Interview: John Markus Lervik

December 28, 2006 at 12:38 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

In this second installment from our discussion with John Markus Lervik we discuss the challenges of enterprise search, search as an integration layer, and where it’s all headed (click here to read the first installment). Also, stay tuned for other interviews we’ll be posting and conducting with speakers from the upcoming FASTforward conference.

On the consumer Web side of things you’ve got a near-infinite amount of data scattered haphazardly around the internet. But within the enterprise you’ve got a more controlled environment - more structured data, richer data sets, etc. - which in theory could make for a better search environment. But what are the challenges of analyzing and managing that data?

JML: In some ways it looks harder on the Internet because it’s more unstructured. But in other ways it’s easier in that there are mechanisms such as links that can be leveraged. And so one of the problems within companies is that though there are fewer amount of documents, i.e. hundreds or thousands rather than millions or billions, they often don’t have links.

In addition you have so many different types of data, e.g. different applications with different security entitlements, that make it difficult. The challenge too is that on one’s intranet or closed system one’s not looking for just any related document. Often what you’re looking for within a company is *the* document. For instance, on the Internet when one’s looking for a document, when one’s using Google or MSN for a query to find that one single document, it almost never works. So you have much higher requirements when one’s searching for a document within a company. And that makes finding something much harder when one’s contending with very different types of data and very different types of content structures. And of course that’s also a reflection of the different types of software being employed within companies - from ERP systems to large information integration applications. It’s not as easy as just putting text into a searchable index.

Andrew McAfee said in a recent article in the MIT Sloan Management Review that “Enterprise 2.0″ is an appealing reality for companies now. And a recent McKinsey/Sand Hill Group report claimed: “The software industry is in the midst of a quiet but dramatic revolution. The implications of this revolution – increased innovation, new business models, technology discontinuities, and global capacity shifts – could be even more profound than previous industry transitions.” Are we at a turning or tipping point in the way enterprises develop, implement and integrate enterprise software. Is this true in the search market?

JML: It is most definitely a turning point. I’m travelling all the time - 200 days this year - and I’m sensing in recent months a real change in the ways companies think about search. We started seeing and talking about search as a platform, search not just as about text but also about structured data, about five years ago. But it’s really only in the last 3-6 months that we’re really beginning to see people turned on and getting it. It’s really accelerating now.

Can you talk about how companies are integrating search into their companies at an operational level?

JML: We’re seeing companies now hiring individuals to lead their search initiatives - search experts are being hired at the executive and management level which indicates that search is now a key part of their businesses, a key part of their internal architectures. For example, Reuters or Reed Elsiver - these huge information businesses now make a point of hiring high-level people to head up their search functions.

Companies are also realizing how these capabilities and people can help them solve issues in more efficient ways. They’re working on large integration projects, projects which in the past cost tens of millions of dollars - they can now create an informational access layer which costs a fraction of that and which helps them move much faster to market and more quickly develop applications.

Essentially, you have two key functions: you have the transactional model where you want to store and organize data and then you have the retrieval model where you want to be able to retrieve business intelligence. All of the latter, all of it, is going to be powered by search. So Business Intelligence is going to be entirely driven by search, allowing you to pull analytics or pull data out of internal systems - it’s also going to be a subset of what search is in five years.

Can you point to particularly interesting apps being developed by your partners or customers?

JML: There are a lot of interesting external apps being developed - from searching yellow page-like sites, or for local search, or vertical search, as well, of course, as for B-to-C and B-to-B sites as well as mobile devices.

As for internal applications, some of the banks are doing some interesting things. Merrill Lynch is really getting it, using search as an information access platform in building business applications on top of our platform. They’re using FAST to integrate their data and then turning that around into informational portals - they are, after all, an information business and they’re using all that data and content and analytics from different parts of the company to provide contextual data to whomever needs it, be they brokers, analysts, support teams or customers. One of bank’s main purposes, of course, is to help their customers, help them get the right information, whether it’s a consumer trying to get information about their account, or a professional fund manager - it’s about providing the right information at the right time. And that’s all about search.

And on the mobile front, one of the largest Internet companies in Japan - Rakuten - has recently launched a mobile service in concert with DoCoMo that employs a FAST search solution. It is seeing its traffic rocket - they’re already at 200-300 queries per second - that’s millions of searches a day. That’s amazing.

You talk about how search must go beyond the search box. What does that mean?

JML: It’s about connecting people to content. But not just to information but also to other people, to other services, to other applications.

So how far do you go with that?

JML: For an example, we see more and more that people within companies are searching within their own organizations for experts on certain topics. But you can always further improve, further develop the results and relevance of those searches. The biggest challenge right now is to open the eyes of people to what search can be - it’s so much more than just a search box. We’re just at the very beginning of this.

A general and broad question: what’s your grand ambition for search?

I’ve been in this space for ten years and it’s incredible how much i learn every day about the potential for search, about the new opportunities in search. It’s mind-boggling and much bigger than people think. Even for me for whom it’s a passion, it’s much bigger than I thought a year ago and a year from now I’m sure I’ll feel the same way.

I think everything we do online will be driven by search. We may not think of it as search as we won’t necessarily see a query box. But it’s about matching, about connecting the dots: matching me as a person to another person and matching me to some interest I have. All those things are going to be queries. All those things will trigger a contextual query that will tap into a search engine that tries to match you with the data you’re after, be it a link to another person, to content, to other services. It’s going to be the fundamental foundation of communities and communication. To provide just one, simple example: when you call me that’s going to trigger a message from my cell phone that will call up emails you’ve sent me or any other data that’s relevant to you calling me, i.e. all these things will be triggering queries.

And going forward, internet portals, web portals, mobile portals - all will basically be search engines with graphic interfaces laid over them. The portals aren’t going to change the way they look. But they are going to change the way they’re generated - they’ll be generated through a search layer rather than a static database. Search will increasingly become an intelligent layer, an access layer that virtually sits there as an integration layer and one that can present things appropriately and contextually for each user - there will be no need to have all the hardwiring. And in this case we will use a search engine to understand what a user wants and present it and that may not be in a search result list. It may present information as graphs, as tags, as a summary of a news article, as other types of content - however you want to present it.

