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Social Collaboration: A Work In Progress

It’s been almost two years since I wrote a column titled “Down To Business: Why Some People ‘Dread’ Collaboration,” in which I cited a body of research that showed unsatisfactory user experiences with social networking and other Enterprise 2.0 technologies. The Corporate Executive Board’s Shvetank Shah weighed in that […]

One respondent to our recent Enterprise Social Networking Vendor Evaluation Survey agreed: “The most challenging aspect of social networking for the enterprise is understanding the technology as it pertains to optimizing existing workflows. We tend to try to adapt social software to meet our (outdated) business processes, instead of seeing ‘how things could/should be’ and adjusting processes to take advantage of technology.”

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What’s Your Unadoption Strategy For Enterprise 2.0?

What's Your Unadoption Strategy For Enterprise 2.0?

Enterprise Social Networks: A Guided Tour (click image for larger view and for slideshow) One of the great challenges of introducing new collaboration technologies is often said to be adoption–getting people to use the technology productively in their work. Andrew Carusone of Lowe’s Home Improvement thinks the focus on […]

As for demonstrating the value of social collaboration to company leaders, showing great adoption numbers isn’t the way to get that done. What do they care that you’ve got more people blogging, tagging, and commenting? Finding the right way to impress those people is about as hard as “playing poker with someone who has got the cards facing the other way,” he said. “Ask them what’s on their quarterly review or on their annual review.” In other words, find out what numbers they have to move to impress their boss, or their board, or the shareholders. Find out what you can do to contribute toward that goal.

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The benefits of social collaboration in the enterprise – what are they, really, and where are the proof points?

The greatest thing about taking a presentation on the road is having honest conversations with real people, hearing about their day-to-day experiences and frustrations first-hand. A couple of weeks ago I talked to audiences around New Zealand about The benefits of social collaboration in the enterprise . There’s a […]

The key message is to look for opportunities with high human latency or areas of business process where we need to wait for a human action to occur. An example of this is booking a meeting to discuss whether to bid on a sales opportunity – it may be a day or two before all required attendees are available at the same time. This means any progress on the sales opportunity is essentially blocked until a decision is made.

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Social networks and business applications integration : what the hell are vendors doing ?

In short : social network and business applications are the two complementary sides of anyone’s work and the tools that support each one should break down the artificial wall that separates them. Vendors are working on it but some approaches of social/business integration show a real misunderstanding of what […]

“By 2020, we won’t be talking about social applications because all applications have to be social,” (Michael Fauscette)