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

Collaborating Externally with Your Customers: The Final Frontier of Enterprise 2.0

I have been working in the areas of Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Online Communities and Social Computing for over a decade and I do still remember the main concerns people had back then when wanting to collaborate with customers and business partners in an effective manner, or other people outside a company’s firewall, for that matter. Back then, in my role as an advocate, and an ambassador, on collaboration and knowledge sharing tools, the main issues we were encountering were, mostly, the lack of new emerging capabilities to help improve an already existing experience that was relying far too much on traditional options like email or Instant Messaging. So that provoked that a whole bunch of interactions with customers were being buried, for good, in email or IM conversations that were rather difficult to track and too cumbersome to engage with at times. 10 years later one keeps hearing that very same inhibitor (Or excuse, who knows), when trying to collaborate and share their knowledge with external parties. Thus both email and IM still remain *the* main collaboration tools suite as back then. But, is that today’s reality really? Do we have choices now? Have we made some progress in this area? Or are we still relying far too much on those traditional tools? Have you, actually, made an effort to look out there for other options? I am sure you folks would have plenty of answers to those questions. I, too, have one I would want to share with you all: now we *do* have choices! Now it’s time to move on to them and change the way we work!

What’s our excuse this time around? I mean, 10 years have gone by and if you would look into the landscape of the hundreds, if not thousands, of knowledge sharing, collaboration and social networking tools that we have today one would probably be capable of questioning why do we still rely so much on those traditional tools, instead of perhaps looking for better, more innovative ways of sharing our knowledge across with those who we would need to work together with in the first place. I guess we could accept that argument 10 years ago when the options weren’t that many. But today? In 2010? Do we still have an excuse? Probably not. Actually, hopefully not!

It’s interesting though to see how this whole game has started shifting gears without us, knowledge (Web) workers, having much of a choice to keep ignoring it nor neglecting it. I have been seeing this very same thing with some colleagues at work, who keep saying that the only way they have got to communicate, collaborate and innovate with their customers is through email, or Instant Messaging. Something that, back then, perhaps, I probably wouldn’t venture into questioning further, but today? Boy, today I am ready to question it and big time! Specially, given the recent announcements that we have seen going by earlier on this week…

I am pretty sure that this very same situation I am describing of how things are happening in such a large corporation as IBM, would probably be the same, or rather similar, for most enterprises out there. If people have been using email for decades, why change, right? If they have been getting by with not too much trouble altogether, why bother, right? If I am just too comfortable within my own comfort zone, why change, why bother? Well, those may be well be very good reasons, but I have got one for folks out there as well: your customers (and business partners!) are the first ones who want to look for much more effective and efficient ways of collaborating, of participating from the co-creation process, of innovating together. Email just doesn’t cut it anymore! It may well have 10 years ago, but not in today’s corporate environment. And this is something that, deep inside, we all realise about, but keep ignoring / neglecting it. Well, maybe it’s time that we start paying attention…

Because what happens when your customers and business partners start working together, without you, on a collaborative business environment you provide? Yes, I know! Before you know it they are off to build stronger personal business relationships that go beyond that odd email exchange every now and then… without you! How does it feel being left out? I bet that’s not much of a comfortable feeling altogether, don’t you think?

You know, there are a bunch of us out there who keep saying that the final frontier of Enterprise 2.0 does not lie behind the firewall. Quite the opposite… The ultimate goal for Enterprise 2.0 is to reach further and beyond the corporate firewall and go where your customers are, and not necessarily on social tools like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, amongst several others. I am sure that plenty of businesses and organisations out there are currently working on providing such kind of infrastructure out there on their Extranets, as a method to prepare the way for knowledge workers to start thinking outside the inbox and get ready for what’s to come, if not already here!

