Published November 17, 2011byamelielaunayonNovember 17, 2011inPress Releases
blueKiwi offers online tools and guidance based on end user study results
Reading, UK, 17 November, 2011 –
Anecdotal evidence is not enough
Social networking has become an integral part of our lives – the culture of sharing and collaborating is changing how we react with one another. Within the workplace, Enterprise Social Networks are similarly reshaping how employees engage with each other, within an organisation, as well as with external partners and customers.
Anecdotal evidence stacks up, but during tough times, hard facts are more often required to convince organisations to invest in such tools. blueKiwi’s White Paper explains in simple terms how an ESN can have a real impact on productivity and more importantly, the bottom line.
A solid point that needs to come across more clearly as we launch anther round of autumn events on how mainstream Social Business has become. There are still plenty of CFO and CEOs out there that have a hard time trying to see the business value and since an investment is needed, more often than not so is a justification.
It will be interesting to see if the use of an ROI calculator can be good enough in a real world scenario to show financially quantifiable benefits !
Published November 14, 2011In my last post, I walked through some of the reasons why compliant social business is so challenging. In this post, I want to take a look at the four steps organizations need to take in order to give themselves the best chance of solving the compliance challenges of going social.
The four steps to getting compliant are:
- Create a cross-functional body to ‘own’ the problem of social media compliance
- Find out what’s happening with social media at all levels of your organization
- Focus on creating a reasonable, defensible social media compliance strategy
- Manage social media compliance the way you manage traditional compliance
Let’s look at each in detail:
As we are approaching he Social Business / Enteprise 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, I really hope the terminology will finally be made clear. Is Social Business and Social Media really the same thing?
I am pretty sure that when I talk to clients I see them differently and so do most of them. So what are we talking about, Social Business, or Social Media.
The content of the piece is still very valid for Social Media and a good read to get up to speed on the subject. So go and read the rest online over at CMSWire.
Published May 9, 2011(This post was originally published on the AIIM Blogger Community here)
Well, for the last 6 months I have been cloistered away, well actually it has been a lot longer, trying to get the AIIM Social Business Buyers Guide together. After initial decisions about who should be in the list and who should not be for this time, the long search / research started. Now I have worked for vendors in the past and have some idea about some of the strange emails they get.
But something still baffles me and this is one for the customer. Vendors if you want to be taken seriously in a business world, behave like business, not like a bunch of developers who do not want to sell anything.
Some lessons learned, which would turn me off completely if I were a customer;
Make it clear what you are offering / selling. Some products look cool, but if your website does not make it clear what you are actually offering.
Make contact details easily findable ! – I live in Germany, and all German websites need to have an “Impressum”, which lists full address and contact details of the person or organisation responsible for the content.
Have someone monitor the accounts! – Great, you have given an Email account, now let someone answer it !
Answer the question: As part of the survey to be included, I send out a questionnaire, where it was clear or not is beside the point. Answer the question you were asked… do NOT copy & paste a piece from your won website. I’d rather you send me the link then.
Stop trying to sell me something: It is amazing. Some vendors will schedule a product demo with a sales person,. This is fine.. but then do not try to keep sell me the product.
Do not offer me a job- Although flattering to some extend, once I have identified myself as an analyst writing a buyers guide, offering me a commission-based job on representing your product is just bad form. Don’t !
Keep your promises – If you promise to send me something, or make a recording of a conference-call and promise to make it available to me afterwards so I do not have to take a lot of notes, then make sure I get it!
All of these would turn off any potential customer trying to find out whom to shortlist!
But there was also a lot of good information delivered by the vendors. Some showed me their roadmaps for upcoming changes and expansions. It is good to see how many vendors are moving into more professional delivery mechanism, business models and professional service organizations as well as a worldwide channel network. We have come a long way from simple collaboration capabilities early this century and the Web 2.0 wave that made Andrew McAfee to call it Enterprise 2.0 in 2006. So as much as I had to struggle to get some information, the information that I did get made me hopeful for great things to come in this market space.
