This weekend I finally succumb to the pressure from my two boys to build a tree house in the woods. We picked out three trees and headed to Home Depot to purchase the needed supplies; $200 and 12 hours later we had an almost functional tree house. What was missing you ask; the ladder. I was shooting for the basic step ladder but the boys wanted a rope ladder. Why? Because you can pull the ladder up into the tree house when girls come over. Ah, I should have seen that one coming based on the n ...
Another survey and another set of results that reveal another blinding flash of the obvious. We don't collaborate very well and the question that needs to be asked is did you need a survey to tell you that? What we might not understand is what exactly collaboration is and what it is not. Ask yourself or your manager if you collaborate with others? The problem with this question is that it is like you wife asking your if you like her new dress. There is only one safe and secure answer to ...
Company are using a form of information market systems to rank, rate, and select ideas. Our own group is implementing something similar and everyone knows about the corporate Patent program. Where do folks come up with these new ideas? Do they just come from out of the blue in a flash of lightning? Are new ideas really one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration? Well, here are a few ideas on how to generate new ideas.
First thing is obvious is to look for a problem that ...
What would happen if your company came into possession of thousands of Violins? Some of these violins were Stradivarius while others were worth $5 and could be bought off eBay. How would or should the company distribute the violins? How would you decide if you were in charge?
Should the violins be distributed based on positional power? The chairman and his direct reports get the Stradivarius while you and I get a box with strings attached? This seems fair based on our classic org ...
Over the past few months, I have had a couple of things taken from my desk here at AT&T. The first is loose change that I had sitting in a little cup. The funny thing was the trail of coins running down the hallway which I wondered if I followed would I find Hansel and Gretel sitting in some cube counting the stolen loot. As someone that usually over analyzes things, I wondered how much they could have taken if they pulled a Johnny Cash and took "One Piece at a Time":
"I'v ...
I still remember my mother telling me that if I get a college degree that my employment ticket would be checked. My grandfather reiterated the same thing as I was the first one in the family to attend and graduate college. For that generation, college was indeed a luxury and something special to celebrate. Companies were more than willing to pay extra for that knowledge and experience but something interesting happened along the way to the bank. Time and businesses didn't stand still for ...
Forrest Gump is widely recognized as a management guru; well sort of. One of the quotes attributed to Forrest is his ideas on business. "Don't own nothing rent your shoes if you have to". In other words, keep your costs to a minimum. Convert everything to a variable cost, outsource everything that you can, and focus on your competitive advantage. Outsource everything? Per John McEnroe, "You cannot be serious".
The answer is yes and no. You can't actually outsource everything si ...
Do you really exist? Will anyone remember you 100 years from now? I am reminded of this question based on my wife’s effort in reviewing our family tree last week. We purchased one of the family tree programs several years ago and she really worked hard to try to understand our roots. Unfortunately, my side of the family ends in South Georgia about 5 generations ago. This makes sense since record keeping wasn't a high priority during those days and especially for the rural south. On the ...
Well, it's that time of the year again when we are asked to update our performance documents for the first quarter. It's also the time I try to update my other career management documents. Like most people, this includes the classic two page resume. For the majority of my career, this was the manifesto for reviewing my progress. Then, two events changed my perspective and changed how I look at this difficult subject. The first was simply going to back to school with a bunch of academic f ...
Well, I have been working on this Visual Resume for about a month now. Each time I think I am done, I get a new idea and a new version is created. Here is the latest version which I really like how it look from an information perspective as well as a visual perspective.
One question that might be asked is why create a visual resume when you are not a graphic artist? For me the answer is that it forces you to look at your ...
I wanted to enhance the Visual Resume with a couple new items. The first is
an expansion for the Industry knowledge which is located in the middle and on
the left. Here you can see my expands both in depth and breath depending on the
number of years. The other is a calculation for Return on Resource Investment.
Here I take into a ...
I decided to update my Visual Resume and many others have in order to provide a more artistic view of my professional history. On the top is a tag cloud that list my experience, technical skills, research interests, and knowledge areas. The bottom section provides a historical view of my employment, education, publication, and other trademark components.< ...
In today's economic environment, you would think that getting fired or laid off is the absolute worse thing that could happen. While this may seem true in the short run, getting fired is, by definition, definitive. Getting fired leaves you with few options and it forces you to act. By acting, you may very well improve your situation and get into a better work environment; one that is more focused on your career goals.
No, the worse thing that can happen to you as an employee is get ...
Are you a firefighter or Smokey the Bear? More importantly, which does your organization value the most? A firefighter is someone that has a tremendous skill set and can come into a giant mess to solve the problems immediately. They can quickly diagnose the issues and get into the details in order to move the project forward. Firefighters are a great asset to have and I don't think you can survive in this world without them.
While it doesn't happen often, many firefighters allow ...
No, I am not talking about the brain numb appreciation that we get when our leadership tells a community of 2,500 people how much they appreciate everyone's commitment and dedication. All the while, you glance over at Joe who is the epitome of the walking dead. No, what I am talking about is the real, personalized and heart felt appreciation that was, not just popular, but part of the business culture years ago. So, I'll ask the questions that need to be asked:
- When was the l ...
Not sure why I like this show but it has my attention every Monday night. American Pickers comes on the History channel and is basically a show of a couple of guys looking for antiques in piles and piles of junk. Anything that they can sell, they buy, from old bikes to metal advertising signs. The best shows seem to center around the guys digging through 10 feet of rubble or cutting back kudzu to find that special item. Their ability to spot something of value in a large pile of junk is n ...
A few years ago, I read that the number one trait that a CEO looks for in their executives is discretion. Basically, the ability to keep secrets is a critical skill that is required in the executive ranks. You don't hear much about this and you certainly don't see any training classes on the topic. Some secrets are famous like the seven herbs and spices used by KFC. Perhaps the most famous one for those of us in Atlanta is the formula for Coca-Cola. Since, I am not in management and ther ...
Conforming is something we do everyday because it makes life easier. Some symbols of conformity are funny when we think about them like the white shirt only dress code at IBM. Conformity is fairly easy to teach to the masses of employees. In some cases we just hand out a manual or send folks to an online training class. Conformity is easy to measure and test for success. Take it from someone that sometimes fails to take the required training in the required time frame and routinely shows ...
It’s that time of the year where you reflect on your past accomplishments and look toward the New Year for professional growth. Google is now a verb so I have to ask have you Googled yourself lately? What does it mean if you do and nothing comes up in the results? Well, that indicates that you have spent a career focusing inside the walls of the corporation for your career development. That strategy was fine in the 70's, 80's and 90's but your falling behind if you try that in today's envi ...
