Reality Check … The Workplace of the Future, Five Years Later

July 3, 2008 at 12:56 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Web 2.0

I initially wrote the piece below a little more than five years ago. 

At the time I had been running around trying to get people to look at the ways that information technology and the Internet would have major impact on the ways we work, and the on the structures and dynamics of the workplace of the (relatively) near future.  Most of the time it felt like being a butcher at a vegetarians’ convention … especially given that it wasn’t so long after the dot.com bust and 9/11/01.

I find it useful to look back, and check in:

The Workplace of the Future
posted Mon November 11, 2002 - 04:00 AM

Fundamental assumptions create beliefs, which shape what we do. A dominant set of beliefs creates what we call a ‘paradigm’. Many people have recognized that a paradigm shift is occurring as we move from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.

While many of the factors and trends are already apparent in the work world today, using them as fundamental assumptions about the emerging future can help to address their growing impact on peoples? work lives and the ways we adapt to their presence.

1. Interconnectedness - between people and between businesses - will continue to grow. Being ‘connected’ in a ubiquitous sense will become more familiar to more people. Access to the Web, and the applications on it, will become easier and easier to use.

It looks like a tsunami coming. Globally, three times as many people are forecasted to be on-line in the year 2003 relative to the number of people on-line at the end of the year 2000. Web applications will more and more often reflect the intersection of human and work activities, and will touch virtually every domain of activity.

So much of  this has happened that the forecast above seems banal today.

2. ‘Smartware’ (smart software) applied to work activities will become ubiquitous for virtually all types and aspects of work. The effects of smartware applied to work will continue to change the fundamental nature of knowledge work, and increase the polarization currently occurring in the work economy.

At one pole, the dematerialization of work (less manufacturing, more information and knowledge) will create ever-higher levels of creative, imaginative and specialized knowledge work. Highly-focused service work will be based on conversations, meetings and negotiations in which people leverage knowledge, money, power (by virtue of controlling something) or time.

At the other pole, legions of low-skilled service work, such as customer service, data entry, sales service and semi-skilled trades work will be supported by smart tools. This type of work will become essentially disposable in nature, in the sense that it will matter little who does the work.

Between these two poles, work will tend to migrate towards one or other of the poles, e.g., skilled trades or teaching school. A school teacher will be supported to significant extents through the use of smartware and smart tools, as will a technician or a machinist. However, the nature of the work will depend upon the context of the organization and the systems, tools and culture of that specific workplace.

It will become critically important to clarify the context with which to use smartware and smart tools. The tools will become important participants in this process, and using them will demand clarification of the context, or the tools themselves will help to clarify and revise the context(s).

This large shift seems to be underway.

3. The ‘line-of-sight’ between the customer, employees’ work and the company’s strategic objectives will be essential, and very complex in some types of work. An employee’s work will need to address the dynamic of mass customization (an individual’s specific skills and personality will need to mesh with highly-structured work processes and information systems).

The other type of work will be niche-based, very narrowly defined and serving a specific need, yet the service provider will offer you an extensive range of services, bundled to create packages of value (value bundling).

This shift is also underway.

4. Tomorrow’s knowledge-work employees will be smart, assertive and questioning of inappropriate or uniformed authority. This sharpens the game for senior managers/executives and makes the notion of coaching (or championing-and-channeling instead of command-and-control) very real.

Many have written often about the growing impact of tech-savvy Digital Natives as they begin to pile into the workplace.  The rapidly-growing use of wikis and blogs in organizations seems to reinforce this observation.

5. Jobs/roles will change continuously - the focus will be a blend of skills and the strategic areas an organization now (in the present) either chooses to pursue strategically or must pursue to stay in the game.

Jobs/roles will become fluid and unbundled (into price-sensitive sets of skills - the tools to do this are currently being built), and ‘described’ this way (except in the Public Sector). Personal learning contracts will become the job description of 2005. This dynamic will continue to grow in importance because younger workers have been told to prepare for this for at least ten years.

Restructuring and downsizing will become regular and accepted fluid dynamics of life in organizations. It is already a common feature of the corporate landscape, and it will become an accepted fact of life.

This has been happening, and has been reinforced by the large shift to online descriptions and applying for jobs using job boards.

6. Most of the necessary ’smartware’ to create all this already exists. New and better applications will appear continuously. The key limiting factor will be an organization’s willingness and/or courage to use them. This will depend on the awareness/openness of senior managers/executives regarding:

· Real willingness to invest in letting smart people use the tools and an interconnected social web of knowledge-building to their full potential.

· The ability of this group to share power, in a real and meaningful sense. The legacy of structural hierarchy, and the manifestations of power and control embedded in our understanding of how to lead and how to manage, have created a real rigidity with respect to the unlocking of potential implicit in the concept of Human Capital.

· The ability of the "top" group to change deeply-ingrained behaviour patterns (see above) and ‘champion and channel’ people to focus on the line-of-sight link between customers’ needs and an organization’s strategic objectives.

The rise in awareness of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, code words for the application of social software and web services to critical elements of knowledge work in many organization, is a clear indication that this forecast is accurate, so far.

All of the factors outlined above, and doubtless others which we don’t yet recognize or understand, will continue to re-shape the world of work and organizations in ways that we haven’t yet foreseen.

What is certain is that the attitudes about work that we have collectively held at near-DNA levels of our psychology, will not serve us well in the future. Flexibility, creativity, authenticity - and opposites such as continual stress, the need to have clear structure, and protective territoriality - will all be key forces in shaping the future of work.

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Notable + Quotable: Elevator Pitches, Multitasking, and Cyberharassment

July 3, 2008 at 11:23 am · Filed under Reviews

Don’t Treat Web 2.0 Like Web 1.0

This Mashable article discusses how most Web 2.0 enthusiasts haven’t fully understood or evaluated how to make Web 2.0 actually work for their business.  “Too often we’re focused on the fun, new, and shiny in our various web apps, and it’s important to occasionally pause and evaluate the business and utility of all this time-sink we’ve accrued in social media to determine if it is in fact worth it.”

Elevator Pitches, Now Ready for Your Uploads

Techcrunch adds an easier upload feature to Elevator Pitches, the startup they launched recently.  Erick Schonfeld writes “But we soon realized that we had launched too early because the process for getting new videos on the site was just too cumbersome. It was all e-mail cut-and-paste, essentially, and we were overwhelmed. New videos didn’t immediately go up, and traffic trickled down.”  Perhaps this new feature will encourage more CEOs and businesses to upload their pitches.

The Boss Made Me Do It: Multitasking Still Inefficient 

From Ars Technica comes this article discussing how multitasking leads to inefficiency.  “The complaints against multitasking are the usual; you’re not as focused as you could be if you were just doing one thing at once, switching focus repeatedly actually makes you less productive as each time your brain takes a few moments to reprioritize tasks.”

Stop Banning Facebook at Work: Multitasking is Here to Stay

A response by YWorking. com to the previous article.  Matt Ellion brings up an interesting point: “The real issue I have with this is one of trust. By constantly monitoring your employees’ screens, by installing filters and blocks, by blanket policies forbidding access at work, you’re essentially saying to your employees that you can’t trust them.”

Awareness:  Cyberharassment

NewlyCorporate gives an introduction to cyberharassment and cyberstalking, sharing information that the modern employee should be aware of.  “Cyberstalkers use the internet or electronic methods to intimidate or harass.  Not every conflict on the internet is cyberstalking.  An offensive email, blog, chat, or argument is not necessarily harassment.”

Slife 2.0 Gets it Right

Mike Gunderloy from WebWorkerDaily reviews the second version of Slife, a time-tracker made for OS X.  His review states that there’s much improvement, “It fixes the problems I saw last time, adds some new functionality, and drops the price - to “free.”

How do you measure workplace happiness?

Steve Roesler talks about happiness and fulfillment in the workplace, as well as its importance: “There’s a relationship between how much you love your job and how well you perform. That’s not a mystery. But there is a dynamic you need to know about in order to manage yourself and others…”

In the same vein, GreatWorkplace posted “Creating a Work/Life Balance“, which includes measures that some employers have taken to improve work/life balance for their employees.  One of these measures - flexibility: “More and more employers are offering employees a flexible work week in terms of hours and days…”

With Fuel Prices Rising, U.S. Companies Work Quickly to Reduce Employee Travel

Rising fuel costs could well prove to be one of the primary reasons why teleworking will become more commonplace:   “66% of organizations reported that soaring fuel costs are having a moderate to very high negative effect on their business operations. And they don’t see an end in sight.”

