Social Business – Living Social

The (Social) Network Is Your Company

May 17, 2013 By Alan Hamilton Leave a Comment

John Gage, the 21^st employee of Sun Microsystems coined the now famous phrase:

“The Network is the Computer”

which became a prominent feature on the Sun Microsystems’ logo and motto. More than that it became part of their philosophy before the large scale adoption of the internet. They realised that the combined power of computers, interconnected, is the real computer – able to carry out more complex tasks than would otherwise be possible by the boxes we sit in front of today.

That same philosophy applies today in the world of social networking. People use Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and other social media tools to extend their friendships beyond what would otherwise be possible.

If Sun Microsystems recognised this in the 1980s, and the late 2000′s saw the rise of social media as a phenomenon which validates and amplifies our own experiences, then why would this philosophy not also apply in business?

For example, the collective experience of people attending a rock concert and sharing their photos on a social media platform amplifies the experience for all who participate. I might get to see angles of the stage I couldn’t from where I was standing because someone else, at that angle shared their photos. I might get new insights to the dynamics of the band or catch a moment which couldn’t be seen from the distance I was from the stage.

What amplification of experience would your organisation experience by extending the natural personal networks of your employees? By making it much easier for employees to find and stay in contact with co-workers with similar issues, working on similar projects or just simply engaged in similar work you extend the reach of their experience to angles which had not previously been connected.

But what virtue is there in sharing the photos? Well, the natural altruisim of individuals comes in to play and encourages everyone who is connected to contribute what they have for the collective good. That photographer would get to see my photos, and those of many others, encouraged to do so by him sharing his pictures.

Encouraging your employees to become interconnected in a business social network is one of the simplest ways of bringing down the barriers to communication in your organization. By connecting the people, the naturally begin to share information and exchange ideas to such an extent over time that the network itself takes on the characteristics of the company. The collective intelligence of the organization is held in the social network and because it is shared it is not dependent on any single node (or individual) any more.

Your staff’s collective knowledge and experience becomes shared and networked amongst everyone else. There’s no single point of failure any more. There becomes a culture of sharing what you know because others do it and people find value in what others choose to share. As I have blogged before here, your value in the social network is not what you know, but what you share.

Consider, therefore, how important building a social network in your organization actually is. This is more than an intranet, a shared server, public folders or just a discussion forum for people to gossip. This is a way of engaging people’s deep-seated desire to be recognized, to be satisfied and to co-operate. To create satisfaction, Herzberg says you need to address the motivating factors associated with work. He called this “job enrichment”. His premise was that every job should be examined to determine how it could be made better and more satisfying to the person doing the work. Things to consider include:

Providing opportunities for achievement.
Recognizing workers’ contributions.
Creating work that is rewarding and that matches the skills and abilities of the worker.
Giving as much responsibility to each team member as possible.
Providing opportunities to advance in the company through internal promotions.
Offering training and development opportunities, so that people can pursue the positions they want within the company.

It’s less about technology and more about actually finding a way of working which genuinely makes your organization more motivated and much smarter. A social business network, such as IBM Connections, can let you do that.

Filed Under: IBM Connections, Social Business Tagged With: al, connections, facebook, herzberg, internet, john gage, personal networks, social, sun microsystems, t, technology

Socialize your Shared Folders with Notes 9.0 Social Edition and IBM Connections Activities

March 12, 2013 By Alan Hamilton Leave a Comment

To mark the launch of IBM Notes 9.0 Social Edition I wanted to show how the combination of Notes and Connections provides a flexible solution to sharing folders of information whilst making you and your team truly SOCIAL by working together on your tasks.

In my last blog post I demonstrated how to use Activities in IBM Connections to restructure a project and manage the process. In this post I want to show how the System of Engagement – i.e. engaging people in managing the project and its tasks, can be turned into a System of Record - one which is used as a long term store of the information relating to a project.

How does this theory stack up in day-to-day practice however? Well, if you read my previous post on Activities and Project Management you can see how to manage the actions. Now I want to show you how to record the details of the process.

