Collaboratively Speaking

I just installed Blogsy on my iPad.

It seems like a very nice way to create Blog posts on the iPad, with easy facilities for including images and video links in posts. I am hopeful that the ability to create blog posts when offline, and then finalise and post them later, will help encourage me to blog more as I travel.

One other reason to choose Blogsy is that it supports IBM Connections, so I can use the same tool for blogging inside IBM as I use for blogging externally.

If you use Blogsy, let me know what you think of it. From my limited experience (of creating this one blog post) it looks great!

Sometimes a blog post pulls you up short. Ben Goldacre, respected journalist and a personal hero, recently made this blog post: What does the Sienna Miller / Virgin story tell us about data security?

Someone at Virgin Airlines has been selling information on the movements of celebrities to a paparazzi agency, allowing them to stalk people:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/apr/05/virgin-atlantic-celebrity-flight-details?newsfeed=true

This illustrates one very important point about large databases:

When you give people poorly restricted, poorly audited access to an entire database full of information, you allow them to realise the full financial value of that data, for any of its imaginable uses. 

This is often poorly recognised by the people running databases in large organisations (the suits rather than the dorks) and it has important real world implications that go way beyond one airline: think banks, hospitals, tax offices, and so on. 

The sensible thing to do, of course, is (1) constrain access wherever possible, and (2) run audits of who has accessed records, to see if they had any need to for their job, and so on. But more than that, if you run a database, for any purpose, you should always be thinking: what value might this data, have outside of the purpose for which it was intended?

This from some who is not only an advocate of open data, but also a great example of what can be done with data when you have access to it.

It jarred in particular because, as a Social Business evangelist, I've been arguing strongly in favour of transparency within organisations. Any information that does not need to be private, should be available to all employees - to enable innovation, better customer service, and generally help them to do their job more effectively. So how does this gel with Ben's comments? And what are the broader implications of the need for privacy on social media?

A few weeks ago, I was delivering a Social Business workshop to a customer who had invited a few of their graduate intake to participate and provide input. During the meeting I was very struck by the different attitudes they expressed about use of Facebook. One viewpoint was a clear separation of "work and private life" which manifested itself as only friending real, intimate friends on Facebook and using other platforms for any form of business networking. Another was a more open attitude that sharing everything you do as it is "the modern way" and if you are open, honest and responsible in all your activities, then you have little to hide (or fear). [If the actual participants in the workshop are reading this, then please excuse me for simplifying and extending your positions to make a point - nothing is ever really that clear cut!]

I have commented before on a personal belief that intermediating organisations' interactions with individuals is a part of the future Facebook business model. So a separation of "Work" from "Facebook" creates difficulties when one's job role involves interacting on Facebook, since current Facebook terms of use emphasise using your real name and require that "You will not create more than one personal profile."

There is another conversation I often seem to be having about Facebook. Many people who reject the service, or use it in mostly read mode, are driven by a fear of "making everything they do public". Even when challenged that, actually, they are only publishing things to a set of friends they have selected, they have an instinctive distrust and assumption that Facebook will just sell what they contribute to anyone they want to. What I rarely find is anyone who has actually read Facebook's Privacy Policy, or who understands the tools Facebook provides to control who gets access to which pieces of information that you are sharing.

Now in practice, I don't expect that everyone will read (and make the significant effort to really understand) the terms and privacy statements of every public web site they use. Of course they should, but they won't - any more than they read the terms & conditions on their mobile phone contract to understand under what conditions their mobile phone operator will share their location and the legal regulations associated with the government's, and other organisation's, rights to access their call history. Even if they did, it is scarcely practical to understand the same information about every operator you roam to when travelling internationally.

Instead, there is a cultural acceptance that mobile phone companies are appropriately regulated, that their behaviour is impacted by the understanding of the effect that adverse customer reactions, and that bad publicity can have in their ability to retain customers. The same cultural maturity does not exist for social networks (yet) and so the accepted norms of their behaviour have not emerged. In their absence, different people make different assumptions (if they think about the problem at all).

Of course, even when conventions have been established, there will be mistakes, criminal activities and other circumstances that contravene these expectations - but a mature ecosystem can react responsibly to those situations and retain customer loyalty (always remembering that such services will also be delivering significant value that users are reluctant to give up unnecessarily).

Similar issue exists with the tools that exist in Facebook to allow users to control access to their content. As the capabilities become more sophisticated, most users understanding of them inevitably lags (not helped by Facebook's evolutionary approach to adding and evolving new features, or their sometimes confusing user experience). Facebook already has the tools you need to share different content with your work colleagues, a network of business contacts, a circle of personal acquaintances, multiple intersecting groups of close friends, your family, and even the set of people you have no idea who they are but they asked to connect to you. Being able to share one piece of content with multiple sets of people has clear benefits (particularly over using multiple tools and so having to share multiple times), which is one reason why this capability is so important to Facebook in growing its usage base. It will be interesting to see how rapidly these capabilities are adopted and the uses they are put to.

