Axero Pulse » collaboration

Enabling Your Community With Social Software

Tim Eisenhauer — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 13:00:44 +0000

Wherever There Are People – There Can Be Social Software

Accounting software as the name suggests is good for accounting and related calculations. Inventory software is useful in any inventory management process and billing software is suited to the billing process. With social software however, the usefulness need not be restricted to any one process. Social software is based on people and human interaction which means it’s application is relevant in just about any scenario where you have a group of people that need to be able to work together and that is a wide scope. It’s about enabling a community by providing a virtual space they can use to collaborate, communicate and work together.

A few months ago I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who lives in a self contained residential township with about 800 home owners. They have a centralized administration made up of some of the representative owners as well as some staff to look after the utilities, maintenance and management of the mini-township and we were discussing the nightmares of coordinating meetings and communication to the 800 odd households every time something needed to be done.

If something like approving a budget to repaint the common facilities or re-surface the roads needed to be done, they had to arrange for meetings where all owners could come together and discuss before approving the move. Even common everyday issues like not cleaning up after walking the dogs called for a long process which involved drafting, printing and sending out multiple notices.

The frustration among the owners and everyone involved was clear as every task called for communication to all members and this was a mammoth task even for something seemingly simple. The sheer number of people in the community and the need to bring them together for any discussion or decision was a challenge.

This is a classic scenario where social software can be applied to mobilize a community and overcome the problems they are faced with. Oddly enough, this community did have a website but it was a static one-way website with brochure like information and not a “people” oriented website. By integrating a social software platform they can create a login section to the website where the owners can sign into and communicate, discuss and manage their community wherever they are and anytime they are free. Polls can be used to get consensus on issues and important decisions that need to be made collectively.

Messaging can be used to communicate not just to the entire community but among individual owners as well. Profiles can help each person know their neighbors a bit better and connect with each other. Events can be organized and better managed. Discussions can be started instantly on forums without having to wait for a scheduled meeting. The workings of the administration can be easily shared with the others bringing about a much more transparent working. Social software is what you make of it and in this scenario there is a lot that can be done to make the community function better.

Property developers offer all kinds of amenities to prospective home owners and I don’t believe offering a social software enabled website would add much to costs especially considering how much of a help it could be in scenarios like we discussed. Finally, isn’t this the edge social software gives? Regardless of the processes, as long as you have a group of people that need a more efficient way of collaborating, coming together and working better, social software can be the enabler. Wherever you have people, you’re likely to have a good use for social software.

Social Software For Managing Customer Relationships

Tim Eisenhauer — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 13:00:39 +0000

Keep Your Prospects Close & Your Customers Even Closer – The New Social Enterprise 2.0 Mantra

Customer relationship management is more traditionally synonymous with one-on-one communication with customers through various medium both online and offline. With the development of enterprise social networks and active business online communities, this is where a lot of the customer service is happening and also where customer relationships are strengthened and molded. This transparent interaction between customers and a business has picked up with more businesses using social enterprise software to build strong online communities and communication channels with their customers.

Don Hinchcliffe recently wrote in a post on the zdnet blogs on the topic of social CRMs:

For its part, Social CRM paints a vision of creating a deeper and more engaging community-based relationship with your customers, instead of the traditional approach of managing them, in a very Cluetrain Manifesto way. Part online community, part crowd sourcing, part customer service, Social CRM can create an emergent, collaborative online partnership with customers that can result in an array of improvements to business performance.

Online communities and enterprise social networks are virtual places where a business and its customer connect and engage in communication. The main difference as compared to traditional customer relationships is it’s more transparent and community driven as against the one on one communication. The dialog and interaction between customers is the driving force and they are the ones actively leading the process and that is something businesses need to understand in order to get it right. Used to the push sales tactics and driving customers actions by directing or managing communications is something companies need to be leave behind with social customer relationship management and they will have to learn to take a back seat and let the customers drive most of the activity.

