Collaboration space, digital work space, business collaboration platform (thanks Microsoft, that sounds fun!). These are all ways to define a place online where people go to collaborate on a project. Sound familiar at all? Well it’s just like that office you drive to every day to sit in a cube and get things done with the same people you see 5 days a week. Wait a minute, though…. you say, I can work with other people through the network, share files, leave comments, maybe even give a star rating to a doc or a person I know – yea, Enterprise 2.0!

Well, I think the state of the online collaboration movement stinks on ice, sister! And the arrival of Enterprise Social Networks, even though greeted by breathless universal enthusiasm, has not improved the state of getting work done that much. Even mashing up a limiting, confining workspace with the transparency of a social network has come up short. Why? Well, first of all as I wrote in my rant, part one, the workspace metaphor just doesn’t cut it any more. Secondly, ESN’s just aren’t architected to enable work. They are great for letting folks know what’s “going on” and discovering other co-workers, but as a work tool, not ready to make significant contribution to enterprise productivity.

So, what do we need to have in a solution to make it collaborative, social, and ready to get work done? Just 2 things really. First, make folks everyday todo’s, tasks, goals, and ideas social, NOT the people. Make the todo’s the social entity, people are already social, they don’t need the help. Second, make all those todo’s etc, along with the work of folks I follow, and my colleagues, visible in a shared social workFLOW, not workSPACE. A never ending river of relevant information flowing in an a familiar social interface. Not a restricted area, but an open transparent playground of work.

But wait, how can I make sense of this endless flowing river of information, if we had a workspace, i would know what was relevant because everything in the space is related. It’s quite simple really. In order to makes sense of a such a cool stream of work, just use tagging, filters and views.

If you are a Simpsons fan you may remember the episode “Dial N for Nerder.” Homer was going on a diet and there was a simple solution to all his cravings.

Betsy: It’s all about little substitutions. If you want to eat something, eat a bell pepper. Crave something sweet? Eat a bell pepper. Want a beer? Bell pepper.

Homer Simpson: It tastes good like pepper, but crunchy like a bell.

Betsy: Bell pepper!

So if you are using Sparqlight and need to make your workflow relevant for you…

Sparqlight: It’s all about views. If you want to track a project, use filters and views. Who’s working on something? Filters and views. Want an idea when you can go for a beer? Filters and views.

Homer Simpson: It tastes good like a filter, but crunchy like a view.

Sparqlight: Filters and views!

Filters and views along with tagging make it easy to create any “lens” to view your workflow and make it relevant. It’s almost unlimitlessly flexible. So breakout from workspace prison and join the flow. Social Workflow that is! You’ll be getting work done before you know it.

Read a great article last night from GigaOm called “Tools for the future of work: Salesforce bets on social”  based on an interview with John Wookey, Salesforce’s new executive vice president and a former exec at SAP and Oracle.I thought he was totally on the money! The winds of change are blowing from many sources and I (and he) think Enterprise Social means getting work done, now more than ever.

Not so coincidently, I’m writing this during the keynote of SFDC’s Cloudforce Conference, where Mark Benioff said 30 minutes ago that “getting work done” was the most important next step to the social enterprise after collaboration.

In the article John Wookey says “The ability to quickly align around goals and what you want to get done is important.” This is such a simple yet powerful statement.

In the social enterprise, its imperative to be able to both have visibility AND manageability around work.. It needs to be easy to assign, track and analyze. These are the foundations of proving ROI. I think Salesforce has done an awesome job of integrating Chatter into 150,000 enterprises and are poised to easily tackle the next step of enabling work, anywhere, anytime, any device. They’ll do it through workflow and they’ll do it socially.

We share that vision of work enablement. It’s important for tools to be simple to use, but to do amazing things. We believe that machines should do the heavy lifting, and you should concentrate on closing more business, being more creative, or maybe just taking the afternoon off. Social is a revolution that is rolling into the enterprise, with or without your permission – might as well embrace and enhance it.

“Raising the productivity of employees whose jobs can’t be automated is the next great performance challenge – and the stakes are high.”

— McKinsey & Company, The 21st Century Organization

The McKinsey Quarterly

I found this report cited in a number of recent presentations and white papers about enterprise social and collaboration. Pretty cool, huh? Really plays to our strengths here at Sparqlight. I mean, to have a respected org like McKinsey sing from our hymn book has got to mean we are on the right path right? Well, this turns out to be a good news/bad news sort of thing.

The report in question was published in August of 2005! So, while it seems to align with what’s happening now, it’s possibly a bit stale. Some of the events of the last half a decade could not have been anticipated, especially the enormous growth and consumer adoption of social networks like Facebook and Twitter and the subsequent consumerization of IT, not only from HW (Think iWhatever at the office) but from a SW perspective as well. Not only do knowledge workers WANT always-on cheap cloud based applications, they want them to operate and democratize their work just like social networks have done for their personal life.

