Category: Collaboration and workplace (Page 54 of 97)

A provocative conversation broke out on one of the discussion groups I monitor last week. “I’m curious how you and others you know are using ‘LinkedIn.com.'” the person asked. “For me, I like who’s in my network, [and] keep asking others to join; but overall I find it to be very static.”
A static network — now there’s a new concept! But there’s a good deal of truth to wondering how these links work within the business environment. Sure I too have a modest network; I check out my Linked-in account once or twice a month to see who’s doing what. For me, this substitutes (poorly) for the water-cooler conversations earlier in my career, when I was surrounded by lots of co-workers. There was always the lunch-time gossip and the hallway exchanges . . . did I know that so and so was working on this new skunk-works project? Had I heard that another sales team just surpassed its revenue goals or that a particular key customer now had a new set of requirements?
While linking-in through Linked-in is a poor substitute for the chatter of the co-located workplace, it’s at least the beginning of a business conversation. It maintains its professional aura, boundaries, and rules, in part by continuing to stove-pipe its connections, and not (yet) mashing up its links and membership.
Not so with Facebook, now trying to take the “digital natives” (those who grew up with the Internet ant the Web) into the workplace. This move — blending the power of networks with mashups — is raising a number of eyebrows. “Friend? Not? It’s One or the Other” Rob Pegoraro, the personal technology columnist wrote provocatively in the Washington Post last week.

You could stay in touch with your drinking buddies at MySpace, then schmooze with your business partners at LinkedIn.
But life isn’t always that neat. And when the private and professional overlap at these sites, you can spend more time worrying about your image than building your network.

To be sure Facebook has a slew of privacy setting — at least 135 according to Pegoraro — but having to define how I want to expose some of my activities to one group of friends and other actions to business colleagues adds complexity to what should be cast as a rather fluid interchange.
What’s missing to my way of thinking is not simply privacy but context. We all have our business personas and our personal personas. We have certain expectations when in a business context, others when in a social context, and still others when “being personal.” Many of our social networks are, in fact, rather complex.
To make these networks useful within a collaborative (and online) business environment, we need to be able to add (and manage) our business contexts. We need to be able to describe (and map) the business purposes for our social networks.

Nora Barnes (director of the Center for Marketing Research at UMass, Dartmouth) and Eric Mattson have a new survey report out on social computing — The Game Has Changed: College Admissions Outpace Corporations in Embracing Social Media. They compare how universities and companies in the Inc. 500 are using social media — blogging, social networking (whch I take to mean sites like Facebook and MySpace), message boards, online video, podcasting, and wikis. In a nutshell

Social media has arrived in college admissions. The ivory tower is innovating even faster than the elite Inc. 500. And the game has changed forever.

I cannot wait to see their detailed analysis.

Picking through their numbers so far, two things jump out. First, universities are almost as likely to use social networks as search engines when evaluating potential students (26% vs 21%).

Admission offices can find out all kinds of information about their prospects by googling them on the web. Tracking and tracing their social networks is close behind. Hum, I wonder what enterprises are going to be doing, both when reviewing job candidates and business partnerships, and when tracking performance. I can see it now — a new generation of “socially conscious” HR and business applications.

Second, we’ve been talking about blogs and wikis in almost the same breadth (thanks in part to Don Tapscott and Wikinomics and “how mass collaboration changes everything”). But not so fast. While blogging is more widely used in universities than in corporations (33% vs 19%), wikis are more widely deployed in corporations than in universities (17% vs. 3%). So we ought to take another breadth, turn down the hypemeter, and better understand how these different modes of collaboration are used in practice.

Here’s my vote. It’s all about the difference between self-publishing and supporting a business process. Blogging’s easy — I’m standing at my virtual Hyde Park corner (as in this blog), using my own time. Others who want to invest their time can read what I have to say. (Thank you, my readers!) But putting up a wiki is all about sharing information that’s part of a business process — I post, you modify, and our colleagues elsewhere in the world add their two cents. The outcome is a group project, the results of our “collective intelligence.” It’s a bit like co-authoring a report or developing a project plan for a group or . . . . you get the point — we share in the results through an interactive process.

Oh, one other thing. Business processes are tough to implement. They happen not by accident but by design. When the bloom is off the rose, we’re going to have to do a lot more work to make wikis really useful within the enterprise.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has 2 articles that relate to enterprise social computing: Instant Messaging Invades the Office, and iPhone Calls to Some Business Users. Our recent informal poll of Facebook users suggests they think instant messaging will be more dominant than some other “social software” in enterprises in the near future. The WSJ article indicates IMing is invading fast.

It is not surprising that iPhones, with their dramatically improved viewing experience, will find a lot more use in business environments. I love my Treo, but avoid viewing spreadsheets and using it with other web apps. The iPhone will make a huge difference to my interaction with our corporate information when I am out of the office. Of course, there are security issues, and no doubt other technical issues that may get in the way initially, but there is no going back. And if tomorrow’s numbers from Apple are less than expected they will merely reflect the initial velocity, not an inability to reach escape velocity.

UMass professor Nora Barnes has added to her earlier research on enterprise adoption of social software, this time focused on use by universities. Below is an intro with a link from her announcement. Also see our Collaboration & Social Computing Blog where Geoff comments on a new report by McKinsey.

Earlier this year, my research partner, Eric Mattson and I revealed that the fast-growing companies of the Inc. 500 are adopting social media faster than anyone would have predicted based on the previous research into corporate social media (summary). I sent you that announcement. Those findings were actually picked up and featured in Business Week in March!

For our most recent research, we followed up on that survey by examining the social media usage of the “marketing teams” (a.k.a. admissions departments) of 453 colleges and universities nationwide. The results are fascinating. I thought you’d be interested.

Generally, the “marketing teams” of academic institutions are more familiar with and adopting social media faster (especially blogs) than even the innovative companies of the Inc. 500. Even more importantly, they are using social media and search engines to research potential students. No longer can applicants behave irresponsibly online without potential consequences to their futures (and their parents’ sanity).

An executive summary of the results entitled The Game Has Changed: College Admissions Outpace Corporations in Embracing Social Media can be downloaded here from the website of the UMD Center for Marketing Research.

Jacques Bughin and James Manyika at McKinsey have just published another thought-provoking report, “How Businesses Are Using Web 2.0.” They’re working with a beefy survey (2,847 executives worldwide, 44% who hold C-level positions), supplemented by an online discussion. Their conclusions:
“Expressing satisfaction with their Internet investments so far, [respondents] say that Web 2.0 technologies are strategic and that they plan to increase these investments. But companies aren’t necessarily relying on the best-known Web 2.0 trends, such as blogs; instead they place the greatest importance on technologies that enable automation and networking.” Companies that are using Web 2.0 technologies “have developed a new way of bringing technology into business . . . This new approach is easier to implement and more flexible than traditional top down approaches.”
Wow, so at the end of the day, our focus on Collaboration 2.0 is all about developing new, more flexible models for deploying business applications! Could it be that this year’s two-dot-oh rave is all about light-weight development models?
Well, perhaps — this is certainly the underlying logic of Google’s $625 million acquisition of Postini, an email security and management company, consumated today. As today’s NYTimes observed, “The deal underscores Google’s ambitions to become a serious player in the business of selling software to companies and organizations, in competition with Microsoft and others.” But as much as I am a fan of Gmail, I don’t think it is going to be the Exchange killer. There’s still going to be a big market for enterprise applications, enterprise email included. (I’m not sure how I would feel about my doctors using Gmail in the hospital when discussing my health and well being.)
Here’s the issue. We can rely on the Internet and the Web to provide an ever increasing set of business services. Some are advertising supported (such as Gmail); others are subscription based (such as Salesforce, Foldera, and Longjump). The savvy Web 2.0 vendors — including Google, Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo, and various startups — are rapidly exposing their APIs for meaningful mashups, each promising to anchor a vibrant ecosystem for content sharing and collaboration. We’re going to have a lot more flexibility. Yet as business leaders and technology visionaries, we are going to have to plan very carefully how we will use the Internet’s power of instant connectivity for our strategic business advantage.
We often forget the amount of infrastructure we have readily available when we go online and exchange email. DNS, TCP/IP, some basic security, SMTP, HTTP — it all works now; earlier generations of technologies limited the scope of these services to enterprise islands. (Remember DECnet, PROFS, and WangNet.) Now we’re concerned about privacy, security, findability, records retention, manageability, and a whole host of knotty systems infrastructure issues.
The challenge facing the collaboration ecosystem vendors for the enterprise (whoever they may be) is to build the infrastructure required to support the “automation and networking” environments that the McKinsey execs have in mind. The jury is still to be convened.
I bet that we’re going to be hearing a lot from the mainstream enterprise vendors–Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP, EMC, Cisco–by the end of the year. With our continuing focus on enterprise collaboration and social computing, we are going to have to pay even more attention to the infrastructure services available over corporate intranets, partner extranets, and the public Internet. It remains to be seen how flexible these loosely coupled core services can be–and how they can be packaged into vibrant business propositions.