Setting the basic guidelines and providing the platform is the first role of businesses and that can be done by starting online discussions, creating topics and being the catalyst in getting an active community going where the customers know they can freely interact with each other as well as the business. Once an active community is in place, gathering intelligence from the activity is equally important. This is where tools like “online polls” can come in handy while gathering more quantitative data. In a community however, though not quantitative, a lot of the intelligence is right there in the form of comments, posts, questions and other content posted on the platform. Questions on products directly to the business or even other customers could be an indication of interest in a product and building a solid process on gathering such intelligence and making it actionable information is something that needs to be worked on.

Whether it’s customer service, sales or marketing, each function can benefit tremendously from a well built online community and getting customers to participate more closely with the business. The software platforms are easily available and technically a social customer relationship management system can be put into place. The people and process is the bigger challenge and once you have that rolling, you’re on the way to building better, stronger relationships with your customers.

Social Networks Vs Email For Business Communication

Tim Eisenhauer — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 13:00:36 +0000

Is Social Networking Software Pushing Email To A New Role In Business Communication?

This is more a personal observation than a researched study, but it seems that the role of email is changing constantly in the business communications environment as social networking software advances to play a greater role in this space. It was just a short time ago when email was the backbone of nearly all external communication with customers and those outside the office — and instant messaging, along with email is how we would communicate internally.

The best way to really understand the change that I’m talking about is this: a few years ago when you stepped into your office or workplace, what was the first few windows you would have opened on your desktop? For most of us, that would be Outlook or our web mail accounts — which we open like a ritual since this was the channel of all communication and the application that connected us to everyone else. Now, think about what the first few windows or applications you opened as you started your working day today. How many of those were social networking based applications or sites?

Social networking software is increasingly becoming the backbone of business communications. Just looking back to how I started this day and how I connected with others and communicated since the start of today is quite different from only email and instant messaging. 1) There was logging into our own internal community and checking for new discussions and updates to previous conversations. 2) There was checking our shared calendar for calls and meetings scheduled for the day.

Accepting some connections on Linkedin, followed by replying to some internal messages, and answering some interesting questions around social software in one of the groups. Adding my name to the attendees list on a Wiki for an event next month what the next thing I did. Then, replying to a number of direct messages and tweets on Twitter. As the day continues, I’m sure I will end up connecting and having conversations with several others before the day ends — and a lot (if not all) of these conversation will happen outside my email account.

Todd Famous did a post not too long ago on the CISCO blog on new forms of communications and collaboration and said:

“I used to get emails from friends through email but I now get almost all my non-work “email” via Facebook. My legacy email account has turned into an inbox for electronic account statements and alerts from social media platforms.”

This is something I can relate to completely, as a bulk of the email I receive during the working day are now notifications for updates that happen across other social networking sites and communities. The inbox is working more as a place to monitor these various conversations across different locations rather than being the actual place where the conversations themselves happen — and that’s a significant change.

As we move towards using social networking and collaborative sites for more of our collaboration and communication needs, how do you see the role of email evolving within this new environment?

Social Networking as a platform for e-learning

Tim Eisenhauer — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:00:39 +0000

Social Networking Vs Learning Management Systems As A Platform For Businesses Learning & Development

It is said the best kind of learning comes from participation and interacting with others. The learning that doesn’t come from having to study a prescribed course, but rather comes from sharing what you know and taking what you can learn from others in a collaborative environment. E-learning is usually associated with the former structured learning modules delivered through learning management systems and e-learning software platforms. These software platforms are great in the sense that they are geared towards structured learning and are well equipped to measure whether the knowledge has been delivered effectively through tests and other tools. There is a new competitor in the software arena, equally capable of delivering great learning … can you guess what kind of software this is? You got it … social networking platforms.

Let’s assume you are a software developer working on a project assigned to you. In the traditional business online learning environment, one would perhaps log in to the learning management system, select the courses relevant to the project requirements (or be assigned courses), go through the content within those modules, and then take a test to measure the learning. The objective is to equip you with the knowledge that you may need, given the tasks you have ahead. The courses and content are professionally designed according to the training and development objectives of the business.

In a similar scenario with a social networking platform, one would typically log in and collaborate with others on a project using the social network as the common working space. If you have questions or seek some information, you simply log into the network, pick the information you need from archived articles, reference documents, FAQ pages, or other content, much the way one would use a library.

Then there are the more interactive options of messaging questions to someone on the network, starting a discussion group, posting a question to a forum, chatting with other humans, and interacting with others to find answers. This format is based on a mentoring system, where just about anyone within the network can assume the role of a mentor and share knowledge.

This sharing based learning is extended, being able to post informative documents, blog posts, videos and links to other sites within the network to share what you’ve learned with others in the group. This in itself makes sure the best content and learning resources available online get shared on the social network, and the site itself becomes a rich resource of knowledge that is there for members to learn from.

Both of these software platforms offer a medium for learning and development, they have their strengths and weaknesses, but it’s worth noting they offer a different form of learning. LMS offers structured learning, which is more ‘push’ based, and social networks offer ‘pull’ (self service) learning, based on sharing and interaction with others. It can easily be compared to the kind of learning you encounter in a professional institution or that you encounter while working or interacting with colleagues, friends, and other social situations. In conclusion, both of these kinds of learning are essential to an all round development of knowledge, and both LMS and social networking software platforms will find a place in the learning and development frameworks of businesses.

Microsoft Office Social Software And Collaboration

Tim Eisenhauer — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 19:40:28 +0000

Microsoft 2010 For Business Gears Towards Better Collaboration - Is Your Social Software Up To The Challenges?

Microsoft-driven businesses (that includes a lot of businesses the world over) have probably been keeping a tab on the news bits that keep being released around the Microsoft Office 2010 developments. The talk around Microsoft’s vision for Office 2010 started much earlier and Share Point indicated they would focus on enhancing collaboration. Recent news confirms that’s exactly the direction they have gone with the soon to be released version of perhaps the most widely used office suite in the world. The company has looked to improve collaboration and productivity in its latest version, which not surprisingly, will also be more web based than its predecessors.

An article published in PC World online recently stated:

“Microsoft is also counting on a more Web-based manifestation of Office to keep from looking like a corporate dinosaur next to fast and loose Web apps from Google and Zoho, as well as to protect itself from the shift from PCs to more portable devices including smart phones and netbooks.”

According to the article, users can also expect to see better unified communication and ability for multiple users to edit documents real-time when online and have remote access to all office documents. It’s evident that office suites are evolving to move towards a web-based collaborative working environment and with Microsoft moving this direction, this will impact the way hundreds of thousands of businesses work everywhere.

Software used by businesses has for a long time been influenced by the direction Microsoft goes… and developers have always had to consider how their software would work alongside the Microsoft software suites so that businesses don’t run into any compatibility issues or find that they can’t integrate their software with the version of Office that’s being used within their business. When it comes to social software, that still applies — or it is definitely a consideration. If a business is relying on a social software platform for most of its communication and collaboration, the flow of documents within these portals is also important. While previously a business’s online collaboration platform (intranet or website portal) was not always used with its offline office suite like Microsoft Office, with this new development towards web based office suites, the chances are they will have to work together.

To be able to seamlessly use web based office suite applications and manage documents across a social network on the business website or intranet there needs to be some room for customization and integration in the software platform being used. For example the architecture of Communifire which is built on the latest ASP.NET 3.5 platform with AJAX and related web 2.0 technologies allows for greater customization. This leaves a business with the ability to integrate newer components and web applications that the business may need in the future. This can however be an issue, especially in social software and community platforms that are built by weaving several free software components to create a wider platform. In such cases, integrating with other critical software that the business is using can be cumbersome even if it is at all possible.

As more business applications move towards the web based collaborative productivity centric way, the need to integrate a business’s various web based software platforms is only going to grow stronger. After all, if all the components are going to help unify the work environment and make things more efficient, they will have to work together themselves.

Social Software Collaboration – Addressing Todays Business Communication Challenege

Tim Eisenhauer — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:01:07 +0000

How Social Collaboration Software Can Take Us Towards A More Transparent Business Environment

The economic crisis and global recession that brought economies the world over to its knees may be showing signs of improvement, but it’s impact is far from over. While the mood is slowly turning positive, the recession has left people more skeptical or more cautious over the financial system and the way business is done, irrespective of where in the world they are. With support from the media, there is a very strong resolve among people everywhere to instill change in business practices and ensure disasters of this scale don’t happen in the future. The millions of people who have felt deceived by the large banks and financial companies will feel this way for quite some time, despite the worst being over for now and for businesses everywhere the challenge of winning the confidence of their shareholders and people in general is going to be one they need to face.

