We have long been advocates of moving business operations into the cloud. The remote access, cost-savings and organizational benefits alone make it a no-brainer. Now that we’ve been floating around in the digital ether for a few years, what have we learned? How has cloud computing affected com…

We’ve discovered a relationship among three points that can help recover idea-value for an organization:

§ Empathy

§ Accountability

§ Engagement

Consider the following diagram:

The higher one can be on this diagram the better, as you will see.

You’ll notice that in our deliverable example above, the level of content value is relatively low, since it is not tied to any audience or outcome. The time and effort in creating the deliverable is wasted, and the idea-value is potentially lost. In fact, the mere existence of this semi-relevant item on the network has a negative effect. It creates a culture of apathy as successive deliverables keep happening with so little apparent value to the reader. Where are the ideas?

This is a pretty common practice at Unitrode, and I would hazard a guess at your organization too.

Empathy Fosters Engagement

What if we consider the packaging of an idea differently? What if we can tie outcomes to the value of personal input and collaboration? What if we invite colleagues in, and ask for input along the way? Who says it needs to be polished and presented on a projector? What if we work in low-res, on sketches and on white-boards? By not focusing on the deliverable value, but on the quality of the idea within, we stand to motivate and engage people to a much higher degree. By helping focus colleagues on the value of their direct input, we stand to create a sense of accountability as ideas spread and evolve.

Remember the deck that someone posted on the Wiki? What if it came with this email attached?

By simply providing respect to others’ contributions and time, we hope to foster a sense of collaboration and active ownership of IP. By inviting others into a dialog, and tying success to their contributions, we hope to overcome apathy and create engaged innovators.

What you can do with this

We’re working with Unitrode to help everyone involved see the value in this model. It seems like a simple step to add a few lines to an email, but try it in your environment. Consider the model as you create anything for consumption. What are you asking your reader to do? Do they have critical input?  Is there something that relies on their expertise directly for success?  By inviting others in to a process, we stand to benefit from the value of their engagement and contributions. This is the core of collaboration- the sharing and development of ideas.

Collaboration solutions are becoming pervasive in the workplace, and are found in forms ranging from document-centric virtual workspaces to Facebook-like social platforms. Forrester Research divides the market into four categories: e-mail and calendaring, real-time collaboration solutions such as Web conferencing, collaboration platforms such as Lotus Notes and SharePoint, and the rapidly growing category of social collaboration.

“Many companies are placing a big bet on collaboration to support their business activities,” says Rob Koplowitz, VP and principal analyst at Forrester. “In particular, the workplace is moving toward one in which many business applications are integrated through collaboration and exposed through the social layer.”

Read More: http://bit.ly/vPSIPr

The Promise of the Salesforce Social Enterprise

Here is what I think the key strengths of the current Salesforce social enterprise vision and stack is, for those organizations traveling down the social business road (as I believe most ultimately will).

• It’s about the data. The connection of social media and data is one of the most profound, important, and high value relationships, as the world is just beginning to perceive. In a social business, the open participation in thriving, conversational business processes and the sum total of the knowledge flowing inside and outside the business is what the organization is able activate on and create value from. The announcement yesterday of the release of Database.com opens this up a common social data model for organizations to tap into, discovery, and analyze. Database.com is mobile ready and has delivered 36 billion transactions this quarter already according to Salesforce. It also prevents lock-in and integrates all of the social applications in an enterprise. They have also announced the integration of 3rd party data through another service, known as Data.com. This data focus, which is the lifeblood of modern business, shows an awareness of what creates differentiation and value for organizations like few other players in the industry backed with actual products.
• It’s a full spectrum social business approach that’s aimed at the flow of work. Now that their vision also integrates customers, business partners, as well as employees, the Salesforce social business vision is now much more complete, end-to-end. Though AppExchange has languished in my mind compared to what Apple has accomplished with their app store, it’s nevertheless a source of major 3rd party innovation and business connected workflow. The raft of announcements, such as the new partnership with Workday, with major SaaS vendors here this week shows how integrated Salesforce has become with the next-generation of cloud applications. Combined with the task focused sales and CRM features built into the core platform, this has a much better chance of ensuring the social activity will have a high level positive impact on the business, something that’s been a hot topic of discussion in the Enterprise 2.0 community recently.
• One of the most complete and mature social platforms. With employee collaboration, customer engagement, and social analytics, combined with an open platform, 3rd party apps ecosystem, and cloud-based hosting, only Jive comes as close to a turnkey solution. The depth of the stack is impressive and the foundation of it has been proven over years of heavy use by businesses.
• A next-generation vision. It’s safe to say that Salesforce has a very clear vision that is connected as much as they can to ground truth about what businesses are doing and then distilling where they think the world is going to their products. They are making a big investment in time and resources in attempting to understand the strategies, lessons learned, and best practices that businesses can just adopt by using their platform. Access to this insight merely by virtue of using the platform is going to be compelling for many.

Read More: http://zd.net/u44yCJ

At a memorial service for her brother, Mona Simpson recalled his love of beauty and his family, and his final moments.

Science fiction writers and futurists have long imagined a world in which we control everyday devices with our voice. But that world is nearly upon us, with the latest evidence being Thursday’s New York Times piece indicating that the long-rumored Apple iTV would include Siri-enabled voice controls.

To be fair, Apple won’t be first in bringing voice-controlled TV apps to market: Google TV’s remote app allowed voice controls more than a year ago, and the next update to Microsoft’s Xbox Live will include Kinect-enabled voice controls when it goes live in late November. But Apple’s introduction of Siri as an integrated part of the user interface could take the concept well beyond how we’ve come to think of voice control to this point.

If Siri does emerge as an integral part of the Apple iTV, it won’t be the first time Apple changed media consumption through the input device. The company also revolutionized the way people interact with content with the introduction of the touch screen on the first iPhone. While it might not have been readily apparent at the time, the ability to control iTunes — and later Apple TV — with the iPhone Remote app was the first step in changing the way people controlled media.

Read More: http://bit.ly/rx7GRK

Social collaboration, with its fast growth and media buzz, is a multibillion dollar market in which startups are jockeying with huge IT companies to capture enterprise spending. At Net:Work 2011, we will cover everything from social tools to the gamification of work. Here are three sessions you can find only at Net:Work.

1. How do you get a highly distracted customer or employee to complete paperwork, pay attention in meetings or respond to surveys? Make the job a game. We’ll talk to
innovators who have found a way to make process more productive and fun.

2. Social tools are having demonstrable and positive impact on the enterprise. We’ll examine the long- and short-term impacts of businesses that use these tools to share knowledge and build trust within the organization.

3. What might the collaboration tools of the future look like? Our panel of CIOs and CTOs will reveal their wish lists and discuss startups and products that are doing it right.

Submit your nomination for the Net:Work “Big Ideas” competition by Oct. 28 at 11:59 p.m. PDT. Big Ideas is where we parade our selection of the most innovative startups or products to the assembled legion of investors, tech enthusiasts and journalists.

Read More: http://bit.ly/tTDC06

In the Information part of Information Technology, Big Data is the Big Hit of 2011.  It’s also a wonderful phrase to play with: take the “big”, place it in front of a few other words and suddenly you have a strapline… or a blog title!  So, is it a big change for IT, or is it just big hype?

There’s no doubt in my mind that big data describes a real and novel phenomenon; unfortunately, there are also many existing and well-understood phenomena in the world of business intelligence and data warehousing that are getting sucked into marketing stories and, indeed, even into respectable articles about big data.

The recent McKinsey Quarterly article “Are you ready for the era of ‘big data’?” (registration required) opens with the following example: “The top marketing executive at a sizable US retailer recently [discovered that a] major competitor was steadily gaining market share across a range of profitable segments…  [This] competitor had made massive investments in its ability to collect, integrate, and analyze data from each store and every sales unit and had used this ability to run myriad real-world experiments.  At the same time, it had linked this information to suppliers’ databases, making it possible to adjust prices in real time, to reorder hot-selling items automatically, and to shift items from store to store easily.  By constantly testing, bundling, synthesizing, and making information instantly available across the organization… the rival company had become a different, far nimbler type of business.  What this executive team had witnessed first hand was the game-changing effects of big data” [my emphasis].

James L. McQuivey, Ph.D. is a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research serving Consumer Product Strategy professionals. Follow him on Twitter at @jmcquivey. Growing up in the ’70s, I was the world’s biggest fan of The Six Million Dollar Man. Every Sunday night at 7 p.m. you…