One of the pleasant surprises of the day was seeing the latest mobile app from SuccessFactors, which integrates JAM and other applications from their suite:

I have to admit this app really raises the bar in terms of both the mobile user experience and the integration it offers into backend (HR) systems.

I also spent some time looking at Employee Central:

On the face of it, you could probably build a half-decent intranet simply with Employee Central and JAM. And if we take what SuccessFactors is offering as either an indicator of what the HR technology market wants or what they think it wants, then very clearly HR professionals are very interested in creating a digital workplace.

(Thanks also to Michael Specht, an analyst with Navigo Research, who was kind enough to share some of his insights about the HR technology industry over a coffee and point me in the right direction.)

The first two posts (with another to come) ask:

• Is HR the missing player we are waiting for in the digital workplace?
• Why is HR late for social collaboration?

Firstly, despite the low representation in Jane's survey data I think the findings are reasonably representative of the HR view-point:

• HR says the Digital Workplace's primary purpose is to support "engagement and belonging"; and
• They concerns about social collaboration are people wasting their time, irresponsible behaviour by people, and regulatory and compliance issues.

However, I don't think they are the missing player - they are just operating in a different sphere from people managing intranets that have a Communication or IT role. The other associated group that I would highlight is also probably under represented are those responsible for facilities management. In addition to interest in engagement and belonging, questions I'm being asked are:

• How can we use technology to support more effective learning and development (in these conversations, there is also often an unstated awareness of the need for knowledge management).
• How can technology support the design of our physical workplace (incidentally, I'm talking to a firm of architects about this on Friday - we will be discussing the role of an enterprise social network in a company interested in moving towards an Activity Based Workplace design)

The big difference I have encountered with HR is that the intranet is a means to an end - they are interested in the message, not the medium. For someone in corporate communications running an intranet, it is very much about both medium and message. I would suggest that if the HR professionals aren't involved in the Digital Workplace conversation, then its because its not yet seen as relevant to their goals or they are dissatisfied with the intranet and are probably pursing their own strategy (marketing is doing the same). The "Digital Workplace" may not be the best terminology to use either, as it doesn't sound very people orientated.

I think the other issue to bear in mind is that HR professionals may fill very different roles:

• Some are focused on operational HR issues - e.g. hiring, performance management, etc
• Another group is concerned about learning and development.
• Others are tasked with bigger strategic issues, such as staff engagement or organisational architecture that may overlap with corporate communications.

But HR are facing greater pressure to collaborate both among themselves and with other corporate functions - and I believe this is primarily because of the impact of Web and social technologies on how people in larger organisations operate. Like other corporate functions, HR can no longer run in separate silos.

The bottom line for me is that regardless of how we achieve it (a "Digital Board" or some other social business structure), we definitely need to join the dots between all the different internal stakeholders.

Are you a HR professional? I would love to know what you think.

"Companies can’t reap the full benefits of a bring-your-own-device policy for employees if they reimburse monthly voice and data charges. But the benefits may not be all that great anyway."

The basic argument here is that the productivity benefits claimed about BYOD are unsubstantiated and it typically doesn't add up financially, unless companies shift part or all the expense to employees. What may make more financial sense is COPE - Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled.

The full Nucleus Research report is well worth reading, because I think CFO magazine have put a particular spin on this issue. Having said that, productivity claims are always an easy target because unless we pick a specifically defined and measurable activity - unfortunately, BYOD isn't likely to impact such a process.

But its also worth bearing in mind that BYOD can have strategic benefits that make the cost worthwhile. For example, such is the demand for BYOD from users the 2011 Cisco Connected World Technology Report found that 2 in 5 college students & younger employees would accept a lower-paying job with device choice, social media access, and mobility.

This actually all sounds eerily similar to the arguments against investing in social software. In this respect, if you think BYOD is the answer to a single quantifiable problem in your organisation, then it probably isn't the right strategy.

Last year I attended Ark Group's KM Australia in Sydney as part of a debate on capturing tacit knowledge using social technologies. This year I'm looking forward to attending as a participant, although you might also find me at different times helping out on the NSW KM Forum's "roundtable" that will be setup during the conference.

