Choosing the right social tool - Reflecting on the #SocialNow conference

Many companies are looking into social tools for their internal organization. Lots of others just select what related companies have chosen. Hoping this is the right choice.

As with selecting content management systems, many struggle to select a social platform. There are so many tools out there and they all say they can help you support internal networks. How to choose the right one? Is there a right one? Does the success of a tool elsewhere mean it will also be successful in the company you work for?

The Social Now conference in Porto (June 26-27), organized by Knowman, addressed these questions. And it did so in a unique way. Basically the idea was to have social tool vendors present based on a concrete company case that wanted to move forward in knowledge sharing, idea management and collaborative project work. The vendors were asked to share their approach in 20 minutes and then an expert panel helped the company ask the right questions to the vendors. Many brave vendors presented: Alfresco, Confluence, Microsoft Sharepoint, Oracle, Newsgator, Podio, Teepin, Zyncro, Xwiki, SocialIBIS, Oobian, and Spreadd. 

Also, several expert talks were given:

• Oscar Berg about how social concepts and tools can improve knowledge work
• Ana Neves (also conference organizer) gave two talks: one about selecting social tools and the other about adoption techniques
• Hugo Magalhães helped the audience decide whether to go for Saas or not 
• Joaquín Peña shared the insights from the Spanish Enterprise 2.0 conference
• Lee Bryant closed the converence with a talk about the social organization. 

I think the conference was truly unique and successfully helped the audience gain more perspective in the social tool landscape. There was lots of discussion during the conference in which participants shared their situations and tools they are of have tried. Furthermore the vendors were open about what they are good and less good at and also answered the hard questions in one-on-one's.

What struck me during several presentations was the fact that many vendors address the process-side of work and how their social tools relate and connect processes to networks and vice versa. I think this underlines the fact that the social tool market is maturing. And this approach clearly helped the audience with their adoption questions, because most organizations spend lots of improving processes. Social tools are more than fun, they help get daily work done and improve the overall business. 

Another interesting insight is that Oracle (with Webcenter) and Citrix (with Podio) are taking on Google, Microsoft and IBM. Both are extending their current, more traditional offerings with social tools. 

A final insight: innovation happens at the edges. John Hagel and Seely Brown stress this in The Power of Pull. The Social Now conference proved this to be true. The smaller vendors all had much more innovative approaches to the social space. Take Podio with which users can build their own widgets to get the information or application they need to do their work. Or Spreadd that connects all kinds of tools to a public stream trying to automate as much narration as possible. Or Oobian that semantically analyzes content and connections to provide insights over huge amounts of data. And SocialIBIS that converts your stream for text to speech so you can listen to the stream while on the move. Or Zyncro that translates stream updates in the language you understand. Just to list some of the features of these platforms!

I was curious if this new way to set up a conference would work. I think it did. Most conference are focused on business or IT. This conference took a more integral approach. The conference was well-structured, an impressive list of vendors presented, there was lots of discussion going on during, before and after the program. I really enjoyed it.

What do you think of the concept of this conference? How could this conference be even better?

And are you in the process of selecting a social tool? What’s your approach? 

All the tweets and other posts about the conference can be found here.

Disclaimer: I was master of ceremony of the conference, but did not organize the it.

Relating structured and unstructured knowledge processes - KMers chat #kmers

Just a small post to invite you all to join the next KMers Chat on this Tuesday, October 5 from 17:00 - 18:00 UTC. I'll be moderating this chat. Participating is easy. All you need is a Twitter account. Just wait for the chat to begin and make sure to append your tweets with #kmers. Lots of interesting and smart people join in.

This chat will be about: Relating structured and unstructured knowledge processes.

Here's a short overview of this topic and some questions:

Knowledge Management is currently often related to the unstructured information and knowledge processes in organizations. In the past the focus of KM was on the structured side. But how can/are these combined in organizations? More specifically: how does enterprise 2.0 relate to BPM? (As you may know this is being heavily debated now on the web.)

Questions:

1. Intro: Is the summary clear? Is the distinction clear? What do you call unstructured information/knowledge processes and structured processes?
2. Do you agree KM currently mostly focuses on unstructured processes? Why is this?
3. Are both types of processes supported holistically/in context in your company or companies you know?
4. What does this mean for tools? Should tools support both processes? Or should we piece together a tool landscape?

Hope to meet you there!

Fused with IT

I've been wanting to post this for some time, but was hesitant to do it. I didn't want it to be 'yet another post on 'Obama and social media'. I hope it isn't, you may be the judge.

