Jacob Morgan's Blog, page 39
July 25, 2013
Friday Vendor Roundup: MangoApps, Yammer, Salesforce Chatter, and Clarizen
Every Friday I’m going to attempt to summarize any relevant news in the future of work/collaboration space. I’ll provide the name of the vendor, a short summary of what the announcement or piece of news is with a link to the original, and finally a short POV. I can’t cover every single thing that comes out but I will do my best to provide as much relevant content as I can. If you have something you think I should include then please send it over and I will decide if it’s something I can add. Again, keep in mind this is weekly roundup so the news or announcements need to be from that week. Here is the roundup for this week:
Mango Apps 8.1 release
I actually meant to cover this when it was first announced and forgot so I’m adding it here. The new version of the platform adds things such as a native Windows desktop client, HTML 5 document viewer, screen capture, Google Analytics integration, and much more. They also launched a product called TinyTake which is a free screen capture and annotation tool that anyone can use..
My POV
I’m a big fan of MangoApps and believe they have a terrific product. They are a privately held company and so their marketing budget is small but their product is powerful which is why you may not have heard about them. I’ve talked to executive team around their roadmap and they have exciting things coming up in the near future. They focus more on mid-size organizations but also have some enterprise size customers. Their product rivals what many of the more known vendors are offering.
Disclosure: We use a review (no cost) instance of MangoApps and have been for a while now
Yammer adds browser extension
Yammer has added an effective way for employees to share external information internally with their new browser extension. This allows employees to push a button to share an article or web-page internally with their teams and also allows them to see if any conversations around that page are already happening.
My POV
A great addition to what is becoming a powerful Yammer arsenal. While the extension might not be a critical component it is certainly a nice to have feature for employees who are looking to start conversations around a particular topic. I’m sure community managers using Yammer are collectively saying “thank you.”
Salesforce Chatter updates mobile functionality
The goal of the new mobile update is to support pretty much any action that an employee needs to take on the platform. Traditionally most mobile apps that enterprise collaboration vendors have are either view only or provide limited functionality. However, the new mobile version of Chatter will allow employees to take actions such as editing customer records or marketing campaigns. The app will also for custom actions such as one click access to submit a help request or travel reimbursement (or anything else that the company can think of). Finally, the app will provided updated analytics dashboards in real time.
My POV
The entire point of this update is to empower the mobile employee. As mentioned above most mobile versions of platforms typically provide limited functionality which means that employees on the go can’t be as effective or productive as they are when in front of a computer. This new update is bring the idea of the completely mobile employee one step closer to reality. The fact the analytics dashboards are also updated in real time based on actions that employees make on their mobile devices also allows for employees to make critical business decisions while on the go. Great move from Salesforce.
Clarizen announces record number of customers
Clarizen just announced they broke the 2,000 customer mark spanning organizations across 75 countries.
My POV
Clarizen is one of those platforms that is sneaking up from behind on many of the “known” enterprise collaboration vendors. They have a superb project management platform and are working on adding additional collaboration capabilities in the near future. Their company is actually larger than most people think and it’s growing fast. Definitely a vendor to watch going forward. They have made some other announcements as well which you can read in the link below.
Disclosure: Clarizen is a client
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July 22, 2013
The Feature Adoption Framework for Social Collaboration
One of the things that organizations need to consider when rolling out a social collaboration platform is how various features will impact or affect adoption. Most platforms today have dozens of features but should organizations roll them out all at once? That can certainly be one approach. But another approach which I find to be more effective is to roll out the features gradually based on their value and how they can help improve employee adoption. In fact, looking at adoption from a technology or features perspective is something that is not typically explored, but should be. This framework can help organizations understand how features can impact adoption. This is one of the many topics I explore in my book, The Collaborative Organization.
Let’s walk through each stage in detail.
