it’s been a long while since last time that I participated on a Blog Carnival, specially around the topic of Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing and Learning. In fact, I would think that there aren’t many out there anymore since most folks tend to spend the vast majority of their time in whatever the social networking site interacting with their network(s). So when I received an invitation a few days ago from my good friend Félix Escribano, over at adidas, where they are currently hosting one around those topics with a specific focus on Learning and how it’s helping redefine the workplace of the future, I just couldn’t help myself diving into it adding my two cents to the conversation. And if there is a topic dear to my heart around learning and education in general, specifically, in a ...  Read the article

According to dictionary.com, a silo is “a structure, typically cylindrical, in which fodder or forage is kept”. In the business context, a silo generally represents a wall or boundary put up by an organization to keep them focused on accomplishing their goals and keeping outsiders from interfering with progress. Sometimes these are also called “stovepipes”. Some might even go on to add that it’s an organizational construct designed to protect and serve the hierarchy. The bottom line is that silos are a method for ensuring focus around specific business deliverables. ... Read the article

For the past two and half years at my real job as the head of learning and collaboration, we’ve been early adopters of a virtual world product called AvayaLive Engage, developed by a company named Avaya.

It was formerly known as Web.Alive, and although I’m not a fan of the name change, that’s about the only negative comment I have with the product.

If you’re unfamiliar with virtual worlds, you are missing ...

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How do we get and keep more women in technology-related careers?
How do we increase the number of women creators, makers, designers, and coders?

Why not just add more women to the mix, and go from there? 

When all we do is “add women and stir”, without simultaneously and deliberately changing that system, we aren’t going to succeed. This tactic leaves untouched the cultural and structural parts of the system that continue to sustain gender bias.

“Add Women and Stir”

The “add women and stir” tactic works on the logic that simply adding more women to a particular event, school, company, or profession, will ultimately lead to a higher number of women staying on that career path.

We see this tactic at almost every point of the career “pipeline“. Well-meaning people aim to increase theoutput of the...  Read the article

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

This week, I was reminded of an interesting stat that frames the current era in an interesting way.

“More people own mobile phones than toothbrushes” – Bill McDermott, SAP CEO

— Brian Vellmure (@BrianVellmure) May 14, 2012

We are indeed on a steady march towards global connectedness. Surprisingly, there is still a ways to go.

Only 32.7% of the world’s population has access to the internet, and only 17% have access via mobile device.

Connections and Collaboration

The trajectory is, however, exponentially marching towards ... Read the article

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

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. 

According to the study from  ... 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:

... Read the article

The Startup Genome project setup a year ago to gather comparative data on startups around the world. Its Startup Compass allows entrepreneurs to compare statistics on their companies with others in their locality and around the world.

A post on Techcrunch provides a great summary of some of the data gathered in the almost 12 months since the launch of the project.

I was particularly interested in the rankings of startup cities around the world, reproduced below. There is no question that the US is no longer the predominant startup country in a world in which economic and entrepreneurial activity is increasingly global. ...

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Around 30 years ago James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente (professors at the University of Rhode Island) were studying how smokers were giving up their addictions.  During their observations they developed a model called the “Stages of Change Model” or “Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change.”  I remember reading and hearing about this when I studied economics and psychology at UCSC and thought it actually applies quite well to enterprise collaboration.  This model has in fact been applied to all sorts of behavior changes, not just quitting smoking.

There are five stages: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance.  When describing the stages I will refer to ... Read the article