In November of 2008 I spent several weeks in Paris, France speaking at a conference and with several Enterprise 2.0 startups, and was pleasantly surprised at some of the sophisticated concepts and capabilities I discovered.
One of the ongoing (and growing) trends in the workplace is the personalization of work … how you, the individual knowledge worker, carry out the work, choose and use the tools with which it is carried out, and fit yourself into the attendant rhythms of collaboration and co-creation built up from processing constant flows of information. I have written about what I call the “mass customization of work” before … I’ll Do It My Way – The Mass Customization of Knowledge Work, and Personalizing Collaborative Work … Individuals and Co-Creation. I am about to add another blog post (this one), which may be the beginning of a series on the personalization-of-work theme.
One of the interesting startups I encountered is PersonAll, being developed by a couple of young French entrepreneurs, Jeremy Grinbaum (President, previously of Google Enterprise search) and Jean-Patrice Glafkides (CTO, previously of HP Software).
PersonAll provides organizations with the means of offering its workers a fully personalized knowledge work portal. It allows each and every employee of an organization to integrate external information (from RSS feeds and other sources) to create always-on sources of information on markets, customers, industries, issues, topics, etc. of interest and utility to the worker, and all pertinent internal information (work team, departmental and organizational objectives, the organization’s news, new policies, access to databases and archives, internal collaboration platforms, etc.). It also enables each and every employee to publish information to destinations where they are involved in the activities of a given community or group.
PersonAll accomplishes this through what Jeremy and Jean-Patrice call a “strategy of constraints”, wherein peoples’ configurations and activities are managed by permissions. Users can access a catalogue of portlets (modular pre-packaged / designed content. There are two types of modules; 1) generic modules which users can customize within certain constraints (such as an RSS reader) and 2) specific modules selected from the previously-mentioned catalogue.
Here’s a quick look at a personalized work screen (though I suspect that the picture is not sufficiently large for you to get a decent sense of the different personalized components of the work screen).
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Effectively, PersonAll lets you, the user, configure the screen you always have in front of your eyes and ears with the combinations and configurations of flows of information and information-processing services that are the most useful to YOU, that help you be your most productive according to your cognitive and collaborative styles.
An extensive use of tags is at the heart of PersonAll’s design and functionality. This serves two key aspects:
1. the classification of “objects” (profiles, articles, modules, etc.), and
2. the management of users’ rights and permissions.
Essentially, this enables the easy and rapid formation, sustenance and (self) management of work communities around topics, subjects and other items of interest and pertinence.
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PersonAll’s business model is aimed at helping organizations reduce costs while improving knowledge worker productivity. This will happen through enhancing effective collaboration and at the same time providing employees with choice when it comes to the the work tools they use. For example, with their own personall-ized work portal, people can migrate easily between projects or between social computing environments.
In principle, the widespread use of PersonAll in an organization also facilitates obtaining values from latent and explicit folksonomies, as PersonAll also offers the organization a range of statistical analysis tools whereby aggregate views of the kinds of exchanges and use of information flows and services can be examined and analyzed, as catalysts for augmenting the organizations ‘collective intelligence’.
In terms of technical design and architecture, PersonAll is based on Java standards, and is optimized for the major browsers like IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome. Of course it is designed to plug into and sit on top of all major / common forms of integrated information systems such as those found in most major enterprises …. the “of course” at the beginning of this sentence refers to the fact that if it weren’t it would not be very useful in PersonAll’s target market, non ? Sacré bleu, zut, alors !
It is also ‘backwards compatible’ with browsers and enterprise platfroms / portals, and completely compatible with what most of us call the “Consumer Web 2.0″. As Jeremy and Jean-Patrice pointed out to me, enterprise social computing can be characterized generally as 2 to 3 years behind the consumer Web in terms of trying, using and adapting to web tools and services, and they are aiming to make it easy to try and adopt … or let’s say minimizing the reasons for any given enterprise to say ‘No’.
PersonAll has some early revenue-generating clients, a good degree of recognition and profile in the Enterprise 2.0 space in France, and some exciting plans up their sleeves for the next year or so.
As some readers may know, I think that the use of social computing tools and services combined with collaborative platforms is THE future of knowledge work and that this major trend will inexorably lead to the re-design of fundamental assumptions about the design of knowledge work.
The personalization of knowledge work and PKM (personal knowledge management) is clearly an established and tangible trend. Given a few breaks and early adoption by a few progressive organizations, I think that this small but smart French start-up has an interesting and exciting future in front of it.
It is now clear that media as we have known it may die before the end of 2010. It is not only newspapers with over borrowed owners and dwindling ad revenues, but TV networks with the same fatal structural flaws. Public Radio and TV are also at risk with states and universities cutting back funding and with shrinking public and underwriting support.
What kind of media if any will we have left by 2011?
I think that Vivian Schiller, (Here is a short video that has her views in a nutshell) the new CEO of NPR is offering a realistic vision for what can emerge. I want to take the key ideas that she has been talking about in a number of public venues and add more flesh and supporting ideas from others in the system that I respect
Here are what I have heard as her key points starting with two areas to avoid:
That there is no silver bullet – such as get a big grant to support us as we are – she can see that as we are, we are not viable
That finding the new minority niche is the holy grail – instead improve access for she feels that if we serve properly then all will be served by our content and by our connection – that the young, that minorities will find us and be involved if we are truly engaging and offer the access that meets their needs
Her big idea is a really really big tent that is a true network that uses all the power of a true network.
The Uber News Network – The future of public media is to be found in a true network that comprises NPR, the Stations, PBS, The Citizens who live in the local communities and others who wish to serve the local community that may include the newspaper or the journalists who used to work at the local newspaper such as The Beacon in St Louis.
That all involved have to see themselves as being more than broadcasters and to see themselves as widely serving the community – that we move beyond content to connection.
That NPR goes out and works to help the stations.
That we build all of this on the deep foundation of good will that exists.
I want to expand on this idea with supporting ideas from other people that have the respect of the system – for part of Vivian Schiller’s brilliance is that she is an exceptional listener and has been ingesting the thoughts and the mood of the system.
The Uber News Network
The Opportunity – By 2011, it is likely that much of the media of today will be gone. Many communities will be without a paper or a local TV station. If things continue the way that they are, the economy may be far worse and much of the effort to save us all will be seen as having failed. The nation will be starved for meaning.
Today, only a few parts of the media are offering Meaning to America and indeed to the world. It is a remarkable achievement that Planet Money is cited by both the Senate and by the Secretary of the Treasury as the ideal place to find language and an approach that makes the crisis possible to understand. The NewsHour is doing the same kind of work as is Bill Moyers.
This is not gotcha journalism. This is meaning making and it is almost exclusively available on Public Radio, TV and now the web.Now all the key content is available at at any time on the web. It would be a simple matter to curate a local page that would have every news source in one easy to find place.
More. Public Insight journalism is growing and the expertise of the community is being brought into the mix. More, on Planet Money, that had learned to connect to an audience in its proto version, BPP, a huge amount of material comes in from a passionate group of supporters.
Imagine then a system that had it all. Global, National, Regional and Hyper Local – Pro Journalist and expert blogger – all working together to give us the help is finding meaning in these mysterious and frightening times?
Vivian Schiller’s big idea is to fill this void of meaning by bringing all of this power to make meaning together. Her big idea is to create so much value that the system gets supported for this.
Moving beyond content to connection – from Audience to Tribe
As the institutions that we all took for granted die, so many of us then will risk losing our identity. Identity is all about our “Tribe”. Our Tribe is often our job and workplace. It can be a sports team. It can be our family. Our identity comes from these connections. In our true tribal past, expulsion from the tribe is the extreme punishment. It is still so today.
As people lose jobs and roles, the search for identity will become the most powerful force in society.
In these terrible times many want to belong and find identity in helping make their community and America well again. These longings are already held in the existing Public Radio and TV “Tribe” For Public radio is itself a huge tribe. Here is how Schiller sees this “Tribe”:
It was the beginning of November and it got a bit of coverage on NPR obviously, and the New York Times and several other places. And I heard from just about everybody I’ve ever known and I got a lot of voice mails and over a thousand e-mails from people I’ve known through various stages of my career because I’ve moved around a little bit. And first of all, it was very nice of course, and I spent my month off in December answering every one of those e-mails.
But as I read through them, something really profound struck me. Which is they were all the same. In the sense that, the first sentence of every e-mail would be something like “Oh congratulations, we’re happy for you and blah blah blah…” and from the second sentence and through the rest of every single e-mail, was an expression of what NPR (and when they say NPR they could be listening to a show from PRI, APM, from their local broadcaster – they really mean public radio, so please understand that I interpret it that way) but what NPR means to them. And it was always very, very personal. It was a show they plan their commute around, or it was a story that touched them and actually motivated them to action, or it was a reporter or anchor that they feel a natural obsession with… but whatever it was, it was very intimate. And there was almost a sense for each one that NPR is MINE. For each of these e-mailers, NPR is mine. It belongs to me.
And I realized that what we have that is so extraordinary is a relationship with our audience – (and it’s a huge audience – I’ll mention that in a minute) that has a relationship with us that’s not just on an intellectual level (as it certainly is) but also on a very emotional level. And that is a powerful thing. I know of no other media company that has that connection in the head and the heart that public radio does. And by the way – in huge numbers. 26 million people tune in to some NPR program – through of course their local station – on a weekly level. That is more than the circulation of the top 50 US newspapers combined. That’s a lot of people.
Just to give you a couple more statistics about what an impact we have – and this is where that carnival barker thing comes in, so forgive me – Morning Edition has a larger audience than any of the network morning shows. The next biggest one is The Today Show and our audience is 45% bigger than Today viewing. Car Talk (and we’re not just serious stuff so I’m going to compare Car Talk to less serious stuff) is twice as big as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report combined. That’s pretty powerful and it’s growing. So there’s audience. Brand is the second thing. With the possible exception of the New York Times, I know of no other media company that evokes the same kind of loyalty that NPR does as an entity. There are certainly forms of other branded media that have larger audiences – Facebook has 175 million active users which is a mind-blowing number but I don’t think anybody goes “God, I love Facebook” they love their connection to other people. It’s not an affinity for the brand.
And in other broadcast media, it’s the shows. The most successful television show in the history of broadcast news is 60 Minutes. And there’s a lot of loyalty to 60 Minutes, but that’s not helped CBS with their other shows necessarily. People don’t think about CBS they think about 60 Minutes. NBC’s successful morning and evening shows have loyal audiences – smaller as I’ve already mentioned – but that hasn’t been much help to their primetime lineup, which has been in fourth place for years. So the loyalty there is to shows. With us, the loyalty is to the brand, which is very powerful.
There is huge potential power here – not just for more pledges but for something bigger. It is in this Tribe that the value resides that can take public radio and TV to the next level.
This tribe can be expanded way beyond the current Tribe – all the groups that Public radio have wanted to serve, the young, minorities etc can find their place in the Tribe that wants to work to make America and their community well again.
We can see this expansion and deepening of the tribe in the CPB sponsored work in St Louis – where KETC is acting as the connector between the helping agencies and the people who need help. Many of the people involved had not been part of the tribe before but are now. CPB are now funding a 30 station expansion of this work where TV and Radio stations will work to help their communities help themselves.
The person who I think gets this better than anyone I know is John Proffitt who works in Anchorage. Here is his current view on the shift to seeing our work as supporting Tribe and Identity. Here are 2 key slides that I hope make his ideas more clear:
I think that Vivian Schiller, and people like John Proffitt, intuitively see the power of Public Media to give people an identity when all might seem too confusing or lost.
As a Facilitator of Tribes – Public Media truly serves the public and gives the community back its power. What greater act of public service could there be?
Vivian Schiller is clear – she knows that most stations are hanging on by their fingernails. To make any of this happen demands that there is catalytic help. She suggests that NPR staff can and should offer this help.
Without help – I fear that this will remain just a few good ideas. The stations are getting locked down in fear and have to be helped.
But I think we can do more than offer help from a few NPR folks.
In the 1930’s Roosevelt set up great public works to give people a wage and their dignity back. The backbone of the nation’s infrastructure was built then.
I think that the New Public Media system can be the Hoover Dam of our time!
Already the unemployed and the under employed geeks are mobilizing and looking for work and identity. Here is a link to Laid Off Camp – a nation wide effort to make connections in the Geek Community.
It is not only citizen journalists that the new network can rely on. It is not only citizen groups that we can rely on. My bet is that the right call will mobilize the Geeks of America to help build the new network.
If we called, the people would come. They would come and they would become us. The separation of audience and station would melt away.
What Next?
