by Jon Husband
March 9, 2009 at 12:46 am · Filed under
Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, IT Department, Interaction, Personal Branding, Platforms, Social Computing, User Revolution
(Cross-posted to the AppGap blog)
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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.
Stay tuned .
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by Rob Paterson
July 8, 2008 at 6:54 am · Filed under
Andy Carvin, Bryant Park Project, Culture, Innovation, NPR, Personal Branding, Platforms, Public Media, Social Media, Social Objects, Trusted Space
One of the aspects that I love about NPR’s new morning Show Bryant Park is that the show shows you what is going on behind the scenes with their Twitter feed and a daily video showing what will be on the show the next day.
BPP was tested in beta by allowing a lot of interaction – real time research.
Now NPR are going further – they are starting a blog whose purpose is to get behind the scenes, under the hood, open the kimono. What people like Andy and Dennis understand is that the more human NPR is, the greater the attachment.
Here is the fist key post:
On behalf of the NPR Digital Media team, we’d like to welcome you to Inside NPR.org, a new blog that will serve as our official headquarters for new features and services we’re developing for the NPR Web site. It’s a chance for you to explore some of the many projects we’re working on, and help us make them more useful as we roll them out.
The idea behind this blog has its roots in our two newest shows – Tell Me More and The Bryant Park Project. Both of them were rolled out as blogs many months before they were ready to go on air, in the hopes of getting as much public feedback as possible. Historically, it’s common to develop a show behind the scenes, only giving listeners a chance to hear it when it was ready for prime time. By creating online communities for each show while they were still “rough cuts,” we were able to build better programs because of it.
Now, we’d like to apply the same rough cuts idea to our online services in general. Whether it’s rolling out social networking, building new mobile products or improving our online strategy in general, we’re hoping we can develop better tools if you’re a part of the conversation.
In the coming weeks and months, you’ll hear from a variety of people from behind the scenes at NPR.org – software developers, product managers, online producers and others who are working on new Web site features. We hope that talking about these activities more openly will help create a virtuous cycle of product development and feedback.
Thanks for joining us; we look forward to brainstorming with you!
— Andy Carvin and Daniel Jacobson
by Rob Paterson
March 31, 2008 at 5:04 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Analytics, Artisanal Economy, Barriers, Brian Hurlburt, Business Model, Change, Enterprise 2.0, Interview, Long Tail, Marketing, Metadata, MicroBrand, Personal Branding, Social Media, Social Networking, Trusted Space, WalMart, Web 2.0, Web Advertising, Web Services, Wikinomics
Sam Walton’s wife’s deal with Sam when they got married was that he could do whatever he wanted – he wanted to be a retailer – but she would never live in a community that had more than 10,000 people. So his constraint was to build an epochal retail system but in the boonies. Look at what he accomplished with this as a restraint! He also found on his path that being in the boonies also gave him a defence against the huge competitors such as Kmart and Sears. No one took someone who worked in the boonies seriously. That is until it was too late!
My point is that, no matter what you think of WalMart now, that we are predjudiced about the boonies. Smart people in all fields – not the least in Social Media – tend to have a big city bias. We too often over look the boonies and those that live and work there – how could they affect us? We all know that you have to be in the big city to know what is really going on. Of course that is why Warren Buffett is the richest man in the world!
My story today is about a man that you likely have never heard of – who lives and works in a small town that you also may never have heard of. We can never know today if he may become the Sam Walton or the Warren Buffett of media, but my bet is that if he does not then someone like him will be.
My bet is that at the heart of the real social media revolution is that if we do indeed move to a networked world then small communities will be able to stand toe to toe with the big cities.
Meet Brian Hurlburt who lives in Yarmouth Nova Scotia a small port on the southern tip of the province where the high speed ferry comes in from Portland. Brian owns a runs a Web “Something” (Yarmouthcounty.com) that tells the aggregated story of everything that happens in Yarmouth. I call it a web “something” because it is more than a web site – it is closer to the old style of really local newspaper that you might see in a western.
Until Brian, everyone had ignored Yarmouth. The fact that the domain was available told Brian that no one cared. The Province did not care – Yarmouth is off the radar in Halifax. Tourists from the US got off the ferry and drive through town and onto other more exotic places that were better known. (Nothing is really exotic in Atlantic Canada but you know what I mean) The B & B’s were all separated and isolated and could not get their message out. So were all the social groups such as Church groups. Small business struggled to get noticed and worried about maybe a WalMart coming to town. The social capital of Yarmouth was draining away. At some point, it would no longer be a community at all.
So who is Brian Hulrburt? Is he some flash young techhie? No Brian is a regular guy who knew next to nothing about the web. Everything he now knows about how the web works he has learned by trial and error. All the fears that a church or a B & B may have about the web – he has experienced himself.
Fear is the great barrier that we all have of the new. So how Brian learned and how he is – an open and vulnerable man – is an important key to his success in bringing so many parts of his community together online. He can describe what has to be done in language and in a tone that does not judge or appear mysterious.
He also did not try and monetize the site until it was ready. He had faith that if he was able to reach a critical mass that the money would come. So he also did not carry a lot of costs himself. He could not afford to have costs involved that would force him to force the economics before the time was right.
Is this not the Craigslist model?
What he has been able to do is to aggregate the life of Yarmouth online. Aggregation in a safe and trusted place is going to be one of the key value creation processes in a world of infinite content. By not pushing the economics he has built the trust and now “owns” the space.
The underlying metrics are also emerging that will drive an economic model that benefits not just Brian but all those who inhabit the site.
In 2007 the site had 100,000 visits. Not hits, over 1 1/2 million of those, but real visits. Because of the power of aggregation, all those that live on the site have now access to al this traffic that they could never have reached on their own. The local paper reaches about 20-30,000. So Brian is reaching more and at a fraction of the cost of the paper. He also enables a growing interaction between all parties which is not possible in a paper.
This is more than Google Local or Craigslist – this is a personal aggregation that includes a filtering that is part Brian and part the client. It can therefore be trusted more than a simple mechanical aggregation. It will over time therefore have more value than a simple algorithm.
A growing part of what Brian can now offer his family of clients is the kind of measurement that conventional advertising cannot. Brian is becoming expert in analytics.
Here I think is part of the core of the new economic model. Mass Marketing needed a mass market as there was so much leakage. With no precision possible, as in WWII, only area bombing was possible. So what could a small place do like Yarmouth. Their feeble sums of money wouldn’t even be noise in the larger scheme of trying to get noticed. What Brian can offer is precision – the Long Tail in action. A B & B can see exactly who it is reaching online and can adjust to get a better focus and hence result.
This will kill the mass media alternatives. Niche + precision = high return.
For me the lessons that I have gained from looking at Brian are these:
- Niche is where the energy is – the Value will be on the right hand side of the Long Tail
- Aggregation around niche is where the value is – the more personal the better
- Precision about what happens in the aggregated niche is what drives the economics and the return
- Power will shift from the large and diffused to the small and concentrated
I asked Brian “where is it going?” He replied by saying that “The web is changing the world. It is helping us help each other again. We can take charge of our own lives again. I want to be part of this.”
by Rob Paterson
March 27, 2008 at 2:01 pm · Filed under
Escorts, Personal Branding
A year or so ago, my sister Diana and I were writing a series on courtesans – we were exploring the unconventional aspects of relationships where some women had the upper hand. Where they used their minds and their innate understanding of men to gain power and an independent life. Women like Madame de Stael or Pamela Harriman.
As I posted, my blog was discovered by a leading light in the escort community – Yes a Governer Spitzer kind of escort but one with the difference that at the really high end, women like the English Courtesan work for themselves only.
The English Courtesan – whom I regret I have never met – is a true advocate of the culture of social media is excellent at connecting with her own world.
Here is a taste as she introduces some of her friends. As you can see, Blogging has become a central tool in the highly personal branding that the high end woman of the world has to have. I love her “About” page too.
The other blogs may surprise you – here is a link to a video of one of the women introducing an artist at a reading dinner. Why might she do this? Because I think at the high end, the real appeal is that they offer warmth and intellect as well as the obvious. This is miles away from CW!
