Socialize Your Business Processes--Report From Enterprise 2.0 Conference

An Li of Yammer presented breathlessly on integrating enterprise applications with Yammer, an enterprise social network platform.  Integrating a social network with enterprise application does not seem to me like something that could be done initially on launch of such a platform, but the prospect of doing so could be a selling point, particularly with departments like human resources that track and rate employee contributions.

71% of employees don’t feel engaged because they don’t feel like they are part of a larger community. Organizations have become siloed.  Different business functions and different offices don’t talk to each other.  (Gallup poll 2011).   Yammer projects to have 8 million users by the end of the year. Even industries that aren’t technology companies such as oil & gas companies and heavy industry are paid clients of Yammer.

Building relationships is very hard with multiple offices, and enterprise software normally only reinforces those silos.  Yammer works to bridge gap across offices and departments.

Supervalue is a Yammer customer.  They are large grocery chain.  They had one user conference once a year, over three days.  Continuing conversation over the year was impossible before Yammer.  Then they launched Yammer and every store manager got an iPad.  They shared beach display photos, showed what’s going well.  They saw growth of revenue from sharing ideas that worked across organization. 

Integrating social within each application is resource-intensive.  Yammer is doing data-level integration.  Zendesk application shares an idea into Yammer.  Everyone in the organization can see it, so people from engineering, marketing, customer service can all see the problem.

They have integrated with:

·         SharePoint

·         Box

·         Salesforce

·         Ultimate software

·         Netsuite

·         Zendesk

Etc. etc.

They use the “Open Graph” protocol to get data into Yammer.  They use “Connect” to push data into enterprise systems.

Universal search lets you filter by people, groups, applications, pages, and topics.
 
Aggregation is really important.  An intelligent algorhythm delivers the most relevant updates. 
Integration is not pushing raw data into Yammer.  It provides transparency around other’s work in other application.

Lisa Sterling of Ultimate Software talked about their integration of Yammer with their instance of their own software product, an HR management tool called Ultimate or UltiPro (disclosure:  my firm has purchased UltiPro). 

At Ultimate, employees don’t use UltiPro as much as they use Yammer. Managers can see contributions and collaborations within UltiPro so they can see what people are doing to be successful.  Yammer also gets a feed of internal job opportunities.  The interface both consumes information and broadcasts information.  Yammer also provides a way to reward people for good work; UltiPro consumes Yammer badges, leaderboards, and rewards.   

They are moving to a single sign-on capacity.  Also tying completion of work milestones within Yammer into UltiPro.  They will also be using UltiPro to share communications, as around birthdays, anniversaries. 

Ultimate's story is a good example of leveraging information obtained through enterprise social networks.  It shows some of the benefits that might come to management from employees "working out loud", exposing their work, interests, and project activities.

Securing Social Business for Compliant Collaboration

I'm at the massive Enteprise 2.0 Conference in Boston over the next two days.  This post is my notes from Sarah Carter's presentation on “Securing Social Business for Compliant Collaboration.”

She’s a British former taxi driver and provided an all-too brief (due to time limitations) and funny (!) overview of compliance issues related to social business tools.

Actiance has 260 employees and 3 U.S. offices. 

Technology is the easy part of social.  They work with 9 of 10 top US Banks, also IBM, Cisco, Jive.

Organizations have much more complicated communications channels.  They are using email, webex, unified communications; users bring in IM, BitTorrent, public social platforms. 

Enabling an enterprise social platform requires consideration of other communication platforms.

Social media has four key areas of risk:

1)      Data Leakage.  Sharing things such as personally identifiable information, the next board meeting minutes. 

2)      Inbound Threats.  We trust the people we’re connected to, but shouldn’t always trust the content from trusted sources.  Spoofing of LinkedIn and Facebook requests is rising.

3)      Compliance & eDiscovery.  Social is just another form of electronic communications.  If you’re recording customer compliance on email, you need to do the same on social channels.  10,000 US laws and regulation address electronic communications.

4)      User Behavior.  Are users using the bandwidth the enterprise need to pull down YouTube videos and the like?  Should people be sharing vacation plans on Facebook?

What’s Needed In Enterprise Social Solutions?

Compliance;  Monitoring, pre & post-review, archiving. 

Integration:  Social needs to be integrated with content management, marketing, workflow

Convenience:  People will use the most convenient tool.

Relevant:  The tool needs to allow people to find and share the most relevant content.

Requirements for Security & Compliance

1. Technical Components

·         Identity Management—link and understand integrations between different online identies such as Yammer, LinkedIn, Twitter

·         Activity Control / Granular Application Control

·         Ability to turn features on and off

·         Anti-Malware Controls

·         Protect Users from Themselves—Control where people share information

·         Moderation—ability to flag an objectionable comment and so forth

·         Logging/Archiving—Record everything a user said in all channels

·         Export of Data—Need to have data exportable regardless of which channel it was made in

2. Components of Effective Use of Social Business

Give users help with measuring who influences, help people understand when their network wants to have information shared.  She shares information with her British friends at 5 AM Pacific.

Help users focus on those people who are important to you today.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Canadian Diplomacy and A Sense of Purpose

Deb Lavoy of OpenText spoke elequently about enteprise purpose. 

The ideal company no longer runs like a "well-oiled machine" but is a mesh of minds producing and learning.  They can predict failure of enterprise application deployment based solely on whether the group has a strong sense of purpose.
Among people with purpose "Their common cores are aligned to a magnetic north. Personal politics takes a back seat."
The very handsome Tyler Knowlton of the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canada told a great story about helping the G20.
One year ago--he was in Toronto working on G20 meeting, his team in charge of electronic / social communications.  Working with the G20 is challenging. The subject matter is complex. G20 has a rotating presidency. Each host / president starts from scratch. The lack of a central repository was frustrating. 

The central delegate was sick of dealing with long email chains, lists, versions, and so forth.  The delegate wanted to apply some of the thinking of Tyler's team to the problem.
He said that if they could come up with it in one month, and it worked, he'd pitch it to the other delegates. They had to switch gears to get tied into the G20 institution.
Email was just the pain point that got the delegate thinking. What they really needed was a system for multilateral negotations, communicating and collaborating.

Three things changed.
First, his team became much more ambitious. They felt that they were feeding into the "big picture." The more work they got, the bigger their contribution.

Second, they became confident and critical.

Third, they became very creative. They had artists, political strategists, web developers. He's learned that parameters foster creativity. Forced thinking about what they had to do, quickly.
They developed something relevant, but also exciting (I wish he had talked more about what they actually rolled out).
They dealt with Korea, and are now talking to France, and are alreading talking to Mexico. The other G20 office was disbanded, but their work is continuing to contribute to the G20 effort.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Bert Sandie of EAI

Bert Sandie of games maker Electronic Arts, Inc. talked about how to create a culture of collaboration at your enterprise. 
What drives people to collaborate?

People who are really good at collaborating do a lot of things that motivate them.  They want to learn AND be social, for instance.  Motivators for collaboration includes a desire to problem solve, altruism, learning, competition, recognition, and more.  Make sure they get an email back to them and their manager about contribution.

At workshops they get to have a good time, but they have to come back and share what they learned.

Are you hiring enough new people? Are you hiring people who are willing to share?

Create physical environments that enhance collaboration.

• White boards
• People sitting down
• People sit in a "pod"
• People move / change offices often
• If you're more than 35 feet away, you might as well be in a different building.

 Different things work for different people.  You have to try a lot of things, and you have to fail.

Bring together special interest groups, run a workshop for 3 days, build a culture of collaboration around it (sounds like an old-fashioned KM Community of Practice!).  When you know the people personally you can

 

The easiest way to collaborate is face-to-face.

 

Changing behaviors takes "heads, hearts, and hands."  Changing the way people think, feel, and behave.  Right when they walk in the door you can change their behavior. 

 

We need to lead the change in our organizations.  If you aren't the expert (in change), find the people in the company who are.  Start with people, your organization, and your environment. 

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Evolution of Enterprise Collaboration (Ross Mayfield of SocialText)

Ross Mayfield is a real pioneer among vendors--his SocialText is one of the best applications that integrates appropriately with SharePoint.  He looked back at the history of enterprise social application evolution and talked about the differences between enterprise and internet adoption of such tools.

He's talking about evolution, not revolution, in enterprise social applications.

Much of the revolution has already happened.  He used to have to explain a wiki.  You can now say with some confidence that there is an established category of enterprise software and that it consistently demonstrate business value in specific use cases.

Ross reviews the history of social application development.  SocialText tried to fit wiki behavior into an application you could install inside the firewall in 2002. 

Microblogging inside the enterprise changed everything.  It was a lot easier to deploy and people took to it very quickly. 

In 2009 the "activity stream" became a dominant approach.

SocialText has tried to adapt web 2.0 tools.  No matter how big your organization is, however, it's smaller than the Web.  It's very different.  If someone does something bad, you can fire them.  Also, the scaling effect is not the same. 

On the web, a core set of contributors is 1%, 9% actively use, 90% don't.  In the enterprise, you have to bake it into the flow of work.  For instance, in company 95% actively use it in the flow of the work. 

Knowledge sharing is a by-product of getting these done in social systems.  You have to accept that it will be imperfect.  It doesn't matter so long as you are getting more of it shared. 

You need to keep doing the security, IT Admininstration, reporting / auditing, and so forth. 

Inside the enteprise, viral adoption generally won't happen. 

SocialText provides a "social layer" where the existing enterprise objects (documents, projects, tasks, enterprise records) become a topic of conversation.

Discovering content through people and people through content is really powerful (agreed!).

In implementing better collaboration, focus less on technology and more on the goal.

Imagine a "Kickstarter" inside your companies that would let you quickly gain budget or backing for internal projects.  There is more and more specialization on the web.  They commonly add a slight amount of structure, organize people around a goal, but not too much. 

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Ming Kwan of Nokia

It was good to actually have a woman presenting a keynote at the general session.  There hasn't been good gender balance here (she is one out of six presenters in this first tranche).  Her presentation focused mostly on how employees can obtain actionable information through internal collaboration, and share that through external social channels.  I wish there had been a few more concrete examples.

Nokia want to get the right information into the right hands at the right time.

They also want to make it actionable.  What can employees do with all of that information?

Their principles include transparency across the organization.  Their company works in 120 companies.
Another key principle is accountability, by having people take ownership and recognition.  
Taking action is another principle.  It's not about the volume of interactions, it's the qualtiy.

Return On Investment

Nokia developed a "social marketing KPI" framework.  It starts with awareness, then moves to appreciation, with highest level of engagement is engagement (action, purchasing for instance). 

Having a set KPI framework gains clarity around the business's performance.  Ideally the new information leads to awareness that leads to action. 

Third Ecosystem

Nokia wants to create a "third ecosystem" with Microsoft (beyond those of Apple, and Google, although she didn't say their names).  In order to do that they will need to collaborate effectively with their partners, including agencies and suppliers.

Nokia's "visualizers" helps managers identify what different teams are talking about (I didn't understand the value of having managers somehow be aware of what are no doubt thousands of conversations going on internally).  Nokia's "Socializer" based on Headshift technology include tasking and pinging. 

Nokia has had internal idea crowdsourcing for a while.  They recently opened up crowdsourcing to the public. 

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Spontaneous Association and Tom Kelly of Moxie and Tony Martins of Teva Canada

Tom Kelly from Moxie Software is presenting with Tony Martins of Teva Pharmaceuticals (disclosure:  Teva is a client of my law firm's.). 

Tom Kelly

Tom Kelly first spoke in somewhat repetitive fashion about how he thought businesses should approach implementing social software. 

The most exciting companies to work at were the one where people are engaged.  The speed at which things are moving has changed in tennis and football just as in our businesses.

Three key elements of any social platform are simple design (simplicity), knowledge, and thought leadership. 

Knowledge is the key part of what we are trying to accomplish.  Knowledge is about sharing what different people know to accomplish a given goal. 

How do you design software for how people work?  People work in groups, on projects.  It must have an interative process to bring innovative ways for people to work.  It should not bankrupt company. 

We do need to integrate into existing systems.  Like Facebook and Twitter, you can add something simple that will let people connect. 

We can change from ""push" model of major enteprise software changes every 18 months to doing something simple (he keeps saying that!). 

Tony Martins

Tony Martins runs the supply chain for Teva Canada.  He started exploring social business in 2005, with Wikinomics. 

The key ingredient is "spontaneous association."  Human beings have an amazing ability to combine their skills to resolve problems.  We are born that way, and can do it as long as we are allowed to.

Teva has used this in the organization. 

There are many changes in regulations, consumer behavior, and the world around the company.  The challenges they are confronting are not what they expected would happen.  For instance, managers at Teva were spending more than half of their time addressing unexpected events. 

A small group of people can come up with solutions much faster than a traditional command-and-control approach where problems are kicked up the organizational chart. 

Provide environments where people can bring their skills together quickly.  Spontaneous association has to happen somewhere.  Over time, Teva found that virtual collaboration spaces (based on Moxie Software) worked well. 

What happened in those spaces was becoming aware of those problems, and leaving it up to the people involved to address.

His most recent experience with business value of this approach was that between January and April of this year (2011), manufacturing cycle time was reduced 40% and reduced face-to-face meetings by 50%. 

He'll be presenting in a workshop later today (with Sameer Patel). 

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Chris Morace of Jive Software

My continued notes below--errors are below.

Chris is looking awfully corporate for a rep from a company with such hip-looking logos and video promos.  This was a very interesting and well-paced presentation, however.

Enterprises are facing waves of disruption from changes in social, cloud, and other new technologies.  We're all being asked to be more innovative, be more agine. 

IT groups are increasingly feeling like more and more of their time is being spent maintaining antiquated enterprsie systems, and not enough times supporting business needs and innovations. 

One conference attendee noted that he could talk to his children by video call from his hotel room, but couldn't get conferencing systems to work at most work meetings.

70% of employees are using unsanctioned cloud applications.

Social is "hot."  There's social in Project Management, CRM, etc. etc.  None of it integrates together.  It creates new silos.  IT professionals are going to be asked to address this system.

The app market is an example of the future of enterprise technology.  Apps are easy to create, quite frictionless.  It's pretty easy.  Software is more of an impulse buy instead of a major decision.  Each channel comes with millions of potential users and a distribution network.  Apps are also integrated with the social graph. 

Chris says we're moving to the "consumerprise" model.  We used to have to explain why social apps were different from email etc.  Now people get it because they are participating in their personal life. 

To thrive in this area, you have to add value to the business AND protect it. 

New models of consumption are critical.  Need to be able to "pay as you go," very simply, so the app just "shows up."  Less lockin for enterprise software.  Vendors earn the right to have us use their product.  We should be able to install an app with the click of a button. 

The amount of time it should take to integrate a new system into the HR/ERM/ etc. enterprise system should be no more time than it takes to fill out a Help Desk ticket.  It should also integrate with the internal social tools.

We also need easy ways to say that an app is OK or not.  Maybe there need to restrict server location, internal or exterrnal storage, etc. 

The policies of companies around personal mobile devices has changed.  He thinks that companies will change their policies around new applications as well. 

The seminal moment in the consumerprise was when Facebook opened up its platform. 

There will only be a handful of winners.  Christian Finn would call this a "nice dream." 

Jive has a platform that can do much of this already.  Hundreds of apps can work together.  Jive will be the first to have an app market.  This is a way we can get around the adoption challenges.  We can really change the way people do business.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Lee Bryant on Social Business Intelligence

I was not able to attend Day 1, except remotely via the live stream.  Today I'm in person at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, my hometown and base for the Stanley Cup Champion Bruins (sorry, had to slip that in here somewhere). 

Below are my notes for the first set of keynotes.

Lee Bryant of Headshift is first up.

"Social Business Intelligence:  The Future of Listening"

He's talking about data-driven business improvement, the subject of a recent study by Andrew McAfee. 

The term "Humanizing" the enterprise predates the term "Enterprise 2.0."  All those using wikis, blogs and so forth are generating lots of data.  How can this data be leveraged to help the business?

Some at this conference have already talked about "Big Data" "activity streams" "actionable insight" and mapping social activity to key business KPIs. 

Social business is not just about direct collaboration with others.  We're also interested in using signals and filters to share "ambient intelligence"  

Lee's colleague Dave Gray is a "visual thinking" guru.  He calls small teams with a high degree of autonomy "pods."  Amazon is an example of pods.  No team should be bigger than what you can feed with two pizzas.

Data is not just about aggregate measures, it's about specific insights into how teams behave.

We can leverage the analysis strategies that companies are using to look at consumer web behavior.  The practice of social media monitoring in the past has been too narcissistic--"Do you love me" "Do you like my brand in this place" etc.  We'll see a move to a more intelligence-driven approach.  We should be looking at things the business can change. 

People have been hiring "quants" primarily so far to "get people to click ads."  This is not ideal.  

Google person says that they have the data to predict divorce two years in advance based solely on spending (searching).  It's not about showing off the size of your data (insert NY U.S. Congressional Representative joke here). 

