If AI isn't gonna clean up social media, what good is it?

Now that our new AI overlords are writing our essays/articles/blogs/research papers/social media posts, I thought we would see massively improved spelling, grammar, and punctuation.  But no.  What?  Nobody's using ChatGPT??  C'mon, people, get with the times!  (I say as I hit the space bar twice between sentences.)

What's the point of this meeting?

Now, more than ever, we need to ask this question! Meetings for meeting's sake only increase meeting fatigue - and there are a slew of folks talking about how to combat it:

• Stanford, "Four causes for 'Zoom fatigue' and their solutions"
  
• MIT Sloan Management Review, "How to Combat Virtual Meeting Fatigue"
  
• Harvard Business Review, "How to Combat Zoom Fatigue"
• Healthline.com, "Zoom Fatigue: Symptoms, Causes, Coping Tips"
• TedTalks, "Zoom fatigue is real - here's why video calls are so draining"
• National Geographic, "Zoom fatigue is taxing the brain. Here's why that happens."
• BBC, "The reason Zoom calls drain your energy"
  
• Mentimeter, "7 ways to fight virtual meeting fatigue"
• Forbes, "Three cures for Virtual Meeting Fatigue"
• Forbes, "Zoom Fatigue is worse for Women"

Number one on Sloan's list of recommendations?  "Cancel unnecessary meetings and make necessary meetings shorter." 

But how do we know if they're necessary or not? AGENDA! Know - and share - the point of the meeting. Is it a knowledge-sharing meeting?  problem-solving? consensus-building? decision-making?  We need to know these things before we can employ appropriate meeting types and fatigue-combating techniques.

This becomes even more important as we start to add virtual reality environments to our online meeting mix. Now that VR has embraced immersive remote meetings and conventions for day-to-day use, it can become part of the existing problem or we can use it as a reason to adjust our expectations and behavior.  According to Bradford Frank, a senior client partner in Korn Ferry's Technology practice, "The key to smart utilization is for leaders to ask themselves what a meeting is trying to accomplish" (emphasis mine). And while I hate to throw these things back at "leadership," this is one of those "back to basics" moments that people in authority need to embrace before they ask their staff to do the same.      

With thanks to ifunny.co and everyone else who rocked this meme!

Oh, we're "hybrid" now, are we?

 

It’s no longer “remote work” – it’s now “hybrid.”  Great, so how does that change my life? Aside from oil changes being more meaningful once we start driving again, not much. However, there are some tidbits I’d like to share from all the reading (and real life) I’ve done on this topic.

1.       Your setup.

a.       Having a large monitor at home REALLY REALLY helps. If you don’t have one yet, ask your manager. If you already have one, take care of it – turn if off on the weekends so it doesn’t burn screensaver images into the screen or fry its insides.

b.       Having a docking station at home REALLY REALLY helps, especially if you have that monitor, an external mouse, a USB headset, etc. As we start taking our laptops back and forth again, with the intention of being productive in both home and office, this is key.  I got frustrated early and bought one for about $80 on Amazon, but if you don’t have one yet, ask your manager.

c.       I also prefer to close my laptop and use an external keyboard and mouse instead of the laptop keyboard and touchpad. Less reaching; easier on the wrists.

2.       Pay attention to ergonomics.

a.       Chairs.  A colleague was using a hard wooden chair to work all day for months until one day her back said “no” and she couldn’t get out of bed. You deserve a comfortable chair that can adjust up and down and swivel. (If you have a Staples store or similar, office chairs go on sale occasionally and can be quite reasonable.)

b.       Monitor height.  When you’re sitting up straight (in your new office chair), your eyes should be able to look straight across to the middle of your screen. If you’re angled, looking up or down, or (heaven forbid) twisting your neck to see your monitor, move it. We all have a fat book we’re not reading that can prop up that monitor.

3.       Greenscreens and ring lights.  😏  Unless you’re a teen, they’re so overrated.  Since our work computers are sufficiently current, your laptop can handle virtual backgrounds for WebEx, Zoom, and Teams pretty well. And if bandwidth is impacting your video, a greenscreen won’t solve that! If you wear glasses, like I do, lighting is important lest your lenses reflect your screen. But reducing the brightness on your monitor is a good start!  If you need more, a gentle overhead light and an off-angle desk lamp can serve the same function – of providing sufficient light to offset the brightness coming from your monitor. Save your money for the comfy chair!

4.       Blue light glasses.  Speaking of the light coming from your monitor (and cellphone), do they really work? The American Academy of Opthalmology says you don’t need special eyewear. But with sales predicted to increase from $19 million in 2020 to $28 million by 2024 per 360ResearchReports, someone’s making serious bank.  Blue light glasses might help your sleep by increasing melatonin levels, but you can accomplish the same thing by putting your screens away an hour or two before bedtime and/or switching to dark mode. Ultimately, it’s up to you. Heck, if you haven’t used your EyeMed benefits yet, it might be an interesting experiment.  From my own experience as a wearer of progressive lenses, what DOES help is a pair of dedicated, screen-distance, single-vision lenses for using when you’re sitting at the computer. According to my Optometrist, single-vision prescriptions are also the easiest for online glasses shops to get right.  (I got mine from EyeBuy.) Just remember to switch back to your progressives when you step away.

5.       Dressing up?  Now that we’ve eaten our feelings/anxieties for over a year and thoroughly gotten our money out of our jeans and sweats will my suits even fit? Probably not, but my black suit jackets look fine over a nice pair of yoga pants. Some folks look forward to returning to business wear while the rest of us are trying to figure out how to sneak Snuggees into our work wardrobes. Ultimately, though, most of our meetings with external business partners will continue to be online, so keep your nice shirts/blouses and just add a jacket – your internal colleagues hopefully won’t mind the jeans.

6.       Territory.  When I worked 100% at the office, I railed against “bullpen” style pods and struggled until I got a proper office of my own. Some colleagues would count the ceiling tiles to ensure they were given an office of equal size to their peers. Offices were status symbols. Now I’m looking at 2 days/week in the office and I care a lot less. Many organizations are taking this opportunity to re-configure office spaces, veering sharply toward hoteling and hot-swapping desks. It’s smart – if someone's not using my office, that’s wasted space the company's paying for. And frankly, since my home office is reasonably comfortable now, I don’t need my downtown office to be my kingdom. As long as the hoteling space I’m assigned is properly cleaned, ventilated, spaced away from others, and has the basics (big monitor, docking station, separate mouse and keyboard, source of caffeine), I’ll be fine. I’ll bring my own pens.

7.       Laptop transport.  A few weeks ago, I went into the office for onsite testing. I brought my laptop in a messenger bag. And my purse. And my lunch. And an extra bag for taking my long-abandoned office shoes home. After returning home, my shoulder ACHED. I wasn’t used to carrying that much stuff. If you can reduce what you carry, that’s ideal, but if you MUST carry it all with you, work up to it and consider a backpack for your laptop (and wear both straps!). Thank me later.

8.       Virtual commutes.  One thing I do miss about my commutes (possibly the ONLY thing I miss) is the carved-out time to decompress and let all those work topics go. Listen to music or an audio book. Breathe. Refresh. But what about the 3 days working from home? Try booking a 20-minute recurring appointment on your calendar at the end of your work day – and use that time to do a quick yoga stretch or mindfulness meditation or even deep breathing. If you use Microsoft Teams, some of that is already built in – just turn on MyAnalytics and add the Insights app to Teams – you’ll be reminded to wrap up your day and prompted with a 1-minute deep breathing exercise.

9.       Hybrid = Inclusive.  Diversity and inclusion have been hot topics this past year and I haven’t met anyone who thinks the core concepts aren’t important and valuable. So what’s hybrid work in essence? It’s finding ways to blend office people with home-based people with our customers, in an equitable fashion, wherever they may be. But we know how to do this – we’ve BEEN doing it – and hybrid work means KEEP doing it:

a.       Ensure there’s an online meeting option attached to all your meeting invitations

b.       Have an agenda – post it ahead of time and follow it. Don’t waste people’s time. I think we’ve all seen the meme, “Another meeting that could have been an email!”

c.       If bandwidth permits, share your video when attending meetings so we get that personal connection (and you can’t be ignored). And make space for others. Let’s NOT go back to the old “Oh hey, does anyone on the call have anything to say?” 2 minutes before the meeting ends.

d.       Meetings may start on the dot, but take five minutes or so to reacquaint with some small talk while others straggle in.  Better yet, START your meetings at 5 minutes past the hour; give your attendees a breather between their last meeting and yours.  After all, in real life we need bio breaks and meetings don’t HAVE to be exactly 30 or 60 minutes long.

e.       Brainstorming? Use a Whiteboard. Remember how we wasted many trees’ worth of postit notes prioritizing ideas? Use an electronic whiteboard. This not only saves trees, but is also more effective in getting participation/input from your quieter teammates. Remember, diversity is being invited to the dance but inclusion is being ASKED TO DANCE. Ask your team members to contribute whether they’re online or in person, and make that as easy as possible.

f.        Meeting recordings and meeting notes are great for reminding people what was agreed-to, what the action items are, and looping others in who couldn't join at the time.

g.       Use a task tracker instead of posting “action items” in your notes.  Notes are useful references but can be ignored. Planner or Asana or Monday are good “lightweight” project planning tools built on task tracking. Assign people tasks; they’ll get reminders and you’ve got a built in Kanban board for the next time you meet.

Proud as a mother hen!

We made it through a dumpster fire of a summer. We - all of us - deserve a round of applause for keeping our sh*t together and not scaring the kids. In case you need to hear it, I'm proud of you!  And by now, I suspect everyone knows someone who contracted COVID-19 so we understand the good sense behind quarantine and Home-based work. 

 

Did you know you can buy these?

And speaking of HBW, how are we doing? It's been 6 months - have you kitted out your home office space yet? I added a 2nd monitor and a wireless keyboard to my setup and it's helped a lot. My summer has revolved around helping my organization adopt Teams for online meetings and rolling out SharePoint document libraries for easier access to documents. I can't even tell you how many guides, FAQs, tips & tricks, learning resources, knowledge-base articles, and #AskMeAnything sessions I've personally churned out on the former -- and I have an entire globe's worth of offices yet to transition for the latter.

But it's working. It's helping. Despite the nay-sayers who want Zoom (we caved; they can have Zoom - if they pay for the license) or reject all help because "there are too many options - how do I know what to choose?" as a population, our staff are adopting the tools and learning new skills. 

Aside: since I can't share the comparisons I wrote for my company, if you still need an approachable "nutshell" on WebEx vs. Teams vs. Zoom, Jefferson Graham wrote a good one for USAToday. And if you're looking more strategically, try this TechTarget article by Luke O'Neil.

In fact, Teams meetings surpassed WebEx meetings for the first time this month! Pretty exciting for me (less exciting for the WebEx product owner). Yay Teams! I'm proud of the success we've had socializing Teams meetings! Proud as a mother hen!  😁

Teams meetings to the rescue!

Watch how fast we add Teams meetings to our portfolio of sanctioned online meeting options!

WebEx is getting hit HARD.  Hammered by Home-Based Work. (#HHBW - I'm gonna make that trend!)  Cisco is doing what they can to scale and improve stability but they didn't see this coming fast enough. Our employees want to use Zoom because that's what their kids use for school and so they had to learn it (and learning one new thing per year is enough!) but Zoom has its own problems. They may resolve the current "Zoom-bombing" security issues but the neglect runs so deep, I'm not sure I trust them to maintain an evolved security posture.

But Teams, now THAT's viable immediately. And Microsoft is making it super easy, too. If you already have O365, give it a shot. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Well THIS should be interesting!

Photo credit:  ugurhan/iStockphoto

 

Um, so my organization sent us home Thursday to do a "work from home" run-through to ensure our readiness to support any IT needs should home-based work be needful and guess what?  It's needful!  As of Thursday evening, we aren't allowed back in the office! 

Can we work from home?  Yes. Obvs!

Do we have all the equipment we need to be highly productive? No, I'm going to miss my docking station, but I cannibalized my home setup for its large-screen monitor, so I'm better off than many.

What does this mean for collaboration? Well this is where "the rubber meets the road," so to speak. Will we be able to transition from hallway "flybys" over to proper collaboration tools?  Time will tell. I suspect we will see more Teams and Slack, however. And probably a huge increase in online meetings.

Is this freaky? Are we going to survive this?  Yes and yes. But speaking as a dinosaur roaming the modern landscape, it sure feels like that @$$&#! meteor got some airbrushing and came back as a virus! 

Keep your head down and be safe!

What Project Aristotle Tells Us About Teams

What is Project Aristotle?  It's a recent Google initiative to suss out what truly distinguishes successful teams. Some refer to studying "emotional intelligence" (a term I don't find particularly meaningful).

What did they learn? Apparently they confirmed many things we already this of as common knowledge AND they were able to assign importance to five key traits of successful teams:

1. Dependability
2. Structure and Clarity
3. Meaning
4. Impact
5. Psychological Safety

That last one is particularly intriguing. The article notes, "teams with psychologically safe environments had employees who were less likely to leave, more likely to harness the power of diversity, and ultimately, who were more successful."

Apparently when you have these five traits, your team does some interesting things:  

• they talk to each other - and everyone talks about the same amount, meaning the quiet people get their voice heard
• team members have a higher-than-average ability to read each others faces for emotional queues

This makes sense to me. A team that cares about their teammates' reactions and makes space for everyone's contribution is exactly what leads to productivity. 

And I'm glad to see it proven! Even if they call it "emotional intelligence."  😏

Collaboration & Scale

Not exactly that scale!

As collaboration (as a useful business concept) has grown, it seems the solutions have settled into niches based on the size of the target participant group:

• Whole-Organization:  Facebook Workplace, Yammer, SharePoint 
• Large Group\Divisions:  Facebook Workplace Group, Yammer Group, SharePoint for teams, SharePoint Communities
• Small-Medium Teams:  Slack, SharePoint for teams, SharePoint Communities, O365 Groups, MS Teams

Why the distinction?  Why does size matter?  Specifically, why can't small-group collaboration be done in a larger forum and vice versa?  I offer that as traditional companies adopt collaborative tools, there is a low-grade user concern that their casual, team-oriented posts might be seen - and judged - by others. We spend a lot of time getting teams to a comfort level where they are most productive and this concern can sabotage that effort. Having a clear delineation between "where the big bosses communicate" and "where we get our work done" is helpful and reassuring.

Hashtag THIS

Facebook is getting hashtags!  This, more than anything else, might revive Facebook's market-ability. Once they can more accurately slice and dice their content, with the aid of user-driven meta information (hashtags), their data will be ROBUSTLY meaningful to market analysts and consumer analysts.  Wow.  #bignews

Skype Lands. . .in Outlook

We've been wondering what Microsoft would do with Skype and Microsoft Instant Messenger ever since they bought Skype. Now we know!  Skype is going to be part of Outlook. 

This brings Hotmail within grasp of feature parity with Gmail, and XBox will have an integrated chat\call option.  We'll have to wait and see what this means for it's enterprise Lync client. Stay tuned!

Buffer

Buffer - for when you have SO MANY choice nuggets for the social media world that you need to spread them out, lest you overload the populace with your wisdom.

A wee bit condescending, non?

What are Your Go-To Utilities and Applications?

I'm always interested in learning about the apps, applications, websites, utilities, and freeware that other IT folks frequent.

According to eWeek and a SolarWinds marketing guy, this is THE list of freeware essentials.

What do you think?

I've used Wireshark (when it was Ethereal) and Skype and Evernote and Symphony before and can vouch for them as being useful. I'm intrigued by VirtualBox and LastPass.  I'm not surprised at the SolarWinds Alert Central pitch, but skeptical.

What are YOUR go-to utilities?

HP joins UC playing field with MS Lync teammate

Interesting.

Until now, Microsoft has wanted customers to drink their Kool-aid and buy Lync servers - basically invest in the UC stack from Microsoft rather than picking and choosing different vendors for different pieces of the stack.  This is the old "Suite vs. Best of Breed" approach.

But now they're teaming with HP, which, as article author Jeffrey Burt says, "is leveraging its decades-long partnership with Microsoft to make it easier for businesses to use the software company's Lync collaboration platform, not only by integrating it into HP's router but also offering it as a cloud service."

The question now is how many organizations use HP routers?  And is it enough to cause Microsoft to stop playing ball with Cisco (which pretty much owns the router and UC markets)?

We shall see.

Interesting.

March 31 = World Backup Day

There must be some synergy with this being the same day as Easter, but I, for one, will not count on my files resurrecting themselves.

Go!  Do!

Still?

Women are underrepresented in high-tech and IT management jobs?  Still?

I guess I can't argue with the numbers, but it's frustrating that we never find out why -- and try to address it.  All I have to go on is my own experience, so here are some possible reasons why IT doesn't attract more women:

• IT is, by nature, detail-oriented and linear.  Perhaps my sisters, like I do,  prefer themes and multi-tasking? (I make myself focus, though.)
• IT is fast-paced and it's difficult to keep up with the latest versions, the latest products, the latest innovation.  Perhaps my sisters, like I do, like to be able to master one thing and feel good about it for a bit, without instantly feeling behind-the-8-ball on another topic. 
• IT is very ego-driven; whoever argues their point loudest generally gets to try their solution first. Even if it's not the most elegant, whichever solution proves effective first generally gets used -- and gets the kudos.  Perhaps my sisters, like I do, prefer to vette the best possible solution, trying a few different things on an equal playing field until one surfaces as the best solution?
• IT is political. You'd think the line-of-business units would have all the politics, right? Nope. Wherever there's a budget, people will count how many FTEs report to so-and-so. Also, as much as I'd like IT to be about the pure "best choice for the organization," many IT recommendations are trumped by "business decisions," meaning that even though we have a top-notch solution, other factors can reject it.  Perhaps my sisters, like I do, prefer to deal with straightforward decision-making?

I don't have the answers either.  I wouldn't ask women to change their core personality -- or change the nature of IT necessarily, but I suspect that my male colleagues would be happy to have a few more women around.  And women can do the work.  I believe women can find IT work interesting and fulfilling.  Maybe those of us in the field just need to say it loud enough to be heard -- and hold a hand out to the young women who DO take a chance on IT.

Bye Bye Lotus

No, not that one. . . THIS one!

I missed the opportunity to say farewell in November, when IBM dropped the Lotus branding, but I feel a bond and an obligation to Lotus, which gave the world a visionary piece of software for the time (Lotus Notes) and gave me not just a job, but the beginnings of a career in IT. Without Lotus (and Iris before it), there wouldn't be Lotus Notes and I would likely be an aging Program Assistant instead of having the interesting and challenging career I do have.

So thank you, Lotus - it's been a good run!

No Bozo!

Hahahahahaaa!  Oh my gracious!

It would have been so easy to write this article, Why Every Company Needs a No-Bozos Policy, from a snarky perspective with thinly veiled references to people the author thinks are Bozos.  But Eric Jackson takes the high road, bless him!  Makes me wonder if I could be so noble.

So Email's Not Going Anywhere, eh?

Not according to this Computerworld article, anyway.  (Thank you for the reference, Lina!)  Then what does this mean for all those collaborative "solutions" that are trying to replace email with "activity streams" and other options?  I suspect they won't do well unless they surface the email IN their streams instead of attempting to replace it with non-email.

Unfortunately, this effort is only happening for the enterprise. Non-organizational email is dwindling, so there's no market for go-getter developers to come up with something new and hip. So we can't hope to social-source an next-gen email--we can only hope that the big corporate solution providers come up with something not-heinous.  Avoiding heinousness requires vision and being in touch with the go-getters.  Both of which become increasingly more difficult, the bigger the solution provider gets.

I am skeptical that we will see a next-gen email come from these sources.  I suspect (and this makes me sad) that we will ride email out until the last of the email-comfortable workforce retires and then replace it -- whole hog -- with something not-email.  By then it may be too little, too late.

I rarely read eWeek, but this caught my eye today:

Cisco, Polycom Offer Tips on Conducting Effective Video Conferences

Have to say, I found myself nodding at most of these. I have to adjust the blinds behind my workstation all the time. Not much I can do about the ambient noise in an open space environment, but I use my mute button judiciously. I would, however, add:

#14: Keep an eye on the time and let your participants know you're aware there's only 10 minutes left, 5 minutes left, and try to end the event promptly (if not early). If participants get the sense that you're off in your own world, they'll bail on you, without waiting to see if you wrap it up on time.

#15: Build in interaction. To ensure people stay engaged (or wake up once asleep), ask questions, send polls, mix your show-and-tell up a bit.

#16: Be energetic. Find a way that works for you (I often stand up when presenting) to keep your voice energized and engaging.

Do you agree or disagree with Cisco/Polycom or my tips?

What tips (#17?) would YOU add?

Jargon, Jargon, Everywhere

What the heck is the difference between "collaboration," "unified communication," and "social media?"  Plenty, but they're all members of the same family. 

This dinosaur views:

Collaboration as the largest container, the bucket that they all fall in.  Collaboration, in essence, is about working together.  Shrug.  All three embrace this.

Unified Communication, or "UC" as it's familiarly called, is about collaborating using realtime communciation tools, such as phone, video, IM, web conferencing and marrying them into offline communication tools like email and voicemail.

Social Media has less to do with realtime communicating and more to do with bringing communities together using web technology -- for a teen, that means keeping up with friends; for an organization, it's typically bringing corporate and customer together.

Perhaps the better question is why are these terms used as if they're interchangeable?  And the answer is:  nobody's read this post yet.

Sharepoint Evolves Too

It would appear that Sharepoint is getting a social facelift. Microsoft bought Yammer, now Sharepoint benefits.  Well good.  About darn time.  Sharepoint interface is terrible on its own. Of all the dinosours out there, (and you ARE one, Bill) Microsoft needs to figure out its evolution faster than the rest in order to stay on top.

Quotable Quotes: Tim Berners-Lee

I'm borrowing Sima Odugbemi's Quote of the Week here:

Berners-Lee’s belief that his invention is unfinished has turned the geek into an activist. “The web is a social invention as much as a technical invention,” he says. “It’s the whole cat and mouse game between the readers and writers that makes the web work.”

The quote comes from Financial Times writer Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, in his September 7, 2012 article, "Lunch with the FT: Tim Berners-Lee"

I have long believed that tech support is 80% psychology and only 20% technology, so this resonates.  The web is at least 50% social -- nothing shocking there, but we tend to forget that technology alone does not make a thing "work."  If it did, then, as the article also points out, then GOPHER from U-MN might be our world wide web right now.

Techies can forget that the solution is not "the thing." It's the USE of the solution that's the thing.

So techies, don't blow off the public speaking courses, don't deride Powerpoint, don't ignore the phone calls of your communications/outreach teams. Embrace social.

Unified Communications by Another Name

Had a situation recently where a big boss said they didn't like the term "unified communication" and wanted a strategy position prepared that used "some other term."  I was stumped.

