Archive for February, 2007
by Jevon MacDonald
February 28, 2007 at 1:45 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
At FASTForward in San Diego, many of us went to a roundtable discussion with Andrew Mcafee, and immediately the conversation went to the role of Search in Enterprise 2.0. My position was that it is too early to worry about search, because we do not yet have a problem (too much content) to solve in the Enterprise 2.0 world. Simple search is doing the trick.
The reason I enjoyed FASTForward however, is because search WILL be the next frontier, and we have a lot of questions to answer.
So, before we ask ourselves “what does search change?” I think we have to really talk about “how will search be changed?”
Despite what we’ve been telling ourselves, the fact is that nobody knows. Vendors like FAST are doing the smart thing (in my opinion) and that is that they are listening very closely, but not making any big moves too quickly.
- How could search be changed?
- Where do search and browse intersect?
- Is search a last resort or first tool?
- Is context (knowing what to show the user, and when) more powerful or less powerful than search?
- What role does search have in creating new content?
I wish I had these answers for you, but I don’t. I am pretty sure, however, that some of you probably have great insights in to what is working and what isn’t.
Don’t be shy to speak up in the comments!
by Hylton Jolliffe
February 28, 2007 at 11:18 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Most of our readers surely tune in to the blog of Andrew McAfee, the Harvard Business School professor who keynoted and led numerous sessions at FASTforward earlier this month (here’s an interview by David Weinberger with Andrew [added later: also check out Kathleen Gilroy’s longer interview with Andrew from before the conference]). For those of you who don’t or aren’t aware of it, a few pointers, in reverse reverse chronological order, to recent posts that follow up on some of the conversations that took place at and after the conference:
FastForwarding to a Better Understanding, part 1
In speaking about two of the roundtable discussions in which he was involved: “…they caused me to start rethinking some of my most deeply held convictions about Enterprise 2.0…”
FastForwarding to a Better Understanding, part 2
In his second post about the event, to which many great comments were added, Andrew lays out the thesis of his second-day keynote and adds “…At a lunchtime discussion that same day, I heard a very different view.”
Tear Down These Walls!?!?
Andrew notes the openness of the Web and how it’s given rise to the “elaborate” and emergent nature of today’s Web and ponders how effective the closed, “walled gardens” of corporate intranets can really be in surfacing good information and ideas. As before, be sure to catch the comments.
by Joe McKendrick
February 26, 2007 at 12:04 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Should Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 be blended into one single category? Since the parade of Web 2.0 technologies has come to the fore, they have been mainly a consumer or business-to-consumer play, and have only tantalized the enterprise side. Web 2.0 is seen as an untamed frontier, open to all, an innovation a minute. By the way, that’s the complete opposite of the approaches of cautious, security-minded, five-year-budget-cycled enterprise IT managers.
If history is a teacher, then it seems inevitable that Web 2.0 will begin to seep into every nook and cranny of the enterprise, just as PCs, Internet computing, and mobile devices did in years gone by. And, there is already plenty of seepage going on — many corporations have blogs and wikis by the score to help their workers collaborate better.
But the real test will be the higher-level mechanisms of Web 2.0 — Software as a Service and mashups. Anshu Sharma, for one, feels that in the long run, Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 are one in the same.
If applied right, enterprise end users should be able to benefit from rich applications that are built and used, simply, with Web 2.0 tools and approaches. “The idea of Enterprise 2.0 seems inside-out to me,” he said in a recent post. “People from the enterprise world used to large ERP-style applications and deployments thinking in traditional terms with a willingness to tweak the model to incorporate 2.0 from Web 2.0. This will not suffice. The square (pun intended) peg of enterprise software will not fit into the round hole (no pun intended) of Web 2.0.”
The trouble has historical roots, Anshu continues. “Slapping a portal on top of client-server software helped SIs and vendors make some money but they were no competition for applications designed from the ground up for the Web. A lot of companies are now trying to do the same by trying to ’service-orient’ their existing applications. I find the tone of discussion on Enterprise 2.0 suffering from the same problem.”