By now, I am sure you have heard of that insult "Don’t be a tool". This odd phrase has seems to have found its way into our lexicon and pop culture over the past few years. Allow me to take you back to 2001 where my wife and I were on vacation in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. I remember sneaking out of the house to get in a quick 18 holes at the par three course across the street. I soon caught up with a couple of college kids who seemed to be having a real good time. I am sure the cooler ...
You have probably heard of folks using the term "ties" to describe the strength of a relationship between two people. A strong tie indicates someone that is close to you while a weak relationship is one more of an acquaintance. Of course, there is a mountain of grey between those two descriptions. For example, there are people that sit next to me in "Cubeville" that I have strong ties with. These are not as strong as the ties I had earlier in my career when I worked in close proximity to w ...
SharePoint Design Gallery is a Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 site dedicated to bringing you the information on how organizations are actually utilizing collaborative technologies in the creation of business value. Like you, I want to see and understand how this technology is impacting the bottom line of the business. My original plan was to showcase about 100 sites but we are well past that and by the end of the month we should have around 250 in the inventory. Specifically, I want to focus on orga ...
| A1-Webmarks(Q-Success) - Book Marking | Advanced Electron Forum (Open Source) - Forums | ||
| Affinity Circles(Affinity Circles) - Social Networks | Akiva (Akiva Corporation) - Social Software | ||
| AOL Instan ...
Make no mistake that I am an over the top advocate for the customer within the enterprise. I developed these skills and attitude during the early nineties where I read every book on Customer Service and studied the success of great companies like Disney and Nordstrom's. I knew that this knowledge and mentality would play well inside the corporation. We repeatedly got comments like "you guys are a breath of fresh air" and "you can't be from IT?". So it shouldn't come as a surprise that I a ... One evening while on vacation we stopped by a small restaurant where we were greeted by the owner. After a couple of minutes, he actually guided us to our table and served us our drinks. I also witnessed him delivering the plates, cleaning tables, and filling glasses. Here was a man willing to do anything to help his business; he had passion. In another example, I went to buy my 3-day fishing license and the owner came out and told me which bait was working the best and how far out folks ... Last week, we took our annual trip to the beach where we usually end up patronizing small businesses. Small towns, especially beach towns, promote small business to drive the local economy. This trip I took special notice of some of the elements that make these businesses so special and then asked myself, could these apply to an Enterprise 2.0 implementation. Over the next few days or weeks, I want to summarize these observations and how we have handled these for our implementation. < ...I asked this question yesterday to a working sub-group of Enterprise 2.0 experts. I thought it might be a good idea to expand this to a much broader audience. We have seen that Collaboration tools have an easier time being implemented in large enterprises. You see this by the huge success of Microsoft's Sharepoint over the last few years. Assuming an organization has moved up the collaborative maturity ladder, does that make it easier for Social Software products to be implemented? Or, wo ... I was reviewing my personal branding activities for the first half of 2009 and began to ask myself if my Twitter activity has killed my other marketing efforts. If so, what impact does this have on my overall brand? Since the early 2000's, I have been very active in publishing; from a monthly column to academic books, I focused my time on sharing my knowledge. Twitter is a Micro-Blog where people share their thought in short message which are limited to 140 characters. Not sure w ... My Enterprise 2.0 implementation isn't as successful as I thought it would be? I hear that statement quite a bit these days where vendors present this nirvana like vision of an open organization where information freely flows from every individual. The idea of simply loading some hardware with a collection of Web 2.0 tools and value emerges is simply a pipe dream. Implementing Enterprise 2.0 takes energy and an enormous commitment from everyone involved. So how long does it take to become ... I wanted to write you a note, not of appreciation but of concern for the future of the organization. Not sure if you have noticed but the business environment has changed dramatically over the past year or so. I am feeling some of the most unprecedented market pressures that have come my way in decades. We need to increase our levels of innovation while at the same time reducing the costs from the operational units. We expect change, invite change, and need new paradigms in order to not ... Like the vision of that perfect mate, we all have this ideal vision of Enterprise 2.0. We take the best perceptions of success and imagine our organization fitting into that mold exactly. We see some 2.0 CEO flying in and laying the foundation of Enterprise 2.0 at our feet. Information Technology delivers the perfect collection of Web 2.0 tools and places them at our finger tips where business value has been waiting for years to emerge. It reminds me of the Christmas Story, where the litt ... Well, the assertions keep coming from a wide variety of well known Enterprise 2.0 experts on the subject that Sharepoint is not Enterprise 2.0. So I thought I would take the time to debunk another one of the common complaints. Sharepoint forces the user to enter the data into a format specified by the system versus allowing the freedom of format as most Enterprise 2.0 tools. On the surface, this seems reasonable criticism, if it were only true. Let's do the ... This post is a rebuttal, of sort, to the enormous Sharepoint bashing that has taken place over the past few weeks within the blog and twitter communities. Thomas Vandar Wal's post on Sharepoint 2007: Gateway Drug to Enterprise 2.0 was of particular interest because he actually took the time to put some thought into his comments. While we are not joined at the hip in agreement, ... Over the past week or so, there has been a lot of bashing Sharepoint by the Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 crowd. Now, let's be fair and say that Microsoft does try to brand Sharepoint as an Enterprise 2.0 tool so perhaps the criticism is fair from that point of view. However, comparing Sharepoint to other Web 2.0 applications is like comparing apples and oranges. If you were to break apart Sharepoint and pull out the Wiki solution and then run a comparison to Confluence, Social Text, or other w ... Nice list of key attitudes for Enterprise 2.0 by Kate Carruthers which were compiled via her conversations during the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum. http://katecarruthers.com/blog/2009/03/key-attitudes-for-enterprise-20-success/ If Kate will allow, I’ll add a few of my own attitudes from the bottom of the enterprise versus the top (i.e. Executive Point of View). 6. Ta ... By now, most Enterprise 2.0 experts have seen the McKinsey Report that focused on the six ways to make Web 2.0 work. The part I like most about the report is that the researchers actually asked the practitioners what was working instead of looking for the "experts" in the field. Here are the six main points. 