I gave a talk called “The Social Intranet” last week at the Deltek Insight conference in Nashville. I described how architects and engineers are using social tools such as blogs, wikis, and update streams inside their firms to create, capture, and share knowledge.

At the end of the talk, I introduced the Intranet Maturity Model, a framework Knowledge Architecture developed to help our clients assess and improve the quality of their intranets.

The model starts at level one, with firms posting essential information on their intranet such as an employee handbook and benefits, and tops out at level five, with firms using their intranets to collaboratively identify new capabilities, services, and ideas to offer their clients.

Source: knowledge-architecture.com Posted by admin 729 days, 43 minutes ago

Writing on the ebizQ site, my Dachis Group colleague, Dion Hinchcliffe, asks what do social business approach offer for enterprise collaboration?

In answering this question, Dion highlights three important and overlapping patterns that all relate to our ability to make previously hidden organisational activity visible, which I summarise here:

• Social networks amongst workers – How employees relate to each other, beyond the mechanistic view presented by the organisaional chart.

• Observable work – Effectively creating a digital open plan environment that isn’t constrained by the limits of the physical work environment.

• Insights and analysis – Our ability to aggregate this activity and related information together into an organisational context.

Source: www.dachisgroup.com Posted by support 731 days, 38 minutes ago

On the surface, a social intranet might seem to be just an intranet dressed up in rounded corners and pastel colors and with features such as blogs, wikis, activity feeds, ratings, profiles and tagging. Yet, the difference between a social intranet and a traditional intranet is far more profound than that.

To really understand the true nature of a social intranet, one need to look beyond the features and user interface design and understand what role it has to play for both individuals and the enterprise in today’s increasingly knowledge-intense and collaborative work environments.

Let’s look at three ways in which a social intranet is profoundly different from a traditional intranet.

Source: www.cmswire.com Posted by bee 739 days, 1 hour, 8 minutes ago

As more and more people share and connect with each other on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, many organizations are wondering if they can replicate such technologies internally within their corporations and what benefit would that be.

There are many benefits to implementing social networking. Here are some of them...

Source: www.citeman.com Posted by admin 744 days, 23 hours, 5 minutes ago

Having a social platform to allow employees to connect and collaborate better will improve the knowledge flows of an organisation. It will allow companies to utilise the collective intelligence of its own employees to crowdsource and solve key business issues.

But in the current economic climate, companies are starting to think more about how to reduce costs. Is social media the answer?

Source: www.stopthinksocial.com Posted by bee 746 days, 23 hours, 41 minutes ago

Over the past five or six years we have seen a societal transformation take shape. Social Media has forever changed the way the world communicates. At the root of that change is behavior change; the idea that people had to learn to start doing something in a new way.

There are always those early adopters (think Twitter users in 2007, Facebook users in 2004), but generally large-scale adoption of new communications tools takes years, often decades (think radio and television) – until now.

Source: steveradick.com Posted by admin 752 days, 23 hours, 58 minutes ago

From a recent conversation with Jeanne Meister, we are facing a new future in terms of demographics at work: we will soon have five generations in the workplace at once. In prior years, we have had three or four generations at a time with some but not vast differences in work behavior.

Today people are living and working longer leading to this new reality. What’s more, this phenomenon goes beyond the US into China, Brazil, Russia and elsewhere. The significance is in terms of types of workforce behavior...

Source: blogs.forbes.com Posted by admin 763 days, 23 hours, 7 minutes ago

Bring the Home to the Office

Most all of us - in the enterprise world or not - update our status, share photos, chat and even Tweet. Maria Ogneva, head of community at Yammer, the enterprise social network used by 100,000 organizations, says that a disconnect between consumer and enterprise software only causes frustrated and inefficient users.

"Employees are also consumers, and when they get to work they expect their software tools to act the way their consumer tools do at home," said Ogneva. "Because social sites and apps have become such a big part of our lives, the wider the disconnect between 'work tools' and 'personal tools,' the more frustrated we become."

Source: www.readwriteweb.com Posted by admin 770 days, 23 minutes ago

An effective networked workplace can be viewed as a three-sided framework, with a leadership/management strategy (radical & wirearchical) that supports collaborative work enabled by social learning.

All three are necessary. If there is any degree of complexity in the work, collaboration needs to be supported by a flexible management framework that encourages social learning. This is especially true for creativity and innovation. These cannot be forced, yet many of our organizational practices s...

Source: www.jarche.com Posted by admin 773 days, 23 hours, 31 minutes ago

Ever since Andrew McAfee coined the term “Enterprise 2.0” in 2006, organizations have been investigating ways that enterprise social software (ESS) can address gaps in how employees work together. But we’ve also come to realize that there is a greater context behind industry interest in ESS.

Over the next 20 years, nearly 80 million people will retire; that’s nearly 10,000 baby boomers a day. This trend will likely lead to significant generational shifts in the workforce, and the potential for a tremendous loss in intellectual capital as senior staff depart.

The trend will also challenge organizations to more rapidly on-board new hires. ESS, alongside an effective change management program, can help an organization address these knowledge transfer needs.

Source: gigaom.com Posted by BasZurburg 784 days, 35 minutes ago