IBM, in this particular case is no different than any other business or organisation out there. A few years back fellow colleagues would be providing extensive feedback on how limiting it actually was communicating with customers using just email or IM. However, and thank goodness for that!, things have been changing dramatically in this space over the course of the years and when before there was a scarcity of choices, nowadays there are a bunch of rather interesting options available to everyone out there. These have also been part of our focus on our internal efforts of evangelising on collaborative, knowledge sharing and social software tools, more than anything else with that mindset of helping knowledge workers understand that collaboration and true co-creation will also need to happen outside the firewall, and the sooner people prepare for it, the better. You can only hide inside for up to so long, before you are left behind without remedy. Time to move on with the times …

That’s why when fellow colleagues ask us about what options do we have available out there for them to collaborate and share their knowledge with their clients outside of the beaten track of the well known Web 2.0 tools, we provide them with a quick glimpse of what’s available and how they can engage with that particular audience. That’s when we start talking about how they could make use of Lotus Connections on the ibm.com Web site, or My developerWorks, or the Lotus Greenhouse. Or, finally, one of those rather interesting environments, sitting up in the cloud, which, just recently, went through a new major release with a bunch of nifty enhanced features: IBM LotusLive.

Yes, indeed, pretty much like for any other business out there, there is probably no longer an excuse to stay inside of the firewall. In the case of IBM, LotusLive proves this very same point time and time again. Here we have got the best of both worlds: a cloud offering that combines offline and real-time interactions; a cloud offering that combines both traditional communication and collaboration tools (Like email or IM) with the new emerging social networking tools (Social File Sharing, Activities, Communities, tagging, social calendaring, social bookmarking, etc. etc.), that we have all grown to be rather fond of with Web 2.0, and that are now part of the new upgrade that took place earlier on this week…

To be honest, a lot has been written about it already on such announcement, so I probably won’t be adding much more to it, other than perhaps point you folks to the wonderfully insightful blog entries that folks like ReadWriteWeb have done over at ”IBM Lotus Notes Takes a New Turn in its Long Historical Run“, or my good friends Ed Brill, Todd (Turbo) Watson or, one other of my favourite reviews, actually, the one coming from Sameer Patel. Too much stuff to comment on in a single blog post!! I would encourage you all to go and read through those as time goes by…

Finally, that’s why we may start witnessing how plenty of businesses and organisations will start thinking, if not busy already with it all, that perhaps once they have moved into the Enterprise 2.0 space, i.e. internal collaboration and knowledge sharing through internal social software tools, perhaps the next stage, the next level of interactions, the next frontier to cross, right about the time when knowledge (Web) workers would be feeling comfortable with that new way of interacting, would be to go where their customers may well be already… waiting for them. And, somehow, I know this may be rather silly, but I am incredibly excited that when our colleagues are ready to make that move, there will no longer be any inhibitor to help them dive in right away! Even for something so relatively simple like conducting a LotusLive Meeting with screen sharing on the Mac, something that wasn’t available before and that’s now part of the new release of LotusLive. You see? Now, I no longer have an excuse myself either!

Will you be joining us there soon?

Technorati Tags: External Collaboration, Internal Collaboration, Choices, Options, IBM Lotus Connections, Lotus Connections, Connections, ibm.com, My deverloperWorks, Lotus Greenhouse, IBM LotusLive, LotusLive, ReadWriteWeb, Ed Brill, Turbo Todd Watson, Sameer Patel, Co-Creation, 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

My Top 5 iPad Apps of the Week – Week #7

Earlier on today, I had the wonderful opportunity to participate on an IBM internal webcast, and face to face event (For those folks who could make it over live in the US), around the topic of Apple and how its various products (Macbook and MacBook Pro, iPhone & iPad) are continuing to penetrate the enterprise world, specially, IBM’s, as more and more of my fellow colleagues begin to experiment and play around with these devices to see whether they could be up to the job in helping them be as productive, if not more!, as with other gadgets they may have been using in the past, over the course of the years. The event was several hours long and rather interesting as well as enlightening. It gave us all an opportunity to see how these Apple products could certainly help knowledge workers become more efficient, and although I can’t share any of the materials shown during the event externally, I can certainly tell you that they all corroborated something I have known myself for the last 3 years already… and counting … Apple products *are*, eventually, more than ready for the enterprise! Even, the iPad!

