Socialcast: Collaboration Beyond the Enterprise

Today the enterprise collaboration solutions provider Socialcast (a VMWare company), announced a set of new features to augment and extend the capability in their already impressive collaboration solution. For readers that might not be familiar with Socialcast's solution, it primarily serves as an internal enterprise activity and interest stream, where colleagues can share status updates, links to relevant content, share files, and easily create internal groups organized along organizational or project lines. More recently, Socialcast launched a product called Reach, which gives customers the ability to easily embed and include the core collaboration platform in any number of enterprise systems like ERP, CRM, or other knowledge management platforms, thus taking 'collaboration' closer to the places and systems where the work gets done.

Today's announcement of the new capability that allows enterprises to dynamically create external collaboration groups, and that extends the collaboration platform to an organizations' partners, customers, or even social media fans and followers; is a natural extension of the Reach tool, taking the collaboration environment beyond the walled garden of the internal enterprise, to wherever and with whomever leveraging the platform makes sense.

External Group View - image provided by Socialcast

Beginning today, users of Socialcast can create dynamic groups to invite contractors or suppliers to collaborate on projects, connect more effectively with joint venture partners, or even conduct on the fly customer and follower focus group discussions by simply sharing a link to an external group on Facebook or Twitter, and invite followers to participate. It is a great piece of functionality, and one that attempts to begin to address the more flexible and fluid ways that organizations, teams, and individuals are getting work accomplished today.  

The other interesting feature that Socialcast announced today is a new organizational charting feature that not only can graphically depict the traditional organizational relationships and hierarchy (automatically generated from Active Directory or LDAP), but also can include insight into the external relationships with customers, suppliers, etc. that the organization's employees have developed over time.  This new and hybrid type of an 'extended organization chart' is a novel idea, and one that over time in many organizations could prove to be just as valuable as the traditional, internally facing org. chart.

These new features continue to strengthen Socialcast's position in the enterprise collaboration technology space, an increasingly crowded market where Socialcast competes with offerings from Yammer, Salesforce Chatter, Socialtext, and others.  Where Socialcast appears to have an edge, is in their realization and reaction to the changing ways of task and resource organization in many enterprises, the need for a collaboration solution to support much more flexible methods of collaboration beyond a separate and isolated tool, and with the ease of deployment and administration that allows the solution to take hold rapidly across and outside the enterprise.

I don't write too many 'new product announcement' type posts, because frankly, most of them are not all that interesting. But I have been a fan of the Socialcast platform for a while, have used the collaboration tool in some of my HR Technology classes, and do feel that in a crowded space that Socialcast has consistently had intelligent approaches and ideas to better enable enterprise (and beyond) forms of collaboration.

More and more, success for many organizations will be at least in part determined by how they can best manage and extract value from a disparate, diverse, and fluid ecosystem of internal and external resources, and products and solutions that can help manage and support this new framework offer organizations some clear opportunities and advantages.

You can learn more about Socialcast and today's announcement at www.socialcast.com.

Are you wearing a wire? Tracking Employee Interaction Digitally

These days it seems most organizational leaders have bought in at least conceptually to the idea that improvements in employee collaboration - discovery of ideas, sharing best practices across internal silos, unearthing insights from the far corners of the firm, and so on, is likely to increase in importance and urgency in the coming years, as almost all organizations try to do more work with less people.The Sociometric Badge - no you don't have to tape it on under your shirt

Sure, a raft of technologies have emerged in just the last few years to facilitate and support employee collaboration, (Yammer, Jive, Socialcast, etc.), and while these tools and others like them all have some excellent features and capabilities, they are limited in scope by their digital nature. We can use tools like these to develop, share, track, and interact, and we can measure and report metrics about those interactions, but as systems that rely (mainly), on computer-generated and supported inputs, (individual status updates, shares of a document, group edits of content, etc.), they still miss capturing a key aspect of employee collaboration, namely actual meetings and conversations between peers and in group settings. 

A new approach towards better understanding these 'real-life' employee (and customer) interactions, created by a company called Sociometric Solutions a wearable device called the 'Sociometric Badge' attempts to bridge this gap between analog conversations and digital collaboration tools and data sets by recording and assessing the information captured in a proprietary framework for further analysis and action.

More information about the capability of the Sociometric Badge from the Sociometric Solutions website:

Using a variety of sensors, the Sociometric Badge is capable of, among other things, capturing face-to-face interactions, extracting social signals from speech and body movement, and measuring the proximity and relative location of users.

