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.