This year's line up includes representatives from organisations that include University of Oxford, United Nations Development Programme, US Army, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Genea, Hunter Water, Department of Primary Industry (VIC), Ezypay, Cancer Council Australia, NSW Treasury and Ernst & Young.

Also look out for the 'KM Conversations' tables, where you will be able to find people interested in talking about social media, technology, content, collaboration, storytelling and Creating ROI.

KM Australia 2013 is taking place from 23-25 July. For more information, email Ark Group for a brochure. You can also join the KM Australia conversation online, on LinkedIn, Twitter (hash tag is #kmaus) and Facebook.

DCMS Wordpress theme

The developers of the intranet for the Department for Culture, Media & Sport in the UK have open sourced their Wordpress theme. I originally blogged about the DCMS intranet back in March.

City of Malmö intranet

The City of Malmö's intranet runs on combination of Rails, Wordpress and Mediawiki and they have also open sourced these various parts.

This week they announced an upgrade to this concept, called Ming.le:

Listening to the media messages and watching the recording of their user conference keynote, this update is all about creating a user experience led design. A key feature of this design is to tightly integrate Infor's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Human Capital Management (HCM), and Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) solutions into a dashboard and activity stream - in other words, what Alan Lepofsky calls "purposeful collaboration".

Without getting hands on access to Ming.le and seeing some solid case studies, its hard to comment on how well this user experience works in practice. Infor competitor, SAP, has also been heading down this same track with SAP Jam (with a similar philosophy of focusing on the user experience). And we may also eventually find that Microsoft has plans to integrate Yammer's capabilities further with its Dynamics suite. So a focus on user experience isn't entirely unique to Ming.le.

Personally, at this point, I still think there is room for both general social collaboration platforms and those like Ming.le and Jam that integrate tightly into transactional systems (aka systems of record). But bearing in mind that corporate communications and marketing departments (and to a lesser extent HR) have often been driving the use of enterprise social platforms as employee engagement tools, it will be interesting to watch how well vendors like Infor can address the transformation needed to make purposeful collaboration work.

She quotes Forrester analyst Tim Sheedy, who comments:

"IT isn't the be all and end all," Sheedy said. "It can be a differentiator for those organisations that choose it to be a differentiator, like the Commonwealth Bank."

Looking at Woolworths in particular as an example of an IT leader (versus Coles, who invested more in marketing, but have also migrated to Microsoft SharePoint Online), they have just announced plans to move 25,000 staff over the next 12 months to Google Apps, which if successful will be followed by a full-deployment to all 200,000 staff.

According to Woolworth's CIO they selected Google Apps because:

"Simplicity and ease of use of the solution, the support for mobility, activity-based working and bring-your-own-device, security and the overall value proposition,"

Interesting to note the use of the phrase, "activity-based working", although its not entirely clear what that means in a retail environment or if this is a reference to office-based staff.

Looking over the coverage of Woolworths in recent months, its still not an entirely homogenous enterprise IT environment (and you wouldn't expect it to be):

• SAP as their core back-end system.
• iPads for mobility (for store managers).
• Microsoft Yammer as their enterprise social network (how they use this with Google+ isn't clear).
• Google Apps for messaging, productivity and collaboration.

With the iPad they introduced a number of in-house apps, some running on Google's App Engine. However, with all these announcements I've heard nothing about what we might classically think of as the 'intranet'. I also wonder if they considered using SAP Jam as their enterprise social network?

Woolworths also appear to have a come along way by embracing the cloud. My memories of interactions with Woolworths in the past was a company with very strict information security policies, so either an IT changing of the guard has taken place or they are confident that Google (and Yammer) can meet their standards.

But the far bigger question, as Sheedy argues, can Woolworths actually use technology in this way as a differentiator?

Because of current market dynamics in Australia, where Coles and Woolworths dominate the supermarket sector (together, they hold 80% of the Australian market versus only 48% and 20% of the major chains in the UK and US respectively) this really is about the ability of both companies to out perform the other in some way.

The SMH reported recently that:

"Coles has posted its fastest sales growth in two years as the resurrection of the once ailing supermarket group enters its fifth year and the retailer continues to strip away customers from rival Woolworths as well as other food stores."

However, Coles is fighting on price, not technology. So can Woolworths be the Commonwealth Bank of Australian supermarkets?

