Yes, that’s right! If you folks have been checking my Dopplr account recently, I am going to be on the road tomorrow afternoon, once again. This time around to Madrid, where I have been a few times already this year, but this time around for a specific and concrete event I will be participating in with a couple of good friends and colleagues that I am really excited about. No, this time around I won’t be doing one of those "See the Light - Thinking out of the Inbox" sessions per se, although I am sure I would be having the opportunity to chime in and make a few connections with what has kept me busy for the last five and a half months!

The main reason why I am flying out tomorrow afternoon / evening to Madrid is to participate in a specific workshop event on Thursday morning that I have been organising with a couple of colleagues from IBM Software Spain where we will be covering a number of different topics related to Social Computing and Enterprise Social Software. The workshop event itself actually fits in quite nicely with the current work I am doing at the moment, along with the rest of my team, where we are helping accelerate the adoption of social networking & social networking tools within the IBM Software (Tech) Sales teams, and, as a result of that, to the entire company as well, since most of the stuff we do is open, public and available to everyone (Inside of the corporate firewall, that is )

Thus tomorrow afternoon I am flying over to Madrid and on Thursday morning I will be spending most of the morning, working with a couple of colleagues, and good friends, too!, on a workshop that will have two different and specific sections. The initial one where I will be spending about one hour explaining further some more what social computing is all about, some of its main key concepts, then explaining a bit my team’s mission and goals and then, finally, hoping to engage in a good conversation as to why Enterprise 2.0 is there and why we should engage with it & start embracing it for our daily interactions while we collaborate, connect and share our knowledge with others.

Pretty much along the lines of the slide deck you will be able to find over at IBM: Web 2.0 Goes to Work, which has been shared in Slideshare already, and which was recently presented by my boss’ boss, Gina Poole, at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. But perhaps with a couple of modifications to accommodate an internal only audience. I have taken the liberty of embedding that deck from Gina to give you a glimpse of what I would be covering on that first hour:

IBM Web 2 0 Goes To Work Presentation:

Then, once we are done with the first hour, we would go for a short break, and right after that the good fun will start! A couple of IBM folks from the IBM SWG Tech Sales team and myself will be working through, following a workshop format, two hours of intense practical tips on how to carry out common tasks from our day to day interactions with a 2.0 flavour, while we collaborate and share our knowledge with other fellow peers by focusing on some of the most powerful, and popular!, Enterprise 2.0 applications that IBM has got as offerings and which we are also making use as part of the Technology Adoption Program:

- Lotus Notes 8
- Lotus Sametime 8,x
- Lotus Connections
- Lotus Quickr
- Lotus Sametime Unyte

At the same time, we would also be covering some of the various different IBM Research applications that we are all currently testing out through the TAP program I mentioned above and which would give folks a nice intro into the bleeding edge of some of the most compelling Enterprise 2.0 tools IBM has been testing for a little while now. Like, for instance, Fringe, Beehive, Small Blue / Atlas, Cattail, Media Library and a bunch of others. Plenty of good fun, I am sure!

A solidly packed workshop of closer to three hours which will keep us busy for most of the day. Then right after that, I will be staying in the city for a few hours before flying back home late in the evening. Thus I am not really sure whether I would be having plenty of time, but if you are around and want to get together for a coffee, tea, a quick chat or something, give me a shout and we can look if we can make it fit this time around…

I wish I could share some of the stuff we will be covering during this workshop, as I am sure you would be wondering right now whether I would be able to share the various materials, but I am afraid that this is an internal only event since some of the slides, plus most of the demo is of a sensitive nature containing information that may not be suitable for everyone. Hopefully, as time goes by I may be able to share some more of these materials after sanitising them a bit. We shall see how that goes …

Either way, we are back on the road! And I can’t wait to share with folks how they can be more productive in their daily routines by spicing up their interactions with some more 2.0 flavours coming from all over the place!

(Oh, did I mention how we actually organised the whole entire event through a Connections Activity and a conference call? Not a single e-mail was sent out whatsoever! )

Tags: IBM, IBM SWG, IBM Software, Technical Sales, Sales, Tech Sales, Workshops, Events, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Personal Knowledge Sharing, PKM, Innovation, Dopplr, Madrid, Spain, See the Light, Enterprise Social Software, Slideshare, Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco, Gina Poole, Technology Adoption Program, TAP, Lotus Notes, Notes, Notes 8, Lotus Notes 8, Lotus Sametime, Sametime, Sametime 9, Lotus Connections, Connections, Lotus Quickr, Quickr, Lotus Sametime Unyte, Sametime Unyte, e-meetings, Research, IBM Research, Fringe, Beehive, Small Blue / Atlas, Cattail, Media Library, Connections Activities, Productivity, Productivity Tools, Productivity 2.0

Coming closer to the six months barrier since I got things started, here I go again sharing with you folks the progress weekly report on my new reality of giving up on e-mail, corporate e-mail, that is. This time around on week 23 and after a very interesting week last week, where the blog posts I have shared previously seemed to have had the desired effect, judging by the number of e-mails received thus far today, Monday. But that would be the subject for another upcoming progress report. Not to worry…

Let’s get down to business though on what happened last week and see if there were any changes. Here is the weekly report:

