Coworking: A Model for the Future of Work

I had the pleasure of moderating a panel, on the subject of coworking, at GigaOM’s Net:Work conference, last week. It was truly a pleasure, because of the experiential diversity and high quality of the panelists.

One of GigaOM’s staff writers published a very good summary of the panel (within half an hour of its completion!) that you should read if you are interested in coworking and how it is changing where and how individuals and corporations work together. In addition, there was a live Web broadcast of the panel (and the entire event), the replay of which you may view here or at the end of the GigaOM post.

I would love to read comments about your coworking experiences and whether your organization is experimenting with coworking options for its employees and business partners. Thanks, in advance, for sharing!

Fifth Annual Enterprise 2.0 Conference Illuminates Current State of Social in Organizations

Milestone birthdays customarily spark reflection on the past and future of the celebrant. The Enterprise 2.0 Conference celebrated its 5th birthday last week with a solid program of pre-conference workshops, keynote speeches, and breakout sessions. The event, as always, provided attendees with a good feel for both the current state, as well as the future, of enterprise social software, networking, and business. This post will focus on insights, gleaned from the conference, about the here and now of social in the enterprise. A subsequent post will address the implications for its future.

Practice: A Bias Toward “How”

An early observation from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference was that several of the most visible “doers” of enterprise social were not participating this year. Dion Hinchcliffe, Gia Lyons, and David Armano (among others) were too busy helping customers plan and deliver enterprise social initiatives to attend. Their absence is, of course, a positive indicator of the current interest in, and embrace of, social activity in organizations.

Those who were at the conference also voiced a bias toward action. One of the most commonly heard pieces of feedback on the event was that the content focused too much on selling and justifying the concepts of E2.0 and social business. Attendees were looking for more information and knowledge about how to use social to successfully achieve business objectives. To paraphrase one attendee’s tweet, we get why, but thirst for how.

One tell-tale sign of this sentiment was the prevalence of the topic of adoption in informal conversations, despite it’s (intentional?) exclusion from the official E2.0 Conference program. Perhaps the early adopters who have attended multiple iterations of the conference have largely moved beyond adoption concerns, but the fresh faces at the event have not and asked for more of the kind of guidance provided in the pre-conference Practitioner’s Black Belt workshop.

Another indication of the need to understand how, as opposed to why, was the enthusiastically positive reactions to the conference sessions that dealt with topics such as organizational design and behavior, leadership, and performance management. Past E2.0 Conferences have conveniently put forth organizational culture as a bogey man standing in the way of adopting social behaviors and tools, without offering ways to affect cultural transformation. Several of this year’s sessions addressed concrete aspects of organizational change management. Most notable were the remarks delivered by Cisco’s Jim Grubb, Sara Roberts of Roberts Golden, Electronic Arts’ Bert Sandie, Deb Lavoy from OpenText, Amy Wilson of Wilson Insight, and Altimeter Group Fellow Marcia Connor.

Technology: Focus on Integration

It was clear before the conference even began that the topic of integration of newer social technologies with well-established enterprise systems would be front and center this year. While that topic was in the spotlight, the current lack of meaningful integration stood out against the talk of plans to integrate enterprise social software with other applications, systems, and business processes. The harsh truth is that the current crop of enterprise social software is dominated by stand-alone applications and suites – collaboration destinations that are not in the flow of work for most and that have created new silos of information and knowledge in organizations.

Enterprise social software vendors have begun to build and offer integrations between their systems of engagement and established systems of record (to use Geoffrey Moore’s crystal-clear terms) such as Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management, and Enterprise Content Management. However, most of these integrations assume that the social application/suite will be the place where people do the majority of their work. Data and information from other enterprise systems are brought into the social layer, where it can be commented upon and shared (socialized) with others. This flies in the face of reality, as evidenced by the limited success of enterprise portals deployments intended to create a personalized aggregation layer sitting on top of existing enterprise systems. People want to communicate and collaborate with others in the original context of specific business tasks. Accordingly, social technology should be embedded (or, at least, exposed) in the systems of record where decisions are made and business process activities are completed, not the other way around.

It was interesting to observe that the need to integrate with systems of record was primarily voiced by enterprise social software vendors exhibiting at the E2.0 Conference. Those vendors claimed that their customers are demanding these integrations, but the topic did not prominently appear in customer-led sessions or conversations. Only one system of record was universally identified as a critical integration point – Microsoft SharePoint. This observation seems to underscore deploying organizations’ preference to communicate and collaborate directly in systems of record.

There was also much discussion of the need to integrate social into business processes themselves. A prominent theme from the E2.0 Conference was that enterprise social software can, and should, support specific business processes to make them more transparent and efficient. Presentations and vendor demos at the event revealed that the current generation of enterprise social software can effectively speed resolution of process exceptions through expertise location and engagement features. However, integration with normal business process activity is essentially non-existent in most enterprise social software offerings, and the vision of social process support remains unfulfilled.

Summary

The 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston was a very well run event that provided attendees with a fairly clear picture of the current state of enterprise social practices and technologies. It is clear that practitioners are past experimenting with social concepts and technologies and have moved on to applying them in their organizations. However, it also clear that practitioners need more information on how to organize for, lead, and incent social business practices. Social technology adoption remains a key concern for the second wave of adopters.

Over the last 5 years, enterprise social software has matured and added functionality needed to build comprehensive, enterprise-ready systems of engagement. However, integration of that functionality into the flow of work – within traditional enterprise systems of record and business processes – has yet to be achieved. It will be interesting to see if that marriage of social and transactional systems can be accomplished. If it can, we will have created next-generation technology that supports a new, better way of working.

This entry was cross-posted from Meanders: The Dow Brook Blog

The AIIM Community: Status Quo Prevails, but Change is Happening

This entry was cross-posted from Meanders: The Dow Brook Blog

I attended the AIIM Info360 Conference and Expo last week, in Washington, DC. It was my first AIIM event in 9 years. I had stayed away intentionally, because AIIM and the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) community had stagnated. Business and technology were changing, but the AIIM community remained fixated on things like document capture, storage, output, and archival. Sharing of, and collaborating on, active content was largely ignored.

Lately, I’ve been signs of renewal from AIIM’s leadership and staff, including an active, purposeful embrace of collaboration and social computing as important components of information management. (For example, AIIM published a paper on Systems of Engagement, authored by Geoffrey Moore, in January and a Social Business Roadmap in conjunction with last week’s conference.) So I thought it would be good to attend the event after my long absence, to learn first-hand whether or not change really was occurring in the AIIM community. The verdict:

Parts of the AIIM community remain deeply rooted in the past. The members who are trying to become more current and relevant are so busy talking about business and technology trends that they’ve lost focus on solving specific business problems.

First a word about the part of the community stuck in the past. Wandering the conference show floor made it crystal clear that the majority of the software and hardware vendors present were there to sell to the legacy AIIM crowd. I saw booth after booth touting imaging and other capture hardware and software, management solutions for electronic (and paper!) documents, and industrial-strength printing machines and software. Enough said.

The show floor did include a few vendors addressing the minority of the AIIM community interested in moving toward more lightweight, collaborative content management practices. Included in that group of vendors were Box.net, EMC/Documentum, Microsoft SharePoint, and NewsGator.

One other thought about the show floor: the Web Content Management vendors were noticeably absent. It seems that they’ve moved on from the AIIM community, probably for a variety of reasons. I hope they will come back soon and try again to push the conceptual boundaries of content management in both large organizations and small-to-medium businesses.

The keynote speeches and the few breakout sessions I attended were more visionary than the majority of the exhibits. Keynoters reported on high level trends affecting how businesses create, consume, share and generally manage content. The vendors who had bought keynote spots also presented visions of content management that made their respective, revised market strategies seem irrefutable.

Similarly, most of the breakout sessions I went to presented fairly high level pictures of how content technologies are evolving and where they are (or should be) headed. There were some exceptions, including a session that I co-presented with Dan Levin, COO of Box.net, on current, real-life use cases for mobile content sharing. However, sessions that focused on how the emerging breed of content management practices and supporting technologies can help solve newer (as well as old) business problems were rare.

In short, there were two conferences taking place simultaneously at AIIM/Info360. The first can best be described as representing the status quo. The second can be summed up as follows:

SOCIAL, blah, blah, blah, COLLABORATION, blah, blah, blah, COMMUNITY, blah, blah, blah, ENGAGEMENT, blah, blah, blah, MOBILE, blah, blah, blah, CLOUD, blah, blah, blah, USABILITY, blah, blah, blah…

I applaud the changes that AIIM’s leadership and some forward-thinking members of the community are attempting to make. They have to start by finally acknowledging the macro trends that are occurring, then crafting and articulating a visionary response. This year’s conference did a very good job of that. I hope that by next year, presenters (speakers and exhibitors) at the AIIM show will move beyond the high level messages and discuss how managed sharing of active content can help solve specific business problems and enable organizations to take advantage of tangible opportunities.