And I think the main thing for us, the good thing for FAST is that we’ve seen this coming for six years. Our technology is built not just around text but also around structured data. We’ve been prepraring for this ability to scale, for analyzing streaming data, not just static data, and we’ve thought about search as a horizontal application. That’s why we are very confident that as we continue our innovation, together with our biggest customers around the world, that we’re going to be in the lead. We believe search is going to be as big as databases in a couple years - the capabilities and the market. And if we play our cards right we’re going to have a fair share of a very significant market opportunity. Of course our customers will be B-to-C companies, consumer companies, ecommerce companies, and online media companies, but they’ll also be B-to-B, or banks or pharmas or government so we’re focusing on the largest opportunities.

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Introduction

December 27, 2006 at 4:50 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

We were asked to introduce ourselves so here goes. I first learned about blogs when I left a large consulting company in March 2004. Blogs had been under my radar screen up until then. I had been involved with implementing enterprise knowledge management systems and portals for large organizations since the early 90s. Prior to that I was involved in technology-based learning systems beginning in the early 80s. In the 70s I was an academic, a psychologist who did research on the effects of media on cognition and learning. Now in March 04 I found the possibilities for blogs, as a part of the next wave of knowledge management and learning systems, very exciting to me. Actually, the reverse has become true, as blogs are now much bigger than KM and Enterprise 2.0 could totally transform KM.

I started my blog, Portals and KM, in May 04 as part of background for an article on blogs for Portals Magazine. I live in Cambridge, MA and joined the Thursday blog discussions initially led by Dave Winer at the Berkman Center. I am became hooked and wrote a book on business uses of blogs with Amanda Watlington. I started interviewing business bloggers for the book and kept going until my co-author said it was time to stop at 70. The conversations were great and it was too addictive. Jim McGee and Kathleen Gilroy in our FAST Forward blogging group were part of this, as were an artist, a winery owner, a restaurant owner, a maker of wooden signs, and many other businesses and non-profits.

In the beginning, my blog covered knowledge management and multiple uses of blogs and now it also looks at web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0, primarily but not exclusively, from a business perspective. I can see the writing has evolved from blogs as novelty to blogs as mainstream. Writing the blog has become part of my routine and many new relationships have come through it. For the last two years I have felt the need to have a post every day, or should I say the compulsion, but advance posting helps. It has also changed my professional orientation and I speak a lot on blogs, and now web 2.0, to a diverse variety of groups and find this energizing. I also consult with clients on these topics through several partnerships

I started writing about music and food in my blog on the weekends, and now art. This has opened up a new set of people to meet through my blog. Then I added blogging about my friends’ favorite places to eat in their cities to my weekend writing, and added some of my own. I was once asked why do this when there are so many food sites. Here is my response, Restaurant Reviews – Why I Blog Them. It is part of my feeling toward the blog as a personal knowledge management. Almost anything I really want to remember, and possibly share, on the work side or the entertainment side goes into my blog. Recently, I reengaged in creating art, mostly charcoal and ink drawings for now, and plan to start an art blog in 07.

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Worksites

December 27, 2006 at 2:17 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Maggie Fox writes one of my favourite new blogs. Social Media Group.

Recently, she asked “how long before social media is recognized as the new email”?
Part of the reason why Blogging and Wikis have not gone mainstream within the enterprise is that people keep talking about them as a market conversation or as “social software”, rather than as solutions to basic business problems.

What if we call them “Worksites?”. A Worksite makes your Intranet both readable and writable. Worksites are designed to do at least 6 things:

1 - Increase profits by improving lateral communication within the organization. As people within silos start to communicate, many benefits follow. Banks, for example, will see increased cross-sell of products to their corporate clients and wealthy clients. Consulting firms with multiple teams will use the Worksites make sure they provide integrated and coordinated solutions for clients. Any company that builds anything (cars, software, couches) will use Worksites to make sure marketing, design, sales and manufacturing / development communicate those critical issues that differentiate an iPod from all the other mp3 players.

2 - Reduce risk by improving control through audit trails and access control. There is no real audit trails with MS Office files flying back and forth using email, IM and jump-drives. And there is no real, centralized, single sign on access control. Intranet Worksites fix those problems. You can see who wrote what when, who read it, what comments they left and there is an audit trail for every single change made in the system.

3 - Radically reduce email. Read/write intranet tools have been shown to reduce internal email on projects by 75%. What more do you want?

4 - Increase the pace of innovation. I wrote a paper on this back in late 2005 called Turning Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators. The summary is as follows:

• Constant innovation is required to succeed into today’s hyper competitive environment.
• Successful innovation is not about the ideas or inventions; it’s about the people.
• If you want innovation, you have to enable your innovation creators.

The paper discusses new approaches to managing for constant innovation and new tools for fostering innovation.

5 - Highlight the deadwood within your organization. Today, some mid level managers maintain their power within an organization not by contributing, but instead by limiting access to information, and obfuscation. There is less room to hide for these types of people to hide as Intranet Worksites increase internal transparency and thus highlight who adds value.

6 - Reduce costs by reducing repeated effort. Today, employees of large organizations spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. They are forced to do this because they have no efficient way to tap into the organization’s collective know how. This was the holy grail of “knowledge management”, but knowledge management focused on the wrong thing. It focused on “knowledge”, which meant that it was implemented as a tax on the organization. After people completed work, they had to go back and document what they had learned. The concept of Worksites are based on communication tools that have proven successful on the Internet. People use them to get work done and to communicate. “Knowledge capture” falls out as a positive externality. Further, there is no need to “manage” the knowledge as these Internet tools are self organizing. There is no hierarchy that organizes the Internet, yet Google followed by Wikipedia are the two most efficient knowledge discovery tools in the world.

