Michael Sampson on Collaboration

Intranets2012: Agenda Is Posted, and I'm Speaking

Last May I attended and spoke at the first Intranets conference put on by Step Two Designs in Sydney. It was a fantastic event. Step Two Designs are hosting the 2012 edition of the conference in May in Sydney, and the agenda has been posted. There's a great line up of speakers.

I'll be attending, and will be speaking on the topic Collaboration: something old, something bold, something cold on Thursday May 17.

Are you going? Learn more ... and register.

Media Portrayal of IBM, Lotusphere, and SharePoint - What?

I've attended Lotusphere 2012 this past week. It was my first time, and as I wrote a couple of days ago, IBM talked about some big things. I was impressed as the vision casting - I hadn't expected that as such, but felt it came across well.

Having attended (and live blogged) the Opening General Session at 8am on Monday, perhaps you can imagine my disgust at reading the coverage of the session in ComputerWorld NZ - SharePoint is a 'document coffin,' says IBM. In an article of 510 words, the author (Sim Ahmed) spends a third focused on just five words from Jeff - and a throwaway five words at best. I'm not denying that Jeff said them - they're in my blog post - and it brought a laugh in an otherwise intensive session. My concern is that by making the review article first and foremost about that throwaway line, the author gives a myopic view of what IBM is doing and attempting to do. I feel it is morally wrong.

A couple of specific issues I have with this press coverage:
- second paragraph says the audience had "over 1000 developers, clients, and media." That is true - 5000 people is more than 1000. But it's bad reporting to say 1000 when the number was 5000 or more.
- fifth paragraph says Jeff made the comment about SharePoint being a document coffin before announcing product changes. If you go and read my blog post, you'll see that some announcements - Connections Next and IBM Docs - came before the statement.

I "get" the competitive nature of the market - I work with clients that use SharePoint, and with those that use IBM products. I've written two books on SharePoint. I speak at conferences around the world on being effective with SharePoint. But to pivot IBM's whole approach at Lotusphere around SharePoint being a document coffin - which in reality SharePoint is for some companies - is wrong. It writes history wrongly - it's not accurate reporting. It portrays a myth. And it sets up competition between organizations that use SharePoint and those that use IBM, where I think each has a lot to learn from each other.

In this more social world, we need to hold those that write articles like this to a higher standard. I for one am disappointed in this coverage.

Notes on ID225 Setting Up Communities to Solve Your Biggest Challenges

Suzanne Livingston and Michael Wanderski are presenting on communities in Connections. My notes from the session:
- Will be talking about a variety of use cases for communities (note that these are similar to what I talk about in the collaboration scenarios in Collaboration Roadmap. It's also an approach I initially wrote about in Seamless Teamwork).
- IBM Connections offers a plethora of tools - profiles, communities, files, wikis, activities, forums, home page, social analytics, micro-blogging, bookmarks, and blogs. Within a community, there are a further set of capabiliies just for the specific community. Eg., the ideation blog.
- When setting up a community, ask this question: What's the goal? Which capabilities do I need to help the community members to reach this goal?
- Scenarios:
- ... (1) Evaluating Product Ideas - Mike showed the use of an ideation blog for capturing, ranking, and promoting ideas. For the manager, they can stop the creation of new ideas, as well as freezing the whole blog. Ideas can be graduated, and you have the option of spawning an activity for ongoing management.
- ... (2) Strengthening Customer Relationships with New Products - using activities for planning future action, and forums with moderated content.
- ... (3) Improving Social Media Presence - the ability to reach into social media services on the Internet, and get a reading on the current sentiment. Or seeing what's being said, and responding to particular issues (whether positive or negative). There are some new things coming, and the Feeds area has been available for a long time. With c.Next, there may be the capability to "Discuss This" for a web page or blog post.
- ... (4) Creating Effective Teams ... using Quickr Document Library integration, place catalog, and calendar. With document integration, you can bring existing content across more easily. It shows the Quickr document library within the Connectinos page. Results are security trimmed - the user gains access to the documents in Quickr that they are permmitted to see. There's also a team calendar coming in c.Next. c.Next calendars can be added to a personal calendar - but it's an overlay to the calendar, but it doesn't block it off for free-busy.
- ... (5) Socializing Enterprise Content - the ability to link to Quickr and SharePoint documents.

