Now with the formal release of Kudos Badges 2.1.1, we've taken onboard a range of client requests and integrated a suite of improvements you are sure to enjoy too. Most importantly, 2.1.1 offers full support for IBM Connections 4.5!

Brand new formal features announced in 2.11 include Kudos Analytics, Kudos Awards, Kudos Mobile, as well as full support of the IBM Notes 9 Embedded Experiences. Read on for more details:

Connections 4.5 Support

Many of our clients around the world are already making to move to upgrade to IBM Connections 4.5, so ensuring Kudos Badges can not only support but take full advantage of the new capabilities in 4.5 has been a big priority. We love Connections 4.5 and wanted to make sure you could upgrade with the confidence that Kudos Badges is fully supported.

To start with:

A great new feature of IBM Connections and the IBM Notes/iNotes 9 Social Edition is the addition of Open Social Gadgets and support for embedded experiences. We've taken advantage of this to deliver a great user embedded experience within Connections and the Notes/iNotes clients (or anywhere that supports Open Social and embedded experiences for that matter!).

So what does this really mean for your users? Well in simple terms it means that they can interact with Kudos Badges in the context of their Notes client. This also means all Kudos Badges, Kudos Thanks and Kudos Awards are displayed in the Discover activity stream and you are able to like and comment on a Kudos related news item!

IBM Notes 9 - Embedded Experience

You can now experience Kudos in IBM Notes 9 with email notifications and an Activity stream widget.

• Watch the video...

Kudos Analytics

Kudos Analytics is the ideal light weight reporting and analytics tool for IBM Connections focused on user adoption.

Utilising data from both IBM Connections Metrics Applications and Kudos Badges, Kudos Analytics gives you the numbers you need to prove ROI, make decisions and plan your success. Looking at both Connections and Kudos, find out the answers to some key questions:

• How many people are using Connections?
• Which applications are being used most (Files, Communities etc)?
• How much is each feature in each application being used?
• How is each Community being used?

Kudos Analytics also really easy to install.

• Watch the video...

Kudos Awards

We've had some great feedback from our clients that really love Kudos Thanks. Users are telling us that Kudos Thanks in itself has created a positive culture of recognition and praise across their users, as well as making Connections a destination and driving further adoption. So we thought we could take this to a new level, and by popular demand have created Kudos Awards.

Kudos Awards allows management to acknowledge great achievements amongst their workforce, even integrate well-known workplace awards such as Employee of the Month. Users can build and customise an awards and recognition program to suit, such as certifications that have been achieved, awards for tenure or years of employment, and many other examples.

Kudos Awards integrates very nicely within IBM Connections, leveraging the Connections Profiles and Activity streams to promote users achievements.

We've Gone Mobile

Now you can 'give Thanks' and keep up with your Leaderboards while on the road! Kudos Badges Mobile can now integrate seemlessly with the new Connections Mobile app from IBM.

Kudos Badges Mobile provides seamless integration between IBM Connections Mobile app and Kudos Badges, without users having to install or regularly check-in with a separate app. We've also leveraged the authentication via the Connections App so users don't need to logon again - How neat is that!?

• Watch the video...

Find out more

To discover how simple it is to implement Kudos Badges into your workplace, or to learn more about how Kudos accelerates performance and productivity in your workplace, check our Youtube Channel or the website at www.kudosbadges.com. We're also available on twitter: @KudosBadges

A forecast is an estimate of a future financial state, usually calculated at different times during the financial year with an aim of predicting a likely end of year position i.e. whether a budget has been underspent or overspent.

There are a lot of forecasting algorithms available however the simplest one we use is to take year-to-date actuals and add budget for the remaining financial year periods.

To make it easier to understand the illustration below that shows how a forecast would be calculated.

Taking this a step further you could consider implementing a rolling forecast.

A rolling forecast, as it sounds is one that keeps moving forward.  Whereas regular forecasting may be calculated quarterly, a rolling forecast generally covers a continuous period of time i.e. 12 months.  The key here is that it crosses any traditional fiscal year boundaries.  

Organisations that implement rolling forecasts tend to have very short planning cycles because they are always reviewing (see the post way back on feedback loops). 

The following illustration shows how a rolling forecast may work for you.  Note how the duration remains the same however the oldest month drops from the calculation.

