Starship Enterprisey Radio

Starship Enterprisey Radio
Ursprünglich hochgeladen von Craig & Nicole Cmehil

Thomas and I often joke about having an audience of only a few people for our Starship Enterprisey Radio Podcast show and how since iTunes won't download the MP3's we're probably losing people everyday but I took a peek into the stats this morning as our latest episode on I Love ABAP has already had 111 hits so I was curious.

Our host provides a Geo Stats view as well as everything else and I was quite shocked at what I saw, so much I had to make a screen shot to share with everyone!

Three little words - 'Change the world'

 

I can't say anymore than please read the post below.

The teched mania has already started. Until the end of the year we are going to be hearing all sorts of great and exciting stuff that is in, is coming soon, will be presented at teched. For the inner geek it is great therapy.
This is all good but then I saw this post yesterday and thought: 'What could SAP TechEd do?'
I don't need to tell you there are people starving every day. I don't need to tell you there are child soldiers fighting wars. I don't need to tell you that just a little contribution could make a massive difference.

I don't need to tell you this.

We are about to go to a conference and spend a small fortune on fees, food, hotels and travel. What if you took a small portion of what you are going to spend on TechEd and made some contribution to help someone break out of poverty?
We could do it individually or we could all join in and do something together. We could all sing and dance about how great we are and how we raised a squillion dollars or silently in the middle of the night a charity (or several ) could get a significant contribution appear in there bank account with no idea where it came from with no one telling them how they have to spend it.

We are a community and we could really make a difference.

We might even change the world.

Source: SAP Network Blogs

 

Technorati tags: sapteched07, sap, ideas, charity, people

ESOA or E-SOA: The Truth

One of the most interesting videos I'm see on the subject and one you should take a look at as well, one thing though MAKE SURE you watch it to the end. It's worth it ;-)

Can the Enterprise embrace video effectively?

Recently the number of services providing "video" content and services have been increasing, now there really isn't anything revolutionary about these services other than in their packaging but it does raise an interesting thought. 

Over half the web's content is now digital video, my friend JD Lasica, a citizen video expert says. He says many predict the web will eventually be 98 percent video.

Source: Global Neighbourhoods: Why Ustream will change mainstream

I'm not sure if this is true but I have done some looking and found the following interesting statistics:

• Internet Video Search Site Statistics
• YouTube by the Numbers
• YouTube Statistics Phenomenal
• The Digital TV Weblog: Online Video Statistics

Granted not a large sampling but an interesting trend, toss in a few of the new "online" video editors and it seems that perhaps life is getting to be more of a "dynamic photo" style these days. Check these Top U.S. Online Streaming Video Properties numbers.

What does that mean for the Enterprise though? Is this something that can be embraced by the world of Enterprise software or is this just another trend that will come and go?

The first question I think needs to be answered, is their a reason for Enterprise to even give this a thought and I think the numbers speak for themselves (provided the prediction is true). Let's give this a thought, I am a developer of Enterprise software so what is it I want to keep in mind? Well first I want to know how my users are using what I built and more importantly how they want to use it - how can I make it better for them and this is true of any software be it Enterprise level or not. You see the good developers are not the ones that built something no one else can continue but they are the ones that have built something so good that everyone wants them to continue building more things. 

Now if (lets be conservative) say 76% are really into online video, they relate to it, they understand it and of course they are visual learners.

As long as they can "see" it, they can comprehend it.

Granted the definition comes from a "parenting" website and discusses how and why it's important to know your child's learning patterns and methods the same holds true into later years as well. How often have you heard the horrible phrase "explain it like I was your mother", sorry may not be political correct and all that but that does apply occasionally.

So if that is the case then should you not be paying attention to the fact that your users are probably amongst those interested in the online video material? Let's call that an "answer" for now, yes we want to give this a thought.

So now that we know we need to pay attention and that we "want" to pay attention what can we (as Enterprise developers and businessy folks) do?

I see the following as a plausible "path" to embracing video in the Enterprise world, this is just my opinion of course and probably differs from many of you but I tend to look more to the simple approach to things and base my thoughts on the real world experiences I've had as a developer in the enterprise world.

The Personal Touch

This is probably my favorite aspect of development and one that most developers never actually get to have, the personal touch is my ability to personally interact with and communicate with the end users. In the Enterprise world it's quite possible that one application might have several thousands of end users and thus impossible to really have that personal touch. However, it's been my experience that when someone using the application can interact with or at least to get to know the developer behind the scenes they tend to use the application more effectively as well as have a greater "desire" to use the application. So how can we easily add the "personal touch" on a scalable level to Enterprise applications.

