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

The Business Case for Enterprise Social Bookmarking: $4.6 Million a Year in Cost Savings!

A couple of weeks ago, the amazingly talented Dion Hinchcliffe put together a blog post under the title of “The 2010 Social Business Landscape” that would probably classify as one of the most insightful, resourceful and essential articles published during the course of this year that everyone in the industry should be reading. Yes, in case you may not have seen it, it is that good! Worth while your time, for sure!, specially, if you are into some amazing graphicware like this one. But, there is something missing from that article, don’t you think? Something that, in my opinion, is one of the fundamental pillars from Enterprise 2.0. Have you spotted it yourself already? Indeed, social bookmarking / tagging!

Not sure what you would think, but I strongly believe that social bookmarking and social tagging are still an important and rather critical part of a successful Enterprise 2.0 adoption strategy. I would even go one step further and state that social bookmarking / tagging are probably essential key elements behind the social computing philosophy altogether. Yet, it’s interesting to see how they both keep getting neglected time and time again, when they are just so critical. I mean, can you imagine … having your business put together and create a massive index of must-have links with annotations and tags across the board that would help you re-find content much much easier than through just the traditional taxonomies? No, neither could I.

My good friend, Harold Jarche, talked about this very same thing as well not long ago on a virtual IBM event for the community of social software evangelists that I co-lead with one other colleague and which I blogged about over at Personal Knowledge Management by Harold Jarche (BlueIQ Ambassadors). In that presentation Harold mentioned how blogging AND social bookmarking are perhaps two of the most powerful personal knowledge sharing tools available out there noawadays and encouraged everyone to make use of both to get started with their own PKM / PKS strategy, which I wholeheartedly agree with quite a bit, since I have been using both for a few years now and I, too, consider them essential to help manage, to some extent, part of your knowledge.

So does Enterprise Social Bookmarking still have a good, solid business case to take back that prominent position amongst the top-notch social software tools within the enterprise? I am not sure what you would think, but I do believe it has. And not just for now, but for a few years already, despite what some folks have been saying all along neglecting such business case for social bookmarking, specially after seeing the debacle of a good number of different offerings available out there, to the point where a bunch of them have even disappeared from the landscape altogether.

By now, I am sure you may be wondering why do I so firmly believe about such business case for social bookmarking, right? Well, my own company. IBM. Over the last few years we have been using Lotus Connections’ Dogear (Now renamed as Bookmarks), where we have been storing over 1 million public bookmarks (Over 640k of them unique!), and with over 2.7 million tags (Over 177k of them unique as well!) of annotated content that we have bumped into out there on our Intranet, as well as externally. That’s just not too bad, is it? Well, it gets better…

For a good couple of years now, inside IBM, we have also been making use of Enterprise Tagging Service, an IBM developed social bookmarking AND tagging tool, which basically allows us to bookmark, tag and annotate various different resources from within our corporate Intranet. So far so good. Like any other standard social bookmarking site. The great thing though is that the results of that bookmarking and social tagging exercise have now been injected, for a few months already, into our Intranet corporate search engine, which means that along those standard system driven search results, we also have the people driven ones with the use of ETS. But the really neat thing is that one of the main resources that also keeps feeding this bookmarking and tagging service is actually Dogear / Bookmarks!

That’s right, the standard corporate Intranet search engine, which, back in the day, didn’t have much of a good reputation, to be honest (People kept saying how you couldn’t find things anymore … does it sound familiar to you as well?), changed tremendously that perception and customer satisfaction increased by 50% while incorporating ETS AND Bookmarks into the mix of results. Thus, eventually, here we have got the best of both worlds: a fixed taxonomy established by the corporate search engine guidelines and standards, and a rather dynamic and constantly changing folksonomy where knowledge workers themselves get to successfully contribute by annotating and bookmaking successfully various different Web resources to then make them easily searchable on a wider scale.

You can imagine what happened from there onwards, right? Not only did the perception, from knowledge workers, of the corporate search engine changed dramatically, but it also managed to save IBM $4.6 million a year in cost savings and productivity gain. Yes, $4.6 million a year! My good friend, and team colleague, Rawn Shah, described it, quite nicely, under the blog post “Enterprise Tagging Service social software saves IBM $4.6 million a year“, if you would want to do some additional reading on how it actually works out. Mind you though as well that article is from 2008, so as more and more of us keep bookmarking and annotating various different links, I bet that’s a lot higher in 2010!

That’s probably why it may well be a good thing that whenever you are planning to drive the adoption of social software within your business you may be thinking about adding social bookmarking and social tagging into the mix, too, because, more than anything else, there is a great chance that you would be capable of benefiting, even more, from your already existing efforts to empower your knowledge workers to be a bit more in control of their own personal knowledge sharing social interactions.

And to show you a little bit more of how it could work out eventually, I thought I would finish off this blog post with another one of those amazingly talented and hilariously funny YouTube video clips from the series of “The Man Who Should Have Used Lotus Connections” that my good friend, and fellow IBM colleague, Jean Francois Chenier, has been putting together over the last few months. The latest episode of this unfortgettable saga is episode #9 on the topic of Social Bookmarking – The Wisdom of Swarms. It lasts for nearly 4 minutes and there is probably very little introduction that I would need to do, if you have been watching them all along. So here is the embedded version, so you can start playing it right away and let yourself be convinced on the importance and relevance, still today, of social bookmarking and social tagging within the enterprise!:

Technorati Tags: BlueIQ Ambassadors, Bookmarks, Business Cases, Case Studies, Collaboration, Communities, Connections, Dachis Group, Dion Hinchcliffe, Dogear, Enterprise 2.0, Harold Jarche, IBM, Innovation, Jean Francois Chenier, KM, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Workers, Learning, Lotus Connections, Personal Knowledge Management, Personal Knowledge Sharing, PKM, PKS, Productivity, Rawn Shah, Social Bookmarking, Social Bookmarks, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Networks, Social Software, Swarms, The Man Who Should Have Used Lotus Connections, Web 2.0, Tagging, Social Tagging, Tags, Annotations

A World Without Email — Year 3, Weeks 24 to 28 (Email Is Where Knowledge Goes to Die – The Presentation)

It has been a while now since the last progress report I have shared over here around the topic of living “A World Without Email“, that experiment that has been going on for over 2.5 years now, where one day I decided to give up on corporate email altogether and, instead, make heavier use of social networking tools to collaborate and share knowledge with other fellow knowledge workers. So I thought I would drop by today over here and share with you folks an update of how things are going, specially now that there seems to be a growing interest in demonstrating how social software tools are consistently not only helping reduce the amount of emails we receive on a daily basis, but at the same time we are starting to witness the changing role of email itself, transitioning successfully into becoming that messaging / notification system that was designed for over 40 years ago versus remaining that content repository where everything goes. Even your knowledge!

Matt Forcey put together a rather insightful blog post not long ago under the heading “Email Usage Drops 28% in Past 12 Months!” where he quotes a recent study by Nielsen “focused on how Americans spend their time online, [and] unexpectedly found that email usage has dropped by 28% over the last year“. Worth while a read, for sure! Just as much as Ethan Yarbrough‘s Email’s Role in an Enterprise 2.0 Environment: Signal Not Source where he is sharing a terrific story of how his own team is progressively changing the role of email in a business environment, moving away from that content repository format where conversations used to happen, to only serve as a notification and messaging system for content that’s stored elsewhere, in this case, social software tools.

If you remember, and if you have been reading this blog for a while now, that’s exactly what I am trying to advocate with “A World Without Email“. Yes, I do realise and acknowledge that email is not going away any time soon. And that’s probably a good thing! What we are seeing though is how email is being re-purposed into no longer becoming the bottleneck of how work gets done. How it is now part of the flow of conversations happening all over the place and, perhaps, in much better, and suitable, social spaces, so that both information and knowledge flow faster and, as a result of that, knowledge workers become more efficient and effective at what they do, which, I am sure, is what really matters at the end of the day… So how have I been doing over the last few weeks, since my last progress report, on moving away, successfully, those various email driven conversations, you may be wondering, right?

Well, things still are going really good! Actually, better than ever! Here is a snapshot of the last five weeks of incoming emails I have received:

As you would be able to see, except for last week I have been consistently getting less and less email by the week, and, even more exciting, way below the 20 emails per week mark!, which surely is making a good progress from when I started 2.5 years ago. Remember, at the beginning, before starting this experiment, I used to receive 30 to 40 emails per day! And now, 2.5 years later, it’s just 17 emails per week! Yes, indeed, you are reading it right! I’m now averaging 17 emails received per week, while the majority of my online interactions are now happening through social software tools.

So, to me, it is not just a drop of 28% in the past 12 months, but way over 90% of the email I used to get! And, not sure what you would think, but that’s *huge!* Yes! Being able to state how email is no longer the only game in town for me, quite the opposite!, actually, is a good thing. It proves it can be done! It proves I am not the only one who can make it happen. And this is when it gets really exciting! When you see other folks increasingly paying more and more attention as to how they interact with their email Inboxes and how they effectively start looking for ways of reducing such email clutter.

Very exciting, indeed! Even more when you notice it’s folks around you who are starting to ask you how you can help them eliminate most of their incoming emails and instead progress towards a much more receptive adoption of social software tools for business. That’s why I’m pretty jazzed up about seeing a whole bunch of fellow co-workers who are continuing to make efforts to reduce their email workload. To the point where entire teams are figuring out strategies to make it work for them and over the last couple of weeks I have been working with a couple of them where there is plenty of promise ahead! Yay!

But it gets better! Because over the last few weeks as well I’m starting to notice how even customers want to figure out ways on how they themselves can get rid of, or reduce substantially, their incoming email. And they seem to keep finding me out there as they search how it can be done (Double yay for #lawwe), which is really good news, because I have been invited a couple of times already to go and present to them how they themselves could live “A World Without Email“.

One of those presentations was eventually one I did last week in Germany for that one customer where they wanted to know what it was like making the transition from using email as a collaboration tool into that messaging & notification system. Thus they wanted me to speak to them for about one hour on what it would be like. Of course, I couldn’t say “No!” to it, right? I didn’t.

And the end result is this mindmap I have put together under MindMeister (One of my preferred online mindmapping tools available out there!) and which tries to explain that 2.5 year long journey of having given up on corporate email and, instead, use social software tools using four different entry points of discussion:

• Why did you do it?
• How did you do it?
• How has it changed the way we work?
• Tips on reducing email – where do you start?

Now, the great thing about MindMeister is that rather you can go to the Web site to see the mindmap itself, or, instead, you can just go through it in the embedded version attached below, which I think is a really cool way of delivering presentations. In fact, for none of these did I use any kind of slideware and it surely was a new, and quite refreshing!, way of delivering a presentation. I should do it more often! Here it is:

I think at this point in time you may be wondering whether there would also be a recording of this presentation so that you could listen to the flow of going from one node to another and learn some more about what that journey has been like in the last couple of years, right? Well, great then!, because I do have a recording of the presentation, although not the one from last week’s customer visit, but from another customer presentation I did remotely through an emeeting (Using LotusLive) and which I’m pretty excited to be sharing it across with you folks over here, in this blog.

It’s a 45MB download you can grab from here and the recording itself includes both the audio and the video, with a short introduction, so you could be able to follow the flow of the mindmap and how the various pieces fit together. It lasts for a little bit over one hour, so you may want to go and grab a cup of coffee, or tea, sit back, hit PLAY and let the show begin. And if you are looking for a one pager of the mindmap itself, I have also gone ahead and uploaded it into my Slideshare space and can be accessed through here.

Hope you enjoyed it just as much as I did putting together the mindmap, reflecting some more on what that experiment has been, and the couple of customer events I have done in the recent weeks. Somehow, I sense we are just starting to have some good fun!

(Ok, here is the thing though, after going through the various Tips on Reducing Email – Where Do You Start?, will you now be capable of Living A World Without Email …? What do you think?)

Technorati Tags: Change The World, Collaboration, Communities, Connections, Conversations, Education, Enterprise 2.0, Getting Things Done, IBM, Innovation, KM, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Workers, Learning, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Productivity, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Networks, Social Software, Web 2.0, Email, No-email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, World Without Email, Matt Forcey, Ethan Yarbrough, MindMeister, Mindmapping, Mindmaps, Slideshare, Recordings, #lawwe

The Conference Call – Fun at Work or Fun in Work?

Why can’t we all have fun while at work? I mean, some serious good fun while we are getting the job done! Don’t you think it is fair? I mean, don’t you think that knowledge workers should be entitled to have just as much fun behind the firewall as outside of the firewall? Don’t you think that it would help those same knowledge workers become much more productive, engaged, committed, involved and purposely determined than those who don’t? I am not sure what you would think, but this is something that I have been pondering for years now and, once again, I had an opportunity to talk about it while in Germany last week, on my latest business trip, as we talked about the impact of social software within the enterprise. Yes, that impact of social tools like YouTube and the wonderfully hilarious The Conference Call by David Grady.

Ha! How did I manage to talk about one of those really fun YouTube videos that’s making the rounds over the last couple of weeks going viral big time, you may be wondering, right? Well, very easily. With a key concept that we seemed to have kept neglecting over the course of the years, but which, thanks to social software tools, it’s coming back into the workplace in full force: social capital to improve business processes.

Indeed, I got to talk about it through a story. Like in most of these cases, stories are wonderful mechanisms to not only transfer your knowledge, but also to share your insights about something that will really stick with folks over time. People don’t remember information. People don’t remember knowledge. In fact, they can’t even manage it properly. But they *do* remember stories!

So during one of the presentations that I did I talked about a personal story that described very well the context of how you can have some really good fun, while still getting the job done, and benefit from that social capital exchange with your colleagues. The story I shared was along the lines of how every so often I have a tendency to share those precious golden nuggets of really funny video clips, or whatever other fun sites, on my internal microblogging / microsharing site (Powered by IBM Lotus Connections Profile Boards, of course! hehe) for my social networks to have a giggle or two on a Friday afternoon…

Thus, a couple of weeks back, I shared what I think is one of the most hilarious YouTube videos you will bump into during the course of this year, specially, if you are a knowledge worker interacting through conference calls with other remote knowledge workers. Yes, you would be able to relate to it quite a bit! In fact, it would be just too scary how much you would be able to relate to it on your day to day workflow, which makes it even funnier (Or sadder … who knows…).

The thing is that if you are looking for a good laugh, and believe me, I had one of those days today, I would suggest you spend the following 5 minutes watching David Grady‘s take on what it is like hosting a conference call nowadays in a corporate environment. If nothing else, it’s one of those hilarious experiences that one finds it hard to forget any time soon!

Now, I am not going to spoil it for you folks, so I will just embed the YouTube video clip code over here, so you can play it right away and judge for yourselves whether it’s just too close for comfort for your day to day workload or whether it is totally unrealistic. Somehow I sense it would be the former …

I am sure by now you may be wondering what this video has got to do with having fun at work, social capital, social computing and my customer visit in Germany, right? Well, like I was saying, I had an opportunity to discuss with that customer how something so trivial and fun as sharing the link to the video in my internal microsharing site resulted in several dozens of fellow co-workers, who also needed to have a good laugh after a long, stressing week of hard work, commenting on how much they enjoyed it, but at the same time, all of a sudden, there was a different set of interactions, on the same thread, from people who felt so identified with the scenario that, before we all knew it, we were all embarking on putting together plenty of good practices on how to moderate and host a conference call for remote attendees.

We also discussed how, now more than ever, with plenty of knowledge workers being remote and rather mobile altogether from their co-workers, we probably needed to start working our way through identifying new methods of engagement, i.e. new working styles, perhaps new technology, or adapt already existing one altogether, so that the situation that Dave describes so accurately in that video could be tamed somehow. And here we are … Still working on it as the video keeps making the rounds all over the place, both inside and outside of the firewall….

Talking about a superb break, right?, in between two intensive workshops! Yes! I also used the video clip to play it in between both workshops I did last Thursday and it surely was rather helpful in provoking a good laugh or two on something that we all get to face day in day out! You gotta watch it!

My good friend Bertrand Duperrin picked up on this very same subject not so long ago under the insightful and rather thought-provoking blog post with the title “Fun at work or fun in work?“. It’s a rather good read and a highly recommended one, more than anything else, because he brings in plenty of good arguments as to why having fun at work, or introducing serious games at work, can only, but benefit not only the knowledge workers themselves, but the business altogether. And somehow the story I shared with that customer on how The Conference Call fun activity resulted in putting together some good practices on improving remote collaboration surely proves the point that any company out there not leveraging fun at work is probably not getting the most of the potential that its employees can offer to improve already existing business processes making them, at least, much more endurable and enjoyable altogether.

Because after all, who hasn’t realised just yet how we are already spending (more than) one third of our lifetime at work, the other third sleeping away and the last third having good fun eventually. Shouldn’t we all try to make it, at least, give it a try to, two thirds along the way? Most probably, don’t you think?

Technorati Tags: Collaboration, Communities, Connections, Conversations, Enterprise 2.0, Getting Things Done, Hippie 2.0, IBM, Innovation, KM, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Workers, Learning, Mobile Computing, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Productivity, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Networks, Social Software, Fun at Work, Fun, Social Capital, Workplace, David Grady, Bertrand Duperrin, Lotus Connections, Connections Profiles, Boards, Serious Games, Conference Calls, Remote Collaboration