As you would be able to see, things have gone back to "normal" with a total incoming count of 34 e-mails for the entire week! This is really good news, because it’s a clear indication of how the previous week was just an isolated event, as I have been explaining all along on that weekly progress report. It is also interesting to see how the days with the highest peaks of e-mails coming through are actually Monday & Tuesday, while Fridays seem to be pretty quiet, which means that folks perhaps would want to get their delegated tasks going at the beginning of the week, so that you can complete them by Friday. And on this particular day things seem to be rather quiet, because perhaps those folks presume you are busy working on the backlog of e-mails received at the beginning of the week. Interesting trend to watch…

Either way, you would be able to see how low the numbers seem to consistently be as we get closer to the weekend, which I can’t blame, because, at least, they are not carried over for over the weekend! But really pleased to see how the numbers have gone down substantially from the previous week, where an unusual activity was taking place given those two scenarios I described earlier on of an incorrect usage of e-mail.

Thus, what else happened during the course of last week? (You may be wondering, right?) Well, plenty of interesting things that I will be mentioning over here as time goes by over the next few days; however, for now, I would want to point you into a very insightful and thought-provoking link that I been reading lately and which pretty much comes to conclude the exact same thing I have been saying for a while on the kind of interactions that I still feel should be going through e-mail.

It is a link I have been talking about with Dave Pollard over in Twitter as we have been exchanging some thoughts on some of the stuff that he blogged about over nearly a year and a half ago! and what I have been doing over the last few months when I decide to stop using e-mail at work. Yes, indeed, this interesting link is from Dave’s blog itself under the very suggestive title "When Not to Use e-mail".

In it, you will see how Dave puts together a whole bunch of really good reasons as to why e-mail is perhaps not the best of scenarios to share information, knowledge, etc. with others in a specific context. I would strongly encourage you all to go ahead and read his very enlightening article, but for now, I am just going to tease you all with what you are going to find and here are the ten scenarios that Dave feels should not be handled through e-mail. Oh, by the way, I can’t stress well enough how much in agreement I really am with him on this one and you will see what I mean after you get reading further with this initial list:

"1. To communicate bad news, complaints or criticism
2. When you are seeking information that is not simple and straight-forward
3. When you are seeking approval on something that is involved or controversial
4. When you’re sending a few people complicated instructions
5. When you are asking for comments on a long document
6. To request information from a group on a recurring basis
7. To convey instructions to a large number of people
8. To achieve consensus
9. To explore a subject or idea
10. To send news, interesting documents, links, policies, directory updates and other ‘FYI’ stuff"

Like I said, to read further up on each of the different scenarios, I can certainly recommend Dave’s article itself. You would be off to a really great read and I am sure, after you have read it all, how it would come to  mind the one single item that is clearly an exception to what I am trying to do, as the main reason why I would still make use of e-mail while at work: those one-on-one private conversations of a confidential or sensitive nature, where only the other person & myself have a got a need to know. No-one else! For the rest, everything else is going out in the public, open & transparent collaborative and knowledge sharing spaces!

If you have taken a few minutes to read through Dave’s blog post you would be able to see how scenario after scenario he is already indicating, and very clearly, where e-mail keeps failing to meet our new demands of a more collaborative and knowledge sharing nature that the 21st century is providing us with while we get to embrace, more and more, Enterprise Social Software or Social Computing Tools in general.

Thus, if you still thought that you don’t need to re-purpose how you are using e-mail on a daily basis, read further Dave’s article and I am sure it would make you think twice about it again. To me, I just got convinced more and more how I need to keep pushing for re-purposing my incoming e-mails, because e-mail is clearly not meeting my needs any longer, while I am attempting to work smarter, not necessarily harder… How about you?

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, email, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Productivity, Conversations, Dialogue, Openness, Transparency, Progress Reports, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Communication, E-mail Abuse, Trust, Visibility, Awareness, Think, Re-purposing E-Mail, Delegated Tasks, Dave Pollard, Twitter, Confidentiality

As I am starting the process to wrap up another very interesting week at work with plenty of things happening to get things going with a very much anticipated weekend, here I am again sharing with you folks some further details on the weekly progress report from the series I have been doing over the last few weeks, where this time around plenty of things have actually happened. We are now on to Week 22, five and a half months already, since I decided to start giving up on e-mail, i.e. corporate e-mail for my daily interactions to collaborate and share knowledge.

And as you would be able to see from the graphic from the weekly progress report, that particular week has been rather rough, specially since the number of incoming e-mails has reached up to the second highest number of e-mails received in those five and half months! Yes, that is right, not very pleased at the moment, but here is the report anyway:

I am sure that if you come to check the different e-mail counts from previous weeks, you would notice how the second half of the week was actually rather all right, and along the lines of what I have been experimenting in the last few months, however, both Monday & Tuesday were rather special, to put it mildly. As you can see, the numbers went sky high in there, 13 & 15, respectively, to then, by the end of the week make a total of 47 e-mails! 47!!!

Thus you may be wondering what actually caused that sudden increase, right? Well, two different things. Both of them not very pleased with, to be honest, although one of them seemed to be a one time event, and here is why: