I’m starting to understand what it means to be work in the new way and not just do the old way better.

The Root Matters

I believe that the starting point of a social platform matters because that is where the core strength and focus lies.  I’ve seen many different collaboration platforms and many are very good at what they do with different starting points and focuses.  If you’re trying to get people onboard and participating on a shared global platform, people need to know what’s in it for them and what the core strength of it is.

Companies are rushing into the social sweet spot but you can tell by using and experiencing their platform on where their core strengths are.  This collaboration sweet spot has three large starting points: Social (Relationships), Content (Documents) and Portals (A Single Integration Place). When looking at a platform, it’s always good to ask, “Is this platform focused on people and relationships or is it more about content or a single place of integration?”

Shared Goals

I believe in  “connecting people to people and people with information” but sometimes, that is not what people are really saying.  What they’re really saying is “The new way sounds good but I need to do things the old way better.“ Or more specifically, “I want to do email, expose business applications and tack on some collaboration.” What part of that is really about the kind of collaboration that leads to discovery, innovation and ultimately back to our shared goals?  Are you merely just giving people a place to do their current jobs in one place or you really changing the way they work? Because of the realities of the firm, the answer probably lies somewhere in-between but I still believe we should focus more heavily towards the new way than the other way around.  People will change.

The Real ROI

The real ROI of social collaboration platforms comes when you can tie the new way back to your community’s goals, which then ties back to your business unit’s goals which finally ties back to our company’s goals.  There is a purposeful way of getting work done in the new way that leads to not just incremental gains (doing things the old way better) but exponential gains.  That’s what the new way is all about.

I had a great experience at Enterprise2.0 this year.  I believe I told Gia, Trisha, Deirdre and Claire, “It’s like coming home.  I feel normal here.” It was great to reunite with Susan Scrupski’s 20Adoption colleagues.  They have been a source of support and knowledge for me.  It was also great to have the GM of Enterprise2.0 — Steve Wylie give a shout-out to my team five minutes into the opening keynote (thanks Steve!).  It really helped us get connected.  It was also great to have thought leaders and practitioners take time out to spend time with us and share with us their thoughts (thanks to Megan Murray, Claire Flanagan, Greg Lowe, Moxie Soft, Socialtext, Jive & the Dachis Group!)

This trip was really a way for us to validate our direction and understanding in this space.  Hearing consistent answers from different people and companies was really reassuring.

Finally, thanks to all the other people that took time to reach out to our team and I.  To find out more about this years Enterprise2.0 Santa Clara conference, check out Jim Worth’s pbwiki site.  See you next time at the Boston!

A Framework For Enterprise2.0 Strategy

I wanted to see if there is a general framework or pattern when creating an enterprise2.0 strategy.

There seems to be no exact recipe when coming up with it since it is a “people project” and not an “IT project”.  Check out Kevin Jones‘ (NASA) as well as Bart Schutte’s (Saint Gobain) blogs.

I’ve referenced works from nGenera, practitioners from the 2.0 Adoption Council, thought leaders like Andrew McAfee, Gia Lyons, etc… to see what that general framework looks like.

It seems that e2.0 strategies can be categorized under Andrew McAfee’s 6 organizational strategies.

The blackbelt session from Susan Scrupski’s 2.0Adoption Council has similar buckets as well.

1.  Setting a Clear Goal (building the business use case and getting executive buy-in)

2.  Technology Selection (based on goal)

3.  Adoption and the Long Haul (setting expectations)

4.  Communication & Education (sustenance)

5.  Measurement (based against goal)

6.  Living By Example

Setting A Clear Goal (Building The Business Use Case)

• “Building the Business Case” is really about making clear “what is it exactly that we are trying to do?”

• There are strategic workshops offered by nGenera, Dachis Group, Jive, and other companies that help us nail down a clear goal.
• nGenera has a paper called 10 Collaborative Intents and Business Values.  Collaboration is a big word and this paper helps nail down exactly it is you are going after in collaboration and maps it to various business values.  Tammy Erickson takes it a step further and maps it to productivity values from a knowledge management perspective.  With the goals defined, you can measure how successful you really are.
• CSC and Claire Flanagan has a great example of laying out a clear business case which helps generate an RFI which leads to technology “bake-offs”.
• A good business case will address the painpoints (what’s in it for me?) and it’s used to get executive buy-in.
• This clear business case will lead into the next step which is technology selection.
• This will also affect the rest of other steps listed above.

My focus is really getting step 1 nailed.  I would appreciate any feedback to make step 1 better (frameworks, patterns, best practices, experience, etc…)

 

The Enterprise2.0 (e20) Conference at Boston was a great conference for me to attend.  I was better able to understand “The State of Enterprise2.0″ and where other companies are in their e20 journey.  Some companies are further along in their journey like EMC, CSC, Cisco, etc… and some are in the middle and some new. 

I especially enjoyed the “E2.0 Black belt Practitioner’s In-Depth Workshop“ session presented by Susan Scrupski and the 2.0 Adoption Council team.  They are great mentors and practitioners of e20 in large companies and the knowledge they share is invaluable to any company trying to implement e20.

• Pointing back to the business case
• Addressing pain points
• Listening
• Addressing “what’s in it for me?”
• What success means
• Collecting anecdotes
• Key stakeholders
• Elevator Pitch to the CEO
• Real benefits
• Knowing your influencers
• Education plan
• Culture, Culture, Culture

There’s so much more I can write about but the presentations on the 2.0 Adoption slideshare will do better.  I especially liked the interactive portion of the session and hearing other company’s experiences.  Rather than summarize the entire conference, Jim Worth has a great one-stop wiki to get most of the blogs on the conference.

I saw somewhere on the web that there were over 19000 tweets on the conference.  Our JME (Jive Market Engagement module) caught 14,028 from 6/11 to today.

Seeing the key influencers was interesting as well.  Luis with 623 hits and Claire with 320 hits top the list of influencers on the web:

Blogs are popping up daily about the conference.  So far 475 blog posts.

Lastly, here are some collections of tweets I found interesting:

Here’s a simple step-by-step example of getting extra user attributes to display on the quick user pop-up in Jive4.  I wrote this for Walt Austin who is a friend of Jennifer Bouani.

Suppose you have extra fields like this:

You want to be able to display that in your quick pop-up just like the full user profile:

Override the theme called view-profile-short.ftl

<ul>

<#if targetUserProfile.title?has_content>
<li><strong><@s.text name=’settings.title.label’ /><@s.text name=’global.colon’ /></strong> ${targetUserProfile.title?html}</li>
</#if>
….
</#if>
</li>
<#else>
<li><strong><@s.text name=’settings.emailaddr.label’ /><@s.text name=’global.colon’ /></strong> <@s.text name=”settings.private.text” /></li>
</#if>
<li><strong>let’s add stuff here…</strong></li>
<@displayProfileFields fields=fields viewingSelf=viewingSelf/>
</ul>
</#if>

The key is this line:

<@displayProfileFields fields=fields viewingSelf=viewingSelf/>

It’s just a macro that picks up your extended fields and displays it in the pop up.

Make sure to include this on the top of this ftl:

<#include “/include/profile-macros.ftl”  />

(Note:  the path above may be wrong depending on your particular environment)

By default in JiveSBS 4.0.x, the company name field doesn’t exist in the popup but it’s super easy to turn it back on.

I just created a theme and overrode /template/global/view-profile-short.ftl and added one line:

<!– turn company field back on in popup menu–>
<#if targetUserProfile.company?has_content>
<li><strong>Company: ${targetUserProfile.company?html}</strong></li>
</#if>

I like -Dthemes.directory option for the app server which allows you to see changes on the fly.

Note:  this works as a theme because the company field existed as a display field in a previous version.

As you can see at the simplest level, there are 4 sections.

This is my attempt to simplify and explain the JiveSBS iPhone app by comparing it to the popular Facebook iPhone app.

1.  menu — choose different actions

2.  action — publish content (discussions, documents and blogs as well as status updates)

3.  feeds — results

4.  filter — see a different view

1.  Menus

Activity: The “catch-all” menu for content.  Here you can see all contents and activities (updates) on those content.  This works in concert with the filters (see filter section below).  I usually like to keep the filters at “Everyone” when I start out so I can see all contents and when it gets too noisy, I use the filter to reduce my feeds.

People:  See people’s status updates.  This also works in concert with the filters.  You also get an extra filter that switches to an addressbook view.

Places:  Go to the different “areas”.  Jive has three different kinds of places (“spaces” in Clearspace terms) to place your contents — Space, Groups and Project.

Yours:   See what contents you authored.

Search:  Searches across contents.

2.  Action

This is where you publish content into Jive.  Depending on what menu you have selected you’ll be able to do different actions.  For example, if you have the Activity or People menu selected, you will be able to update your status.  If you have Places or Yours selected, you will be able to post content.

3.  Feeds

The different results you see based on Menu, Action and Filter you have selected.

4.  Filter

This is a way to reduce/increase feeds.

Connections:  Those you follow or those who follow you.

Colleagues:  I’m not sure what this is exactly.

Everyone:  Everyone in the system.

Example 1: I want to update my status.

1.  Menu — Activity or People

2.  Action — you’ll be able to set your status and location.

Example 2: I want to upload an image to a content

1.  Menu — Places.  Click on a space/group/project you want to post content to.

2.  Action — you’ll be given a choice of what type of content you want to post.

Example 3: I want to see what my friends are up to

1.  Menu — People

2.  Filter — Connections

Example 4: Adding Multiple Communities

Click on the mysteriously small (i) above the menu.

I am a big fan of the Jive SBS IPhone app written by SmallSociety and it’s pointing to three Jive communities.  I use it daily and I really like the geo-location feature, updating my status, and uploading images straight from my iPhone.  You can download it from iTunes if you haven’t already.

Other than some caching glitches, I think the most common issues I’ve seen and heard is “enabling” it.  You can check out this wiki document in Jivespace for the error maps or here’s a summary below:

Common Errors:

1. This device is not authorized.

a) Mobile access is not enabled in the admin console.

b)  You are not in a group with mobile access

c)  Or if you are, you have not enabled it on your user profile.

2.  Secure connections are required.

Use “https”

3.  Could not make a secure connection.

Url is wrong.

4.  There was a problem connecting with that server.

Url is wrong.

5.  Unable to Log you in.

This means you’re pointing to the correct url but something else is wrong.

Something else is wrong but I don’t know what it is.  Check case-sensitivity for usernames.

NOTE:  we found out today that usernames are case-sensitive. (thanks to Claire for finding this)

Enabling Mobile Access in Jive:

1.  Enable Mobile Permissions From the Admin Console.

create a group with mobile access permissions.

2.  Validate if you have mobile access by checking your user profile.

You should see a little iPhone widget on the right-hand side of your user profile.