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?
… 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?"
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Enterprise 2.0 – Hype or Happening ?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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...