Stage 1- Initial Features
Implement basic and intuitive features that can help solve problems right out of the gate. Rich profiles and microblogs are a great starting point, along with the ability to share files and search for information. Enabling single sign-on functionality is also crucial to implement early on as it can be a huge factor in ramping up early adoption and solves a very clear and immediate need in most organizations. Depending on the size of your organization, you may be in this stage for one to six months. Instead of basing this on a timeline, look at employee use and feedback as an indicator for when to advance.
Value
Employees will start being able to find and connect with their colleagues at work through the use of rich profiles. They will also be able to share ideas and content and ask and answer questions via the microblogging functionality. Instead of relying on e-mail as the content repository, employees will be able to share files with one another easily. They will no longer have to sign on to multiple platforms to access information; they will only need to log into one system that can authenticate them across all other systems. Executives will start to gain insight into how employees work and how the organization as a whole functions. The organization also will start to see the serendipity effect emerge.
Stage 2- Additional Features
Once employees become more comfortable with and accustomed to the initial set of features, you can begin to turn on additional capabilities. Project and task management features should be added as well as group and workspace creation capabilities, shared calendaring, and collaborative file creation, storage, and sharing (among others). These features will help employees add more context to the way they work while providing them with the additional tools they need to solve business problems. Organizations are typically in this stage for around three months.
Value
Employees will be able to manage more of their day-to-day work lives on the emergent (or social) collaboration platform. Tasks can be created and assigned, and special project groups or department groups can be created to keep everyone on the same page. It also becomes much easier for employees to retrieve and share information with one another. Adoption will increase as employees will need to access the collaboration platform to get the information required to get their jobs done. Employees will also start to see a reduction in duplicate content as well as improved communication. A “single source of truth” for projects and information begins to be formed here. At this stage colleagues also typically begin to influence one another to collaborate. Finally, executives gain greater insight into their organizations.
Stage 3-Systems Integration
Once the set of features and capabilities is rolled out, integration can begin with other legacy and back-end systems such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), billing and invoicing, and ticketing systems. All required and relevant integrations are rolled out here as well as any remaining features the organization wishes to roll out. Organizations typically are in this phase for 6 to 18 months or more.
Value
The emergent collaboration platform now becomes the front door for the enterprise, and everything employees need to get their jobs done is found in one place. Adoption increases even further as employees no longer need to access other applications or sites and can instead utilize one platform to get everything done. Process improvement is very noticeable here. Context around collaboration becomes prevalent, and communication becomes increasingly horizontal rather than vertical. Executives now have a very solid understanding of what is happening in their organizations at the ground level.
Stage 4- Best Practices and Ideation
The final stage involves employee ideation and innovation and the creation of best practices. Here we see employees being able to contribute their ideas and feedback to help shape the future of collaboration in the enterprise. New ideas, use cases, and opportunities are identified and pursued. Best practices are developed regularly to address issues or recommendations for how employees can best leverage the emergent collaboration solution. This isn’t to say that best practices and ideation can’t and won’t take shape in earlier stages, but this is when it really starts to become formalized and distributed. Some organizations put a heavy emphasis on developing best practices and including employee ideation concurrently with earlier stages, which of course is another option. Organizations typically remain in this stage once the other three are completed, but they can regress, for example, if a deployed platform is being replaced for another one or if the organization feels that new features were rolled out too quickly.
Value
Through the use of best practices successes can be replicated and failures can be minimized. Employees are now able to share and access a resource base to help educate, train, and guide new and existing employees to make the most of emergent collaboration. Employees are able to contribute their own ideas and provide feedback to help shape the future of collaboration and work at the organization. Emergent collaboration becomes the standard for how work gets done. I also don’t want to suggest that this is the only phase where employee feedback should be considered; that should be ongoing through all the phases of deployment.
Keep in mind that this is one framework you can use but that it can be adapted. For example, instead of having two feature stages, your organization might have three. This needs to be mapped to what works best for your organization.
Finally, getting and sustaining desired adoption levels does take time. Nobody likes to hear that things take time, but that’s the reality, especially in large organizations. Successful emergent collaboration initiatives aren’t looked at as projects or campaigns; they are looked at as an evolution of doing business. Smart organizations understand that this is how things need to be done in the future. Can you imagine your organization not deploying these tools in the next three to five years?
July 21, 2013
The Feature Adoption Framework for Social Collaboration
One of the things that organizations need to consider when rolling out a social collaboration platform is how various features will impact or affect adoption. Most platforms today have dozens of features but should organizations roll them out all at once? That can certainly be one approach. But another approach which I find to be more effective is to roll out the features gradually based on their value and how they can help improve employee adoption. In fact, looking at adoption from a technology or features perspective is something that is not typically explored, but should be. This framework can help organizations understand how features can impact adoption. This is one of the many topics I explore in my book, The Collaborative Organization.
Let’s walk through each stage in detail.
Stage 1- Initial Features
Implement basic and intuitive features that can help solve problems right out of the gate. Rich profiles and microblogs are a great starting point, along with the ability to share files and search for information. Enabling single sign-on functionality is also crucial to implement early on as it can be a huge factor in ramping up early adoption and solves a very clear and immediate need in most organizations. Depending on the size of your organization, you may be in this stage for one to six months. Instead of basing this on a timeline, look at employee use and feedback as an indicator for when to advance.
Value
Employees will start being able to find and connect with their colleagues at work through the use of rich profiles. They will also be able to share ideas and content and ask and answer questions via the microblogging functionality. Instead of relying on e-mail as the content repository, employees will be able to share files with one another easily. They will no longer have to sign on to multiple platforms to access information; they will only need to log into one system that can authenticate them across all other systems. Executives will start to gain insight into how employees work and how the organization as a whole functions. The organization also will start to see the serendipity effect emerge.
Stage 2- Additional Features
Once employees become more comfortable with and accustomed to the initial set of features, you can begin to turn on additional capabilities. Project and task management features should be added as well as group and workspace creation capabilities, shared calendaring, and collaborative file creation, storage, and sharing (among others). These features will help employees add more context to the way they work while providing them with the additional tools they need to solve business problems. Organizations are typically in this stage for around three months.
Value
Employees will be able to manage more of their day-to-day work lives on the emergent (or social) collaboration platform. Tasks can be created and assigned, and special project groups or department groups can be created to keep everyone on the same page. It also becomes much easier for employees to retrieve and share information with one another. Adoption will increase as employees will need to access the collaboration platform to get the information required to get their jobs done. Employees will also start to see a reduction in duplicate content as well as improved communication. A “single source of truth” for projects and information begins to be formed here. At this stage colleagues also typically begin to influence one another to collaborate. Finally, executives gain greater insight into their organizations.
Stage 3-Systems Integration
Once the set of features and capabilities is rolled out, integration can begin with other legacy and back-end systems such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), billing and invoicing, and ticketing systems. All required and relevant integrations are rolled out here as well as any remaining features the organization wishes to roll out. Organizations typically are in this phase for 6 to 18 months or more.
Value
The emergent collaboration platform now becomes the front door for the enterprise, and everything employees need to get their jobs done is found in one place. Adoption increases even further as employees no longer need to access other applications or sites and can instead utilize one platform to get everything done. Process improvement is very noticeable here. Context around collaboration becomes prevalent, and communication becomes increasingly horizontal rather than vertical. Executives now have a very solid understanding of what is happening in their organizations at the ground level.
Stage 4- Best Practices and Ideation
The final stage involves employee ideation and innovation and the creation of best practices. Here we see employees being able to contribute their ideas and feedback to help shape the future of collaboration in the enterprise. New ideas, use cases, and opportunities are identified and pursued. Best practices are developed regularly to address issues or recommendations for how employees can best leverage the emergent collaboration solution. This isn’t to say that best practices and ideation can’t and won’t take shape in earlier stages, but this is when it really starts to become formalized and distributed. Some organizations put a heavy emphasis on developing best practices and including employee ideation concurrently with earlier stages, which of course is another option. Organizations typically remain in this stage once the other three are completed, but they can regress, for example, if a deployed platform is being replaced for another one or if the organization feels that new features were rolled out too quickly.