The result of this demand is that technology HAS caught up to the spirit of the McKinsey report and new enterprise social tools have emerged that make it easy to discover and collaborate with your peers and colleagues. These new collaboration tools have started to gain significant adoption, but I think they are missing some critical elements.

Later in the McKinsey report is this quote – “As ‘tacit’ interactions replace more routine economic activity, and the scale and complexity of many corporations creep upward, the need to manage collaboration is growing.” – for me, a KEY component of managing collaboration has to be accountability. It’s imperative that organizations track, analyze and constantly improve their collaborations and the work that results from them.

Users of Sparqlight can create benchmarks and use built-in tools for the measurement of enterprise social collaboration and efficiency of their team’s or company’s collective social workflow. That’s the first step. The next is to use rules and automation to take some of the load off already overtaxed knowledge workers. Smart workflow enables smarter, happier, more productive workers.

BTW, as I get to the bottom of this post, I realize that the McKinsey report (read the whole thing, link here) is actually pretty relevant, maybe even more so today. We are faced with a lot of ways to get work done. Better processes and collaboration are certainly a start. Smarter tools will get us even further.

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Today, Sparqlight and Yammer announced a significant partnership and tight integration of our products. I wanted to say a few words about why this is important and REAL, not just one of dozens of barney partnerships announced every day.

By integrating our technology with Yammer, not only will Yammer users be able to see your work as you complete it, but they will be able to embed Yammer events into Sparqlight work stream just as if they were working directly in Sparqlight.

Powerful Transparency

This powerful transparency makes it easy for others to discover your activities and join in. And it’s all organized, tracked and easily managed within either the Yammer activity or Sparqlight work stream. This increased engagement leads to better work and more efficient workers.

Simple Permissions, Easy Control

Publishing access to the Yammer activity stream is easily managed. First, Sparqlight users determine which records can be published. Post everything to the activity stream or limit to certain record types.

Additionally, users can control posting at the single record level by using # and @ tags. A simple #YAM explicitly posts to the Yammer activity stream.

Assign and Track in Sparqlight, See it in Yammer

With the integration, you can see all your Sparqlight activity in Yammer, making it easy to communicate and enable immediate productivity gains. From the smallest task to the most complicated company-wide initiative, Sparqlight and Yammer together eliminate outdated, unorganized collaboration methods and help you get work done!

So, it’s easy to see why we are so proud of the integration and grateful to our new partner, Yammer, for all the hard work they put in to make the products work so seamlessly together. It would have been simple to do a logo swap and slap a data sheet together, but that wouldn’t have made it any simpler for our customers to get work done – this innovative partnership does just that and I can’t wait to see what we accomplish together.

Check out the Press Release >

Check out the Sparqlight/Yammer Solution Doc >

As the NKOTB in the enterprise social space (as a company and as the new marketing guy at Sparqlight), I’ve been diving in and really thinking about what it means to work socially.

It’s apparent to me that “making everything social” and simply sharing activities with your co-workers is a one size fits all approach that wears out it’s welcome pretty quickly Just as Enterprise 2.0 pushed Web 2.0 to the mind-share minor leagues, it’s time for Enterprise 2.0 to grow up and get to work. Company’s need to structure work and their tools from the start to be social and it requires a re-imagining of what it means to collaborate and communicate.

There are currently two factions waving the flaming torches of enterprise social. Lumbering CRM, BPM and ERP dinosaurs (Oracle, IBM, even SFDC, etc) trying to protect huge historical pools of recurring revenue and the hordes of ankle-biting start-ups building social tools that are designed to complement legacy technology by providing organizational transparency and frictionless communications between the lowliest knowledge worker and the CEO (and sometimes their customers).

I’m not saying that either of these approaches are completely misguided. It makes total sense for large enterprises to leverage bolt-on social tools on top of their EXPENSIVE giant legacy systems. I’m also a huge fan of removing ANY and ALL barriers to effective, speedy communication though a purpose built social tool like Yammer, Jive, SocialText or any of dozens of others. But both of these approaches rely on transparency as their key feature. While easy access to who’s working on what is cool and useful, what we really need are tools that help structure work, break it into manageable chunks, and schedule and assign it. And it needs to be inherently social from the get go.

It’s not enough to stand around the water cooler and talk about what you are working on or peeking over someones virtual shoulder to offer help. It’s time to move way beyond transparency and discovery and into efficiency and accountability.

I want to spend way less time scrolling through endless email threads looking for some vital info or calling around or texting to see if something critical is complete. My workflow and my team’s must be relentlessly social – all our goals and to-do’s broadcast where appropriate, assignments easy to make and track – it’ll all be in my work stream and available anytime. And this will be done automatically, not waiting for me or my co-workers to publish to a separate stream. Tight integration, collaboration and visibility will become the norm.

When I plan and execute my work socially, a cool thing happens, collaboration occurs with a purpose and I can track how I’m doing – as a person and as a company. Sparqlight is designed to be social from the ground up. Try it and see what it’s like to move beyond conversations and social voyeurism and simply get work done.