Social media engagement and student innovators

Final round up for today, two sessions.

1 Using social media for engagement with students

See them as not just receiving content, but as collaborators and creation of content. Engagement is a dialogue and a conversation.
Not just engagement with students, but staff, local community, the media, prospective students, parents...


Top tips.

• Don't bark. Don't just get information out. Has to be a conversation
• Build relationships.
• Learners congregate in diverse spaces. Not just Facebook and Twitter. Snapchat, tumblr etc all popular. It's not about us. Need to be inclusive and have conversations where they want to have them.
• Provide a quick response. Turn poor customer service into bad.
• Collect data. You need metrics to inform your service and your planning.
• Take a strategic approach. Look at the different channels and how they fit together.
• Support your staff. Can't base social media strategy on one person being available.

Article from the speakers in latest JISC Inform which is worth a read.

As part of the session we used a neat little bit of software to share ideas about how we could use social media to enhance an open day. Never used todaysmeet before, but looked as if it could be useful.


2 Summer of Student Innovation

I've blogged about this before, so won't bore you again, but it was great today to meet and talk to some of the students whose ideas are being developed as part of this programme. They had stands in the exhibition, and also took part in a panel session about how the initiative had gone, and what they'd learned from it. You can see the 6 projects which have been taken into productions here.

The new programme has just launched, so if you are a student who has a great idea for how technology can enhance the student experience, and want to get £5,000 to develop it, go here and enter.


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The Social Business

Another session today was on how social business is changing the way organisations work by Stuart McRae from IBM

More companies now use social media internally than externally.
We are entering the post PC era. Apple selling 100m iPads in 2013. Usage shifting from creation at desks to consumption on the move
McKinsey estimates that social technologies could raise productivity in some areas by 20%
Driven by 4 disruptive mega trends. Social, mobile, cloud, analytics. (Now, where have I heard that before....)
Increasingly influential and vocal customers. We can't just listen to them. Need to interact and lead them,
Growing demand for 24/7 and mobile connectedness. People collaborate on the move.
If you want the best talent and employees, have to give them a working environment which gives them the best experience and productivity.

A Social Business strategy should be driven by the above challenges
It should enable the workforce to work more effectively, increase productivity and improve employee satisfaction
It should also produce exceptional customer experience, customer engagement and customer delight!

Primarily a culture issue, not technology.
Need to encourage employees to collaborate and not compete
Collaborate with partners to serve customers better
Engage employees in conversations with customers

Social businesses deliver better results by empowering their people to perform better and to serve their customers better.

Need to empower employees, even when it requires working across organisations
Corporate IT has to go away and become cloud based to achieve this.

20th century collaboration tools are no longer good enough. Eg email.
Email model vs social media model. With email everything is pushed to you, just in case you might need it. With the social media model you pull the information - when you need it, you can find it.

"It's not information overload, it's filter failure" , great quote from Clay Shirky

Encourage sharing of information, eg tweeting. Success comes from changing user behaviour, from "knowledge is power" to "knowledge sharing is rewarded".

Content needs to get away from being document centric. Move to online creation and collaboration with mobile device support. Focus on sharing.
Simplify the media. Focus on content and communication.
Make the content discoverable, use tags, social bookmarks. New generation of knowledge management.

Adoption is key to business success.

A thought provoking talk there's a lot more Information on this topic on his website.


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Leading a Controlled Revolution

Interesting case study from Schneider Electric about how they introduced a social enterprise program.

Big company, 150,000 employees in 100 countries. Introduced the programme to tap into the knowledge held by the employees, to connect to people. To make sure people are connected to each other, and connected to information.
IT department is a key player in the programme. Part of IT strategy is working smarter.

3 main objectives.
One window to the world of Schneider electric
Know what's happening around us
Bring collaboration to our line of work

Designed an enterprise wide social collaboration platform using Tibbr, and are building a collaborative and personalised employee portal. Integrating a collaboration layer, wikis, blogs etc. Will eventually integrate with business apps to create a desktop.

Deployed in a phased way using focused communities and locations, and influential teams. Trained them, showed them carefully how to get best out of solutions. Then let it spread out of pilot group, ie let it go viral. Eventually opened it up to whole company. Gone from 6000 users to 50,000. 70% of users return every week.

Three phases, connect, contribute, collaborate.
Connect- learn what a network is, understand how to use it, observe conversations.
Contribute - use new media to broadcast content, post new content, engage in 2 way dialogue, launch and participate in conversation, develop working relationships
Collaborate - really use the tools to collaborate across teams to support business objectives of the organisation. It's all about adding value.

Using it for IT support, users posting questions on social platform instead of going to Helpdesk, crowd sourcing solutions.
Also being used to share information on vendors, to get help with engineering problems.
Communities are being formed on the platform, >100. Communities of experts, of practice, of interests. Has caused big culture change. Comms used to be top down, now much more bottom up, and much more interactive. Comms team not happy at first, didn't like concept of comments etc, wanted to keep top down communication. Have changed now :-)

Some challenges
Technology - fix the basics, check the quality of product before release, have clarity on technology landscape, have a roadmap for future, develop apps in house if cant get functionality from vendors.

