Shuffling to Buffalo

Today I have the great honor of presenting at the Buffalo-Niagara Human Resource Organization's annual event, HR Strategies on the Road to Recovery.

My session is about collaboration tools and technologies, what they are, how they can be applied in organizations to foster increased innovation, and how HR leaders and professionals might go about assessing and deploying these kinds of technologies.

I also have lots of unrelated images in my slides, and a dorky but neat 'Star Wars' effect on one of them.

I sent out a few tweets in the last couple of weeks about the event, mainly to try and discover if anyone in my extended network would be there today, and I was met with silence.  So either I am not that popular in Buffalo (likely), or the Greater Buffalo community is not all that dialed in to Twitter (probably), or the community there is passively ignoring me, (possibly).

At any rate, I have embedded the presentation below, apologies in advance for the crude nature of the design, pretty soon I am going to just start doing these 'Jimmy The Greek' style.

BNHRA - October 27, 2010 - Steve Boese

View more presentations from steveboese.

If you do see me in Buffalo be sure to say hello.

Email and Easter Eggs

Chances are many of the emails you spend all day cranking out to your colleagues take about 1/10th of the time to actually scan read as they do to for you to compose.  By the time they get to paragraph three,(assuming they made it that far),  most recipients have tuned out, distracted by the three new messages that just popped into their inbox, a phone call, a text message from their kid, or, if they are really on the cutting edge, a stray Tweet or Direct Message.

If there is something in the message that is really, truly, important you can't bury 175 words in. Hardly anyone is paying attention that far down, trust me.  Don't think this applies to you? Test it out sometime.  Draw up another one of your typical 385 word soliloquies on the budget planning process, or next year's performance management initiatives, or whatever is consuming your thoughts today.  But in the third or fourth paragraph, slide in the  equivalent of an 'Easter Egg', a concept taken from video games where game players can unlock secret or extra functionality by discovering a hidden code, message, or other undocumented feature. Unlocking the ‘egg’ grants the player more abilities, or access to normally hidden levels for game play.

Except you shouldn't have to make your 'egg' all the secret, or hard to spot.  Try it. First thing in the morning send out your own ‘Easter Egg’ a little something like this:

Lead with 200 words of drivel importance then slip this in ... 'So as we continue in assessing the most critical functional skills of the organization's talent, let's tie up any loose ends in our thinking by meeting at Noon for a long lunch at (insert name of local pub here), where I will buy lunch and beverages for all in attendance.  At the lunch we will continue to examine the cross-organizational implications and synergies of our holistic approach to leadership and increased employee engagement, blah, blah, blah. Thanks very much, etc.

Then don’t send another message about the lunch invitation, try to avoid any direct conversation about the plan, and don’t respond to any calls or emails for the rest of the morning.  In fact, sneak out of your office at about 11:15 or so, (or whatever time is sufficiently early to avoid being seen as ‘going to lunch’) and head over to the pub.  Grab a table large enough for at least a few of the invitees to join you, and wait.

Assuming you are reasonably well-liked (at least enough to accept a free lunch from), one of three things will result:

One - No one, or maybe a token colleague shows up - time to really re-think your communication style because whatever you are doing, it’s not working.

Two -  A small group (3 or 4) turn up.  Not bad, but not great either.  Here’s where you have to really evaluate the composition of the ones that turned up. If it the three young guys that spend most of their time talking about fantasy football and happy hours, you can be pretty confident the only message that got though was ‘free beer’.

Three - The majority of email recipients do actually show up for lunch.  Either you have a really attentive team, or you maybe have one person that found the ‘egg’ and shared it with the group. Either way though, you can feel good that the message did get across, even if it was buried in the blather.

The thing is most of us probably think we are pretty effective communicators.  We might even ask our peers, friends, and colleagues to give us feedback and help us improve.  But, especially if you are the boss, people lie.  A better way to see how your communication stacks up is to put it to the test once in a while.

So where is lunch again?

Extending Your Reach

Yesterday enterprise collaboration vendor Socialcast announced availability of a new set of tools and capabilities called 'Reach', that enable easy integration of the Socialcast activity stream and microblogging platform to traditional enterprise systems like CRM, ERP, Sharepoint; and even newer tools such as wikis and blogs.

To appreciate why this is important let's take a step back to look at enterprise microblogging in general, and Socialcast in particular. Internal organizational microblogging, often referred to as 'Twitter for the Enterprise', has been around for some time.  Several vendors offer varied solutions in the space, the most notable and popular is probably Yammer, a service that has also recently improved and expanded its offerings.  Enterprise micoblogging has always offered important benefits and features for organizations, especially when compared to Twitter. 

