After choosing the right enterprise social platform, see my previous post, it is essential to start and enable your people on how to use the tool and get them to understand why they should use it. The old story about the carrot and the stick. Make sure that they feel helped and made their life easier, as people in general, don’t like change. And to succeed in achieving your goals you have set to become a social business, step one is getting the people moving. Research shows that if you don’t do anything only 5% will start and the rest will continue the old way.
For starters you could tell the people theory on how to use it, but wouldn’t it be helpful if we could give them a little push in the right direction to start using their social network tooling. Especially if there is already so much available in the toolbox: a broad platform offers to anyones likings.
Within IBM Connections there is now a great way to give your users a head start with IBM Connections Touchpoint.This asset of IBM Software Services will onboard new users and the end result is a filled out profile, some network connections and some communities in the community list. Just enough to get the system to work for that person, as based on that it will show content on his activity stream and the end user will not stare at a blank screen and emotionally log off.
Touchpoint will start a guided procedure that takes about 5 minutes but is for the end user really worthwhile:
The first step is to have the user fill out his/her profile and upload a profile picture.
The second step is to have the user to tag about how the profile can be found. What is the users core competence, what are is the user about, what is the users intrest. This is an important step as it will make this profile found if someone searches on a keyword and on tags. It will also make the profile show up in tag cloud and linked people when searching for content in Connections.
The third step is about starting up the network within the organization. The list here shows suggestions and the user search for other colleagues. Just click and the colleagues are added to the network
And it also gives suggestions of the bright stars in the company
The last step is the on boarding of the user in Communities that are interesting
The end result is a user that is networked within the organization and is ready to participate in communities. The activity feed will now be filled with content from the people of the users network and information from communities. Based on the memberships and on the network, content suggestion is done by social analytics.
Check out this video on youtube to see a real life demo:
So far so good. the first step in using the system is set, but it is a small step, as if there is no follow up on integrating the platform in the end users business process, it will soon be seen as “yet” another information tool. But at least the first impression that lasts for ever hurdle is taken.
Two years ago IBM put social business on the map and told the world that they had to become a social business too; “Get Social, Do Business”. At Connect 2011 IBM told the world what you could and should do to become a social business and Connect 2012 it were the customers telling other customers how they have become a social business. That was really powerful as it shows the (sometimes intangible) benefits of a social business. And that last remark is interesting, as most companies want to know the ROI upfront before investing in Enterprise Social Software (ESS). As I was listening to the audio book Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee in my car (which explains why I can’t tell on which page I have the quote, so my apologies upfront) there was also the statement in the last chapter that the ROI case is not always to make with 2 digits after the “.”.
The ROI of ESS is not immediate as e.g. the implementation of a digital telephony system or a web conferencing system. It requires more time and effort on the part of cultural change management and getting social embedded into the existing processes of an enterprise. This does not mean that there is no ROI case to make! There are a lot of success stories of the use of ESS and there are also reports of e.g. McKinsey, that state that enterprises using social business are outperforming the companies that don’t. IBM even delivers workshops and other services like the Business Value Assessment focused on the benefits of becoming a social business, providing clients and business partners with case study examples of successful social businesses, and helping them to develop an agenda for driving social adoption.There are a lot of examples benefits of what social business has brought companies that started to use enterprise social software. Most of the examples on that blog post give hard numbers or time reduction, but the best example is TD Bank. The result they had with their ESS was that the employees were proud of their bank, felt valued and had more trust. Those things are not measurable in hard currency, but real value for your enterprise.
So the question is not whether you should become a social business, but whenwill you start?
WHERE DO YOU START WITH BECOMING A SOCIAL BUSINESS?
There are a lot of white papers, blogs and books about how to become a social business. Sandy Carter has written in her book Get Bold: Using Social Media to Create a New Type of Social Business about the Social business agenda to help companies to become a social businesses.
The focus in the book is on the organizational aspect of becoming a social business and the conclusion is that becoming a social business is not about IT, but it is all about people!
Reading blog posts, reports and other information I see that the rule of thumb is that the effort to become a social business is 20% IT and 80% change management. This blog entry will not focus on the change management and cultural aspects of becoming a social business, but on what platform/ features do you need to offer your employees to accept and enable them to work socially?
WHAT ESS PLATFORM TO CHOOSE?
Before an enterprise is selecting an ESS platform what are the specifications of that tool. In my opinion it is key that formal requirements are set up. Why?