It was a good session. Good to see the scenarios approach being used as a way of describing capabilities.

Pulling It All Together - Michael's Comments on Lotusphere 2012

I've been attending Lotusphere 2012 as an industry analysit this week in Orlando. Although I've known some people, it's been overwhelming being here for the first time. 5,000-7,000 people sharing a relatively small space for a week is quite incredible. It's definitely the biggest event I've ever attended.

To date, I've taken notes on all of the sessions I've attended, and blogged those here if that was permitted. There were a couple of analyst-only events that while I took notes, were not for blogging. As I leave Orlando in just a few hours, here's my thinking about what I've seen and heard.

1. IBM knows how to put on a large scale event. I've been impressed with the smoothness of how the week has gone. Getting multiple thousands of people through meals has worked smoothly. Of course, having a large event center and good staff has made that possible, but it did actually work. Well done.

2. The overall sense I take away from the event is that IBM has wanted to (a) continue casting a vision of the future of social business, and various other trends, as well as (b) introducing everyone to customers who are making it work now. The customers who have shown up to speak for 5-10 minutes on the main stage have given great credibility to the vision, by talking about what they are doing now. It was tastefully done - and impressively coordinated.

3. IBM has a strong story to tell around Connections, both what it can deliver now for social / organizational collaboration, and what's coming in the immediate next release. The integration of Notes Mail and Exchange into the Connections interface for users, so they can see their newer Connections material alongside their traditional email, is a good move. Bridging the two worlds will help move people away from a sole reliance on email, and will facilitate a step-wise migration to different ways of collaborating.

4. Notes and Domino, the traditional Lotus products, have had some focus at the event. I've heard some Notes/Domino administrators complaining about this lower focus, and I'm of two minds about my reaction. On the one hand, mail is a mature offering with little opportunity for discontinuous change. So the reduced focus makes sense, given the game changing opportunities with Connections. On the other hand, there's a need to bring Notes/Domino administrators and users along for the new journey. IBM's work around making parts of Connections freely available as an entitlement for Notes/Domino customers goes some way to addressing this, but the more critical aspect is that Notes/Domino administrators need to take the challenge and step up to the broader picture. IBM can say this again and again, but the administrators need to hear that and take it on board.

5. It's been gratifying to see a good level of focus on collaboration strategy, governance, and business/user adoption. Those topics are of deep interest to me, and I'm delighted to see people talking about these topics in the IBM collaboration area. I haven't always agreed with the approaches being advocated, but that's a better problem to have than the topics not being discussed at all. As Alistair Rennie said, technology is important, but it's not the only thing that's important.

6. I'm glad I came. I got to hear and see what's going on with IBM. I got to meet some people I needed to see. It's been a great investment of time and effort.

I'm heading to California soon, then back to New Zealand on Friday night.

Notes on CCS112 IBM Connections Rollout and Adoption at Colgate

Mitch Cohen presented on the rollout and adoption of Connections at Colgate. I arrived 5-7 minutes late, so missed the first piece.

My notes on Mitch's session:
- Are getting ready for Connections 4.0. Plan to get new servers, then move the data over when it's ready.
- best practices:
- ... meet with small teams. It's not intuitive about how you could use Connections.
- ... agree on the business need.
- ... give many examples
- ... circle back for progress.
- ... start small - too many features causes confusion (start with Files and Forums - they are easy to understand), make it fun (no questions in email, no attachments in email), move on to activities (to manage large meetings, or to manage your team).
- ... communicate - communicate to end users, dispel the myth about Facebook, self service communities, and getting senior management buy-in.
- ... hold Collaboration Days - to describe what's coming up. You can't make people read. Hold onsite and virtual. Set up stations on Mail, Protector, Mobile, and Connections. Provides a way of telling things informally. Users liked this.
- What's next? Various things, including Connections 4.0 later in 2012.

