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My digest of the international INTRA.net Reloaded conference, Berlin (April 2012)

by Philipp Rosenthal, May 3, 2012

Summary: my take on 2 days at the conference ‘INTRA.reloaded – From communication to collaboration’ (April 17/18 2012, Berlin). In an increasing number of companies the ‘intranet’ is more and more seen as a potential starting point to create a operational workspace. Optimizing information access and transparency and motivating collaboration are the key drivers at the moment. Still: there is no blue print available yet. However, the thoughts and belief are moving in the right direction and the ones in charge become more persistent in their will to support employees in achieving their goals and improve their access to experts and expertise.

Bridging companies and customers
An increasing number of companies is rolling out services to connect their customers with the organization. Either for the purpose of service or for going after improvements and innovation the wall between corporation and customer seems to become less solid. Particularly successful seem to be the endeavors in which corporate leaders (aka C suite) are involved as sponsor and in which they acknowledge the multi-folded value of such an initiative.

Increase value and involvement with internal services
The tendency was clear: modern intranets have to be value adding workspaces, whereas today most portals still serve the purpose of information distribution and corporate communications. Servicing the right information at the right time to the right user in order create real work support is an endeavor some companies have started to pursue. People in charge are much more conscious of the importance of (unfortunately rarely executed) renovation work for information architecture and taxonomies. Otherwise the automation of digital services to become situation aware work tools will always experience data quality (= findability) as the major limitation. ‘Rubbish in, rubbish out’ is understood – at least my most protagonists.

Consciousness for active change management
Guiding employees through change with marketing style activities or dedicated advocates and community managers is really fashionable now. Just throwing a piece of IT at employees hoping that the majority of them will catch it and find some reason behind has been identified as a ‘no go’ – in particular by the reps of IT departments I was able to speak to. That management has to get involved and play an active part in the change and execution process is definitely perceived as a key success factor.

Asking the right questions
What’s still challenging is the way of figuring out the right starting point and how to bridge vision and reality. Throughout the conference I had the feeling that user and challenge centric thinking is still overruled by the quest for the right tool. It’s functionality (e.g. microblogging) that is introduced to employees – not a service that resonates to a particular challenge and thereby automatically makes its use obvious to employees. The tendency however, is definitely a move towards more user focussed approaches.

Summing it up: the future for information and knowledge workers looks brighter than three years ago. As soon as companies have overcome their internal blockage that only ERP projects can be funded with three digit millions the future will be even brighter. To unleash the potential that’s currently buried in the heads of talented people and network drives new ways for information distribution, retrieval and enrichment have to make their way into organizations. Getting some inspiration from social and commercial media seems to be a good idea because a lot of references at the conference were made in that direction.

I would like to close with the advise of our last speaker @d_ott: decentralize, simplify, advise & train…and be nice to your users.

I couldn’t agree more :-)

In case you’re interested in my presentation at the conference on the future of information work at Tieto including the socialization of our own intranet…here it is:

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From E-mail to Social?

by Philipp Rosenthal, April 1, 2012

Attending a conference in Berlin I was part of a discussion that quite frequently comes up in the context of a social media inspired workplace: ‘How much e-mail volume will we be able to avoid if we succeed in re-channeling some messages to other (social) channels?’ One participant however, raised the even more relevant question: ‘How can we ensure that people don’t get lost in figuring out on which way the expected or desired piece of information will find them?’.

I still remember the announcement and then the related work order of a larger IT player that intended to encourage (or shall I say force) its employees to use social channels instead of e-mail to distribute internal information. How far that company has succeeded with this endeavor I actually don’t know.

Even though I can understand that a clean cut seems to be a promising way to execute this transition I am not entirely sure that it will be very much appreciated by the individuals. Radical change isn’t favored by a lot of people. Whenever the ‘Big Bang’ is mentioned people tend to twitch…

Getting used to the new way bit by bit

On multiple occasions I have elaborated on the need of a step-by-step approach and on how to find the evolutionary phases of a digital workplace that fits the organization and its employees. From my perspective moving along people relationships and putting new ways of working in the closest context of the user will help the transition.

20120401-080655.jpg

The beauty of this approach is that it won’t be affecting everyone at the same time. By introducing a replacement to e-mail in the context of close team work employees can get used to certain scenarios in which information is no longer distributed by e-mail. One scenario:

Scenario
Aligning sales force and offering development

Challenge
Ensure that sales teams are updated on the latest material and developments for offerings and related value propositions.
Enable sales teams to give feedback and enrich offering management and sales material based on customer and market feedback.

