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

OpenNTF – Bookmark Viewer for IBM Lotus Connections Dogear

I am sure you would agree with me that Social Computing, and, in particular, social software tools, still have got plenty of different challenges within the enterprise in order to provoke that massive cultural shift most of us have been looking forward to for a long while. One of those challenges has always been trying to accommodate the mobile workforce and provide something so relatively simple as offline capabilities from most of those social tools.

Yet, it is not happening as much as one would have hoped for, don’t you think? I mean, there are some Enterprise 2.0 Social Software applications out there that are starting to tap into the offline world. Alas, not as pervasively as what you would have hoped for. And that’s one of the main issues that most mobile knowledge workers have got right now as we speak with regards to their own adoption of social software in a corporate environment.

At IBM, where 50% of the workforce is mobile already, we are seeing this very same issue as well and the interesting thing is that more and more we are seeing how some of our various social software tools we are exposed to on a daily basis are making serious attempts to accommodate offline interactions. And the latest example is coming from one of my favourite social software tools: IBM’s Lotus Connections.

Actually, from one of the components I have started to rely very heavily on over the last couple of years: Dogear (Now graciously renamed Bookmarks after Lotus Connections v2.5 went GA). Check out "Bookmark Viewer for IBM Lotus Connections Dogear" by Hanspeter Jochmann, where you will be able to see how all of the bookmarks folks may have been storing in Dogear / Bookmarks can now be taken off into a Lotus Notes database that allows you to have a rich set of interactions, while working offline, and then synchronise them back to the server once you are connected again. Amazingly powerful! And something I was really looking forward to after having gone through some very bad experiences myself.

Remember Ma.gnolia? I was a big fan of it; I had several thousand bookmarks stored in it and was a rather heavy user all along… Till one day, I came to work, was on my way to bookmark a few sites and found out Ma.gnolia went through a server crash and LOST all of my bookmarks! Without a chance to provide a backup or anything. Just GONE! All of them! Ouch!! I thought I would have to re-create most of the work I put together in it, but lucky enough Dogear came to my rescue and allowed me to recover most of it.

Ever since that painful experience happened, I haven’t gotten outside and use any other social bookmarking site available out there. Not only because I haven’t been convinced that any of them would do what I would want them to do (Specially with the protection and backup of my own bookmarks!), but also because I don’t think I would feel comfortable going through that very same experience of losing my bookmarks once more, should they suffer from an irrecoverable server crash.

So I have decided to go internal and rely, almost exclusively, on Lotus Connections Bookmarks inside the firewall. And every now and then I synchronise them with my Dogear / Bookmarks over at ibm.com so that folks out there would have an opportunity to check the kinds of links that are of interest to me and that can be shared externally. For the internal ones, you know where they would go… hehe

Thus when Hanspeter shared this brilliant offline Bookmark Viewer for Dogear I just couldn’t help but giving it a try and all along to state I have been rather happy is probably an understament. It just works! My fellow colleague, and good friend, Luis Benitez, blogged about it and pointed out to a YouTube video that explains how that Notes database works:

And if you notice, it pretty much puts together that key concept of replication and "working offline" from traditional groupware tools into the space of social software, which, I am not sure what you would think, but I think it’s just pretty awesome! Best of both worlds in just a single application coming together nicely and allowing me to always be control of how I use it, whether I am connected or not. Just brilliant!

I just hope that plenty of other social software tools follow this very same trend, because otherwise we are going to continue missing out on a large chunk of the corporate workforce who are constantly on the road, disconnected, while at customers, and the last thing they would want to worry is try to figure out whether they can get connected to just bookmark a site. This Bookmark Viewer clearly shows the way it’s possible to accommodate those needs, because, after all, we all know what’s like being on the road without a live Internet connection, don’t you think?