Collaborators
Leadership involvement is necessary - actual participation, not sponsorship.
Set up communities, communication and training, celebrate successes
Is a space called Cafe Schneider for non work related conversations.


Good presentation. Glad our comms team aren't like theirs :-)


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Digital Gaga

Next session is from Jamie Anderson, described as a management guru in the programme. session is on Doing Business in the Digital World, Myths and Realities.

Case study about customer engagement using a brand which has risen to be a global brand in only 3 years - Lady Gaga! Fabulous animation showing her success. She has:
40.5m twitter followers
50.5m Facebook followers

At a time when music industry in decline. Done it all by understanding customer engagement. Have to stand out and be different, but also have to be a brilliant musician. Also have to be connected. Need a brand. Used to hum Queens's Radio Gaga so given name (brand) of Lady Gaga at 18.
Then worked on look, art performance on stage.

Launched as $4m start up project. No record contract etc
Thought differently. Singles usually 3 minutes because that's what fitted on a vinyl single.
Couldn't get radio time, so went straight to video, on YouTube. Length of video depends on attention span. 7m 47secs optimum time apparently,
Changes her look weekly. Keep customers interested.

There are 4 pillars of engagement in digital world demonstrated by Lady Gaga:

1. Excitement. Have to excite customers with services

Must have great product.

Also need to be known. Connectors in music industry used to be DJs. Now new ones especially music bloggers. So, they targeted influential music bloggers, and generated 10s millions hits on YouTube. That lead to her videos being viewed millions of times.
Now has 2.2bn downloads. For free.
Her debut tour was 200 concerts raising $227.4 revenue.

Forming a community is very important. Use social media for mass intimacy. Only person with password to Lady Gaga account is Lady Gaga. Authenticity is hugely important. She retweets, answers, thanks.
Gets involved eg with anti bullying campaigns. That leads to....

2 Emotional connections

Give things that are special, that other people don't get. Eg telling twitter followers about perfume launch.
Picture of her without make up caused huge spike in sentiment analysis. So, has done it again.
Take control eg Daily Mail published picture of her looking fat, tweeted about her problems with weight control.

Built her own social media platform. Little monsters. Have to ask to become part of it......

3 Exclusivity

Information just for you. Makes you feel special.

Gaganomics. Given away more than 2bn free downloads to sell 23m albums and 91 m singles. Piracy still rife but you don't steal from your friends.

Now, streaming (Spotify) is changing download market. Producing huge amount of data and analytics. Using analytics to track customers behaviour, likes etc.

4 eCommerce
How do you connect with customers?. How do they connect with you? Need to be whoever your customers want you to be. Lady Gaga has been with iTunes, Amazon, Spotify.

Excitement, Emotional connectivity, Exclusivity. eCommerce - get them right and you'll get customer engagement.

Brilliant presentation, and nice to hear some Lady Gaga music and watch some videos. This blog won't have done it justice, but interesting to see a case study using a musician.







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Friendsurance

Next up was a case study discussion with the founder of Friendsurance

Friendsurance is insurance as a social business. With standard insurance, much of cost of premium goes into administration and marketing.
With Friendsurance you insure each other, anything exceeding what can be afforded by the peer network goes to traditional insurance company. Much lower admin, marketing and small claims costs.
First viral product in financial sector.
Very old traditional product been modernised by use of modern technology including social networks.

Innovation very important to them, especially for improving the customer experience.
Innovation should not be used to make things easier for us, but should always be done to make things easier for the customer.

The user guides everything about how they operate.
Use hackathons and disruptive ideas to innovate. Sometimes developers will say something will take 4/5 months. Intern in a hackathon solves it in 2/3 days. Doesn't matter that it was an intern not a developer.

Have to partner with traditional insurance companies, but very difficult. Different timescales. Friendsurance does all the magic! Don't use the IT departments form the insurance companies, they are too traditional. Friendsurance employ people who think differently.
Makes use of customers' existing social networks including Google Plus, LinkedIn, Facebook.

Interesting example of a start up company using a different way of working (although wasn't Lloyds originally friends?)



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Becoming a Social Organisation

Opening keynote this morning is on Becoming a Social Organisation, by the author of this book:




Got a couple of copies if anyone in Sheffield wants to borrow it.

Organisations deploying Social media often fail. It's the "provide and pray" logic. Provide the software, and pray that people collaborate. But no point implementing tools if you have no idea what your supposed to do with them. Few managers know how to turn potential collaborations into meaningful results.

A social organisation is one that applies mass collaboration to solving their business problems. Resources are applied to innovate, collaborate and achieve results.

