Pie’s comments on the Yammer purchase

Thanks to the wisdom of Gmail, e-mail that I receive where I am just “one of the many” gets filed away in the “Bulk” folder.
I try to check it every now and then, and got a surprise today when I saw an email alerting me to Laurence Hart’s latest blog post.
I was surprised because he had written about the purchase of Yammer by Microsoft. I didn’t even know that this had occurred! (Been very out of touch lately).
You can read Laurence’s post above. I like his analysis.

Thanks Laurence

Posted in E2.0, Twitter | Tagged Laurence Hart, , pie, Yammer | Leave a reply

Promise #1 – The value of a Content Management system

Refer: 14 Unfulfilled Promises

Background

In my post “The value of a content management system” I described how the US Air Force Medical Service had added an E2.0 interface to their content management system, and finished the post by trying to find out if I could republish some of the material from the article.

Delivering on the Promise

Instead of republishing excerpts from the post, I have included a link to the post, so that you can read it yourself:

Social Network Enlightenment Found in the U.S. Air Force Medical Service

BLUG – I’ll be there

BLUG

I’m going to the Belux Lotus User Group conference that is being held in Antwerp, Belgium.

Am I a big Lotus user? No – not really.

Then why am I going? Because the sessions they’ve got lined up look excellent!

There are three main streams – Development, Administration, and Business/Other. I’ll be attending the “Business/Other” sessions.

Social Business

At this years “Lotusphere” (IBM’s big conference), there was a big focus on Social Business. And and looks like this will be playing a big part at BLUG.

After what looks like a very interesting Opening Keynote, there will be a Panel Discussion on  “Social Business”. Does this “buzzword” actually has any credence?

Members of the “Panel” include Luis Suarez, who has been living without e-mail the last 4 years, Femke Goedhart, an IBM Champion (and someone that I met at a SharePoint event last year), Stuart McIntyre, a Social Business Consultant (and author of the blog Collaboration Matters, and Chris Miller (aka IdoNotes) from Connectria.

This is one discussion I’m looking forward to.

Further in the “Business/Other” stream there will also be sessions on Cloud Computing, Balancing freedom the freedom of social media with the corporate restrictions that are often necessary, hearing how to “survive” in the business world without e-mail, as well as some other interesting sessions.

As I mentioned, I’m not a big “Lotus” person, but I feel that you can learning can come from all different sources. So I’m ready to learn. I’ll be there with my notepad (yes – the paper-based version) taking notes.

I’m also looking forward to meeting some of the IBM/Lotus crowd. (If you see me there, come and say “Hello”).

Nerd Girls

And…before I forget – I’m looking forward to seeing the Nerd Girls. At Lotusphere 2012, these girls organised the “Spark Talks”. These talks are very, very good (and inspiring). I wrote about one of the Spark Talks in an earlier post, and I am keen to see what the girls have organised this time.

  • BLUG site
  • Shiny Social Tools Meet Practicality At Lotusphere (informationweek.com)
  • Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Customer Conversation – Russell’s Convenience (billives.typepad.com)
  • Lotusphere 2012, opening general session with Michael J. Fox;

A comment by David on “Social Leadership”

In my last post, #SWCHAT – Social Leadership, I mentioned that there seemed to be the feeling that there was no such thing as “Social Leadership”.

In response, David Christopher, the host of the #SWChat’s, posted a really valuable comment. You can read it at the end of the above-mentioned post, but I feels it’s really worthy of its own post…

The term “Social Leadership” doesn’t really exist in business today but it was clear from the event that leaders need to start understanding and working towards being more social.

The reason reason? Empowerment.

With a social business infrastructure the old hierarchical structures are broken down and decentralised. Employee’s become more empowered and open collaboration becomes the norm.

Leaders therefore need to evolve their leadership styles to accommodate this type of new workplace, a social workplace. Once they embrace this type of leadership then the tacit and explicit knowledge of the employees can be shared openly and becomes an incredible asset. An asset that is often ignored or not realised.

This is the future, the next generation workplace as some call it but many companies are still a long way off achieving this.

The SWChat event last week clearly highlighted this.

I’m looking forward to next weeks chat. Thanks David.

  • Managing Social Media Chaos: A Leadership Priority (forbes.com)

#SWCHAT – Social Leadership

  Yesterday, David Christopher hosted another Social Workplace Tweet Chat.

Social Workplace Chat is a weekly event on Twitter where people from all corners of the globe come together to discuss topics around The Social Workplace. This particular chat session is an incredible way to learn more about the “Social Workplace”.

David is an excellent host, and knows, exactly, how to encourage excellent discussions on the topic in question. You can find out more about up-coming #SWCHAT’s, as well as interesting stuff over the most recent one, at http://www.stopthinksocial.com/swchat/.

This week’s chat covered “Social Leadership“.   The main feeling about this was:

There is no such thing as “Social Leadership”.
Leader is inherently “social”.

Further to that, David also put forward three other questions:

  • Why are companies not adopting a “Social Leadership Infrastructure”?
  • What type of people do you see embracing Social Leadership, and what type do you see fearing it?
  • Are introverts more comfortable with Social Leadership?

The answers to these were interesting. Based on the fact that the “Social” Leadership didn’t actually exist (see above), the responses to these questions tended to concentrate more on the adoption of social media (i.e. the web 2.0 tools used).

With regards the last question, many references were made to a book titled “The Introvert’s Guide to Success in Business and Leadership”. This seemed to be the basis for this week’s chat. I have bought the book, but have only had a chance to skim through it.  David, however, wrote about it on his blog.

I have captured the essence of the chat in Storify. Click here to read it for yourself to read the discussion (note I have removed Retweets, and any “small talk” tweets).

http://storify.com/markjowen/swchat-social-leadership

[Alternatively, you can download a PDF version here.]

  • A comment by David on “Social Leadership” (markjowen.com)

What is Enterprise 2.0 – by AIIM

As mentioned in an earlier post (“Innovation Management“), I’m following AIIM’s Enterprise 2.0 Practitioner course, and it’s really helping me transform all these ideas on what I “think” E2.0 is, into a more clear, and better defined understanding.

Here’s a slide deck that AIIM have made available on “What is Enterprise 2.0”. It gives a succinct overview and provides some good information.

  • AIIM presentation on Information Governance
  • AIIM Study: Social Technology Business Benefit Hinges on Process Integration
  • The 10 best SlideShares every social media enthusiast must read
  • The 10 Best Social Media SlideShare Presentations of 2014
  • Enterprise 2.0 Isn’t About Social Business, It’s Just About Business

Innovation Management

Quote

I’m following the AIIM Enterprise 2.0 Practitioner course at the moment, and in Module 4, there is a slide that contains the following definition of Innovation Management:

Innovation management is the economic implementation and exploitation of new ideas and discoveries, and the implementation of an innovation culture in an organization, to promote and make possible the development of new ideas and business opportunities. Innovation management consists of innovation strategy, culture, idea management and implementation of innovation processes.

– John P Riederer, University of Wisconsin.

While reading this, I couldn’t help thinking about 3M. If you recall, in my post Innovation policy from an unexpected mine – 3M, I described how William L McKnight, the head of the company, did just what was described in the definition above. He gave Dick Drew an environment where Dick could develop his new idea, one that was totally different from the core product of the company. And it was this environment, this innovation culture, that allowed 3M to grow to what it is today.

  • The Future of Innovation Management: 5 Key Steps for Future Success (bjconquest.com)
  • What Every Innovation Manager Needs To Know about Value Creation? Let’s Start with Something Simple. (futurelab.net)
  • Blog Post: What is the function of KM? (gurteen.com)
  • Managing Innovation (advancementsynergy.com)

Why Virtual Events Matter – a post by Daniel O’Leary

I have started watching the presentations from the AIIM Virtual Social Business Conference. Even though I was not able to “attend” the conference live, AIIM are making all the sessions available for a limited time.

Thanks to a twitter feed that was running at the conference, I saw that Daniel O’Leary, an “AIIM Capture Expert Blogger” had written an excellent post on the value of Virtual Events.

Here is a link to his post…Why Virtual Events Matter

 

  • I’ve just signed up for…The AIIM Social Business Virtual Conference (markjowen.com)

The Use of Collaborative Software in Virtual Teams

I was delighted to discover a whitepaper by Eike Grotheer’s on “The Use of Collaborative Software in Virtual Teams”.

I’m interested in how “virtual teams” operate and work together, and so started reading his work. Then I realised that I had actually been part of his research. To gather data for his thesis, Eike had sent out  requests to participate in a survey in May 2010. (Google still has a cached copy of the survey). In November 2010, he sent out the results of his research. And I never looked at it!  (Kicking myself now, though!)

As I read Eike’s work I got even more excited – his research not only involved communication in virtual teams, he had used TAM (Technology Acceptance Model) to determine the effectiveness of the software.

(If you are not familiar with TAM (Technology Acceptance Model please check out my earlier posts: Predicting User Acceptance; and Applying (loosely) the Technology Adoption Model to a Real-Life situation)

Eike had used some pretty advanced statistical techniques to analyze his findings (Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient; Kruskal–Wallis one-way analysis of variance), and I won’t go into those in detail.

Survey Results Summarized
  • 265 people responded to the survey,
  • There was also a very large variety of tools in use (Microsoft Outlook, SharePoint, Microsoft Project Server, Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime, Lotus Quickr, and Google Apps were all listed, along with other collaborative applications).
  • Most of the features that are frequently used can be split into two categories:
      • Tools for sharing and managing information (e.g.  document, content and knowledge management)
      • Tools for direct communication between team members

User Satisfaction and the Use of Collaborative Software in Virtual Teams

OK – this is where it started getting interesting. Eike rightly states that

the use of information systems can only provide a benefit to an organization if users first of all have interest in using them and then actually make use of them.

To try and explain this the Technology Acceptance Model was devised (refer earlier mentioned posts for more detail). It states that the a user’s intention to use a system is influenced by the perceived usefulness and  the perceived ease-of-use.

Eike analyzed these two determinants (perceived usefulness and perceived ease-of-use) to determine their impact on the use of collaborative software. (He points out that, as everyone who responded to the survey is already using collaborative software, the intention is already known, and that the use is measured.) 

Again, I won’t go into too much detail. In the survey there were 4 statements that were related to the perceived usefulness, and 4 statements that were related to perceived ease-of-use.

Performing a bivariate correlation analysis on the data from the survey, Eike was able to show that there was a positive correlation between the perceived usefulness and the actual use. This effectively proves (statistically) that the more users perceive collaborative software to be useful within a virtual team, the more they will use it. (Sounds logical, but then this fact means that the TAM can be verified).

Tackling the other determinant of the TAM, Eike did a bivariate correlation analysis between each perceived ease of use item, and the extent of use of collaborative software.

There was no significant correlation which meant that the ease of use of collaborative software  has only a minor effect on the usage behaviour. However, it wasn’t actually possible to draw a conclusion as the survey participants were all experienced IT users, and the difficulty of the software may not have prevented it being used.

Going further, Eike investigated the impact of TAM factors on project success. Again using statistics he was able to show that there was a positive correlation between perceived usefulness and project success, and between perceived ease-of-use and project success. This confirmed that a relationship between the use of collaborative software and project success does exist.

In other words, the more useful the participants perceived the collaboration software that was used in the virtual team to be, as well as how easy they thought it was to use, had a positive impact on the success of the project in all aspects.

Summing it up

Sometimes it is easy to think “well, that’s already obvious”, but I always find it valuable to be able to scientifically prove (in one way or another) what everyone assumes.

And that is why I found Eike’s research exciting. From a handful of well thought-out survey questions, he was able to scientifically prove that

if software is considered useful by its users, it enables them to become effective and productive in their work, and if it is easy to use, it enables them to make use of it straight away, and leads quickly to desired results. 

Other useful links:

  • Virtual Teams: Key Success Factors – Part 1
  • Virtual Teams: Key Success Factors – Part 2
  • Virtual Teams: Key Success Factors – Part 3
  • The Complexity of Virtual Teams

 

 

A meeting of the great ECM minds – the #ECMJam

Today the second ECM tweetjam was held. The topic:

the connection between ECM and SocBiz

Organised by Bryant Duhon, the list of participants looked like a veritable “Who’s who” of the giants in the world of AIIM and ECM.

As mentioned – this was the second ECM tweet jam. You can read Bryant’s initial explanation of what it is here:

(http://www.aiim.org/community/blogs/expert/ECMjam-Part-Deux-Enter-the-Social)

And…here is Bryant’s report on the first ECM Tweet Jam:

(http://www.aiim.org/community/blogs/expert/ECMjam-ECM-Sexiness-and-Microsoft-Isnt-the-Devil)

Bryant will be writing a report of today’s ECMJAM. It will be worth waiting for.

If you want to read the raw tweets though, check out the tweet stream

Related Posts

Laurence Harts post on the ECMJam