1. The Transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top. It is rare to actually have the time to troll around the web looking for items of interest. My first stop was to Susan Scrupski's blog to see what she is writing about. Her slides on Enterprise 2.0 caught my attention. Here is the quote from the 5th slide: Microsoft is IT's BFF. Just deal with it. Microsoft will continue to play in the starring role of the 800-lb gorilla in the corporate corridors of IT power. And, sadly, IT still ha ... Ok, call me old fashion or just out of touch but idea of conference attendees doing Twitter during the session is annoying at best. As a speaker, I would consider this rude behavior that basically says that my opinion is more important than what the speaker is actually saying. This weekend, I attended the SoCon09 Conference where this behavior was not only normal but expected. This lady sitting two seats over was hitting her keyboard so hard that it was distracting to those sitting around ... Yesterday's presentation to the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) went fairly well considering I wasn't feeling up to par. The group was a bit older than I expected from a Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 perspective. Also, not as many job hunters as I would have expected especially since TAG is a great networking opportunity. Only a couple of folks mentioned they were between jobs. There were many consultant types there pitching their wares which is fine and I did get a chuckle out of one ... Kevin Kelly has authored a wonderful Web Book Download over on Changethis.com that discusses how you can create value in a world where everything is free. The basic idea is that with the Internet, the distribution cost of information and many other products have fallen to zero. So how can you stand out and create value? Mr. Kelly points out eight simple ideas. 1. Immediacy: Your ability to deliver products and services faster ... Many organizations are now deploying collaborative and social software as an enterprise solution. There is tremendous overlap between the different technologies as more and more vendors emerge with solutions (i.e. IBM, Microsoft, etc.). While these technologies have been out for several years now, we only have a few success stories to learn from. Organizations like Intel, CIA, and Dell have published their success stories but few others have emerged to share their lessons learned. Part of ... Ok, here is a 2009 question for all of those Enterprise 2.0 employees. Which is better for your career, to blog inside your company or outside? Many people would respond to say that you should do both but let's face reality, most of us don't have enough time to do both. Last year, I tried to do both but the majority of the time I found myself copying entries and repeating what I said. Other times, the thought or comment had a little too much inside information to be used on this blog (ext ... Haven't blogged much lately for no real reason other than pure laziness. The two book chapters came out last month which is the last thing I had in the queue for 2008. I think I'll remember 2008 as my failing to keep up with Social Computing outside of work. I did a good job with LinkedIn but pretty much failed in everything else. Lack of time, more kid activities, and the job got busier are all good excuses but excuses none the less. I would make a new year's resolution to do better but ... It is no secret that the world of business is changing. Even prior to the Sub-Prime debacle, the world of business was going though some dramatic changes. I heard on the news that 80% of new jobs come from small business and roughly 70% of the workforce in now employed in small businesses. If you add in the unemployed (6.7% - 11%, depending on how you measure it) and government workers, that doesn't leave you much room for those of us working in large organizations. And, seeing what is ha ... What is the value of information? Many would say the most valuable information is accurate information that is delivered at the exact moment when it’s needed. I might argue that knowing the current traffic environment is the most critical information that I need on my drive home. Waiting 10-15 minutes for the next report could put me in a traffic jam that could have been easily avoided. Or, what would be the value of knowing that the dog that attacked my son over the weekend was aggressiv ... Why do people cut you off in traffic? Why would these same people never do it standing in line at your local Wal-Mart? Perhaps the exception to this is the man that punched a teenager this week after she accused him of cutting in line at McDonalds. That being said, most people are civil and obey the unwritten rules of our society. That is, until they can become anonymous where many people change over to Mr. Hyde. This past week, the southeast saw what it would be like to live in a world ... We can sometimes get lost in our "communications" world where there are only 2-3 competitors or the belief that the battles of today are all bi-polar; Microsoft vs. Apple or Democrat versus Republican. The reality is something much different in that we have endless choices. When I was in my early teens, my grandfather would take me down to the Grocery Store in Midville, GA (Think Mayberry, R.F.D.). Grocery store may be a stretch by today's standards in that the store wasn't much bigger tha ... People are always asking for the business value in social media but few seem to ask about the consumer value of social media. Last summer, we had an interesting story emerge from the UK. It has been a long standing bank tradition to offer interest free overdraft protection for college student up to two years past graduation. The protection was limited to around 2,000 pounds. In July, the HSBC bank announced that they would no longer honor the policy and would discontinue the program by Au ... What is a professional? Well, if we use sports as an analogy then a professional is someone like Tiger Woods or Phil Mickelson who get paid for being in the top of their field. Interestingly, Chris Wood who is an amateur placed fifth in this years British Open. Simply put, if you get paid to play then you are a professional. Another definition might be one of certification or a degreed professional. We consider Pharmacists and Medical Doctors professionals because they are licensed by so ... Several readers of this blog have pointed out that I left off the Customer off as a value-add component from my Enterprise 2.0 Blueprint. At first, I was resistant to change it since we are talking about Enterprise 2.0 and not Web 2.0. I don't consider companies deploying Web 2.0 technologies to interface with their customers as part of the Enterprise 2.0 equation. However, this is where my mistake is getting clearer. The purpose of the employee, organization, and business is to serve the ... There is a dark side to Web 2.0 technologies. Like its predecessor Web 1.0, this technology transformation will alter the fabric of how business gets done. I was watching the Antique Road Show last week and one of the hosts made an interesting comment about the web. He basically said that the internet has destroyed the antique business with price transparency. Prices had eroded with the sites like eBay entering into the market. The example item was a poster which was once thought as extr ... It was 1973 and I had just got my Evil Knievel jump cycle; the one where you wind the crank, hit the release and watch Evil speed down the hallway toward the makeshift ramp. Soon the sun was up and I wandered past my 3 Speed bike (with banana seat) and the idea hit me. Evil plus Bike plus Towel for a Cape equals Really Cool and I envisioned myself jumping the creek behind our house. It all seemed easy enough; pile up some dirt, get a running start and glory was mine for the taking. I woul ... Recently, the Wall Street Journal published an article on why online communities fail. The author, Ben Wortham, quotes a study done by Deloitte on 100 companies that have attempted to build online communities. The research pointed out that around 35% of the companies reviewed had less than 100 members and 25% had fewer than a thousand members. What isn't clear is if these numbers only represented the nu ... Last week, AT&T announced that they are going to move the corporate headquarters from San Antonio to Dallas, TX. This seems like it would be big news; a fortune 10 company moving to a new location. Can you imagine Ford moving his Green River plant to Oklahoma or Mr. Walton moving from Bentonville, AR.? Yet, the AT&T move barely made it to the AP. Why? First, we don't really have "workplaces" anymore. They have been replaced by "workspaces". Does it really matter that the perso ... Dr. Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for developing his Micro-Lending practice and the creation of the Grameen Bank. The idea is fairy simply in that his company would setup an environment where extremely poor people would be able to get small loans in order to create businesses. He talked to 42 impoverished women from a nearby village and found that they were all hardworking people who were paying outrageous fees to suppliers because they could not pay in cash. Dr. Yunus found ... I have to admit that I am more of a visual person. I like to see all of the pieces put together in order to get an idea of what I am looking at and how I might be able to utilize it. After a couple of weeks, I put this model together to pull together the various pieces of the Enterprise 2.0 puzzle.
