E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Giving up on Work e-mail – Status Report on Week 6

And like every Friday, here I am again, folks, putting together this particular blog post to detail what my week has been like, trying to escape work related e-mail and divert, accordingly, most of the conversations into the social computing world. This week would be the sixth in a row since I got started with this new experiment and so far it has been one of the most interesting, more than anything else because for the first time in all of those weeks, I have now found out what may be the one and only reason why I might give up on this initiative and go back to good old e-mail! Here is a screen shot of this week’s report that I have uploaded into my Flickr account and which will you a hint or two on what happened:

I bet you have seen already what has happened during this week. Yes, indeed, my weekly intake of e-mails has gone sky high to a whopping 41 e-mails a week! Coming from 35, lowest number so far, from last week! Yes, I know that for most folks 41 e-mails a week would be something like paradise, but to me it is actually quite a substantial change, specially since I hit the lowest number of incoming e-mails last week with 35. And the funny thing is that up until today I just couldn’t figure it out why that was, till I was putting together an internal blog post on something completely different and it hit me big time!

So here it goes, here is the main reason why the number of e-mails has gone rather high this week, compared to other weeks: social software!!! Yes, that is right! The same social software tools that I have been using all along are the ones that have increased my weekly intake of e-mails! Can you imagine that? How did that happen? Well, because of something that is just so simple, that everyone takes it for granted: performance & availability!

As you can imagine, inside IBM we have got a rather robust corporate e-mail infrastructure that has been going strong for a good number of years. In fact, I cannot remember the last time when my Lotus Notes e-mail was down! However, I cannot say the same thing about some of the social software tools we use. Yes, that is a right. A good number of those various social tools are actually still running in pilot servers, while we test them and take them to the extreme, and with very limited support. Yes, the everlasting flavour of beta! And this week it has incredibly difficult for some of these tools because they have been more down than up, and when up rather slow! Yes, I know, one of those weeks that I am sure you folks could relate to as well.

So, the immediate consequence from that is that when people needed to get across through to me, they would be making use of whatever the social software tool we regularly use and instead of sharing the info they would not be able to because of those performance issues and they all diverted to what they know works consistently: e-mail! OUCH!!!

Yes, that is right, that is how I felt!! So it looks like from all of the different hurdles that I thought I would be confronted with, i.e. learning curve, user adoption, facilitation, cultural changes, open / public vs. private interactions, confidentiality, etc., it seems that it would be social software after all the one that may force me to give up in the end… Too funny, eh? Well, I hope that this was just a bad week for the infrastructure of those social software tools, because if it continues to be like this repeatedly, then I need to come up with a backup plan!

Oh, you were expecting me to say that I would eventually give up? NO WAY!!! I have seen the light and I will not back out from it. Yes, this was a rough week, but I got through it still eventually with a zero inbox and hardly any effort. Yes, I had to be a bit extra patient, but I am good at that, or so I am told. I understand that folks may contact me again through e-mail first, but then again, as soon as they see that those social software tools are up and running again, we would be going back to where we left it last week, i.e. the lowest number of incoming e-mails I received ever!

So, not a chance I will give up. I will still keep pushing for it, the pros clearly outnumber the cons and I am surely looking forward to seeing what happens next week, when I will be having Monday off and will surely be a rather busy week with the end of the first quarter of 2008 coming up! What do you think? Will the pilot servers and infrastructure hold up or will it just go down from here onwards and will have to implement that backup plan, which, by the way, will have to do quite a bit with living outside of the firewall, heh … What do you think? Were all of those weeks a dream and all of a sudden I got a painful wake-up call or will things go back to normal and that incoming number of e-mails will go down? We shall see…

Happy Easter to everyone who is celebrating and have a GREAT weekend!

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, email, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Productivity, Conversations, Dialogue, Openness, Progress Reports, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Performance, Availability, Beta, Easter

IBM Drives Enterprise Adoption of Social Networks with New Enterprise Adaptability Practice

And it looks like I may be continuing with some more blogging on IBM and its adoption of social software within the corporate environment, because a couple of days ago Jack Vinson pointed me to another superb article where one of my fellow IBM colleagues, and good friend, Scott Smith, describes the kind of disruption that social computing is causing to the enterprise world! Check out the article over at IBM Drives Enterprise Adoption of Social Networks with New Enterprise Adaptability Practice!

I know it is a rather lengthy blog post over at The Global Human Capital Journal, so I am going to keep things short and perhaps just point you folks to some of the most interesting quotes from the entire entry so that you can get a glimpse of what you will find in there, plus some more additional commentary from my side.

