(Not to mention it’s in my boyhood state, so I get to visit the cathedral on Yawkey Way and watch my Red Sox play)

So when I was absent this week, several of my close contacts texted, IMed, or e-mailed me, saying, “Dude, where are you?”

So, What’s New?

I’m excited to share that I joined tibbr, TIBCO’s enterprise social computing platform. In a marketing role there, I’ll help with tibbr’s overall positioning, messaging, market strategy and social media presence.

Aside from the fact TIBCO has built a tremendously powerful and intuitive social computing product, what excites me about tibbr is its ability to integrate systems of record with systems of engagement – and do so in a contextual way that gives people the power to act and execute right from within their enterprise social platform at work. I’m also really excited to work with the tibbr team, who bring a deep knowledge of business technology paired with a passion for social. I know I’m going to learn a lot, and that’s something that’s always important for me in any job.

Thank You, Socialtext

While I’m excited to push forward with tibbr, I want to publicly thank my colleagues and friends at Socialtext – who have taught me so much and who helped cultivate my knowledge of this space. I’ve had an incredible run there that I’m immensely proud of, and I’ve been mentored by some of the best people in the business. From New York to Sydney, I’ve had the opportunity to visit and work with forward-thinking companies who helped pioneer the enterprise social world.

I’m lucky to call many of you my friends as I make this transition, and I know we’ll stay in touch.

Meanwhile, this blog continues, and I’ll be blogging over at tibbr as well. So stay tuned.

Instead of interacting with the pictures you took during the weekend, I explain, you share what document you edited or a transaction you took in your sales system. This gives you and your colleagues the ability to take action on that information in real-time.

But even if the conversation progresses to that level of granularity, and the person I’m talking to agrees that activity streams represent a better way to consume business information and connect with colleagues, I’ve been often dogged by one important question, “Well, what you’re saying might be true. But in the end, how isn’t this just another tool for me to deal with at work? As it is today, I can barely get through my e-mail, which, as you point out, stinks.”

Overall, it’s a question that the Enterprise 2.0 industry — software companies that sell social technologies to businesses — has handled poorly. Even today, we still see blog posts that call for the end of e-mail or bombastic presentations that call upon companies to cast the “dusty” systems of record that they invested millions on into the corner.

We need a more pragmatic approach that tackles the “why isn’t this just another tool?” question more substantively. The phrases like “this is like Facebook for your company” or the “why aren’t your tools at work like the ones you have home?” are tired, old and not good enough. They especially don’t work in communicating the value of enterprise activity streams.

Ultimately, the real value with activity streams will be to provide a social layer on top of your current business systems. Before many companies get there, however, they need some more practical reasons why they need activity streams in the first place.

So let’s get a few things straight:

1. Admit Activity Streams Are Another Tool (It’s OK That It Is)

From a purely practical standpoint, various activity streams, and social software in general, are extra tools layered on top of the current systems a worker has in place.
This is inherently true because we’re not replacing systems of record; social software should be designed to complement them and make them more useful. Activity streams don’t replace your e-mails; it makes the e-mails you receive more relevant. As system updates flow to you and pass downstream more efficiently, and you put filters in place to catch what you want to examine later, your communications (including e-mail) can be for more focused and relevant.

2. When Done Right, Activity Streams Quell, Not Add To, Information Overload

The New York Times has been running an interesting series called “Your Brain on Computers.” In a recent article that detailed how much we tether ourselves to the devices and systems around us, we saw just how acute the information overload problem is at work.

In 2008, people consumed three times as much information each day as they did in 1960. And they are constantly shifting their attention. Computer users at work change windows or check e-mail or other programs nearly 37 times an hour, new research shows.

Activity streams take information overload by the horns and pare it down to size by putting your employees in control of the information they consume. Rather than tab toggle to various applications all day, you can select what information from those systems you wanted pulled to you. You can check on it at your convenience, and it’s not pushed to you against your will like e-mail.

Filtering by tags, groups and transaction types from a system will create control that e-mail notifications (a popular refrain for Activity Stream skeptics) only does minimally, and badly.

3. You don’t have to stare at activity streams all day

Geeks stare at activity streams all day, but normal people don’t. Too often, we try to push the value of Activity Streams (and to a degree microblogging) by presuming in our argument that things would be better if people watched the stream all day. This is simply not realistic.

Someone who isn’t on Facebook all day still gets immense value from it, and the same is true with enterprise activity streams, mainly because:

1. Activity streams encourage relevance. Today, if you went on vacation, you can return to work and go through all the e-mails you missed, but you’ll be limited to what information you were addressed on, and a good portion of those messages will be largely irrelevant. With Activity Streams and microblogging, you can seek out keywords and tags relevant to your job, and find out what happened while you were away that really mattered (you can also look at ranked content).
2. Activity streams aggregate information from systems. Similarly, you don’t need to go to each system of record to see what you missed while you were away. Instead, you set up filters and aggregate the specific information you want from each of these systems, as well as the information generated by colleagues that matter to you.
3. Activity streams and microblogging are reply-optional. The reply expectation we have with e-mail doesn’t apply. Although Activity Streams are persistent in their real-time nature, you can passively examine the information that’s relevant to you as many times a day as you find valuable. This, again, speaks to the power of pull (versus push).

4. They’re Cheaper and Easier

Some of the biggest winners in the move to enterprise activity streams are casual (or non) users of traditional enterprise systems. Today, to get information locked in an ERP or CRM system, you must be a licensed user of that system or be on an e-mail list that pulls certain information from them (that, most likely, someone other than you decided might be relevant).

Now, since companies have the ability to utilize open web standards to pull vital information into an enterprise activity stream, a company’s employees can get more from their systems of record, without having to be trained on one of these complicated systems.

The answer to the question is complex, and it’s increasingly becoming more pragmatic: You must start with LOBs if you want a social software implementation that derives meaningful business value, but you need to involve IT if you want the technology woven into the fabric of your company’s long-term architecture.

Early on in the process, LOBs unquestionably make the best champions for enterprise social software because their pain points are so plain to see. They live them everyday. A sales team loses a deal when it didn’t communicate with the right people in marketing. An engineering group lets down an existing customer because they didn’t solve her problem or question fast enough. By not having a place to ask questions openly, share expertise, and find the best people and information to do their jobs, these employees missed out on key business opportunities. The detrimental effects of these broken communication and collaboration processes cause LOB heads to recognize the merits of social software faster than most. They become the best advocates to find social software that helps them solve these specific business challenges.

But IT becomes an important player, too, especially at large companies. Obviously, they help ensure best practices around administration and security. However, since some software as a service (SaaS) offerings have matured to the point that they can handle those functions just as well, the more important role IT will play comes in the effort to make older, traditional enterprise apps social — by integrating them with the LOB’s social software platform of choice.

This middleground approach of LOB champions, coupled with involvement from IT at the appropriate times, has unfortunately not been embraced widely in the Enterprise 2.0 market. Many have opted for one extreme or the other. On one hand, you have those who ignore IT by providing free apps that require a company to pay just to get control of the domain and accounts that their employees signed up for, and traded corporate data over, without permission. That is not a freemium model; it’s a SaaS sales by extortion model.

The other model is just as ugly and even more expensive: A traditional IT-centric roll out. Most often, this social software was built with developers rather than end-users in mind. They try to forcefit new technologies into an old collaboration model, while completely ignoring open Web standards that ensure these applications can hook into others in a vendor agnostic environment. Worse, since LOBs don’t drive the selection and implementation process, you risk deploying software that they will never use to solve their business challenges. As Gartner pointed out, 70 percent of these implementations fail, and it’s really no wonder why.

So my advice is to strive for the middleground. The risk is lower, and the benefits will be both immediate and long-lasting.

/cgl

notes for real-time web meet-up

Scott Schnaars of Socialtext on the initial discussion with organizations about the need to purchase social software:

1. First, assess where Enterprise 2.0 is on the list of buying priorities. For example, deploying Windows 7 could be top of mind, so find out where you stand before you can have a conversation about the value of Enterprise 2.0 technologies.
2. Identify where pain points exist. Regardless of the amount of users you want to give access to enterprise social software, there are two areas where social software that can help drive business value: a) to fix broken informal processes and b) formal processes that exist inside organizations. An example of an informal process would be employees drowning in e-mail for processes that have no home in another system. An example of a formal process would be if people across departments are spending too much time trying to coordinate with each other on joint projects (update meetings, company materials, etc.)
3. When talking to a stakeholder or buyer, ask the question: “In a year, how can we measure whether or not this was a success?”
4. Example of key metrics: TransUnion saved $2.5 million from its use of social software. Why? They collaborated in a central area online to solve some technical problems that were occurring with their internal systems. By coming up with innovative ideas collectively, they avoided buying new hardware to solve the problem.

Chris McGrath of ThoughtFarmer

1. McGrath says, “we sell top down.” And at the top, a primary consideration is SharePoint.
2. If you’re a Microsoft shop, you need to have a SharePoint strategy and understand how Enterprise 2.0 technology and social software fits into it. How is this going to integrate with SharePoint? When would you use SharePoint? It needs to be part of your sales presentation as an Enterprise 2.0 vendor.
3. How can you leverage existing investments in legacy technology (again, SharePoint being a component).

Tom Kuegler of PB Works

1. ROI is critically important
2. Don’t shy away from saying why social software is a replacement for existing technologies.
3. Start with bottom-up approach. Prove success at a departmental level, and then you have value that you can show people at the top.
4. “You have to bring it back to numbers. If you can’t bring it back to numbers and do hard ROI, then stop what you’re doing because you’re wasting everyone’s time.”