Because the tools should be consistent with the goals. To give an example: Capgemini choose to use Yammer as they ESS tool, but the employees know that “no confidential or client-specific matters are discussed”. So how can you work and not be able to discuss freely about your work? Seems like rowing with your hands tied to your back. When I read the blog my impression here was that management saw that they had a lot of people subscribed to Yammer and management thought: well lets turn it on to start Social. Not realizing the shortcomings of the solution they chose. Another reason could be they wanted to get control over the freemium environment and then had to pay up to be able to administer the users. And when they finally had control they found out that a lot of users had only a profile but were no longer active user (probably as there was no change management / cultural change to promote and keep people engaged).
So my point here is: think before buying ESS platform! Check your goals and set the requirements to achieve those goals. It is just like one would do with the purchase of any software program. But the question then arise: what are the must have specifications to look for?
Wouldn’t it be great to have a big red “Ask” button on your mobile phone, iPad, and browser that instantly connects you to everyone in your organization when you need something? And how great would it be to have a big green “Share” Button to update you teammates and management on your work, interests, and experiences? Better yet, the big buttons were smart enough to connect you to the right people, without spamming or bothering those who weren’t available.
It is a nice and simple description of an ESS platform, but in reality there is off course more to it. The rest of this blog entry will try to describe (IMO) the key features.
Open and Flexible Platform
The first and most important requirement of ESS that is should be an open and flexible platform for anyone to use within the enterprise. Don’t go for point solutions, but make sure that specific solution integrates into your ESS platform.
Why should you have an open extensile platform? Because the pace of innovation is going fast, you cannot rely on an ESS solution that gives an update only once every 3 or 4 years. Three years ago Android had a small market share, two years ago an iPad was non-existent and now we see Pintrest coming up on as the latest social phenomena. To support these fast changes in the outside world, make sure you get an open an extensible platform with a regular functional release cycle. In the industry software vendors are getting into more frequent release cycles. No releases to only fix bugs and security patches, but real big functional improvement cycles. When you look at mobile apps the update cycle is very quick. This way the end user get new incremental functional updates ad fixes, but you don’t want to patch the core of your ESS system every two or three months.
The reason to have an open standards based ESS platform is to assure that you can leverage the power of your platform to incorporate the latest trends and you can incorporate these into your business processes into the social platform. It will also allow you to integrate other existing or new corporate systems, intranets and processes. Here you can think e.g. about SharePoint Web Parts, ActivityStrea.ms, oAuth, OpenSocial, CMIS, Widgets, etc. to enhance your platform and embed and integrate social into the enterprise.
Openness also means that the consumption of the ESS services should be independent of the (browser) platform it runs on (Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.). And, looking at the growth of mobile usage of the Internet, ESS should have apps for all major mobile operating systems. These apps should deliver all capabilities to the end-user. So don’t limit the mobile end user to e.g. only see and use the activity stream but make sure the end user can access the all ESS services of your platform. To conclude: bring (integrate) social into your enterprise (processes), don’t bring your enterprise processes into the ESS platform. Social Everywhere!
ESS Networking
As has been said before ESS is about people and the way they can Find, Reach and Collaborate with each other. Reading (euh listening to – in my case) the Enterprise 2.0 book of McAfee the concept of strong and weak tries was explained as one of the basic principles of Social Networks. And this is the core feature of the ESS platform: finding people and maintaining a relationship and exchanging information.
There are a lot of platforms that have a profile page and have a message board (Twitter). But one feature that is key is the tagging of information and people, e.g. within Connections everything is tagged. So based on a tag I can find everything, whether it is a blog, a file or a person. So finding people based on tagging allows me to find expertise, as you don’t search for a name, but you search for expertise. In 1999 someone said to me: “You don’t know much, but you do know who knows it or where to find the information.” Well, I had my brain tagging right, but it was all inside my head. People had to know me first before finding information and when I left the company the knowledge network was gone. So tagging is key, because it allows others to discover information with a social search within the ESS platform. Even if people have left the company the digital footprint will remain and will point people into the right direction.
The message board will help to get the discussion going and to keep in contact with you network. On the board people can let others know what they are working, ask for help, answer questions. It gets the conversation in the open (also know as working out loud) and no longer stored in email conversations. It is also a tool that helps to stay in contact as people are not always at the office.
Another aspect of an open ESS platform is that the personal (social) information is available in every context possible: web pages, instant messaging, email, Office and other collaboration environments. When ever you look at data within the ESS platform, relevant people should be visible. As there is so much content available it is important to know who has created it and it is good to be able to see who that person is and to be able to contact via mail, message board, instant messaging, etc.
