IBM’s goal is to promote the vision of social business by embedding it into the digital activities and everyday thinking of employees. The challenge is to inspire already technically savvy and digitally motivated employees to become ‘digital citizens’, enthuse them about the value social media can add and motivate them to start exploring the online world.

I managed a few minutes out of my schedule last week to stop by the Yammer Tour event in San Francisco. I was in San Francisco doing a keynote for sugarCRM's user event and luckily the events overlapped. As I was listening to Yammer CEO David Sacks talk about some of the new Yammer features and interview some customers, I was struck by how much social tools like Yammer are changing businesses. Yes, I know that's almost all I've talked about for the last 4-5 years, changing businesses with social technologies and driving real cultural changes, but seeing that transformation really makes an impression. It's easy to get lost in all of the forward looking research and discussion on technology when in fact, what really matters is what businesses are actually doing with the tools to get some real business benefits. Does using social tools for business really make any difference? There are all sorts of ways to measure value when it comes to technology, we wrote a whitepaper on the ROI of social that has some ideas. Social business impacts business processes across the company and is having some interesting and very positive returns. Not all are as obvious as others though, and some of the less obvious are perhaps the most transformative.

When the book on informal learning came out, nay-sayers attacked me as some kind of loony. Some still do. I’ve got a thick skin.

QUESTION: How do you know that informal learning works?
ANSWER: How did you learn to walk and talk? How did you learn to kiss?

QUESTION: How can you measure what people learn?
ANSWER: By judging what they do. Has their performance improved?

QUESTION: How can we assess the ROI of informal learning?
ANSWER: Cost-benefit analysis. But hold it, how to you assess the ROI of formal learning?

QUESTION: How do you know learning on the job is 80% informal?

Recent studies, including an employee satisfaction report from APCO Worldwide and Gagen MacDonald, point to several benefits that arise from social intranets as enterprises deploy new social communication solutions.  Enterprise social networks, when configured and used properly, are becoming the main knowledge repositories and communication hubs in the enterprise. They are replacing corporate intranets as the most comprehensive and reliable places to find information about the company, its processes and procedures, and the people who work there. 

I’m regularly trying to do two things: explore mobile capabilities, and get folks to think more broadly about how we can support performance in the organization.  I was asked to flesh out a proposed title for a stage at the upcoming mLearnCon, and thought about trying to map the 4C’s of mobile to the major categories of mobile work opportunities.  It’s a slightly different take than my previous meta-mobile post where I looked at performance support, formal learning, and meta-learning...

This post is the first in a two-part reflection on two enduring management obsessions: control and employee engagement.

Shifting to the right

Following my post describing the Smart Work Framework, Harold Jarche (@hjarche) correctly commented that letting go of control would be an issue for businesses shifting to the right of the framework, from traditional structures characterised by place-dependent hierarchical structures to physically-distributed, networked structures.

Legacy of insight

As I have said repeatedly, in blog posts too numerous to identify, we have been here before. My contention is that social business developments are only the next phase in a trajectory of reform of ways of working, which began ...

Nora Ganim Barnes and her colleagues at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth have looked at business blogs for some time. In 2010 50% of the Inc. 500 had a corporate blog, up from 45% in 2009 and 39% in 2008.p Now in 2011, the use of blogging dropped to 37%. In contrast, they found, in a related study that blogs continued at the same 23% level in Fortune 500 companies. This has, in part, happen because of the rise of other social media that have taken over some of the function so blogs. However, blog remain the main vehicle if saying something of substance and most of the traditional media outlets have adopted them.

Mayra Aixa Avilar (who I hope to meet someday, maybe at mLearnCon?) pointed to this post saying “mLearning is starting to diverge from eLearning not only in specific meaning, but in approach and design as well”, and I want to politely disagree.   Depends, of course, on what you mean by elearning, to start with.

My, how times have changed. Two years ago, people were scoffing at the term social learning. Three years ago, social learning was solely for the nerds like me, whereas four years ago it was a term used solely in academic circles. But during the past year and a half or so, social learning has become cotton candy at the fair. Everybody wants some.

In particular, there has been a fair amount of shuffling, repositioning, flanking and acquiring going on in the vendor space as it relates to our fluffy, sugary ...