Since Christmas I’ve been evaluating an iPad 3G for use at my work. Right now it is running wild and is not connected to our internal or guest wireless network. It doesn’t have access to my work email, so my first impressions are not as an enterprise user but as a regular Joe. Once I get access to our work environment there will be a new set of evaluation criteria.

Overall

I have to agree with just about everyone’s thoughts, the iPad is pure joy and a game changer in almost all areas. Let’s leave it at that!

Pros

• good size and weight for daily use
• excellent battery life after living through 20 years of laptop life
• great screen
• easy access to applications

So So

• 3G wireless performance
• internal microphone

Cons

• no Flash support (and websites aren’t providing an alternative)
• slow charging when not in sleep mode
• typing anything longer than a quick email using the virtual keyboard is gruelling

Later this month I should be getting the iPad connected up to our enterprise email and intranet. That will provide whole lot of new experiences to share.

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)

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.

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

• 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

For enterprises that truly want to benefit in the area of agility and teaming, a quick read and action can reap huge benefits.

We observed, for instance, one workgroup that rearranged their standard cubicles so that, instead of having a cluster of four served by a centre aisle with barrier walls to provide privacy, they opened the four up and created a centre meeting area with a round table. This group — technically oriented — wheeled up to the centre table and back to their “desks” at the margins of the space 10-15 times a day. (The lunch period, instead of being an “eat out” time, moved to become much more of an “eat in” session at the centre table, a mix of social time and “what have you heard” information sharing about industry news and developments.) This group was the parallel to the same function in another office: the other office made no such changes. Four people outperformed (quality and quantity of work) twelve in a more traditional setting: none of the four had ever been anything above a “satisfactory” performer before the change.

Today’s technology (wireless, VoIP, web conferencing and online collaborative spaces) allow anyone to work in the office environment that is suitable for the task. As office furniture is upgraded or offices relocated, fully reconfigurable offices should be high on the list.

True, but when you announce it in that way the ramifications of that failure is not fully understood by everyone. Many ignored that message as they did not need Internet access just them. They went about doing their business.

However, like many organizations we have an internal Blackberry Enterprise Server connected to our Exchange system. So while email was working in-house, messages were not being delivered to the Blackberries.  This was not initially obvious and communicaitons did not go out alerting those users. The BES needs to connect to the RIM server prior to reaching the handheld devices and visa versa.

So now the problem, how do you let someone in the field know that they can’t send or receive messages on their Blackberry, when the tool used to let them know there is an outage (email) only works in-house to Outlook workstations?

I’ve thought that setting up a private Twitter account for out-of-band communications (SMS and the phone still worked). How about using a bulk text messaging service that can use a preset distribution list. Does anyone have any ideas.

From: Rocketboom.com

I was in the Skytrain station (Granville) a few days ago and noticed all the Telus ads. New smartphones, Blackberrys and all kinds cell phones. Stay in touch, access the internet etc, etc.  Kinda makes me want to visit my local Telus dealer to get something new.

But wait!

Telus doesn’t have any service in the underground Skytrain stations in Vancouver. Hasn’t had it ever that I can remember and I’ve been a Telus customer for at least 15 years. I see lots of people using their phones – I wonder who they are with? Definitely not with Telus or Bell, our local CDMA carriers.

Why is that Telus can’t get it together and get the appropriate antenna system installed in the tunnel? Not enough high-paying business customers? They seemed to be able to do it for the tunnel by the PNE. Well,  the worlds a-changin, and more and more of those high-paying business customers are moving transit (ie. Skytrain). 

What a joke, advertising your phones and the cool ($$) services in a place that has no signal.

I think Telus marketing needs to have a heart to heart with Telus engineering and infrastructure delivery.

For the more advanced user check out the first 2-3 minutes of this one. And you thought a stylus for your PDA/Smartphone was a recent invention.