The process seems pretty straighforward. Turn up at the office in the morning, check your email and voicemail, then just before heading over to the office pantry for a cup of thin, industrial coffee, place the Sociometric Badge around your neck and the badge will begin recording how much you talk (versus how much you listen); it will gauge how much you sit versus how much you move around; and an infrared sensor will track how often you're facing other people also wearing the badges.

After a period of data collection, about a month or two, the folks at Sociometric Solutions will use their analytics platform that combines Sociometric Badges information, e-mail traffic analytics, and other proprietary data collection methods to provide individual and group visualization dashboards. The idea being that these dashboards will provide organizations a more complete view of collaborative behaviors and interactions, than simple monitoring and metrics of purely digital forms of communication like shared wikis, activity streams, or email alone.

Sociometric Solutions points to a case study from Bank of America where that found that call center workers who interacted more with their colleagues felt less stressed, handled calls more quickly, but had equivalent customer approval ratings to those who didn't interact as much. Addtionally, Bank of America scheduled employees' breaks so that they could interact and talk with one another more often throughout the day. 

It is an interesting, if possibly instrusive approach, but one that makes perfect sense that people have been collaboratively solving problems, determining solutions, and generating innovative new breakthoughs for ages by simply talking to each other.

It could be the next great breakthrough in harnessing the collaborative power of the enterprise won't be limited to rolling out the next 'Internal Facebook' tool, it might be simply gaining a better understanding of the informal, verbal, and offline interactions happening all the time.

What do you think? Would you wear a workplace 'wire'?

Need a Creative Solution? Check out the HR Happy Hour Tonight

It is just about the middle of summer here in the USA, the Major League Baseball All-Star Game was played earlier in the week, most of the country has been experiencing classic July sunshine and heat, and the latest installment of the Transformers movie franchise, a classic summer action movie, is dominating the box office. Due to staff vacations, distractions caused by the good weather, and from having the kids home from school, summer can also be a time where the pace of business slows down a bit, and individuals and organizations sometimes have a rare chance to reflect, recharge, and strategize about business and even personal problems that will have to be attacked in earnest in the Fall, (if not sooner).

Summer also gives us some license to explore and experiment. Traditionally TV networks have tested out new programs in the slower, (and less lucrative), Summer season in hopes of sorting out what might work in the Fall and Winter when audiences and ad rates both increase. Simply put, summer is about the only time all year many of us get to take a little breather, take some stock in what we are doing, (or not doing), and think about what we might want to do differently, or what challenges we'd love to address.

So tonight on the HR Happy Hour Show, we decided to do a bit of 'Summer programming' as well. Instead of another run at recruiting, or HR Technology, or management, or social media in the workplace, we are taking a bit of a diversion with a show called 'Creative Approaches', with our guest Matthew Stillman, author of the fantastic Stillman Says blog.

Matt offers what he terms, 'Creative Approaches to What You've Been Thinking About', by listening to the problems and concerns of everyday people, and via a process of discussion and exploration, offers what are usually challenging and intriguing options and opportunities to help his 'patients?', try and approach their issues.  The killer idea of Stillman Says, is the venue in which Matt conducts these sessions - a simple table and two chairs in the middle of New York City's Union Square. He then documents some of these conversations on the Stillman Says blog.

It really is a remarkable and compelling project, read a few of the stories on the Stillman Says blog and see if you don't agree with me.

So tonight on the HR Happy Hour Show - 8PM EDT / 5PM PDT, Matt will join us for the hour to offer 'Creative Approaches to What You Have Been Thinking About' - this is your chance to call in, tell us about a situation or problem - work, career, school, personal - doesn't matter, and let Matt work a little bit of his creative magic to brainstorm some creative options for you.

Problems with the boss? Not sure if you should pursue a new career? Have a great idea and just don't know how to execute? Call in tonight and let us know.

Here are the details to tune in tonight:

HR Happy Hour Show - 'Creative Approaches' - Thursday July 14, 2011 - 8PM EDT

Call in to ask a question - 646-378-1086

Follow the conversation on Twitter - hashtag #HRHappyHour

Listen live on the show page here, on the call in line 646-378-1086, or using the widget player here:

Listen to internet radio with Steve Boese on Blog Talk Radio

This should be a fun and entertaining show, and I hope you can take a break from margaritas on the deck long enough to join us. Actually, you should bring the margaritas, it is the HR Happy Hour after all!

Moving the mundane to the cloud

Yesterday the cloud-based content sharing and collaboration platform company Box (still most commonly referred to by its web address Box.net), announced it's largest enterprise deal to date - an agreement with consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble to deploy Box's file sharing and content collaboration solutions to as many as 18,000 of P&G's 127,000 worldwide employees.

