It’s ironic isn’t it, that at a time when the problems that confront us, such as the end of cheap oil, a war that we cannot get out of, an education system that fails 40% of Americans, a healthcare system that serves only a few, that our news is so awful.
CBS put all their eggs in Katie’s salary and now are thinking of leaving news. ABC spend half the debate on stuff that doesn’t matter. We now know that most of the experts called in to advise us about the war were on the payroll of the Pentagon.
News is becoming entertainment or has often been bought just when we all need to be informed.
How can we get a sense of how these issues, or any issue, really affects us?
I interviewed Michael Skoler of American Public Media to find out how he is using new technology to draw on the real experience of over 50,000 citizens to ground their news at a price that they can afford. His project is called Public Insight Journalism and may be part of the foundation of a more relevant way of offering news.
Over 55,000 people are in the network and are tapped for their experience - how are gas prices affecting your life rather than what do you feel about rising gas prices.
This network is facilitated by a new kind of journalist and by a new kind of social software that keeps the system healthy.
The experiment is now 5 years old and has gone beyond the experiment into the operational and is now starting to spread.
What do you think about the news today? Do you think this may help?
Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
… is that the contributors to this blog have for the past nine months or more been analyzing and opining upon the issues about Enterprise 2.0 takeup and implementation that are highlighted by this article in today’s ZDNet by Dennis Howlett.
Notwithstanding a substantial amount over the past two years of online and offline "press" about the Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 phenomena and the increasingly participative and interactive online environment (first for consumers and now increasingly apparent as "the" future for the workplace), decision-making about enterprise software in general continues to warily circle the issues involved with implementing community-based collaboration or more broadly defined, "social computing".
You’ll note that in the article (excerpt below) Dennis checks in with FASTForward’s Jevon Macdonald, who is of the opinion that Microsoft Sharepoint may well be the safe, "default" implementation of choice. Certainly Sharepoint has developed some key alliances over the past year that seem designed to support that point of view.
Here’s a You Tube video (also featured in Dennis’ article .. thanks for the pointer, Dennis) that presents a wide range of views on the question "Enterprise 2.0 - Hype or Happening?"
.
Enterprise 2.0 - Hype or Happening ?
.
In the ZDNet article Dennis (and Jevon) make a key point about value propositions. That said, getting an enterprise IT shop to listen seriously to the value proposition of a small startup is a key challenge in and of itself, regardless of how good it is.
I also believe (even after a decade or more of general agreement that functional stovepipes and silos are not helpful) that a large number of enterprises do not really know how to come to grips with regular and continuous flows of information across functional boundaries and throughout the organization. And it’s quite likely they won’t be able to come to grips with using such flows effectively (in any practical sense) until the architecture of their IT systems enables it and supports it, and the management learns, and practices with, using these flows to feed effective collaboration.
…as you know it. Right now I’m falling over startup vendors vying for attention in the so-called ’social software’ space. The fact enterprise people hate the term doesn’t seem to bother those who are bypassing IT as they sell into the marketing departments of companies at departmental budget prices. But there is a battle brewing on two fronts.
First, we have the mega vendors who think they ‘own’ the enterprise but have little clue what they’re doing when it comes to providing community style collaborative software. As Barry Libert, chairman of Mzinga said to me: “Does Microsoft have a relationship with me? Do any of the ‘monster’ vendors?” Second, we have the startups who are largely making their money by selling social media style solutions to marketers. While the two solution sets may look the same from the outside, they are being bought in fundamentally different ways and are setting up a tension that today is barely felt but which will have a disruptive effect on the software buying patterns of the future.
It is particularly appropriate that Phil Wainewright has penned an article dubbed Enter the socialprise as this plays directly to the themes I am currently exploring.
He says:
But enterprise computing is still designed for the old, stovepipe model in which every transaction took place within the same firm. There’s no connection with the social automation that’s happening between individuals.
[ Snip … ]
I then spoke to another Irregular, Jevon MacDonald who has been working in the so-called Enterprise 2.0 (aka socialprise) space for some time. He said that where the startups fail but where the incumbents succeed is in identifying a specific value proposition within specific industries.
His view is that Sharepoint will be a ‘big winner in the next five years.’ If the amount of noise being made by Microsoft is indicative, then it should be a winner. But…he also says: “Sharepoint deployments are horrendous and I really don’t know why people put up with them.”
