This evening I attended a TrainingMag Network  webinar by Ray Jiminez - Chief Architect at Vignettes Learning. Ray was addressing the topic of creating 'Lecture free Webinars'. Webinars are... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

June is just around the corner and, once again, that can only mean that one of my favourite times of the year for conference events is about to kick off as well. Yes, that’s right! Once more, and like every year, the Enterprise 2.0 event in Boston is approaching really fast and before you know it it’s already here! Mark your calendars for June 20th to 23rd, because this time around it looks like it’s going to rock more than ever! Yes, you can see how excited I am about going there in just a few weeks from now. But first things first. Before #e2conf there will be another one of my favourite Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business events taking place in Milan, Italy, on June 8th. Indeed, mark your calendars as well for the Social Business Forum 2011. I will be there as well! … And you? That’s right! The Enterprise 2.0 Forum in Milan, now transformed into the Social Business Forum, is moving along nicely from year to year into consolidating itself as one of the most relevant Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing and Social Business events in Europe, along with the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in both Paris and Frankfurt, and, once again, it’s a great pleasure, for me, to be invited by the always insightful and rather resourceful Emanuele Quintarelli, along with the smart folks from Open Knowledge, to participate in such a wonderful and refreshing event on all things related to Social Computing within the enterprise. It’s going to be a true honour to share the stage with an amazing array of inspirational speakers as this year’s edition, and taking a look into the extensive Agenda one can only conclude what an interesting event it surely is going to be, since there will be a bit of everything for everyone! Ohhh, and did I mention how the conference is free for everyone to attend? Yes, free, as in free, the real free! One of the many reasons why I’ll be looking forward to attending and presenting at the Social Business Forum 2011 is, as usual, the networking part of such events, specially, when in this case I’ll be meeting in the flesh, for the first time in many years, folks who I have been following in the KM, Learning, Online Communities and Social Computing / Business fields such as George Siemens or Esteban Kolsky, or meet up, once again, with a nice bunch of good old friends, as it’s been quite long already since last time we met! So looking forward to that as well! Not to mention the rather impressive agenda as well! Either way, my session is going to be a new one I have been contemplating already for a while on the topic of "The Hybrid Organisation" where I will cover the role of traditional organisations, structures and hierarchies and how they would compare to new ways of working around networks and communities. I will be covering how we have been using such hybrid approach at IBM with BlueIQ of combining both top-down and bottom-up social software adoption to the point where we all feel that it’s probably one of the most comprehensive and empowering approaches towards adoption of social tools: instead of split and replace go more for augment and empower! Yes, indeed, combining the best of both worlds! Why not, right? I will be sharing plenty of experiences, lessons learned, know-how, on what worked and what didn’t and why. Either way, I will probably have an opportunity later on, before the event kicks-off, to talk more about the event itself and everything, but for now I thought I would go ahead and leave you with a teaser interview I did last week with Roberto Cobianchi, who kindly invited me to participate in a rather interesting Skype interview where he asked a bunch of questions on the topic of the Social Enterprise and Collaboration and I just shared my ¢2 cents of the conversation on those topics; yes, you know, they are still some of my favourite ones from the last few years… So we did the interview and decided to split it up on two parts. Part I is readily available over at "On collaboration: Interview with Luis Suarez (first part)" and here is the initial set of questions we cover, so you could have a glimpse of what to expect from some of my answers hehe : A little bit of an introduction of yours truly: for those folks who may not know me… Yes, I’m still that crazy weird guy who is living "A World Without Email" and who is very much long overdue an update on progress! (Coming up shortly!) Can we, knowledge workers, collaborate effectively even while working remotely?: My answer was pretty much along the lines where we may not have a choice any longer in today’s distributed and rather virtual working environment… or do we? How far does culture help influence how collaborative and social a certain business can / will be?: Picking up further on the theme of how critical having the right corporate culture is in order to help boost your online existing collaboration with social tools, and how cumbersome it may well all become, if your organisation still lives by the "Knowledge is power" mantra. Of course, we had to talk about it as well… what is it like working AND living "A World Without Email" in a corporate environment where email stats seem to indicate there’s a huge increase day in day out? Will social networking tools replace email any time soon? (I ventured to give out a time when that would happen for most organisations, by the way!) In another interesting question that Rob asked we talked about the costs of Enterprise 2.0 and which focus area would be, in my opinion, the one grabbing most of the traction and additional interest; it’s not technology, by the way… And that would be it for Part I, folks; in a couple of days, Roberto will be sharing Part II, which I will probably be referencing it as well to add a few more thoughts on it and the overall Social Business Forum 2011. For now, I would want to take this opportunity to sincerely thank Roberto for the lovely conversations we had and for hosting the interview and to all of you folks out there who will be in Milan, on June 8th, attending the event live, come and drop by to say "Hi!". It will be a great pleasure, as usual, catching up in real life, too! See you there!! (Pssstt, remember … it’s free for everyone to attend! Bring your friends, customers, business partners, too!, and start living social!)