So what is this revolutionary thought I have? Oh wait not revolutionary at all it's all very common and already out there all over place. Developers (for the most part I do know an exception or two) hate documentation. What's worse though is that users (again I know an exception or two) hate reading documentation. So what if we made the documentation "visual", as much as possible? We give the user an option 1) read it 2) view it as a short screen cast with instructions 3) we take a page from the DVD/movie industry and we let the developer themselves give commentary to different features. For example, I like option 3 by the way, we let the developer give their own thoughts about "why I created the input form like that" or "the reason you need to give the input like that is because I can then do this, that and that." It's like Twitter, the user can choose the method they want to be informed by. A perfect example is Ed's (fellow Irregular) use of video to explain his Wii demo.

This of course is a 1:many approach and has some appeal but not all.

The Personal Chat

The personal chat is another favorite of mine and one (as a user) I would really like to have. One of the biggest complaints I hear when people contact support is that sometimes the person calling thinks the support person is not actually paying attention to them so they are immediately on the defensive, they are not positive and basically as the German's like to say genervert (or peeved off). So how can you overcome that? One way of course is the 1:1 text chats that many companies are providing and others like Qunu.com are enabling, however still how often have you typed something into chat and waited for a response? How often has your mind wandered and you give way to thoughts the person is busy with someone else the whole time and you are not a priority for them? Enter companies like Eyejot.com and you start to see potential alternatives to ensure the user that they are the priority and that people are paying attention.

What I mean is truly the ability for the end user to request a chat and then see/hear the person they are getting help from. To ensure them that they are the priority and the user is not sitting there talking to his buddy about the game last night while typing responses to you. This enabled directly in the application itself. 

The comfort level of the end user when dealing with support should be a main priority and a primary concern for Enterprise companies. If I am a user in a company and I get the feeling that support is not there for me, then I begin looking for alternatives and there are a million out there and many are able to "jump over" the local IT shops.

 The "Hammer"

Hammer actually translates from German into English as "the awesome idea". This is the third way I see for "easy" integration into the Enterprise environment.

Imagine you are sitting there and your application starts to give you some attitude, well with the simple click of a button, two things would happen. The first being that a support ticket is opened with all the necessary information as well as a "screen capture" to record a short video of you reproducing the problem and both being sent together to the support folks. The second is you being automatically launched to either a Wiki site or Forum (or both) around the exact activity you were working on so you can discuss with others what is happening. Might even be the case that someone has already had the problem which you can then try their "fix". The support folks would also be taken there and upon finding a solution your support request and "video" would then be added to the forum and/or Wiki for others to benefit from. Now if you happen to try someone else's "fix" and it works you'd have the ability to inform support of that as well.

Sure you could do that a bit differently and not inform "support" until after the "community" route but it's a matter of your process of choice. The main thing though is that you have a video screen capture of the problem as it happens.

OK that brings up the issue of "IP" and confidential information being displayed and "shared" so that would certainly have to be addressed and most likely only available for the "support" folks, who could then recreate it themselves with "test data" and supply that to the community.

Naturally the videos and updates of the new "solution" would automatically be updated to everyone running the application.

In addition to those options I also see the possibility of the "this session may be recorded for quality control reasons", you hear often when you call a company that "This call may be recorded for quality control" so why not the ability to "video record" a user session? GB's of storage space are cheap these days, compression is good and screen capture tools can actually capture multiple varieties of screen areas so why not simply record ever users session for "video" review in times of problems later? Automatic "pause" can be implemented when the user goes to something outside of their "work" so privacy issues should be at a minimum. Let's say we setup the recording to handle all SAP (OK I work there right) transactions (not including those where I am dealing with my own personal data) then I set it to capture anytime I am accessing a web based SAP system/transaction but to skip anything else I am doing on my screen, unless of course I opt to "start recording" in the middle of something.

At the end of the day I probably have 4 maybe 5 GB of compressed screen capture. Considering my laptop has had over 21.5GB free for over a year now I don't see this as a big problem, 4 to 5GB x 5 days is feasible then at the end of the week I save it off to the network or burn it or whatever. Say we average around 700 GB a month, how much does one actually need to keep? Say I also have the ability to flag individual days for long term storage otherwise I simply just drop the oldest date and add one on top.