Yesterday, I took my list of barriers and provided a few examples in each area. I have added a few more and switched things around a tad. More importantly, I asked myself what is the impact of the barriers on the eventual success of the implementation. 
Clearly, nothing
much is going to happen until you get the infrastructure in place but the impact
of overcoming the techno ...
Here are a few barriers and issues related to Enterprise 2.0 adoption. Awareness: Basic knowledge of the existence, availability, and reliability
I have a theory about deploying Web 2.0 applications within the enterprise. I’ll call it a theory simply because I can only prove half of it. Suppose we have the time, money, and resources to put up five implementations at once, each with a different software solution. Let's say we are going to deploy an enterprise wiki and we pick Social Text, Confluence, PBWiki, and two others. The software is the only variable in the mix which means that the amount of training and education are the sam ... Interesting article in this month's issue of Fast Company. The article spotlights a new Web 2.0 company called Ning that is run by Gina Bianchini with Chairman Marc Andreesen (Netscape Fame). The article describes an interesting concept called Viral Expansion Loop which basically attempts to define the process that happens when you see viral growth in a social ap ... I must have got up in a bad mood today thinking this thought. I hear and read that executives are concerned that if organizations deploy Enterprise 2.0 that employees will spend too much time doing non-business value-add things. Things like sharing information, providing best practices, or collaborating with someone in another organization. Now, how much time could you possible waste on these awful activities, 15 or 30 minutes per day? Yet these same managers or executives have no issue w ... Recently, I joined a Board of Directors for a small organization with about 5 million in sales. We had our second meeting where we were reviewing the business model and one of the other people on the team, who owns several businesses, made an interesting comment. When you add business (think value chain) to an inefficient system you will kill it but when you add business an efficient system then you will drive profits The basic idea resembles the McDonalds m ... In the latest issue of KMWorld, Hugh McKellar references some work done by Gartner where they identify five major challenges for deploying Web 2.0 within the enterprise. 1. Overcoming Cultural Barriers Not sure that I would disa ... Wanted to mention the Enterprise Information Management Conference held in Toronto, Canada. Wilshire Conferences and DAMA International are proud to announce their first Enterprise Information Management Conference to be held in Toronto, Canada. The program will focus on EIM as an emerging discipline for tying together all of the enterprise’s information assets and applications. I will be providing the Keynote Address as well as a Wor ... Palladium is offering a discount to the conference that I will speaking to in May. One day will be dedicated to Enterprise 2.0. Exclusive Discount Recently, CIO magazine published an article on Collaborative and Social Software. One comment made me think a new was that 80% of implementations fail. I think I am going to disagree with that statement by adding my experience. Only about 40% of actual implementations fail but an astonishing 95% fail to succeed. As I have commented before, there is a big difference between not failing and succeeding. That being said, why does this happen? We in Information Technology have over 30-40 yea ... Watching the news coverage last night of the election, I was intrigued by one particular segment that talked about how, despite unemployment and interest rates being historically low, we seem to be concerned with the economy. The analyst provided many other economics components that when put into historical perspective are quite good. Yet, we all feel like it's the "worse economy in 10 years". So what's going on? While conservatives might blame the panic inducing media, I think something ... Putting together some slides some slides for an upcoming conference, I started to put some thought into the elusive Business Value of Enterprise 2.0. After doing this for the past 4 years, locating examples of business value isn’t really that hard, especially when you have 30,000 case studies to pull from. That being said, I am reminded that not every implementation has that type of history or luxury. Breaking down this concept into two different perspectives, business value can be measure ... Well, it’s the first of the year and now is an excellent time to review your Enterprise 2.0 strategy. If 2007 was your first year implementing then your metrics might not be the best place to start but the questions remain. What are your growth rates for the year? On your blog, how many people posted once a month? How many people posted once or twice and lost interest? What was the page view analysis? Now is a great time to review and analyze your performance in Enterprise 2.0. Once yo ... Not sure why but I found myself in the mail room yesterday and took notice of couple of things. The first was the fax machine and the other was the mail drop. It doesn’t seem that long ago when these two objects were the most used items in communication. Today, both are all but dead now. Email, mobile devices, and the Intranet have replaced these and many others, including the desk phone. Now one has to wonder if the next generation will render these tools as obsolete. Maybe it won’t be ... I read an article over the Holidays that stated that 70% of the people surveyed indicated that they only use 15-20% of their skills in the current role. I believe there is more truth in this result than many people, especially in leadership positions, would admit. First, think of the employee of today. Most Information Technology professionals that I know have an MBA, business experience or actually operate a side business. Therefore, they have a foundational understanding of accounting, ... Does the metadata organization collaborate with the data steward group? Does the data architecture team collaborate with the operations team? Does the data quality team collaborate with the end-user community? Clearly, these are unfair questions because no one in their right mind would actually admit to not collaborating. Unfortunately, much of what we call collaboration really isn’t. If we are not collaborating, then what are we doing? Well, we might be communicating, cooperating or coordina ... The end of the year is always an excellent time to review your success and setbacks during the year. From a Enterprise 2.0 implementation standpoint, we did an excellent job and the numbers speak for themselves. Our collaborative team and intranet environment expanded to 28,000 sites. The social software emerged as one of the favorite communication mediums where the wiki pages exceeded 2,500 and we had over 200 blogs. All of this was accomplished in just over 6 months while the company we ... IBM has published an interesting newsletter focusing on the business landscape for blogging. The article discusses the impact blogging has and reality that Social Software is part of our life and a leading source of information. Ed Brill who runs one of the most popular blogs talks about “being able to have an intimate, one-to-one relationship with thousands of customers who buy/deploy/manage the product I sell is immensely rewarding. I’ve been able to win business, save business, and affec ... A few weeks ago, we posted the concepts around a blogging strategy. What I didn’t include was the ideas around “How” to blog, so here are 10 tips that help me. 1. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Writing a blog is like having a conversation, you don’t have to over analyze your thoughts. If you have a tip on Sharepoint then just write it up. If you have an interesting article idea then jot down and post. If you want to complain about the chicken in the salad then wr ... Here are a few ideas for internal organizations thinking about blogging on the Corporate Intranet Blog Entrance and Exit Strategy Entrance Strategy The one thing I learned last week in New York City is that you do not cross the Hudson River unless your horn works. The horn is basically an indicator that I am going to go through that intersection regardless if you are standing there or not. I will also say that every New Yorker we talked to was kind and considerate to us. I had the opportunity to address a group of technologists on the merits of moving toward Enterprise 2.0 on a personal, organizational, and enterprise level. ... Ok, who or what in New York City hit the preverbal home run when it comes to the customer experience. Well, let’s start with those places that stuck out. First, our hotel was over priced and the essence of customer service was poor at best. They claimed to have free wireless connections in every room. The service never worked and only worked for about 30 minutes in the conference area. Inside the room, everything screamed that the customer should come last. Open the fridge and you get c ... This months, the Harvard Business Review published an excellent article discussing the right conditions where collaboration can flourish. In large organizations, where the workforce is distributed, there are certain elements that need to be in place to foster collaborative type communications. Members of complex teams are less likely – absent other influences – to share knowledge freely, to learn from one another, to shift workloads flexibly to break unexpected bottlenecks, ... There is axiom that states that if you connect customers then you connect them to your brand. This indicates that if you provide the means by which customers can get together and share information, knowledge, and best practices with each other, then they will repay you with brand loyalty. This would apply to both the consumers of the products/services as well as the producer; producer indicating our business partners. The availability of easy to deploy Web 2.0 tools, it’s hard to imagine a ... Regardless of your position, role, responsibility, there is one thing that you can be sure of in our environment. You are part of one or more business models within the enterprise. The bottom line is that all of us provide some form of service to either outside entities or internal customers. Take a look at the following model and see how many of the boxes you can fill in with your own model.
