Three times a lady! Speaking at IBM Connect 2013

I am so happy today! It might be a little self indulging but here it goes none the less.

You may have heard this song by The Commodores (or Lionel Richie) 'Three times a lady' ?
That's what I'm singing to myself all day today.

Why?
After already having been approved to be a speaker at IBM Connect 2013 in the beginning of december 2012, I today got a confirmation e-mail from IBM that both my Birds of a Feather sessions submitted have been approved as well!
So I am feeling like 'once, twice, three times a lady'.

Birds of a Feather sessions (BOF)
A Connect 2013 BOF is a relaxed, interactive discussion, with no media or AV. This is a 'chalk-talk' style meeting, and the purpose of the discussion is to gather input, feedback, and learn from each other. I will be the facilitator of the discussion. All attending get the opportunity to become engaged. This is not a 'one to many' session.

These are the 3 sessions I will be doing coming january:

BP304 Become a Social Business: Leverage User Adoption Through Gamification Sasja Beerendonk, e-office
January 29, 16.15 - 17.15 Swan Pelican
User adoption is key to success when implementing social software within your organization. When confronted with social software, employees often find themselves clueless about how to get started, because it requires a different work manner, behaviour and attitude. Step-by-step gamification guides employees into the right direction and takes them to a higher level of understanding and usage. This session covers topics such as: What is gamification? Is it suitable for my organization? What motivates people? From "Maslow’s Need" to "Pink’s Drive", you'll understand the basic concepts of motivation that gamification uses. I will also show a demo on gamification for IBM Connections and the metrics used to measure and stimulate desired behaviour.

BOF106 Using Actvities to Manage MeetingsSasja Beerendonk, e-office; Marion Vrielink, Saxion
One of the challenges for social software adoption is that employees need guidance in understanding how to embed IBM Connections in their daily work routine. Often people say they do not have time to blog, or dont know what they should be sharing. Dealing with these kinds of roadblocks is what user-adoption is all about. Come to this BOF to learn how we dealt with these challenges!

BOF108 Metrics That Matter. Insight to Employee EngagementSasja Beerendonk, e-office
It is generally perceived that in social networks only 1% of people are actively participating by creating content, 9% is contributing by recommending and commenting and 90% is just 'lurking'. Commonly referred to as the 90-9-1 rule. But is this really true for social software in the enterprise? Discuss if this rule shouldn't apply to your Connections user group, and how to measure engagement by user type (creator, contributor, joiner) using the metrics provided in Connections. Metrics provide numbers and graphs that tell you about the usage of Connections. Numbers in itself are meaningless. So what are the right questions to ask to provide meaningful insight ?

Ofcourse I am hoping you will join me in one (or all!) of my sessions. If you have any wishes, or feedback up front, feel free to leave a comment here or send me a message of some sort.

Webinar Wednesday: meet, beloon, stuur en verbeter:vergroot adoptie van uw platform door de toepassing van speltechnieken

Binnenkort presenteer ik bij IBM Connect 2013 sessie 'BP304 Become a Social Business: Leverage User Adoption Through Gamification' op dinsdag 29 januari.

Voor iedereen die zelf niet aanwezig is tijdens dit event: je kunt ook een korte versie bijwonen online op 13 februari op de e-office Webinar Wednesday.

Hebt u onlangs een nieuwe samenwerkingsplatform binnen uw organisatie aangezet? Of denkt u erover om te gaan werken met een sociaal intranet? Vraagt u zich af  hoe u medewerkers bereid krijgt te werken met deze nieuwe omgeving? Hoe u hun gedrag en houding kunt veranderen? Hoe hen te leren anders samen te werken? Aandacht besteden aan gebruikersadoptie van nieuwe technologie bepaalt 90% van het succes. 




Dit webinar laat zien hoe u door spelelementen toe te voegen binnen het samenwerkingsplatform of intranet, het voor medewerkers aantrekkelijker wordt om deel te nemen én het hen leert effectiever om te gaan met de sociale functionaliteiten van het samenwerkingsplatform.


Inschrijven voor dit webinar kan hier.

Social Connections IV community twitter graph

Another great Social Connections event full with brilliant speakers from all over the world has taken place this November 30th in Amsterdam. Social Connections IV had more attendees than ever (200) and was packed with three tracks of presentations by IBM'ers, business partners and customers solely about social business with IBM Connections.

As usual there is quite a bit of tweeting going on during an event, and Social Connections is no exception. The hashtag for the event is #soccnx. Doing some network analysis delivers a great graph of the Social Connections IV community. The graph displays all the connections between attendees (and even non-attendees) that have tweeted #soccnx.

Graph of #soccnx twitter network during Social Connections IV

Download a larger version of the graph to see more detail.

Social Connections community is tightly connected
The graph is compiled of 210 vertices (nodes) and 4010 edges (links). These are the twitter accounts and their connections to eachother. The average geodesic distance is 2,113666 and the maximum still only 4 - meaning that the Social Connections community is a tightly connected community. On average every person is only two links away and the maximum is 4 degrees of separation. So even less than the famous (unproven) theory 6 degrees of separation. Just exactly how close everybody involved is to one another is also apparent from the number of connected components: there are only 5 'subgraphs' of tweeters that are connected to each other but not to anyone in one of the other subgraphs.

When digging deeper into the table underlying the graph I can give some insight in various types of measures of the centrality of a vertex within a graph that determine the relative importance of a vertex within the graph 
(devided into degree, closeness centrality, betweenness centrality, eigenvector centrality and PageRank).

Top 20 vertices (tweeters) by Eigenvector Centrality

The top names are not surprising. They are the ones organising the event, speakers, IBM employees or very influential people in the IBM social business arena.

Create Connections Blog posts with Word

Use Word and its full formatting features to share information in IBM Connections Blogs  

Have you tried the IBM Connections toolbar in Microsoft Word? It allows you to work efficiently on Word documents, yet publish your information easily online in you IBM Connections environment. And I'm not just talking about adding it to your Files or to Community Files. Yes, it can do that too. But you can even post your Word document to a Blog, attach it to a Wiki or add it as an item in an Activity! I am particularly happy with the functionality to actually transform your Word document to a Blog entry, as it might help people to start using Blogs more.

There are two adoption hurdles to using Blogs that I encounter regularly:

1.   The old habit to put information in a file

2.   The limitations of the IBM Connections Blog editor

The old habit to put information in a file

One of the hardest habits to kill is for people to create information in Word documents. I've written about this before in blog posts and created a whitepaper even back in 2010 (dutch) Omzeil het gebruik van mappen en bestanden. Over Wiki's en het werken in de 21e eeuw. Employees automatically revert back to putting texts into Word documents, that they then save on a computer drive in a folder of their choice. In itself, of course, there is nothing wrong with creating Word documents. Word can prove to be a useful tool when information needs excessive formatting, such as table of contents, headings, page numbers, headers and footers, embedded images, tables or graphs. Especially when the document needs to be preserved in a specific system for archiving or compliancy, for advanced workflows or for sharing with others outside the organization, a Word file may be the appropriate way of creating information.

There is a down-side though to using Word documents, in a social environment such as IBM Connections. Social software provides many ways of sharing and collaborating on information that might prove to be better. Better how and why? Any information in a file requires extra steps to get to the content itself. Information in a Word document is accessible to me only after clicking it and opening it in Word. Other tools, such as a Blog or a Wiki give instant access to the content itself. I don't need an extra click, nor a program to open it.

As far as I am concerned Connections social tools such as Blogs and Wikis are more appropriate to create and share content when:

1. the content does not require advanced Microsoft Word formatting functions
2. the content is for internal use only (not to be sent to others outside the organisation)
3. the content needs co-authoring (Wiki) or commenting (Blog)

The limitations of the IBM Connections Blog editor

The IBM Connections plugin for Word brings all the Word functionality within IBM Connections Blogs. Many people are struggling with the Blogs editor in IBM Connections. It's not easy to use, people are not familiar with it and you can't create your content offline. Using Word instead brings the familiar functionality into Connections, allowing you to create your content offline as well to save it to Connections later.

The IBM Connections toolbar

Whenever you feel like posting your Word document to Connections, it provides several options for you to choose to get your Word document online through the Save & Send menu:

How can you save a Word document as a Blog entry in IBM Connections?

Basically you need to take these easy steps below, or watch the video demo (also embedded at the bottom):

1.   Make sure you install the IBM Connections plugin, which will give you the IBM Connections toolbar:

2.   Start a new Word Blog post document
Go to File – New – Choose Blog post

3.   Create your Blog post content

4.   Save & Send the document to Connections

5.   Go to File – Save & Send – Send to IBM Connections – Choose Send to Blogs

6.      Choose your Connections server and Blog

7.      Add some Tags

Watch this demo:

These are a few of my favourite things ...

"Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. Bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens. Brown paper packages tied up with strings. these are a few of my favourite things."

Connections 4 has been out now since September 7th and since then I've been playing around with it on our own demo environment which we are preparing for our Connections 4 Testdrive on October 4 in Rotterdam. And yes, it has a few of my favourite things... .

 

Of course there was the already familiar bits announced through webcasts and even from way back Lotusphere in January through slides and demos. Yet, there is nothing like test driving something yourself!

I have even found some little cool things that I did not see in any of the demos I watched. This is not a full list of all new features, and definitely not a full list of everything that's great about IBM Connections. But it is an overview of some great enhancements that allow employees to do their work efficiently.

Most of the improvements in Connections 4 are about context.
This means: getting information presented within the same context without having to move from one page to another or switch applications. The next paragraphs will show what some new features have in common with the concept context.

1.    The embedded experience in the new Activity Stream. For example when a colleague shares a file and I'm seeing this because I follow the colleague (or the community where the content was published) I can take action immediately from the Activity Stream. The possible actions depend on what is posted, but for instance with a shared file I can download the file directly without having to go to the file page first, or view the comments, and even make a new comment myself! The embedded experience saves me time and focus, because I don't have to click through separate windows.

2.    Second is the Mail and Calendar integration. As I mentioned in my blog post earlier, integrated Mail and Calendar allows me to do my work from one entry point for about 90% of my work. No need to switch back and forth between Connections and Mail/Calendar, as I can quickly see new mail arriving within Connections and responding to it without having to leave my browser. Most Mail functionality that I use on a daily basis is available through integrated Mail, and if not, I can easily go to my webmail from there and do more advanced stuff in my Mail or Calendar.

3.    I can Repost a Statusupdate so the information becomes available to my network as well. This is particularly valuable because it broadens the reach of information through networks of networks, as explained in an earlier post about the Strength of weak ties. Being able to repost a message is an easy way of sharing to my network what someone else has said, without having to send links (via email) to colleagues.

4.    Somewhat the same idea is the Share button, that is available always at the top of the screen, no matter what page I am on. When I find interesting information I can share this as a Statusupdate within my network by clicking this Share button.

5.    Fifth is the improvements to Communities which allow me to stay within the context of my community work. To prevent information overload or to focus solely on what's going on in a particular Community I can use the new Recent Updates view in the Community. In one single overview I'm up to speed again with everything that's been going on there.

Of course the possibility to post Statusupdates to a particular Community helps to prevent information overload as well. Instead of posting a Statusupdate to the whole organisation (anyone who is following me), I can direct certain information to a specific target group through posting it to a specific Community.

Events are a great way of making Communities all about work. All the meetings important to Community members can be posted as an event, to which any member can subscribe. Why not just use the Lotus Notes (or Outlook) Calendar scheduling instead? I can give some arguments for working openly through Community events.

