McKinsey Quarterly: Making internal collaboration work – An interview with Don Tapscott

One of the best resources for those interested in Social Business has to be the McKinsey Quarterly.

As many of you will know, McKinsey & Co are one of the most respected management consultancies around, and are involved in a significant volume of work with organisations around the world on Social Business and internal productivity. The McKinsey Global Institute produces a regular annual report into the use of Social Business – a must read for sure.

However, the reason for this post is to direct you to this interview with Don Tapscott where he describes why effective knowledge management within enterprises requires replacing e-mail with social media. Filmed in September 2012, Don does a great job of explaining how Social Business tools will revolutionise business in this decade, and how it should be approached differently from previous collaborative technologies.

(If you prefer to read these kinds of interviews, the transcript is also available).

I particularly like Don’s example of an organisation cancelling 80% of their meetings that were ‘informational’ by sharing the information online in place of the meeting.  

Collaboration Matters believes that this Social Business ‘revolution’ is as significant as Don and others state, and are working with organisations to make massive gains in productivity through the shift from meetings and email into a much more efficient social strategy.

Get a fantastic deal for IBM Connect 2013 with Kenexa

Update 10th January 2013: It seems that this deal was too good to be true and thus it has been withdrawn. If you managed to get your registration done in time then well done!

At Collaboration Matters we love to look after our customers, and so we are delighted to be able to share a fantastic deal with you courtesy of Kenexa.

The IBM Connect 2013 conference is coming up in just 2 weeks time. Many of you will know it as Lotusphere, but the near-20 year old conference has now been rebranded to IBM Connect, to reflect the new focus on Social Business and Smarter Workforce topics as well as the traditional messaging and collaboration areas. The conference this year takes place from 27-31 January at the Dolphin and Swan resort at Walt Disney World.

As a special offer to customers and prospects of Kenexa (a recent acquisition by IBM in the Smarter Workforce category), there is a special offer as follows:

Attend two days of the conference for just $995—saving hundreds off the two-day rate. Use code MAFFZR

Attend all five days of the conference for just $1,295—saving hundreds off the normal full conference rate. Use code JSHTTA

We recommend that all our IBM Collaboration Solution customers attend Connect – there really is no better place to hear the latest news about the products and solutions you use, as well as being part of the best community in the business.

Click through to register – there’s no time to waste!

Joining the team… Sharon Bellamy

I am truly delighted to announce a new member of the Collaboration Matters team, Sharon Bellamy.

In many cases, Sharon will need no introduction, as you will already be familiar with her great work on IBM Connections at a number of organisations, regular blog posts, appearances on This Week in Lotus, speaking engagements at user groups and Lotusphere conferences, her efforts to co-found and organise the Social Connections user group and indeed, her status as an IBM Champion!

If you haven’t had the fortune to meet Sharon yet, hopefully you’ll soon have the opportunity to get to know her enthusiasm, tenacity, deep technical skills and boundless energy!

Sharon will be working to deliver Social Business projects to our customers, including technical and business consultancy, managed services and training.

Welcome Sharon!

The Social Business imperative – a time of radical corporate change

Rooven Pakkiri, Head of Social Business at Collaboration Matters has recently had a paper published by the well-respected UKSG organisation. It is entitled ‘The social business imperative – a time of radical corporate change’ and is featured in their ‘Insights: the UKSG journal’ publication for July.

Here’s the excerpt:

‘Social business’ is about the inspired use of collaboration technology platforms inside the company firewall to solve business problems. It has often misleadingly been described as Facebook or LinkedIn for the company, but it has a much more profound objective than social networking sites. It represents a technology-led paradigm shift that will reshape the culture and processes of organizations within five years. This article explores the very heart of social business: the emancipation, distribution and consolidation of knowledge – which aligns neatly with the traditional roles of publishers and libraries to date. It looks at the background, in terms of economic theory: increasing the value of ‘labour’ over ‘capital’, and the promise of social business: to make better use of the knowledge embedded around the organization, looking at examples from the real world and assessing the cultural implications, such as valuing patterns over process or influence over hierarchy. In conclusion, the article presents a final vision for social business: loyalty and gamification, the future of work and the end of the traditional workplace.

Covering topics such as ‘Background economics: the evolving dynamic between labour and capital‘, ‘The promise of social business: optimization of knowledge‘ and ‘Understanding the value of pattern over process‘, Rooven presents an overview of what Social Business is and how Collaboration Matters takes it to our customers.  This isn’t about technology for technology’s sake, instead as an enabler for a paradigm shift ‘that will reshape the culture and processes of organizations within five years’.

You can download the paper free from the UKSG site.

IBM introduces the IBM Connections Suite

At the Social Business event in the Netherlands today, IBM announced the new IBM Connections Suite.

The Convergence of Social, Unified Communications, and Content Management

Including IBM Connections, IBM Connections Community document libraries, IBM Sametime Advanced and IBM Sametime Unified Telephony Lite, this new solution is designed to provide an organisation will all the tools to offer its users a cohesive suite of social collaboration tools.  I’m sure that you will hear more from Luis Benitez and others as the day goes on in terms of details – I know that there are some great video demos to look out for too.

From our perspective, this new bundle provides a single part number for a really cohesive bundle of tools: instant messaging, VoIP, microblogging, communities, social profiles, document libraries, instant polls, forums, media galleries and so on.  When you compare the breadth of the solution with anything from Jive, Socialtext, Microsoft or SalesForce.com, it all stacks up tremendously well.  Like for like, there really is no comparison in ‘bang for the buck’.  IBM has done a super job of pulling it all together into one product.

As always though, Social Business is not really about the technology.  It is an enabler to help an organisation and individuals working within it to get to a culture where sharing carries less friction, where information and resources are easier to find and where the organisation is flattened to a point where it becomes about the ‘wirearchy‘ rather than the ‘hierarchy‘…

The Connections Suite will absolutely provide an organisation with the bundle of tools it needs in its’ kit bag.  The next challenge is how to implement them in a way that supports the organisation’s goals and direction.  That’s where IBM’s partners (and internal services team) need to step in, to remove the complexity from this bundle of products, make it into a really cohesive single solution and then to layer ‘the interesting stuff’ (user adoption, customisation, business process alignment, community management etc.) on top.  We can’t wait!

The rise of the Community Manager and the Collaboration Garden: an IBM Social Business Briefing

For our third IBM Social Business Briefing (aka Wicked Wednesdays) on 25th April at Royal Exchange in London, we felt the time was right to move the discourse from thought leadership and education to a more practical footing.

Of course, we still leveraged the superb network of independent thought leaders who we are lucky to have at our events BUT at this latest event we changed / evolved the format.

On this occasion I framed the discussion on the emerging role of the Community Manager (seen by some as the ‘rock star of the Enterprise’) and then actually used a collaboration platform to discuss, collaborate and innovate around the chosen topic.

The objective or rather the output of the debate was not simply to gain a better understanding of this subject (the fastest growing job role in Social Business) but also to create a job description for the role of Community Manager which could then be downloaded and iterated by users.

To help us achieve this we introduced attendees to the Collaboration Garden – a place where the Wicked Wednesday discussion and collaboration goes on in and around the physical events.

Once inside the Garden, users could not only record their opinions and raise questions but they could also examine (through the software) the potential responsibilities and attendant tools on hand to assist a Community Manager with user adoption – e.g. gamification and social media feeds.

The overall sentiment was that this was our best Wicked Wednesday to date and pointed the way forward for future events.  Weaving the use of the collaboration platform into the discussion from the start had a number of important effects:

• It forced us all ‘to drink our own champagne’
• Individuals contributed to the Garden on-premise and remotely (including from Spain and Ireland)
• It highlighted how much was lost when we simply spoke and did not record
• Live collaboration in the platform allowed for multi-threaded conversations which themselves were profoundly different to normal conversation
• Those who were not familiar with a social collaboration platform experienced it in a way that was far more refreshing and natural then the traditional demo mode

Wicked Wednesdays are all about sharing and collaborating with those who attend the latest trends, twists and turns in the Social Business journey. We take risks at this event; we have to in order to keep things fresh and real.  So it was particularly gratifying to hear that the new format was warmly welcomed by those involved.

We are planning our next Wicked Wednesday/Social Business Briefing to take place in June and in keeping with our need to innovate we are experimenting with moving the venue from the Royal Exchange to a comfortable, friendly, coffee shop in the city which should be fun.

For more information, feel free to contact us directly.

Collaboration Matters awarded IBM Platinum Achievement Award

Collaboration Matters were delighted and incredibly honoured to be publicly recognised by IBM last week at the Software Partner Marketing College at IBM South Bank in London.

The ‘IBM Software Platinum Achievement Award – Outstanding Marketing Achievement’ recognised those business partners that have marketed IBM’s and their own solutions in innovative and ground-breaking ways over the past year.  Finalists were Portal, Applicable, Barrachd and Collaboration Matters with Collaboration Matters taking the award.

Activities that were highlighted in considering the award included:

• The Collaboration Diner at UC Expo (breaking the mould for trade show stands, by making the main event the conversation and contribution, not the sales effort)
• Our ongoing series of Social Business Breakfast sessions (combining education and discussion on topics and issues relating to Social Business all through a combination of face-to-face and tool-based collaboration)
• The Collaboration Garden (an exclusive invite-only Social Business platform allowing organisations and individuals to trial, learn, discuss and be educated around the power of Social within Business)

Key to all of these initiatives has been our focus on being ‘refreshingly different‘ – an IBM Business Partner like no other.  It is great to see IBM reward our efforts:

“Collaboration Matters are creating innovative solutions with IBM collaboration technology in response to the Social Business models more and more customers want to pursue.”
Mark Barrett, Business Unit Executive, Partner Sales, Software Business, UK and Ireland

Thanks must go to my colleague Rooven (who was behind the concept for the Collaboration Diner), to the team at Arrow ECS (our VAD) and to all those at IBM UK who have supported our efforts this year.

Different technology, same values

A Lotus Notes ad from the R5 days, circa 1999:

‘I am ready‘, ‘I am connected‘, ‘I am not alone‘, ‘The power to work the way you want‘, ‘Share work and ideas‘ and so on…

This was describing Collaboration, Messaging and Workflow software from 13 years ago, but could so easily be describing the impact of Social Media and Social Business tools (such as IBM Connections) today.

My goodness, Lotus Notes and Domino really was painting a vision of the future…

Warning for IBM Connections admins – change that Plugin keyfile password!

If you are running IBM Connections (any version) and have configured your SSL connect between the HTTP Server and WAS by importing the WAS SSL certificate into the Plugin keyfile (versus creating your own keyfile) and haven’t changed the default password, go do so now!

As this IBM technote states, the default password expires on April 26th, 2012:

The password to the plugin-key.kdb file that is shipped with WebSphere Application Server expires on April 26, 2012 US EDT. On distributed this file is placed in the [Plugin_Home]/config/{webservername} directory when a web server plug-in is configured on an installed web server.

CVE-2012-2162

If you are using the WebSphere Key and Certificate Management generated plug-in key store you are NOT affected. If, however, you are using the key store installed by default with the Web Server Plug-in for WebSphere Application Server and you have NEVER changed the key store’s password, then you must change the plug-in key store’s password, which removes the pending password expiration, to avoid a security exposure. Generally, as a best practice, IBM recommends you always change passwords from the default value to enhance the security of your system.

In reference to this specific security exposure concern, a majority of users do not reference the affected file at runtime and therefore are not impacted. However, a small minority of users must take action and use certificate management tools to remove the password expiration prior to April 26, 2012 to avoid experiencing this issue.

All the instructions for fixing this issue are contained in the technote, so take a read and make sure you’ve got this covered.

For the record, my advice when configuring a new Connections environment is to create a new keyfile with your own password, create a self-signed certificate or request a certified one from Verisign etc, then to import the certificates into WAS.  This is all detailed in the presentation that Rob Wunderlich and I gave at Lotusphere 2011.

Social Connections III – Registration is open, session abstracts invited!

Social Connections (the IBM Connections user group) is back, returning for its third event.

Scheduled for Friday 22nd June 2012 at the IBM Labs in Dublin, this is the best chance you’ll have this year to hear directly from IBM Connections customers, consultants, partners, advocates and developers. Yes, developers too! By the kind invitation of IBM we are going direct to their European development base in Dublin, home to many members of the IBM Connections coding team. We’ll have sessions from IBMers on topics such as customisation, widget development, installation and management of Connections. Given that Connections 4.0 is imminent, you may get a sneak peak of what’s coming up in the future too!

However, this is a User Group rather than an IBM education event, so it won’t just be IBMers speaking. With two tracks (Business and Technical) we’re after the best of the best from around the community to speak at the event. As we’ve had at SocCnx I and II, the event will have a mix of customer case studies, adoption advice, technical show-and-tells, panel Q&As, and a few sessions we just can’t predict right now!

The call for session abstracts is open now, and closes on 30 April 2012, so if you would like to submit an abstract to be considered (for a 30minute session) please register for the event today and submit your idea. We’re particularly keen to hear from those outside the usual ‘bubble’ so if you’ve never spoken at Lotusphere or any of the other LUGs please don’t let that put you off. The Social Connections crowd are a very friendly bunch and we’d love to hear some new voices!  If you have any questions, please contact Sharon or Stuart for more info.

All the details are at SocialConnections.info, so please head over there to register and to submit an abstract.

You can also join the LinkedIn or Facebook groups, or follow all the news on Twitter (@SocCnx).  Hope to see you on June 22nd!