Author: Thomas Vander Wal
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5 Core Insights for Community Platforms Today
Intro: The last two or three years have been “interesting” in the community platform space as things have been shifting quite a bit with regard to vendors. Most every organization I know is looking at changing their platform as their contract is up for renewal and they are looking around, or their vendor’s state has…
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Building Social / Collaboration Platforms
I started my trek designing, developing, and managing social / collaboration platforms in 1996. Over those years I’ve been part of a lot of different projects, development of platforms, long term and short term strategy and planning with vendors in the space, and in recent years back helping design, and product management (from an advisory…
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Team Roles Needed for Social Software Projects
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Thomas Vander WalI have a lot of hands-on designing, developing, and managing of social / collaborative platforms since 1996 and regularly advise product makers, vendors, and buyers around right fitting and understanding then working on solving problems they may have. One of the things that was regularly surfacing around 2007 as enterprise social platforms were getting taken…
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Diversity of Enterprise Social Tools
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Thomas Vander WalOne constant in the 20 years I’ve been working in and around organizations and their social platforms is lack of understanding of the diversity of tool types. Today that lack of understanding of the diversity continues, but the diversity and the dimensions in that diversity have increased. Since 2004 I’ve run workshops, given talks, written…
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Slack is more than chat: Why it is the trojan horse to better enterprise
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Thomas Vander WalDuring the last couple of years, since Slack has been publicly available, it has taken off like wildfire. To many it is “just a chat service”, which gets derided and belittled like most chat services do. This is until they find that chat has not only a place in organizations it has lasting value in…
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The One Year Club: A seven year review
In 2008, or so, I would have semi-regular calls with a friend who was also doing social and collaboration consulting and advising. Stuart Mader and I would set aside 30 minutes or so to compare notes about our client work (these often lasted 2 to 3 hours). The common trait with our clients was most…
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Running Podular Teams
One of the things that has brought happiness from the Connected Company book being out for nearly three years (now in paperback), is getting the idea of podular teams and organization out there for a wider understanding. From 2001 onward I ran my product and project teams in a podular manner. Since then I have…
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Shift Happened – Part 4: The One Social Way (Or not) to Doing Social Really Well in Enterprise
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Thomas Vander WalHaving been at the heart of social and collaboration since 1996 (no, I’m not kidding) it is interesting to see how large organizations that are doing social well (>80% employees are active) actually are doing it. The interesting thing is most of these organizations are not using just one service or platform. They are using…
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Design Fiction Futures for NYC Libraries
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Thomas Vander WalI have long been a fan of design fiction to frame what the deployment of a design idea looks like after it has been created and is in use. I have used this quite a few times in my own work over the years. But, seeing great examples of design fiction in public isn’t a…
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Getting Good Case Studies in Today’s Competitive World
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Thomas Vander WalEfficiency and business advantage is what many businesses see as their differentiator. A week or two back while following the Twitter Stream and some live blogging of Enterprise 2.0 Summit: London I kept hearing how there were no new companies talking about their own case studies than there were a few years back. Many presentations…