- Bring Your Own Device - large demand to use personal devices for mail.
- ... started a program for offering mobile to all employees. Want to help employees be productive and effective while being out-and-about.
- ... needed to be easy, self-service (no help desk), legal agreement for opt-in, and employees are responsible for costs.
- ... did things with Traveler (iOS), Android came in 2H2010, and have BES Express.
- ... getting ready for go live - password enable all devices, develop a self-service web site (sign the legal agreement, FAQ). Had 3 months to complete.
- ... CIO sent out one email. Had 582 users in the first 24 hours, and over 1300 users in the first one week. 22 months later - have 3600 users (over 2000 are iOS). It's growing now by word-of-mouth.
- ... next steps - creating a Colgate App Store.

Notes on BP102 User Blast by Mat Newman

Mat Newman from the West Island of New Zealand (otherwise known as Australia), is talking about Lotus Notes and users.

Key points:
- If users hate Notes, it's the organization's fault. Not IBMs.
- It's important that users know the name of the different parts of the Notes client - eg., the toolbar, the status bar, the sidebar.
- Every Notes database has a standard layout. Previews are good - and you can show them on the right or the bottom.
- "Advanced menus" are turned off by default. Show users how to turn these on, when that makes sense.
- Teach your users about the Notes client shortcuts. They may usage much easier.
- Bookmarks allow you to access Notes and other applications very easily. Eg., you can drag an Excel spreadsheet to the Notes bookmarks bar, or a Web page.
- ... Bookmarks can be added to a Startup folder, so when you start Notes, the tabs are ghosted by default. They aren't opened until the user clicks on it.
- Allow users to create a full-text index for local replicas.
- Very easy to change the search scope in Notes. Choose the drop-down by search. And you can add more databases into the search list.
- ... in Notes 8.5.3, you can also search by Recipient or By Subject. There are some specific version requirements on the server and client.
- Widgets provide easy access to information and applications. Can add Google Gadgets, or a Notes view, (among other things) to the sidebar.
- Using actions, you can wire data from a message or document to the sidebar. Eg., an address in an email message to a map on Google Maps. Have some flexibility about how this is set up.
- Plug-ins provide full applications in the sidebar - eg., for Twitter (TwitNotes), for Connections, and more. If there is no widget or plug-in available, see if the Web site of interest has a mobile version. Eg., m.linkedin.com.

Notes on Wednesday's Keynote at Lotusphere 2012 - The Future of Social Technology

The session has three individual sessions, then a panel discussion of the three speakers.

Speaker 1 - Sir Tim Berners-Lee
- The web was originally was supposed to be about a collaborative space. Social business is a way of getting there.
- Cerf developed IP in the late 1960s. In the late 80s-early 90s, Tim was annoyed that there was no level of abstraction on the documents. He just wanted to see a web of documents, so wrote HTTP.
- The next level of abstraction - "linked data" (the semantic web). Allows the computer to understand the data - and away from documents the computer can't understand.
- ... eg., a calendar entry points to an event - but we don't care about the data format. We want to see what's linked to this.
- ... eg., moving from one application to another - some data can move across.
- ... eg., looking at things on a time line. What changed, and when?
- Can build applications.

Speaker 2 - Manoj Saxena, GM IBM Watson Group
- In February 2011, Watson bet the two best winners on Jeopardy.
- Watson was a collection of different technologies from across the IBM portfolio - eg., 2800 processing cores, 16 TB RAM. Could process (read and understand) 200 million documents every 3 seconds.
- Next step - Watson for Healthcare (August 2011), and in 2012 ongoing the focus is on other industry sectors.
- some stunning statistics:
- ... 90% of the world's data was created in the last two years
- ... of this, 80% in unstructured. And so IT systems can't understand it.
- ... traditional systems only leverage 20% of available data
- Customers are calling IBM and seeking possibilities for applying Watson.
- How it works:
- ... Watson understands natural language and human speech - at scale.
- ... It generates and evaluates hypotheses based on evidence
- ... Adapts and learns from user selections and responses
- Gives rise to probabilistic computing - "Based on the evidence, I am 70% confident that ... "
- Healthcare:
- ... healthcare knowledge is doubling every 5 years.
- ... Doctors in the US spend less than 5 hours per month keeping up.
- ... Watson can help a doctor make a more accurate diagnosis.
- ... IBM is also working with WellPoint and CS to work on beating cancer.
- ... Expect that social collaboration will enhance Watson - based on discussions in communities (doctors and patients).
- Could also apply Watson to - contact center, financial services, government, and telecom.

