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Recent Idea Management Posts from William's Blog
Companies everywhere are recognizing the need to innovate successfully, and to manage that innovation in ways that will drive business results. William Rogers, CorasWorks' Co-Founder and Chief Workplace Architect, is working with government agencies, corporations, and other organizations daily, discussing and demonstrating how innovation can be harnessed and managed on SharePoint with CorasWorks' Idea Management Solution. William blogs about the topics that arise in the field and how our Idea Management solution is built to anticipate the challenges of variations across innovation goals, company culture, and more to effectively manage innovation across industries and sectors. We've given previews of recent posts below as well as links to the entire blog post. William's full blog can be accessed here.
Posted October 31, 2011
Why would you want just a Social Intranet?
I recently read an article by Toby Ward posted October 18th, entitled Despite SharePoint’s Success, The Social Intranet is Still Rare. He talks of the massive adoption of SharePoint. He does a good job of describing how Intranets are evolving and the use of social media tools to create a Social Intranet. Then, he provides data showing that users of Intranets with social media tools actually are showing low levels of satisfaction. He also says that enterprise Social Intranets are rare, particularly on SharePoint. Bottom line is that I agree with what he writes. In this article, I’ll give you my take on why this is and talk about the other half of the story which is about where else people are going with SharePoint 2010, and, how fast.
read more
Posted October 17, 2011
Drive exceptional results by combining social business collaboration and project management
We kicked off October as an exhibitor at the SharePoint Conference in Los Angeles. At our booth, we were showing our two core solutions for SharePoint 2010 – CorasWorks Cim for Social Business Collaboration and CorasWorks PPM for Project Portfolio Management. These are two robust solutions that work great stand alone. However, we got people really excited by demonstrating business scenarios where the two are combined to drive a new experience. In this article, I’ll cover the three combo scenarios that we were showing and give you an explanation of how they come together. read more
Posted September 18, 2011
September 2011 releases for Cim Pros
We’ve just released a small wave of items that are able to be leveraged by Cim Pros using CorasWorks Cim on SharePoint 2010. This wave consists of the following: 1) the v2.1.1 Hotfix release of Cim, 2) a new Community module flavor called “Quick Facts”, and 3) the New Project Initiation application.
These three items are all released to the Cim Pro community of the Cim Learning Center. They are only available to Cim Pros that have access to the Cim Learning Center and are using these items in licensed environments of CorasWorks Cim. Here are details for each. read more
Posted September 17, 2011
The What is Working? Solution. Using Cim to Drive Continuous Improvement
We often talk about CorasWorks Cim to be used as a tool to drive innovation. Therefore, we tend to think of new ideas, processes, and creating something novel. However, one of the biggest opportunities for larger organizations is taking things that are already working and get them working in other parts of the organization. I’ll present you with a solution we call “What is Working?” and describe how this simple mechanism can drive continuous improvement. read more
Posted September 17, 2011
Use Challenges to Drive Results with Enterprise Innovation
There are a lot of organizations that are new to Idea & Innovation Management solutions such as CorasWorks Cim for SharePoint 2010. One of the most significant best practices we emphasize for those new to innovation is the use of event-based Challenges to drive innovation vs. general idea communities. In this article, I’ll drill down into Challenges as a key ingredient in the standard enterprise recipe for innovation.
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Posted August 29, 2011
Innovation on SharePoint 2010 Should be Different, Which Makes it Better
This week we’ll be doing a webcast on the new release of CorasWorks Cim for Idea & Innovation Management on SharePoint 2010. Our approach to Innovation with this solution is different from the pack of other offerings in the space. This is because our solution runs natively on SharePoint and we have designed it to really leverage the full potential of SharePoint to drive innovation. In this article, I’ll give you a heads up of the reasons behind this which we’ll be talking to and demoing in the webcast. read more
Posted August 21, 2011
Driving Business Value with the New Project Initiation social business process
Last week we added the New Project Initiation (“NPI”) application to our App Showcase. This CorasWorks Cim-based app running on SharePoint 2010, front-ends your Project Management systems and provides you with a broad funnel for new project idea/proposal capture and collaboration and a process to review, evaluate and approve them. In this article, I’ll look at the business scenario, drivers of business value, and common objections/pushback that you get by adding this front-end app to your project work. read more
Posted August 14, 2011
Enabling Enterprise-Wide Social Business Processes
With the launch of Cim v2.1 last month, I’ve been engaging with a very different set of business groups amongst our customers. These are groups that have really never gotten into leveraging SharePoint – even though their organization has it deployed enterprise wide. They are now looking to leverage Cim on SharePoint 2010 to scale out and up enterprise-wide business processes that have been operating in limited, cumbersome environments. This scenario that we call enterprise-wide social business processes (EW-SBP) is a targeted scenario for Cim and leverages the entire CorasWorks value proposition. In this article, I’ll provide the overview of this scenario. read more
Posted August 13, 2011
Engage the User with the Cim Activity Stream
In my last post, I explained how Cim enables you to create many different social business applications for your SharePoint 2010 environment. I ended with a scenario of how we bring it all together to provide end-users with a single user experience across all of these applications. The key enabler is the new Cim Activity Stream. In this article, I’ll drill deeper into it to explore why and how it works to drive user engagement. read more
Posted August 12, 2011
Cim v2.1: Our approach to adding value with Social Business Apps
Since the launch of Cim v2.1 last month, I’ve had a lot of meetings with customers. The conversation quickly turns to a discussion of what are the most valuable applications of this social business software across their SharePoint 2010 environment. With Cim v2.1, we make it easy to frame this conversation because we ship with 3 core solutions that are ready to implement out-of-the box. Each of these is really a framework for a category of applications. Armed with this, customers get focused on the business value much more quickly. In this article, I’ll go over our solution oriented approach and how it delivers business value to you. read more
Posted July 30, 2011
Social vs. Social Business on SharePoint 2010
Over the last few weeks, as we’ve taken Cim v2.1 to market, we are increasingly compared with pure social technology players in the market. Certainly, Cim v2.1 has gotten more social and this question is reasonable. There is some overlap; we are both starting in the same place. In this article, I’ll provide a simple approach I use to draw the key distinction and how this difference drives us as vendors in different investment directions and value propositions.
The really short answer is that in most pure Social offerings, the focus is on the conversation and the network. Whereas in Social Business offerings like Cim, the focus is on the application and the business result supported by the collaborative conversation. read more
Posted July 19, 2011
User Centric Focus Empowers Social Collaboration on SharePoint 2010
Service Pack 1 of SharePoint 2010 was recently released. The “mainstream” of SharePoint users are now on their way to migrating to SP2010. Where are the new quick wins and big wins for organizations on their new platform? We believe that social collaboration on SP2010 offers great potential. Can collaboration really be enhanced in a significant way? The answer is yes. read more
Posted July 12, 2011
Enabling the Collaborative Snowball Effect to Drive Results
I just returned from a wonderful vacation week on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. I was there for my wife’s reunion. It was a reunion of people that had been part of Na Kani Pela. This was a choir that sang liturgical music and Hawaiian songs at masses and then in public concerts around the world between 1974-1978. It was a wonderful event, with more than 50 people coming together, after 30+ years – most of whom hadn’t spoken in 30 years. The reunion was not the original catalyst. It was a result of a snowball effect due to social collaboration over the last 2 years. I think that it provides us with a good example of how social tools can be used in business to enable a collaborative snowball that drives results. I’ll tell the story of the Na Kani Pela reunion and then give you a business scenario that is similar yet different.
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Posted June 28, 2011
Social Business Software: Give yourself an unfair advantage
Social has been hot for a couple of years. Now, people are trying to figure out how to apply the capabilities to business. Often people come to the space with vague notions of social. Every conversation seems to bring up Twitter and Facebook. It makes sense. People are coming to the space based upon what they know as consumers. However, when talking about CorasWorks Cim on SharePoint, I find it very effective to start the conversation a bit differently. It goes like this. . .
read more
Posted June 21, 2011
Cim v2.1 Overview: Social Business Software on SharePoint 2010
It’s that time again. We’ve been heads down on CorasWorks Cim v2.1, the next release of our Social Business Software solution on SharePoint 2010. In this article, I’ll cover some of the key aspects of this release. . .read more
Posted May 30, 2011
Customers and Partners Show Their Stuff at CorasWorks Hosted Federal Case Study Seminar
Okay, we love to present. But, we decided to turn the tables and host a Seminar where our Federal customers and their systems integrators showed off what they’ve built with CorasWorks on SharePoint. This packed, standing room only, unclassified event was held last week at our corporate headquarters. I was blown away by the breadth and richness of the applications and their mission-critical importance. Here’s the skinny. . .read more
Posted May 17, 2011
Clyde and Co’s Claims Management Application: OpenApp Development with CorasWorks v11
Last week, Rhonda Jenkins of Clyde & Co, a major international law firm, graciously presented their Claims Management application to our customers and partners. This mission-critical business application was built using CorasWorks v11 running on Microsoft SharePoint. She presented the detailed business case along with a demonstration. It is a very compelling business success story that demonstrates the potential of the “OpenApp” style of development made possible with CorasWorks v11. Here’s the story. . .read more
Posted April 19, 2011
Knowledge Pool: Easier Collaboration, Better Knowledge
My last post, Social Business Collaboration Meets SharePoint 2010 Intranet, included a few videos showing how your collaborative experience can be enhanced using Cim Social Business Collaboration on your SharePoint 2010 Intranet. They focused on people working within an IT Department portal. In this article, we’ll do some “Day in the life” videos and look at a specific scenario where users are sharing and collaborating as part of a knowledge community from across a SharePoint environment. We’ll see how the knowledge evolves and improves via the collaborative community and the inter-action of participants. read more
Posted April 18, 2011
Social Business Collaboration Meets SharePoint 2010 Intranet
Many of our customers are in the midst of migrating to SharePoint 2010. In most cases, the initial objective is to lay out an Intranet with multiple departments and business functions. In this article, through a few videos, I’ll show you how your new Intranet on SP2010 can become a much more vibrant, engaging, inter-active, and productive place to work when it is enhanced with CorasWorks Cim Social Business Collaboration. read more
Posted April 9, 2011
Presentation on Social Business to Federal SharePoint User Group
This past week I made a presentation to the Federal SharePoint User Group on CorasWorks Cim v2.0 for Social Business on SharePoint 2010. I’ve attached the presentation for your reference. The presentation was oriented to a standard SharePoint audience, particularly one that is looking to migrate or beginning to leverage SharePoint 2010. I’ll cover some of the key points made in the Social Business Overview and in the live Demonstration. read more
Posted APRIL 3, 2011
Knowledge Pipeline: From Raw Information to Published (and improving) Knowledge
In my last article, Drive Tangible Results when Social Activity is “In-the-flow” of Business, I referenced people/sources over the years that have written about the importance of putting social activity “in-the-flow” of business in order to drive adoption and tangible business value. In this article, I’ll discuss a specific application that follows this design approach with Cim v2.0 on SharePoint. The application is a Knowledge Pipeline that works to capture raw knowledge, process it to transform it into publishable content, and then, serves it up to customers for them to consume and provide feedback. read more
Posted march 29, 2011
Drive Tangible Results when Social Activity is "In-the-flow" of Business
In my last post about about Cim v2.0 Communities, I talked about how our native design enables social communities to be directly tied into business processes on SharePoint 2010. The importance of putting social activity into the flow of business is not a novel thought – it has been talked about by the social software/Enterprise 2.0 gurus over the last four years. In this article, I’ll give you references to their original writings on the topic, and then, I’ll discuss the CorasWorks approach that makes this happen for enterprise businesses. read more
Posted march 27, 2011
How Cim v2.0 Communities Drive Enhanced Effectiveness of Social Collaboration on SharePoint 2010
A great number of organizations are in the midst of their migration to SharePoint 2010. This migration carries with it a new set of expectations for the platform. So, what are the key areas for new value? A common one cited is potential network effect of social collaboration with your internal workforce. In this article, I will drill down into Cim v2.0 Communities and how they enable a new level of organizational effectiveness and directly drive tangible business value through social collaboration. read more
Posted March 4, 2011
Understanding the World as you Innovate
There are side benefits to getting out of the office and flying half way around the world to do an implementation (see my article on UCB in Belgium) – you can learn interesting things. Courtesy of Koen Dehaen of UCB he shared with me some very interesting videos on how to view the world. I highly recommend that everyone looks at these to get a real world view of things over the last 200 years. read more
Posted MARCH 4, 2011
New Cim v2.0 Jump Start Enablement approach Accelerates Innovation on SP2010
With Cim v2.0, we have moved our solution for SharePoint 2010 from an app for Idea and Innovation Management to being an enterprise platform for innovation applications. Initially, we delivered most of our customers directly working primarily with the business groups. Now, we have a new model where we can work with IT and partners to turn them into enablers that empowers them to deliver multiple applications as part of their overall innovation initiative – we call it Jump Start Enablement. read more
Posted FEBRUARY 25, 2011
Ease, Power and Value of Cim Stage Gate Forms
In my article, moments ago I wrote about Social Collaboration for Managers. Let’s stay in the process management discussion and cover another important feature for managers that are working items through their Stage Gate process. The feature is Forms. Cim has some extra details that really bring out the power of forms in a Stage Gate process and make it unusually easy to tailor the forms thus enabling you to continually improve your process. read more
Posted FEBRUARY 25, 2011
Social Collaboration for Managers (they are people too)
Cim v2.0 has a lot of new social collaboration features such as Peer Reviews, Scoring, Auto-Promotion, Virtual Workspaces, My Site Snaplets, My Site Bookmarking/Tagging to Social Networks. Most of these are oriented towards the general community (“the crowd”) and intended to drive broad visibility and participation. But, what about the managers that have to wallow away actually reviewing, evaluating, and deciding on all of these great ideas, requests, proposals, projects, etc. Well Cim v2.0 puts some social sizzle in their hands also… read more
Posted February 22, 2011
Fast Adoption of Cim v2.0 and Key Driving Apps
Its barely been two weeks since Cim v2.0 hit the streets. It is being very rapidly adopted by existing CorasWorks customers and new accounts. The new Social Business Process solution category we add to Cim v2.0 has opened it up to a whole new crop of business units across our customer base. In this article I’ll cover some accounts and the types of apps. read more
Posted January 31, 2011
Crowd and Management Social Eddies in Cim 2.0
A couple of posts ago I talked about Social Collaboration and Business Processes being two sides of the same coin in Cim 2.0. They are different animals but very related. In this article, I’ll drill down into an example of features in Cim 2.0 that show how and why they are different, similar and related. read more
Posted January 30, 2011
Cim for Process Improvements: It’s Official, It’s the BRI in Cim v2.0
Cim v2.0 is coming up next month. We have Base Reference Implementations (BRI’s) that are part of the shipped product. These are standardized, off-the-shelf solutions that are initially implemented to get customers up and running quickly. They are then customized to meet the customers different application scenarios. Thus, one BRI serves as the base for many applications within that solution type. read more
Posted January 30, 2011
Social collaboration and business processes: Expect them to be two sides of the same coin
As a lead up to the release of Cim v2.0 in February, I’ve been making the rounds with the analysts. At the same time, I’ve been spending a great deal of time with our beta customers. There is a very interesting dichotomy between what our customers want and what most vendors are selling and analysts are covering. So, a bit of sharing… read more
Posted December 22, 2010
Cim Process for Application Change Requests
The first Cim Social Business Process app I wrote about was Product Ideas. That article was also a primer for the new line of process apps based upon Cim. It is a bridge between classic idea and innovation management scenarios and our more standard business process apps. Let’s take a half-step forward and look at a different social business process – Application Change Requests. read more
Posted December 21, 2010
Cim Process for Product Ideas: Primer for Social Business Processes
As noted in my Cim 2.0 Overview article, we are adding support for Social Business Process apps in the release in a new category called Cim Process. We will publish a number of apps in this category during 2011. In this article, I’ll take a look at the current version of the app for the Product Ideas process. This is the sample app included in the product. Follow on apps will be in the Cim Learning Center. This article will give you a feel for this particular process, and, it will serve as a primer for this class of apps. read more
Posted December 20, 2010
Cim 2.0 – Overview of Release