Anshu provides a working definition of Enterprise 2.0, which — surprise, surprise — is the exact definition of Web 2.0. SaaS, he says, is where the enterprise intersects with Web 2.0. “I would argue that all Web 2.0 applications are hosting-capable if not entirely hosted,” Ansu says. “The benefits of the long tail come into effect only when you have large number of users and but for a few very large companies it is hard to see how this effect will play out if the application is not hosted.”
Enterprise 2.0 mashups will be the same thing as Web 2.0 mashups. In the enterprise, SOA and Web services help expose internal applications for this type of integration, Anshu says. He provides an excellent example of such a mashup in action:
“You are browsing a catalog in your procurement application. As you mouse over the price, a bubble pops up (AJAX style) to tell you whether this is within your purchasing authority. This is a mashup of procurement and financials.”
“If Enterprise 2.0 looks, feels and behaves like Web 2.0 then why is it so hard?” Anshu asked, then answers is own question: “It is not hard.” The pain points in this process, he points out, are within the “existing enterprise applications that will in five years be legacy, just as client-server applications became legacy and mainframe apps before that.”
by Bill Ives
February 26, 2007 at 9:54 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Last week I went to the Thursday Blog meeting at Harvard’s Berman Center. Dave Winer first organized this event when he was a fellow in 2003-2004. It was my introduction to blogs in the spring of 2004. The sessions cover topics related to blogs and the web in general. They continue and I recommend them to anyone in the Boston are on a Thursday night.
Andy Carvin returned from Washington this evening to talk about Web 2.0 and National Public Radio. He was recently hired to help NPR become more involved in the participatory web. One of the initial efforts was to create the Rough Cuts blog to provide draft versions of a new radio show they are planning. As the site says:
“We want the new show we’re developing to be one you can’t live without — and we’d like your help. This blog lifts the curtain on our process. We’ll talk about our ideas and play “rough cuts” of pieces we’re piloting. Do you like what you hear? Why or why not? Let us know — and let’s make some great radio!.”
This was a big step for NPR as they have traditionally only wanted to air shows that are very polished to keep up their image. I am also a big fan of their work. Now they are talking in public about what went wrong in a show and what went right and inviting participation. The response from the public has been very positive and they received many helpful constructive comments. Once the current show graduates to airtime, they will put a new work in progress through the same blog.
You may have been thinking, what does this have to do with Enterprise 2.0, if you are still reading at this point. Whenever I was involved in a successful knowledge management or portal implementation in the past, it always involved going through rapid iterations and getting a lot of target audience feedback at every step. We often would go on the road to gather the same type of participation, sense of involvement, and constructive suggestions that NPR is doing through their blog. A number of IT product marketing managers have commented that they now get the same type of customer feedback on their products from their externally facing blog that, in the past, they could only get from road shows.
Why not do the same thing for internal initiatives such as knowledge management or really any internally focused program? Trail balloon blogs inside the enterprise could greatly augment other channels for obtaining user feedback, giving users a sense of participation, and gaining getting commitment from the target stakeholders. I wish that we had access to blogs when I was involved in these past major enterprise implementations of new programs. I will certainly recommend considering this as a part of any roll out in the future.
by Jerry Bowles
February 23, 2007 at 7:30 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
For those of you who are interested in the enterprise possibilities of blogs, wikis and other forms of interactive media, Social Media Today is hosting the first of our web-based colloquiums: Using Social Media to Buzz Your Brand, next Tuesday, February 27 at 11 am Eastern, 8 am Pacific.
The format will be a roundtable, and we have some great participants lined up, including Mike Prosceno, Vice President, Marketplace Communications, SAP; Todd Davison, President and Co-founder Bulldog Solutions; Jim Murphy, Research Director, AMR Research; Mitch Ratcliffe, Co-founder, BuzzLogic; and Todd Tweedy, CEO, BoldMouth. The role of Barbara Walters will be played by me.
If it goes well, we may do more. And it’s free.
If you’d like to join us, just go here and sign up.
Please sign up to join us and feel free to pass the word along.
And, if you haven’t checked out Social Media Today yet, please take a look. It’s an human-mediated (me) collection of the best writing from members of the Social Media Collective, a diverse group of bloggers, consultants, investors, journalists, and analysts who represent the web’s best thinking on social media, marketing and Web 2.0.