Watch this space for more information as well as some excerpts here in the near future… and if you are a vendor who thinks that they might have missed a trick when talking to me, please feel free to contact me. It is never too late to improve on a mediocre first impression! 
Published December 20, 2010One of things that has been bugging me for the last few months is that some of my friends, as well as people around the office of several friends are having to deal more and more with absentee colleagues. Not because there are not enough people in the office, or not enough qualified people around.. but because these colleagues have just had enough. They have suffered something called burnout. Until I faced it myself, I did not take it seriously, but since then I have been reading up on it. The World Health Organization lists is as a stress related disease under Z73.0, under Problems related to Life-Management Issues. And there are a million articles around about what causes it and how to avoid it.
The one thing that struck me the most is, that it often catches engaged and dedicated people who are hard workers and go far beyond the call of duty. They work hard, often without recognition, without appreciation and sometimes even isolated from their colleagues. They have too much to do, find it hard to share their thoughts and reach out or even find suitable discussion partners amongst their peers inside of an organization. It seems that the ways of working, more disconnected, more distributed, working from home, without the direct support of colleagues may be a factor as well as it can increase the felt isolation
There are of course other reasons for burnout, but I would like to concentrate on those, and with the help of this community start a little research project. I would like to look at the impact of social Media on the reasons for Burnout. This is not about Social Media leading to burnout, which I am sure also is possible, trying to keep your many different channels fed 7 times a day with something more or less intelligent to say.
I am looking for empirical and research evidence that the use of Social Media, the sharing amongst peers, the communication and transparency can actually prevent Burnout and make return into a normal working environment easier. I do not think that this is a trivial issue as Burnout costs society billions of dollars every year. [according to research by the leading private insurance company in Australia, they put the figure at $14] Maybe we are even barking up the wrong tree when we keep saying that it is about people and culture change… it may be about keeping our workforce sane.
During a recent conversation with someone who has just come out of depression and Burnout, this person said the following. “Social Media helped me getting connected without having to face my real social fabric and still interface casually without having to share my pain. […]At the end, it really helped getting back into the game without a too deep fracture.”
Now I am not saying going on Twitter will in any way avoid Burnout, but maybe having a social environment where you can continue to function and have more control and maybe more appreciation can help in some cases.
As I am not a medical doctor or psychologist, I am looking for such people who are interested in working together on doing some research on this. I am also looking for people that have suffered Burnout and are active in Social Media and Social Networking both inside and outside the organization.
If you are interested in talking part, please send me an email to research@hkkconsulting.com, stating your brief story, either as a therapist or a sufferer.
I look forwards to hearing from you. The research will be published on hkkconsutling.com next year, but I will continue to contribute to this community on the subject as I believe it is of interest to a lot more people than we think !
Posted in Analyst, Current Affairs, Enterprise2.0, Social Media | 
Burnout, Business, Social media, Social network | 
Leave a commentPublished August 26, 2010I thought I was going to write about something else, but hey, I am in a taxi from Changi Airport in Singapore to my hotel for a few days talking about Enterprise 2.0 for a client here. 12 hours ago I was in Amsterdam, using the clever Privium system which uses advanced biometrics (iris recognition) to skip the late summer holiday queue….
There starts surprise 1: Apparently I had a long outstanding speeding ticket in the Netherlands and their biometric system is linked to the police computer and it pulled me right out of the queue. I had to pay my fine or not be allowed to pass through. Not much of a choice. I paid, waited for my “get out of jail free card” for the return journey because the computers would need 2 weeks for updating – or so I was told. I did not think to question that the system could pull up my flag in a second but not be able to update my status to “clear” for 2 week, but hey, the mysteries of computers.
Surprise 2. Nothing to do with computers. As I walk into the lounge of my preferred airline… who sits there but a friend of a friend, someone I shared a daily train ride with for about 18 months, way back in 19…..89 or 90 if memory serves me. Haven’t seen him since and before you know it I had a blocked seat next to me on the flight, a map of Singapore and half a dozen addresses for my next mission… getting myself an iPad to take home.
It was strange, how many different worlds connect…and I still got stuck with the lowest common denominator. Me doing one art of a process quickly and speedily did not guarantee that everything gets done quickly.
And I learned something else that day as well. There is no substitute for personal relationship and actually having face to face meetings with people. No Facebook or other relationship could have done, what this blast from the past could have done for me.
So lets not go overboard when it comes to finding more virtual ways to do things. After all, we all remain human and need human contact ! So get away from behind that Facebook or twitter client and go to the meet-ups, shake some flesh and get to know the people for real. You will be surprised – pleasantly in most cases – and it thoroughly enriches your online social activities !
Posted in Enterprise2.0, in eigener Sache, Social Media, Training, Travel, Uncategorized | Leave a commentPublished May 21, 2010Da kam doch vor ein paar Monaten die Einladung! Ich blogge seit dem 19. April nun auch für die AIIM Communities, und zwar für die Enterprise 2.0 Community. Hier in meinem eigenen Blog war es ja schon immer etwas stiller, da ich eher auf Twitter zu finden bin, aber inzwischen packt mich auch hier der Wunsch, öfter etwas zu Projekten, Gedanken zum Thema Enterprise Content Management, oder sonstiges auf zu schreiben.
Die Gedanken sind immer meine eigenen, obwohl ich mit Sicherheit auch auf die vielen Freunde und Experten in der Branche zurückgreifen werde, die schon viele Jahre den digitalen Ether mit ihren Beobachtungen füllen. Dabei wird der Inhalt gemischt in deutsch und englisch sein. Ich habe genau deshalb auch die Google Übersetzung eingebaut. Verwenden Sie diese wenn Sie diese Beiträge in einer anderen Sprache lesen wollen.
Natürlich freue ich mich auch über jede Rückmeldung, Anregung oder Frage. Nur los damit. Meine Kontaktdaten finden Sie an anderer Stellen auf dieser Webseite ohne Probleme.
Published March 2, 2010
Image via Wikipedia
Ich habe mich im Internet Mal wieder nach neuen Blogs umgeschaut und bin dabei über Stefan Pfeiffer auf den folgenden Post gekommen: “Gibt es einen Markt für Enterprise 2.0?”
Ja, brauchen wir, war meiner Meinung nach die einfache und deutliche Antwort. Aber dann habe ich Mal scharf darüber nachgedacht. Was ist eigentlich Enterprise 2.0…vor allem in der Abgrenzung zu Web 2.0, Social Media, Social Networking und den ganzen anderen Begriffen, die im Moment so rumfliegen.
Offensichtlich braucht de Markt das, so zumindest die vielen Kollegen die als Social Media Experten durch die Gegend reisen und die vielen ehemaligen Enterprise Content Management Abteilungen und Produkten die plötzlich Enterprise 2.0 heißen. Andrew McAfees Buch mit dem Titel Enterprise 2.0 ist in den Bestsellerlisten ganz oben. Der Markt braucht also Enterprise 2.0.
Wie sieht es aus mit dem Kunden? Dem Kunden in Deutschland? Twittert(zwitschert) er, baut er eine Facebook Fanpage auf und geistern die Mitarbeiter durch Google Buzz, Google Wave, etc. um dort Kunden auf zu tun? Die Antwort ist ein deutliches ‘jein’. Mann zwitschert aus Spass und vielleicht noch aus Marketing Kalkül und aus persönlichen Gründen. Eine Fanpage wird erstellt bei Marken, damit es kein anderer zuerst macht. Alles schön und gut, aber nur ein weiterer Kanal in den Markt.
Viel interessanter ist was man mit den neuen Tools innerhalb eines Unternehmens erreichen kann. Wo ist der Mehrwert bei der Wissenserfassung und Verteilung. Wie bekomme ich die Informationen zum richtigen Zeitpunkt zur richtigen Person?
Bei dieser Frage sind natürlich sehr viele Faktoren zu berücksichtigen. Viel zu viele für einen kurzen Blogpost, aber die Antwort, so vielschichtig sie auch ist, ist fast nie eindeutig. Es führen mehrere Wege nach Rom, aber nicht alle ! Was mir bei vielen, die über die neuen Enterprise 2.0 Technologien sprechen fehlt ist das Verständnis für die dahinter liegenden geschäftlichen Bedürfnisse, das Verständnis für die Firmenkultur und die Möglichkeiten die bereits vorhanden sind. Nicht neu um jeden Preis und Web 2.0 um jeden Preis, sondern intelligentes analysieren der Bedürfnisse und zwar ganzheitlich, nicht auf der Mikroebene sind notwendig… und da haben dann auch die vielen Enterprise 2.0 / Social Media Collaboration tools ihren ersten Einsatz… bei dem Erarbeiten der Bedürfnisse. Erst dann haben wir den Kunden wirklich erkannt und die richtigen Fragen gestellt und können wir mit Sicherheit sagen – Ja-es gibt einen Markt für Enterprise 2.0.
Published August 24, 2009The time is getting closer for Gartner PCC Summit. Held on the 16th and 17th of September in London it will once more bring together some of leading experts and practitioners in today’s industry to discuss a wide variety of subjects. They will be joined by customers with real stories to tell
And this year there is a special challenge. The economic crisis has made it clear that every project and every implementation needs to show clear returns in a quicker time then before. At the same time trends like Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Cloud computing, Saas and the new workplace give the individual worker more freedom, more control over how they create content and which channel to chose to collaborate and distribute this content. Notable user organizations and Gartner analysts will give their view on it and yours truly has a spot on the 16th of September on Enterprise 2.0.
The title isn’t Connect to Success for nothing, so get on your bike! There are still 23 days left for registrations, so visit the site and register now… they even provide a Justification Kit if you need help getting your hands on those all important travel allowances !
Posted in Current Affairs, ECM, Enterprise2.0, Market Intelligence, Technologies, Travel | Leave a commentPublished August 3, 2009
Image via Wikipedia
Some time I ago I noticed a blog post on SharePoint being like Lego, lots of bits and pieces that need assembly and can be put together in many different ways. I twittered about it and got a lot of reactions from it. Some where in agreement, others pointed out to some significant holes in that theory… and I started thinking about it a bit more.
I was an avid fan of Lego when I was a kid, and so are my kids these days, although the Lego that I played with looks nothing like what you can buy today. In my days it was multi-coloured blocks in a variety of sizes, but still the majority was exactly that… bricks. The slopes, windows, doors, flat pieces, wheels and various other things came from ready-to-build boxed products. My biggest concern back then were cheap imitations, they did not quite fit, were a little bigger or smaller, and of inferior quality. Also, with a load of square bricks and rectangular bricks you couldn’t build everything, sometimes pieces were just missing. You made do however, it was good enough.
These days, walking around the local toyshop, looking at the Lego I noticed it is hard to buy just bricks. Everything is prepackaged, you get your magician boy set, your space adventure set, various historical periods sets that include a dragon and various other creatures… and then I spotted my first figure with none of the telltale studs you need for assembly. It was a 2-piece dragon, clicked together in only one way and that was it. wings rotate but are permanently attached, the idea of creativity and assembly and play gone. No more imagination needed – just follow the instructions and you get exactly what you see on the outside of the box.
What has that got to do with ECM in general and SharePoint in particular?
Lets start with one set of the vendors: They provide bricks, large number of bricks, everyone can have a brick each at a low price, it is usable, clickable and extendable easily and in different ways… we call it Basic Content Services.
The other group provides sets: Ready made or already assembled, some studs available, some surfaces very smooth. It is maybe not for everyone, but if you like playing with dragons, it sure looks a lot better than one made of 200 square bricks – we could call them Content Enabled Vertical Application or CEVAs.
For each one of them some assembly is required, the studs providing the necessary interfaces, according to various standards, APIs and SDKs.
Now on to SharePoint, where does that fit into it? Some bits are preassembled, some just a jumble of bricks. An advantage for SharePoint is that most table tops that people build on are already equipped with lots of Lego studs onto which SharePoint would seem to fit very nicely. A house, a wall is easily build and serves its purpose. But what about that Deathstar spaceship or Hogwarts School of Magic? It can be done, but there are other toolsets that might be a closer match.