But we need to accept that there is no consensus as yet on how Facebook should use the information that it is sharing on your behalf, to deliver more value to you, to generate revenue to fund the services, to help law enforcement agencies, or even for the greater good of society. That cultural consensus will emerge over time and be recognised in hindsight. In the meantime, we can only apply the general frameworks that already exist (e.g. UK Data Protection act, the European Data Protection Directive, the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, etc.), as well as the laws of the lands in which the services are offered, and hope that regulators do not rush too hurriedly to enact laws in the area without first understanding the issues and how its citizens wish to balance the inevitable trade-offs they imply (the law of unintended consequences will apply).

Which brings me back to the enterprise Social Business question. Employment contracts, acceptable use policies, social computing guidelines, and other such company edicts and critical to the successful adoption of Social Business. Employees need to know what they are, and are not, allowed to do on internal social platforms. And how they are allowed to behave on external social networking sites in the context of being a company employee (whether or not they specifically declare their "views to be their own"). Many companies provide "PR Training" for employees talking to the press, with policies that no-one else would discuss any company business with journalists, and assumed that only senior leaders were likely to publish press articles.

Today, every employee is an ambassador of their company if they comment on business related issues online (or even personal issues when there is a business attribution in their online presence) and so every employee needs to know what behaviour the company considers acceptable and what would result in disciplinary action. It is as negligent for a company not to educate their employees on this as it is for an employee to ignore such an obligation. So effective adoption of a Social Business strategy must include the articulation of these principles and the effective communication of them to all employees.

In IBM this starts with the core values the company's employees defined for how an IBMer should behave (during our first major internal jam, and one of the key starting points for our evolutions to be a Social Business). It continues with the business conduct guidelines we adhere to, the company's privacy policy, and the social computing guidelines that form an adjunct to them. It should be noted that these are simply evolutionary extensions to the core employee guidelines that were already in place - not some completely new concept. Other companies will define, express and manage their policies in other ways, but embarking on a cultural transformation to become a Social Business - Engaged, Transparent and Nimble - without such a policy is risky, to say the least.

Which brings us back to Ben Goldacre's blog post.

I would argue that there are good reasons for making customer's travel details visible to employees - within strict guidelines about the use of this information (I will avoid the thorny question of whether a celebrity's information should be protected any more than any other citizen, whilst acknowledging that there are differences in risk and potential uses of the information and the unique position of the airline industry around the use of aliases, which has been the traditional way celebrities would try to separate their business and private lives).

Preventing an employee from selling company information by limiting availability of the information is analogous to trying to make sure people don't break laws by making it impossible to do so. The reality is that many different things need to be balanced in making a policy.

Limiting information about customers to a small number of people who absolutely need to know is sure to reduce a company's ability to empower its employees to innovate, as well as their employee's ability to collectively deliver better customer service to those same people. The correct balance between who information is available to, and monitoring how it is used in order to manage abuse, is something that should be a core part of the culture of the company and its operational & management procedures.

The right way of managing a risk is rarely to reduce it to the absolute minimum, because reducing risks almost always increases costs and prevents innovation. If risk/benefit analysis concentrates primarily on risks, then it will generate few benefits.

So I would rephrase Ben's key points as: (1) constrain access to confidential data to those who can use it to improve business outcomes, in the context of a clear understanding of the employee's obligations with respect to the data, and (2) monitor use of such records to identify improper use and reward employees who find innovative ways of creating business value from it.

Which reminds us that to become a successful Social Business organisations need two things...

• A Social Business platform that lets them deliver Social Collaboration to their employees, their partners, their customers and the rest of the world, integrating with internal collaboration, knowledge management and business application platforms and with their external web site and public Social Networking services in an appropriate, controlled manner - delivering not just open knowledge sharing, but also appropriate access control and compliance monitoring tools.
• A Social Business adoption strategy that manages a cultural change so that employees know how to use these knowledge sharing tools and the information they makes available, in an appropriate manner, articulated in a transparent way that is clear to its customers and partners, as well as its employees.

Which are the core topics that I created this Blog to discuss, and of which I will explore other aspects in coming posts.

[Note: This post is very Facebook focussed as it seems to be at the forefront of discussion in these areas, but the same issues apply to other online services like Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Pinterest, iTunes, Google, etc. Facebook also seems to be force to take a lead in terms of addressing these issues in order to evolve an acceptable economic model for financing its service, to position itself against new, innovative services, and to manage the parallel (and, inevitably, much slower) evolution of regulatory frameworks. This should not be taken to indicate that the issue is more important on Facebook than the other services - in fact, because the issues tend to be discussed more in the context of Facebook, there is probably more potential for users to fail to understand the issues with other services. It is the whole industry that is immature in this respect.]

As I was leaving the IBM Connect and Lotusphere conferences in January, I had a conversation with someone (wish I remember who - remind me if it was you!) who said that what impressed them most about the conference this year, over last, is that it had changed from discussing what you could do with Social Business, to what people are doing. This is supported by the amazing number of customer speakers at the conference, both in the keynotes and break-out sessions, describing their experiences putting Social Business into proactive.