In a good social organisation, it's OK to ask questions, to share experiences and trade ideas and experiences. Not related to organisational structure.
Some mass collaboration behaviours:
Collective intelligence - all of us are smarter than any one of us.
Flash coordination - SWAT teams for complex problems
Expertise location - finding the right people regardless of where they are
Interest Cultivation - bringing together birds of a feather
Emergent structures - building an understanding of how things work in reality
Relationship leverage - reaching the masses interactively

It's about mass collaboration, not technology. Mass is the important word. Has to be the whole community. Has to be a purpose, a why.
Social media, community and purpose come together to enable mass collaboration.
For effective collaboration, has to be a cycle of engagement including contribution, feedback and review to encourage more contribution.




Purpose is key. Has to be a reason why you would volunteer your time, experience, attention, energy and ideas? We don't pay people to engage in social media.

Have to guide and nurture mass collaboration. Need just enough structure. Have to watch and nurture, make sure participation is appropriate. Make sure it's achieving it's purpose, but the most important thing is to take the ideas out of the collaborative community and make them work in the organisation.

Is a social media assessment kit on the web to see how ready you are as an organisation.

Have just taken it, and we have a "forging" attitude. I think that's good!



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Anything, Anytime, Anywhere

Here I am at the Gartner Portal, Content and Collaboration Summit. Opening welcome is slick as always. Covered the most important interconnected forces around today:
Information, Mobile, Cloud and Social.
Combine to create an "always on" era.

First keynote follows on from this and is entitled Always On. Anything, Anytime, Anywhere. I remember going to a SUN ERC conference about 12 years ago where I heard that phrase coined for the first time.

Industrialisation of IT does not mean the death of the IT professional, but frees us up to do more interesting things.

Picture of a typical CIO. Looking out over the horizon. Or, not sure what it is or how it got there.




CIO technology priorities at the moment include cloud and mobile, and are looking for customer experience to drive innovation. This latter one is a big change from previous surveys. IT more than ever now has to be part of the business, cannot be separate.

Social computing not very high on CIO list of priorities. (NB, it is on mine :-)). But, the only way we will deliver solutions to our business problems is by collaborating with each other.

How do we put the Nexus of the 4 forces, Information, Mobile, Cloud and Social, to work? Things we should be looking at to build really cool collaborative apps:
Image and position capture
Integration into the social network through APIs
Tagging
Approval workflow
Text and natural language analytics

Some other scenarios:
Second screen
enhance real works with virtual overlay. Eg watching a film with iPad on your knee to interact and look things up
Or meta data over a sports event.

Healthcare
Health management of the whole individual based on the individual's interactions inside and outside of a doctors office. People are more honest with their friends than their doctors. Big privacy and ethical issues of course.

People are driving a convergence of information, social interaction, mobility and cloud. Using multiple devices and applications of their choosing people connect with each other and interact with a wealth of information. Seamlessness of the experience relies on underlying cloud infrastructure.
People expect this interactivity in all of their roles, ie personal and work.
BYOD will be the norm. Followed by bring your own applications.
We used to talk about rogue developers. Now we have citizen developers.
We have to give up some control, in order to have some control.

People are drivers. Customers switch between open and closed environments, apps, devices etc, but all they see is the glass. They don't know, nor want to know what goes on behind it. User manuals barely exist now. Things just work. Or they should. Big challenge for our architectures which are often complex and based on legacy technologies.

What is a portal now? Integration of different apps? But iPads do that without a portal. Tying to solve problems in wrong place in the architecture. Too close to the glass.
Existing architectures are usually conceived in isolation and are techno centric not user centric.

Empowered individuals are untethered, work anywhere on anything. Have access to great design, technology and app choices, and will quickly discard apps that they don't like and move on. They aggregate and integrate information. They will engage with technology if it provides value to them.

Information is key to good apps. From multiple sources, historical and in real time, specific to the individual, relative to the individual's social connections, informed by their behavioural patterns. Interesting problems to work on.

Is our view of enterprise content management in our organisations informed by the above, or are we still document pushers?

Interaction across devices is important. We all use different devices for different experiences. Eg iPads for consuming content, laptops for creating. Therefore consistent state and data access is vital.

Lots of architecture implications for everything covered in this talk.
We need to embrace a post modern architecture,
Think in terms of an ecosystem. Mutual and interdependent. Co-creative, innovative and collaborative.
SOA is important.
APIs are the skeleton key, design APIs for your consumers
Choose from the range of app development tools
Legacy modernisation is the elephant in the room. It's required but not easy.
Architect for the Cloud.
Evaluate IaaS and PaaS providers
Understand the business. Build things that add value.

We need to channel our inner anthropologist, sociologist and ethnographer
It's not just about technology anymore!



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Social Media in CiCS

Had a good meeting today discussing how we as a department use social media, and how we might use it to engage more with students and staff.  Blogging is something some individual members of the department do. Some, like me, use commercial products like Blogger or Wordpress and have them hosted off-site, some use our in-house blogging software, uSpace, based on a Jive product. Some blog regularly, some less often.  What we haven't had before is a departmental blog, so we've changed what used to be a static news page on our web pages into a blog. So much better - it's easy to update, we can include pictures, links and videos, and, more importantly we can collect feedback in the comments field.

We've been using Twitter in the department for a few years, and have learned a lot of lessons. We've gone from just posting status updates, to being much more interactive - asking questions, looking for feedback and responding to comments. We're now considering whether we should have a separate feed for the status updates or not. Our intention is to make the main CiCS account much more interactive. 

Whilst Twitter is extremely popular, the main social network used by students is still Facebook, and we've finally taken the plunge and set up a page. Early days, and we haven't formally launched or advertised it yet, but are optimistic that this will prove to be another good channel to interact with students. A few years ago we felt that students were quite protective of their social space and didn't want us to invade it, but the evidence now is that if it is carefully handled and targeted - and the change to "liking" pages rather than having to be "friends" or in a group has made a big difference here - then students will engage. The University made a lot of use of Facebook for our new intake of students this year, and it was very successful - it was good to see a peer network developing as students helped each other, and that's what we want to encourage.

Of course, I'm really supportive of all of this and think it's definitely the way to go, but there are issues we'll have to deal with -  how do we log and collect feedback, especially if faults etc are raised with us,  how do we link it to our problem analysis, and how do we resource it? We also have to be acutely aware that everything we post is available to the world. None of this is insurmountable, especially with the good teamwork we have here.

And then of course there's Google + on the horizon.....

Privacy and Publicity

The keynote today was from Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft, and was about privacy issues faced by young people using social media. Excellent thought provoking talk. The following are notes of the main points, haven't got time to turn it into a proper post.

Privacy is a complex issue to young people, especially around social media. Its about the freedom to control a situation.

Why do young people participate in social media?. It becomes an absolute social necessity. The equivalent of the mall. You go to see and be seen. Failure to participate means you're excluded from a lot of social culture. Facebook the dominant player. Ynd people tell you that you're expected to be on Facebook. If not, you'll be asked why and you'd better have a good reason.

Facebook, text messaging are the main ones at he moment, but will change. There will be shifts and transitions. Already are niche sites eg tumblr, twitter. But what drives particpation is the ability to be there because everyone else is there. Theres a constant flow of information.

Concept of the networked public. Spaces that are constructed through networked technologies as well as the imagined communities formed by people coming together.
People want to be in a public, but don't want everything they've said to be public for the world to see.

Teens recognise that a fundamental change is happening. Things are becoming public by default, private by effort.
Need to make choices over what to make private. It's easier to make things public than private. Eg post all photos, tag, wait for people to complain before remove them. Share first, take down later.

But there's still private communication in all of these networks. People choose what to make private. Most is public. Why bother hiding it?

Password sharing very high, probably about 50%. Yng people say it's a way of feeling connected. Very difficult for us to understand!

Young people are learning about different audiences. Eg employers. They're learning, put things up, take them down. Unexpected audiences are a real challenge to them.
Quotes from teenager: " I wouldn't go to my teachers page and look at their stuff, so why should they look at mine"
"Facebook is for friends, not for my mum, why doesn't she understand that"
"Everyone disappears after the mom post".
They need parents to understand social boundaries - Just because it's accessible doesn't mean you're welcome.

Interesting strategies that young people use to achieve privacy:
Asserting social norms. Eg status updates directed at different people. Get cross when the wrong people comment. Use different type of language when addressing different audiences.
Use technology. Eg block certain people from seeing certain things.
White walling. Log in everyday and remove posts from day before. Make Facebook real time.
Deactivate accounts when not being used. When not logged in, can't see anything. Becomes synchronous.
Hide the meaning of things by usingg references eg song lyrics that your friends will understand but your family won't. Access to meaning separated from access to content.

Social media has made things more visible. Lot of experimentation with how to make things private. Kids are not inherently digital natives. Not born knowing how to handle these issues.

We need to know about these issues so that we can help them navigate the complexity.
We can ask the critical questions to make people think and reflect and see things from a different perspective. Not judgemental ones.

Huge challenges we have to deal with in terms of giving students opportunities, but deal with privacy issues. Can't just expose them. We have to put down frameworks to help them. We have to understand the complexities of privacy and publicity in order to help them.

Flexible working and social media at Virgin Media

Next session from Virgin Media on a pilot they're undertaking about flexible working and social media

They have 20k employees in 800 UK sites. High amount of travel and entertainment expenditure. Very email centric. Lot of voice conferences.

A number of drivers for change including cost savings in travel and hotels. Also improving the experience for employees and improving the way people interact with each other. Their property footprint is high with only 45% utilisation so efficiencies needed there.

