Archive for February, 2007
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.
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.
[photopress:simon_revell_wikiwed.jpg,full,alignright]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
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.
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