Dear Friends, Partners and Customers and yes, oh my dear extended social network,

as we’re reaching the end of 2011 I wanted to thank you all for your business and your inspiration.

2011 was a busy year for me – more coaching and training gigs than in past years, and a constant stream of consulting projects. I am still focused on helping companies (and the people inside them) grapple with the implications and challenges of Enterprise 2.0. Now, Social business means challenges and tasks in helping with the integration of technologies and platforms, but also – and dare I say more importantly – social business needs efficient implementation work to reach its goals. Things like widespread adoption, continuous business process- integrated and day-to-day use don’t come as naturally as we might have expected in the past. So this has taken much focus in 2011 and I am excited to continue this journey in the new year.

So as I’m grateful for all the projects underway and finished, lessons learned and wonderful stuff experienced I thank you for all the past year. I look forward to working with you in 2012 and wish you, your teams and your families a very happy and healthy new year.

Martin _ frogpond

CC Image by Joe Kovacs, who has much nicer images of Basel than mine – the sky’s pretty much the same anyway

Yes, cleared the mess by now – and slowly recovering. Will see how this works out.

ps. I did have backups, nice long passwords, and a pretty current WordPress install. Will elaborate on this as soon as possible.

[Update: it's been a nasty Spam Injection - ie. while normal users of this site didn't see the spam links, but the Google bot did. With the help of the Googlebot Spoofer I was able to see the actual mischief, ie. links to all sorts of warez et al.

The actual spam wasn’t embedded in the posts (or the database) but was deposited in extra files on my server, hidden from plain first sight and referenced via an hacked .htaccess file.

The compromising access to the files was achieved via an outdated WordPress plugin – not one that I missed to update but one that seems to have degraded over time and development from WordPress 2.x to 3.2.x.

My fixes included a) kicking that stupid plugin b) fixing the .htaccess c) removing the spam repository files d) changing passwords everywhere (WP users, database, ftp access and e) some hidden sauce that I won’t blog about.

So hopefully this write-up helps others, namely those webmasters that I informed via Email about their compromised sites.

We’re living in interesting times, huh? Stressful they are, but mostly rewarding …

written 5 minutes before hopping under the shower, then the car, then the commute, then the scheduled social circle of da day work meeting

Ob es ein gutes Zeichen für eine zukunftsgerichtete Internet-und-so-Konferenz ist wenn die Teilnehmer weiter sind als die manche Leute auf dem Podium? Oder anders herum gefragt warum trauen sich manche auf so eine Plattform mit halbgaren Ergebnissen aus pseudo-wissenschaftlichen Seminararbeiten*? Und nein, damit meine ich nicht Sascha, auch wenn seine ausgedachte Trolltheorie mehr unterhaltsam als wissenschaftlich begründbar ist (Oliver hat mitgeschrieben). Aber den Tag bzw. den Vortrag mit der Stilvorgabe <rüpelnder rant> zu beginnen hat etwas ungemein inspirierendes. Kann man ja nicht allzuoft machen, ist vielleicht aber auch besser so …

Was bleibt also vom ersten Tag der re:publica 11 für mich? Im Grunde das zu erwartende – übervolle Sessionräume, übervolle UMTS-Funkzellen und übertolle Gespräche mit alten Freunden und Bekannten. Vielleicht sollte ich heute komplett auf Face-to-Face Interaktion setzen? Offline bin ich vermutlich ohnehin, wenn auch unfreiwilllig. Dagegen sprechen im Grunde nur a) die Vorfreude auf manche der heutigen Vortragenden, die ich nun doch nicht verpassen möchte und b) meine ausgeprägte Neugier (die mich so auch immer wieder in Grossman-Stiglitz-Informationsparadoxon-Fallen laufen lassen wird, vulgo: ich weiß erst nach der Session wie sie denn nun war).

Gilt irgendwie für die re:publica als Ganzes - man weiß aus Erfahrung dass es Fallen geben wird, man kennt sogar aus Erfahrung deren “Bauform” und Lage – und dennoch tappt man frohgemut rein. Wie immer eine tolle re:publica, ich bin froh dabei zu sein.

