Collaboration and Chess
One of the things I love about chess is that the variations of moves in a game are virtually endless. There are more possible moves in a chess game then there are atoms in the entire universe and more moves then there are seconds that have elapsed since the big bang. All of this, on a tiny 8×8 wooden [...]
Why Did Microsoft Acquire Yammer?
If you haven’t heard the news yet, Microsoft has officially announced that they acquired Yammer for 1.2 billion dollars. I’ve had several discussions around this over the past week or so, ever since the rumors first started circulating. It’s an interesting move and I think it makes sense. Yammer has just under a million paid [...]
With Yammer, Microsoft Begins Its Journey From Collaborative To Social
Confirming what we already knew, today Microsoft announced they are acquiring Yammer for $1.2 billion in cold cash. Here’s a blog post by David Sacks, the CEO of Yammer. Microsoft doesn’t report a revenue breakdown for their individual products but SharePoint is believed to be one of the fastest growing products with annual revenue of [...]
An architecture of participation
What happens when half of the world’s population lives in cities? When over three billion people are online? When there are more than 15 billion connected devices?
Old organizational models hit …
Is Adoption the New ROI of Collaboration?
This was the message that Yammer’s CTO and Co-Founder Adam Pisoni delivered at the Info360 Conference in NYC this morning. While I’m not sure that the title of the presentation translated into the actual content, the presentation itself was great; filled with useful stats, telling visuals, and relevant analogies. It’s actually a good thing that [...]
The Darwinian Workplace: Kill the Weak and Drain the Strong
Recently Harvard ran an article published by Serguie Netessine and Valery Yakubovich (from Insead and ESSEC) called “Getting Your Employees to Compete Against Each Other” and “The Darwinian Workplace.” Naturally this caught my attention. According to the article: “By using technology to create a form of the leaderboard typical in sales organizations, innovative firms are [...]
MIT Report on Social Business: What are Companies Really Doing?
The folks over at MIT teamed up with Deloitte to produce quite an interesting report around Social Business which included responses from almost 3,500 people around the world. The goal of the report was to shed some more light around what is happening in the world of social business; which includes both customers and employees. [...]
Collaboration Starts Before We Enter the Workforce
I don’t think anyone can really say when collaboration starts but I think we can all agree that it starts well before we enter the workforce. Most discussions around collaboration today have pertained to the enterprise, but we start to work with and communicate with people far earlier than that. Why don’t we talk about [...]
Collaboration in the Workplace: Where do You Start?
Let’s say you’re an executive at a larger size organization with around 100,000 employees and are looking to infuse your company with collaboration, where do you start? Now, I don’t mean starting in term of developing use cases or reviewing vendors. I mean, which department or group do you start with if you want to do [...]
Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at IBM
I had the opportunity to have several in-depth conversations with John Rooney (CIO of Technical Strategy) and Ethan McCarty (Senior Manager, Digital and Social Strategy) of IBM. The conversations resulted in our recently released case study on Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at IBM. Here is an overview of that case study. With over 420,000 employees in [...]
The Twelve Principles of Collaboration
1. Individual benefit is just as important as the overall corporate benefit (if not more important) Don’t focus on the overall corporate value and benefit when communicating collaboration to employees. Employees care about how this will impact them on an individual basis. How will this make their jobs and lives easier? 2. Strategy before technology [...]
New Study: Only 10% of Employees are Engaged
I don’t like reading things like this, I really don’t. But today I came across a report released by Modern Survey which found that we have a lot of work to do around engaging our employees. Modern Survey isn’t the first firm to report low engagement numbers, Gallup and Blessing White (along with others) have [...]
ROI of Collaboration Comes from Hindsight not Foresight
I just came back from a Yammer event in San Francisco where several of their customers (7-11, Deloitte, Westfield, and others) shared their experiences and insights from using the product. The question of ROI and measurement came up as it always does. The customer panel said something which I have been saying for quite some [...]
The Widgetized Enterprise
I think the delivery and pricing models for vendors is going to change, actually I think it has to change. Right now if you want deploy a collaboration vendor you get licenses for your employees and get access to their suite of features. If you have another vendor you like you do the same thing. But what [...]
Employee Collaboration to Benefit the Customer
A little while ago I wrote an article on how employee collaboration and customer collaboration initiatives solve different problems. I kept hearing about how one was more valuable or had a greater impact on the organization than the other but the truth was that they indeed addressed different needs for the organization. However just because [...]
