SWOOP Blog
Latest Articles
Blog Archive
The power of the question mark
At SWOOP Analytics we examine interaction patterns between people on enterprise social networks Yammer by Microsoft and Workplace by Facebook. One of the things I have always wanted to uncover is how many questions are being asked, and what – if any – impact is made by asking questions.
When Artificial Intelligence Sentiment Analysis Meets Yammer
Microsoft is undoubtedly the leader in office productivity software, with generations having now grown up using its Office products suite. Less heralded in the productivity space, however, are the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities Microsoft has developed over a similar time frame.Much of the AI found in the Office suite is hidden or embedded in functions like the spelling and grammar checker in MS Word. Other AI applications are more explicit, such as Cortana, which can, among other things, remind us of commitments we may have made but overlooked. Microsoft is making much of this AI capability available to development partners with API connections through its Cognitive Services unit. While it is still early days, we have observed some active piloted integrations with selected Microsoft products like Dynamics 365.
When Artificial Intelligence Sentiment Analysis Meets Yammer
Bringing some of Microsoft's artificial intelligence capabilities to bear on collaboration tools opens up a new realm of productivity.
Five reasons you should update your staff profiles in SWOOP
For most large organisations, it’s an absolute pain to keep your staff directory up to date. Staff profile data tends to be spread far and wide across different systems, be they human resource data bases, email directories, payrolls and the like; with no single up-to-date repository one can rely on. Believe me, the journey is worthwhile for many reasons. In this post we are selfishly addressing our SWOOP customers and prospects.
SWOOP is founded on the science of social network analysis (SNA). Value from SNA is achieved by identifying the relationship connections between individuals. The follow-up core value then comes when we can understand the groups that these individuals belong to. We often hear organisations talking about their ‘barriers to collaboration’. These so-called ‘barriers’ are regularly defined by staff attributes, collected in the ubiquitous staff directory. Having conducted in excess of 100 SNA projects globally over the past decade or more, these are the so called ‘barriers’ that our clients have been most regularly looking to break down:
Five Ways for CEOs to enhance Staff Engagement
Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) is starting to impact how staff at all levels of the organization behave and interact with each other. In particular, we are starting to see progressive CEOs and their senior executive teams looking to ESN to sidestep the traditional top down communication cascades and engage directly with ‘shop floor’ level staff, to build staff engagement overall.
Efficiency Versus Effectiveness: 57 Yammer Networks Can't Be Wrong
Studies of how organizations work have been around pretty much since the beginning of the industrial age. Now in the digital age, that stopwatch has morphed into a digital dashboard that lets employers and staff drive even greater efficiencies by conducting forensic analyses of how they spend their time at work.
Benchmarking Your Way to Collaborative Success
We will shortly be releasing our 2017 SWOOP Enterprise Social Benchmarking report along with some webinar briefings to bring it to life. It is the world's largest comparative analysis of collaboration patterns between organizations, using operational activity data. The report provides some significant insights gained from how individuals actually interacted, as opposed to what they might say they do. We analysed the collaboration patterns of more than 250,000 individuals across 57 organizations over an extended six-month period.
The 6 Stages of Digital Workplace Maturity
How do you define digital workplace success? To me, a successful digital workplace is one that helps us get jobs done.
How Healthy is your Enterprise Social Network?
At the heart of any Enterprise Social Network (ESN) are the groups or communities formed within them. Understanding the health and productivity of these groups should therefore be front of mind. For ESNs we can look again to the more mature experiences with consumer and external customer communities for guidance.
Influential People – SWOOP Style
In this series of articles, we are profiling each of the SWOOP Analytics Widgets by referencing them to the Enterprise Social Maturity Framework, that we introduced previously. The SWOOP analytics widgets are designed to guide our end users through each stage of the maturity journey.
Enterprise Collaboration Maturity Frameworks
It’s popular for organisations adopting a new technology platform e.g. MS Office 365, or management practice e.g. agile working; to think of their progress in terms of maturity. Maturity frameworks have been a popular means for organisations to be able to assess their progress with a significant change initiative.
Yammer Benchmarking Insights #3 – Collaboration at the Personal Level
In this episode we drill down to the most detailed level. That’s you, the individual collaborator. At SWOOP we have designed behavioural personas to characterise individual collaboration patterns based on your pattern of activity.For example, if you are a Catalyst, you are good at getting responses to your posts
Connecting the enterprise - one tool breaks the rule
The world is getting more interdependent, and to get stuff done more people need to coordinate what they are doing with people in other business units. No wonder that collaboration is a hot topic. But what has surprised me is that in spite of an increasing number of tools, most of them are actually not connecting people across business unit boundaries. Sounds like a contradiction? Read on…
How to Use Hashtag Analytics to Track Employee Engagement
The origin of the hashtag can be traced to identifying key words in computer code. From there it evolved to tagging topics or groups in early chat rooms.
SWOOP Video Blog 2 - Yammer Groups
In this second episode of Swoop Benchmarking insights we are drilling down to the Yammer Group level. Groups are where the real collaborative action happens.
Can the 'Like' Economy Work Inside the Enterprise?
Now that Workplace by Facebook is here, the big question is whether the behemoth consumer social network can effectively work its magic inside the enterprise.
Yammer Benchmarking Edition 1
First in a series of SWOOP Yammer Benchmarking video blogs. SWOOP has benchmarked some 36 Yammer installations to date. This first video blog shares some insights gained on the important measures that influence collaboration performance.
Looking Beyond the Product to the Purpose: MS Office 365 Groups
Need a conversation starter? How about the Mac vs PC? IPhone vs Galaxy? Facebook vs Twitter? Beach vs Mountains? Clinton vs Trump? Nothing better to while away a few hours than an animated conversation and debate about why I might prefer one product over another. We all know in the end that despite extensive reported analyses and feature lists and the like, our choices are likely deeper than a simple feature by feature trade-off. It’s much subtler than that. An Apple zealot is aligning with Apple’s stated core purpose; its user experience mantra. People will keep lining up outside Apple stores as long as Apple can sustain its mantra. A swipe instead of a click may not seem much, but for an Apple zealot it reinforces their strong preferences to buy Apple.
Seeing How You Work, Changes How You Work - What's Your Online Persona?
Our SWOOP Personas are having a much bigger impact than I expected. For a quick summary of the five personas see our previous posts: Observer, Broadcaster, Responder, Catalyst and Engager. In summary, these personas provide you with insights into your online behaviour on your enterprise social network.
The Smoke and Mirrors of Enterprise Social Networking Metrics
Carrie Basham Young issued an ominous warning to enterprise social network community managers in her 2013 CMSWire article. “It’s time to realize that the metrics and data displayed to you inside your analytics dashboard aren't creating value, and in fact, might be causing you harm," she wrote.