This is the swamp we are wading into. This is the swamp we are committed to cleaning up.

Our primary tool is a Knowledge Cloud.

Awhile back, every company needed a “Corporate Portal” to bring together all of their information stores into one interface (hat tip to Plumtree Software and Kirill Sheynkman for the history lesson.) That was the best solution at the time.

The problem was that this approach just put a common window into the swamp, it didn’t structure the data in a way that made it useful. Industry tried organizing everything in giant taxonomies, then folksonomies with user applied tags. It just didn’t work. The collective desk was no more organized than the average worker’s desk. People didn’t want to do the work – they wanted computers to do it. To be fair to the 90’s, the tools to do this structuring (the components of the big data stack we have now) were simply not available. Until recently they were insanely expensive science experiments.

A Knowledge Cloud combines three critical aspects:

1) People Data – rich, multi-faceted profiles that include internal and external data sources and reputation scores. This deep profile allows the Knowledge Cloud to provide Smart Routing, delivering personalized relevancy. It also makes people “findable” in more critical ways, with constant onboarding and reallocation becoming the norm.

2) Activity Streams – beyond static profile attributes, activity streams provide a flow of ongoing data. It’s one thing to claim something, it’s another thing to consistently do something. These keep the profile up to date automatically and provide new frontiers in human capital analytics.

3) Content – APIs combined with cloud storage and a big data stack allow for a “hub for spokes” model of content, where knowledge can be harvested and stored with its related activity stream, automatically tagging, categorizing, and contextualizing the information.

It’s early in this new evolution, but this is clearly the future. A Knowledge Cloud will become an absolutely critical piece of every organization, enabling productivity in a way we soon won’t be able to live without.

One of the hardest problems for social software is getting employees to take that first step and actually start using it. We have found that one of the biggest barrier’s to software adoption is that it normally requires change; employees have to stop using what works for them and start using a system that they are unsure of.

At Red Rover we are constantly working on ways to ensure that users can continue to use the systems they know and that work, while still reaping all the benefits of our Knowledge Cloud platform. Our most recent addition has been the ability  to interact with Red Rover from an “email list”.

Email lists are one of the most ubiquitous social communication systems in organizations. Email lists allow employees to share knowledge by sending information as an email to one address. What has made email lists so powerful is that they do not require employees to change their workflow, everyone uses email all the time.

Of course, an email list does have disadvantages.  For one, it mixes essential and non-essential information together in one place. It does not allow you to choose who in the list receives information and who doesn’t, the message is simply sent it to everyone. The history of the email list becomes tied to individual emails, making it hard for that information to be extracted.  Until now.

Red Rover has created a way to bring some of our great features to users who prefer working with an email list, not only helping them to be part of the conversation, but also improving the functionality of their email lists.

Users can now send messages to the email list just as they normally would, adding pictures or other attachments as they would like.

The email then gets sent to everyone again, just like it would to a normal email list. However, it also gets added to the Red Rover activity stream, where we do some formatting magic to make it look great within the context of the application.

When you receive an email from the Red Rover enhanced email list, you have the option of replying to the message, or following it. If you follow the message, then you will receive all replies. If you don’t think the topic concerns you, then you can just ignore it and you won’t receive emails if others reply to that message, cutting down on the noise that email lists can so often create. If you are viewing the conversation within the Red Rover application and you reply to the conversation, that reply is also then sent to everyone following the conversation. The conversations become archived within Red Rover, making that history available not only to the employees who were there at the time, but to new employees as well.

Imagine the situation where a new printer is installed and someone sends an email to the email list with the instructions for how to use it.

That conversation goes back and forth where various employees add information on using certain features and troubleshooting various issues (hit the top once, kick the bottom twice and pull a funny face to prevent paper jams, for instance). In a normal situation, that would be as far as the email list goes.

With Red Rover, employees who never print anything, can now opt out of the printer conversation. When a new hire comes along and needs to use the printer, they can use Red Rover to search for the conversation and not only see the instructions for how to use the printer, but also share in the cultural history of the organization. If a new problem arises with the printer, someone can again find that conversation, add a comment, and they will immediately be able to reach out to all the printer experts that were part of the original conversation.

Finally, tying a company’s email lists to Red Rover allows the users to take advantage of Smart Routing. Instead of everything going to everyone, the right information can be sent to the right people; reducing noise, which in turn makes employees more willing to engage within their community. Over time Red Rover can learn the fact that you don’t use printers and stop any printer-related emails reaching your inbox, while at the same time ensuring that emails that you do care about (how to use the scanner perhaps?) do show up.

“I don’t want to look at all of this,” Julie said, echoing the last three testers, “I just want to see the items that I care about.”

Julie was a volunteer giving us her thoughts on our software. She was one of 15 in that round of testing, and was giving us her first reaction to the activity stream – a standard user interface pattern that Red Rover employs to unify streams of information.

