Archive for September, 2011
by Bill Ives
September 29, 2011 at 3:58 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
Hivemine is the new parent company for AskMe, a social business solution that has won numerous awards and established a presence in the enterprise 2.0 space. I recently spoke with David Wachter, their Chief Marketing Officer about their offering. We first went over the difference between formal knowledge, such as policies, procedures, and training, and social knowledge: the most current content that is often being informally shared through out the organization. A social business solution can accelerate the creation, collection, refinement and sharing of this valuable knowledge.
David said that Hivemine understands that the social network is just the start and collaboration is a means to an end but the tools need to be people oriented, rather than document oriented to be effective. The goal is leveraging the best ideas of all employees and the synergy that can come from conversations on how to make things better to produce socialized knowledge. I would agree with all of these points. Simply the practice of sharing knowledge not only gets it in more hands, but also makes it better. The focus of AskMe is creating these useful conversations within the enterprise.
AskMe supports four stages in this process of creating socialized knowledge. Connecting the right people at the required time. Collaborating on topics of importance to the organization. Creating content for future use across the organization and communicating this collaborative output for better business performance. There are four main components to the software that cover these four functions.
Through the Connect capability shown below people can ask questions directed at existing content or ask specific and relevant experts for answers. These experts are generated in four ways through AskMe. The first way is through the content in the profile that everyone develops. The second way is through the actions that people do. The third way is through a rating system where people rate the value of answers that others provide. The fourth way is through a tool Hivemine calls TacitAGENT (auto-generated tagging) that integrates with Exchange and indexes user emails to generate suggested expertise tags based on unique content. Individuals can then select which of these tags they want to add to their profile.
The Collaborate capability allows for the back and forth conversations that occur as questions are asked, discussed and answered. See a sample screen below.
Through the Create capability people can create an FAQ. See a Create screen below. They first start the process with a question. Once they get proper answers the FAQ is created. When it gets more formal and properly vetted, the FAQ can be nominated as a Best Practice. This ranking gets it a higher status on search results. AskMe includes a business rules engine where you can build in company specific workflow for content approval and creation.
The Communicate capability provides users with tools like blogs, wikis, and announcements to help make the content more accessible once Q&A sessions have been transformed into FAQ’s and best practices. See a sample screen below.
I like the focused nature of the tool. It is different than most general-purpose collaboration platforms. AskMe is deployed within a number of large organizations to improve their knowledge capital. For example, Pratt & Whitney connects engineers across programs to share lessons learned and best practices. Novartis enables R&D and Marketing centers worldwide to share knowledge through a central knowledgebase. Microsoft also uses it for cross-organizational collaboration and as a single stop knowledge source.
AskMe is built in the ,NET environment and can easily sit on top of SharePoint and Exchange. It integrates with SharePoint through Web parts but can also work standalone or integrate with other tools. They are launching a SaaS version this Fall which is a great move.
by Bill Ives
September 26, 2011 at 12:44 pm · Filed under
Web 2.0
I recently attended Forrester’s Content & Collaboration Forum 2011 and was pleased, but not surprised, to find it to be a great event. Forrester notes that in five years, almost half of US workers, about 63 million people, will be working virtually. I am already one of them. This will change everything in workplace IT support from designing workplace information strategies for collaboration, to delivering content experiences to people across channels, to engaging the next-generation workforce to serve customers better.
The Forum explored what the “current demand for more portable, social workplace experiences means for your workplace strategy.” I covered seven sessions across three different blogs so this post provides a listing of all of them in order of appearance. I will add one more based on my interview with Leslie Owens as soon as I can finish it.
Cisco on Enabling the New Collaborative Workspace
Driving Business Value Through Enterprise Social Networking
Should You Move Your Email To The Cloud?
The Natural Synergy of Mobile and Collaboration
Forrester’s Leslie Owens on Harnessing the Voice of the Employee
Creating Global Knowledge Sharing Networks at ConocoPhillips
Forrester on Benchmarking Your Mobile Readiness
by Bill Ives
September 19, 2011 at 3:16 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
Many organizations are implementing both external facing social networking programs, as well as enterprise social networking tools. However, these are often different programs using different tools that are not integrated. BroadVision has introduced Clearvale to address this issue. I recently spoke with Richard Hughes of BroadVision to better understand their Clearvale offering.
