Sex will happen | it's how you get there
March 24th, 2009
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I’m leaving Jive. I love Jive.

I’m leaving Jive. I love Jive.

I’ve never had the experience of walking into a company and being inspired, then leaving a company four years later and being just as inspired, if not more. But Jive has been that for me. I’ve never learned as much as I have in my years there. Or worked with amazing people like Dave Hersh (you can read his post about my departure here), Matt Tucker, Bill Lynch and the rest of the team.

Jive has been that magical connection between a market opportunity, a company and a team of amazing individuals. I loved to work with them every day. It’s a team that wakes up and goes to sleep fighting to win. A team that shares a single vision and DNA. A team of people who has what it takes to go big. And that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Going big.

I don’t know how many of you have been lucky enough to have an experience like that in your careers. If not, I hope you do. Everything I’ve ever said about the company, I believe. And I’ve never been more proud of the people there and the mission they are on. I believe in them.

Every parent’s dream for their child is that they succeed beyond their wildest dreams. And every company needs different things at different parts of their growth. These are natural events, the coming and going of people in a company to help them achieve what’s needed. Jive has grown a ton. They have been proclaimed the leaders. They have defined a completely new category. And this, is an organic parting of ways for us. It’s the way companies are supposed to grow.

Chapter Big

It’s time for me to make more big things happen. To work on new things. To change the rules and create breakthroughs. I’ll be sharing more soon. But for now, just know that I’m leaving Jive at the end of the month. And join me in wishing them lots of luck.

I know I do.

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Posted in Industry
February 10th, 2009
3 Comments

10 Years of going small in the enterprise

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Posted in Industry
September 30th, 2008
47 Comments

What it takes to Go Big

Bravery

Ultimately, Going Big means the courage to be brave. It’s hard enough for us to do in our personal lives and a million times harder at work. Companies are so highly matrixed and political that they make sticking your neck out nearly impossible. At least, shunned. No one wants to take the ball or stand out. Since no one is brave at work, most employees mimic lots of average and invisible employees.

Conceptualization

Big comes from big ideas and big dreams. Most people and companies don’t know how to recognize an idea.  It’s not anyone’s fault, we’re just not practiced at developing them. Most ideas don’t have a clear course. And charting new courses or knowing how to stop turning the same crank is not something companies genetically know how to do. Ideas need care. Anyone can kill a sapling but only those who can Go Big can grow them into trees.

Intuition

Instinct is amazingly human. It’s so immediate we often don’t give it a voice. At work, we bury instinct with layer upon layer of justification, data, and gobs of the unnatural for fear that our instinct may be wrong. We don’t trust ourselves, in large part thanks to the Naysayers, who have used fear to bash down people’s gut. Gut is a powerful guide in our individual lives but for some reason we abandon it at work. Your gut doesn’t have supporting data. Like a relationship, it isn’t something you can prove before you do it.

Relationships

Plain and simple, if you can’t rally people, you can’t Go Big. The more people we can motivate, the bigger we can go.  Since the only way to deliver is through a powerful network of leaders and followers, nothing works without the relationships you’ve built. They are your water. Make sure you have plenty. Networks aren’t created through entitlement. They’re created through respect.

Execution

Ultimately, if doughnuts aren’t leaving the factory, you’re not Going Big. People and companies need to deliver and re-deliver consistently and constantly. They must bring their Go Big dreams to life. Execution is key. Markets and coworkers have no loyalty. They judge you on what and when you deliver.


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Posted in Industry
September 23rd, 2008
3 Comments

18th Century Twitter

A friend recently told me about the book Strange Red Cow, a collection old 18th and 19th century classified ads. You remember those? Folks eager to connect to other people through a small, defined amount of text? Basically, Twitter in print.

Finding what they’re looking for

In looking over all the missed connections in classifieds I was reminded how, for centuries, people have tried to share and connect. I remember reading over classifieds and wondering about the people who posted. Did they find what they were looking for? Did “he” ever find the woman who stood next to him in line? Now, every second on Twitter, people publish equally succinct posts which reach out to each other for help, to share, or to connect.

The cost of missed connections at work

In the workplace, it’s been known forever that the cost of missed connections costs companies millions of dollars in lost knowledge or missed expertise. Everyday thousands of employees miss the opportunity to find people who can make what they’re doing less redundant or more valuable. What’s the ROI of a fully networked, 100% connected workforce? What’s the value of having all those connections saved for others to profit from?

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Posted in Industry
September 16th, 2008
12 Comments

The big, fat “Enterprise Hole”

Before we talk about the hole

Let’s take a quick look at how technology has provided value so far. Boiled down and oversimplified, there are three stages.

