesirable (or harmful) situation. TRIZ suggests introducing an intermediary material between the two surfaces. Think about shaving: you’re using shaving soap as an intermediary between your skin and the blades to smoothen the experience.

If we consider the business units as one surface and the corporate IT department as another surface, what will the intermediary material be?

Allowing gradual change

Besides breaking down internal silos, corporate networks must incorporate previously external nodes as contributing participants as well.  The technology required to support this network must operate as a platform delivering what is necessary and relevant for nodes to perform and progress towards business goals. (Social Business Design for Workforce Collaboration)

This platform, or the “intermediary material” as described in TRIZ, will be implemented along the principles of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The huge data silos that are present in the company contain a vast amount of data, together with the corresponding business logic for safeguarding data consistency. However, the problem is that we don’t get enough value out of these systems, so let’s open up these systems through services or APIs. The end-goal is of course to optimally support the business user in their daily work, so the user-centric applications (like an iPhone app, a customised SharePoint page, a widget in Jive SBS, …) will tap into the services or APIs from the back-end systems.

In order to keep this all a bit manageable, we will need to take care of the following:

• Gradually disconnect the user-facing applications from the back-end data silos and introduce a middleware layer that acts as the hub between the user-facing applications and the back-end data silos.
• Anticipate changing processes: using Business Process Management systems we can dynamically (re)configure processes between user-facing applications and back-end data silos
• Focus on identity management and security: you will need a smart identity management solution for Single-Sign On across all the applications and a strong security model to control access to your precious data services / APIs

The added benefit that this approach gives us, is the fact that we don’t need an overnight big bang implementation. By ensuring that there is no tight integration of user-facing applications, business processes and back-end data systems, we have now an IT landscape that allows gradual change in order to reach one day the much-desired “agile enterprise” that we are all dreaming of…

This post originally appeared on the Headshift blog.

Today we are announcing the hiring of our new CFO April Downing.

April brings a wealth of experience to our table in both public and private company accounting and finance as well as deep experience in mergers and acquisitions accounting and integration in high growth companies.  She is an accomplished executive and operator that brings dedication, tenacity, and focus to our efforts and has what it takes to be part of a killer team.

The release announcing April is here and the full text is included below.

We are looking forward to working with April as we push ahead into the coming year to help companies realize the potential of a more collaborative, connected, participatory and social mode of doing business in this networked economy.

SOURCE: Dachis Group

Dec 11, 2009 09:00 ET

Dachis Group Names April Downing Chief Financial Officer

Senior Executive Brings Public and Private Company Financial and Operational Leadership to Dachis Group

AUSTIN, TX–(Marketwire – December 11, 2009) – Dachis Group today announced that it has expanded its management team to include April Downing as the firm’s Chief Financial Officer. Downing brings more than 15 years of corporate finance, strategic planning and management experience to Dachis Group having served in high-growth public and private companies.

“April has a proven track record of delivering strategic planning and operational excellence in a dynamic and high-growth environment,” said Jeff Dachis, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Dachis Group. “Her experience with integrating acquisitions, raising financial capital, and managing growth in both public and private companies is well suited to the needs of our company. We are thrilled to have April join our team.”

Prior to joining Dachis Group, Downing was providing executive-level financial consulting to several companies launched from Austin Ventures’ Entrepreneur-in-Residence program. Before this, she was Chief Financial Officer for AlterPoint, Inc., a venture-backed network change and configuration management software company through the successful sale of the company to Versata, Inc., a global IT solutions provider.

Prior to AlterPoint, Downing was Chief Accounting Officer and acting Chief Financial Officer of Motive, Inc., a publicly traded provider of broadband management software with over $100 million in revenues. Over her six years at Motive, Downing served in several key financial roles at the company, including leading Investor Relations through the company’s IPO in 2004 which raised $50 million.