Speaker 3 - Andy Miller, President and CEO of Polycom
- on the role of multimedia communication in collaboration and social business
- Andy wants to talk about a vision of communication and collaboration
- Video communications - traditionally been seen as a room-based mode, based around travel savings.
- ... Reality today - it's a productivity tool. It's not room based.
- Polycom's vision - how to make video collaboration ubiquitous.
- ... Polycom today announced cloud-based delivery of video capabilities
- Some examples:
- ... 8 of the top 10 hospitals are using Polycom video solutions to speed diagnosis and save lives. Eg., remote diagnosis of a patient - are they having a stroke? If so, what should they do about it?
- ... 4 of the top 5 colleges use Polycom to increase knowledge and extend reach.
- ... leading government agencies are enhancing citizen services and increasing public safety with Polycom
- ... 10 of the largest banks and 6 largest insurance companies, use Polycom to save costs and speed the flow of information. Eg., kiosks in a retail branch for talking to a subject matter expert in another location.
- ... Manufacturing ... improving supply chain
- ... Entertainment ... reducing production times
- key trends in collaborative communications today:
- ... a generation raised on video - audio conference calls won't be enough for millenials.
- ... the proliferation of mobile devices - eg., 64 million tablets today, expected to grow to 320 million by 2015 (90% will be video enabled)
- ... readiness of the network - 3G, 4G, and WiFi
- ... social connectedness - 800 million users on Facebook
- ... cloud delivery - $41 billion today, growing to $241 billion by 2020. Customers want video as a service.

Panel Discussion - Tim, Manoj, and Andy
Q1. To Tim - what are the problems and pitfalls we will experience on the way to the semantic web?
- (Tim) It depends on the Internet working - neutrality and openness is really important.

Q2. To Manoj - what kind of changes are going to take place in the lives and role of the knowledge worker as AI and the semantic web become more pervasive?
- (Manoj) It will create growth opportunities from a career perspective. Knowledge workers will learn new skills and capabilities, with new opportunities. People can engage around driving outcomes.
- ... It will also put new demands on people. How do you see a business as processes and information models? Also - how do you understand the technology?
- ... Have to step up and skill up.

Q3. To Manoj - will the line between IT and business blur?
- (Manoj) It's already happening - among CIOs (with business training) and architects.
- ... Anyone who can drive a reduction in cycle time will be very valuable.

Q4. To Andy - will we see a generational divide between digital natives and immigrants?
- (Andy) There is a divide already today, eg., email and conference calls, vs. social networking and video. Polycom is working to bridge the chasm.

Q5. To Manoj - you talked a lot about healthcare. What other industries will be impacted by Watson?
- (Manoj) It's a hot discussion. There are examples all over the place.
- ... In terms of the strategy - looking at information intensive industries, and the liquidity of information. We are going about it in a systematic way.

Q6. To Tim - what are some concrete steps for getting business value from the semantic web now?
- (Tim) Get people to understand the technology, and what it can do.
- ... Join the Web Consortium group, so you can learn faster and be part of the transformation. Help us with building the new standards.

Q7. To Tim - looks like there is an HR component on this?
- (Tim) And training - take 20 people and assign them time to look at what's going on. To learn, to see what can be done. Let them build some system.

Q8. To Andy - how do organizations move the needle on video communications now?
- (Andy) Polycom helps organizations use the current tools in place - Sametime, Connections - and bring video into those. It's not rip-and-replace.
- ... Secondly, understand the supply chain requirements. You will need to work across company boundaries. Just having things inside the organization is no longer enough.

Q9. To Manoj - what do organizations do now?
- (Manoj) Three things:
- ... educate - see what it can do. Look around. Share this with your team.
- ... enable - start small. Start implementing with 5-7 people.
- ... encourage - get some results, and start talking about what's happening. (Eg., Exemplar stories from User Adoption Strategies.)