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by Phil Wainewright
February 23, 2007 at 9:27 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Participation is the biggest challenge to the success of Enterprise 2.0 in an organization — as it is for any knowledge-sharing exercise in an enterprise. If you can’t get the people with the knowledge to participate in whatever mechanisms you build for sharing it, then it’s patently apparent that you’ll fail in that objective. Frustratingly, the history of enterprise IT is littered with failed attempts to share information and knowledge, from CRM shelfware in the sales office to disused intranets on the company’s central servers.
But if the Web is the inspiration for Enterprise 2.0, then perhaps we should redefine the objective. The blogosphere constantly hums with excitement that “everyone” is setting up blogs, uploading videos and recording podcasts. It’s the year of ‘You‘. But take a look at who is the You in YouTube, for example, and you’ll find that 90% are passive participants. Only 10% upload content, and most of that is just copied from elsewhere. Less than 1% contribute truly original video. It’s the same split between creators, synthesizers and consumers that Bradley Horowitz previously observed among Yahoo! Groups users.
I’m not aware whether anyone has researched the output of that 1% to determine what percentage is useful and what percentage — to be brutally frank — is cr*p. The nature of the Web is that anyone can post anything, and then the magic of the wisdom of crowds allows the best to float to the top, discarding what’s of no value. The proportion of useful material must lie somewhere on a continuum between Pareto’s 80:20 rule and the Horowitz/Arthur 1% rule, and I think you and I both realize that it’s almost certainly at the lower end of the scale.
So here’s what Web 2.0 tells us about likely participation in any Enterprise 2.0 project:
- only one in ten people will contribute at all,
- only one in ten of those will contribute anything original, and
- less than one in ten of those contributions will have any value to anyone else.
No wonder Simon Revell, speaking at this week’s London wikiwed about introducing a wiki to a large pharmaceutical company (Flickr pic courtesy of David Terrar), was so dismissive of the notion of training users how to get started:
“If they can’t be bothered to spend five minutes to work it out, it’s not worth wasting the time and money on training them.”
In other words, concentrate your efforts on the minority who are already motivated to participate. There is no workaround for the 1% rule. Instead, recognize it exists and work with it. With luck, you’ll find it’s more like a 3% or 5% rule among knowledge workers, since middle-class professionals (and their offspring) are more predisposed to posting content online than other demographic groups. But still accept that most of what they contribute will be irrelevant, inaccurate, superseded or redundant, and build the system in a way that allows users to discover and recognize the most useful items.
The real problem of course is that the notion of building a system with such inherent unpredictability and redundancy is anathema to the corporate mindset. No well-governed organization is going to invest in a system for knowledge capture and sharing that has a 99 percent failure rate built in. I know that if you are reading this blog, you probably already understand the nature of the Web and you realize that this tolerance of failure is a necessary part of how it works. But you just try explaining that to the CFO.
by Jim McGee
February 21, 2007 at 5:00 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, barriers
Alan Kay is talking once again about what went wrong with the personal computer and personal computing. Here’s a pointer to a recent interview he did with CIO Insight magazine that is well worth your attention.
A CIO Insight
Alan Kay was recently interviewed for CIO Insight magazine’s Expert Voices feature. In this piece entitled Alan Kay: The PC Must Be Revamped–Now, Alan discusses the mindsets that stand in the way of real innovation - and what his not-for-profit VPRI is doing to address the issue. In the article, Alan defines Croquet as one of those efforts and as “a new way of doing an operating system, or as a layer over TCP/IP that automatically coordinates dynamic objects over the entire Internet in real time. This coordination is done efficiently enough so that people with just their computers, and no other central server, can work in the same virtual shared space in real time.”
[Julian Lombardi’s Croquet Blog]
Alan is up to his old tricks of trying to invent the future instead of predicting it. His focus remains on viewing the personal computer as a learning tool more than a productivity tool, which means, among other things, that you should be prepared to invest time and effort in that learning. He is not fond of efforts that sacrifice the real potential of tools by focusing on making the first five minutes easy and entertaining at the expense of crippling the long-term capabilities of the tools.
Alan remains a disciple of Doug Engelbart:
Engelbart, right from his very first proposal to ARPA [Advanced Research Projects Agency], said that when adults accomplish something that’s important, they almost always do it through some sort of group activity. If computing was going to amount to anything, it should be an amplifier of the collective intelligence of groups. But Engelbart pointed out that most organizations don’t really know what they know, and are poor at transmitting new ideas and new plans in a way that’s understandable. Organizations are mostly organized around their current goals. Some organizations have a part that tries to improve the process for attaining current goals. But very few organizations improve the process of figuring out what the goals should be. [Alan Kay: The PC Must be Revamped Now]
There is a potentially deep and rich connection between challenging knowledge work and technology. But realizing that potential will require different attitudes about how much time and effort we should be prepared to invest in learning. Organizations thinking about investing the technologies collectively identified as Enterprise 2.0 should also be thinking about what investments they should be making in the appropriate individual and organizational learning
by Bill Ives
February 20, 2007 at 12:31 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
The Nielson Normal Group has released their 2007 Intranet Design Annual, naming the ten best Intranets for the year. To get on this list, companies submit themselves and are reviewed by a panel of three experts in the field from the Nielson Normal Group, including one of the founders, Jakob Nielson. The criteria include: navigation, design, search, personalization and news delivery, content, and overall. Each of these criteria is further broken down into subsections, (e.g, overall includes: innovation and fun, support for main functions, captures company’s spirit, accessibility). A summary can be found on Jakob Nielson’s web site and the full report is for sale through the firm. I was given a review copy of the full report, via Mat Schwartz, another panel member.
The 10 best-designed intranets for 2006 are:
American Electric Power (AEP), United States
Comcast, United States
DaimlerChrysler AG, Germany
The Dow Chemical Company, United States
Infosys Technologies Limited, India
JP Morgan Chase & Co., United States
Microsoft Corporation, United States
National Geographic Society, United States
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), United Kingdom
Volvo Group, Sweden
I was especially interested in the inroads of Enterprise 2.0 features and approaches. The summary said that the winners “took a pragmatic approach to many hyped “Web 2.0″ techniques.” So I approached this exploration with a little caution. Yes, many web 2.0 features have been hyped and fortunately I did not find the report reactionary in substance. Rather it offered some data on what is being done at several leading firms who are heavy intranet users, although I did take some exception to some unnecessary wording. For example, it said. “Several winners have weblogs this year, but the blogs are restrained, emphasizing useful information instead of “what I did on my last date.” This is an anachronistic straw man as business blogs have been around for several years, getting high marks for Fortune, Business Week, and Harvard Business review as early as 2005. However, in fairness the report went on to say, “Microsoft even has a blog for its intranet’s managing editor to discuss features and news coverage.” That sounds like a very practical and good use of blogs.
They reported that Ajax was widely used this year, primarily “applied as an add-on feature that’s integrated into useful contexts as opposed to being used for its own sake.” They gave some examples. “Comcast displays nicely designed content previews that look like super-tooltips when users roll over lists of brand assets. Similarly, AEP updates the user’s custom list of links without refreshing the rest of the page, DaimlerChrysler updates its homepage stock ticker, and Microsoft shows the results of employee polls (a popular feature on many intranets) as soon as the user has voted…RSPB’s carpooling page (seems interesting). When users click on a map marker, it brings up a photo and other information about the employee who’s driving from that location, without otherwise changing the map or the rest of the page.” This sounds both practical and creative.
They also found that Microsoft uses social networking in a pragmatic manner to make its employee search even better, sorting results by degree of distance from the user and noted that such “sorting can be very helpful in a big organization where many people may have similar names or the same job titles.”
They also found some wiki use on intranets beginning in 2005 and noted that this year “National Geographic Society employs many wikis in a highly useful manner” through its NG Lingo wiki, which explains its internal acronyms and specialized terminology. They noted that such an intranet feature is especially helpful for new employees and that “this year’s winners included many more features to facilitate the “onboarding” (new employee) process.”