This afternoon, I'm attending a Learning and Skills Group webinar by Julie Wedgwood - where she plans to share with us an amazing new suite of tools that has caught her imagination, demonstrating how... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

In the recent past I have been blogging over here a couple of times already on some of the amazing piece of work that BASF (disclaimer: An IBM customer) has been doing over the course of the last year or so on becoming a Social Business and behave and act as such. Living Social is no easy task, for sure, but with a bit of perseverance, commitment, resilience, and a couple of other key important traits BASF has been demonstrating it’s now possible to achieve it. And big time! Even if you are not in the IT industry. Even if IT is not your area of expertise, "get social, do business" is very much no longer a dream for the corporate world in general, but quite the opposite, probably; pretty much an imperative no business can no longer ignore nor neglect. The story behind connect.BASF though (BASF’s social business platform, based on IBM Connections) is a special one. Through plenty of dedication, communications, executive sponsorship, education, unprecedented leadership, etc. etc. they are now at the stage where becoming a social business is no longer a long term goal, but today’s reality. Take, for instance, this short video clip of a little bit of 3 minutes, where my good friend CheeChin Liew shares the story of what it’s meant for BASF to live social: The really exciting part of this tremendous success story is not the full commitment to make a difference in this Social Business space, but to eventually have done it in such a way that presents the perfect business case, and business opportunity, for all of those companies to embrace Enterprise 2.0 techniques and technologies, even if you are not in the IT industry. I surely would want to stress this one out a bit more, since time and time again I keep hearing from various different people how lucky we are (at IBM) for being an IT company with the right social technologies. It looks like for us it’s just a given, a no-brainer, and while I certainly disagree with that sentiment (Since we do have a bunch of other challenges to fight against), it’s great stories like this one from BASF that confirm that even non IT related companies can be amazingly successful with their 2.0 deployments to help improve their effectiveness and efficienfy from their own knowledge workforce as they get to collaborate and share their knowledge amongst themselves, their customers and business partners. And so much more! Because in that video clip that I mentioned above CheeChin gets to share how becoming a social business has meant for them to empower people to connect with one another, reaching out to share their knowledge and learn from others in the context of nurturing, cultivating and fully embracing communities to solve business problems and achieve certain business goals. He also mentions how Mergers & Acquisitions have got the perfect use case for social business in helping teams, organisations and whatever other groupings get to know each other much easier by having information and knowledge flow naturally from knowledge worker to knowledge worker. The use case for microblogging that he gets to share as part of that story is fantastic! One of my favourites, actually. One that I can surely relate to and corroborate as perhaps one of the most impressive cases to prove the business value of social tools: helping facilitate the sharing of ideas across openly to pursue further ad-hoc, on the spot, collaboration sparked by those same ideas in the first place. Eventually, with the end result of promoting such rampant innovation inspired by a engaged, transparent and nimble set of interactions and conversations for which most knowledge workers would probably wonder why they didn’t start much sooner! And the best part? All of that inspired by my all favourite 2.0 concept: facilitated serendipity (Or informal and accidental knowledge discoveries, whatever term you would want to use). Informal / Social Learning anyone? Finally, one last key message from CheeChin’s interview recorded and put together on that video clip is that sense of utilising social software tools for something more than just related to pure work. In their case, for something so important, inspiring and mind-blowing as social good. What makes us unique and humane, and differentiates us from the rest of species. Now, I am not going to spoil it for you much further, you will have to watch the clip to see what kind of social good connect.BASF promoted with such a huge success. Needless to say that the first word that comes to my mind is a strong sense of pride. Ok, that’s 5 words, but you know what I mean, right? Either way, if you are still wondering whether social business can be good for your company, whether in the IT industry, or not!!, brilliant success stories like BASF’s connect.BASF can probably confirm that there is a way to become a successful social business. It’s just a matter of having the commitment to make it work across the organisation, following that hybrid approach of top-down, bottom-up that I have talked about in the past, wanting to help define and shape up the next generation of businesses for the 21st century. BASF is already there! Well done!!