I sat down recently for lunch with Darren Gibbons and Gordon Ross of OpenRoad Communications, a small Vancouver firm focusing on the design and implementation of corporate intranets and internal communications strategy.
As part of their work with clients over the past several years and their experiences in designing and adapting intranets, they developed a hybrid wiki, blog and CMS platform called ThoughtFarmer.
Beyond wikis - Knowledge Sharing for the new enterprise
ThoughtFarmer combines structure and social networking with easy wiki authoring, helping companies share knowledge and strengthen community.
.
ThoughtFarmer has gained some significant clients over the past year or so, including NESTA (National Endowment for the Sciences, Technology and Arts - the largest single endowment devoted exclusively to supporting talent, innovation and creativity in the UK), IDEO (the globally renowned industrial design firm) and most recently eHarmony.
I’ve known about ThoughtFarmer since its early days, and wrote up a descriptive entry in the recent book "Making Knowledge Work - the arrival of web 2.0", published by the ARK Group (UK).
I wanted to delve a bit further into the why’s, what’s and how’s of ThoughtFarmer, to find out more about the appeal it held for client organizations who are serious about tackling the issues and dynamics of Enterprise 2.0.
I ran through the following 4 questions with Darren and Gordon in a question-and-answer interview format. .
1. I understand that ThoughtFarmer is an hybrid collaborative platform comprised of a wiki, social networking capabilities and various modular elements that traditionally have formed part of an enterprise’s intranet platform. Is that correct, and can you offer us a more concise description ?
D & G - Yes, it’s a hybrid, which is actually becoming a fairly standard architecture or configuration for Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platforms.
Our conception of ThoughtFarmer and its initial design came out of our work with clients helping them implement intranet publishing tools. As Web 2.0 tools and services became more prevalent, we realized that it would be natural to incorporate these into an intranet publishing and knowledge-sharing application, and so we set about designing and building what became ThoughtFarmer 1.0, a platform to support easy user publishing and the sharing of pertinent information and knowledge in an intranet environment.
Our first client, IntraWest (at that time owner of Whistler Blackcomb and other ski resort properties), essentially provided us with the design principles. They wanted a platform that would make it easy to:
- publish and maintain current, up to date and relevant content - create and sustain a content repository that would also serve as the company’s central knowledge repository - strengthen workplace community by bringing forward and exposing the relationships amongst colleagues who were spread out geographically, and - minimize any additional work (the "thing" would have to be self-sustaining and create no additional employee headcount).
Interestingly, these design principles came out of the (admittedly progressive) HR function, who insisted that we focus on the needs of both the organization AND the users. Initially, IT said "Use Sharepoint" but that involved some fairly significant customization and user training efforts. HR said "that’s a non-starter", and so off we went. .
2. In your opinion, what most clearly differentiates ThoughtFarmer from the other recent arrivals on the Enterprise 2.0 scene that combine wikis, blogs, social networking, enterprise search, etc. ?
D & G - We think that the answer to that question has to be "ease-of-use". The core design principles can be summarized as "Simple" and “Social”
Simple - we got rid of as much jargon as we knew how - for example, everything a user posts is a "page" - and we provide the users with a fair bit of simple but clear structure. There are lots of simple "tools" that help users re-structure and shuffle around the content, such as by re-labeling or sorting the content, through the use of easy-to-manage tagging.
ThoughtFarmer offers full text search, making it easy to find all sorts of content, and the newer version (2.5) incorporates such useful features as activity tracking whereby everything that takes place is logged for easy future reference.
Social - we also focused on "Social" as a design principle, which essentially means that every feature and the pages on which the activity takes place follow the axiom "simple rules for complex spaces". We’re big fans of Edward T. Hall (The Hidden Dimension), and worked to introduce attention filters that allow for the customization based on the cognitive capacity of individual users. ThoughtFarmer features something we call activity tracking, which is based on Hall’s theory of proxemics (the study of the human use of space within the context of culture). We implemented a sllder-based attention filter that enables zooming in and / or out and lets a user see all the projects in which she or he is a member and all of the related project content and activity on the intranet.
We believe that his is a deeply humanistic design principle for knowledge work in social settings.
.
3. I understand that for a small not-Silicon-Valley-based Canadian Enterprise 2.0 startup, you have had some impressive initial client wins. What is the implementation of ThoughtFarmer you are most proud of, and why ?
. D & G - We’re proud of the fact that some very innovative and innovation-oriented companies have chosen to use this application designed by a small Canadian communications firm. We’ve only just recently been able to talk about the fact that IDEO (designers of the Palm V, the Swiffer, the Apple Mouse and many other innovative products) chose ThoughtFarmer. IDEO evaluated every Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform they could find, and chose ours. They are currently using it on their main intranet and are rolling it out to their offices around the world..
4. Is it plug-and-play, or does it’s implementation involve customization and set-up depending upon a given enterprise’s overall information systems architecture .. or is this even the right question ?
. D& G - Yes, it’s essentially plug and play, although of course every organization will have different requirements and a different IT architecture with which ThoughtFarmer must operate. But to offer an example, a recent installation of ThoughtFarmer at eHarmony (involving more than 250 employees) required only 5 days to install the platform, train the employees and migrate all the pertinent content. ThoughtFarmer is Microsoft-based (SQL server and .Net), and is "IT-shop" friendly. OpenRoad is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and ThoughtFarmer was recently certified for Windows Server and SQL Server 2005 by Microsoft’s product testing labs. Even though we like to consider it "plug-and-play" the design does not preclude customization and specialized integration with complex corporate IT architectures. ThoughtFarmer can also be used as a collaboration-oriented module within larger-scale intranets, and of course a wide range of other business applications can be integrated into the core ThoughtFarmer platform.
The description from the program: “Reality has sold us a bill of goods: Because we’ve had to keep our physical stuff neat and orderly, we’ve assumed that the ideal information system also is neat and orderly.But that type of organization actually excludes more information than it makes available.As information – and, importantly, metadata – get digitized, we have to unlearn millennia of lessons reality has taught us.The changes affect not only the basic principles of organization, but also who gets believed and why.In this session, David Weinberger explores what happens to experts, authorities, and the business and institutions that depend on them as we move to social knowledge, rich in connections but often uncontrolled and uncontrollable.”
Links are more than those underscored words that fall in the middle of pages, and essentially say, ‘Okay, time to leave and go somewhere else.’
In his keynote at FastForward ‘08, David Weinberger took a close look at this phenomenon we’ve all become very used to, the link, and dissected what it all means for the way we view information.
In the good old days we called them hyperlinks, a very hyper-techy-sounding word for something that is ultimately very human-driven.
Of course, David spoke about much, much more than links. Bill Ives provides some perspective on David’s talk, here, and Jerry Michalski spoke to David in an onsite interview, posted here.
We’ve reached a stage in which “all contents are also connections,” David said. “Everything leads to everything else.” He added that unlike the structured approach to information retention we’ve grown accustomed to in enterprises (think relational databases), links are a very human interaction. “Links are the opposite of information,” he said. “Links are messy, personal, and one-way.” In other words, links are purely user controlled, part of the “unowned order.” And, in a way, adding soul to the soul-less machine.
Such is the progression we’re also seeing with the growth of the Web, and in the collaborative, Enterprise 2.0 communities and tools we are seeing. There is no owner; because we are all the owners.
Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Web 2.0 — as glorified by Time Magazine when the publication named “You” as the Person of the Year — has moved from entertainment and social networking medium to strategic corporate weapon.
That’s the view of best-selling author and digital society guru Don Tapscott, who recently declared that Web 2.0 “is no longer about hooking up online or creating a gardening community of putting a video onto YouTube… The new Web, so-called Web 2.0 and service oriented architecture are really becoming a new mode of production, and changing the ways that we innovate, the ways that we make decisions, the ways that we collaborate, and the ways that companies engage with the rest of the world.”
I recently moderated an ebizQ Webinar in which Don discussed how Web 2.0 technologies and approaches are dramatically changing the way businesses manage and analyze information. (Audio replay available here - registration required.)
Don Tapscott broke new ground in 1996 with his book, The Digital Economy: The Promise and Peril of Network Intelligence. His latest book is Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, co-authored with Anthony Williams.
In our Webcast, Don described how he sees the Web 2.0 world — with its high degree of collaboration — changing the face of business intelligence to “collaborative intelligence.” Prior to the introduction of Web 2.0 methodologies, he explained, internal data had “been accessible in various limited ways through traditional ERP reporting systems, MIS and business intelligence.”
