blueKiwi 2009 – The Sociology of Productivity is a Core Design Principle

March 30, 2009 at 6:48 pm · Filed under 2.0 Business Model, 2.0 Design Thinking, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Work-net-ing, Trusted Space, Web 2.0

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In November of 2008, Stowe Boyd and I were invited to speak at the soft launch of blueKiwi 2009, an innovative collaboration platform which is one of the leading European providers of Enterprise 2.0 social computing business software.  Stowe began the evening’s presentation with an overview of the high-level impacts of the web on human activities, I brought that down somewhat closer to the ground by providing a perspective on the impacts of interconnection and networks on organizational and management dynamics, and Carlos Diaz, the President and CEO of blueKiwi, gave the audience an excellent overview of blueKiwi’s value proposition and the design and new features offered by the 2009 version.

blueKiwi has now revamped its web site to signal the launch of the bK 2009 version and value proposition, and is “coming out” with bK 2009 at this week’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Last week I caught up with Carlos and co-founder Christophe Routhieau, CTO and software architect, in order to go into deeper detail as to why blueKiwi promises both innovation and pragmatic value as a social business collaboration platform.

We started off by covering a bit of history about blueKiwi’s roots and how the platform came into being just as the Web began to have major impact on the knowledge-based workplace.  Carlos and Christophe were already successful web entrepreneurs in France.  Carlos and his brother Manuel co-founded the web agency groupeReflect and Christophe joined the agency in 2000, and the team managed it successfully through several business cycles, eventually selling it to Emakina, an interactive marketing agency.   Carlos and Christophe said it was useful and important to the early success of blueKiwi that they are coming to the issues of collaboration and social computing from the web rather than from a starting point in the pre-web information technology world (the traditional software world).

The initial version of blueKiwi was conceived and built prior to the advent of the domain known as Enterprise 2.0 in response to client organizations that wanted to use Web 2.0 capabilities inside their organizations to communicate more spontaneously and efficiently. So they and their early clients understood that people were growing into using the Web, and wanted to use that knowledge and understanding to inform the core design principles, functionality and usability of the first version of blueKiwi, which was built and implemented at one of their key clients, Dassault Systems.

Given that all the serious Enterprise 2.0 platforms claim to focus on the sociality now seen as central to effective responsiveness and organizational agility and effectiveness, I asked them what differentiates bK2009 from some of the other leading Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platforms.  For me, this is where things start to get really interesting and what I find exciting about what blueKiwi has to offer.  Starting from the vantage point of the Web 2.0-savvy user, they have designed and built blueKiwi to be user-centric whilst responding to the business issues that require the building, distributing and  and deploying of business-focused knowledge … the essence of social business computing, in my opinion.

bK2009 is centered on the building, nourishing and sustaining of business-focused relationships – building useful knowledge and getting things done.  Carlos and Christophe pointed out that they had learned something important during the 2nd wave of blueKiwi’s adoption by clients … most collaboration systems start from the point of view of technical capabilities and do not make it easy, or overlook, the building and growing of relationships.  In the past, users of collaborative platforms had to go about building their business relationships, both internally and externally, outside of the collaboration system / platform.  bK2009 is first and foremost a means of building valuable and value-added relationships in the course of doing one’s work … it can enable, contain and manage all the activity in a business ecosystem.

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Digging a bit deeper, I asked them what they thought was unique about blueKiwi.  Carlos and Christophe believe that not only is their product design different from competitors, but they are very enthused about breaking new ground with the “economic model” offered by blueKiwi.  The feel that with bK 2009 they are breaking new ground in two ways.

First … all collaboration platforms offer spaces where people can connect, gather, share and exchange information.  Thus far, the mainstream approach has been to offer spaces where people can connect and gather, and then share content … information about issues, problems, and areas of interest, and as people exchange and collaborate, useful knowledge is built.  bK2009 turns this upside down, or around (you choose).  It is designed on the principle that the collaborative space is there for content and its distribution, and the individual user then chooses which groups she or he wishes to engage with.  Thus, any individual user can be a member of the groups they have chosen to interact with.  And of course it has a Twitter clone as one of its features.

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What eventuates is a network of interaction around pertinent content, and thus over time an ecosystem around issues in which engagement is de facto defined by the users’ interest and willingness to engage.  This then leads to the ability to watch and quantify the volume of interactions and obtain a better, and visible , understanding of the value that is being created (responsiveness, innovation, deepening understanding and so on).

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There are three key effects stemming from this approach:

1. there is an inherent, and ongoing, flexibility in creating and participating in (”on the fly”, said Carlos) any given group (reminiscent of Clay Shirky’s “ridiculously easy group-forming ) – the individual is always in a sense at the centre of an information ecosystem in which she or he is by definition an integral part,

2. thus, an organization’s productive social networks are developed out of the interactions between individuals (I call this the “natural sociology of knowledge work”), which in effect reproduces the dynamics of blogging or using LinkedIn or Facebook, and

3. bK 2009’s profiles reveal an individual’s contributions in a dynamic and interactive way … an user creates his or her profile, but others can add to it (a la reputation systems) and finally, the bK 2009 platform offers up various analytics on the types and foci of any user’s inter-activities.

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Second … as blueKiwi has evolved through its second wave of client installations, what it learned was the practical logic of Metcalfe’s Law of Networks, whereby the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected members of the network (debate continues, as you will note in the links and citations at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry).  To date, the standard model of pricing for social computing / social business platforms involves fees based on the number of seats or users.  The more users, the larger the fee, and the fewer the users, the less the fee.  So, many organizations begin with pilots, or make decisions about enhancing collaborative capability that involve decisions about the difficulty and costs of customization of their installation of Sharepoint or IBM Lotus Connections.

Back to Metcalfe’s Law …  blueKiwi believes that organizations should realize that collaboration in connected networks is the way work will be done all the time in the near future, and so organizations should seek to enroll and engage the entire organization in the use of the collaborative platform.  Thus, the fees to use bK2009 are based on the levels of user activity each month.  As activity increases the value to the organization increases, and accordingly blueKiwi’s revenues from that client increase.  Conversely, if there is no activity, there is no revenue to blueKiwi.

This is essentially like pricing a utility, like paying for electricity or water … so, if eventually all or almost all knowledge work is going to happen on a collaborative platform, it makes sense that the platform and its capabilities be seen as one of the organization’s necessary utilities. As activity increases and the value to the organization increases, so should the price paid for the capabilities that help create the value.  Technology is thus not a cost per se, rather the activity the technology enables reflects the price and value of the utility, and the users determine the ROI.

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Regarding its positioning in the Enterprise 2.0 market space, Carlos stated that bK 2009 is coming from the position of having “nothing to defend”.  What does he mean ?  He means that, for example, Sharepoint or IBM Lotus have fundamental technology assumptions and massive installations to defend, whereas blueKiwi is a new player, one that is coming from origins in / on the web as opposed to previous, pre-web IT design principles and  architecture.  They (blueKiwi) watched consumer behaviour on the web, Dassault Systems asked them to help build a system for more spontaneous, efficient and effective exchanges of information and knowledge, and the result after several years of intense design, development and deployment is a collaborative platform that in my opinion more closely mirrors the natural sociology of knowledge work than any other platform about which I know.  The fundamental design principle stems not from the “technology” that supported existing work processes, whereby the design and architecture of the technology drives the way(s) users operate it (or try to do so), but from how people exchange and use information and knowledge.

bK 2009 is a “social technology” .. a couple of other capabilities reinforce this position.  bK 2009 enables users to plug in and use a range of widgets so that they can take advantage of a wide range of pertinent socially-generated information and knowledge (this is closely aligned with some of my previous mutterings about mass customization / mass personalization of knowledge work).  As both Carlos and Christophe stated, the ultimate goal is have organizations recognize that bK 2009 is effectively a layer over the organization’s existing IT architecture, and that it can and should operate as a strategic complementarity to existing databases, enterprise search engines, security functions and so on.  It’s a social technology, and blueKiwi wants existing and future client organizations to see its design and capabilities as offering a “Social Hub” that complements an organization’s existing industrial-strength information technology architecture and investments.

Over and above the offering for large enterprises considering Enterprise 2.0 possibilities, blueKiwi is also now offering bK2009 Pro Edition for small and medium-sized organizations, for a flat (and affordable) fee.   An interesting wrinkle … it allows such organizations to invite external members of its value web to join and interact.  So, effectively it is providing these organizations with what they would today seek to accomplish by setting up a Facebook group (effectively side-stepping any potential hassles with Facebook privacy or Facebook owning all the member data).  Neat !

I was impressed by this company and its people when I spent time with them, and I remain impressed.  Can you tell ?

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UPDATE: If you want to know more about bK2009 or can’t see the detail on the screen shots well enough to understand as well as you’d like to, here are three short, well-produced video clips that help explain how bK2009 helps Foster Conversations, Build Efficient Networks and Bring People Together.

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News – Context or Commodity?

March 30, 2009 at 8:45 am · Filed under CPB, NPR, PBS

The reasons for the death of Newspapers and Network TV are many. But one thing is for sure – that more and more people don’t read papers or watch Network news. The excuse given by those who work in both is mainly that they have put all the good stuff on the web for free. They go on to lament the fact that the public are losing their connection to Quality news.

I think that this is self serving rubbish that is simply not born out by the facts. Are the newspapers and is Network TV really the quality source of journalism that they all claim?

When I saw this chart the other day – my little grey cells began to fire big time. What might it mean that NPR’s audience may have increased by nearly 100% over the last 10 years and newspapers decreased by 11.4% and network news by 28%? These are staggering differences and surely demand an explanation?

Here is my hypothesis. It is my observation that most papers and most of the Network News organizations have given up offering context and have made News into a disconnected stream of soundbites and headlines. NPR’s rise has been driven by a focus on providing people with the context and the deep understanding of what is going on.

• For all the claims for investigative journalism and getting to the truth and the bottom of things, Network TV and most papers follow the adage “If it bleeds – it leads” Loud disconnected headlines. Almost no seeking for a context. Almost never asking why or what is really going on. In fact they have made the news more and more confusing by not offering up the bigger picture.

• Generally the papers and the TV networks got the two biggest stories of our time wrong! They generally bought the whole deal about going to war. They generally missed warning signs of the financial disaster that has unfolded. Most still have nothing helpful to say about both today. Most still offer only today’s headlines. Most still confuse the people even more.

• NPR and other Public radio Producers (WBEZ, WBUR etc) and PBS (Newshour, Frontline. Bill Moyers, Charlie Rose etc.) on the other hand have made a conscious effort to help us understand what is going on. Planet Money has become THE Show on the financial crisis with over a million downloads of its podcasts a week. Margaret Warner is becoming an expert in her own right on the complexities of Afghanistan. It was a special moment to see the regard that Ambassador Holbrooke and General Petraeus gave her last week. She knows as much as any westerner can about what is going on there.

I think that it is this POV – to find the context – that has pulled NPR and Pub Radio away from the herd. I think that there is a hunger in America to understand and that Public Radio and TV are on track to meet that hunger.

Yes the web is important – NPR’s podcasts reach a new un-served audience that is 15 years younger than the radio. Yes most of PBS news is now online and free. But many papers and the networks have most of their news content online too.

In complex times CONTEXT is surely what has made the difference?

Now I see even more exciting moves as CPB realizes that if the resources of Public Radio and TV News and Opinion are aggregated and made even easier to obtain that the lead in audience will widen further. This is now being worked on.

In 2010 Pub Media will go beyond offering context as content but will find the best ways of aggregating this and making it very easy to access and to participate with.

As they get closer to being able to do this I think that the economics will come.

In the next post in this short series, I will talk about the last leg of this stool – the participation aspect of the work. I will look at how the voice of the citizen can be brought in and how Pub Media is planning to transcend news itself and help citizens return to the great tradition of America – of citizens solving their own problems locally.

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All in a Day’s Work — in 140 Characters or Less

March 28, 2009 at 10:44 am · Filed under FASTforward'09

Can you summarize what you’ve accomplished within Twitter’s 140-character limit? Geek & Poke’s Oliver Widder explores the possibilities.

(P.S. The above statement used only 136 characters…)

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CNBC Sourpuss disses ‘networking’

March 27, 2009 at 4:06 pm · Filed under Seth Godin, Social Networking

The ultimate form of “turbo networking:”

“Hi, my name is Joe. What can you do for me?”

In a new post, CNBC’s Jim Mason admonishes readers to “Forget What You’ve Heard—Stop Networking!” He claims that networking has gotten out of hand, and that we should stop using the word “network” as a verb.

“Introducing yourself to as many random people as possible in order to advance your career is, amazingly enough, actually a bad use of your time.”

I understand where he’s coming from, but he misses the point.

Of course, networking simply for the sake of pushing services or wares is transparent and can be downright obnoxious. And no where is it more transparent than within social networks. As Seth Godin recently put it, “we all cringe, its like someone trying to sell mutual funds at a funeral or at a cocktail party.”

Networking works best when it creates movements, connects tribes, and enables the sharing of information and insights between individuals and organizations.

Networks are powerful, and, contrary to what Mason says, are a very good use of your time — whether you are advancing your company, a project, or your own career.  As I’ve posted in the past, networks are the core of “Personal Outsourcing.” We no longer have to hope the individual in the next cubicle knows enough to help us with a problem. We now can cast a net across the entire globe.

But don’t approach networks with a sales pitch. As Seth Godin puts it, it’s a way “to connect to real people, and be connected to real people.”

In the meantime, don’t listen to the dour voices at the mainstream media, and keep on networking.

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What will happen when your local TV Station & Newspaper are Gone?

March 26, 2009 at 8:30 am · Filed under CBC, CPB, FASTforward'09, NPR, News, PBS, Platforms, Public Media, Public Radio, Public TV, TV

We are surely entering a new reality? The discussion of the “Deathwalk” of papers and TV Stations has until now been academic but now hardly a week passes when a city or town loses one or the other.

What will happen in your town when there is no more “Official News”?

Of course I don’t know but it may be fun to speculate. A good way to speculate I think is to think of nature. What does nature do when an over mature system crashes? When say a big tree falls or there is a forest fire?

Nature has a iron-clad set of rules for the death of an over mature system. The rule seems to be – the small and the fast growing fills in the space. In phase 2, the trees that can get height fast and shade out the rest come next. In phase 3 the slow growing larger trees push by aggregate and then dominate. And then the cycle continues.

So if this pattern is reliable then this is what will happen when your community loses its Big News.

• The Fast Growing New Growth  the “Poplars” – The best of the local bloggers will rise in prominence. Some of the personal brands in the old will also join the local blogging scene. These bloggers will not only write about what interests them but some will pull in and filter news from around the world. They will act as much as taste makers and editors as contributors. But many will also wish to focus on what interests them – “Beats” in effect. Food, politics, books, whatever. The new system is largely here but it has low structure and hence low value.

• Aggregation – Very quickly some of these will form an affiliation. We have seen an early variant of this in St Louis with the establishment of the Beacon. The Beacon is an online “News” service made up of many of the best journalists that used to work for the main Paper the Post Dispatch. The Beacon has moved into the offices of KETC, the PBS local TV station. (Postscipt – Here is a major article by The Current – the Trade Magazine of Pub Media on this work) There are plans for KWMU, the local NPR radio station and the local University to move in too. A great addition will be to find a way to pull in the best of the bloggers. This has not yet been done but is surely possible and desirable. Also on the cards will be the power of this local system to pull in great national and international coverage. CPB, NPR and PBS are working on how best to create and offer a combined feed of the best of their News in one easy to use complete forum. As this aggregation phase builds so does the overall value to all parties in it. The Network Effect benefits all. Costs fall, ROI rises. It becomes central to the economic, social and political health of the community. Being so widespread it excludes competitors. You either have to join or die. It is also hugely valuable to the global producers and to the global aggregators. At some point, NPR and PBS and maybe the BBC also have to form their own aggregated system that lives on top of the local system?

• Climax – I think that the climax or mature and stable phase will emerge from the Aggregation process. This is surely what Sloan did for GM? GM in its heyday was built on the aggregation of a number of brands.  But this time, there is a different economic model. This was not the result of a traditional use of financial capital. Now we have a global system that is truly PUBLIC. It has strong economic roots and is sustainable but it is no longer controlled by a few men with access to credit. It would be very hard to attack by any political force as well.

If I am right and that nature does offer us a model, then the Aggregation phase is where the future lies. The people that can lead the aggregation will “win”. If we can do this in the Public sector then the Public will win.

So where will this happen in your community?

In the US I think that St Louis offers us a strong hint. Journalists, Public TV and Radio can get together to offer a home for the rest of the local blogging ecosystem. They can also pull in national and global content and offer up stories from their own place. I think that the current talks between CPB, NPR and PBS are also very encouraging.

But what about Canada? Would the local music station be the aggregator? How easy/hard would it be for a few bloggers to do this – hard I think. We don’t have the emergent local system that the US has. This tells me that the urgency in the US to “see” their total public system for what it is – the future – is extreme.

It’s all there to win or lose.

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