Lotus Knows Idea Jam

via connections.euluc.com

Der Jam, der in englischer Sprache stattfindet, behandelt vier Themenstränge:
– „Lotus knows, dass smarter arbeiten erstklassige Technologien benötigt …“ – “Lotus knows working smarter depends on great technology…” – Wir reden über coole Funktionen der Lotus-Technologie, ohne die Sie nicht leben können oder die nicht bekannt genug sind. Und falls Sie Ideen haben, was noch cool sein könnte …

– „Lotus knows, dass Marketing Schlüssel dazu ist, dass Technologie auch eingeführt wird …“ – “Lotus knows marketing is key to technology adoption…” – Wir wollen Ihre Ideen, wie wir grössere Aufmerksamkeit für unsere Lotus-Angebote erreichen können und wir unsere Nachricht besser im markt bekannt machen, ein Thema, dass mich persönlich natürlich besonders interessiert.

– „Lotus knows, dass Technologie nur dann erfolgreich ist, wenn Kunden damit erfolgreich sind“ – “Lotus knows technology is only great with client success…” – Sprechen Sie mit uns darüber, wie Sie Lotus-Technologien erfolgreich einsetzen, wie Sie die Produkte eingeführt haben, wie Sie Ihre Mitarbeiter trainiert haben und so weiter. * „Lotus knows, dass die Welt kleiner, enger und schmaler wird“

– “Lotus knows the world is getting smaller, flatter and smarter…” Wir leben verstärkt in einer globalen Ökonomie. Hier wollen wir Ideen sammeln, wie Anwender rund um die Welt von Lotus-Angeboten profitieren und profitieren können.

Interessante Initiative – wenn es gelingt deutlich zu machen dass Lotus mehr zu bieten hat als Mail und Kalender hat es sich gelohnt. Und es ist sympathisch dass die Botschaft nicht als “klassische Marketingkampagne” und im Gießkannenprinzip, sondern in den interaktiveren Social Media Kanälen gepflegt werden soll:

“IBM wird auf vielfältigen [Kommunikationskanälen] mit Endanwendern kommunizieren, die Trends setzen, Entscheidungen im Bereich Collaboration, Gestaltung des Tools am Arbeitsplatz beeinflussen und Vordenker in der Nutzung neuer Technologien sind.”

Da fühle ich mich auch angesprochen – habe mich registriert und bin gespannt auf den Innovation Jam nächste Woche.

Posted via web from enterprise2open

Extended social media strategies (or is it “social business design”?)

I am currently preparing two in-house social media workshops (both will be borrowing heavily from the Enterprise 2.0 playbook as well). While one will lean a bit onto social media monitoring, the other one will focus on using social media instruments for internal knowledge dissemination in yet to be formed professional social networks.

Now, I am trying to pursue an open ended and flexible approach to both talks and was thus looking around for some nifty visualizations to provide some additional structuring without being too restrictive (yes, I was shortly pondering the use of wordles too) . Honestly, there are a lot of nice looking social media whatever visualizations – including David Armano’s take on social business design which I bookmarked then and which served me as kind of starting point:

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Basically it’s a visualization that guides us onto good questions, and a lot of room for improvisation in an adaptive workshop setting too: What would businesses be like if they were truly social?:

Imagine if a company like GM, was at the core “social”. Not just participating in “social media”—but through every part of their business ecosystem, were connected—plugged into a collective consciousness made up of ALL their constituents, from employees to consumers to dealers, to assembly line work[er]s etc. What if big organizations worked the way individuals now do. We’re actively using cloud services, mobile, networks and applications that offer real time dynamic signals vs. inefficient and static e-mail exchanges. In short, imagine if what makes “Web.2.0″ revolutionary was applied to every facet of an organization transforming how we work, collaborate and communicate? We think this is possible. And we’re calling it “social business design“.

I really like that approach, for one it’s probably one small step closer to some kind of nice and “easy as it gets to explain” consultancy “products” (probably neede for the Enterprise 2.0 field to flourish, see comments #2 and#4 at the link, alas german language), second it’s incorporating a good part of the fuzzy social stuff we all know is important into the concept, while not talking tools:

[there are four] archetypes of Social Business Design:

Ecosystem – a community of connections
Hivemind – the socially calibrated mindset of individuals
Dynamic Signal – the constant multi-faceted means of collaboration
Metafilter– a method of finding signals in vast amounts of noise

Think informal social networks and their role for the real workings of organizations. Or think of the importance of “social capital”. So while some differentiation and clarification is still necessary, this may be an interesting social media (implementation) heuristic (aka “consultant’s product”).

OK, for posts on the concept see these interrelated posts (this seems to be the Dachis team together with David and Jeff Dachis, of course):

# Peter Kim: Reflections on Social Business
# Jevon MacDonald: Taking the Leap: Social Business Design

Peter Kim: Reflections on Social Business
Kate Niederhoffer: Social Business Design: a social psychologist’s take
Jevon MacDonald: Taking the Leap: Social Business Design

Especially Jevon is expanding on the intricate tasks that arise when companies become more (inter-)active, ie. matters of organization. Lately he’s been posting Understanding the role of Enterprise 2.0 and moving towards a Social Business and then Social Business Design and the Real Time Enterprise (now I get the underlying pattern behind all those scattered posts, Jevon – all the best for the dachis team).

upLIFTing conference videos – being an innovative traditionalist and ideas on changing innovation

What makes conferences special? Is it the athmosphere, is it people, is it food? Is it after-conference provision of videos or blog posts?

Well, even when I say that it’s easier to scan through blog posts after conferences sometimes having video content available is just cool. TED is in fact offering many cases in point (and I am waiting for the idea of organized TED video screenings to take off), reboot videos are probably a good example too. Then there’s the LIFT conference, a

[…] series of events built around a community of pioneers who get together in Europe and Asia to explore the social implications of new technologies. Each conference is a chance to turn changes into opportunities by anticipating the major shifts ahead, and meeting the people who drive them.”

Some of the talks are free to see, like the one from John Thackara on Changing the Planet:

[…] gives a provocative talk about the role of design in finding solutions to the ecological crisis. After inviting us to avoid terms such as “future” or “sustainable” as they maintain a certain distance to the problem we face, he shows a rich set of projects he participated in. He makes the important point that the resources to be put in place already exist and that they might not necessitate complex technological developments.

And there’s also Bruce Sterling, who talks about the “Internet of things”:

[if it was] just about adding chips, antennas and interactivity to the things we own, it would be no big deal. Discover a wholly different perspective: Open, unfinished objects which can be transformed and reprogrammed by their users; Objects that document their own components, history, lifecycle; Sensitive and noisy objects that capture, process, mix and publish information. Discover an Internet of Things which intends to transform the industrial world as deeply as the current Internet transformed the world of communication and media.

From an collaboration (or shall I say organizational structures and design, or even more cheekily, Enterprise 2.0) point of view this little talk by Lee Bryant is most interesting, take 5 minutes of your time and see if you’re a traditionalist like him:

Equally interesting (but with no video to be checked out so far) are the talks by Marc Giget (Cnam) and Catherine Fieschi, Counterpoint/British Council on Changing Innovation:
First one on the end of IT (#yesyesyes), where Euan Semple got involved obviously (as living and walking proof for “Social computing for the business world”), second one on “Innovating with the non-innovators”:

  • Today, corporate information systems are innovation’s worst enemies. They set organizations and processes in stone. They restrict the enterprise’s horizons and its networks. They distort its view of the world. But ferments of change emerge. Meet those who breathe new air into current organizations, those who design tomorrow’s Innovation Systems.
  • Innovating used to be a job in itself. It has become a decentralized procès which includes, in no particular order, researchers, entrepreneurs, designers, artists, activists, and users who reinvent the products they were supposed to consume. Why is that important? What does it really change? And where will it stop? WILL it stop somewhere?

I think that both points are of interest to Enterprise 2.0 practitioners (who are – when they understand their job right – designing tomorrow’s IT systems, err, innovation systems), while catering for both the needs of their corporate users and allowing for the freeform emergence of user-contributed solutions. And yes, it’s funny in a way that “old and basic” tools like wikis excel at both of these tasks …

Here comes everybody – true on many accounts

Steve Cunningham is summarizing books via video, nicely produced as he’s using a mixture of visualizations and “key point”-slides. And he’s asking his followers on Twitter which book he should tackle next, cool.

Here he’s reviewing Clay Shirky’s “Here comes Everybody” (btw, he claims to not being related with Ward Cunningham):

Nice blurb too:

Question it answers: Why we are going through the biggest change in how we communicate the world has ever seen.

Why you should care: Most books on “new media” focus on the what. This is the only book truly dedicated to the why.

Oh and btw, you may enter into my writings on Shirky and more videos via this post: Clay Shirky on Cognitive Surplus

reboot11 – recapping days 0 and 1

Ah, I promised some learnings, did I? First one: it turned out a good idea to arrive early, that is on Wednesday afternoon, the day before reboot. When I got to Kedelhallen some people were already there and while I was too late for getting into Wemind’s event there I happened to meet Kim Bach, with whom I had a very cool conversation around everything in between anarchy, bread baking and zoos and then a nice walk to the pre-reboot boat trip.

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I guess there have been some photos taken at this boat-trip, which was nice and a good start to an evening at the Copenhagen beaches  …

OK, now onto some of the talks on day one, I arrived early too:

Matt Webb started the talks, demanding more cultural invention – if only as a way to do more interesting things. Agree, we should stop “solving problems” and start “inventing culturally”, if this means going for the deep thinking. Needless to say that it all related to “design thinking” – and yes, “design has to invent, to create new ways of doing things, and to contribute to culture”.

