On a cold December morning in the Norwegian capital Oslo, I found myself together with about 50 members of the Enonic community at their final developer meetup of the year.
Enonic is a Norwegian CMS vendor that’s been around for 20 years and has dipped its toes in foreign waters with international expansion in both the US and the UK. Unlike many others in this space these days, Enonic is both founder-led and bootstrapped without venture capital. Judging from the talks at the meetup, Enonic boasts a solid footing in their home market.
With version 7.13.5 of their product, Enonic XP just released, we saw some slides, more live demos, and as expected for a developer meetup, the source code to a number of interesting implementations.
Read moreMastering the digital transformation journey requires an updated tech stack, but as they like to say at Conscia.ai:
"Headless doesn't have to mean 'Brainless'"
In a recent member's call, we heard an update from Bart Omlo at Conscia.ai, a Toronto-based start-up focused on orchestrating personalised experiences in a composable stack.
Bart joined Conscia.ai 6 months ago as the first European team member and has since then been deep in conversations about DXO (digital experience orchestration), DXC (digital experience composition) and orchestrating.
Read moreEmpowering editors to design their best content is difficult. Content design may be at the bottom of their to-do list. The CMS is just another system they have to learn how to use. Published outputs are the end goal. When they can’t publish content the way they want, they settle for less or they go outside the platform.
But what if editors were involved in continually shaping the CMS? What if their natural workflows informed the set-up? What if instead of hacking features to fix content issues, there was a way to develop something more intuitive to their needs?
In a recent member's call we were joined by Emma Horrell, User Experience Manager at the University of Edinburgh who shared how UX work with editors helped the evolution of content design.
Read moreMagic @ Work is here! Inner secrets from Christian Vandsø Andersen, a magician who is also VP at the LEGO Group.
The new book ‘Magic @ Work’ is a journey into the extraordinary and in a recent member's call, Christian told us more about the book, shared his perspective on combining magic and management, and even used a card trick to illustrate his point.
The book dives into the mesmerizing world of magic and teaches the reader how its principles can elevate your leadership, whether you're leading teams, projects, or even yourself. You can also discover the enigmatic techniques that magicians use to captivate audiences and apply them to leadership, innovation, and influence.
There’s more in the book, incl. the first publicly available documentation of the leadership model at the LEGO Group. The book is also written on a sad personal backstory, and we’ll get to that, but in the call, we started with Christian telling us about the idea behind the book, so let’s begin there.
Read moreWhat happens when you bring together leaders from different industries who are working on different fields?
Yesterday our digital transformation friends at diconium in Hamburg hosted our sold out annual Christmas member's meeting, where we had an afternoon of learning and networking across the different fields we cover incl design leadership, employee experience, digital strategy and product management.
As the legendary advisor and influential consultant Ram Charan famously said:
"Listening isn't just hearing; it requires the willingness to entertain other viewpoints - especially opposing ones"
Like a miniature version of our 3-day Aarhus conference, we made it through 10 lightning talks in a packed afternoon with quite some thought provoking perspectives. In between we had a bit time for reflections and the conversation continued over some good food.
Read moreCongratulations to Joel Varty and Jon Voigt from Agility for winning the #boye23 conference Small Feature Award. Their remarkable CMS feature, which allows real-time viewing of other users' edits and presence, impressed both the judges and conference participants, earning them the majority vote.
This feature exemplifies how a subtle enhancement can significantly improve user experience. It's especially relevant in a post-pandemic world, facilitating remote teamwork seamlessly.
Read more“Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.“
Quoting novelist Martin Amis who died earlier this year, Sree Sreenivasan in a recent member's call, explored the usefulness of generative AI and we looked both at why it’s scary and how it applies to our work.
Little doubt remains that generative AI will have substantial significance in our ever-changing world, but it’s also clear that vast impact remains to be seen.
It’s a fast moving field with many big announcements happening weekly, so tuning into a curious and experienced mind like Sree proved quite interesting.
Sree is the former Chief Digital Officer of New York City….
Read moreWhen you say business automation, it’s a topic that’s been heavily influenced by vendor marketing and where the vendors have been setting the agenda. That’s not unusual for emerging tech, but given the substantial investments in automation, it’s about time to think more about value, and perhaps a bit less about the ever changing tech.
For our local chapters focused on Business Automation, this quarter was really focused on thinking less automation-first and more value-first.
