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Social media is not a noun (media) accompanied by an adjective (social). In fact, as long as we think of it that way social media can only fail to achieve what the thought leaders who advocate its use believe it capable of doing. Social media is, in fact, a compound noun. Neither term is sufficent to describe what is done by those using it unless we consider it as part of the other. social business design social media MORE
One of the most visited posts on this blog is titled, Empathic Research Methods and Design Strategy. In it I add to points made by Adam Silver, a Strategist at Frog Design, noting that globalization and digitalization in the 1990s resulted in product and service interfaces with more culturally diverse and geographically distributed customers. The combination of these forces led designers to search for new methods to augment artistic intuition. MORE
The emergence of social media provides people inside and outside organizations with a way to actively speak about, speak to, and engage the product and service offerings of enterprises. Currently, 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content and 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands. Enterprises, on the other hand, listen to, engage, and act on insights gained from social media. Social Networks Web 2.0 MORE
Back in 2006 I read the following point on Hugh Mcleod's blog, Gapingvoid: "If people like buying your product, it’s because its story helps fill in the narrative gaps in their own lives." At the time I thought it conveyed nicely the point made by Gerald Zaltman in How Customers Think that "companies should define customer segments ont he basis of similarities in their reasoning or thinking processes" (p. 152) rather than the conventional constructs related to demographics. MORE
The title for this post is drawn from a recent assessment of SharePoint 2007 offered on Thomas Vander Wal's bog, Personal InfoCloud. Thomas' post, as always, offers a unique point of view on what Enterprise 2.0 consists and, specifically, how SharePoint measures up. He isn't offering his own formal assessment as much as reporting the stories clients and potential clients shared with him over the past couple of years. MORE
Digital ethnography is an increasingly feasible research technique as smartphones decrease in cost and more people carry them around. The photographic capability of smartphones is an important resource in making digital research ubiquitous, giving people the ability to capture images and record observations as they go about their everyday lives, and characterize those observations for ethnographers. MORE
An early Skilful Minds post introduced The Great Innovation Debate, focusing on the distinctions between Tom Friedland's conception that when it comes to innovation the world is flat, and the alternative point of view espoused by Richard Florida that the world is spiky. Meaning that the aggregation of creative people in cities, in proximity to one another, largely drives innovation and economic growth. MORE
To get to the main point quickly, let's do what few people offering thoughts about collaboration actually do. Let's explicitly discuss what it is. First off, collaboration isn't just about people sharing information to achieve common goals. Collaboration is about people working with other people to achieve common goals. Advocates of Enterprise 2.0 MORE
On several occasions I've discussed dialogue in relationship to organizational self-orientation, open innovation, brand strategy, and learning. MORE
So, here social media sits, between fear and faith. Needless to say, the truth about social media's implications for business design lies somewhere in the middle. The fact of the matter, as Todd Defren tells us, is that we need to begin seriously discussing "how Social Media Thinking will impact the greater whole of the company.". Customer Experience Enterprise 2.0 Experience Design social business design social media socialCRM MORE
My previous post discussed the Open/Closed culture fallacy in social business design. I contended that leaders of large corporations are typically unable to answer the key strategic questions posed by David Armano in an important post recently. In this post I'll continue that line of thinking by considering a combination of David's third and fourth questions in light of the open/closed culture fallacy. MORE
I've discussed ethnography several times before, the first taking note of the trend toward virtual anthropology and the next talking about the significance of Tom Boellstorff's ethnography of Second Life, followed by a couple of posts about ethnography in relation to empathy and globalization. Indeed, Cheskin's Davis Masten and Tim Plowman characterized digital ethnography as the next wave in understanding the consumer experience in a Design Management Journal article as early as 2003. MORE
