Portals, Collaboration and Content

The UUK Efficiency Conference is over, a very useful day, and I'm still in London for the Gartner Portals, Collaboration and Content Conference. When I first started coming to these the focus was very much on the technology, what portal technology to use, how to generate and store content etc. Looking at the programme for the next couple of days the emphasis has changed to much more about how software is used, especially for collaboration and the use of social media.

Will try and blog some of the sessions, probably in note form, whilst suffering withdrawal symptoms from missing Freshers Week in Sheffield. Am being kept in touch though by frequent updates through twitter and mail, and sounds like lots of good team work going on back there.

Given the emphasis on social media here, I was surprised there was no mention of using social media during the conference to interact with colleagues, and the hashtag wasn't pushed in the intro or displayed. Maybe Gartner needs to get social!

First session today was entitled Business gets Social, and in summary covered:

As individuals and professionals we have been quick to embrace the internet and a new generation of technologies born on the Web to change the way we communicate, connect, voice our opinions and concerns, or take decisions. We are changing faster as individuals than the organizations we do business with. As employees, customers, partners, consumers, citizens, or participants in open conversations, we expect those that employ us and those that want our business to engage with us differently. Businesses need to get social.

Here are my notes, a bit long, it was an hour of fast delivered information, but some interesting nuggets if you scan through it.

The many faces of social:
Public social networks started in the 70s and 80s, with The Well, The Source. Now Facebook, Twitter, Google plus. Difference is organisation, around content taxonomies in old ones, new ones organised around people.

Social behaviour is governed by the social behaviour of others. Social relationships are often based on trust and reputation. Social communication has moved form unspoken signals, to cave drawings, to storytelling, printing press, radio, Internet, twittering..... All forms of communication, just using different media.

Over last 30,000 years size of human brain has shrunk by 10%. One theory of why is we were less social then, and humans had to be more capable. As we live in closer proximity, people are smarter in a collective group, can rely on others. De-duplication of function.

Unconscious emotions, intuitions, biases, social norms and habits drive most human behaviour.can make assumptions about people based on 1/10 sec exposure to a face.

Social pervades our organisations. Within our teams, with peers, across the organisational structure, on the board. Social phenomena are an intrinsic part of everything we do. Social also transcends the enterprise. Networks of friends, family, etc which influence what we do. People respond to social cues and ignore organisational controls. Social collectives drive attitudes and purchasing decisions.

Social is not just new sharing and collaboration tools, or a communication channel. It also provides context - information, actions and agents. It drives relationships and reputation. Can't just use it like you'd use other media to broadcast messages.

Enterprise 2.0:
Bringing the social read/write web into the enterprise.
Austins Law. Internal hierarchical resistance to bringing social web into the enterprise. Based on number of employees and number of levels in hierarchy.

Where is social adoption fast:
Education at the top.
Youth using social tools and fuelling new employee demands
Smaller, more agile firms adopting quickly

Pace of Change:
1971 first microprocessor
1977 email
1981 pcs
1985 on line community The Well
1991 www
1995 Windows 95
1997 apple Newton
2001 Wikepedia
2002 Friendster
2003 Facebook
Then accelerates rapidly

Now we have things like The Pulse of the Nation. A Twitter sentiment analysis showing how happy are people according to tweets.

Behaviours are changing forever. Moving from personal productivity through knowledge distribution to collective empowerment. Is it revolution? Yes probably.

Rate of change is accelerating. Going to see new forms of social networking appearing with bigger impact. If you can't cope already, retire.

Customer relationship now about consumerisation of IT. Socially and digitally connected customers.
IT depts getting freaked out about it. "iPad provokes IT anxiety" recent headline. Companies buying them and then telling IT department to get them working.

Control is an illusion, get over it.
48% of companies ban access to Facebook during working hours. Completely pointless as everyone has smart phones etc. Like banning Internet back in 90s

Consumers more willing to complain than before, more willing to comment and talk about it, more likely to leave a bad company after one experience, social networks magnify these up.

And the point?
Recognise the massive power of people
Mass collaboration is the differentiator
You can engage with them, or ignore them. At your peril.

The future:

The Internet of Things, Embedded sensors, Image recognition, augmented reality, near field communication

Real time predicate analysis, big data, audio and video analysis, in memory computing

Natural user interaction, touch and gesture, media tablets, screen advances, natural language question answering

Life logging.
Ubiquitous cameras, wearable cameras, ultra cheap storage, instant upload to social media, Diminishing expectations of privacy.

Instrumentation and self quantification. Measuring blood pressure, Sperm count, etc. Uploading it and sharing it (hopefully with doctors..?)

Mobile devices are transformational. Smart phones will outship PCs in next couple of years.

Spend on apps rising rapidly. Question from consumers will be "Why can't this application be more like an app?" Prediction that soon we'll be spending more on apps from app stores than on big enterprise applications like SAP. And of course spend won't be in IT department.

How do we deliver apps through our portals? Portals will be much more personal.

Phew. That's it


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