So by now you are probably thinking I am nuts (if you've gotten this far) but let's add another layer on top of this.

Facial recognition, no I don't mean to video the person or something but by using technology similar you can actually process the video and "find" similar transactions or activities. Wait my screen resolution is bigger or I work with the window floating and not maximized, and? Regardless of where someone has the screen on their desktop the screen capture, captures the video so in most cases I think that location would be the same and thus quite easy to find all video segments showing a particular screen - scrap those out and compile an overall list video.

So now that you've read my mad scientist thoughts on this, let's take a look at some practical reasons behind doing it.

• People have an inherent curiosity for knowing "who did what"
• People want to feel as though they have a personal connection to those who can help them the most
• Companies want to streamline their processes in order to maintain low head count but scale up customers
• Customers want their problem fixed now and not tomorrow but most of all they want to feel as though they are the most important person and priority right now

This of course could be a huge pipe dream or a load of nonsense but I'm thinking it's something worth taking a closer look at, you?

Technorati tags: enterprise, video, adoption

Workshop start...

I was originally going to try and do this "live" but considering I was the only sitting with a laptop open (or even visible) in the very beginning I decided to maybe wait. It turned out as the 19 of us sat down to begin there were  7 laptops out but only 3 (including mine) were even open (BTW 1 of the open ones wa sthe only MAC one).

I think myself and one other were the only ones actually in any sense blogging it but I've yet to find the other blog, so perhaps they were just taking notes. Therefore with all that in mind I decided instead to share some of my "live" thoughts as the day progressed as well as my attempt at a "mind map".

First presentation of the day was from Matthias Flügge from the Fraunhoffer FOKUS group, they hosted the workshop and he wanted to be sure we had some background on who they were to begin with. Matthias I met via email through a coworker and have to say he's a stand up guy and I was happy I decided to head over to help out.

EACE/Frauenhofer FOKUS

• largest org for applied reasearch
• 1.25 bil budget
• 1988 berlin est

 

 

 

 

Next up was George Milis from EUROPEAN DYNAMICS who gave us some of the history on the current strategy and policy.

EU Policy - George Milis

• EU policy classified around human collaboration
• Lisbon strategy (goal is to expand and focus this policy moving forward)
  • eu more attractive place to invest and work
  • knowledge and innovation for growth
  • creating more and better jobs
• essential drive of EACE is the i2010: European Information Society 2010

This is actually pretty heavy stuff on the policy and all that I think the EI (Enterprise Irregulars) would find this most interesting and probably have quite a few comments on the strategy and existing policies in terms of the EU becoming a leading place for e-Collaborative Working environments. This lead us into TNO's analysis of "Human Collaboration" with of course regard to the concept of e-Collaborative Working Environments (CWE).

Human Collab - Leo Pennings

• pysch trip down the path of collab (interesting take on the social aspects as well as economic and culutral)
• define e-working environ
• new gen collab work environ
• human collab from individual/team prespective
• network structures for human collab
• define it
• groupware - computer based sys for coop and collab
• coop - async
• collab - sync
• grc analysis of e-work environ? This brought up all those memories of GRC and the resulting blogs in response to the Starship Entrprisey Podcast
• importance of collab e-work environ
• improve human abilities to work collably
  • increase creativity
  • boost innovation and productivty
  • provide advanced services
    • provide worker centric, flx, scale,adapt tools
    • boost seamless
    • anytime anywhere
  • "nomadic" personal knowledge access
• fits into groups/teams but what about multiple groups/teams? very narrow focus on isolated groups/teams?
• Den woud be proud - lady (Jane Hall from Frauenhofer) hit them with "did you do an economic study around human collab" - result = confusion / answer = "not yet"
• new question - now time for EU to define standards or let it still be competitive?
  • response - not strictly to do with topic more gen. EU should support it but perhaps EU should not try to org. a standards movement
  • response - EU should maybe just come along after standard has survived and adopted then put a "stamp" on it
• question: how can a tech dev know they actually fit into this "framework"
  • response: that's a new issue, no real answer - not there yet no metrics defined
  • response: purpose of all these analysis is to do that
  • statement:  not question about what tool but rather how do I do this "task" - RIGHT ON!!! the whole thing seemed to be so focused on "tools" that no one really sat back (unitl) now to simply say who cares what tool it just needs to do what I want!!!
  • statement: no "platform" all tools not integrated people don't use them it's only email - no real collab, this was a hard one to take in but as things progressed I realized that even though they were constanly talking Web 2.0 none of them really were involved in "Web 2.0" or had a strong understanding of it and why it was there or what was available.
• **changed ppt to show that's not true**
• I quickly changed my presentation to account for the audience and the topic and wanted to focus more on what we had done that they were seeing in their survey results as "not happening", try our community is specific but from my experience over the years many of the base line ideas, thoughts and actions are the same regardless of the community and topic.

