Optimizing in the Collaborative Age

Most people can identify with a common issue within their own organizations: the attempt to solve a problem before really, truly understanding the problem. We are wired to think tactically, to seek... read more

Breaking through the Coasean Floor

In James Q. Wilson's 1989 book Bureaucracy, Wilson repeatedly mentions Ronald Coase and his 1937 paper 'The Nature of the Firm' regarding the value of the hierarchical organization, in which Coase ... read more

Outlining Your Enterprise Social Collaboration Strategy

People prefer lists over lengthy manuals. You advise them that rolling out any technology should be a carefully planned exercise involving stakeholder discussions, testing, and clear alignment to b... read more

Governance, Culture, and Capability

No offense to all of my friends who work for consulting companies, but technical consultant are a dime a dozen. You'll find them on every social network, sharing their knowledge and professional ad... read more

Social is Not Like Facebook, It's Like eBay

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One of the most common requests from end users who are looking for better social interaction within the enterprise is to build "something that looks like Facebook." The idea is that people want fea... read more

The Turbulent Move to the Cloud

We can all see that our organizations are getting to be more mobile -- whether than means people doing more from their smart phones and tablets, or just that teams are more geographically dispersed... read more

Collaboration through Gamification

In a presentation to the Finland SharePoint User Group, Jussi Mori (@JussiMori) of Peaches Industries outlined some of the issues surrounding end user adoption and productivity on any collaborative... read more

The Intersection of SharePoint Metadata, Social, and Productivity

One of the most popular presentations I give at various SharePoint events around the world attempts to illustrate the correlation of metadata, the increasingly prevalent social computing tools we u... read more

Focusing Too Much on the Future

When my company is nearing a new product release, there's this funny little dance between product management and the sales organization that is fairly common within product and service companies. W... read more

Thoughts on Automation of your Social Experience

"A positive customer experience can create a brand advocate who shares the experience with their network of family and friends. And it’s not just the network effect; studies show that customers who... read more

Is Social Collaboration a Disruptor?

According to Wikipedia, "disruptors are employed by several alien species in the Star Trek series, including Romulans, Klingons, Breen, Cardassians, Iridians and Orions in their personal and milita... read more

Preventing Productivity "Leakage"

How productive are your end users? We all have this idea running through our minds about what productivity means, and whether or not we think our organizations are good at getting the most out of o... read more

EIM, ECM, ERM, KM, Collaboration = Confusion

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I had a conversation with a brother in law a few years back about academia, and the seemingly overwhelming need to pontificate on every thought, every idea, every possible variation of and argument... read more

Force-Feeding Taxonomy to the Enterprise

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While presenting at last year's Taxonomy Bootcamp (a KMWorld event) in Washington DC, I was able to attend a number of sessions on information architecture and taxonomy development given by people ... read more

SharePoint Wins with the ECM Ecosystem

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I started a conversation with my friend and ECM expert Chris Riley a few months back (Is SharePoint 2010 Really Ready for ECM?) in which we explored some of the enterprise content management capabi... read more

Augmenting, Bridging, and FOAF Networking

While on the road this past week meeting with various partners and technologists at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, coupled with recent news around Microsoft's acquisition of Yammer and... read more

Measuring an Employee's Influence Is Not So Simple

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I've been asked a dozen times to  spend more time on Salesforce, our company's current CRM platform, and using its social utility, Chatter, to socialize with the extended sales and operations teams... read more

Bridging the Echo Chamber

In his paper "The Social Origin of Good Ideas" (University of Chicago), Ronald Burt states: "a dense social network of people in the same department (and who were therefore likely to be per... read more

Measuring Influence Is Hard

"The problem with measuring social media through last-click attribution is that social channels tend to engage people at the top of the sales funnel rather than right before they buy."   ... read more

Augmenting Your Social Capital

Many organizations underestimate the cultural learning curve associated with implementing more social collaboration tools. People are becoming more familiar with consumer-based social tools, yes, b... read more

Improving Dialog within Your Company

In a post on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network by Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind, the authors shared the results of a small survey they conducted focusing on the high rate of change in th... read more

Abstracting Your KPI Perspective

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I was in the train station in Nuremberg Germany last week, watching the thousands of people bustling through the main corridor, arriving or departing through the one main passageway, and reflecting... read more

How Revolutionary is Social?

We've all sat in a meeting or overheard someone talking on the train or while at lunch about the latest, greatest social technology, and about how it has changed the way they do their work, or what... read more

The Need for the User Profile

How often do you update your online profile? Maybe the bigger question is: how many online profiles do you maintain? For me, my primary profiles are Facebook and LinkedIn. Facebook doesn't feel muc... read more

The Unanswerable Question

One of the most-asked SharePoint questions has absolutely nothing to do with technology: How do we get started? Whether I am presenting on managed metadata and taxonomy, social computing, governanc... read more

Activity Streams Are Not the Killer App

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Expert blogger David Lavenda wrote an interesting piece for the Fast Company blog which essentially paints activity streams as the email-killer. While Twitter provides a sort if activity stream, be... read more

The Power of Decentralization

Back in 2001, I joined a venture capital-backed startup to help design and deploy a hosted collaboration platform for high-tech manufacturing companies and their extensive ecosystems of design and ... read more

Just Be Genuine

One of the more difficult aspects of the new world of marketing in a social computing paradigm is throttling your communications. Twitter is fleeting. Unless you've hit on a specific hashtag or key... read more

Increased Productivity Means Focusing on Adoption

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Increasing productivity without increasing demand is part of the problem in our current recession, and if you look closely at the data, has been an issue with the US economy for more than a decade.... read more

The New Normal of Social Sidling

Remember that great episode of Seinfeld where Elaine was plagued by an annoying officemate who seemed to always appear at the right moment to mistakenly get credit for work he did not do, and was g... read more

Stop Complaining and Improve Your Search

Upload a single document into a brand new system, and search is going to be fairly simple. One document, one possible search result. Easy. Likewise, upload dozens, hundreds, thousands of docume... read more

Contextualization is the End Goal in KM

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I found myself in Vancouver BC last night, having dinner with my good friends Sherman Woo (@spsherm), Michal Pisarek (@michalpisarek) and Paul Culmsee (@paulculmsee) talking about food, travel, Sha... read more

Quantity, Not Necessarily Quality, Matters

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I overheard two friends in as many days making the same comments about their social networks -- they were in the process of shutting down their networks, decreasing the number of people they connec... read more

The Role of the Business Analyst in SharePoint

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One of the most underappreciated (in my estimation) roles in IT is the Business Analyst, and yet it should be one of the most critical functions in your organization. Within many companies, a BA is... read more

Social Pays It Forward

There is great value in the immediate, real-time connections made within the various consumer-based social platforms. Within the enterprise, however, the greater value is realized over time.   ... read more

Understanding Cultural Requirements

I saw a wi-fi placard in a hotel recently and laughed that it still touted the service as being "50 times faster than dialup." I can't remember the last time I even owned a computer with a modem, m... read more

The SharePoint Assembly Line

Everyone knows the story of Henry Ford, the Model T automobile, and the advances made to productivity and mass production by utilizing a revolutionary process called the assembly line, where instea... read more

User-Generated Taxonomies Will Make or Break SharePoint

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The less control or governance you put in place over a system, the more likely end users are to embrace that system – and make a mess of it. That's the problem with cheap (free), web-based tools wi... read more

Is Taxonomy Social?

I did an online presentation a couple months back for a user group, sharing some strategies for developing a strong metadata taxonomy. One of the participants reached out recently with an interesti... read more

Evolution of the Enterprise App

Social Informatics is the study of information and communication tools in cultural and institutional contexts. It is a broad, inter-disciplinary analysis of usage patterns that spans sociology, ant... read more

The Value of Social in the Enterprise

It's easy to get caught up in the movement toward social applications for the enterprise. End users are driving it. They expect it. So much about the way that we connect, the way we interact with o... read more

Is SharePoint Becoming Middleware?

