A Sign of the Times: Web 2.0 Coming to Wall Street

August 2, 2007 at 11:57 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, event announcements

We already know that Wall Street loves Web 2.0 stuff — look at the valuations of companies such as Google, MySpace, Salesforce.com, and FaceBook (not publicly traded, but worth a lot).

But, interestingly, it appears Wall Street companies are beginning to employ Web 2.0 technologies in their own operations. Hence, the impetus behind the upcoming Web Tech 2.0 on Wall Street conference coming up in November. (Note the O’Reilly effect in action — it’s called “Web Tech 2.0,” not “Web 2.0″)

The event is being put on by the A-Team Group and Flagg Management, who also put on the Web Services/SOA on Wall Street and Linux/Open Source on Wall Street events every year.

According to the conference promoters, many of the heavyweights of Wall Street will be there. “Major firms including Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Wells Fargo, Jefferies, among others have Web 2.0 at work to reach new demographics and support new sales programs…. The major financial firms headquartered in New York will be there - Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, Salomon Smith Barney/Citibank. All have Web 2.0 programs.”

The promoters also say they will be looking at the platform aspects of Web 2.0 as well as the communication enablers — mashups, SaaS, and scalable data centers are all on the preliminary agenda.

Proposed topics include “Software as a Service (SaaS) – will it work for financial applications?”; “Rich User Interface technology options – AJAX, Flex, JavaFX and Silverlight – for the financial markets”; “Webtop delivery – a fresh approach to the trader workstation?”; “Mashups as the new messaging middleware for financial markets business processing”; ” Scalable and On Demand datacenter architectures to support Web 2.0 and SaaS delivery to Wall Street.”

Comments

McAfee, Davenport to Debate Merits of Enterprise 2.0

June 16, 2007 at 11:38 pm · Filed under Barriers, Enterprise 2.0, Podcasts, Web 2.0, event announcements

Prepare to feel the E2.0 ground rumble, epicenter Boston.

Two of the keenest thinkers on the information technology scene — Harvard’s Andrew McAfee (who provides the intellectual underpinnings to Enterprise 2.0) and Babson College’s Tom Davenport — will go head-to-head in an online videocast from the Web 2.0 conference taking place this week. ZDNet’s Dan Farber will moderate.

The debate/discussion is scheduled for Monday, June 18, at 10:00 a.m. Eastern.

Here is a link to the live videocast.

Davenport, author of Competing on Analytics and a vocal proponent of the power of IT to transform business published an article in Harvard Business Review questioning the value of Enterprise 2.0 to business. He considers E2.0 to be the “next small thing,” rather than “the next big thing,” as Andrew McAfee believes (and as we proclaim with such persistence at this blogsite.)

Davenport questions whether E2.0 technologies and services “will empower employees, decentralize decisions, free up knowledge, and generally make for better places to work,” as McAfee and many of us here at this blogsite believe.

Comments

Enterprise 2.0 Market Readiness Survey

May 9, 2007 at 7:55 am · Filed under Enterprise Rave 2.0, event announcements

In preparation for the Enterprise 2.0 Rave, now being run as a virtual event, the co-conveners of the event have put together a brief survey on market readiness that we hope you’ll take the time to fill out. We’ll be gathering responses and sharing the results with those who take the survey.

Take the survey at the URL below and feel free to spread the word or point to it from your own blog - the more people we can get to participate the more useful it’ll be:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=937203810006

Comments

Sun plans developer-focused, on-demand application grid services

May 8, 2007 at 4:40 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Microsoft, Web 2.0, event announcements, mashups

Before the end of the year, Sun Microsystems will follow the lead of Amazon and Microsoft in providing a “pay as you drink” applications hosting service that provides a lifecycle approach to new web application development and deployment.

In addition to announcing JavaFX Script, a lightweight programming language for creating rich online and mobile content, Sun software chief Rich Green said that Sun plans to leverage its grid and utility offerings — priced on a per-use basis — for swiftly building and deploying web applications, services, and mashups.
While specifics on the venture were limited, Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz seemed to embrace the initiative during a press conference at the JavaOne Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, indicating he thought having such services available soon would be beneficial to Sun’s business goals.

The Sun development and deployment as a service offering would follow other increasingly popular application hosting and infrastructure as a service offerings that are designed to offer developers and entrepreneurs quick, low-risk paths to production — from tool to test to deploy and then hot-provisioned scale. Amazon’s EC2 service, for example, has proven a boon to start-ups and departments within enterprises seeing a fast-track to applications and content hosting.