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Comprehensive Tour of Lotus Connections

July 2, 2008 at 9:07 am · Filed under Reviews

I have been writing about IBM’s social software efforts for a while and most recently about Lotus Connections in small bits, (e.g., Activity-based Computing Moves Forward at Lotus Connections). So I was pleased to recently have the chance to have an extended conversation with Suzanne Minassian, Lotus Connections Product Manager. As Suzanne writes in Synch.rono.us, Connections was developed from applications that have been in use inside IBM for years (see The story of Lotus Connections). Connections has six major components: Profiles, Communities, Blogs, Dogear (social bookmarking), Activities, and an aggregation component called the Home Page.

We started our tour with Profiles. Suzanne said that it began in the CIO office in 1988 and eventually became the IBM Blue Pages. Each employee has a page with information about their job, location, background, picture, organization, and more. It provides a place to run searches for people based on those attributes, helping IBMers identify those who might be interested in their work, people who could help with their projects, and teams working on similar projects from across IBM. There are over 360,000 IBMers and over 150,000 more related people on Blue Pages, including consultants and partners, so we know this can scale. A version is now offered to the market through Profiles. Here is a Profile page with widgets, including social tags, reporting structure, colleagues, links. View contact information, background information and aggregated contributions. Download vcard and pronunciation.

The Communities function was also initially developed by the IBM CIO office for internal use. It origins came from Community Maps which provided a way to manage communities, email, and Sametime (aka IM). Elements were added such as discussion forums, ways to share blogs within the community, integration with Sametime as a broadcast channel, and integration with wikis. IBM partners with Socialtext and Alassian for traditional wiki functionality. They will also soon offer wiki capabilities within Connections through Quickr (the new version of QuickPlace). The Quickr wikis tend to be primarily used for team workspaces, which is not surprising.

The blog functionality in Connections came from Blog Central, also developed by the CIO Office from an open source tool called Roller. Blogging was introduced as a way to encourage knowledge sharing within the organization. Many IBMers had external blogs, but an internal blog service gave employees the ability to discuss projects and work at a level of detail that otherwise wouldn’t be suitable externally. I wrote about these early days of Blog Central in a 2004 Portals Magazine article. “IBM set up Blog Central without any restrictions or predetermined uses as a pilot to see what creative uses evolve. Dan Gruen observes that this “hands off” approach has paid off and enabled “bottom up” innovation by individual IBMers. Serendipity, itself, is one of the emerging benefits. Recent blog posts of everyone are displayed at the IBM Blog Central site so participants can see what the others are doing, discovering new ideas, as well as people who have compatible interests. Many new initiatives and relationships are generated this way. This serendipity extends to regular meetings as each participant can look at the other’s blogs to find previously unknown common interests or new ideas to discuss, getting to know more about the others in less time, making meetings more effective. “

Suzanne says that Blog Central is still going strong, serving many different specialty areas within IBM. Sales, engineers, researchers, product evangelists, and experts use their blogs to share information and promote discussions across boundaries. They have updated the interface. There are also many ways to find blog content. Search results within Connections bring back related tags, forums, blogs, wikis and profiles, along with traditional search results. Blogs can also be rated and you can see featured blogs. Here is th blogs tool with ratings and comments.

Social Bookmarking within Connections is provided by the well-known Dogear application created by IBM Research in Cambridge. It was one of the first enterprise social bookmarking tools. In 2004 some IBMers were using del.icio.us but it had its limits. There were also security concerns with having bookmarks on a publically available site, and while you could bookmark internal pages, metadata on that bookmark could share confidential information. Once inside the firewall, the developers added authentication and other features. While they provide the opportunity to make bookmark private, about 4% are marked this way. You can view most popular bookmarks and tags and filter tags to view related ones. You can create watch lists to see what people are doing in Dogear, as well as to follow your favorite tags. You can see who has watch listed you. Within the enterprise you can use tags to find people with similar interests and build your reputation. Internal thought leaders develop a following through watch lists without having to write a blog. You can also provide notifications of tags and write a comment, saving the trouble of writing an email. You can also filter your tags by asking to see only combinations of tags. Now there are over 418,000 public bookmarks within IBM on Dogear.