Richard first gave me some context for this move. BroadVision began 18 years ago in the eCommerce space and was quite successful with on-premise solutions. They determined that personalization was the key to online commerce. More recently several trends have emerged. The cloud has arrived along with the move of social networking from the Web to the enterprise, resulting in enterprise 2.0. Most recently, the concept of social CRM has also come out of the social business movement. BroadVision rightly saw the opportunity to address this new enterprise social networking market. Instead of modifying their consumer Web tools to fit enterprise needs they decided to completely rebuild a tool set specifically designed for enterprise use.
Clearvale is an entirely new product built from the ground up with a focus on people. There are three main groups: employees, customers, and partners. You can create separate networks for each group but manage them as an integrated system. Richard offered a useful slide on the relationships between enterprise 2.0, social CRM, and the consumer Web social networking. You can see the segments that Clearvale addresses below.
In addition to providing networks for employees, partners, and customers, Clearvale offers a means to connect to public networks such as Facebook as shown by the arrow above. They do not suggest that Clearvale customer communities are a replacement for Facebook. Quite the opposite, they encourage their clients to maintain their branded Facebook pages but use them to direct traffic to their Clearvale enabled customer community where they have more control and monitoring capabilities. Facebook and a Clearvale powered community can complement each other in the somewhat the same way the Twitter complements blogs as a driver of traffic to the more comprehensive messages and features.
Richard said they have added into Clearvale all of the capabilities associated with making a business social (blogs, wikis, forums, activity streams, LDAP, bookmarking, communities, and much more) so that an organization can have access to a complete set of integrated tools and avoid the best of breed route that often results in silos. You can select which of the functions you want to include in your community. Since you can set up the employee, partner, and customer communities separately so you can vary the functions for each to meet their unique needs. Below is a sample Clearvale screen showing some of the functionality.
Richard mentioned that when he presented at the recent recent webcast organized by the Boston Enterprise 2.0 conference he asked the audience how many have implemented external communities, how many have implemented internal communities, and how many have done both. If they had done both he asked how many have integrated the two. The most common answer was implement both but not integrated them. The least common answer, even behind the “do nothings,” was integration of external and internal communities. These results make sense to me and this is the challenge that Clearvale addresses quite nicely.
Clearvale is also designed to integrate with enterprise apps such as CRM, HR, and even SharePoint to provide a platform of engagement through social and people focused apps. I think the term engagement is correct, as a social front end will likely increase enterprise app use. Richard said that if an enterprise social networking tool does integrate with the existing enterprise apps it is limited to simply facilitating water cooler chat. I could not agree more. This is what enterprise 2.0 needs to do to move beyond Web 2.0 in the enterprise.
Richard mentioned some recent research from the Altimeter Group that points to the need for this out of the box integration. Altimeter found that in the first two years companies tend to spend most of their implement dollars on people to properly manage the effort. By the third year they shift to spending IT dollars to custom technology development, quite likely part of this is directed at integration services. Clearvale is designed to offer this integration upfront.
Clearvale offers three versions. Clearvale Express is a free version with enough functionality to be useful but not the full set. Clearvale Enterprise contains the full set of features. There is also Clearvale PaasPort that allows third party partners to offer specialized versions. Below is a sample Clearvale Express screen that shows that a lot comes with the free version.
They also offer a mobile capability and a sample activity stream displayed on a smart phone is shown below. You can add action items to the activity stream and attach them to a task to monitor results. These types of workflow features are essential to move social networking beyond the chat phase.
I think that Clearvale has made a number of smart choices in their product design and development. The multi-dimensional integration capability is great vision and one that both simplifies and enriches the adoption of enterprise 2.0
by Bill Ives
September 14, 2011 at 2:42 pm · Filed under
Web 2.0
The leading edge enterprises are becoming more social and there are many financial and organizational benefits to this increased connectivity as McKinsey has documented. Moxie is now providing a comprehensive platform for the networked organization through its Spaces by Moxie™ suite, which includes Employee Spaces™ and Customer Spaces™. I recently spoke with Tom Kelly, the CEO, and Azita Martin, the CMO, about their offering.