How to get started? Public Radio and TV are not a monolith. Like Republican Rome, the culture and structure make it hard to take action. In fact it is almost impossible to get collective action. In the last few weeks I have talk with several friends – all long for someone to take the lead.
In my reading of the runes, along with Tom Thomas of SRG and Mark Fuerst of IMA I think that enough people are ready. I think that Vivian Schiller has correctly sensed the vision and the plan.
If you also listen to Pat Harrison of CPB and to Paula Kerger of PBS – you feel an alignment. They too have been saying many of these things.
All are reluctant to step forward. After all in the past, such leadership would be punished. This was not herding cats this was herding lions! But I think that this will not be the case today.
I think that the lead has to come from the top. I feel that if NPR, PBS and CPB got together and announced that they were behind an approach like this, that enough would say yes to form the core group and to get the work begun.
When Rome was confronted with a major crisis – they gave up their complex system of checks and balances and accepted direct leadership. I think that the system is ready for this and that it trusts the leaders of NPR, PBS and CPB to do what is best.
McKinsey has issued a useful report on six ways to make Web 2.0 work. They were covering Web 2.0 inside the enterprise so I rename their topic enterprise 2.0 for clarity in my own mind.They studied more than 50 early adopters to garner insights into successful efforts to use Web 2.0 as a way of unlocking participation surveyed, independently, a range of executives on Web 2.0 adoption.They found that unless a number of success factors are present, Web 2.0 efforts often fail to launch or to reach expected heights of usage. They also said that enterprise 2.0 might end up having a greater impact that such recent enterprise approaches as ERP and CRM.So far I agree with them.
Then I looked at their six success factors. Not only did I agree with them, but these six were some of the exact same success factors we found for process centric KM in the early 90s, at least at the headline level. Now some of the details are a little different to no surprise but the essence is the same. I am not saying that KM and enterprise 2.0 are the same but I think their success factors are similar so we can learn from the past. In addition, there is an historic continuity of the early process-centric KM and enterprise 2.0 when it is applied to business processes. I touched on these factors a bit in this series on early KM (see KM Stories: Lessons from Six Implementations).
Here are the six success factors McKinsey found for enterprise 2.0 and why they were essential for process-centric KM, and still are. I will let you go to the McKinsey report for the details of what they provide to enterprise 2.0.
One: The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top.I called this: Gain and Enlist Top Down Support to Overcome Turf Issues. I could have subtitled it in the early 90s as creating a culture of knowledge sharing from the bottom up. I also think that with process-oriented enterprise 2.0 you also need to overcome turf issues and top down support is needed for this effort.
Two: The best uses come from users but they require help to scale. Our research shows the applications that drive the most value through participatory technologies often aren’t those that management expects. I referred to this factor as Listen to the Users. Success is usually directly proportionate to the amount of user involvement. We turned to the process experts to build the KM supported need for these processes. In the past many firms had enterprise software that dictated process steps imposed on the users. Many of the users resisted this top down approach. So the involvement of users not only got the software right, it helped with adoption.
Three: What’s in the workflow is what gets used. For KM this was called – Align Knowledge Applications to Key Business Goals and Process as well as Design Measures Aligned to Business Processes. I have long thought that process centric KM is much more valuable than library centric KM. The later was what gave KM a bad name. The process centric approach was my introduction to KM and the better tools in enterprise 2.0 are a way to realize this approach.
Four: Appeal to the participants’ egos and needs not just their wallets – traditional methods tend to fall short when applied to unlocking participation.One way to do this is to address the daily business needs of the users or Design Performance Measures Aligned to Business Processes.If you put the tools into the workflow you will generally achieve this objective. Financial incentives that are for things that do not directly support work are domed to failure or gaming or both.
Five: The right solution comes from the right participants select users who will help drive a self-sustaining effort (often enthusiastic early technology adopters who have rich personal networks and will thus share knowledge and exchange ideas).We always looked to the evangelists to aid in the spread of KM. It is no different here.
Six: Balance the top-down and self-management of risk. Numerous executives we interviewed said that participatory initiatives had been stalled by legal and HR concerns.One way to avoid these obstacles is to involve all the key stakeholders from the start, another KM best practice.I remember when the legal department at one firm said they wanted to review everything that went into the KM system before it was placed there.That bottleneck would have killed the system. The legal department had not been involved from the start, a lesson learned. We were able to negotiate a compromise approach that allowed the project to move forward.