Much has been written about how president Obama used social media to connect with (potential) voters. For instance:

• The Global Human Capital Journal: "Social Media is its O/S (Operating system)." This report drills down to the underlying concepts of Obama's campaign, how this fits with the Web 2.0 tools that his team and voters used and what businesses can learn from this.
• Infonomics had a comparable piece but also stressed the content management side of the campaign.
• Wired has a slightly different and more critical approach: "Obama's campaign was never a bottom-up endeavor. The incoming president didn't crowdsource his view on the Iraq war or use Digg to determine how to allocate campaign dollars. He ran one of the most tightly controlled, top-down campaigns in modern history...". The big question this article asked is: Will Obama keep on using Web 2.0 concepts and tools.
• Don Tapscott in his book Grown up digital stresses that Obama's campaign showed he understands the Net Gen and meets their norms (freedom, customization, scrutiny, etc.).

Obama's use of Web 2.0 and more importantly, they way he used the underlying concepts/philosophy of Web 2.0 is truly remarkable. And lots has rightly so been written about it.

But I'm wondering if this is all there is to be said. I'm triggered to think about this because of a remark made by Tim O'Reilly's some time ago. And he - together with John Battelle - repeated this in their great report 'Web Squared'. This is what got me thinking:

Infused with IT

Relating to this remark they point to the Obama campaign. But also to WalMart. It's about "the real-time enterprise". Not 'just' about using blogs and wiki's.

But what does this mean? Doesn't this mean that the Obama campaign was much more than web 2.0 concepts and tools? Of course they were new and used effectively. But to use them effectively blogs, wiki's, etc. are not enough. Yes, it was also about culture. Wasn't it even more so about the underlying ICT? The Obama campaign and real-time enterprises in general like Walmart are 'infused with IT'. I'd really like to learn more about what this means. Does it relate to what I've been writing about? That structured and unstructured information need to be managed under one architecture? That unstructured information is easily collected and generated by web 2.0 tools (sensors), for instance, and is subsequently piped into more formal systems, like product data management and enterprise resource tools? It would be really nice to see an overview of all the IT Obama used, not 'just' the new media tools.

---

If You Read This and Like It, Tweet This to your Followers:
Infused with IT [shorturl] #IT #web2.0 #KM

 

Tags van Technorati: web 2.0,IT,content management

EMC also Focusing on Personal Information

Ran into this interesting news via Michael Sampson's blog: EMC started a company that will focus on personal information management.

I've always wondered why the large enterprise information management vendors never adequately addressed the personal information space. I found they basically said: use the enterprise system, even if it doesn't fit your personal way of working. Will Decho, the new company, truly address this gap? I'm really curious if they will and will follow this step.

Also refer to EMC press release and Decho site (which basically tells you Decho now 'only' sells a backup service).

Tags van Technorati: knowledge worker,knowledge management,content management,information overload

Collaboration Some Time Ago

I have a pile of articles on my desk categorized as "someday/maybe". Meaning (following GTD) I will read them "someday" when I have time. Well I recently ran through the stack and found an article that I should have read before, although it's from 2006. It is an "Ethnographic study of collaboration knowledge work" by S.L. Kogan and M.J. Muller (IBM Systems Journal, vol. 45, no. 4, 2006).
It was a really interesting read. For one, to see how far we have come. But it also stressed some issues in collaboration that are still very hard to support digitally.
To begin with the last point. This article gives an interesting Table (table 3) with an overview of "Attributes associated with work processes". Or, in another way, it summarizes the tension knowledge workers live in. These tensions are:
- unstructured <> structured
- static <> dynamic
- ad hoc <> predefined
- one person <> multiperson
- single use <> repeatable
- business critical <> not business critical
- automated <> not automated

A while back I pointed to the "IT Flower". The IT Flower showed that applications try to support these tensions, leaving gaps. For instance, ERP, PLM or some ECM systems are good at supporting very structured business processes, but they're not good at supporting less structured processes such as document collaboration. For document collaboration most people would rather use a wiki, for instance. But, as we know and experience, there's always stuff that seems to be in-between. Or stuff that moves from the wiki to a more formal tool and back. How is this supported? Usually your regular 'copy-paste' comes in here.
This point is rightly stressed in this old(er) article:

Knowledge workers need a simple way to change unstructured, informal processes into more formal, structured processes.

And talking about 'structured processes', I really liked what they said about the 'business applications' supporting these processes, such as SAP:

Whereas transactional, procedural descriptions of (these) processes are important, we tentatively agree with Guindon, who argues that formal versions of work may provide their principal value as reference versions of what must be done by the conclusion of an activity, rather than as maps of how a business activity should actually progress.

So, looking at this, how far have we come in really supporting all facets of collaboration. In the past only the formal business applications (top down) existed. Now we have wonderful light-weight, flexible and social tools that help us collaborate in the way we like. However their is no bridge between these two yet. On the internet, this isn't a problem. But for companies this is. I experience it daily.
What do you think? Will this be bridged? And how will it be done?