I was interviewing the CEO of a Silicon Valley company as part of an internal communications audit. “How does knowledge move most effectively through your organization?” I asked.

He pondered the question for a minute, then said, “If you really want to know, step outside and hang out with the smokers.”

I haven’t had a cigarette in 20 years, but I remember well the outdoor smoking circle. Four or five times a day, I’d congregate with eight or 10 people, most of whom didn’t know each other, around the ashtray—and it was a different eight or 10 people every time. With only work in common, we wound up talking about work. Each of us learned what was going on in other departments.

Source: holtz.com Posted by support 605 days, 2 hours, 26 minutes ago

Forrester Groundswell Awards announced the winners, with applications aimed at employees in the categories: Collaboration System, Innovation System and Employee Mobile Application.

Deloitte Australia Yammer Network by Yammer

The Australian affiliate of Deloitte, deployed Yammer in 2008 with no plans for mass adoption. But usage rapidly exploded, spreading to 5000 of the company's staff and 12 national offices. Yammer users have lower staff turnover and Deloitte says Yammer has reduced costs, broken down silos, and accelerated innovation. It also builds culture, improves connections for mobile workers, and makes it easier to leverage knowledge and expertise.

Innovation @ HCL: The Value Portal

All HCL employees have access to the Value Portal, a platform for innovation and collaboration. The key factor leading to the success of the system was management's encouragement of rank and file employees to contribute ideas. Employees using the Value Portal have generated 7,312 ideas so far, of which 860 have been implemented.

Enabling Medtronics' Global Sales Force with Mobile Content Management

Medtronic's Mobile Content Management System enables sales reps to download collateral into folders on their iPads. As a result, sales reps can quickly call up the latest videos, presentations and PDFs when visiting customers.

Source: forrester.typepad.com Posted by support 605 days, 5 hours, 1 minute ago

Mobile and all these other things that are being bundled up with it that are going to drive probably an order of magnitude bigger shift in IT and the CIO’s organization than the PC did 20 years ago.

The skyrocketing popularity of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets has, on one hand, energized users, but on the other hand, it has caused IT and business leaders and CIOs to scramble to support these new clients productively and safely.

In order to explore how enterprise app stores are part of the equation for better mobile management and overall mobility-enabled work success, we examine the trends driving enterprise mobility with a principal analyst from Forrester Research....

Source: www.zdnet.com Posted by support 606 days, 2 hours, 35 minutes ago

When employees are engaged, they work harder and help the company perform better. To create more powerful employee engagement in your organization, try implementing these five tips.

1. Clarify what's expected of employees
2. Offer internal career opportunities
3. Empower frontline employees
4. Encourage teamwork
5. Provide regular feedback

Source: www.ragan.com Posted by support 661 days, 4 hours, 14 minutes ago

A searchable people directory is the most common “killer app” on an intranet and this feature kicks butt in ThoughtFarmer, social intranet software. The people directory includes faceted search that lets you narrow down results and the search engine indexes expertise tags on the built-in rich user profiles. Expertise location is easy and fully integrated with the rest of the social i...

Source: www.thoughtfarmer.com Posted by support 668 days, 3 hours, 12 minutes ago

A tweet yesterday prompted me to remember sage advice from Dave Snowden which I took to heart in my work with social tools at the BBC. "You can't manage knowledge but you can create a knowledge ecology". I thought it might be useful to others to list the ten most important things I learned about doing this.

1, Have a variety of tools rather than a single system. Not everyone sees the world the same way or has the same needs so mixing up different tools with different strengths allows people to find one ...

Source: www.euansemple.com Posted by support 692 days, 4 hours, 54 minutes ago

With the coming of social media in the workplace, organizations began to dream of a spontaneous self-driven collaboration that would get rid of rules and organization frameworks to deliver outstanding results. Today we all have to acknowledge that reality is quite different.

Facing an impressive amount of possible options, employees are lost, all the more since the value proposition that’s been made to them made no sense regarding to their daily goals and constraints. Tom Davenport suggests us to limit the scope of collaboration in order to reinforce sense and focus : specific tools for a specific goal for a specific amount of time.

But even if this way of doing things was proven successful with average uses, we should not throw the to throw the baby out with the bath water and forget community and serendipity principles : both can work together but are not about the same tasks, the same needs. However, Davenport’s idea may work for most people and, mot of all, directly applies to what’s key for them and impacts value creation.

Source: www.duperrin.com Posted by support 728 days, 4 hours, 38 minutes ago

There are many challenges we face as Intranet/Content Managers. I have two in particular surrounding Intranet Content that I am facing now and so I appeal to you, the wider Intranet Community, what are your thoughts and experience in these. I will attempt to clarify my thoughts and articulate them as concisely as possible…

Source: katrinamarquesintranet.wordpress.com Posted by support 734 days, 5 hours, 9 minutes ago

If there is one thing that became pointedly clear when I spoke at the J. Boye intranet conference, it's that we are all experiencing different aspects of what it means to become a world-class corporate (social) intranet.

The typical shelf life of an intranet implementation averages about 18 months. You can easily extend this timeline when you add on the complexities of social layers. So, if you feel that your company has been struggling with not only the correct strategy but also the implementation tactics of a social intranet, don't feel bad. You are not alone.

Source: www.ragan.com Posted by support 734 days, 5 hours, 14 minutes ago

With social media tools present on over 87% of organizations’ intranets (regardless of organization size) no one can dispute the impact these tools will have on business and internal communications. But in order for employees to adopt them as critical business tools an effective training program needs to be part of your social intranet strategy.

Gartner predicts by 2014, 20% of organizations will rely on social media rather than email as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications, mirroring our experience in which the intuitiveness and social appeal of this new technology is displacing e-mail in our internet activity.

Source: www.prescientdigital.com Posted by support 743 days, 4 hours, 51 minutes ago