If you are not familiar with Box, (shame on you, the service rocks), it was created in 2005 on a simple idea - that individuals, small businesses, and increasingly, large enterprise customers should have a way to access and share their content and files from anywhere.  Box offers a free plan for individuals that provides up to 5GB of storage space, and over the last few years has added an array of features and application integrations (Google Docs, LinkedIn, Salesforce, NetSuite, etc.), that appeal to the enterprise user. As the SaaS deployment model and cloud-based solutions for the enterprise have become more firmly established in the enterprise space, particularly in the HCM arena, organizations like P&G are continuing to explore the benefits and potential of this model in decidedly mundane process areas like simple file storage and sharing.

But for most knowledge workers this simple process - create a file, save it somewhere others can see it, manage access and changes, make sure everyone is up to date on the latest version, and so on - often proves to be a painful, laborious, and altogether productivity-sapping exercise in frustration. So just like the modern era of popular SaaS and cloud-based solutions like Salesforce have shown, Box (and a few others), are proving that there are benefits to be found, even in large traditional enterprises, in the simple file storage/sharing space.

At its core, the Box service is as simple as the network file shares that almost all enterprise users have grown up with. Connect to Box, create a project name or folder, upload your files, and access them from any internet connected device from there. But what Box brings in functionality beyond the tired old file share you are used to is access to the content from iPads, iPhones, Androids, and BlackBerry; advanced (and easy to use), sharing and collaboration capabilities; ways to easily preview files; full content search capability; and more.  And all this advanced functionality for enterprise users requiring very little if any involvement from corporate IT departments.  

The Box/P&G announcement is likely just one of the first in what are likely to be many such deals announced in the coming months/years.  For many enterprise users, the realization that the Cloud is now a fundamental part of the corporate experience won't come from the once or twice a year they access their Talent Management suite provider's cloud-based performance review process. It will be when they save, access, modify, share, embed, link, and otherwise interact with the mundane - Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, Acrobat files - but instead of living on their desktop and in the labyrinthine file system on the departmental shared drive, these files and the actions that are taken upon them will be in the cloud, more visible, more accessible, and ultimately more powerful.

Kind of a dull post for a Friday I know, but I guess that is the point. When even dull processes can be improved and transformed, well I think that is a kind of real progress and benefit to all this cloud talk.

Have a great weekend!

A Workplace Without Email?

In what I promise will be my last blog post about email, (really, is there anything more tedious? Except of course people who Tweet about phone calls they just had.  So annoying. I mean would you ever have an online Tweet exchange with someone and then call someone else on the phone to let them know you have been tweeting away with the first person, and how 'amazing' they are?  No one cares who you are talking to on the phone. Get over yourself.).

So anyway...

Today I saw the follwing Tweet from Sarah Goodhall (@tribalimpact) on Twitter:

Initriguing, no?  Clicking through to the link mentioned in the Tweet reveals the details of the story:

Atos Origin moves to be email free in three years. Doable?

Atos Origin is an international IT services company, and a very large one, with approximately 50,000 employees worldwide.  It's CEO Thierry Breton has come to the conclusion that email, in its current incarnation and use inside Atos Origin is no longer adequately serving the information sharing, creation, and collaboration needs of the large, far-flung organization.  

He wants Atos Origin to be a 'zero email company' within three years.

Money quote from the  Computer Business Review piece on Atos:

So why the big move? Because email is not helping any more, basically. "The volume of emails we send and receive is unsustainable for business, with managers spending between 5 and 20 hours a week reading and writing emails... We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives. [So] we are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organisations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution."

Man - first time I have ever seen 'email pollution' compared to filth-belching smokestacks.  But in a way I get it.  Just like industrial pollutants fill the air and waterways, little by little, always more, more, more, our email inboxes never seem to ever truly 'empty'.

More from the CBR article:

Breton argues that social media community platforms and collaboration tools are much superior ways of letting his employees share and keep track of ideas "on subjects from innovation and Lean Management through to sales".

That experience, he says, has prompted him to conclude that "Businesses need to do more of this - email is on the way out as the best way to run a company and do business." Use of such replacements has already cut email use by up to 20%, claims the firm.

Makes sense - if a reduction of email volume of 20% is seen as a great benefit to the organization, and its harried managers, then why not shoot for 40%, or 70%, or as Atos Origin is going for, an elimination of all internal email.

Can Atos Origin, a 50,000 or so strong organization completely free itself of email in the next three years?  Perhaps.  But there seems to be no doubt if they can succeed, and do indeed see increased productivity, profits, and happiness other organizations will surely try as well.

Need to run, in the 20 minutes it took to write this post, I got about 33 new emails......

Have a great weekend!