AAA Yammer Testimonial from Yammer on Vimeo.

Jaimee Clements talks about AAA’s experience with Yammer microblogging. She provides great information about why Yammer (or any microblogging application) helps within a distributed organization:

• finding pockets of knowledge
• solving long simmering problems
• engaging staff and executive
• connecting a distributed workforce

So I will start over but I really need to think how all these social networks and aggregators will work with one another.

In this video Stowe Boyd interviews Charlene Li (co-author of Groundswell). Use it to re-energize your Enterprise 2.0 plans. Some of the enlightening quotes are:

• “it won’t go very far without an executive champion”
• “when you put social technologies in place it starts tearing down the way that power is shared”
• “when you give the power to people to post into a wiki or write a blog, [...] and if you let them do it freely, that diminishes the gate-keeper role. [...] and if you think about the way that organizations are laid out, its usually a bunch of silos, and social technologies puts a big stick of dynamite in that”
• wondered why we are finding blogs so little used. “I think its because people don’t like blogging. It’s hard to find time to sit down and compose your thoughts. [...] It asks people to communicate in a very different way. [...] I suggest to executives that they not blog, but they sure talk a lot, so I suggest they video themselves.”

Charlene thinks that enterprise Twitter-like tools will displace a lot of email. “It supplements the natural communication already going on, like IM, which many enterprises have already adopted.”

Posted on the Enterprise 2.0 Conference Blog.

If you only have a few minutes, the first 2/3 of the video is what you should watch. Some key points:

• making the case for change
• transformation through technology in a very short period of time
• 92% of employees take the employee survey (45 minutes)
• key question – is my manager / supervisor practicing the Aetna way (at 83%)
• they had a situation where staff did not admit they worked for Aetna
• employee engagement moved from 48% to 78%
• the are focusing on a high performance organization (expectation, not fear based)
• their performance management system is based on results AND leadership (can’t get results while not developing and leading staff  - if you achieve good results but have poor leadership = no reward!

Source: MIT World

Althought this was for a legal conference, just view the slides and remove the (few) references to firm and practice. It applies to any large organization. Lots of good information. Slides 9 & 10 has a good list of the types of Web 2.0 tools.

What meeting?

Wonder why your brainstorming sessions are a bust? Mitch Ditkoff (Ideachampions) gives us some of the most common reasons:

1. Poor facilitation
2. Wrong (or poorly articulated) topic
3. Unmotivated participants
4. Insufficient diversity of participants
5. Inadequate orientation
6. No transition from “business as usual”
7. Lack of clear ground rules
8. Sterile meeting space
9. Hidden (or competing) agendas
10. Lack of robust participation
11. Insufficient listening
12. Habitual idea killing behavior
13. Attachment to old (“pet”) ideas
14. Discomfort with ambiguity
15. Hyper-seriousness (not enough fun)
16. Endless interruptions
17. PDA addiction (Crackberries)
18. Impatience (premature adoption of the first “right idea”)
19. Group think
20. Hierarchy and/or competing sub-groups
21. Imbalance of divergent and convergent thinking
22. No tools and techniques to spark the imagination
23. Inelegant ways of capturing new ideas
24. No time for personal reflection
25. Pre-mature evaluation
26. No follow-up plan

Now that you’ve finished nodding your head 26 times, check out some of the excellent advice to make your next brainstorming session a success. 26 Reasons Why Most Brainstorming Session Fail (and what to do about it)

• Each year the amount of information created in the enterprise, paper and digital combined, grows faster than 65%.
• Non-productive information work, such as reformatting documents or reentering documents into computers, consumed more than $1.5 trillion in U.S. salaries last year.
• Survey respondents spend as much as 26% of their time trying to manage information overload.
• Respondents split their time evenly between dealing with paper and digital information, but 71% prefer to deal with digital information.
• The amount of time U.S. information workers spent last year managing paper-driven information overload cost $460 billion in salaries.
• Reducing the time wasted dealing with information overload by 15% could save a company with 500 employees more than $2 million a year.