Communities
In the previous paragraph I mentioned: Find, Reach and Collaborate. Finding the right people within the ESS platform is key. The second step is to be able to connect with these people with one click of the mouse (or for that matter the touch of a finger). The third step is to collaborate with others. Writing blogs, collaborate in wikis, generate ideas, share files and bookmarks, discuss in forums, etc. Communities are key in getting work done. Here information is shared within the context of the community. If someone needs to find information, a community is often a good starting point to get information, but also “meet” a group of people to network with, that are participating on the topic. And if you don’t find your answer you have a community filled with people that work on the topic you can ask a question. In the context of the community it is also important to have an activity stream to know what is going on within a community.
Analytics
The third key feature is social analytics. As there is so much content created information overload. Analytics can help to filter and suggest content for the end user. Currently we see that activity streams (activitystrea.ms) as a new standard of informing users what is happening within their network. In Facebook I can see what my friends are up to. If I miss something, no problem and the number and activities of my friends are limited. So it is manageable. In my work I would go crazy if all updates of my network would show up. It would be like a fire hose in full force. Here is where analytics come in and can filter out and present the relevant information, transforming the fire hose in a garden hose. The activity stream will give updates on what is important and where action is needed. Gartner describes in the next generation of collaboration services this as the new way of working, where tweets, processes and activities show up in the stream.
The second good thing about analytics is content suggestion. This means that when new content is posted in my area of expertise, it will show up as interesting for me. Like I said before: there is too much content being created to keep up with, so this will help. And not only content, but also people (I ought to know) are suggested by the system. So when new hires or people learned new skills that are related to your expertise area you are notified of their existence.
Third: Analytics is key to drive the adoption of your ESS. If you can measure what is going on within the system, you can check the goals you have set to achieve with your ESS. Analytics on the level of communities are even more interesting as you can drive and control the community if you know who are the (top) contributors, what content is popular etc.
Governance, risk management, and compliance
Governance is important to tell people what they can do, supposed to do and what they shouldn’t do within the ESS platform. Most of the time there will be no trouble as ESS is used within an enterprise environment where people act with a certain level of professionalism and everything added to the system has the name of the author. But there is always the possibility that someone can always misinterpret a written message. So every ESS needs to have the option to flag content.
Compliancy is a big issue as more and more regulation is put in place by governments and institutions. Compliancy within an ESS platform should provide the ability to monitor, track, and quickly pull out relevant data around conversations, posts and file uploads. For email and other systems this is often already in place, but it is also necessary for the social content that is generated, e.g. with the partnership with Actiance IBM Connections is providing a level of auditability in the technology, where every notification, every event, will be captured, archived in real-tim, and then made available through a substantial discovery process. If an employee posts insider-trading information to a blog, and later removes that post–but not before someone viewed it–an audit trail will preserve the evidence.
Collaboration
In the list of must haves I did not mention the blog, wiki, forum, file sharing, social bookmarking functionalities specifically. I see these applications within ESS as a given, like a bike has pedals. Most of these applications can be found within most ESS solutions. One thing I would like to mention here is that it is important for user adoption to have to features available in the context of the users workplace. That can be: posting a Word document into a blog, adding a file into the file share environment of the ESS platform by using drag and drop within Windows Explorer, uploading pictures from a mobile device into an activity stream or share a file from within a community into a Enterprise content management system. Integration is key and it works both ways, e.g. showing social information about the sender in your email client, or integrating email – social email – into the homepage of your ESS.
Social Personal File Management
One key differentiator is the file sharing functionality. What is not important is the place to store the file, or we would all be using Dropbox, but it is the capability to tag, like, share and collaborate around a document. No longer are files being placed on a shared drive, copied, modified recopied etc. There is one version and people will share links, where it is important that the link is “filename” proof (URL does not contain title) as with a rename the URL breaks. Here a nice Youtube video:
that shows the concept of social filesharing and a more traditional approach. One important feature that is important is to see your collaboration. What I mean by this is that the user can see what people have downloaded the file and have re-shared the file. This will give the user the ability to see his tippers; the people that will help him to spread his knowledge.
CONCLUSION
As I tried here to give you some pointers on the must haves of an Enterprise Social Software platform it is up to you to make a choice on what platform will suit your enterprise best.
First make sure you have the cultural change management in place. Set your goals and set the requirements list with your must haves. These are different for every company and even for every department. So talk to communications, HR, etc to ensure you can deliver the right tooling for your employees. One key ingredient is the tagging as it is the glue that makes the social software stick.
Second make sure you have a flexible and open platform. It ensures that it will be further proof and makes it easier to integrate in your enterprise (collaboration) environment to enrich the current workplace with social. Together with a full mobile client it will help in the user adoption.
