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We love shiny new things. The latest hype, oh, let's talk about it! But is it really new or does it just have a new name? Just think about how we talked about 'groupware software' back in the day. Nobody calls it that way anymore. We talk about 'collaboration software/tools' now. The same goes for 'web 2.0'. Nobody says that anymore. We call is 'social media' now, although I'm sure we'll have a new term for it soon. A last example (as I could list many more examples): everybody is talking about 'digital transformation' now. Before that all the talk in town would be about 'social business' and before that it was called 'enterprise 2.0'. Definitions are important. It's all about being clear about what we mean. What I don't understand though is the way many present something as completely new while it clearly isn't. The term is different, but the underlying theme is the same. That's why I...

There are quite a few books about ‘collaboration’. Recently one was added to the list: ‘Collaborating in the social era’ . I had the pleasure to read Oscar Berg ’s new book twice. Once in ePub format and then in paper. And I must say I enjoyed reading the book and highly recommend you read it too. Reason to read the book The first reason I enjoyed it is because I’ve been following Oscar’s writing ( blogging ) for years now. It’s great to see his writing has been collected, structured and extended into this book. Intranatverk did a great job publishing it. The second reason is the fact that many books you read about collaboration are theoretical. They give us general and more strategic things to think about. And these kinds of books have their own right. I enjoy them as well. On the other hand, after finishing those books, I can feel lost. What steps can or should I take? Oscar’s book is not about that. For one, it’s clear that Oscar is not only a consultant, but has done ...

The Enterprise 2.0 is slowly coming to an end. We're at the final keynote round about ' Framework of the Social Enterprise & the Future of Work '. First up Marie Taillard . Marie challenges us to look beyond the enterprise to the ecosystem. Where is the value in the ecosystem? Where is your customer at? Are we - at the summit - focusing enough on the customer? Internal and external can and should help each other. Then  Peter Vander Auwera about 'Corporate Rebels United, the start of a corporate spring?'. Our orgs no longer serve our needs. They cannot keep pace with the current world. Corporate rebels wants to address this. They love the organizations they work for and address the issues in the organization from a deep personal conviction. 21st century practices of new orgs according to corporate rebels: organizational structure lead ing ship strategic options portfolio decision making lean execution system innovation self-expression And ...

Enjoyed participating in the Lego serious play session . Some pics... The Lego pieces we got to use Working hard on the assignment My tower... Add caption

Now a practice panel about ' Social as Enabler for Corporate Behavior Change '. First up Celine Schillinger who has been addicted to social collaboration by accident. Celine shares 3 cases in which she has experienced and facilitated change within the company she works for (large pharma company): It all started with an email from her to the CEO, that received no answer. She forwarded it to a small group of friend-colleagues and it became viral. This multi-disciplinary/multi-divisional group of employees decided to meet over lunch and try to address this in a good way. They continued to meet in real-life and support the community with Yammer (called WoMen - capitals are deliberate). They created 62 crowdsources solutions (related to gender-balance. Then the CEO said: Let's meet over lunch. The CEO proposed to do a workshop with the whole leadership team about this topic. From then on this topic was on the agenda and is 'implemented' in the performance metrics....

First up, Lee Bryant about leading 21st century firms. This talks is part of an expert panel about Defining the leadership model and design of the 21st century organization . Here are my notes. So, what comes first social tech or new organizational structures, Lee asks. Step 1 is deal with your org chart, your organizational structure. The culture of work is changing. We are talking about human resources instead of resourceful humans. Productivity has gone quantum. 12 people is the new army. Hierarchy is one dimension of the organization. It exists and will continue to exist, but it is very expensive to get things done. We will move to small, coordinate agile teams. The general manager that has no specific skills is not something of the future and are generic best-practices. Communities and networks are the new structure (or actually the old structure of the org). Podular working ( Dave Gray ) needs an underpinning service platform. There are companies doing this, like Kyocer...