This lead us into more of the "tools" themselves and it became quite obvious that they focused on more tradditonal tools and not the mass of "Web 2.0" apps out there, more or less just the "features" that people tend to associate with "Web 2.0" and the attempts of many of the traditional tools to integrate such features. No one really sat back to think about the reason - traditional tools either need to integrate the new features or risk losing their users to the new ones that began based on those features.

assesment of collab tech - jonas pattberg

• 100+ tools catgorized "domain driven"
• define "roles and tasks" and what they "need"
• very detailed 60 criteria to analyze with compared "features" not "tool" - analyasis seems to have huge gaps
• tools - selected by those that cover "broad" range - sent out surveys to vendors some answered some did not
• not many of the new Web 2.0/Office 2.0 tools listed
• semantic web in there???
• web 2.0 = blogs, wikis and social bookmarking
• input only from about 15-20 experts "not" from the end users (at least in this - next presentation standard answer)
• apparently "social networks" don't have much focus??? ROOM for improvement realized
• "lack of interoperability among tools hinders cross-organisational collaboration"
• "we" see the need for open interfaces and standards, XML and web services

empiracl eval - Linda Kool

• 475 - only 47 responded 10% they thing good??
• no thought to those "large" groups not able to share is it for reasons of "IP"?
• For me this was a major ploint of failure with the survey, in large groups or even small groups it is quite possible someone wants to contribute and collaborate however they are unable to do so because of an NDA or simply the fact their "told" not to.
• response to me: "oh probably a good question to ask"

After a short break for lunch and all that we moved on to the "real world" examples from IBM, SAP and from a group who did a research study around applications and integration.

industry - Arnd Layer

• IBM
• saw 3 waves
  • 80's personal productivity - excel, etc
  • 90's team productivity - email, etc.
  • 00's org. productivity - collab tools
• example: IBM Blue Pages (yellow page app linked to HR, etc.) --> Harmony
• IBM "Blue Pages +1" to include links to Xing, MySpace, Blogger, etc. total Harmony but with greater external integration
• Now this was just awesome and was very interesting to hear how IBM is really taking things and putting it into the hands of their employees.
• IBM has "activites" central task/project setup - think Planner on steroids, kind of reminded me of MindQuarry and the buzz it's getting right now.
• "ThinkPlace" = idea exchange of sorts?

My own presentation

This was actually more or less a talk about or experiences with community, growth and acceptance over the past couple of years and the tools we use together with our community.

 

 

After my little bit where I talked longer than I wanted, my idea was to more give them a brief overview and open it to discussion considering we have experienced a much different level of adoption and interaction than their survey suggested. It did though, just more directed to me than amongst everyone (coffee break lead to even more questions and discussions which was very cool). After me though came...

Every software is social - Prof. Dr. Volkmar Pipek

• "about tthe power of connecting people"
• adoption - give the user ability to change at "use time"
• GuiXT? This really made me think about GuiXT or am I wrong?
• "smoking point at the company" . ONLY in Germany
• questions came up: "trend to web or not" - obvious I'm not in a industry/market savy group :-(

Integration Knowledge Communities into Knowledge intensive Biz Proc - Dr. Frank Fuchs-Kittowski

• Wiki, Wiki, Wiki

My rough notes, and my attempt at a Mind Map it was very interesting and I wish I had acaptured it all on audio or video as it was worth attending and will be in worth following along as it progresses! I'm a member of the EU but also of the US so I'm always curious when something is being done to make a certain location the "best" for someone wanting to work and more so when it falls into my field itself!

 

Technorati tags: Workshop, e-Collaborative, CWE, EU, Policy, Frauenhofer FOKUS, EUROPEAN DYNAMICS, IBM, SAP, University of Siegen, TNO

 

 

Panels, not my language...

Wednesday I took part in a panel during the 19. medienforum.nrw in Cologne. It was my topic and my language but not my language.