Approach
Establish a joint digital space for sales and offering representatives. Key services for the users:

  • One-stop shop for the latest offering material
  • Consolidated information flow from offering management to sales organization to promote and comment changes in material
  • Structured feedback process from sales to offering management
  • Informal whiteboard for both parties to exchange spontaneous ideas and collaboratively develop shared subjects
  • Direct access to online communication and virtual collaboration channels including presence information
  • Calendar for shared event planning (e.g. conferences)

Achievement

  • No update e-mails (and attachments) for offering related material
  • No cc-to-all-who-might-be-interested emails regarding customer feedback
  • No never ending email strings on updates and discussion around new material (incl. attachments)
  • No ‘sorry…I forgot to put you cc’ situations anymore
  • Cross-border and cross-perspective development of offerings and related collateral
  • …

This scenario is close to day-to-day operations (shared goals) and in particular the interdependencies between the both stakeholder groups. The benefit of maintaining a one-stop-shop from both sides is obvious and creates immediate value.

As soon as social and commercial media inspired techniques for information distribution, enrichment and retrieval are established, new services can be launched…e.g.:

  • virtual sales case war room
  • the offering development board
  • pre-sales template factory
  • social media inspired project room (actually another good starting point…)

Step by step e-mail volume will start decreasing. As long as people can be 100 percent sure that there will be only one single source where they will be able expect a specific piece information.

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Presentation from the Portal Technology Conference, Berlin 2012 (German)

by Philipp Rosenthal, March 27, 2012

Wie versprochen gibt es hier die Konferenz-Präsentation von gestern. Es hat mir Spass gemacht und ich fand die anschließenden Gespräche sehr inspirierend.

(c) Tieto Corporation 2012

Ergänzende Hintergrundgedanken
Strategiepräsentation: http://goo.gl/X7f5I (http://goo NULL.gl/X7f5I)
Opinion Paper:  http://goo.gl/1o9QI (http://goo NULL.gl/1o9QI)

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Improve decision making with social principles and technologies

by Oscar Berg, March 20, 2012

Decision making processes that involve multiple parties and multiple perspectives can be lengthy and cumbersome, and consensus decisions are often elusive. Embracing social principles such as participation, openness, transparency and dialog and using social collaboration practices and tools to support collaborative decision-making, it is likely that much of the decision making in organizations can be improved both in terms of process and outcome. The potential advantaged include:

  • Anchoring decisions with all interested stakeholders by enabling them to participate in the decision making process.
  • Improving the outcomes by incorporating relevant information and expertise which otherwise wouldn’t have been considered (because it was unknown or not accessible at a feasible cost).
  • Making it easier to implement any decided changes since the workforce is aware of the decision and the can follow the reasoning behind every decision evolves as new information is added.

Many organizations still practice the traditional “top-down” decision making where executives and managers make decisions without letting key stakeholders, such as the ones affected by their decisions, participate in the decision making process. They might gather input from some key stakeholders, or they might just choose to practice the “My way or the highway” principle in their decision making. In such decision making cultures, it is not very likely that using social collaboration for decision making will be readily embraced. Being transparent and allowing participation in the decision making process is the direct opposite from what they are doing.

In consensus-based decision making cultures where the decision making process is already collaborative by nature, it should theoretically be easier to use social collaboration. But in practice, it might not be as easy as it might first seem. For one thing, people who are used to consensus-based decision making might not be comfortable with the transparency and openness that is required for social collaboration. As consensus-based decisions are made in face-to-face meetings or via closed communication channels such as email or private virtual spaces, no-one outside of the meeting room might ever get know what was said and decided (or not decided).

Despite the (to me) apparent advantages of applying social principles and technologies to support decision making processes, it is likely that it will take a while until most organizations are ready to apply it to their core decision making processes. Ultimately, it is about redefining leadership for the digital and connected age, and that doesn’t happen overnight.

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User-centric = more profitable

by Oscar Berg, March 12, 2012

Did you know that user-centric organizations achieve 23% higher revenue per employee than those that are technology-centric? And did you know that productivity has dropped 17% the last years in enterprise software usage? If this doesn’t make you think twice about how you approach new IT investments, then someone – probably the owners of your organization – should be really worried.

According to the 4th annual IT Adoption Insight Report (http://sandhill NULL.com/article/2012-it-adoption-insight-survey-reveals-disturbing-level-of-enterprise-productivity-loss/) produced by Oracle UPK together with Neochange, the effective usage rates of enterprise software are down compared to two years ago, with users experiencing productivity losses of around 17%:

It’s like giving everyone Friday off. Many factors contribute to this problem but, simply put, end users are struggling to absorb the glut of IT investments made over the past several years.

Organizations do have a choice and can do things to avoid or change this situation. The study finds that the secret lies in being more user-centric as an organizations:

  • Technology-focused organizations spend ~13% more on IT than their user-focused peers as a percentage of revenues.
  • The user productivity loss of tech-focused organizations is 2.3 times greater than user-focused organizations. Tech-focused organizations are leaking almost a quarter of their users’ application usage time.
  • User-focused organizations outperformed the tech-focused companies, achieving 23% higher revenue-per-employee against their industry peers.

Another report, also coming from Oracle but this time from the Oracle Application User Group (but sponsored by Oracle) has looked at the reasons for upgrading ERP systems. Dennis Howlett highlights in his ZDNet blog (http://www NULL.zdnet NULL.com/blog/howlett/73-oracle-customers-upgrade-to-stay-supported-no-reported-roi/3955) the following amazing (in a scary way) findings:

73% cited ‘end of support’ as a compelling reason to upgrade their ERP suite. 40% anticipate better functionality.

 

44% of respondents took more than 12 months to upgrade including a staggering 13% not knowing how long it took.

Howlett also notes that the study carefully avoids the real question that organizations should ask: what is the ROI from upgrading? He manages to put his finger on what is likely the real problem:

Customers are hoping and praying they don’t get left stranded so are forced into upgrade. The situation is so dire that many are throwing money at the problem without really thinking it through.

In the light of this, it should not be a hard to see why productivity in enterprise software use is dropping fast; the users and user productivity are simply not part of the equation, as other technology-centric issues (ensuring software support and increasing functionality) are considered to be of higher importance. .

What decision-makers in those organizations need to understand is that being user-centric is a mindset that is instrumental to building a high-performing organization. Until quite recently the main role of information technology in organizations has been to automate transformational and transactional processes in order to reduce the amount of expensive and sometimes inefficient human labor. But since then we have moved to a situation where about 40% of the workforce in the Western world is engaged in knowledge work and where knowledge work has become the epicenter of value-creation in the most successful organizations (read “Knowledge Workers and Knowledge Work (http://www NULL.theworkfoundation NULL.com/Assets/Docs/Knowledge%20Workers-March%202009 NULL.pdf)” by The Work Foundation).

The productivity of this growing and increasingly important knowledge worker workforce obviously requires a different approach when aiming to boost productivity using information technology than the traditional technology-centric and rationalization-focused approach. Instead of leaving the people out of the equation, information technology must be designed in a way that it extends people’s abilities and senses, allowing them to make the most out of their collective expertise, talent and engagement. We are seeing this happen on the commercial web, but it is yet to be seen in enterprise IT.

The findings highlighted from the studies above should be a horrifying read for someone who is even the least concerned about the productivity their organizations. If you think about it, the outlook isn’t that good either; if we continue in the same tracks as we have so far, for every IT investment that is made the situation for knowledge workers and their productivity will only get worse. This is the exact opposite to what most decision-makers believe will happen when they make decisions about new investments in enterprise software. Some seem to think that the next shiny and feature-rich system will be the silver bullet that solves all their problems. And no wonder why they do; there is a multi-billion global industry of IT vendors affirming their beliefs.

Let’s take an example from my own company to illustrate the problem and what you need to do about it to fix the situation.

In 2008, it was estimated that Tieto’s 16000+ strong workforce of IT professionals spent 30 minutes in average on time reporting every week. The time reporting task itself isn’t that complex, but the bad user interface in our enterprise time management system made it a time-consuming nightmare. What it meant was that a significant amount of our billable time wasted on something that was necessary but definitely not a value-adding activity. Not only that, it also caused a lot of frustration among the employees, something which was confirmed by the yearly user survey which found that 50% of all ICT complaints was related to time reporting. People also had a tendency to wait with the daunting task of time reporting, causing delayed invoices and thus lost revenue. For an employee it wasn’t the best way to end a week of work, so postponing it to after the weekend was seen as an appealing option.