Q10. To Manoj - what kind of investments will be needed?
- (Manoj) We work with customers at two levels. A tactical track - for delivering value within months. Also a strategic track - scoping up projects that align with strategic.
- ... Investment - money for training, and money for pilots.

Q11. To Andy - what's the level of investment needed?
- (Andy) You need the infrastructure - whether it's call control, video, or social. Once the infrastructure is there, you can leverage off that.
- ... Eg., mobility - use whatever tablet you have.

Q12. To Tim - we have limited resources, lots of competing priorities, why is semantic web so important?
- (Tim) keep your existing systems, and focus on extending them. Because you have locked data today, you are limiting organizational value. You need to be able to link them.
- ... When you do linked data, you have greater awareness of problems and opportunities.
- ... In the medium term, you can drive discontinuous change. The value from being first - not being left behind.

Q13. To Tim - what about the cultural changes in organization? How do we deal with this?
- (Tim) There's the boring stuff, "not invented here." Some people hug their data.
- ... The other question - how do we affect culture? Could we understand other people better from using AI and semantic data?

Notes on CCS105 Bayer MaterialScience - Integrating IBM Connections and Microsoft Technologies

Bert Oberholz and Cindy Schlebusch from BMS are talking about BMS's implementation of Connections, and the integration with Microsoft technologies.

My notes on the session:
- Bayer - three main business areas: crop science, health care, and material science. Global organization - 113,000 employees, in 291 subsidiaries. Have companies in almost every country.
- History - in 2009, a discussion started between R&D people. Found that different teams were working on similar topics across the world. Could not share information, or make things visible.
- ... started with Connections 2.5 in 4Q 2009, with 50 R&D researchers, but it was available more widely. Had fast organic growth - quickly went to 500 global users. Then opened it to all 14,000 BMS staff.
- ... in 2010, more focused approach - to introduce Connections with the new personalized work place (a new standard laptop image).
- ... in 2011, implementing Connections 3.x, and an plug-in with Outlook (to give you a view into Connections from Outlook). In Q3, the platform was opened to Bayer globally. In Q4, had an adoption and positioning strategy around Connections. Also had plug-ins for Office and Windows Explorer.
- ... plan for 2012 - Bayer-wide availability, integration with SharePoint, and Connections 4 late in 2012.

- adoption strategies:
- ... the new standard working operating system - was Windows 7, Office 2010, Exchange/Outlook 2010, SharePoint 2010, and Lync 2010. SharePoint was supposed to be the collaboration platform, but BMS found that SharePoint couldn't deliver what BMS needed. There were also 2500 people on Yammer, so CIOs decided to go for a common social collaboration environment. Opened Connections up for the whole of Bayer.
- ... adoption strategy:
- ... ... (1) CIO as frequent blogger and commentor.
- ... ... (2) one-hour of training on Connections, as part of the workplace training.
- ... ... (3) evangelists providing departments and teams with teams, presentations, and positioning help. "We found that after talking with a group for two-hours, they were ready to go with using Connections."
- ... ... (4) regional caretakers.
- ... ... (5) central support organization.
- When looking at Connections vs. SharePoint, Documentum, and BMS's KM tool, Connections supported most of the requirements. Some things that SharePoint, Documentum, or the KM tool were particularly strong in, Connections could do in a "lite" way, and this was often enough for most people.
- ... if Bayer didn't choose Connections, they would have had to wait until SharePoint next, purchase NewsGator (or other third party tool), or build the extensions in-house.
- ... draw a distinction between social cooperation and enterprise collaboration. Social = profile and networking, communities, and activities. Enterprise = projects, and project management. Also document management. The social cooperation is handled by Connections; SharePoint does the Enterprise Collaboration.

- integration challenges:
- ... we want to make it easy for users.
- ... eg., integrating Profiles. Connections profile will be the master. My Site will have some things.
- ... eg., the business card - in Lync, in SharePoint, in Outlook, in Connections. Will modify the Connections business card to show what the Microsoft one shows. If you click the picture, it will go to Connections.
- ... eg., difficulties in making IBM's plug-in working within a SharePoint Farm environment.
- ... eg., authentication between Connections and SharePoint. Need some changes from IBM.
- ... eg., Fast Search - for Connections data as well.

