10 Things Silo Organizations and Management Will Never Understand

The next time you are cruising at 10,000 feet or roaming around some conference exhibition floor or just trolling the web, think about your company.

I want you to think about how you share information today, and what you would change about it for tomorrow. If you could see yourself through the eyes of your customers as well, even more helpful.

If you find yourself thinking along the ideas below, you may be a silo organization and in that case...

Your organization may profess to "getting social" or "being open" or using collaboration tools or providing everyone access or using the latest version of   but there is more to this discussion.

1. It's in an Email - Most common denominator of collaboration, famously said but many long time email users. A person's email inbox is a huge silo and bottomless pit. Hopefully you are above this level, even if only slightly. Delete is the enemy, guess where your email may have gone at some point.
2. I sent an IM - Whatever system you use, unless you are posting the IM as a status update or message that is open for everyone to see, your IM is another bottomless pit but at least it does Emoticons :-P
3. Everything is on the NAS/Network/Cloud - This is NOT the same equivalent as "everything is in a Notes database or a community or a place or a site". This is a file server which may or may not be indexed for others to find in your chaotic directory structure. Ever ask new employees to find something? Their replies might surprise you. Then again, you may bask in their ignorance and laugh like Cruella DeVille at them.
4. Management doesn't use  - Use what? They drive Porsches or Teslas...do you? Since when do you need to follow management's lead? If you did this you would be using yellow legal pads rather than any computers. Management wants outcomes, bring them something that will help everyone get together and complete tasks properly.
5. Many Clients - But which one should you use? Browsers alone you have 4 common ones on the average desktop which may, or may not, work with your existing solution. Your cocoon is not open for business if you need people to revert to older models. Standards are important.
6. We know what people want - Maybe, maybe not. if you are not talking up, down and outside your organization, how will you know? Anyone can build an app, but if you want one that works outside your organization, how do you get the feedback? How do you store it? How do you analyze it.
7. Where is everyone - The need to have your staff in front of you at the office, all the time, may be helpful, but it also limits production for some people. Cubicles do not stop the loud talkers or speakerphone conference call makers. Open plans provide more interaction of course, but not always more production. If you find you need to grow your empire, you just might be a silo king or queen.
8. Never use your tools - You ask for the tools, you paid for them, but you never believe in them. Do you find yourself always questioning more details, verifying information, harping on some piece of the puzzle, yet still not completed the framework yet? If so, then you need to use new tools. Gone are the monolithic databases and in place you have tools with unlimited analytics sources. One example BuzzSumo 
9. You never see customers - Different from #6 because YOU have to get out and speak to customers. The real people that pay you money today. Do you reach out to them, personally, in some way during the year...if ever? Don't leave it to sales. Don't leave it to marketing. You are the executive, if you are not thanking the customers you have regularly, someone else will. Hint: Many of the clients have some form of social media account, even if it is only Linkedin, you should be their friend. Stop saying it is the other people's jobs.
10. Always eat alone? - If you always find your self eating alone, even when in your own kitchen area or cafeteria either your food smells horrible or you are too far removed from your staff. Get up, get out, buy soda or juice for everyone or at least hang out where they eat. if you have no idea what I am talking about here, never mind, move along.

Extreme? Some of them others just basic ideas which for whatever reason escapes even the most well meaning people.

Think about your daily work habits and reflect on what could be better.

Analytics and Crickets

While hanging out at #Sugarcon this week with good friend Stuart Mcintyre we were struck by what we saw as a lack of socialness (made that word up) from the attendees. Granted this is in contrast to the obscenely over the top socialness of my fellow IBM friends which can be zealous in their path to be social.

SugarCRM itself is fairly active as are Larry Augustin CEO and Clint Oram CTO on Twitter. Keeping in mind we can only really see the tweets or posts if #sugarcon was in the tag or discussion. So where is everyone?

In this graphic on the left, courtesy of NextPrinciples, which by the way you can click on and move any of the links and connections, a very nice benefit, you can see who had tweets retweeted or was the primary creator of the original tweets. You can see about 30+ accounts were pretty active although over 700 tweeted something, see Engagement below. If I presume about 1,200 people attended then about 2-3% are active socially. And since I know many of the names, they are business partners. Begging the question, where is the audience? Where are the customers? The lines to the small balls in the graphic are more customers but still the audience was not heavily active. Even at the voting for the AppTakeDown winner it was about 25% that voted. See graphic on the right.

