One of these folks is Chris Pepin who recently wrote about a Forrester study showing that there is real business value generated on the back of the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) phenomenon. This does make me wonder whether and how companies should incentivize this practice.

Speaking personally, I did hold out on this for some time on BYOD, mainly because of the increased security my employer imposed on my device, something which I knew would interrupt my personal usage of my phone. But I first dipped my toe in at a conference and from there on in found it hard to sever ties. If nothing else, I have the opportunity to clear out my junk mail whilst waiting to pay for groceries (or indeed whilst I’m clearing out my own junk on the porcelain throne, something I probably shouldn’t share, although I know I’m not alone). To be honest, the biggest incentive I could see my employer providing is the design of apps to the same beautiful levels we see in the consumer space. If I could have an intranet experience that came anywhere close to aping Google Now, hell, I’d suggest recruiters should highlight this as a company perk.

Meanwhile, IBM Champion Scott Francis will be showing off mobile BPM solutions. Here we’re talking about enterprise software to manage automated processes which can be accessed from any device from desktop down through tablet to smartphone.

Hopefully more enterprise application developers will follow suit and consider the loosening of the desktop hegemony.  It’s becoming increasingly difficult to make a case why any enterprise application shouldn’t be mobile enabled.

About 90 days ago, IBM Executive Ed Brill switched roles and moved out of the collaboration business and into mobile (perhaps testament to the large overlap between these two topics). Thankfully Ed documents much of his business life on his blog, and recently discussed the major mobile trends top of mind for him right now. I don’t want to steal all his thunder, but I was particularly interested to see mobile analytics make his list, and more particularly the kind of analytics that can monitor your every tap and swipe and feed that back to thr app developers.

I’ve spent some time in the past working with web analytics but think mobile analytics has the potential to go much further. I say this because with a reduced viewport area it’s that much easier for users to experience usage frustration. This makes design a more compelling differentiator. A reduced viewport also reduces the number of elements per page, so the number of testing permutations are reduced, simplifying the analysis and design phases. These factors should help mobile analytics prove its worth.

This will actually be my fourth outing to IBM Impact and my own use of mobile technology at the event has changed quite dramatically. Roll back to 2009 and you’ll see me sporting a basic Samsung feature phone with slide-out keyboard which at the time was great for tweeting (via SMS of course). If I really wanted to connect, I’d be searching around for a power plug my laptop could sip from whilst I fought with the conference wifi. This year I’ll have a smartphone and tablet, and am just taking a laptop as backup (I doubt it will leave my hotel room). I’m expecting my mobile devices to keep me connected and manage my schedule.

How times have changed and will continue to do so as our journey into enterprise mobility continues.

Learn more about IBM Impact

Learn more about IBM mobile solutions

I had the opportunity to share what Micaela meant to us in a Eulogy during the Mass:

Micaela, through your short life, you taught us (and continues to teach us) a whole bunch of things. I’d like to share just a fraction of these now.

Micaela, you taught us about miracles. Your quick wispy breaths and light fluttering heart let us know that you were special: an angel in our midst.

Micaela, you taught us that through our deficiencies come our greatest strengths. Spinal Muscular Atrophy left you with little movement in your limbs when you were born, and gradually weakened you over time. In recompense you were gifted with staggering alertness and a powerful, transfixing, endearing gaze.

Micaela, you taught us that life doesn’t always give us what we expect. But that’s OK. What we expect is based on a view of normalcy that deserves to be challenged from time to time.

Micaela, you taught us how powerful the small things on this planet can be. Size really doesn’t mean much. For you, seven weeks was a lifetime. A gentle pulse from your small fingers could put us on top of the world. A twitch of a smile could melt our hearts.

Micaela (or bubbles as you were often referred to thanks to your ability to produce a cute little foam through your pursed lips), you helped us realize how loving your brother Marco is. We saw his willingness to shower you in kisses and feature you as a central character in the stories he built.

Micaela, this one I can barely explain: you reminded us that this life is transitory. I believe you chose us, and chose us for a reason. Exactly what that reason is I continue to ponder, but that choice was made by you before you arrived. And as your breath finally faded on Monday afternoon, I felt that although you had left us here, you had gone somewhere. That truth was written in the peace on your face.

Micaela, you taught us that our lives are measured not by our worldly accomplishments or by the status we achieve. Nor by the arguments we win, and that the resentments we harbor are worthless. You literally had no time for any of this.

Yet through your life, sweet relationships were built.

Between you and us.
And between ourselves to create the web of support you needed.
Support from your grand parents, our aunt Martha and cousin Louise who have been with us constantly.
The medical services and hospice staff who work in this most heartbreaking of areas.
The extended family, friends and colleagues who have showered us with thoughts and prayers.

So, we can’t look at your life without seeing the relationships it fostered.

But after all, isn’t this true for all of us?

We should not forego building relationships in favor of the other worldly stuff. Because when it comes down to it, there is no other stuff. The only thing that really exists is the love that binds us all.

I thank you Micaela, for spending some time schooling us in the matters of life. For you now I pray for everlasting peace.

Micaela Pereira Feb 23 – April 15, 2013

Program from Memorial Service

Poem by Albert Pereira (Micaela’s uncle)

Newsletter by Marci Pereira (Micaela’s grandad)

We cannot say enough about the Families of SMA who provided tremendous support from the moment we heard Micaela had SMA. If you feel moved to help this organization, they welcome donations.

This follows the success of introducing online education provided by MIT into an engineering course. As Information Week states:

“SJSU ran three sections of its introductory electrical engineering course; two were normal lecture courses, one was blended. San Jose State’s president, Mohammad Quayoumi, said the blended class achieved a 91% pass rate vs. 59% for the traditional classes.”

The course in question is MIT 6.002x. As with most MOOC courses, it comes complete with a promotional video selling the benefits of attending:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, SF Appeal notes there is strong interest from other schools in the system:

"Electrical engineering departments at 11 other CSU campuses are interested in having their faculty teach edX’s circuits classes in fall 2013 and are sending representatives to SJSU to learn about it this summer."

In addition to the strong performance, another cited advantage is the ability for schools to educate the same number of students in the face of education budget cuts. In this blended model, faculty have to do little preparation in order to adopt the MOOC into their course. Instruction, questions and grading is all handled via the MOOC.

One thing I find interesting is that whilst much of the discussion around MOOCs revolves around whether they will replace institutional learning, in this model MOOCs and institutions can forge a symbiotic relationship.

What does this mean for academic relations teams within businesses who have a skill-building mission?

The landscape is now that much more competitive. Working with faculty to introduce industry concepts or a point of view into a course becomes that much more tricky if the faculty is already sub-contracting education delivery from a MOOC. Also, from a faculty perspective, the traditional model where training materials are provided for faculty who in turn are then expected to learn the material in order to deliver the material to the class, suddenly looks much less attractive.

On the other hand, if industry can partner with the academic providers of MOOC courses, or indeed create online classes themselves, all of a sudden the potential to scale thought-leadership across a large number of schools becomes a possibility.

As Gregory Ferenstein points out in TechCrunch,

“we have almost no idea how this will affect our educational system. What we do know is that the unknown is coming — very, very quickly."

TechCrunch also offers their characteristically snappy coverage of the SJSU launch.

I’ve had the opportunity to discuss this question with industry experts, academics and (thankfully) students over the last year or so. I’ve boiled the results down into this short presentation on social business:

Key points:

Scaling the conversational nature of business
In the pre-industrial era, business was localized, customized and highly conversational. Think of the way commerce happened in a small village. Stories would be shared over the sale of a loaf of bread at the bakery. Village folk would talk and trade recommendations.

Then came the industrial era and the imperative to realize economies of scales and produce goods for large global markets. The transactional process was optimized for efficiency (think supermarket checkout lines).

Social networking has brought back the potential for business processes to become more conversational, albeit on a larger scale to what was previously possible.

More customer-focused business
In the field of marketing and communications, we’re seeing chinks in the traditional broadcast model that was ushered in by the rise of mass media. The idea that it is the role of the company to create messages and broadcast those out with the intent of creating demand is being challenged.

Social media are creating forums for discussion with open dialogue occurring between companies (theoretically any employee), prospects and customers.

Increased workforce productivity
Social networking within the enterprise allows for the freer flow of knowledge across teams and departments leading to less information silos and more efficient internal processes for instance by allowing expertise to be more effectively sourced.

The pivotal role of analytics
Social analytics is necessary to uncover the business value of using social networking. This applies at many different levels across the whole enterprise. For instance, monitoring customer feedback following a product launch, determining which employees are the most effective networkers or helping key influencers extend their reach.

Look for further videos in this series which will look more specifically at how social networking is transforming different areas of business.

More introductory information on the nature of social business:

Resources from the MIT Sloan School of Business

Forrester blog posts on social business

IBM on social business

Dachis Group on social business

I was surprised what I dug up.

Numbers that showed academics and experts are considered the most trusted sources on your company or brand. And that’s where there appears a disconnect. I don’t know too many companies that have active influencer programs for this sector. Most concentrate on press and analyst relations. And I’m especially surprised to see analysts that far down the list.

So what can you do to build advocacy among academics? If you haven’t already, build relationships with those that have incorporated your products or services into their courses. Feature them in interviews and invite them to your events or ask them to give their opinion on new product launches. If you don’t know which academics you should be reaching out to, start with those who are teaching subjects around your area of expertise. And don’t forget the business schools. You can mentor students, offer case studies, guest lecture,  just to name a few opportunities.

As an aside, this just goes to show there is a sliver of merit in the practice of coming up with an assertion and then finding fact-based evidence to back it up: occasionally you may surprise yourself in what you uncover. I certainly didn’t expect what I found here

See the full survey

BTW, I do think these kind of surveys should be taken with a pinch of salt. After all, what we say we do doesn’t always match up with the behavior we see in the digital realm. Google wouldn’t be the cash cow it is today if the surveys were true and virtually no one clicked on search ads.

One of the points that really resonated was the idea that web publishers can use social data to move from being content creators to service providers. Why did this resonate? I think one of the reasons is that thinking of the client experience is so ‘en-vogue’ (to borrow the phrase from Luis Suarez). Areas such as social business and ecommerce are strongly focused on optimizing the client experience right now. Furthermore, in management theory, we’re seeing the emergence of service science as a discipline. 

Where does social analytics fit in?

Graham talks about the way in which publishers can look at social intelligence, whether this be sentiment analysis, keyword analysis or other social data produced by their target audience, and use this to develop a content strategy. A tough pill to swallow, I’m sure, for content creators who have been taught the inviolable nature of the creation process. However, when practiced most effectively, analytics does not negate creativity, but rather guide it in a direction closer to the end user. One example Graham suggests is looking at fan sentiment to determine content for a sports site.

Other key points from the presentation:

• Social media generates human telemetry that can be used to solve some of the world’s most intractable problems
• Social analytics can uncover useful insights in particularly fickle industries like fashion
• The industry is moving from monitoring to management where more and more systems are allowing actions to be taken or workflows launched directly from the reporting dashboard

View the first and second part of Graham Mackintosh’s Social Analytics presentation

More on IBM Social Analytics

In the past many social networks were implemented within the firewall as stand-alone instances, effectively forums available for discussion, but not tied to any function, role or process. This obviously led to problems of adoption. Sure, some folks would naturally take to the tools and become high activity contributors, but overall it becomes incredibly difficult to show the business value for the setup and maintenance of the network when its not embedded into people’s work environment.

However, Fabian points out that we’re beginning to see social networking playing a more central role in the enterprise and so more examples of business impact are coming through.

Read more on this or watch the whole presentation over on the Social Business School Blog.

This is the question posed to Luis Suarez, Social Business Enablement lead and long-time social business evangelist. Luis is well-qualified given that he’s been exploring this area for 12 years and spends a lot of his time talking through social business adoption with customers and IBM employees.

Luis offered the following tips:

1. Start with noting your current processes and behaviors, and then look at how social software could potentially help improve them. As is often the advice with technology adoption, avoid the temptation of getting mesmerized by the tools and looking for ways to jam them into your work process.
2. On a related note, look for where the productivity drains occur and explore collaborative solutions to overcome these. If you can solve some of these issues, you have the best chance of seeing the greatest returns. 
3. Start each day by telling your network (wherever that may be) what you have going on that day. It may be that you only post one update a day, but by giving your network an insight into your working life, you will find that they will be more useful and valuable when you need help.
    

On the 3rd point, Luis touched on the concept of ‘narrating your work’ or ‘working out loud’ espoused by Bryce Williams and Dave Winer, who sums it up particularly well on his blog:

"Narrate Your Work is something I used to tell my team at UserLand Software, because we were a virtual team, with people in Seattle, Boston, Vancouver, Germany and California. But it would have applied even if we were all working in the same office. As a manager, I wanted to know where my people were, because if they were completing a project I needed to be thinking about their next steps and how their deliverables fit in with other stuff that was coming online. And if they were late I needed to understand why."

Sound anything like your work environment?

You can find Luis working out loud on his blog or Twitter (just for starters).