social – 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

Is the wiki the hero of social content management?

August 30, 2012 By Alan Hamilton Leave a Comment

Everybody these days is prefixing stuff with “social”. Even being social needs to be socialized these days. It’s not enough to actually go out and meet your friends, but you have to tweet and Facebook-post about it too – presumably so that your less social friends can feel socially-inadequate. Anyway, being as I am an advocate for social business, I have been thinking about what the BUSINESS bit actually relates to.

There are many descriptions out there. My favourite is that from Sandy Carter‘s “Get Bold” book:

“A social business is one that is engaged, transparent and nimble”.

But how do you put this into practice? What does a social business do at a practical level?

There is an excellent series of videos on YouTube called “The Man Who Should Have Used Lotus Connections” which go some way to describe common business scenarios and how the guy could have solved them better and more easily using a social business tool.

I have expounded on this blog and elsewhere about using the various aspects of IBM Connections to achieve social business outcomes. I am passionate about the use of Activities as a business process automation tool, but would like to take a look at the under use of Wikis in a social business.

We’re virtually all familiar with Wikipedia. It’s the online encyclopaedia built and reviewed and edited by people like you and me. It’s social business at its essence – it’s engaged because the people who are involved are committed to its success. It’s transparent because everyone can see what’s been changed and when it was changed and by whom. It’s also nimble – content can be created, reviewed, edited and removed quickly and adjustments to suit new circumstances are easily made. Just check out the page on Syria as an example.

Most businesses don’t use Wikis for anything other than being an online handbook, however. In these scenarios the people are hardly engaged, the changes may be transparent, but nimbleness doesn’t really apply. In many respects the use of a wiki for, say, a staff handbook, or knowledgebase while convenient, is not the best use of technology.

I would like to see organisations making much more use of wikis as a way of managing knowledge. The wiki can become an organic “brain” of information which represents the collective intelligence of the organisation. Consider for a moment creating a wiki page about each client your business deals with. You’d then create sub-pages for, say, proposals, help desk issues, background information, meetings, and the likes. Each of these pages would have sub-pages for each occurrence, e.g. a page for that new proposal, or a page for the meeting report for the project review meeting.

The contents are easily searched, easily constructed. The wiki supports rich text editing and attachments and promotes the interlinking of content. By its very nature it’s intended to be transparent, nimble and engaging. By its very nature it’s designed to be flexible and adjust to suit the needs of the situation.

Instead of enforcing a rigid CRM-style structure on the end users, why not allow a structure to be built for each customer which suits that customer? You’ll find that the information is just as accessible, just as meaningful and, I believe, will help develop the creativity of the users to encourage them to capture more and more information. By removing many of the structures around traditional CRM solutions and replacing them with a wiki structure the needs of the information can be accommodated without loss of fidelity or affecting your ability to find stuff.

The wiki software itself needs to be improved, I’ll concede. It needs better exporting and importing ability and some mechanism to recognize terms and automagically link them to existing pages describing that topic, but that’s my pet hobby-horse (anyone who ever used Lotus Agenda will know what I’m talking about).

Other than these caveats, I would strongly recommend that you take another look at the wiki and consider if you could use it as a means of building a social content management solution to unlock the knowledge in your organisation.

Filed Under: IBM Connections, Social Business Tagged With: content management, IBM Connections, sandy carter, social, wiki

Who do your customers trust?

January 28, 2012 By Alan Hamilton Leave a Comment

According to the Edelman Trust Report, 65% of customers see credibility in someone like themselves in your organisation – up 22% from 2011. Only 38% trust the CEO – down 12%. This decline in the CEO trust is the largest since Edelman started doing this work.

Making “the ordinary people” in your organisation engaged social employees means that your organisation’s brand reputation is more likely to be improved than when the CEO stands up and says you’re all great.

The public’s expectations of a trusted organisation rank the following (first is the most important) facets:

Listens to customer needs and feedback (67%)
Offers high quality products or services (67%)
Treats employees well (64%)
Places customers ahead of profits (62%)
Take responsible actions to address an issue or crisis (62%)
Has ethical business practices (60%)
Has transparent and open business practices (60%)
Communicates frequently and honestly on the state of its business (57%)

What does this list tell us? It tells us that listening, ethical, caring, communicative and transparent organisations is what customers want. By implication, organisations that behave in these ways will succeed.