Sun may not be first in this space, but it does have the assets to be large. For example, Sun already has a compute-intensive grid, and ample storage as a service offerings. By bringing its tools, NetBeans framework, open source Java community, middleware, virtualized runtime containers, and pay-per-drink grid together provides a significant, long-term subscription opportunity for Sun and its partners.

I also think Sun needs to be more aggressive at bringing its own (or co-branded?) Web 2.0 services via open APIs to market. If Sun has OpenOffice.org, why not OpenOffice.Saas? If compilation of Java code as a service is impractical, how about debugging scripting and markup languages as a service? Can we do something with ID federation and management, or governance, or single sign-on, in this regard? Uh, huh.

If Sun can prove these approaches as viable, it can then package the services in association to its new “red shift” customers as they offer other niche services on top — from media to telecommunications to mobile commerce. If Microsoft can go “Live” so can Sun.

IBM, HP, and Red Hat may have other means to the market. For Sun, this should be a priority.

Comments

Let’s Get Ready to Rave! (Enterprise Rave, That Is)

April 20, 2007 at 8:53 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Rave 2.0, event announcements

Can I confess something. I have come to loath travel. Having knocked off Antarctica and Greenland and Iceland before I was 25 (courtesy the U.S. Navy) and spent a 20-year career in corporate communications traveling the world first and business class on other people’s money (back when first and business class actually meant something), I find airplane travel these days about as satisfying as careening down a Mexican mountainside on a 40-year old bus designed to hold 50 people with 162 fellow travelers and 57 live chickens.

You can imagine my delight, then, when Francois Gossieaux of Corante fame invited me to take part in Enterprise Rave 2.0, a 24 hour Enterprise 2.0 brainstorming session with fellow practitioners and guests on May 21-22 at the trendy Hudson Hotel in New York City. As fate would have it, I live across the street from the Hudson. If I turn my head slightly to the left and look out the window as I type this I can see it. That’s my kind of travel.

The program looks outstanding. Andrew McAfee will kick off the event on the evening of May 21 with a keynote address that frames the issues around E 2.0 and Euan Semple will kick off the next morning session with an “Introduction/Provocation.” (Euan is an outstanding provocateur and I mean that as a compliment.) Andy McAfee will instigate the afternoon. The rest of the schedule consists of facilitated breakout group discussions and reports and a final wrapup at the end of the day.

If you are a practitioner looking at deploying web 2.0 tools in your enterprise or actively struggling with pilot projects to try to do that, don’t miss this event. And if you are planning to go, use the link in the left sidebar (at Enterprise Web 2.0 if you’re seeing this somewhere else) to get a $250 discount. I’m looking forward to welcoming you to my neighborhood.

Comments

Bungee Labs starts off Web 2.0 Expo with a bang — web development as a service with a low-cost hosting model

April 16, 2007 at 7:41 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, SOA, Web 2.0, event announcements

It’s time to add another IT category to the official IT lexicon: software development and deployment as a service (SDDS). And this one’s a keeper.

That’s my conclusion after seeing a demonstration of Bungee Labs’ new Bungee Connect offering, which combines the virtues of online web application development with a near-real-time test and debug capability and with a click-to-host service that — now here’s the rub — costs the developer next to nothing to get into full production.

Here’s an offering that recognizes that new business models that vastly expand the universe of web services players is what the web is all about. The company goes live today at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, the service allows beta access May 1. Developers may register to participate in the early-access beta program at www.bungeelabs.com.

The attraction is not just in the WSYWIG, drag-and-drop, rich Ajax interface creation ease (sans controls) for those familiar with scripting and web applications development. It’s not just that said produced services, and aggregations of other services and objects, can be tested and debugged very quickly online. It’s not just that the application can then be deployed at scale to the world instantly via a responsive grid.
No, the real innovation is how the Bungee Connect model provides an incubator, and — in essence — a business development partner to the developer so that they do not just create an application — they can create a business. That’s because the cost for the use of the tools, testing, and then hosting is free, and the subscription cost for the at-scale hosting only kicks in based on the use of the application by end users. Low use means low costs, and high use means a predictable measure of the proceeds goes to the development and hosting service.

The deal is based on a straight-forward quid pro quo: Bungee Connect gives developers and entrepreneurs the start-up support for free, no charge during beta, and then the business stays with Bungee as the grid services provider while the applications ramp up into a sustainable business, or a low-cost TCO service for companies. Bungee collects rent — so to speak — based on use of the underlying infrastructure. Pay as you grow.

The usage fees, billed monthly, will be based on infrastructure and utility computations that combine computing, storage and network interaction. The aggregate utility rate is expected to be $1 per computer-network-interaction-hour. That sounds familiar somehow.

What do you get for your buck? Typical commercial business applications are expected to consume between one and five interaction hours per user per month, depending on usage and each application’s run-time combination of web service access, application processing, and network interactivity, says the company’s release. Before that fee kicks in, however, Bungee Connect automates SOAP- and REST-based web services integration, Ajax control programming, state management and instantaneous deployment — all through an extensible, end-to-end environment delivered over the web: no install for developers, no installation of delivery infrastructure, and no client install for end users, says the venture capital-backed company.

Very, very cool — not to mention highly disruptive on a variety of levels. Salt Lake City vicinity-based Bungee Labs has been stealthily combining the best of the Web 2.0 trends and innovations to pull together what may well become the best, fastest, cheapest way to create a vast ecology of new self-sustainable and perhaps healthfully profitable ecology of online services. And the tools also can be used to aggregate other existing pre-built or new services from the growing list of web services and services API providers. Bungee has its own runtime libraries of programming functionality, too.

Bungee Connect is already aligned with a solid core of such providers: Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, RealNetworks, Windows Live, PayPal, and eBay. Nice company that can become the company that you keep as a developer/entrepreneur to quickly and flexibly deliver to market what users need, want, and will pay for. Or perhaps you’d like to build something that, like honey for flies, brings in a ton of click-throughs. Well, okay monetize via online ads and pay Bungee the rent and the ad provider its vig. It’s still a business, fast, fleet, and financially solid.

Then perhaps the SMBs and enterprises would like to rent these compilations. And there you go, rent them to the end users while building and hosting on Bungee Connect. Lots of business model permutations to explore.

Interestingly, Bungee is avid about keeping the developer’s code and property under the developer’s ownership, if they wish. Or they can opt to share via three different types of open source and hybrid licensing. Get viral, or get vicious — whatever works for you and your customers, or your customers’ customers, or your customers’ customers’ customers.

The on-demand app dev environment, joined with community-based development or skunks-works stealth, is deeply integrated with the deployment grid to automatically generate application state management. It also provisions additional infrastructure as needed, and also automates the fees and licensing — while housing and protecting the developer’s intellectual property. Later on, Bungee Labs expects to allow for importing and exporting of code assets, as well as use of UML and analytics. I’d like to see an Eclipse community mashup soon, myself.

The speed on this whole thing blew me away in the demo I saw last week. A javascript client download package called Bungee Pulse, at 400kB, starts the process, and Bungee uses a global CDN provider to keep speeds well managed. They say it works over dial-up … really.

The whole thing reminds me of Robert Duvall’s character’s trek from New York to LA in the first Godfather film where he encounters a certain late-night horse. This sounds like an offer you can’t refuse, but in a much nicer manner; clean sheets, too.
“Ajax is just the beginning of the RIA story and Bungee Labs provides the rest of the solution with a web-based IDE, on-demand scalable deployment, a well-designed community model and a built-in component ecosystem with real-world licensing options,” said fellow ZDNet blogger Dion Hinchcliffe, also President and CTO of Hinchcliffe & Co. and editor in chief of AjaxWorld Magazine, in a release statement. “Bungee Connect is a surprisingly complete one-stop shop for the RIA development, deployment and operations lifecycle.”

The Bungee Labs approach has been a solution waiting to happen. All the ingredients are now in place. This will provide the means to create and test RIAs for many facets of businesses — large enterprises, SMBs, ISVs, other SaaS players, cottage-industry hacks-for-bucks. You name it. Bungee Labs is targeting this all at SMBs, but I see larger ultimate appeal.

When any of these organizations can outsource development, while retaining the developers and code rights, when they can partner with the best of the on-demand ecology of providers, when they can graphically layout pages and forms online lickety-split, and when the grid-utility model is made affordable by a no fees and no upfront investment basis — well, then the whole thing begins to slide into everything-as-a-service mindset.

I expect that Bungee Labs’ offerings will be one of many similar approaches that slash development and deployment costs, and that together act as a catalyst to the end of software development and use as we’ve known it. Others, especially Microsoft, will need to follow suit, just to hold onto developers — but also to hold on to their CALs.

I saw a Bungee Connect-powered demo of Microsoft Exchange Server delivering email and calendar as a service via a browser — not Outlook Web Access, no! Bungee Connect was doing it, all on the level, CALs protected. But the Exchange functions were mashed up with a bunch of other non-Microsoft services. All in own browser view, easily changed and re-arranged, all on the server. Freedom! Indeed, the Bungee Connect model plus the Microsoft Live model, dragging along the older Microsoft stuff, is a hyper disrupter, but without a rip-and-replace. Just make it all a service. Toss in Google and PayPal monetization and business services and we’re in a whole new ball game, baby.

We can expect to see this emerge as a greenfield play, but there’s no reason why enterprises as they adopt more SOA principles won’t quickly grok the value of an increasing portion of their services development taking place in such a manner, especially if the grid holds up under all kinds of demand, and the costs of supporting that grid begin to redefine TCO … Like subtract the cost of infrastructure support and maintenance.

SMBs can essentially get the best of a SaaS model and their own custom application development capabilities without a need for an IT department (beyond a handful of creative demons). They might even begin to cotton more to the idea of a thin-client or a desk top-as-a-service approach.

Service providers, telcos, and hosts would do well to consider layering a similar app dev as a service approach — perhaps an OEM arrangement — on top of their business services offerings. Imagine one monthly fee for network, telephony, mobile, and application development and deployment. Sure you can!

Hey, perhaps you’d like to create or apply a professional services business that caters to those learning and using a Bungee Connect service? Yep, bolt that puppy right on there. Developers could even enjoy the benefits of an auction approach for their service and support needs. Low cost meets lower cost. Check-in and check-out for multi-developer process management. Instantly deploy applications to any URL. Anywhere in the world. Globalization ‘r us.

Downsides? Bungee Connect is its own environment, when you build in it, that’s where the code runs. That will provide food for thought for a lot of developers and businesses, but the fit for start-ups and for creation of essential web services at SMBs is compelling. Perhaps Bungee Labs will someday need to find a way to “release” code for a fee, but I think many developers and builders will opt to use one of the more open licenses and recognize this a web services ecology play — and increasingly a shared web services world — a least for the foreseeable future.

Bungee Connect is a very interesting development, one that reminds me of a little Dutch boy who just took his finger out of the dike.

Comments

FASTforward ‘07 Conference (A Word from Our Sponsors)

January 11, 2007 at 10:58 am · Filed under event announcements, house business

Comments

2007: The Year Enterprise 2.0 Breaks Out into the Enterprise

December 20, 2006 at 10:56 am · Filed under event announcements

My colleague over at the ZDNet blogging consortium, Dion Hinchcliffe, has just posted a year-end wrap-up of the state of Enterprise 2.0, and what a year it’s been.

Dion, who has been far out front of the industry in his thinking and writing on Enterprise 2.0, predicts that 2007 will be the year that Enterprise 2.0 “will significantly break out into the enterprise.”

Enterprise 2.0 entered the lexicon earlier this year, Dion notes, when Andrew McAfee , a Harvard professor, introduced the term and philosophy in a Harvard Business School blog post, based on an article he wrote for the MIT Sloan Management Review. McAfee described Enterprise 2.0 as “simple, free platforms for self-expression that remove the last remaining barriers to sharing information using Web technologies, given that even very trivial barriers can drastically reduce creativity and contribution.”

Dion also tracked the growth of the two main core elements of Enterprise 2.0 (blogs and wikis), and finds there has been considerable adoption over the past two years, overtaking traditional communication channels. Dion’s chart is posted below:

But there’s a lot more to Enterprise 2.0 than simply posting or participating in blogs and wikis. Dion observes that that its becoming a key part of enterprise management:

“CIOs, and more importantly, technology savvy workers are increasingly applying Enterprise 2.0 within their organizations because it can often be adopted very inexpensively, is by its intrinsic nature easy to use (requiring little if any end-user training), and many believe that it can be applied incrementally. This makes Enterprise 2.0 IT-friendly on numerous fronts to deploy by already harried, budget-pressured IT departments that are eager to deliver some low-risk wins. And informal data does suggest that many organizations will indeed be trying next year to get at the promise of productivity that Enterprise 2.0 tools offers.”

Dion also notes the challenges and obstacles that lay ahead for Enterprise 2.0, including “fears of a loss of control of communication within organizations; worries over the ‘dumbing down’ of corporate conversation; the available means of determining the accuracy of information captured and shared by employees using Enterprise 2.0 tools.” Plus, he notes, actual reference case studies of companies successfully deploying the methodologies are few and far between.

(For more on the obstacles and challenges, fellow FastForward blogger Jerry Bowles just posted a great summary of the leading management fears with Enterprise 2.0. Much of it boils down to fear of a loss of control.)

Dion didn’t venture specific predictions for 2007 yet but promises to do so in a later post. He does, however, link to Jevon MacDonald’s list of seven predictions for the year ahead. Jevon predicts plenty of announcements from IBM and Microsoft around Enterprise 2.0 tools, as well as more articles from Andrew McAfee.

Interestingly, Jevon also predicts that adoption of Enterprise 2.0 will be lukewarm in large enterprises, but mainly within small companies of 100 employees or less, especially around SaaS offerings.

My thinking is that within larger enterprises, SaaS is more likely to be delivered internally, as part of SOA strategy. I’ll be discussing this relationship between SOA, SaaS, and Enterprise 2.0 in more detail over the coming weeks.

Comments

Top 10 Management Fears About Enterprise Web 2.0

December 19, 2006 at 9:40 pm · Filed under event announcements

It is probably bad form to flog your greatest hit but since we’re in the “best of” time of year and this was by far my most viewed post this year and Dion Hinchcliffe just said something incredibly nice about it in his blog, I thought I would share a slightly digested version with the audience here at the FastForward blog.

Social media like blogs and wikis and online journals offer unique ways to capture, share and store an enterprise’s most valuable asset–the accumulated knowledge of its people, even those who have retired or moved on.  This is an opportunity too valuable to pass over lightly.

The value proposition for big organizations is strong but getting there will mean overcoming some formidable obstacles, both technological and cultural, not least of which is giving up some management’s ability to control the flow of information and data within the organization.   As Harvard professor Andrew McAffee observes:

These tools may well reduce management’s ability to exert unilateral control and to express some level of negativity. Whether a company’s leaders really want this to happen and will be able to resist the temptation to silence dissent is an open question. Leaders will have to play a delicate role if they want Enterprise 2.0 technologies to succeed.

What are some of the questions that organizational leaders are apt to be asking and any vendor who hopes to succeed will need to answer.  This is by no means a comprehensive list and I welcome your additions and thoughts.

Technological Barriers

1.  How can I be certain that the information that is gathered and shared behind the firewall stays behind the firewall?

2.  How do I control who has access to particular levels of  information and databases?

3.  How do I protect the integrity of the information from malicious tampering by disgrunted employees or managers?

4.  How can I be sure that information is being “tagged” properly for efficient retrieval later? 

5.  What kind of training do employees need before they can effectively use the technology?

Cultural Barriers

6.  How can I monitor the system to make certain that what individuals are saying and sharing reflects company policy?

7.  What are the legal dangers in saving and sharing so much loosely supervised input?

8.  How do I distinguish “productive” use of the technology from horsing around?

9.  How do I “manage” the gathering and disseminating of so much unstructured information?

10.  How do I know if I’m getting my money’s worth out of the investment in technology?

Obviously, there are many other questions that will be raised by enterprises considering the new social media technologies as a collaboration platform.  If you have some questions, or thoughts on mine, please leave a comment.

Comments (4)

Words, words, words

December 18, 2006 at 5:59 pm · Filed under event announcements

The trouble with trying to describe what is going on in organisations as social computing breaches their defenses is that we have to resort to some pretty clumsy labels in order to do so. Enterprise 2.0 is probably the clumsiest of the lot but like Web 2.0 it will serve a purpose if used with due care and attention.

But even subtler language can cause problems.

Niall Cook picks up on two phrases attributed to JP Rangaswami in the recent Information Week article about him and his work:

When asked about the respective roles of blogs and wikis in organizations, he said that blogs are for the “creators and thinkers” whereas wikis are “about doing things rather than thinking about things”.

I am not sure that JP actually meant such a clear distinction as the language suggests and in my own experience categorising one group of people as “doers” and another is “thinkers” creates artificial separation uncomfortably close to a class system. I believe people move from one type of activity to another and back on a frequent basis and our experience at the BBC was that people became pretty confident at moving from forums to blogs to wikis depending on what they were trying to achieve and using hyperlinks to weave a web of meaning between them.

This is why Niall’s main point is really interesting:

I’d argue that there is a fourth type - the connector. They may not be a creator, a thinker or a doer (at least not in the blog or wiki sense). But by tagging the blog posts and wiki pages that they find interesting, they automatically - perhaps even unwittingly - create connections between intellectual property and the people who create it. The tags they use to “describe” these resources become the glue that holds the whole continuum together.

If we can set aside the idea that these different activities are associated exclusively with different types of people they are nonetheless very useful as ways of describing different types of behaviour.

One of the joys of the new way of looking at work enabled by these new technologies is that it makes it easier for people to break out of the rigidities imposed by old labels and the pre-conceptions that came with them. Moving fluidly from one type of behavior to another while moving around the computer screen and fusing them all into a new and powerful capability is a skill that is just emerging and will, I believe become essential in business.

Comments (2)

Will Enterprise Web 2.0 totally transform enterprise knowledge management?

December 18, 2006 at 1:10 pm · Filed under event announcements

A number of my fellow FAST Forward bloggers have written on the promise of Enterprise 2.0 and I certainly agree with its transformational potential, some of which has been realized already. I quote them and tell web 2.0 success stories at workshops. But I always hedge the claim with the huge change management effort to fully realize this vision across large organizations. As Indus Khaitan nicely wrote, “It (Enterprise 2.0) is the place where employees collaborate, exchange thoughts, create plans, capture meeting notes, track projects, create documents. The Writable Intranet means that enterprise knowledge is “free” and searchable by anybody. The “freedom” implies that knowledge is neither in e-mails and nor in documents but in easily accessible and searchable repositories.”  Sounds good and I am convinced that we will get there, or at least I hope so.   But it will not be easy because of human, not technical. issues.

Here is a brief sample success story on the possibilities. When Al Essa was the CIO at MIT’s Sloan School, he faced the challenges typical of any CIO. It required considerable time to monitor the efforts of his multiple project teams. Projects tended to operate in silos and many complained that they did not know what the others were doing. Al turned to blogs to address this issue. Al said, “We have created a blog forum for each project. Project managers provide updates and everyone in the department can access all project blogs. The project blogs act as true dashboards. The project lead maintains their project’s blog and other team members can contribute.”

Al could now review each project’s status online and drill down for more detail as needed. These status reports, and the ability to comment or ask questions, were also available to everyone in his department, so cross-project communication was a simple matter, a by-product of the project teams’ new blog reporting platform. Al could point teams to others facing the same issues. Individuals could access these reports in several ways. They could browse the department intranet for them and they could subscribe to them through RSS. The instant, secure, and constant accessibility, in searchable format, that blogs brought was a huge productivity improvement over swapping project reports and commentary through multiple emails. It brought his teams closer and everyone became believers in the new approach.

One significant benefit of this approach was the creation of a knowledge management system as a byproduct of simply doing the work. As time goes on the project records and deliverables can be easily accessed, creating a useful knowledge repository. This could eliminate or greatly reduced the difficult task of getting contributions to a KM system. It also realized the vision of Indus I quoted above. At first, some people resisted the idea but Al simply said that this was the new policy and give it a try it. Fortunately, most, if not all of his staff became believers.  But this was a relatively small department with a common focus and IT sophistication. Al Essa’s effort fit the profile that Jim McGee just wrote about on this blog in his post, Implementing social technologies inside organizations,  “individuals who have enough power and influence to persuade a work group to “run the experiment,” and whose work group is responsible for a consequential enough deliverable that the results of the experiment can carry some weight in the organizational hierarchy.”

What about taking this to a large enterprise with multiple departments and agendas? I greatly admire the work of Rod Boothby and his enterprise blog architect that takes what MIT did and goes way beyond. Having been part of large consulting company I can see the enormous productivity benefit that would occur with such a system that allowed everyone to be aware of the work of others and benefit from their efforts. But when I mention this to people in some large consulting companies or other types of firms the response is often skeptical. They feel that many people do not want everyone to know what they are doing and many client contracts prohibit this type of knowledge sharing. The latter is easier to deal with as you can have restricted access to certain sets of content. It is the attitude that will be harder and the attitude issues will take some carefully thought out change management work.

A few years ago Lotus Quickplace was an early precursor to some of the functions that the MIT blog system and other web 2.0 efforts now offer. I had a chance to develop knowledge management systems with some of the initial versions and was a big believer in its value.  It still has a large user base. Quickplace provided access control to a site. This ability to limit participants was seen as a big benefit. Later when IT people and senior executives wanted to be able to see inside these Quickplaces, initial users were not happy. This is an interesting contrast to the openness of web 2.0 tools like blogs and wikis but this request was seen as going back on one of the original benefits. People then felt they were going to be spied on. They failed to see any benefit for themselves from the transparency and none were likely presented.

We are now living in an increasingly transparent world. Perhaps the required openness to transparency within the enterprise will be, in part, a generational issue.