* aus Political Correctness Sentimentalitäten keine Links und keine weiteren Worte

Die Digitale Gesellschaft ist die Antwort der Netizen auf Organisationen wie den IT-Verband Bitkom oder den Eco als Verband der Internetwirtschaft Deutschlands. Ähnlich wie diese Lobbyorganisationen der Industrie soll der Verein “Digitale Gesellschaft” verschiedene Kampagnen unterstützen, die sich mit Themen wie Netzneutralität, Urheberrecht und Vorratsdatenspeicherung befassen und in die Politik hineinwirken. Via

Ich bin gespannt auf gehaltvolle Vorträge und Gespräche, und auf den Perspektivwechsel den ich dort in meinen – leider nur zwei – Tagen machen möchte. Es ist ja regelmäßig so, dass Berater in ihren Beratungsprojekten anderen Methoden und mentalen Modellen folgen nachhängen, wie bspw. Wissenschaftler und Netzforscher im weitesten Sinne. Das Programm gibt hier einiges her, ich werde vermutlich die zwei Tage zwischen Friedrichstadtpalast und Kalkscheune hin- und herpendeln, wobei jeder der mich kennt weiß dass ich immer wieder im Innenhof der Kalkscheune zu finden bin …

Actually this sounds more like a business model innovation design post, huh? You’re right but the prototyping method is dear to my heart and pretty close to recent real life consulting engagements of mine …

it’s the thing to (virtually) attend the next three days – and it starts tonight. Guess who’s on the list of guests …

It will be interesting to see which one’s of the following topics will gather most interest and action:

• Building the Social Business of the Future
• Building Participatory Organizations Through Social Adoption
• Using Social to Understand and Engage with Customers
• What does Social mean for IT?
• Identifying Risks and Establishing Governance

Indeed these are the pre-planned forums where people are invited to join, discuss and contribute – I will participate mainly in the strategy tracks as I call them (“Building the Social Business of the Future” and “Building Participatory Organizations Through Social Adoption”) hoping to discuss ideas, arenas of possible uses etc.

After all it’s not about Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 and the Social Web by themselves but about corporate uses of it all, where the usage can regularly span corporate boundaries (even when many things are happening behind some sort of firewall it must not stop there).

So timely this Social Jam is well, huh? Well, it’s probably quite an example of using social software for innovation and idea management across traditional boundaries (who is allowed to participate, who can manage to be there, etc.), that allows wide participation (that said – it starts at 10 AM EST, which is about 4 pm my time, hence thankfully not as early as for people on the West Coast …).

Ist Enterprise 2.0 ein ernstzunehmendes Thema oder nur eine neue Modeerscheinung? Zeigt die jüngste WikiLeaks Affäre das Versagen von Vernetzung und Transparenz auf? Steigern Social Intranets, Wikis, Blogs etc. tatsächlich die Produktivität?  Welche Rolle spielen Compliance, Führungsfunktionen, Unternehmenskommunikation und Zusammenarbeit dabei? Muss jeder alles wissen?

Das Communardo Trendforum Stuttgart bietet für diese und weitere Fragen eine Diskussions- und Austauschplattform für Führungskräfte sowie verantwortliche Entscheider aus den Bereichen, Intranet, Unternehmenskommunikation, Organisationsentwicklung und Wissensmanagement zu aktuellen, wichtigen Themen rund um die Optimierung von Kommunikationsprozessen und Team Collaboration in Unternehmen.

Das Oberthema “Prozess-(R)evolution im Enterprise 2.0″ ist natürlich spannend und offen genug gehalten um spannende Diskussionen anzustoßen – ich würde denn auch gleich den Titel anders formulieren und mit Prozess-(R)evolution durch Enterprise 2.0 antreten. Ganz im Sinne des Enterprise 2.0 als Vehikel und flankierende Maßnahme für die Umsetzung (ohnehin notwendigen) organisationalen Wandels. Ja, das habe ich auch schon mehrmals diskutiert, ua. hier “One word as a focal point for change – Collaboration“ und hier “Cultural change and developing collaboration capabilities“.

Wenn am Ende des Abends gehaltvolle Gespräche über die Zukunft der Idee Enterprise 2.0 entstehen (das von mir aus auch gerne unter dem mentalen Shortcut Social Business geführt werden darf, es geht ja mehr um die Idee als um Begrifflichkeiten, dann kann man auch eine Zeit mit verschiedenen Interpretationen leben) dann wäre ich zufrieden, es gibt ja auch genügend zu diskutieren, wie Joachim Niemeier sehe ich dort u.a.

[...] Themen wie Change Management im Kontext von Enterprise 2.0, neue Qualifikationsanforderungen zur praktischen Nutzung der neuen Arbeitsformen und die Einbindung von Enterprise 2.0 in eine längerfristige Organisationsentwicklung.

Gerade das letztere rührt an eine wunde Stelle und offene Flanke der Enterprise 2.0 Diskussion, die Frage nach der strategischen Einordnung, der Positionierung im unternehmerischen Kontext, der Frage wie Enterprise 2.0 bestehende Geschäftsmodelle und Modus Operandi von Unternehmen ändern muss und wird, wieviel sich Social Business Design vornehmen kann und soll etc. Insofern bleibt die Diskussion auch weiterhin spannend  ….

There’s of course the german Lotus team, ie. Stefan Pfeiffer with german language notes (see eg. OGS: Activity Streams, Mobility und Social everywhere) and the not-so-affiliated folks (Volker Weber, Alexander Kluge, die Noteshexe und mehr …).

Some of the prolific bloggers I had the pleasure to (re-)meet are Bill Ives from Portals and KM, Falk Hedemann from german magazine t3n (german blogging hence, interesting report on the RIM PlayBook), Luis Benitez and my irregular friends from the enterprise 2.0 sphere (Luis Suarez, Susan Scrupski, Bertrand Duperrin, Rawn Shah, Larry Hawes, Vinnie Mirchandani …) and other spheres (James aka Monkchips to start, I am curious to see what he’s writing, always insightful commenter on Twitter he is, plus the always knowledgeable Alex Williams from ReadWriteWeb Enterprise too – how can one person do such good live-blogging?).

I haven’t met Turbotodd so far (and it’s getting late, yes) but one can’t have everything, no?  But I have shook hands with Scott Treggiari, who’s the last press/analyst/blogger with me in the press room on Wednesday evening. More to meet at tonight’s party – an appointment with Harry Potter it is.

ps. I will update this blog post with links to the posts as they come in (and I come around reading them, tomorrows a time of travel.

Rant over, anybody who finds recursion in here is free to keep it. And no, I won’t give you any links.

Via Schockwellenreiter who made my day thus.

I won’t regurgitate any press releases, you can easily find them at the IBM Lotusphere press room, rather it’s notes about the questions (and consecutive) answers (with an occasional snappy remark by me, of course).

So what was in there? First, recapitulations of the things we’ve heard already at the opening session, ie. the importance of mobile social business (stressing that clients will be there for all major mobile platforms), the upcoming Project Vulcan-enhanced new Connections next, Sametime next and everything next, and the announcement of new programs to help partners embrace the “growing social business market opportunity”.

I think that “embrace to leverage” is good, needs some coaching and education and IBM is stepping up their efforts, see eg. the Become a Social Business site, aimed not only at customers but also at partners et al. Fitting that they’re taking great efforts at also educating and motivating IBM staff. As Paul Greenberg tweeted: “They are not only eating their own dogfood, they’re breeding their own dogs!” – yes, and it’s a great investment too: ”IBM aims to train 50K of its employees on #socbiz this year, so they can be more effective and help others” as Larry Hawes says correctly.

In the question round it started off with an analyst asking how IBM prioritizes open standards – and which ones?

Alistair Rennie chose the safe road and answered that – whether inside or outside the firewall – with standards there’s always a spectrum (or as I would say, there’s legion to choose from and some of them don’t catch on even if they are very cleverly devised and all). So, for IBM HTML5 is a big one, OpenSocial, OAuth, Activity Streams and more. This parallels what eg. RIM is thinking (there should be no Apps needed for the web, native access is cool because it also allows you to employ your existing tools) and is mirrored as well in the provision of the Social Business Toolkit (more on this later, I have to sort out some things on this, like seeing through my notes from Charlie Hill’s sunday morning talk “Executive Insight: The IBM Social Business Platform”)

How long will it take for widespread adoption?

Again Alistair Rennie took to it – explaining that IBM sees it as a business-driven thing (and I say is obviously grounded in it’s approach, you better be when you’re that old …, no need for too much revolutionary /missionary zest), where you need to be able to act sensibly and contextually relevant. But the social business mindset can be applied to a wide variety of business processes and the advantages are tangible (sure, they are I say) so he’s optimistic about adoption.

What are the ideas to help people filter through the information avalanche? (this wasn’t the exact wording of the question, but close enough -I thought it a bit awkward, ie. remember the notion of Clay Shirky – filter failure, not information overload)

Two elements – one filtering (yes, analytics, applying semantic analytics to extract meaning and act upon it), the other (predicitive) analytics – especially important when you think of the synchronization of activity streams on mobile devices. You don’t want all info tidbits presented there, so you need to differentiate the super-important or urgent from the rest. So you filter stuff in the back, then push the best onto the device. The exact methods to do this are in the working, but it’s essential that this filtering and high-lighting is done in an open and transparent way.

Concerning organizational change management – what is IBM doing to help people understand the importance? Does it reshape fundamental (departmental) organizational processes? What are IBM’s experiences?

Hmm, here I didn’t get the whole answer, but I am pretty sure it revolved around demonstrating benefits, educating and coaching (see above on what IBM is doing, yes) and the need for an (internal) team of ambassadors (think what the BlueIQ team has done for IBM) who explain, show and tell, … Alistair also pointed out that while it always depends on the context, ie. industry and business segment, IBM has brought a row of clients to #ls11 that can give insight into what they’ve done, so go ahead and talk to them.

So what is part of Project Vulcan?

