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
Barriers, Enterprise 2.0
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
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