Large organisation adopting social mediums, who thrive while sharing before the social tools, tend to become avid representatives of the Enterprise 2.0 and social workplace, those companies usually harvest value out of the social workplace and introduction of a digital means to extend their natural work process.
One of the best example is Deloitte and the Yammer love affair, Accountancy consultants share information to survive, they are a co-organism that just got extended with the services of yammer.
Wouldn’t it be great if this was the case for any company? presenting the tools, educating the people and bang we hit the gold vein of the social workplace era.
Sadly this isn’t the case, we have to understand that we are not at the stage where companies are ruled by the social generation. Employees do not fully understand the value of information sharing, and in some cases regard information sharing as a loss of job security.
Pondering about this for a while i though, how can we then promote the use of the social workplace in organisations?
One of the methods is to expose the non users to the users, making the public know about the small groups of people who produce value from the social workplace.
There are probably multiple ways of doing so and i cant even imagine all of them but the one i think will create create value and help in exposing the network is Digital Curation.
Digital Curation is similar to the curation of the art in the museum, a selection of the best “Content”, based on predefined criteria representing the company business and culture, are selected and maintained in a shared location. These items are catalogued (Tags, Categories etc.) and indexed for quick find.
This curated content is transmitted through common medium in the organisation with the aim to expose and educate.
What i envision is the exposure of the company through email to a curated valuable set of snippets and links from the social workplace.
This will get some inquisitive people the small push to discover what was going on.
It will expose the tools without the fluff, only the stuff.
But most importantly it will give the value to the people and the best reaction can be a conversion due to a mishap, “If only i had this info yesterday” type. A person who relises the work related value of the Enterprise 2.0 is going to be hooked and become the best advocator.
This is not to replace an appropriate education to the system but more to enhance that with sharing the current experience on this new tool, teasing people to join the crowd.
If we can change the peoples perceived value of the new tool then it will get its proper place.
But this is the side benefit of curation, the main benefit is that curation will enable a timeline representation of the value from the network and will enable the curator to then report of the value increase or decrease as it appears in the network.
This monitoring of the social workplace and the deeper metrics it represent will enable a better monitoring on the networks value production.
Product Management and release cycles
I am a bit shocked from release processes in the last few weeks and cannot hold back the feeling.
I am a supporter of release fast release often but there is a bit of a stretch named “Within Reason”, if your application size is 30Mb and you release every 3 days the commitment is, how do i say it gently, over demanding.
release within a reason is a bit like resisting the developer urge to just throw all the new magnificent features that are hot out of the testing oven and giving them to the customer. its a noble thing to do, but it has its price.
Making a person update regularly is one thing but annoying them with multiple updates makes a regularly updating customer to a deferring update customer, its like a nagging kid, the more updates there are the less you feel they are important and deserver your attention.
Another thing i noticed lately is developers putting release notes, this harms the product and should be done by the product manager. why do i say this? look at the following example from prezi desktop.
Crop images and pdf’s by double clicking on them.
Draw straight lines, bend arrows, and manipulate them much easier.
Application starts much faster.
This is agonizingly not commercial and lacks the sales pitch, we need to make the client feel the love we spread. a person reading this will think, who is running this company? how is this allowed out? what does this reflect on my information security and the way things are managed?
Yes i know that these days with the Sony fiasco there are claims that even well managed companies are not that well managed. and security is just a matter of luck.
Looking at iTunes release notes you get the feeling they know what they are doing
iTunes 10.2.2 provides a number of important bug fixes, including:
• Addresses an issue where iTunes may become unresponsive when syncing an iPad.
• Resolves an issue which may cause syncing photos with iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to take longer than necessary.
• Fixes a problem where video previews on the iTunes Store may skip while playing.
• Addresses other issues that improve stability and performance.iTunes 10.2 came with several new features and improvements, including:
• Sync with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iOS 4.3.
• Improved Home Sharing. Browse and play from your iTunes libraries with Home Sharing on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iOS 4.3.
This has the feel that i am in the centre, yes in the middle of the product they are thinking of me and not on themselves.
We have to get the feeling of been cared for while we use the product, this is the secret sauce of the big brands.
Yes i am claiming there is merit to the Product Manager other then just setting the tone of the product and making sure features get released, he has the job of communication to the crowd and mediating the products achievements.
Especially in a startup when we are probably the developer and the product manager we need to keep this in mind when we write the release notes, the client is in the middle of the product and we need to communicate that thought.
We need to remember that releases as importent as they are, unless you are apple and i have to use your bloated itunes, need to be incremental if possible and small if can. a full release of the product is not always necessary if the product is architecture in a way its achievable.
So to all my Startup buddies i call, learn from the mistakes and improve.
Choosing a Content Management System
Nearly all websites these days use some sort of Content Management System (CMS). A CMS is a tool (usually web-based) that helps facilitate the process of creating, posting, organizing, and managing the content of a site.
Types of content you may find managed in a CMS include news stories, blog posts, photos, videos, events, and more