Short answer: last year it was a project not a product, this year there’s tweaked products, ie. Notes next is heavily Vulcan vision influenced. Equally the mobile solutions (there was talk about this at ls10 for sure, see eg. my write-up of last year’s analyst briefing), the provision of the Social Business Toolkit etc. So basically Project Vulcan is everywhere …

There were more questions on Symfony, the dangers risks of social software, ie. downsides of transparency, and also on how much IBM is investing and expecting to earn. Needless to say that this last one was asked by a guy from forbes.com (I bet you knew that already, huh?). He got a short answer, ie. core focus, big play, big expectations (I bet you knew that already too, huh?). The longer answer involved some grounded reasoning around the benefits not alone being in saving money, but eg. also driving down cycle-time, time to market etc. And there was a nice remark on CSC seeing social business is working and consequently not putting the numbers on close scrutiny all the time. So much for this zombie-alike recurring theme of “We can’t do this as long as we don’t have numbers” (aka the RoI discussion et al.).
ps. very geeky picture above (“it goes to 11, we checked”) by The Original Turtle

And like last year there was a surprise guest for the opening, actor Kevin Spacey. Some grounded remarks on collaboration, social networks, helping people achieve their potential and the social responsibility of mentoring. Plus – again – some rationale for collaborative social business, ie. based upon his personal insight into filmmaking as an effort of many and the need to lower the walls for innovative ideas to come inside one’s organization and social sphere. Yes, the movie industry can be understood as an archetypical model of networked collaboration and Kevin tells us the story of how he and partners founded a web based platform for scriptwriters years ago – helping them not only to turn in their scripts but also to help them learn from each other. And yes. that was long before the social network.

Then regular Lotus time with Alistair Rennie expanding upon this year’s theme Get social. Do business. Some takeaways from his talk:

• social business is all about a new business context emerging, both in terms of open tasks and opportunities. We need to help business people to solve hard problems, problems that are keeping them awake at night. Read business volatility, the changing nature of customer relationships, et al.
• creative leadership needs to tap and redesign relationships, in order to leverage collective intelligence
• social business is a real game changer, and we know that game changers are rare. Here we have one for sure, even when the model and its understanding is still in the early stages. Why? Because we (and that’s not only IBM but us) have been thinking and researching on this since years literally. IBM wants to lead this movement.
• evolution from mainframes to departmental computing, then PCs on every desk, then the Internet – now it’s stage five, ie. Social Business.
• Companies that employ social technologies Social businesses outperform their competitors according to a recent McKinsey study. It’s because they’re more engaged, more transparent and more nimble and agile (able to change and adapt quickly and able to act with speed). Being engaged in networked social business, ie. working the networks pays as well – when they’re transparent it’s easier to tap distributed competencies and capabilities
• What social business needs is open standards – best served with enterprise grade security. IBM is commited to standards, be they HTML5, activity streams, open social, or else.
• Activity Streams are the cornerstone of the smarter knowledge workers environment, aggregating information from all kinds of sources (be they internal or external social media). And these streams can be accessed and worked on when on the go as well (unified communications as well). So, mobility is another key thing. Clients on all kinds of devices and platforms.

Now some notes from the following panels and demos, starting with RIM CTO Jim Basillie who came onstage with a RIM Playbook (multi-tasking and flash support included unlike other market playbooks . He’s holding it’s a viable platform (well, he’s got a point, at least it’s “CIO approved”).

Jeff Schick moderated a customer panel (with BASF, KBC, CSC and AT&T) on how they employ social Lotus software (plus some remarks on how it played out economically, I noted one thing that the guy from BASF said that it’s no longer a mere question of RoI at their place by now, they have demonstrated that it’s worthwhile and have crossed the Rubicon it seems).

Another customer panel with the AFL (he**, australian english is so hard to understand, mymy), the Massachussetts Blue Cross Blue Shield and RBC, big canadian bank. All perfectly satisfied with what they’ve done with Lotus so far.

Then introduction to the demo rounds, reaching back to last year’s Project Vulcan blueprint roadmap vision, the Vulcan ideas get integrated into Notes next, Connections next, Sametime next, xyz next. The idea is to provide exceptional work experience (shall I say with the goal of improving day to day corporate work?). Find some notes on the demos at Alex Williams who was live-blogging the event, Alan Lepofsky was also live-blogging the opening session and has more details of the demos.

After that I was off to the official press conference and a round of executive meetings and briefings during the most time of the afternoon (there will be more posts, stand by … I was writing this post during the whole of the afternoon, ie. during the breaks in my schedule)

PS. Luis Benitez embedded the Lotus live-blogging Cover it Live collaboration of him and Mitch (cool pictures and loads of short remarks made during the session)

PPS. You can see the whole 2:30 video footage of the OGS here: