infoarch

Back after a nice French lunch, Claire Flanagan and Rachel Happe talk about adoption/change and community management . Claire simply had too much slides and information to give you a good summary. Which is great (to be clear)! I'll share a couple of notes from the talk below. A nice overview of research Jive did on the value companies are getting was shared by Claire (and is inserted in this blogpost). Business value of internal social was only realized when organizations did the following: senior leaders role-modelling integrate social into day-to-day activities removal of other tools So, how to change your organization and get them ready for internal social? Claire shares the following steps: process (define what the new way of working looks like, definitely for executives - use cases, which is not persona-focused, focus on processes) incentives (reward open leadership, bonus tied to 'open' objectives) comms/marketing (executive 'launch' mes...

The first practice panel about ' Social as Enabler for Strategic Business Excellence ' by Joachim Heinz  and Martial Tardy . First Tardy of Solvay about the Solvay and Rhodia merger facilitated by means of an Enterprise Social Network. Learnings: don't fear misconduct, fear a ghost town reverse the communication streams get in gear with a new editorial tempo get on top of social technologies Next Heinz about Bosch's social business initiatives. Bosch has 300.000 employees. Why social business at Bosch? Because of the network society and to tap into the potential of the huge number of employees. They want to develop to an agile, open and transparent business system in a highly connected environment. Steps they distinguish are ( top-down approach): guidelines and principle (e.g. only 20% closed communities, open/transparent by default) technology and processes (developed an entirely new onboarding wizard developed jointly by Bosch and IBM - helps newcomer...

Wired is my favorite work-related magazine by far. I read all editions from cover to cover (almost). Recently Wired celebrated its 20th anniversary with a special edition . Reading through that edition is a fascinating trip through history. And it's only been 20 years! For their anniversary Wired also collected some of their most popular articles and bundled them into an ebook. One of the articles struck me. The article is titled:  The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980 - 2020 and is written by Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden. I'm a sucker for these kind of articles. But I found this one intriguing because it was written some time ago. I was curious how well they predicted what was going to happen in the time we are living in now. Of course they got things wrong, but many predictions are quite correct. Go ahead, read the article and see for yourself. But there's one part in this article that I wanted to share with you. It relates to all the posts that have bee...

The 2nd edition of the SocialNow conference was held in the beautiful city of Lisbon. As you may remember SocialNow is a unique conference. The conference is organized by Ana Neves of KnowMan . The conference is about helping organizations compare and choose internal social tools. Several Enterprise 2.0 tool vendors have to present their tool relating to the situation of a fictitious company and its issues with collaborative project work and topic-based knowledge sharing. The program is complemented with keynotes from leading experts in the field. I really enjoyed this edition of SocialNow and thought it was even better than last year. I’ll share my notes and learnings from the conference in several posts. This is post nr 1. BTW: You can find a Storify by Paul Corney of day 1 and day 2 here. Challenges Emanuele Quintarelli  kicked off the conference with a talk about the challenges of the social enterprise. As with many experts in the fields his talk was not "happy cl...

OK, we defined the goal(s) of our social intranet . Now we have to get commitment from high-level management, right? It depends. I don’t think this is the only way to go, although we have learned to do it this way: write a plan, get budget by getting commitment from management, get IT on board and start rolling out. This type of planning always lead to long projects. I think internal social media concepts and tools challenge us to think differently. Mostly the tools are really cheap and everybody can set them up and configure them. A Yammer network for instance is up and running in 30 seconds. So, why don’t you go ahead and do this? Not because setting up the tool is the only thing that much be done for a successful roll out of social tools. I’ll get back to that in a bit. But you can do this because you can. The big question is: Are you dare-devil enough to do it? Or is this impossible in your organization? In many Dutch organizations this way of working is allowed and even encoura...

Part 2 of my notes from the workshop about User Adoption strategies for Sharepoint by Michael Sampson . (Part 1 can be found here .) We're at stage 3: Enlivening Applicability. Ways to do this: Over the shoulder watching: show how people use the tool in practice and learn from them Group re-imagining: help a group see beyond current work practices Embedded champions: one participant mentioned she connected to secretaries to speed up and encourage technology adoption. ( I agree! ) Sandbox for experimentation: don't go live right away, but start small, let people play with the technology and use the technology for the roll out itself. Easy first steps: closing down the options, focus on some affordances of the technology not all. Built it and they will come: set up the tech and see if users will adopt it by themselves Next phase (4): Making it real. How do you make it real? Provide zero other options. E.g. take away all other platforms but one. Experience from th...