The topics discussed at Skilful Minds fall in a range of challenges involved in translating strategic business goals, and the complex needs of people, into exceptional experiences, for employees who provide products and services and those who consume them, whether the latter are customers, users, learners, or just plain people. Commentators and practitioners of experience design tend to focus on the latter while largely ignoring the former. MORE
My last post, Institutional Innovation and Podular Design, noted a number of insights from the Aspen Institute''s report, Institutional Innovation: Oxymoron or Imperative? One insight which I did not discuss is relevant to understanding the changing way teams work together in organizations and, by implication, in a Connected Company. MORE
We know that most learning in the workplace is informal. Most observers put it at around 80%. Recently, John Hagel and John Seeley Brown contended that "as much as two-thirds of headcount time in major enterprise functions like marketing, manufacturing and supply chain management is spent on exception handling." MORE
A recent Economist article discusses the relevance of Dunbar’s Number to friending in Facebook, and its relation to the size of social networks, especially networks of close friends. The article addresses a similar issue outlined in an earlier post here on the influence of influentials on Twitter, which focused on findings of a recent study by members [.]. Social Networks social media facebook friends social core social media marketing social network social networking twitter Web 2.0 MORE
The trade-offs in deciding whether to implement a lingua franca policy are pretty well known. Pressure from other global players such as suppliers, customers, partners, and competitors who increasingly use English is one. Diversification of organizational tasks across departments in different countries creates bottlenecks without a lingua franca, increasing inefficiencies. A third reason relates to making mergers and acquisitions among global companies smoother in organizational terms. MORE
There is nothing like an exception to the way things are done to highlight the need to increase knowledge sharing, especially if the exception is one instance of a pattern that results in bad experiences for customers. As Jay Cross recently noted, people learning at work rely on social, or informal learning, around 80% of the time. MORE
The Interaction Design Foundation is publishing Gamification At Work by Jankaki Kumar and Mario Herger for the public tomorrow. I just finished reading the book and taking notes thinking I might review it. However, rather than do a simple review of the book’s content, I decided to situate the major points from the book into a post on […]. MORE
The Altimeter Group’s report from earlier this year, The Evolution of Social Business: Six Stages of Social Business Transformation, offers the above graphic to exemplify the way social networking develops as the social activities of businesses mature. I tend to feel skeptical about many developmental models in social business simply because markets differ, sometimes in fundamental ways, […]. MORE
Don't Gamify Wild Bill discussed the importance of designing for voluntary play in serious games. Play is the baseline requirement for any game designed to provide useful indicators for gauging individual and organizational successes over time. Specifically, my point is that those interested in gamifying employee engagement in social business, and who also aim to effectively use collaboration, must optimally design for emergence not just competition and cooperation as guiding principles. MORE
What do you think the typical manager might say if you told them their employees don't gossip and engage one another in non-work related tasks enough? Most managers have heard of the watercooler effect without ever having the meaning of the concept sink in to their understanding of how it relates to performance and collaboration. A couple of studies released this summer dealing with performance and collaboration in teams merit consideration. MORE
Common wisdom among thought leaders who examine learning in organizations notes that most of the learning that occurs is done informally, or socially. However, informal learning has its own limitations that we all need to keep in mind as we think through the ways in which it adds value to business processes. Collaboration Customer Experience e-Learning 2.0 MORE
BRPs result in business exceptions and take up almost all of the time employees spend at work. Interestingly, much of the writing I see on Big Data is about making ERPs more efficient or making guesses about when to expect occurrences of a BRP. In other words, both goals are really about making coordination of organizational efforts more efficient and/or effective. Big Data Collaboration Ethnography Innovation Social Business Design Ubiquitous Computing Web 2.0 MORE
One of my earlier posts discussed the learnability of a service as a key challenge for experience design. Today I ran across this early video from Don Norman on learnability and product design. I thought I would share it. Experience Design Innovation Learning Experience Service Design Social Business Design User Experience Collaboration Customer Experience learnability learnable social learning user experience MORE
Recent studies, one by Sentiment360 and the other by FreshMinds, contend that social media monitoring tools aren't very accurate in measuring sentiment, much less influence. The insight isn't a new one and speaks to the now well-known issue of whether social media engagement is scalable. MORE
One of my earlier posts asked the question, Who's on Your Team? Its focus was on the importance of social software applications in the Enterprise to the ability of distributed project team members to recognize who is on their team at any point in time, and who isn't. Organizational analysts refer to the challenge as a boundary definition problem for teams, when members are spread across large distances whether geographic or cultural in nature. MORE
Grocery shopping is one of those chores that we all have to do from time to time. I'm introducing the topic of grocery shopping as a service journey not because the concept is new. Few people who analyze what grocers do and how people who shop in their stores get the job of buying groceries done would be surprised that it is a journey. What I want to do is provide a brief history of the grocery shopper's journey, and key transformations of that journey. MORE
I recently received an invitation from Mads Soegaard, Editor-in-Chief at Interaction-Design.org to offer those who read this blog an early view of a new chapter on Social Computing in their encyclopedia. I’m a little late on this writing for you to get a pre-publication view of the chapter but I wanted to make sure and point it out for [.]. Collaboration e-Learning 2.0 Enterprise 2.0 Innovation Social Business Design Web 2.0 MORE
In Social is the plural of personal JP Rangaswami contends that institutional innovation is required to achieve the potential that social software offers organizations in general, and for-profit companies in particular. JP's voice is one of several important contributions to current thinking about innovation. Change Management Collaboration Experience Design Innovation Social Business Design Social Media Social Networks Web 2.0 MORE
Word of mouth communities and networks using social software are increasingly spread over regional, national, and international borders, making them much more important to those who market branded products and services, online and off. The recent buzz around the concept of social business points to the growing importance of social networks and communities to the evolution of business practice. MORE
Social Flow in Gameful Design made the point that social flow contrasts to Csikszentmihalyi's original concept of individual or solitary flow, in which a person's engagement in actions is optimal, where they lose a sense of time and awareness of self in an intrisincally rewarding feeling. Social flow implies a qualitatively different order of the flow experience, a group-level experience. MORE
There is a lot, actually a whole lot, of buzz over the past year about the gamification of business, specifically marketing, training, customer service. Much of it misses the simple point that it is the experience with it, the playfulness of it, that makes a game. Not the scoring system, or the rewards, or anything else can make up for a game that participants (customers or employees) don't experience as play. MORE
People discussing the pace of change that organizations face in dealing with connected customers, globalization, competition, distributed workforces, innovation, etc. often assert that a paradigm shift is needed. I agree with the basic point. However, the way forward is seldom clear and simple when facing the need for dramatic changes in how we think about organizing what we know into practical changes to such fundamental challenges. MORE
Skilful Minds
JUNE 24, 2013
The Interaction Design Foundation is publishing Gamification At Work by Jankaki Kumar and Mario Herger for the public tomorrow. I just finished reading the book and taking notes thinking I might review it. However, rather than do a simple review of the book’s content, I decided to situate the major points from the book into a post on […].
Skilful Minds
JUNE 27, 2011
Social Flow in Gameful Design made the point that social flow contrasts to Csikszentmihalyi's original concept of individual or solitary flow, in which a person's engagement in actions is optimal, where they lose a sense of time and awareness of self in an intrisincally rewarding feeling. Social flow implies a qualitatively different order of the flow experience, a group-level experience.
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Skilful Minds
MARCH 27, 2013
The trade-offs in deciding whether to implement a lingua franca policy are pretty well known. Pressure from other global players such as suppliers, customers, partners, and competitors who increasingly use English is one. Diversification of organizational tasks across departments in different countries creates bottlenecks without a lingua franca, increasing inefficiencies. A third reason relates to making mergers and acquisitions among global companies smoother in organizational terms.