Yes, that’s right, we talked about MacBooks and MacBook Pros, about the iPhone and its various perks, specially for the mobile workforce, and, of course, about the iPad and how the latter is also helping shape the way we compute through a new mobile experience. So I thought it would be a good opportunity, once again, to drop by over here and continue further with that series of blog posts on My Top 5 iPad Apps of the Week that I have been collecting through Twitter initially as #elsuapps and share a couple of other interesting links that I have bumped into, since the last blog post, which seem to claim, rather strongly, how the iPad itself is here to stay not only as a superb consumer driven product, but also as a business one.

If not, check out the really insightful blog post put together by Krishnan Subramanian over at CloudAve under the title “iPad in Enterprise: IT Folks Can Have One Too” where Krishnan references further a good number of additional links that state not only how business people, but also IT related folks, are turning towards the iPad and liking what they are seeing. So if you can combine both workforces to talk the same language (i.e. “I want an iPad!”) there is  great chance that exposure and willingness to have would be rather phenomenal and probably unstoppable. His article surely is a worth while read to figure out what other businesses out there are doing in this space.

Then, head over to this other article by Dan Frommer at Business Insider or this other one from Gary Goldman where you will be able to read further on plenty more insights on how the iPad is taking by storm other kinds of business. Yes, indeed, it looks like it is unstoppable! But it gets better! If the corporate world is looking out there very closely how such device is having such a huge impact for the mobile workforce (For the most part), it looks like Education is following up quite nicely…

Check out this wonderful and very enlightening blog post put together by my good friend Victor Ruiz, under the title “El iPad y la educación” (Article in Spanish, by the way), where he comes to share some really good tips on how the iPad can influence education overall, as well as a good number of worth while reading references on how different institutions and organisations are starting to pay attention to this rather innovative way / method of delivering education and training. It surely is another worth while read, and I am certain I would have an opportunity to bring forward a good number of other relevant links related to how the iPad itself will be coming along to a school system near you any time soon! Perhaps at a later time as well, I will take the opportunity of how I feel myself about such device disrupting the way we not only learn about new things, but we actively interact with them all! Stay tuned!

For now though, it’s that part of the blog entry where I will be spending a few minutes covering My Top 5 iPad Apps of the Week and this time around for Week #7. We have gone a long way already, but the mechanics of how this section works has remained pretty much the same. Untouched. You know, I will be listing 4 different iPad apps of the week that I continue to make regular use of, and a 5th one, which is usually the iPad Game of the Week. Short descriptions, rather to the point, with their corresponding URL links, and where I just share the one or two key features I like the most, or the one or two reasons that keep dragging me back and forth into each and everyone of those applications. Hopefully, you will find them helpful as well as time goes by. Thus without much further ado, here we go with this week’s picks:

• FlickStackr: I have been playing with a good number of Flickr related iPad apps and so far I have found two of them that I really enjoy quite a bit. The first one is FlickStackr. And the reason why I like it the most, so far, is because it allows me to not only view Flickr pictures in a wide variety of options, but it also allows me to upload pictures I have stored in the iPad in a breeze and through quite an amazing user experience with every single level of detail considered! Yes, if you are using Flickr, a must-have!
• BlogShelf: In the past, I have mentioned a couple of iPad apps related to RSS feed reading from Web sites and blogs, with perhaps Reeder, Newsrack and River of News as my favourite ones so far. Yet, I have got a special place for a good number of blogs that I consider special, because I keep coming back to them on a rather regular basis; they are my daily reads, the ones where I take a bit of extra time to digest their content, because over the course of the years I have grown to trust the people behind them as well as meet most of them in real life and somehow having a special place like BlogShelf helps me keep treasuring such a treat when reading their blogs. It’s just like having your own library of essential reading through blogs. I tell you, quit an experience, if you are looking for that unique space that those essential reads of yours would deserve.
• BeejiveIM with Push: I have been testing as well a good number of different Instant Messaging clients for the iPad and to be honest with you, if I would have to single out only one of them that you would need to look into it, that would be BeejiveIM. It’s a superb iPad app that not only does the job right, i.e. allowing you to keep up with the multiple IM protocols available out there, but also doing a beautiful job at it. It’s almost like you don’t feel you are using IM after all. And for someone who relies so much on it IM to get your job done throughout the day, this is certainly one of those essential must-have iPad apps that you won’t be able to skip for much longer. Go and grab it today!
• VLC Media Player: What can I say about VLC that folks out there may not know already, regardless of the operating system they may use. VLC is my favourite media player on the Mac, and on Windows, and now on the iPad, too! It’s a wonderful experience to be able to have an application that will allow you to play any kind of media file without a single glitch and providing a very similar experience than what you would get on a Mac, for instance. But better. This time around on the iPad. Now, there are plenty of things I could say about this app, but I am actually going to point you folks to a recent blog post by Victor Ruiz, once again, who wrote a rather interesting overview of how it actually works and how you can set it up. Article is in Spanish, but you would be able to see how straight forward it is and how well it actually works. Another must-have app, for certain!