Obviously another driver is the trend towards consumerisation of IT. The best toys are now at home and everyone wants to use them, especially the execs with their tablet devices. The consumer experience is being defined by Apple and Google. Bring your own device, any device any time, and
enterprise apps need to look like consumer apps.

So, they Introduced Quad, social software from Cisco, and WebEx for video conferencing

In space terms, this has enabled a shift to shared spaces, more breakout spaces, less offices and cubicles. Wireless everywhere. Also removed loneliness of home working. They've seen a huge increase in flexible and mobile working.

Annual benefits have seen £5m savings in property and £2m savings in expenses.
Big increase in productivity, as staff have more time with less travel. Staff satisfaction has improved as has their work life balance.

There were one off costs in terms of infrastructure and licences, but these have been recovered.

Introduction of WebEx, especially video has made a huge difference to the organisation. Used for training, troubleshooting, meetings, working from home discussions.

Quad has created the opportunity for serendipity. Filtered, relevant, personalised information comes to you. The demise of the inbox. You find stuff you didn't know you needed to know. Also enables conversations between people that are previously unknown to each other. New relationships have been built.
Enables discovery of skills in people, and the unlocking of the power of workforce. Can ask question across the organisation or in a community. Very good search capability.

Good example of a major network outage. 1 engineer in a data centre used quad to find the engineer who knew who to fix it. He was in a hospital waiting room, luckily with his laptop. With the use of quad, WebEx and remote log in, he fixed it.

Virgin Media are currently running a pilot with 1000 people. Good take up, lots of WebEx sessions initiated from Quad. Lots of communities formed.

They've also seen evidence of the social software rule, which I'd never heard before of 1:9:90. 1 content creator 9 commenters 90 lurkers, apparently exemplified by Twitter.

The lessons they learned:
Preparation is key. Understand the business. Do lots of research. Have clear goals and objects, and know what you're measuring
Won't be successful without board level sponsorship and participation
Breadth and depth of Quad gave users choice of platforms which is essential.




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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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A Digital Day Out

Today I was supposed to be attending a conference on digital and social media in the public sector, but last week it got cancelled. As many of the attendees already had trains/hotels booked, someone suggested we should meet anyway. Very quickly a venue and sponsor was found, speakers who had been going to speak at the conference volunteered their time, and a Digital Day Out was born! I had a horrendous trip down which took nearly 5 hours, and involved getting on 5 trains. 1 cancelled, 2 got me to Doncaster, 3 got evicted from, 4 broke down near Stevenage, 5 got me to London.

The event was sponsored by Cisco who kindly provided a venue and lunch, but ironically no wifi. The venue was fantastic, right next to the O2 arena on the Digital Peninsula, which is being developed as a home for the digital industries.
The view from the 11th floor was very distracting. We could see the Olympic Village and Canary Wharf, and I learnt that there are plans for a cable car from the peninsula across the river!The event was for the public sector, and consisted mainly of people from local authorities with a smattering of others from health, education, museums etc. The format was informal with a number of presentations and a lot of round table discussion. Topics mainly covered included the use of digital and social media in a public sector organisation.

Rather than write a detailed account of each session, here's a list of the main topics and the things I thought were interesting:

Presentation from Cisco on BIG, The British Innovation Gateway. Read about it here.

Kulveer Ranger, the Mayor of London's special advisor for all things digital. (that must be an interesting job working for Boris), spoke about data.
Big issue when oyster card first introduced, people worried that data would be used to would track them, so it was locked down. Fast forward 10 years, data is much more open. People want to see their own data, and use it.

The digital world is immediate, no time for reflection. Things can be tweeted before you've had chance to think about it. Or before you've said it's confidential.

Blurring of digital identities. Do we have a public one and a personal one, or just one?

Good debate on IT skills in children/ students. Do we need to teach them IT ie how to use a spreadsheet? How does a computer work? How is a game developed? Or not?

Should we still be having conferences about technology? Is it not more about how to use it?

Emer Coleman from the London Data Store talked about making public data available. Its all about trust, and risk. All about risk. Very difficult to dermic what the public are interested in. public are interested in. Best to release everything, see what happens. Are risks. Have to have strong leadership, that will back you if you make a mistake.

Ken Eastwood talked about Public Sector Nomads. The way we work has changed due to technology. Can we use it to change more? Usually small incremental change - the Senior management get a Blackberry or iPad and can get their email. Should we look at a more strategic step change.
There's evidence that changes to working can give benefits in work life balance, higher motivation, improved productivity. There's also reduced
accommodation costs with hot desking and touch down, home based and flexible working, as well as the environmental benefits of less travel and congestion. Bring on Work 2.0?

How can you be an elected representative in 21st century and not use social media. But, can get you into trouble with misjudged tweets. More blurred boundaries. Boundaries blurred.

Many organisations still ban use of consumer devices, some lock down Blackberries so that you can't access the Internet on them, many still seriously restrict Internet access on desktops. Madness!!,

If you're not a digital organisation in 5 years time then either you won't exist or the world will have changed around you so much you'll struggle to survive.

Things must change because we have no money. We have to create different, better, cheaper services.

Personal use of social media by councillors can drag public institutions into the 21st century.

Is there a problem with information overload? Should public sector be involved in directing people to web sites, apps etc. Can they be trusted intermediaries? Dangerous to do that?

Social media is a great tool for the public sector to engage with the community, but policies vary. For example the Home Office use it, but in a mainly broadcast way rather than interactive. they have a YouTube channel,, but comments disallowed. And their staff can't look at it because media streaming's not allowed on their network. Neither is java, flash, access to social media ..... Serious concerns about security or paranoia?

Rav Chambers from Be Inspired Films. Good talk on using video in social media. Once video loaded to somewhere - Google, vimeo,YouTube - can be shared with others with one click. All free. Cost of putting an add on Tv about £30k.
YouTube is the second most used search engine, first choice for younger generation.
Main barriers are cost, (resources and time), skills and confidence.
Important to know why you're using video, and check at end if you achieved aim.
Money isn't everything. Initial set up doesn't have to be expensive.
A camera isn't a Hoover, it's a gun. That's why it's called shooting

Social media has democratised society. 400m people visited twitter last month. A phenomenal communication tool.

Third sector have had to adopt social media to survive.
Democratisation of information through social media.
Importance of serendipity in discovering information. Don't just stick to trusted networks. Cross pollination also important.

So, all in all, a good digital day out. We in the public sector can learn from each other, and it's good to talk and share information.

I also got a bonus trip round Ravensbourne, which will be the subject of a separate post.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

LEAN BBQs

Exciting day yesterday as we began our journey to becoming LEAN. And no, I don't mean a mass diet. We're using some excellent help from the St Andrew's LEAN unit to help us understand the way it works, and we're running through two different processes - Maintenance of programme regulations and student computer account registration. Hopefully after that we'll be able to demonstrate the benefit to the University and get some commitment to take it further forward.

This morning we had an interesting telephone call with a Gartner analyst about introducing release management into our cycle and that led to a discussion about how some of our processes including change management and project management fit together. Lots to think about.

I'm also involved in planning a session for our Internal Communications Network on using social media  - looking at the pros and cons of using blogs, Twitter etc in a work setting. I have plenty of examples of both, but the pros definitely outweigh the cons.

And today is our departmental BBQ - the last one in the picturesque setting of our car park. Hopefully by this time next year we'll be in our new building with a proper garden with grass and everything. Off to chop salads now, but expect photos here later.

To blog and tweet, or not to blog and tweet......

Quietish blogging time at the moment - lots of time being spent doing stuff I can't write about, including some HR work and marking funding submissions.

I have had time though to take part in a few other interesting meetings this week. We've produced an updated Data Quality Policy for our corporate data which will hopefully be approved fairly soon.  In terms of quality we're looking at relevance, correctness, completeness and timeliness of the data in our systems, and we've put together a series of  aims and objectives, as well as examples of good practice supporting the quality of data. It will be published and available soon.

Changes to our change management system are about to be introduced, which will see a more active approach to approving changes instead of the more passive  "if we don't object you can do it" system we have at the moment. The CAB (change advisory board) will move from virtual to physical, at least for a trial period.

I've also had some discussions with other senior members of the department about communication, especially feeding back both during and after conferences, seminars, and other events.  I'm obviously a great believer in doing that using social media - the whole reason I set this blog up was to answer the question from my department, "what do you do?"  I felt it was particularly important to feedback on conference sessions, link to to relevant information and presentations,  say what I thought was interesting or relevant etc. With the advert of twitter and hashtags, you can now feedback during the conference itself, allowing people to keep up with events who aren't there, share important information, links etc.  I've followed a number of conferences recently from the hashtag. Some have many people tweeting, some much fewer. The most recent was the AHUA (Association of Heads of University Administration aka Registrars) Conference, thanks to the lone tweeting Registrar from Nottingham University, Paul Greatrix. Fascinating to see the things they were discussing, although I understood he got the mickey taken out of him by the rest, but as he said, leadership is hard!

So, there's been some discussion here about why the other members of the Exec, and indeed the rest of the section heads, don't do it, and whether they should. I have my own  view, obviously, and there have been others expressed, but if you have a view, then put it in the comments. Would be interested to know.

Facebook and Twitter use in Universities

There's been a couple of interesting posts recently about use of social networking in Universities. First one I saw was Brian Kelly's post about the institutional use of Twitter in Russell Group Universities. Some interesting metrics, and Brian suggests some good practices that Universities should adopt. There's a fairly lively discussion in the comments as well, with most people finding the data useful.

Then a couple of days later, another post about the use of Facebook in the same group of Universities and some more discussion, particularly on whether in a big University students are more likely to feel an affiliation with their department, school or course rather than the institution.