“The expansion of the management team to include someone of April’s caliber further solidifies the ability of Dachis Group to aggressively grow both organically and through acquisitions,” said Chris Pacitti, a general partner with Austin Ventures. “Dachis Group is uniquely positioned to be the leader in enabling large global enterprises to capture the value inherent in social technologies that are already becoming prevalent throughout their organizations.”

About April Downing

April is a seasoned financial and operational executive with over 15 years of working with publicly and privately held companies. Most recently, April has been providing executive-level financial consulting to several companies launched from Austin Ventures’ Entrepreneur-in-Residence program. Prior to that, she was the Chief Financial Officer for AlterPoint, Inc., a venture-backed network change and configuration management software company, through the successful sale of the company to Versata, Inc., a global IT solutions provider. Before AlterPoint, April was Chief Accounting Officer and acting CFO of Motive, Inc., a publicly traded provider of broadband management software with over $100 million in revenues. She began her career with Price Waterhouse’s Audit and Business Advisory Services, where she specialized in technology start-ups and early growth companies.

April is an Advisory Board Member for Women’s Sake (an organization focused on Career and Lifestyle Resources for Women) and has been recognized by Austin Business Journal as a ‘Profiles in Power’. Located in Austin, Texas, she was also nominated for Austin’s 2008 Best CFO Award.

April has a master’s degree in accounting from The University of Texas and is a certified public accountant.

About Dachis Group

Founded in 2008, by Jeffrey Dachis, Dachis Group is a professional services firm based in Austin, Texas, with offices in London and Sydney. Dachis Group (Dachis Corporation, Inc.) was created to unlock the value of social technologies for large corporate enterprises.

Dachis Group believes that the future of business lies in a socially calibrated, dynamic business culture that empowers all of its constituents to exchange value. Through a proprietary framework and methodology, and a network of technology alliance partners, Dachis Group helps businesses innovate to capture value through Social Business Design(SM).

Dachis Group delivers services through three main practice areas: Customer Participation and Engagement, Workforce Collaboration, and Business Partner Optimization.

Dachis Group serves global companies including: AXA, BBC, BP, Philips Healthcare, Coca-Cola, Intuit, Southern Company and Yum! Brands in industry verticals including: consumer products, media and publishing, health care, financial services, information services, software, and semiconductors.

The company’s strategy is backed by a commitment from Austin Ventures to build and grow organically and through acquisitions.

If you are interested in finding out how Dachis Group can help your business, contact: inquiries@dachisgroup.com or download our fact sheet and contact us.

For more resources: Stay on top of the most current thinking on Social Business Design and subscribe to our Collaboratory feed.

To learn more about Social Business Design, download our Social Business Design white paper free of charge.

Dachis Group is always looking for talented individuals and leaders, contact: opportunities@dachisgroup.com

One of our alliance partners, Socialware, has been tackling this issue with technology solutions, and starting today is offering free products. Social Marketer renders a new toolbar in the page that allows users to choose if their messages are public, or internal to the enterprise. Internal status updates will get search optimized and put into a unified stream, while personal ones may have different retention rules . Another product, Risk Manager, allows for rules-based moderation of tweets, posts, and updates.

Here is a screenshot (click it for a larger image) of the administration console for managing the social network traffic. It provides for some pretty interesting and granular control of which types of messages and events are allowed, disallowed, and moderated. You could, for instance, block Facebook chat and all the Facebook applications (which may typically be games) while encrypting or moderating status updates. A rule can be created that could moderate or block any message that contains something with the format of a social security number, or credit card number.

While all of this is taking place, all the message traffic is being retained and archived to support retention policies and regulatory requirements.

A comprehensive solution to the issue of managing the public social networks in the enterprise would address the people issues, contain process modifications, and utilize technology like Socialware. Considering that these are the places where employees already congregate, it makes sense to leverage them rather than attempting to drive adoption of look-a-like tools that could be run on-premise.

Socialware is providing an important piece of the puzzle that enables employees to use these new tools, while mitigating risk at the same time.