A year ago, on the flight back from Lotusphere 2011, I sketched out on an aircraft napkin the key technology "mega-trends" that I saw at the conference which, I believed, would drive rapid adoption of Social Business. I used the diagram many times through 2011, with some minor changes depending on context, until it evolved into a form that seemed to resonate with most audiences.

The changes during the year first moved the Customers to the centre, where they belong, since I increasingly saw the need to serve customers better become the only reason social business projects (internal or external) were getting funded, then added empowerment of employees (expanding from exceptional web experiences to include exceptional work experiences) and partners (who are an essential part of today's virtual enterprises).

That left space to reflect the dramatic shift in the Unified Communications market in 2011, as it became clear that UC is not just about unifying telephony with collaboration (e-mail and instant messaging) but also incorporating social collaboration into the users web or work experience. What I like to call "extending presence beyond the green dot". I don't want to know that the person I am trying to contact is "away", I want to know that they have gone to lunch with a customer and will be back at 3pm. I don't want to know that they are "offline", I want to know that they are on vacation for the next two weeks, or are travelling in Australia so they will only be online overnight. I don't just want to know that they are not available, I want to be given a link to content they are sharing that might help me in their absence, or to people they work with who might be able to help in their absence.

This complements discussions I often have about the importance or putting content in the context of people . The "Business Card" represents the current state of the art in "Presence" for people, and includes whether the user is online or not; their current location (if shared); their last Status Update; direct access to ways to communicate with them (e-mail, instant messaging, click to dial, etc.); their full Profile (with more information about them, like their management structure, and connections to their colleagues); and their shared content (files, blogs, communities, wikis, etc.) This works the other way round when searching for and finding content, by placing what you find in the context of its author and people who have commented on it or recommended it - with a full Business Card available for each, allowing you to quickly ascertain the credibility and trustworthiness of the contributors and of commentators - and so of the content itself.

The power of this diagram is not the separate technology advances it describes (in social collaboration, mobile devices and cloud computing) but the way they interrelate. Two of my past managers and role models taught me lessons related to this: Mike Zisman (former CEO of Lotus) wrote a paper once called "Timing is Everything" and Jim Abbey (MD of Systems & Telecoms) used to say "if the Wright brothers had tried to build a plane that could carry 300 people at nearly the speed of sound with toilets fore and aft, they would have failed". It is the fact the Social, Mobile and Cloud are happening at the same time, and coincide with an economic crisis that is forcing every organisation to maximise the value of every single employee, that is creating a truly transformational pivot point in the way organisations work.

The important thing is not that these three trends are happening, but that they are happening at the same time.

The social networking products on the Internet that give us the model for social collaboration are all cloud based (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn). Smartphones would be completely pointless if there were no cloud services for them to access (local Apps soon get boring). We have reached the crossover point where more social networking updates are being done from mobile devices than PCs (as well as the point where more Smartphones & Tablets are being sold than PCs) and social networking really blossoms when it allows a user to record their reaction immediately and in multimedia (if you see a new billboard from your competitor you do not want to try to remember to send someone an message about it when you get back to the office - the moment is over then and you will forget - you want to send your marketing content a quick "tweet" with your thoughts at that moment - and preferably attach a photograph or video clip to it).

Now think about the implications of these technology developments. I talked to a customer last year who had launched a marketing initiative on Facebook in India. Not remarkable, you might think, but the interesting thing was that the marketing team had to do it from home, because they could not access Facebook in the office. I also met with a business team who had launched a new project using an external, cloud based collaboration platform because IT could not give them the capabilities they wanted in house. I know, from conversations in the canteen at another customer, that employees who cannot update Twitter from their desk PCs, just use their Smartphone.

The really disruptive thing about mobile devices and cloud based social collaboration is that IT can't control them. If business units believe they can deliver better business outcomes by going round IT and using external services, they will. If those services are free, and deliver business value, then how can the company effectively control their use? It is beginning to dawn on IT organisations that if they do not deliver exceptional work experiences that enable their employees to deliver exceptional customer experiences, they will simply become irrelevant to the companies that pay their salaries and the business will start using external cloud services that help their employees to do their jobs better.

Sure, they still need the compliance team, the security team, the risk team - but those teams will be expanding their remit to manage use of external cloud services, as well as internal IT services. The more senior the person I talk to, the easier it becomes to convince them of the importance of Social Business. The Luddites are lower down in the organisation. Although they claim "management will never accept it," they are are simply wrong - senior management already "get it" and know they need to refocus middle management what their business needs to do to succeed. They are also wrong when they say "the users will never change the way they work" as those same users spend their evening on Skype talking to their grandchildren, on Twitter engaging with people who share their interests and sense of humour, on Facebook organising the team for the next pub quiz - and LinkedIn looking for their next job (perhaps with a more enlightened company that will provide them with tools that make their jobs easier).

So, my initial plan on the flight this year was to update the diagrams above for the next level of Social Business. But I decided not to do that yet. Those messages still resonate. In the words of Roy Amara (of the Institute for the Future) "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." These trends have a way to run yet - and it will take years for many organisations to internalise them, invest in them and realise the benefits.

Of course, the ones that do it quickest will be the ones that gain competitive advantage from this transformation.

Instead, let me offer some thoughts on some additional technology shifts that will help to evolve these trends in 2012:

• Social Analytics: I love the way IBM has added Recommendations to IBM Connections, and improved Search results by leveraging analytics, but this is just the start. IBM has a unique capability to leverage its Research organisation and deep skills in analytics, textual analysis and search to guide users to the people and knowledge that will help them to do their jobs better.

  Twenty years ago, the main problem IT was solving was giving users access to information. Today users have access to more information than they can possibly use, and the challenge is to give them just the information they need, when they need it. The answer to that challenge is not in the information, it is in the context - the relationship of information to people - and that is where IBM Connections is focussed. Further leveraging Social Analytics will increase Connections ability to deliver a Social Collaboration layer over existing content, processes and business applications that enables use cases which make employees more effective.
  

• Unified Collaboration: After years of watching organisations struggle to make the investment required to deliver the clear benefits of Unified Communications to its users, it seems to me that UC is becoming a part of the social transformation. Presence is one aspect of the rich context that surrounds a user at a specific point in time. Once it is clear that someone has the expertise needed, providing an easy way to reach to them via telephony, video, audio chat or screen sharing are services that the social collaboration platform needs to provide.

  IBM achieved its market leadership in the social business because it didn't start from the technology, it started from the business - the use cases that that help users to do their jobs better and, in the process, deliver a return on investment. Unified Communications has had limited success because organisations couldn't articulate how it would make employees more effective. Even if there was an ROI, it could only be achieved if users changed their behaviour and companies doubted that would happen. Making UC part of the social transformation addresses this (and leverages the fact that YouTube and Skype are part of the public Internet's social scene). For the enterprise, this combines more effective Context with the proven ROI from telephony & travel cost avoidance. But rethinking UC as a necessary component of social collaboration will only change the game if it is done from the perspective of making users' working lives better by delivering on required use cases - rather than simply as a technology implementation to cut costs.

  UC simply isn't about making telephone interoperate with your PC anymore. User's don't want to use a PC, they want a smartphone or tablet, and organisations don't want the expense of managing complex PC workstations. An iPhone isn't a telephone, it's a multimedia, unified end point that allows me to communicate, collaborate and act at a distance. Sure, interoperability with the telephone network helps with adoption, but its not the point. One of the most revelatory moments of 2011 was when I sent an SMS to a neighbour on my new iPhone 4S. I suddenly realised that it had not sent an SMS. Both of us were using iPhones, and "it" figured out that iCloud could deliver the message - without me needing to pay for an SMS. Each user want all their collaborative interactions to "just work" as effectively as possible, and without worrying about the current context of the person/people they are interacting with. Smartphones are great for that. Unified Communications has changed its focus from figuring out how to make telephone work over the Internet to figuring out how to make Internet Services interoperate with Telephone Services. Now it needs to hide all that technology from the user, and just make communications and collaboration work over all media, independently of the end points of the participants. Which is great for IBM, as it is avowedly end point agnostic.

  An aside: When I wrote the Unified Communications Strategy for Lotus in the 1990s, I wanted to call it Unified Collaboration. That was a hard sell at a time when people had trouble raising their vision beyond Unified Messaging. Now its time has finally come. Users want one end point for all their communications and collaboration that integrated with the applications they use, and they want it to be device independent (across smartphones, tablets or PCs depending what device that is most convenient right now. That is an inherent part of the IBM Project Vulcan vision.
  

• Video: The Internet has proven over and over again that it is easier to change the game than to evolve existing mechanisms. Skype showed us many years ago that you can dramatically increase the quality of communications by adding video to voice and instant messaging. YouTube rode the wave of video becoming a standard part of digital cameras and smartphones. Today, when an employee wants to share something that moves, or happens on their screen, they want to use video - and know that there is no reason why they should not. Enterprise Video isn't about users going to a video-conference room to get an inferior version of being in the same room. It is about leveraging the cameras in their Smartphones and Laptops to make communication and collaboration better. The technology exists to deliver on these use cases today, and social collaboration platforms simply need to step up to using it.
  
• E-mail Reduction: Not ever more e-mail, but less. As we educate users that they can find the people and information they need using the social collaboration solutions, there will be less and less need to send them information in case it is useful to them. This cultural change is the single biggest challenge facing companies adopting social transformation. How do you train users not to send e-mails unless they have a specific actionable need from a recipient who is not currently available for a real time conversation, and to use other mechanisms to communicate information in other circumstances? While making sure that necessary information flows and activities continue while the transition happens.

  This is going to take two things. The user experience we offer to employees needs to offer a coherent environment where they users can work with all of their communication and collaboration tools - e-mail, social and unified communications - on whatever device they are currently using (which is what IBM is enabling its customers to do in 2012). In addition, organisations are going to need to train their users to communicate and collaborate in a new way. Not by putting them in classrooms and giving them courses, but by educating them in every communication they send to them, by ensuring thought leaders demonstrate the appropriate behaviour, by measuring their managers based on how well their employees are making this change, and by deploying work environments, business processes and applications in a way that support this transformation. This is what we call Social Adoption, and it is not reasonable to expect every employee to figure out why it is a good idea for themselves. Organisations need to focus on explaining to their users the benefits of working this way - and removing the obstacles that exist to adopting these practices.
  

Today, the world is reorganising itself because of the disruptive impacts of Social, Mobile and Cloud. Organisational power structures are shifting as employees are being empowered to shape the companies they work for. The Agricultural Economy became the Industrial Economy and then the Information Economy. The 21st Century is seeing the rise of the Relationship Economy. A company is no longer about its brand(s) - it is now about its people and how they help its customers. In a social world, consumers don't want to do business with companies, they want to interact with the individuals that comprise that company. Consumers no longer trust organisations - but they will continue to trust people. They will demand a relationship with your employees as a condition of doing business with you. It is no longer enough to make your customers feel special, you need to make each individual customer feel special, every time they interact with you.

IBM's Social Business strategy is about enabling organisations to make the cultural shift to become Social Businesses. To let them build new relationships between their employees, new relationships with their partners, and a new type of relationship with their customers. It needs a new form of social work environment to allow employees to build and manage these relationships - but companies that achieve this cultural transformation are going to grow faster than their competition.

I was just reading an interesting post by Marie Wallace on the use (or not) of Social Analytics in the Enterprise. Here are my thoughts...

The issue with Social Analytics in the Enterprise is that, in itself, it solves a problem that most companies don’t realise they have. It’s one of these “middleware” things that needs to be used by applications that solve problems to get investment. Of course, down the road, if companies end up with a plethora of different solutions embedded in different applications is a problem, they will maybe move towards a generic platform. But to start with, they are not likely to invest.

Fixing Enterprise Search is solving a problem that companies know they have (although willingness to invest in it is mixed), but the question is – do you build social analytics into a search solution (it’s a bit of a stretch, but that could work as search is analysing all the sources used for social analytics) or does internal Social Collaboration evolve to solve the search problem by applying analytics to content users produce and tag (as they consume) and therefore make the Enterprise Search problem go away?

There are other well understood enterprise application domains where Social Analytics is needed, but mostly they are being addressed by Social Collaboration platforms (expertise locations, knowledge management, team collaboration) – so these platforms need to become the delivery mechanism for Social Analytics.

I do see that there is a domain of management problems which do not have an associated software solution where Social Analytics can help – like Business Transformation, Acquisition Integration, Process Optimisation, Talent Management, Workforce Flexibility, etc. Here Social Network Analysis can support decision making and help direct organisational change. However most of these need more that just Social Analytics to understand the situation, they need a Social Collaboration platform to put the required changes into practice.

So, I don't think Social Analytics is a product category that enterprises will buy into, in itself. It is just something that Social Collaboration platforms need to do exceptionally well – as it will become increasingly important as a differentiator for them in the future.

Note: for those who do not use the Guardian App, the following is almost certainly far to detailed to be interesting (I'll try for broader appeal with my next post), but if you do use it I would really welcome your feedback on my thoughts.

Summary: solid effort, but needs more flair, insight and commitment.

It seems ironic to be criticising the Guardian App for not delivering the exact qualities that Guardian journalists deliver every day: flair, insight and commitment. The problem isn't the content, and first contact a couple of months ago was very promising, but there are serious issues which simply haven't been addressed.

I bought a subscription to the Guardian via the App last night. But I did it with my head, not my heart. I often talk about the difference between, say, an Android tablet ("functional, can do everything you would want to do, a logical choice") and an iPad ("beautiful, just does what you want, an emotional choice"). Right now, the Guardian iPad app is in the former category.

Here is my critique of where it needs improvement. Hopefully they will address these issues as I would like the App to become a central part of my life, just as the Guardian is my newspaper, so I don't decide to cancel the App in frustration in a couple of months time because I am not using it enough and prefer the web site (or go back to just buying the paper on Friday and Saturday, as I do not have the time to do justice to it more often).

In a blog post last year, expressing his love for his Kindle, Ben Goldacre expressed beautifully the key need that is not delivered by this App: "that one feature - a dynamic personal archive of interesting bits - is AMAZINGLY, ludicrously, and spectacularly helpful: just one more step on the path of outsourcing parts of my personal autobiographical memory to devices so that I can get more done" (http://bit.ly/xoQZWG).

What the Guardian App does well is to take the newspaper and make it available to someone who unwrapped a new iPad for Christmas. These users don't have an expectation of what an exceptional iPad App should be and accept the limitations of the medium, rather than challenging them. What it does not do well is respond well to the need of experienced, committed iPad users who feel that their device is an extension to themselves. I am sure the implementors know how to design an exceptional iPad App, but I am not sure that the people controlling user experience decisions are allowing them to do so.