Source: IDC survey, Information Overload Site

And more serious:

• 28% – The percentage of the typical workday wasted by interruptions caused by unnecessary information
• 53% – The percentage of people who believe that less than half of the information they receive is valuable
• 42% – The percentage of people who accidentally use the wrong information at least once per week

So what is IOS? Watch this video!

Many of us spend most of our working hours in offices that were designed in the 1970′s.  But we don’t need to. Check out officesnapshots.com and laze away a while checking out the digs of all your favourite companies. The tech companies, advertising firms, innovation groups and every stripe in-between.

Dream and enjoy.  And don’t forget to check out the nutrition stations, meeting rooms and fun spaces.

One of the really, on the edge ones, is the offices of Selgas Cano in Madrid.

So how does your office rate?

“Social media makes listening easier. But listening is scary because we might not like what we hear.”

Ethan Yarbrough explores the topic of social media and says its better to be engage in the conversation because it is happening whether you are there or not What do you tell a company that fears social media.

If you really want to listen, then you need to be prepared for what your customers and employees are going to say. You might not be able to deliver what they want but you are able to meet them on their turf.

Inn At The Quay, originally uploaded by Elwin Witzke.

I really like the architecture of this hotel built right on the Fraser River in New Westminster, B.C.

Peaceful on Deer Lake, originally uploaded by Elwin Witzke.

While taking a stroll around Deer Lake we saw a number of people enjoying this quiet jewel in the middle of Burnaby. It’s a beautiful place to come an spend an hour in a busy day.

One example of an enterprise social network is NewsGator’s SocialSites. It built on top of Microsoft SharePoint and provides a dynamic space for communities, expertise location and “work streaming”. Two screenshots from NewsGator Profile Page and Community Site.

A few of the key messages from the report are:

• that consumer Web 2.0 products are not long-term solutions for enterprises, especially free or ad-supported services
• IT continues to be the gatekeeper preventing Web 2.0 applications from being leveraged in the enterprise
• business areas are asking for these tools and bypassing IT if they find a service that will help them in some area
• IT is worried about scalability of these applications
• IT budgets are primarily focused on maintaining legacy applications with little capacity to look at these new tools
• younger employees growing up with these tools will want something similar when they arrive at your doorstep to work
• IT is concerned about the security of Web 2.0 applications
• major enterprise players (IBM, Microsoft, etc) will make Enterprise 2.0 a feature of their monolithic solutions
• major growth in the enterprise will not happen until the baby boomers retire from the executive ranks
• social networking tools that allow customer interaction, profiles and participation in discussions and blogs will receive significant investment

Read a good review of the Forrester report.

Enterprise 2.0 Spending - Forrester

Via ReadWriteWeb.com

Social software in government headed for mainstream

Two great quotes:

Government folks are really jazzed about social media. Within all industries, there’s some level of excitement and passion for social software. In government, it’s off the charts. I think that’s because there’s such a high level of frustration with existing rules and restrictions. People are dying to talk to each other, and to free themselves from the restrictions that government processes have put in place. Intellipedia was an inspiration to many, many agencies and individuals.

and…

The interest has an hourglass shape. Senior government officials “get it”; they see social software as a way for government agencies to be more integrated with the communities they serve. Junior and mid-level staffers “get it”; they see social software as a way to cut through bureaucracy and work more effectively day-to-day. The obstacle I hear about again and again is upper-middle managers who have internalized the need for minimizing risk, while not yet adopting a strategic mindset around serving the needs of the agency’s external stakeholders.

• constantly expanding email servers
• wasted time navigating through email topics that you are not really that interested in anymore
• missing the emails that are really important
• way to much material left around when you really wished it had been deleted

Folio reports via Techcrunch that Neilsen company has deleted the Reply-to-All Button from Outlook. Check out the article for a copy of their corporate email announcing the change.

reply-to-all not available

I think this is a great idea. Way to often staff just keep on hitting Reply-to-All when it is not necessary. If you need to inform, discuss or include many people, they should use one of many collaborative tools available for that purpose.

I made this Gigapan image from the north press platform during President Obama’s inaugural address at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC on January 20, 2009. It’s made up of 220 images and the final image size is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels.