Jane McConnell shares the results of her yearly - and great! - Digital Workplace survey. This is part of the expertise panel about digital workplace concepts and trends . Jane defines the digital workplace as the intersection of people, tools and organization. The two main drivers for the digital workplace are: increasing organizational intelligence; gaining efficiency & cost savings Key to transformation Jane found in her latest research is that the top management and operational management are twice as involved in strategic decision-making with respect to the digital workplace. Much more was shared in her slides. Too much, too fast to keep up. I focused on studying her slides instead of blogging... Sorry. Next up  Michel Ezran about the research Lecko does on the adoption of enterprise social networks. They try to measure the level of engagement in 15 organizations. Some findings: a few transversal communities generate most of the ESN value deplo...

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...

A panel discussion about ' Key factors for strategic enablement ' is kicked off by  Emanuele Quintarelli . He shares his research on the state of affairs of Enterprise 2.0 projects in Italy. Not a pretty sight: no goals, leaders don't understand, no metrics, but also... social business is here already. Companies are just doing  it. So, how do we move forward? Some remarks by the panel: Luis Suarez says we are confronted today with the fact we should manage for the longhaul. Employee disengagement is the big issue we should address. Management is the barrier, so we should address that. David Terrar says we should bring internal social back to hard business facts Chee Chin Lie: talk less about strategy, but do  it. It talks time. BASF is only two year into internal social and he sees lots more potential for his company (and other companies). At BASF recognizes this takes time, but they found it of strategic important.

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...

I'll liveblog large parts of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit. I'll try to publish my notes as soon as the talk is over. First talks at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit are by Jon Mell and Dan Pontefract about ' Heading from Engagement to Passion in Future Work Performance '. Flat army First, Dan Pontefract about 'Flat army'. Pontefract starts with some stories about his experience in corporate life. Why do organizations feel like jails? Research (Gallup a.o.) shows employee engagement is horrible in most large organizations? In the US research shows this leads to huge losses in productivity. Disengagement is a huge issue in organizations. How do we avoid disengagement in organizations? Most people want to find purpose at work. At Telus, the company Dan works for with 40.000 employees, they use several different models to encourage engagement in leadership, collaborative tools, etc. Telus had engagement issues. Half of the employees were not engagement. They d...

Are you planning to go to the Enterprise 2.0 Summit ? I hope so. It would be great to meet you there. To me the Enterprise 2.0 Summit is the conference about enterprise 2.0 and social business in Europe. It’s the place to be to learn from experts in the field, ask your questions and share your insights. So, I feel honored to be one of the summit's ambassadors this year! I couldn’t make it last year. But I did go to the editions before that . I really enjoyed it. The conference is well-organized, it has great speakers en lots of talks tapping into the practical experience of the speakers. (Here's a blogpost from the conference organizer about the summit.) This year will be extra interesting. Many organizations are just jumping on the social business bandwagon. So it will be interesting to hear from them why they are and how they plan to do it. Furthermore, there are many companies and consultants that have ‘been through it all’. Some are disappointed. Enterprise 2.0 an...

This is my final post about the SocialNow conference 2013 . In this post I’d like to share some highlights from four talks. Two were about gamification, one was about money and one about the future of work. Gamification The presentations about gamification by Andrzej Marczewski (of Cap Gemini) and Paulo de Carvalho (of Vodafone) were very interesting. I really enjoyed how these presentations were placed back-to-back. Andrzey gave a general but very good introduction to gamification . He talked about the what, why and how. I really enjoyed how he also talked about cheating and gamification. Paulo talked about his experiences with gamification inside Vodafone. He gave a detailled overview of how they applied gamification to certain business processes and how they deeply thought about the right metrics and incentives for the game to be useful. Costs Ana Neves gave a short presentation about the cost of social tools in the enterprise. Don't focus on the lic...

Now for some highlights from the vendor presentations in my second post about the SocialNow conference.  Foulders has not been launched yet, but presented their concept and tool at the conference. They want to start where the users are: their email inbox. And most people have multiple inboxes. So they provide a super dashboard over all your inboxes and help you organize the tasks that come out of your email. They use language technology to help the user quickly and efficiently organize emails in tasks and folders. Podio  was at the conference for the second year. I didn’t hear anything new with respect to the product. There will be a big update to the product in the very near future. Podio is still an impressive product that wants to help us overcome email and make spreadsheets better. Spreadsheets can easily be turned into open and smart Podio apps to improve collaboration and communication around them. Another new tool to SocialNow is Wordpress with the P2 e...

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...

James Dellow has a nice post researching the history of email and why email is so successful. More importantly he wonders what this means for social tools and their success. He concludes his post with the following: Enterprise social software can also learn some important lessons from email: We need interoperability between enterprise social systems. Users prefer standardised interfaces. It needs to be cost effective to own and operate. Far from being a nemesis, email and enterprise social software are more likely to form a strong symbiotic relationship. I've been thinkings and blogging about this topic quite a bit as well. I did research and product concept development on document management tools in the past. One of the things we said back then is: integrate document management into email. I think this principle still applies. I also think the killer social tools will be deeply integrated into/with email. For that reason I think Google+ has a good chance of winning ...

SharePoint is used by many companies . Lots of them are struggling to use it strategically. How can SharePoint become essential for our organization? How can organizations drive SharePoint adoption? These are questions I hear a lot from customers. There are many SharePoint conferences out there. Do we really need another one? My colleagues and I at Entopic found many conferences address SharePoint from a technology and developer perspective. Which is great. There is clearly a market for this. However, we wondered if there are also conferences that address the business- and user-side of SharePoint. We found only a couple world-wide. For this reason we thought it would be good to organize a SharePoint conference with a business focus. And apparently more people were looking for something like this. There were 300+ attendees. Symon Garfield kicked off the conference with a keynote about how to implement SharePoint successfully. Symon discussed several reasons why implem...

One of the podcasts I listen to regularly is HBR Ideacast. Recently Paul Polman, Unilever's CEO, was interviewed. I thought the interview was great and inspiration. You can find the podcast and transcript here . There's lots of talk about social business lately. What does it mean? How can it be done? And how does it relate to new social tools? I like the way some are stressing social business as human  business. Businesses consist of humans and should do what is good for humans inside and outside of the company. The interview with Polman give a short insight into what a human business could or should be. A human business is a responsible business. It takes it's responsibility for the world, environment and humans in general. This has to do with how they produce products and services, the packaging they choose, the way they take care of employees and partners, etc. Polman went even further by stating that responsibility and sustainability comes before money and shareholde...

It still excites me every time when my RSS reader and tweets point me to interesting content I wouldn't have found by myself. It is true: Interesting information finds me. James Dellow pointed to Cecil Dijoux's interesting slide deck about 'The nature of software and how it changes the business' . The nature of social software and how it changes the business - Cecil Dijoux from SocialBizForum There's lots of good stuff in the presentation. What particularly struck me was slide 55 and 56. Those two slides are about how Enterprise 1.0 tools, like ERP, CRM and PLM tools, relate to Enterprise 2.0 tools. These slides are important for many IT departments and high-level decision makers to understand Enterprise 2.0 is not an either-or, but and-and game. I find we still have a long way to go here. Some time ago I wrote about this along two lines: relating business processes to networks , and relating different types of work to tools . It's interesting how e...

Many companies are looking into social tools for their internal organization. Lots of others just select what related companies have chosen. Hoping this is the right choice. As with selecting content management systems, many struggle to select a social platform. There are so many tools out there and they all say they can help you support internal networks. How to choose the right one? Is there a right one? Does the success of a tool elsewhere mean it will also be successful in the company you work for? The Social Now conference in Porto (June 26-27), organized by Knowman , addressed these questions. And it did so in a unique way. Basically the idea was to have social tool vendors present based on a concrete company case that wanted to move forward in knowledge sharing, idea management and collaborative project work. The vendors were asked to share their approach in 20 minutes and then an expert panel helped the company ask the right questions to the vendors. Many brave vendo...