Category: Technology

Building Social / Collaboration Platforms

Oct 2, 2017

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by

Thomas Vander Wal

in Community, Design, Enterprise, Social Lenses, Social Software, Technology

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…
Team Roles Needed for Social Software Projects

Jun 20, 2016

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by

Thomas Vander Wal

in Community, Content Mangement, Enterprise, Knowledge Management, Refindability, Social Lenses, Social Software, sxd, Technology, User Experience

I 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…
Slack is more than chat: Why it is the trojan horse to better enterprise

Aug 25, 2015

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by

Thomas Vander Wal

in Access to Info, Applications, Enterprise, Knowledge Management, Local InfoCloud, Portability, Refindability, Social Software, sxd, Technology, Tools, User Experience

During 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…
Running Podular Teams

May 15, 2015

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by

Thomas Vander Wal

in Community, Enterprise, Social Software, sxd, Technology, Tools

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…
Getting Good Case Studies in Today’s Competitive World

Dec 3, 2014

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by

Thomas Vander Wal

in Access to Info, Community, Conferences, Enterprise, KM World, Knowledge Management, Social Software, Technology

Efficiency 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…
The One Social Way – Or not – to Doing Social Really Well in Enterprise

Nov 18, 2014

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by

Thomas Vander Wal

in Enterprise, Shift Happened, Social Software, Technology, Tools, User Experience

One of the interesting things, having been at the heart of social and collaboration for business a good long while (since 1996, no I’m not kidding), is seeing how large organizations who are doing and have been doing social well (more than 80% of employees are active users (more than once a week (often daily)…
KM World 2014 Is a Real Gem

Nov 8, 2014

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by

Thomas Vander Wal

in Community, Conferences, Enterprise, KM World, Knowledge Management, Social Software, Technology

I’m sitting Saturday morning a little bleary (I don’t sleep well around good conferences) waiting for my coffee that can’t brew quickly enough. This past week I spent most of the days at KM World 2014 in Washington, DC giving a workshop on the first day (Tuesday) “Improving Knowledge Flows: Using Lenses to See Needs…
Shift Happened – Part 2: Small Apps Loosely Joined

Apr 8, 2014

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by

Thomas Vander Wal

in Access to Info, Connectivity, Design, Devices, Enterprise, Information Architecture, Information Creation, Knowledge Management, Mobile, Model of Attraction, Portability, Shift Happened, Standards, Technology, Tools, User Experience, Web

What are Small Apps Loosely Joined? There has been a large shift in how many people work today and part of that is in the tools that they use to get work done. This shift in work patterns mirrors the shift that many had in their personal lives around social interactions and productivity. Late one…
Everynow

May 26, 2013

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by

Thomas Vander Wal

in Devices, Information Architecture, Interface, Reference, Technology, Ubiquitous Computing, User Experience

We are living in a time where there are not only many concurrent realities existing at once, but our understanding of “Now” is perhaps broader and more broken than most any time since the Middle Ages started sprouting into the Renaissance. This is nowhere more prevalent in our understanding of the future, particularly the near…
Mistaking the Edges for the Norm

Jun 22, 2012

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by

Thomas Vander Wal

in Applications, Community, Social Software, sxd, Technology, User Experience, Web/Tech

One of the best lessons from social quantitative analysis in grad school (public policy) was learning to understand if you are viewing edge cases or the norm (mainstream). Humans have some common traits, but when you start to design or develop any sort of program (be it government services or social software) you start to…