We can learn lessons for approaching data from sports.  Two Red Sox championships were driven by "Moneyball."  People are also starting to map soccer data.  They track kilometers run "at top speed" versus "total amount run" because the former correlates with goals scored.

We need to immerse ourselves in the data.  Insights too often stop at the marketing department, although they might not be in a position to make the changes required.

We need to move to machines that generate signals of key events, and pipe them around the organization, making sense of them with social analaysis.

Social analysis is applying "many eyes" to the data.  How can we stimulate people to take action based on information derived from socially derived information.

Nothing motivates people more than feedback given in the course of the workflow.

He  talked at a very abstract level.  I wish there had been more concrete examples of social business intelligence and analysis in action. 

Enterprise 2.0 Day 1, Second Session: Hinchcliffe on Tools and Techniques of Emergent Change

Dion Hinchcliffe's address was to "examine the latest Enterprise 2.0 tools and platforms, current and cutting edge implementation techniques, and explore successful Enterprise 2.0 case studies." He certainly was an able and appropriate speaker for such a large topic (he runs the Web 2.0 Journal, Hinchcliffe & Company and is an avid blogger , web 2.0 educator-slash-consultant, and TV show impresario.) Unfortunately the case studies and implementation received short shrift in favor of an intensive and extensive discussion of what constitutes real and successful Enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 is different, powerful, and important, and will take 5-10 years to spread through the corporate world.

Dion wants people at the session to join Facebook, Twitter, and Friendfeed. If you do too, look me up! (I use KMHobbie for those sorts of apps).



State of E. 2.0


Wikis and Blogs



Two years ago at this same conference Dion asked the room how many could easily create a blog post or wiki page on their intranet. Three people raised their hands. Today more than 80% of the people did (he usually sees two-thirds). While wikis and blogs are the start of E2.0, not the end, this is quite a change.


Lines are blurring between consumer and social media. Work and home life too. People now create vastly more content than our institutions or the official media.

"Mind share" is the next step to "market share" so it's important what the buzz is. Dion used accurate charts of what people seach on Google to identify what is more popular or interesting. Searches for "Enterprise 2.0" are not rising, but searches for wikis, which first started in 2005, now surpass blogs. Searches related to phone and email are both declining. People do wikis first and blogs second. More succesful rollouts tend to do both.

Adoption and State of the Market

In terms of Rogers' adoption curve, social networks are in "early majority", consumer blogs & wikis in "late majority", Enterprise 2.0 might be in the Adoption Chasm, after early adopters

Hundreds of Enterprise 2.0 pilot projects exist. Enterprise 2.0 is far more than blogs and wikis but it is where most people usually start. Sometimes implementation is not at all official. Individuals install them and get a spiral network effect, for instance at AOL (the company). Within 60 days a personal mediawiki sitting on a single person's PC had completely eclipsed the company's Documentum document management system for the people exposed to it.


Culture matters, so Enterprise 2.0 is not taking off in Germany like it is in the U.S. and Commonwealth countries. The attitude of, break it first, ask permission later is a product of a particular culture.


Even in the U.S., small and medium businesses have been slow to adopt. They are not sophisticated consumers of IT and didn't have legacy enterprise software.


Large enterprises are buying this stuff today.


Dion showed a Forrester Research "Magic Quadrant" slide of Q3 2007. There were no firms in the "leadership" quadrant and only two (IBM and Microsoft) in the "challenger" quadrant.


For firms with between 1,000-4,999 employees, 41% are buying Web 2.0 tools in 2008, 15% of enterprises are only "considering" a purchase, and 55% are not considering


The vendor space is rapidly developing--BEA and SAP now coming along. IBM has been beating the drum, Microsoft has Sharepoint. Between 80-90% of $60-70 billion in software spending goes to these four. By 2013 should be a $4.3 billion chunk, per Forrester Research Report of April 21, 2008. Some of the smaller vendors are doing things like develop good plugins into Outlook.


Successes and Lessons Learned


Generally speaking, successful projects report better communication, improved cross-pollination and leverage of knowledge, higher productivity, and few expected problems.


Over the last few years, people have learned how to:

• create network-based communities in the workplace
• manage communities through seeding content, moderation, etc.
• draft social media guidelines for workers
  manage change change management methods
• drive adoption
• govern Enterprise 2.0 projects
• measure outcomes

Many successful implementations have reached a tipping point through an enterprise seeing leaders adopt the tools. (In similar fashion, my uncle Charles Hobbie used to tell of how in Korea, a country he was quite familiar with, the media makes it a point when the weather gets hot to show the Korean President outside in a formal short-sleeved shirt. While it is not a formal news item, the next day, but not before, every professional has ditched the tie and is also wearing a short-sleeved shirt).


