This week in links - week 20, 2009
"Banks Prepare Web 2.0 Onslaught" by David Potterton:
Banks are getting ready to provide new interactive services that incorporate concepts of Web 2.0, including internal collaboration communities, external blogging, and online portals incorporating rich Internet applications (RIAs)."How to Collaborate More Efficiently: Tackling That Mountain of E-Mail" by Ross Mayfield:
Yes, banks.
...many banks are already using Web 2.0 techniques to a significant extent behind their firewalls and with internal applications. In a recent survey we completed with 150 U.S. financial institutions, we found 25 percent of respondents were utilizing wikis internally; 20.7 percent were using internal blogs; and 16.7 percent were using some form of business/social networking.
All of these tools are starting to become vital, especially to large institutions where complex, geographically dispersed organizations have suffered from their size in terms of information sharing, collaboration, and efficiency.
The average number of corporate e-mails sent and received per person is expected to reach over 228 a day by 2010. Businesses lose $650 billion annually in productivity due to unnecessary e-mail interruptions. The problem is fundamental to what otherwise makes this technology great. The problem is largely behavioral, and new practices and technologies are emerging to solve it.
From a user's point of view, e-mail is what you could call a Push medium. Beyond your control, anyone can push an e-mail into your inbox at near-zero cost. By contrast, new Web 2.0 mediums emphasize Pull. You choose who or what you want to subscribe to, pull information to you when you want it, and unsubscribe when you want.
Ideally, we would use Push mediums for directed, private or time-sensitive communication, and use Pull for less formal, more public or less urgent communication. The point is, now there is a choice — so long as you can gain agreement on which to use for what and how to use it.
- Tactic No. 1: Gain agreement on internal e-mail practices
- Tactic No. 2: Move group e-mail to collaborative work spaces
- Tactic No. 3: Establish public protocols when possible
- Tactic No. 4: Reply to e-mail in public
- Tactic No. 5: Leverage special purpose social software
"Managing demand for a social software environment" by Gia Lyons:
Client: “I’ve got 50,000 employees who want to use this social business software, like, yesterday. How do I get them onboarded in a positive, managed way? It’s impossible, right?”
Not impossible, but it does take some meticulous planning and lots of work to do it right, if my successful customers are any indication.
Here’s an approach that has worked for some of my clients.
- Strategic People Collections - Identify one or two strategic collections of people and give them most of your love and attention.
- Advocates - In parallel, spend lots of love and attention on identified advocates, regardless of where they sit in your organization.
- Do-It-Yourselfers (DIYers) - Finally, develop a “self serve” approach for everyone who has no patience to wait until you get to them. These are the “let me do it myself.
"Seven Ways To Cut Costs with Enterprise 2.0" by Social Computing News Desk:
Enterprise social computing makes sense even in a down market given the hard cost reductions associated with even a modest investment, reports NewsGator.
"Despite, or even because of, the current economic difficulties, enterprise companies should see innovative social computing solutions as ever more important," NewsGator, the social computing company, asserts in a new white paper that the firm released recently.
NewsGator's first-hand experience working with Fortune 500 executives on Enterprise 2.0 projects has revealed seven ways, many it says are far from obvious, to more than recoup the cost of a social computing initiative. They include reducing the costs of email storage, content, printing, enterprise software, travel, employee on-boarding and enterprise application integration.
- Reducing email volume.
- Reducing premium content costs.
- Lower printing budgets.
- Reducing expensive seats of enterprise software.
- Trimming travel budgets.
- Increasing talent management ROI.
- Reducing enterprise application integration costs.