If you would remember, last Friday I eventually finished up the week putting together a blog post, where I was sharing a number of insights on something I have been doing at work for over a week now and which I thought would interest folks over here as well. As you all well know, I am a social computing evangelist at IBM and all along I have felt that I needed to change something in my day to day interactions in order to go through a substantial leap towards embracing social software behind the corporate firewall. And that major step has actually been giving up on e-mail!

Like I said, while I am entering the second week of this particular experiment, and not to worry, over the course of the next couple of days I will be sharing with you folks how things are going so far, I thought I would start the week with some additional thoughts triggered mainly by the good bunch of commentary that people have been leaving at the original blog post I put together. I thought those comments were just too good to go by unnoticed and perhaps buried in the threaded discussion. So over the next few minutes, I am going to try to address those comments, hopefully, being able to add some more into the overall conversation. So here it goes:

From Turtle’s comments: "We have an enterprise license for QuickPlace, but no, instead people thrash out long topics in email that then overload my account quota and get everything all plugged up."

Yes, indeed, that is exactly how I have felt myself for quite a while! I am sure I’m not the only one who has got a quota on his mail inbox and that soon enough it piles up to the point where you are blocked, i.e. mail jail. This, folks, was one of the primary reasons why I decided to take this radical approach of moving away from e-mail. For good. And embrace, even more, social computing.

One of the things I realised about was that the more e-mails I tried to respond to, the more answers I would get back at me, and as a result more and more files will be sent out across my mail box and before I knew it, I would be in mail jail again. So for a few days now, I don’t reply to e-mail (Unless it is something confidential or a private conversation that needs to take place between the two of us), I go and seek that person in my social networks and provide the answer to the query in that public space. That usually triggers a notification mechanism and they find out about it. I move on. I know it takes a bit of getting used to it, but once you start doing it once at a time and start moving away some of those conversations, it would become a natural experience and you will regret not having done it before! Later on, I will explain why…

From Laura W’s comments: "[...] not sure others are there with it all yet. Really be interested to see how it shifts behaviour and use!"

To that set of comments from Laura I would say never underestimate what people have been exposed to all along. Believe it or not, there is a great chance they may have had an early exposure to those social software tools, but because they are in their own comfort zone with processing e-mail, they may be feeling it is not the right time just yet. Provoke it! Smart moving them out of their comfortable spaces and bring them further on into the public dialogue going on within social networks. Inviting them over with your reply to their queries surely is going to get their attention. Specially if you reply faster than you would normally do with e-mail. That will give them a sense of what’s your response like w.r.t. e-mail vs. social networking. The sooner you reply with the latter, the more keen they would be to move away from the former.

From John Smart’s comments: "How do you keep from getting information glut???"

Something that, believe it or not, I learned from Twitter some time ago… Following the flow of the river, versus drowning on the lake. That is right. Today I bumped into a lovely quote from Ton Zylstra as well on Information Abundance vs. Information Overload and that is exactly how I feel about it. Sometimes you will be able to grab it all, some others, you won’t, but that is when the power of the social networks will kick in, because believe it or not they will come to your rescue! Think of it as the give and take from participating in a community. Your community.

"[...] you said that you scan 2,500 articles each morning! If we assume that everyone will follow suit and also give up on email, that number will easily double, right?"

Not necessarily, because at the same time that I get that amount of articles, there is plenty of scanning and filtering that goes on, and in most cases done by the social networks I belong to, which means that at the end of the day I end up reading / going through 30 to 40 items I really want to keep and which are now readily available online on a public space for other folks to enjoy. This is along the very same lines of when you read a newspaper, if you come to think about it.

"How will you keep from missing questions that people would normally direct to you via email?"

You wouldn’t miss a single question, if you really want to… Welcome to the wonderful world of syndication (RSS / Atom feeds)!! In my opinion, syndication is probably the single, most important success factor from moving into a social networking collaborative space, because you can configure and set up those various alerts or feeds to notify on everything you need to be notified on. Key difference from e-mail is that with e-mail you are no longer in control. With RSS / Atom feeds you are at the center of it all and in control of how much exposure you would want to get. Oh, and believe me, even if you miss out one question / query, you will be getting friendly reminders from those folks, just like you would do with e-mail in the past.

However, here is the key thing that will make it all work. If you have nurtured your social networks and connections rather nicely you will be finding out how over time they are going to be helping you out sorting out those questions, so that in case you forget or in case you may be busy with something else, they will be able to jump into the social computing open space and answer those queries for you. And voilá! Helped provided, without your own involvement!!! … Although it works in both ways, too! Those same folks would also asking the same thing in return in the overall social networking space, whenever they would need to, just like you did.

"Will they need to make a post, then send a link to you via email or is there some other mechanism?"

Well, like I said, they can use whatever method of getting in touch with me. Preferably through our mutual social networking spaces we all belong to. But that may not always be the case. Folks can still send me e-mail with no problem. The difference now is that I am not replying through e-mail, but through other means, and much faster than through the normal e-mail expectations, so that over time folks would realise how they can get faster through to me. E-mail is not going to be it any longer! Various social computing tools would surely get my attention! As so would they get yours, I am sure.

"And how do you follow replies to your comments on others’ blogs? Will that scale?"

Oh, a quick and short answer on this one: Welcome, again, to the wonderful world of syndication with RSS / Atom feeds! Your online / offline feed aggregator is what is going to keep you sharp and on top of it all! Also Web 2.0 tools like CoComment will become very handy and helpful! And best of all, anyone can make use of them!

"Put another way… your mail inbox has a priority all its own because people are sending messages to you, individually and specifically. If you are giving that up, why isn’t it making things worse for you?"

Let me put it this way. My mail inbox does not have a priority, specially when I have to fight against mail jail, or spam, or unsolicited e-mails or whatever. I lost control over it and it is not longer having the priority it once had. However, on the other hand my social networks do have that priority and the main reason is because I treasure those connections, those relationships, because, after all, with social computing, we are talking all about the people, and the same way I’ll be watching out for them helping them out fix whatever the issues, so will they, helping me with my own.

That is the whole point of the commitment behind belonging to a social network: you care about people’s needs and try to help them sharing your knowledge and experiences. With e-mail, you are just so focused to have a clean inbox that you lose track of what needs to get done and before you know it, you are out of touch with what is happening. Your inbox is more about information, whereas your social networks are more about people & their connections. Now, which side would you want to sit on? I think you know what my answer is going to be, right?

From Swan’s comments: "I know that any kind of categorization is going to be over-simplification of life, but it might be interesting to draw up some categories of knowledge workers and then assign a recommended “bundle” of tools that would meet that type knowledge workers’ needs"

In a way, Swan is spot on with regards to this one! The key thing from this particular initiative I kicked off a few days back is nothing more, nothing less than becoming myself (And as a result of that… applicable to others) smarter, without working harder necessarily at it. Yes, I know, it may sound more complicated than it is, but believe me, it is worth while a try. You would be amazed as to how many conversations you can drive away from e-mail and move them into open spaces, i.e. your social networks, and best part of it all, is how keen your connections would be to hang out in those open spaces because everyone would have a chance of sharing, connecting, collaborating and innovating together at the same time! And from a single triggered action!

Give it a try yourself for a few days and you will see how you would be able to cut off e-mail almost completely and for good!

Now, I do know though that your job may involve handling and sharing of very sensitive information across the board and in that particular case it may not really apply that much, but I bet that time and time again you would be able to find the odd conversation you can divert into those open social software spaces. And you know the drill. Starting small, and building up further from there will get you there! It surely has helped me reach the status where I am today, where the average of e-mails has been keeping steady all along during these few days and reduced by more than triple the amount of what I used to get not long ago!

That would be it, folks. As you can see, lots and lots of information details to digest in this rather long blog post. I hope though that experience will give you plenty of ideas to try out at your own organisation(s) and, why not?, share your thoughts as to how that experience is going. You will be gratefully surprised, I know. For sure! … I was

Tags: Twitter, e-mail, email, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Productivity, Hints and Tips, Communication, Conversations, IBM, Social Tools, Productivity Tools, Information Overload, Information Abundance, Ton Zylstra, Syndication, RSS, Atom, Feeds, Control, Trust, Trusted Networks, Collective Intelligence, CoComment, Knowlege Workers

In yesterday’s blog post I already hinted something that, although I don’t have much more time to expand on it further, as the weekend is just around the corner and tomorrow is a big day for me (Those of you on Facebook and Twitter already know about it!), I thought I would drop just a couple of lines to let you know what I have been up to this week. These particular links to very enlightening and thought-provoking blog posts by Beth Kanter and John Tropea, respectively, will give you an idea of what I am talking about…

Yes, I’m giving up on e-mail! At least, work related e-mail! That’s right, this week I have launched a new experiment, or initiative, at work where I have diverted most of my conversations into social computing and social software tools, both internal and external.

You did what?!?! Yes, I surely did!! Just like you are reading it. Last Saturday I decided that enough was enough and I created a post in my internal blog where I was mentioning that from that day onwards I would not be answering any e-mails, nor write any e-mails myself either, but instead I would make the most out of social software tools and social computing, in general, to get in touch with other knowledge workers and collaborate further sharing and exchanging our knowledge over there.

I know, you can call me crazy now! You can say I am out of my mind, but the truth is that I am now on the 5th day of taking such a radical approach to my daily workload and the overall experience has been tremendous!! In all of those 5 days I have received a total number of 45 e-mails. Yes, you are reading it right!! 45 e-mails!! When normally on a daily basis I would be getting, on busy days, between 30 to 45! A day!! But this time around, things have been different. I have been telling people I will no longer be responding to e-mails, because the more I respond, the more I get. I am sure you have seen and been through that already!

So have I given up on all incoming e-mails as such? No, I wish I could, but there is one single scenario that I cannot ignore and that will force me to continue making use of e-mail as a communication tool (Notice that I am mentioning here communication vs. collaboration - More on that later!) and that is the unique and rare opportunity (Yes, I am one of those lucky guys!) to engage on a private conversation where information of a sensitive nature gets exchanged. Of course, in that case, that conversation is still going to be carried out through e-mail & it would be the only time that I would be responding back.

For the rest, I have decided that if I want to demonstrate how powerful social computing is within the corporate world, and beyond, I am going to make a complete shift to it and try to provoke as many conversations as possible out in the open space of social software. Yes, you can say I am crazy, but, hey, I thought it was worth while giving it a try.

And like I have mentioned above, it has been a total success!!! At least, on the first week of pushing myself to the other side. The way it works is that people can send me, and will keep doing so, different e-mails, and me, instead of replying to each and everyone of those e-mails, is going out to the social computing tool(s) where those folks may hang out and share the information / knowledge over there, so that if someone asks me a question on something, I will provide the answer in that social software tool, and that means that colleague will have his / her issue addressed, but everyone else, too! Because it is in the open, everyone can see that answer and benefit from it, even if they don’t need it at that moment!

Oh, and when it is the other way around, me wanting to find out about something, I go into my usual social networking spaces and interact there with my various social networks to get an answer or, at least, some pointers, and therefore trying to avoid making use of e-mail altogether. Pretty interesting stuff, eh?

Well, like I said, it has been working great thus far! Just this week, the first one, I have been getting 45 e-mails, when normally it would have been a lot higher than that. Yet, everyone has been trying to get through me or get me involved through the usage of social networking tools. So I have been using quite often Lotus Sametime 8.0 (With some of its lovely social networking capabilities I will cover one of these days), Blog Central (i.e. blogs), Wiki Central (i.e. wikis), Lotus Connections (With blogs, Dogear, Activities, Profiles, Communities), Lotus Quickr, Fringe, Cattail, BlueTwit (An internal Twitter clone), Media Library, Beehive, Atlas, etc. etc. (And not counting the external social software tools I use on a regular basis!)

That is right! That is what I kept saying to myself all along before getting started with this. If we all are to drink our very own champagne, I might as well get started with the one I like the most, don’t you think? Certainly, e-mail is not going to be it! Social computing is!! And big time!!

So, stay tuned because when I have a bit more time, some time next week, I will share some more on this new exciting and incredibly rewarding and re-energising activity I have gotten started, almost, a week ago, which is encouraging me more and more by the day to move away from e-mail and live social computing. Only question remaining so far is, why didn’t I start this years ago? Makes you wonder, eh?

Tags: Facebook, Twitter, Beth Kanter, John Tropea, e-mail, email, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Productivity, Hints and Tips, Communication, Conversations, IBM, Lotus Sametime, Sametime 8, Blog Central, Blogs, Wiki Central, Wikis, Lotus Connections, Connections, Dogear, Activities, Profiles, Communities, Lotus Quickr, Quickr, Fringe, Cattail, BlueTwit, Media Library, Beehive, Atlas, Social Tools, Productivity Tools

A few weeks ago one of my fellow IBM colleagues, Peter Andrews (Faculty and Innovation Strategist - Executive Business Institute) asked whether I’d like to have an interview with him talking about the topic of blogging and the kind of impact that is currently having within the corporate world. As you can probably imagine I just couldn’t ignore such an invitation and we spent a bit over one hour talking about blogs and how they are shaping the conversation within the enterprise. And so Effecting Blogging: Joining the Conversation was born and published on ibm.com.

That is right. Earlier on today, that particular interview I did with Peter was published over on the Internet and, if you are interested, you can grab it over here. To give you an idea of what you will find in there he is the summary published on the Web site:

"To some blogging is intriguing but mysterious. But with some basic tools and a few guidelines, it can be an effective business tool and even replace email as the center of work activity. The keys to successful blogging are writing about a theme you are passionate about, being consistent and persistent, having a thick skin and recognizing, above all else, that you are not in control. In essence, blogging is interactive, which means listening and reacting is as important as having your say."

From there onwards, there were a number of different questions I went through with Peter and I thought I would share some of them over here as well, so that you can get a glimpse of what you will find in the interview and how you may be able to skim through them easily:

Q. Could you say a bit about social computing and its emerging value to businesses?

Q. Back to blogging. What advice would you give to someone who wants, not necessarily to blog, but to get the most value (from a business perspective) from the blogs that are out there?

Q. This naturally leads to the advice you’d give someone who wants to be a successful blogger (for his or her career / business), since participation becomes inevitable. What would that advice be?

Q. One of your theses, which you put into practice, is making blogging, rather than face-to-face meetings or e-mail, the center of your work / life. Could you walk me through a typical day that illustrates this?

Q. This is almost unimaginable for some of us. Can it be approached with baby steps? If someone wants to make blogging central to their business life, what steps should they take?

Q. What are some of the creative uses of blogs that you’ve seen? What is your advice to those people?

Q. In your blogging life, have you had any surprises?

Q. On the other hand… Have you seen any blogging disasters? Any cautionary tales?

Q. Blogging, as with much of Web 2.0, is participatory, and possibly democratizing. Doesn’t this in some ways threaten management?

Q. Why do companies need to accept the ethos of blogging? Can there be a compromise between current business culture and this emerging participatory culture?
Does anything about the blogosphere worry you?

Q. How will blogging transform society?

Q. How does it change the discourse? Does it open up new topics? Change the depth? Engage new participants with different perspectives from text
bloggers?

Q. What do you see in the future for blogging and allied practices?

Yes, I realise that it is a long interview (Guess that’s what happens when you are excited about the topic you are passionate about! ), so without much further ado, I am just going to point you to Effecting Blogging: Joining the conversation from where you can download the full PDF IBM Executive Technology Report.

Hope you enjoy it, just as much as I did going through the interview with Peter. And stay tuned, because in that same interview I have already hinted some things about my new mission at work with the current job I do on a daily basis for this year. Some people may find it shocking. Some people may find it impossible. I can only say it’s now my reality!!

Tags: IBM, Executive Technology Report, Executive Business Institute, EBI, Peter Andrews, Effecting Blogging, Blogs, Metablogging, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Innovation, Conversations, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, ibm.com, e-mail, Productivity, Blogging 101, Technology Adoption

Today has been one of those incredibly hectic days with all sorts of things happening in various fronts. One of them I am hoping to be able to blog about in the next day or two. We shall see. It’s been rather interesting and exciting (Apart from very thought-provoking at times!) at the same time. But more on that later..

For now, I just want to share with you folks a video clip that one of my fellow IBM colleagues shared internally and which, to say the least, will make you think twice about the things you and I care. Yes!, another one of those blog posts where it’s the small things that matter… And here it is why:

After watching through that I am sure that one gets to learn a thing or two on putting the right things into the right perspective, don’t you think?

Update 14/02/08 : Special thanks to David Rojas for the additional comments and for finding the video in YouTube, much better to link to and embed than the original, so … updated!

Tags: Life, Priorities, Work, Money, Perspectives, Small Things, Small Things That Matter, What Really Matters, Economy, Poverty, Richness, Wealth

I am sure you would all remember how excited I was about making my full transition from my Windows notebook to my recently acquired MacBook Pro with the installation, and successful setup!, from the IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 Beta client for the Mac. So far things have been running pretty smooth and I can certainly confirm that the user experience is just from another world! It simply works! Well, to add further up into the excitement, here I am putting together this blog post where I am sharing what, to me, was the last collaboration tool I needed to have it in my Mac to completely move away from the Windows environment. And never come back! Yes, I am talking about IBM’s Lotus Sametime 8!

Up till not so long ago I was actually using Adium to connect to our internal Sametime server(s) and must confess that the user experience was not as good, probably because of how much I have gotten used to other Sametime related real-time collaboration tools, like Notesbuddy, IBM Community Tools and lately Sametime 7.5.1. The cons have been so numerous that all along it felt kind of crippled, blind, numb, so restricted, in short, such a sense of not getting the most out of it all.

So when today I had the chance to finally manage to connect my Lotus Sametime 8 to our internal Sametime server(s), I was just ecstatic! And big time!! I am back in business! And enjoying every minute of it with one IM client that expands further and beyond around the concept of Instant Messaging, real-time collaboration and social networking across teams and communities. I am sure that during the course of Lotusphere 2008 you had a chance to get some exposure on the huge buzz around what is happening in this space with Sametime 8. Well, not to worry, as time goes by, I am hoping to be able to blog some more about it so that you folks get a chance to see what I meant when I said, I am back in business!!

For now, here is a lovely screen shot I took today with Skitch (Whoooaaahhh, do I love this massive productivity tool quite a bit or what?!?!)  of Sametime 8 running quite happily on my MacBook Pro (Contact list not showing to protect the privacy from people, by the way, in case you are wondering why it is showing empty):

Rock on!!

Tags: IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Windows, Mac, MacBook Pro, Lotus, Lotus Notes 8, Notes 8.5, Notes 8.5 Beta, Lotus Sametime, Sametime, Sametime 8, Sametime 7.5.1, Adium, Notesbuddy, IBM Community Tools, ICT, Lotusphere2008, Skitch, Productivity Tools, Collaboration, Online Collaboration, Real-Time Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Software, Plugins, Eclipse

If last week I created a blog post on an upcoming conference event I would be rather interested in attending, but which in the end I will not be able to, since I have got other commitments, here I am again writing about another event that has passed through me without noticing and that I also wanted to blog about: Open Enterprise 2.0 Mashup Summit: Expanding Customer Value Networks, which already took place on February 1st. Bummer!!

Yes, indeed, double bummer! I first got a couple of notices from various resources about the upcoming event and although I knew I was not going to be able to make it, I still wanted to blog about it ahead of time to give folks a chance to potentially be share & share their thoughts with us. But you know how it goes, time flies when you are having fun and just today I realised the event took place already over a week ago! OUCH!!!

Would probably need to ensure it doesn’t happen any more, as I always find quite interesting such events where they are trying to do something that very few folks have ventured into at this point in time: mashups. That is right! You may have heard all over the place, and for years!, about traditional knowledge sharing and collaboration. You may have heard about social software and the impact it’s currently having within the corporate firewall. However, there isn’t, just yet, in my opinion, quite a buzz built up on what I think is what is going to make social networking click for the enterprise out there and big time in the end!; i.e. merging the best of the traditional knowledge sharing & collaboration with social computing: mashups!

If you take a look into the actual agenda you would agree with me that it is a rather impressive one, to say the least, and quite a few of the topics do actually indicate an initial trend of how social computing should not be focusing on substituting what’s already out there, but, on the contrary, enhance and augment what’s been used for years and which continues to be used! That challenge of mixing up successfully both traditional knowledge sharing & collaboration with social computing is what makes mashups such a fascinating topic at the moment. Still to be thoroughly absorbed by us all.

That’s one of the reasons why I was seriously looking forward to finding out whether folks, who may have been attending the event, will be sharing their insights on what actually happened and the outcome of the summit. So, did you make it to the event? Did you actually blog it? It looks like not many people have ventured into sharing their experiences just yet… Thus what are you waiting for? … We are all eager to find out some more on the next challenge for the Enterprise …

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Mashups, Composite Applications, Collaboration, Value Networks, VNA, Value Networks Analysis, Conference Events, KM Events, Summit, Mashup, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Web 2.0, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, Social Networks