In summary, when you attempting to get people to embrace a new technology and business approach such as enterprise 2.0 that involved greater participation, lessons can be learned from the relevant past. I also think the similarity helps validate the six factors that McKinsey found.
Can Enterprise 2.0/Web 2.0 open up the world’s largest sprawling organization to realize greater transparency, agility, and community participation?
Vivek Kundra thinks so. He has just recently been appointed as the US federal government’s first CIO, and promises to move the government to adopt more consumer technology, as well as cloud computing. He sees cloud computing as an alternative to the “big IT” culture of federal agencies.
As reported by ComputerWorld’s Patrick Thibodeau, Kundra is also a big fan of social networking communities such as Facebook, which he sees as a potential model by which citizen-based communities can help drive policy. Facebook’s 140 million users have “been able to self-organize on issues, on policy, on problems and create a movement so people can be heard,” he is quoted as saying.
“We have the ability to run an open, transparent, participatory and collaborative government,” he also said.
Sounds like a great start. Doesn’t “Hi, I’m from the government, and I want to be your Facebook Friend” have a nice ring to it? (Okay, maybe a little scary, but at least a step in the right direction…)
Phweet is a very interesting service on two (or maybe three) levels.
First, if you are a heavy Twitter user, with a little bit of practice you can work it into your Twitter workflow, thereby offering you and followers a means to "escalate" from connecting via a tweet to a more intimate voice conversation.
Second, the same basic technology can be enabled anywhere … for example, on Craigslist or eBay or other community driven sites. In effect, the Phweet capabilities can become part of the Web’s voice communications infrastructure.
And third, although I do not understand well the technical aspects, I think Phweet can become a central part of telephony on the web, doing away with the big telcos stranglehold on the dial tone.
Join us for the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 Oct 3-6, Anaheim CA
With over 240 sessions, SPC11 will provide you with the training, insight, and networking you need to develop, deploy, govern and get the most from SharePoint. You’ll also hear from Microsoft Engineers, Product Managers, MCMs and MVPs who will discuss topics such as cloud services, best practices and real world project insights. To see a preview of the sessions we will be presenting at SPC11, click here.
To register, click here.
RECENT EVENT
Christian Finn Keynotes 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston
Microsoft's Director of SharePoint Product Management Christian Finn, an Enterprise 2.0 keynote speaker, talks about SharePoint, the future of enterprise collaboration and the value of community.
To read more, visit, CMS Wire
Or view the video of the keynote below:
SharePoint 2010 SocialFest
A group of seven startups recently joined us at SharePoint 2010 SocialFest, an event hosted by the Emerging Business Team at the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus.
The format: a week-long session focused on extending the SharePoint platform using their unique and innovative applications in the emerging social business space. In addition to intensive development time, the teams heard from various developer experts, SharePoint engineering, SharePoint product management and a panel of nventure investors.
The FASTforward blog periodically hosts webcasts - to hear a recent conversation with Denise Warren, general manager of NYTimes.com, and Alan Webber, author of "Rules of Thumb" and co-founder of Fast Company. The topic: how today's newspaper and magazine publishing companies are innovating to stay relevant (and profitable) click here.For the latest interview with Marty St.George, the CMO at jetBlue, click here
FASTforward 09: Video Interviews
Be sure not to miss our interview series with several dozen attendees of FASTforward'09, including all the contributors to this blog, as well as Clay Shirky, Charlene Li, and many other notable thinkers and doers. The interviews are tagged and can be accessed by topic.
Check out the first of a series of guides to the 2.0 world from the contributors of the FASTforward Blog. This and future FASTforward Blog guides aim to deepen understanding about topics we think critical to the future of the enterprise and how people and organizations communicate, collaborate, innovate, and more.
In this guide, Robert Paterson weaves together the many posts that have been written on the FASTforward blog about Twitter, the groundbreaking application that has attracted millions of users and is changing the way they provide, gather, and share information and insights.
This site is a companion blog to the FASTforward conference and summit series and is sponsored by FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary. The blog, like the conference series, aims to drive and deepen conversation about how today’s companies can use technology to place users in control of information, and is home to ongoing discussion about the user revolution and Enterprise 2.0 opportunities and challenges. More info here...
