Leena Rao blogs on Techcrunch that Yammer 2.0 To Launch As A Powerful, Full-Fledged Social Network For The Enterprise

The new Yammer will essentially turn the microblogging application into a full fledged social network. Yammer plans to add a number of applications to its platform that will increase its functionality beyond just a communications platform. An events application will allow you to invite co-workers to company or group events and track responses. Attendees can also download the event into their calendar.

An ideas application will help employees and administrators create, find and categorize the best ideas within a company. Employees can rank ideas through voting, and ideas can be created separately or can be promoted from existing conversations on Yammer.

Yammer is also going to be upgrading content sharing by allowing users to preview information in shared links. The startup has also added a Q&A app that encourages workers to ask questions and find answers from a database, and includes a polling application. Additionally, the new version of Yammer will allow users to assign a task resulting from conversations and track its completion, and will include the ability to tag content with topics, making it easier to find conversations by subject.

Yammer’s been a great success – microsharing within the enterprise having risen much faster than shared workspaces, internal blogging or wikis. So it’s interesting to see how this will play out. As the article hints – it would be a great buy for an organization like Google which is seeking to both enter the social space as well as gain traction within the enterprise with Google Apps. On the other hand it would be a great buy for large traditional enterprise tech firms who want to add a social layer to focus on the Organization 2.0

Personally I think the uptake of the new features will happen gradually. Micro-sharing is faster and takes much less effort than other functionalities. What Yammer has done in its current avatar is ease acceptability of social tools within the organizations that are using it. I’d love to know how the Quora like Q&A app as well the ideas app gains traction in the organizations that use Yammer 2.0

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There’s an interesting question that is posted to Julika Barrett who works for Dell Corporation in the newly formed service division as part of an account team that supports health-care clients in its information technology (IT) needs. As a learning and development specialist, she supports the IT associates with skills development, career management, and process improvement. She has held roles designing training, implementing training programs, instructing, coordinating projects, and providing consultation in documentation and training.

Read the full interview here
Who Else Wants to Take Training & Development to “The Next Level” Like Dell?

Q. What are your thoughts on “online learning communities,” especially when proposed as a solution?

The potential is very high to capitalize on social networking. Online learning communities formalize the informal information pipeline that goes on in an organization but I have only seen aspects of these communities in action.

For example, I have seen in companies that employees share ideas and solutions to problems by blogging, Skyping, and texting. Online training, through synchronous web meetings, provided opportunities for networking, problem-solving, and collaboration that transfer back to the workplace.

I still would like to see a plan with a vision of what an organization can become using social networking. These communication tools take time to use and for people to gain confidence in connecting. In a reactive environment, social networking becomes more of a distraction than a positive strategy.
Q. Change is definitely a process. What should corporate trainers expect in the 21st century?

Eventually, we go back to basics—what do we need to do and what do we need to know in order to make it happen. We, as learning professionals, need to develop 360-degree vision, to understand what has passed in an organization, what an organization strives to be, and what we need to do now to get there. We can have the best tools and technology possible, but their use still depend upon solid instructional design principles, learning theory, and performance management. The trick is to be so fluent in our knowledge and performance that we can provide structured design quickly to keep pace with the speed in which organizations operate.

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I believe that behaviour in the consumer space that people are exhibiting on Facebook and Twitter and other social technologies will be replicated within organizations soon. In the US – tools like Yammer, Socialtext, Socialcast and others are already making this possible.

However people always ask “why should people share within the enterprise?”. Here’s an interesting post I came across that shows how this behaviour is a generational change and how people using these technologies think differently about work and the hows and whys of work.

Andrew McAfee blogs on the HBR site on How Millennials’ Sharing Habits Can Benefit Organizations

Matt Gallivan, a senior research analyst for NPR, who said “Sharing is not ‘the new black,’ it is the new normal. There are too many benefits to living with a certain degree of openness for Digital Natives to ‘grow out of it.’ Job opportunities, new personal connections, professional collaboration, learning from others’ experiences, etc., are all very powerful benefits to engaging openly with others online, and this is something that Gen Y understands intuitively.”

Older generations of knowledge worker, including mine, don’t share this intuition. We basically work in private, or in small groups of close colleagues, and only share our output — papers, reports, plans, presentations, analyses, and so on — once we consider it done.

Gen Y finds this approach somewhere between quaint and dumb. They inherently follow the advice of blog pioneer Dave Winer to “narrate your work” — to use 2.0 tools like blogs, microblogs, and social networking software to broadcast not only the finished products of knowledge work, but also the work in progress.

Millennials are more likely to talk publicly about the tasks and projects they’re working on, the progress they’re making, the resources they’re finding particularly helpful, and the questions, roadblocks and challenges that come up. This narration becomes part of the digital record of the organization, which means that it becomes searchable, findable, and reference-able.

As this happens, two broad benefits materialize. First, people who narrate their work become helpful to the rest of the organization, because the digital trail they leave makes others more efficient. Second, by airing their questions and challenges work narrators open themselves up to good ideas and helpfulness from others, and so become more efficient themselves.

As Gallivan says, the Facebook generation understands these benefits, while other workers often do not. Older generations are more likely to see work narration as a narcissistic waste of time. Gen Y, meanwhile, knows that narrating their work, when done right, saves time, increases productivity, and knits the organization together more tightly. We should start following their lead and stop reflexively working in private.

We will see norms and behaviours evolve in this space – but it points to one thing specially in the Learning aspect, its more important to know the hows and whys of what people have learnt than the learning itself. That is the key to unlearning – the critical skill in the new generation.

What do you think?

Do you think this will lead to a clash of generational styles of working in the organization?

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Job Description:-

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Hi Everybody!!!
Can any one please tell me what is the basics difference of Gross salary and Net Salary?

lookin for the ebook titled above if anyone can help will be a super help to me…thx for the efforts, appreciate it

the book title is Strategic Management: Competitiveness and Globalization, Cases, 8th Edition

Hello

How much increase in package can somebody expect on joining the same IT company after completing mba having taken sabbatical for those 2 yrs. MBA done from a bschool in top 20 in india

Any idea??

Thanks

Dear all
I am Ex – Air Force, MBA (HR), MA (ENG), and B.E (MECH) looking for a change. Presently working as a Admin/HR MANAGER, since 04yrs, in Petro Chemical based Mfg Firm (SME) near Chandigarh,with a annual turn over 35 Cr. and 115 Appx manpower of all ranks.Looking after all aspect/segment of the firm, competent enough to handle all issue e.g ESI,PF,Labour issue,factory act,Security,Vender management and other Statutory Compliance and Liasoning in Depts and internal audit,ISO Implementation etc.Kindly help me to find a suitable opening,it is badly needed.
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e-mail:

Hello Everybody,

What is the exact contribution to the PF by the employer???

13.61% or 13.67%

How it is divided?

Regards,

Shreekanth.P.R

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