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5 things your CIO wants to get out of your collaboration platform

I was standing at the back of the room at a recent partner event, listening to Microsoft COO Kevin Turner address a crowd of 65 people on all of the changes that have happened (and continue to happen) to Microsoft’s business in the past year. If you’ve never heard KT present, he is (in my view) Microsoft’s best cheerleader, and will leave partners inspired and thinking creatively about how to better work alongside the company. I’m looking forward to hearing from him again in early July at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference (WPC) taking place in Houston, in fact. At this special event, KT outlined the huge list of platforms and initiatives delivered in the last 12 to 18 months (Win8, soon to be Win8.1, SP2013, the App Store, etc) and the many more that will quickly be coming to a store, server, or cloud near you. It was clear from listening to him that Microsoft’s plan to adopt the "online-first" development and delivery model is in full-swing.

Some of the questions from the audience are clear evidence that this transition is being felt within the partner community. Primarily, some audience members expressed concern that the shift to Microsoft’s cloud-first delivery model is negatively impacting the partner ecosystem. There was some great dialog around this point, but, in my view, KT’s answer was fairly compelling: for ISVs and SIs who are struggling with the move to a cloud-based model, you should not think about your customer footprint today as shrinking due to Microsoft’s expansion into SaaS and services, but as a growth opportunity. KT mentioned a couple times the 2.9 billion devices that Microsoft is now targeting (PCs, tablets, smartphones, and embedded devices). he did recognize that the move to the cloud comes with tremendous change in product architectures and delivery methods, and in how customers are serviced, but he focused his comments on the potential upside -- how the model brings with it huge opportunity across a multitude of devices.

Turner’s comments caused me to reflect on some of what I heard from CIOs presenting at an AIIM.org think-tank event earlier this month in Chicago. Consensus among those participating was that the shift toward the cloud is forcing companies to think much harder about their system architectures. This room full of CIOs, CMOs, and other business and academic leaders largely agreed one one thing -- that most of our collaboration initiatives have not lived up to their promises. To be fair, the prevailing issues with any single platform or tool have less to do with the technology, and more to do with a lack of planning, a lack of governance, and a failure to understand how these technologies can help (or hinder) our businesses. But from the AIIM.org event's anecdotal feedback, it appears that companies are giving this change -- and any new deployments or investments -- much more scrutiny than in the past, which is a good thing. Organizations must not simply jump into the deep end of the pool with cloud, but think through each system, each solution, and determine whether the cloud will truly benefit that system or solution, whether they should remain on prem, or that some kind of hybrid solution is necessary – and then understand the management and governance impacts of that decision.

Is there a shift in how executives are looking toward the next wave of collaboration tools? Do they understand the root cause of previous failures? It got me thinking about what leaders really want from these platforms -- and not in terms of meaningless platitudes and sales hype, but in common sense terms. I started to put together a list whilke in Chicago, and have included here some themes around what CEOs and CIOs want to get out of their broader collaboration initiatives:

They want to know that people are using the tools provided.
Looking at data around “adoption” is an insufficient indicator as to whether people are actually using the technology provided, or getting value from their tools. Executives are looking for deeper insight into what activities people are using successfully, which ones drive the most business benefit, and which ones they can reduce, improve, or remove if it means focusing on those areas that are most effective.

They want to know that their employees are being productive.
At the end of the day, productivity is the goal of all of our structured collaboration (like SharePoint) and unstructured collaboration (like Yammer or Chatter) efforts. They’ve spent massive amounts on these tools and platforms, and so its no surprise that they want to see that these financial investments are turning into more business output and streamlined processes. The tools and platforms should reduce barriers, and allow employees to do more.

They want to know that people are leveraging the collective knowledge of the company.
Beyond productivity, this is a much more specific question – are people leveraging the combined knowledge of the organization? CIOs want to know whether the technology is a limiting factor, or whether there are cultural habits which restrict how people share, and search for, content and expertise. This is one metric that is poorly reported in existing tools, but is essential in understanding how well people are actually collaborating.

They want to know that people feel connected.
This is more of a question of community. CIOs want to know whether the tools we use are bringing us closer together as a company, allowing geographically dispersed team members to actively participate in what is happening at headquarters, and to give everyone a voice.

They want to know that the tools they’re paying for will help their business grow.
Ultimately, the investments made need to directly tie to more business activity, more leads, more customers, more revenue. While many leaders recognize the qualitative benefits of collaboration, when budgets are under review and markets are uncertain, CIOs need to be able to point to hard numbers – and IT leaders need to be able to draw lines between specific technology initiatives and positive revenue performance.

Obviously, CIOs are asking many more questions than just these, but I wanted to at least share some of the ideas and trends that I am hearing as I participate more and more with executive leaders and learn more about how they are approaching enterprise collaboration, and, specifically, solutions in the cloud.

The Gaping Hole in Social Influence Measurement

In the important American film Back to School, there is one scene where the late Rodney Dangerfield – who in the film plays a wealthy businessman who goes back to college to spend more time with his son, but instead of doing his homework on his own, “outsources” the workload to a team of experts – gets into a verbal altercation with author Kurt Vonnegut and fires him for writing a bad paper. Vonnegut (who appeared briefly in one scene) had been tasked with writing a paper on himself, but the paper earns a failing grade after the teacher figures out that Dangerfield did not do his own homework, with the teacher famously telling Dangerfield “Whoever *did* write this doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut!”

It’s funny that as I sat here thinking about one of the gaping holes in the measurement of social influence, this hilarious scene came to mind (some additional insight into how my mind works).

A lot of people question the validity of social influence scoring. We can’t see into the algorithms, because then we’d be able to manipulate our scores. And they’re all constantly evolving, and, in theory, improving as they capture more and more data, and the statistics learn about our patterns of social behavior over time. But shouldn’t your established ownership or expertise on a topic be a part of your overall score? Using the example above, shouldn’t Kurt Vonnegut have the highest Klout score on the topic of Kurt Vonnegut?

Another example: I currently have a higher Klout score than the SharePoint product team on the topic of SharePoint. Yes, I realize that Twitter and Klout profiles are run by people, not teams, and that their scores are an amalgam of overall social activity – meaning that the score are weighted across multiple social platforms, and different types of interactions -- but I do think there should be exceptions where brands or products come into play. Maybe the SharePoint product team is only posting to their blog, tweeting out links, and occasionally re-tweeting other relevant links from the community. This is enough to build a moderate Klout score. But I am also very active on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, and LastFM, posting content across a dozen sites on a regular basis, and interacting with readers and re-tweeting a dozen or more times a day. That is why my Klout score is larger than the SharePoint product team’s score today.

But should that be the case? Should there be a way to see more clearly the social influence of a person or a brand within a specific topic, rather than across this broad blend of topics and activities? I think so.

Part of the problem is not understanding entirely how the algorithms perform. The SharePoint product team may have more K+ points from the community on the topic of SharePoint than I have, but I have more activity online in a variety of topics, giving me a broader depth of networking activity, thus raising my overall score. Maybe the answer is for Klout, Kred (which provides a Pinterest-like view into your influential activities), PeerIndex and other similar efforts to quantify social influence to recognize differences between individuals and brands (they’re starting to do this – but only in how you define your profile, not yet with any differentiation in how their scores are indexed), and between overall influence and the influence within a specific, targeted topic.

So maybe my overall Klout score is 71, but my “Klout Topic Score (KTS)” for SharePoint might be 87, my KTS for Yammer might be 75, and for Lord of the Rings it might be 49 (need to work on that one, get it up higher). By breaking out this level of detail – and in this example, maybe the SharePoint product team has a KTS for SharePoint of 95 – it may do wonders for giving credibility to Klout and other social influence scoring tools, and giving people (and advertisers) a much better view into the true influence of a target subject.

For most people, this level of detail is probably overkill – but within the enterprise, you can begin to understand the importance of granular social influence as you try to identify internal – and external – influencers for your own products, services, or brands, allowing you to do more to support those people and help them continue to advocate on behalf of your brand. It’s an area my own company, Axceler, is getting into, and its becoming increasingly important to the social collaboration space.

Mapping Out your Market Potential

For the past twelve years, I’ve made some of my time available to entrepreneurs to share my experience and perspective, doing some pro bono technology consulting here and there as I’ve had time. I’ve been getting back into that mode, planning to start a networking group here in the Seattle area with the sole purpose of connecting entrepreneurs and startups with experienced technologists and managers who are willing to give a little of their time – for free. For my 4 readers who started following this blog way back in 2002, you might recall that the original name of the blog was the Samaritan-Web Project. While I’m not exactly coming full-circle to those original ideas and plans (SWP was to be a part of my doctoral studies), I am excited to be talking to entrepreneurs here locally, and take that energy back into my day job.

One topic that often comes up in my initial sessions with many entrepreneurs is to help them understand – and focus in on – the right scope for their technology or their company. There is a fundamental flaw in the thinking process of many entrepreneurs out there in the midst of building their companies and seeking angel or venture capitalist investment: simply put, their market projections cannot be defended. The total available market (TAM), around which the typical entrepreneur plans to build their pro forma business model, is often defined by figures pulled from some random analyst report off the Interwebs. Many times, the research performed by an entrepreneur is nothing more than an evening of cutting and pasting data culled from the factoid-enriched information superhighway.

So maybe you’ve read through a number of presentations, possibly talked to some domain experts in the industry, or even conducted your own field study to determine the size and depth of the opportunity. Most don’t go to this extent. They overly rely on someone else’s data rather than understand their own unique value proposition – and do the hard task of distilling those massive but totally unrealistic numbers down into something they can target, they can build strategies against, and which investors will believe.

But what if there are no clearly defined market boundaries? What if your market is so completely bleeding-edge that there’s no way to define a clear0cut set of prospective customers? Where do you find the data you need? What if no analyst has invested the time to research your new and not yet mainstream field of technology? What do you do if all the available information you find online and through the major research firms is vague, with wildly varying estimates, and is, in effect, useless for your planning purposes? What then? How can you possibly construct a reasonably sound financial model capable of resisting the scrutiny of a potential investor?

In my twenty-plus years working in technology and writing on business and management best practices, I have often used software modeling as an analogy of how entrepreneurs and companies should approach their business problems. The fundamental problem with most business planning – and market sizing, specifically – is that the underlying business model and the components of the “system” are ill defined and not truly understood. In parallel, a problem among software engineers is the urge (for some, arrogance) to code before properly outlining the problem and potential solutions. As humans, we are wired for problem-solving, yet we often jump to solutions before the problem has been completely defined. How often is this same mistake made in business? Quite often, in fact.

Do you understand your product or service? What I mean is, do you truly understand your market, your target customer, and your competition? Before you answer ‘yes,’ consider this technique:

A (simplified) modeling approach is to outline what you know about your offerings, and to develop use cases that help you define each of your offerings as an individual product, and to define their uses and constraints. Try to fully document the features, functions, and constraints of each offering. Once you have this outlined, you can then begin to develop scenarios for these use cases, which will help you to visualize how your customers will use your offerings. Scenarios might describe uses of a single offering, or combinations of two or more offerings. The goal is to model out every conceivable use for your offerings. These scenarios can help you to define or create new uses, or to identify customer groups not considered in your original plans. The trick is to be creative, to “think outside of the box,” and to let the ideas flow freely, abstracting your scenarios enough that you do not blind yourself from new uses, new user groups, or new industries that may find your offerings useful.

Outlining each of your business components, and then brainstorming the various scenarios for using those components is a “holistic” method of business planning and market strategy. Understand what your product is, and you’ll better understand how to position it in the market against comparable products or “like-services.”

Now that you have your product or service definition in hand, it’s time to start thinking about building a defendable financial model (or swag). Some of you may be asking, “What is a swag, anyway?” For those unfamiliar with the term, it is jargon for “Scientific (or Silly) Wild-Ass Guess,” used when establishing high level sizings for large projects.

Your financial model and underlying business strategy for execution and measurement of your model are nothing more than an educated guess, especially when your product or technology is untested, or in a bleeding-edge industry. How do you defend a financial model when you’re proposing a business around a product nobody has yet seen? There are some basic questions you can ask that will help you build a more accurate and realistic market model:

• What is your Total Applicable (or Available) Market?
  In general, there is data available for the TAM of any product or service, even if your product is revolutionary. For example, software as a category can be broken down into business or consumer applications, and then even further as operating systems software, games, business productivity software, and so forth. Rely on the work you did developing your use cases and scenarios to help you define the proper industries to include in this larger figure. Many entrepreneurs only use the TAM in their calculations – this is a BIG mistake, and shows they have not done their homework. The TAM shows the larger industry trends, but that’s about it.
• What is your Served Available Market?
  This is the slice of your TAM, which actually applies to your product group. If there are competitive products on the market, the SAM is the market which all of them currently serve. If your product or service is new, and there is nothing like it on the market, then you need to define the value of like-services, that is, the value of products or services that individuals and companies use today because they do not have your product. You may need to get creative here, but if you understand your offerings, this is not as difficult as it sounds.
• What is your geographic reach?
  You’ve just created a product, and now you’re going to sell it worldwide? Is that a reasonable plan? Not likely. Understand the limitations of product and your customer footprint. Modifying packaging and providing support for expansion into foreign markets can be expensive, not to mention the costs of international sales and marketing, putting partnerships and sales channels in place, etc. Don’t write off foreign markets – just plan for them later, building off the success of markets you know.
• What are your primary channels of distribution within that reach?
  Once you have defined where you will sell your offerings, you must define how you’ll move product within that geography. Is your website enough to support your projected sales and growth? Probably not. How are comparable products being sold?
• Who are your key partners for sales and marketing within those channels?
  Scalability is critical to growth and market share. Do you have the necessary relationships in place to develop those channels of distribution, and get your product in front of the customer?
• What will it cost for you to capture 10 to 20 percent of that market?
  Now that you’ve defined the size of your market, your channels of distribution, and the partnerships to get you there, what will it all cost for the next 3 to 5 years to make this plan happen? It’s a good practice to know the weighted cost of each employee you bring on, and the number of resources you’ll need to achieve the market penetration you’ve outlined in your prospectus. Understand the numbers behind the numbers you present to investors, and how the level of investment you need, increases or decreases based on changes to your penetration numbers. Investors will want to understand whether another million more, for example, could increase penetration from 20 percent to 40 percent, or if due to other factors (market conditions, competition) it would only increase it to 22 percent. If you can answer this kind of question, you will shine.

Just remember, even the best laid out plans are still a swag. Nobody expects you to hit the exact numbers proposed in your executive summary financial plan – but investors will want you to have some degree of confidence that you are close to reality. Based on the answers to the questions above, you’ll have a much clearer understanding of the costs involved in reaching your goals, the market factors behind your financial plans, and therefore how much money to raise to accomplish your early goals. And, more importantly, by understanding each of these answers, and the data behind them, you’ll be able to defend your assertions in front of investors.

Embrace the Tweak

In a Baseline article by Michael Vizard called "Proving IT's Value to the Executive Suite," the author makes the case that without measurement and management visibility, you can't understand and promote your program/platform/strategy ROI to the company. Want to get your executive team to sign off on some great new tool? Need additional funding for existing system expansion? Need to hire a couple new engineers to help the company better position itself for changes to your industry? Great. So…where’s the data making your case?  It may be impossible to outline every possible risk, every competitive stance, or every possible scheduling issue – but without core data that supports your request, your “gut feel” that it’s the right thing to do may not be enough. Something that stuck with me from business school was Deming’s focus on measurement and iteration, using that data to inform your next steps, and with each little step, get you closer to proving your hypothesis.

If the goal of management is to make decisions on behalf of the company, the role of management is to read these measurements and, once you have enough of a sample size (enough data, that is) to make a decision, to take action. One measurement of successful management is the ability to view, interpret, and take action of this data faster than your competitors.

In his article, Vizard uses a great example of a marketing department (in an example that sounds like most marketing departments I've known) that cannot seem to make the connection between dollars spent and value achieved:

In the absence of any real measurement tools, most investment in marketing campaigns is based on an article of faith that assumes there is a definable return on that investment. Moreover, most marketing departments are not all that efficient because they don't conclusively know what campaign is working, and, more important, when it is actually working.

Think about how much the IT industry has changed even in the past 2 to 3 years as organizations quickly move toward the cloud. In almost every conversation the question of ROI comes into question – people want to know specifics on how new tools and platforms, and even new hires, will impact their bottom line. The problem is that answering that question – even for tools and solutions that, instinctively, will bring value – can be difficult. What it requires is measurement and iteration. Take a hypothesis and some target metrics, create a baseline, and then trial the new solutions, tweaking and measuring as you go until you have sufficient data to make a decision.

Seth Godin wrote a blog post on "tweaking" in which he suggest that people constantly look for ways to test and measure and improve the user experience, to find the right feature/tool/solution to deliver the business benefit you seek. He has even built a lens on Squidoo to promote the cause of tweaking:

I'm talking about turning an arrogant checkout into a useful one by turning off the button that automatically resets to opt in to the spam list every single time I return to the checkout. Or changing the size of the product photo from 144 pixels wide to 500, because making the product the star can triple clickthrough.

This is stuff tweakers know because they do it every day. Because they test and they measure. This is high return on investment knowledge, because it can take hours, not weeks to implement and test.

The lesson to be learned from both articles is that value is most often derived from an iterative process of hypothesis, metrics, testing, and adjusting based on what you learn. Knowing how to direct your project or team or company (whatever your scope of ownership) is never a straight-forward proposition. We have to work at it. We have to nibble away at the foundation of what we know and try to figure out how to achieve that much sought-after ROI. How do you know you're moving in the right direction? You're tracking it, you're tweaking it, you're socializing your findings with your team, and people are responding.

The Yammerization of Enterprise Collaboration

If you feel like you are under full-scale assault from the marketing militia in Redmond, just you wait – with the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (#WPC13) just weeks away, what we’re experiencing now will feel like light summer rain compared to the tsunami approaching. And to be honest, I don’t mind the rain. at. all. I’ve pretty much decided to wear a swimsuit all the time, metaphorically speaking.

:-)

While attending SharePoint Saturday Chicago Suburbs (#SPSChicagoBurbs) on June 1st, my good friend Naomi Moneypenny (@nmoneypenny), CTO of SharePoint ISV ManyWorlds, gave a presentation that outlined reasons for using Yammer -- and enterprise social, in general. While I was not the target audience for her session, I was hoping to learn something new about the platform that maybe I had missed in the past year of heavy usage. Nope, nothing new from a technical standpoint. But she did present some useful info on why we’re seeing the sudden increase of focus on social collaboration in the enterprise (aside from Microsoft’s $1.2B acquisition of Yammer last year) and why its a good thing for internal communication.

As Naomi pointed out, enterprises are huge social systems, with vast personal and project or data-driven networks, where “innovation comes from serendipitous connections, or "happy accidents" which you want to create more of” between people, teams, and projects. Only so much of this can be planned – the goal of a company should be to provide opportunities for these “serendipitous connections” to occur and then get out of the way, according to Naomi.  But what complicates this effort are the many data silos – some due to limitations of technology and collaborations platforms, others because of individuals who hoard data (because knowledge is power!), making location of expertise and the findability of relevant content difficult, at best.

Social collaboration, using platforms like Yammer, Tibbr, IBM Connections, and Chatter, is about removing these silos and allowing everyone to participate in the corporate dialog, creating more of these opportunities for “happy accidents’ where innovation occurs. While I am a big believer in this model, I also believe unstructured collaboration (social) goes hand-in-hand with structured collaboration (using platforms such as SharePoint) – the two are more effective when running side-by-side, with clearly defined boundaries.

Naomi then went on to summarize the purpose of social networking in the enterprise down into four main points:

• Decentralizing decision-making (to the people closest to the problem)
• Aligning employees along higher-level motivations, beyond process
• Creating a culture of transparency, with constant improvements
• Engaging employees for ideas

I like the simplicity of this model. For many of us, trying to articulate the benefits of enterprise social can be difficult. We are being asked to put quantitative measurements and benefits on something that, for the most part, bring qualitative improvements to the organization – but with the definitions above, you can begin to get creative on how you might begin to track and measure the benefits within the unique nuances of your own corporate culture and operational framework. For example, “creating a culture of transparency” might be interpreted as feedback forums. You might look at the number of product or organizational suggestions that are submitted through Yammer rather than traditional methods, and then – because of the visibility of the suggestions, and the ability for everyone to provide feedback and improve upon that idea – also track the financial impact of those suggestions. Both the number of suggestions (we had 47 submitted in April, but 75 submitted in May) and financial impact of those that are implemented are quantitative measurements against those qualitative activities.

Naomi also briefly covered the latest incarnation of Yammer certifications. While these programs have not yet become part of the partner competencies, I can see this step right around the corner. In the meantime, the real benefit of these certification programs is to help ensure that you are getting all of the benefits out of the platform within your own organization. Whether you direct end users toward the power user certification or not is up to you – personally, I don’t see much value in it versus just using the platform. It’s not THAT complex of a product. However, I can see huge value in the three other certifications to ensure that you are maximizing your time and dollar investment in the Yammer platform:

YAMMER COMMUNITY MANAGER CERTIFICATION

Yammer Certified Community Managers (YCCMs) are the organizational leaders who build engagement within their enterprise’s network. YCCMs demonstrate effective leadership in building an enterprise social networking culture by:

• Developing a community strategy and improving engagement
• Leading productive discussions by creating and managing Groups and Notes
• Promoting greater transparency and collaboration across the company

This certification is designed for organizations in the early stages of developing a community; newcomers to community management; those who need to understand community management to develop policies or procedures; and community managers who need to revitalize a stalled community.

YAMMER TRAINER CERTIFICATION

Yammer Certified Trainers (YCTs) use their network to design and implement Yammer training programs and incorporate Yammer into existing training programs. Beyond assisting users with Yammer technical features, Yammer Certified Trainers develop and facilitate courses that increase effective network use within a business context to maximize training engagement across the organization.

YAMMER ADMINISTRATOR CERTIFICATION

Yammer Certified Adminstrators (YCAs) assist an organization in the administration and configuration of Yammer networks. This certification focuses on demonstrating advanced technical skills with intergrations and creating external networks; managing information through monitoring and data exporting tools; and leading effective information sharing by nurturing a culture of proper use.

Enrollees can choose from a full certification program that includes training, testing, and support, or a test only option, which provides access to the pre-certification network and offers certification testing.

For more details on these programs (and the power user course, if you’re brand new to the platform) you can find info here.

I’m really looking forward to #WPC13 in Houston next month (the WPC part, not the Houston-in-July part), hopefully learning more about Microsoft’s integration roadmap for Yammer and SharePoint / Office365, and announcements of further expansion of social across Microsoft product families (akin to the Dynamics CRM announcement).

Is Social Collaboration a Disruptor?

 
(This post originally appeared over on AIIM.org here, but I thought I’d extend the conversation to my blog expand the dialog)

According to Wikipedia, "disruptors are employed by several alien species in the Star Trek series, including Romulans, Klingons, Breen, Cardassians, Iridians and Orions in their personal and military small arms as well as being mounted as cannon, emitters, turrets, and banks. Only the first three are known to have type-3 disruptors, the most advanced developed so far, by the 24th century. Disruptors cause damage by exciting the molecular bonds of targets." (http://bit.ly/OGfTJB)

Interesting, yes, but not really relevant here. Dictionary.com does a better job of defining a disruptor -- or disruptive technology, as causing disorder or turmoil; destroying -- at least temporarily -- continuance or unity; or as breaking apart. Social collaboration technologies are often described as being disruptors in the enterprise, but do they really fit that definition?

One of my favorite cartoon strips is a series around Dilbert sharing his theory that the origin of the universe did not begin with a big bang, but in fact began with more of a "Phhbwt" sound (you can find the strip here), at which point he is mocked by Dogbert.

My contention is that social collaboration is a better fit for the "Little Phhbwt" than the big bang usually associated with disruptive technologies.

Here's my thinking:

• Does it cause disorder and turmoil? Possibly within some organizations, but in general, no. The biggest argument here is that there can be disruption caused when end users drive the speed at which social technologies are deployed internally, causing potential intellectual property risks as well as IT management headaches as the new technologies are put in place and supported.
• Does it permanently or temporarily destroy continuance or unity? I would say no, as the nature of these technologies are about connecting people, putting context and dialog around content, and building inclusive and transparent environments. If anything, they bring continuance and unity into the organization.
• Does it break apart the organization? Nope. It's a lover, not a fighter. It's about surfacing data, building connections.
• Is it new? Is it something never before seen? Not really. Product lifecycle management (PLM) platforms go back a couple decades or more, and the dawn of the worldwide web brought with it a broad range of synchronous and asynchronous technologies that make the Facebooks, Twitters, and SharePoints of the world possible. It's not like someone invented these tools overnight. These concepts and adaptations were introduced slowly, with plenty of media attention and fanboys at each step (hence the 'Little Phhbwt' reference).
• As a category, no, but what about individual technologies within the category? Well, sure. I'll use Twitter as an example. They didn't create the underlying technology, but their application of the available technologies in a novel way, and the rapid rise as the platform of choice for SMS-like communications took the world by storm, inspiring an entire ecosystem of partners, copycats, and customers. I think it could be said that Twitter has been disruptive, but view it as just one small piece of the overall social collaboration category.

Now, whether or not you agree that social collaboration is a disruptive technology, I do believe it to be a disruptive force within some enterprises. Why, you ask? Because it has the ability to turn internal -- and external -- corporate communication on its head.  It is disruptive in its ability to apply metadata and context and conversation to our content and ideas in ways that were previously difficult, at best, or impossible for many organizations. And it has the ability to improve the information worker's productivity like no other advance since the creation of email.

#Discuss

Oh Taxonomy, how quickly we forget you

One of the best parts of my job is that i get to participate in events and networking circles outside of my company’s primary customer base – which is SharePoint. I’m occasionally able to attend or present at events where very few, if any of the participants know anything about SharePoint (its rare, but those people DO exist). Of course, when I want to talk in detail about structured and unstructured collaboration at some of these events, I get a lot of blank stares. These are not your traditional IT Pro crowds, but otherwise come with fantastic learning and great connections outside of my typical circles.

Visiting Chicago this week, I have been able to participate in 4 different events: I presented two sessions at SharePoint Saturday Chicago Suburbs (great inaugural event, btw), I presented to the Chicago business SPUG, I participated in a Rightpoint event at the Heartland Microsoft offices on social collaboration, and am half-way through an AIIM think-tank event. I love the opportunity to meet new people and hear their feedback about what is working for them within their own collaboration strategies, what questions they might have, and how they are approaching their individual business cases. One of the stand-out themes this week has been the need for stronger taxonomy and metadata management....and no, I didn't prompt these discussions (not this time, anyway).

Is it me, or has the latest SharePoint release blocked out all sunlight on this topic? (hence the picture of the eclipse) And yet it remains as one of the most fundamental architectural underpinnings of any collaborative platform. Metadata makes structured collaboration work, and is the key to tying unstructured (primarily social) collaboration to structured -- -something that is not really happening just yet within the social/Yammer evolution inside SharePoint, but is (in my opinion) the next obvious step in the evolutionary process to bridge that gap between unstructured (Yammer) and structured (SharePoint) collaboration.

Of course, building out a taxonomy structure is just the first step. Most organizations don’t implement what they have developed, or, at best, are just not consistent in how their taxonomies are applied. From a business standpoint, this causes problems with the business owners who see all of this valuable time and resources going into defining process and taxonomy, and then receive no reward. They never see the benefits of this hard work because what was built was never completely deployed. Without following through, without consistent application of the taxonomy, and without development and adherence to necessary governance principles, much of this effort will be wasted.

Of course, this is a problem that goes beyond metadata and taxonomy spheres, and is a common trait of large, complex IT projects, in general. But while the statistics behind IT project failures is widely reported, the devil is in the details as to why many of these taxonomies efforts fail. My own experience has shown that a majority of these projects fail in large part to a failure to fully plan, or to fully implement against the plan. I love the quote by entrepreneur and author Jim Rohn: “Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying basic fundamentals.”

Consistency is the issue behind the failures to deploy the majority of taxonomy plans. Of course, there are some best practices that you can consider:

• Build your taxonomy based on what needs to be searchable, not just based on common metadata, such as title and author. Dig a bit deeper.
• Your taxonomy may vary based on the types of data being tracked – and that’s fine. You should design your taxonomy for the data.
• Find your SMEs (subject matter experts) and utilize their expert knowledge to better capture and classify your data.
• Use the taxonomy. Apply the tags you’ve created. You did all that work – now its time to apply it.
• Don't compromise your plans over tool limitations. Cut corners with crappy technology and you undo all of your hard work. Outline your taxonomy first, and don’t limit what you build to the technology you are using today.
• Remember that at the end of the day its about your end users. If they cannot find the content they need, your system is broken.

So here I am once again, lecturing my 4 readers on the importance of metadata. But come on people…it’s important. Yes, I know that building out your taxonomy is a hard task, but it’s crucial to the long-term success of SharePoint or whatever other content management system you’re using. Develop a strategy and stick with it.

Cutting Through the Social Noise

There is a lot of noise around social these days – and I admit that I am regularly adding to that noise. The problem is that definitions suck. As more companies are looking more closely at their enterprise content management and internal collaboration initiatives, trying to figure out the business value that these systems really provide, stakeholders are increasingly asking the question: what is the role of social computing in the enterprise? They want to know the business value of these tools and the billion vendors (ok, slightly less than a billion) pushing solutions out the door. They want to know what best practices can be applied to their organization today, and the tactical steps that will help them better communicate with their teams, their partners, and their customers.

Companies don’t need more articles telling them that they need social. What they need are case studies, real-world examples of the benefits social can provide.

Much of the confusion out there comes from the "apples versus oranges" comparisons of the various consumer-based solutions (Facebook, Twitter, etc), and a misunderstanding of what features among them can actually be applied in the enterprise. The fact is that platforms like SharePoint have provided social capabilities for years, arguably more than most companies are culturally ready to employ. But people compare their enterprise platforms to consumer-based solutions, and want everything to work just as seamlessly on their phone or on their tablet as on their desktop or laptop. THAT is where innovation has increased over the past couple years in social. The features, i would argue, are not new (for the most part) but the user experience has improved tremendously.

But back to the problem of defining social computing needs. Human nature (at least within the Information Worker crowd) is to solve problems before you understand the scope and scale of the problem. We start picking out features, and tend to force fit what we have selected onto our problems. With social tools (and collaboration, in general), you really do need to understand what it is you are trying to solve before you buy.

Here's the key to understanding social: the fundamental element of any social computing solution and of any content management platform, and the key to linking the two together, is search (which is enabled through metadata). Social tools help surface data, they unlock silos of expertise, and they help instill a sense of community. But underneath all of that is more than group chat – its the ability to connect to, search for, and find data. Metadata is attached to all of your content, it organizes and differentiates your lists and libraries, and it enables your workflows and forms. When used in concert with a collaboration platform, such as SharePoint, your metadata layer interacts with your structured taxonomy and your unstructured folksonomy, or end user-generated keywords, and provides order and purpose to your content and to your platform by powering search.

Through interaction with social tools, end users introduce context to data. They tag, they link, they Like, they rate, they share, they talk about it, and across all of this they build intricate webs of connections between people and activities and content – all of which make your content more searchable, more findable. THAT is the business value of social. And that’s the long version of my explanation of social.

Many problems in the world struggle for answers because they are not properly defined. I believe this to be the case with the social dilemma. Now that you have this fundamental understanding of how metadata and social work together to power search, maybe you can step back and look at these shiny new social tools with a clearer understanding of how they can (or can't) add value to your organization.

Understanding Where Social Fits into Your Enterprise

I’m back on the road tomorrow morning, heading east again – this time to Chicago to participate in the inaugural SharePoint Saturday Chicago Suburbs event taking place at DeVry University (1221 N. Swift Road, Addison IL) this Saturday.  The cost, as always with SPS, is zero – so if you’re in the Chicago area and would like a day of free SharePoint training, grab your co-workers and head on over. For those of you who are navigation-impaired, you can find the list of speakers here, and the event schedule here. Good stuff.

My topic this weekend is the increasingly-popular subject matter of enterprise social. Specifically, my session ‘Generating Business Value through Social’ will attempt to walk you through the best practices of doing just that – aligning your SharePoint (and non-SharePoint) social strategies with business objectives and end user adoption in mind. No, not adoption – counting the number of people who have logged into the system each month does little to tell you the value of your platform. User engagement is the real metric you want to track. It’s harder to identify and measure, but that’s where you’ll begin to unlock the real power of social within the enterprise. I’ll share case studies, show you what comes with SharePoint on prem and Office 365 (and even Yammer), and then talk to you about where to go from there.

If you are unable to attend, you can at least take a look at the slides I’ll be using. You lose a lot without the narrative and examples, but you’ll get the general idea:

Generating Business Value Through Social from Christian Buckley

In an unusual move for me, I will not be leaving town after the event. Oh no, I’m sticking around. I’ve been to the Chicago area about a dozen times, couple dozen on top of that sitting at O’Hare waiting for the fog to lift in San Francisco so that my final leg home could begin, but have never been into the City proper. I am looking forward to it. My Dad and grandparents are from there, so its about time I found myself in the area without back-to-back-to-back events happening. Plus, Jeff Willinger (@jwillie) and Kim Frehe (@kimfrehe) promised to keep me entertained.

Amidst some work activities with my Los Angeles team who will be attending SPS, I’ll also be presenting Tuesday night next week at the SPUG (at Microsoft’s Chicago offices) on a similar topic of ‘Productivity, Gamification, and SharePoint 2013.’ Jeff saw this me present this one at the Denver SharePointFest event earlier this year and made a special request. You can register via MeetUp here. And it wouldn’t be a SPUG event without a SharePint activity following close behind. Join us, and we’ll share a Diet Coke together.

On Wednesday, June 5th I’ll be attending Rightpoint’s Employee Engagement & Social Enterprise Summit, also located at the Microsoft offices. Looking forward to, once again, talk social engagement! (Btw, I just shipped some of my infamous kitten t-shirts and a couple signed books to the Rightpoint offices for giveaways at this event).

On Thursday the 6th, my team will be conducting a half-day event around Governing SharePoint in a Hybrid World. I’m going to try and participate for a couple hours, but then i will be running off to an AIIM.org leadership council event across town.

It’s going to be a long week, but i have been looking forward to this trip for a while. Hope to see you out there! Watch for my tweets and posts through these adventures.

Amplifying your Inner Kevin Bacon

I am amazed at how plugged in we have all become through the various social networks. I signed up for the Contently professional writers network this afternoon, connecting all of my various social networks to this Pinterest-like writers showcase tool, and thought to myself how ubiquitous these types of platforms have become.  The vast majority of us are plugged into the mainstream social networking platforms, such as LinkedIn, Facebook,Twitter, and Google+. We use them for quick registration to comment on a blog, sign up for newsletters, or even to apply for credit. But are we really leveraging our networks? Are we tracking the right data to analyze and capitalize (professionally, if not financially) on our connections? Do you have networking goals (stated or unstated)? What are you trying to accomplish by participating? Who is your figurative Kevin Bacon, and how many steps away from him is your network?

The science behind social networking is burgeoning, and most people are barely skimming the surface of what we can do with this data. Most of us are familiar with just the top layer -- the people with whom we are directly connected. And through some tools, we can see into our second level (and sometimes third level) relationships. Linked in added some great visualizations for this data, which I am using more and more to get a quick synopsis of how I am connected to a prospective…er, well, connection. 

But how do you know whom to connect with to strengthen your overall network? THAT is the harder question to answer, and one which the mainstream platforms don't address. I’ve written about this in the past, but the topic of social influence is becoming more and more important to content marketing – and corporate marketing strategy. Is social influence about the number of followers? How many re-tweets you receive? Or the depth of dialog you have, and the action that people take based on your own actions? Is there some other way to identify (intelligently) as to which connections will provide the most relevant connections based on your profile, your interests, your most recent searches?

Building social influence is not the same thing as building followers. Tools for building followers can be somewhat shady, with dozens (or more) tools out there to help you build followers. Mike Watson (@jmikewatson) and I even outlined, and started to build, a legitimate toolset for finding, qualifying, and regularly purging Twitter followers in what we envisioned to be an automated method for automating twitter followers. While i still think it would be a valuable tool (if anyone wants to partner on it and help me build it, let’s talk), the real power in building social influence is substance.

Let me say this REALLY LOUD: Creating marketing copy is not the same as developing authentic, valued content – which is the key to building social influence. Good content is the source of all successful social networking expansion strategies.

Once you have good content, the next step is distribution. As I shared in a previous post (The Power of Circles), Google+ has the ability to sort connections by sub-topic and serves as one of my primary distribution methods. Facebook may have limited value as a destination (more and more people are taking “Facebook vacations”) but because it focuses on the network you already have, its another great distribution method. LinkedIn takes things a step further, helping you to both distribution content and also to identify new connections (part of its model of using "trusted" connections) through your existing network as well as through public and private shared groups/interests.

What we need are tools that understand and interpret our profiles, that suggest connections outside of our existing networks -- based on explicit network queries that you make manually, or are somehow automated (such as aggregating themes across multiple Bing! searches). And now you’re starting to understand the tool that Mike and I had envisioned (and i still want to build. Ping me. Really.)

We need to get smarter about the tools we use and the analysis we conduct if we hope to get the most value out of social networking, and amplify our inner Kevin Bacon (Kevin Bacons, plural?). Any other thoughts on how to amplify your social profile?