Is your company “anti-social” because there is too much noise? Are you having challenges getting a grip on your various social networking tools? Keep reading to discover how Persistent Systems did it.

Imagine running a global software development firm, with over 6000 employees, nine development centers, spread across three continents, in various time zones. When your business is finding virtual experts for various client projects at the speed of light, instant collaboration becomes essential for success. Persistent Systems based in Pune, India, is one such award-winning software company that has championed their collaboration challenges, with strong tangible results and exceptional employee productivity statistics.

However, their story is not simply about discovering how enterprise social software is much more effective than email, phone, and other traditional forms of communication. They are beyond that point in their journey. Read More »

Tags: Cisco Quad, Cisco WebEx, Cisco WebEx Social, collaboration, employee productivity, web conferencing

Duke University Basketball Coach, Mike Krzyzewski, Coach K to his fans, is arguably the most successful college basketball coach of all time. Under his leadership, his teams have won numerous national championships along with recording a win percentage that is the envy of any team, regardless of sport. In little more than a decade he managed to build a mighty record of success.

However, during the 1994-1995 season he left after twelve games to have back surgery. Quite surprisingly, Read More »

Tags: collaboration, human network, ONA, Organizational Network Analysis, social network analysis

While enterprise social networking has been covered extensively in the media and by IT analyst firms, one of the least discussed aspects of the topic has been the issue of design and the potential impact of design on employee adoption of such tools and applications.  At the June Enterprise 2.0 Boston conference, I presented a session, “Design Considerations For Enterprise Social Networks: Identity, Graphs, Streams & Social Objects”, in hopes of drawing attention to the issue and to spark conversation around design practices. The session did not focus on any particular user interface (UI) technique or product implementation (e.g., e-mail, community site, social collaboration platform, etc.). Instead, the information was presented at a holistic and inter-disciplinary level, covering a collection of related issues:

• Affordance-centered design
• Social theory and design
• Work and personal value
• Blended user experience
• Psychology of adoption
• Enterprise architecture

Read More »

Tags: design, Enterprise 2.0, social networking

I love Olympic Opening Ceremonies because they are so larger-than-life. It’s also fascinating to see which aspects of the host country’s national heritage are selected for display on the world stage. I was surprised and delighted to see the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) prominently featured, along with the UK’s National Health Service which the hospital is a part of.

At first I was wondering why in the world they were wheeling out kids in hospital beds in the middle of such an extravaganza (see video clip at end of my blog), but it soon dawned on me that many in Great Britain see their healthcare system, and the young patients it serves, as a national treasure. It also reminded me of two customer case studies our team produced recently.  Read More »

Tags: Cisco TelePresence, Cisco Unified Communications., collaboration, customer case study, Great Ormond Street Hospital, London 2012 Olympics, National Health System

Do you ever feel frustrated when you just cannot access the right information right when you need it? Or when you spend several hours chasing multiple sources, verifying if something is accurate or not when you have urgent issues to resolve? Well, now imagine this scenario in a business environment where your personal performance or the performance of your team is affected with these exact same challenges every day.  And then imagine situations where you may miss the boat on closing a very important deal, resolving an urgent, technical customer issue, or misinterpreting data for an important report, because of all these communication barriers.

When we access information in a static, asynchronous environment, we have several dependencies, factors, variables, and therefore a higher chance of error. Our inability to verify data instantaneously, and having no version control in place, can make collaboration in a business environment quite challenging. Imagine an employee trying to verify if the document that was emailed to him or her on a specific date is indeed the latest and greatest version. Then imagine the string of email communications to various colleagues in order to confirm if the version he or she has, is indeed accurate. Let’s keep this story going; Read More »

Tags: avodaq, Cisco Jabber, Cisco WebEx Meeting Center, Cisco WebEx Social, collaboration, customer case study