Conversations Connected with Context – Socialtext Signals

Socialtext launched Socialtext 3.0, a trio of applications for connected collaboration with context:

  • People – Social networking for the enterprise
  • Workspace – Group-editable wiki for easy, flexible, enterprise-wide collaboration
  • Dashboard – Customizable home pages that let each person decide where to focus their attention.

Here’s the 60 second video, fresh from Ross Mayfield’s blog

Now add Signals to the mix, Socialtexts Twitter for the enterprise clone …

[…] integrated microblogging for the enterprise. Socialtext Signals is social messaging for the enterprise connected with context. With the rise of Twitter, more people are learning the benefits of microblogging as a medium for conversations and sharing each day. Socialtext developed a standalone version six months ago. Using it internally we’ve learned how different usage is from Twitter, not just because it is more private, but because it is in the context of a company. The social patterns of what people say and share has taught us a lot about potential use cases. Now in private beta with Socialtext customers, Socialtext Signals will provide an integrated user experience across Socialtext Workspace, Socialtext Dashboard and Socialtext People.

Above, that’s an 18 min interview found via Robert Scoble. Yes, I believe this is an important addition and will be an essential part of any enterprise 2.0 platform. Integrating social features like easy microsharing and social networking into Enterprise wikis is just natural. While supporting relationships is a generic purpose, it needs an integrated user experience (that’s a point where laconi.ca based implementations still have a hard time), a focus on work groups and a discrete use (well, we need to ease a pain point to really make the point). See how Dennis Howlett expands on the need for context-sensitive linkage

SocialText [Signals] is providing the essential linkage between people and context with some elements of process. That’s crucial for this type of application to make sense in a corporate environment.

This move by Socialtext is all too timely, we’re seeing enterprise Twitters pop up here and there. Check out some of the recent newcomers with Laura Fitton’s evaluation sheet and read up on some of my thoughts on related adoption patterns and best practices.

How to get people actually to use it …

Yesterday Björn put up the edited view of Suw Charman-Anderson‘s keynote at the Enterprise 2.0 FORUM at Cologne. I blogged a lot about it then, but since I haven’t got much time on my hands. So I am glad that he stepped in and set up the recorded video footage. Suw was talking about adoption strategies for social software in the enterprise, proceeding from the idea that people are basically reluctant to change behaviours. Well, “training cats” is hard, yet we need more than just a rewarding system, even when this is a good start. Björn sums up the talk with these points:

  • the importance of identifying the problem on the day-to-day work of the individual that can be solved by social software
  • the user-centric adoption as bottom-up approach that has more potential to be successful than the top-down approach
  • the need of a leadership by engagements […]
  • for the implementation of social software projects she proposes a “trojan mice” aproach in the means of small projects introduced into the ongoing organisation (to grow securely)

Furthermore, when I live-blogged her talk I also noted these adoption points and life-hacks

  • provide the pilot group with gripping stories, let them become evangelists (”each user can become a trainer”, yes, we’ve reached a lot if we’re at this point )
  • […]
  • Enterprise 2.0 change management needs to be in for the long haul, this is a long term engagement thing

BarCamp Stuttgart – Rückschau und mehr …

Es wird Zeit für meine Rückschau auf das Barcamp Stuttgart Wochenende. Kurz gesagt – es war so gut, dass eine Neuauflage im Herbst/Winter 2009 geplant ist. Hier kann man sein Interesse bekunden: BarcampStuttgart2, mehr Informationen folgen dann.

Eine zentrale Frage ist es natürlich wie dann das Event-Tag aussehen soll, das diesjährige Tag #bc0711 müssten wir wohl ergänzen. Aber #bc0711_2 – nun ja, ich weiß nicht …

Viele Sessions habe ich selbst dieses Mal nicht besucht, entsprechend ist die Anzahl und der Umfang meiner Berichte beschränkt. Aber Kaffeemachen bzw. die Diskussionen mit vielen alten und neuen Bekannten (u.a. Christian Spannagel) gehen nun einmal vor. Insofern verweise ich hier mehr auf die Vielzahl der Berichte anderer, aber auch auf die vielen Tweets und Dents.