Now, he continued, “for the first time, this is all being supplemented by massive quantities of additional data that is created through new models of collaboration, as consumers and employees use the new tools of collaboration — wikis, blogs and social networks.”
“The marriage of this new accessible data with the firm’s traditional internal data creates an unprecedented challenge, as well as an opportunity to gain insight into the behavior of the company’s most important stakeholders, and to translate that knowledge into success in the marketplace.”
The speed of Web 2.0 processes is also changing what end-users expect from BI approaches as well. “Think about if you do a Google search, you get the results back instantly. If the results took half a minute, or five minutes, or 10 minutes, you’d probably stop using Google so much. Traditional BI was kind of like that — which is part of why we didn’t use it so much Because you’re calling out to a disk, basically.”
The merging of Web 2.0 and business intelligence has become an enormous opportunity for growth, Don said. “For starters, we’re seeing the integration of business intelligence, which has historically has been about numbers, with content and knowledge management, which has been historically about words.” For example, Don foresees the rise of of 3-D visualization of BI data.
“The mother of all opportunities is people across an organization being able to collaborate more effectively around data.” He calls this collective intelligence the holy grail, in which “minds across an organization can come together around information and data that they believe and is relevant and timely and pertinent to them.”
(An audio replay of our recent Webcast is available here - registration required.)
Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Nick Carr may be down on IT, but he’s hot on social networking software. The author of IT Doesn’t Matter has sparred frequently with Harvard colleague Andrew McAfee on the value of Enterprise 2.0, but makes the following admission in one of his latest posts:
“It seems increasingly clear to me that the social networking phenomenon will, in some yet-to-be-determined form, invade corporations.”
Nick says that social networking applications will occupy a very different place within enterprises than traditional enterprise software, however. Social networking applications will be part of the informal organization (collaborative and non-hierarchical), versus the way software has traditionally been applied within the formal organization (very hierarchical, procedure oriented, highly political).
Here’s the challenge: The informal organization has the greatest impact on companies, since this “governs the real flow of information and influence in a company, that defines who’s in the loop and who’s not, what’s important and what can safely be ignored.”
However, the catch is “most corporate IT systems, unfortunately, are geared to the needs of the formal organization and ignore the informal one. Designed through elaborate, top-down processes, these so-called enterprise applications usually end up as rigid, cumbersome systems that are disconnected from the everyday jobs of workers.”
Ultimately, the future of corporate computing may actually lie with online services such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Nick Carr predicts. “It’s easy to make fun of these sites. Used mainly by kids and students, they often resemble the junkyards of popular culture – crude, silly, and disposable. But don’t be fooled by the garish surface. Social networks are popular – and powerful - because they are constructed in response to, and through, the actions and conversations of their members. In stark contrast to corporate IT systems, social networks shape themselves to their users rather than forcing the users to adapt to preset specifications.”
As Bill reports, Serena, a software company, is replacing its existing intranet with Facebook as a front end linked to a low-cost content management system behind the firewall:
The 800-employee firm “is going through a major transition as they move from more traditional enterprise applications to web 2.0 mashups. The leadership wanted all employees to be better connected so they could be on the same level of understanding, excitement, and commitment to this transition. They also thought that using a web 2.0 tool, like Facebook, represented the best way to take the whole company into this new space.”
Using Facebook, Serena enjoys far more collaboration between internal groups, as well as with external constituencies, than they would with a far more expensive and maintenance-heavy traditional intranet.
Nick Carr observes that social computing services “do what corporate systems so often fail to do: they make the codification and sharing of valuable information easy.” This is certainly the case with Serena. However, ever the skeptic, Nick also cautions that such services face hurdles in enterprises — “matters of data security need to be worked out, as do protocols for sharing sensitive information within and between organizations.”
He also predicts headwinds of resistance from many within management ranks. “Just imagine what will happen when the informal organization suddenly becomes as visible as the formal one. I suspect that some people at the top of the org chart will be less than pleased.”
Back in my days as director and editor of AMS, the management association, the mantra for greater productivity and peak performance was “invert the pyramid, flatten the hierarchy.” Perhaps social computing will make that a reality.
Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
I gave a recent presentation with Op Risk and Compliance Magazine on the application of Enterprise 2.0 concepts to manage risk. Most of the audience was non-technical and I doubt many attendees read TechCrunch, but the message around Enterprise 2.0 seemed to resonate quite well. The reason was quite clear - they wanted to better harness their “informal networks”.
The Business Problem
Prior to the meeting we conducted a survey with over a hundred individuals, from the CFO/CRO level to delivery leads.
Most had made substantial investments in Information Management programs, including a better approach to governance, but still had huge challenges.
Across virtually every type of risk, respondents relied on phone calls, e-mails and ad-hoc meetings as a major source of risk information.
Most expected costs to keep going up from long-running Information Management programs; the strong services market for Information Management was causing turnover issues and knowledge was being lost.
Despite the investment in governance programs, the defined standards and architectures weren’t always applied.
The results were largely as expected but it did help frame a discussion around Enterprise 2.0.
The Relevance of Enterprise 2.0
Most of these financial services organisations thought they were getting a better handle on their information assets and that their governance programs were helping. Feedback, however, stressed the relevance of the “informal network” in solving problems - the emails, hallway discussions and phone calls that place on a daily basis or in a crisis. What the session covered was that both formal Information Management frameworks and informal networks are important - and risk managers should make use of both.
When it comes to bringing the informal network together with a formal approach, technologies and techniques from Enterprise 2.0 are a great fit: collaboration, search, tagging and aggregation are the keys to bridging the gap.
Networked Information Governance
For purposes of the discussion I referred to the approach as “Networked” Information Governance. Networked Information Governance = Information Governance + Enterprise 2.0. The idea for the name came from an excellent article published by Paul Strassman in 2001. At the time of its authoring in 2001, networked business models were continuing to grow in popularity, from the military to the most agile Fortune 2000 organizations. What it pre-dated was the radical advances in collaborative technologies would occur over the next few years. His introduction frames the problem:
“”Governance” is what information management is mostly all about. Information management is the process by which those who set policy guide those who follow policy. Governance concerns power, and applying an understanding of the distribution and sharing of power to the management of information technologies”
Governance may include “centralized” power, but traditional push-down models of architecture and standards only provide part of the solution. Implemented the wrong way, they hamper innovation and agility. We need standards for some stuff, or we can’t be agile or innovative - we’re always fighting fires. With a foundation of standards, we can distribute power and empower a community to be far more productive.
I described the approach by starting with more traditional principles for Information Governance and then focused on the additional areas (listed below) for Enterprise 2.0. I tried to avoid terms like mashups (relevant to aggregation and application of standards) but I did use some more familiar technology terms.
Collaborative Community. Collaborative technologies can streamline communications to capture content in informal network as well as build the formal.
Organizing the Informal Network. Build a content model that is easily populated through user-driven categorization, informal collaboration begins to take on more formal structures.
Aggregation of Ideas. Not all good ideas have to come from the inside. Social Computing techniques provide an easy way to bring linked content together.
Linking the Informal to Formal. The same principle of applying content categories can be applied to formal governance processes.
Searching the Knowledge Network. Enterprise Search techniques should be implemented to make this information easily accessible.
Collaborative Asset Management. The maturity of your business and technology assets should be a known quantity and this information easily shared across the organization.
Global Standards Bodies. Having an external perspective through a central authority can help to balance competing interests and work to a similar approach.
If you want to see the approach in more detail, you can reference it as part of the Open Methodology Framework.
Governance 2.0
Can this approach be extended beyond Information Governance? I believe it can. Governance techniques can generally benefit from this approach - from a corporate board decisions to managing compliance with environmental regulations. I see some of the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 as enabling agility when we are formal (e.g. long-tail development) and more organised when we are informal (e.g collaboratively developing a solution). When we bring it together (e.g. collaborating on an architecture design standard) the value-add really comes in.
In summary, if you are trying to implement Enterprise 2.0 you may find that your biggest allies will come from some of the places you least expect to find it. Risk and Compliance leaders feel the pain of knowledge loss and transparency issues. Speak to them about their issues and then talk about Enterprise 2.0 and you’ll see some lights go on. Thensend them a link to TechCrunch.
Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
This site is a companion blog to the FASTforward conference and summit series and is sponsored by FAST. 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...