In contrast to all other IT firms I have worked for in my career, Tieto’s top management actually decided to so something about it. Considering the business case, it should of course be a no-brainer for any top management team to make such a decision, but it seems that if there is no user-centric mindset in top management nothing will happen even if you have the most compelling business case: they just don’t get it. In their minds, a new user experience can’t really make such a difference. But boy are they mistaken.

So, it was decided that our skilled service designers and UX people should design and develop a new user interface to our time management system. After having introduced the new web-based user interface the business case was reaffirmed:

  • The time spent on time reporting was reduced from 30 minutes to 5 minutes in average, reducing the number of hours spent on time reporting from 8000 to 1500 on a yearly basis
  • This which translated to annual savings of over 2 million Euros.
  • Time reports began to arrive in time, so that invoices could be sent on time
  • The amount of complaints related to time reporting dropped dramatically

The most important result of this initiative is that the way this problem had been addressed and approached became a blueprint that has since been used for simplifying the execution of other administrative tasks.

Service design of time reporting task

Service design of time reporting task

Simplifying administrative tasks by user-centric design of user interfaces is the most effective way to eliminate or significantly reduce waste in a knowledge-intense organization. There are plenty of low-hanging productivity fruits waiting to be picked if you just put your user-centric eyeglasses on. You create win-win situations where the organization wins in terms of increased productivity and decreased costs and where the employee wins in terms of a more endurable work situation. The investment made is often small, especially compared to the benefits gained. For the time reporting application ROI was achieved after a couple of weeks. Put this in contrast to the enormous investments made in upgrading enterprise apps where ROI isn’t even assessed and which end up putting users in an even worse situation productivity-wise than they were before the upgrade.

The best thing with the time reporting application is that now it is coming to my smartphone as well. I will soon be able to choose to do the time reporting whenever and wherever I find the time, such as on the train from work when I suddenly remember that I forgot to do the time reporting before I shut down my computer and left the office. Hurray for that.

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Traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers

by Oscar Berg, March 5, 2012

With the current pace of change, organizations will have to be prepared for the unexpected. They will have to provide flexible access to people and information resources to serve unanticipated information needs whenever and wherever they occur. However, traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers in this respect.

This presentation from my talk at IntraTeam Event Copenhagen 2012 (http://www NULL.intrateam NULL.dk/sv/event/intrateam-event-copenhagen-2012-intranet-sharepoint-and-enterprise-search) explains how traditional intranet’s fail and what to do about t.

Why Traditional Intranets Fail Today’s Knowledge Workers (http://www NULL.slideshare NULL.net/TietoCorporation/why-traditional-intranets-fail-todays-knowledge-workers)
View more presentations from Tieto Corporation (http://www NULL.slideshare NULL.net/TietoCorporation)
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Follow to lead. How tag related content clouds motivate participation in information management.

by Philipp Rosenthal, February 16, 2012

This article is dealing with the approach to use a combination of structured tags (conventional taxonomy) and unstructured tags (social taxonomy) to form virtual spaces for information and knowledge work. It’s about replacing static spaces that are pre-defined and filled with content with agile spaces that form around a specific tag on request collecting all related and relevant content in real-time. It is about changing perspective. It is about supporting high performers and (thought leaders) to stay on top of things and stay inspired.

Until now corporations have found various ways of putting people in groups with a common denominator. On a meta level the most commonly used ones are

  • organizational structure (eg business line or team)
  • hierarchy (eg management teams)
  • profession (eg engineers or project management experts)
  • subject matter/interest (eg mobile, ERP, solar power)

However, the groups formed by strict definition are facing the particular challenges of granularity and convergence. Especially when it comes to virtual spaces for information exchange and consolidation.

Dividing for example a group of subject matter or professional experts into smaller sub groups leads to less and less critical mass (equals activity) and on top of that a potential limited perspective on things. Collecting everything (eg documents, reports, best practice) under a large umbrella on the other hand leads to information overflow and lack of transparency – even though it would be beneficial if multiple angles on one particular subject could be found ’in the same place’. Old ways of structuring information in for example taxonomy based folder hierarchies resonate on that particular challenge. A continuously growing pool of information however, quickly leads to a loss of transparency and orientation.

Todays answer: (enterprise) search.

