Making the Digital Workplace Work

Armless Black Knight kicking King ArthurI recently wrote an article at CMS Wire about how Intranets have been eclipsed by the advent of new tools like enterprise social networks (ESNs). Like the old web, Intranets, and the portals that were often created in their name, didn’t really serve much of a purpose outside a large bulletin board. Efforts were made to make them more useful but without addressing a real need, those efforts often came to naught.

The concept of an ESN works better because it is a place where people can come together and work. I’m not talking Facebook in the office. That is crazy. I am talking something more akin to Yammer. I am talking about taking the break room and moving it online for organizations that are collaborative in nature but may not be co-located.

My good friend Jed Cawthorne took exception to my article. He said Forget ESN’s, Give me a Digital Workplace.

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How NOT to Succeed at Social Media

Turtle on its backFirst off, I’m not an expert on Social Media. I have a lot of experience, have observed a lot, and keep tabs on the ‘best practices’. I have never run a corporate social media strategy or spent too much time analyzing how different strategies impact my effectiveness, though I have consulted on both.

I simply share what I want to share and talk to people. That is the point after all, isn’t it?

Even so, I can see when someone is doing it wrong, even without a critical article being written to clue me in to the problem. Recently I have been watching a company try to get their social media engine running and they are flailing.

FLAILING.

I want to share the what they are doing poorly.

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Moving Past Systems of Record and Engagement

Tom Baker & Matt SmithWhen the terms of Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement were introduced, they were a great way to introduce the concept of expanding social from the water cooler to the digital world. Then a  funny thing happened on the way to success. It didn’t work.

For every success story on the move towards social business, there are more examples where collaborative software didn’t take off. When you sit down and ask why, it becomes apparent that the issue isn’t always that people don’t want to collaborate. They just don’t want to do it in a forced manner.

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Predictions of Pie for 2013

Last year, I didn’t write a prediction post. That is a shame because evaluating last year’s predictions is an easy post to write. Of course, that’s not why I write prediction posts. I usually write them to highlight other predictions that I feel are really good, really wrong, or just plain silly. I then mix in a few creative ideas and Bingo!, instant post.

So without further ado, here is what you can expect in 2013.

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Sitecore Sym NA: Social Connected Deep Dive

Checking out the Sitecore Social Connector. If you’ve been to the AIIM website, you see that we do a little of this. I want to do it better. I’m here to see if we can do it cost effectively. David Morrison is presenting in this session.

  • Version 1.3 was just released and it is a free module (Nice confirmation for ignorant people like myself)
  • Social Brainstorm
    • Simplify visitor registration and authentication
    • Post content to social networks directly from CMS
    • Manage multiple Facebook accounts

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Hyped Tech Lives Only to Solve Real Issues

One of the joys of working for AIIM is attending a wide variety of events. In fact, one of the unexpected joys is is the board meeting.408234_10151195570639391_1800285567_n The reason is it brings a lot of smart people in one room to talk about the Information industry’s direction. Every single person there genuinely cares about the future of the industry.

As a result, we have a lot of good discussions on the drivers moving the industry forward. Last year, prior to my joining AIIM, it was observed that Big Data, Social, Cloud, and Mobile were emerging and important issues that Information Professionals are having to start addressing.

This year, as we reviewed the list to see if the items were still relevant, we turned these concepts on their head.

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You are Marketing, not Sales

I was trying to catch-up on some of my reading the other day when I came across this article from ASEA (American Society of Association Executives) talking about how We’re All in Sales Now. The article covers the changing roles of the Association staffer and how everyone is now a sales person.

Except we’re not.

We are all marketing. This may seem like a subtle difference, but it is a critical one that needs to be made. The end-game and objectives are different. They need to be measured differently.

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Yammer and Microsoft, a Win for Both Sides

There is going to be no shortage of analysis of Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer. I’m not going to take time to parse it all. I do want to share some quick thoughts on the acquisition while everything is still fresh on my mind and the deal seems more likely to be completed.

Yammer Cashing Out

Yammer was one of the pioneers in the the Enterprise 2.0/Social Business space. The issue that over the years as the space has evolved, the amount of evolution coming from Yammer has been limited. Their product has gotten better but they remain, at their core, a micro blogging service.

imageThe space has been moving on though. People have been learning that all these Social Business tools work best when they are part of the business process, not when they are on their own. With Yammer, you may produce less email and generate greater visibility into what people are doing in the organization, but you also have a new inbox to check. It is just one more window to keep open.

Let’s face it. Chatter turned SalesForce into a social platform. Yammer has been stuck in tool mode.

Yammer was facing a stiff uphill battle to remain relevant over the next several years. They seem to have been heading in the right direction, but there were a lot of questions about whether or not they could evolve fast enough to keep up.

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It’s 2012 and We Are Still Working on Process

There are two great frustrations in my overall career. The first is that there is more unmanaged content now than there was when I started. The growth of Content Management just isn’t keeping pace with the growth of Content.

The second is the fact that we are still trying to automate the same types of processes now as we were when I first started in this industry in the 90s. My first project was a Correspondence Management System. Call it a mail room solution or whatever the latest slang dictates, the problem is the same one I was talking to a large agency about solving in January!

People are asking me to speak on Process and why projects go wrong. Cloud and mobile are dropping as stand-alone topics. They are becoming part of the discussion around how to solve the old problems with addition of these new tools.

Reinforcing the issue are a few fun facts from some recent AIIM research:

  • 45% of scanned documents are created digitally
  • 77% of invoices that arrive as PDF attachments get printed
  • 31% of faxed invoices get printed and scanned again

Depressed yet?

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