Note, however, that this does not mean you should fire your Chief Knowledge Officer. Instead, change her title to Chief Internal Communications Officer. As Harvard’s Dr. Andrew McAfee has said many times, to get the full benefit of a Read/Write Intranet, you need support from management. The CICO’s job is to get the right communication tools in place and then foster the right management environment to encourage the use of those tools.

Nothing in the list above is about blogs, wikis, RSS. Nor is it about external blogging for marketing purposes. Banks, Hospitals, and Hedge Funds do not need or want their employees to be blogging about work on the open Internet. “Mr. Boothby deposited $478.23 today” is not useful. In a Bank with 100,000 employees there might be room for only a few external blogs. However, there are plenty of reasons why the Bank would want to have far more than 100,000 internal blogs. To begin with, the Bank might want to have each employee create a People Page about what they do and what skills they bring to the table. The Bank might then want to create a Project Worksite for each of the major internal projects going on, including new product roll-outs, new system development, new marketing campaigns, etc. For major commercial clients, internal Client Worksites could help internal teams that are spread across geographies and departmental silos to improve coordination, better serve the client’s needs and sell the client more products. Finally, Product Worksites could help the bank keep its own employees up to date on the latest developments with each of the complex financial products they sell.

100,000 people + 10,000 projects + 30,000 major clients + 1,000 products.

It is only when companies start to realize how they can use these tools that we will see social media as the new email.

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Five Predictions for Enterprise 2.0 in 2007

December 26, 2006 at 4:46 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

One prediction you can take to the bank is that at the end of the year every “expert” in every industry will make predictions for the coming year.  It’s a generally harmless exercise and, fortunately, readers have short memories.  In that spirit, here are my predictions for Enterprise 2.0/social media for the coming year:

1.  Social networking will go vertical.  The big general interest sites like MySpace.com and Facebook.com will continue to grow, but at a slower pace. Smaller sites targeted at users with shared interests will boom.  Niche-oriented networks aimed at people who are passionate about a particular topic may not attract millions of users but many will become significant and sustainable businesses.  Companies to watch:  Sermo.com, an online community for doctors, CarSpace, a site for car enthusiasts; Classical Lounge; a site for composers and musicians; Dogster and Catster, (take a guess).    

2.  Multi-purpose collaboration platforms that deliver applications for blogging, wiki creation, and social networking within a single framework while allowing easy content and permissions management will easily capture the corporate market for social software.  Big winner:  Blogtronix, the Swiss Army knife of collaboration platforms.  Socialtext has made some important alliances and will continue to be a top contender.  So will Confluence.  Big loser:  Six Apart.  Blogging platforms are so last week.  Next must-have function:  Interactive video.

3.  The Empire will strike back.  IBM and Microsoft will jump on the Enterprise 2.0 bandwagon in a big way but in their usual top-heavy style that aims to please IT by building in a lot of expensive control functions that frustrate end users and ensures that social software experiments are likely to fail in large organizations.  They will probably do very well.

4. The Anti-Empire will emerge.  A new breed of company–call it the anti-IBM and anti-Microsoft–will emerge that aims to make life for knowledge workers easier and more fun by “consumerizing” the experience of endless toggling between desktop and web apps.  Write this down somewhere:  Serendipity Technologies. 

5.  User-generated applications will become the next hot thing.  If Web 1.0 was “read only” and Web 2.0 is “read/write,” the next logical growth phase will be “read/write/execute.”  User generated applications will emerge that allow users to tie together web services to dynamically create custom functionality without having to know anything about programming or development.  Big winner:  Teqlo.

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DIY KM and Recruitment

December 22, 2006 at 11:04 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, barriers

The Boston Globe recently had a review of the music CDs for 2006. It started like this, “2006 was a DIY year in music, and we’re not talking about a glut of homemade albums. The do-it-yourselfers were the fans, not the artists. We read each other’s blogs, listened to millions of songs online, shared our discoveries, and bought the music we liked rather than the music the suits tried to sell us.” There are many emerging web 2.0 tools to support this interest. I was approached recently by a site, uPlayMe, that is “a free social networking application designed to link people with similar tastes in musical artists, songs or genres.”

What happens when these people go to work and find the suits are in charge? How can we bring this same level of participation and engagement inside the enterprise? I think you know where this is going, another promo for Enterprise 2.0. It is such a great opportunity to engage the most recent generation in the workforce and counter all these negative employee surveys I have heard about. Enterprise 2.0 is also a way for smart companies to attract the right people as the employee shortage that has been predicted starts to take hold. For example, there are many tools and ways that can link people with similar business (or even music) interests inside the enterprise.

I really liked Euan Semple’s, Ten questions companies SHOULD be asking themselves about Enterprise 2.0. They were the questions that would be asked by the same people who participated in the Web music scene of 2006. How do we get them to do the same thing inside their workplace? Euan also addressed the issue in Business as Usual. One result will be DIY KM as their activities create an accessible archive of their activities or interactions. McKinsey did a report, The Next Revolution in Interactions, on the importance of interactions in adding value and the need to support them with the proper IT investments. If done right it could be the same level of engaged interactions as described in the Globe except that they would now be covering matters of the enterprise and they would be accessible for future use. Jevon MacDonald wrote on some of the issues in From Inside to Outside: How do new organizations work? and referred to a book with right title, Trusted Space, with Robert Patterson.

Indus Khaitan commented on my post on the change management issues in enterprise 2.0 , “The aspects are definitely human; it requires evangelization in from of the CIO, or the Knowledge Officer. In corporations we’re still seeing initiatives around traditional Content Management System which give us nothing more than a “static intranet”. This is because the executive leadership does not see a visible ROI around “Writable Intranet”. Employee recruitment and retention could become one motivator and one very significant ROI.

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Enterprise 2.0: Getting started

December 22, 2006 at 8:59 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

One of the problems with the discussion about Enterprise 2.0 is that it remains abstract and conceptual. Until organizations see real improvements in performance that outweigh the risks in implementing web. 2.0 solutions behind the firewall, they will not move forward. So how do you begin? What are the specific steps that you need to take to get an enterprise 2.0 project underway?