The panel was in German, which I speak but it's certainly not my native language and so it was quite a new experience for me.

The panel started off quite well, I was contacted about participating it sounded like a good idea. The topic was right and so I contacted others inside of SAP to see if someone was interested - that's how I met Charlotte from our KPS group who deals with all of the internal podcasting. We discussed and all was good -- then we got "the mail", the mail was from the moderator and gave us reason to "pause" it seemed as though the topic changed midstream on us. After a few calls and emails though we were assured all was in order and things were as we expected.

Fast forward to day of the event. I take the train and arrive pretty much when I planned and met up with Charlotte so we can chat and take a look around before things get started. We run into two others from the panel and then the 5th from the panel and are getting to know each other and discuss what is happening and the details of how "we" think things should work while waiting for the moderator to show up. We then find out that the moderator (flying in from Berlin - funny I am on a train to Berlin right now) is delayed, a problem with his plane so at this point we've no idea if we are going to have a moderator or not. 5 minutes to go and the moderator has finally landed but is stuck in traffic at the moment. We start, Nicole was nice enough to step in and act as the moderator - we introduce ourselves and hit the first question (while answering Nicole steps out and our moderator who has finally arrived steps in).

The next questions start coming pretty quick, our moderator had quite well prepared cards and notes and things get rolling. It's a pretty good mix from 100% internal to 100% external roles around the corporate environment. A decent size crowd I thought and from my understanding quite a bit more impressive turnout than the year before.

The event itself was quite cool looking (totally did not get a chance to take any photos so will be looking for some to mooch). Our panel setup was the 5 of us and the moderator on stage (big screen behind us) followed by the audience all sitting out in front. I took some notes for our own SAP TechEd this year.

The audience itself I think was a mix of skill/knowledge level around the topic and I realized near the end that one topic which provoke some thought was one that we did not actually really get into, Wikis. It was after the panel was over that I had several people come up to me and begin to ask more about our experiences with Wikis and adoption...

 

Technorati tags: Social Software, Panel, Events

First impression - EACE Project workshop

I guess this is what they call "live" blogging, I've arrived now in Berlin and I'm at the FOKUS Center for Open Communications with a kick butt WLAN access with no "guest account" to login so I've no net so I guess not really live blogging after all?

25 people have registered for the workshop so it should be a pretty focused discussion, I met Matthias (organizer) who promptly thanked me for showing up with small gift (these are cool workshops) and let me know he is looking into the WLAN access bit.

The place is well done with a nice professional feel to it so far the others here are dressed casual (me) to full suit so full clash of cultures I figure will be here so it'll be interesting to see what they have to say to my presentation. I've left the slides pretty vague and not so directed as I wanted to give plenty of freedom and flexibility to cover whatever direction those speaking before me come up with.

Slides I'll upload in a bit once I have connection which I just got handed actually (see live blogging) so will look for a means to upload the slides - what does everyone recommend?

 

Technorati tags: FOKUS, Frauenhofer, Berlin, EACE

Starship Enterprisey Radio - iTunes

We are still working on the issue many have of downloading episodes of Starship Enterprisey Radio through iTunes, however for those that are not having an issue here's some interesting news.

We've just been approved and added to the iTunes store.

 

Technorati tags: Starship Enterprisey Radio, SER, podcast

Why I Dont Visit Second Life

 

Source: Why I Dont Visit Second Life

I'm a fan of Second Life and I think he has some great uses but I could not resist in reposting this, probably one of the best video pieces I've see doing a mock up of something. Other than seeing the chair the guy is "flying" with this was just totally awesome! Might have been more humorous having someone with a animal mask on our something.

Big thanks out to Ed for sending it over.

Technorati tags: second life, humor

Welcome to the Blogosphere: Etay Gafni

I got a call earlier this evening from a friend and coworker at SAP, Etay. Etay was one of the founding members of SDN and is simply just an awesome person. So always happy to take his call we got into a conversation about blogging, tools, services, etc. as he was thinking about starting up his blog.

So here I am about to go to bed, the big "German" speaking panel is tomorrow so I want to get some good sleep and I get an email from Etay saying he dove in and started it up.

Give it a look just wait on the subscribing though, he's not got his Feedburner there just yet!

Blog: While I was Working

Now Etay and I have had some pretty interesting chats on his visits to Walldorf so I'm quite looking forward to what he posts.