To start this process, and to mark its launch day, I am going to use IBM Notes 9.0 Social Edition. It has a sidebar which can be connected to your Connections environment to show what Activities you have and to allow you to interact with them without jumping between them:

The Activities sidebar is integral into IBM Notes 9.0 Social Edition and provides a bridge between your email and your Social Project Tasks. This is the same structure we examined in the last blog post.

The example email I have shown in the screenshot you can see that there is also a file attached to the email. When I drag the email from my drafts to the Activity a few things happen:

First the integration creates an Entry in my Activity outline in the area where I drop the email.

Next it creates a second Entry with the file attachment:

If we log into the web browser version of IBM Connections and go to the Activity we can see the email dropped into place:

You can see from the entries that it creates that one has a Bookmark with a Lotus Notes icon and another (a child of the first) with a paper clip icon. The first is a copy of the email I dragged in together with a link back to my original email in my mail file.

It uses a notes:// URL format so it relies on having IBM Notes installed and for the end user to have access to the mail file. In any case the message is included in the Entry so you don’t need to go back to Notes to see the email:

You can of course spawn new entries from either the email or its attachment, such as a comment, more tasks and so on.

Taking this approach you might consider having a new section in your Activity, labelled “Communications”, and treat it like a Public Folder where everyone involved can place their communications or other information.

In this way you can use Activities and IBM Connections as providing a way of converging Systems of Record (like document management systems) and Systems of Engagement (like wikis and forums):

Social Business connects systems of engagement and systems of record

You can now treat Activities as your System of Record for a project or major task. You can manage all the actions, record comments and save all your communications and files relating to the project directly in the same place. Everyone has access to the same version of the truth, everyone sees what’s been happening and most importantly you are engaging everyone to participate by making it easy to share. As Ginni Rometty (IBM CEO) said just last week (at 12 minutes 10 seconds):

In a social enterprise,….., your value will be not what you know, but what you share.

When you combine your new found social project management skills together with the encouragement to start recording and placing all the information that lead you to the decisions you made on that project you will find that the value of what you share increases enormously. Using a tool like IBM Connections’ Activities makes that possible NOW.

Thanks to Bruce Elgort for suggesting a couple of edits to this post!

Filed Under: How To..., IBM Connections, Social Business Tagged With: activities, IBM Connections, lotus_notes, Social Business

Using Activities to Restructure and Manage a Project

March 11, 2013 By Alan Hamilton 1 Comment

Earlier today I was preparing a project for handover to a colleague. Although we have a documented process we follow for the work, it is in the form of a Word document and can be difficult to track which steps you’ve completed and which are still to be done. So that my colleague and his manager can work through the steps to be performed in a set order I went about using one of my favourite applications within IBM Connections – Activities.

Activities is like a simple to-do list manager which can expand into a multi-user, multi-community project management and documentation solution. It brings SOCIAL PROJECT MANAGEMENT to any department and avoids the situation where only the project manager might know the true status of a project.

Activities’ tasks are aggregated and joined together so that you, as a user, can see all the work you’ve to do, across all your activities, sorted by date order. This makes for a tremendous productivity gain as I don’t need to go hunting in each Activity to see what’s coming next.

In Project Management parlance, Activities provides a multi-level task facility and management of several Activities essentially acts as program management, or portfolio management.

In my case I wanted simply to get the procedure we have, which is how to install an IBM Sametime Standard Server, into the order in which I believe my colleague should carry out the steps. Rather than going through the standard procedure, which lays out all of the tasks in a linear order, I realised that it would be more convenient for him to have it broken down into a number of telephone calls/remote sessions he will conduct with the customer.

When you create an Activity in Connections it opens what I can only describe as a project home page. Here you can structure your activity into sections, add comments and other content and all the tasks that you or your colleagues need to perform:

In the example above I have created nine sections, each designed to group the tasks that my colleague has to perform into the calls or sessions he will have with the customer.

