Ron Miller of EContent wrote a very good article AIIM Study Finds Enterprise Search Still Lacking about an upcoming AIIM report on Findability and disappointed expectations for enterprise search. Ron's title is more polite than some of the words I've heard (and used) to characterize enterprise search. Bluntly - if we all agree that enterprise search sucks, what is to be done?
One big problem for collaboration has been too many borders - technical or cultural - creating silos of information for no good reason - and many bad ones. There's also a big problem if you don't have a good way to mark borders that enable collaboration where there's a natural expectation of privacy.
For example - if you work for a law firm there's a reasonable - and legal - expectation that only the client and members of the firm have access to the collaborative space reserved for work with each specific client. But a member of the firm may be working with many different clients at the same time, and need to keep on top of many external engagements - and a host of internal engagements that are shared within the law firm but invisible to all clients.
WSJ.com's Ben Worthen quotes SAP chief executive Henning Kagermann "giving an interview in the back seat of a hybrid Mercury SUV instead of his usual Town Car, in accordance with SAP's new environmental policy". Kagermann is skeptical about the proposition that "large corporate-software projects will disappear, replaced by easy-to-use Internet-programs targeted at individual workers". Kagermann says:
... the most important features for the managers who buy business software are still a system’s security and reliability, and whether the system helps a business comply with an ever-growing number of government regulations, says Kagermann. Systems bought by individuals or departments don’t have the company-wide perspective necessary to meet these goals - The Reason It's Called Management Software, WSJ.com
On Mr. Kagermann's last point - systems from small, agile suppliers are perfectly capable of meeting security, reliability and other business requirements based on a company wide perspective. And small, agile mammals discovered their niche and evolved to reshape the world of ah... dinosaurs. No offense!
I'm just back from the 2008 Current Strategy Forum at the US Naval War College in Newport. This year the topic of panels and presentations (including addresses and extensive Q&A by the Secretary of the Navy, Chief of Naval Operations and, the Commandant of the Marine Corp) was the Cooperative Strategy for 21s Century Seapower - a joint strategy for the US Marine Corp, Navy and Coast Guard. The strategy raises prevention of war - deterrence, cooperative relationships with more international partners, trust built through humanitarian assistance and disaster response - to an equal level as the conduct of war. In the very best sense this is a positioning statement: what a nation should expect from its maritime forces.
Our citizens were involved in development of this strategy through a series of public forums known as the “Conversations with the Country.” Three themes dominated these discussions: our people want us to remain strong; they want us to protect them and our homeland, and they want us to work with partners around the world to prevent war. These themes, coupled with rigorous academic research, analysis and debate, led to a comprehensive strategy designed to meet the expectations and needs of the American people.
To the best of my knowledge, Clay Shirky is responsible for popularizing the term Social Software. By his definition, it's primarily about patterns of connections:
Social networking promotes new and serendipitous connections among people (and in TeamPage 4.0 the content they create and comments they make within a business context). But the public Web - and bounded world of Enterprise 2.0 - also creates connections based on serendipitous discovery using search, syndication, and context.
Network scale search of blog content is one Web scaleable way to find out who's actively talking about or working on a topic that interests you. Once you find a relevant hit, you then have the opportunity to: 1) make a personal connection; 2) subscribe to a syndicated feed from that individual or group; 3) make your own blog post or wiki link to tell let others in your strongly connected group - and anyone else in the who can read your post - that you've found an interesting fact or connection. Blog / wiki connections make it possible to add situational context - including time based patterns of interest - to search, which is particularly valuable in the relatively small and link-poor enterprise.
Your post then becomes a new item which others can discover - or read if they subscribe to your personal or group blog / wiki - as a potentially valuable source. This weak signal amplification creates a spreading activation network that can quickly span the globe - and further extends and reinforces the network. It also reinforces the value of old fashioned and irreplaceable face to face connections by letting people keep in touch with their extended network without creating undue work for either the sender or receiver.
The "social" part of software in the Enterprise 2.0 opens opportunities for strongly connected groups to work together more effectively, while making valuable connections within and across the enterprise. These connections would be wildly impractical if we were limited to the physical world of airplanes, meetings and conferences, or the disco ball era of email! But the value of these connections can lead to real strategic advantage, not just reducing the cost of travel and frustrations of email.
Last month I had the pleasure of interviewing HBS Professor Andrew McAfee at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit Tokyo 2008. The forty minute interview was videotaped in Professor McAfee's HBS office based on questions submitted in advance from the Tokyo conference site (www.enterprise20.jp). Topics included the definition of Enterprise 2.0 versus Web 2.0; return on investment; risk of disclosure; factors for successful Enterprise 2.0 deployment - and a series of questions and followup on Enterprise 2.0 and competitive advantage that particularly struck me:
Kevin Marks, a Google engineer and Technorati veteran, said in a talk about the company's OpenSocial project and Social Graph APIs that e-mail is a "strange legacy idea."
"E-mail has died away for a group of users. for the younger generation, they don't use e-mail," he said, talking about the young Web users who have started to abandon e-mail for Facebook messaging and mobile texting. "They see it as this noisy spam-filled thing that annoys them every day...they see it as how you talk to the university, how you talk to the bank." Marks pointed to technologies like OpenID that promote the notion that online identities these days are defined by so much more than e-mail addresses--URLs and social-networking profiles, to name a few.
Blogs, wiki's and IM displace use of broadcast email for group working communication. Email is a great medium for one to one - back and forth - communication, but it's a terrible medium for group collaboration. Clay Shirky says:
All enterprises have more knowledge in their employees as a group than any one person, even (especially?) the CEO. The worst case is where one person has a problem and another knows a solution, but neither knows the other – or that the other knows. Despite e-mail’s advantages for communication, it falls down as a close collaboration tool on complex projects: E-mail makes it hard to keep everything related to a particular project in one place; e-mailed attachments can lead to version-control nightmares; and it’s almost impossible to get the Cc:line right. If the Cc:line is too broad, it creates “occupational spam” – messages from co-workers that don’t matter to everyone addressed. If the Cc:line is too narrow, the activity becomes opaque to management or partners. -- Social Software: A New Generation of Tools by Clay Shirky, Release 1.0 Vol 21, No. 5, 20 May 2003 (.pdf)
Blog581: February 26, 2008; Posted by Jordan Frank
Sometimes "free" is hardly that, and TCO calculations don't begin to account for the "cost" of a failed initiative. Below is an anonymized e-mail sent from a manager in one division of a very large global enterprise to another manager in a separate division which is now evaluating Enterprise Wiki software.
In yesterday's note Control Doesn't Scale, I talked about how Enterprise 2.0 relies on an Enterprise 2.0 architecture and approach in order to work more like the web. Reflecting on a speech by Andrew McAfee at FASTForward 08, Bill Ives puts the matter very nicely:
David Weinberger has an incredible knack for putting information management issues into perspective, and always does so with just the right amount of humor and sarcasm (something I generally aim to achieve - but I imagine I fall short of a perfect Weinberger).
Steve Hodgkinson, Ovum research director, sees Enterprise 2.0 as a genuine opportunity for technology to act as a catalyst for changes in organisational culture.
"Enterprise 2.0 is emerging as the most practical way of sharing and managing knowledge in a range of contexts, from team collaboration to customer self-service forums. This leads to the ability to bring about cultural change with the personal power of informal networks such as wikis, blogs, profiles and forums."
"The root of its culture change power, however, is its ability to unleash the personal power of informal networks," said Hodgkinson.
Key ideas within this new system include:
* The need for a flat organisation, rather than an organisational hierarchy
* Folksonomy rather than taxonomy
* User-driven technology rather than IT department control
* Short time-to-market cycles; to continue and increase flow
* Global teams of people, rather than locating the whole organisation in one building
* Emergent information systems, rather than dictated and structured information systems
* The opening of propriety standards
Blog563: February 11, 2008; Posted by Jordan Frank
Some of my past entries (Best Practice and the Wikipedia Big Brain, Yin and Yang of E2.0, and Pros and Cons of Emergence) have discussed the importance of some structure in the collaboration process, even when using software like wikis and blogs which can permit N degrees of emergent structure. A recent sustained effort by an MBA class in Israel illustrates the importance and benefit of applying structure to the task.
Nick Fera asks who is better for "Wicked" problem solving, Groups or Individuals? after reading a December 5, 2007 article in ScienceDaily about a Sandia National Laboratories study.
Spending just a little time looking at specifics on your own collaboration patterns sheds light on the central role of communication and collaboration in the every day business process of a "knowledge worker."
Collaboration and knowledge sharing don't sound mission critical until
you consider this: Teams that fail to do both, fail to perform. Bridging Faultlines in Diverse teams(A Dummer 2007 study published in the MIT Sloan Management Review) details
the kinds of performance failures that result when teams fail to collaborate and share knowledge:
Good Morning Silicon Valley's Off Topic section for 18 Jan 2008 links to
this page as "the least entertaining game ever". Unfair, unkind, funny, but with an element of truth:
close to a perfect example of what I'd call a good cheap shot. To restore my karmic balance and express a personal opinion that the authors of the game might appreciate, see this page.
Dennis McDonald really strikes the "What Project Blogs?" nail on the head when he describes how, for lighter-duty "innovation oriented" teams, blog/wiki systems can be their core platform whereas for "heavy duty" teams, they "take precedence by making the availability of reports and data from the more structured tools more accessible." With blogs for projects, function follows form. More specifically, project teams need to communicate and share content over time - that's the form of a blog and is the principal rationale for why every project team should maintain one, or more, blogs. Additional project management functions required can be layered on top of the blog, or can be provided by other more structured systems when necessary.
As I read through a few posts from Lynda Moulton, Jack Vinson and Jessica Baumgart, all involved in my ASIS&T 2007 and Gilbane panels late last year, I am pausing to absorb the surprising rate at which we've collectively moved away from the double drawer file cabinets and dewey decimal systems that I learned to use only a decade or two ago.
In "Wisdom of Crowds is Cowardice," Central Desktop points to a Ross Mayfield statement (on the Conferenza blog) about the benefits of making decision rights more participatory and decoupling information rights from decision rights. Central Desktop concludes by urging "Lets just try to keep a little perspective when we talk about this stuff." OK. Lets do that...
James Robertson's article Collaboration Tools are Anti Knowledge Sharing? discusses the pros and cons of collaboration tools, with particular emphasis on the problems associated with proliferation of 100's or even 1,000's of information silos. Michael Sampson's response nicely vouches for the pros, while cautioning against having a hodgepodge of disparate collaboration tools.
Jim McGee did an excellent job in The Problem of Emergence of wrapping up our coffee talk with Jack Vinson on the pros and cons of emergence when adapting Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0. The simple fact is that Enterprise 2.0 is different from Web 2.0, and because of that, these differences have to be accounted for in the technologies implemented and in support of the adoption process.
Bill Ives of Portals and KM shifts his usual focus to raise a question near and dear to all of us who live in New England, Searching for the Perfect Fried Clam. He lists three tempting choices in Massachusetts, settling on Woodman's in Essex as his first choice. I'll certainly put that on my list, but must nominate Evelyn's Drive Inn in Tiverton RI for the Clam of Honor. Not only do they have great fried clams, but they're also my top choice for Rhode Island style (clear) clam chowder and traditional Rhode Island stuffies ("Fresh local quahogs halved and filled with our spicy blend of chopped clams and chourico").
Blog479: September 3, 2007; Posted by Jordan Frank
One of my favorite aspects of the Traction platform is its ability to help human's "scale" to handle working with a large amount of information content. As I noted in Wikis Reduce Email, we have over 130,000 pages, comments and attachments in our own enterprise system, but it's very manageable. Traction turns information overload into underload and facilitates the transformation of text into human knowledge and intuition. Blosint agrees.
When asked "How are things?" a college friend used to reply "Same old, same old" as a way of saying "Nothing has changed, nothing's gone wrong, things are fine." This was always good to hear.
JP Rangaswami writes an excellent blog - Confused of Calcutta - where he shares his experience as an "accidental technologist" who moved from investment banking to the services arm of a telco. His post on Facebook and Knowledge Management tells a great story about what happened when he decided to open up his mailbox to his direct reports:
Learning Fake Steve Jobs' real identity is about as much fun as learning that Santa Claus died on 6 September 1959 of pneumonia and complications from a stroke. Adopting an anonymous persona for for satiric or polemical rants has a long and honorable history, unlike the self-serving sock puppetery of some real life CEO's. The former FSJ takes a nice parting shot at Valleywag:
To add a bit more data fuel to the survey research fire: In an in depth survey of 120 IT Executives at large companies (average $10B revenue), Nemertes Research reported that "18 percent said their company is using blogs, 32 percent are using wikis, and 23 percent are using RSS."
