by Jon Husband
February 4, 2010 at 4:37 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Collaboration, Connected Enterprise, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Interaction, Organizational Design, SharePoint, Social Computing
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.
The L&D pros are wrestling with the fact that most often one of or the core accountability of their role is for choosing, implementing and supporting an LMS whilst the utility and effectiveness of said LMS is increasingly in question. The question of LMS effectiveness is feeling the impact of ‘work-arounds’, as of course employees everywhere are learning socially, in interaction with others on-and off-line. And (I think) there is pressure on mainstream LMS platforms also coming from the spread of collaborative social computing platforms like the most recent version of Sharepoint (2010) and its competitors.
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.
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by Joe McKendrick
November 3, 2008 at 9:25 pm · Filed under
Blogging, Enterprise 2.0, Microsoft, SOA, SharePoint, Wikinomics, Wikis
One of the advantages Enterprise 2.0 approaches offer in many situations is the relatively low or incremental prices at which technology is made available to organizations. It looks like things will even get more affordable.
A recent report from Forrester Research predicts the Enterprise 2.0 market is about to see impending “price drops” on tools ranging from blogs to wikis to social networks. Forrester analysts cite three specific reasons for the price drops:
“Commoditization, bundling, and subsumption. Increased competition and slowing innovation means that there is less differentiation between blogging solutions. Further, many vendors, from Microsoft to Six Apart, now offer a complete, enterprise-oriented suites that bundle a mature set of essential tools, which drives down prices for individual tools and specialized solutions.”
The increasing ubiquity of SharePoint — which supports many Enterprise 2.0 features — also may help to drive down prices from many other vendors, Forrester predicts.
The only area that may see price increases is software for handling mashups, Forrester predicts. “IT departments will prioritize mashup technology as part of portal, business intelligence, and business process management software investments as well as a major component of SOA implementations.”
by Bill Ives
October 5, 2008 at 9:02 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SharePoint
This is part four and the last installment of my notes from a local event sponsored by Knowledge Management Associates, “Real World Sharepoint Experiences.” Tara Seppa is a Microsoft Information Worker Solution Specialist who works with small to midsize businesses in New England. She covered Microsoft’s Sharepoint Investment areas. Tara started by saying that the latest launch wave – Windows server 2008 will include virtualization. There will also be SQL2008 enhancements to better work with Sharepoint including compression and high availability.
The Microsoft Search Server 2008 will be better suited for intranet searching with new federation capabilities and no preset document limits. It will be available in two versions including a free express version for a single server. Search will use mashups to include content form multiple sources in one result set. Currently, there is federation – search from other sources now. The next move will be to a combined mashuped set of results. Sharepoint will also allow for tagging and rating of content while maintaining the taxonomy.
The next release of Sharepoint, Microsoft will be investing for the paradigm shift to more web 2.0 capabilities. The consumer web is influencing the enterprise and search is getting bigger. Microsoft feels that software + services is the best of both worlds – combine SaaS and desktop apps. There are limits of Sharepoint online that can be handled by desktop apps. Social networking and social software are on the rise and success here is about building trust. Social networking is an important first step for collaboration and finding documents. Currently, knowledge is modern organizations isn’t just 80 undocumented, it is 95% invisible. The Sharepoint social networking capability, Knowledge Network, was not implemented in last version of Sharepoint but they are planning to implement it in next version.
Other new investments include making lists more relational and they will be the backbone of Sharepoint. Social networking will get more emphasis as mentioned above. Microsoft made a big investment in Facebook. The Sharepoint My Site profile will be seen as the hub of network. Knowledge Network integration is likely to happen as mentioned above. It indexes what’s on your system to determine your expertise (but you can turn it on and off). So the Knowledge Network will cover more than just what you put on your profile to My Site. It will look at how you are really working.
Finally she said they want to get beyond sequential collaboration. Influences from both the Groove acquisition and wikis will help them get past the limits of check in and out.
I asked about the announced commitment to integration with best of breed players who now offer some of the new directions she described for Sharepoint. Tara said Microsoft will continue its integration with best of breed players, especially in vertical market applications. Sharepoint is more of a platform and will not try to bring in all features into the product.
She closed with the announcement that Office 14 will be out soon and a new release of Sharepoint will come out at this time as well. Office 2007 separated language from function. It works so well they will be doing it from Sharepoint in next release. There is a Sharepoint blog to follow the latest moves.
by Bill Ives
October 3, 2008 at 1:39 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SharePoint
This is part three of my four part notes from a local event sponsored by Knowledge Management Associates, “Real World Sharepoint Experiences.” Tim Farrell and Marcel Meth gave a recap of the recent Sharepoint best practices conference. This event sold out quickly and I understand that Microsoft may offer them more frequently because of the popularity. Last year Microsoft sold over 1B$ (US) worth of Sharepoint. Here are the headlines for the event that they attended.
Tim and Marcel said that the walls are collapsing between intranets and extranets and this change is reflected in applications. In addition, virtualization is now supported through many vendors. There is a move for Sharepoint to support non-Windows browsers such a Linux (this would shift one of Sadie’s points in part one). At the conference there was some mention of Sharepoint online – it does exist.
Search with Sharepoint is improving. It is important to remember that Web search and intranet search are different. It takes a while to get it set up with manual adjustments to the thesaurus, rank ordering, etc. You need to create a consistent taxonomy and single version of the truth. Also, ensure the taxonomy can be updated and create content types – (e.g. artists, album, track).
Sharepoint workflow is not ready for prime time as it requires a lot of expertise to get it right. I think this will be a critical feature. My experience has been with Sharepoint that if you have a very skilled developer that they can do almost anything but it becomes expensive in terms of implementation costs.
Companies are finding that the My Sites profile pages are starting to be used creatively. This is not surprising given all the practice many people have with sites like Facebook. They also cautioned to not replace the network drive with Sharepoint as these tools serve different functions. Be sure to do capacity planning and get sufficient hardware.
Do not assume front office administration staff can manage Sharepoint. It requires more IT skills than are usually found there. Devote the same time to training as you do to building Sharepoint. This is consistent with the Pam Conway’s session.
During the week, they heard from developer experts, SharePoint engineering, SharePoint product management and a panel of tier one venture investors. On Friday, they presented in front of a panel of judges including Charles Schwab & Co. and McKesson where Huddle took first prize.
With 