Skilful Minds
APRIL 30, 2013
Common wisdom among thought leaders who examine learning in organizations notes that most of the learning that occurs is done informally, or socially. However, informal learning has its own limitations that we all need to keep in mind as we think through the ways in which it adds value to business processes. Collaboration Customer Experience e-Learning 2.0
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Skilful Minds
JUNE 19, 2013
The Altimeter Group’s report from earlier this year, The Evolution of Social Business: Six Stages of Social Business Transformation, offers the above graphic to exemplify the way social networking develops as the social activities of businesses mature. I tend to feel skeptical about many developmental models in social business simply because markets differ, sometimes in fundamental ways, […].
Skilful Minds
AUGUST 14, 2010
What do you think the typical manager might say if you told them their employees don't gossip and engage one another in non-work related tasks enough? Most managers have heard of the watercooler effect without ever having the meaning of the concept sink in to their understanding of how it relates to performance and collaboration. A couple of studies released this summer dealing with performance and collaboration in teams merit consideration.
Skilful Minds
DECEMBER 9, 2010
We know that most learning in the workplace is informal. Most observers put it at around 80%. Recently, John Hagel and John Seeley Brown contended that "as much as two-thirds of headcount time in major enterprise functions like marketing, manufacturing and supply chain management is spent on exception handling."
Skilful Minds
APRIL 1, 2011
Back in 2006 I read the following point on Hugh Mcleod's blog, Gapingvoid: "If people like buying your product, it’s because its story helps fill in the narrative gaps in their own lives." At the time I thought it conveyed nicely the point made by Gerald Zaltman in How Customers Think that "companies should define customer segments ont he basis of similarities in their reasoning or thinking processes" (p. 152) rather than the conventional constructs related to demographics.
Skilful Minds
SEPTEMBER 28, 2011
There is nothing like an exception to the way things are done to highlight the need to increase knowledge sharing, especially if the exception is one instance of a pattern that results in bad experiences for customers. As Jay Cross recently noted, people learning at work rely on social, or informal learning, around 80% of the time.
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Skilful Minds
MAY 2, 2013
People discussing the pace of change that organizations face in dealing with connected customers, globalization, competition, distributed workforces, innovation, etc. often assert that a paradigm shift is needed. I agree with the basic point. However, the way forward is seldom clear and simple when facing the need for dramatic changes in how we think about organizing what we know into practical changes to such fundamental challenges.
Skilful Minds
JANUARY 31, 2013
In Social is the plural of personal JP Rangaswami contends that institutional innovation is required to achieve the potential that social software offers organizations in general, and for-profit companies in particular. JP's voice is one of several important contributions to current thinking about innovation. Change Management Collaboration Experience Design Innovation Social Business Design Social Media Social Networks Web 2.0
Skilful Minds
MARCH 3, 2010
One of my earlier posts asked the question, Who's on Your Team? Its focus was on the importance of social software applications in the Enterprise to the ability of distributed project team members to recognize who is on their team at any point in time, and who isn't. Organizational analysts refer to the challenge as a boundary definition problem for teams, when members are spread across large distances whether geographic or cultural in nature.
Skilful Minds
SEPTEMBER 11, 2013
BRPs result in business exceptions and take up almost all of the time employees spend at work. Interestingly, much of the writing I see on Big Data is about making ERPs more efficient or making guesses about when to expect occurrences of a BRP. In other words, both goals are really about making coordination of organizational efforts more efficient and/or effective. Big Data Collaboration Ethnography Innovation Social Business Design Ubiquitous Computing Web 2.0
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Skilful Minds
JANUARY 2, 2013
An early Skilful Minds post introduced The Great Innovation Debate, focusing on the distinctions between Tom Friedland's conception that when it comes to innovation the world is flat, and the alternative point of view espoused by Richard Florida that the world is spiky. Meaning that the aggregation of creative people in cities, in proximity to one another, largely drives innovation and economic growth.