·       Because meeting invitations sent to particular people will only attract these people, and nobody else will know about them, eliminating serendipity. It could be someone else in your organisation is interested, or could provide input or help with an event. But they can't if they don't know about the event.

·       Another reason is that when the event is for a large group of invitees, the organiser might not be interested in accept/decline messages. With events, there is no such thing. Members simply add the event to their Calendar through iCal subscription.

·       If the team or department for which the meeting is intended changes members (new employees, employees leaving the organisation) the organiser might forget to alert the new members and they don't get invited. In the case of a Community event, they can simply add the event to their Calendar themselves.

6.    As for the previously mentioned Statusupdates, they offer some more improvements that provide contextual work. Both Statusupdates on the Home page as within a Community allow you to include a file (uploaded or from Files). This way I can post a status message related to a file and give readers the opportunity to access that file right from the embedded experience. No need to copy/paste file url's or refer readers to another location. Again this embedded experience helps employees remain in the same context, not having to switch back and forth to different pages.

7.    And of course there is the hashtag (#). Using hashtags in Statusupdates makes information easier to find. Tagging your Statusupdates keywords with the '#' turns them into tags. And the new search functionality allows me to search through Statusupdates as well. This is bringing Statusupdates information within the context of all content, whereas before the information in Statusupdates sort of got lost because there was no way of searching for it.

8.    To make it easier for people to start using files instead of working locally with My Documents on their computer, the Bulk file upload is a welcome gift. Whether from the Explorer Plugin or from the browser employees can upload multipe files at once, and even add/change tags for multiple files at once. Once employees have their most used files in Connections there will be less chance that they will resort to emailing attachments, and they are more likely to remain working in Connections.

9.    Discuss This is a means to bring information that is somewhere on the internet into your organisation to discuss it within the context of an interest group. Any page can be discussed in a Forum. Discuss This takes the information that's outside of the organisation, and makes it into a topic in a Forum of your choice. Without having to copy/paste url's, it simply creates the link. Anything on the internet that you wish to discuss further with a group of people can be drawn in to the Community that it is relevant to.

10. With Related Communities different Connections Communities can be bridged, so that Community members get all relevant information delivered within the same context.
A Related Community shows up on the overview page and pulls in recent activity from one into the other. It could be that you wish to bridge two Communities on the same Connections environment. Maybe because they are covering the same or are somewhat related. It could be a project Community that wants to bridge work done in another project because what happens in one is relevant for the other. Even Communities on different Connections environments can be bridged. Thus allowing to collaborate in two environments without losing oversight. Maybe you have an internal directed Community on one server, and an external directed one on another where you collaborate with clients or partners. From the internal Community you can relate the external Community to it, so you can keep track of what's going on in both all from the same context.

Testdrive IBM Connections 4 on October 4

sustainable highway to improve internal collaboration and knowledge

e-office would like to invite you to get acquainted with IBM Connections 4 - the latest version of the collaboration platform from IBM -on October 4.

IBM Connections is social software for the leading collaboration and knowledge sharing easy. The new version makes it possible to no longer work from your inbox. In Connections 4 are all sources of information and actions together. Connections 4 offers can also be integration with SharePoint, making it an integrated workplace for employees arises.

Are you ready for this way of working? Come experience Connections 4 and see for yourself. On October 4, you can use the software hands-on. Even if you do not know IBM Connections this is a great event to start discover the capabilities of the software.

As e-office, we are convinced that our future as effective, sustainable and profitable organizations lies in solutions that are possible with IBM Connections. On October 4, besides a test drive of Connections 4, we offer you an additional testdrive: in an electric car. All participants can drive several electric cars during lunch time. 

when:
Donderdag 4 oktober, 9.30 – 14.00 uur

where:
Elektrisch Vervoer Centrum Rotterdam, Delftseplein 24, Rotterdam

program:
9.30 uur    Reception in Rotterdam
9.45 uur    vision on social business  
                Roland Hameeteman, ceo e-office 
10.00 uur  introducing IBM Connections 
                Luis Benitez, social software product manager IBM
11.00 uur  break
11.15 uur  testdrive Connections 4  
                Sasja Beerendonk, social business strategist & trainer, e-office
12.45 uur  lunch & testdrive e-cars 
14.00 uur  roundup (and return e-cars) 

sign up

You can register via the registration form.

Do you have a preference for a particular electric car? Look here for the list of available vehicles and give your preference to us via the registration form!

Note: for the test drive yYou need a valid drivers license.

Change habits with Connections Mail integration

With IBM Connections 4 being released a few days ago the discussion about Mail starts again. As you may know, IBM Connections integrates Mail and Calendar into the browser window. Is integrating Mail into social software a contradiction? Should users not just start using the social software tools instead if e-mail?

Lately I have been talking a lot with customers, thought leaders, colleagues and business partners about IBM Connections Mail (and Calendar). Mail has become something ambiguous these days. There are those, mostly innovators and forerunners, that believe using e-mail is not done, almost something to be ashamed about. They fully embrace social and the new way of communicating and interacting that comes with it. As do I, being an adoption specialist, ofcourse.

I love social and the new way of working (I call this work21) that comes with it. I am a strong believer in IBM Connections for companies to become more agile. I will advocate working openly at any time. In fact I use e-mail less and less in favour of statusupdates, blogs etcetera.

And there are those who are using e-mail all the time as it has been their primary tool for getting work done for about twenty years. And they wholeheartedly believe e-mail is going to stay forever as it is now, and social is not for them, or just a passing phase.

It seems many of the advocates of social are horrified with the idea though that IBM Connections 4 integrates Mail (I never hear them say anything about the Calendar actually). Their point usually being email is a bad way of communicating and should be replaced by Connections social functionality.

But this is, to me, such a harsh stand to make. This will work out fine for 1st wave adopters, but in my opinion is only going to put second wave adopters off. As an adoption specialist I am very much aware of how social software is impacting the way of work. Basically, employees and organisations as a whole need to change their way of working. By now I think it is generally accepted to say that they will not just come if you build it. Adoption is very much necessary, however easy to use a software tool may or may not be.

Adoption is about changing behaviour. The innovators that have long moved to working open and social are amongst the 1st wave adopters. Quite often using new software such as IBM Connections is part of their work. And there's the point I am trying to make: the employees that are now using email as their primary tool for communication and collaboration don't just 'get it'. They need to be taken in to a new way of working, until it becomes natural to them. Unlike 1st wave adopters their work is NOT using new social software. In fact, they might not even enjoy using software at all! Any software to them is just a means to an end. Until the new way of working becomes natural to employees, they will fall back on the tools they know: Email.

Habits die hard. Once you are familiar with a way of working, you're not likely to change that over night. And this is exactly why I think integrating Mail into IBM Connections is so great. It makes it easier for employees to ease their way in to Connections. It takes the familiar way of working into the new environment. It allows for people to work in a browser with their e-mail and calendar, within the context of social. It takes away having to switch between two environments, therefore improving the chance of staying in Connections. Making it easier to transition to social tooling, because they get familiar with the user interface and might see others working in a social manner which will show them the way.

Luring them in, is wat Mail integration does. And once in they will surely start seeing the benefit of social. Why? Because they start to familiarize themselves and they will see some of their peers using it. Because change is social. Change is a process, not a one-off event and takes time. And change is made real by what people do! Once in Connections employees see what others are doing, and are more likely to try it out themselves given a little time to get more familiar. This is what Mail integration does: give 2nd wave adopters a chance and the time to adapt to social collaboration.

Watch this demo of the IBM Connections 4 homepage to see Mail integration in action (among other things).