Oh, another good thing from the article that you should not miss is the description of a couple of technologies that IBM has been putting together and which, in my own personal experience, have become essential in my escaping and fighting work related e-mail. Yes, I am talking about SmallBlue, a.k.a. IBM Atlas and IBM’s Lotus Sametime family products. Very helpful tools not only capable of enhancing your real-time collaboration experience, but also with great potential to help you find the experts right when you need them and when they can collaborate and share their knowledge with you. Amazing stuff that, as I get to uncover the tools suite I am currently using to escape e-mail, you will be able to find out some more on it in upcoming blog posts.

So here is one of the various different quotes that I thought would be worth while mentioning over here:

"As organizations have already gone global (and become more complex), they want to drive innovation, and innovation comes down to people and collaboration. They have to connect those people and make the world small. They need to find the right people at the right time"

Indeed! Scott is right on the money with that statement and for those folks who may have been reading this blog for a little while now, this particular may resonate as very similar what some of the various topics I have been discussing over all along on the kind of impact social computing is having behind the corporate firewall. Amongst many other things it is helping business realise they have got an incredibly amount of great talent with various knowledge workers that in the past was just plainly hidden and not available. Now, all of a sudden, that focus that used to be on tools and processes is slowly, but steadily, leaving its place to a focus on people, i.e. the knowledge workers, as the main drivers of the different interactions and knowledge sharing activities. Something that in the past wasn’t having the same kind of impact as it is having nowadays, something that may well be *the* main success factor for those companies that would want to thrive in the current Knowledge Economy of the 21st century.

From there onwards you would get to read some more on how some of those various social networking technologies have been helping out different businesses address, and perhaps fix, one of the main issues that knowledge sharing and social computing have been having all along: finding experts, right when you need them!, to start sharing their knowledge and collaborating with other knowledge workers.

As the article continues to dive into the impact of these emerging technologies behind the corporate firewall, there was one particular quote that I thought was very relevant as well for the overall discussion and it is this one:

"People who don’t trust each other will not collaborate because collaboration is about sharing and collective risk taking. Innovation is a practical approach to channeling creativity, and the most efficient innovation entails cross-boundary collaboration. You’re stalking surprise and taking risks and making mistakes. That won’t happen if the enterprise culture doesn’t prize trust and discontinuous risk-taking"

I am not sure how many times I have been saying this already, but that trust is one of the main key success factors from any social networking tool available out there. People hang out in these social software tools on a regular basis, because they want to improve very much their social capital skills so that they can help improve their trust levels with others, specially in the corporate world, to such extent that they would be much more participative and engaging when they know someone they can trust, than when they don’t know a specific person they would need to collaborate with.

And that is one of the reasons why social software is key to any business, because if there is one thing that social software is good at is helping knowledge workers work through building those trust skills by sharing knowledge snippets that could be work related or not, but still provide value that would be helpful to others. Yes, that is right, interactions through communities making use of social software is going to bring many many benefits, but perhaps the most significant is the huge push on improving your own social capital skills, something that all along most corporations have been missing, as they thought it was not that important in the recent past. Well, think again, not only is it important, but crucial to any business to boost such set of skills to help bring knowledge sharing and collaboration into the next level.

And from there onwards you will be heading towards the end of the article where you would be able to find this other interesting gem which I think summarises pretty well why business cannot longer afford ignoring social computing, both inside and outside of the corporate firewall, and how if they don’t pay attention and react to it soon, they would probably be the businesses of the 21st century that would be struggling the most to the point where they may no longer exist in the medium / long term:

"Web 2.0 is the age of collaboration; people pay more attention when companies solicit and act on their input. Brand value will be increasingly driven by how well the brand inspires and participates in customer relationships and experience. Too many companies still see themselves as producers and customers as consumers. Of course, this is literally true, but the value of the underlying good continues to drop, and Web 2.0 enables people to create value via scalable digital relationships"

Thus still think that Enterprise 2.0 hasn’t got its place within the corporate world? Not sure what you would think, but something tells me it has, and a lovely spot, too, I must admit!

Tags: IBM, Jack Vinson, Scott Smith, Human Capital Management, Enterprise Adoption, Technology Adoption, Global Human Capital Journal, SmallBlue, IBM Atlas, Atlas, Lotus Sametime, Sametime, Social Network Analysis, SNA, Social Software, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Media, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Communities, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Management, KM, Innovation, Expertise Location, Trust, Social Capital, Skills, Knowledge Economy