One of the topics that really doesn’t get much discussion are the concepts of marketing and branding within the Enterprise 2.0 space. I don’t really want to spend time on dwelling on the basic definitions or utility of this type of effort. I would rather just provide a simple collection of our activities we do to constantly communicate to the enterprise that we are here and ready to service your Collaborative and Social Software needs. 1. Post communications to the Enterprise Weblog ... I am still stuck on the differences between Communication, Coordination, Cooperation and Collaboration. I need an analogy to use to demonstrate what it means when two disparate teams actually collaborate together. Imagine Main Street in some little town in North Carolina. On one side of the street is Johnson and Son’s Fine Bakery and on the other side of the street is Marilyn’s Cakes and Treats. Up until now, they have co-existed in peaceful harmony. But look out, the city council is goi ... What do the following companies have in common: IBM, Levis Strauss, Kodak, Zenith, Firestone, Timex, Nestle, US Steel, Polaroid, and Sears? Answer: they all owned or lead their industries during my generation. Take IBM, many people will say they got lazy or egocentric but the reality is that they focused their attention on the wrong enemy. The leadership assumed that their competition would come from a direct attack by someone offering a better, much improved, and faster mainframe. Yet, it ... Last year I put in for the Enterprise 2.0 conference to discuss the importance of implementation success. Our session was not chosen and in many ways I was ok with that. We only had 10,000 Collaborative environments and limited entry into Social Software. That has changed over the past 12 months as I have shared here in the blog on several occasions. Needless to say, I tossed my name in the hat again for next year. I hope they bring in more practitioners next year. While I enjoy ... Trademark 2.0 makes it to Amazon Rank 127,000. Ok that’s nothing to brag about but out of 4 million books available that’s not all that bad. Here is a nice comment left on LuLu.com for the book. I really enjoyed reading Trademark 2.0. The author used examples throughout the book that perfectly illustrated his points. Some o ... If I were to ever leave AT&T and start a consultant company, one of my first questions to executive management would be to ask “Do you really want to succeed in the Collaboration and Social Software Area?” Ok, I wouldn’t last very long in the consultant business by asking real world questions but when has reality ever come into play. At some point, you will be faced with this question. For example, many programs will start with some left over equipment and open source software. Other grou ... I am making my Web 2.0 overview available online at http://ww.rtodd.com. Chapter three (Trademark 2.0) focused on reviewing the impact of Web 2.0 to our business, organizational, and personal lives. The chapter takes an in-depth review of the technologies and social requirements in order to deliver value t ... When we think of traditional manufacturing, we think of huge capital investments where profit can only be obtained with mass volumes of production. The obvious products are things like the automobile, clothing, and book publishing. In fact, I was chatting with a friend of mine that owns a plastic form company and he indicated that my not so brilliant idea would cost me $250,000 just to get setup. Then, another $100,000 in production costs before attempting to sell the first product. Nothing n ... Clearly, that really isn’t a fair statement since no one in thier right mind would actually admit to not collaborating. Unfortunately, much of what we call collaboration really isn’t. If we are not collaborating, then what are we doing? Well, we could be communicating, cooperating, and coordinating. Communication is simply the transfer or attempt to transfer information from one party to another. Communication may be the attempt to make sense of confusing data or mixed messages th ... Here are the chapter highlights for Trademark 2.0 which is now available on Amazon.com.
Yesterday, we had one of the major vendor’s stop by for an hour overview of his new products. We talked about how we service so many customers with only a few resources. He commented that we could encourage more people to call his organization for help when needed. I tried to explain that would be the worst thing we could do since that would not enable any kind of reuse. While in the short run we could reduce a small percentage of the work, this would not work in the long run. Why? We h ... Folks might be wondering why I haven’t posted as much over the past few weeks as I did in the prior months. Perhaps, I have run out of things to say about Collaboration, Sharepoint, or Social Software. Well, that clearly isn’t the case but I do have a good reason: work. We must have hit a tipping point inside the company and demand has sky rocketed. Our team is working 12 hours a day just to try to keep up with the enormous demand for our products and services. Our collaborative sites ha ... Interesting article in the current issue of Information Week asking Where are the CIO's? The author reviewed 12 corporations and only 5 had the CIO listed as one of the top executives in the corporation. Only 42% of the Fortune companies have an Information Officer? Ok, that's not fair and clearly not a scientific research study. Still, one has to ponder the implications. Didn't Read More So you are deploying a collaborative solution (Sharepoint) or rolling out Social Software, what skills would you look for? What skills would you need in the client-support which is the fundamentally difference between success and failure? Here are my three: First and foremost is Customer Service skills. You must, repeat must be able to handle a wide variety of customers and interactions. From the CEO to the call center employee, you must be able to communicate the ... Here is my conference overview session fro Web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise. While this session will focus on the Data Professional, the majority of information could be applied to any technology profession. Conference: Metadata Symposium Session Overview ... After my fifth phone call and email on this topic, I think it’s time to create an informative post on a confusing topic. Can Sharepoint and Social Software exist in the same environment or must you choose one or the other. The first step in answering this question is to layout a framework for the components of Enterprise 2.0 and see how Sharepoint matches up. Using Dion Hinchcliff’s model as a guide here are the basic components. The ... It’s hard to put into words the excitement to see “Collaboration 2.0” included in Dion Hinchcliff’s Mid-Year review of Enterprise 2.0. Focusing on the internal facing and social aspects Hinchcliff's model which includes wikis, blogs, tagging, professional profiles, prediction markets, social IT, collective intelligence and Collaboration 2.0. What thrills me is that this is an exact replica of the strategy we have in place with the exce ... Imagine a spectrum where on one end is social software and the other is the Intranet. The social software is a centralized service that acts as a many-to-many communication medium. Centralized in the sense that all of the weblogs, wikis, and other components sit within single environment. The Intranet, on the other hand, is a one-to-many communication medium that is decentralized where every business unit or group has their own server. Since the service is decentralized, there will be a w ... When I was putting together the Top 25 Enterprise 2.0 Weblogs, I ran across an interesting entry from Jim Kukral. He took the top Marketing blogs and created a cross matrix with 12 components including: Here are the top 25 Weblogs (blogs) as ranked by Technorati. The members of the list had to be classified as Enterprise 2.0 which may indicate the obvious absence of those blogs that we all consider to be the actual top hitters like Andrew McAfee, Collaboration Loop, Don Tapscott and Dion