It’s imperative to recognize that this didn’t just happen with the creation and growth of facebook, or my space, friendster, or geocities... Read the article

Introduction

In the past two years we have seen a dramatic increase in interest in a new approach for systems that support office workers.  Much of the focus for information technology deployment has been on automating or even eliminating less skilled jobs.  This has been largely effective, and organizations today are able to much more with fewer people. People today spend less of their time on routine tasks, and more of their time on things that make a difference, than was possible just ten years ago.

The challenge is to determine how to support higher skilled modes of work.  We call this kind of work “unpredictable work” because one cannot predict in advance the exact course of what will be done.  This is technology for the rest of us: managers, decision makers, executives, doctors, lawyers, campaign managers, emergency responders, strategist, and many others who have to think for a living.  These are people who figure out what needs to be done, at the same time that they do it, and there is a new approach to support this.

The trend goes beyond being just a technology...

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Back in 2003, Bill French coined the now rather popular quote “eMail is where knowledge goes to die” that’s been making the rounds all along and which over 4 years ago I decided to adopt myself (Orkindly steal, errr, I mean, reuse, if you would want to call it that way), as part of that new mantra of mine on Living ”A World Without eMail“. Well, nearly 10 years later, and only 6 after its birth, I think I’m now ready to declare something that I never thought I would be claiming, at least, not this soon, but I am afraid we have reached that point: Twitter is where conversations go to die. Sadly. 

It took email over 30 odd years to reach that status where more and more people started to question its long-standing status quo within the corporate world and it looks like Twitter has accelerated that same perception to just a... Read the article

This post is on behalf of the CIO Collaboration Network and Avaya

Did you know that in the past 3 years, we’ve seen:

• Encyclopedia Brittanica go out of print after 244 years
• Newspaper Ad Revenue surpassed by Internet Advertising after 305 years
• Number of Landlines surpassed by Mobile Phones after 125 years

We’ve seen the meteoric rise and fall of companies like Nokia, RIM, MySpace, and Groupon.

The average tenure of an SP 500 company has dropped from 75 years in 1937 to just 15 years in 2012. At the current rate 75-80% of the SP 500 will be replaced by 2027.

Technology advancement continues to shorten feedback loops, speeding up the game and competitive pressure in nearly every industry. If your organization is in technology, you’re probably towards the front. If your company is in industrial materials, you’re likely closer to the end of the long tail. But, the changes we are seeing will affect... Read the article

Crowd funding is a growing force in starting and/or growing small businesses or creative projects. The concept is simple, put together a compelling story and get people interested enough to pledge an amount of money in return for "something".  The story is publicized on some online community and hopefully interesting enough to go viral on several public networks. Kickstarter is arguably the best known crowd funding site, but its not the only one. There's RocketHub, invested.in, PleaseFund.Us, Indigogo, Pledge Music and I'm sure a few more that I haven't managed to track down. The business models differ a bit but in general the concept is pretty similar. ... Read the article

Every year since 2006 Jane McConnell releases her report on digital workplace trends which is quite an in-depth piece of work.  The most recent one clocking in at over 150 pages of information with online survey data from over 456 organizations around the world!  Her most recent report looks at both the consumer and employee use of social and collaborative technologies.  While it is quite comprehensive I will extract a few pieces of information which I found to be interesting.

As you can see from the image below most organizations are still at the early stages of their enterprise collaboration initiatives. In our report that we released last year we found the same to be true so it looks like not much has changed here.  Although what does seem to be true is that organizations are starting to move up the ladder of maturity.  While 33% of companies still have fragmented...
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You may remember how in previous articles that I have put together over here in this blog I have mentioned how, lately, I am going through one of those stages, where instead of participating rather actively in a good number of various different social networking sites, I’m now more inclined towards plenty of reading and listening what’s happening out there, then do a bunch of more reading (books, articles, white papers, etc. etc.), followed by lots of additional self-reflection and learning on the sides from watching video clips, mainly of conference event recordings available on YouTube and, eventually, come back to the blog to reflect on some of the stuff I have learned in the process.

Yes, indeed, in short, I am spending now more time blogging than in the usual social networking sites, the so-called message boards. And today has been no different. Specially, since I have been catching up on a couple of recent keynote speaker sessions that have totally blown my mind, since my head is still spinning with dozens of ideas and I just can’t help... Read the article

You may remember how in previous articles that I have put together over here in this blog I have mentioned how, lately, I am going through one of those stages, where instead of participating rather actively in a good number of various different social networking sites, I’m now more inclined towards plenty of reading and listening what’s happening out there, then do a bunch of more reading (books, articles, white papers, etc. etc.), followed by lots of additional self-reflection and learning on the sides from watching video clips, mainly of conference event recordings available on YouTube and, eventually, come back to the blog to reflect on some of the stuff I have learned in the process.

Yes, indeed, in short, I am spending now more time blogging than in the usual social networking sites, the so-called message boards. And today has been no different. Specially, since I have been catching up on a couple of recent keynote speaker sessions that have totally blown my mind, since my head is still spinning with dozens of ideas and I just can’t help...

Read the article

Metrics aren’t hard to come by, in fact it’s just the opposite, anything can be a metric and that’s a part of the problem.  Organizations today are struggling with trying to understand what they should be measuring and looking at when it comes to enterprise collaboration.  Should they be looking at how many employees are using tools or how many comments are being submitted?  What about how many groups are created or how many ideas are submitted?  Most vendors offer these types of metrics as a part of their reporting and there’s nothing wrong with looking at these metrics if they are the ones you have identified as measures of success.

At the same time though a part of me has always wondered, why bother looking at any metrics at all?  Do they matter?  Would organizations not... Read the article