  1. Pink: You’ve saved time. Now all your paper and information is digital.
  2. Blue: You’ve made your digital stuff accessible by other people. Think wiki or a file folder.
  3. Green: Now that people have extra time and made everything centralized, you can step back and think about better ways to do things. 

You are somewhere in the blue egg

If connecting people together and/or sharing content centrally is innovative to you, you’re in the blue egg. It’s an innovative idea, but I’d argue it isn’t delivering valuable change to your core business yet. For that to happen, you have to to fill in the big, fat “Enterprise Hole” and connect the dots to the ways you do things now. 

The big, fat “Enterprise Hole”

Companies are execution machines. Remember when you got your first job? You were hell-bent on making a difference and changing the way things got done. You were filled with ideas. Problem was, the minute you looked for a place to deliver that value, you were shown your box and your crank. You probably thought you’d be given a chance later on but then found out that the higher up you go, the bigger your crank. There are generations worth of “keep the trains on time” DNA in place in the Enterprise. No time to change things, those trains have been running like that for years. 

So long, in fact, that Enterprises are experts at execution. Everyone has their cog in that machine. Given the legacy in place, it’s no wonder that there are a ton of execution resources and expertise in place. But to unlock innovation, there’d have to be a way to deliver conceptualization and strategic value as part of everyday work, not to mention persistent expertise on how to do it. That effort, from soup to nuts, would need to be linked together. Imagine what having a closed-looped reality from concept to execution would really be like. As it stands, this missing wedge is the big, fat “Enterprise Hole.” Social computing will fill that hole. Not only will it fill it, but it will extend it’s capillaries into the existing execution processes already in place, perhaps making some of the more repeatable and predictable ones, automatic. Sorta like the way your car’s headlights come on automatically. 

Cracked nuts

Industry folks like to debate who will crack this nut. The first group think that it will be the big vendors like SAP, Oracle, IBM or Microsoft and that they will just magically bolt on social computing into their existing stuff. The second group think that there will be new entrants like Google, Salesforce, Cisco or maybe an unexpected CMS vendor. Lastly, there are some that believe that perhaps a pure-play could emerge and join the ranks as a completely new Enterprise player. I guess we’ll see. The good news is that this is the hottest part of the Enterprise software market today and there’s sure to be some big gains soon. 

 

* Credit: Some of this post came out of some brainstorming I did with Hideshi Hamaguchi (@hideshione) from Lunnar. He and I should drink coffee more often. Thanks, as always, to @michaelsigler for working with me on the graphics.

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Also posted in Productivity
September 15th, 2008
4 Comments

Introducing Ricky Revenue

Face Ricky

Ultimately you have to convince Ricky Revenue that transforming your company makes sense. It’s not that he’s all about revenue. He’s not. Ricky just wants to understand the business case, even if there is line item for it in the budget (and especially if there’s not).

Ricky doesn’t have a bias either way

The only thing he cares about is measurable value. He’s hypnotized by it. Even Norman Naysayers have to debate Ricky based on measurable business value. The best thing about Ricky is that he’s your best friend if you can bring him along with your plan. But he can be your biggest obstacle if you leave him out of the picture.

It’s not that Ricky has to have fancy ROI models or spreadsheets with pivot tables

Sometime he just needs to clearly understand the business opportunity and what the plan is to get there. That may be return but it may be a solid business plan and enough wiggle room to measure as you go. Either way you have to make a clear case.

The last character in this drama

Obviously, the last character in the cast is the person driving the project forward. I’m thinking it’s a dolphin-like animal but I haven’t told @michaelsigler who has created both Norman and Ricky (though a shout out to @LenDevanna from EMC who joked with me about Ricky and gave me the idea). Clearly, we need to do a comic strip. Keep your eye out.

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Also posted in Productivity
September 11th, 2008
13 Comments

9/11 and the social software movement

Towers of people

The moment the planes hit the World Trade Center it was immediately transformed from America’s icon of commerce to two towers filled with people. In an instant our Government’s Pentagon was turned on it’s head. Our national psyche was shattered and an entire generation shared in horror and disbelief. Everything we had taken for granted was re-evaluated. While our government locked down, we more than ever before, reached out to each other.

The pivot after the tragedy

This isn’t a post about 9/11. It’s about what happened afterwards and the longer term effect on us. In the weeks, months and years after the tragedy, we desperately reached out. We turned to our computers. We emailed, we poured over the thousands of stories on blogs. We searched for the people who had been there or who were sharing their personal stories. We commented, we connected, we asked why. News broke faster over blogs and email than traditional media. At the same time our government quickly learned that their systems weren’t built to connect the dots the way we really needed them to.

Cutting the red tape

Getting to who and what we needed faster was critical in this time of need. The companies didn’t matter, the people did. The “Government” didn’t matter, we wanted to know why we didn’t know and weren’t protected. The media didn’t matter, it was the experts who could share and who we could talk to directly. We wanted transparency, speed and connection.