So many things 'fly by' me when I'm working. I get to know Websites, technologies, design ideas and people all the time. This Blog is about these types of information/knowledge we all gather, while we are working...

Something we should all think about doing or?

People I admire

It happened again, I was tagged. Seems to be the new one going around - list post 5 images 4 5(according the guy who tagged the guy who tagged Dennis) people you admire and tag 4 5 others to do the same. Dennis a fellow Enterprise Irregular tagged me. 

Wow, maybe I put to much thought into figuring our how this works?

Anyway here are 5 people that I admire (I admire a lot more but here are 5 and why)

Maggie Fox - I met Maggie just recently in Vienna during the SAP SAPPHIRE event and was quite blown away with her. She's doing those things I'm trying to do and candid and honest feedback was fantastic. (Photo via Facebook)

 Danielle Grossi - I met Danielle on the plane heading to SAP SAPPHIRE Atlanta. We were sitting next to each other and basically ignoring each other until a magazine from someone she works with was handed to her and it had a photo of Leo (SAP) in it so of course I started the blah blah thing and now I can safely say she rocks! She's a young entrepreneur with a cool vision for a new online service and she has the guts to take it forward and I admire that a lot!

 

Jeff Nolan - Jeff and I never really worked together nor have we ever met but once or twice and never on a one or one basis but Jeff is what you could call the closet thing to a "Enterprise Cultural Shift Hero", the things Jeff was doing while at SAP for me was "man I want to do that too!" of course he has "bigger" friends than I do but I think I'm holding my ground and helping to continue some of the things he started. (Photo via Twitter)

 Denis Browne - now Denis has one of those jobs that I just wish I had, he's in charge of the SAP Imagineering team - a group that's job it is to do crazy things with technology and SAP to see if it makes sense. What I admire the most about Denis though is the fact that he stands behind his people, his projects and he is determined and motivated to see things happen!

 Stacey Fish - Stacey is one of those people who kind of hides behind the curtain but without her so many things would simply not work. She has an hear for listening and sound and solid advice.

I could probably continue to expand the list and have it to about 20 easily but 5 it is and the reasons. All great folks! Those I'm tagging are great folks as well and so I suggest you check them out as well.

So in the tradition of being "social" I'm now tagging Ed Herrmann, Marilyn Pratt, Mark Finnern, Nigel James and Dan McWeeney.

Technorati tags: maggie fox, jeff nolan, danielle grossi, denis browne, stacey fish, humor, nigel james, mark finnern, marilyn pratt, ed herrmann, dan mcweeney

Expediting Adoption of e-Working Collaborative Environments

 

I seem to be quite busy with "speaking" lately, not sure why or what's up - maybe something in the water ;-)

This one is a short one and I will be speaking in the workshop in the afternoon for 20 minutes or so on the "The world(s) of the SAP Community Network" and discussing some of the challenges we've faced with a global community.

The EACE European project develops policy recommendations for the European Commission to expedite the adoption of collaborative working environments. Towards this end, EACE evaluated existing collaboration patterns and tools, and consolidated research results by identifying best practices, developing a theoretical framework of human collaboration and verifying the policy recommendations in pilot applications.

The workshop will discuss the findings of the project and present viewpoints and experiences from the industry, the research community and other stakeholder in order to stimulate discussion on the identified gaps between technological advancements and their practical application. The objective is to agree on a number of challenges and policy recommendations for expediting the further acceptance, development and implementation of e-Collaborative Environments.

Please, click here to download the programme of the workshop.

TOPICS to be discussed

• Current and future policy frameworks aiming at accelerating the adoption of Collaborative e-Working Environments
• Weaknesses and strengths of the available collaboration tools and platforms
• Behavioural, organisational, socio-economic and regulatory factors that influence the adoption of electronic collaboration tools at the workplace
• Role of knowledge management and social networks for improving collaboration

... See more

The workshop is taking place June 22, 2007, in Berlin and you can register online now.

Register NOW, no fees are required to attend the workshop.

Link to EACE - EACE Home

Take a minute to vote: McAfee vs Davenport

 

It seems Susan is having a bit of problem so I thought I would jump in and help her out by posting her poll on my blog as well.

So if you got a minute take a look and fill it out.

 

Perhaps Raju, Arvind and the others at Zoho might be able to come up with a slick work around for those having the same problem as Susan.