Activities is another tool developed by IBM Research. It is designed to simplify the work process by connecting the many different communication channels and social software functions related to a single project. It takes the information out of the silos of individual tool and makes information activity centric. You can information directly into Activities or drag and drop information from other tools and add comments. It also has calendaring and contact information. Here is an Activity list with prioritized activities.

Connections allows for extensions through plug-ins that allow you to embed Connections into other tools. This is a good idea and Suzanne said it has increased adoption. You access Connections through Microsoft Office tools, as well as Lotus Symphony. IBM Research and the CIO office are working on new features and capabilities. People have seen the popularity of twitter so now there is an experimental BlueTwit for inside IBM. The Beehive tools are exploring how to use Facebook features like fun walls, photo posting, and high 5’s inside the enterprise. With the opportunity for use and testing within the large IBM population, potential products can be evaluated on usage data across a range of audiences, not just the IT people.

I asked Suzanne about how people can deploy Connections as they are misunderstanding in the market on this issue. You do not need to purchase or have IBM Websphere Portal Server or other IBM products. Connections is offered as a standalone suite of tools. You are provided Websphere application server and access to DB2 at no extra charge. You can also use other databases such as SQL and Oracle. IBM also provides standalone versions of Profiles and Activities. Connections is an on-premise software offering. However, some IBM partners will host it for you, and IBM itself is now offering BlueHouse, a hosting service for small firms, which includes some elements of Connections.

Lotus has been developing community-based software long before Web 2.0. Now with IBM Research and an active CIO office testing new ideas on a portion of the over 500,000 IBMers and external people in the IBM environment, it gives them an opportunity to really test and improve social software in a large enterprise context. I am going to be having several more conversations with Suzanne this summer on this application development process and some of the other tools that have emerged.

Post Script - See how Luis Suarez uses Lotus Connections to cut way back on his email as discussed in the New York Times, I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip.

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Dealing with being the lone tech wolf in the office

July 1, 2008 at 8:15 am · Filed under AppGap Tips, Tips + Pointers

Although the use of computers is prevalent, the ideas of how to use them more efficiently and optimally still escapes most people. This can become a major obstacle within a business environment. After all, if you’ll be using computers and their software as your most important tools in the workplace, you ought to do it properly. This could be something you understand, especially if you read this blog. But what if you’re the only one who understands this in the office?

It’s a familiar situation to most tech-inclined people. You find a new and more effective way to do things, try to share them with others, but they say “No thanks! I don’t want to be bothered with all that!” If you know from experience or merely have a hunch that your coworkers are like this, is it even worth it to try?

Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t. But, like most things, you’ll never know until you try.

Start with a small suggestion. Don’t start planning an online collaboration system just yet. Maybe a simple suggestion of installing instant messaging software so you and your coworkers can easily ask each other questions and get instant answers without running from one office to another. Changing the underlying system has to happen in little steps, if you want it to happen at all.

Be the example. Since you’re trying to share the idea that some tools increase efficiency, start with yourself. Show how efficient you’ve become as a result of competently using these tools.

Don’t be surprised if they don’t love how efficient you are. I’ve found that some supervisors give more importance to tradition and “time-tested process” than actual results.

Get someone on your side. Even if it’s just one person. Convert them one-by-one if you have to. Since you’re the only one who knows about web apps, productivity software, and GTD, others might consider you an alien who makes things more complicated. If another person gets great results from what you preach, then others are more likely to follow.

Learn to accept that there are some things you can’t change. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try your best, but don’t get your hopes up that working for your company will soon be like working for Google - where everyone is updated on the latest trends and ideas on technology. There will be some things that will be very difficult to change and there will be obstacles to your path. Of course, this doesn’t equal defeat. As long as you can still use your tools and processes yourself, and as long as your input is appreciated in some way, you’ve made a difference.

Are you the only tech-inclined person in the workplace? How do you deal with people who aren’t maximizing the web and the software tools at their disposal?

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ThoughtFarmer – Intranet 2.0

July 1, 2008 at 7:26 am · Filed under Reviews

No, this is not an oxymoron. ThoughtFarmer provides a nice integration of old school intranet and new school social media to provide a comprehensive platform for enterprise 2.0.

A few weeks ago I met with Chris McGrath, co-creator & product evangelist for ThoughtFarmer, at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. The ThoughtFarmer team has been doing web application development for large corporations and government clients in Vancouver, Canada since 1995. ThoughtFarmer began as a client project for Intrawest Placemaking (the development division of Intrawest, the company behind Whistler Blackcomb, Steamboat, Winter Park, and several other resorts).

Placemaking wanted the ultimate intranet: an always-current, self-healing knowledge repository that would capture the company’s intellectual capital and strengthen workplace community. Chris and his colleagues developed a prototype of the system that was enthusiastically embraced by Placemaking. But when they went looking for a technology to power it in Placemaking’s Microsoft environment, the only apparent option was a heavily-customized version of SharePoint.

The SharePoint customization couldn’t match the prototype and would exceed the project budget, so Intrawest put the project on hold. Chris and his colleagues saw a market opportunity to build a wiki-inspired intranet platform specifically for Microsoft environments – a simpler, friendlier alternative to SharePoint. So they invested their own funds, built ThoughtFarmer version 1.0 from scratch on the .NET platform, and sold the first copy to their original client. The result is documented in a case study on Cases 2.0.

ThoughtFarmer’s primary goal for Placemaking was simple: turn all users into authors. Using an underlying wiki base, all employees at Placemaking can add, edit and annotate content on the ThoughtFarmer-powered intranet. With the exception of a few policy documents, Placemaking’s intranet is a completely open, malleable, living collection of current thoughts, processes and key lessons learned.

This reminds me of what Janssen-Cilag did when they scrapped their traditional intranet for a wiki so everyone could contribute, except ThoughtFarmer takes this concept much farther. The wiki base is embedded under a full suite of intranet and social media tools in ThoughtFarmer. As they say nicely on their site, “ThoughtFarmer embraces the good things wikis have brought us: an open, easy, democratic authoring environment with no barriers to content creation. ThoughtFarmer then adds structure and social networking to that wiki core.” You get “wiki collaboration, without the chaos.” Here is a screen shot of a ThoughtFarmer intranet with some features highlighted.

With its latest 3.0 release, ThoughtFarmer provides blogs, calendaring, discussions, document management, people profiles, search, security, tagging, version history, wikis, workstreams, and more. You can have free tagging like del.icio.us or closed tagging with a taxonomy. One example of closed taxonomies is the physician extranet “Primary Care Central” they deployed for the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority. For example, to find a lab requisition on Primary Care Central, a physician can navigate by lab location, condition type, or requisition type. The tags help surface the same lab form in multiple, logical locations.

ThoughtFarmer is also multilingual. They now support English, French, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean because of current clients and will add more languages on request. ThoughtFarmer is optimized for organizations with 100 to 5,000 employees that run in a Microsoft environment, as most do at that size. They authenticate with Active Directory to make it easy for these organizations.

ThoughtFarmer has a blog by its own name that includes some interesting cases studies such as Graymont Limited, a mining company that works in 200 year old quarries using enterprise 2.0 technology. Graymont wanted to create a common set of information tools for over 1000 employees in several dozen locations across the continent. Graymont’s IT Director, Ron Ogilvy, said that their ThoughtFarmer intranet is “a continuously evolving, self-healing base of information.” There are also great pictures of the mines.

In Spring 2008, ThoughtFarmer tried a creative marketing idea to reach bloggers. They created a fake company, Tubetastic, with the slogan “We make tubes – a whole series of them” (a reference to Ted Steven’s infamous remarks on net neutrality). They set up a ThoughtFarmer-powered intranet to run the company. They placed selected bloggers in key positions in the company and invited them to participate. I was on the list and did look at the intranet but was too distracted with other things to comment at the time. However, ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch wrote about it and it got nice comments from people like Jeremiah Owyang and Suw Charman-Anderson. It is an innovative idea that might only come from British Columbia. Kudos to them for trying it. But more importantly, I think that ThoughtFarmer provides a nice blend of traditional intranet functions with social media in a wiki base. It has achieved its goal of turning intranets on their head to increase participation and bring them into enterprise 2.0.

