In the early morning of September 11, 2001, I was driving through downtown Los Angeles, shocked at what I was hearing on the radio, and awestruck by the police and military helicopters circling and protectively watching over the City of Angels skyline.

Like many of you, as that day progressed, I watched the news intermittently, contemplating what these events might mean for the world, our country, friends and loved ones in New York City, and my new bride and me (We had just purchased our first house the night before).

What I didn’t know until just a few days ago , is that while I was somberly working at a client site, comfortably detached from the horror of the collapsed skyscrapers, hundreds of thousands had fled away from the burning twin towers and found themselves trapped on the South side of Manhattan. In the chaos that ensued, bridges, tunnels, roads, and other public transportation were shut down. There was no way off one of the world’s most densely populated islands.

It was in those circumstances that the largest maritime evacuation in all of history took place without any previous planning, infrastructure, or dedicated staff.

Yes, this was larger than the Dunkirk evacuation (commonly known as the Miracle of Dunkirk) in WWII where 339,000 Allied soldiers (British, French, and... Read the article

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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.

With this objective in mind, IBM BeNeLux enlisted the aid of global marketing agency, Ketchum Pleon, to help them transition from not just doing social media, but to transform  their daily business through social technologies. A pool of best technical minds and leading innovators – who believe in building a smarter planet – decided to move IBM and its clients well beyond social media into a new era of collaboration they call Social ... Read the article

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.

So it was interesting to me to go back in time to when ... Read the article

Several years ago, my wife and I ran out of toothpaste in a remote part of small Southeast Asian country. We spent half the day trying to find a place that carried a halfway recognizable form of packaged toothpaste. It was more of an adventure than you might imagine. We ultimately found one unopened Colgate toothpaste box covered in dust in a small bazaar kiosk. In that case, we were excited and thankful. It didn’t matter much that the box was a bit dusty, nor that it wasn’t our typical preferred choice of toothpaste.

I remember coming back to the United States several months later, and going shopping for toothpaste once again. I found myself paralyzed in the aisle as I tried to make sense of shelf space that looked similar to this:

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

Growing up, I spent much of my time playing competitive team sports. I played soccer, basketball, and (American) football. In each case, almost immediately after some level of effort, I knew how I had done. I got immediate feedback from my coach(es), other players, and often from the crowd. I knew how much weight I had lifted, how fast I had run, if my shot had gone in or not. I could look at the scoreboard and see where things stood.

Brian Vellmure making a tackle against Colorado State 1994 Source: Associated Press

As I progressed in age and level of competition, we increasingly watched hours of recorded film to analyze steps, movements, body positioning, reaction time, and... Read the article

When we talk about the impact of the social web, social business, social CRM, consumerization of IT...almost anything that has to do with the changing business environment, the topic that universally comes up is the change in people's expectations. This applies to employees, who want a user experience for the enterprise that is as "good" as their personal web experience and who want devices that provide the best and most modern functionality. For collaboration they are either provided modern people-centric tools by their company or they work around IT and use consumer tools that more completely meet their needs (although arguably not always the needs of the company when it comes to security and IP protection). The list goes on, and on and is both a great opportunity for business and a challenge for IT and older paradigms of "control" ... Read the article

This post is on behalf of the CIO Collaboration Network and Avaya Last weekend I had the pleasure of introducing a movie for the first time to my 5 year old son – a movie that incidentally, I first saw when I was 5 years old. In it, an iconic message was communicated via a [...] Read the article

Undoubtedly you remember scenes from the Terminator when Arnold gets all sorts of intelligence about his surroundings, complete with risk assessments and recommendations of what to do next.

Several weeks ago, DARPA revealed that they are close to releasing contact lenses for soldiers that “give warfighters access to systems that greatly enhance their...  Read the article

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In The Social Psychology of Organizing, Karl Weickexposed the theory of enactment, stating that organizations were fundamentally an abstraction of the reality, essentially brought to life through management’s narrative. In that sense, changing the way we work requires much more than technology and the empowerment of knowledge workers. Taking a broader perspective, and looking at organizations, not only as a production and profit-making machines, but as center of a part of human activities mainly taking place in cities, sheds a different light on the role and nature of what we call social businesses.

While trade was an important part of the wealth of cities during Antiquity, we had to wait until the XIth century for economic exchanges to regain importance after few centuries of...  Read the article