Skilful Minds
JUNE 24, 2010
Recent studies, one by Sentiment360 and the other by FreshMinds, contend that social media monitoring tools aren't very accurate in measuring sentiment, much less influence. The insight isn't a new one and speaks to the now well-known issue of whether social media engagement is scalable.
Skilful Minds
JULY 15, 2009
So, here social media sits, between fear and faith. Needless to say, the truth about social media's implications for business design lies somewhere in the middle. The fact of the matter, as Todd Defren tells us, is that we need to begin seriously discussing "how Social Media Thinking will impact the greater whole of the company.". Customer Experience Enterprise 2.0 Experience Design social business design social media socialCRM
Skilful Minds
AUGUST 27, 2009
To get to the main point quickly, let's do what few people offering thoughts about collaboration actually do. Let's explicitly discuss what it is. First off, collaboration isn't just about people sharing information to achieve common goals. Collaboration is about people working with other people to achieve common goals. Advocates of Enterprise 2.0
Speaker: Clark Quinn, Ph.D., Author and Executive Director of Quinnovation
The pandemic and associated upheavals of 2020 has led to both the need and opportunity to rethink how we think, work, and learn. Being forced to distance, we took emergency steps to build mechanisms that supported remote-learning, with an emphasis on elearning and virtual training. The consensus suggests that our existing elearning and training weren’t as well-received as we hoped. Our efforts to rely on elearning more and translate training to virtual experiences weren’t well-designed. The underlying reason is that we’re not well aligned with how our brains really work! In this session, Dr. Quinn will also go over the implications for learning and working effectively both in general and in this new era. Come see what L&D can, and should, do to help transform organizations to work smarter (and wiser).
Skilful Minds
APRIL 15, 2010
Grocery shopping is one of those chores that we all have to do from time to time. I'm introducing the topic of grocery shopping as a service journey not because the concept is new. Few people who analyze what grocers do and how people who shop in their stores get the job of buying groceries done would be surprised that it is a journey. What I want to do is provide a brief history of the grocery shopper's journey, and key transformations of that journey.
Skilful Minds
MAY 21, 2011
Don't Gamify Wild Bill discussed the importance of designing for voluntary play in serious games. Play is the baseline requirement for any game designed to provide useful indicators for gauging individual and organizational successes over time. Specifically, my point is that those interested in gamifying employee engagement in social business, and who also aim to effectively use collaboration, must optimally design for emergence not just competition and cooperation as guiding principles.
Skilful Minds
FEBRUARY 4, 2010
I've discussed ethnography several times before, the first taking note of the trend toward virtual anthropology and the next talking about the significance of Tom Boellstorff's ethnography of Second Life, followed by a couple of posts about ethnography in relation to empathy and globalization. Indeed, Cheskin's Davis Masten and Tim Plowman characterized digital ethnography as the next wave in understanding the consumer experience in a Design Management Journal article as early as 2003.
Skilful Minds
SEPTEMBER 3, 2009
Social media is not a noun (media) accompanied by an adjective (social). In fact, as long as we think of it that way social media can only fail to achieve what the thought leaders who advocate its use believe it capable of doing. Social media is, in fact, a compound noun. Neither term is sufficent to describe what is done by those using it unless we consider it as part of the other. social business design social media
Speaker: TJ Seabrooks, former CEO at Rustici Software
Have you ended up with a collection of content inputs and data outputs that might be hard to wrangle? If your organization uses multiple LMSs and has content coming from many different places, or you’re heading in this direction, this webinar is for you.
Skilful Minds
SEPTEMBER 23, 2009
My previous post discussed the Open/Closed culture fallacy in social business design. I contended that leaders of large corporations are typically unable to answer the key strategic questions posed by David Armano in an important post recently. In this post I'll continue that line of thinking by considering a combination of David's third and fourth questions in light of the open/closed culture fallacy.
Skilful Minds
OCTOBER 20, 2009
Word of mouth communities and networks using social software are increasingly spread over regional, national, and international borders, making them much more important to those who market branded products and services, online and off. The recent buzz around the concept of social business points to the growing importance of social networks and communities to the evolution of business practice.
