Among experts who work on the important area of organizational behavior and development, there’s a model for evaluating corporate culture called the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI). A good description of the model and its application is available here.

An interesting evaluation model came out of the OCAI work, called the Competing Values Framework, which establishes two dimensions along which an organization’s culture can be evaluated:

• Internal focus vs External focus, or integration vs differentiation
• Stability vs Flexibility, of control vs discretion

“Intranet” is an outdated concept and word. Can it be rehabilitated with “Social” as its first name? There have been some excellent articles and posts recently that help articulate the evolution of enterprise Intranets especially as social collaboration factors are considered.

In a recent article entitled Why Social Networks Are Replacing Intranets (subscription required), Aragon Research makes the case that Social Business environments like Convo are increasingly being considered for corporate Intranets. We’ve definitely seen this trend among our users.

The underlying logic is that social Intranets are about connecting people who are trying to get real work done. They connect people to people, not just people to content. But simply adding an activity stream to the internal corporate portal does not make it more appealing (except for voyeurs) nor does it add additional value. At the heart of the trend toward Social Intranets is the interest in making collaborative capabilities more available throughout the enterprise.

The question is often posed: will social platforms improve communications within an organization? This is similar to questions about measuring the ROI of a new platform. The queries are completely understandable: why undertake a significant change without a clear sense of the value you can expect in return?

Good news reiterated today in a much cited and tweeted post. The actual report, from Gagen MacDonald, that is the source of this news came out in December, but a post on Social Enterprise Today, and a tweet by Dion Hinchcliffe brought it into full flower.

According to the report, the inexorable rise in enterprise adoption of internal social platforms continues apace. The report employs a variant on the typical name for the category - Internal Social Media - but the meaning is clear.

Here's the challenge: in spite of all the promise of social business networks to improve the way organizations communicate and collaborate, in this early stage in the development of the category, most internal networks fail to meet an organization's expectations. At the heart of the matter is that fact that, while the technology enables a vastly improved way to communicate and collaborate with your colleagues, organizations often stumble when it comes to changing old patterns of behavior.

In a recent report called Helping Information Workers Find The Value In Collaboration Tools, analyst TJ Keitt described a general under-utilization of social tools. In the article, Forrester research discovered that even among social software users, email is the preferred communication method.

The quest for uncovering internal knowledge within an organization has been around for a very long time and was one of the early goals of knowledge management. Hind Benbya and Marshall Van Alstyne address this issue again through their MIT Sloan article, How to Find Answers Within Your Company. As they write, the challenge of locating internal knowledge on a specialized topic exists in any large organization.

It's not uncommon for a workgroup to include team members that are outside the originating organization. This can happen when you're dealing with external content providers, clients, partners, consultants or sub-contractors. Oftentimes, these kind of extended team projects pop up quickly, and you need to find a reasonable place to share files and other project content: graphics, documents, links, bios, schedules, etc.

Most internal systems present some difficult hurdles in these cases. If your organization is running SharePoint, it's difficult to authenticate people who aren't in the company directory. You can ask your IT department to add external people to the directory for the sake of the project but the request, if it's granted, might take weeks to be delivered.

Claire Flanagan provides an extremely useful and comprehensive set of advice in her post, Community Advocates Part Two: What Motivates Them? How Can You Reward Them? I will not repeat the details here and encourage you to read it in full. I just want to offer a few headlines and share one of my own related experiences.

I really like the way Claire segments the different types of advocates, First, there are connectors who “are well networked and can help amplify your brand, providing necessary Word of Mouth through to their network.” Then there are critics who “can provide important insights on what’s working or what’s not working or be a source of innovative ideas.” Of course they are useful to extent they are not pushing their own agenda. The third group is the creators who can help develop important community content or answer community questions. Finally, there are collectors who can help keep the community content organized by providing necessary tags, ranking content or moderating community content.

Here's the most simple success formula ever. It will drive business success by driving customer and employee trust.

This formula is especially effective when thinking about customers - their experiences; what you want them to feel, think and do; and what kind of processes and systems you need to build to support them.

1. Treat people the way you want to be treated without fail.
2. Given that human beings are involved you will fail at some point. When it happens see #1.
3. Make steps #1 and #2 the foundation of your business strategy, the essence of your brand.

Applying the Golden Rule will drive performance improvement into every part of your business - HR, operations, sales, marketing, service, management.

Organizations are increasingly getting focused on employee engagement, which is simply a measure of an employee’s enthusiasm, energy and commitment to the organization and to the quality of his or her work. It has been referred to as an emotional state that measures employees’ attachment to their organization, willingness to perform, and sense of ownership for the process and outcomes for their work.