Hinchcliffe. Interesting that some shouldn't even belong in the list but it is what it is. Where is Collaborage? Not too far out with a ranking of 36. Is there a better way to locate the top 25 E ... Last week an “Enterprise 2.0” consultant called to chat about what he could to for me and my enterprise. I don’t really think he did his homework to know who he was talking to but I enjoyed his 15 minute overview of Web 2.0 within the organizational context. This consultant assumed that I would be impressed that they had spoken on the topic and even had one of the 75 million weblogs. Finally, after allowing this conversation to slow, I asked the most important question you can ask of your ... I had the opportunity to speak to a C-level executive at another company about Collaborative Solutions and in particular, Sharepoint. For two years, his IT experts were telling him that Sharepoint didn’t scale, wasn’t reliable, extensible, or manageable. Reluctantly, they did setup an environment but Client-Support was non-existence and collaboration wasn’t supported or encouraged. The IT group finally informed the executive that they needed to buy a collaborative tool which they did imple ... As you can tell, Collaborage went under the knife over the week to get a new look and feel. Since Web 2.0 is the perpetual beta environment, it makes sense to rebuilt my weblog every now and then. Anyway, I was looking for an interesting photo to ack as a lead and noticed an interesting use of social tagging on iStockPhoto. Seems that people that upload photos have the ability to set the initial tags for the item. This could be a librarian that actually does this function. As you browse ... The Economist Intelligence Unit has released a report entitled “Serious Business: Web 2.0 goes Corporate”. The research polled 406 senior executives from around the world on the impact of Web 2.0 on their businesses. According to the survey: In fact, according to our survey, 31% of companies think that use of the web as a platform for sharing and collaboratio ... This is the second post in a series focusing on how to get the message out to the user community. This channel focuses on how to educate people on the collaborative solution or offering. Here is a link to the first post focusing on the technology channels. Brown Bags The first review of "Trademark 2.0: Defining Your value in a Web 2.0 World" has come in and it's not bad at all. Thanks to Daragh O'Brien for his kind comments. He has recently published a book that sets out a recipe for establishing your personal brand (he uses the term trademark for a variety of reasons). Part of his thesis is that the collaborative tools of Web2.0 (the Read/Write Web as it is often called). What sets this book apa ... Wow, this look interesting. A Web 2.0 Bootcamp focusing on 7 major patterns of Web 2.0 applications, the structure and business models of Web 2.0, and how Web 2.0 concepts are applied directly to the design and development of online products and services. Business model coverage includes The Long Tail, crowdsourcing, Data as the Next “Intel Inside”, community ecosystems, and other proven ways of using strategic Web 2.0 approaches for commercial success, market leadership, and competitive dis ... As mentioned in earlier posts that awareness and education are two of the most important hurdles to overcome when deploying Collaborative Software in the enterprise. This weblog entry is the first of four entries on ways that you can communicate your offering and value via channels: Technology Channel, Education Channel, Communication Channel, and Other Channels. Let’s start with the technology channels since that is one of the easiest ones to do. We will assume that we have developed a sin ... Created a New Group under the Magnolia web site in order to share Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 websites. Feel free to Join and add links that you know about in this space. I'll try to add them as I come across them as well. Need to claim the blog on Technorati by posting a weblog post. With apologies to David Coverdale, “Here I go again”. The problem with organizations today is that they are built upon vertical, top down hierarchal structures. This may make it easier to merge large organizations but can create havoc in building long term business value in the 21st century. Yes, top down direction is still important but we also must consider “enabling and motivating self-directed, thinking-intensive, professionals and managers” to work with each other horizontally and dia ... One of the things that seems to undisputable is that the productivity of the enterprise continues to increase year by year. The basic reason for this is the reduction of interaction and transaction costs within different organizations. Nobel Prize economist Ronald Coase is the first economist of any consequence who has anything useful to say about information economics. Coase studied why organizations are formed, what guides their growth and what leads to their demise. He observed that com ... According to the US Department of Labor, we will need to retrain 75% of the workforce in new technology and new methods of doing business. 80% of all jobs will require some form of post secondary education by 2015. The time of abundant resources is gone and most companies have to look overseas to locate educated, productive, and available resources. We are not prepared to grow our companies unless we turn the tide of Executive MBA educations which may take us to a more efficient but irrelev ...
First, email is a one-to-one communication medium. Even if you include several people in the email then it’s still a one-to-few communication medium. Collaboration is a many ... How are you going to run your Social Software program; as a cost center or a revenue generating program? No, you can’t cop out and say both. At the end of the day, you need to pick on or the other. If you choose cost center then you need to focus your energy on constraining the program. Management is about containment, so running as a cost center makes a lot of sense. You can cut down on the software and choose the lowest cost provider. You can purchase the lowest cost infrastructure an ... Last month, I posted a quote from Eric Shinseki “"If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less" which sums up the basic message of Enterprise 2.0. The one thing I forgot to do is to introduce myself; I am change. I am change. I work for you, with you, and along side of you. I am your partner and competitor. I am an opportunity and a threat. I am a Lion and you are the Gazelle. I will not come at you straight ahead and announce my arrival with an executive ... There are many examples of organizations that have been completely transformed themselves over the past few years; none as much as the photography industry. Just about every component of the ecosystem has been transformed or been reinvented. Not only has the technology changed but our behavior and habits have been transformed. Take the camera; once you loaded film inside and could take 20 pictures in hopes for a good one. Now, you can take hundreds of pictures and simply delete the ones y ... We have two paths of organization and corporate strategy in our world and they rarely seem to co-exist. You innovate, create, and destroy your old business before anyone else can. This will force you to think outside of the box and realize that success is fleeting. It took decades to build up a manufacturing plant and enable capacity. However, today your business can be re-engineered in a matter of days. Other organizations focus on standardization, creating incremental improvements, and ... Will Enterprise 2.0 do more harm than good? The obvious answer is no but management has a way of screwing things up. With the advancements in technology and a little elbow grease, we are now able to deliver executive dashboards with up to the minute information on sales, ordering, status, etc. In fact, we push and push to reduce the latency of the information just for this reason. We will spend millions of dollars to reinvent business process just so we can see an up to the second picture ...
Since your organization is rolling out Social Software, now is the time to ...
That’s a good question that many of us are afraid or unable to answer. That being said, I’ll propose one methodology for analyzing this question. I think it’s fair to say that the majority of the organization rides together, like a swarm of bees. We can make generalities about the enterprise population in order to determine where they stand on certain things. For example, I can survey my employee group and note that 89% drive to work. While 11% work from home, ride share, or use public t ...
Toby Ward (Intranet Blog) has documented an interesting case study of Collaboration using Microsoft's Sharepoint. More importantly, he shows a very interesting method of looking at out of date content which is a huge concern for most implementations. ...Scott Gavin has posted another excellent collection of slides about his internal journey with social software. I won’t mention the company name but if you look close enough then you should be able to figure it out. Our organization may be about 2-3 years ahead in collaborative type environment but about 10 months behind in social software. I like the presentation for several reasons and not the least of which is that someone is going public with his thoughts and lessons learned. We need mo ... An updated version of "What Happens When" has been posted on Slideshare. Added eight more examples of companies gaining a strategic advantage using Web 2.0. ...
So you’re running the corporate Collaborative or Social Software implementation and you have to make a decision. Ok, it’s a hypothetical decision but none the less. You can add a high profile Intranet as a customer or 100 Collaborative spaces; which do you choose? The high profile Intranet will replace the traditional HTML or Active Server Page site with a collaborative site that has the look and feel of the traditional Intranet. The collaborative options can either be hidden in th ... Recently, Joseph Pine and I exchanged emails which always make me think beyond the obvious. He and his co-author make you re-think the basic ideas of value creation. While I think I am late to the game with this observation, I will continue with my rendition of it. I am a technologist, and I understand the basic value creation of information and metadata. But I failed to connect the most obvious of ideas with Web 2.0 and the associated techn ... Another way to look at Enterprise 2.0 adoption is to review the reasons people are not using the Enterprise 2.0 services. Most organizations like to survey their current customers to understand why they are using them. However, this seems to be self defeating but also depends on the level of maturity. The key is to survey the user community and here are three possible scenarios. I could have picked any tool but for demonstration, I’ll choose Microsoft’s Sharepoint as the example: ... Just to play the Devils Advocate; I was listening to a
2. Communicate and Create an Open Organization. The essence of Enterprise 2.0 is the creation of an open organization where communications and value can emer ... Everyone one wants a Return on Investment model for collaboration and social software. Just to let you know, there are hundreds of such models out there for traditional information technology type programs. One quick ROI is to replace business unit Intranets with collaborative software. This isn’t as obvious as it might seem to us since most people can’t separate from the command and control model of Intranet applications. Information Technology won’t really support this move since it red ... Social Computing Magazine has picked up two of the Blog Posts here at Collaborage. They have published the fifteen ways to utilize a wiki as well as the fifteen ways to use a blog in the corporate environment. What other ways have you seen these tools being used? Here are fifteen ways in which organizations need to run their corporate Web 2.0 implementation as a business. 1. Investment Capital 2. Real Customers 3. Suppliers After reviewing the slides and video’s of the 2007 Enterprise 2.0 Conference, I asked myself what is missing. What is missing from the agenda and from the other sessions that is an absolute requirement for success? Several of the speakers touched on with concepts like ROI (which was avoided like the plague), customers, and growth. But no one seemed to focus on the idea that collaboration is a business. A business that comes complete with customers (many types), suppliers, supply chain, de ... Here are a couple of interesting items from the Enterprise 2.0 conference held in Boston, MA. which was held this week. First, is Ross Mayfield’s interactive notes from the How to Build an Enterprise 2.0 Platform Employees Will Use session. Very interesting, I really picked up on a few key points: 1. Integrating people, processes and data and making the communications a core part of the effort Excellent. Social Computing Magazine has picked up one of the Blog Posts here on Collaborage. This is an excellent advancement since it indicates that people are interested in actual case studies and real world experience. One of the basic things I observed with my years in the Metadata space is that people want to see what works, not theory but real world Fortune 500 company experience. I make no apologies for being a rabid fan of the “The Experience Economy” book written by Pine and Gilmore. The insight and forward looking research has literally changed how we look at business and technology. The basic premise is that quality products and customer service are no longer differentiators of value. They are simply the price of entry in every busines ... They call it the tipping point which a phrase popularized by Malcom Gladwells’s book called The Tipping Point. In social terms, a tipping point is the event where a previously rare phenomenon becomes rapid and dramatically more common to the end user community. For Collaborative and Social Software this rare event is actually utilizing the software for more than a curious glance. It is more along the lines of truly replacing the business functionality and creating a defined value add. The ... 1. The need to be in Perceived Control of their Environment Great Job on defining the new productive worker within Enterprise 2.0. Last year, we spent quite a bit of time taking a long look at what is takes to compete in the next 20 years as a high performing information worker. The advent of Web 2.0 and other social technologies are changing how we look at productivity and this slideshow does a simple but effective job.
1. Aggregation of User Contributed Content Once commented how I transformed Metadata into a principle architecture within the enterprise. The question revolved around how I convinced 100 architects to accept this new way of thinking? Truth be told, I didn’t have to convince 100, only 2. The key was to locate those influential individuals and based on their actions, others would follow. Since many cases Enterprise 2.0 revolves not around the technology but around the culture and behavior issues, we need to locate those key ... In Web 1.0 organizations defined who the winners and losers were going to be. They defined the rules of play, rules of engagement, and framework of the eco-system. Standard products, delivered globally, and manufactured in mass. The soft drink industry provides a great example where the winners and losers were defined by the market penetration of global proportions. The winners were Coke and Pepsi and only the best of the best could compete for the customer’s attention. In Web 2 ... Tom Peters published on this topic in his 1997 Fast Company Article called “A Brand Called You”. The essence of Mr. Peters message is that you are in charge of your brand and that all of us can own some part of the market. Everyone can learn, and educate themselves to become, at some level, an expert. The vast majority of knowledge is available on the Internet and if you look hard enough you can find information pertaining to your specific situation. Almost 10 years after the article, the m ... 1. Establish your Expertise and Define your Professional Trademarks 1. Friends and Family (Personal Network) The IT Innovator Don Tapscott suggested a term “Prosumer” to describe the blurring gap between the producer and consumer of a product or service. On the surface, this sounds like an important discovery and it is in the outside world. Clearly, organizations are using social software to drive adoption, marketing, and innovation within their industry. The instantaneous feedback organizations get from the consumers of their product create an environment that is conducive to the most agile of e ... 1. Announcing Company News and Events 1. Intranet Replacement; Open Access and Collaborative. An easy win… No sense in me replicating Niall's Work View 15 Uses of CorporateBook Marking 1. Monitoring news/blog coverage of your company FistPartner has produced an interesting map of these technologies that we commonly refer to as the Enterprise 2.0 market Map. This is very good map that will force you to think about your implementation as well as how you would alter the map to represent your own organization. Welcome to the FirstPartner Enterprise 2.0 Market Map. Enterprise 2.0 is a term which many struggle to define and understand. We have therefore de ... You have to be better than YouTube, MySpace and Wikipedia. If you take the average contributor rate in these organizations, as compared to the reader population, you will get some number around 0.16%. No, that’s not 16%, it is around a tenth of one percent. When you world includes billions of people then 0.16% produces a very large population of contributors to your social world. However, in a 100,000 person firm, you are talking 100 people. Doubtful that your CEO is going to spend too many r ... In Strategy & Business, Nicholas Carr (Author of Does IT Matter) has written an article about the application of "peer production" to business innovation. The title the magazine gave the piece is "The Ignorance of Crowds," but it's really more about the weaknesses, or limitations, of crowds. As usual, Mr. Carr provides us an image and insight that we blindly ignore in our pursuit of collaboration. View Article< ... 1. Executive Communications 1. Collecting Business and Technical Requirements A couple days ago, I posted that there were two types of Enterprise 2.0 customers or opportunities. I was wrong, dead wrong. The “engaged” and the “not engaged” left out the group that is currently “being engaged”. How silly of me to forget that there is a transition period where everything you do is being showcased. That amount of time where the individual is just getting started. We can classify this group into three service offerings just like Kroger does when they checkout a c ... Within the collaborative space we can classify customers into those that have been engaged and those that have not. Let’s first look at the ones that have not engaged your Enterprise 2.0 effort. We can classify these users into the three different areas and define the cause. The first group of users that have not engaged your effort are the ones that have never heard of you, your product, or services. Here you have a Marketing and Branding problem. Your ... From one of my previous posts, I made reference to how odd it is that we spend over 90% of our time talking about something that will only have a 10% impact on your implementation; namely, tool selection. Take wikis for example, you have several choices between collaborative products like Sharepoint, focused products like Social Text, and open source products like XWiki. So in the words of Charlie Daniels: Boy let me tell you what: I bet you didn't know it, but I'm a fiddle ... By now you have probably heard of Web 2.0 and all of the hype surrounding the next evolution of web technology. The impact on our culture is unmistakable with the advent of Weblogs, Wikis, and many other social applications. While Web 2.0 has been debated by researchers as to who and when the concepts emerged, little argument exists that the technology has arrived. Unlike Web 1.0, this new technology encourages user participation and derives its greatest value when large communities contri ... If I were to ask you what tool would you use within the enterprise to communicate or collaborate on a project, the obvious answer would be the one that offers the greatest value. Value is defined as the constant push and pull between the amount of pain and the embedded functionality. Without the constraints of time, money or resources, we would implement the product or service that provides the greatest value. This would indicate that the mass adoption of social software within the enterpri ... Dan Ward just published a wonderful book on the simplicity cycle. He presents an idea that we will all kick ourselves for not coming up with it. The basic is that we start at ground zero on a two dimensional chart where the Y-axis is the complexity of the product and the X-Axis is the goodness of the product. As you add additional features, the value of the product increases. This will continue for a period of time until you hit a point where adding additional features will actually decre ... When implementing collaborative or social applications within the enterprise, four scenarios emerge where you can provide service. Education Opportunity: A customer has never heard of collaborative or social software, what the functional purpose is, or the value created with collaborative software. Here we have an educational gap that can be addressed with presentations, white papers, executive overviews, newsletter additions, and other marketing efforts. < ... While Web 2.0 applications like Flickr, SlideShare, MySpace, and Second Life provide great examples of large scale deployments, we seem to have a shortage of Enterprise mass adoptions. Mass adoption would be where a large percentage of employees, contractors and business partners access the social application in their day to day work. To put this in perspective, Wikipedia is updated by only 1% of the user base actually updates information. In January 2007, the site registered 42.8 million uni ... Suppose I go online and order a brand new F-150 pickup truck. Everyone in Georgia has a pickup truck; it’s a state law. The price, including all of the additions, is around $30,000. I drive that truck one mile down the road, now what is the value of that truck? My guess would be around $25,000. That first mile is a killer from a value perspective. In most cases when we consume products and service the value decreases along side. Not any more; organizations are beginning to figu ... So they put you in charge of the Collaboration rollout and that’s the good news. What type of business are you going to build? McDonalds or the Whompoa Club (Shanghai). The objectives are very different; McDonalds wants to process as many customers as possible in the shortest amount of time possible. Since the power of social software is the number of people involved then I am leaning more toward this model. In fact, that is exactly how we have modeled our environment. Since we me ... One of the missing components of most implementations of Collaborative and Social Software is the responsibility for the success or failure of the effort. That sounds a bit harsh, but regularly, I fail see the components of a vision, mission, metrics, roadmaps, or game plans. It simply goes back to the concept that if the software is loaded on a server then we are done. Unfortunately, that is at best, short sighted. So, what is our vision? Collaboration and Online Service ... While the differences between Enterprise 1.0 and 2.0 are grey at best, we can attempt to draw some segmentation by reviewing the high level characteristics. The following table provides a side by side comparison of these technologies.
|
Over the years, our organization has deployed almost 35 knowledge stores including the Metadata Repository that won us several industry awards. One of the secrets was always having a champion involved in the project. This person may have been a repository champion but it was far more important to have a producer or consumer champion. In the Enterprise 2.0 world this would be someone who cha ...
Remember the old days when people were selling domain names for millions of dollars? How much did http://www.cookies.com go for? I actually sold one for $2,500; not bad for a $20.00 investment. While domains may not be as critical as they were before Google, they still play an important role on the Intranet.
HP has embraced the idea of a company blog by allowing their employees to talk about a wide variety of topics. From Usability to Second Life, they transparency of the organization is evident. Will we ever get to the point that we are willing to step outside of the symbolic walls to let our voice be heard? Will we be allowed to? In this, the age of transparency, it seems people still can't ...
1. Wiki Page Count
Collaborage
has been redesigned for a couple of reasons. First, I want to learn more how
Moveable Type works and what you can do with the tool. While, I am not as solid
at the CSS stuff and clearly I have butchered the core functionality of the CSS,
the design looks like I wanted it too: Clean, Professional, and Flexible.
Second, I wanted to get away from the standard templates wh ...