Back to my webinar reporting business for this afternoon. This Learning and Skills Group webinar is by Hanif Sazen of Saffron Interactive. BTW, for those who're interested, Saffron Interactive write... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

As I have mentioned in a blog post a couple of days ago, on June 8th I will be participating in the upcoming Social Business Forum 2011 event in Milan, Italy. And as a way to introduce my breakout session on the topic of "Organisations or Communties?" I mentioned a recent interview I did with Roberto Cobianchi "On Collaboration: Interview with Luis Suarez (Part One)", where we talked at length around the topic of virtual collaboration, online communities, and the role social networking tools are playing within the enterprise. The interview was divided in two different parts and yesterday, Roberto published the second part under "On collaboration: interview with Luis Suarez (second part)". Once again, we spent some time talking about some interesting facts from another infographic (This time around SocialCast‘s "Dare to Share?") around the subjects of Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing and how can both, through cooperation, help solve business problems more efficiently. Specially, in today’s, now-more-than-ever distributed corporate environment where not only is the vast majority of the knowledge workforce working remotely, but at the same time those knowledge workers keep working on multiple projects and teams across the board. Long gone is the time when we *all* used to be co-located and working on the same floor, on the same building, on the same single project / team, without having to go elsewhere to get the job done! To such extent, and to share with you folks over here a little bit of a teaser on the kinds of conversations we had during that second part of the interview, I thought I would go ahead and add those questions over here, with an additional short annotation, perhaps, and point you to the article itself to read the rest. And see what you think on this rather important topic around fostering and boosting collaboration within the workplace. Once again, I would also want to take the opportunity to thank Roberto for taking the time to do the interview with me and for sharing it across over at his blog. Many thanks! So, here we go: "In the long history of humankind (…) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed": Indeed, now more than ever, we have been witnessing, over the last couple of years, how more and more businesses are starting to turn their heads towards their internal (AND external) communities, whereas before they weren’t just simply doing it, as perhaps the most powerful organisms to help boost collaboration and knowledge sharing across the board, helping flatten the organisation encouraging work to take place amongst networks versus teams and organisations, making them all much more agile and nimble. Yes, indeed, about time that happens, don’t you think? "From an enterprise perspective, the social software and the change in the behavior of employees is not only a question of efficiency or cost reduction, it’s a matter of survival": And that matter of survival is driven mainly by customers and business partners, even competitors!, whereas before it was all somehow driven by vendors themselves in their ivory towers thinking they always knew better than their customers, when all along, social software tools have confirmed it’s rather the opposite. No matter how much a vendor is knowledgeable about their own products, your customers will always know more than you, not only because of the extensive use they make of your offerings, and the figuring out of new ways to use your products you didn’t even think about!,, but because they are also connecting and talking to other customers, amongst themselves, and competitors! to converse about your products and that’s something that in order for businesses to succeed they can no longer ignore, nor neglect. They need to dive right in, before your customers move on to the competition… just because you were not there! "In the same infographic: "20% to 50% of collaboration activity resulted in wasted effort". There are three main factors: poorly planned meetings unproductive travel time bad communication I think you agree with that, but which one do you suggest to consider first? Which one do you think is the first to fight with?"This question surely was an interesting one, specially, since I have been trying to tame down, quite a bit, one of those items for a few years now while living "A World Without Email"; thus, considering that one out already, my answer for this question was probably what’s going to be my next quest, poorly planned meetings, not only because of the quality of some of those meetings, but also because of the sheer number of them we all seem to have throughout the course of the day (How can you have 7, 8 or 9 meetings a day and still get work done?!?! That’s just insane!), when, in reality, we may not even need them in the first place, if we would get to utilise our own collaboration, knowledge sharing and social software tools much more effectively reducing our dependency and addiction, not to count the time we spent in meetings! But that would be another topic for an upcoming blog post on living "A World Without Meetings"… (Notice that I am not going to state I’d want to kill off meetings altogether, but certainly find smarter ways of getting the job done without having to call for a meeting along the way…) "How many tools do you use in your daily work in order to reduce mail overload?" I tried to be brief on this one, since I know it could get far too long before we all know it, but basically I mentioned the main social tools I am currently using, both internally and externally, in order to reduce, rather substantially, my dependency on corporate email and, like most of you folks know already, I detailed plenty more of that on a recent mindmap & presentation I put together on that very same topic of "A World Without Email", for those folks who may be interested in finding out much more in-depth. "Each tool is an opportunity to keep in touch with customers, colleagues and partners and so on": Indeed! and 4 years later I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s that fragmentation and diversification of my mailbox that has allowed me to forget / worry about all of those issues with inbound email. It just doesn’t happen. Even if I am gone the entire week on a customer and company event like I have been, having just returned from Barcelona, Spain, where I got 17 emails for that single week, while I have been interacting all over the place on social tools. Priceless! Oh, and here is another good reminder for a much overdue update on the progress report over the last few months that I need to do as well over the next couple of days … "When do you foresee to arrive to zero emails?": Probably, the one million dollar question that everyone is trying to answer to a certain extent, for sure; specially, seeing how there are some business that are starting to question the validity of corporate email and are already well embarked on a mission to ditch it altogether. As part of my answer, I mentioned how we would probably not be capable of ditching it altogether, since there are two single use cases for which email still is probably the most effective of communication tools (i.e. Calendaring & Scheduling and 1:1 private / confidential conversations), but for the rest we can probably kiss it good-bye, if we are all ready to embark on diversifying and fragmenting our Inboxes to look out for much more effective and efficient collaboration, knowledge sharing tools within the social computing realm.  I guess that time will tell, although for me, seeing a reduction on my incoming email already by over 95% is probably good enough for me to state I’m almost there, don’t you think? And that would be it! Those were the questions that Roberto asked me as the second part of the interview and I do hope you may have found some of the answers interesting and relevant. I would be looking forward to the Social Business Forum event  where, after checking out the agenda, I know it’s going to be a rather interesting and tough challenge to decide which sessions to attend, because, once again, the line-up of speakers is outstanding with plenty of smart folks like Bill Johnston, Sameer Patel (Who has already blogged about the event over here), Cordelia Krooss, Esteban Kolsky, George Siemens, Bertrand Duperrin, Norman Lewis, Ming Kwan, Craig Hepburn, Rosario Sica, Laurence Lock Lee and a few others! Lots of really good friends to meet up and see again, and a bunch more new ones to be made in a packed couple of days of great conversations and thought-provoking knowledge sharing around Social Business! Yes, sir, you can tell I just can’t wait for it to get started!! And you?