Skilful Minds
MARCH 22, 2009
The title for this post is drawn from a recent assessment of SharePoint 2007 offered on Thomas Vander Wal's bog, Personal InfoCloud. Thomas' post, as always, offers a unique point of view on what Enterprise 2.0 consists and, specifically, how SharePoint measures up. He isn't offering his own formal assessment as much as reporting the stories clients and potential clients shared with him over the past couple of years.
Skilful Minds
MARCH 1, 2009
A recent Economist article discusses the relevance of Dunbar’s Number to friending in Facebook, and its relation to the size of social networks, especially networks of close friends. The article addresses a similar issue outlined in an earlier post here on the influence of influentials on Twitter, which focused on findings of a recent study by members [.]. Social Networks social media facebook friends social core social media marketing social network social networking twitter Web 2.0
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Skilful Minds
JULY 12, 2010
Digital ethnography is an increasingly feasible research technique as smartphones decrease in cost and more people carry them around. The photographic capability of smartphones is an important resource in making digital research ubiquitous, giving people the ability to capture images and record observations as they go about their everyday lives, and characterize those observations for ethnographers.
Skilful Minds
NOVEMBER 17, 2011
I recently received an invitation from Mads Soegaard, Editor-in-Chief at Interaction-Design.org to offer those who read this blog an early view of a new chapter on Social Computing in their encyclopedia. I’m a little late on this writing for you to get a pre-publication view of the chapter but I wanted to make sure and point it out for [.]. Collaboration e-Learning 2.0 Enterprise 2.0 Innovation Social Business Design Web 2.0
Skilful Minds
APRIL 25, 2011
There is a lot, actually a whole lot, of buzz over the past year about the gamification of business, specifically marketing, training, customer service. Much of it misses the simple point that it is the experience with it, the playfulness of it, that makes a game. Not the scoring system, or the rewards, or anything else can make up for a game that participants (customers or employees) don't experience as play.
Skilful Minds
DECEMBER 2, 2009
One of the most visited posts on this blog is titled, Empathic Research Methods and Design Strategy. In it I add to points made by Adam Silver, a Strategist at Frog Design, noting that globalization and digitalization in the 1990s resulted in product and service interfaces with more culturally diverse and geographically distributed customers. The combination of these forces led designers to search for new methods to augment artistic intuition.
Advertiser: Skilljar
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Skilful Minds
NOVEMBER 8, 2011
One of my earlier posts discussed the learnability of a service as a key challenge for experience design. Today I ran across this early video from Don Norman on learnability and product design. I thought I would share it. Experience Design Innovation Learning Experience Service Design Social Business Design User Experience Collaboration Customer Experience learnability learnable social learning user experience
Skilful Minds
AUGUST 18, 2009
The emergence of social media provides people inside and outside organizations with a way to actively speak about, speak to, and engage the product and service offerings of enterprises. Currently, 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content and 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands. Enterprises, on the other hand, listen to, engage, and act on insights gained from social media. Social Networks Web 2.0
Skilful Minds
JUNE 7, 2010
On several occasions I've discussed dialogue in relationship to organizational self-orientation, open innovation, brand strategy, and learning.
Skilful Minds
APRIL 6, 2009
The topics discussed at Skilful Minds fall in a range of challenges involved in translating strategic business goals, and the complex needs of people, into exceptional experiences, for employees who provide products and services and those who consume them, whether the latter are customers, users, learners, or just plain people. Commentators and practitioners of experience design tend to focus on the latter while largely ignoring the former.
Speaker: Sandi Lin & Linda Schwaber-Cohen
In this webinar, Skilljar CEO Sandi Lin shared learnings from Skilljar's recent study and her insights on the state of Customer Education. She dug into key findings so you can benchmark against industry trends and understand how your strategy and metrics compare.
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