Third: When comparing feature functions, dig deeper then the functional description. I found out that two products had the same applications within the ESS platform, but when looking at the functionality there was a big difference. If possible take a test drive to see how intuitive and how, I know it sounds silly, how the UI looks like. The first impression lasts forever when the user uses the system for the first time. New applications should always be easier then the existing way of working. Otherwise users will still work the old way. To give an example: one of my customers had the UI made like Facebook: zero phone calls to the help desk. So try how your defined tasks are done and compare how they are done, as you could see in the youtube movie, every platform does it differently.
Third: when you have your specifications look at where you want to run your software, on premises or in the cloud. Cloud is now a very hot topic for IT, although sometimes things are not allowed (by law) or some functionality is not available. So if the cloud ESS is not delivering your must haves, a private cloud (hosting) might do the trick (e.g. so you can talk about customers and share confidential data).
While I was preparing my mobile collaboration video I was surprised that the capabilities IBM Connections delivers is almost one on one with the full web client. And not only on iOS, Android and Blackberry phones, but also on tablets. With the trend of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) we see more people that use their own device.
Most vendors of collaboration software deliver push mail, instant messaging clients for multiple devices, but for social I think the focus on most big vendors is only on the conversation. So people are then stuck in second gear.
Worst mobile experience here is Microsoft SharePoint, as they have a brilliant client for the Windows Phone,
but really no mobile interface at all for other clients. So I tried the most downloaded app for SharePoint, but it focussed only on documents; not social at all. Yammer has multiple clients, but there I thought it was lacking the full capabilities. The focus was on the conversation and that was about it. Jive was also limited in comparison with their full web client, but I really missed a tablet version. Well enough typing here and see for yourself.
Just watched a very nice video. Talking is the CIO van BAYER on IBM Connections:
This video by Bayer at the recent German event launch pretty much covers most customer questions about Connections – but here are the answers straight from the mouth of a customer!
First minute are in German but the presentation is in English and current accessible externally. In german the person explains that he was up to speed with his job in 6 weeks in stead of 6 months
because the conversation is focused on business – on Yammer people just talk about movies etc.
* Why is Connections better than SharePoint + Newsgator?
cost, complexity and development effort
* How did you deal with adoption?
be clear about what tool to use when – make sure users understand what’s in it for them and they will follow
* Do the senior execs engage?
yes! CEO microblogs at least twice a week and has his own community.
* What kind of adoption are you seeing in your customer base?
a lot! 66% of users use frequently with over 100 posts each day
* Why would a CEO use a microblog?
because they get to engage with people they otherwise wouldn’t and they get to see what people think is really important
* How do you position Connections in wider collaboration strategy such as SharePoint, Document Management etc.?
SharePoint works for structured documents, if you want to share ideas and getting people to work x-department you need Connections!
* Does it integrate with Lync?
YES!
If you want to hear more customers talk about what they have done with IBM Connections, how they started their road on becoming a social business, How they started with User adoption, their mobile strategy, etc come to Connect 2013 in Orlando – January 27-31
Microsoft to accuire Yammer: Brilliant move or waste of money?
When I heard the announcement of the take over of Yammer by Microsoft I did not know what to make of it. I would have expected NewsGator to be a more natural fit, as it runs on top of Sharepoint.
To learn more I went to the Yammer.com and Microsoft website: no news at all, but there were other blogs that wrote about it: to quote personalcloud.info “mid-day Friday the Wall Street Journal confirmed that Yammer agrees to sell to Microsoft. This doesn’t mean the deal is announced nor done, and even if that happens it isn’t over until it is over (as Yogi Berra says).” So the question remains why does Microsoft want to pay $1.2 billion for Yammer?
Is it for the technology?
Although they are in the Magic Quadrant of Gartner, everybody including Microsoft tells their customers that SharePoint is more focused on documents then on people and is not as social as it should be. So to buy Yammer to get into the MQ is not necessary and on several blogs there are stories that the next release of SharePoint will be more social. To go even one step further: recently Microsoft launched their site so.cl (http://www.so.cl/)
So Microsoft is working hard on getting social into the DNA of their new products. So why buy Yammer, as most of the time Microsoft copies what other companies have done before and improve it (e.g. Lotus 1,2,3 – Excel, iPod – Zune, Game Consoles – Xbox, Apple Store – MS Store, etc.). So for $1.2 billion I would expect that Microsoft would be able to add social into their SharePoint (360.
Or don’t they have a clue what to do with social business and how to embed it into the Office suite. That would be a bold statement, but inn the blog entry of RealStoryGroup they wrote about the Pre-empt Disappointment. This means “early whispers suggest that Microsoft did not enhance the platform’s social features to the extent everyone expected.” So the take over of Yammer would help Microsoft to deflect criticism of not delivering enough social into SharePoint 2013.