One notable case study from the same industry is SuperValue in the US, who last May talked about using Yammer as a tool to support the turn around of that business:

"SUPERVALU is focused on acting as one company, working toward a common goal of delivering increased value to all of our customers and meeting their needs store by store to become America’s Neighborhood Grocer. Internally, we are working to drive an open, transparent and agile culture, while continuing to bolster what makes us great – our associates, history and heritage."

Unfortunately, a year later the company continues to struggle.

But leading with technology doesn't mean throwing technology at the problem. You need to do something different with it. That's the challenge for Woolworths.

This week, you will find me at:

• ShareThePoint (Sydney) conference, 10th & 11th April - This is Australasia’s biggest SharePoint event that tours Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong. If you can't make Sydney, they will be in Melbourne in June.
• Jive's Getting Serious With Social Business dinner, evening of the 10th April - this event will feature ACE Insurance, NBNCo, REA Group, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and PwC.

Later in the month:

• Sydney University's Digital Disruption Research Group, 17th April - hosted by Kai Riemer.
• Government 2.0 Lunch, Canberra, 22nd April - this month features Keitha Booth from the NZ Government and Stuart Coleman from the Open Data Institute in the UK.

And finally in early May:

• Meet the New Microsoft, 1st May - an opportunity to hear about Microsoft's vision for the digital workplace ("Work is something you do, not somewhere you go") and how employees can "connect, communicate and contribute to the cultural DNA of your organisation through the use of social and productivity tools". This event is also being repeated across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane during April and May.
• Atlassian RoadTrip 2013, 2nd May - Sydney is the last stop on a 10 city tour by Atlassian, where you can talk shop with Atlassian product managers and Expert Partners.

If you are attending any of these events, don't forget to say hello.

One SharePoint consultant, Joel Oleson, has been bravely blogging with SharePoint, but has decided to migrate to Wordpress:

"Microsoft has never invested a lot in their blogs. It’s ok to say that SharePoint isn’t the best blogging platform. In fact I don’t shed a tear when I say it’s not the best wiki either. There are point solutions out there that are better than SharePoint and most SharePoint consultants will stand up and admit it. Maybe that’s even a good litmus test for your SharePoint consultant. Tell him you want to stand up a public blog and ask him what you should use.

I’ve had a great run with this blog on the SharePoint platform, but it’s driven me a little crazy over time."

(Note: The link to his specific post about this is currently broken)

This isn't actually news to the Microsoft community. In 2010, Microsoft itself migrated Windows Live users to Wordpress.com - back then, they said:

"As we looked at customers’ blogging needs and what different companies were providing, we were particularly interested in what WordPress.com is doing. They have a host of impressive capabilities – from a scalable platform and leading spam protection, to great personalization and customization… So rather than having Windows Live invest in a competing blogging service, we decided the best thing we could do for our customers was to give them a great blogging solution through WordPress.com."

Incidentally Microsoft's own blogs - e.g. the Office blogs - use Telligent. Meanwhile, Yammer and Skype also use Wordpress.

There is nothing wrong with picking the right tool over vendor "brand" loyalty. I wish there was more of this in the industry.

Time passes and people eventually get on with the job of finding alternatives to Google Reader. And yes, we need alternatives because neither email or social networks provide an efficient methods of aggregating the long tail of news and user-generated long form content:

• Activity streams rely on either serendipity (being in the stream at the right moment) or crowdsourced content curation (what's popular rises or repeats to the top).
• Auto-generating magazines, like Flipboard, either republish activity streams or republish channels of curated content and traditional news. These interfaces work best for smaller volumes of content that can be consumed at a leisurely pace.

To put this another way, imagine if Google only showed new content in search results or you had to page one by one through each hit. These interfaces would work in some situations, but not others.

I'm not actually that bothered by Google Reader closing down as such. Yes, this is foolish strategic decision by Google that has damaged their brand. But there are plenty of alternatives and I could, if forced, spin up a cheap cloud server to host my own RSS aggregator. But looking at the different tools I use, I realise that I am ready for a next generation tool or platform that can better fill the role that was previously being met by Google Reader. The minor detail is that I haven't found one yet that doesn't simply recreate Google Reader or force me into an inefficient user interface.

In the meantime, come the 1st July the filter bubble will become a step closer to being a daily reality for many of us.