(Oh, before I forget another special thanks to Hanspeter for helping make our lives much much easier with our own adoption of social software tools in combination with those other tools we have been using for a long while now! Talking about a nice, tight and smooth integration of the 1.0 and 2.0 worlds! Well done, Hanspeter! Thanks ever so much!)

Tags: IBM Lotus Connections, Lotus Connections, Connections, Bookmarks, Dogear, Social Bookmarking, Social Bookmarks, OpenNTF, Bookmark Viewer, Lotus Notes, Notes, Databases, Offline, Mobile Workforce, Workforce, Knowledge Workers, Mobility, IBM, Hanspeter Jochmann, Replication, Synchronisation, Ma.gnolia, Crashes, Data Protection, Data Ownership, Data Backup, ibm.com, Luis Benitez, YouTube, Videos, Screencasts, Groupware, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, Productivity, Productivity Tips, Tips, Hints, Tricks, Hacks, Hacking

The Surprising Science of Motivation by Dan Pink

If you have been reading this blog for a while now, you would know more or less what my thoughts are on that topic that has always been, rather unfortunately, too!, associated very closely with traditional Knowledge Management and which doesn’t seem to have escaped as well the world of Social Computing: awards and incentives within a knowledge sharing culture!

In the past I have talked a few times about such concept of incentivising your knowledge workers with rewards so they go the extra mile to keep sharing their knowledge in a futile attempt to spark activity around your teams or communities. I am saying futile, because in over a decade that I have been working within the KM field I have yet to see an awards programme that is actually effective and efficient, not only from the business perspective, but from the knowledge workers’ one as well! It just hasn’t happened. And probably never will (And thank goodness for that!).

In the last couple of weeks, a good friend of mine, one of my various virtual KM mentors, David Gurteen, has been twittering rather often on a superb TED video clip he bumped into and which touches base on this very same topic, but with a wonderfully fresh new approach that I am sure is going to blow your minds and leave you speechless. At least, that’s the effect that it had in me as I watched through it over the weekend!

The video clip is a recording of a TED presentation earlier on this year, in Oxford, by Dan Pink that lasts for a little bit over 18 minutes and which I can assure you right now will be worth every penny of that time! In it, Dan gets to explain what science knows about incentives and awards and what the business seems to keep ignoring time and time again! And I couldn’t have agreed more with him on that statement!

Now, I know I could talk for ages on this topic, since it is one that comes close to my heart in detailing how much damage it has done to KM by itself, in general, but also to the corporate world by and large. And somehow, it looks like as social computing and social networking become more and more relevant by the day within the Enterprise world, we seemed not to have learned our lessons from the last few decades and we are making the very same mistakes by not even looking back as we did back then and that went wrong.

So before that continues to happen without remedy, I am going to stop right now and just point you to one of those TED videos that is surely going to rock your world, in every single way possible! On the topic of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation here is Dan Pink making a rather compelling case on why we need to change our ways and perceptions towards incentives if we would want to survive in the Knowledge Economy of the 21st century and leave behind what science has proved time and time didn’t work in the first place. No matter what approach!

Believe me, this is one of those videos you will be forwarding on a regular basis to various different people who keep asking you how they can incentivise their teams and communities to be top performers. Encourage them to watch it and see how it wows them to levels they haven’t seen, nor experienced, before! Yes, I know, it is that good! And I am surely glad that David tweeted about it a few times encouraging everyone to watch it. Because now that I have done so, I feel like we are on to another really exciting fight in the Enterprise 2.0 space… One where we will need to succeed! Or else! Here is the embedded code for it so you can watch it directly from here:

Fascinating, wasn’t it? I am sure you would agree with me it’s been one of the best TED videos we have seen in a long while. And while watching through it, I just couldn’t help thinking as well about one of those thought-provoking and rather revealing blog posts from another good friend, and virtual KM mentor as well, Dave Snowden, who couldn’t have explained it all in better words that these: Rendering Knowledge.