My notes from the pre- conference workshop with Michael Sampson about User Adoption strategies for Sharepoint. (This workshop is part of the Intranet Conference .) Technology is easy compared to getting people to use the technology. Most people aren't first wave users. They don't say: Give the new tech to me. They ask: "Why should I use it? What is the reason for the new technology? My work has to be improved by the new technology." They basically tolerate the tools. If something is easier it's better for them than that it is perfect. Most organizations assume adoption will be 100%. So, there's a problem. The objective is not user adoption. It's the overal effectiveness of the organization for instance. Or, improve work. The overal approach to user adoption is very important. (Refer to the Collaboration Roadmap .) Research shows that people are least satisfied when IT rolls out and the most dissatisfied.... Sharepoint is a platform. This means ...

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.

Why is intranet so hard to get right? It's one of the things I keep wondering about. Especially after reading the Global Intranet Trend reports , following discussions on LinkedIn groups and listening to talks at conferences . There definitely is progress in intranet deployment, but the steps are small. I'd like to share my thoughts on why intranet is hard. As in all (my) blogposts I don't not claim to have all the answers and reasons. I'd love to hear from you why you think intranet is hard (or maybe I'm getting it all wrong: intranet is easy). Right With 'get right' I mean having an intranet that really fits the needs and processes of a company, truly supports employee in their daily work, etc. It's an intranet with which the company is happy. It's a business critical 'tool'. Reason 1: People and technology To me the most important reason why it's hard to get intranet right is: people and technology don't fit . An organizat...

Yep, using is believing.  Most of the time at least. Try to explain someone why he/she should buy an iPad. Or should use Twitter. Or Google+. It's not very easy (but some are really good at it). Sometimes it's even frustrating, when your audience scrutinizes every sentence trying to describe the affordance of a tool. It's even one of the things I catch myself thinking when I give social media strategy workshops . 'They should just start doing  it (in a smart way)'. In the meantime, this doesn't keep me from talking, blogging, demoing to trigger people. Just like the first link in this post triggered me to write this post!

I enjoy  leading workshops. Sharing my knowledge and experiences with others and learning from participant's knowledge and experience is truly inspiring. I wanted to share some of my insights from the social media workshops I've been giving. The workshop focuses on social media as a hype or trend, social media strategy, social media concepts and tools, etc. We're just getting started One of the things that really strikes me is that we are only just starting to understand social media and experiment with it in practice insides companies and on the internet. I know there are examples of companies being successful in this space. But more than 90% of the people I get in my workshop haven't experimented with social media personally and in a corporate context, are often afraid to dip their toe into social media, find it hard to define next steps, etc. Concepts and Tools I usually start my workshop by talking about underlying concepts of social media. Understanding the ...

What is social business? What does it look like? Dave Gray shares his view in napkin sketches. Life expectancy of a S&P 500 company is getting shorter. It's 15 years now. Companies are complex systems (shown by complex hierarchies). There are companies that make sense of other companies because they are so complex. Think Microsoft and government. For every extra employee your profit goes down. For every 3 employees your profit per employee goes down. It is increasing, but by less and less. Or: diminishing returns. However productivity goes up in cities when population grows. Why? We think about companies as machines (stable, little relation to environment), but should start to think about them as organisms. That adapt to the environment. Companies are made out of people. But they don't live long and can be less productive the larger they get. Dave refers to Arie de Geus' book The Living Company. His findings are long-living companies are: decentralized. Porous boudarie...

A couple of days ago I gave a talk about (some of) my Enterprise 2.0 experiences at the Web24Business Brainstorm . Saskia Lammers of the Temporary Art Center Eindhoven ( TAC ) was also invited to speak. She told about her work in developping a new social website that would support the community of artists. It was interesting to see the idea of the website consisting mostly of content from elsewhere, like Facebook, Youtube, etc. My 20-minute presentation gave a short overview of the work that was done in Océ in the Enterprise 2.0 space. And some of my insights. Here are my slides : Enterprise 2.0 Experiences View more presentations from Samuel Driessen And, as always, comments are more than welcome!

