Hometown Unicorn

Aside from the buzz and enthusiasm of social software deployments, there's sometimes a back-story.  I've been wondering about how well organsations deploying social software plan catch to on-boarded users before they fall back to old habits. Here's the scenario that I am thinking of. When we deploy business change technologies, we tend to measure on-boarding as a one-off activity (we measure stuff like that partly because it's easy to measure, which is a bit of an anti-pattern in itself).  So, once a user has been trained, posted, edited a profile, added people to a network, we cross them off a list.  However, this fails to recognise what, from my experience, is the strong influence of learned-behaviour of the non-social user, and how these users' inertia can reset interactions to levels of lower social value. The reasons we fall back to old ways and habits are many: The derived social value of an interaction obeys the "Convoy" principle The answer ...

Today I start a new challenge,  working for an IBM Premier Business Partner called Portal in Bracknell, Berkshire.  I'll be helping their customers make, and get value from, their investments in IBM Collaboration software of all types : from transactional portal application dressed with user managed web content, through Social Software for organisations on the road to becoming a social business, and not forgetting along the way our Notes/Domino customers who've been getting value from Notes, Sametime and other Lotus products for over 20 years.  Today's the day to meet the Portal people and get connected - many of these people I have known from project work over the years and it's a great pleasure to be linking up with and working with them again. The main thing on my mind today : the decision to embed Lotusphere 2013 inside the IBM Connect event . I have two contradictory thoughts on this : "It's not a moment too soon" : customers are confused about t...