Continued Pain Points


Relevancy of search in the enterprise is a real problem. It just doesn't work as well as on the Web, because of the absence of the link infrastructure and concomitant search algorithms. Until link structure and large percentage of workers generate links gets into enterprise systems, it will continue to be a problem.


Organizations that are not knowledge-dependent will realize less benefit. I think that means that knowledge-dependent outfits like, for instance, law firms, will realize a lot of benefit.



Dion plugged "The Cluetrain manifesto, " a set of 95 theses developed in 1999 (almost 10 years ago) e.g., Markets are getting smarter faster than most companies. It is available on-line for free, and very little in it has not aged extremely well.

What is Enterprise 2.0?


Innovation in software and networks is coming from the Internet, not from the business world. Other tools like email, database servers, etc., came from the enterprise and then made it out to consumers or the internet. Web 2.0 is a collection of documented best practices. Web 2.0 is a set of new software applications that shifts most control to the users. Gives them control over content, structure, and processes.


For instance, the first wiki was the "simplest database that could possibly work'"--a blank web page with an Edit/Save button.

Web 2.0 applications are essentially free for users because they leverage economy of scale and rely on advertising for revenue.

Social media now generate more media than traditional media. There are 60-90,000 videos on Youtube every day.


Web 2.0 Principles


All Web 2.0 winners such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook are:

• using the web as platform;
• treating data as the next "Intel Inside";
• leaving behind the Software Release Cycle;
• leveraging lightweight software and business models;
• managing software above the level of a single device;
• providing rich user experience;
• innovating code assembly; and,
• incorporating collective intelligence.

Tim O'Reilly boiled this down to, "Networked applications that explicitly leverage network effects." The networked effect occurs when a good or service has more value the more that other people have it too. For instance, once email or the telephone reached a certain tipping point in value, people "have to have it" or they are out of the conversation.

Reed's Law--if the network is social, it is much more valuable.


We've seen a sudden shift of control from institutional to individual control. Open Source software produces much more code than "normal" software companies.

Enterprise 2.0


McAfee in The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration (March 2006) coined the term Enterprise 2.0. He defined it as "emergent, freeform, social" applications for use within the enterprise.

There is a simple answer to individuals in corporations who question why they should bother with Enterprise 2.0. It leaves behind reusable knowledge. A blog will record the answer to the FAQs so people won't bother subject matter experts.


What about where people want to have people come to them to get the answers? Possible answers are:



1) knowledge belongs to the organization, it shouldn't be hoarded.
2) Sharing and collaborating will benefit the sharer because it will benefit the organization he or she is a part of.
3) Participation is a way to gain the sort of reputation as a go-to person that the curmudgeon is trying to maintain.



People find that large organizations are creating and recreating same information in a couple of different places.

"Network effects by default" should be the norm. Only lock down information following extra effort.


Benefits of Enterprise 2.0

• Increased knowledge retention
• More adoption and use of knowledge management tools
• Creation of emergent structure and processes
• Increased transparency and availability of information
• Less duplication of effort (some companies discover they were maintaining the same information twice or three times).

What is different about Enterprise 2.0?


It is Emergent--lets right structure and details come out over time. There are low barriers for using it--the lower the barriers are, the higher the adoption.


McAfee's SLATES test is what Dion uses in assessing whether a particular approach qualifies as Enterprise 2.0. SLATES means Search, Linking, Authorship, Tagging, Extensions, Signals.


Search--discoverability and reuse of information drives retun on information

if you don't link the information you can't make sense of it.


Linking


Authorship--users generate the content

Tagging--handles volume problem--users provide their own context, provide multiple perspectives or conceptions on documents--other people share point of view--"one of most potent" in financial return study. must be on the fly. Tags stabilize around a core set.

Extensions--Lets users recommend content based on other's behaviour


Signals--centralizes the location of where you look at changing information. Signals ensure that there is pervasive access to the information.

Without tags and signals, the volume of information in a social collaboration environment quickly becomes overwhelming.


How reusable is the knowledge with search, tags, and linking? How large an audience can you reach?


Enterprise 2.0 must also be "Non-interruptive." Sharing incorporated into the workflow is much more effective.