And then I spotted (via a tweet from the Registrar of the University of Nottingham), this study which looks at Twitter and Facebook use in European Universities. I'm not sure adding the number of Facebook and Twitter followers together to create a league table is good science, but it's nice to see Great Britain at the top of a table! Apparently UK Universities are by far outperforming other countries in communicating via social media with more than 60% of all university twitter followers connected to UK institutions.

There's a rather good post on whether these sort of metrics actually tell us anything here. I haven't made my mind up yet. It's great to see Universities engaging with social media, and it should be encouraged. I'm surprised that some Russell Group Universities don't have either a Facebook or Twitter account, but I wonder if it's doing them any harm in communication, reputation or marketing terms. I suppose only time and more research will tell.

Alice, Twitter, Quora and WiFi in the Park

Good start to the day with meeting with one of our student sabbatical officers. As he tweeted later, "we discussed Orgreave, Alice in Wonderland, Twitter, and even what we were supposed to be talking about".  Of course, what we were supposed to be talking about was IT facilities for students, and we did, especially some improvements we're looking to make to the registration process, introducing SMS for better communication and our new portal. twitter came up a lot in the hour we spent together - and as we are both fervent twitterers, some of the time bemoaning the fact that other people just don't get it, and how useful it can be if used properly. As a source of information, news, advice, and from the Students' Union perspective, as a campaign tool.

Social Networking came up in a later meeting in a planning meeting with the Faculty of Science, especially in terms of how academics use it, whether they use it, and how best it can be used in teaching. We know there's a whole lot of staff out there who either haven't used it at all, or who've dabbled in it, but aren't sure what to do with it. We've talked before about introducing digital media literacy training, and this needs to be integrated with best practice in terms of teaching.

Other things which came up in the planning meeting were using laptops to better utilise space, for example laboratories when they're not being used for practical classes, and we're about to begin a pilot with the Biology departments.  The student experience needs to be at the core of everything we do, and talked about how little things - like equipment in lecture theatres which doesn't work (even clocks!) can have a big effect. As can lecturers who don't know how to use the equipment, and so we're working to standardise it as much as possible.

Expanding the wireless network - which is already extensive on campus, but not pervasive - is going to be vital if we're going to be able to support the explosion of mobile devices, and one of the suggestions was that we extend the coverage to the public outdoor spaces, some of which already are covered but by leakage from the buildings. WiFi in the park - with the bandstand at the hub?

And finally, discovered a new website today (thanks to Jo), Quora.  Still trying to find my way round it and what it's for. Will keep you posted!

How IT changes the enterprise

Next speaker was Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics. His latest book, Macrowikinomics, isn't out yet but Google managed to get us a copy each.

His hypothesis was that we are at a turning point in history for the enterprise. Financial systems, Newspapers, Universities, Healthcare, energy providers, the music Industry. All are changing.

There are 4 drivers for change:
Web 2.0. Accessed through many inert objects now, not just computers. Other important features are broadband mobility, geospaciality, true multimedia, web services. The new web is a platform for computation with the internet becoming a giant computer. The old web was presentation only. The Web didn't used to be considered real IT but it is now. It is more cost effective and has better integration than many of our legacy. Many of us have systems old enough to vote and drink. God may have created the world in 6 days but he didn't have an installed base.

The net generation. There's a demographic change and the kids now coming into employment will be a driver for change. They are a generation which processes information differently.

The social revolution. HTML being eclipsed by XML. Now the we is being used for collaboration, not content. Allowing people to self organise into communities.

The economic revolution. The enterprise is changing. There are different ways to do things. Good example of guy who owned a gold mine. Couldn't find any gold. Published all his geological etc data on Internet and announced a competition with a prize of $500,000 to anyone who could tell him if he had any gold and if so where it was. He found $3.4b of gold, well worth the half a million prize money.

5 principles for innovation, wealth and sustainability:
Collaboration. Openness. Sharing. Independence. Integrity.

Work is changing. The old work best characterised by Dilbert.
The new is more people orientated.
A new operating platform for the enterprise needs:
Personal profiles
Social networking
Blogging and microblogging
Wikis and document co creation
Ideastorms
Team project tools
Deliberation decision making
New generation knowledge management
IT integration and administration


The worst mistake people can make is thinking things will "get back to normal". Newspapers will never be the same. The music industry (whose third largest source of income is suing people who love its products), will never go back to how it was.
We are in the age of networked intelligence, beautifully illustrated by a video of a murmuration of starlings demonstrating a social organisation where there is collaborative leadership with each bird each taking responsibility.

Excellent, entertaining talk.

Social Network Analysis

One of the themes to come out of many of the presentations and discussions was that successful collaboration projects recognise that 80% of the effort should be put into the people issues. The technology is only part of the story. One way of getting a perspective of what issues might exist is to do a social network analysis.  Look at current relationships and connections between people, identifying nodes and information flows. If you look at how work gets done you can identify influential people, groups who work together, and loners who don't communicate. It can then be interesting to compare with the organisational structure. In the above hypothetical example there's an individual easily identified who seems key, but would not be easily identifiable from the organisational chart. Without him, the "blue" team would be totally disconnected from the rest of the group. The Head of the Dept (red) is also fairly disconnected.

So, could doing such an analysis on our own departments/teams tell us anything we didn't know? Could we use it to better understand how we work, and where there might be issues?  The presentation included some examples of social network analyses of projects and their interaction with stakeholders, which did illustrate  how integrated the members of the network are, how well information is being shared across the network and how influential certain project participants are. It seemed to provide a more useful depiction than a project organisation structure diagram since it can identify critical relationships in projects.

Definitely food for thought.

Roundtables

The rest of the day at the IDBG CIO meeting was taken up with roundtable discussions and talking to suppliers. The roundtables are a good way of sharing information and exploring different issues, especially with colleagues who aren't in the HE sector.

The first was entitled Towards a Digital Britain, and really focused on what we thought the issues were in achieving a totally connected society.  I think we all agreed that one of the biggest barrier was connectivity.  We have much poorer 3G and wireless coverage than some other countries, even less well developed ones.  And even were there is good coverage, some people are still "not connected", probably because they don't want to be, or can't see the benefits or can't afford a PC. Some towns (close to Sheffield!), have less than 30% of people using the internet, and as things are geneally cheaper on the internet, and more services are moved there, this is going to disadvantage them.

The second roundtable was on cloud computing, and focused very much on local authorities, especially Westminster. This council has being 'infrastructure free' as a strategy, and aims to be so by 2014. It is outsourcing everything, including network provision, desktops and applications. I would argue this isn't really cloud computing, although the definitions of outhosting, outsourcing and cloud are becoming a bit blurred. As usual, they were interested in what Universities are doing, especially the move to things like Google.

The final roundtable I went to was about reputation and brand management, and the role of technology. We looked at how technology, especially social media, can enhance your reputation, and how if not used properly it can damage it.  I used the recent example of The Royal Opera House.  A blogger, Intermezzo, blogs about the ROH, gives information about performances, reviews, promotes shows etc and generally enhances their reputation. However, the ROH head of legal affairs decided they were using some copyrighted images illegally, and sent an extrodinary series of emails to them, including the threat to ban them from the ROH, and also including some fairly interesting grammar and spelling.  There's nothing the blogging/twitter community likes better than a cause like this, and suddenly the ROH was a trending topic on twitter  for all the wrong reasons, was appearing in the news and blogs, and was inundated with emails and poor  feedback.  In the end, the Head of Corporate Communications had to step in an apologise. I know, because I was one of the complainants, and received a very apologetic email.  Very poor handling of a situation by someone who clearly didn't understand social media. But I have to say, very well recovered once the comms people got hold of it.

As I'm staying in London tonight for a Gartner Summit tomorrow, I took the opportunity to see a show  - We Will Rock You.  Brilliant!

User Support Conference

I've been at the UCISA User Support conference for the last couple of days. Yesterday I gave one of the plenary talks on Web 2.0 and mobile apps - how can we use them to help our users, and what support issues are there. I covered what Web2.0 is, why we should use it, how we can use it, and what some of the benefits are. Gave some examples of how I use it - blogging, twitter, uSpace, - and how some other senior managers and IT staff use it. Mobility and the wide range of mobile devices and the services we can offer took up the middle part of the talk and a brief case study of our implementation of CampusM, our mobile app. I finished with a look at the funding issues we're going to face, and how we're going to have to look at different service delivery models - self service, out sourcing, and cloud. Finally, my vision that we are no longer the gatekeepers of information or systems, but we will have to be more facilitators and educators. But, even in the face of what could be severe financial cuts, we must not forget to innovate - it will not be enough just to keep the lights on.

Later in the afternoon there was a debate - the two statements being argued were:

"Should we continue to do more of the same , but do more with less as the unit of resource decreases?"

Supported by Ajay Burlinham-Bohr from Anglia Ruskin University.

Or

"Should we leave the bread and butter stuff to other and concentrate on developing more specialised, bespoke and higher quality services?"

Supported by Mike Roch from the University of Reading.

There was a lively debate, with both statements being ably argued. Mike starting by pointing out that we came into Universities to achieve excellence, not mediocrity, that we have the talent to do that but have to be selective how we deploy it. We should concentrate on what we're good at, and share things more. As a wonderful demonstration of spreading things too thinly he used the loo roll provided in the college, which was decidedly thin....

Ajay argued that we should face reality, and that IT in HE was a hobbyists paradise. commercial organisations wouldn't tolerate such technical diversity, and we should get our own houses in order before outsourcing our problems.

A lot of overlap between the two statements, and much tongue in cheek, but very entertaining, and a surprise win for Ajay who'd stated behind in the initial vote.