• Trism: And, finally, the iPad Game of the Week. Actually, this is a special one to me, more than anything else because it is not really just for iPads, but also for the iPhone; in fact, it was one of the very very first games I got for my iPhone and I cannot tell the amount of hours I have spent playing some wonderful games in there getting the most out of some of the native concepts behind such devices. If you loved it on the iPhone, there is a great chance that you will like it as well on the iPad. The experience is just as engaging and the challenge, just as tough! Which is ideal, because it is one of the games I play the most when I am off to a long business trip! Endless hours of good fun! No doubt!

Ok, folks, that was it for this week! Another round of My Top 5 iPad Apps of the Week for you to have a look and perhaps give it a try to one or two of them. I am hoping you will find them just as useful as I do myself. The truth is that I am finding this series of blog posts rather interesting, because one revealing thought from this series is the fact that I am starting to sort my iPad apps per week on my iPad and somehow that’s given me an opportunity to manage better how I get to find them time and time again, without having to resort to the super nifty search option. It also kind of reminds me of the good number of apps I still have got to share with you all, but that would be the subject for another blog post in its due time … Enjoy them!

Technorati Tags: #elsuapps, Apple, Applications, Computing, elsuapps, Games, Insights, iPad, iPad Apps, Mobile Computing, Mobility, Recommendations, Computing Experiences, iPad for Biz, Enterprise iPad, Krishnan Subramanian, CloudAve, Dan Frommer, Gary Goldman, Victor Ruiz, Education, Training, Learning, Flickstackr, BlogShelf, BeejiveIM with Push, BeejiveIM, VLC Media Player, VLC, Trism

Enterprise 2.0: Two Success Stories on Connecting People with People to Make a Difference!

If you remember, a couple of months back, I briefly talked about a recent business trip that I did to Germany to come and visit a customer for a couple of days where we would have a bunch of events, and plenty more conversations, to talk about Enterprise 2.0, Social Software Adoption, online Communities and Knowledge Management 2.0, amongst several other topics. Probably nothing out of the ordinary, to be honest, compared to what most of you folks out there, who may also be social software evangelists and ambassadors, may be involved with on a daily basis. What was rather extraordinary though was that, throughout those couple of days I spent in Ludwigshafen, I finally met some really good friends while talking about everything but social tools and how, at a rather rampant pace, a bunch of new social behaviours, within the business context of a large enterprise, are changing the corporate culture of BASF (with Connect.BASF) to make it much more collaborative and empowering to share their knowledge across to keep accelerating their various different innovation strategies. Who wouldn’t feel inspired with that, right? … I surely did!

That’s why today, after a few weeks have gone by (Time enough for me to digest further on what I got exposed to throughout those couple of days), I thought I would go ahead and share with you folks some of the highlights from those workshops and presentations I participated in, as well as some of the conversations we had throughout the visit. As a starting point, I was invited by CheeChin Liew, then followed by Cordelia Kroos and Horst-Dieter Lange, all of whom were wonderful hosts to an unforgettable visit… And I will explain why shortly.

Like I have mentioned above, the premise of the couple of days in LU was essentially to get together, and exchange our experiences, know-how, lessons learned, good practices and whatever other stories on what social software adoption within the firewall is supposed to be all about for such large companies as both BASF and IBM. Needless to say that those conversations were all rather engaging and very enlightening, more than anything else, because I probably learned just as much as we all did! Yes, I know, you can never, or should never!, stop learning from what other folks are doing in this Enterprise 2.0 space, because there is always a great chance that you would learn something else new during that time that you didn’t realise about before!

