Adoption is a fulltime job,” said Staresina. “Forget if you build it they will come.
A quote from Emily Staresina about the SharePoint + Newsgator intranet recently implemented at Australian property development company, Stockland. Since they launched at the end of last year, about a quarter of Stockland staff have completed their Newsgator profiles.
Microblogging is great for maintaining a cohesive work environment among geographically dispersed offices, says James Dellow from the social business consultancy Headshift.
"With access to microblogs, executives can be in touch with what's going on across the whole organisation. In a virtual sense, the CEO is sitting next to the employee."
In the future, Dellow says enterprises will be using data analytics to pick up issues, trends, and opportunities from microblogging conversations.
I was quoted in the SMH, in an article by Cynthia Karena who was looking at the benefits of enterprise microblogging with tools like Yammer, Chatter and tibbr.
I stumbled across this recent Webinar aimed at government folks in the US about Yammer, which outlines how Deloitte's went about launching it to its global user base (Yammer originally started in Deloitte Digital, in their Australian practice). Deloitte is one of Yammer's high profile success stories and its one I've been tracking for a while.
Formally launched globally within Deloitte on 11/11/11, they followed a 90 day plan to implement Yammer:
Only yesterday I was talking about Yammer governance on the Headshift Asia Pacific blog, so its interesting to see the elements that Deloitte included in its plan:
You will also note they distinguish between the activities required to launch and achieving a "steady state".
By following this process, Deloitte report in these slides that:
the Deloitte Global Yammer network now exceeds 43,000 members.
This is about a quarter of their employees (~180,000 in total).
I would consider the social intranet solutions I covered at the NSW KM Forum on Tuesday as pretty mainstream within the social business software landscape. Of course there are many other solutions out there that mirror the same basic social patterns in those particular solution - e.g. products that are similar to Yammer, Jive or Newsgator. In fact there are too many to mention which is why I tend to focus on a short list of proven products. However, there are some other products I'm watching that I think are extending and exploring new collaborative patterns. Here are some examples, which have strong emphasis on structured tasks and taking action:
Strides (VMware Socialcast)
"Strides is a fresh approach to getting things done. With Strides, you and your team can work together more effectively as you tackle new challenges, hurdle information barriers, and soar to new heights!"
Do (Salesforce)
"Easily create and share tasks, projects and notes with your team so you always know what needs to get done, no matter where you are."
SAP StreamWork
"It's the first and only solution that brings together people, information, and business methods to drive fast, meaningful results. People: Get everyone on the same page. Information: Share documents and data all in plain view. Methods: Provide structure with tools for brainstorming and decision-making."
"NationalField leverages the power of private social networks to give you valuable insight into your company’s productivity and effectiveness. You can track teams, gauge results, even encourage healthy competition—all within one secure social network."
Nokia Socializer
This isn't a product as such, although it is built on top of an existing off-the-shelf package (Socialcast) using an API-based approach. Socializer is an example of a new bread of social action tools that "uses a clever combination of social analytics and game mechanics to maximise attention and action."
Personally I think there is something rather special in Socializer that goes beyond any of the generic tools mentioned above - the point being, there is still room for bespoke (or at least semi-bespoke) solutions.
To date, the workforce collaboration discussion has been dominated by the focus on conversation-centric social tools (even with products that have features that support tasks and projects). But as you can see there is strong pattern of "action" through out all these products and examples.
I'm expecting that social action frameworks are going to rapidly become more important and I'm sure that some of these products will either eventually emerge as stronger contenders in their own right or we'll see them have an influence over the evolution of the current crop of leading tools.
Last night I presentated at the NSW KM Forum, where I talked about the range of social intranet software options available on the market. While a lot of the subsquent conversation was about being social inside organisations, one of the more practical discussions was about the issue of working online with 'tables'... you know, like those you create in Word or Excel:
Nothing yet beats a spreadsheet in terms of pure flexibility and tools, like sorting and calculations - so for really heavy lifting with tables you'll need to use a Web-based spreadsheet like Google Docs and Socialtext's Socialcalc, or embed a spreadsheet.
However, lets have a look at a few leading tools and how well they support tables:
Atlassian Confluence
The whole rich text editor has been given a massive upgrade in the latest version of Confluence and tables are a lot easier to use now that users don't need to worry about dealing with wiki markup (which has been removed in the new editor). Confluence's table editing is pretty good although Jive (see below) packs a few additional formatting features. However, as complete package Confluence also offers a range of file embedding, spreadsheet, charting, and task list macros that other platforms don't offer.
Jive
Jive's table editor is still essentially based on HTML tables, however the user interface removes some of the complexity of fine detail formatting - you can set the padding, background colour, text alignment (horizontal and vertical), font and colour without feeling you are going anywhere near the HTML code.
Not a lot of love from Yammer for tables, unfortunately. You'll need to make do with sharing spreadsheet files instead for anything more than dot points lists.
Most other Web platforms use a common rich text editor plugin, like TinyMCE or CKEditor. Support for tables has improved in these plugins but IMHO vendors like Atlassian and Jive are still leading the way. Note: the editing experience on a particular platform will depend on the version of the rich text editor plugin supported and how it is configured.
why do we provide our users with out of the box [SharePoint] Team Sites that contain a bunch of senseless containers for information that offer no guidance as to what they should be doing with these things (Shared Documents, Discussions, Tasks, Announcements and so on)? A SharePoint Site is simply a medium with which to accomplish a business goal, outcome or process. You need to provide your users with clear guidance around what function the site will serve. Simply telling them to use a Team Site is not going to provide clear context to users working within.
Further exacerbating this is that now not only do users not have any idea where to store things, they now have little idea about how to store them. With the new capabilities that SharePoint offers beyond that of a simple fileshare users are further confused about what is the best medium for their content. So should be they putting a team meeting in the shared calendar, or should it go in the announcements list or maybe they should email out to everyone and store it in a document library?
The Fix?
The fix is to inject the context that users need into the sites that you create. To accomplish that you need liberal doses of Information Architecture, an understanding of user requirements, an appreciation of the processes they are using all combined with the SharePoint configuration options that leverage this (metadata, content types, document and list naming, navigation and so on).
All sound advice for SharePoint champions from Michal Pisarek, but it also highlights how much reinventing the wheel goes on with collaboration technologies (actually, in the intranet space as a whole).
Obviously the actual configuration options and methods are specific to SharePoint, but the idea applies to all collaboration tools. If you aren't helping users customise their online workspaces then you will make it harder for them to make sense of the underlying tools. This is potentially one important difference between 'community management' on the public Web versus inside organisations, which should include moderation and curation plus workspace design.
Pisarek's post is also a reminder that so far SharePoint really hasn't taken us far beyond the original Lotus Notes collaboration paradigm - we were doing this kind of contextual customisation at E&Y with Notes and Quickplace back in the early 2000s. Take a look at a product like Newsgator to get a sense of where we should be taking users on their SharePoint journey.
Hat tip Alex.
Everyone talks about collaboration in the workplace today but what does it really mean? How do you get from here to there? Every snake oil salesman is selling social something: enterprise social; social learning; social CRM; etc. For me boils down to three principles.
In my post about Designing Social Workplaces, I discussed a model for collaboration built around social networks, observable work, and insights and analysis. However, I quite like the nuance in Harold Jarche's post, Making collaborative work work where he talks about stepping through Narration of Work, then Transparency and finally Shared Power as a basic roadmap for creating a collaborative workplace.
Socialtext Motley Fool's Social Intranet is JingleView more presentations from Socialtext
An overview of Motley Fool's "Jingle" intranet. The tangible stat shared in this case study is the 3/4 reduction of all-hands email being sent. For a general overview of Socialtext 5.0, see this presentation recording.
The Reserve Bank of Australia has been critical this last week about the depressed attitude in industry towards the state of the Australian economy. Like the rest of the developed world, there is obviously no way Australia can entirely avoid the competition of cheap labour overseas or the impact of global financial markets. But there is also a risk that Australian businesses use this as an excuse - research published last year highlighted that only a small proportion of Australian businesses are employing progressive management practices. This wasn't some wonky marketing survey, but a piece of serious research highlighting that:
"high-performing workplaces are up to 12 per cent more productive and three times more profitable"
In a related piece of work, my Dachis Group colleague Dave Gray has been looking at what characteristics define long-lived, successful companies. He was shocked to find that the life expectancy of large companies has fallen from 75 years in the 1930s to only an average of only 15 years. Dave's conclusion is that these companies are collapsing under their only dysfunctional weight. Right now, the logical reaction in some businesses to this "weight" problem is to downsize and outsource. Others on the other hand are embracing this challenge (that 12%).
I come into contact with some of those progressive organisations primarily from a technology perspective, although some are also attacking it from a broader social business level. What is interesting for me in this process is to observe that here in Australia, unlike say the US, our issue or need for concepts like Enterprise 2.0 isn't so much about overcoming dominant command and control structures; rather we need to embrace social technologies so we can:
In our government too there is an opportunity that has been mostly missed to date in the Government 2.0 conversation about enabling those inside government and those involved with service delivery to use these same technologies to also work more progressively. This is a missing piece in a puzzle that has spent more time focusing only on the veneer of citizen engagement through social media.
Of course, I'm not claiming that social business tools like software for workforce collaboration and social intranets trump the global and local financial and economic factors faced by Australian businesses. I'm simply saying don't ignore the evidence about how to be more productive and profitable. When wrapped up with the right implementation approach, these tools provide a critical technology platform for helping this to happen.
About this Webinar
Intranets may not be naturally social, but the people who use them and organisations where they exist certainly are. Many organisations are now recognising the importance of social intranets for workforce engagement and productivity.
If you are thinking of deploying a social intranet or want to add social features to an existing intranet there are now many mature software options available to you, but which tools should you be considering?
Headshift | Dachis Group's workforce engagement practice has helped many firms bring their existing IT systems to life by adding a social layer that helps people get their work done more effectively. In this 40 minute showcase Webinar, learn from our practical experiences about:
- What is a social intranet.
- What are the key features of a social intranet (and the problems they help to solve).
- Get an overview of the best-of-breed social intranet software tools.
- Find where and how SharePoints fits.
Agenda
- Defining social intranet software.
- Key features of social intranets.
- Vendor overviews.
- What about SharePoint?
I'm hosting a short 40 minute Webinar on 28th Feb at 11am (AEST - Sydney time) to provide a quick overview of social intranets and the leading software tools in this space. This is very much a technology-focused session to help people learn a bit more about the options that are available in the market.