As soon as a pre-built system – that cannot be split up anymore without creating even less transparency – is getting to big corporations tend to throw a search engine against it. Unfortunately the saying ’rubbish in, rubbish out’ applies in particular to search results. Going through the effort of enriching information with a structured taxonomy, adding the ability for users to add social taxonomy and then calling it the foundation for search is rarely to be seen.

Even more challenging is the endeavor to encourage users themselves to apply both while creating content or uploading files. Simply because the answer to ’what’s in for me’ is difficult to be answered with ’a better search result’. A better search result is very subjective and dependent on the search/matching quality (search query, match of search term and corresponding taxonomic expression etc.).

The content cloud – relevant content around a tag is the new group

Another solution – and maybe a more promising – would be the option to offer a service to users that allows them to explore content in a new way. On one page users can see everything that is related to a tag (social or structured):

  • documents
  • people
  • information in the intranet
  • status updates and notifications
  • workspaces (if the user is eligible to the content)
  • ext. search results
  • …

It’s is the content cloud around a tag. It’s the collection of everything and everyone that has a stake in the ’word(s)’.

No matter where the information resides…

It’s a group without being a group. It’s a collection of information, documentation, knowledge, skills and expertise without the necessity to manually consolidate and maintain it. It forms when it’s needed and it vanishes when it has fulfilled its purpose.

Imagine it to be the hash tag on Twitter with more than just tweets being displayed in a pre-filtered steam.

Flavored with additional elements this service could solve multiple challenges:
- orientation for the new
- inspiration for the ones that are curious
- support for the ones that need help
- convergence for the ones that seek another perspective

It can be the foundation to create a new followership within an organization. People follow topics and thereby extend their network, knowledge and reach and maybe to become leaders for a certain subject due to the personal footprint in it.

Think about it…what’s in for you now? Transparency. Visibility. Relevance. A whole new set of opportunities beyond just a search result.

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Mobile collaboration at Tieto

by Oscar Berg, February 10, 2012

Our presentation “Mobile collaboration at Tieto” from the Digital Workplace & Social Collaboration Forum 2012 in Stockholm last week, February 1-2, is now available for viewing and downloading at Slideshare. Check out how we are mobilizing our workforce at Tieto to improve information worker productivity and collaboration.

Mobile collaboration at Tieto (http://www NULL.slideshare NULL.net/TietoCorporation/mobile-collaboration-at-tieto)

View more presentations from Tieto Corporation (http://www NULL.slideshare NULL.net/TietoCorporation)
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Opportunities and challenges of mobilizing your work force (@ M-Days 2012, Frankfurt)

by Philipp Rosenthal, February 2, 2012

Today I had the opportunity to give a short presentation on the social and commercial media inspired digital workplace in the context of the German M-Days conference in Frankfurt. My key subjects were the following:

Use ‘time to burn‘ to start tasks, collect thoughts or get rid of administrative tasks though mobile services.

Make use of the variety of functionalities modern mobile devices offer by putting a metaphor around them and make users aware of all their options (simply because the engineer’s approach ‘here – these are all the things you can do with it’ simply never works with normal people).

Stick to the amazing model of mobile apps: simplicity. Extract specific actions from the complex bigger picture and make them easily accessible in an encapsulated environment (the app). Refrain from adding and adding and adding stuff…don’t start making things complicated again after you achieved simplicity.

A mobilized workforce needs new leadership. Presence won’t be an indicator of performance or commitment anymore. Employees have to take over the responsibility to think about the consequences of not being in the office and that they have to still make sure that their colleagues aren’t blocked by their absence. Leading a mobile workforce is challenging but at the same time extremely rewarding for both sides…

Check out the presentation here (sorry…German only for now)

Mobile Work @ M-Days 2012, Frankfurt (http://www NULL.slideshare NULL.net/DesireIT/mobile-work-mdays-2012-frankfurt)

 

On a more personal side note: If you are interested in getting the actually impression of the Generation Y (Digital Natives, Millenials etc.) you might want to get in touch with this one here…you will be positively surprised, inspired and you will have to change the picture in your head a bit ;-) @derjonathan (https://twitter NULL.com/#!/derjonathan)

 

 

 

 

 

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Boosting productivity with workforce collaboration

by Oscar Berg, January 31, 2012

Globalization and the digitalization of the economy increase the pace of change and forces organizations to quickly adapt to new conditions. Consumer behaviors and preferences are changing rapidly as we move towards an even more connected and digital economy, forcing businesses to constantly innovate their products and services. This is a reality an organization has to accept and adapt to, and the pace of change will not slow down.

Increasing competition forces many organizations to focus on their core business and engage in close collaborations with a network of partners and customers, transforming into an extended enterprise. A functioning extended enterprise requires all the involved organizations to continuously improve their responsiveness, agility, productivity and ability to innovate – and be aligned in these efforts. The key to do this is to make effective use of all their collective intelligence: the people and their talent, expertise, knowledge, information, and ideas. They simply cannot afford to let organizational design, geography, shared attitudes and behaviors (culture) and other factors limit the access, allocation, rapid dissemination and use of its collective intellectual capital the way many organizations still do today. They need to make everything they can to make all of it available and accessible to anyone within the extended enterprise who needs it – as quickly as possible, regardless where they are and when they need it.

Up until now most of the efforts aimed at improving information work and workforce collaboration has been focused on making individual workers and teams more efficient. Most organizations have created digital work environment to optimize personal productivity and teamwork, but doing so they have neglected the fact that information work is becoming increasingly interdependent and collaborative, relying on collaboration in networks across locations and organizations and stretching far beyond teams. Although it might seem as a paradox, these digital work environments have in fact made people more isolated and unaware of what is happening at work. Many of us need to interact with lots of people in different organizations and locations on a daily basis, but our digital work environments don’t provide the transparency and openness that is required if we are to see what is happening elsewhere. It becomes harder for us to make decisions that are benefiting the company as a whole and not just ourselves and our teams. This is something that creates inefficiencies, duplicate work, sub-optimization, lost innovations, low reuse of knowledge and solutions, and so forth.

A common reaction to this lack of transparency and openness is that we tend to work primarily with the people we already know, and preferably people in our close proximity. It doesn’t matter if we would have achieved better results if we had worked with other people, with other skills and information. Since team members tend to think alike after a while, it leads to group thinking. We focus on our own goals and act on the things we already know. We don’t get access to the new information existing elsewhere that would improve our performance both as a team and as a company. We don’t make use or relevant expertise, talent and resources which are available elsewhere.

The starting point is by necessity empowering and engaging every individual in their workforce to share, interact, collaborate and build their professional networks across teams, locations and other organizational structures. For this to happen it is a necessity to create more open and transparent digital work environments, where we can see and interact with each other throughout the workforce, across organizations and locations. The environment needs to increase the visibility of people and information, and provide mechanisms that allow people to find and discover relevant people and information, without drowning in a rising sea of information. First of all, such an environment will allow an organization to improve its capability to serve unanticipated information needs by connecting people and information across the extended enterprise, thereby improving its responsiveness and agility. Secondly, it will allow it to improve its ability to innovate by enabling ideas to be shared across to those who can implement them. Thirdly, it will help to improve productivity by minimizing sub-optimization, rework, redundant work and bad decision-making as organizational silos are being dissolved.

The harsh reality is that companies that continue to only help a small fraction of the workforce to become well connected, such as managers, sales people and formally appointed experts, will be outperformed by companies that are able to connect all their people regardless of position, budget or whatever. Dealing with business challenges all starts with connecting the right people. As we have written in Tieto’s Transforming into a Social Business (http://www NULL.slideshare NULL.net/TietoCorporation/transforming-into-a-social-business-opinion-paper-from-tieto) opinion paper:

The digitalization of businesses has laid the corner stone for building powerful networks and utilizing the power of those networks. All that has to be done now is to join up the dots (or rather, to enable them to connect by themselves) and make sure that the concepts of collaborative intelligence and crowd-sourcing find their way into the organization. Now is the time finally to unleash the power of operational networks that solve problems and act upon opportunities in a fraction of the usual time. This can now be achieved with significantly fewer resources and by activating underused resources such as expertise hidden in distant corners of the enterprise. Connecting the right people with each other and connecting everyone with the right information at the right time essentially is what social business is about. It allows large enterprises to operate with similar agility, responsiveness and ability to innovate as a small startup business.

Much of this can be achieved by introducing new and innovative collaborative tools and technologies originating from the commercial and social web. These kinds of tools allow collaboration to happen more easily and across barriers, and the technology investment is often a lightweight overlay to existing infrastructure. By embracing and learning from the consumers and the massive innovation happening in the marketplace, an organization can facilitate workforce collaboration to boost their productivity.

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