Die Unterlagen meiner eigenen Session zum Thema Enterprise 2.0 und Unternehmenskultur reiche ich hier nach. Nicht in Form von Slideshare oder Powerpoint sondern als Präsentation im Wiki (Bild ist verlinkt …):

Ausgehend von zwei Konzepten (Implementierung, Enterprise 2.0) kam ich zum Faktor Unternehmenskultur (und dem Faktor Mensch). Der Claim “… nicht von Alpha bis Omega – aber fast” ist dabei natürlich unrealistisch – hinter allen drei Begriffen tun sich Welten auf, die zudem massiv zusammenhängen.

Letztlich wurde die Session denn auch zu einem Par-Force-Ritt durch verschiedene Modelle und Konzepte des organisatorischen Change Managements, u.a. Zielgruppen des Wandels, Gewinner und Verlierer, Stakeholder-Analyse, Ansatzpunkte der Implementierung, Infrastruktursektoren, Erfolgsfaktoren und mehr bevor ich am Ende auf ein paar Theorieklassiker der Organisationswissenschaften (Edgar Schein und Co.) eingehen konnte.

Mir hat die Diskussion viel Freude gemacht, das erste Ziel das diffuse Konzept “Unternehmenskultur” für die Teilnehmer etwas konkreter und handhabbarer zu machen habe ich sicherlich zum Teil erreicht. Bspw. weil es dazu führte dass sich der eine oder andere damit mehr beschäftigen will. Verständnis für die Ebenen, Funktionen und “Mechanismen” der Unternehmenskultur ist eben extrem wichtig für die Einführung von Enterprise 2.0 ist. Ja, fast schon ein Mantra: “Changing tools without a real cultural and process change won’t do it”.

Zuletzt – ohne die Finanz- und Sachsponsoren ist es nicht möglich ein Event dieser Güte zu organisieren. Allen Sponsoren sei hiermit ein riesiges Lob gezollt, das Engagement wurde von allen registriert und beachtet. Auch die Organisation durch das (Kern-)Orga-Team Jan, Markus und Carsten ist bemerkenswert. Ich selbst war als Wiki-Kümmerer wie andere mehr am Rand involviert, umso mehr kann ich einschätzen wieviel Zeit und Mühe die drei investierten. Ein großes Dankeschön – ich freue mich schon auf die Orgarunden zum BarCampStuttgart2.

Enterprise 2.0 forum – part 3

On to the last two cases at the Enterprise 2.0 Forum, starting with Christian Kuhna from Adidas (see my post on the pre-conference interview with him here: Enterprise 2.0 at Adidas – pre-conference interview).

Mr. Kuhna showed the features and parts of the planned intranet 2.0 platform for Adidas (the overall planning phase took about 6 months. It shows). I like it, they’re getting many things right, starting on the individual level, i.e. with the employee in mind going from there to group collaboration and on.

Question from the audience what will happen to the legacy systems once the newly designed integrated system is in place. Short answer – these will be “consolidated”. Some other questions had to stay unanswered, well NDAs are everywhere I guess.

Now and last on the agenda is Arne Schümann of Festo Didactic, some kind of inhouse weirdo organization (hey, this is tongue in cheek) – well, rather an organizational division that’s more free to think freely ;~)

Some noted points:

  • Festo is thinking and living knowledge management since long, hence this company has got an easy head-start
  • Start with as little features as possible
  • E 2.0 is about people, people, people
  • make it feasible to achieve quick wins (like when motivating people to participate, he’s seeing visibility as a treat, I am not that sure about this point, whatever)
  • start with real-life meeting to bond any project team, building up trust
  • groups and CoP are emerging now freely and without official triggering
  • Festo now gets asked by industry peers how they proceeded and succeded, i.e. customers et al. are interested and a new business may emerge that way (hey, that’s a business model innovation)
  • you can’t win without IT and most importantly
  • focus on some real business problem – tackle it and proove the success

Well, that’s it so far, you may read on here, my past take on the pre-conference interview with Arne Schümann: “Changing organisations via Enterprise 2.0 – Festo“.

Live blogging the Enterprise 2.0 Forum – part 2

Reporting the talk by Prof. Dr. Michael Koch, Universität der Bundeswehr München of the results of the SNS-Study (“Ergebnisse einer Best-Practice-Studie: Erfolgfaktoren bei Kooperationssystemen 2.0“) is hard. So I rather forward you to his blog, site and all. Anyway, for some instant information you can check out my writeup of the pre-conference interview (“Enterprise 2.0 implications and digital natives“).

Now it’s up to the most interesting part of the afternoon, see my (racy but tongue in cheek) tweet down below. But I guess this is really one thing conferences need to integrate to stay relevant (see the Sweettt podcast epsiode “Conversations as The Future of Conferences” for more on this):

Well, I’m in the track that’s collecting thoughts and ideas on management involvement in Enterprise 2.0 (well, how to convince your CxO). I am feeling a bit awkward as I don’t want to spoil the emerging ideas of the group with my views …

Well, anyway – some collected thoughts by the group, alas, these are only quick and brief notes:

Quick wins (or how to win management sponsorship quickly): We’fre not alone, there are cases, people in the know, consultants (hint …), it’s about time to act now and one of the best: arguing with usages for existing and pressing problems

Challenges (or what gets into the ways of our ambitions with Enterprise 2.0): fear in all flavours, seen (and dreaded) need to change management’s understanding and role – we don’t want to change and we fear democracy and transparency

Supporting lines (or the surefire ways to convince your CEO): Return on Investment (both in terms of more turnover and/or reduced costs), CxOs must act as role models, innovation and knowledge management benefits, competitive advantages, leveraging the distributed potentials of all our employees, …

The other groups tackled issues like e.g.

  • technology – no need to talk about this, all things Open-Source vs. Closed-Source et al.
  • implementation (well, rather early stages of getting Enterprise 2.0 out there)
  • motivation – or how to get employees to use these systems?
  • integration – how can be fit it into existing infrastructure (of any kind)
  • role of IT
  • role of moderation in Enterprise 2.0 (well, turned out that they dealt with nifty details of organizational culture in the context of E 2.0 at last, plus a collection of sensible roles and personas to have in E 2.0 projects)

Live blogging the Enterprise 2.0 forum – part 1

Some notes on the talks at the Enterprise 2.0 Forum. Kongressmedia put together a nice agenda and group of speakers. Check out some of the tagged and tracked tweets at Twemes. I and some others were microblogging too.

Suw Charman-Anderson started off the event, I can’t give a full report of her extensive talk, so just some tidbits. She offered sound advice (I am agreeing on all accounts, this is boring I know, but hey, I guess we’re just having “shared understanding”). And I really understand and value her effort to make things understandable, but not too easy at the same time.

  • provide the pilot group with gripping stories, let them become evangelists (“each user can become a trainer”, yes, we’ve reached a lot if we’re at this point )
  • on success factors for adoption: all in all it’s preferrable to focus on user-centric adoption (yes, evangelists, catalysts, whatever we call these pivotal people)
  • on the importance of leadership in E.0 projects (I guess that’s herding cats) – yes, leading by example is important (yes, I too talked in my workshop yesterday about the importance of having both method- and power-sponsorship)
  • Enterprise 2.0 change management needs to be in for the long haul, this is a long term engagement thing
  • nice metaphors too – “trojan (wiki) mouses” that sneak into corporations

Next up were Oliver Nitz and Rupert Petschina of Web Innovation Institute and Telekom Austria AG. They were presenting on the potentials of social software for making internal processes more effective. There was a nice metaphor and “storytelling hook” inside their presentation, i.e. the picture of a hen shed that reminded me too that I really need to blog about Lee Bryant’s “Free the Battery Humans” presentation at this year’s reboot and some thoughts I evolved since then.

Next up was JP Rangaswamy, again no full account of the talk, but some points. Suw did an extensive post (“Enterprise 2.0 Forum: JP Rangaswami“) on JP’s talk, extensive coverage and recommended. I guess typing on a whitey Mac goes a lot faster than on my dull PC box.