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In his AIIM post entitled The Future of SharePoint (and Windows 7 Phone) Jeff Shuey predicted "that there will be a boom in solutions that look nothing like SharePoint does today. SharePoint will r... read more

Insert Taxonomy Here #TaxoBC

In her presentation this morning at the KMWorld Taxonomy Bootcamp taking place in Washington DC, Marjorie Hlava, President of Access Innovations, claimed the number one problem that most organizati... read more

Re-Thinking the Wisdom of Crowds

In his book "The Wisdom of Crowds" author James Surowiecki begins with a story of British scientist Francis Galton attending a country fair in which he was able to show that 800 guesses on the weig... read more

Taking the next steps in social productivity

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The problem with social computing is that it's just such a huge waste of time, and drives absolutely no value to the business. At all. Period. Nope. None. Well…..Ok, sort of. Alright, maybe I was t... read more

I don't believe in "SharePoint governance"

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There is this crazy idea out there that there is somehow a defined model (loosely defined, at best) for governance within SharePoint. By that I mean a generally accepted view of what it is, who own... read more

The Future of LOB App Integration

In an earlier life, I was issued a number of cards and keys to various buildings, systems, and devices. I spent a few years as a Technical Project Manager, largely working in the business intellige... read more

The Rise of the Social Revolution

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"the social business revolution is starting to take hold in companies. These solutions are starting to empower  individuals, enabling them to challenge traditional hierarchies and bypass communicat... read more

The Need for Change Management

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There is a natural progression in the growth and development of a software development team or start-up. As the problems and your solutions get more and more complex, the tools you require to manag... read more

Tapping Into Kevin Bacon

The vast majority of us are plugged into the mainstream social networking platforms, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and the newest member of the club, Google+. But are you leveraging your net... read more

SharePoint sprawl, but with good intentions

I was born and raised in northern California, and have seen some dramatic changes to the state in the past 40 years. Like many other parts of the country (and in other population centers around the... read more

Governance semantics

"It is easy to get caught up in the language surrounding governance. There are hundreds of books written on the subject, and no shortage of opinions on the Web. At the end of the day, every organiz... read more

Governance: overused, misunderstood, flavor of the month?

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"Governance might be one of the most overused terms in the SharePoint community. Governance exists at many levels in different organizations. There is corporate governance, legal governance, projec... read more

It's about business productivity, not server maintenance

When I moved my family from Northern California (born and raised in the east bay), the first comment my older kids made was "Dad, there aren't any baseball fields!" Both passionate about baseball, ... read more

A Tweet is a record

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One of the questions that came out of last week's #ECMjam resonated with me: Are tweets records? I was on the road, occasionally able to watch the conversation on my mobile phone, but unable to jum... read more

The Need for Network Renewal

In a previous post (The Power of Circles), I compared one of the most compelling new features of Google+ --circles-- to a Harvard Business Review article (A Smarter way to Network, Cross and Thomas... read more

When should you bring in end users?

There are many topics that can act as a lightning rod in a conversation. Religion. Politics. Tastes great, less filling. People dig in, want to be heard, and can talk on and on for hours. The same ... read more

SharePoint as an IT service offering

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At the Puget Sound SharePoint User Group (#PSSPUG) meeting last night, Owen Allen (@owenallen) led a panel discussion on SharePoint as an IT service offering with several prominent members of the S... read more

The Power of Circles

I was reading the July/August 2011 edition of Harvard Business Review and came across an article by Rob Cross and Robert Thomas entitled 'A Smarter Way to Network' in which the authors share their ... read more

Is SharePoint 2010 Really Ready for ECM?

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Co-authored with fellow AIIM blogger and ECM expert Chris Riley (@rileybeebs)   This is an interesting question, and the answer really depends on who you ask. Microsoft has made great strid... read more

In SharePoint, Social Tools = Personal Productivity

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Many companies, whether considering further investment in their SharePoint 2007 deployments or planning upgrades to SharePoint 2010, are reviewing their social media strategies. Users are chomping ... read more

Yet another SharePoint governance article?

There has been an interesting dialog running through the SharePoint twitterverse today, focusing on an increasingly common theme of the role of governance within SharePoint projects. Check out #spa... read more

Social as a Search Layer

I saw this tweet come across the interwebs this morning and think that it perfectly encapsulates the level of dialog surrounding social computing:   "The message and mechanics are absolutel... read more

SharePoint is a User Platform

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There's been an interesting theme running through the blogs and Twitter conversations of late identifying a shift, perhaps, of content and focus around the SharePoint platform, moving from IT Pro a... read more

How to kill innovation in SharePoint, in five easy steps

Alright, I admit it: I borrowed my post title from a great article by Jason Hiner, Editor in Chief of TechRepublic, in which he provides guidance on the habits to avoid if innovation is in any way ... read more

New to the AIIM Expert Community

As the newest member (for now) of the AIIM expert community, I thought I’d introduce myself and share some of my technology and business background to give readers a good perspective of the topics ... read more