The success of user generated content sites and communities such as MySpace, Wikipedia and the Blogosphere leads many to question the merit of imposing any structure on collaboration. Leading thinkers like Jim McGee and Bill Ives recently offered their ideas and sought opinion from others on the FASTForward blog.
The video This is what the web looked like in 1994 - a DEC promotional video of that era - got a bit of attention recently. Just for the record - here's what Enterprise 2.0 looked like in 1968 - courtesy Doug Engelbart and his team at SRI. Doug's bootstrapped use of Augment to design, build and extend itself shows how Enterprise 2.0 will work when we finally gets our acts together. Augment was used as a collaborative platform for: CAD/CAE design of its own hardware components; sofware development; a software repository; issue tracking; a research notebook and public journal for ARPANET software development - running as ARPANet node number three.
A new market report, this time by McKinsey& Company, says a majority of executives say they plan to increase investments in technologies which fall under the collective hood of Enterprise and Web 2.0.
As reported by Nicolas Carr, the Forrester report (a survey of CIOs) released earlier this year suggests 35% of companies are already using all 6 technologies covered in their report (including blogs, wikis, social networking, podcasts, RSS and Tagging). This is well above the 33% reported by McKinsey as already using or planning to use a wiki. Earlier this year, a study of the Inc. 500 reported that 19% have deployed blogs while 11% have deployed a wikis.
To add a bit more data fuel to the survey research fire: In an in depth survey of 120 IT Executives at large companies (average $10B revenue), Nemertes Research reported that "18 percent said their company is using blogs, 32 percent are using wikis, and 23 percent are using RSS."
The story goes on to indicate "some IT executives will consider open source, but many do not think it is enterprise ready and also have concerns about support costs. IT executives surveyed said the ongoing maintenance of open-source applications would be higher than for commercial off-the-shelf products."
Forrester provided more grist for the data mill on this topic. The following chart and some detail on it was posted at Read/WriteWeb:
Minus the seeming misplacement of IM along with other Web 2.0 technologies, two great points for consideration come from this data:
1. All except Social Networking are perceived to have at least "Limited Value" by > 90% and at least "Moderate Value" by > 59%. This may be a strong turn since a few years ago when I'll be the same ratios may have claimed that blog and wiki technology had negative value for the enterprise ;)
2. RSS and Podcasting (note, podcasting is a subset of RSS) got more "Substantial Value" points than Wikis and Blogs. Before jumping to write checks for RSS clients but not wikis, one must recognize that value creation happens in the blogs and wikis. There is an information lurker phenomenon at work here: Given an 80/20 or even 99/1 rule, substantially more people may consume blog and wiki content using RSS readers, thus the perception of universal value for these technologies.
Joe McKendrick asks "Is Web 2.0 Really Dominated by the Young?" and offers some data suggesting its for people of all ages, though under 25ers are the majority in communities like MySpace. In the enterprise, however, there is a question as to whether 2.0 adoption is better started with younger or more experienced management-level employees.
Congratulations to our Japanese partners SEL and AKJ on a great showing for Traction TeamPage at LinuxWorld Japan 2007. SEL was a gold sponsor and launched a Japanese TeamPage customer forum in advance of the event.
Traction Roots: A Whirlwind Tour (.ppt 6.2MB) tells the Traction story in pictures: 1) Tim Berners-Lee's web trades stable links for utmost simplicity and bottom-up scalability without central control; 2) Traction creates spaces which are pleasant and stable islands with a rich hypertext model internally: bi-direction links; comments based on ternary relations rather than hacking the representation of the referent object; faceted permission models uniformly enforced for search results, cross-references, as well as content browsing; fully journaled actions, etc. 3) Traction generates HTTP addressable views of its content to enable any item in the Traction corpus to be read and linked like the rest of the web (optionally restricted by access controls). This creates a pleasant and stable island that's easily connected to other islands of stability on the Web - as well as anything in the storm tossed sea - not a stovepiped box.
In his Mar 26, 2006 post, Putting Enterprise 2.0 in Perspective, Mike Gotta agrees with Tom Davenport and Andrew McAfee that a balanced discussion of E2.0 should include "... how well an enterprise addresses the complex organizational dynamics that often inhibit change," not just "irrational exuberance regarding the technology."
In every previous generation hypertext system, the ability to read, search, link and communicate came with a terrible price: it might work well, but only if you were willing to put everything you wanted to work with into some sealed box, and convince everyone you wanted to work with to use the same box. From the earliest days of Vannevar Bush's Memex, the vision was universal, but the implementation was a siloed. As Ted Nelson once said on the folly of using computers to simulate paper, Xerox PARC's first paper simulation was followed by Apple's contribution:
But the Web over the universal Internet turned the world-view of Lotus Notes (and the Sharepoint stack) inside out: no proprietary client, no proprietary representation, no requirement to work inside the proprietary box - and every motivation to make anything valuable you create or deliver compatible with the least common denominator representation outside the box - http addressable HTML.
A study by Bill Tancer of Hitwise provides more grain to the Lurker effect that I referenced at AlertBox. He indicates that 0.16% of visits to YouTube are to upload content and 0.2% of visits to Flickr are to add a picture. This affirms that most of us are passive visitors of public sites. But this is far from a blow to 2.0. In fact the increase in viewership affirms the value of the medium. Individuals simply need a reason to contribute. As I conclude in the original post here about Beta Bloggers, there is a simple and obvious role for any knowledge worker to publish a steady stream of content in the process of every-day work process and communciation.
This week, BusinessWeek.com reports the Wikipedia co-founder seeks to start over. While the blemishes of vandalism and some poor writing doesn't sway Wikipedia fans, Larry Sanger, one of the Wikipedia co-founders, disagrees.
Despite years of debate, constructive discussion and an occasional flame war as well as scores of wikipedia edits, there remains ambiguity and disagreement on "what is a blog" and "what is a wiki." In a series talks at KMWorld, Burton Group’s Catalyst Conference, IQPC’s IntranetWeek and others over the last year, I've offered my own definition. So, here goes my attempt at a baseline set of definitions, with a bit of historical context.
I enjoyed FASTForward '07 last week in San Diego - an excellent conference and 60 degrees warmer than Providence Rhode Island! It featured great keynotes (particularly Andrew McAfee on Enterprise 2.0 the Next Disruptor), sessions, networking and entertainment.
The good news: Research shows awareness and use of social media (Message boards, social networking, online video, blogging, wikis and podcasting) is significant and apparently on the rise.
Andrew McAfee asks a great question in A Technology Flip Test: Introducing Channels in a World of Platforms: "... imagine that current corporate collaboration and communication technologies were exclusively E2.0 platforms -- blogs, wikis, etc. -- and all of a sudden a crop of new channel technologies -- email, instant messaging, text messaging -- became available. In other words, imagine the inverse of the present situation. What would happen? How, in the flip-test universe, would the new channel technologies be received?"
Everyone at Traction Software is honored to learn that TeamPage has been named a InfoWorld 2007 Technology of the Year Award Winner. In addition to InfoWorld, we'd like to thank customers and friends of Traction for helping us build a product that works well and serves a useful purpose. I'd personally like to thank Traction Software's employees and partners, as well as the inspiration from Andy van Dam, Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart. What a way to start the New Year!
I had the honor of speaking at the Boston Knowledge Management Forum on Monday. I was joined by Kathleen Gilroy of the Otter Group (who wrote a piece on the event
beforehand) , Susan Dobscha of Bentley College, and Kelly Drahzal of
IBM. I was also on an enterprise blog/wiki vendor panel led by Kathleen
(thanks Kathleen!).
Burton Group's Peter O'Kelly's report titled Hypertext and Compound/Interactive Document Models: Collaboration and Content Management Implications
goes a long way towards explaining the benefits of and drive towards
hypertext (a platform for blogs and wikis and more) as a backbone for
collaborative work and communication. In the report, Burton Group says Traction TeamPage... "...comes
closest to bringing the visions of hypertext pioneer Doug Engelbart to
fruition, and that it is also a very useful leading indicator in terms
of features other vendors will eventually add."
KnowledgeJolt with Jack writes about a study reported on Jakob Nielson's AlertBox about Participation Inequality: Lurkers vs. Contributors in Internet Communities. Jack agrees and expands on Jakob's recommendations for increasing participation. Both are on point for public internet communities like wikipedia, group blogs and product review sites. However, the problem can be simplified in enterprise settings when catering to beta bloggers.
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Forrester provided more grist for the data mill on this topic. The following chart and some detail on it was posted at 