Chief among these features are the ability to create secure, company-only networks, support for internal group formation, better functionality for sharing files and images, and less restriction (or no restriction at all), on the length of status updates beyond the Twitter-standard 140 characters. While the internal microblogging solutions have evolved, and continued to improve, they have to this point been somewhat limited in their attractiveness in many organizations due to their stand-alone deployment and their position as yet another enterprise system to be used, maintained, and monitored.  

Much like Twitter sort of 'exists' on its own, mostly separate from other applications and software services that people use for their work, enterprise microblogging has stood separate as well, and for many use cases or valuable forms of collaboration between and among company colleagues this has proven if not an absolute barrier, certainly as a constraint to more widespread organizational deployment.

Activity stream embedded on a wiki page

Socialcast has been in the enterprise collaboration space for a few years, and their microblogging and  'enterprise activity stream' solution is flexible (allowing integration of content from external networks like Twitter or RSS feeds), and easy to use and deploy.  Deployment options both on-premise or hosted make the solution more broadly appealing and able to meet varying IT organizations requirements.

The newest addition to the solution, Socialcast Reach,  takes an important step in addressing the isolation issue, by providing the capability to embed and extend the collaboration platform and activity stream directly to the classic enterprise applications where employees carry out their work.  By simply inserting some simply code, the Socialcast collaboration platform is instantly embedded inside the ERP, CRM, or the company wiki.  So when a sales rep has a question about price or product availability when updating a customer account in the CRM, they can ask a question in an embedded Socialcast collaboration widget, to which others in the company can respond from wherever they happen to be, in the CRM as well, in the Socialcast application, on their mobile device, or anywhere else that the platform has been extended.

In addition to the familiar microblogging activity stream paradigm, Reach also offers support for two other types of collaborative engagement. 'Discussions' -  focused discussions around key resources within your business that allows employees to engage in specific conversations related to customers, projects and operational metrics; and 'Recommendations' -  a way for a user to “recommend” via a button on any resource in the enterprise, and for that recommendation to be inserted into the Socialcast platform, surfacing that person’s recommendation for the enterprise.

If you have only experienced microblogging via Twitter, or even if you have tried an enterprise microblogging solution, this ability to weave and embed the collaboration backbone more deeply within the accepted and expected existing systems and workflows in the organization may be the most important development yet in actually driving increased levels of user adoption and accruing value from more systemic collaboration. 

For companies considering an enterprise microblogging or collaboration platform, Reach gives you another reason to check out Socialcast.  Driving richer and deeper collaboration inside the enterprise and ingrained as part of the organization's work practices is likely an important issue and concern in most enterprises today.  Talking about increased collaboration won't make it so, but deploying isolated tools and technologies might not either, and with 'Reach' Socialcast has created what might be the first collaboration solution that really understands that issue. 

RIP Bloglines

The once innovative and popular online RSS and news aggregator Bloglines will discontinue service on Friday, October 1. The Ask.com team that operates the site has essentially said that social media sites like Twitter and Facebook killed it.  Bloglines was the first feed reader I ever used, and I still have a 'subscribe with Bloglines' badge on the right sidebar, (don't worry if you can't find it, I don't think anyone else has either).

From a blog post on the Ask.com site, the underlying reasoning behind the shutdown of Bloglines is as follows:

...when we originally acquired Bloglines in 2005, RSS was in its infancy. The concept of “push” versus “search” around information consumption had become very real, and we were bullish about the opportunity Bloglines presented for our users. 
 
Flash forward to 2010. The Internet has undergone a major evolution. The real-time information RSS was so astute at delivering (primarily, blog feeds) is now gained through conversations, and consuming this information has become a social experience. As Steve Gillmor pointed out in TechCrunch last year , being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people as Twitter and Facebook dominate real-time information flow. Today RSS is the enabling technology – the infrastructure, the delivery system. RSS is a means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of itself.

To me the money quote in the post from Ask.com is the line about 'being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people. RSS readers (and for the remainder of this post, let's just use Google Reader as our example, since I am 99% certain no one is reading this post in any other RSS client or application), offer the powerful capability of delivering to you the news items, blog posts, and other website updates automatically, in a persistent manner, and make them easily consumable on your schedule (or just as easily ignored).  

