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I had the pleasure of presenting at Tech23 this week, which was quite an experience. Firstly, I would like to thank Rachel Slattery & her team at SlatteryIT for a truly professional event. In terms of quality of people presenting, on the panels & in the audience it was one of the best conferences I’ve attended – if not, the best. Getting that many people together can’t have been an easy task, especially without any glitches

From a personal point of view, I found the whole process of putting together five minutes extremely exhausting. It’s very hard to know what to put in & what to leave out, and there’s still so much more I would like to have said. The value of doing it in 5 minutes though, is exactly that you don’t have to say everything. It makes me wonder whether every presentation should last five minutes, giving your audience the chance to answer the questions important to them. Having Scott Farquhar, Martin Hosking & Emmanuel Rodriguez asking questions was far more valuable to the watching audience than listen to me prattle on.

So what of the other 22 presenting? I don’t remember a bad presentation at all, though of course you would expect that with the caliber of presenters. During the practice run the day before, I had the pleasure of watching Dr. Alex Brooks running through his pitch for Marathon Robotics. That put the chills up me, as his presentation was absolutely excellent – made me a little worried. After all, how can you compete with moving robots getting shot at! My concerns were unfounded though, as he rightly took out the top gong for Innovation Excellence & the People’s Choice. Great work Alex.

My other favourites included BiNu, Taggle, Solar-Gem, Aviator Controls & ReadCloud. All provide technology that can make a real difference to the world, which is a great place to be at. The Taggle presentation was pretty funny too, which tends to shine through at such events.

Market Leading Insurance Company Enhances Internal Sales Competition

It’s no secret that as the economy suffers, organisations are looking for new ways to increase sales, improve communication and improve the bottom line. Take, for example, Australia-based 1Cover, who implemented the Social Business Integrator from Platform46 to better inform their sales team of each other’s performance, increase competition between the team, and ensure all employee’s are kept informed of all activities within the company.

"Over one million satisfied Australians have used 1Cover, and our customers deserve the best service we can provide," said Ed Feltham, CEO of 1Cover. "When we investigated how we could improve the sales performance of our team, we didn’t find anything with such an immediate return on investment."

With a rapid rollout, 1Cover deployed Platform46 Social Business Integrator within two days. One of 1Cover’s primary requirements in transitioning to the new solution was to be able to facilitate a seamless migration for their employees, while retaining an ability to tweak their requirements over time,"It's fantastic to work with proactive organizations who understand that innovation in the workplace can be affordable, easy to use and risk-free," said Platform46 CTO Richard Atkinson. "As a customer focused company, 1Cover really understands that the right solution brings strong benefits to their business in terms of better value for customers and improved organisational flexibility".

Platform46 Social Business Integrator enables organisations to deliver a “pulse” to their workforce – taking real-time information from existing enterprise applications, and communicating key events to all employees. The platform’s integration options include proven connections to CRM systems, document management systems, ERP systems and more – leaving what is communicated to the imagination of the company.

With the advent of RIA technologies (Rich internet Applications) it is possible to deliver a very rich experience within a browser. It is hence no surprise that a lot of Enterprises are adding these capabilities for their business users with a promise of providing seamless, interactive and rich experience for their enterprise applications from within their intranet. This has given rise to a big push for adoption of enteprise dashboards which allows business users to interact with data that sits in the data warehouse in real time, anytime and anywhere from their intranet.

Most of the RIA applications focuses mainly on prividing a rich content in a browser platform and Enteprises simply publish it to the intranet and give access to a few Senior managers for this dashboard content. The senior managers then collaborate and discuss around insights they derive from this information with their peers using traditional email , face to face discussion or phone call.

The problem is the ability to discuss around the data collaboratively through email is limited and so effective multi user collaboration on a common topic is not achieved effectively. This is the missing link that we at Platform46 plan to address with our “Social Business Integrator” product by fitting ourselves into various RIA applications and intranet front pages and provide ability to collaborate with peers around insights derived from the dashboard such as for example “Why is Region X doing better than Region Y?” This enhances sharing of information across multiple levels of the organization, breaks silos and enhances team work.

Social Business Integrator can provide the ability to fit itself in as a widget or frame within a existing Enterprise dashboard application or intranet front page and the same view can also be configured to get feeds and information from any other existing IT systems such as CRM, ERP to provide real time unfiltered streams of events and information at the right level of granularity to the intranet users. By combining RIA technolgies for use to build Enterprise dashboard along with Social Business integtation, Enterprises can truly make their dashboards live by fully engaging their most important asset i.e. Employees of the organization to share information and work more effectively with each other.

Collaboration allows creativity to happen. In business, we are used to looking at data & statistics… if you can’t measure it, who cares? Are there any parts of the business that aren’t data-driven because I can’t think of one? Data is certainly important, make no mistake, but it isn’t everything. Didn’t Enron have a lot of data? Didn’t seem to do them much good…

So where do we go from here? The truth is we are heading towards a new era where it’s not enough to have good data, more is expected. Employees expect their executives to show understanding and enhance collaboration. As a collaborative company creates greater value, there’s a growing role for collaborative management.

Being aware of the feelings of others is good behavior, but compassion really works when the employees of organizations understand what their co-workers are feeling. So surely there’s a link between compassion and collaboration?

The link between these traits involves being less self-interested and be more willing to help others. Alternatively an organization can push command-and-control behavior. This is a form of self-interest. Another form of self-interest is lack of consideration of how others feel.

I have been actively researching on what “Social” means to organizations when they are trying to socialize their intranet or as it is fashionable to be called nowadays , adopting “Intranet 2.0”. I did a quick Internet Search and not surprisingly I was inundated with information. What I found very surprising was most of the information talk about nothing more than adding Blogs, Forums into the intranet as part of socializing the Intranet and the Enterprise.

Can one claim that they have Socialized their intranet just by adding a MicroBlogging capability to all users logging into the intranet and allowing them to leave behind a comment on any content in the intranet?. I don’t think so. The reason being there is evidence that internal employees have a strong resistance to participate and collaborate if they are presented with a simple blog capability around contents in a intranet . I believe this is due to the fact they view the content as somebody else's and do not feel ownership of the information, even though it is needed for their job. Due to this lack of ownership they have strong resistance to collaborate around it and the “Social” never happens.

Though the existing content from intranets and the social tools will be critical elements for socializing the intranet, what is really important to socialize the intranet is a fundamental change in the way the intranet is positioned, packaged and presented to its Employee. Instead of intranet being a content centric website , it has to be designed as a online personalized workspace where employees can go and get the information that is most relevant to them and also network with their work colleagues around these information. The employees for example should have the ability to subscribe to relevant feeds from existing published content into their workspace and also be able to subscribe to updates that are relevant to them for their jobs from existing IT systems such as CRM, ERP , CMS within the enterprise and be able to stay on top of what is happening within the Enterprise . If we now add the social tool such as microblogging around this within this personalized Workspace for the employee we believe the intranet will become truly social. The employees will participate more freely as the same content is positioned and presented to them as their own personal workspace getting access to the content they want in their own personal Corporate Wall. This approach for socializing the intranet along with tying it to any existing Enterprise IT systems is what we at Platform46 call “Social Business Integration” and with our “Social Business Integrator” product we aim to truly “Socialize the Intranet.”