I think that one of the most practical uses of wikis is event planning for both logistics and substance but that might not surface on the formal intranet stage. Another practical use is document sharing such the enterprise wiki set up by Novell.
The report did not say anything about tagging or mashups. One of last year’s winners, IBM, is big into both of these behind their firewall. Perhaps they were not looked into or included in the award submissions.
It seems that these high profile firms are beginning to integrate Enterprise 2.0 features in the manner proscribed by Andrew McAfee and many others, including the adoption tip writers on this blog. Beginning with practical, focused applications that address specific business needs to demonstrate the value of these approaches and tools. The idea is to win converts from the bottom up as people directly experience the benefits and ease of use that Enterprise 2.0 can bring. The big payoffs from broader adoption will come when this foundation is established. The report appears very useful for anyone wanting to keep up with what is happening at big firm intranets.
by Jerry Bowles
February 20, 2007 at 10:56 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
The biggest challenge that most managers or work team leaders face when they decide to use a wiki is getting their coworkers to use it too. Some organizations have been extremely effective at getting mass participation on their wikis, others have simply failed altogether.
The nice folks at Atlassian, the private Australian company that is among the leaders in enterprise wiki software, decided to see if they could figure out why. Obviously, it is in their interest (and that of the other wiki companies, too) to find ways to help customers be successful in their implementations.
It turns out (no surprise) that people working together online have pretty much the same habits and personality quirks that you encounter in real life; which is to say, they behave in ways that range from super positive and reinforcing to downright nasty and demotivating. Because wikis are community efforts their ultimate success depends upon encouraging the former and keeping a lid on the latter.
Atlassian has now launched a public wiki called Wikipatterns.com that focuses on identifying and collecting patterns that help coordinate peoples’ efforts and guide the growth of content, which is the key to wiki success. Equally important, Wikipatterns also collects anti-patterns that might hinder the growth of a wiki, so they can be fixed or avoided.
“The site contains three major strands of content: People patterns and anti-patterns, adoption patterns and anti-patterns, and a walk-through of the stages of wiki adoption,” says Stewart Mader, Atlassian’s wiki evangelist. “The patterns and anti-patterns on the site are loosely modeled on the concept of software design patterns — those recurring, recognizable, and applicable patterns of behavior that can be applied to a wide range of situations. For instance, the Magnet pattern recognizes that putting certain content exclusively on the wiki will help people get into the habit of using it regularly; i.e., posting all your meeting agendas and minutes on the wiki establishes it as the place for the most up to date information.”
Mader says Wikipatterns.com is intended to give anyone, anywhere, using any wiki software, a source of information for successfully introducing a wiki to their organization. It’s a terrific new resource for enterprise wiki adopters and one that I hope the other wiki software vendors will embrace because it benefits everybody.
by Joe McKendrick
February 15, 2007 at 11:04 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, barriers
The technology consumer market may shift direction on a moment’s notice as new ideas are brought to market, but for enterprises, it’s slower slog to move to new technologies. Pilots need to be conducted, concepts vetted before review boards, ROI estimated, and various constituencies convinced of its value.
One global Internet manager recently blogged about how fired up he was about the new Enterprise 2.0 approaches coming to the forefront. He was skeptical about all the Web 2.0 claims until recently, until the market began to take off.
However, he expects to encounter a lot of resistance, especially from the IT department.
“Large companies are not famous for rapid adoption of new tools. Most of companies are using SAP, Microsoft or IBM. IT managers don’t take the risk to connect applications that could be incompatible.”
Plus, even though the software vendors are starting to offer some Web 2.0-related software, there will be the usual issues with integrating the solutions with the 1.0 versions of software. Best case scenario — enterprises will start to see enterprise 2.0 features at work by 2009.
The bottom line is that to advance in the enterprise, Enterprise 2.0 will needs enthusiastic proponents that can work both within the system and work outside the system when necessary. Ultimately, Enterprise 2.0 is a bottom-up movement that will be driven by empowered end-users — just as PCs worked their way into the enterprise two decades ago.
by Jerry Bowles
February 15, 2007 at 9:30 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
If you’re one of those people who’ve been waiting for somebody to create a tool that would let ordinary mortals without programming expertise mix and match applications and create their own mashups, today’s your big day.
