infoarch

Just wanted to wish you and your loved ones a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Hope you have a great time. And, thank you all for reading my blog and tweets and all the online and offline interactions. They are much appreciated. I'm on vacation with my family, so I'll won't be blogging and will hardly tweet. Hope to meet you soon - in 2012!

The future cannot be predicted. But, even if it could, we would not dare to act on the prediction. - Arie de Geus in The Living Company

As you know I work for Entopic . Entopic has organized a conference about intranet for several years now. It has become the largest intranet conference in the World. We’re working hard on the 2012 conference. It will be held on March 13, 2012 in Utrecht, The Netherlands. A large part of the program has been defined and we hope to finalize the program in the coming week. This year we wanted to focus on the soft(er) side of intranet. What are the skills intranet-related people need to successfully implement and maintain a intranet and especially a social intranet. We found three keynote speakers that know all about this side of intranet: Menno Lanting will talk about leadership and intranet James Robertson will give an overview of the changing intranet landscape Michael Sampson will present about facilitating collaboration with intranet We also have a great list of interesting breakouts this year. Ranging from Shell about knowledge management and intranet to the Loc...

How is the blogosphere doing? Several post have been written in 2011 about it being dead . At the beginning of the social media revolution everyone was told to start blogging. Now, most think microblogging is enough, it seems. Twitter has become a popular why to (micro)blog. And other types of blogging are showing up, like Posterous and Tumblr . As well as photo blogs, like Instagram . Since 2004 Technorati publishes an overview of the State of the Blogosphere. Recently ‘The State of the Blogosphere 2011’ was published. I’d like to share a summary of this interesting report with you (as I’ve done in previous years). Who are the bloggers?  4114 bloggers were surveyed for this report (about 3000 less than in 2010). According to the research 75% of the bloggers are 25-44 years old. The level of education of blogger is high, mostly college and university level. Technorati distinguishes four types of bloggers: hobbyists (60% of the respondents), part-time and full-time prof...

ThiemeMeulenhoff organiseert maandelijks een iLunch. Een iLunch is een inspirerende bijeenkomst voor TM medewerkers. Meestal wordt een externe spreker uitgenodigd om de iLunch in te vullen. In december was ik uitgenodigd om te spreken over het succesvol inzetten van Twitter, privé en zakelijk. Mijn slides heb ik gedeeld op Slideshare en bij deze ook hier. Feedback, vragen en commentaar zijn welkom. Scoren met Twitter iLunch ThiemeMeulenhoff View more presentations from Samuel Driessen

Outdoor maps are great. Google is doing a wonderful job with Maps . But what about indoor maps? I've been tracking posts about this topic for some time. And just recently Google announced it's taking Google Maps indoors . Here's a short video about his initiative: I think this will have huge implications for companies as well. Just think about adding maps to your internal intranet employee directory.

McKinsey has been following the social business movement for some time now. And they're following to see if it can live up to the expectations. Recently they published the results of their 5th annual survey under 4200 global executives. The polled them how their organizations use social tools. The finding of the report are interesting. There's clear progress: social tools are being used more and more and in more effective ways. When adopted across the networked enterprise and integrated in work processes of employees, clear benefits are seen. There's a boost in financial performance and market share, which relates to the results of previous surveys. However not many companies are fully networked, meaning they are internally and externally networked. One of the most interesting things I read in the report was the fact that executives believe if organizational barriers to social tools diminish, they could transform the core business processes. This is a big stateme...

You may have never seen this. But my blog contains a list of books I'm reading at the moment. I just finished reading 'Making it all work' by David Allen. I re-read his book 'Getting things done' every year to review the way I'm working and apply new GTD elements to my productivity framework. But I thought I'd read Allen's newest book instead this year. I'll review 'Making it all work' soon and share it with you as a blogpost. I enjoyed reading this book as it goes into the philosophy and mechanisms behind GTD. Currently I'm reading 3 books: As I told you I'm reading 'What Technology Wants' by Kevin Kelly. Not an easy book, but fascinating. I'm almost finished reading it and hope to review it in January. And I just started reading 'The Information' by James Gleick and 'The Living Company' by Arie de Geus. Have you read one of these books? If so, leave a comment and tell me what you think o...

Just wanted to share my enthusiasm with you about a great assignment I received from a client. Recently we were contacted because our client wanted to set up a new intranet. They were thinking about doing an internal survey to find out what employees expected from their (future) intranet. Soon they concluded this would only give them a list of things they already knew. "We don't really know what we need." So, they came to us/me with the request to organize trips to five interesting intranets. Show us five interesting intranets that we can learn from. Based on those visits we will learn a lot about organizational issues, budget, technology platform, adoption strategies, types of intranets, etc. Wow, what a great assignment! I also think this is smart thing to do. Why do it all yourself if there's so much to learn from others? Isn't this also a faster way to get to results? I'm honored to get such an assignment and it's great to organize this for them. I...

Just a short post to say I'm honored to be an  ambassador  of the 2012 Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris! I was hoping to be an ambassador last year, but was asked to give a talk then . I really enjoyed the summit. The keynotes were very good, the breakout sessions were interesting, the conference was well-organized and the evening dinner and drinks were inspiring. It was fascinating to see what is being done in Europe in the enterprise 2.0-social business space. This years program looks great as well. The summit will be held in Paris instead of Frankfurt, which will be interesting. You can register here . All my posts about last year's summit can be found here . Are you going to the Enterprise 2.0 Summit? I'm also curious which Dutch people plan to go! ;-)

Talking to an old-aged man who had just discovered the internet, he said: "The internet is just so great, what a huge amount of sources we have there!" And I agree with him. The internet is amazing. The huge amount of content shared there about all kinds of topics. The way we can interact with content and people via the internet. The amazing number of different internet services. And we have reached the end of what the internet will bring us. But is the internet all good. There have been many that question if the internet is such a positive force. Shouldn't we question some (or all) of the changes the internet is doing to the world and to. Andrew Keen wrote about the negative aspects of the internet on culture . Nicolas Carr published about book about what the internet is doing to our brain . And more can be mentioned here. Recently I bumped into a review of The Filter Bubble in my Dutch newspaper , went over to watch the related TED Talk with the same title and ...

I listen to the HBR Ideacast regularly. Recently Gary Hamel was interviewed about his HBR article 'First, Let's Fire all the Managers' . As you may know Hamel has devoted a large part of his life to thinking about better ways to organize and manage companies. What kind of management (if any) does this time period need. Of course, Hamel goes into why he wrote an article about this topic. But to me the most interesting part was that Hamel provides examples of companies that don't have management. When I was listening I caught myself thinking: Yeah, less management would be great, but can we really live without them? Hamel shows it can be done. He points to one company called Morningstar for instance. Very interesting and thought-provoking! What do you think? Can your company or could you live without management?

Eryc Branham recently posted an interesting article about 'The invisible company' over on ReadWriteWeb . I think his post also underlines that companies are inherently social. A company is a collection of humans. And (most) humans are social beings. I find most people don't look at companies this way. I hear lots of talk about social business as if business' are only social if they use social media internally and interact with the market via social media. Companies aren't social when they use social media. But, as Eryc says, social tools can be and should be used to make the social interactions between colleagues visible.

A conference about social media, organized using social media and presented by experienced social media enthusiast, can that be done? Yes, it can. I was part of such a conference a couple of weeks ago. It was called 'The Social Media in Practice Event' (Dutch: Social media in de praktijk) . Ronald van den Hoff of Society 3.0 kicked off the event. He gave an interesting talk about the influence of the internet and social media on society, and its implications for businesses. I liked how he stressed businesses should be built around passion and learning from mistakes. They should be ever more open to what's happening around them or else they will be eclipsed. Interestingly he also said large companies will get smaller and smaller and independent contractors/free agents will be the 'companies' of the future. I also went to Roos van Vugt 's breakout about leading into social media. She works for Deloitte and explained how see introduced and is cultivating socia...

The New York Times has an interesting 'experimental projects' group, beta620. ReadWriteWeb recently pointed to an interesting experiment, called Longitude. Wouldn't it be neat if news items could be browsed through by a map? So you can see what news has been published about the city or country you live in or are interested in? Longitude does just this. One thing I was wondering is: Is this concept also interesting for the intranet? Could it be valuable to international companies to link the news items and intranet pages to a location? Clearly there are good cases for the combination of location and intranet . Curious to hear your thoughts about this. Go ahead and play with Longitude. Great stuff for in the weekend if you ask me!

What does social media have to do with finance and control? And even auditing? Those were questions I had to think about after I was invited to give two talks with prof. Eddy Vaassen about 'Control and audit implications of social media'. And I must say, it was challenging and fun. Our slides can be found here: Finance and Control Implications of Social Media View more presentations from Samuel Driessen Most of the questions from the audience were about control. What are the implications of using social media for the company's reputation? Should social media be organized centrally? Etc. Furthermore, some wondered if social media was only for marketing and communication, not for other parts of the organization, like R&D and Finance. There were several other keynotes. One was particularly interesting. Prof. Dennis Campbell gave a talk about 'Control and customer experience'. His research clearly related to the points we made. It shows that: Mor...

Some time ago Deb Lavoy wrote an interesting post titled 'Social Business doesn't mean what you think it does, neither does Enterprise 2.0' . I just wanted to point you to it. The discussion around the post is interesting.  I also commented on the post. I'll mix it into this post and hopefully you'll read Deb's post and join the conversation. I like the way Deb links social business to deeper societal and even philosophical movements. I think this is one of the reasons Tapscott c.s. wrote the book 'Macrowikinomics' . W.r.t. philosophy she relates social business to Enlightenment 2.0. I was wondering if we can just say it relates to the current philosophy, postmodernism (- there is no absolute truth, everything is fragmented, deconstructionilism, subjectivism instead of objectivism, etc)? Extending that thought, we know philosophies come and go (objectivism is followed by an era of subjectivism, then objectivism, etc). I think we are now learning t...

Jane McConnell recently shared 4 questions about intranet (aka the web workplace) that she is going to ask several panelist at an upcoming conference. Big and good questions, in my opinion. Her questions are: Are we reaching the end of the intranet as we know it? How do you imagine intranets to be in the future? Enterprise search seems to be essential in today’s world of masses of content in the managed intranet, in collaborative spaces and in enterprise social networks. Some people see “search’ as the logical point of convergence and the ideal user interface for the “digital workplace”. What is your vision of search and its role in the digital enterprise? How do you see the evolution of “governance’ in a world where managed content and user-generated, spontaneous content are blended? If you were to give one piece of advice to organizations just starting the social (or 2.0) journey, what would it be? Jane wondered what her blog readers would answer. Here are my answers (also p...

There is one presentation I love watching every year. It's loaded with data and just sets the agenda for the coming year. It's Mary Meeker's talk at the Web 2.0 Summit . You can watch it here:  And find the slides here . As I said, it loaded with data and insights. I'll highlight just a few. Striking is the international growth of the internet. It's definitely not the US-only in the internet. And Africa and South-America are continents to pay attention to. Another thing is the speed of adoption of new communication technology is increasing, even in recession. The speed of adoption of the iPhone was fast compared to the iPod, but just look at how quickly the iPad took over the market. The next big thing according to Meeker? Everything that has to do with our ears; Sound/audio. And, of course, the continuing growth of mobile.

The company that I work for, Entopic , recently organized the Web editor’s conference (Dutch: Congres Webredactie) . It was the first conference in Holland (and the world?) for web editors. Dutch posts about the conference can be found here . The tweet stream can be found here (#webred11) and all the presentations here . I’ll share some highlights from the conference with you here. The Future of Content The conference started out with a talk by futurist Gerd Leonhard about the future of content. He gave an interesting talk about the past, present and future of content. He started in the broadcasting era and move to what he calls the broadband era; the time we are experiencing now. He stressed this is happening now and if we or institutions don’t get on board we/they will be disrupted. I liked they way he pointed to the increasing influence of technology on our lives, but also stressed the extreme importance of human ingenuity. Of course, Leonard also addressed the post pc statements...

How do you use LinkedIn ? Who do you connect to? Do you use LinkedIn Groups? This post on the NextWeb triggered me to answer these questions publicly. Resume LinkedIn is an interesting platform. I've been using it for several years now. At first I basically uploaded my resume to LinkedIn. I hardly visited LinkedIn after that, except for excepting link requests. Some time after that LinkedIn introduced Answers . I followed several topics there, but stopped after about a year. The quality of the questions was horrible and it seemed I didn't get anything back from the answers I gave. Groups I also joined several LinkedIn Groups. Groups is interesting and it keeps me coming back to the LinkedIn site. Right now I'm following 27 groups, mostly in my area of expertise (intranet, social media, knowledge management, enterprise 2.0, social business). Most of the groups have interesting discussions. The update in my email every day helps me keep up with what's going on i...

I enjoy following Seth Godin 's blog. He has as inspiring way of pushing out short(er) blogposts and getting me to think. One blogpost about 'Talker's block' struck me recently. It struck me for two reasons. It related to the situation I'm in every now-and-then: writer's block. I'll have several draft posts, almost ready to be published, but they stay in the draft folder for too long. The other reason is: It's part of my work to get others to blog. And to my regret I see people starting to tweet and use Facebook, quite easily. Blogging, however, is a step too far for most of them. No, blogging is not for everybody. But some people don't start to blog because they fear writer's block. Or they're insecure about their writing skills. Or they fear for the comments others will have on their musings. Godin challenges you and me to get over it. He says: Writer's block isn't hard to cure. Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly,...

In a couple of weeks I'll be giving a masterclass with prof. Eddy Vaassen about 'Control and audit implications for social media' . Wow, what a title, eh?! This masterclass is part of a large conference in Holland organized by NBA-VRC for accountants and controllers. The topic of this year's conference is Customer 3.0 . I'm working on the slides for the masterclass. And I'm curious what your expectations are when you read the title of the masterclass. What topics should be addressed? What are control and audit implications, according to you? Do control, audit and social media relate? If so, please explain. Of course we'll share our slides as soon as they're ready. Feedback on those slides is welcome, as always.

Giving a guest lecture is great fun, I find. I recently had the chance to interact with about 60 college students. They were in their second or third year. The topic of the lecture was social media use within company. So, Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business. My slides can be found here (in Dutch...). I kicked off my lecture with some open questions. I'd like to share the answers to one question with you. I was curious what social tools they use themselves to get things done in their lives. With all the talk about millennials being digital natives (or aren't they ), easily moving in the social space, organizing their life and work with these tools, etc I thought I'd see if this if the case in practice . I shared what I got from the students on Google+ . In sum, this is what they told me. Of the 60 students: 40 use Twitter Almost all use Facebook Just over half use Hyves (Dutch social network) 1 uses a bookmarking tool 2 blog 0 have a wiki (although all have ex...

Binnenkort, 27 oktober a.s., wordt het event Social Media in de Praktijk gehouden. Het belooft een bijzonder congres te worden. In de eerste plaats, is het congres op een bijzondere manier bedacht en opzet . In de tweede plaats, de lijst met sprekers hebben allemaal diepgaande ervaring met social media. Mijn workshop gaat over het raakvlak tussen social media en kennismanagement. Volgens mij is kennismanagement en social media een perfecte match. Kennismanagement was een hype en is als top-down strategie mislukt. De opkomst van social media biedt geweldige mogelijkheden voor kennismanagement 2.0. Tijdens de workshop ga je uitleggen waarom ik dat vindt. En we gaan er ook mee aan de slag. Aan het einde van de workshop kun je persoonlijk aan de slag en/of in (een deel van) de organisatie/instelling waar je voor werkt. Wat verwacht je van mijn workshop? Ik hoor het graag van je. Ik neem jouw input dan mee in mijn verhaal. Kom je ook naar Social Media in de Praktijk? Geef je hier o...

Food is not something I blog about. But I'd like to make an exception for  Blog Action Day . BAD11 is today! This year's topic is 'food' . I've joined BAD for a couple of years now. It's a neat way to focus some of our time and attention on a bigger cause. Food, there's lots to say about food. As a person who has always had (more than enough) food, I feel privileged and thankful. There are lots and lots of people in a totally different situation. Just think of what is happening now in Africa. And we know there are many more places in the world where people have little to nothing to eat. What can we do about that? For one, blog. The whole idea of Blog Action Day is to have many bloggers write about the same topic. Hopefully this will shift the world a bit in the right direction. The right direction being: a more fair spread of food over the world. On the hand I often feel helpless. Helpless about the fact that we know there are people dying of hunger...

A long time ago I blogged about the IT Flower . I thought is was a very interesting diagram and I still use it regularly. I find it helps people understand the different types of work, how things get done and how they are(n't) support by tools in companies. Recently I read Harold Jarche 's post about "Informal Learning is a Business Imperative" . I find his work on social learning and personal knowledge management highly interesting. Most of his posts contain lots of food for thought and have interesting diagrams to chew on. This post did as well. The diagram in this post clearly shows the different types of work and how they relate to different types of learning. This fits perfectly on my two above-mentioned posts about the IT Flower. This diagram is an extra layer focused on types of work and learning. (Or the other way around, whatever you like!) I’m also happy to see that the diagram shows that even in very structured work there are still non-routine tas...

I really like the way Socialcast is sharing their vision on the workplace of the future. Every Tuesday they share an interesting infographic about an interesting topic related to their vision (and product). They call it #e2sday . The last one was about the intranet . I thought I'd share it with you because I recently wrote a post about why intranet is so hard and... why it can be easy as well. I was curious which sources they used to set up this infographic. It struck me the sources were pretty old! Which is not the same as outdated, to be sure. The problem with the intranet is an old(er) problem for sure. I agree with the statements made in this nice visual. What I tried to do in my posts is ask: But why does this happen? Why is information not up-to-date on traditional intranets? Why is it unclear what the strategy and intention of intranet is? Etc. Hope you enjoy and learn from this nice infographic!

Recently took the time to watch some Dreamforce 2011 talks. There's lots to learn from them. I particularly enjoyed Marc Benioff's interview/talk with Eric Schmidt . I liked the way they stepped back and looked at the history and future of the technology industry in general, and the internet especially. Just to list some of the questions they talked about: what the future of the manufacturing industry (in the US and Europe) will be? Why is it hard for existing players to move to new technology standards? What should an existing company do when technology shifts? Where is 'cloud' and 'social' going? What is the potential of the internet for business and government? Is this only for large companies or more so for small companies? In short the future according to Schmidt is: mobile, local and social. And here's the whole talk for you. Hope you enjoy it!  

Recently I started blogging for Frankwatching , a Dutch blogging platform about the internet in general. My first 3 posts are: Boekrecensie: The Intranet Management Handboek Foursquare is zinloos (voorlopig) Waarom is intranet zo ingewikkeld? Happy to say the last two posts have received a lot of good comments. I'll be translating the posts and publishing them on my personal blog as well. You can find my profile and post feed here .

‘The Learning Organization’ was a hot topic in the nineties. Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline was published at the beginning of the nineties (1990). And The Fifth Disciplines Fieldbook shortly after that (1994). Recently I reread the Fieldbook. Nowadays lots is being written about social media and its power for personal and business use. Not very often you hear people and businesses say they use new media for learning. Although this area is very interesting. Harold Jarche and Jay Cross  (who recently pointed me to these interesting posts about this topic), to name just two experts, have been writing and publishing about this topic. They wonder: How can learning be improved by using social media? How does social media affect and possibly change learning? What is social learning? Related to this, Jarche also writes and talks about personal knowledge management, which also relates to personal learning. Really interesting stuff. I follow their work closely. (I've colle...

After reading the Shift Index (Big Shift) I was curious what the book ‘The Power of Pull’ would bring. I was hoping for a more practical story than the Shift Index. I was also hoping for examples on how to move from Push to Pull. I’m not sure if I got what I was looking for. And I’m not sure why either. Is it because I read the Shift Index before reading this book? Is it because I’m already in the Pull area for some time (at least I think I am…)? Or is it because I’ve read lots of books and blogs about the same topic (like the books The Cluetrain Manifesto , Wikinomics and Macrowikinomcs )? (After writing this interview I went through the reviews on Amazon. Lots of different reviews there: from very positive to very negative.) What is this book about? Let me give you the author’s short summary on p. 2: “Pull” is the common dynamic they see under several success stories. Pull is “the ability to draw out people and resources as needed to address opportunities and challenges. P...

So, I’m on a roll now. As promised I would share my review of several books. This is the next one: Free by Chris Anderson. An article in Wired about Free triggered me to read this book. Free is a big deal nowadays. Many products and services are offered for free. And people are making lots of money charging nothing. “Not nothing for everything, but nothing for enough…” (p. 3) Free has always been around a long time, but it’s changing. The internet seems to be doing something interesting to what we pay for things. “Somewhere in the transition from atoms to bits, a phenomenon that we thought we understood was transformed. “Free” became Free.” (p. 4) This book is about this phenomenon. Chapter 1-3 dive into the fascinating history of free. And the different kinds of free: direct cross-subsidies, three-party market, freemium and nonmonetary markets. (p. 23) Free started out as a marketing method. Now free is an entirely new economic model. (p. 12) The old free was based on the econ...

I read ‘TheTipping Point’ a long time ago. Then I wrote a short, boring blogpost telling you I read it. Recently I thought: I’m going to write a longer book review about Malcolm Gladwell’s book. In this way I can remember its contents more easily and, if you haven’t read it, inspire you to read it. Concepts ‘The Tipping Point’ was my first Gladwell book. I wanted to read it because of my interest in social media and social networking (- later his take on the effect of social media in revolutions was highly debated …). The book is not about social media and social networking (tools). It’s about the underlying concepts of social media and networking. And, as I’ve said before , those concepts are important to understand. Tipping What is the book about? The subtitle of the book is: ‘How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference’. In his own words: “ The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. … Ideas and products and messages and behaviors s...