A recent study by Nielsen that focused on how Americans spend their time online, unexpectedly found that email usage has dropped by 28% over the last year. Since we’re certainly not communicating any less, what are people doing as an alternative? Not surprisingly, the data show that social networking use increased by 43% over the same time period. A separate analysis determined that Mobile Internet use has also increased dramatically.
When I used to have a real job, one of the things I hated about being on vacation was the dread of what woud face me in my email inbox. As it became easier to access email remotely, I began to check in every day just to keep the load and the surprises down. Today when accessing email remotely is commonplace nearly all my pals in the conventional workplace tell me that they do the same. (The full report is here)
The young, under 30, hardly use it at all – they don’t even use the phone.
But what about the rest of us who still work for and with organizations that make email the centre of the communications system? Can you push back and get more productive? Here are two well known people who have confronted this question and have won the battle.
I have been consistently getting less and less email by the week, and, even more exciting, way below the 20 emails per week mark!, which surely is making a good progress from when I started 2.5 years ago. Remember, at the beginning, before starting this experiment, I used to receive 30 to 40 emails per day! And now, 2.5 years later, it’s just 17 emails per week! Yes, indeed, you are reading it right! I’m now averaging 17 emails received per week, while the majority of my online interactions are now happening through social software tools.
So, to me, it is not just a drop of 28% in the past 12 months, but way over 90% of the email I used to get! And, not sure what you would think, but that’s *huge!* Yes! Being able to state how email is no longer the only game in town for me, quite the opposite!, actually, is a good thing. It proves it can be done! It proves I am not the only one who can make it happen. And this is when it gets really exciting! When you see other folks increasingly paying more and more attention as to how they interact with their email Inboxes and how they effectively start looking for ways of reducing such email clutter.
Very exciting, indeed! Even more when you notice it’s folks around you who are starting to ask you how you can help them eliminate most of their incoming emails and instead progress towards a much more receptive adoption of social software tools for business. That’s why I’m pretty jazzed up about seeing a whole bunch of fellow co-workers who are continuing to make efforts to reduce their email workload. To the point where entire teams are figuring out strategies to make it work for them and over the last couple of weeks I have been working with a couple of them where there is plenty of promise ahead! Yay!
But it gets better! Because over the last few weeks as well I’m starting to notice how even customers want to figure out ways on how they themselves can get rid of, or reduce substantially, their incoming email. And they seem to keep finding me out there as they search how it can be done (Double yay for #lawwe), which is really good news, because I have been invited a couple of times already to go and present to them how they themselves could live “A World Without Email“.
Why and how did Luis do this? Here is a link to an excellent interview with Luis conducted by the Doyenne of the Social Media world in Canada, Nora Young at Spark (CBC Radio). The interview was almost exactly a year ago and as with this post was timed to appear as we all struggled back to work and a full email inbox.
Luis’ main issue with email is that it makes it too easy for someone else not to care or know if you are busy and to impose work upon you or to engage you in their politics at no real cost to themselves. For instance – if I was to send you a large document as an attachment – there are many steps that you must take to read it – and then it all gets even worse if you wish my comments etc. Far easier to share a document. For instance, how many times have you got a “Cover my ass” CC or BCC? When what was really needed was a real debate? How many tomes have you been really busy and have a colleague impose a deadline on their stuff on you? This is the kind of behavior that Luis objects to.
Or what about all those newsletters that you don’t have time to read? Or those missives from on high from senior management that tell you how great they are or how we all have to ull up our socks?
Yeah, my feeling is that the modern workplace is structured completely wrong. It’s really optimized for interruptions. And interruptions are the enemy of work. They are the enemy of productivity, they are the enemy of creativity, they are the enemy of everything. But that’s what the modern workplace is all about, it’s interruptions. Everyone’s calling meetings all the time, everyone’s screaming people’s names across the thing, there’s phones ringing all the time. People are walking around. It’s all about interruptions. And people go to work today, and then they end up doing most of their real work after work, or on the weekends. So, people are working longer hours, people are tired – I’m working 50-60 hours this week. It’s not that there’s 50 or 60 hours worth of work to do, it’s because you don’t work at work anymore. You go to work to get interrupted.