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Learning from Each Other

June 30, 2008 at 5:09 pm · Filed under Collective intelligence, Enterprise 2.0, Learning, Web 2.0

A colleague of mine teaches a course in Online Social Networks the Computer Science department at Boston University. He’s done it for two years now, and his teach method has come under some scrutiny, for what he does is pretty novel in a traditional university setting. During the course, each student needs to create a web site as part of required credits for the course work. What my friend doesn’t do it is either to tell them how to do it, or provide him with tools for web site building. He gives them enough direction so that they know where to look and get started, but after that they are on their own — almost. What he aims for is that the students will ask each other what they are doing, where they found good (free) tools to build web sites, and so on. Most of his students come away delighted with the course, though there are always a few who complain that B. doesn’t teach them anything. They overlook, of course, the fact that they actually learned a good deal.

I had similar experience recently during Enterprise 2.0 and the blogging panel that I was on (see my blog on this at Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness). I am saving some bits about content and conversation for a more comprehensive note here on the AppGap anon. We on the panel had decided that we would like to do less talking and more listening so we did not do a usual panel with powerpoints. We merely introduced ourselves and started a conversation, intending to be open to questions and comments from the audience. We ended with a really rich discussion about blogging for business (that was, in fact, not really the topic we’d prepared to discuss). The audience participation was great, including a lot of information about blogging that we as panelists would never have known. Yet, in the conference wrap-up session, I took note when one of the attendees offered the comment that she was very unhappy with panels that didn’t provide content. That is, she came to be taught, and not to enter into a conversation. (We also had attendees who were thrilled with the way it all turned out.)

Learning from each other is a recurring theme for John Seely Brown (JSB), whom I heard talk a few months ago at a client’s. What he said was, “Learning from each other matters.” Speaking of formal education, he said, “we learn from other people in the room, not from graduate school.” Think of the best courses, the best seminars that you attend. Aren’t these the ones that generate the most conversation, that inspire people to share their stories? Learning occurs socially, which is why he feels strongly that Web/Enterprise 2.0 represents the future of learning.

At a subsequent panel on “Developing a Next Generation Workforce,” led by Mike Gotta. That was another great exercise in learning from each other. The conversation wanted to talk mostly about the “millennials/Generation Y” and the impact of their entrance into the workforce. An Xer piped up and made a comment that makes me understand how this shift to social learning is generational. She said, “It all goes back to how we learned in elementary school. When I was in school, we were told that when we finished our assignment we could work quietly on homework or other reading. The Gen-Yers are told that when they finish, they should help someone else.”

I see this as all of a piece: learning to share, learning to learn from others. The role of the instructor? As Andrew McAfee put it (in yet another session at E2.0), the best advice he received when he started teaching at Harvard was to “trust your students,” that is, to set up a classroom environment in which the students are learning not (just) from the teachers, but from each other and collectively building up knowledge.

Person Andrew McAfee

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Design Dogma

June 30, 2008 at 2:42 am · Filed under AppGap Tips, Tips + Pointers, Work Design

I was recently reading through an article by Eric Reiss‘ on dogma for making websites usable. With a number of AppGap authors writing about work design and information design recently, I thought I would share Eric’s take on Orwell’s Rules for Authors applied to online information system design:

1. Anything that exists only to satisfy the internal politics of the site owner must be eliminated.
2. Anything that exists only to satisfy the ego of the designer must be eliminated.
3. Anything that is irrelevant within the context of the page must be eliminated.
4. Any feature or technique that reduces the visitor’s ability to navigate freely must be reworked or eliminated.
5. Any interactive object that forces the visitor to guess its meaning must be reworked or eliminated.
6. No software, apart from the browser itself, must be required to get the site to work correctly.
7. Content must be readable first, printable second, downloadable third.
8. Usability must never be sacrificed for the sake of a style guide.
9. No visitor must be forced to register or surrender personal data unless the site owner is unable to provide a service or complete a transaction without it.
10. Break any of these rules sooner than do anything outright barbarous.

Eric’s words are a reminder that often we forget that our designs often don’t fit the worker, but are implemented to suit something else, whether a management practice or someone’s ego. What we end up with is something that is less than fit-for-purpose.

When we bring new tools and practices into the modern workplace we shouldn’t forget the philosophy of user-centred design and take time to consider:

1. Who are the users?
2. What are the users’ tasks and goals?
3. What are the users’ experience levels?
4. What functions do the users need?
5. What information might the users need, and in what form do they need it?
6. How do users think things should work?

Maybe if more of us drew on these questions in our craft, as do so many of those evangelists who’ve brought us web 2.0 tools like wikis and blogs, then practices like knowledge management would have been more successful.

M

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Awareness Summer 08 Release Brings Sharepoint Integration and New Features

June 27, 2008 at 8:38 am · Filed under Reviews

I have written about Awareness several times, the most recent was on the Fast Forward blog, Awareness Makes a Smart Move with Its Facebook Integration. Last week I caught up with Eric Schurr, VP of Marketing and Direct Sales, to discuss the latest version of its platform, Awareness Summer 2008. This release includes Microsoft SharePoint integration, advanced social networking functionality and portable widgets that extend Awareness-powered Web 2.0 communities to any website and third-party services such as iGoogle and Facebook. In addition, administrators of Awareness communities now have enhanced self-service reporting and metrics functionality to better understand and manage community activities.
Microsoft SharePoint users can now connect with Awareness communities on the Web, bringing external-facing social media to SharePoint users. This allows Sharepoint users to link to these external communities through web parts for social networking, content contribution, content viewing, as well as administrative and reporting functions. There is also, single sign-on, integrated search, and the Sharepoint profile can be enhanced with Awareness capabilities. This integration can support customer collaboration, marketing campaigns, market input for innovation, market research, and other community-based objectives. This Awareness - SharePoint integration can also be used to complement SharePoint for internal-facing communities.
The Summer 08 Release also provides additional ways to connect with other applications using their portable widgets and improved API. The portable widgets allow Awareness-powered communities to be extended to any page on the Internet. These widgets span a range of Awareness capabilities, including displaying and contributing community content, social networking features and more. Awareness widgets can be rapidly placed on any HTML page or third party services such as Facebook and iGoogle. The Awareness API has been extended to include the entire range of Awareness community and administrative level capabilities. This empowers companies and partners to build their own communities and integrate with other collaboration and social networking services. They can also extend and embellish the communities that Awareness builds for them. I think providing completely open APIs is a smart move, as well as all this increased connectivity.

Awareness has also increased its social networking capabilities to complement its support for user-generated content. A customizable user interface and the ability to create different types of social groups within communities can make for a more varied user experience to drive increased engagement and participation. New features include: people lists, status, profile privacy, presence and activity feeds and a personalized drag and drop user interface. There are also two new types of organizational constructions within communities. First, there are Neighborhoods, where community administrators can create structured social areas that feature comprehensive security and customization. The neighborhoods are more “top-down” and structured with assigned membership. In contrast, there are also Groups, where users can create ad-hoc social areas that other users can join by invitation or by request. McDonald’s has launched a number of the neighborhoods to connect with both employees and owner operators.

Awareness has also worked on its administrator functions. They now have increased self-service capability to report and graph participation and success metrics in their communities, including user activity, content activity and other metrics. These include user and group growth over time, most and least active users and groups, top/bottom categories, most viewed content, most commented on content, highest rated content, etc. They have also increased performance with significant increases in page views per second capability, showing 10 to 20 times performance improvements over the current Awareness release.

I think they are hitting key areas with this release, especially the increased integration, social networking, reporting, and the offering of both top-down and bottom community options. As I wrote recently in response to Andrew McAfee at the Fast Forward Summit, striking the right balance between the concepts of “emerge” and “impose” is what will define successful enterprise 2.0 offerings. Awareness is working to cover both of these bases with their Summer 08 Release.

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Facebook webinar slide deck and questions (and hopefully answers)

June 26, 2008 at 1:03 pm · Filed under Communities, Webinar

Below you’ll find the slide deck that accompanied yesterday’s webinar. In addition, you’ll find the great questions and comments that were flowing in over the course of the discussion, only some of which were we able to address. We’ll be pointing the panelists back to your questions and hope they’ll be able to respond in the comments. Feel free, of course, to pose new questions as well.

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Questions and Comments

• A few of the speakers today have mentioned that some companies take a dim view of Facebook because they see it as a “kid’s thing.” Are there strategies you can recommend to turn that fun/social element of Facebook into a virtue for building engagement?
• How can Facebook group coordinators build deep social capital to drive engagement?
• Which of the engagement issues discussed in these cases are present in any electronically-mediated social network and which are specific to Facebook given its affordances and limitations?
• How would you characterize the level and quality of engagement in Facebook groups with a substantive purpose vs. a marketing purpose?
• Kimberly touched on how social network behaviors seem different from professional behaviors; can we say more about this?
• Can you please briefly explain to me what the “Influentials Theory” is?
• Are the loosely associated groups of individuals in Facebook actually communities? Do they behave as communities?
• Has anyone done a functional comparison among Facebook, LinkedIn, and SharePoint, etc? That is, these hosted Web 2.0 apps and enterprise tools?
• I think this work is very interesting, and can’t help but wondering “What’s Next?” From a research (study) perspective, some things were uncovered and learned in this experience. What will we do with these and where do we go from here?
• Would most of you agree from this experience that it takes a calculated combination of virtual and on-the ground connection to build these kinds of communities?
• Kimberly: how did you work with the 5 people who were “recruiters” of the 1300 or did this just evolve?
• I think the Alexa graph shown [in the slide deck] narrows the field of relevant data. If you zoom out from Alexa’s results to encompass all of the last year, you see a similar shallow dip in June-July of last year (likely due to summer vacation for college students). As the ‘Facebook Generation’ grows up, we may see that cycle fade out. But it does show that the Facebook crowd may still be relatively young. Does that significantly limit the ability of brands or companies to cultivate a relevant audience?
• Is it viable to use Facebook groups as a stepping stone to a full blown ‘for fee’ membership site?
• Was there any data gained from the study that provided a link between the group and improvement in sales? Any evidence that community members went the next step and actually clicked a link to initiate on-line commerce?
• Great research - very interesting - thank you very much. But is it is still a pity that the event platform is not more open and social itself - allowing people to see who is here and what questions people asked. Wondering why that is so?

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Is Your Workplace Results Oriented or Time Oriented?

June 26, 2008 at 8:50 am · Filed under AppGap Tips, Collaboration

Sometimes it feels like the company owns your time, and that usually means that you work in a time-oriented office. Usually this is the regular 9 to 5 job where you log in and out of the office and your supervisors need to see you actually working. This type of work environment is traditional and comfortable - since this is how we’ve been doing things from the Industrial Revolution onwards. But a new type of workplace is emerging, one that is more results oriented and focuses on what you accomplish rather than how many hours you log in.

Having experienced both approaches to work, I noticed some key differences and made the following list based on my observations:

Time Oriented (TO): You must work hard. Maximum input produces maximum output.

Results Oriented (RO): You must work smart. Maximum output from the minimum input possible is desired.

TO: You are seen as diligent if you are the first one in the office and the last one out of the office.

RO: It’s not about when you arrive and when you leave, it’s about what you accomplish during your stay - no matter how long or short it is.

TO: Let’s have long, regular meetings so we know we’re discussing things in depth.

RO: Let’s have meetings only when necessary, and make them as short as possible.

TO: Use email to communicate as it is short and saves time.

RO: Use the appropriate communication tool for the situation - whether it’s email, instant messaging, a collaboration platform, or a phone call.

TO: It’s about when you work that matters.

RO: It’s about how you work that matters.

TO: You must adapt your working style to the needs of your company or supervisors.

RO: You must find a way to satisfy the needs of your company or supervisors within your own working style.

TO: Show up and offer your time.

RO: Step up and offer your ideas.

Is your workplace time oriented or results oriented? What makes you say so? And have other items to add to this list?

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