Jeff Nolan, the brave young man who runs Teqlo, a startup that makes widgets work together and allows you to combine and integrate useful web services, has decided to skip the usual private beta and do a public beta instead. That means you can run over there right now, sign up, and build your first monster mash before lunch.
Two key things to remember: this is a demonstration of the technology, not the business; it’s still a little rough around the edges (that’s why they call it beta) and, alas, it only works with Firefox.
“Please keep in mind that this is a development release and we have much more to come that will define how the business is built around it,” Nolan says. “Also, in the interests of setting expectations appropriately, there are only a small number of widgets that you can use and that means you shouldnt expect to do anything productive with this. This release is intended to demonstrate how the core technology works and get your feedback about where we should go with it.”
Have fun.
by Bill Ives
February 15, 2007 at 7:39 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Here is a take on the early adoption stages of a familiar technology. Perhaps you have already seen it given the speed of viral communication on the web. It is not completely inaccurate in spirit since it took almost 2000 years after text was created to come up with the concept of an index to promote random access, something we take for granted with this technology. It has also been claimed that these tools were not used silently until the middle ages. St. Augustine, for example, did not want to read after his fellow monks went to bed for fear of waking them up. If this is correct, the concept of silent reading took over 1500 years to evolve. Of course, the first text documents simply recorded the oral tradition - e.g.. Homer. It took a while to get to content specifically created with text in mind.
So it may take users a while to understand the creative possibilities that the paradigm shift that Enterprise 2.0 offers. Some of the best web 2.0 applications started with this in mind. For example, MySpace had a strategy to not have pre-conceived notions about how users wanted to interact with the site. When users started creating group profile pages around interests and associations, MySpace accepted this behavior where Friendster did not.
by George Dearing
February 14, 2007 at 4:40 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, innovator interviews
One of the best things about the FASTforward conference was seeing how customers have used FAST technology - how they’ve applied it to the real world. I sat down last Thursday with CEO Tauseef Bashir of TauMed, a virtual health community, and got a glimpse of how healthcare information is evolving. This time the evolution is being driven by social media and powerful search technologies.
(Photo | Tauseef Bashir and Jerry Bowles)
According to some recent stats from TauMed’s PR firm about 10 million Americans go online each day searching for answers to health questions. And to no one’s surprise Health searches are now just as popular as paying bills online, reading blogs, or using the web to find phone numbers and addresses.
With that kind of activity, you can see why there’s an information land grab going on. So Is there room for another WebMD? And how do you compete with the 800 lb. gorilla? Bashir says they’ll do it by improving the quality of information, how that information is delivered and expanding the site’s social networking capabilities. No small task by any stretch.
The beta site, launched in December, is impressive. It’s actually more impressive when you see it go head-to-head with WebMD. During his demo, he showed me some of why there’s so much buzz around search becoming the new interface. When we searched for “MS” (multiple sclerosis) in WebMD’s v1.0 site and asked to see the Web results, we saw things like Microsoft Corporation and other irrelevant items. Doing the same search in TauMed rendered much more precise results. The other things I liked were the “ask a question” and “HealthShare“ features. Tauseef’s product team uses rich Ajax interfaces to dynamically serve up content, giving the site a clean, interactive feel when searching for data or contributing content for HealthShares.
Tauseef,a former FAST employee, is passionate about the company’s prospects and knows they’ve got a fight in front of them. He says consumers have short attention spans for fruitless searches and irrelevant information and intends to capitalize on it. The data mining and contextual analysis is the key, he says, to serving up razor-sharp results and creating a memorable user experience. But search aside, I dug a little deeper on the social networking aspects of TauMed’s community. Apparently, they’ve built their own content management system (CMS) and blog-like capabilities. I couldn’t help but notice how their user profile pages mimic blog features, providing very simple and intuitive interfaces and easy onramps to adding user-generated content.
The other thing that popped up during the demo was advertisements, mostly from Google. I’m OK with that, but what surprised me was the irrelevancy of certain ads. In the midst of deep-diving for additional multiple sclerosis (MS) information, a political ad obtrusively took over half the side rail in TauMed’s 3 column-ish layout. Suffice to say, Tuaseef quickly pointed out their product team is in the midst of improving their ad-serving backend. He also added TauMed was an early AdMomentum customer, putting much of the platform under rigorous testing and customization.
But let’s face it, as Web 2.0 as TauMed 1.0 is, they still have a numbers problem. Not the financial kind, but traffic. Outside of mass media advertising, you’ve got a classic case of a company needing some good ol’ fashioned grassroots and word-of-mouth marketing. Perhaps they should also reach out to other social software providers supplying the resources to companies building intranets, niche communities, and other social-oriented portals. You could even include some of the office 2.0 candidates like ZoHo, CentralDesktop, and others. They too will become more and more dependent on customized content as user bases grow. I guess you could think of it as enabling TauMed to become the de facto health widget.
However it plays out, they’re an interesting company that has a new evangelist.
Technorati tags:
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FAST,
AdMomentum,
FAST+Search,
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Central+Desktop,
health+2.0Cross-posted @ WOW Feed::Tracking New Media and Technology
by Jevon MacDonald
February 14, 2007 at 12:17 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
A lot of the conversations I have been having lately, and a lot of the posts I am seeing in the Enterprise 2.0 world, seem to be focusing on the search for some sort of answer. The Killer App, Mass Adoption, Search at the Center, Re-engineering large organizations…
The problem as it seems to me is quite different.
Up until now, we have been building systems, intranets, databases, CRM tools, etc. with the presumption that we are capturing some sort of Answer. That there is one small bit of fact that will always stay the same.
The most difficult reality is that nothing stays the same. The smart answer today is a stupid idea within weeks. Of the best thinkers we have today, very few of them will make any real difference in the future.
How will a new breed of enterprise tools allow for this?
- Search must focus on returning context more than answers.
- Ideas must be allowed to fail, and success must be acknowledged.
- Adoption is impossible, people take ownership
- The best result must be found, not determined.
- People have an innate need to create, they do not have an innate need to find, or be shown.
- My network beats your hierarchy 10-to-1 every time
What other changes do we need to respect in new enterprise software and platforms? What real needs do we now have a chance to address?
by Bill Ives
February 12, 2007 at 12:52 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Jim McGee raised some great points with his post, Auditors and Enterprise 2.0 technologies. I have also encountered this specially when talking to a whole firm of auditors. I certainly agree with all his counter points, especially his close, “By making the thinking and the debate visible and organized, you blunt, if not disarm, those who would try to portray the debate as something other than what it was.”
I would add that working in a transparent common space makes any potential bad behavior more visible, trackable, and even controllable. The fear is not how web 2.0 tools and approaches will be misused. While they can be misused it is much less likely than the siloed tools. The fear is rather how people will misuse the old style siloed tools like email and IM (or even telephone) to inappropriately convey what goes on in the common public space by taking it out of public view. With email you lose control once it is sent out. With a blog or wiki it remains visible. The auditors should love the web 2.0 tools because you can more easily audit them.
by Hylton Jolliffe
February 12, 2007 at 11:26 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
A “table of contents” for those catching up on the posts and discussions that took place here last week. In this post we pull together quick pointers to video interviews conducted over the three days of the conference.