 

Link to Love Wordpress?– Me too; just don’t live here. « ITSinsider

SAP unveils Co-Innovation Lab and envisions Web 3.0

SAP is pushing hard into the world of collaboration and this is another piece of the puzzle. Working closely together with our own partners and customers in an open environment is key to ensuring that we remain where we are, on top!



read more | digg story

Panel Question: "Negative News"

 

On Wednesday Social Media Today hosted an hour-long, interactive webinar, “The Art and Science of Forming Successful Online Communities.” I moderated a panel which included Gina Bianchini, CEO and Co-Founder of Ning, Rohit Bhargava, Vice President Interactive Media of Ogilvy 360, Julie Wittes Schlack, SVP for Innovation at Communispace, and Craig Cmehil, Evangelist of SAP’s SDN.

Source: Can Passion and Authenticity be Duplicated? Follow-up Questions for Webinar Week

Me as you can see I took part, the panel was quite interesting and held the attention of well over 200 folks logged into the website (I think even more were simply dialed in via telephone). It was quite an interesting chat and I have the feeling we had a wide range of attendees from those new to the ideas of "social media" and "social networking" to those who live it daily.

Some of the questions though we were not able to get to so I decided to take a few minutes today and pick one of those questions and try to answer it.

"How can the online communities be best used to diffuse negative news stories on your company?"

Now I work for SAP, large and international and there always seems to be somebody out there saying something and occasionally those things are "negative".

I recall one case at the end of 2005, where the blogosphere exploded with comments of how a SAP board member was quoted as saying they were against Open Source. The quote was taken a bit out of place but within 24 hours (impressive for this crazy thing called blogging right) it had gotten to the point that the board member needed to make a response. Now with all the resources out there and all the places one could make a statement about this topic, the board member (Shai Agassi) chose to respond to everyone with a single blog entry posted to the SAP Developer Network, entitled "I LOVE Open Source---Really!".

Now that was just one case, but there are plenty out there and not just in our community but everywhere. The presence of an online community, especially one around a particular product, suite, platform, company, etc. tends to be your best spokesperson for the job. They are the ones passionate about your topic and therefore the most credible people to respond about your topic.

This of course does not just happen though, you need to first enable them to do so with the proper technologies and second you need to ensure that they can do it, not everyone is ready to pick up the banner and run into battle some need motivating to get them ready while others need a simple nod of the head so to say "go for it!" 

Once your community starts to talk it does not matter how many people continue to talk about the negative item those who are active and interested in your community will know the truth and move on to the next interesting item.

Technorati tags: community, social meida

Open Question: Blogging and podcasting for primary school children...

I've mentioned this service before in the past, but I've not really been to active with it and to be honest I've not really been a regular on the site to even get a feel for how well it's doing.

But again it's a discussion forum across multiple topics but they are audio messages that you record online and leave for others to listen to, you can even subscribe to a whole discussion via RSS or iTunes and take the conversation with you.

I just went back after mentioning this to a few other folks and decided to take another look. 

I came across the following discussion which was started about 3 months ago and had no replies, Chinswing Discussion: Blogging and podcasting for primary school children in EFL.Twinning and tandem projects., I decided to reply and to also give it a little thought.

In the US my little sister in the third grade was already working on making their own homepages on the net so it's obvious that schools are starting earlier to get kids involved in the net, of course they are ignoring problems with the various social sites and how some kids are interacting but that's a topic for another time I think.

So blogging and podcasting for primary school kids? Well in general I think it's an excellent way for kids to express themselves in a creative and open environment as well as to encourage social interaction in both the virtual part of our lives as well as the physical part of our lives. I also see problems with it, the first that springs to mind I leave an audio message on the thread about and would love to hear your thoughts as well.

Subscribe to the thread: RSS iTunes

For those not wanting to sign up to yet another service, give your comments or thoughts (or link to blog entry) and I will try my best to feed those back into the audio discussion as well.

The service is Chinswing and it's free and you just need a microphone to record in the browser.

Also check out another interesting conversation that started on "Classroom 2.0".

Technorati tags: chinswing, children, schools, blogging, podcasting, classroom 2.0

SAP wants to hear from you...

There are times when you just come across something and have to just sit back and smile, Steve has talked about, heck most of the Enterprise Irregulars have talked about it, others have complained that no one pays attention to them. So what is it? Well "listening" to your customers before you build it!