How do you take a term that's already pretty entrenched in the industry and change it without losing a lot of the helpful associations that come with it?  We brainstormed and came up with "communication connections" and "universal communication" and "anytime anywhere communication" but none really satisfied.  After a few revisions of the presentation, we put UC back in.  Everything else connoted something we weren't intending!

I completely understand that prunes are now calling themselves dried plums -- sure!  Prunes have a bad rap as cheap, fuddy dud laxatives whereas dried plums sound kinda yuppie and upscale.  But UC was never a prune -- it's always been a plum.  Who doesn't want UC?  No sense discarding a label that actually works for you.

Name That Tune!

Do you remember this TV show?  A dinosaur would!

Apparently some intrepid Cisco gnome can deploy 200+ Jabber clients in ONE DAY.  Good on ya, man!  I suspect, however, that as a best practice, one should plan for a slightly longer and more controlled rollout.  I'll be spending a lot of time here when the time comes!

Masters Degrees don't pay off for IT?

New study from Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce says sometimes a graduate degree pays off -- potentially up to 40% earnings boost.  But sometimes not so much.  Especially in IT (and four other fields I don't care about).

I find it interesting that they quote Modis (a big IT body shop) as saying improved skillsets and interpersonal skills are more important than greater academic qualifications.

So many people I know are thinking about getting a M.A. or a M.S. to get out of a slump, a slot, or otherwise jump-start their IT careers.  Hit the brakes! 

Mama?

Dino skeleton expected to return to Mongolia

Is that you, Mama?

I wonder if Tyrannosaurus bataar is on LinkedIn. . .

War of the Email: Outlook\Exchange 2010 v. Notes 8.5

I'm intrigued.

I've been living the argument for many years, but I've never seen this particular comparison before.  Author Martijn de Jong is not unbiased, but he is open about his background and tries to stick to facts.  And he's quite right, IBM should have published a comparison like this a long time ago.

Unfortunately this comparison won't change minds when it comes to the Big Picture, but it might open eyes in the Little Picture -- if some people still think certain Outlook-y things can't be done with Lotus Notes (and vice versa).

Well done, Martijn.

"Connections, what?"

Congratulations, IBM Connections!  Worldwide market share leader in social business three years running.  Nice!

So what is it?  A suite of everything you need to get going in the social business world, all interoperable, all streamed together, all together capable of making email obsolete.  35% of Fortune 100 companies are using it.  No other software supplier has anything quite like it. You'd think IBM would be marketing the h*ll out of it.

Have YOU seen a commercial for it lately?  Yeah, me either.

Until they do, here's a 4-year old goodie they could dust off and re-air -- if they felt like selling software.

Have we reached the end of Email?

Thierry Breton of Atos is a bold, bold man!  He is banning the use of email internally.  Wow!  If it works, this man is a KM genius.

I will watch this experiment keenly over there, but not rushing to implement it myself.  I am quite intrigued, but knowing my organization, which is a bit on the older/conservative side, a little skeptical. I note a key passage in the article:




When we don't have internal email anymore we will have fantastic new tools - a
cloud computing environment, social networks, instant messaging, micro blogging,
document sharing, knowledge community - these offer a much better approach for
an information technology company.

An alternate ecosystem for information sharing must exist and be well used before our more entrenched email users will start sharing their information in that forum instead of email. We have some of this, but I would argue it's not well used. This transition will be easier for the 30-and-under crowd, as the article alludes to, and very difficult for those who have already lived through the revolutionary change to embrace email.

You cannot take tools away without first providing not just a replacement, but it must be an EXCELLENT replacement. So excellent that people immediately see the utility and its benefit to them.


I wouldn't take a bone away from a dog, unless I had a steak to offer!



Any different slants on this idea?

What do Dinosaurs and Social Business have in Common?

I owe Christine Crandell a debt for her Forbes article, "What Do the Extinction of Dinosaurs and Social Business Have in Common?" because she perfectly explains the point of this blog -- "A failure to adapt is the failure to survive," she says and she's right.

Lotusphere 2012

Several colleagues and I attended this year's IBM\Lotus Software Conference. As always, the sessions were intense and very future-oriented. Some key themes they emphasized this year:


Social Business is the way of the future

The pace of business is speeding up substantially (you have 60 seconds to engage your customer -- that's all!) and being productive is increasingly harder these days. According to IBM, forward-thinking organizations are 57% more likely to allow their people to use social & collaborative tools to be more engaged and productive to meet future challenges. Social Business ties information, processes and resources together using collaborative tools to streamline the way people do business. Gone are monthly business trips, on-call pagers, and emailed tasks. Instead, we now see video rich teleconferences, cellphone text messages, and activity driven action items.

At this year’s conference IBM offered some good solutions -- browser based collaborative tools, social analytics, and applications -- that boost user communities to become more productive and social. Not merely allowing, but empowering people to be dynamic in how they retrieve, interact with, and convey information is crucial to making Social Business work. We saw real examples of how IBM technologies were delivering Social Business solutions for various organizations (Bayer, Polycom, Premier Healthcare, GAD, TD Bank) all over the world. Watch a 60-second snapshot of the hottest Opening General Session announcements. "Social" is the new business model. "Social" means engaged, transparent, and nimble. This feeds really well into the work the Bank Group is doing on the Millennium Development Goals, and even addresses our Innovative Knowledge Sharing and Transparency initiatives. Along with "Collaboration" and "Community," expect "Social Business" to be a hot new buzzphrase!


Activity Streams (IBM Connections) bring everything together

Lotus long ago transformed Notes into more than just email -- it's effectively a "collaboration platform" that WBG people use all day, every day. Since it acquired Lotus Notes, IBM repeatedly tried to insert new "Social" features in Notes, but has increasingly focused on a bigger collaboration tool: IBM Connections. In this broader web-based platform, "Communities" could correspond to formal WBG Networks but also less formal shareholder networks -- and "Activity Streams" shows you the important updates from relevant data sources you select, such as internal/external Communities, Social Analytics, Activities, Bookmarks, Profiles, Sharepoint, File system, Group Calendars, Wikis, Blogs, Forums, Microblogging (status updates) etc.. Email is only one source in many! It's a bit hard to describe in black and white, so click here to see what an IBM Connections homepage looks like. This, or something like it, may become your personal work dashboard some day.


Unified Communications

It's not enough to pull all the computer pieces together -- in a Social Business, meaningful communication and collaboration also come from phone calls, Instant Messages, videocalls, and videoconferences -- IBM Sametime Unified Telephony (SUT) endeavors to unify the experience. We agree with IBM that people want to have one client that gives us everying -- presence/chat/voice/video -- on our computers as well as on our choice of mobile device. At WBG, we are already in step, as we have ICP providing our Unified Communications strategy and solutions, so this was slightly less relevant to us.


The Cloud

There was a lot of emphasis on IBM's cloud service, which was rebranded from LotusLive to IBM SmartCloud for Social Business (or "SmartCloud"). 80% of the Fortune 500 use one or more IBM cloud computing capabilities. They offer their full suite of collaboration products (including email) and you can get a free 60-day trial if you are interested.


Mobility gets you there

68% of the population accesses social sites via cellphone and 36% have made purchases from cellphone. iPhone/iPad popularity and Android's rapid consumption of market share means we -- and IBM -- can't focus solely on BlackBerry anymore. IBM is working to bring the best of "Social Business" to all of the major devices however they can -- either by developing their own client or by feeding a native-to-the-device client. "Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD) initiatives in organizations like ours are driving this. We got some good XPages tips and some ideas for Sametime on iPhone and Android!


Oh, and I needn't have worried about lacking gadgets -- I took my Christmas Present (iPad 2) and fit right in!