Third webinar for the day. I 'm now attending the Elearning Guild webinar on 'Social Media in e-Learning: Ur Doin' It Right' The speakers are: Mark Oehlert, Defense Acquisition University Koreen... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

Fourth and last webinar for the day, is yet another Elearning Guild webinar. This one's a real life case study for enterprise collaboration by Lisa Choi, Beth Branick and Wendie Whelan from Advantage... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

Over the course of the last couple of years I have taken the chance to blog, every so often, about one of my favourite video series that has surely changed the perception of the real impact of the Social Web, not only within the corporate world, but also within our own society as a whole. Of course, I am talking about the Did You Know? series of video clips that keeps re-surfacing every now and then. One other interesting outcome of those clips is the good amount of spin-offs that abound all over the place on the Web, like today’s inspiring video that I thought I would share over here to kick off another week at work. It’s all about going Global, Local, Personal. It lasts for a little bit over 4 minutes and it was originally presented at the Elisa ICT Symposium 2011 conference event in Helsinki, Finland. And apart from painting together a rather interesting landscape of the impact of the Internet, and the Social Web, in our lives, both at work, and in our personal relationships with others, whether co-located or not, the rather interesting part of the video clip is how it evaluates the impact of current trends like Cloud Computing and Mobility to set the stage of how we will be using the Internet in the next few years… More instrumented, intelligent, interconnected than ever. More integrated, even, into our daily lives. What really resonated with me from the video itself though was the main theme permeating through these three keywords: Personal, Local, Global. Personal from the perspective of how critical context is as "the new battleground for business" (Couldn’t have agreed more with it!) and how we can probably no longer ignore it, nor neglect it, in a business environment as perhaps one of the most critical success factors for employee empowerment. Local from the perspective of how that context is king and how through the use of social networking tools we have got that opportunity to localise our knowledge having access to globally available information. And, finally, global by helping introduce a concept I have grown very fond of over the course of years, specially, internally, at IBM: global integrated enterprise. Global companies helping define the next generation of the corporate environment for the 21st century combining nicely both that global reach with that local flavour of flattening organisations through the extensive use of social computing tools and, eventually, arranging work through networks and communities instead. Not a bad start of the week, don’t you think?

I am a trainer by profession. I know there are war cries in the industry to just get rid of the training department completely. I agree and I disagree. Jane Bozarth's landmark quote remains at the... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.