They were, and still mostly are, a private and personal kind of experience. Sure Google Reader has built in additional capabilities for sharing items with people that are following you on Reader, and for connecting these shared items with Google Buzz and Twitter.  But some of these integrations require several manual interventions, and you have to admit if you are someone that has linked their shared items on Google Reader to your Twitter account to automatically Tweet, you are solidly outside the mainstream of the average blog reader.  And in terms of the uptake of 'following' on Reader, as of this writing I have 4,613 followers on Twitter, and 68 on Google Reader. Your mileage may vary.  But a 'shared item' on Reader connects with me in a way that a Facebook post or a Tweet doesn't, in Reader I am pretty sure my contact actually read the piece before propagating it to their connections.

Ask.com is making the determination (that very well may be true, it is hard to know), that simply consuming content in an RSS Reader is no longer 'good enough'.  We have, as users, to be able to easily spread that content out across our social networks like Twitter and Facebook, and in turn, we need to be able to mine our networks to find and consume content pushed or shared by our connections.  That news item, blog post, or funny video of kitty antics accrues more value to us, and to the network, the more that is is shared and circulated.  I get it, in fact that is pretty obvious. I would love this post to get widely shared around the social web, passed from Tweet, to Facebook wall, to Google Buzz, and back around again in a self-sustaining frenzy of consumption.

But before any of that can happen, I need someone to actually read the post first.

Which is exactly the capability that Bloglines was and Google Reader still is, so good at.  It is sad to me to see Bloglines disappear, but what would be worse I think is if we stop focusing on engaging with good content individually, personally, and for our own development and understanding while anxiously seeking out the Retweet button. Great content absolutely should be shared, but it needs to resonate with you first, and if RSS devolves into just the plumbing for sharing content, then I think some of that connection will get lost.

By the way, the Retweet and Like buttons are at the end of the post.  

I know, I am a hypocrite.  RIP Bloglines.

Redesigning Everything

I am totally fascinated with a contest called the 'Dollar ReDe$ignProject'.

The project, organized by brand strategy consultant Richard Smith, is a tongue-in-cheek attempt  to revitalize the American economy via a 're-branding' of some of our most visible and tangible manifestations of economic activity, the set of US Federal Reserve notes.

From the 'About' section of the Project site:

It seems so obvious to us that the 'only' realistic way for a swift economic recovery is through a thorough, in-depth, rebranding scheme – starting with the redesign of the iconic US Dollar – it's the 'only' pragmatic way to add some realistic stimulation into our lives! Therefore, you must take part and we really want to see what YOU would do.

Various designers, students, folks that like to play around with Illustrator and Photoshop have offered their suggestions for redesigning the set of bank notes that for the most part still maintain their basic design structure from the 1930s.

One interesting example from the contest, submitted by the graphic design firm Dowling Duncan is on the right.  Their designs for the various notes and denominations attempt to link the face value of the note to an historically significant figure or event. In the example on the right, the re-imagined $100 note refers to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's famous 'First 100 Days', when a number of significant legislative actions were approved to combat the economic depression of the 1930s.

Besides the collection of really engaging, creative, and amusing submissions (somewhere in there you can find a 'Steve Jobs' $50 bill), the project and the enthusiasm of the design community to participate reveal some interesting lessons that I think could be relevant in an organizational setting as well.  

Sacred cows - What 'wrong' with the $1, $5, or $100 bills?  Well I suppose nothing.  But could they be improved? Absolutely.  Could that improvement actually drive downstream benefits far beyond the redesign itself?  Quite possibly. But unless the attempt is made, you'll never know.  

The crowd - Sort of an obvious conclusion, and one that doesn't need to be pointed out yet again.  Or does it?  It still seems to me that more organizations and even smaller divisions in organizations don't do a great job soliciting ideas from their version of the 'crowd' for improvements, creative ideas, and even feedback. Making the submissions public, improves the process as well.  The better ideas surface more readily, more people can get involved in improving the ideas, and the entire process gains more relevancy and a larger degree of trust. For almost every issue, someone out there is passionate about it, and likely would want to get involved if given the opportunity.

Fun - Looking at the redesigned currency is fun. Creating the designs certainly had to be fun for the firms and individuals that have participated.  Even judging the contest I imagine is going to be a blast. What is wrong with a little fun in the organization? Unless you are in one of the lucky (or smart) organizations that has managed to navigate the last few years unscathed, introducing a bit of fun into the routine would be most certainly welcome.

What do you think?

Is redesigning the dollar bill a good idea?