“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.

A DocLink, for the uninitiated, is basically like a URL but specifically for a Notes document in a database somewhere.  This predates URLs by about 10 years, at least in the form that we know them.  Traditionally a user would send me a doclink to a document in a Notes database they wanted me to act on.  More sophisticated apps used emails with Doclinks to run a workflow of some kind.

This model carried over into the internet world and any messaging system these days can easily send you an email with a URL to a web page which might contain actions for you to perform.

Notes, however, with version 9 is different.  Using Embedded Experiences Notes can do the work of getting that web page or application the original email and presents the action you have to perform in the context of the message.

One of the reasons this is good is because I don’t need to go clicking on a link to find out what the message is about.  It’s presented, with the fidelity of the original application, right there in the email.  The buttons work, I can perform all the same actions as the original application has, but I am doing it inside an email.

This is a big productivity gain as I don’t need to move from one application to another, I don’t need to log in each time to another system simply to see what a link contains and I can deal with the action straight away.

In this one example above I saved about five seconds.  That might not sound much but today I got about 100 of these emails, so I saved 500 seconds, a little over 8 minutes.  Let’s say half of the employees in IBM (200,000) saved (conservatively) 5 minutes a day using this.  That’s 16,700 hours PER DAY we’ve saved.  Multiply that by your day rate and you’re clearly more productive by being SOCIAL BUSINESS.

I am joining the world-wide ICS SWAT/Tiger team as a Social Business Consultant, focused on the UK, Ireland and Nordics.

I am really looking forward to some new challenges and perspectives having spent nearly 20 years in the IBM Business Partner community, so I hope you continue to follow my blog.

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!

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. 

1. The field “To Do” is the title of the task itself.
2. 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.
3. Assigned To is obvious enough – who is going to do this particular task.
4. Due Date is when it’s needed to be done for.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.

Content Management Interoperability Services is a standard used amongst enterprise content management system producers to help improve the compatibility of the backend with the multitude of front ends, such as mobile devices, desktops, etc, that want to access them.  IBM has built CMIS compatibility into SmartCloud and also Connections so you can use this fact to make it easy to work with files you have in your public, private or hybrid cloud solution.

I have been using LibreOffice 4.0 for quite a while now and have come to find the fact that it includes not only CMIS support but also WebDAV very useful, especially until the release of the Connections FileSync solution announced at IBM Connect in Florida earlier this year.

The first step in LibreOffice to getting this working is to switch on LibreOffice dialog boxes instead of using the operating system’s default dialogs.  Go to Preferences, LibreOffice, General and switch it on as shown in the red box.

Switch on LibreOffice dialogs in the Preferences

Next, go to File, Open and when the dialog opens press the little selector button, shown in the red box below:

Selector button in File, Open

This is where we’ll set up the CMIS location, in this example for IBM SmartCloud for Social Business:

Add SmartCloud for Social Business as a location

Give the destination a name, like IBM SmartCloud for Social Business.  Then choose CMIS as the Type.  In the Server Details section, under Server Type choose Lotus Live Files.

The system will default to the old LotusLive address.  Change this to https://apps.na.collabserv.com – all the rest of the URL should stay the same.

Next click on the little refresh button shown in red.

Challenge for user name and password

When you press the refresh button the Authentication Required dialog comes up.  Enter your SmartCloud user name and password.  Click OK.

Navigating your folders in SmartCloud

You may be asked to supply a master password to store your credentials.  Do that, and then the dialog box will show your new destination.  Click on IBM SmartCloud in the Places box and give it a second or so.  You’ll see My Folders and My Files.  Double-click on My Files and SHAZAM!

File opened from SmartCloud by CMIS in LibreOffice

Double-click on the file you want and in a few seconds it’ll appear.

Do your edits then File, Save to send your changes back.  Saving seems to take longer than opening.

For new files, select File, New from the menu bar as usual.  When you are ready, select File, Save:

Saving a file to SmartCloud

Select IBM SmartCloud from the Places, navigate to the folder you want, provide a file name and press Save.  I found saving quite slow.

You can repeat adding places to provide links to, say, your own Connections environment or Greenhouse by following the same procedure,.