Rise of social connection

In the years since then, we’ve kept this trend going. We know that connecting people online is critical. We can get much more done more quickly this way. We no longer turn to “the company,” we turn to the people in these companies. We turn to the experts. We want to add our voice to the places we care about and find others who share our desire. We don’t turn to ABC or CBS or any other company that’s supposed to be “the” resource. We look for people who know. This change has transformed an entire generation who expect to do business with the same people-centric values born from this tragedy. This level of interaction and transparency still has it’s effects on us today.

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Posted in Industry
September 9th, 2008
17 Comments

Citizens of the new tribes

The way we relate has evolved

Perspective has shaped how we connect and relate to each other for centuries. These physical and emotional boundaries are not only expanding they’re more discoverable than ever before. Connectedness is a core human desire and our “social” DNA is what fuels our happiness in our work and personal lives. It’s worth taking a look at the big picture to better understand our small, everyday tribes and the way they’re evolving.

Tribal Connectedness

We all know what a tribe is. We still have them. I just joined a tribe of 50,000 people in the desert. Tribes identify themselves and connect through culture, ethnicity, lineage and interests. The world starts and stops within their population. They have strong regional boundaries, ties and connections. These egalitarian clans have been the staple of human culture for centuries.

Spiritual Connectedness

Being a part of something larger than yourself is a massively powerful way to be connected. Certainly, the core aspects of organized religion are about identifying with a common faith, group rituals and connecting people through a structured communal system. 

National Connectedness

Vast and often born from revolution, most people in a nation never even meet each other yet they feel connected by a common bond. That bond-whether it’s real or imagined-is boxed by ethical, philosophical and cultural beliefs. People are reminded of their connectedness through flags, anthems, and national sports teams.

Binary Connectedness

Driven by technology, people can now connect over great distances. Messages can nearly immediately be transmitted from one person to another person. Things like telegraphs, telephones, faxes, and email opened the world to unparalleled 1-to-1 communication. Grandma can see pictures of her grandchildren without getting on a plane.

Neotribal Connectedness

Social Technology satisfies our immensely powerful desire for community bonds and allows us to build groups and gather globally around the things we identify with. The footprint of our daily civilization is no longer bounded by geography or structural doctrine. Our population isn’t identified through demographics or easily targetable through traditional avenues. Neotribal networks are connected, co-operating tribes that cut through great distance, spiritual and national boundaries to rapidly unite desired interaction.

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Also posted in Productivity
August 18th, 2008
14 Comments

Jive launches Clearspace 2.5

From our customers to the product

One of the best parts of being early to market with a great product is that you get to participate in a hell of a lot of customers and their real-world deployments very early in the overall market growth. At the beginning of 2008 we reached out to our top customers and asked if we could come on-site to learn more about how they’re really using our products. We had over 700 conversations with customers at the “C,” mid-level and individual contributor level to find out more about what was and wasn’t working. Their feedback was consistent and we learned a ton. One of the many things was that these companies saw Clearspace as the geopgraphic center for their company and for us to acheive success we need to focus on removing adoption barriers. So that’s what we did. Today we launch Clearspace 2.5. Here are the links to what’s new for Clearspace and Clearspace Community.

What’s new in Clearspace 2.5 video

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Here’s what’s new

1. Add new conversations to old places.

Customers told us they wanted more ways to get Clearspace functionality in places outside of Clearspace. Now you can turn on discussions on any web page. That means that inside your company, you can add dicussions to a static Intranet page or a part of your wiki. Outside your company you can turn the ordinary, social and add discussions to product pages, or any other page ripe for community.

2. Connect the dots for your Salesforce

Our new Salesforce.com integration helps your Sales people get way more perspective on their prospects. Now, when they’re looking at a record in Salesforce.com, they can not only see their own notes on the company but (assuming their running Clearspace and/or Clearspace Community) they can also see the internal conversations, blogs, people, and comments that related to their prospect. This very “situationally specific” instance, lines up your company and/or community’s social interactions and applies it’s value all at once.

3. Live in your inbox

Let’s face it, people still live in their inbox. But now, you can directly email (or carbon copy) stuff that should be a task, a blog post, a document, a discussion…basically anything you want can be emailed into Clearspace. As well, once others see your content, they can respond and you can keep everything going right from your inbox.

4. Self organize

We’ve done a ton to add super kick-ass self organization features in this release. This includes

  1. New “Live Search” that breaks things out in content/people/places while you search
  2. Totally overhauled (and WAY powerful people directory)
  3. Twitter-like social networking (you can now follow/unfollow people, see what their working on, label them, etc).
  4. Another big addition was Groups. So now folks inside a company or in a community can organize how they want to. Groups feature our super-popular widgetizable interface so that the Group owner can set things up exactly the way they want to.

5. Easiest Rich Text Editor on the Market

The engagement and adoption rubber hit the road with the Editor. If publishing a comment, a task, or a blog isn’t incredibly easy and pleasurable, people will resist using the application. We heard this loud and clear for our customers and are now happy to provide the slickest editor on the market today.

6. Global phrase replacement and easy skinning

Let’s face it, Social Software terminology is exclusive and foreign to most everyone. Not to mention that each industry and even company has it’s own lexicon. To get around this, we’ve added a tool that let’s you globally change the name of features. Now a “blog” can be a “report” and “friends” can be “peeps.

Not only are words important, so is making the application look familiar. We have two levels of look-and-feel customization:

  1. Easy color picker and logo uploader allows for very fast and easy customization without knowing a single line of code.
  2. Our new theme engine allows you to upload a single CSS packet and have it applied across the entire application

7. Massive speed increase

Perhaps the biggest improvement to Clearspace 2.5 is the huge amount of work we did to make it 200% faster than 2.0. That’s pretty impressive given the amount of new features that were added (nearly 200) and a big requirement in the Enterprise where performance is a very big deal. Kudos to our engineers for all this amazing work.

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Also posted in Productivity
August 6th, 2008
1 Comment

Enterprise UI Summit Profile: Salesforce.com’s Craig Villamor

This week I’ll be profiling a few of the people attending Jive’s Enterprise UI Summit, which is Thursday & Friday in Aspen.

What are you focused on at Salesforce.com?

I manage the Platform UI Design Team at salesforce.com. Our team is focused on designing interfaces for the force.com platform that allow our customers to administer, customize, integrate and build applications to meet their specific needs.

Is there such thing as an Enterprise User Interface? What does it mean to you?

It’s all about context. The lines are blurring between the consumer and the enterprise, but at the end of the day, enterprise software needs to provide productivity, reliability and security (not necessarily in that order). At salesforce.com, we are guided by two key design principles: keep it in context and adopt the best of the consumer Web. There’s a lot of great innovation happening in the consumer space and much of it is transferable to the enterprise. For example, we’ve recently introduced inline editing, which allows users to make quick edits to a record without having to navigate to a separate edit page. However, we are careful about which design patterns we adopt from the consumer Web and we often tweak them to make sure they are “industrial strength”.

What makes a good UI?

The classic answer is, it depends. If a UI meets the needs of its target audience, both at a practical and an emotional level, then it has succeeded.

What are some examples of good and bad Enterprise UIs?

The same basic principles apply to enterprise UIs as they do to any other UI. To design a good UI you need to understand your users and their goals. Bad UIs ignore the user and merely expose underlying functionality and data models.

Why is enterprise software user interface and user experience been a lack of focus, historically?

In the past, there was a tendency to discount the benefits of a good enterprise user experience because the end user “has to use the software as part of their job”. This attitude started to change in large part because of the emergence of Software as a Service, which offers customers and their end users more freedom of choice. Customers don’t have to invest millions of dollars in infrastructure and integration costs that traditional client/server enterprise software requires and, as a result, switching costs are not as high. In this environment, user experience becomes a key differentiator because users are not locked in.

Do you see change occurring and if so, what’s driving that change?

Absolutely. Enterprise software is changing for the better by adopting successful models from the consumer Web and adapting them to the enterprise. In my mind, there are two key drivers for change. One driver is internal: UI designers, product managers and developers inside enterprise software companies see great ideas in the consumer space and apply them to enterprise software. Other drivers are external: End users are increasingly technology-savvy and have come to expect rich user experiences from their interactions with Websites like Amazon and Google, and want that same experience and ease of use with enterprise applications.

What’s uniquely hard about designing for enterprise software?

There are many things uniquely challenging in enterprise UI design. Certainly, there is less “freedom of motion” in an enterprise UI. It takes much longer for an entire organization to adapt to change than it does an individual. Change can also introduce unwelcome cost to the customer in the form of additional user training or decreased productivity due to a steep learning curve, so ease of use is paramount.
Scale is another big challenge in enterprise UI. By this I am not referring to technical scale, like number of servers or efficiency of code. Instead, I am referring to the management of large sets of data in the UI, whether it’s users, accounts, or anything else. Most consumer apps don’t need to scale to tens or hundreds of thousands of records and even enterprise UIs can start to buckle under the weight of these large data sets.

What do you hope to get out of the Enterprise UI Summit this week?

There are a lot of exciting changes happening in the Enterprise software space and I look forward to sharing ideas and inspiration with such a distinguished group of UI professionals.

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Also posted in Productivity