In each section I have placed all the tasks I believe he needs to perform:

As you can see from the structure, IBM Connections lets you create a multi-level to-do list for all the tasks to be performed. These can be many layers deep as you need for your project. Note that there is already one comment posted next to the “Obtain Sametime software from Passport Advantage”. The social aspect of Activities allows any participant to start a discussion on a single tasks and spawn additional tasks off from these.

My colleague’s manager is an author in this particular activity. He has chosen to Follow the Activity (see first screenshot). Rather than ask questions about whether or not a particular task has been done, by following the Activity he gets updates in his Activity Stream in IBM Connections each time something changes. This also avoids him being bombarded by emails with status updates.

In the depths of each task in my Activity I can provide as much or as little supporting information as is appropriate. In the screenshot below you can see one of these tasks opened out for more detail.

The field “To Do” is the title of the task itself.
Tags let me assign system-wide to this particular task. This is really useful in the future if I do a search for a particular technology or skill in Connections. I can then find actions one of my colleages carried out on a particular project and if necessary get in touch with him to get some help. Tagging makes it really easy to find information or people who can help you.
Assigned To is obvious enough – who is going to do this particular task.
Due Date is when it’s needed to be done for.
Attach File lets me attach multiple files for this task, such as a very detailed sequence of commands, or a file which needs to be supplied for the software.
Add Bookmark would let me provide links to wiki articles, blog posts or in fact anything that has a URL which might be pertinent to this task.
Custom Fields lets me put extra placeholders in. One of the most common custom fields we add is the “Expected Time to Complete” field which describes how long the task would normally take.
The Description field is where you can provide as much information as you see fit about the tasks which need to be carried out. It uses the Connections Rich Text editor so there are lots of options for formatting and producing bullet-points etc.
If this is a task that I want to make visible only to me – such as a review of the overall Activity, I can flag it as being private. This means that although the whole Activity will appear for those who are members of it, this particular task will be hidden only for me.
Lastly, although Connections normally sends an email message to the Assignee of the task, you can also choose to notify others of this particular task.

These tasks can be made into a very sophisticated hierarchy of tasks and sub-tasks to suit the needs of your project.

I hope this brief introduction to Activities sheds some light on the power of the tool at your disposal as a Connections customer. Look out for another blog post on using Activities Entries with your IBM Notes Activities sidebar as a way of capturing email and other information alongside your tasks.

Filed Under: How To..., IBM Connections, Social Business, Technical Stuff Tagged With: activities, IBM Connections, Social Business

How can we create Predictive Knowledge?

February 22, 2013 By Alan Hamilton 1 Comment

Lew Platt, HP. “If only HP knew what HP knows, we’d be three times more productive.”

Much is discussed these days about Big Data and the role of Predictive Analytics to help create better business decisions and provide information from data. How would it be, however if we could apply Predictive Analytics to knowledge?

What I am getting at here is the role that Predictive Analytics can play in recommending information to you, suggesting next steps for you in a business process, connecting information together based on links elsewhere and generally providing suggestions based on modelled interactions which have been validated elsewhere in the system.

A knowledge repository, such as a file system, a document management system, a social business solution or just a good old discussion database is essentially a data set of unstructured information which, if modelled correctly, could provide inferences which could be applied to assist the user going forward.

Such an idea, of course is not new. I have worked on so-called Expert Systems in the past and most recently, of course, IBM has turned Watson to the cause of healthcare and cancer research.

IBM Watson is drawing inferences between huge data sets of data and information to help doctors with the work they’re doing in cancer research. How can we, however, use similar concepts (at a fraction of the cost) to help us with our rather less noble quests in every day business?

Simplistically we could implement predictive analytics by automatically linking text in a wiki with definition pages. e.g. If I wrote The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog and I have wiki definition pages for fox and dog, it would be great if the system would create links to these pages for me. Better still, the system could save me the bother of having to go to my own definition of fox or dog and could go out to the internet, pull the information in that I need and create that page for me. Of course, like Watson, I need to vet the information it comes back with – only I can truly know if the results the system is giving me are either appropriate or accurate. Using scoring, weighting and analysis, however we could teach these systems to get better over time.

