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In the business book category there are two types of books. On the one hand you have books that serve a relatively easy solution to a problem everybody knows is way more complex than the book tells us. Usually the author doesn’t have actual experience with the topic he/she is writing about. The book is largely based on interviews and other books. The author pulls these together and provides the reader with an overarching model or list of learnings the reader can apply. I’m not saying this approach is wrong. I regularly read these kind of books and enjoy doing so. But when I’m done I’m usually left with the feeling that the inspiring story is far away from the real complexity I have to deal with. On the other hand there are books which are clearly written by authors who have been or still are there. They clearly know what they are writing about, don’t provide easy answers or simple 1-2-3 steps to success approaches. These books try to help in your real situation and provide loads...

In little over a month the next edition of the SocialNow conference will be held. Organizer and good friend Ana Neves has been working hard on putting another great program together. And I'm honored to be the host of the conference again! So I hope to see you there. SocialNow is a special conference. I wrote about previous editions (and I still need to blog about the last one...). SocialNow is special for different reasons: For one it's a well-organized and thought-through conference. The conference organizer works in this field, knows what businesses are looking for and what conference visitors need to get value-for-money. The conference has a unique format. There is not one conference in which you get great keynote talk and discussions combined with real demo's of tools based on actual user stories in a business context. The conference is not only for people/companies looking for a new internal social tool. I find that the demo's also help you define a...

Now that plans are being made for the next edition of SocialNow, it’s a good time to post some of my notes from the previous edition. I’m really looking forward to the next conference and hope to meet you there! Special conference As you my know SocialNow is special conference. The structure is very different from other conference. The whole idea is to help you (the audience) listen to and select the right internal social platform for your needs. This is done by asking vendors to present to a fictitious company with real-life needs and convince them that your platform is fit for their needs. The company is supported by ‘consultants’ with expertise in IT, design and business. And of course the audience may ask questions as well. Here we go: Talks and tools The vendor presentations are mixed with several keynotes by Tim Walters , Louise McGregor , Luis Suarez and Euan Semple . I’m not going to summarize those talks. I do want to share my notes about the vendor presentatio...

The 3rd edition of the SocialNow conference is coming up quickly. This time it will be held in The Netherlands. The previous two editions were held in Portugal. The unique concept of the conference hasn’t changed. The conference is focused on helping you select the right internal social tool. Many people and organizations are struggling with this. There are loads of internal social tools out there and often social tools are already being used internally (e.g. Yammer …). But how do all these tools stack up? As always most internal social tools say they can do everything. But can they really? Even when they have to present their tool against real-life business situations? That’s what SocialNow is about. Many tools will present, but no marketing talk is allowed. The tool has to speak for itself by relating what the tool can do to specific organizational challenges. Such as international collaboration, dispersed knowledge sharing and expertise finding. These presentations will b...

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...

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...

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...

Many organizations have a hard time with selecting the right technology for their business. There is a huge need for expert support here. The company I work for helps select Content Management Systems for instance. Decision makers wonder what to choose. "Should I focus on a platform that is good at content management? Or should I focus on social first? What is the right approach?" Not many people are experts in this field. Not many people have to select new technology very often. Organizations do this every 3-5 years. So when they do, they get nervous and find it hard to oversee the field they’re looking at and the decision they’re making. They don’t want to invest in technology that will become irrelevant in just one or two years. They want to make a sustainable choice. Interestingly, there is now a conference that helps decision makers (and their helpers) do just that. There are basically two kinds of conferences: one focuses on business (users, adoption, business ca...

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!  

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...

Stuart McRae 's talk will be about IBM's experiences with internal jams. Jams were started in 2001. In 2003 they did a value jam . What's a Jam? An online forum on which people can post ideas, discuss them, etc. They learned that what happens on the backend is essential for the success of the jam. It makes the results richer. Jams leverage the collective wisdom of the organization. They have real-time metrics running in the background, visualized to see who's participating, what are the themes, etc. What happens after the jam? Sometimes it's easy. With the Jam about values the values were the result. But sometimes it's more complex. Elements of the Jam are: vision, strategy, purpose Jam! Analysis (e.g. understand why people comment) Champions & Leaders workshop (about 100 employees, face to face networking related to themes) Work streams to turn ideas into action The most important thing after a Jam is to continue the conversation out in the open. (They did ...

Next talk (no slides!) by John Hagel about Cascading Change: Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things into Motion. We are moving to a world of increasing returns. This world is very different from the world we were in, the world of decreasing returns. This movement can be typified by moving from business as stock to flows. Stocks was about: build up knowledge, protect it aggressively and capitalize on it. But in a world of excelerating change, these knowledge stocks rapidly diminish in value. (Except for companies like Coca Cola.) New opportunities are in the area of knowledge flows. And this is where social tools come into place. Not only used insides companies but also over institutions. There are even more values between institutions than inside them. Some say we should move fast here. But Hagel's approach is: move slowly so they trigger cascades and are sustainable over time. Social software adoption approaches: bottom-up, starting in teams deploy it in a section ...

What is the future of intranet technology? Looking at the cheap social tools, what should intranet teams invest in? And what does mobile mean for the intranet? These were just some of the questions Tony Byrne addressed in his keynote at the Intranet Conference ( Congres Intranet ). Byrne advised the audience to focus on a light-weight application architecture for the intranet. Lots will change in the coming years and is changing. Making the architecture lighter will give room to respond to new technology, changing business and user needs. One central intranet platform is not (going to be) enough. Make sure the elements and functionality of the intranet can be clicked together and mixed. Organize for mashups. Another theme in Byrne’s talk is the social layer. We should add a social layer to the intranet. Make the technology more human through social. Integrate the elements of social everywhere in your intranet, like tagging, commenting, social networking, location, etc. Byrne als...