Dion Hinchcliffe is visting Australia this week to promote his new book, Social Business by Design, co-authored with Peter Kim. The Headshift Asia Pacific team have been busy lining up speaking events and media interviews all week, however Dion and I have found time to put together a short whitepaper on the state of social business in Australia. This paper provides that all important Australian perspective on the trends and ideas outlines in Dion's book. The paper will be published online later today, but while you are waiting we've posted a video talking about some of the highlights: The criteria for the case studies included in the paper, the differences between Australia and the global experience of Social Business and key insights.

UPDATE: The paper is now available to read and download from SlideShare.

BTW if you are interested in attending either of Dion's workshops tomorrow, Social Business 101 (in the morning) and The Consumerisation of IT (in the afternoon) please contact the Headshift team by email at hello@headshift.com.au to request a last minute registration!

Broadvision continue to improve Clearvale, their Elgg-based enterprise social networking offering. This recording of a recent Webinar covers current updates to the platform and there are a number of features worth highlighting:

• How tasks and actions are incorporated into the activity stream.
• Integration with Outlook that allows users to move email conversations into Clearvale.
• Widgets to display Salesforce reports in Clearvale.
• Analytics to support adoption.

Their adoption metrics are based on the concept of network usage and assess the value of contribution, using three measures: connectivity, activity, popularity.

Worth watching, video recordings of the panel sessions from Yammer On Tour events in Melbourne and Sydney. There are lots of themes discussed across both panels, but watch these videos and then see if you agree with my commentary here.

Some nice design fiction from Google. You might enjoy the parody version too.

I'm focusing a lot on social intranets this week, so I thought I'd reshare this interview with my colleague Dion Hinchcliffe at Congres Intranet 2011.

Dion is also going head-to-head with Dennis Howlett later today on the ZDNet blogs to debate: Social enterprise: Real or fiction?

The marketplace for enterprise activity stream is a crowded one these days, with vendors all types offering solutions. This includes enterprise software company SAP, who launched their own solution back in 2009 originally in beta as 12sprints and then rebranded as StreamWork.

While there are many similarities, StreamWork is slightly different from other activity stream tools. Not surprisingly it has a strong task orientation - StreamWork primarily support two views - a main status feed and activities. Hashtags are supported, but other than activities there are no groups. It also provides an instant messaging tool.

Activities are mini-project workspaces (similar to the activities concept in IBM Connections) and you can add from a selection of StreamWork and a small selection of 3rd party widgets. These widgets help you with basic tasks and information management but there are tools to help with coordinating, deciding and analysing. For example:

• Agendas and timelines. 
• Ranking, pro-con, and cost-benefit tables. 
• Consensus votes and quick polls. 
• SWOT and responsibility matrices.

SAP appear to be positioning StreamWork as being a tool for action and one of the obvious gaps is the lack of features that support workforce engagement, informal collaboration and knowledge management.

However, I was pleasantly surprised that StreamWork provides an API and also supports OpenSocial (incidentally, Atlassian Confluence is one example of the kind of integration that is possible). There are mobile apps for the BlackBerry (of course, this is SAP) and the iPhone. Personally, I think the Web interface is better than the iPhone, which is usable but could be better.

There are a couple of case studies out there about the people who are using StreamWork:

• a 50 person humanitarian aid organisation; and 
• a Swiss furniture manufacturer.

You can take StreamWork for spin yourself by signing up for an account on the free edition.

"The mobile experience we have today is basically designed for tech-savvy businessmen," says designer Amid Moradganjeh. This is a mistake, he thinks. There is another group of people out there, a bigger group. They have an "average digital life," meaning that they don’t have to process hundreds of emails a day while running from meeting to meeting. While many of them do have a rich digital existence on the desktop, they see little need to stay fully connected when they go outside. One explanation for this is that smartphones simply haven’t become cheap enough and that, inevitably, we’ll all come to own one. Moradganjeh wonders if for many people an iPhone/Android smartphone is too complicated and too much power. For his thesis project, he engaged in a program of research and speculative design which resulted in Rimino, "an attractive, invisible and more integrated experience."

Rimino - A Human Touch on Mobile Experience from Amid Moradganjeh on Vimeo.

The Rimino concept might not be exactly right, but shows why thinking about user experience design from the perspective of different users is so powerful.

Personally, I've found the background information on National Field a little obscure. Sure, I get the concept of how they integrate performance management into their enterprise activity streaming app and the fact it was used in Obama's 2008 Presidential campaign in Ohio does grab your attention. What I've not been so clear about it how it works in practice and in different scenarios. So, if you are familiar with tools like Yammer but haven't heard of National Field before it worth watching the video and then browse their Website (which appears to have more information about their product and clients than it did in the past).

I think NationalField may work best where there are no performance management systems already in place for a key or core activity (again, its not clear if it has an API or supports integration with other systems). I don't see any reason why other activity stream apps couldn't support the same concept, but the most common use case I've seen with other tools has been about integrating around hard process and structures. But with growing interest in embedding activity streams in task-orientated work flows, then National Field does offer a interesting vision for what this could look like. Of course it may be less compelling for industries like professional services, which while they count hours and cents the actual work isn't transactional in nature.

Perhaps the closest direct competitor might be something like Salesforce, with its tight CRM system integration through Chatter.

Are you using or have you tried National Field?