Value
Through the use of best practices successes can be replicated and failures can be minimized. Employees are now able to share and access a resource base to help educate, train, and guide new and existing employees to make the most of emergent collaboration. Employees are able to contribute their own ideas and provide feedback to help shape the future of collaboration and work at the organization. Emergent collaboration becomes the standard for how work gets done. I also don’t want to suggest that this is the only phase where employee feedback should be considered; that should be ongoing through all the phases of deployment.
Keep in mind that this is one framework you can use but that it can be adapted. For example, instead of having two feature stages, your organization might have three. This needs to be mapped to what works best for your organization.
Finally, getting and sustaining desired adoption levels does take time. Nobody likes to hear that things take time, but that’s the reality, especially in large organizations. Successful emergent collaboration initiatives aren’t looked at as projects or campaigns; they are looked at as an evolution of doing business. Smart organizations understand that this is how things need to be done in the future. Can you imagine your organization not deploying these tools in the next three to five years?
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July 19, 2013
Friday Vendor Roundup: Telligent, Jive, and Ping Identity
Every Friday I’m going to attempt to summarize any relevant news in the future of work/collaboration space. I’ll provide the name of the vendor, a short summary of what the announcement or piece of news is with a link to the original, and finally a short POV. I can’t cover every single thing that comes out but I will do my best to provide as much relevant content as I can. If you have something you think I should include then please send it over and I will decide if it’s something I can add. Again, keep in mind this is weekly roundup so the news or announcements need to be from that week. Here is the roundup for this week
Telligent acquires Zimbra from VMware
Zimbra which used to be a part of VMware was acquired by Telligent which will actually re-brand as Zimbra…Telligent will be no more. While Telligent focused on many of the social aspects of collaboration Zimbra has a core feature set around more traditional means of collaboration such as task management, email, shared calendaring, and file sharing. However, Telligent did have some of these features built into its existing platform. This acquisition also means 100 new employees as well as existing Zimbra customers will be carried over to the new company.
My POV
To be honest I haven’t paid too much attention to Zimbra in the past and VMware doesn’t seem to really care that they are getting rid of it; they have their own product focused on social collaboration called Socialcast. Overall it looks like a good move for both companies VMware seems to have peaked with their use and need for Zimbra and Telligent is just getting started with it. The Telligent brand will disappear and everything will become Zimbra which I found to be an interesting choice but not a bad thing. This acquisition doubles the size of employees and increases the number of customers and partners which is always a good thing. This will provide a great opportunity to up-sell and cross-sell Telligent and Zimbra customers which means more revenue. It will be interesting to see how the re-branding and the integration works out.
New Jive summer cloud release
Jive just released the newest version of their product which includes an advanced gamification module powered by Bunchball, improved analytics, and added integrations with Chatter, Yammer, and Evernote through their acquisition of Streamonce.
My POV
When you drill down into the new version of the product a little bit you find that the recent changes are actually quite interesting. For example managers an now create custom missions and rewards based on customized actions and paths that employees take on the platform. This is all designed to help improve employee engagement and productivity. The recent Streamonce integrations also mean that organizations who are using multiple platforms such as Jive, Yammer, and Chatter can now see activity and collaborate across multiple platforms without any additional coding. Most organizations are typically using several platforms at once which are all oftentimes cobbled together with custom integrations and additional coding. This new integration focused on configuration not coding which is a big deal. Jive is certainly making the right moves to stay on top of the enterprise collaboration market.
Ping Identity raised an additional 44 million in funding
Ping Identity offers single-sign-on and identity management technology to over 1,000 corporate clients. The company is getting ready to IPO in 2014 and will be using the recent round of funding to focus on international expansion.
My POV
As organizations shift their IT infrastructure to the cloud, allow for flexible work environments, and BYOD; identity management is going to be an even more crucial role for organizations. I think there is a massive opportunity for a company such as Ping Identity to become the standard for identity management and single-sign-on. In a few years every large organization is going to need what Ping Identity is offering. I’m sure that in addition to the continued growth of the company we can see some upcoming acquisitions and I’m excited to see what the next two years will hold for them.
See you next week!
July 18, 2013
Four Things Employees Can Do to Align Their Teams and Satisfy Their Boss
Nobody likes to be micro-managed yet managers always want to know what employees are working and employees feel a lot of pressure to always have to justify where their time is going. In larger size organizations especially, a lot of an employee’s time can be spent just looking for stuff. I’ve spoken to a few employees at large organizations who experience tension between their teams because everyone always wants to know what everyone else is working on. Another big challenge for employees is keeping their teams aligned which is crucial considering today’s modern distributed workforce.
These are two of the many areas where a collaboration platform can prove to be a most useful solution. There are a few things employees can do to to keep their teams aligned and their bosses satisfied:
Narrate your work
Leverage the technology to not only share what you are working on but what you thinking about. This allows your team to see where your thought process is taking you and allows them to comment and share their ideas and feedback. Not only that but if your manager wants to know what you are working on they can simply take a look at your updates. Problem solved.
Ask and answer questions
Finding people and information inside of many companies can be a very tedious task. So why not rely on the collective intelligence of your organization to help you? You can ask for documents you are looking for, advice on a project, or who you should be speaking with about a current engagement. Answering questions also helps establish your presence within the organization as a leader, something which was not possible before.
Create groups
Perhaps one of the most effective ways to keep alignment within your team and organization is by creating groups where you can share all the relevant files and information with the right people. Let’s say you are working on a particular client engagement or reside within a certain department within your company. You can leverage groups to make sure that the right people are getting access to the right files at the right time. No more emailing, no more going back and forth. Everyone can see what is going on what everyone is working on and the beauty is that nobody needs to bug anybody else. Perhaps one of the best benefits of this is the reduction in reliance on meetings. If everyone can stay up to date on what’s happening then that means less meeting time.
Co-create content
Instead of sending emails back and forth with documents and revisions employees can co-author documents which means one document that everyone can create, edit, and comment on. Collaboration platforms provide easy versioning and sharing controls to make sure that the right people are involved and reliance on email is dramatically reduced.
It’s in the best interest of employees to use collaboration platforms in their day-to-day jobs to help keep their teams aligned and their bosses at ease. The next time your boss asks you “what did you do today?” you tell them to go check the collaboration environment where they can see everything you were working on. Problem solved.
July 15, 2013
The New Standard for Evaluating Enterprise Software is How Consumer Grade It Is
It’s no secret that much of modern day enterprise software (specifically around collaboration) is being modeled around consumer web software; and there’s good reason for that. When we think of platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, or (insert company here), we associate them with things such as ease of use, access on any device, connecting with and finding people and information, building communities, and engagement (and I’m sure many other things). But, when we think of enterprise software those are pretty much the exact opposite things we think about. If you look at pretty much any piece of social/enterprise collaboration software today you will notice two things; virtually all of them look alike and do similar things; and they all have features and functionality taken from the platforms we use in our personal lives aka social media, aka the consumer web.
Enterprise software is starting to be evaluated based on how “consumer grade” it is and this is a big shift; how often do you hear an executive say something like “can it do hashtags like Twitter?” or “can you create groups like in Facebook?” Traditionally there has always been this big rift between consumer software and enterprise software and now the two are starting to blur quite closely. Sure, there are still some differences in a few areas such as use cases but for the most part they are converging. Many business leaders want to have enterprise software that can do the same things that consumer software can do (and of course go beyond that). After all, if it’s so easy for us to find and access people and information on any device on the consumer web shouldn’t we expect just as much, if not more, within our organizations?
Collaboration vendors which offer cloud-based offerings are making this that much easier. For the most part it’s just as easy to set up a new Facebook page as it is to set up a collaboration environment for your team and this is pretty amazing; what’s just as amazing is that anyone in your company do it…anyone. This poses an interesting challenge for many CIOs who used to have enterprise on lock-down, meaning nothing happened unless they said it happened. But, that’s a topic for an upcoming post!
So what does this mean?
For the first time there’s going to be this give and take between enterprise software and consumer software. Right now consumer software is the front runner which is spurring innovation ideas for the enterprise but eventually this will change and the enterprise will start to develop very specific use case or scenarios which may then be relevant for new innovation in the consumer web. We already see this for example in the financial space where companies are adding compliance functionality on top of enterprise collaboration platforms. It’s a bit of a see-saw effect. Twitter, Facebook, Klout, Foursquare, Wikis, Blogs, and many other pieces of consumer software are now the standard for enterprise software.
This also means that it is still important to not just focus on enterprise software but to also pay attention to what is happening on the consumer side of things because at least for now, that is where many enterprise software ideas are coming from. However, what’s also particularly interesting is how enterprise software vendors are able to take ideas from the consumer web and improve upon them; adding additional features and functionality.
Personally, I still think we are near the early stages of innovation for enterprise software. The seesaw has only moved in one direction and there are many more moves still to come. But one things is clear, the standard for evaluting enterprise software is how consumer grade it is.
July 12, 2013
Friday Vendor Roundup: Podio, Box, Dropbox, and Tibbr
Every Friday I’m going to attempt to summarize any relevant news in the future of work/collaboration space. I’ll provide the name of the vendor, a short summary of what the announcement or piece of news is with a link to the original, and finally a short POV. Obviously I can’t cover every single thing that comes out but I will do my best to provide as much relevant content as I can. If you have something you think I should include then please send it over and I will decide if it’s something I can add. Again, keep in mind this is weekly roundup so the news or announcements need to be from that week. This is just getting started and I expect it to grow quite a bit but I’ll try to keep it manageable. Here is the roundup for this week
Podio (acquired by Citrix) Adds Audio and Video
Podio added the ability to talk to and see your colleagues. It’s similar to using the Gchat interface where you can click on a phone or a camera icon to activate a certain action. This means that employees don’t need to leave the application to use something such as Skype to have audio or video chats. It’s all available directly within the Podio application.
My POV
A great addition to an already powerful platform. However, this feature set is starting to become the standard instead of a differentiating factor. It can be a bit frustrating to to have to switch applications for audio and video chat and storing those conversations for search later but this solves that problem for all Podio customers. I’m very happy with this and I’m sure customers are as well.
Box Named as a Forrester Wave Leader, Hires Top Talent From Oracle and Salesforce
In the recent Forrester Wave report around sync & share platforms, Box was named as one of the leaders. I follow box in the enterprise collaboration space which is why I am giving them special attention here, however other companies such as Egnyte, Citrix, and Dropbox were also on that list. This is a unique accomplishment for Box as they are now the only vendor that is recognized as a Leader in the Enterprise Sync and Share and the Online Collaboration markets analyst firms, Gartner and Forrester.
Box also hired senior level leaders from Oracle and Salesforce to run sales and engineering. See the second announcement link to get a breakdown of names and roles.
My POV
No surprise here as the folks at Box have been hard at work building a tremendous product which is gaining a lot of attention. Not too long ago Box moved into an office which was MUCH greater than their staff needed. When I asked Aaron Levie (their CEO) about this, he mentioned that it just goes to show that Box has tremendous plans for growth and expansion. I believe he said something along the lines of “taking over the world,” and he’s getting there! Their recent hires accurately highlight their core focus in the foreseeable future; expanding their product features and dramatically increasing sales.
Link to Forrester Wave announcement
Dropbox Launches Datastore API and Drop-ins
This past week has marked some very interesting and exciting things for Dropbox. The Datastore API they released basically allows developers to create applications which can be used and synced both offline and online. The simple analogy that was used is how Amazon’s Kindle knows what page you are on regardless of what device you are using and automatically updates and syncs. The goal is to have this done with any application whether it be a game, a photo editing app, a to-do list, or perhaps even a shopping purchase. Drop-ins allows users to attach or “drop in” files from Dropbox into other applications. For example if you wanted to send an email and directly attach a file from Dropbox (instead of sending a link to that file) you can. You can also save files directly to Dropbox instead of to your hard drive.
My POV
A very good addition to Dropbox. In a recent interview their CEO said that users shouldn’t be able to tell whether they are working online or offline. My favorite example of what this looks like is the TripAdvisor City Guides application which basically downloads packets to your iphone for a specific country or city that you want to visit. Then while you are offline you can still explore things to do, the best places to eat, and can even write reviews and check into locations; then this syncs once you get online again. The integration is seamless and their offline app feels very much like their online app. Being able to do this for virtually any application is a big deal and should greatly improve the experience and functionality of any app that uses this API. Drop-ins is also a great move but in my opinion not as crucial as their Datastore API. However, the two work very well together. This is huge for developers looking to create applications that work across multiple platforms and devices while making for a superior user experience. I believe Box has similar if not identical functionality focused on files for organizations but I don’t believe they have this for applications.
Tibbr Adds New Marketplace Apps
Yesterday tibbr announced that they are adding new apps into their growing marketplace for things such as ideation, customer engagement, task management, and several others. The new apps which include Teamly, Kollaborate, Wazoku, and others; are available in their app marketplace as we speak.
My POV
Tibbr is one of those companies that offers a compelling product that very few people know about; which is unfortunate. They are slowly but surely moving in the right direction but they seem to always be one step behind where many of the competitors are. Jive, Yammer, Atlassian, and many other vendors out there have a far more developed marketplace with applications that can do almost anything (and if they can’t you can build your own). So while I like the tibbr announcement and see it as a step in the right direction; I’d like to see something more substantial coming from them.
July 2, 2013
Do We Really Want Data-Driven Organizations?
Big data, lots of data, a whole ton of data, super massive big data!
This seems to be what a lot of people are talking about lately; how to collect and leverage as much data as we can possibly get to make business decisions; aka building the data-driven organization; and it scares the hell out of me.
When I was in college I was always told by my economics and statistics professors that data can be deceiving. In fact you can pretty much tell any story that you want with the same set of numbers and a bit of careful manipulation. Nowadays we are getting data from every corner of the web both internally and internally; everything from social media platforms to enterprise collaboration applications to cloud storage providers to customer purchase information (and that’s just the tip of the iceberg). The amount of data that we get is getting bigger and bigger and it will never slow down; it will only get bigger. So, naturally organizations are thinking of how they can collect and make the most sense of the data that they have access to from all over the web.
There is nothing wrong with leveraging data to make business decisions. But that’s very different than having a data-driven organization. A data-driven organization is one that puts information and data ahead of people and relies on data to tell us what to do and how to do it. Right now that might not seem like a big deal but eventually we are going to start living our lives the way data tells us to; and at that point we’ve essentially given up what makes us human.
I love sci-fi books. Actually the Foundation and I, Robot series by Isaac Asimov are probably my all time favorite science fiction books and they all deal with big-data in some way. The Foundation series deals with a character by the name of Hari Seldon who develops something called psychohistory which is essentially a science that combines history, sociology, and mathematics to make predictions about the future as it pertains to the world (not individuals). Clearly this Hari Seldon fellow was dealing with massive amounts of data as the fictional population at that time was far greater than 7 billion. Long story short, Hari creates psychohistory, eventually dies and the “world” is essentially living out what they “think” they should be doing based on Hari’s predictions. In other words the people are doing things because the data tells them to.
Sure, it’s a bit of a stretch to compare this fictitious novel with a data-driven organization but hopefully you can still see the point I’m getting at here. Our organizations should always be people driven not data-driven. I posted this on twitter and Ben Haines the now CIO of Box responded by saying, “people driven with data enabled decisions win win,” and I completely agree.
The challenge that we are going to face going forward is how to keep our organizations “people driven” without giving up too much control to data. If we spend all of our time trying to build a data-driven organization then eventually we will have no need for managers or employees, just robots who do what the data tells them to.
We don’t need data driven organizations, we need people driven but data enabled organizations.
July 1, 2013
My Keynote Presentation on The Future of Work at the Social Business Forum in Milan
Last month I was fortunate enough to be asked to keynote the Social Business Forum in Milan. It was a great event with lots of smart people sharing some terrific insights. My session was on the future of work and the organizers were kind enough to send me an HD video of the session. It’s just over 15 minutes and includes some background and personal information on yours truly; just to help you get to know me a little bit better.
Hope you enjoy my talk!
Jacob Morgan – The Future of Work from SocialBizForum on Vimeo.
June 28, 2013
Friday Vendor Roundup: Jive, Yammer, and Tomfoolery
Every Friday I’m going to attempt to summarize any relevant news in the future of work/collaboration space. I’ll provide the name of the vendor, a short summary of what the announcement or piece of news is with a link to the original, and finally a short POV. Obviously I can’t cover every single thing that comes out but I will do my best to provide as much relevant content as I can. If you have something you think I should include then please send it over and I will decide if it’s something I can add. Again, keep in mind this is weekly roundup so the news or announcements need to be from that week. This is just getting started and I expect it to grow quite a bit but I’ll try to keep it manageable. Here is the roundup for this week.
Jive Software New Mo bile Apps
Although Jive has offered it’s product on mobile devices in the past they are now creating native applications specifically for iPhone and Android devices. Additionally Jive is also creating new applications to better help serve corporate sales teams. Per the announcement these mobile apps are going to greatly improve the functionality of Jive on mobile but moving from beyond just observing and commenting on content to actually creating content such as a document. The smartphone apps are free but the new sales application will be $24/user/month and is designed to provide much richer customer data, a more robust mobile CRM if you will.
My POV:
Glad to see Jive staying so committed to mobile. Many of the companies I speak and work with are very much focused on empowering their mobile workforce and extending capabilities to these devices is a big part of that. I haven’t seen the new mobile sale application yet so I can’t comment too much on that, I’m sure the price will be very negotiable.
Yammer Partners with Klout
Yammer announced that they will be integrating Klout scores into employee profiles. Not only can an individuals Klout score be displayed internally but organizations have the ability to create a company specific Klout score which reflects how influential an employee is just internally within the organization. Yammer will also be adding a developer certification program and is actively working on building out their ecosystem.
My POV:
More of a nice to have instead of a need to have. This isn’t that big of a deal in my opinion. It seems like Klout is having some challenges on the consumer side of things so is now trying their luck inside of organizations. Other vendors have had their own internal scoring and reputation system for a while now. I like the idea of being able to create and customize your internal Klout score for employees but I don’t see this as a critical or even a necessary feature for most organizations, still…a nice to have should you want it.
Tomfoolery Launches Their Anchor App
Started by former Flickr GM Kakul Srivastava, Tomfoolery is a company created to build mobile apps for work. Their first app was just released called “Anchor.” The app as of now is free to download and is similar to what you would expect to see and find from any other enterprise collaboration application. However, the user experience and design is much improved.
My POV:
I think that Tomfoolery is going to be an interesting company to pay attention to over the next 1-2 years. I played around with their Anchor app and while I really like the design and layout it’s not that different then what other platforms are already offering. Perhaps this is better suited for mid-size and smaller organizations but I have a hard time seeing Anchor make its way into larger organizations at this point in time, perhaps in the future.