If you are a user of the popular Zite application for the iPad you might be familiar with such a feedback loop already. You tell it what you’re interested in, it gives you news articles and when you strongly like or dislike an article you can tell it – it then adjusts the quantity of similar news depending on your choices.

Now suppose all this good work could be turned on the silos of information residing in your organisation. Suppose you employed predictive analytics, knowledge management and social business to built a learning, predicting and truly helpful solution for your business.

Suppose you’re writing an article about a new HR policy and at the side of the page the system recommended a blog post that a previously unknown colleague had written? Suppose it unearthed an email you weren’t previously familiar with or found a document on a file server which might help you. Consider too, such a systems ability to reduce re-work when preparing a presentation. Wouldn’t it be great if the hours you spent on that graphic for that slide only to discover that someone else has already created one – a better one – after your presentation – could be eliminated? We can do all these things just now through tagging, searching and the likes, but all these require our input at the time when the information is put in and also at the time when we’re looking for something.

Predictive Knowledge is something which really can only start off as Poorly Educated Guesses, but with time and the right feedback mechanisms we might approach a smart, learning solution which can infer connections between what we’re doing and what already exists – internally or externally – to help us work smarter.
As Andrew McAfee pointed out Lew Platt of HP recognised that

“If only HP knew what HP knows, we’d be three times more productive.”

How much more productive would your organisation be with predictive knowledge?

Filed Under: Social Business Tagged With: andrew mcafee, hp, knowledge management, knowledge repository, lew platt, predictive analytics

The Path to Social Business

January 31, 2013 By Alan Hamilton Leave a Comment

The path to becoming a social business, one which has a more engaged workforce, customer-base and supply chain, is one which ultimately leads to greater business success. What components, however, do you need to consider putting in place from a strategic standpoint?

My graphic below attempts to put each of the components I feel any organisation should consider implementing or integrating into their social collaboration environment.

The Path to Social Business
(C) 2013 alanghamilton.com

The blue cans at the bottom of the arrow are the silos of information your organisation already has in one shape or form.

Working from right to left, the tacit knowledge of your employees is the one you definitely have. By tacit I mean the things they know about your organisation, your customers, how to do things, what works, what doesn’t, the intelligence the have about product pricing, service delivery and so on. If you could somehow capture that information, i.e. know what you know then the collective intelligence of your company would explode exponentially.

However, just asking people to tell you everything they know about your organisation is a strategy destined for failure from the outset. If I asked you to tell me everything you knew, how could you possibly do so. You might start with some personal history of yourself, your family, your work but soon become tired. Most of what you might tell me might be irrelevant to my use. It might be “interesting data” but not “knowledge”.

Instead, if you and I had a conversation where I asked you questions and you answered then two things happen: 1) I get the information I need 2) You get the satisfaction of assisting. That endorphins-releasing satisfaction is addictive, and something you will want to repeat. Before I know it you willingly help me by giving advice freely, without being asked.

So it is in your organisation. By asking your experts questions and getting their answers into a medium which can easily be shared their tacit knowledge, i.e. things they just happen to know, are set free. Everyone gets to profit from them. The expert gets their endorphine-release satisfaction and the recognition of being a subject matter expert and everyone else can get on with doing their job just a little better. By turning this into a virtuous cycle so the collective intelligence of your organisation can be dramatically enhanced.

That knowledge in your experts’ heads is not of course the only source of intelligence. You will have spreadsheets, databases, HR systems, ERP systems and all sorts of other pools of electronic information. Most of these line of business applications don’t talk to each other. Often they have contradictory or sometimes complementary information about the same subject. Imagine being able to connect these different pots of information when you needed it so that when you’re trying to find out about that new customer you’re trying to win you have as much information as possible to help you succeed.

Many organisations are “socializing” their business processes to build the tacit knowledge capture into these systems. For example, take a look at this integration of IBM Connections and SugarCRM:

How could you engage your staff more by adding social technologies into your business processes? What might be the outcome?

Filed Under: Social Business Tagged With: Social Business, social business process

Bring Social to your Business Processes

January 13, 2013 By Alan Hamilton Leave a Comment

In January 2011 I attended Lotusphere and witnessed IBM’s entry in to the Social Business arena. It was a seminal moment for me, having been involved in IBM collaboration solutions for nearly 20 years. In my time I have seen collaboration described variously as groupware, document management, knowledge management, intranets and now social business. I am not saying that each of these solution categories are the same – they most definitely have distinct features and facets which distinguish them. I am saying, however, that each of these disciplines have a large common overlap.

So it was, therefore, with great interest that I saw the launch of social business with a critical eye. What was different about this compared to the many intranets I have been involved in building, or the groupware solutions I have created in Lotus Notes?

The fundamental difference between social business and ALL that has gone before in the collaboration space is that while a social business solution such as IBM Connections supports the collaboration features of its predecessors, it introduces spontaneous collaboration into an otherwise linear knowledge capture system.

In laymans terms, what I mean is as follows: An intranet, discussion database, document management system or similar is designed by us to hold information we otherwise wish to access in the future. We have agreed that we will use it to store that information and will, for the most part, refer to it when we are looking for something. These systems do not encourage the spontanaeity of discussion, commenting, referral or improvement. A social solution treats these as the bedrock and builds mechanisms for being better informed about what’s going on. It provides the capability to start a discussion thread on an individual atom of data.It encourages participation, knowledge-seeking and knowledge capture.

A social business solution stands in the gap between Systems of Record, such as an intranet or document management system and Systems of engagement like instant messaging, video conferencing and web-meetings.

Social Business connects systems of engagement and systems of record

It allows the knowledge which circulates in the Engagement to be fastened to the atomic level of data which resides in your organisation. It means that you can provide context, background and a snapshot of the mindet of the individuals involved in your business process at the time. Neither the Systems of Record or Systems of Engagement can do this.

Thus, given the time I have spent in this area, the announcement that IBM was getting into the Social Business area was a big deal for me. In the intervening two years I have witnessed IBM Connections go from being a collection of different projects in IBM into a single product. I have seen it move from being this close-flying formation of applications into a single cohesive system. I have also seen it mature from a ground-breaking solution which some people had difficulty understanding the purpose of into one which in my slightly biased opinion is the gold-standard for social collaboration in the enterprise.

Looking Forward

Thus, it is with great expectation that in a couple of weeks I will join the many thousands of other social collaborators in Orlando at IBM Connect. It’s a week of intense knowledge-capture. It’s a week of intense social activity and its a week which reminds you that you are part of something quite extraordinary.

Above all, however, I am looking forward to the next chapter of social collaboration: The previous chapter was about socialising your organisation to get at the knowledge which existed but remained largely unmined. The new chapter will be about driving real business advantage by implementing social business processes.

Socialising business processes means that your bridge between the engagement and record systems is complete. You can start to bring knowledge into your atomic data and build INTELLIGENCE from it. Your customers become part of your business in ways they have ached for over the years. You increase the motivation of your staff and start on the road to building the kind of business relationships money cannot buy.

If you are attending Connect in Orlando please come find me. I’d love to have a chat.

Filed Under: IBM Connections, Lotusphere 2012, Social Business Tagged With: IBM Connect 2013, IBM Connections, Social Business

Is culture slowly killing your organization?

January 4, 2013 By Alan Hamilton Leave a Comment

If change is happening on the outside quicker than it is happening on the inside of your organization, the end is in sight.

– Jack Welsh.

The wrong kind of culture could kill your organisation

Let’s consider one simple scenario which would occur in any organisation. We have the company handbook, published by the management as a rulebook by which staff are expected to refer and abide. Typically the HR department will produce this document, perhaps in consultation with senior management, certainly seeking senior management sign-off.

Once it’s done it might be posted onto the Intranet and a news item put up with a link to it.

In other organisations the document, often a wordprocessor document or PDF is put into the requisite folder in the ECM system or the file server and an email sent round to everyone with a link to it.

I bet in the majority of organisations the file is still emailed around everyone and new starts get a copy of it emailed to them when they start. Each update of the document requires another mass mailing to all staff. Because its an important document people file it in their email folders. Subsequent updates also get stored and as a result they have lots of copies of older revisions of the same document. The net result is a massive duplication of files.

None of these scenarios are particularly efficient and, frankly, mimic the business processes we would have followed in 1913, not 2013.

You might think that you have read this sort of article before: you know that there are great and fancy new ways of working with the cloud, with servers and all sorts of stuff. Equally you know that your organisation has no chance of actually implementing these things because primarily the way you’re doing it works and ALWAYS HAS WORKED.

This is why if you really want to effect change in your organisation you need to reach the hearts and minds of those at the top. Your success in this endeavour is by your ability to influence those at the top.

Assuming you can reach somewhere near the top of your organisation you have an opportunity to express how the culture of your organisation needs to accommodate change. Just because you’ve always done something that way doesn’t mean that a new way wouldn’t be better.

At the stage when you can actually get some sort of meaningful dialog with those above you the conversation needs to be framed in terms they will understand. Cost savings; efficiency improvements; customer service improvements; being able to hire the right people; retaining key staff – all of these are issues which senior managers want to know about.

Some of these benefits are wooly, or at least would need a lot of work to develop a return on investment model for. One that should have some resonance with anyone, no matter how long-in-the-tooth they are is the issue of STAFF.

People coming into your organisation, especially younger people (i.e. younger than about 40), are all well-used to expressing their opinions to strangers in online systems. They might review a product on Amazon, they might provide feedback on eBay, they might post something to their wall in Facebook or take part in that chat room or discussion forum on a subject of their choice.

Virtually everyone we’re looking at will have a mobile phone, and probably a “smartphone”. They will all know how to text people and are well-versed in shortening conversations to text-length to get the message across. They might not be avid Twitter users but I bet they have at least “Liked” a product on Facebook.

You already have an engaged workforce – it’s just that they’re engaged in other things.

My point is that you already have an engaged workforce – it’s just that they’re engaged in other things. No-one has trained them on their use of Amazon or eBay or Hotmail or Facebook. They didn’t read the (non-existent) manual about their phone in order to send a text message. The truth of the matter is that they figured it out for themselves or sought help from someone they thought could help (an “expert”).

These “Generation Y” employees that are slowly invading your organisation will find the working environment of your organisation old fashioned and backward. They know of lots of other ways in which what YOU HAVE ALWAYS DONE could be done better. Unless your culture encourages at least discussion and experimentation which these new approaches then I fear it will be writing its own long-term suicide note. Those new, energetic staff will not hang around for the long haul. They will use your organisation as a stepping stone elsewhere. The older members of staff will slowly leave too, retiring in most cases. With them will go the organisational intelligence which has been keeping your organisation alive all these years.

This is why your organisation, and its senior management in particular, needs to embrace a culture of change. Resisting change is like trying to hold back the tide. Sooner or later you will get drowned.

So if you are reading this as one of the “enlightened”, frustrated by your management’s inability to recognise what is going on around them in this respect, perhaps this article has given you some fuel for your culture change fire. Good luck.

Filed Under: Social Business Tagged With: cuture change eBay Facebook Amazon staff

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
« Apr
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31

About Me

Alan Hamilton

Social Business Consultant

Twitter Updates

Blogroll

Published Work

Archives

Follow Blog via Email

Search alanghamilton.com

Usual disclaimer

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Looking Forward

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

About Me

Social Business Consultant

Blogroll

Published Work

Archives

Follow Blog via Email

Search alanghamilton.com

Usual disclaimer

Follow “Living Social”