How do we engage people better? Are we happy with this little or this much engagement? 

Let's look at this information, again from NextPriniciples. Keep in mind these are just for the few days of the show and do not imply anything other than what went on at the show. In some cases SugarCRM people themselves or their accounts were excluded in these graphics.

Sugar7 is announced, but no you tube videos for it? Lost opportunity. Customers like videos, social media people love graphics. perhaps they were posted, but just not included in the analytics.

 

This is hopefully untrue, but only 10 blog posts? I wrote 2 and Stuart 1, but surely there were more. maybe my friends at NextPrinciples can help with this.  A lack of primary bloggers may be hurting. then again, if we look at a week long view, will we see better details? 

The last graphic is probably not as helpful because I do not believe @sugarcon is an account on twitter so it is not surprising that there was no growth in followers.

Large numbers of followers, attendees that are social, bloggers and more all help to provide proper analytics but I was surprised at the details for the conference. If you can't get people excited enough at your annual show, I wonder what the analytics look like during the year.

Now look at  this graphic that shows the top 20 7 Hashtags:

IBM was a Diamond sponsor, no doubt this helped raise the Hashtag, but also many people expressed there impression that IBM was not the older IBM. Nice to see IBM getting that traction and awareness.

We were probably too small to get #sugarcon to trend on Twitter, but then I don't think the keynotes were livestreamed for those that could not attend which could have helped grow more awareness. 

I'd like to see more reach out to the world by SugarCRM. Their product is great, they have a great executive team, they are priced appropriately. How will they reach the goals that Larry Augustin mentioned at the opening keynote? Without leveraging their social customers they are missing a great opportunity to enhance the brand and value of the product.

Not Excited About IBM Cognos?..You Should Be

As part of the IBM Social Business Social Residency this week, run by the IBM Redbooks, we had the luxury of having a great conversation with Mark Heid from IBM. (I hope to publish more on this for the IBM Social Business Insight Blog in the near future.)

Mark is the Program Director of Social Analytics at IBM and luckily, he is based in Raleigh. His session was the highlight of my week by far! As I tweeted earlier today, I am such a geek and have fallen in love again with a technology.

No slides, no marketing pitch, just here is what we do and what YOU can do with a product like IBM Cognos Consumer Insight. Man have I been an idiot to ignore this for so long. but let me backtrack a bit.

Most likely I can not do the product justice, but here is what we gleaned from today and see if you agree with me. I suspect most of my technical friends will agree, for the rest of you I am going to try to shape the description in a way to help you see why this is just so cool.

For those that do not know what analytics are, analytics is the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data. It is the idea that one can measure or chart details culled from disparate sources of data into an algorithm which could lead you to a conclusion about, well, anything.

Big Data is a term for all the mounds of data streams that companies, even you at home, amass but are unable to sort properly or see the string which holds it all together.

When you combine analytics with your Big Data you start to find patterns that emerge that can be very meaningful to your business or life.

As an example, if a store or restaurant has a loyalty or rewards card, as many do, your purchases are recorded and in most cases scoured for tangible information to assist the business in providing you even better service next time or perhaps coupons to match your lifestyle.

Before you cry foul over privacy, IBM does not perform any analysis unless you have opted in. Businesses let you know when you get their cards that the data will be used potentially and you have the right to opt out of this analysis. I doubt many of you have opted out or even thought about it. But that is another blog post for a later time.

While I am in Raleigh my credit card companies are probably trying to gauge if I will be returning again soon or was this a one off event, like a vacation. If the same credit card companies followed my social media stream they would of course realize this is a class which we have come to Raleigh and not likely to return in the near future.

In contrast, I am quite sure most of our credit card companies recognize that we all "vacation" in Orlando every January around the 3 rd week of the month. I know Disney looks forward to us coming at least.

Think about the upcoming US Presidential election and how much sentiment is being expressed online over it. Poring over the data and analysis could provide a much better indication of who might win over any data those annoying robocalls or political pollsters can provide. Anything which gets rid of political robocalls and pollsters calling me I am VERY in favor of helping.

Real time analysis of what is happening in your IBM Connections world could be greatly beneficial to your HR staff as far as understanding employee sentiments, to Finance around perhaps costs which are not always so clear for some projects and from a Sales angle you could glean which of your sales people is up or down at any given time. No more guessing.