So what set of Lego should I buy? For me it always comes down to the same things:
- Think before you act
- Design before you build
- Know what your goal is
- Make sure you use bricks that conform to the standards
- don’t glue things together, you might need to change something in the future and getting those bricks apart again is impossible.
or in ECM speak : interoperability, flexibility, standards and change management
One of the best methodologies out there is MIKE2, which guides you through this process with clear plans along the way. That way we get a result that we can play with! Because business today are not looking for a 2 year building process with Lego bricks, they are looking for a final result that they can use !
Well, those are my toughts anyway. What do you think? Am I right, wrong, partially right ? Did I miss some big Lego developments? Or is anyone selling a pile of those plain old bricks in good nick, please let me know ! Post on Twitter using the hashtag #ecmlego and I will find you!
by Hanns
Image (c) Lego
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Published July 30, 2009Well, time for another blog entry. For the last few months I have been active on Twitter as hannskk, trying to find out whether the short and quick communication of that medium would give me the immediate feedback that I wanted and the reach to an audience that was interested in ECM and Enterprise 2.0, which is why this blog has been silent except for a reposting of a post I did for the Knowledgecenter blog of my colleague Bob Larrivee.
Well, Twitter did satisfy my desires, and still does and it was nice to see the first Retweets and Replies, the #followfriday endorsements showing up. Then the first real meetings with real people in the form of tweet-ups. And as I was meeting these people I was thinking… when did a blog entry ever lead to meeting real people, striking up real conversations and getting some quality face-to-face time? I don’t remember any of my colleagues ever mentioning any of this either. I know that John Mancini, the author of the Digital Landfill Blog often meets and talks to many people in his role as President of AIIM, but what about others?
Initially I thought it had to be one or the other, Twitter or Blogging, just the sheer time involved in keeping up to speed with the thousands of messages on Twitter that may be of interest during a week and trying to write a blog about a subject that may already have been discussed to death on Twitter seemed doing double the work…
.. and then something else struck me. If I continue this thought, then what about my Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, my Social bookmarking on Diigo and Delicious, the time spend on Email, various wikis and the phone? Was I not doubling the work on many of these as well, inefficiently repeating the same message in different places, feeding my Tweets into Facebook, updating my LinkedIn Status and sending emails to tell people about what I was doing, even as my Skype and MSN profiles reflect what I am doing as well for those people that are connected with me there? Of course I was and of course I am, but where to cut, where to stop? Potentially I was reaching different audiences in different places, but there was enough overlap to make some people remind me that all those tweets in Facebook were making them block my messages altogether.
Well I have come to a conclusion, reinforced by my conversation with some other Social Connectivity “Geeks” – different places and different audiences and different content is the only way to go ! “The right tool for the right job !” – nothing new but in the huge influx of tools over the last 2-3 years and the continuous exploration of each one of these for personal and business value, the target got lost.
So here is my entirely personal conclusion of how to use these tools:
Twitter:
DOs: pointing people at resources, scanning for interesting links and retweeting those, floating ideas
DON'Ts: selling stuff…if I follow you and the first thing you do is DM me to check out this website or other for the ultimate Twitter tool to get me a million followers or dollars, I will immediately unfollow you.
Facebook:
DOs: personal stories, family and friends
DONTs: As much as Facebook would like to, it is not for business, it is for personal stuff…so I need to clean up my contacts there
LinkedIn: my personal choice as a business tool for keeping in touch, but only people I know or have done business with or worked with. What is the use of 5000 connections if they do not know you and you do not know them. Just because you belong to the same group doesn’t add any value to the relationship.
Diigo : for social bookmarking. Not as widely spread as Delicious, but some nice filing and organizing possibilities and a toolbar that allows selective highlighting of a webpage and keeping a note there – not sure how persistent this feature is over page changes.
So based on those conclusions, sorry for all those business contacts I am going to disconnect with on Facebook … and watch this space for some more regular contributions.
Do you have comments about this post, or different conclusions, or a different view, do not comment here! Connect with me on Twitter and let’s discuss it there, it will show up on the right in the Twitter feed:-)
by Hanns