The challenge of being able to create a more transparent, more accountable work environment is a universal one. Having transparency in day to day functioning builds confidence both internally within the organization as well as externally among people — which is why businesses have to seriously evaluate how they can move to a more transparent system of working. Whether it’s your sales team working with customers, management working with employees, management communicating with shareholders, company buyers evaluating purchases, or project managers working with customers, if you’re communications are transparent and there for others (who have some association with the work you’re doing) to observe, then everything is being transacted in plain view and the scope for large scale scandals, frauds, and misuse of position is reduced.

A similar challenge was highlighted in a case study involving Canada’s trade association for airports when they were evaluating a collaboration solution which would help them work with the several member airports. They were geographically scattered and there was no visibility into the business proposals and deals being made, as most of them happened through email discussions which were privy to the parties and it was easy to exclude people from being cc’d. While document sharing and collaboration helps to an extent, documentation is one part of business communication. Social software based collaborative networks offer a better more well rounded solution as they can centralize the documents around a deal or discussion and also provide a transparent platform for the communication and working that goes with it. In a collaborative networking environment, unlike email, people interact within groups, shared documents like wikis, forums and so on, leaving a clear record of the working process — which is there in plain sight for anyone to see.

Business communications need to be more transparent and corporate culture is slowly being driven by peoples need for more accountability towards being more open. There is a lot we can take from social networking and collaboration software technology there. Trade associations, governing bodies, governmental agencies, and businesses can all benefit from developing a better, stronger collaborative communication process which makes everyone more accountable and brings back the confidence to all involved. That is a change that can bring us all one step closer to better business practices in the future.

Social Software For Quicker Product Development

Tim Eisenhauer — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:00:30 +0000

Building A More Inclusive Product Development Process With Social Software

While this may be easier to relate to for those who work in large enterprises, regardless of what size and level a business operates at, if you are a product company, product development is core to your being and the better you can make your product development process, the more success you’ll find around the corner. The challenge facing most product companies is how to step up the development cycle and get products to market quicker while being able to innovate and give customers exactly what they are looking for. It’s not that businesses are not listening to their customers while developing products, but often by the time they are ready and rolled out, customers are already looking for something better or competitors have swiped market share while the product was still in the works. What’s needed is:

A quicker product development cycle
Customers involvement and participation in the development process
A more inclusive process where more minds can contribute and collaborate without involving inefficiencies

The problem with the last requirement is that the more people you involve in the process, the more inefficiencies you’re likely to invite. Inefficiencies of time, place, and communication. At the same time, if you can’t include more customers within the process, you’re gambling on the fact that the opinion of a small focus group or fewer people will reflect the way all customers will react to your final product. This is where social software for business collaboration has been able to provide solutions for product companies. By implementing a social networking based collaboration platform, a business can have a base to build a more inclusive product development process that is scalable. Employees, partners, product experts, and selected customers can be granted access to an online social collaborative environment where they can freely interact, share ideas, and jointly work towards developing new products.

Companies that have built their product development platforms on social software have seen significant improvements in their process and ability to get products to market sooner — giving a significant edge over their competitors. Here are just some of the advantages that companies have observed since they’ve adopted social software environments for their product development efforts:

They have seen that, when placed within a company, the social architecture (that many people are now familiar with from social networking sites like Facebook , Orkut, LinkedIn, and others.) has encouraged greater interaction and activity, creating a conducive environment for collaboration. Also, the adoption of the platform was easier — and employees, project teams, and customers found they could interact freely.
The platform is completely suitable for freely interacting with others, sharing ideas, opinions, collecting data and feedback, have open discussions, and have a very transparent working system that high level management management and just about anyone with access to the system can simply observe by just logging in and checking on current activity.
Customers and project teams located in all places around the world can log into the same system and participate regardless of where they are. This means they don’t have to disturb their schedules and travel and also means they can have customers from the US, Germany, Hong Kong, Australia, and any other country included in the product development process and get as wide a participative group as they need.
There is a record of all previous interactions and conversations between each member within the platform — this becomes a great resource for the company well after the interactions have taken place. The system becomes a permanent resource for anyone within the process who needs access to that information.
It fosters a truly open communication culture for open collaboration — the product development process need not be restricted to a fixed number customers and select project teams, but others within the business can simply pitch in suggestions or share their ideas if they can contribute something useful towards the development process.
It’s highly scalable and very inclusive allowing wider collaboration and more sharing of ideas without being inefficient.

While each business will need to build on a social networking platform and customize the environment to work cohesively with their specific product development strategies and processes, the advantages of having a powerful collaboration platform to drive better products out more efficiently are clear. With the ability to include customers within the deepest levels of the product development cycle and still speed up their development cycles, we are bound to see businesses truly working with their customers.

Moores Law And The Evolution Of Social Software

Tim Eisenhauer — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:11:18 +0000

Remember those days not too long ago when we used to stay on the edge of our seats in anticipation of the next processor that would roll out of Intel or AMD that would make the last generation of pc’s and laptops look like snails? Or when storage companies would launch the next drive that would seem so huge that we would wonder if we could ever fill them up? Moore’s law has reigned supreme in 1965 and the prediction that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years is remarkable. Till more recent times that is. Gordon Moore is probably surprised to see how difficult it’s become to keep at that rate in recent times, in which chip manufactures are hitting a slowdown of sorts. We’ve always depended on hardware advances to carry us through the huge growth in information that has become so much a part of our everyday lives — and now many believe we’ll have to turn some of that focus towards the software.

Social software in particular seems to be going through much of the same path as hardware did in the earlier days and at the same mind boggling speed. The need to have a virtual “space” or software that aids in collaboration has been around much longer than most would believe. As long back as the 1940’s with the Memex as Christopher Allen’s insightful article “Tracing the Evolution of Social Software” points out. According to the article:

“A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

Since then we’ve seen hypertext, information exchange, groupware, business suites, forums, discussion boards, web portals, blogs, and the social networking sites that almost every one of us is on today. Through every phase from the start, what has been consistent is the growing number of users that have adopted these technologies with every passing year and the immense growth in the volume of content and information that is exchanged and consumed through this software. Considering that Facebook had crossed 100 million users last year, and then taking into account how many of these users use the platform for over an hour a day, the amount of data the software has to support is immense by any standard. What’s interesting to note is that it’s not just social networking sites like Facebook that need to keep up with the growing demand. Businesses all over the world, with employee strengths ranging from a few hundred to tens and hundreds of thousands are relying on social software for their business communication and collaboration infrastructure — and the information being exchanged is growing rapidly every year.

Now, considering that the hardware technology is not growing at the rate that Moore was confident will continue through the end of time, a lot of emphasis will fall upon the developers of social software to carry us through the evolution of information exchange, amidst the hardware, that will soon seem to become a limiting factor. All this is well and good on a macro view, but how does all this affect the average social software buyer or user?

When we buy or decide to use social software for our businesses, many of us tend to make decisions that fulfill our current requirements, ignoring the trend at which our information needs are advancing — and ignoring how Moore’s law also applies to social software. We tend to forget that although a particular software works well now, it may have to be customized and tweaked to support what’s expected of it along the way and into the future. All of the large scale social networks have been overhauled and modified considerably from time to time to scale with the growth — and the same applies to even the smaller networks.

Service-oriented architecture, or SOA, which software platforms like our own Communifire is based on, is seeing an increased support among developers who understand the need to leave room for enhancements and new components to be added on in the future. Back in 2005, InfoWorld published an article titled” IBM exec: Impending death of Moore’s Law calls for software development changes,” where the company emphasized SOA and said:

“Continuing with IBM’s SOA push, Booch introduced a demo of “SOA Integration Framework,” which is intended to provide for a set of services at the developer’s disposal when building an SOA. Still a research project and not an actual product, the framework generates a WSDL for a service and allows the developer to search for appropriate business components.”

While we continue to use social software we need to learn from its evolution, and remember — even software can become obsolete quickly. It’s important to think ahead and consider the factors that offer you room to scale in the future. Users will continue to grow; usage of social software is also going to continue to grow, as is the immense volume of information that will need to be handled.

Is your social software up to the task?