I have been involved in implementing several of these projects this year. In my workshops on this topic, I suggest that groups find a deep need that can be addressed by a distributed architecture and start there. These needs are often about improving performance that can be directly tied to improved revenues or profits.

Once this need has been identified I recommend prototyping with consumer web 2.0 tools. Most of the features of the enterprise 2.0 toolkit can be demonstrated on a small scale with readily available tools: blogs, wikis, podcasting, and rss aggregation. It is very simple to build a platform for your prototype out of these tools.

Next step: get going. Give prototypers some basic training in how to use the tools and what is expected from them. Emphasize how using the new tools is going to save them time and expand their access to critical information that will improve performance. Get people solving an important problem using the web 2.0 toolkit.

Bring in experts to provide foundational content for the project and stimulate and guide thinking. Model behavior for how you work in a 2.0 network.

Run your project for a sufficient length of time (120 days) so that the group really gets the experience and benefits of working in this new way.

I have used this “recipe” with quite varied groups of people and found it to work in every case. There is a reason that 60 million people have started blogs and thousands are podcasting. These tools really work. They offer a powerful new channel for creative expression and efficient new means of getting the right information. But they are a new language and like a new language, the best way to learn them is immersion.

And in every case our prototypes have propagated beyond the initial small project. People tell their friends and colleagues about their experiences. They won’t abandon their blogs and aggregators once the prototype is over. Innovators in the group start their own prototypes.

Enterprise 2.0 is emergent. So let is begin simply and emerge naturally.

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Business as usual?

December 21, 2006 at 4:14 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

I have to confess to worrying about Enterprise 2.0.

A lot of the writing about it sounds very like Enterprise 1.0 or even 0.0 and feels at times like an attempt to dissipate the effects of a disruptive technology and assimilate it into “business as usual”. Trouble is I don’t think this is possible, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle and I believe we are on path analagous to the one enabled by the printing press. That led to The Reformation and The Enlightement and shaped the world view that so many of us now take for granted. What will our equivalent of The Enlightenment be like fifty or a hundred years from now?

I am not about to make predictions, nor am I big fan of techno evangelism, but I do believe it is important that in blogs like this, and in the upcoming conference, to be challenging and prepared to be challenged - to feel uncomfortable and be made to question some of our assumptions. There is a high degree of collusion in the fiction that is the grown-up world of business with all of its cultural norms and assumptions. It takes guts for people to break ranks with that and frustrating for those who are not allowed to be part of it - but the fact is that tools like forums, and blogs and wikis flatten playing fields. They give voice to those currently unheard and can expose embarrassing silences.

These conversations will happen whether inside the firewall or outside it and in my view it is better to be part of them than not. We began latterly amongst my team to talk of our work at the BBC as democratisation of the workplace. If this makes some people uncomfortable maybe they should consider that democracies are considered by many to be the pinnacle of man’s ability to organise himself - to the extent of taking up arms to defend them - why shouldn’t they work for business?

Would your organisation qualify for Most Democratic Workplace 2007?

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Wikipedia Gone Amuck?

December 21, 2006 at 3:27 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

I belong to another discussion group that has been exchanging numerous emails complaining about the wikipedia article on community 2.0.  It seems that everything is 2.0 now.  It states that “Community 0.0 represents live, person-to-person interaction of the pre-internet era. Community 0.0 is displayed in the conventional social environments of neighborhoods, religious organizations, or schools.” Then goes on to add in all the web 2.0 stuff under the title of community 2.0.  Perhaps this is a takeoff, like the lyrics to “Whiter Shade of Pale.”

Now I think Enterprise 2.0 or Intranet 2.0 serves a real purpose in talking about web 2.0 behind the firewall.  There is a clear difference here. Community 2.0 seems redundant as it repeats one of the traits of both web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0.  I know that Enterprise 2.0 was kicked off Wikipedia for a while and is now under the term, Enterprise social software. That was not fair, especially if they allow such terms as Community 2.0.

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Escape from Blackberry

December 20, 2006 at 9:49 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Much of Enterprise 2.0 is about asynchronous communication. Blog, wikis, social bookmarking, et al provide common spaces to create, share, and archive information. RSS lets us decide what we get. The break through is transparency but one that makes things more efficient and less of a burden. Here is a great story on what happens when asynchronous tools become real time.  I think things could become overwhelming if everyone felt the need to be connected to all these great new tools real time, all the time. We might lose the control that these new tools give us over communication.

Paul Levy is the CEO of large Boston hospital and he writes the blog, Running a Hospital.  Jessica Lipnack pointed me to his post, Blackberry Cold Turkey. Here he describes his liberation for his Blackberry. I agree so much with what he says.

Paul writes about the bad effects of having constant access to your email when you are away from your computer, “manners disappear. We sit in meetings and, at best, try to look at our handheld screen without appearing to be distracted from the conversation. You have seen the maneuvers — a casual glance towards the crotch where fingers are quickly at work — a sudden excuse to go to the restroom — a coughing fit so the person can turn away from the table and check the Blackberry. At worst, we just put the device on the conference table in front of our face and divest from the conference. Worse still, relationships disappear. A couple sits side by side at an airport, each reading and writing email on their two machines. A child impatiently waits to talk to a parent while the driver hurriedly answers an email while stopped at a red light.”

With RSS it could be worse as we could get updated through a mobile device on blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, as well as email. This is why I disliked IM and why I do not have a Blackberry. People often expected (or I felt oligated) to stop what I was doing and answer an IM. But I may be an extreme case. I even resisted cell phones for a while and usually leave mine off, except by prior arrangement with someone who needs to reach me.  Now that I am no longer in a large consulting company, I do not have IM and I do not give out my cell phone number for business except on rare occasions. There are places for real time communication and there are times for asynchronous communication. We need to have our personal spaces and we need to be able to focus on what is happening right in front of us.  Kudos to Paul.

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When Will The Enterprise 2.0 Workflow Take Hold?

December 20, 2006 at 4:35 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

For e2.0’s value to shine, I think we have to get into the psyche of the enterprise business user. By that I mean baking Web 2.0 into the their work process, an Enterprise 2.0 workflow if you will. What we e2.0 evangelists are fighting is good ‘ol fashioned legacy stuff. Legacy culture, legacy technology, and of course the legacy of web 1.0.

And those legacy effects will always (to some degree) be an inhibitor to Enterprise 2.0. Some folks just aren’t very good collaborators. I’m not sure if it’s a generational thing, a geeky thing, or just a predisposition to despise any new technology. Whatever the case, the non-collaborators and general web 2.0 naysayers will be hard to de-throne in enterprises unless we show how work gets done using web 2.0.

Without getting into an ROI discussion ad nauseam, I think it starts with an understanding of “how” the work gets done. Call it process, workflow, tasks, whatever way you describe it, there’s a set of events that trigger other events. As you analyze your processes, all sorts of things begin to crystallize. For one, you see how the information is used to create a work product. Secondly, you see the consumers of  the information and how they interact with it. And perhaps most importantly, you start to see other ways the information can be used to feed other work processes or product.(think Teqlo)

Let’s go a level deeper and use tagging or social bookmarking as an example. Most folks can understand the notion behind tagging, especially those with a more formal background in managing content. Those folks are used to terms like taxonomy, classification, metadata, and indexing. So when you describe a webby way to mark content, their lightbulbs quickly go off. From a client perspective, most of the time I use Technorati to demonstrate how tagging works. There’s a big search engine indexing stuff in near real-time. Got it.

What’s more challenging is describing scenarios where your client can incorporate tagging in the context of a workflow or process. When’s the last time you saw a delicious widget setting nicely beside say, a sales order? It’s at this point where thoughts (or nightmares) of integration, security, and maintenance all begin to rear their ugly heads. Why? I think it’s because most enterprise users haven’t seen the web infiltrate their work environment. By infiltrate I mean a real integration, one where web 2.0 applications become an integral part of their company’s service-oriented architecture (SOA). And what about the ERP providers? When will they start to OEM this stuff? Doesn’t it make sense to embed social bookmarking capabilities into your CRM system? That’s when the enterprise 2.0 workflow takes hold. That’s when Johnny in sales can finally pull his SAP data and tag it for customer support, and marketing.

Hopefully in the near future playing “tag” will evolve into more than just reminiscing about your playground days.

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Ten questions companies SHOULD be asking themselves about Enterprise 2.0

December 20, 2006 at 1:17 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Elsewhere on this blog Jerry Bowles just reposted his “Top 10 Management Fears About Enterprise Web 2.0″.These are still questions that I hear occasionally when working with clients and they will continue to be asked for a long time I have no doubt. What worries me though is that they are very “old world” questions and they are not the questions that people who have grown up on the web ask.

Things are changing though and those in business who are attracted to this way of looking at the world tend to ask different questions and have different fears so I thought I would put together a list of questions that I believe companies “should” be asking themselves.

Feel free to disagree in the comments!

1. How do we find the people in my organisation that get this stuff and get them to trust us enough to help make it work?

2. How do I get my IT guys’ heads around the technologies without scaring them off?

3. How do we balance the possibilities of greater networking capability and openness with the constrictive reporting legislation we are currently subject to?

4. How do I capitalize on the female qualities of this new world and move away from the dominance of male characteristics in the workplace?

5. How can we increase the chances that the behaviours in these new environments will be better than those that have gone before?

6. How can we ensure that we achieve the diversity and engagement required for the wisdom of crowds to operate?

7. How can we ensure that our legacy “knowledge” is accessible enough that this connected world can breathe life into it again?

8. How do we get over the fact that this stuff doesn’t cost much money?

9. How do we attract the right people with the right skills before our competitors do?

10. How can we be honest about the impact on our business to enable it to reinvent itself before current business models collapse?

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2007: The Year Enterprise 2.0 Breaks Out into the Enterprise

December 20, 2006 at 10:56 am · Filed under event announcements

My colleague over at the ZDNet blogging consortium, Dion Hinchcliffe, has just posted a year-end wrap-up of the state of Enterprise 2.0, and what a year it’s been.

Dion, who has been far out front of the industry in his thinking and writing on Enterprise 2.0, predicts that 2007 will be the year that Enterprise 2.0 “will significantly break out into the enterprise.”

Enterprise 2.0 entered the lexicon earlier this year, Dion notes, when Andrew McAfee , a Harvard professor, introduced the term and philosophy in a Harvard Business School blog post, based on an article he wrote for the MIT Sloan Management Review. McAfee described Enterprise 2.0 as “simple, free platforms for self-expression that remove the last remaining barriers to sharing information using Web technologies, given that even very trivial barriers can drastically reduce creativity and contribution.”

Dion also tracked the growth of the two main core elements of Enterprise 2.0 (blogs and wikis), and finds there has been considerable adoption over the past two years, overtaking traditional communication channels. Dion’s chart is posted below:

But there’s a lot more to Enterprise 2.0 than simply posting or participating in blogs and wikis. Dion observes that that its becoming a key part of enterprise management:

“CIOs, and more importantly, technology savvy workers are increasingly applying Enterprise 2.0 within their organizations because it can often be adopted very inexpensively, is by its intrinsic nature easy to use (requiring little if any end-user training), and many believe that it can be applied incrementally. This makes Enterprise 2.0 IT-friendly on numerous fronts to deploy by already harried, budget-pressured IT departments that are eager to deliver some low-risk wins. And informal data does suggest that many organizations will indeed be trying next year to get at the promise of productivity that Enterprise 2.0 tools offers.”

Dion also notes the challenges and obstacles that lay ahead for Enterprise 2.0, including “fears of a loss of control of communication within organizations; worries over the ‘dumbing down’ of corporate conversation; the available means of determining the accuracy of information captured and shared by employees using Enterprise 2.0 tools.” Plus, he notes, actual reference case studies of companies successfully deploying the methodologies are few and far between.

(For more on the obstacles and challenges, fellow FastForward blogger Jerry Bowles just posted a great summary of the leading management fears with Enterprise 2.0. Much of it boils down to fear of a loss of control.)

Dion didn’t venture specific predictions for 2007 yet but promises to do so in a later post. He does, however, link to Jevon MacDonald’s list of seven predictions for the year ahead. Jevon predicts plenty of announcements from IBM and Microsoft around Enterprise 2.0 tools, as well as more articles from Andrew McAfee.

Interestingly, Jevon also predicts that adoption of Enterprise 2.0 will be lukewarm in large enterprises, but mainly within small companies of 100 employees or less, especially around SaaS offerings.

My thinking is that within larger enterprises, SaaS is more likely to be delivered internally, as part of SOA strategy. I’ll be discussing this relationship between SOA, SaaS, and Enterprise 2.0 in more detail over the coming weeks.

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Top 10 Management Fears About Enterprise Web 2.0

December 19, 2006 at 9:40 pm · Filed under event announcements

It is probably bad form to flog your greatest hit but since we’re in the “best of” time of year and this was by far my most viewed post this year and Dion Hinchcliffe just said something incredibly nice about it in his blog, I thought I would share a slightly digested version with the audience here at the FastForward blog.

Social media like blogs and wikis and online journals offer unique ways to capture, share and store an enterprise’s most valuable asset–the accumulated knowledge of its people, even those who have retired or moved on.  This is an opportunity too valuable to pass over lightly.

The value proposition for big organizations is strong but getting there will mean overcoming some formidable obstacles, both technological and cultural, not least of which is giving up some management’s ability to control the flow of information and data within the organization.   As Harvard professor Andrew McAffee observes:

These tools may well reduce management’s ability to exert unilateral control and to express some level of negativity. Whether a company’s leaders really want this to happen and will be able to resist the temptation to silence dissent is an open question. Leaders will have to play a delicate role if they want Enterprise 2.0 technologies to succeed.

What are some of the questions that organizational leaders are apt to be asking and any vendor who hopes to succeed will need to answer.  This is by no means a comprehensive list and I welcome your additions and thoughts.

Technological Barriers

1.  How can I be certain that the information that is gathered and shared behind the firewall stays behind the firewall?

2.  How do I control who has access to particular levels of  information and databases?

3.  How do I protect the integrity of the information from malicious tampering by disgrunted employees or managers?

4.  How can I be sure that information is being “tagged” properly for efficient retrieval later? 

5.  What kind of training do employees need before they can effectively use the technology?

Cultural Barriers

6.  How can I monitor the system to make certain that what individuals are saying and sharing reflects company policy?

7.  What are the legal dangers in saving and sharing so much loosely supervised input?

8.  How do I distinguish “productive” use of the technology from horsing around?

9.  How do I “manage” the gathering and disseminating of so much unstructured information?

10.  How do I know if I’m getting my money’s worth out of the investment in technology?

Obviously, there are many other questions that will be raised by enterprises considering the new social media technologies as a collaboration platform.  If you have some questions, or thoughts on mine, please leave a comment.

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We’re live!

December 19, 2006 at 1:08 pm · Filed under house business

As a handful of you know, this blog has been gearing up over the past week or two as we prep for its launch. Well, as of yesterday we’re live and looking forward to what should be a compelling and wide-ranging discussion of Enterprise 2.0 applications and issues over the next eight weeks.

(A little context: this blog, which is sponsored by FAST Search & Transfer, was conceived and developed as a companion blog to FASTforward 07, which will take place in San Diego from February 7-9. The conference, like this blog, aims to explore how a new generation of enterprise appilcations and capabilities are enabling companies to better capture, harness, analyze, and search data, foster communication and collaboration, and connect individuals and ideas within companies. More info on the event, at which Ray Lane, John Battelle, Tim O’Reilly and others will be speaking, can be found here.)

Here in the blog we’ve convened an outstanding crew of blogging contributors who will be exploring the broad range of ideas and applications that are falling under the Enterprise 2.0 umbrella. They’re all longtime observers and players in the space, have authored numerous books and articles as well as speak frequently on related topics, and collectively are uniquely qualified to be hosts for what will surely be an informed and spirited discussion over the coming weeks.

In a subsequent post I’ll introduce the respective contributors. For now we encourage you to jump in and join the conversation - leaving comments or emailing our contributors with questions or topics you’d like to see them tackle. They are a tremendous resource and we encourage you to take advantage of their collective expertise, experience, and perspective. Also, if you have friends, colleagues, customers or other contacts that would be interested in this blog, please let them know about it.

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Words, words, words

December 18, 2006 at 5:59 pm · Filed under event announcements

The trouble with trying to describe what is going on in organisations as social computing breaches their defenses is that we have to resort to some pretty clumsy labels in order to do so. Enterprise 2.0 is probably the clumsiest of the lot but like Web 2.0 it will serve a purpose if used with due care and attention.

But even subtler language can cause problems.

Niall Cook picks up on two phrases attributed to JP Rangaswami in the recent Information Week article about him and his work:

When asked about the respective roles of blogs and wikis in organizations, he said that blogs are for the “creators and thinkers” whereas wikis are “about doing things rather than thinking about things”.

I am not sure that JP actually meant such a clear distinction as the language suggests and in my own experience categorising one group of people as “doers” and another is “thinkers” creates artificial separation uncomfortably close to a class system. I believe people move from one type of activity to another and back on a frequent basis and our experience at the BBC was that people became pretty confident at moving from forums to blogs to wikis depending on what they were trying to achieve and using hyperlinks to weave a web of meaning between them.

This is why Niall’s main point is really interesting:

I’d argue that there is a fourth type - the connector. They may not be a creator, a thinker or a doer (at least not in the blog or wiki sense). But by tagging the blog posts and wiki pages that they find interesting, they automatically - perhaps even unwittingly - create connections between intellectual property and the people who create it. The tags they use to “describe” these resources become the glue that holds the whole continuum together.

If we can set aside the idea that these different activities are associated exclusively with different types of people they are nonetheless very useful as ways of describing different types of behaviour.

One of the joys of the new way of looking at work enabled by these new technologies is that it makes it easier for people to break out of the rigidities imposed by old labels and the pre-conceptions that came with them. Moving fluidly from one type of behavior to another while moving around the computer screen and fusing them all into a new and powerful capability is a skill that is just emerging and will, I believe become essential in business.

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Will Enterprise Web 2.0 totally transform enterprise knowledge management?

December 18, 2006 at 1:10 pm · Filed under event announcements

A number of my fellow FAST Forward bloggers have written on the promise of Enterprise 2.0 and I certainly agree with its transformational potential, some of which has been realized already. I quote them and tell web 2.0 success stories at workshops. But I always hedge the claim with the huge change management effort to fully realize this vision across large organizations. As Indus Khaitan nicely wrote, “It (Enterprise 2.0) is the place where employees collaborate, exchange thoughts, create plans, capture meeting notes, track projects, create documents. The Writable Intranet means that enterprise knowledge is “free” and searchable by anybody. The “freedom” implies that knowledge is neither in e-mails and nor in documents but in easily accessible and searchable repositories.”  Sounds good and I am convinced that we will get there, or at least I hope so.   But it will not be easy because of human, not technical. issues.

Here is a brief sample success story on the possibilities. When Al Essa was the CIO at MIT’s Sloan School, he faced the challenges typical of any CIO. It required considerable time to monitor the efforts of his multiple project teams. Projects tended to operate in silos and many complained that they did not know what the others were doing. Al turned to blogs to address this issue. Al said, “We have created a blog forum for each project. Project managers provide updates and everyone in the department can access all project blogs. The project blogs act as true dashboards. The project lead maintains their project’s blog and other team members can contribute.”

Al could now review each project’s status online and drill down for more detail as needed. These status reports, and the ability to comment or ask questions, were also available to everyone in his department, so cross-project communication was a simple matter, a by-product of the project teams’ new blog reporting platform. Al could point teams to others facing the same issues. Individuals could access these reports in several ways. They could browse the department intranet for them and they could subscribe to them through RSS. The instant, secure, and constant accessibility, in searchable format, that blogs brought was a huge productivity improvement over swapping project reports and commentary through multiple emails. It brought his teams closer and everyone became believers in the new approach.

One significant benefit of this approach was the creation of a knowledge management system as a byproduct of simply doing the work. As time goes on the project records and deliverables can be easily accessed, creating a useful knowledge repository. This could eliminate or greatly reduced the difficult task of getting contributions to a KM system. It also realized the vision of Indus I quoted above. At first, some people resisted the idea but Al simply said that this was the new policy and give it a try it. Fortunately, most, if not all of his staff became believers.  But this was a relatively small department with a common focus and IT sophistication. Al Essa’s effort fit the profile that Jim McGee just wrote about on this blog in his post, Implementing social technologies inside organizations,  “individuals who have enough power and influence to persuade a work group to “run the experiment,” and whose work group is responsible for a consequential enough deliverable that the results of the experiment can carry some weight in the organizational hierarchy.”

What about taking this to a large enterprise with multiple departments and agendas? I greatly admire the work of Rod Boothby and his enterprise blog architect that takes what MIT did and goes way beyond. Having been part of large consulting company I can see the enormous productivity benefit that would occur with such a system that allowed everyone to be aware of the work of others and benefit from their efforts. But when I mention this to people in some large consulting companies or other types of firms the response is often skeptical. They feel that many people do not want everyone to know what they are doing and many client contracts prohibit this type of knowledge sharing. The latter is easier to deal with as you can have restricted access to certain sets of content. It is the attitude that will be harder and the attitude issues will take some carefully thought out change management work.

A few years ago Lotus Quickplace was an early precursor to some of the functions that the MIT blog system and other web 2.0 efforts now offer. I had a chance to develop knowledge management systems with some of the initial versions and was a big believer in its value.  It still has a large user base. Quickplace provided access control to a site. This ability to limit participants was seen as a big benefit. Later when IT people and senior executives wanted to be able to see inside these Quickplaces, initial users were not happy. This is an interesting contrast to the openness of web 2.0 tools like blogs and wikis but this request was seen as going back on one of the original benefits. People then felt they were going to be spied on. They failed to see any benefit for themselves from the transparency and none were likely presented.

We are now living in an increasingly transparent world. Perhaps the required openness to transparency within the enterprise will be, in part, a generational issue.

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‘Hello, I’m SOA.’ ‘I’m Web 2.0.’

December 18, 2006 at 10:27 am · Filed under SOA

Apple Computer’s television and Web-based commercials are simple and funny. You have the uptight, bumbling “PC” guy attempting to connect with the cool, laid-back “Mac” dude.

Perhaps those two are a fitting analogy for what we’re seeing in the SOA and Web 2.0 worlds. The “SOA” guy is the one in a corporate suit, a bit uptight, and prone to making things more complicated than they should be. The “Web 2.0″ guy, on the other hand, is the cool, good-looking one.

However, the PC and the Mac have far more in common these days than ever before, and even can communicate with each other effectively, at least through Internet protocols.

And, inevitably, the current chasm between service-oriented architecture and Web 2.0 will close to the point where the two will be indistinguishable drivers of this phenomenon we call “Enterprise 2.0.”

Here’s what SOA and Web 2.0 have in common:

SOA proponents can use Web 2.0 to open up channels of communication. SOA developers and deployers themselves are adopting Web 2.0 tools — blogs, wikis, collaborative Web-based services — to enhance and speed up their internal corporate efforts. For example, one huge problem vexing many SOA efforts is the array of architectural, integration and development teams scattered across the organization and not talking to each other. Through the use of internal blogs and wikis, these teams can better synch up their efforts and learn from each other.

Both approaches are about services and abstraction. The goals of both SOA and Web 2.0 are to deliver software as a service (internally or across the Web) that hides any underlying complexity from the end-user.

Another staple of Web 2.0 — application mashups — also bear a striking resemblance to the “composite applications” that are part of many SOA efforts. Both techniques involve the rapid development and deployment of new applications that pull data from multiple sources from across a network. Google Maps-based services essentially do the same thing as a middleware-based customer-service application pulling in data from multiple mainframes within an enterprise.

Here’s how SOA and Web 2.0 are different:

SOA is about enterprise efficiency. Web 2.0 is about individual empowerment. The goals of the two approaches are markedly different. But the forces of transformation that have swept enterprises in recent decades have always had their roots in individual empowerment, which companies adopt to their advantage. Think PCs, think Internet, think self-service. The Web 2.0 wave is following a similar trajectory.

For Web 2.0 projects, the operative term is ‘just do it.’ For SOA, build a business case first. Web 2.0 technologies can be quickly adopted with minimal disruption to current operations. SOA projects mean breaking down business applications, after getting buy-in from affected end-users of the applications from across the enterprise.

As SOA and Web 2.0 converge into Enterprise 2.0, we’ll see the best of both worlds emerging — the discipline and enterprise focus of SOA, enhanced by the flexibility and entrepreneurial spirit of Web 2.0. That’s a “mashup” we all look forward to.

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Welcome to User Experience 2.0

December 17, 2006 at 7:38 pm · Filed under event announcements

Tim Berners-Lee made a lot of people unhappy not long ago when he suggested that there wasn’t all that much new about Web 2.0.  From a purely evolutionary technology point of view, he may be right but it seems to me that what has changed dramatically with the widespread adoption of social software is a greatly improved user experience.   

Web 1.0, with its static, read-only HTML pages, was basically a one-trick pony. It was like the 13-inch Philco TV that came into my parents’ house in 1956–so amazing that you didn’t mind the snow and the test patterns, at least until better technology came along. But, as the nice folks at Philco found out, user experience is a moving target that ultimately separates winners from losers in the marketplace.   

And, if the early Web technologies quickly frustrated users, consider traditional Office software which has been around so long that it has become boring, routine and mind-numbing to most users.  For kids now entering the workplace who are younger than Excel (1985 for the Mac, 1987 for Windows) and have grown up with video games and lot of interactive consumer technology, the thought of spending their work days in a cubicle trying to find the right piece of information in customer relationship management and sales contact databases, supply chain and inventory systems, websites and web pages and e-mail systems, is not all that appealing.  “Death by navigation” is how IDC describes it in an Executive Brief titled “Getting Results by Empowering the Information Worker:  What Web 2.0 Offers Beyond Blogs and Wikis” available here.    

“Most workers spend a lot of time toggling between applications to retrieve data they need to do their jobs. They waste an enormous amount of time and they get worn down by the tedium and frustration of trying to find relevant information. Productivity and morale suffer,” says Shahar Kaminitz, CEO of a startup called Seredipity Technologies, which is developing Web 2.0 applications that address these common problems by providing a more “consumer-like” user experience to information workers.

Kaminitz says the new Serendipity Worklight software platform, to be released in late January, will dramatically improve user experience by adapting to enterprise use many of the Web 2.0 technologies that have driven the spectacular growth and popularity of social software on the consumer side of the web.  The result, the IDC Executive Brief suggests, is could be happier, more productive knowledge workers. Hey, who says work shouldn’t be fun?

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An Enterprise 2.0 case study from 1998

December 15, 2006 at 11:12 pm · Filed under event announcements

Case examples of organizations employing information technology in strategic ways that are relevant to Enterprise 2.0 can be difficult to find. I know of an example from the late 1990s that nonetheless offers relevant lessons for today.

Black and Veatch is an engineering management and design firm that builds large-scale projects such as power plants. I first learned of them as the reviewer who vetted their ultimately successful application for an Enterprise Value Award from CIO Magazine.

What makes the lessons from Black and Veatch so relevant are the careful effort to marry technology to the core knowledge work process and the investment in organizational learning over time. Instead of simply deploying off-the-shelf CAD software, Black & Veatch developed software that supported a design process that was redesigned to leverage detailed data about past projects and the current project. Further, over time, Black & Veatch’s design engineers learned to make more effective and productive use of the software, and the software itself was updated to exploit that learning. Take some time to read about their effort to “reengineer the engineering process.”

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Implementing social technologies inside organizations

December 15, 2006 at 10:17 pm · Filed under event announcements

If the set of technologies loosely identified at Enterprise 2.0 are to have any hope of real success, we need to take a closer look at how they are introduced into organizations. I see two basic patterns for technology introduction in general use and neither holds much promise.

The first pattern is embodied in the massive ERP rollout. Here, a highly structured set of technologies and corresponding processes are imposed on the organization. People in these systems have equally structured roles that are imposed on them in order for the overall system (organizational and technological) to perform as a designed mechanism.

In the second pattern, some fundamentally individual technology sneaks into the organization at the hands of discrete individuals. Spreadsheets, word processors, web browsers all infiltrated the organization. Even email and networking followed a fundamentally organic diffusion process.

Enterprise 2.0 technologies, of course, are social tools. Their promise and their challenge is that they exist at the boundary between organic and mechanical. Real success depends on blending aspects of both deftly.

Organizations deploying technology tend to view process too mechanically. They can put technologies in place, but aren’t adept at helping individuals and work groups learn how to put the technology to use effectively.

Innovative individuals can experiment with new tools and techniques and can encourage their peers to take up some technologies simply by example. But they generally lack experience and authority to craft the small group learning and experimentation to discover the joint ways of using technology to support more productive and effective processes that exploit the full potential of the technology.

The challenge is to find a third way. My own prediction is that the best path for introducing Enterprise 2.0 technologies is from well-positioned individuals up to selected work groups rather than down from the technology organization. By well-positioned, I mean individuals who have enough power and influence to persuade a work group to “run the experiment,” and whose work group is responsible for a consequential enough deliverable that the results of the experiment can carry some weight in the organizational hierarchy.

Successful experiments will have little or nothing to do with technology specifics. Instead, they will be characterized by how effectively they mesh with and advance specific processes within the organization. Or, by how they transform a loose set of existing practices into a process that can be managed and improved.

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