Notes on CCS104 Statisticians are a Social Bunch, no really, they are!

Steve Wellington from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and Mike Handes from IBM Australia and New Zealand are talking about how the ABS have adopted IBM Connections.

Here's my notes on the session:
- ABS have 3200 staff and 700 field data collectors. When the census happens, need up to 40,000 additional temporary staff.
- ... ABS have been using Lotus Notes for 15 years. In the early years, ABS was an innovator around collaboration in the Australian government. Key idea - the ability to share information through a knowledge sharing platform, rather than locking it in email. Broke the area up to personal, workgroup, and corporate databases.
- ... Culture: working in teams, not as individuals (therefore have team-level mail databases). Secondly, everything is open by default.
- ... For knowledge management and records keeping in Australia, in similarly sized government agencies, the ABS spends only 15% of what others spend. But the ABS is seen as best in class.
- ... Knowledge management was integrated into work practice.
- Employees are using lots of different tools in their private lives. And they want these new types of tools in their work.
- ABS work drivers - geographically dispersed teams, anywhere / anytime / any device expectation, staff working across multiple projects (therefore monitoring multiple workgroup team sites is difficult), and tight labour markets in Australia.
- ... from the government and community - increased productivity (year-on-year), engage with the community online (eg., filling out the census online), staying ahead by making proactive improvements rather than reacting to survive.

- Why did the ABS choose Connections?
- ... the current Notes-based Workgroup Database were team focused. Knowledge became fragmented, information was hard to find, and it was difficult to work with peoeple outside the organization (especially counterpart organizations in other countries).
- ... Connections - content revolves around people.

- What does success look like?
- ... it doesn't look like - IT-centric deployment, poor performance characteristics, no adoption plan, small initial user population.
- ... Had previous lessons with Sametime - initially, managers did not understand, and wanted it removed. It's now a tool that the people can't live without.
- ... Strategy - seeded the environment (content, use cases, champions)
- ... ... Example - a senior manager used a blog for keeping his team up to date. More than just work information though.
- ... ... Example - forming online communities around interests and technologies, not workgroups and projects.
- ... Communities may replace the current workgroup database in the future.
- ... Been in production for about 18 months, and 90% of staff have accessed Connections.
- ... Changing to an "everyone contributes" environment. Eg., a glossary wiki.
- ... Staff are coming in with existing skills. Training can focus on the context - why.
- ... For external collaboration, using a hosted version of Connections.

- The Future:
- ... Social analytics - helping staff to make sense of the data.
- ... A blurring between the inside and outside.
- ... Developing an integrated collaboration workspace.

Notes on CCS110 Great Expectations - Students Today, Awesome Employees Tomorrow - Cardiff University

In the first session after lunch, Simon Vaughan from Cardiff University is presenting on its work with Connections in education.

Here's my notes on Simon's session:
- Emerging countries are adopting and using social networking tools more than developed countries. In Africa especially, there is very high penetration of mobile devices. Impact on student education? Top request - to connect students with the alumni and overseas universities.
- The connected student - they want online systems that "know them" and are secure.
- Cardiff University:
- ... 27,000 students, 6000 employees. Research-led univerity. Geographically dispersed campus.
- ... email is the standard collaboration tool. Need access to relevant information.
- ... challenges:
- ... ... (1) a university has people across all age groups, and with preferred ways of working. Eg., 70-year old professor with chalk and a board, down to the young students who want to use IM and Twitter.
- ... ... (2) students expect to be always connected, and full access on any device. They want to be able to test out new ideas without asking permission. They work in communities - and they want the ability to create communities on the fly. They have high expectations about the future. They want information quickly.
- ... ... (3) students expect tools that enable connection with others, across and beyond the university, from multiple devices, and to collaborate better than using email. They want 24x7 access to key systems.

- essentially: because today's students have deep experience with Facebook, Twitter, and other ways of working together, if we want to get them into our university, we have had to change the way we deliver education. And by implication - we will have to keep doing this in the years ahead as new technologies come along.