We want to hear from you about any ideas you may have for SAP to leverage the existing Web 2.0 Technologies and Trends to further enhance it's products and/or processes thus generating further value for you our valued Customer / Partner or Community Member. Example of a Web 2.0 product idea could be: I want to have the ability/tools to create a collaborative environment such as SDN easily in my company...(-: Example of a Web 2.0 process idea could be: I think it would be a good idea if SAP leveraged the community to develop new functionality together with the community. This is your chance to let us know of your ideas!

Source: Forum

Now the thing that really set's this off above anything else that's come out in the past is the fact of the medium they chose. It's a discussion forum, so they really are "discussing" things!

It just launched a week or so ago and has 12 topics, 39 posts and over 3000 views already.

 

So for me this is a case of "putting your money where your mouth is" heck even here on my blog I state that "Without community and the personal touch you become just another chunk of code among a sea of bytes and bits." so this is it, they are listening, talking, discussing and for the product itself. Leveraging and interacting with the community, a first step towards Hasso's statement "Without community there is no product" - it tends to fit!

You can also subscribe to the forum via RSS as well, here.

Technorati tags: SAP, Web 2.0

Show them you want them to stay...

James just picked up on a thought today, probably because he's busy doing a bit of Spring Cleaning while he clears out his office in preparation for a new set of diggs.

Sometimes I read my colleague Stephen O’Grady with dread, with a mounting existential horror. He is so good, writes so well, is so insightful, with a dry wit and no lack of charm, that I ask myself: What if he goes somewhere else? But then I remember, and breathe again. Why does Stephen do such great work? Because he can. You can see he loves what he does, and I can’t imagine there is anywhere else he would have the freedom. Stephen has the freedom to leave, sure. He could probably quadruple his salary if he went over to Gartner. But that’s the least of my worries. You can’t chain your colleagues, partners or customers to you. You can only help them love what they are doing, and when people feel like that you’re in good shape.

A bit on the "hippe love" side but that's OK, it's a strange new world of social media and community we live in. It did however remind me of something my very first boss in the corporate world told me, I've never forgotten it.

"Craig, remember this if you remember anything - anyone can be replaced"

That has stuck with me now for going on 10 years and at first I was paranoid thinking I was about to lose my job and end up on the street. Later I began to realize what it is that he meant.

This is my take, what's yours?

Everyone is unique and valuable but no one is the single most important person. Sure I may be an awesome coder or excellent at whatever it is I do but so are many others, so the point is not to make (in my case) a program or application so complex or impossible that "only you" can deal with it. It's not about trying to make yourself irreplaceable through complexity but rather through innovation. Deliver, and do it often and keep doing it and you've made yourself valuable because of it, not because I made one application that no one else can manage.

That's how I've worked the last 10 or so years as well. I've continued to find ways to bring value to what I do and to help others and by doing so I've been treated very well and basically "like doing what it is I do", by bringing value I am given freedom (maybe not as much as RedMonk folks get) and through that freedom I explore new avenues and find ways to bring new value. It's a cycle and as long as I maintain my end and the those in charge theirs then the cycle continues to go and all is well in the world of, well - me!

It's Friday and I had a thought ;-)

Link to James Governor’s Monkchips » Love: The Only Barrier to Entry Worth a Damn

medienforum.nrw: Programm

June 20th I will be heading to the very cool city of Köln (Cologne) to participate in a panel discussion around social media and communication in a corporate setting. Big thanks out to Nicole Simon for "talking" me into this. You see this will be my first time speaking at a panel in German (or any language other than my own - English) and so far the organizers and Nicole all think my German is fine and I'll be perfectly fine - I say my grammar is horrible (both in English and German) but hey I'll give it a go, it is later all a topic I'm very fond of.

Social Software Goes Corporate

Möglichkeiten von Blogs, Podcasts und Videocasts im Rahmen der integrierten Kommunikation

Unternehmen experimentieren verstärkt mit Social Software. Wann ist der Einsatz von Blogs, Podcasts und Videocasts in Unternehmen sinnvoll, und was ist dabei zu beachten? Welchen Stellenwert hat Social Software im Kommunikations-Mix?

14:00 - 15:00 Uhr

Raum Ruhr

Moderation Thomas Schildhauer

Panel-Teilnehmer Charlotte Haimerl, Craig Cmehil, Michael Scheuermann, Klaus Eck, Jan Malte Andresen

Source: medienforum.nrw: Programm

Technorati tags: medien forum, nrw, germany, media, podcastday2007