As mentioned in My Sabbatical article, Cim v2.0 is planned for release at the beginning of February. We’ve had great success with the Cim v1.2 release as shown in our Featured Customer Stories. The v2.0 release broadens the product and goes deeper. I’ll break it down into the two solution areas supported in this release – Idea and Innovation Management and Social Business Processes. Along the way I’ll start to introduce you to some new modules and features. read more
Posted December 20, 2010
My Sabbatical on Social Business Systems
In Q3 we launched our new CorasWorks v11 application platform for SharePoint, the v1.2 version of Cim, and the v2.0 version of PPM. These new products are the basis of our lineup to deliver value through Social Business Systems on SharePoint 2010. So, over the last 3 months I went deep into the jungles of our customers armed with these new tools. I focused primarily on scenarios using Cim. I took the lead as engagement manager on a number of Cim projects and saw them through start to finish. I took the calls, I lead the sessions, and I listened and learned. I also engaged with a large number and variety of our customers to expose them to our new products and work on loads of new types of applications. In addition, I worked with analysts and other thought leaders who are all sensing the growing importance of Social Business Systems in the 2010’s. Some, may call this work, I call it learning, fun, and really rewarding. read more
Posted October 24, 2010
The Economist Oct 9th, Global Economy and Growth: The Innovation Imperative of the 2010’s
In our CorasWorks Idea Management for SharePoint webcast last week, I referenced the October 9th issue of the Economist magazine with the headline “Grow, dammit, grow!” in talking about today’s innovation imperative. The Economist issue includes a great discussion of the global economy including an 18 page supplemental spread sub-titled “How to grow”. It is a great read to really comes to grips with the challenges of the 2010’s and beyond as a re-balancing of the worlds economy takes place. In this article, I’ll touch on some high points and my view of the role of innovation. read more
Posted October 24, 2010
3 Core Phases of Activity of an Innovation System
In our webcast on CorasWorks Idea Management for SharePoiint this week we showed our new graphical breakdown of the three core phases of activity of idea and innovation management. In presentations, our customers have found this approach to be very useful to plan how they are approaching innovation. It also reflects the overall modular architecture of the CorasWorks Idea Management solution. I’ll run through it in this article.
With CorasWorks Idea Management (Cim), we provide a solution that makes an end-to-end process for innovation possible on SharePoint. We’ve architected our solution to be flexible. We’ve broken the innovation system into 3 core phases of activity as pictured below. read more
Posted September 19, 2010
Idea and Innovation Management as an IT-Provided, Enterprise
Shared Service on SharePoint
As CorasWorks Idea Management on SharePoint gets out there more in the SharePoint enterprise community, IT departments are starting to look at providing Idea Management as an Enterprise Shared Service as part of their offering to the business groups. I’ll address this by recounting an actual question and answer thread that I had with an organization. (NOTE: This article is written for those in IT with enterprise SharePoint experience).
General Scenario:
The customer looks at Idea Management and likes the solution. However, they come to the conclusion that innovation within their enterprise is not a single, big solution. Rather, they see it happening at the department and division level. They also want the burden on the business groups to support themselves assuming Idea Management supports this (For SharePoint enterprise accounts, this is actually very common). Accordingly, they want to bring it up as an IT-Provided, Enterprise Shared Service, on their SharePoint infrastructure. This means that they want to offer it “as an application service” on top of their SharePoint offering so that their different departments/business groups act as separate tenants (multi-tenant) and customize it to their local needs. read more
Posted August 30, 2010
IT Requirements Gathering with Idea Management: Reduce Costs, Drive Collaboration and Visibility, Improve Results
In my last post, I introduced a new way to leverage Idea Management for group-to-group Channels that increase interactivity. In this article, we are going to look at a business scenario that takes the Channel approach and integrates it with a more standard innovation management workstream. The scenario is IT Requirements Gathering and the solution provides a solid way to reduce costs, increase collaboration, and drive efficiencies and effectiveness.
Does your organizations’ IT department gather requirements for new applications, changes to existing applications or infrastructure, or new infrastructure projects? How is this done? Meetings perhaps? Emails? (lots of both) Is it considered effective? Are the “customers” all local or are they distributed? Do you ever get the questions later on as to who wanted a given requirement, or how important it was ranked, or whether it got into the project?
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