Inauguration

You can view the image on his blog or in fullscreen at
http://gigapan.org/viewGigapanFullscreen.php?id=15374

Zoom in and pan around. It’s lots of fun.

So what makes a successful corporate blog?

First and foremost is the realization that a blog is for the customer’s benefit – not for the company’s. It’s important to remember readers will only come back if there is value for them. That’s right value for them. Not value for the company. Readers don’t care if you are providing a nice, efficient press release site.

Rick Burnes reminds us of the real reason for corporate blogs in a posting at ZDNet.

Blogs for Customers, Not About Companies

If you look closely at the search results you pull up every day (and even some of the Alltop corporate blogs), you’ll see that an alternative model of corporate blogging is beginning to emerge. Instead of writing about themselves, companies are following the lead of the other company blog in the Technorati Top 100 — Signal vs. Noise. They’re beginning to create content that’s not about their business, but that appeals to their buyer personas.

Whole Foods is going beyond their blog and publishing recipes. American Express is publishing small-business advice. Indium Corporation is writing about thermal interface materials.

In each of these cases, the company is attracting a broad audience by focusing on content that is interesting to the demographic it serves rather than content about the products it sells.

Every company that is considering starting a corporate blog should spend some thinking about how this effort can support their brand. Otherwise publishing the blog could be wasted effort.

This podcast from Podtech.net and sponsored by Verizon Business provides a strong case to include a teleworking intiative in your 2009 planning. Some key points:

• to be effective, teleworking needs to be supported right from the top of the organization
• productivity and engagement scores can go up when employees are given the option to telework
• IT needs to step up and deliver reliable, secure and cost effective solutions during 2009
• technologies such as collaboration, unified communications and mobile access need to be part of the mix
• cost savings are available from implementing a hoteling workstation environment
• reduction in carbon footprint and congestion show corporate responsibility to staff and customers
• HR needs to provide training to managers who will have staff working from remote locations

Source: Podtech.net

Sponsored by Verizon

So slow

ZDNET reports on the Computerworld article “The 5 reasons IT can’t speed things up”. I think the first two are way overdue in being addressed.

A focus on big projects. In every case, the whole structure of the IT organization — from project offices to approval processes — is geared for large projects that last a year or longer. The projects are strictly linear, with business analysts interacting with architecture to produce reference solutions, then development experts converting that into designs, and then specifications being laid down. All this is good for getting a big effort right, but these steps slow down the work.

Hostility toward new ways of doing things. These IT organizations won’t invest in and experiment with new tools, approaches and methods until there is a project “worthy” of them. Meanwhile, no business client will take a chance on anything new. The result is that yesterday’s languages, tools and methods remain today’s — and likely tomorrow’s.

Silence rather than dialogue on IT investments. When business people are left in the dark about IT’s existing portfolio, they can only wonder: Are the existing pieces expensive to maintain and test? Is the company losing technical quality through skills attrition or lack of investment by vendors? Is it suffering declining functionality as the work processes evolve and the software doesn’t? Without portfolio feedback, the business can’t judge whether to extend what it owns a little longer or to start again for the next decade. More often than not, the business defers to IT — and IT defers to what it already knows.

The business side’s commitment level. Not all the problems are in IT. In every one of these companies, the business does not make IT tech projects a priority. Decision-makers don’t come to meetings, and key issues aren’t worked out early. Far too often, core questions — “What is a superior customer experience?” or “What is a premier supplier?” — aren’t asked until late in the game.

At project’s end, the business won’t participate in testing or invest in deployment support. That’s a governance breakdown. Successful IT projects are a partnership, but too often the business side fails to do its part.

Corporate style. Corporate behavior influences what you can do. If your performance evaluation system is too rigid, or if you are required to plan (and then execute according to that plan) with nothing held back for change, your speed will be limited. Here, IT can push against the limits, but it’s hard to go any great distance past them.

Computerworld column by: Bruce Stewart

So why is it so difficult change behaviour. Take out wiki and replace with SharePoint and you still have will the tendancy to use email and separate documents.

Collaboration - Email vs. Wiki

From : Wikinomics Blog