A couple of weeks ago, my face hurt. Really, really bad. So I went to the doctors office expecting to spend the first half hour of my visit filling out all of the obligatory paperwork. I was surprised to find, then, that gone where the paper forms and instead my data was collected and tracked electronically. My doctor and I spent more time interacting, addressing my problem and coming up with a solution. And as a result it was a much more enriching experience.

It struck me that if the medical industry, which has a history of being a system of records and paper files, can recognize the importance of enabling...  Read the article

“Increasingly, strategic advantage for corporate institutions will hinge on privileged positions in relevant concentrations of high-value knowledge flows and the adoption of practices required to participate in and profit from these knowledge flows”.

By these words, John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davidson define in The Power of Pull what they call the second wave of the Big Shift. Their impressive concept and research have already been thoroughly and brilliantly commented. Social business, or whatever we call it, has the potential to drive us through the necessary changes to harness flows of knowledge and take fully advantage of human collaboration and creativity.

Are we stuck in a document-based view of the firm?

But to fulfill this promise, thus to trigger the third wave of...

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(Originally posted on Enterprise Strategies: http://enterprisestrategies.com/2012/09/26/improving-organizational-communications/)

To help social business emerge from hype to mainstream adoption, it is important to demystify how social business improves people’s jobs. One area that social business can benefit across a wide range of areas inside of companies is the Communications Plan. Today, communications plans have wide application across many areas of business:

• Projects
• Programs
• Change Management
• Marketing
• Organizational Change (re-orgs)
• Crisis Communications
• Product releases

What is a communications plan?

According to Hieran Publishing a communications plan contains the...

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I spent the first part of this week at VMworld, mostly catching up on two acquired products, SocialCast and Zimbra, as well as the Horizon product line. I continue to be impressed with the feature set and depth of the SocialCast product and I have to say that the strategy and direction for the product are really shaping up nicely (more on that in a minute). Along with the barrage of press releases from VMware this week, you may have noticed an announcement from IBM about another acquisition, Kenexa. Now IBM acquiring another application company has become pretty common over the past few years, but this acquisition, I think is interesting more for the implications of strategy than just from the additional assets added to the IBM solution portfolio.

Over the past few years I've focused quite a bit on some emerging technology that falls loosely into the category of social applications. We've gotten more... 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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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

With the evolution and growing attention to employee engagement one thing has become very clear. Employee engagement comes in many shades, different definitions. It’s a concept that outwardly has a very simple meaning, but we know underneath, there are multiple layers, multiple shades that add to its complexity. Its meaning and how you define it can vary depending on your role, your organization, your individual satisfaction and even personal happiness. The levels of interest vary: there are those who don’t understand its value and won’t take part at all, those who play more of the voyeur, watching as it  happens, and then there are  those who are eager participants, actively driving and leading engagement efforts. We also know that how organizations define and promote employee engagement has evolved over time and has varying shades of...  Read the article

In the past you may remember how time and time again I have mentioned how one of the main use cases from a successful Social Business would eventually be that one ofcustomer service and customer support, although over the course of time you may have noticed how my experienceshave been very lacking in this regard. So, instead of giving up on it altogether a long while ago I decided to keep pushing for it, because I knew it that at some point it would click and that would be the day where we may be witnessing that tipping point for that use case to become a reality. Well, I think that day has arrived. Today. And that company that has finally understood what a social business is all about is one that I never expected that it would be coming around, as seen on this blog a few times already. That social business with a success story on providing excellent customer service and support is Movistar. Yes, you are reading it right.Movistar!

I have always been saying that the day both telcos and airlines, along with government, amongst a couple of others, start embracing social... Read the article

One of the most important dynamics in almost all industries today is how value creation is increasingly shifting to be between organizations rather than within organizations.

Most notably, the nature of client-supplier relationships have dramatically shifted over the years.

This is not new. I have spent considerable time working with the institutional financial services sector, and seen major changes over the years. I recently recalled a White Paper I wrote years ago, How Collaborative Technologies are Transforming Financial Services, in the wake of a Collaboration in Financial Services conference I co-organized and chaired in New York.

Here is an excerpt from the White Paper...

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“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” – BILL GATES

The statement by Gates underscores the importance of clearly defining your vision, business model, and process(es) before implementing technology to try and remedy the ills of your organization. But the ironic reality is that technology advancements are moving so fast that organizations are being forced to fight on numerous fronts at the same time; increased competition, loss of brand control, new communication channels, much of which is being enabled by and executed on employee and customer owned devices...  Read the article