It may not be a perfect solution but will keep us going until Connections FileSync is released!

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?

Even if you’re not a Lotus Notes user, you still have some great options for making handling files social.  One of the best of these is the Desktop Plugin also available from Greenhouse.

It works on most flavors of Microsoft Windows and provides a file-server, tree-based view of the files you have access to across all the IBM Connections environments you might have.  For me, I use it to access the files in the Seric internal Connections instance and also Greenhouse.

After you have installed the plugin, you see the IBM Connections logo on your desktop and also in the list of destinations in Windows Explorer:

Right click on the IBM Connections name on the left hand side to start the process of adding a connection to your system:

In the URL field, enter the URL to your Connections implementation.  Here are a couple that I use which you might also benefit from:

1. IBM Greenhouse:   https://greenhouse.lotus.com
2. IBM SmartCloud for Social Business:   https://apps.na.collabserv.com

For your own installation and for IBM Greenhouse, I have found setting the Authentication Type to Basic works.  For IBM SmartCloud for Social Business, set the Authentication type to TAM Authentication.

Enter your user name and password for the service you’re configuring.  If all goes well, you’ll see a large icon appear in the Windows Explorer window:

The Plugin recognizes SmartCloud and gives it a different logo.  Click on the Connections system you want to access, in this case Greenhouse.  You’ll see something like:

These icons should be self-explanatory and give you access to your files wherever they may be throughout the Connections system you’re working with.  Particularly useful is the fact that the files contained within Communities can be accessed by drilling into the Communities themselves.

Working with Files

Adding and removing files is as simple as dragging and dropping them from wherever they are on your computer into wherever you want them to go in whatever Connections environment you have set up.  It’s also really easy to use the right-click action in Explorer wherever you are to add files to Connections:If you already have a file in Connections which you want to access or work with, simply drill-down to it in the Plugin and then right-click.  The  context sensitive menu pops up:

This lets you perform a wide array of functions, such as:

1. Opening the file with an application on your computer
2. Opening the file in a browser
3. Uploading a new version of the same file
4. Sharing the file.
5. Seeing what the sharing settings of the file are:
6. Locking the file to prevent edits
7. Looking at the version history of the file:

Clicking on Properties shows the file properties dialog box which gives you enormous control of the file right from your Windows desktop:

Adding a File

When you want to upload a file, you can, as describe above right click on it or drag it into the place you want it to go.  When you do this, the Plugin asks what additional information you’d like to provide for the file:

This lets you tag the file, decide who can see it, and control how they can use it once you’ve uploaded it.

Summary

This brief look at the Connections Desktop Plugin hopefully gives you a taste for the kind of control you can have over the files that your Connections, Greenhouse or SmartCloud for Social Business system gives you.  While it might not provide the most heavy-duty document management facilities you might find in the likes of Filenet, I have found that much of this is enough to provide a level of collaboration and control which lots of organizations have previously struggled with.

Well, the good news is that IBM Notes Social Edition does that too!, behold:

You can set up the colors for the categories in a new tab in the Preferences, right next to the color-coding of emails you’ve been able to do:

You can also vary the colors of standard, uncategorized diary entries now too.

When you are creating an appointment, you merely choose the category for the entry and the calendar does the rest:

Download the public beta of IBM Notes for yourself and take a look for yourself!

“cultural, technological, business and industry trends that are driving social collaboration in the enterprise”

I invite you to have a read of it, if only for two reasons:

1. To recognize the same facts and phenomena which IBM and others have been evangelizing about for a very long time;
2. For the quote “Today, Yammer and SharePoint are connected through Web Parts and Open Graph capabilities. We’re developing deeper connections that will involve integrated document management, feed aggregation plus unified identity”

Their own graphic admits that “Today” they only have “Basic Integration”. “Tomorrow” will have “Deeper Connections” and in the “Future” there will be “Connected Experiences”.

I realize I am partisan in this argument, but I would like this blog post to stand as my testimony towards this fact: In Microsoft’s terms, IBM delivers the Future Today.

Please, dear reader, explore what Microsoft actually offers in the socially-collaborating enterprise against the announcements of REAL software made by IBM last week.