While the specifics of our conversations in the group meetings is confidential, this post is written in the spirit of sharing and summarises some of the bigger topics happening.
Read more“Change is inevitable. Resistance to change is just as predictable.
How do you motivate teams to willingly get on board?”
This is the premise from the recently published book called Change Fatigue by Jenny Magic and Melissa Breker. Released in May, the book focuses on what the authors call ‘flipping teams from burnout to buy-in’ and it addresses the foundational psychological safety domains that drive willingness to change, alongside practical change facilitation techniques you can use today, regardless of where your team is starting from.
In a recent member’s call we were joined by the two authors who in an informal conversation took us through what’s in the change facilitation book, and they also shared a few insights on how your team can lead, plan, deliver, and sustain change.
Read moreWith AI Copilots already in the marketplace and many workplaces, we are now beginning an accelerated transformation of work.
How is work changing today? What's different this time? How are organisations measuring, managing and leading this change?
In a recent member’s call industry leader, Microsoft MVP and past Boye conference speaker, Richard Harbridge joined us from Toronto and shared key insights to help you better understand, prepare and lead improved AI enriched communication, collaboration and management experiences.
So work is changing, it’s going to happen and it’s coming fast
Read moreAI can generate the best content, proofread text, write code, and even conduct code reviews. AI is the best and will put us all out of our jobs.
Is this hype grounded in reality? Is AI truly helping people or are we just diverting our attention to becoming experts in prompt engineering which then consumes our hard-earned time?
I chaired the Tech Forum at the recently held Web Summer Camp in Croatia, which was also the Q3 meeting for our European CMS Expert members. Ondrej Polesny from Kontent.ai kicked us off with a deep dive into the real-life narratives, practical insights, and the potential of AI in content management.
Read moreFarther, Faster, and Far Less Drama offers a simple but powerful set of leadership behaviors to align teams and accelerate progress.
From team leaders to consultants to stay-at-home parents, everyone wishes life could be less complex, but that often feels impossible.
In this new book that came out in April, Janice and Jason Fraser introduce the Four Leadership Motions, a method they have been using for decades to help all kinds of teams make fast, meaningful progress—including Navy SEALs, startup CEOs, and Fortune 100 executives.
Read moreAI is coming hard and fast at all of us, but assessing AI capabilities has so many dimensions.
Why should communications teams be championing AI in their organizations? Precisely because of that middle L in LLM. The deep knowledge of genres, rhetoric, metaphor, and other functions of language that determine the success of communication is key to assessing the potential and limits of AI.
It is our professional responsibility to discover, share, and discuss ethical problems and universal or local benefits within our field of knowledge. but we also have a responsibility to go beyond our professional perspective in this learning process. What can seem a blessing in communications may be a curse in public management and vice versa. In this phase, we really need cross-disciplinary insights.
Read moreI recently attended the SaaS Vegas community meetup organized by Karel Dytrych and Hana Weaver. This event was specifically for people from Czech SaaS startups and took place from Thursday to Sunday.
Yesterday, I was interviewed by Matthew McQueeny for the Konabos Konaverse podcast, where he asked me what community means to me.
This Thursday, I am excited to attend another community event called HackerCamp, where people from the Czech technology community come together in the woods.
So, what do communities mean to me?
Read moreIn a 2018 article I authored, “How AI Assistants will impact businesses and consumers,” I championed the potential of AI assistants to reshape the landscape of business and consumer interactions. At the time, it was evident that AI-driven platforms were poised to revolutionize how people accessed information, made decisions, and connected with brands. A central tenet of this transformation was the recognition that cultivating and retaining customer trust was pivotal to the widespread acceptance and success of AI assistants.
A central theme of the article was the capacity of AI assistants to analyze diverse data sources, spanning news, regulations, and customer satisfaction metrics. Armed with this wealth of information, these platforms had the potential to offer astute recommendations tailored to individual preferences and needs. However, it was clear that these recommendations hinged on user trust.
Trust was identified as the bedrock for effective AI platform performance. A virtuous cycle was posited, where a user's trust in an AI assistant would lead to greater task delegation and decision-making authority. This, in turn, would furnish the assistant with more data to refine its recommendations, thereby reinforcing user trust. Conversely, any negative experiences could disrupt this trust cycle, underscoring the delicate equilibrium AI platforms needed to maintain.
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