In terms of implementing this type of functionality, programs like Cognos Express and Cognos TM1 provide the capabilities for users to easily define their own business rules for all sorts of calculations including forecasts.

Here are the details:

Webinar site
http://www.e-office.com/eog/nl/website2011.nsf/index/e-officewebinarwednesday#.UW6yyEoSBzc

The info for the webinar
8 th of May - demo Kudos Badges for IBM Connections
by Mark Bouma - 12.00 uur (CET)
free webinar

e-office uses Kudos Badges in IBM Connections to stimulate the adoption process within organisations.
Kudos Badges adds game mechanics to the IBM Connections-platform which encourages employees to work with this collaboration platform and enables them to be more effective with the social functionalities.
In this webinar Mark Bouma gives you a demo of Kudos Badges. You see the different parts of Kudos and you learn to configure Badges yourself, based on your organisation's key values and goals.

The registration for the Kudos Badges webinar is here.

Hospital waiting times for surgery are always an area of focus.  The time spent on a waiting list has a real impact on a person’s physical and mental wellbeing as well as that of those around them.

We were asked by a client to assist with a project to analyse theatre utilisation. 

After analysis of each of the stages of the theatre process it became apparent that the utilisation was being affected by the pre and post operation times.  This was identified through a simple stacked bar chart visualising the procedures and their component steps.

Patients were only being brought to theatre when the previous surgical procedure had been completed and the theatre scrubbed down.  

The solution was simple.  Bring the patient to the theatre suite earlier and start the pre-theatre care in an ante-room while the theatre was still being prepared.  

It is a simple efficiency however it allowed additional theatre sessions to be made available each day meaning more patients were able to receive their procedures in less time.

It just shows that Business Analytics really can change lives, this is not just software people!

Whether you are using Cognos Insight (including the free Personal Edition), Cognos Express, for small to medium enterprises, or Cognos Enterprise, there is a solution designed for your business.

Now, more easily than ever, you can take your insight further and leverage the skills and experience of some of the best minds in the world through IBM Many Eyes.

IBM Many Eyes is a project launched a few years ago by IBM that promotes the use of contemporary visualisations and encourages users to share data and visualisations in a public environment.  The idea is that the crowd can help a user determine the best visualisation and assist with interpretation of their data.

Version 2 of IBM Many Eyes has just been launched and this goes further by offering additional visualisations and actively suggesting the best types of visualisation techniques as well as still supporting the crowd sourcing concept.

For a quick video overview of IBM Many Eyes check out this short YouTube clip.

Now, I appreciate that some of you might not want to share your data with the rest of the world so if you want to limit your audience to just your own team, workgroup, department or organisation there is IBM Cognos Collaboration.

IBM Cognos Collaboration allows you to share the decision making using Cognos as the basis for those discussions.  Users can annotate output from Cognos, discover definitions behind the data and best of all, this is summarised into a threaded discussion managed within the security of your own IBM Connections environment.

Here is a quick overview of IBM Cognos Collaboration.

Time to get social with your analytics!

Clients are aware of the benefits of Smarter Analytics such as competitive advantage, operational efficiency and managing risk and compliance however they just aren't sure where to start.

When answering this we always talk around three major steps (illustrated below).

Step 1 is to plan and to align with business strategy.  In practical terms this could be a simple as improving end of month reporting times from weeks to days or eliminating complex spreadsheets from the annual budget process.  At the other end of the spectrum it could be the development of business analytics strategy incorporating a roadmap with key targets and objectives.  The key thing is to plan (have we mentioned that already?).  If you fail to plan you plan to fail.

Step 2 is to master information.  This is where the rubber hits the road and it can involve implementation of a data mart or data warehouse as well as the implementation of a Business Analytics application.

Step 3 is to realise the value.  This is leveraging the benefits from step 2 and feeding this back into the business process such as through a feedback loop.

The time it takes to complete these steps differs between every organisation and will is dependant upon factors such as complexity and resourcing however even the longest journey begins with the first step.

However if you are going to be at Partnerworld and would like to see a first hand demonstration of Kudos Badges for IBM Connections, let me know and I am sure we can find a time. We are actively growing our network of partners around the globe and are keen to work with the best Connections partners out there. If you want to meet just ping me on twitter @adambrownaus or you can email me on abrown@isw.net.au

The best part is that Cognos Insight is built using technology employed in Cognos Enterprise and Cognos Express so you can't outgrow this software!

As part of promoting the launch of Cognos Insight Personal Edition, IBM held a competition to develop an application using Cognos Insight and the best application, as judged by the Analyticszone.com community, would be the winner of a Honda Insight car.

That competition has now closed however you can still vote for the winner.  Registration at analyticszone.com is free and gives you access to download your own copy of Cognos Insight person edition.  

There are some great entries and impressive visualisations highlighting some  intriguing data so please check it out.

Now the IBM Connect conference will be an celebration for Team Kudos and our awesome clients. I have to say I am so proud to be part of the team that created Kudos Badges. Andrew Welch, Jay Agrawal, John Bilson, Scott Headlam, Scott Leis, Meg Woolley, and everyone else involved have truly created an outstanding solution for IBM Connections that our clients all around the world have taken up with passion.

Kudos Badges was built from the ground up for IBM Connections and as such we have taken advantage of all the great capabilities the Connections platform offers. iWidgets, OpenSocial, Activity Streams, Embedded Experiences, Mobile, etc have all added to our ability to deliver an exceptional user experience and add real value to users of Connections.

Since launching Kudos Badges this time last year we have grown our user base to hundreds of thousands of users around the world with clients now in the UK, Finland, Switzerland, USA, Australia, South Africa, India, Germany, The Netherlands, Mexico, and a few that I am sure I have forgotten. We have some awesome partners that have taken to Kudos Badges and now offer it as a default part of every IBM Connections implementation they perform.

So THANK YOU IBM for your support and this recognition. It really does mean a lot for this Australian company to be recognised on the world stage along side our peers.

Award Info:

This award will be presented to a Business Partner who provides the best solution for creating an Exceptional Customer Experience or a Smarter Workforce through the use of IBM Collaboration Solutions (ICS) application development tools. The offering must leverage new technology innovations such as the Social Business Toolkit, XPages Extension Library, Web Experience Factory builders, or Mobile Controls. Submissions for this award should be solutions that leverage these new technologies to address a specific business need by:

• Enabling interactions with customers or employees through online social networks (on-premise, cloud, or public social network sites)
• Enhancing situational awareness through analysis of social data, or
• Supporting contextual collaboration by integrating social capabilities into existing or new business applications leveraging OpenSocial gadgets and creating an embedded experience

Selection Criteria: Special consideration will be given to developers new to Social Business application development with solutions that:

• Leverage multiple IBM Collaboration Solutions development tools and products (e.g., IBM Connections, IBM Lotus Notes and Domino - especially Domino Designer, XWork Server and XPages, or the IBM Web Experience - especially IBM Web Experience Factory, and IBM Worklight entitlements to Web Experience).
• Support multiple types of devices, including rich client, web, mobile, smartphone or tablet
• Are deployed in a production environment, and are public references.

Also a big congratulations to all the other winners and finalist. IBM Collaboration Solutions has a truly impressive list of organisations building solutions around the ICS solutions! Keep innovating!

We have been working with IBM Connections since very early in the products life and we are ALWAYS asked the same questions from our clients - How many users are doing xy&z? Can you show that trending over time?

With IBM Connections 3 this was always difficult as there was only the limited Metrics and Statistics that Connections provided out of the box. There were some clever things we could do to capture them daily and export them to spreadsheets where clients could then develop their own reports etc from that. However it was fairly limited and a bit of a pain really.

Then with IBM Connections 4 IBM introduced the new Metrics Application and integration with IBM Cognos to deliver quite and advanced reporting and analytics capability. This is great stuff however lots of the clients we speak to consider it too heavy for what they need and they don't really want to spend the days required to get Cognos going and integrated, yet alone provide additional server infrastructure to do so. It is really just a bit too heavy.

So enter Kudos Analytics. We have been providing some basic reports as a part of Kudos Badges around usage and adoption for quite a while however with the introduction of the Metrics Application we are able to do a lot more detailed analysis. Have a look at the video for a demo.

We have found that most users of Connections really just want some light weight reporting that is easy to access and install. Kudos Analytics takes about 10 minutes to install and get started. This is just the first step and we are planning on adding Kudos Analytics capabilities for individual Communities so Community Managers can see what is happening in their realm. We would also love to hear your thoughts and ideas on what else is needed so come visit us at IBM Connect pedestal C49!!