What happens is, is that you show up at work and you sit down and you don’t just immediately begin working, like you have to roll into work. You have to sort of get into a zone, just like you don’t just go to sleep, like you lay down and you go to sleep. You go to work too. But then you know, 45 minutes in, there’s a meeting. And so, now you don’t have a work day anymore, you have like this work moment that was only 45 minutes. And it’s not really 45 minutes, it’s more like 20 minutes, because it takes some time to get into it and then you’ve got to get out of it and you’ve got to go to a meeting.
Then when the meeting’s over, you’re probably pissed off anyway because it was a waste of time and then the meeting’s over and you don’t just go right back to work again, you got to kind of slowly get back into work. And then there’s a conference call, and then someone calls your name, “Hey, come a check this out. Come over here.” And like before you know it, it’s 4:00 and you’ve got nothing done today. And this is what’s happening all over corporate America right now. Everybody I know, I don’t care what business they’re in. Like when I talk to them about this, it’s like “Yeah, that’s my life.” Like, that is my life, and it’s wrong.
And so I think that has to change. If people want to get things done, they’ve got to get rid of interruptions.
Email is just part of this uncritical work culture that forces many to do their work after hours at home!
So what do Luis and Jason offer up as an alternative?
Luis still thinks that email has a place – in calendar management and in private one on one matters such as salary etc. But he has found that he can push back and negotiate a better way for nearly every category of work. Want me to work on your document – then share it with me! Have an issue to solve – open a conversation in public! Want to avoid being put upon by others – work in public so that people can see when you are busy – so if you use shared documents – people can see you are editing or drafting.
The whole point is to learn how to protect your time.
Jason has the same advice.
So, this isn’t really a plug, but we use our product called Campfire, which is a real time chat tool. That is our office. Campfire is our office, and that’s a web based chat tool where there’s a persistent chat room open all the time. Anyone who has a question for anyone else in the company posts it there and in real time, everyone else can see it if they’re looking at it. But if they’re busy, they just don’t pay attention. And then if non one responds, then that means someone is busy. Not like, I’m going to keep calling their name until they turn around. That’s what it’s like in most offices. Or you ring someone and they’re not there and so you call their name, and they’re not there, so you go to their office and you bang on their door. If someone doesn’t respond in Campfire, it means they’re busy. And unless it’s a true emergency, where you really need an answer right now, then you just let them be and they’ll get back to you in three hours. And the truth of the matter is, there are almost no true emergencies in business. Everything can wait a few hours. Everything can wait a day. It’s not a big deal if you get back to me later in the day for me to know right now.
And the other thing about interruptions and calling people’s names, and ringing them on the phone and stuff, it’s actually really an arrogant sort of move because you’re saying that whatever I have to ask you is more important than what you’re doing. Because I’m going to stop you from doing what you are doing for me to ask you this questions that probably doesn’t matter anyway. So, we’re very cognizant of this, and we make sure that we only ping people, that’s what we call it, digitally and in ways that will not really get in their way if they’re really busy.
He uses his own tool but of course there are many tools that we can use – the tool is not the key it is the idea of working in public that is.
How do you get others to play? Well if you are Jason – it’s easy you are the CEO! But Luis is not the CEO. He publicly told the world that this was his intent. He pushes back and negotiated with his own team and colleagues – and the value of this spread out.
I think it is a given that Culture is the main barrier for most large organizations as they look at how to use Social media. As my colleague Joe reminds us there is real hesitancy in the mainstream. No large bureaucracy can be so bound by the fear of losing control than government. So it is interesting - to me anyway – to discover a Canadian Federal Government Agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs, that has got more than a toe in the water. They are well engaged in an area where it is relatively “safe” to find out how to do this. I think that their experience here will give them the right and the know how to expand this into their operational area and to give others in Government the experience-based confidence to follow.
When the public think of Veterans Affairs, many of us think of Battlefields and Memorials. I was one of many thousands who returned to Vimy Ridge for the 90th anniversary in 2007.
Like many who visited, I blogged about my experience and posted a lot of information. Of course in these days I was not alone. Today thousands of us post material. Many people are exceptionally knowledgeable. There is enormous wisdom and energy embedded in those who visit.
One of the first ahas of Keith Hillier and his team Teresa MacLean and Joey Mokler – was that they could enhance the experience by bringing the Battlefield to the public rather than focus only on bringing the public to the Battlefield.
This recognition that there could be a “safe” way to bring the public in had very early roots in VAC. Today “silverorange” is a global leader in designing social media platforms. They have sites designed for leading entertainers such as Feist and Sloan, have added design to Firefox and Ning, have leading edge sales sites and so on. But few know that silverorange got its start with Veterans Affairs. A long time ago when many who are now old men at silverorange were in their early teens, VAC put out a tender for kids to create a Virtual Memorial for all those that had died in Canada’s conflicts.
This is the entry for my wife’s uncle Bill.
These are the entries that I made on his behalf. So even before “Social Media” was a buzz word, VAC had created a site, using kids, where the public could find out about their loved ones online and where the public could not only look but participate.
The key issue here in terms of culture and barriers, is that this is quite real – the public are really contributing and the service is authentic and valuable – but that the risks are low. Above all that VAC is learning by doing how to get a start.
They are much further along now. When I first started work with VAC about 10 years ago, they had this wonderful archive of film that they had made of interviews with Vets from WWI, WWI and Korea. The question back then was what were they going to do with this.
Over time this invaluable archive is being made available for all of us. Not just in a static way but in a way that we can all use and share.
So what about today? Canadian Forces have been in action for many years in Afghanistan. What about their story? What about their families?
The answer is of course Facebook! There are over 200,000 members right now. Much of this is very personal and touching.
Here we see a film made by young Canadians about what Vimy meant to people in New Brunswick followed by a piece on the Highway of Heroes – the route taken by our fallen as they return from Afghanistan.
So what is really going on behind the scenes at VAC and how can what they are doing help you? Here are a few “Tips” that I can see now after nearly a decade in this work.
1. Leadership - First of all the work is being lead by a very senior and trusted executive – Keith Hillier ADM. My experience is that skunk works don’t work. At VAC as at KETC and before at NPR – having the most senior executives as the real champions is essential. For there are organizational risks and there is big push back and fear. Having a very senior person lead the charge enables you to extend your reach.
2. Use Projects – Don’t try and change the world in one go. Have a real project that you can use to find our by discovery and trial and error that will not get people fired if things don’t go well. At VAC this began with the Virtual Memorial and then has been extended into putting the film archive online on YouTube and now with asking the public to participate on Facebook. Teresa told me of their fears of trolls on Facebook. Conventional wisdom is that if the community is sound enough, they will control the trolls. But of course you don’t know that for sure. The war in Afghanistan is a tricky topic right now and sure enough some came to the site to talk about this. But the community – who are there to support the troops and their families asked them to go away and they did!
3. New actions lead to new thinking not the other way around - You can plan for ever, you can imagine for ever but it is only when you do that you learn and by learning your mind gets changed. By choosing small projects that could be made “safe” VAC is doing the doing and so all at VAC, not just the members of the team, can experience the new for themselves.
4. Start small - The team behind Keith includesTeresa MacLean and Joey Mokler. The money behind this is tiny. But the support is big. I think this is the safer way ahead. Jesus was born in a manger. Moses was found in the Bullrushes. You keep the organizational risk and the naysayers quiet by not announcing the second coming up front.
5. Partner – The early partnership was with a group of local teen nerds – what a gift to them and what a gift to PEI. You will not have the skills inside when you start. Now VAC wish to extend this to their service delivery for Vets. They do not have the resources for this. So the plan is to Partner – Partner with other agencies that can help them build a robust service delivery platform.
6. Have a clear vision for the future where social media gives you the win – The vision for “Commemoration” (Memorials etc) was to bring the memorial to the Public. The Vision for “Commemoration” – offering meaning for the sacrifice and the lives of our vets was to give this to the public. The new service delivery goal will be to shift the web from being a big pamphlet to being the place where the services of VAC are enacted – where a vet can get what he or she needs. Finally the visions for the social needs of the vets – which in most cases exceed the program needs – is to use the web to help vets get connected to others like them so that they can help each other. So far so good!
I think that VAC have earned the right to go for the service goals now – don’t you?
I think that they offer us a process that any large organization can follow too – don’t you?
The question that kicks off this short four-minute video:
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Is Social Media a Fad ? Or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution ?
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Thanks to Euan Semple for surfacing this recently-updated (current statistics) view of the spread and penetration of social media into our daily human activities.
It’s not hard to imagine similar patterns to the growth of social computing and informal, socially-driven learning for the average organization 5 or 10 years down the road.
As some FASTForward readers may know, I’ve worked with organizations on human resources, organizational/work design and organizational effectiveness issues for most of the past two-and-a-half decades.
I’ve also been reasonably deeply involved for the past decade with the evolution of the Web and networks and how they impact knowledge work, work design, collaboration, knowledge management, and individual, group and organizational learning.
I wrote this short burst of one-pagers a few years ago in an attempt to be succinct but pithy about the range of changes we all are or will be experiencing as the interconnected environment in which we carry out work contiues to spread and penetrate the inner workings of organizations. I’ve changed a few words here and there to reflect that we’re now in 2010.
I’d love to know what you think, and what I’ve missed or need to change.
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1. Customers, employees and other stakeholders are all interconnected, and have access to most, if not all the information that everyone else has
This fact has large implications for any organization. It means that you can’t hide – anywhere.
Michael Schrage of MIT puts it very succinctly:
“Networks make organizational culture and politics explicit”
It’s essential, in this interconnected age of instant accessibility to information and knowledge, that as a leader and manager you are aware of the potent force that is contained in networks of connected information and people.
The implications are clear.
People have to understand and believe in what an organization is doing, why the organization is doing what it does, and how it’s doing it.
The messages from leaders have to be clear and believable, and the culture that carries out the organization’s mandate and mission has to be flexible, responsive and open.
Fear and cynicism, being driven to perform – as opposed to being invited to contribute your best – can’t carry the day.
2. The organization chart usually reflects power and politics in the organization … more often than not, customers and employees find work-arounds to create the experiences that delight
Most organization charts reflect an organizational design that is intended to deliver a strategy developed by a small group of people sitting on the top of an organization
Evaluating and ordering jobs in terms of their size and importance is often used to implement the organizational design
Most methods of job evaluation use factors, logic and language that were developed in the 1950’s and 1960’s – perfect for the Industrial Age, less than perfect for the interconnected Information Age.
Often, reporting relationships and chains-of-command get in the way.
Why do you think the Dilbert comic strip has been so successful for so long ?
Probably because people know that lots of time, energy and effort is expended keeping bosses happy – usually at the expense of customers.
Many managers aspired to, and spent the last twenty years, learning how to become “bosses”. Do you know what prison guards are called by the inmates ?
You guessed it – Boss
3. People interconnected by the Internet and software have ways of speaking to each other – and so they do that – all day long
People communicate. That’s what people do.
They share jokes, they send around interesting e-mails and web sites, they help each other get things done.
The nature of work in the Information Age has changed – dramatically. And it’s likely that the nature of work will keep changing.
If you want to see what work might look like – watch developments in the usability and usefulness of blogs and wikis. Watch younger people as they bring the gaming mentality into the workplace and watch how they communicate using cell phones, e-mail, and IM and the (eventual) derivatives of podcasting.
Watch, too, for developments in telepresence.
Employees are people, too. They communicate just like all the other real people, in Social Networks. They’re the ones communicating with your customers and shareholders.
It’s essential for an organization’s success, and the personal success of each and every one of those employees, that they feel proud of what they communicate. They want to be engaged in positive ways in making a meaningful contribution – to the customers, to themselves and to their fellow employees.
Thousands of articles have talked about how command-and-control dynamics are less than effective in the new set of interconnected conditions found in the workplaces of the Information Age.
Remember how you felt (or feel today) when commanded by a parent or other authority figure?
All too often, going to work in today’s organizations feels like re-living the adult version of that experience.
Not all organizations are like this – but fewer and fewer of tomorrow’s organizations will be able to function effectively if command-and-control remains the dominant dynamic.
Coaching has become an important response to changing this dynamic. Coaches help leaders and managers listen better, respect other people more authentically, and become more effective at striking a balance between:
Clarity and Decisiveness … and … Flexibility and Openness
As change swirls and complexity keeps on growing, champion-channel-coordinate helps good ideas and effective responses come to the surface, be examined thoroughly, and get implemented.
Effective leaders and managers know how to (or learn how to) champion, channel and coordinate.
Bosses are different than leaders and managers – as both a conceptual construct and in the lived experience found in our relationship with them.
5. Conversations are where information is shared, knowledge is created and are the basis for getting the right things done
Human beings have been having conversations since time began. That’s how we’ve figured out all of the things we’ve invented and how we govern ourselves. It’s how we’ve gotten to how we are now.
In the Industrial Age, reporting relationships, and the assumption that the dog on the top of the heap knew more than all the other dogs, were the formalized structure for conversation. It doesn’t work very well this way, anymore.
The only way to deal with ongoing change is to create and sustain effective conversations – with your customers, with and amongst employees and with everyone else.
Sharing information, and creating new knowledge, in order to respond to ongoing change, is the only way that will work from here on out.
The structure, tools and culture of organizations will have to honor this fact.
There’s no other way it’s going to work.
6. Trust, Transparency and Authenticity are the glue that holds it all together
People want to trust, they want to believe – even in the face of large amounts of evidence that the system is being manipulated in the favor of a select few
In North America, we’re still trying to shake off the disbelief about the blatant dishonesty and fraud demonstrated by some corporate (and governmental) leaders. We actively do not want to believe things may be as corrupt as they seem … institutionalized dishonesty and deceit.
We don’t want to believe that these attitudes and behavior might be more widespread than is apparent, yet somehow we have a feeling that the common corporate culture rewards and supports this possibility.
Many people – checking their 401K’s or stock portfolios, or looking back at the job(s) they’ve lost – feel at best disrespected and at worst enraged that they have been taken advantage of.
The interconnectedness of the Web has created a means for people to challenge blind authority, and to push back. If their trust is abused, many will use this to establish their own authority or fight back
Let’s understand one thing … when people who have been abused decide to get organized and push back, they become a potent force.
Interconnectedness is a potent force for creating transparency and demanding trust, and many are just now learning how to use it more effectively.
7. The Workplace of the Future will be more diverse – in terms of demographics, values, gender, race and language
In the midst of all the interconnectedness and sharing of information, the composition and shape of the workplace will keep changing.
North America and Western Europe are landscapes of a changing population – different waves of immigration keep coming, and each new generation brings fresh change to the workplace. The workplace of the near future will be a sea of people from a wide range of countries, cultures and languages – and they will all be interconnected.
The range of diversity brings with an equally wide range of beliefs, values and reasons for working.
This emerging mix will bring new dynamics of relationship into the workplace – both online and offline
Learning to listen, respect and champion-and-channel will be an essential competency for success.
8. New, integrated and sophisticated technologies are being developed and implemented – and the knowledge workers of tomorrow will be more interconnected than ever
Web 2.0 has found its way to the workplace – it’s an infrastructure that’s decentralized and more open … and therefore more complex in terms of human dynamics … than that which came before.
Remember Napster ? The workplace versions exist and may be coming soon to a workplace near you. Indeed, the wider conversation about blogs and the workplace is only growing, and acquiring useful examples.
Many forms of “smartware” are also on the runway, getting ready to take off. New tools are absolutely essential to deal with the overload of information that already exists – and grows more daunting with each passing week. This “smartware” will find its way into the workplace.
Smartware will either “dumb things down” (entering information, and the system does the rest), or “smarten things up” (helping people collaborate and create new knowledge).
Many of these tools will add capability and functionality to the continuing need for effective collaboration – and so will make collaboration more and more possible.
More technology-supported collaboration will in turn increase the need for effective leadership and coaching – champion-and-channel will become more necessary than ever. The game will get sharper again.
Adapting to the new tools will require new forms of social interaction in the workplace. As change keeps coming, and work activities become more interdependent, the required adaptation will become more social and cultural in nature.
9. We’re All In This Together
The interconnected Information Age is showing us that we’re all linked together – and that the whole system matters. Systems thinking is not new .. but the spread of networks makes it effects, impacts and challenges more visible and more immediate.
This applies to organizations, to networks of customers, suppliers, employees and communities, to our societies and to the planet.
New language for this principle is popping up everywhere – knowledge networks, intranets, communities of practice, systems thinking, swarming, social software, social networks, tipping points.
Awareness is the key. Maintain an “open focus”.
Being aware of yourself, others and the effects of your actions and ways of being in relation to others is a fundamental requirement in these conditions.
10. There’s No Going Back to “Normal” – Permanent Whitewater is the New Normal
It’s almost trite to say this – the only constant is change.
However…over the past 15 years or so, there have been enormous amounts of energy spent resisting change – waiting and hoping for things to go back to “normal”.
It won’t happen. It’s useful to acknowledge and accept this, and get started … at learning how to learn, and equipping yourself for constant adaptability.
It’s a good – but not the only – way forward.
At the same time, you won’t survive by trying to make yourself into a chameleon. You can’t be all things to all people.
Connecting to your self – your values, your ways to build and acquire knowledge, and understand and use your intuition – is in my opinion the only way to go.
As FASTForward readers may know, colleague Rob Patterson and I have decided to put forth a series of opinions about the HR issues that may become prominent as the implementation of purposeful social computing proceeds in the enterprise arena.
I believe it’s fair to say that Rob and I come by our interest in this area honestly, as we both have had significant chunks of our past careers tangled up in the world of human resources management. Rob was Senior Vice-president, Human Resources for one of Canada’s major banks, and I spent a number of years in a relatively senior role with Hay Management Consultants, one of the well-known global HR / organizational effectiveness consultancies.
Today we are both dropouts from that career path. We both encountered the Web in its early days and decided that it would have a major impact on work, organizations and human activities, and asked ourselves the question “Do I want to belong to the past, or to the future ?” We came to the same answer, it seems. We’ve both been blogging etc., and proselytizing its usefulness, for what seems now like forever. I started blogging (arguably) in 2001, and if I remember correctly Rob started around about then, maybe in 2002 ? We’ve both been intimately involved in what’s now called social media ever since.
In my opinion, nowhere is the impact of hyperlinks, HTMLx, well-designed platforms, easier-and-easier-to-use tools, etc. more apparent than in the lively and far-reaching conversations all over the Web about the tug-of-war between structured formal learning and semi-structured informal learning as bedrock for equipping employees to deliver effective performance in their work. As my ITA colleague Harold Jarche often says,”work is learning, learning is work”.
Generally, the Learning & Development area of organizations tends to fall under the HR function, though in some instances teh Marketing department is getting involved. And, from what I can tell, the Learning (Training) & Development industry is in an uproar these days. More and more of the pros in that area are beginning to understand that fundamental workplace dynamics are probably forever changing in massive ways, as organizations and employees everywhere are exploring the benefits, the tools and the necessary organizational adaptations. The implications for stimulating, supporting, managing and measuring employee performance are important, and massive.
How and why employees learn is directly linked to setting and managing performance objectives, which in turn is related to the design of (knowledge) work and individuals’ learning contracts and the acquisition and evolution of job competencies. Today, performance objectives tend to be developed top-down (which is necessary, as performance derives directly from an organization’s strategy and overall objectives). But that genesis does not take into account the whole picture of an organization’s or individual employees’ information-and-knowledge ecosystem.
As both horizontal and vertical networks inside organizations (or inclusive of connections external to the organization) become increasingly interconnected and intertwined, the impact on which objectives most clearly define effective and high levels of performance needs to be explored more deeply. This is also, I think, connected to the ongoing debate about the ROI of social computing, the value of intangibles like relationship capital and intellectual capital, and metrics about effectiveness in a networked environment
That exploration will be the subject of my next post in this series on HR in the Enterprise 2.0 context. If you’re interested, please stay tuned.
Join us for the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 Oct 3-6, Anaheim CA
With over 240 sessions, SPC11 will provide you with the training, insight, and networking you need to develop, deploy, govern and get the most from SharePoint. You’ll also hear from Microsoft Engineers, Product Managers, MCMs and MVPs who will discuss topics such as cloud services, best practices and real world project insights. To see a preview of the sessions we will be presenting at SPC11, click here.
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RECENT EVENT
Christian Finn Keynotes 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston
Microsoft's Director of SharePoint Product Management Christian Finn, an Enterprise 2.0 keynote speaker, talks about SharePoint, the future of enterprise collaboration and the value of community.
To read more, visit, CMS Wire
Or view the video of the keynote below:
SharePoint 2010 SocialFest
A group of seven startups recently joined us at SharePoint 2010 SocialFest, an event hosted by the Emerging Business Team at the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus.
The format: a week-long session focused on extending the SharePoint platform using their unique and innovative applications in the emerging social business space. In addition to intensive development time, the teams heard from various developer experts, SharePoint engineering, SharePoint product management and a panel of nventure investors.
The FASTforward blog periodically hosts webcasts - to hear a recent conversation with Denise Warren, general manager of NYTimes.com, and Alan Webber, author of "Rules of Thumb" and co-founder of Fast Company. The topic: how today's newspaper and magazine publishing companies are innovating to stay relevant (and profitable) click here.For the latest interview with Marty St.George, the CMO at jetBlue, click here
FASTforward 09: Video Interviews
Be sure not to miss our interview series with several dozen attendees of FASTforward'09, including all the contributors to this blog, as well as Clay Shirky, Charlene Li, and many other notable thinkers and doers. The interviews are tagged and can be accessed by topic.
Check out the first of a series of guides to the 2.0 world from the contributors of the FASTforward Blog. This and future FASTforward Blog guides aim to deepen understanding about topics we think critical to the future of the enterprise and how people and organizations communicate, collaborate, innovate, and more.
In this guide, Robert Paterson weaves together the many posts that have been written on the FASTforward blog about Twitter, the groundbreaking application that has attracted millions of users and is changing the way they provide, gather, and share information and insights.
This site is a companion blog to the FASTforward conference and summit series and is sponsored by FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary. The blog, like the conference series, aims to drive and deepen conversation about how today’s companies can use technology to place users in control of information, and is home to ongoing discussion about the user revolution and Enterprise 2.0 opportunities and challenges. More info here...
