Social Business strategist, podcaster, blogger, founder of Social Connections and conference speaker
Unfortunately I’ve just missed the actual anniversary, but I thought it worth celebrating that this week marks a decade since the announcement (on 22nd January 2007) of two products that have had an immense impact on my working life, Lotus IBM Connections and Lotus Quickr.
Firstly, two extremely well-respected IBM ISVs are forming a strategic alliance:
Specialists from all over the world are preparing themselves for Social Connections 10 – the core event for the IBM Connections community. So did Infoware and panagenda, both sponsors at the event, and formed a strategic alliance to jointly market both parties solutions.
The solutions Infoware DomainPatrol Social for content and user management and panagenda ConnectionsExpert for monitoring, adoption and analytics complement each other perfectly.
I’ve been a strong advocate for Infoware‘s Domain Patrol Social product for a number of years,
feeling that it fills a much-needed hole in a Connections community manager’s toolkit – managing communities, profiles and files in a way that the product itself does not allow.
I have also heard great things about panagenda‘s upcoming ConnectionsExpert product, which is about to be launched at Social Connections 10. This will offer metrics, analytics, realtime monitoring and adoption measurement all in one package. Given Panagenda’s network of partners and their own strong consultancy team (including Femke and Christoph), this is sure to do well.
As the press releases state, these products should prove to be highly complementary, and knowing the two organisations as I do, I think they’ll work tremendously well together.
Secondly, a social collaboration company that I’ve followed for a very long time, nooQ, is now partnering with IBM on adding visualisation features to IBM solutions, including IBM Connections:
We are excited to announce we have entered into a partnership with IBM.
Since we won product awards at Socialnow we have been speaking to IBM on working together. The next logical step for that was to apply for IBM partnership status, which has been approved.
nooQ will work with IBM their customers using IBM Connections to apply our intelligent, machine learning algorithms and visualisation to sit on top of existing IBM Connections data.
There are a lot of features in the IBM product that are not in nooQ such as blogs and wiki’s but now IBM customers will have the added benefit of an alternative interface to surface personalised content. They will be able to use our volume controls to filter and display visually what is important to them.
We will be focussing on IBM’s next generation Social Business products such as IBM Connections and also excited to see what powerful combinations we can complement and improve including their other next generation social business products with machine learning such as IBM Verse, IBM Watson, and Toscana.
I watched nooQ’s presentation at Social Now and it was fascinating to see the response from the audience in terms of being wowed by the potential of their solution, and could almost hear the cogs whirring in terms of the potential for the visualisation techniques and insight to be layered on top of other collaboration platforms – including Connections and Jive. It’s impressive to see that IBM and nooQ have moved so quickly, and I look forward to hearing more about the partnership and roadmap.
Both alliances will be in action next week at Social Connections 10 in Toronto, so if you have the opportunity to attend, you really should! There are still tickets available so register ASAP!
Or even Tim Cook…
Sometimes it takes a really poor performance and presentation style (from ASUS CEO Jerry Shen in this case) to see the excellence elsewhere:
However, even looking past the presentation itself, I find the Zenbook 3 announcement to be fascinating.
You can’t deny it’s a good looking machine, nor that shoehorning an i7 into a <12mm thick notebook is impressive, but if announcing your new flagship model as simply a thinner Macbook clone with a faster CPU, then what does that say about the innovation and vision of ASUS itself?
Those that know me well will recognise that I have three true passions and priorities in my life:-
So when it came time to revisit number 2 on that list, it made sense to bring in a little of 1 and 3…
After a whirlwind and very enjoyable 15 months working for Jive Software, my full-time employment concludes in the next couple of weeks.
I have loved working with so many fantastic colleagues in Jive EMEA and further afield, and never before have I had the opportunity to consult for so many fantastic customers in such a short period of time. With over 25 major projects in just over a year, it has been a phenomenal opportunity to influence the program strategy at well-known organisations that rely on their internal and external communities to support and transform their businesses.
It is my hope and expectation that I will continue to work with Jive going forward – directly, via partners or with customers. Despite the change in circumstances, I will be delighted to keep a positive working relationship with such a great team, plus my admiration for the products has only grown in the time that I’ve had more time to focus on the features they offer.
However, I never envisaged working as an FTE for too long – I’ve been in the independent consulting game for too long and enjoyed it too much to leave it behind long-term. So whilst I’m sad to leave Jive’s employment, I am thrilled to start the next chapter…
So, it’s time to start a new consulting business. I’ve been here before with Collaboration Matters (2008) and Social 365 (2011), so what has changed since then?
I still see massive opportunity for revolutionising work within organisations through the use of interactive intranets and enterprise social networks, plus the application of wider changes currently being considered under the banner of ‘the future of work’.
My involvement with colleagues in the incredible Change Agents Worldwide network only re-emphasise that whilst we’ve come a long way in terms of reinventing and transforming organisations towards openness and transparency (becoming ‘teal’ organisations if you like…), there is still a way to go in so many of the businesses that I interact with.
Many organisations still do not have access to platforms that properly support connecting, communicating and collaborating amongst individuals, teams and communities, and too many of those that do are still only partially-committed to shifting away from traditional M&E (meetings&email) practices towards fully open workstyles.
Given the current marketplace, I anticipate continuing to spend the majority of my time focused on enabling and facilitating corporate clients to accelerate their transformation in this area.
However, over the past few years there are a couple of areas where I’ve felt a deeper and more powerful surge of change occurring, and therefore see a greater opportunity for my input…
Whether for customer support, peer-to-peer assistance, product marketing or partner management (or typically some combination of all of these use cases and more), it feels as though an increasing volume of organisations are seeing the need for building vibrant, passionate, collaborative communities outside of their own structures and corporate boundaries.
These types of communities are not new of course, we’ve been discussing ‘extranets’ and the like for at least a decade or more. And yet, the technology available is less mature than on the inside (though products like Jive-x, Lithium’s online community platform and IBM’s Connections Cloud and Digital Experience are improving fast) [note]I plan to work with Jive and IBM technologies going forward, plus potentially others in the future.[/note], but more significantly, the best practices and strategic approach are some way behind. Complexities such as multi-lingual landing pages, content segregation/curation where supply or specifications are controlled by region, efficient SEO, and spam-eradication are challenges that are rarely an issue on internal platforms, yet can make or break an external community.
My analysis is that fewer than 1% of organisations have effective external communities today, and thus the opportunities for both new launches and improvement of existing communities are significant.
I mentioned both family and fostering at the top of this post, and here’s the reason…
Whilst I have utmost respect for local government institutions and fostering/adoption agencies – they do incredible work under tough conditions and tight financial restrictions – they are hardly paragons of technological excellence!
What we’ve seen through a number of years of working with both official agencies and those that work or volunteer on their behalf is that there is a massive and unanswered need for secure yet accessible online communities. Security and privacy are incredibly important – these are very confidential matters that are being discussed – and yet the needs for connection, communication and collaboration are probably more important than in any other form of organisation. After all, these are folks that are effectively working 24/7 in stressful and emotionally-demanding roles dealing with crises on a daily basis in many cases. Whilst much of the discussion amongst these groups takes place on Facebook and Twitter today, the communication resides on ‘secure’ email, and the collaboration typically takes place face-to-face, if at all. Given the confidentiality concerns, there is no way this can all be moved to a public social platform.
For these reasons, I see huge need for revolution in terms of how these kinds of public service communities operate, and yet neither enterprise vendors nor public networks are really providing an adequate solution today. I plan to take this on as a significant goal for the new business.[note]I’d include user groups and other independent bodies in this category too – there are few platforms that really suit this requirement today.[/note]
Hence the name we’ve chosen… Fostering Community.
Whether internal, external or public service, I want to see communities launched, develop, mature and deliver value to their members, and I’m throwing all my efforts into making that happen for my clients and my peers.
If you’d like my assistance with a project you have planned, or just a spark of an idea for a community that you’d like to bring into reality, please do get in touch.
Originally posted at ibmconnections.com…
Moving on, is a simple thing, what it leaves behind is hard.
Dave Mustaine
This site (IBMConnections.com, plus IBMConnectionsBlog.com) will close today, with all posts migrated to Stuart-McIntyre.com for posterity.
Thanks for reading, commenting and contributing over so many years.
Stuart
I love my job.
Seriously. I know that’s a cliché, but honestly, I love what I do.
Since early 2008 when I started Collaboration Matters (which morphed into Social 365 back in 2012), I’ve been privileged to have the opportunity to consult for some of the most insightful and forward-looking organisations around the globe. 7 straight years of helping companies improve the productivity of their workforces through using social technologies; working with not-for-profit agencies developing online communities (the real meaning of ‘social enterprise’); assisting 600-year old publishing houses to develop internal communications strategies that will take them forward into the next decade or more.
With these projects and many many more besides, I have been lucky enough to have almost constant work to take on, plenty of challenges to get my teeth into, and to be blunt, to continue to put food on my family’s table. That’s not to mention the opportunity to blog, to podcast and even to start a user group that has now met in 8 different countries over the past 4 years.
From Collaboration to Enterprise2.0, through Social Business and ESNs, then onto Working Out Loud and Digital Transformation, the terminology may have changed in those 7 years, but here in 2015 I believe even more strongly in the value of these technologies and approaches to make a real impact on working practices and to help change organisational culture for the better.
I love doing my own thing, feeling as though there are no boundaries to what can be achieved through my own energy, drive and commitment.
So all that said… I’m giving it up.
I am delighted to announce that later this month I will be joining Jive Software as a Senior Strategy Consultant in their Customer Success organisation.
If you’d have asked me 6 months ago whether I’d give up my company to go permanent again, I’d have said ‘no way!’, at least not for the foreseeable future.
However, there have been a few nudges along the way that have convinced me that this is the right next step in my career…
Firstly, at one of my most recent engagements, I’ve had the amazing opportunity to review and analyse more than 30 different platforms in order to create a short list for their procurement process, and then to take those solutions through to final selection. There is no doubt in my mind (both objectively and subjectively) that Jiven emerged as by far the strongest offering in this marketplace. Whilst the analysts might squabble about the final order of their leaders, they unanimously view Jive Software as one of the strongest and most focused vendors in this space. My own personal experience in past customer engagements, and again during this selection process, leave me with no doubt that this is almost certainly the most rounded offering out there, and if there are any weaknesses at all, that Jive Software are driven to resolve them at the first opportunity. In addition, rather than having one offering to fit all organisational scenarios, I love Jive’s approach of having packaged solutions for internal and external communities, plus their focus on different work types and on new solutions for those organisations that need lighter and more mobile-driven apps.
Secondly, I’ve been hugely impressed by everyone I have met in the months since I was first approached. Every single individual has been focused, insightful, passionate about their roles and hugely pumped up about the future of the company. One review of the organisation on GlassDoor said the following:
Jive has flipped the typical corporate ratio of top performers to mediocre performers on its head. At most companies 90% of the workforce has middle of the road performance with 10% being top performers. Jive is just the opposite. 90% of the staff are top performers and 10% are middle of the road. This is truly the most competent and highly skilled group of colleagues I have ever worked with. It makes it a pleasure to come to work.
I’ve been honoured to work with some fantastically talented colleagues over the years, but I am genuinely excited to be joining my new team.
Thirdly, moving to Jive does not undermine the friendships I have built in the wonderfully unique Lotus/ICS community. I consider so many people in the community to be my very best friends in the world, and I will stay in touch with you however and whenever I can. However, this is the right time for me to take a different path, to switch gears, and to embark on a new adventure with an organisation that is 100% focused on making the social collaboration ideal a reality.
So, in summary, you’ll probably have realised that I am really pumped up and excited by this opportunity at Jive. It just feels that the environment, the timing and the role is right. I have no doubt that I’ll miss some of what I have now, but boy, I can’t wait to see what else is out there!
News from IBM today:
Armonk, NY – 24 Apr 2014: IBM today announced that for the fifth consecutive year, IDC ranked the company number one in worldwide market share for enterprise social software. According to IDC’s analysis of 2013 revenue, the worldwide market for enterprise social software applications grew from $968 million in 2012 to $1,242 million 2013
Impressive run of success for IBM Collaboration Solutions and, specifically, for IBM Connections.
This graphic sums it up rather nicely… 🙂
[image_frame style=”framed_shadow” align=”center” height=”428″ width=”600″]http://ibmconnections.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ibm_championships.jpg[/image_frame]
Niklas Heidloff and the team at OpenNTF recently raised the question of which hashtag should be used for IBM Connections development-related posts and tweets.
It’s a very fair question, after all having an agreed common hashtag that is used on relevant posts makes it much easier for advocates and newcomers alike to find and follow Connections-related content. Given that IBM is pushing Connections as a development platform of the future, it is crucial that the community makes Connections as open and prominent for developers as we possibly can.
Therefore, I asked the question on Twitter, Skype and LinkedIn over the past 7-10 days, captured a number of suggestions, and opened a vote. The results are now in:
So, the community has spoken… #ibmcnx and #ibmcnxdev have been chosen!
Let’s see them being used! 😉