And I did! As a starting point, we hardly ever talked about social tools, but more about changes of behaviour, of already existing habits, of how corporate cultures are being affected, like a storm, by all of this social networking stuff, of the challenges we all keep facing with our adoption efforts, etc. etc. It’s amazing how, in most cases, we may all be working for different companies, different industries, different business areas, yet our challenges all seem to be down to the same dead-end: the corporate culture AND how to change it to make it more 2.0 savvy!

Thus there were a number of highlights that were rather interesting and insightful and that I thought I would spend a few minutes on and see how much you could also probably relate to BASF’s experiences with their own adoption of social networking tools. Perhaps, like I said, we are all getting closer to one another more than we originally thought… How about these?:

It’s never been about the tools, but more about the so-called “state of mind” or mindset (Enterprise 2.0): That’s just so accurate! To me, it was rather refreshing to eventually meet up with CheeChin, Cordelia and Horst Dieter’s teams and discover that they, too, felt, the biggest challenge is not technology, nor the processes, but more how you, as a business, can empower your knowledge workforce to become smarter at what they do while not trying to get them to work harder. It’s all about accelerating your knowledge workers’ productivity and efficiency, which, in return, will result in helping accelerate the execution of the specific business processes in place. So to them, like a good bunch of folks out there, social computing walks hand in hand along with executing effectively business processes, which is probably way beyond the limitation of just looking into another set of social tools hoping magic will happen. Well, it may not. Focus on the people and I can guarantee you it will be coming around!

Executive sponsorship / leadership AND involvement still is key: One of the other major highlights from my visit was the fact that while delivering a couple of presentations on the topic of Social Software Adoption and Evangelism, in general, even executives made time out of their tremendously busy schedules to chime in AND participate from the events, as well as the conversations. Their involvement, throughout the whole process of adoption of these new 2.0 social behaviours, within a business context, has been phenomenal and judging by the growth of their internal Enterprise 2.0 initiative (As my good friend Luis Benitez describes nicely over at this blog post) their success is more than guaranteed! They not only have got their executive buy-in, but they are willing to walk the talk, and that’s as good as it gets, in my opinion. Don’t you think?

It is an effort from everyone that should never be underestimated!: Plenty of folks keep saying that Enterprise 2.0 is a movement that should be driven by one specific group, whether it is Communications, Marketing, HR, Sales, IT / Infrastructure, even Knowledge Management. The truth is that is not entirely correct. It’s an effort to be made by everyone in the organisation, regardless of the business unit! And this is something that, to me, was also a big ah-ha moment, when throughout the couple of days we spent together I presented to various different groups, within Communications / Marketing, IT, KM and they were all on the same wavelength… Ready to commit and engage on making things work, not just within their own business unit, but across the enterprise, which is probably as good as it gets as well, because the level of penetration from your own enablement and awareness campaign is probably going to be much more effective if you reach out to multiple groups and you get them involved to help you drive those adoption efforts from the very first moment. And the way CheeChin, Cordelia and Horst-Dieter are coordinating their adoption efforts within, and beyond!, their teams is just rather commendable, to say the least. Get them all involved and you will be much better off right from the start!

Communities are still *the* major drivers of social software within any enterprise!: I will never tire of repeating this particular one message: whether folks realise about it, whether they would want to acknowledge or ignore / neglect it, if you would want to accelerate the adoption rate of social software within your business, you will be plenty more successful having a community building program, than not having it. Why? Because communities live and thrive on multiple complex interactions for their daily routines of collaborating and sharing their knowledge across and, in most cases, traditional tools like email are no longer cutting the chase of keeping up with the fast pace of how information and knowledge flows inside, and outside!, of a community. So having the right community building techniques to foster interactions and the right community tooling surely is going to help your business adopt, and adapt, to these social software tools, and behaviours!, much easier than whatever you could have imagined. And BASF has got a great story to share in this regard which I touch base briefly below on a recent presentation CheeChin did at one of those special events that surely marks a before and an after. But read on to the next entry point, before I spoil the fun!

You don’t have to give up on the past, but augment it with the future!: This is something that I have been postulating myself for years and that, some times, creates some interesting reactions, specially from those revolutionaries who feel that Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t relate to anything at all from what was previously done. Well, rather the opposite! If you build your 2.0 adoption strategy around what is available from the past, you are preparing the way for your knowledge workers to make a much easier transition into new ways of knowledge sharing and collaboration, moving beyond into the next natural wave of social business interactions. This was a rather interesting discussion throughout the specific workshop we did on Knowledge Management 2.0, where we were contemplating how Social Networking has never tried to substitute and replace all of the efforts and hard work that have been put together with traditional Knowledge Management, for instance. Quite the opposite, actually. It’s always been about augmenting what was already available out there, to make it better, smarter, more efficient, more effective and productive at the same time, so that relatively easy tasks like finding the right experts or the right piece of information / knowledge would not take hours, but a matter of minutes. So if you can build further up and benefit, tremendously, from what you already have, why neglect it and abandon it, when you can make the most out of it and inspire a new wave of open, public and transparent collaboration and knowledge sharing interactions? Don’t you think that would be too much of a missed opportunity? … I think so!

And, finally, talking about openness and transparency, how about going public with it AND share your 2.0 experience? Well, that’s exactly what the folks at BASF have done already. Want to learn more? Go out there and share your story with others, so they can help you enhance it and make it more unique. Go out there and find out for yourself how we are all benefiting tremendously from these conversations taking place, out in the open, on social software adoption, where good practices, lessons learned, extensive know-how and experiences, get shared across so nicely it’s difficult to stop, or give up on them altogether! That’s probably what happened to CheeChin himself when, just recently, he was invited to go and speak at the NLLUG event in Amsterdam about their experiences implementing and adopting social software within the enterprise to help them drive innovation into the next level!

The immediate result of that is that you folks can benefit from that as well, because, as a result of CheeChin’s wonderful presentation at NLLUG, he then went ahead and shared it across at the BASF Slideshare space under the title “Our Online Network connect.BASF“. Don’t worry, you won’t have to go too far away; I will go ahead and embed it over here in this blog post, so you can flip through the charts easily and stop at some of the most interesting ones, like #7, #8, #9, and, of course, #14 (On Communities), as well as the couple of success stories shared across as well (Yes, I, too, love, and heart good, success stories! Yay!). Worth while going through for sure! So here you go:

 

Not bad at all, don’t you think? Well, I have got another one for you. A tremendously powerful and touching story, where people shine at their best; where technology and tools become an enabler, what they should be all along; where innovation can take the most of unexpected paths to make a huge difference between getting the job done and going the extra mile altogether along with it! This is one of those stories you would need to make time for it, because it will be not only rather inspiring on its own, but it would also help you identify one of the key premises behind Enterprise 2.0, right from the start: the opportunity to successfully connect people to people AND make a difference as a result of such serendipitous encounters. Thus go ahead and read through 3M‘s John Woodworth‘s “How social networks can answer a question faster than Google“, whose title itself is rather thought provoking on its own, with regards to the power of the network(s) vs. traditional search engines like our good old friend Google Search. Who would have thought about that, right?

Disclaimer: Yes, both BASF and 3M are customers to IBM. Hopefully, this post will highlight though how we all may not be that far apart from each other after all, regardless of the industry, vendor and whatever else, with regards to the adoption and embracing of social networking for business, as others seem to keep claiming time and time again. Time to move on, don’t you think?

Technorati Tags: Adoption, Collaboration, Communities, Enterprise 2.0, Germany, Innovation, Knowledge Sharing, Leadership, Learning, Luis Benitez, Social Computing, Social Fabric, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Networks, Social Software, Social Software Drivers, Social Web, Social Workplace, Ludwigshafen, BASF, Connect.BASF, CheeChin Liew, Cordelia Kroos, Horst-Dieter Lange, Social Software Adoption, 3M, John Woodworth, Community Building, Executive Sponsorship, Executive Buy-in, Connecting People