Fuzed

http://www.gofuzed.com 

One of the goals of Enterprise Social Networking and Collaboration technologies is providing simple content creation tools for everyone in the enterprise to instantly share information, to get the point across, to inquire, to update, to give and get feedback, to alert and to advise others. More importantly these solutions give the ability to connect with the people or experts that are behind this content.

The common theme across various software solutions offering Enterprise Social Networking solutions is the use of an “Activity Stream” defined as a single view that serves as a real time aggregator of events, content and activities happening across the enterprise. The Activity Stream in addition to showing real time content being created and shared by others can also show activities from other applications and systems to provide one place to go to for real time updates. Many enterprise social networking and collaboration solutions provide connectors to social web, cloud based SaaS enterprise software as well as popular ERP systems for this purpose.

In many ways, Activity Streams are a great alternative to email. Email tends to be time consuming due to information overload, lack of good organization and categorization capabilities, lack of people identity and history, lack of deeper collaboration around content attached in emails and lack of good subscription based consumption.

The question that we asked at Fuzed is “Will Activity Streams suffer with the same information overload problems that email has over time?”  and even more broadly “Do single facts of information floating by in the Activity Stream by themselves provide all context required to complete an idea, a task or a thought or a question or even a response?” While Activity Streams allow better content categorization, provide aggregated statistics on responses to created content and better people identity and history with ability to connect with those people in a meaningful manner, will the sheer amount of real time information in the stream tilt the Activity Stream towards the information overload problem? The answer is no if people and information are presented with context.

What do we mean by context? There are a variety of different ways a system can be built to provide context. Software can recognize a person’s job, their location, their role in the enterprise, their expertise, topics of interests and other criteria to auto manage or auto focus the Activity Stream to filter items of interest. Fuzed has adopted the notion that people work and share based on relationships in the physical world and therefore offers an equivalent rich portfolio of relationships each with a dedicated activity feeds. These feeds that can be viewed together or individually provide strong filtering, subscription and notification capabilities to manage information overload.

But at Fuzed, we believe that’s just one type of context. The other more important context is around a factual piece of information itself. One of the challenges that enterprises face is exposing information from multiple systems, each with unique factual pieces of information that employees need to access for “360 views” that aid in decision making. For example, to work on a specific task for a particular project, one may need to go to SharePoint to access project documents, access a work in progress document in the works stored on the local PC, a question that a team member had asked which may be in email and a survey from the business team regarding their feedback. Additionally, people rely more and more on information from outside the enterprise to complement factual information from internal systems in making or influencing decisions. These may include searching the web, analyst reports, industry news, expert analysis, subscribed data sets, trends and even social web sources like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

When people create or share a factual piece of information using the simple content creation tools discussed above, by itself this factual piece of information may not provide the entire necessary context for others to perform work or use it to complete a thought or aid in making a decision. A factual piece of information may require others to tap into other systems or applications internal or external in order to find other related factual pieces of information to complete the context. The problem is that if this factual piece of information was shared with a group (lets say in our example, the document in SharePoint), it is entirely possible many members of that group spend time trying to complete the context (by trying to piece together all relevant items like the local document in PC, that question in email, the response from the survey) to accomplish a task never-mind effectively share what they found.

What if software aided in that context adding and sharing process? What if software could allow groups of people to share the burden of adding context? This is where we, at Fuzed have spent a lot of time thinking about and making it easy for people to add and discover context. So that when a member of the group sees the link to the SharePoint document in Fuzed they also immediately see related information connected to that document like the question and its answers, like the survey feedback, the report and the tweet from a customer. This saved this group member incredible amounts of time trying to search and piece together this information by themselves. Now imagine that every group member would have otherwise spent this time individually trying to piece this information.

In order to enable group based context adding capability, Fuzed provides plug-ins for a variety of applications and soon will allow enterprises to connect internal applications to Fuzed for the primary reason of enabling people to tap into the various factual pieces of information. Two of the most common actions that people are used to in social network solutions are the “Share” and the “Like” buttons. Fuzed introduces a “Connect” button that we hope becomes as ubiquitous as the other two.

As more and more people connect factual pieces of information, the resultant knowledge can be surfaced and used by others any time on demand now or in the future. Whenever a factual piece of information visible in the Activity Stream has existing context, the context will automatically be surfaced right in the Activity Stream. The use of visual cues in the Activity Stream alerts the user of additional context being available. Imagine discovering factual pieces of information you did not even know existed or knew to even search for. More importantly, the ability for others to rate the helpfulness of the context also ensures that the most relevant information is always right there. Not to mention, people who tend to connect the most impactful factual pieces of information can become part of a trusted network of individuals others can count on.

At Fuzed we think of the Activity Stream evolving into what we call is the “Context Stream”. We believe that extending the use of social within the enterprise to be more than the ability to connect people and collaborate, gives new life to information that otherwise may not surface at the right time. It also saves an organization productivity time spent in searching for relevant information.

Our leadership in thinking and our execution of evolving the Activity Stream into a Context Stream deserves consideration as you evaluate your enterprise social strategy.  Please feel free to contact us at info@gofuzed.com to learn more.

One of our customers recently incorporated Fuzed as part of their continuous improvement project. In their case, the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) process was being targeted for continuous improvement. The handoff between business and IT for requirements gathering, project estimation, feedback, and transparency are critical elements for projects completing successfully, on time, on budget and delivering needed value to the business. As tweaks to existing processes were defined, Fuzed is instrumental in bringing people together, building knowledge communities for empowerment and rather than measuring if new processes work (which can be done in various ways), Fuzed is used to measure if people understand the why and the how of the new process to ensure sustainability.

Here is how they are using Fuzed :

1. Groups were created for project teams, communities of practice and communities of interest
2. Project Groups in Fuzed included representatives from business and IT. Within IT, these project groups also included various roles like Business Analysts, Architects, Test team, Developers and more..
3. Each role had its own community of practice group in Fuzed where new processes could be discussed, assets could be collaborated on,  experts opinions can be acquired, and knowledge could be tapped as needed
4. All groups within Fuzed were able to connect to tools like SharePoint and Internet Search right from Fuzed to connect and share relevant information and content with one click
5. The Continuous Improvement Team (also known as the Operational Excellence Team) focused on getting the right information from the involved parties to ensure processes were understood and can be sustained. They used Fuzed Surveys for feedback and opinions and Fuzed Assessments to test knowledge to target specific audiences within a group. For example as part of a project team a group of Business Analysts could be targeted to provide specific opinions.  One of the key actions that people were required to do is connect the response to their feedback or opinion with assets that were created as part of the process. This could include connecting content in SharePoint or uploading documents from local file stores. This allowed the Continuous Improvement Team to not only gain insight into if people understood the new process but also had access to the various assets regardless of where they were that were created as part of the process.
6. Analysis was a key element for the continuous improvement team. Analyzing survey and assessment results and tying it back to the original goal of whether new processes are being culturally adopted and understood was being accomplished.

Fuzed has gone beyond building a community for this customer. From enabling people to adopt change where people are actually empowered to really change so that the end result is sustainable began with recognizing that collaboration, sharing and tapping of knowledge, access to tap into other organizational assets, opinions all have to come together.

Contact us to learn more.

The landscape of work is changing rapidly. New innovations in how products and services are created, marketed and business models on how these products and services are sold are changing and evolving at a fast pace. In addition, customer tastes, preferences and methods of engaging with a business are also changing rapidly and increasingly getting harder to predict and react to.

Businesses are challenged with enabling their most valuable resource – the human capital to keep up with this changing way of business. Businesses are looking for their people to rise to these challenges by using creativity to solve problems, create new products and services, and enhance existing solutions and processes to directly impact customer and partner satisfaction. In addition, businesses want their people to spend their time thoughtfully in analyzing information and ideas while having the ability to communicate cross culture and mediums in implementing these ideas.

To enable the human capital to deliver, businesses need to ensure the highest levels of productivity can be attained. They need to ensure people can move from information isolation to behavioral change geared towards sharing that is sustainable. This includes continuous process improvement, where “best practices” across the business are identified, implemented and maintained. Businesses need to make sure it is easy for people to capture, share and retrieve knowledge in new and existing productivity tools.

Unfortunately, due to antiquated technology adopted during the time of “non transparency”,  the human capital according to IDC studies, spends 25% of their time searching for the information whether inside or from the internet. This problem is continuously compounded considering the amount of information getting created today is growing at a faster rate by the day. Out of the people searching for information,  only 21% find the right information while 40% don’t find any information, right or otherwise. The cost to the enterprise to pay for this time is significant even when not accounting for lost opportunity to deliver on the challenges mentioned above.

Fuzed is built from the ground up to deliver on the challenges posed by businesses in arming the human capital with the right information along with all relevant context that reduces individual searches by 20%, repeat searches by 50% and increases the probability of finding the right information by 50%. Fuzed values human relevancy, the idea of pervasive sharing and adding of context to allow people to search less and deliver more.

To learn more about how Fuzed delivers on social knowledge management, please explore :

Introduction to Fuzed : http://bit.ly/PYr13b 

Feature List : http://bit.ly/X2hF8P  

For those interested in an OnPremise version of Fuzed, our technology architecture overview : http://bit.ly/RT5DPb 

We would love to hear from you : info@gofuzed.com 

Fuzed (Dallas, Texas) August 28 2012 have announced the latest release of the Enterprise Social Collaboration Software. Building on the vision of using social media to link disconnected yet related information across the enterprise, the advanced features continue to mark the huge differentiator between the Fuzed and other Social Enterprise Networks or Collaboration tools on the market. While other solutions focus squarely on using social media to connect people within an enterprise, Fuzed, a Social Enterprise Collaboration and Knowledge Mapping solution argues connecting information along with connecting people unleashes the true power of social media within the enterprise.

 

Fuzed V1.2 introduces full messaging capability. Send email like messages through Fuzed, attach files or URLs to messages and see an entire message thread in an activity stream view. Attachments don’t get lost in Fuzed. Any attached content in a message can be further shared and socialized with multiple users and communities. 

 

CEO and Founder, Raheel Retiwalla enthuses “Fuzed are answering the calls of thousands of companies frustrated at managing information overload. Knowledge and communication is currently lost in Email, file directories, applications and messages. With the use of social media within the firewall, Fuzed provides a method for improving efficiency, effectiveness, and engagement within the organisation. Everything can be viewed and linked to relevant people or other related information and responded to in an appropriate and timely manner.”

 

Microsoft SharePoint integration gives users simple access to document libraries of any accessible SharePoint sites right within Fuzed.  This development means that finally, SharePoint content can be socialized with communities in Fuzed. Documents in SharePoint can be linked with other relevant information shared in Fuzed or with information in other apps. With Fuzed, content in SharePoint team sites is no longer a silo.

 

Fuzed introduces a new user experience for knowledge discovery on any information shared within Fuzed from any application or source. With one click access, get related enterprise information, related web information, experts and tags for anything shared in Fuzed. Users can see all activities and related information in one easy to navigate view.

 

For organisations who do not want a Cloud solution, Fuzed supports a simple “On Premise” solution. Retiwalla explains: “An installer has been introduced to our implementation kit to make it fast and simple to install and configure Fuzed behind the firewall. The Fuzed installer supports multiple scale-out options to enable IT to run Fuzed in a distributed off the shelf hardware environment.“

 

Continuing the innovation in people connection centric collaboration, Fuzed introduces questions and answers capabilities. Users can ask questions, conduct survey or polls to groups or other members. Members answer questions and have their responses rated by the community, to ensure the most relevant answer is always visible to others. The Enhanced search function will then return results from any group or message and present the search results in one holistic view making it easy to see all activities performed on that information.

 

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http://www.gofuzed.com/GetStarted.aspx

Download a feature list for Fuzed Version 1.2

 

For Further information contact:

 

USA Office – Raheel Retiwalla    Raheel@gofuzed.com

UK/EMEA – Julia Manley              Julia.manley@gofuzed.com

Fuzed, 2 Lincoln Center - Suite 850, 5420 LBJ Freeway , Dallas, Texas 75240

About Fuzed

Fuzed puts the power of Social Media to work in the Enterprise.

The Enterprise Collaboration software  connects Social Web, Internet, Public Cloud, Private Cloud and Corporate Applications.

Fuzed connects people, builds communities, and lets people link disconnected data across multiple applications using social media tools.

The Collaboration and organisation of disconnected enterprise data into easy-to-discover content, aids the management of information overload and the exchange of ideas and discussions with relevant context in one place.

Easy to discover content is transformed into capital whilst users can share instant feedback providing a way for people to link relevant information items and their knowledge.