Victus pro Scientia Opus -- Food for the Knowledge Worker

Ambient Awareness Redux

At this weekend's U.S. Open in Merion, two things were quite noteworthy:

 

1.  As it did in 2011, except more so, it felt at once liberating and scary to have to leave our smartphones outside the gates to the facility.  (The USGA does not permit them to be brought into the event, although I saw several people using smuggled devices to catch somer amazing pictures.) 

This, of course, heightened my awareness of just how much we have come to depend on our mobile devices for everything to knowing what time it is to planning meetups via a quick text to researching anything and everything about the tournament (toughest hole?  18.  Sorry, Phil.).  The ubiquity of these devices and the verging-on-OCD degree to which we count them is well-documented at this point.

2. I also ran into quite a few old friends from the Philadelphia area, some who I hadn't seen in 5-10 years.  Pretty much all of them knew that I had recently taken nine weeks off between the end of my old job and the beginning of the new one, and expressed a mix of congratulations, wonder, and concern that I had taken the time off.  (I highly recommend it, and make a point of doing it once every 20 years or so).

This phenomenon really underscored the "ambient awareness" concept that I first encountered in the New York Times in 2008.  I was struck by the degree to which most of my conversations with many Facebook friends started halfway through, due to their our each being "read up" on the other via Facebook and other social media.   As we start to see more adoption of enterprise social platforms in our workplace, I hope that more of my conversations in the workplace will work the same way.

 

Impressions of the 2011 SharePoint Conference, Part 6 (Expert Best Practices)

The second “Best Practices” type of session I attended was SPC245, “Making SharePoint 2010 Collaboration Rock by Increasing Findability” presented by Jornata’s Scott Jamison.  Although he is a principal at a competitor, he is also a top-notch presenter, and I always enjoy and get value from Scott’s presentations.

Clearly vying for the title of “Hardest Working Man in Show Business,” Scott, in his third presentation of the day, blitzed through many specific, practical tips on how to make SharePoint more usable and information more findable, including the following highlights:

• Folders (great for contributors, especially incumbents who have a general sense of where things belong via “tribal knowledge”) vs metadata (great for consumers who understand metadata, but can be tedious for contributors if they have to tag content manually).   One key “Go Do” item Scott frequently advises is to create separate user experiences (via default views) for contributors vs consumers.
• Improving search results by paying attention to how things are named (especially the critical “Title” field) and where stored (e.g., the fewer slashes in the path, the higher-ranked in search)
• Improving search results by measuring their effectiveness with out-of-the-box reports from SharePoint:  search queries that returned no results or no best bets.
• Changing default navigation in simple but effective ways like getting rid of the default left-hand navigation where it works counter to how users will find their way through a portal.

All of the techniques that Scott related were in response to common user challenges that each of us has seen “in the wild,” and they were crisply and artfully presented. 

Impressions of the 2011 SharePoint Conference, Part 4 (Microsoft Roadmaps)

A second Microsoft roadmap session I attended at last weeks’ SPC was session SPC271, David Pae’s “SharePoint 2010:  Improving Productivity with Social.”  It was actually somewhere between a roadmap session and a case study session, with examples of social computing inside Microsoft (and of course, Contoso) that illustrate where SharePoint 2010 and complementary products can foster social computing initiatives.

David Pae and colleague Paul Javid (Social Product Manager) walked us through the history of social computing, Microsoft’s Enterprise Social Strategy, some specific examples and demonstrations of social capabilities of SharePoint and other complementary Microsoft technologies.

The most noteworthy things from this session:

1. A REALLY cool demo of Lync doing real-time English-Spanish translation of an instant messaging thread – I’m dying to see more of this, and think that the Lync/SharePoint combination provides an unparalleled communications and collaboration platform.
2. A good audience question about a limitation of the “noteboard” capability in SharePoint 2010.  Out of the box, it is not possible to comment on a comment, or to “like” or rate a comment.  [This question underscored how hard the presenters’ job is in a conference where Microsoft has committed to not discuss product futures, and it’s not fair to certain ISVs to discuss/promote others. (cough:  NewsGator!)]
3. The Microsoft products NOT mentioned.  Although Microsoft does a nice job of presenting a story that incorporates SharePoint, Exchange and Lync (on-premise or in-cloud or hybrid), the following technologies with social or collaboration indications were prominently NOT mentioned: 
   1. Skype, a social and collaboration tool with a huge user base, but what feels like a lack of an enterprise integration story ready to be told by Microsoft (whether for statutory or strategic reasons)? 
   2. SharePoint Workspace – how does the offline client, a necessity to many mobile information workers, impact the social computing experience?
   3. OneNote – shared note-taking is at least as social as IM, and the syncing capabilities with SharePoint create interesting opportunities.

Overall, this session provided a solid overview of out-of-the-box social computing capabilities of SharePoint, although not too much of it would be new to our clients running SharePoint 2010.  There will be, however, some more details gleaned from customer case study sessions (still to come)...

Echoes of Enterprise 2.0, part 2: The Revolution Will Be Recorded

Each year, I attend the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston to get some visibility into where social and collaboration technologies are headed.  I attended the keynote speeches Tuesday, comprising eight presentations of 15 minutes each delivered rapid-fire style.  This post is the second of what I expect to be three "echoes" from these keynotes.

Among the most interesting keynote presentations was "Managing People and Process Across A Networked Organization" by Jim Grubb, VP, Corporate Communications Architecture, Chief Demonstration Officer [note: what a great title!], Cisco Systems, Inc., who detailed Cisco's vision for collaboration. Jim discussed the fusion of synchronous collaboration (e.g., voice communications, and live + virtual meetings where parties are interacting with one another in real-time) and asynchronous collaboration (tools and techniques we more frequently associate with Enterprise 2.0, e.g., wikis, blogs, document-level collaboration tools, etc.).

The most interesting, and I dare say chilling, aspect of the keynote was a vision of a world where voice communications can be integrated with asynchronous collaboration tools using the following scenario:

• A meeting, either live or remote, is convened.
• The meeting is recorded for future usage ("we have so many meetings in part because we don't remember what we discussed")
• The meeting proceedings are transcribed, indexed, and stored.
• Meeting proceedings can be searched from collaboration workspaces and portals.

This scenario made me think about the potentially chilling effect of the recording on meeting participation and the free-wheeling, thinking-out-loud, spitballing, serendipitous style of collaboration so important to innovation and the creation of new ideas. This free exchange of ideas between people (also sometimes known as "Ideas Having Sex") is absolutely critical to trust.

If I knew that all of my participation in meetings and conference calls would be recorded, indexed, and forever searchable, I know that I would be far more judicious in what I said, especially in internal conversations.  Perhaps we would get used to it the same way that we are used to being videotaped by ubiquitous surveillance cameras today, or recorded on customer service phone lines, but people at Enterprise 2.0 with whom I chatted about this idea (including one who knows a lot about e-discovery) shared my initial, chilled impression about the potential unintended consequences.

How we manage, culturally, to bridge the inherent conflict between the need to find and record the fruits of our information workers' labors and the need to provide safe places where colleagues can freely share ideas, even bad ones, will be fascinating to watch over the next several years, and will be critical to our success as information workers and knowledge managers. 

How are you planning on balancing these conflicting needs in your organization?

Echoes of Enterprise 2.0, Part 1: Don't Re-Tweet the Revolution

Among the highlights of this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston were the keynote presentations.  The keynotes are always a high point of the conference, and this year’s were remarkable because of the size, complexity, and sophistication of the organizations represented (e.g., Microsoft, Deutche Bank, Eli Lilly, Cisco, Avaya, etc.) , and the expertise of the presenters themselves.

One presentation I found compelling was that of John Stepper, a Managing Director at Deutsche Bank.  John’s theme was “Stop Evangelizing, Start Doing,” and he echoed a central theme of this year’s conference:  BUSINESS VALUE.

One of the sub-themes that resonated with me was the business challenge: “Help me get through compliance,” a common lament of workers in organizations with strict compliance requirements. Compliance adds cost, time, and hassle to many business processes, often because workers aren’t aware of what the compliance group needs from them.  Not surprisingly, this theme has a corollary from compliance workers:  “Help us avoid surprises.”

Social computing at Deutsche Bank transformed compliance processes by making them more transparent, resulting in:

• simpler processes (internal “customers” can help refine processes that they can see and understand), and
• better-qualified projects (with compliance requirements and processes highly visible, higher quality submissions were received, resulting in a reduction of costly iteration/re-submission).

In providing this and other examples of the commercial benefit of social technology within Deutsche Bank, John showed real business transformation and encouraged the audience to seek similar opportunities within their own organization.  Rather than working from a script of best practices, seek out high-value opportunities that are relevant to you.  Or, as he more succinctly put it: 

“Don’t just re-tweet the revolution – start your own.  Change the work!”

[of course, like 50 people in attendance re-tweeted this pithy remark, some more ironically than others]

One additional note on form:  John also benefited from a slide deck that was as simple as it was beautiful, rooted in the Presentation Zen philosophy.  I'll post or tweet a link if I see the deck posted.

Social Computing Served Three Ways

In the most recent season of "Top Chef All-Stars," eventual winner Richard Blais liked to present one ingredient in three ways, to show off all of its flavors.  In his honor, I present to you my own trio of delights. His were culinary, mine are centered around social computing, as my expertise is in working environments far less noisy and hot than his.  Hopefully, my output will be similarly tasty, if only because three is a magic number.

Lask week, I was privileged to attend a program at the Center for Information Management Studies (CIMS) at Babson College:  "Enterprise 2.0, Social Software and Collaboration."  The program featured three excellent presentations on the theme:

Noted author Paul Gillin's session about "the quiet revolution behind the firewall," where he guided us through ten key business benefits of social media.  The single best insight I got from this session was a quote from Kartik Hisanagar, professor of operations and information management at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business:

"Today, social networking is being thought of as a separate thing.  We'll see that fade over time, and it will become just part of the way we interact."

Source:  "Is Business-centric Social Networking a Revolution -- or a Ruse?", Knowledge@Wharton

The second session had a more academic slant to it.  Professors PJ Guinan and Sal Parise reviewed their recent research.  They performed over 70 interviews with social media practitioners at 50 large companies about "corporate culture and social media strategy development,"  and discerned four major strategies. The results of their research are soon to be published in the Harvard Business Review, and I recommend looking out for it as a good guide to assessing your organization's social media strategy relative to size, tolerance for risk, constraints and opportunities.

The third and final session I attended blended corporate and academic themes, as Stephen Laster, CIO of Harvard Business School, presented on the topic of "enabling the social generation" and customizing the enterprise's response to them. He related the broad themes of convergence, consumerization, crowd-sourcing, and how "digital natives" use social tools to research, collaborate, produce and leverage content in new ways.  He then proposed ways CIOs can engage these users and enable the future workforce, which broke down into:

1.  Understand the possibilities (not just the risks!). 
2.  Partner to prioritize, and listen to the business.
3.  Deliver with excellence:  on time, on quality, and on budget.

The CIMS event was the first of a flurry of upcoming events tied to the theme of social computing, including:

SharePoint Saturday Boston (April 9th at Microsoft's Waltham office), where there's always a good assortment of content about social computing in SharePoint.

The SIM (Society for Information Management) CIO panel on social computing, April 14 at the Needham Sheraton.

Last but not least, KMA's April webinar with NewsGator on April 20, where we'll explore social computing capabilities native to SharePoint 2010 and how NewsGator Social Sites can help take enterprise social computing to the next level.

I hope to see you at these events!  Stay social!

Office 2010 Web Applications Preview

In this window between Microsoft's July Worldwide Partner Conference (with many Office 2010 previews) and Microsoft's October SharePoint Conference, I'm working to learn about Microsoft's Office 2010 applications.

A recently posted video shows an interesting aspect of Office 2010:  Office Web Applications that are positioned as an on-line companion to the richer Office client experience, for users with only a browser and needs for high-fidelity collaboration around Office documents.

Office Web Apps Video

Office 2010 Preview Site

Late addition:  ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley wrote a great article recently summarizing Ten Things To Know as Microsoft Office Web Apps go to testers. 

Enterprise 2.0 Keynote #1: Driving Action by Design

At this week's Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, there was a wide variety of content, but one of the more compelling presentations I caught was a Tuesday morning keynote speech by Jascha Franklin-Hodge, CTO of Blue State Digital, entitled "mybarackobama.com: The Secrets of Obama's New Media Juggernaut."

Notwithstanding anyone's political leanings (more on this later), the presentation illustrated many topics of real and immediate interest to anyone doing business in this day and age, especially those of us who use social media and the web to build business and connect with our clients and prospects.

Mr. Franklin-Hodge spelled out six core principles of a successful new media campaign:
1.  Drive Action
2.  Be Authentic
3.  Create Ownership
4.  Be Relevant
5.  Build a Strong, Open Brand
6.  Measure Everything

The first of these, "Drive Action," resonated most strongly with me on a few levels. First, as I look at our firm's website, which we're in the process of re-designing, I see many opportunities for improvement, and few places where a user is directed to "Ask us for more information," or "Get started now."  Clearer calls and lower barriers to action help convert interest to action at the point where a prospective buyer is most likely to buy, and this was a cornerstone of the Obama campaign's web strategy.

Not only is "Drive Action" a mantra for web site design, however, it's worth considering in light of other business communications as well.  I frequently get e-mails that SCREAM for action implicitly, but no explicit action is requested by the author, so time is wasted on communications (i.e., negotiating the follow-up) that accomplish little.  For example:

 Author:  We need to meet to review this deliverable.

 Respondent:  Yes, I agree, let's meet. (READ:  "Back to you, author!")
 
 and so on.

GAH! Several cycles could be cut out of this communications loop by simple addition as follows:

Author:  We need to meet to review this deliverable.  I looked at your calendar, and it looks like  you're  free at 2 pm.  Can we meet then for 15 minutes?  Please let me know, and I'll send an Outlook  meeting request.

As a result of this presentation, I am committing that I will be more cognizant of ASKING for action when I want it.  There's a fine line between this and bossing people around, I suppose, but being clear and concise about what the next steps are, in any business communication, is critical to effective action.  How many meetings do we walk out of without a clear agreement on who is doing what next, by when?  Unacceptably many.

There were similar insights for each of the six core principles, and many great examples of beautiful, functional, effective design, but I must confess that for me they were diluted a bit by the partisan tone to the presentation, as illustrated by the following: 

• From the presentation's tone and content, it would appear that Republicans are immune to social community-building, mired in a 1950s world of press releases and position papers handed out to fedora-wearing, dead-tree media types. 
• Also, as some colleagues later suggested, I would also have been VERY interested to see a timeline showing how the Obama campaign's efforts were re-allocated from beating Hillary Clinton to beating the McCain/Palin Republican ticket (the presentation only focused on the D vs R segment of the presidential campaign).

Crowd-Sourced SharePoint Governance via DebateGraph Visual Wikis

I read with interest a recent post by one of my favorite bloggers, Paul Culmsee that I want to share.  I especially like Paul's blog because:

1. He and I care about some of the same things:  Project Management, Governance, SharePoint, and pop culture (although I prefer Eric B & Rakim to Opeth, and I haven't yet had cause to integrate Tom Cruise into my blog's content, thematically)
2. We're unlikely to compete with each other for business, given the distance from Perth to Boston, MA (11,635 miles).
3. He's generous with his knowledge and his opinions, and has welcomed correspondence and feedback on these topics.
4. He writes in a breezy style, accessible yet insightful.

OK, now that the honorifics are dispensed with, I'll get to the point:  Paul blogged this week on an innovative approach to SharePoint governance:  a product called DebateGraph, which serves as sort of a visual wiki that shows graphically how ideas relate to one another.  An example follows (sorry for the static image -- can't fit the interactive version into this format):

Seven Sigma has created downloadable DebateGraph SharePoint web parts to allow users to visually show the debate of any issue within a SharePoint wrapper, but to me the most interesting application is the one where "n" is the biggest:  Seven Sigma's public, Internet-facing debate about SharePoint governance, shown in the example shown above.

So, if you have strong opinions about SharePoint governance (I know you're out there -- you haven't been shy about expressing your opinions with me), please take a look, vote, and make your voice heard about what works and what doesn't in SharePoint governance.  Join the debate today!

On-Line Identity Management 2.0: DandyID

Our firm focuses a great deal on collaboration as a way to solve business problems, and we view social media tools as a great addition/complement to the Microsoft Information Worker technologies we use and advise our clients about every day.  Accordingly, several of us have accounts with such services as:

• Typepad (blogging)
• Flickr (photo sharing)
• Delicious (social bookmarking)
• Twitter (microblogging).

One of the most difficult things about using all of these "best of breed" services is maintaining a centralized record of account credentials for each of these services.  I recently learned of a tool that I've been looking for for quite a long time: DandyID, an on-line tool for managing, in one place, all of my on-line identities.

I tried out DandyID this week, completed my profile, associated my DandyID with my various on-line profiles (out of the hundreds they offer), and used DandyID to verify my credentials with the services that offer this option.  I also was able to see where I rank among the digiterati, as far as the number and quality of my on-line presences.

I then took a link to my DandyID profile and dropped it into my e-mail signature so that people can follow me on-line using the services and accounts I've chosen to share with them.  (NOTE:  This is not managed on a user-by-user level via DandyID -- content is shown or hidden based on security/privacy settings in each of the individual services.)

  

I've used the free version to do everything I've described here, but DandyID also has a premium offering for $4.99 a month that includes social stats and analytics about how and where people interact with you on the Web.  I've also yet to explore the "Contacts" functionality in DandyID -- looking for a good use case to test this.

Now, if I could only find a centralized service to manage all my passwords across those accounts...

NOTE:  Shout-out to @DougCornelius and @jackvinson for the Tweets that led me to this tool.