Julie was 42. She didn’t like the standard user interface pattern. She didn’t mind it when Facebook did it, that was different. Facebook was a cocktail party with friends, she could happily meander through that, it was a pleasant way to waste time. But here, in our test, with our application, she was at work. That was different. She needed the important things. She needed the useful things. She needed the things she cared about in the context of work and nothing else.

We all feel this way. Too much stuff. Too much work to find the nuggets. It’s not a new problem, but it is the problem of social software in the enterprise. “Social” as an add on, with its comments, shares, edits and likes, is increasing the amount of stuff. Social publishing lets anyone add to the stuff.

All of these are known issues. Clay Shirkey pointed at “filter failure“ way back in 2008, showing the explosion of information and predicting further overwhelm.

The software industry has been experimenting with many ways to solve info overwhelm. Start ups are launched daily to address it. But while most of the work is being done in the consumer web, the enterprise software industry, with its longer cycles, is both behind and following the wrong examples.

What was fascinating in the usability study was a suggestion that the user interface preferences split along demographic lines. Testers under 35 tended to prefer the activity stream. They prioritized “fresh,” short form content that was easy to scan. In contrast, those over 35 preferred authority and popularity. They wanted magazine like content, long blogs that someone had crafted as a piece of content. When they saw something that looked vaguely like Twitter or Facebook, they were immediately turned off.

Traditionally, enterprise software vendors do not want to talk about adoption or usability, but it’s a new era and we are on a mission.

Our mission is to make individuals more successful by organizing the community around them.

To achieve our mission, we require adoption from the whole community, with all of its diversity and preferences. We are committed to usability.

To address the different preferences we heard from our users, we’ve launched a new home page that surfaces the featured content (for authority), the popular (for priority) and coming soon . . . the personal.

It has more whitespace for separation of content. One user commented it felt like “fresh air.” Fresh air is pretty much the opposite of overwhelm.

Lots more work to do, but it’s exciting to be releasing updates that our users love.

At its most basic, it goes like this:

Melissa  →  Read → A blog.

“Melissa” is the actor. “Read” is the verb. “A blog” is the object.

When work, and the monitoring of it was analog (think Mad Men) all of these verbs existed in language and on paper:

• “Peter closed the new account.”
• “Peggy printed the story boards.”
• “Roger drank his 5th martini.”

Management has always been about verbs. Verbs are tactics.  When managers provide goals, they have an easier time measuring output. To improve performance however, we have to be able to improve the tactics- we have to modify the verbs.  ‘Do more of these verbs and less of these.  Do these verbs differently.’

“What you measure is what you get.” – Peter Drucker

Any given application will provide your actors (employees, customers, students, community members, etc.) with a number of possible verbs.  Salesforce enables a collection of verbs that drive the goal of “selling.”  Just as importantly, because these verbs are now digital, they are counted and measured.  Individual applications provide feedback loops to drive usage, increasing the verb count in the right direction. The verbs get stored with rich data that provides context and the possibility of deep insight.

As larger enterprises transition from big installed software that “does everything” to more focused, cloud based applications, we are going to get more applications that use the Activity Stream Standard. This enables the sharing and aggregation of verbs; we can now measure the actual tactics and compare them to the goals.

The inaugural event (hosted in January by Cooley LLP) was akin to a sold-out broadway show. Every seat was filled and the back of the room awash in handshakes, briefcases and coats slung over shoulders. With a buzz of curious excitement in the room, four companies presented a product demo and doing a bit of Q&A. Red Rover was one of those four. In addition to a peek at the product, CEO Kevin Prentiss shared his thoughts on social technology and how Red Rover handles “Those That Will Never Change“.

Social and big data were major themes with Bitly, PerspecSys and Socialware rounding out the demo deck. The demos provided the spark for passionate conversations after the meetup.  Red Rover was thrilled to not only present but also connect with other innovators in the enterprise tech ecosystem. We will be back to this much needed meetup.

For those who were there, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the event. And if you couldn’t make it to the inaugural meetup (we’re sorry we missed you), we hope to connect with you at one in the future.

If technology serving enterprise business is your bailiwick, it’s a must-attend event.  Rumor has it there are still tickets left for the March meetup, but get them quick because they’re sure to be standing room only.

No matter the culture of the company, there are always those who embrace the new and those that claim they will never change. There’s quite a bit of angst about the never changers, managers talk carrots and sticks, and consultancies like Accenture collect bundles of cash to get large companies’ employees to actually use the SalesForce licenses they bought. Projects that start by trying to change the behavior of those that “will never change” rarely produce the results the company wants.

These employees feel they have a system that works for them and it’s extraordinarily difficult to talk them out of it. We’re big believers in not replacing anything that works. Seth Godin and others can rage on about the personal career dangers of not changing, but for us, it’s not about judgement, it’s about bringing the whole community together.

On the other side of the community are the early adopters, whose vision for new ways of connecting help drive the company forward. They need, and crave, the new and the shiny. There are stereotypes that these are the young folks, but that’s not what we see in our data – an early adopting mindset cuts across generations. Curious and playful are everywhere.

What’s needed then, is getting everyone onto one system in the way that works for them now. Getting all of the different usage patterns feeding into one system enables the most powerful leaver of behavioral change – peer norming – to take hold over time. This, more than consultants or training, is what will bend the usage curve towards the new thing.

Red Rover is out to make individuals more successful by organizing the community around them. The game of social software is to make the “organizing” part as painless as possible. For some people, painless means an interface that feels kind of Facebook-y. For others, in the same company, it means staying in email as much as possible.

From a product perspective, this means a focus as much on the interface of email as the interface of the web app. It means keeping list serve addresses and most list serve patterns in place for those that want them.

Companies are diverse, people have preferences. We love backbone.js and the new mobile workforce, but for those that love email, and claim they’ll never change, we love you too.

And then there are workplace resolutions. Did you resolve to increase the sales leads for your team, get involved in the company’s sustainability efforts, or communicate more effectively with management this year?

All of us would like to see things change for the better in our workplaces. It  may seem like those resolutions are the hardest to keep because so many others must be involved in the execution. Resolving to double your team’s customer service scores might make resolving to go to the gym look like a piece of cake, because one of those choices is completely up to you and there other one isn’t. But the flip side is that it’s oftentimes harder to motivate ourselves than it is to motivate others.

It takes the same sort of positive energy to do both, but I find that’s it easier to stick with a resolution if you focus on others – that will help you get outside of the world of excuses we all carry in our heads. Offer to help your colleagues with their professional resolutions, and involve others in yours. You’ll discover that the positivity you generate in your work life gets amplified by others, which makes it easier for you to take that home and apply it to your personal life. If you can rally people to success at work, you can rally yourself to get to the gym or wake up on time, or do whatever it is you resolved to do this year.

It’s easy to forget how captivating and contagious the human spirit can truly be when we’re mired in the tediousness of daily life. You can’t solve the company’s problems on your own, but your team can move mountains together when everyone gets out of their own heads and invests themselves in helping each other succeed. The positive energy everyone generates at work will be a great reminder of what each of you is cabable of achieving on your own as well.

Photo courtesy of John Haslam. 

The problem with industry buzzwords is that many people use them to sound like they know what they are talking about when they don’t. Buzzwords are not inherently bad or unprofessional. But, they are overused terms that unfortunately become industry-defining and mainstream, simply because everyone else is using them. Because of their prevalence in mainstream communication — meaning, everyone has “access” to this language — some industry professionals may be hypersensitive to buzzwords and may judge your use of them if you can’t back it up with a qualified understanding of their definitions and applications. Here are five ways to make sure you sound like you know your stuff, so you don’t get written off by potential industry contacts.

1. Back them up with data. Use infographics and industry reports to qualify the industry terms you are referencing. The goal here is to give them weight, otherwise it may seem like you just picked the trendiest words for your presentation. Do you think organizational engagement should be your company’s focus in 2012? Find the resources that bolster your claim and demonstrate why your team should head in that direction.
2. Don’t bundle them together in one sentence. It’s easy to sound like you know your stuff if you bundle a few buzzwords together and let them “define” each other. But, walk into a room with one person who actually knows what those words mean, and how they relate to your industry, and your thin veil of know-how falls away. Even if you do know what they mean, you’ll still sound like an amateur.
3. Focus on your action plan. Okay, so everyone’s buzzing about knowledge sharing technology, and now you are too. Great. But, how are you going to use what you know to make something positive happen at your organization? Lay out a real, actionable plan to back up the buzzwords and people will be less likely to doubt your use of them. Without the plan, those words become frothy and irrelevant.
4. Use the right ones. Using buzzwords can contextualize your ideas and connect it to a larger industry trend. Just make sure you are picking the ones that pack the most punch. Throwing in extra terms that are irrelevant to your work, but are equally trendy, will NOT make you look any better. In fact, that move could work against you if someone presses you for more information about your work. You’ll have to backpedal to answer to the empty claims you’ve made and redeem yourself.
5. Just don’t use them. Instead, be well-read on your topic and know what you are talking about. Buzzwords are tricky. They are trendy terms that can make you sound really cool if you use them properly, and in front of the right people. But user beware: people are so attuned to them, there’s a higher likelihood they’ll make you look really bad. Avoid setting yourself up for epic conversation failure, by avoiding them entirely. However, if you must use them, test out your buzzword-laden phrases with trusted colleagues and experienced advisors. They will tell you if you sound like a tool, and hopefully prevent you from embarrassing yourself in front of more discerning audiences.