Tom said that social platforms are now moving beyond simple communication and connection to deploy more robust functionality and more elegant design. These are two factors they are focusing on at Moxie. For example, a social platform needs to connect to rich profiles of employees. It needs to be able to locate and expose expertise, it needs to be able to form logical work groups for activities and supply the needed tools, and it needs to be project oriented to allow for effective collaboration around projects. For example, in Employee Spaces all documents, social objects like wikis, blogs and conversations are in the context of projects, so people collaborating on projects can find all the information relevant to that project in one place.
To accomplish these needs, the design should be both simple and elegant. Rather than being structured around documents like the more traditional content management tools, the new social tools need to focus on people, groups, and projects. Documents do not do work, people do so this needs to be the organizing principles for tools that enable people to get their work done. I could not agree more. Here is a sample Moxie screen showing the clear organization of its components.
Here also are two sample profiles.
Tom said that for those organizations heavily invested in the old style content management tools, Moxie can provide a social interface to bring them into the connected workspace. It can also work in a standalone mode to cover the content and collaboration needs of an enterprise. Tom offered an example of TEVA Pharmaceutical who has gained significant operational efficiency in their supply chain. TEVA is a Canadian company that competes delivering generic drugs to market faster. With Moxie Employee Spaces, they were able to achieve a 40% reduction in manufacturing cycle time. They are able to easily report and quickly resolve manufacturing issues. In addition to the cycle time reductions, they have seen an over 50% reduction in the number of meetings organized to address unexpected manufacturing problems. This is a great testimony to the efficiency gained through social tools in the enterprise.
Tom went on to cover some of the functional benefits. The Employee Spaces status updates promote a significant reduction in email, especially those ones that are FYI or CC’s that clutter up your inbox. Documents and related dialog can be shared within the transparent update stream rather than as attachments in siloed email.
Employee on-boarding can be conducted in a much more efficient manner as new hires can easily be integrated into the right work networks, significantly shortening the time for them to be connected to the right people to become effective in their work. The robust employee profile is a big aid here. Then when employees leave, all of the work they did remains and is easily accessible.
Tom mentioned that innovation is a team sport and that is certainly the case. Crowd-sourcing can be supported. They use idea storms for their own product development at Moxie. Perhaps even more importantly the teams that implement these new ideas are efficiently connected and the right resources can be easily identified.
Internal communications can become more interactive through blogs and the status updates. This can extend to customer communication and you can collaborate on projects and share social functions in a secure manner with clients. As enterprise become more comfortable with the new transparency, there will be greater opportunities to learn from interactions. This potential is one of the things that first attracted me to the Web 2.0 tools. I saw that knowledge management could become an effortless byproduct of using the right tools, and not an additional activity at the end of a long day.
We discussed metrics. Moxie currently provides a series of activity-based metrics such as usage levels, who knows who, and who should known who. They will be doing more work in this space to increase the discovery of where new connections need to be made, Employee Spaces uses Autonomy search and this is an important part of discovery. Enhanced search capabilities provide the ability to search for information across all types of content regardless of whether the information is within Employee Spaces or within an external application such as SharePoint. Search filters and tags can be used to narrow search results, using an easy-to-navigate user interface.
They also provide comprehensive mobile apps for the iPhone, Blackberry, and other devices. They have further enhanced integration of their social media listening and sentiment analysis with Facebook, Yelp, Flickr and Yahoo Firehose (YQL), adding to its existing integration with Twitter, You Tube, Bing, Blogger, and Digg among others. Also included is the ability to send direct messages back to users on Twitter.
Social and mobile are the new directions for enterprise apps. I like what Moxie is doing and look forward to their next moves. Here is a link to some of their demos.
by Bill Ives
September 9, 2011 at 9:24 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
Mobile is on the rise with tablets and smart phones passing desktops and laptops in usage. A number of vendors are rushing to provide capabilities to this emerging opportunity. DoubleDutch has expanded its initial offerings to provide a comprehensive suite of mobile apps for the enterprise. I recently spoke with their CEO Lawrence Coburn about this move.
Lawrence rightly noted that software that is in your hand and often at your side 24/7 is different than the apps you use at your desk. With HYVE they are providing a series of lightweight apps with specific functions and simple interfaces to serve the worker on the run. He said that they are not trying to be a Facebook for the enterprise with a single destination point to cover all needs. Instead, they are offering a series of easy to use productivity tools for the business user in the field.
They are working in alignment with four emerging themes in the workplace. Mobile is passing desktops as the most used device, social is passing email as the most used app, simplicity and limited functionality is becoming the norm for enterprise apps, and the Management 2.0 approach to flat and transparent organizations in gaining acceptance over the old hierarchical structures.
HYVE is designed to support all of these trends with mobile, social, simple, and location-aware apps. It also provides an engagement layer between the user and traditional enterprise apps such as ERP or CRM. Part of the employee – app interaction is automated by geo-location awareness and much of the rest can be handled by the tapping capability of smart phones rather than typing. A sample status update screen is shown below.
For example, logging in a client account activity into a traditional CRM system takes, at best, around ten minutes and is often delayed until a sales rep returns to the office. With the HYVE Sales app, geo-location sensitivity picks up when the repauto fills some input and provides relevant client context from the client location. The rep can then tap selections from list of options. HYVE Sales shortens the update time to around 10 seconds and it happens in real time so account records are always up to date. For example, another employee could learn of the rep’s presence at the client site as soon as it happens and ask the rep to handle an additional matter while they were there.
HYVE also makes good use of analytics. You can get a breakdown of your activity and this can be aggregated for groups and organizations. Here is a sample analytics screen showing the activity for a user.
Here is sample activity feed so you can check on what is happening with the people of interest.
The DoubleDutch HYVE enterprise suite includes seven apps with more on the way. Here are their descriptions. There is HYVE Knowledge™ for project-management teams, including product development, management, small and mid-size businesses, and IT consultants.
HYVE Field™ serves field workers, including service, delivery and maintenance professionals working outside the four walls and servicing customers and partners.
HYVE Sales™ supports sales teams in multiple industries looking to build collaborative environments that track pipeline progress, tighten strategy on accounts, and enhance customer retention and satisfaction activities and metrics.
HYVE CSR™ is designed for enterprises that want to build communities, engagement, and collaboration around Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) efforts and employee volunteer opportunities.
HYVE Onboarding™ serves HR organizations that want to streamline the employee onboarding process and create a collaborative culture for both existing and new employees.
HYVE Engage™ is for brands and media companies that wish to engage both businesses and consumers.
HYVE Events™ meets the needs of event producers that want to add mobile, location and social capabilities for conference and tradeshow attendees. I can certainly see the utility of this one, as well as the others.
Lawrence said DoubleDutch designed HYVE’s features for intuitive ease of use like most consumer Web tools. In fact, they borrowed some of the interface from social media applications so it would be recognizable to new users. They also added a gaming component to further encourage use. You can get points for various activities and receive achievement badges. It can become every addictive and DoubleDutch reports that 60% of the users log in more than 100 times a week. Mobile is the next frontier in enterprise apps and DoubleDutch has developed a very strong offering for this expanding market. I like all aspects of what I have seen.
by Bill Ives
September 5, 2011 at 3:02 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
Rob Armstrong wrote an interesting post, What do you mean by BI?, on the Smart Data Collective in which he outlines five different levels of business intelligence along with the IT and user requirements for each. First he notes that he “like(s) to read an acronym backwards. BI is not about business intelligence, it is about having enough intelligence regarding your business that you can make, and take, relevant, timely, and profitable actions.” We would agree. Here are the five levels with the IT and user requirements for each in Rob’s words.
Level 1: “Basic Canned” Reports: – users have no ability to change the content of the report and receives latest version of pre-determined output. “Highly optimized by IT; Well defined by Users.”
Level 2: “Canned Ad-Hoc” – users target parameterized dimensions for pre-determined and pre-optimized reports. “Highly optimized by IT; users determine “typical” dimension blocks.”
Level 3: “Customized Canned Ad-Hoc” – users can define dimension boundaries and also determine columns or calculations that appear on the report. “Optimized by IT; KPI’s defined by users.”
Level 4: “Create your own” – user have free reign to determine the columns, dimension ranges, and even create new metric calculations limited only by their security access needs. “Users understand SQL processing and creation. May also create temporary tables or store results.”
Level 5: Data Mining – in prior levels users are asking questions to get answers. In data mining the “user is asking questions to understand what questions really need to be asked.” “Users trained in data model and SQL practices.”
Thought...