How do organisations achieve these characteristics?:

By becoming a social business where the culture of the organisation encourages these facets.
By a senior exec close to the customer’s needs leading the breaking down of the organisational barriers to achieve openness and transparency
By recognising that the employees in the organisation are the people that your customers really listen to when they are seeking to trust your organisation.

I’d recommend anyone interested in social business transformation to take a look at the Edelman report and consider how IBM’s AGENDA for Social Business can provide practical steps to achieve these ends. Check out Sandy Carter’s slide deck on Slideshare, below:

Get Bold: Social Business Agenda- Presentation by Sandy Carter, VP Social Business Evangelist IBM Corporation

View more presentations from IBM_Lotus

Filed Under: Social Business Tagged With: edelman, social, trust

IBM Docs beta – Social Document Creation

January 25, 2012 By Alan Hamilton 2 Comments

IBM Docs is the new name for the technology preview which was previously called IBM LotusLive Symphony. It essentially is IBM’s foray into the browser-based office productivity suite and competes at some levels with Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365.

So what does IBM Docs have going for it that the others don’t?

Its free
It supports real time collaboration on a document – i.e. two people working on the same document at the same time.
It’s compatible with OpenOffice and Microsoft Office document formats.
It will be available as an on-premises install as well as IBM-hosted cloud offering.

For me its the last of these points which will allow organisations to really make the leap into a much simpler, integrated and browser-based IT model. If your organisation isn’t yet ready to embrace a private or public cloud offerings, IBM Docs is one of the first to offer you the benefits of browser-based document editing, but hosted on your own servers in your own premises.

So what does IBM Docs do and how good is it?

IBM Docs is currently available for you to play around with on IBM’s Lotus Greenhouse site. The screenshots in this blog post are from that system and I recommend you have a go with your own documents to get a feeling for the features.

Creating a wordprocessing document

When you click on the New Document button, you’re asked to provide the name of a document to create. After this, you see the following screen:

You begin typing like you would in any other word processor.

As you can see from the above, it supports the usual headings and text formatting controls we’ve become used to. More complex documents are also supported with tables and other special layouts.

So far, nothing much different from other online document editors. However, lurking under the Team menu option, or if you pop the sidebar out you find that the social aspects appear.

Social Word Processing

IBM Docs lets you assign different sections of the document to different users, with actions to be assigned and workflow around the review. In the screenshot below I have created a couple of sections, one for me to work on and one for my colleague Martin to work on.

Martin and I can now collaboratively work on the document, constrained in this case by the sections I have set up. When I have done my part, I can mark my section complete and move it onto the next section of the workflow.

In the above example I have entered my text. When I click on Mark Complete an email is sent to the approver (me in this case). As the approver I have a number of options to progress the edit:

If I come out of the IBM Docs document and then go to Activities on Greenhouse, I find that a new activity has been created for my document because I created assignments on the different sections. Opening the Activity up shows the different tasks, the assignments and the current status of those assignments:

Because these assignments are treated like any other in Activities, they now appear in my To Do list in Connections. If I have set up the Activities sidebar in the Notes client, they’ll be there too. Particularly nice is the fact that the individual entries in the Activity contain a link to the document itself.

Sharing your document with others

IBM Docs offers a broad range of options for sharing your work with others. The obvious one is that you can share the document online and send people a link. However, the concern that probably most people have about such an online system is the ability to save the document as a Word or other format file.

The good news is that this is easy to achieve.

Simply select More Actions, Download as Microsoft Office to download your document in Microsoft office format.

The result, as you can see above is a very acceptable rendition of the document, in this case shown in Microsoft Office Word 2011 for the Mac.

Uploading your own documents

Having shown how good IBM Docs is at creating and sharing documents, what about uploading pre-existing documents into it? I uploaded a proposal document I created as a .docx file (new Office format) into IBM docs.