David Weinberger, here I can say it with Peter’s words: “David Weinberger, who I always love to see talk, spoke about the web being a morally charged tool, and about optimism”. Yay, nice video, found via Peter:

Missed the talk by Matthias Müller-Prove, but went into Martin Jul’s session on what we can learn from Japan when they rebuilt after World War 2 – as they called on Deming for ideas, the session evolved into a collection of management principles (“Reboot your management“), some of whom are equally fitting our world of Enterprise 2.0.

It concerned Deming’s 14 principles for management, the humanistic, long-term thinking, keep learning, use the scientific method, and build from quality philosophy, that helped shape companies such as Toyota and Honda..

Researching the background of his work, it was interesting to see how the World-War 2 Training Within Industry principles played a big role in shaping his ideas and how its focus on operating from a basis of scarcity – such as saving material, time and labour to win the war faster, plays so well in an entrepreneurial setting and in cutting through the big-company trap of just throwing more money at problems.

Why is Google Wave a tsunami?

wavelogoWhy is Google Wave important? Well, the toys of today are the tools of tomorrow, a compelling keynote for a developer conference is cool and all, but there’s more on the upside:

  • Google Wave is poised to reshape (rewires I say) the nature of communication (yes, more face-to-face real-timelineness communication), improving the web experience. We probably need to experience and use it a while to understand its potentials completely …

– A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
– A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
– A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

And as we’re moving onto more real-timeness and collaboration already (think Friendfeed lifestreams, real social bookmarking and annotation, social news and more), this is much more than another Google service:

  • Yes, it’s a promising product, framework and protocol.
  • Yes, it’s got an API which is devised to allow “developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves”.  With HMTL 5 and a supportive browser we get an app that is part wiki, part chat, part forum, part collaborative office and document (nah, content) sharing tool and part email. We get multi-user real time editing – be it in uploaded photos, videos or other stuff (alas, you can’t edit the photo or the video but you can collaboratively tag the uploaded files). It’s possible to play-back the history of the document to see how it evolved (think wiki page history on a ton of steroids).
  • Yes, the platform will be open-sourced, it will be able to run on any server, so it won’t belong to Google. It’s a standard thing so whoever is hosting waves can build no walled garden (you listen Facebook, do you?) but must ensure interoperability (yes, like with plain old mail). One step closer to living in the cloud of distributed apps and data. And it’s playing along the lines of integration and adaptivity … so I can’t wait to put this on my own servers

At last, one more thing, something that explains why Google is such a remarkable company – it’s the story behind Wave. Starting from the question “Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?” they have achieved a lot. And Google’s introductory blog post has the innovation story, ie. why it must have been Google to say yes to this idea and on the early days of Wave (more on Google innovation culture, ie. a company whose unique culture shows through in small ways):

When Lars Rasmussen first floated the idea, Google co-founder Sergey Brin wasn’t impressed. “He came to me and he said ‘This may sound kinda crazy, but we’re going to reinvent communication and we just need a bunch of engineers to go of to Australia for a while and we’ll get back to you after a couple of years,'” Brin remembers. “It was not a very compelling proposal.”

More wave information at the usual places, like Techcrunch, Tim O’Reilly (Open Source, Open Protocol, and Federated Wave Clouds), Forrester, Mashable

And yes, you can sign up for Google Wave updates

Upcoming part 2: Change Management, collaboration software suites and thinking about innovation

A small overview of the next things I am up to, but first a short retrospective on last weekend when I participated in the RTVC, a premiere virtual workshop on Change Management (methods, tools, whatever, overall ideas). Results are getting collected, systematized and refined by the team at the Change Management Toolbook (namely Holger Nauheimer, who was instrumental in coming up with this experiment). So far I have filled three wiki pages with notes (and transcriptions of the chats I participated in), will try to filter out the nuggets soon.

Tomorrow and the day after I will be in Düsseldorf for the 2009 DNUG (german Notes user association) conference – this time the topic is „The Innovative Enterprise – Generating Value in a Smarter World“ (yes, we’re talking about a smarter planet here, too). Two disclaimers: I got invited by IBM to this event, and IBM is a customer of mine – anyway all tweets and blog posts are still my own opinions and all, you know the deal.

Well, I guess that the Web 2.0 (heck, Enterprise 2.0) will permeate all keynotes, workshops and even the networking (geek) talk. Definitely looking forward to this, especially to see and hear more about the more general vision “smarter working”, but also what Kevin Cavanaugh, long time IBM manager will say about composite applications (mashing up mashups?), what’s the business with Linux desktops, Lotus collaboration approaches, cloud computing vs. on premise, integration et al.

Some other highlights of the program on Tuesday (some of them on conflicting time slots, alas):

On Wednesday it’s a day of workshops for me (well, sometimes you have to integrate with Sharepoint), preceeded by keynotes: