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 Khalid Yagoubi (Developer @ Whatever) in Knowledge mgmt
November
An article originally posted on www.cioupdate.com
“Enterprises must reconsider and redraft their knowledge strategy for this “2.0″ world (…) the traditional deployment of centralized content management systems will have to be merged with this newer phenomena of community-driven content generation.”
Read the full article at www.cioupdate.com
In my opinion…
Human factor is often forgotten in knowledge management. This article shows that human is the epicenter of KM. But how to extract and manage knowledge from people ? According to Raj Datta, CKO at MindTree, the solution is in social media and web 2.0.
People need to discuss, give opinions, share and have the feeling to belong to a network, they are not computers. It is why the traditional process-driven approach of KM must be changed into a people-driven approach. Furthermore, the work style of new generations is more fluid and collaborative.
Social media seems to become more and more important for Knowledge Management and can bring innovation in enterprise, just look at open source communities …
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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 Olivier Verbeke (CEO @ Whatever) in Enterprise 2.0
October
An article originally posted on www.cio.com.au
“Too many organizations choose to block what they don’t understand - it makes their environments easier to control. But what might the benefit be of truly understanding social media tools and allowing their use accompanied by a strong and appropriate proper use policy?”
Read the full article at www.cio.com.au
In my opinion…
A worthwhile 12-step guide to getting the most out of Web 2.0 tools and making it safe-for-purpose.
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Mixed by Gregory Culpin (Business Development Officer @ Whatever) in After party
October
An article originally posted on www.kbs-frb.be
“Le Prix Lionel Van den Bossche est décerné chaque année par le Fonds qui porte le même nom, géré par la Fondation Roi Baudouin. Son lauréat 2008 est la jeune société Whatever, basée à Louvain-la-Neuve, pour son projet Knowledge Plaza, une solution pour le partage de l’information et des connaissances au sein de l’entreprise.”
Read the full article at www.kbs-frb.be
In my opinion…
Whatever has been awarded the “Lionel Van den Bossche” innovation award 2008 for Knowledge Plaza after being initially selected amongst over 700 candidates!
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Mixed by Gregory Culpin (Business Development Officer @ Whatever) in Enterprise 2.0, Social software
October
An article originally posted on mashable.com
“As the corporate adoption of microblogging tools like Twitter continues to increase, it’s only a matter of time before companies decide that there is something there worth exploring. Well-known startups like Mahalo have a 50% adoption rate of Yammer. Companies like IBM are using similar functionality on their Facebook-like internal communities. With so many potential benefits, why wouldn’t a company want to give this a try?”
Read the full article at mashable.com
In my opinion…
Microblogging in the enterprise has been getting a lot of attention lately and speculations are made about its usefulness (or the opposite). To my mind it won’t help manage your information, but it will definitely help it flow and get people out of their e-mail boxes. Informality is another aspect of microblogging which helps quickly materialize knowledge that they would otherwise keep to themselves, yet without locking them into the silos of point-to-point instant messenging as microblogs are logged and shared.
Finally, one of the most important factors for adoption is the “what’s in it for me?” question which also gets a straightforward answer: if you know what people are up to, you’ll be more effective at finding the right person at the right time in order to get your own job done right. It also creates more opportunities for interaction and helps gathering feedback on your own work.
To those who blame these tools for additional information overload and attention diversion, what are you afraid of as long as the tool provides sufficient network/topic/project filtering features and its users stay professional? Receiving 20 status updates is far more useful and less disturbing than being disturbed by 3 people who are looking for information you can’t provide.
At the end of the day, you’ll only know if you try it out for yourself. So if you have the opportunity, I strongly recommend you give these Instant Messenging derivatives a shot. How? Well first choose a tool candidate requiring a minimal setup procedure (this article compares several amongst which my current favorite – Yammer). Find a few motivated folks in your workplace to test drive it but guide them with usage examples to avoid creating just a playground or another “information pit”. Finally, gather their feedback before considering a possible wider deployment.
Remember, even a small communication benefit over zero implementation effort leads to infinite return. So why wouldn’t anyone want to give this a try ? And if you have, what were the hurdles and solutions you encountered ?
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Mixed by Gregory Culpin (Business Development Officer @ Whatever) in After party, Enterprise 2.0, Knowledge mgmt, Trends
September
An article originally posted on Library Clips
“I feel that people will indeed post to a micro-blog as the content is the length of an SMS, ie. a max of 140 characters. This is not hard at all, and the format encourages a type of informalness. Another low barrier is posting via email or some sort of app that’s real easy to get to and post, perhaps via the browser or a desktop widget. Actually micro-blog posting via IM feels right, it feels more casual and something people may be inclined to do, unlike a blog they are not fearing that lot’s of people will see their published post, in fact micro-blog streams fall off the radar quite quickly.
This is not a mirror replacement for typical blog content, using micro-blogs we also tend to share stuff we wouldn’t blog, more akin to IM…so this makes blogs and micro-blogs (or presence networks) very complementary.”
Read the full article at libraryclips.blogsome.com
In my opinion…
If you are wondering whether microblogging can be a useful tool inside your company and can complement existing blog/wiki platforms, read through this post as it gives concrete examples of messages/conversations which can be captured and further fill in communication gaps between employees.
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Mixed by Sam Van Campenhout (Business Development Manager @ Whatever) in Enterprise 2.0
September
An article originally posted on blog.hbs.edu
“Imagine that an organization has deployed a full suite of emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) for its members— blogs, wikis, discussion / Q&A forums, upload facilities for photos and videos and etc., Digg-like utilities to flag and vote on digital content, prediction markets, some kind of enterprise Twitter, and whatever else a ‘full suite’ consists of, now or in the future. And imagine further that the leaders of the organization are sincerely interested in pursuing Enterprise 2.0 and getting their people to actually use the new tools. What would they then do? What would be their smart course(s) of action?”
Read the full article at blog.hbs.edu
In my opinion…
Interesting article from Andrew McAfee on his blog in which he tries to come up with a rather simple weight-free yet multidimensional model in order to qualify/rate the contribution of individual end-users (both taking into account quantitive as well as qualitative criteria) to social software platforms; this will for sure evolve into a more in-depth model that many organisations will be able to use/finetune for their environment.
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