The Wild Man of Social Networks

In doing some work for a large software company recently, I had the chance to interview one of the directors.  His philosophy for collaboration was simple: "Make sure everyone speaks English" and have them all co-located on our campus!" I know this was said somewhat tounge in cheek, but I was still shocked by this "luddite" attitude towards collaboration from a market leading global company.

Some of the Issues with Enterprise Collaboration Strategies

In working with large enterprises like BT, Logitech, General Dynamics, and  Network Appliance, I have seen a lot of similarities in the process of creating a corporate collaborative strategy.  In general it is IT that instigates this process, but sometimes it is from management.  In several cases it was a new CIO that was the impetus for this change.

A metric for small collaboration vendors

I estimate there are about 2000 vendors in the collaboration space today.  A few large ones like:  Adobe, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft, and then many, many smaller vendors.  The Gartner magic quadrant is only for large vendors, but how do analysts rate smaller vendors and on the sam

Chatter and Quad, why do they matter to you?

Chatter is the new Facebook-like collaboration tool announced this week by salesforce.com, and is focused on internal collaboration. I was also briefed by Cisco in their new all-in-one enterprise collaboration platform called Quad.  Pricing was not yet available, but there should be a Quad app out this summer for iPhone and iPad.  They talked about their “prosumer” video camera the “Flip mono pro” with 16GB/4 hours recording time. This is coupled with a cloud-based hosting service which then makes it applicable to enterprise policies.

Social Regret

A recent study done by Retrevo on  "Social Media Remorse" and the consequences of questionable online postings found that 32% of people surveyed say they've posted something online they regretted.

Engaging at Web 2.0 Expo

Yesterday was the first day of the Web 2.0 Expo at Moscone (SF).  The show was much smaller this year than in past years.

Collaborative Mini-Assessment is Live

I have created (with the help of my webmaster Cliff) a mini-assessment for you to determine how collaborative both you and the organization you choose to assess are.  The assessment takes less than 5 minutes and provides you with some insight and feedback based on your score.  Here is the link to take the assessment if you wish:

http://www.collaborate.com/assessment

Why Collaboration doesn't work

OK, for a site on collaboration saying that collaboration (as it is implemented in the enterprise today) does not work, that is a pretty strong negative statement.  I will go even further and say that not only does collaboration not work, but it is hard to sell to management these days because often the ROI is unclear.

What's stopping You from Collaborating

About 20 years ago I went around to a lot of companies and asked the people I talked with, if they wre good at collaborating, and to a man, they said "yes."  So that did not get me very far. I ended up creating an assessment tool that could quantify a person's "collaborativeness" (but that is another blog). What I did do is to ask what is stopping them from collaborating?  I got a wide variety of answers "inadequate technology", to "other people were not good at collaborating with me."

Questions to think about on work in 2020

I was at a NewWoW symposium in February and have been thinking about some of the questions asked at that meeting.  Here are some of the premises we took to be as true to start building our scenario on.