The cost for the full product is not cheap, it is a 6 figure deal and then some. But there are numerous uses for this even without looking at a retail angle. As a Business Partner I see numerous ways to work with the product and I would imagine so would you. Think of government entities which need to analyze their usage of consumables, small businesses which want to find what holds their client base to them or a financial institution looking to plan for offerings not seen before but gleaned from the data.

What is the downside, aside from the cost, you ask? It sounds too good to be true. The part for IBM Connections is real time for the last 2 years but if you wanted to devour lots of data and social media, the process will take a little longer. The reason is because syntax and tweaking of the searches, data review and such is time consuming and we don't all have IBM Watson in our offices. The programming language which would require one to invest quite a bit of time as well to be able to make the data turn into gold.

Why write this 2 years or so after Connections was an entitlement to Cognos 10? Because like you I watched or listened to various presentations, read posts but it never spoke to me like Mark did today and that is what made all the difference. As a long time Lotus person my focus was elsewhere, and for good reason, but as we evolve as partners and the technology evolves in looking for that next ledge to jump off, this is a good one.

I hope Mark will continue his relationship with all of us and thus future blog posts can delve into this deeper, but for now I feel like a new window has opened and I "get" it and I hope you can appreciate why as well.

Lastly, if you want to see it in action you can go to this IBM page and test it out.

Morale DashBoards? Scary or Necessary?

This caught my attention today on Twitter. Mike Rhodin, past Lotus GM was discussing progression and social business. And it was pointed out that maybe HR needs a morale dashboard. Presumably fed from Blogs, Comments,Twitter, Facebook, Sametime, Yammer, FourSquare and the other personal apps everyone uses on corporate time.

One company, Cubevibe, URL, Twitter, does this already. there are many sites that will track references about you or your company across the Interverse but a Dashboard? Interesting.

Would you as a CEO want to see this? Would you like the risk of thinking all is good when it may not be?

Does HR really want to report to management that people hate their jobs or their company? Wonder how the American Airlines people feel about the filing of Chapter 11 today?

Do we live on a usual plane of all is good until found out otherwise? Would an instant analytics dashboard spring someone into action to fix it all? Don't think so if IT and Sales are anything to gauge by from their past dashboard efforts. Most people still complain about IT and help desk delays.

So would RIM have decided sooner to open up BES to all devices? Not likely as management has seemed out of touch, but would you or your boss change direction if the needle was heading towards the darker side of happiness?

In another light, could HR or an executive hone this down to a specific group or business line in order to justify jettisoning it?

With great progress comes great power, choose wisely.

No Phone and No Internet, but Bin Laden Got work done

sadly Somehow and that probably shocks so many Westerners who can't imagine being disconnected for even a few minutes.
Sadly it worked for him too ... for years.
But how did he get intelligence reports? Did he even care?
Was he a true CEO, so far removed from the front lines that the only thing that mattered was him and his thoughts and it mattered little whether they were winning or losing their battles?
Or was he the CEO thinker type? Preferring to be introverted and accomplish his work in the background?

Naturally he wasn't checking in on Foursquare or Gowalla or Facebook or Twitter but no doubt coded messages did get distributed through some intermediaries, probably through some of these and other countless systems. Intelligence gathering is endless, thus why IBM is betting so big on analytics. The sheer numbers of data crunching makes it impossible for anything but a computer to sort it all out. But interpreting the data correctly is still important.

Sure he was wanted and hunted by everyone, well, except the Pakistan government it seems. And he knew very well that any phone or internet would give him away. So without the distractions he could make his grandiose plans.

Not that this could have been seen as coming. The US security and military teams did an excellent job of keeping this all quiet. But if you think like a Poker player for a second, was the US being quieter about Osama since they found out where he was hiding? If so, would he have realized this as a bad sign and high tailed it to a new hiding place?

So maybe not being plugged in, even a little bit, was his downfall? Businesses that still refuse to pay attention to the online world in all its forms are missing out on information that could help them.

Congratulations to President Obama for not just "bombing the site to kingdom come" but finding a way to get the body and proof. I trust at some point the video/photos will be released, else the conspiracy theorists will come out.

Thanks to all the military personnel that were part of it and hope you all get to come home to your families sooner than later because of it.