And, now, to finish up and wrap this blog post I thought I would leave you with a couple of truly inspirational quotes for those folks out there who consider themselves Knowledge Workers and who, I am sure, would be able to relate to them quite nicely. Both of these quotes, by the way, match so closely the main theme behind the TED video that’s incredibly surprising:

"A knowledge worker is someone who gets to decide what he does each morning" by Thomas A. Stewart

Or this other one, which, in my opinion, is just spot on:

"Knowledge workers are those people who have taken responsibility for their work lives . They continually strive to understand the world about them and modify their work practices and behaviors to better meet their personal and organizational objectives. No one tells them what to do. They do not take No for an answer. They are self motivated" by David Gurteen

Tags: Awards, Incentives, Motivation, Recognition, Inspiration, Inspiring, David Gurteen, TED, TED Videos, Videos, Presentations, Dan Pink, Science, Business, Dave Snowden, Rendering Knowledge, Knowledge Workers, Knowledge Work, Knowledge Economy, Thomas A. Stewart, Tom Stewart, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, Productivity

The Man Who Should Have Used Lotus Connections – On the Misuse of Email

I am not sure whether you may have been listening to the CBC radio show Spark interview I did with Nora Young earlier on this week, and which I have blogged about it over here, but, if you have, you may have noticed I have tried to explain how all along, during all of this time living "A World Without Email", I don’t have anything against it per se, as a system to help people communicate with one another. In fact, I still think it’s probably one of the best tools out there for 1:1 communications.

A different matter would be email as a collaboration tool, although that’s perhaps the subject for another blog post at some point in time. What I have been up against all along, throughout all of these months though, is not email as such, but how we keep misusing it (And abusing it!), over and over, for the daily tasks that we know we could use better tools for, in the first place, but that perhaps we don’t because email is just way too easy.

To follow up that statement with an example, I would love to point out to you a YouTube video that one of my fellow IBM colleagues, Jean Francois Chenier, has made available and which has been so incredibly popular inside IBM with hundreds of views and downloads that by that same popular demand it made it into YouTube itself, and the best part is that it won’t be the last one!

Go and have a look into The Man Who Should Have Used Lotus Connections; a short, incredibly accurate, and hilarious, video clip of a bit over three and a half minutes that describes the painful experience of going through such a relative easy task / activity of sharing files with your colleagues using what we have been using for years: yes, indeed, email! (Funny enough, if you would ask me for the number #1 misuse of email file sharing will be it, by far!; hummm, well, perhaps followed closely as well by Reply to All !)

You will find plenty of humorous commentary that describes pretty well (Too well at times!) the scenario that we go through every time we share a file through email. Pretty much along the lines of what Chris Rasmussen detailed not along ago with this graphic, but this time around showing it with an amazingly funny animation.

The rather interesting part of the video clip is from minute 2:14 onwards, where you will be able to see what a difference it would have made making use of a social software tool for file sharing. In this particular example, it showcases IBM’s Lotus Connections (The Files component, to be more precise, which is by now one of my favourite social software tools behind the IBM firewall! And I am sure you will be able to see why after you go through the video clip).

I tell you, indeed, after you watch that last part of the video you will see the huge difference between both approaches and you will see as well why I’m so keen on living "A World Without Email", specially when someone decides to send me a 10, 20, 30MB large presentation just because they wanted to make things really easy. Really? Do you think so? Specially, after going through that video clip? I am not sure what you would think, but I don’t think so!

A special big thanks to Jean Francois for putting together in a wonderful video clip the struggles we go through with relatively simple tasks just because we didn’t want to start Thinking Outside the Inbox! Well done! Thanks for showing us the way, Jean Francois!

Have a good one everyone!

Tags: CBC, CBC Radio, CBS Spark, Spark, Nora Young, YouTube, Videos, Jean Francois Chenier, IBM Lotus Connections, Lotus Connections, Connections, Chris Rasmussen, Files, File Sharing, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, email, Productivity, Re-purposing Email, No-Email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, Information Overload, A World Without Email