Interviews by David Weinberger, in no particular order:
- Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of “The Long Tail”
- John Battelle, author, blogger, editor, media entrepreneur
- Jeanette Borzo of the Economist Intelligence Unit
- Matthew Brown, a senior analyst at Forrester Research
- John Markus Lervik, founder and CEO of FAST
- Carl Frappaolo of the Delphi Group
- Stephen Gallagher, Senior Director at Accenture
- Susan Feldman, IDC
- Dorothea Herrey of Dow Jones Consumer Media Group
- Bill Inmon of Inmon Data Systems
- Dan Keldsen of the Delphi Group
- Zia Zaman, FAST
- Lydia Loizides, former exec of tech and emerging media at Interpublic Media
- Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School
- Tom Mandel of ConnectBeam
- Kathleen Gilroy, Otter Group
- Hadley Reynolds, FAST
- Jim McGee of the Huron Consulting Group
- Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media
- James Robertson of Step Two Designs
- Michael Schrage, MIT
- Euan Semple, consultant, formerly of BBC
- Sandeep Swadia, FAST
- David Watson, Digital Media at Disney/ABC
Interviews by Kathleen Gilroy:
- “The meaning of search“
- a montage of statements by conference participants on the meaning and future of search
- Tim O’Reilly:
- Web 2.0 is defined by building systems that get better as much people use them. This means asymmetric competition in the information business. But there are opportunities to work in the global information commons. O’Reilly hosted a panel where he interviewed the search person from Reed and the head of business development for Fast. They discussed producing more contextual search and looking at federated search where the data coming from multiple customers was combined and made available.
- Andrew McAfee:
- Enterprise 2.0 is about new forms of collaboration and unlike previous enterprise computing efforts, e20 enables the expression and capture of judgement.
- E20 will not happen just by building new technologies and expecting people to use them. It is hard to get e20 to become part of the DNA of a company and it will require sustained management and leadership through coaching, rewards and incentives, leadership, and building a culture that is attuned to the benefits of working in this new way.
- E20 is very different from groupware (Notes, Sharepoint) in that it is very unstructured. Groupware often failed because it demanded too many rules and the terms of interaction were defined from the start.\
- Ray Lane on the “interpersonal enterprise”
by Jim McGee
February 12, 2007 at 8:51 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Over a lunch conversation on Thursday with Andrew McAfee, a group of us discussed barriers and enablers for adopting Enterprise 2.0 technologies within organizations. One objection that I have often seen raised came up in this conversation as well; that blogs, wikis, and other collaboration technologies represent new risks in an era of increased scrutiny and regulation. The reasoning goes that there is already too much risk associated with tools like email and IM of inappropriate behaviors being subject to discovery and that, if anything, for sensitive issues no electronic traces should ever be created.
The primary fear appears to be that legitimate internal debate and discussion of complex problems will be taken out of context and misrepresented. I think this fear actually represents a powerful argument in favor of Enterprise 2.0 technologies as a decided improvement over today’s ad hoc environment of email, instant messaging, and scattered memos and presentations. By design, Enterprise 2.0 technologies contextualize the development and refinement of ideas as a social activity. By making the thinking and the debate visible and organized, you blunt, if not disarm, those who would try to portray the debate as something other than what it was.
by Kathleen Gilroy
February 10, 2007 at 11:42 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, videos
I spent time at the FastForward 07 conference in San Diego asking people if search had changed their lives. Here’s what they said….
by Jerry Bowles
February 10, 2007 at 5:25 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Let’s be honest for a moment: FAST is not the first company you think about when you think of search. If you’re like me, four days ago, you probably thought the whole competitive landscape for search technology had already been definitively settled. Google won. Game. Set. Match.
But, like me, you’d be wrong. The FASTForward Conference in San Diego was a real eyeopener for me and, I know from talking to several other bloggers, a number of us who haven’t been following search nearly as closely as we should. It wasn’t just the size of the crowd–more than one thousand people (more than double last year’s attendance) or the big name speakers like John Batelle and Andrew McAfee and Tim O’Riley that made the event seem so special–what really raised the magic quotient was the palpable sense of excitement among the many customers and users in attendance that enterprise search is still in its infancy and we’ve only begun to think of great applications for it.
A lot of this year’s buzz was generated by the idea that enterprise search is the gateway to all those mountains of hard-to-find information that reside in relational databases. (See Joe McKendrick’s great post below). FAST CEO John Marcus Lervik even went so far as to predict that his most fierce competitor in a few years will not be Google, but Oracle. Huge as the idea of unlocking databases is, it only one of hundreds of applications and refinements of search that are already transforming and disrupting industries. We’ve barely scratched the surface of contextual search, for example, which will produce real competitive advantage to companies that learn to use it well.
My takeaways from the FASTForward conference are these: the enterprise search game is still up for grabs. Google hasn’t already won. Search is the new portal. Search changes everything.
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