Jane McConnell raised an interesting question about the relationship between social media and culture . She asked: Will cultural differences impact adoption of social media? Will culture “eat” social media for breakfast? or will social media “eat” culture? I find social media interesting because I see the relationship between social media and culture as bi-directional. The (company) culture has to fit social media (culture) for successful adoption. But I also see culture change due to social media use. I think this has to do with the underlying concepts of social media, like relational networks, information is social and humans as social beings. These concepts fit us people very well, because they are deeply human. Tapping into these concepts when rolling out social media is a key to success (and positive cultural change). Rolling it out as technology (non-human focus) is a key to failure (and negative cultural change). Als o refer to this interesting post about cultural differences ....

Lee Bryant closed the Enterprise 2.0 Summit with a talk about Social Business. Where's Enterprise 2.0 headed next? It's in the direction of providing real business value. Enterprise 2.0 has been adopted at least a bit by most organizations. There's a nice spread of use cases, showed by research supported by Headshift . Lee sees Enterprise 2.0 as a Trojan mice for organizational change. Small but impressive changes to the organization. Enterprise 2.0 is still in the early phase, patchy and tool-centric (like the KM wave was in the beginning). We're looking for quantifiable business improvements, like: lower operational costs networked productivity business agility effective management (move away from information hostages: businesses run by writing and moving report up and down the ladder) customer centricity (Listen! But many companies lack a structure to socialize what you're learned by listening) Where is business practice going...

CheeChin Liew (BASF) is up on the stage. Interesting how CheeChin compares the development cycles in the organization with the development of communication tools. The increasing speed in product development cycles at BASF requires different communication skills and tools. Connect.BASF consists of three pillars: networking. Employees can be visible, profiles, in communities. knowledge sharing. Communities (there is overlap with point 1), tags and search etc. collaboration. Blogs, wiki's etc. It is a global platform. Ho did they start? It started in Communications (by Cordelia Krooß ). They convinced to start a steering committee around this topic (@shake ) with a board member as sponsor. CheeChin was in R&D. He had launched wiki's there. E2.0 was not started by IT. IT came in later. This project is now permanent. In the launch phase they focused on IT implementation a lot. They have connect.BASF days with external, inspiring speakers. They do a lot ...

Luis Suarez , Lee Bryant , Alexander Richter and Alexander Stocker will discuss adoption archetypes. The Alexander's kick off with an overview of their research. They point back to the research that was done on Groupware in the past. This is a basis for the research on Enterprise 2.0. Archetype nr. 1: Exploration. Continuously identifying feasible usage scenarios for IT-services which are suitable for any use. Archetype nr 2: Promotion. Coordinated communication and targeted training of IT-services with focus on certain modes of use. Their research shows: Wikis and weblogs have gained maturity, making promotion the dominant strategy in corporate settings. Microblogging has the explanation strategy. Research will continue to see if that changes. Luis takes the stage. Talks about BlueIQ - driving social software adoption at IBM. IBM started with social stuff 40 years ago with their forums. But in the modern sense of social software they started in 2001. Points to the whit...

Next talk/discussion with Rob Howard , Luis Suarez and Frank Schoenefeld . Frank gives a list of 7 pitfalls of Enterprise 2.0. Don't care at all. Frank says: You are obliged to care. Since Enterprise 2.0 is freeform, emergent and easy to use - just let it happen. Frank says: in a closed system entropy/disorder always increases (2nd law of thermodynamics) It's not about technology... Frank says: It is. It's about culture... Frank says: It is not. You can not measure the ROI of it. Frank says: You can if you want to and have to. Information overload kills. Frank says: It does indeed. Shield yourself. With Enterprise 2.0 we've found the holy grail for everything (in the organization). Discussion: Rob disagrees fundamentally with the thesis that it is about technology. The big successful companies have a business objective and then select tools to be successful. Analytics is important (they should map to a strategy). Rob missed 'r...

Next talk by Bertrand Duperrin , Ellen Trude , Emanuele Quintarelli and Mike Thompson (Headshift). Bertrand kicks off by focusing on Cultural issues in general, between Europe and the US and it's implications for Enterprise 2.0: self protection: culture as an excuse local identity protection vs globalization and mergers different attitudes towards autonomy, rules, hierarchy... philosophy of work trust/mistrust vs companies, colleagues... will engage with colleagues organization boundaries that reinforce cultural ones who said legal? Bertrand says this is a major issue and it's a good thing we are discussing it here. Every country with its own culture has to find it's own approach wrt e2.0. Now Mike Thompson ( Headshift ) who collaborated in a large research project on Enterprise 2.0 . This research is still going on. First results can be found here . He says the research shows that it's more related to company culture than coun...