Why Enterprise 2.0?

We are automating more and more--we have automated extraction and conversion of raw materials. Routine interactions like check generation and billing is now very well automated. Complex interactions that require decision making, collaboration, and knowledge consumption are now subject to efficiency benefits of Enterprise 2.0.

There was a lot more, including a demo of the Space.ous portal / Enterprise 2.0 platform. I will try to post on it soon.

Enterprise 2.0, Boston 2008--First Day Plan

I'll be doing some live blogging from the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this week. If you're there and would like to meet face-to-face, email me (look me up at goodwinprocter.com ) or Twitter me @KMHobbie.

I don't have much responsibility for analyzing possible security breaches, and I'm very interested in the vendors that are working with and complement Microsoft's Sharepoint 2007, so on June 9 I'll be attending the workshop "Social Computing Platforms: IBM & Microsoft," addressing both IBM's Lotus Notes and Microsoft's social collaboration systems, out-of-the-box and otherwise.

Then in the afternoon I'll take a look at successful Enterprise 2.0 in Implementing Enterprise 2.0: Exploring the Tools and Techniques of Emergent Change.

Social Computing Platforms--IBM & Microsoft

I learned more about Lotus at this presentation, as my firm is a Sharepoint shop.

The Lotus Connections Speaker was Suzanne Minnassian, IBM Lotus Connections Product Manager, IBM.

Lotus Connections lets companies set up communities that span the firewall, and are available through an external site. In her example (apparently drawn from real life), she hurts her ankle running on the Esplanade, and goes to the hospital web site looking for information about doctors who might be able to help. Through a standard search, she finds a sports medicine doctor. She sees more information about a doctor than just her contact data—she also sees a blog by the doctor that gets published inside & outside the firewall, gets access to doctor’s calendar to schedule an appointment [ I doubt that would ever happen! ], and sees what internal “communities” the doctor is involved with. If one of them is a “sports injury” community, she might be able to get advice on how to treat her injury in the short term from another patient.

Lotus provides much richer set of information for users inside the firewall.

Compared to Microsoft, it looks a lot more user-friendly and easy to adopt. Microsoft is stronger in having so many partners and applications developers that are willing to invest in integrating with Sharepoint.

Lotus has really built out a fully mature social networking and collaboration system. Suzanne noted that “the longer a social application is out there, the more data gets added to it” and it also looks like the longer a social collaboration system has been published and actively modified, the more and better features it has.

I totally ate up the rich use of social tags in Connections. For starters, bookmarks, in their “Dogear” system, apply to people, items such as blog entries, documents, and external web sites. In all environments, tags are links to what others have tagged with that word. Tags are directly integrated with search, such that documents tagged with the search term come up higher in the list. Furthermore, people who have been tagged or who have tagged using that word are displayed alongside, in case you’d rather call someone than look at a document. You can filter down search results by tags, with guided navigation, so that you can see which content has to do with “Liu” and “environment” after two clicks.

Suzanne noted that having your content “pre-filtered” by other users through tags has greatly enhanced search at companies that have adopted the system. Tags and combinations of tags generate RSS feeds as “watchlists” so users can monitor content additions containing particular terms.

Users have profiles, with a rich set of data pulled from their work, connection, and tagging activities. Allows people to establish formal “connections” with people (I wonder if this is mediated, i.e., if the person on the other end of the proposed connection has to agree to form the connection.) Each user also has an “iGoogle”-like landing page with a set of widgets that can be moved around, such as blog posts, tags, activity by other users, activity on tags, and so forth.
Lotus Connections also allows quick creation of “Communities.” They’ve learned that different groups organize around different types of activities, and so their communities have flexible features such as discussion boards, other live communication such as IM, wikis, shared bookmarks, and feed views.

A feed view is a list from an RSS feed that people can comment on and share with particular people. There are also “Activities” which constitute flexible project management spaces.

The one social piece missing is a feed reader, which Lotus still has in Beta (it’s called “Spectacular”.

Connections also has a very flashy-looking social networking analysis tool built in. You can view a person’s connections, in the form of icons that are closer to the main person’s icon the closer the relationship. Like ContactNetworks, strength of relationship is determined by mining email and IM. The strength can be filtered by date, division, or country. You can also search networks for a particular keyword, which shows clusters of people and lets you identify the key people who connect clusters of people. In the example Suzanne ran, she found the key IBM person working on, of course, “tagging.”