Is it for the customer base?
When tweeting in my network about “why”, I got one response that said it could be for the customer base. Looking at the customer base of Yammer, especially the accounts mentioned on the website, and looking at the proclamation of 85% of the Fortune top 500 is using Yammer I must say that it is impressive. I could not tell if the top fortune 500 are all paying customers. My first guess would be that most of these companies are using Microsoft Office, and thus are already are know to the Microsoft sales force. So I cannot imagine that Microsoft would spend $1.2 billion for a customer base they already have in their CRM.
Besides the paying customers there are also a lot of freemium users. That might be interesting for Microsoft, but the feedback I get from my customers is that they do have a Yammer usage, it is low and communities are barely used (e.g. out of the 350+ communities there were only 12 with 10 or more users. And because not everybody within the enterprise is using it and there is no user adoption, embedding into processes, there are a lot of sleeping accounts.
So why will Microsoft buy Yammer?
Not for the Yammers customer base, not for Yammers technology. Maybe to have social capabilities in the cloud and to tell the world that they are social (me)too, what ever the next version of Office will deliver? That would demonstrate that they don’t have a clue about social business in Redmond, but I think they are smarter then that, so to answer the question: imho it is a waste of money.
What do you think?
Google Apps for Business is not a team collaboration tool
Google DNA
The mission of Google is to get a profile of their users. In the Google Official Blog it is written: “to help our users get the most from the web”. With this latest merger of all your Google service ID’s into one profile Google knows more about you and the services you use. Google can now optimize their services for you and target you with specific content and adds. Google is focused on the individual and not on collaboration between people. Let me elaborate on this point, as you might think: “What about Docs and Google+?”
Google Docs
The power of Google Docs is that you can share and collaborate on with other people. Google Docs is only great to collaborate within a document, just like IBM Docs and Microsoft Office 365. But it is NOT a team collaboration tool:
Some of the questions here: How to find your documents? How do you find expertise? How to collaborate around documents?
First of all: you cannot tag any documents in Google Docs (or for anything else in Google Services for that matter). Google relies on its search, and assumes that everything is searchable. But as we know that is not true for non text based information. Tagging on the internet allows us to find anything within Youtube, Facebook and Flickr. These are sites where there is not much text in the stored images and videos (often just a title). Based on the labels people share, it allows other users to find the right file they are looking for. And if an image gets more tags of different people it will show up bigger in the tag cloud. But for Google docs it really does not matter as you can not see the corporate files, but you can only see files that are explicitly shared with you. In the screenshot of IBM Connections below you
see the files that publicly available within the entire enterprise. This allows the sharing and discovery of knowledge and not hiding it in a silo. This Content in Motion is discoverable via the search (text and tag). On the left you see the tag cloud. This allows users to see at a glance what the list of files is about. It also allows users to click and drill down on a topic. This makes tagging really valuable, as this tag cloud is always in context of the information. In the image below you see the files overview in Google Docs. As you can see there is no domain file list you can search, you can only see your files and the ones shared with you.
Within Google Docs you can label/folder files, but there is no (public) tag cloud and your labels are private. So no one else can see or search your public files. The focus here is on individuals that work together on a document and not on sharing with the enterprise.
In Google Docs I would have expected tagging so people you have shared your document can see what the document is about. Google adheres the principle of search, so no tagging needed, but what if you upload an image? For files that you upload that are not text based, or text “intensive”, e.g. presentations, you will have a hard time finding it. You might try to use Collections (Folders) to put files into context, but other people cannot see in what collection you have put the file. So any contextual information is lost for others to see. What I found strange is that you can share a file into two collections by opening the metadata interface, but it is not possible to put a file into two or more collections by drag and drop. Unfortunately if you drag and drop the file into a folder you loose all previous collection information. So if I want to let people know what the file is about, I assume I will have to use the description field and type in the tags or information about the document to be able to find it. To get to the meta data I select the document in the checkbox and click on the eye icon and this is what you will see.
Here you see how I have added some tags, so other and myself can give some more background information. Beside the (imho) clunky interface, with scrolling, it raises another issue: How do I collaborate “around” a document. Where do I leave my comments and ratings? I can star a document, but that is just for me. No social sharing of appreciation for a document. the only place for me is to get my comments into the description field. But when I click on the pencil icon I get this:
It blocks the existing text, so chances are that the original text will be lost (or for that matter the tags that have been put there). This is not inviting to have a discussion around a document. And it is not visible on what “version” the comments were made.
In the screenshot below you see in Connections the rating and discussion (collaboration around a file) is properly in place.
