Mixed by Sam Van Campenhout (Business Development Manager @ Whatever) in Enterprise 2.0
December
An article originally posted on blog.hbs.edu
“Recent events in the news have inspired a thought experiment: I asked myself what I would do if I were put in charge of IT as part of the turnaround effort at a big US automaker. To be a bit more specific, I imagined that one of the big 3 American auto companies was taken over tomorrow by enlightened and aggressive new leadership whose only goals are to restore the company to operational and financial excellence. This leadership is enlightened (in my book) because it believes firmly in the power of IT to help businesses achieve their goals and differentiate themselves in the marketplace, and will fund and fully support whatever initiatives I propose (this is a complete fantasy for several reasons, but thought experiments aren’t supposed to be constrained by reality.).”
Read the full article at blog.hbs.edu
In my opinion…
Will any of the VPs of IT of the major US car manufacturers read Andrew’s post on how he would use IT (as a means, not a goal) to use all of the knowledge that resides within these huge organisations to get through this economic hurricane?
I hope so.
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Mixed by Sam Van Campenhout (Business Development Manager @ Whatever) in Enterprise 2.0, Knowledge mgmt
November
An article originally posted on blog.hbs.edu
Andrew posts his answer to 3 questions that were regularly raised by people commenting the previous posts on this topic.
- If you measure activity, aren’t you just going to get activity?
- Why not measure instead what we’re really interested in: innovativeness, productivity, service levels, etc.?
- Wouldn’t some people treat ESSP contribution as a chore, doing the minimum necessary, and with minimal thoughtfulness?
Read the full article at blog.hbs.edu
In my opinion…
seeiing/using = believing (positive nature) vs pessimism
Andrew still believes that a multi-dimensional individual measurement program will help organisations to focus & reach goals, despite all negative comments (things that may go wrong while measuring) posted by people reading part I & II
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Mixed by Gregory Culpin (Business Development Officer @ Whatever) in Enterprise 2.0, Knowledge mgmt, Taxonomy
November
An article originally posted on www.socialenterprise.it
“Knowledge Plaza offers without a doubt a new and extremely powerful platform for locating and capitalizing business knowledge, skillfully mixing advanced concepts such as social filtering, people tagging, the merge of taxonomies, tags and facets, the use of experts such as vertical search engines. (…)”
Read the full article at www.socialenterprise.it
In my opinion…
Emanuele Quintarelli, an information architect, user experience and social software consultant, wrote up this complimentary article about Knowledge Plaza. If like me you are not Italian literate, check out the following English translation.
Grazie mille per il relè Emanuele and we’ll be glad to gather your feedback for making the interface even more intuitive. 
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Mixed by Gregory Culpin (Business Development Officer @ Whatever) in Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise search, Knowledge mgmt, Social software
November
An article originally posted on www.theappgap.com
“Knowledge Plaza is a Web-based platform for enterprise search, social bookmarking, knowledge management, information brokerage and expert identification. Every tile, or piece of information, has its own page like members so you can see all the activity related to the information. You can also send a link to the page so others can see the context around the information. I like this in the same way I think the Mosaic concept adds value. You get the context surrounding information and you can share this context. This concept of providing context is pervasive in Knowledge Plaza and I think that is one of its greatest strengths. It takes knowledge management nicely into enterprise 2.0.”
Read the full article at www.theappgap.com
In my opinion…
Bill Ives wrote up this excellent article about Knowledge Plaza at the App Gap, after only a brief tour of the solution. We’re already looking forward to further interaction and collaboration during his next visit to Belgium.
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Mixed by Gregory Culpin (Business Development Officer @ Whatever) in Enterprise 2.0, Knowledge mgmt, Trends
November
An article originally posted on pistachioconsulting.com
Laura Fitton from Pistachio relayed this short business use case story for Twitter written by Gary Koelling of Best Buy and Blue Shirt Nation fame.
Image via CrunchBase
“We had a meeting today, about 30 of us in a room, where we heard from some very high ranking executives as they took us through their thinking on how to implement a relevant digital strategy. Sounds dreadful right? What was different was that there was a huge tv screen next to an overhead projection of the ppt. On the screen was a web app created by @benhedrington call spy. It was rolling every tweet tagged with #BBYCDS from Twitter. Almost everyone in the room and lots outside the room were tweeting thoughts and questions throughout. There were enough tweets, in fact, that the tag #BBYCDS trended on summize to number two right ahead of “sarah palin” and right behind “halloween.”
And what struck me was the dynamic of this meeting. It was participatory. No one was talking out loud except the guy presenting the ppt. But the conversation was roaring through the room via twitter. It was exploding. People we asking questions. Pointing out problems. Replying to each other all while the ppt was progressing along it’s unwaveringly linear path.”
Read the full article at pistachioconsulting.com
In my opinion…
Microblogging in a single room is the behaviour you’ll see at conferences nowadays, but I was thrilled to discover a company actually practicing this to manage all their meetings and presentations.
Whether you are 5 or 500 people, the ability to instantaneously share ideas and conversations without disrupting presentations almost sounds too wild to one day become common practice. My first impression is however that this could be slightly overkill for smaller groups/companies. Also the fewer the people, the closer the speaker and therefore the more potentially disturbing could microblogging become.
Should critical mass therefore be a requisit? Could we apply the same to web conference meetings and training sessions to dynamically gather feedback? Next step is now to convince the boss to try this out
What are your thoughts about this?
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Mixed by Antoine Perdaens (COO @ Whatever) in Enterprise 2.0, Trends
November
An article originally posted on www.readwriteweb.com
Oliver Young, an analyst at Forrester Research, stated that despite there being a lot of buzz about the consumer market for web 2.0 applications, “the greatest opportunity today for vendors is in the business-to-business collaboration space”.
Read the full article at www.readwriteweb.com
In my opinion…
The trend is definitely about social networks and mashups, but what about B2B collaboration spaces? Tools like Basecamp started early by providing a simple SaaS solution where one can manage projects with his clients. In the enterprise, trends are clearly growing towards solutions answering such needs: not only can project management be done with your clients, but so can knowledge management.
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Mixed by Gregory Culpin (Business Development Officer @ Whatever) in Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise search, Knowledge mgmt
November
An article originally posted on www.socialglass.com
“Recent discussions at work have prompted me to re-iterate something very fundamental that often gets overlooked when it comes to Enterprise 2.0. An organization will never adopt a single social productivity tool. Knowledge will ALWAYS be scattered.
Enterprise search will unlock data and increase the propensity for information (and the knowledge workers who create it) to be discovered. Discoverability leads to recognition, and recognition leads to increased participation. Enterprise 2.0 must be approached holistically.
Clearspace doesn’t do this. Thoughtfarmer doesn’t do this. Mindtouch doesn’t do this. There is no “Enterprise 2.0 in a box” solution. Period.”
Read the full article at www.socialglass.com
In my opinion…
I recently stumbled upon Jeremy Thomas who stated a few months back on Twitter that “Data within the enterprise will never be unified in one place i.e. a wiki, community, KM platform” and that “Search is key”. This followed his post on Social Glass which had been followed up by people such as Jon Husband and Chris McGrath with whom I couldn’t agree more on the fact “Enterprise 2.0 is as much a mindset than tools”. However, I guess you realize that closing the door to new potential solutions actually opens a huge one for being challenged?
Search is of course important, but in its current state search alone is insufficient. Enterprise search is as broken as web search: too many different sources, too little context. The fact is although it brings silos together, unfortunately context is either left behind or difficult to homogenize when brought in from this diversity of sources and formats.
The only option left is to then give users the ability to build context themselves around all this information once it’s been discovered and/or retrieved.
Funnily enough Jon Husband mentioned PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) which we’ve believed for a long time to be an essential step towards proper adoption of EKM (Enterprise Knowledge Management) solutions.
“Personally essential, collectively critical” : these are actually thoughts which lead our team to develop a few months back what is being recognized as a very elegant I&KM receipe which gathers any form of information (docs, websites, emails, contacts, search tools), but which more importantly allows users to interact around these items. Not only is all your information searchable, but it becomes contextualised under a single coherent umbrella: “No more silos, just context”. Social interaction and productivity then kick in to give you (what we think is) an all-in-one enterprise-wide solution for EKM.
Either way, I’d be more than glad to share thoughts on this with you guys. We are getting very positive feedback about the platform, but it’s definitely a treat to get dubious people on board and convince them this is actually possible;-)
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Mixed by Thomas Moreau (Head of Training @ Whatever) in Enterprise 2.0, Knowledge mgmt
October
An article originally posted on Broadband Evolved
“KP is definitely new and innovative and if you get a moment, I would recommend that you take a look. I especially love the concept of using people that you know and trust as a proxy for contextualizing traditional searches…”
Read the full article at www.broadbandevolved.com
In my opinion…
Thanks for this post, Matt. We call it the “EaSE” concept: Experts as Search Engines. Knowledge Plaza lets you perform Google searches inside the collection of Web sites or pages related to a user, and even to a whole group of users.
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Mixed by Sam Van Campenhout (Business Development Manager @ Whatever) in Enterprise 2.0
October
An article originally posted on blog.hbs.edu
“I received a wealth of insightful comments in response to my earlier post on Enterprise 2.0 ratings for knowledge workers. I thought I’d use some of them to continue discussing the topic, starting with the very basic question of whether measuring E2.0 participation is a good idea at all. A few commenters felt that it was not, and that the very act of measurement would pollute or drain enthusiasm from exactly the activities E2.0 enthusiasts are trying to encourage.”
Read the full article at blog.hbs.edu
In my opinion…
Almost one month after launching the discussion whether knowledge workers should have E2.0 ratings Andrew McAfee posted part 2 of this topic.
Most people who reacted on the blogpost tend to think that rating people would actually discourage contribution though no evidence for that is provided.
According to Andrew McAfee who tends not to believe this rating may have a twofold result: it may encourage friendly competition and make people strive to improve their scores.
I personally believe that one number of a couple of numbers aren’t enough to rate people’s participation. After all, some people (a minority) may be excellent at adding information whereas others are really good at tagging, commenting and rating (after all: isn’t that just what transforms information into knowledge?). Therefore only a complex rating scheme may correctly display the actual value of what people are contributing (in whatever form).
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Mixed by Gregory Culpin (Business Development Officer @ Whatever) in Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise search, Knowledge mgmt, Social software
October
An article originally posted on scottgavin.info
“In my biased opinion, we’ve delivered the most exciting Enterprise 2.0 social productivity platform on the market. And with new development coming to fruition in the next month it’s just going to get better.
Knowledge Plaza has been developed as a Web-based platform for enterprise search, social bookmarking, knowledge management, information brokerage and expert identification.
The platform allows you to add websites, emails, documents, contacts, references and discussions. Multimedia is on the way. You can tag, annotate and share anything you add. Using workspaces, your network and company facets sharing and finding information is at the core of Knowledge Plaza.”
Read the full article at scottgavin.info
In my opinion…
Scott Gavin’s claims about Knowledge Plaza are indeed very broad, however we stand by them as his post and many others’ reveal e.g. Bill Ives’s recent post.
An authentic knowledge hero’s piece of work!
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