  • cost of repair and cost of damage as equation to look at while implementing wikis
  • nice story on Space Shuttle design limits that derive from long-ago decisions, i.e. designing the width of rail gauges
  • we’re in the middle of big shifts, like e.g. distributed ability and power to publish, Internet as a nice copy machine
  • my price for best quote goes to JP calling to “throw the policies away” (if they are restricting you to adapt to the changed contexts).” Yes, there’s no point in following out-dated modes, when we’re in disrupted mode
  • one central guiding principle for corporate wiki implementation: keep the cost of transmission and reproduction low

On organizational pathologies, JP showed a spy manual on how to interfere and disturb – and even when the audience was giggling we all know that these are timeless issues in corporations. What once was sabotage is now normal mode of work.

Then, it’s Alexander Warta from Bosch, talking about opportunities for corporate wikis and experiences at Bosch:

  • it’s not about nifty tools, rather it’s about a new paradigm (knowledge works needs to be self-driven and distributed)
  • What they did? Many things like e.g. supporting expert debriefings, international expert’s collaboration and much more
  • presented the results of an inter-company study on wiki use (done by the Bosch team).

Perceived Challenges? He’s systematizing it into seven fields of tension:

  • individual effort <-> social, collective benefit
  • awareness <-> privacy
  • current information <-> trustable, sound information
  • structure <-> freedom (and freeform emergence of structure)
  • usability <-> functionalities
  • participation <-> coherence
  • media boundaries <-> media integration (binding it all together)

BTW, I have asked Alexander to present these results and some of his experiences at the upcoming WikiWednesday Stuttgart. Come and join us if you’re close.

Next up, and last talk before lunch is by Matthias Büger of Deutsche Bank (I blogged about the pre-conference interview here: “Pre-Conference interview: dbWiki – building a Web 2.0 corporate knowledge base“) but he asked the audience not to tweet/blog/whatever his actual talk. OK, no problem. Now off to lunch and “networking d’enfer”

Adoption patterns and best practices – now Twitter

Tonight I did a quite long comment on Björn’s post at the Enterprise2Open blog on “Microblogging as a Corporate Tool“). These are some thoughts, and essentially my take on the adoption issues with Twitter that are cross-linked and -influenced by the discussions at Centrestage, Communardo (and Cem Basman too).

Björn asked about the requirements we’re seeing (and need to meet) when we want to introduce these tools towards organizations and assumed that “we need Twitter to succeed for the masses before micro blogging can be implemented in a substantial way”. I don’t think so and explain below, but he’s got a very good point in demanding more best-practices and enterprise success stories. Anyway, here’s a quote of what I commented:

I am divided if “understanding” is what we need to drive corporate adoption. Twitter and co. are basically easy to get applications. The way I see it, people don’t use it because they don’t understand and don’t see the altered mode of communication – as it’s so counterintuitive to what we all have learned for long.

Yes, telling and educating corporations about Microblogs won’t hurt (and adding a list of possible usage arenas is a good start too, @Dirk) but I propose to focus on the personal benefits of “ambient initimacy” for knowledge workers and explore usage potentials in project or innovation management from there.

People don’t really care about project documentation and “after action” knowledge reviews (and innovators despise processes and organizational boundaries) – hence, we must provide them with light-weight tools that don’t add much additional work load and that bring instant benefits. This is where Twit’ter, Yammer and co. are coming into play: they are making it easier to feel connected, to communicate and they allow for easy “drill-down” (at least three times: in terms of intensity of debate, in terms of private or public conversation, in terms of engaging into a conversation when I feel so and dropping out from it again when fit).

Now, Laura Fitton prefers “microsharing” to “microblogging” (yes, the latter is pretty common and already a kind of industry standard) and I can see the reasons. It’s not so much blogging, messaging, documenting or whatever. Twitter and co. are also means for sharing time, for caring about your colleagues and professional network.

So, as microsharing alters the patterns and ways of communication within an enterprise, we may need 1) an organizational culture that understands the need and value of “caring for your colleagues (and what are they up to in this d*** project”) and 2) we must understand that people need to use it personally some times to understand its benefits for them and their work.

Btw, somehow this reminds me of the initial reactions of people towards wikis. And with that said, I’ve seen it quite often that when people begin to use their intranet wiki, ideas where this nifty tool (and method to collaborate, dare I say) might be used too emerge quickly. I guess that might happen with enterprise microsharing platforms as well, so it’s more about building a versatile and adaptive platform than getting the usage scenarios right from the very start.