When taking a closer look at the meta data of Google Docs I can see with who I share this doc. But I cannot see who has downloaded it, what version, if the document has been reshared (by whom with who) and in what collections others have placed the file. This is in Connections completely transparent (under the tabs): you can see who has downloaded (a previous or latest version) and you can see who has re-shared your file with other people or communities.
As I have said before Google is about individuals and so is the sharing of documents in Google Docs: you can only share documents with individuals or a group of individuals you have defined. There is no integration with Google Circles and there is no corporate search (with tagging) over everything (files and people). This will make it hard for users to find expertise and knowledge within the enterprise.
So what seems to make Google Docs so attractive?
Collaborate within a document – co editing: a real cool feature to see people collaborate in one browser screen. But that is no longer a competitive advantage as IBM Docs and Office 365 deliver co-editing capabilities. To take it one step further (as I know IBM Docs): in IBM Docs you can assign sections to be written or reviewed. This allows IBM Docs users to collaborate with a team on one document and the team members can see, in an Activity of IBM Connections, if a user is finished writing/reviewing their section. In Google docs I see no controls, so while working on a doc nobody knows who is writing what part and what the status is. So here again the Google DNA of individual focus makes it harder to collaborate (synchronous or a-synchronous) on a document. One very cool feature of Google Docs is the revision history, which shows on the fly the delta between the edits. Fantastic feature with makes sure you can see what has been edited by others. But again this does not tell anything about the status of the document and what the status is of what people are working on within the document.
Google is not a social!
“But what about Google+? ” would be your first reaction. It is a social software twitter/ message board functionality. That is social software right?
Well then that is about it: Here again the person focus DNA of Google does not foster community collaboration. With Google+ it is possible to broadcast your message to your Circles. And you are able to share a Circle with others. This makes it looks like you have a community where you can share information, but that assumption is wrong!! A Circle is nothing more then a personal distribution list. Let me explain:
In my Google+ stream I see that Frenk has shared a Circle with me and I can click the button View Shared Circle. It will give me this screen:
This overview of the Circle shows me the details of the members within that Circle. As you can see I cannot use this Circle that has been created by Frenk: I can only add the content to one of my Circles or create a new Circle. This means that there is no more link with the original Circle of Frenk. I can add / remove users and Frenk can add/ Remove users and there is no link or update between the Circles. This fork of the Circle shared by Frenk starts the moment he has send it to me. You cannot keep the shared message and use it after a while, as the changes Frenk makes afterwards to his Circle are not updated into the shared Circle. This way every shared Circle is a snapshot in time and is a fork of the original Circle. So in Google there are no communities with members that people can join to collaborate and can be used by a community manager. The only option is to create you own distribution list and hoping that you keep your own list of individuals up to date.
So how about the share functionality within the Circles? I have share information to a Circle and then noticed Frenk was not in the Circle. So I added Frenk to the Circle, but the info I posted earlier did not show up on his wall. So in contrary to a community, you cannot access data that has been accumulated before you joined the Circle. This makes it impossible to join a community / project team and start catching up on the collaboration information that is available for the team. Another point I noticed is that if data has been shared in a Circle or if your post has been re-shared you cannot see with whom.
I can see it has been shared Public or in this case with Limited. So let me see what the limited group consists of: I can see only 22 people and 41 others. I cannot tell who these other are! “Where is my corporate data going to?” as Circles can also contain external G+ users. In the example you have seen famous pop stars in the Shared Circle of Frenk, so the chance of getting spammed as you ended up (by accident) into someones Circle are quite big and you can have a mix of internal and external users in one group.
I have also tried to share files that are in Google Docs, but Circles are not integrated to Google Docs, so my conclusion here is that secure collaboration with communities is not something you can do with Google Services. Communities of Practice of Communities of Interest are not a part of Circles. Circle information is only possible to see from the moment you join the Circle, but as you can not see any history, this makes it not a tool for capturing knowledge for (social) knowledge management.
So what is good about Google Apps for Business as a corporate (social) collaboration service?
Google Mail: e-mail service that people might know from using privately. But in my opinion the web user interface is not the most intuitive one. And as we all know e-mail is a commodity. So this is not a distinctive unique selling point.
Google Docs: Co editing in documents in Google Docs, with a great change tracking mechanism. Here again I miss the editing management capabilities in an activity. And this feature is now also delivered by IBM Docs and Microsoft 365. I see no compelling reason to get Google Docs, especially the inability to find and search the corporate (domain) for documents and people profiles.
Google+: Great tool for message board. Like a Twitter+, with the easy of targeting your tweets to your own Circles. I like Google to share my broadcasts to my circles, but it is definitely not a tool for collaboration: No files sharing, no concept of community, bookmarks sharing, activities, activity streams with process information based on social analytics.
Google Apps for business Suite: Would a compelling reason to get Google the integration of the services? Well no: the impression is that the Google Services are loosely coupled services with a single sign on and shared contact list.
So the answer to the last question: I don’t know.
Special thanks to my friend who works every day with Google Apps for Business.
Looking at the history of electronic collaboration services we have seen the emergence of several collaboration services the last two decades. And yet we still see a lot of people using email as their primary collaboration tool. With the emergence of instant messaging and social software, inside and outside the firewall we can collaborate a lot smarter. Only why are people still hesitant? Why do end user still send attachment in the email? Maybe it is the habit of working with email, or maybe it is too much work (too many clicks) for doing it differently. This article will provide a short history of collaboration services and describe the characteristic of the next generation.
History
Talking about the fourth generation of collaboration tooling it implies that there are three previous generations. Each generation added new functionality on top of the existing collaboration environments. So here a short overview:
The first generation started with the email and calendar software. The peak of email collaboration was during the decade from 1990 to 2000. At the beginning of this decade cc:Mail was the biggest corporate email platform. In 1991 cc:Mail was bought by Lotus Development to enhance Lotus Notes, a groupware platform, with better mail functionality. During the decade there was a fierce battle for the corporate email market share between Lotus Notes (groupware) and Microsoft Exchange mail (only).
The second generation (2000-2005) added instant messaging (IM), webconferencing and shared workspaces to the email environment. Lotus Development started in 1998 with Sametime as corporate instant messaging product. This was a couple of years before a broader acceptation of IM within the enterprise. Now we see that with the explosion of instant messaging on internet and in social networking sites that people are getting used to the concept of using IM. It is no longer seen as a nice to have. One step further: within IBM communicating via instant messaging is more important then email. This is not only the way IBMers now work, but it is also in the official SLA: the IBM IM infrastructure has a higher priority then the email infrastructure.
The third generation collaboration tooling emerged five years ago and is still growing. It started with the start of web 2.0, which allowed users to participate on the web by creating, sharing and consuming content via Blogs, Wikis, Profiles, social networking sites and web applications. IBM had internally all kinds of internal sites running and in 2007 it launched the corporate social software suite: IBM Connections. For those of you who pay attention: we are still in the age of social business and here we are talking about the next (fourth) generation of collaboration tooling.
Fourth Generation Characteristics
So what is the fourth generation all about? Looking at the previous generations, they brought new functionality on top of the existing collaboration services. The fourth generation does not add new forms of collaboration, but it is about integration. As we talk about unified communications (UC / UCC), which provides a consistent unified user interface and user experience across multiple devices, in applications, processes and media types to collaborate in real time, I like to talk about Unified Collaboration. The fourth generation of collaboration services is about enabling the user to use the most effective collaboration service via a universal dashboard. It will allow the end-user to use more efficient ways of collaboration then email. Collaboration should be one click away, and when using unified collaboration dashboard, this option becomes reality. It delivers the promise of less email and more efficient collaboration.
Besides the unified collaboration interface, using a unified collaboration console, other characteristics of the fourth generation of collaboration services are described below:
As the world is getting more interconnected, and not only from a social perspective, but also from a technology perspective, this is an important aspect. Openness allows inter enterprise collaboration. This avoids emailing back and forth as means of collaboration beyond the firewall. Openness also allows the integration of consumer and other services, e.g. include twitter messages into the dashboard. This integration will blur the line between personal activities and business activities. Another advantage of using open standards is that it will allow the integration of processes and services to seamlessly integrate into the universal collaboration dashboard.
Mobile experience is becoming a part of the design. No longer is mobile access an afterthought, but now mobile usage is becoming mainstream. This means that the fourth generation of collaboration services needs to be available any time, anywhere and on any device (Mac, Windows, Tablet, Smartphone, etc.
One of the characteristics of the next generation is a mixed delivery of on premises and cloud-based delivery. We see that the cloud is becoming more important to deliver collaboration services and the usage of services will be transparent for the end-user. They just want to use a service to collaborate, e.g. post a message to Twitter is not different then posting a status message on the IBM Connections board.
As we are moving away of the email culture, real-time collaboration will take a prominent way of collaboration, even better it will become the default modality. E-mail will not die, but the culture of dumping everything, attachments, requests, etc. will change in the future. The big advantage is that while using instant messaging it is the best way to get things done, as the recipient delivers your answer immediately.
The capability of Social Analytics is key in the fourth generation of collaboration services. Finding and getting the right information and learning about people you ought to know is key in the era of information overload. As someone said: “it is not the information overload, but it is the filtering deficiency”. Social analytics is not only great to help users not to drown in information, but it can also help in improving the efficiency in delivering information, by giving insight into with whom and when they are collaborating.
Fourth Generation Benefits
So we now have an understanding of where we are from a collaboration history perspective. We know the characteristics of the fourth generation of collaboration services. But what business issues can it solve? Here are some of the issues that it addresses:
Information overload: The growth of data is exponential. Not only are we producing documents, but with the use of social software, we are also producing blogs wikis etc. with content. For mortals like us it is impossible to stay up to date (with this growth rate) without any smart filtering. There are only 24 hours in a day.
Navigation and usability: Within enterprises there are a lot of systems people are working with. Not only do people work in their email, but they use another tool to share documents, work in a CRM system, etc. And most of the time these products are of different vendors and have each their own interface. It makes is hard to navigate and to learn all the different user interfaces. This fragmented collaboration toolset does not facilitate an ease of use. In terms of user adoption: the new collaboration tooling should be ten times easier – as said before: “One click away”. Another aspect is that having the multiple collaboration services, it means that the end-user still has to decide what to use when. It might give some confusion if people use different technologies. The advantage of having one UI for not only desktop, but also for mobile devices, that covers, like a social middleware the collaboration services in the backend, the ease of use and user adoption will grow.
Work without (firewall) boundaries: In the current world, more and more people are using their network to get information. This collaboration is no longer bound to the internal network, but it has evolved to collaboration outside the firewall, e.g. people are using LinkedIn Groups to ask for opinions and discuss , use Twitter to communicate, use cloud services to have web meetings and share files with external people.
IBM Project Vulcan
So what has this to do with IBM Collaboration software? As I read the paper of Gartner: The Emergence of Fourth-Generation Collaboration Services, I noticed that it described exactly the design principles of IBM Project Vulcan.
IBM Project Vulcan was announced in 2010 and is a design vision and is about:
Innovation – using analytics to understand individuals and empower people to work in new ways with the goal to get productivity breakthroughs driven by integration, social analytics and attention management features, e.g. activity streams.
Convergence– Unifying the experience to best meet individual collaboration needs across access and delivery models, which means simplify the work environment with mobile, web and desktop experiences, and hybrid deployment mode
Opportunity– making possible the next generation of solutions built on an open foundation.
Continuity– Building on today’s capabilities and investments of customers for a smooth path to tomorrow.
The goal of the project Vulcan design is to increase the end-user productivity by integrating the existing collaboration services with one user interface and have a good attention management with social analytics capabilities in place on any device. Another key aspect of project Vulcan is the use of a loosely coupled modular architecture, based on open standards and delivered on premises or in the cloud. This will allow companies to implement social middleware on top of their collaboration services, integrating and reusing existing and new capability by choice into the collaboration dashboard, so e.g. it does not matter if a customer is running Microsoft SharePoint with Outlook mail, or if they are running Lotus Notes clients with IBM Quickr, to be able to take advantage of the new collaboration dashboard /user interface.
Lotusphere 2012 – Project Vulcan Has Officially Been Delivered
A very good article has been written by CMS Wire. I am encouraging you to read it as I am not going to create a resume here. To conclude: IBM has shown at the Lotusphere that the vision of Vulcan has been now delivered into the products. In the center of the Unified Collaboration is the Connections homepage or dashboard. This is the entry point for the enduser to find, reach and collaborate. Including social email and instant messaging. Another product that has been announced is IBM Docs, the realtime co-editing of documents, spreadsheets and presentations in the browser. Just like Google Docs and Office 365 it delivers the capabilities to edit documents. IBM delivers IBM Docs in the cloud or on premises and embeds this capabilities into the (4th generation) collaboration environment, which is a big plus over the competitors. If you like try, just follow the link to the beta site here.
So now the waiting for Connections 4, which is now in beta, has started.
The second step is to have the user to tag about how the profile can be found. What is the users core competence, what are is the user about, what is the users intrest. This is an important step as it will make this profile found if someone searches on a keyword and on tags. It will also make the profile show up in tag cloud and linked people when searching for content in Connections.
And it also gives suggestions of the bright stars in the company
Wouldn’t it be great to have a big red “Ask” button on your mobile phone, iPad, and browser that instantly connects you to everyone in your organization when you need something? And how great would it be to have a big green “Share” Button to update you teammates and management on your work, interests, and experiences? Better yet, the big buttons were smart enough to connect you to the right people, without spamming or bothering those who weren’t available.
Collaborative thoughts... 