Good design is all about understanding and delivering on use cases, and there are key use cases that the App fails to deliver sufficiently. First, addressing a problem the paper does not have - offline use. Second, addressing deficiencies compared to the paper - "tear out and keep" (which is also addressed much better by the web site today). Third, addressing usability compared to other iPad apps. And finally, really exploiting the medium.

1. Offline use. The is the primary reason (today) why an iPad user would buy the App instead of using the web site. But, basically, all you can do in offline mode is read. The only tool for anything else is copy/paste. How do you mark an article to come back to later to read or reread something in a calmer situation? How do You copy a link to come back and follow it when online? Why can't you share and article and have it tweeted, or whatever, when next online? You can't even email a link to an article when offline, even though there is no logical reason to need to be online to do so.

2. Tear out and keep. There are several use cases that involve ripping something out of a physical paper: to remind you to do something or to follow up on something later; to show to someone; to read later when you have time; to keep an archive of useful, interesting or entertaining content; etc. Improved copy/paste and Instapaper integration have somewhat addressed these, but not adequately - e.g. only Instapaper is offered, while all my web clippings are in Evernote, and I would also like to bookmark articles and links in Delicious. Both more options to integrate and a generic ability to copy a link to the current article (and copy a link in the current article) are needed - as well as an "Open in Safari" option. Select/Copy/Paste should provide a Select All option, and work for all content (the most important thing missing is photographs - for years I have kept scrapbooks of the best of Guardian photography), but there are also issues selecting some sub-headings which force you to select some text and then expand it to include the heading - and it seems particularly abstruse that you cannot Select in the copyright notice! And why can't I save a picture, when I can open a link to the web site and save the picture from there?

3. Usability. For me the main issue here is navigation. The Sections/Articles structure is great, but there needs to be a better correlation between the layout of the headline pages and the order of the articles when you page through them - otherwise it is very hard to find your way back to content, and to quickly page through what you want to read (e.g. how do I read all the classical music reviews on a Friday? Or the non-fiction reviews on Saturday? How do I page through the letters to see if mine was published?) I like the idea of serendipity by mixing things up, but as everyone is not interested in everything, in practice it often causes irritation. The most brilliant example being the appearance of the Answers in middle of a series of Quiz Questions (24/12)! Aside from that, when the App has been suspended, why does it always restart on the Issues page - I nearly always want to carry on reading from where I was (the only logical exception is after a new issue has been downloaded). It would be nice to have the Guardian as an App on my home page (but I guess that is a Newsstand restriction). Finally for navigation, there should be some sort of Search across the issues downloaded (and ability to launch a search on the web site). With respect to the actual content, some additional links clearly need to be added for the mobile version - e.g. an article late last year on favourite pubs did not have a link to where they are or to their web site, and the list of top 10 bestsellers in on the Guardian bookstore which did not have a link to buy them! I also find the app a little slow to respond (especially startup - remember mobile App users are in to instant gratification) - but maybe I need to upgrade to an iPad 2. 4. Exploiting the medium. We live in a Mobile, Social, Cloud enabled world. Why is the Comment is Free world isolated from the Mobile App world? Why can't I access related comments from the context of the article in the App. And contribute to them? Even when offline? I understand why the Paper and the Web have to be different in this respect, but the Mobile App provides a unique opportunity to bridge them - and take the next step forward in defining what a "newspaper" will be in the future.

I tried not to get into solutions above - I believe it is better to identify issues and let smarter people come up with solutions, but as the key is intuitively addressing use cases without the user having to think about how to accomplish them, some solutions are obvious. Taking the first three issue areas above (the fourth is a larger question), here are some thoughts:

1. Offline: The action button should always be available. It should always offer to "Mark Article" for reference later, and there should be a selection alongside Issues/Sections/Settings for "Marks" which displays the list (in some form) and lets you go to one of them (ideally "Mark" should then change to "Clear Mark" and articles with Marks should only be deleted after a second, longer period of time - at which point the Mark goes too, maybe with a warning on startup for a couple of days). The Action button should also offer "Copy Link" (if there is an online equivalent article), and you should be able to Share an article via email, even when offline (and ideally via Tweet, Facebook, Instapaper too, with the action happening when next online).

2. Tear out: "Copy a link" to this article and "Open In Safari" (if it is also on the web) are essential (I can do it by emailing a link, then copying the link from the email and discarding it, but why are you making my life so hard) and also Copy a link in the article (and Open in Safari instead of, or from, the embedded browser?) Also Select/Copy/Paste should work anywhere in the article and should copy everything, including images - which should also offer "Save Image" (just like you can when you view the article in the browser). Ideally I'd like support for Evernote (web clippings), Delicious (bookmarks) and LinkedIn (sharing) - the first preferably working offline with the Evernote app (otherwise offering deferred clipping, alongside deferred bookmarking/sharing) - plus an ability to "Save To" any App on the iPad able to store HTML content. All of this in addition to the Mark proposal above, for coming back to things later.

3. Usability: the physical paper is grouped into sections for a reason, and when you page through the articles (not via the index) on the iPad, the same logic applies (e.g. on Fridays group the film reviews, pop reviews, classical reviews, jazz/world music; or on Saturdays, the non-fiction books, fiction books, children's books, ...) While the Section Headline Pages can aggregate a set of articles onto one (e.g. "Letters and emails" or "Reviews: Film") when I click on the section and page through, I should get all of the articles in that section, in sequence. It would be easy to navigate directly to the group of articles that I want - as would ordering the pages in roughly the same order as on the HeadlinesnIndex page, rather that completely differently. Whenever I start the App, I should be able to go back to the article I was reading - except at the start of day when it can show the new issue, and if there is an updated version of the issue when it can offer to download it instead of entering the version I was reading. Finally, there needs to be provide more links to content, a Search capability, and improved performance (especially startup and perhaps opening articles).

A couple of things that don't fit into the categories above would be: adding the Weekend Magazine (magazine's work brilliantly on the iPad); the crosswords/sodukos (I would be happy to buy an additional app); The Guide (especially the "What's On" information - and why not leverage your data); and can we please have a free subscription to the iPhone App with the iPad App (as many of us have both devices).

To quote Jonathan Ives "It's very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better". I believe the Guardian was trying to be different to other iPad Newspaper Apps and achieved a lot in the process. But I am not sure it has managed to be better.

The modern Web 2.0, Mobile, Social world has evolved a model of trying something innovative, getting it into users' hands, listening to feedback, and rapidly evolving and improving it. I was very impressed when I first saw the Guardian App, but have not been so impressed by its subsequent lack of rapid improvement. I hope this changes.

The Guardian prides itself on being different - and also better. I would like to see it's App do the same.

Business Computing World kindly published my piece on the Evolution of the Social Business on December 23th, just in time for Christmas!

It looks briefly at the three attributes of a Social Business (Engagement, Transparency & Nimbleness) and the key trends that are driving businesses to become social (Social Collaboration, Mobile Devices, The Cloud and Customer Engagement).

Is your Business becoming Social? Are your Competitors? How are your Customers influencing your Social strategy? Let me know what you think on the comment thread here, or the one for the article.

I was just reading Andy Piper's excellent post on the suitability of Facebook as a B2B marketing channel Is Facebook really useful for B2B? I posted my thoughts as a comment over there:

I’ve talked a lot (more in presentations than on the web – must fix that) about Facebook as a channel to consumers. It seems to me after reading your piece that there probably is still a role in B2B marketing around the ephemeral engagement you mention, because Facebook as a channel is fundamentally a way of reaching individuals (in a personal context) not businesses (or people as an employee). I guess Facebook could try to change that in the future, but right now they are focussed on the individual.

Of course, you could say the same of billboards at airports, and they are full of B2B marketing (including IBM’s Smarter Planet). Whereas billboards at bus stops are generally consumer focussed. So I can see a role for B2B brands on Facebook getting generic, brand building messages out – and maybe also engaging with individuals to understand their personal opinions of a brand (which is going to influence their business decisions) rather than a traditional marketing channel supporting sales. More for Social Marketing by a Social Business.

With the 20th Anniversary of the Web falling this week, there has been quite a lot of discussion around what the web might look like in another 20 years. I can imagine many different possibilities, but how about this for a possibility...

One service provider becomes the single landing point for individuals using the web. OK, not an original thought - that was what Yahoo! was set up to do, during the era of search it seemed like Google was everybody's home page (and the future of bookmarks seemed dated as it was easier to just search for what you wanted) and now Facebook seems to be on a similar path to Net domination.

It was an interesting journey, that sort of mirrors what we have seen with Knowledge Management in the enterprise. First it was all about Taxonomies. Then it was all about better enterprise search. And now it is about using social connections to discover knowledge. But I digress.

Let's assume for a moment the "next great thing" doesn't come along, and Facebook adapts to the evolving needs of its customer and so continues to grow, until eventually everyone on earth has a Facebook account where they live their online lives. Not just their landing page, but the bulk of their web experience - as it is all linked to their social circles. What would that mean?

Well, it could mean that corporate web sites become irrelevant. If users live their online lives in their social world, then to get their attention all B2C retailers will need a presence in that world. Facebook becomes the intermediary for commerce. Of course, to do that they don't only need to replace corporate B2C web sites, they also need to replace Amazon and they need to convince news organisations, music vendors and many others to use them as the most effective way to reach consumers.

Quite a challenge. But groups like the music industry definitely need help in creating a new channel to consumers. I wonder if Facebook is smart enough to give them a compelling solution in the way Apple did - and then leverage their engagement with users to make it even more effective. At the same time as carving a role for itself in the future of news organisations. Not to mention television at it moves online. And the delicate role they would need to fill as intermediaries between governments and their citizens.

Far fetched? Probably - and there are many alternative visions for the future of the web. But an interesting thought experiment - and I expect there are some bright people in Facebook trying to think through what would be necessary to make it succeed.

I haven't done an iPad post for a while, but was just prompted to by a great CNET article: http://cnet.co/qmBiSC

It prompted me to write on my IBM internal activity stream:

I don't "use the iPad" in the way I "use my laptop". Instead I read the Guardian, check what's happening with my friends (Facebook) or in IT (Twitter), or find out what's going on in the world of IBM Collaboration (via blogs through the feed reader). Like all great technology it doesn't get in the way or require me to think about it. It is invisible, I just see the content

That's what Apple does exceptionally well. It doesn't think about building a better mobile operating system, or creating a Tablet to compete with someone else, it thinks about what users want to do, and how to facilitate letting them do it without getting in the way. It does feel (most of the time) as if all the irritations around the closed platform and managed ecosystem are there to allow others to contribute to that goal, without letting them undermine the user experience (yes, sure it's about making money too, but ultimately you are going to make more money if you create a solution that flies off the shelves, rather than by controlling it).

I'm still struggling with whether to get an iPhone or an Android to replace my BlackBerry. In some way, there doesn't seem to be much of a gap that needs filling around the MacBook Air and iPad - all I really need is something that will let me make calls, show my electronic boarding pass and take pictures, check Twitter/Facebook and find my way home if I get lost, when I am out in the evening with only the things in my pocket. And I can do all those things, even on a BlackBerry (in face, much as it frustrates me, I would not be very motivated to do anything if the trackball wasn't giving up).

But... I am sure that isn't really true. I know there will be different apps that really work well on the mobile and enrich my experience. But the thing is, iPhone users I know tell me about the great Apps they use, while Android users tell me how great the operating system is. Apple markets the way it will change my life, while Android markets the fact that it does Flash.

So will an Android mobile phone be invisible the way I want it to be?

Picking up from the thread of my last post on e-mail reduction, I presented at the Dachis Social Business Summit recently, and for the event put this slide together to illustrate the final thought in that blog post:

We can only solve the e-mail overload problem by changing the behaviour of the people sending e-mail, not the ones receiving too much.

Of course, recipients can help cause this behaviour change, as many of the great collaborators I have worked with demonstrate - back in the mid 1990's Jim Moffat at Lotus used to insist on posting the answers to questions in a Notes database and send a link, to persuade people to go and search before they asked questions, while Steve Cogan, one of the early social role models in the IBM Collaboration Technical Sales team would send people links to his bog, files or bookmarks if they e-mailed him a question which was answered there, and asked those who should know better whether they had searched there first if he knew the answer was available, and Luis Suarez does such a good job of advertising the fact that he would rather receive questions via other means that he probably gets more apologetic e-mails than anyone else I know!

It's amusing to think that back in the mid 90's, when corporate email was really becoming entrenched and the world wide web was just starting to appear, and people were philosophising about push vs. pull - with some of them even predicting a future where general access to the web would wipe out the market for e-mail!

As it turns out, there were plenty of use cases to keep both busy, and each found its role. But I think (and hope) that Social Business is changing those use cases and shifting the balance.

What is happening is that multiple movements are coming together to drive a gradual change in the e-mail usage model. The most important is an understanding that to cope in today's fast moving, globalised, highly competitive world, company cultures are shifting towards openness, sharing and transparency - deliberately moving away from the concept that "knowledge is power" to the concept that "knowledge used more powerful".

Combine this with mature technology platforms, like blogs, wikis & social bookmarks, and the rapid adoption of these social sharing tools to address different use cases by public Internet users (who are also employees when they are not updating their Facebook page, Flickr photographs and YouTube videos, or having live video and VoIP conversations with their grandchildren or second cousin in Australia).

These people bring an understanding of the value of social collaboration into the workplace. People are naturally social, and whether they exhibit that at their local football club on a Saturday afternoon or by joining an active live Twitter discussion about tonight's X-Factor or Question Time, they are still being social. Similarly they want to be social at work, building trust relationships with the colleagues who they need to cooperate with to do their job and listening to news and gossip about what is going on in the rest of the business: who is joining or leaving or changing roles, what projects are starting or succeeding or failing or finishing, and hundreds of other things that actually help them to do their job better. Whether they do that around the coffee machine, in the canteen over lunch, down the pub on Friday evening, or whether they do it over e-mail, instant messaging or social media, many people realise they need their social networks to be good at their jobs - and they are the employees who deliver most to their employers. Of the alternatives, the social media option transfers more information, more effectively, to more people, than any of the other online options.

What's more, it does it in an open, transparent way that can remove the need for employee satisfaction surveys and manager appraisals because it is immediately apparent who is helping and who is wasting other people's time. Who is truly achieving results and who is just claiming the results from the work of others.

Only by encouraging adoption of social tools throughout the organisation can we build the confidence that users can either discover the information they need, when they need it; or that they can discover a person with the knowledge they need who can help them out. Not just "knowledge workers" but everyone with expertise to share, or needing knowledge or expertise from others, needs to become part of the enterprise nervous system provided by its social business platform.