As you can see, IBM Docs does a pretty good job at rendering it in a working format. Here’s the original in Word:

Next time I’ll take a look at the features of the Spreadsheet area in IBM Docs. I hope you’ve enjoyed this glimpse into the Technical Preview of IBM Docs.

Filed Under: IBM Docs Tagged With: ibm_docs, social, symphony

IBM Docs beta – Social Document Creation

January 25, 2012 By Alan Hamilton Leave a Comment

So what does IBM Docs have going for it that the others don’t?

Its free
It supports real time collaboration on a document – i.e. two people working on the same document at the same time.
It’s compatible with OpenOffice and Microsoft Office document formats.
It will be available as an on-premises install as well as IBM-hosted cloud offering.

So what does IBM Docs do and how good is it?

Creating a wordprocessing document

When you click on the New Document button, you’re asked to provide the name of a document to create. After this, you see the following screen:

You begin typing like you would in any other word processor.

As you can see from the above, it supports the usual headings and text formatting controls we’ve become used to. More complex documents are also supported with tables and other special layouts.

So far, nothing much different from other online document editors. However, lurking under the Team menu option, or if you pop the sidebar out you find that the social aspects appear.

Social Word Processing

In the above example I have entered my text. When I click on Mark Complete an email is sent to the approver (me in this case). As the approver I have a number of options to progress the edit:

Sharing your document with others

The good news is that this is easy to achieve.

Simply select More Actions, Download as Microsoft Office to download your document in Microsoft office format.

The result, as you can see above is a very acceptable rendition of the document, in this case shown in Microsoft Office Word 2011 for the Mac.

Uploading your own documents

As you can see, IBM Docs does a pretty good job at rendering it in a working format. Here’s the original in Word:

Next time I’ll take a look at the features of the Spreadsheet area in IBM Docs. I hope you’ve enjoyed this glimpse into the Technical Preview of IBM Docs.

Filed Under: IBM Docs, Social Business Tagged With: ibm_docs, social, symphony

Lotus Notes gets social

January 24, 2012 By Alan Hamilton Leave a Comment

One of the main announcements at Lotusphere 2012 was the name of the forthcoming next version of the Lotus Notes client – Lotus Notes Social Edition.

It represents a re-focusing of the Client towards Social Business and encourages the use of many of the technologies in IBM Connections for a more productive work environment. From Ed Brill’s Flickr feed, you can see a screenshot of what it will likely look like:

Why is this important for social business, however? And would it encourage a current non-Lotus Notes organisation to switch?

Why is it important for social business?

Many of us work in organisations which have some form of electronic workflow going on. Whether its automated notifications from a server because it’s low on disk space, or whether it’s a request for a vacation or to approve a purchase order, a lot of what lands in our inbox these days is not necessarily written by one of our colleagues, but instead is an automatic notification about something.

We’ve all experienced the sinking feeling when we’ve been away from our email for a couple of days and return to hundreds of unread messages. We have to pick through these for the information that is truly useful; for the messages which convey something we need to action or something we need to know. The rest of it normally goes in the trash.

By automating many of these workflows into Activities in IBM Connections these notifications become a “river of news” which, although important, is separated from actual communication by the Lotus Notes Social Edition client.

For a social business, you can interact with the activity stream in the same way as you would read a twitter feed. You can filter this according to a variety of criteria and essentially “tune out” to what you consider to be noise.

The important thing here, though, is that the activity stream is an important part of your information dashboard. The screenshot above shows the Stream, the Inbox and the Calendar – these are the basic things you need to have access to in order to participate in the social business.

This is something which will be unique to Lotus Notes Social Edition.

By using the social business tools within Connections, such as Wikis, Activities and Blogs, the activity stream can give you the updates and notifications you need, but separate from actual communications via email.

Would it encourage switchers?

The Lotus Notes Social Edition is the first truly social email system built for business. It combines email, calendaring and the activity streams in a way which the modern workplace will warm to. Because Notes is now going to separate email from workflow and status updates, the end user will have greater clarity of what’s going on.

Would it encourage people to abandon their “legacy” email clients in favour of a Social system? I believe so because:

The complexity of the user interface has been greatly reduced. Compare the screenshot above with your average Microsoft Outlook 2010 screenshot and you’ll see what I mean.
Email is still an important part of business communication but overload of information is something we all recognise.
It brings the advantages of social collaboration into the centre of the daily work environment, rather than it being an afterthought or something which users need to go somewhere else to see.
A social business is one which is more engaged with its work and will therefore be more productive.

These plus I am sure many other reasons will encourage businesses to look at IBM’s fresh approach to business productivity and help them evolve into social businesses to stay ahead of their competition.

Not bad for a 22-year-old product!

Filed Under: IBM Lotus Notes, Social Business Tagged With: lotus_notes, social, social_business

Winning friends, sales and influencing people with social business

January 22, 2012 By Alan Hamilton Leave a Comment

Having just returned from Lotusphere in Orlando, Florida and just about shaken off jet lag, I have started to reflect on what was certainly for me the best ever Lotusphere.

Apart from the glitz, glamour and energy around, I was surprised by the number of people I knew. Most of them I had never met in person, but I was familiar with because of their online presence in Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and the IBM community sites we all hang around in. Often I would introduce myself to someone who’s name I recognised from their name badge, who would then say “Ah, Alan – @alanghamilton“ – My twitter handle was the thing they recognised me from (they wouldn’t say the @, I just added it in a shameless self-promotion attempt).

Apart from being a good ice breaker, people already “knew” me. We would immediately continue discussing a topic we had exchanged electronically. This was great and helped make me feel less of a “party of one” as these events can often do.

In a social context all this is to be expected, but in a social business, think how much more cohesive an electronic community such as this could make an organisation? People with common problems or interests might never meet each other in person because they are separated by geography, divisional structure or company can collaborate on topics of mutual interest simply by PARTICIPATING in communities, broadcasting what they are doing, and posing questions to others.

In a large organisation you frankly don’t know who is out there who might simply have the answer or experience you’re looking for. A system of engagement, like IBM Connections, often turns into a system of record (i.e. the place where things are stored and referred to) by people participating and using the social business tool as a reference point.

Most of us, however, work in small companies. So small, in most cases, that we all know who our colleagues are and broadly what they know and don’t know. In such situations you might think that social business solutions are not really much value. But that’s where you’d be wrong.

At Lotusphere this year Jeff Schick pointed out how important it is for organisations to differentiate themselves from each other. It is simply not enough to have a better product, lower price, or better service nowadays. Small businesses have the agility and nimbleness to make change quickly and it is in the area of social business that I believe they can really win – and win fast.

By making their business more transparent to their customers, exposing who in their organisation are experts in their subject matters, allowing customers to pinpoint individuals who can help them, and providing not so much a window on the company but a door customers can come through whenever they want then small business can transform their fortunes through social business.

By engaging the people you work with, and most importantly, your customers in social business you build long-lasting trust-based relationships. Sales will come not by formal proposals, and long lead-generation processes but by simply being the best darned company out there that does what the customer wants.

The old sales mantra of making it easy to buy for the customer is surely encapsulated in social business. By being truthful, trustworthy, outgoing and engaging, any business can win the friendship and trust of people they have never met and find they have much more in common than they knew – much like I did this year at Lotusphere.

Filed Under: Social Business Tagged With: ibm, ibm_connections, jeff_schick, linkedin, Lotusphere, social, twitter

The Social Experiment Pays Off

January 13, 2012 By Alan Hamilton Leave a Comment

Some organisations see the implementation of a social business strategy and having a Facebook page as being two sides of the same coin. In situations where you are not working for a business-to-consumer organisation you might therefore ask yourself why having a presence on Facebook is a useful proposition for time and money to be invested in. Thinking this way is to confuse Social Media with Social Business.

Social Media is all around us. It’s Twitter, Facebook, 4Square, Klout and all those other systems which proliferate at present. Some will succeed, most will fail. Most of these systems are seen by people over the age of 40 as being “so what” systems. As Douglas Adams so wryly pointed out in The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, anything invented after you’ve reached the age of 40 seems to be against the natural order of things.

Social Business, however, is about breaking down the barriers which every organisation has, to foster a culture of openness and sharing. People narrating their work through micro blogging or by contributing to forums and idea blogs is not them wasting their time but in fact is them pulling that tacit knowledge they walk out the door with every night into explicit which the rest of the organisation can share.

Andrew McAfee at last week’s IBM LoLA conference reminded us what Lew Platt at HP said “If only we knew what we know at HP”. He realised what many other managers are beginning to realise – that inside their organisation lies unknown and untapped a vast treasure of knowledge, know-how and best practice. If tapped, this information could drop millions to the bottom line and yield huge gains in speed, customer satisfaction and organisational competence.

Many have implemented intranets to try to address this need. Intranets are like email – vast siloes of information which is poorly indexed, often out of date, has little context and is often structured in a way which made sense to the HR department because they had an organisation tree which they based the structure on.

A Social Business system, however, encourages and rewards the freewill sharing of information through business processes and the usual run of work. By integrating your organisation’s business practices, knowledge capture, file sharing and day to day operations you make the collection of what you “know” an automatic process. That tacit information – the individual pieces of the corporate jigsaw we all hold which, if we all got together to put them together would mean we would all see the big picture – gets turned into explicit information just by us doing our jobs. It doesn’t take data evangelists or heroes to religiously share and collaborate – you just make the process of working and collaborating part of every day life at work and reward the end user by them discovering things they didn’t already know without them havign to go hunting.

At Seric Systems we have embraced this approach. IBM Connections is now the core and hub of our organisation. It’s the go-to place for any information. We “gamify” the pursuit of knowledge capture and enjoy the discoveries our colleagues bring us on a daily basis. We’re just taking the next step along the road, however: bringing our customers and business partners into the system.

Many folks reading this would think it a risk thing to do. In fact, it has begun paying dividends for us. We encourage our customers and partners to comment on the same information we comment on ourselves. We seek feedback and their experiences with technologies and situations we are debating internally. Do you know what the result is? Some absolutely brilliant and insightful feedback and tacit knowledge has been shared by a sphere of users who were previously external to our organisation. Fresh ideas, fresh perspectives and a greatly strengthened bond with our customers and partners is the result.

Sure we still have some “Seric only” areas for “personal” stuff, but the business-as-usual stuff is open for our friends to participate in.

Let me finish with an anecdote. When I was young I used to take a short ferry trip across the River Clyde in Glasgow to visit my grandparents. The highlight of the ten minute ride was a trip to the viewing gallery of the engine room. The huge pistons and workings of the engines of the ferry were a constant source of amazement and awe to an eight-year-old boy. Why did they make the engine room visible? So that people could understand and appreciate how the ferry worked. Imaging making your engine room visible and better still encourage participation with your trusted partners. How much more would they understand of your business and how much better would working with them be?

Social Business, therefore, is not about the latest social media buzz system or fad. Its about a fundamental change in your organisation to let your customers and partners participate in your engine room for better business outcomes.

Filed Under: IBM Connections, Social Business Tagged With: IBM Connections, social

The Social Experiment Pays Off

October 18, 2011 By Alan Hamilton Leave a Comment

Sure we still have some “Seric only” areas for “personal” stuff, but the business-as-usual stuff is open for our friends to participate in.

Filed Under: IBM Connections, Social Business Tagged With: IBM Connections, social

About Me

Alan Hamilton

Social Business Consultant

Twitter Updates

Blogroll

Published Work

Archives

Follow Blog via Email

Search alanghamilton.com

Usual disclaimer

May 2013
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

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

So what does IBM Docs do and how good is it?

Creating a wordprocessing document

Social Word Processing

Sharing your document with others

Uploading your own documents

Share this:

Like this:

So what does IBM Docs do and how good is it?

Creating a wordprocessing document

Social Word Processing

Sharing your document with others

Uploading your own documents

Share this:

Like this:

Why is it important for social business?

Would it encourage switchers?

Share this:

Like this:

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”