Skip to content

{ Category Archives } Enterprise2.0conf

LongJump

I really hate going through a lengthy interview about a hot new product, only to have them tell me at the end that half of what they told me is off the record. Not embargoed until some near-future announcement date, just off the record. Grrr.

Other than that, I had a pretty good demo last week from Pankaj Malviya, CEO of LongJump, who I missed at last week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference. LongJump is the brand for a service provided by Relationals, which has been in business since 2003 with a hosted CRM plaform targetted at media companies. Bonus marks to Pankaj, who starts into the presentation saying that their target users are business managers who organize information and create workflow, then in an aside, says “I see that you’re a business process management expert”, which means that either he’s looked at my blog or his PR person has briefed him well. :)

All of their solutions, including both those with the Relationals brand and the new LongJump hosted solutions, are focussed on the small to medium business market. LongJump, in fact, is created on the same underlying platform as the Relationals CRM, including components such as the MySQL database.

LongJump is a platform for creating data-driven, widget-based web applications, as well as offering a shared catalog environment for offering those applications by subscription to other users, including monetization of the applications. The application assembly environment is similar to an iGoogle home page, or other similar portal environments: widgets can be placed on the page, although they can’t exchange data or do other data mashup/filtering functionality like Yahoo Pipes. They have their own widget format, but it’s similar to the Google widget format and they’re working on making it identical so that widget created for Google could be used in LongJump.

LongJump Asset Tracking demo

The demo application was an asset tracking application, and I didn’t see much difference from the seemly endless array of lightweight web-based application development environments until he started showing me how to apply workflow to objects. There’s no graphical process mapper, but you can set states through which an object must pass and the predefined responses at each of those states, which in turn creates a sequence of tasks assigned to specific people or roles. The workflows can be triggered by data events, such as “renewal date less than 30 days”. This is crude from a BPM standpoint — it reminds me a lot of what IBM had in their Content Manager application a couple of years ago to do simple object-based workflow routing — but I haven’t seen anything else like it in this space. They plan to enhance this capability further, and I think that they could have a real competitive differentiator here.

Each application is “packaged” for publication on their catalog; for example, the Asset Tracking application above consists of all of the tabs that you see along the top (Home, Directory, PCs and Servers, Phones, Equipment, Reports, About), where each of those tabs has its own set of widgets and the underlying data sources. The catalog then makes published applications available for subscription by others, and handles the monetization.

LongJump is in an early (closed) beta now, with an open beta expected by end of year — I find this a longish timeline for this sort of application, but it’s coming from a more traditional company so I expect that their internal test and release procedures are different from the usual hair-on-fire Web 2.0 startup. They received 1,800 applicants for the closed beta, and have about 10 customers on there now.

2007 07 06 Enterprise 2.0 Comments (0)

Enterprise 2.0: Zoho

I had a chance for a one-on-one chat and demo with Raju Vegesna, Zoho’s evangelist, while at Enterprise 2.0 this week; since I do face-to-face interviews with a paper notebook, however, it’s taken me until the flight home from Boston to find time to transcribe my notes.

I’ve played around with Zoho, Google Apps and a few other Office 2.0 applications, but find it hard to find the compelling argument for me to start using them: I’m often in places with flaky, expensive or non-existent wifi, and it just doesn’t make sense to have my productivity impacted by the inability to connect to the internet. Case in point, I’m at 35,000′ right now, writing this blog post in Windows Live Writer, not in the Movable Type online environment where the blog is actually domiciled.

A few new releases in Zoho, however, have me willing to try it out: Zoho Wiki and Zoho Meeting. I’ve used another free hosted wiki, PBwiki, but they’ve only just introduced WYSIWYG editing and it still feels a bit kludgy; I could use MediaWiki on my own hosting platform, but they don’t have WYSIWYG editing at all, and I think that’s a major barrier to adoption. So seeing Zoho Wiki, which uses Zoho Writer (the word processor) as the text editor, makes me want to give that a try instead. It also has some nice capabilities for direct integration with some of the other Zoho tools that I want to test out.

The big news this week is Zoho Meeting, and that’s what Raju and I spent most of our time on. Currently free, although I’m expecting some sort of monetization model in the future, this is an online meeting and desktop sharing application, like Webex. It requires the meeting host to used a downloaded Windows application, but the attendees can either use a (Windows-only) ActiveX control, or a Java or Flash plug-in on other operating systems. There’s a high degree of integration with other applications: you can launch a Zoho meeting from a Skype chat, or embed it into a page of a presentation on Zoho Show if you only need to hop into full desktop sharing mode for part of a presentation. The meeting session is downloadable afterwards as a Flash file for replay, and can be used to generate a discussion forum thread with the meeting archive linked in. And, like Webex and other desktop sharing applications, it can also be used for remote control of a Windows PC: you leave the host running on the computer to be controlled (say, your home computer), then enter the meeting from another computer and (presumabely password protected) take control of the host computer.

I also saw Zoho Notebook, a free-form authoring application similar to Microsoft OneNote (but hosted), where you can add pages in a sort of binder/notebook paradigm, then put any type of content on the pages. There’s version control on the objects, and read-only and read/write security can be applied at the paragraph level for sharing.

Zoho Creator was interesting, too: a forms-based database application development environment, similar to a number of others ones that I’ve seen like DabbleDB. You create an application by drawing the associate user interface form, which in turn generates the database required for the fields on the form. You can edit the script behind each form object to change the default behaviours and add more functionality. The data can be viewed in the form or in a table view. Multiple database tables with joins are supported, and data can be imported and exported from the tables.

There’s also a QuickRead browser plug-in for IE or Firefox that acts as a viewer for many different office document types, insteach of having to launch the behemoth MS-Office application just to view a document that’s linked on a website. The browsers handle a lot of the document types natively, but QuickRead seems to handle many more that aren’t supported by the browsers themselves.

Also in the category of fun things to do with MS-Office documents, there’s a WebDAV sort of plug-in for MS-Office applications to allow the documents authored in those environments to be replicated online, which provides an easy transition path for Office users who want to get started on Zoho.

The last thing that we looked at was Zoho Mail; I’m not sure that Raju intended to show me that, but I saw it on his screen when he was getting set up for the demo, and it piqued my interest. It’s still in closed beta with 20-30,000 users, getting ready for general release in a couple of months. By providing some really slick interlinking of content types between Mail and the other Zoho applications, and a much more MS-Outlook style of interface (including the ability to see all attachments to all messages as a sort of document store), they’re looking to add value over what Google Mail provides. I suppose if you can’t be bought by them, then you have to try and beat them.

2007 06 21 Enterprise 2.0 Comments (0)

Enterprise 2.0: Town Hall wrapup

The conference finished with a general “town hall” session with Jessica Lipnack of NetAge and Stowe Boyd of Blue Whale Labs. I had thought that there was too much preaching to the converted going on here, but I sat with Eric Hoffert of ShareMethods during the session and as a vendor, he’s talked with a lot of customers here and saw many who are just getting started or looking at how to start. I stand corrected. :)

They redid the same survey (by SMS) as to whether the attendees felt that incumbent enterprise applications would add on Web 2.0 functionality and remain dominant in that area, or whether new Web 2.0 applications would take precedence; Web 2.0 went from 55% to 75% of the vote since the original vote during the Tuesday keynote. The IT versus user control question saw user control gain in popularity from 77% to 85%, and in the hype versus reality showdown, reality went from 69% to 89% popularity.

Boyd saw that the enterprise people attending are eager to adopt the best of Web 2.0, but still maintain the things that work for them from the older technology; unfortunately, they’re having difficulty figuring out which is which, and which is likely to be valuable in the future. The enterprise software vendors, on the other hand, are very clear about the fact that not only do they have the answers, but they’re going to make the decisions for you. He feels that the Enterprise 2.0 moniker is being misapplied in many cases: that it is really radically different, and that many of the vendors (especially the older enterprise software vendors who are positioning Web 2.0 as “old wine in new bottles”) just don’t get it yet. He gives no passing grades to any of the parties involved (watch McAfee’s keynote to see what he’s grading), except to give the users a B- for effort. There’s a lot of things going on, but not a lot of understanding of how to apply those in a practical fashion.

I had to duck out a few minutes early to catch my flight, in the middle of audience members telling about their “veil lifting from the eyes” revelation during the conference:

  • Allow the users to define what they need (”if they come, we will build it”), rather than having IT decide (”if we build it, they will come”)
  • The value of folksonomies over taxonomies
  • Software-as-a-service on the way to becoming a utility rather than being considered a business risk
  • The blogosphere is an incredible source of information, both about the authors and the content
2007 06 21 Enterprise 2.0 Comments (0)

Enterprise 2.0: Thomas Vander Wal

The last breakout session was with Thomas Vander Wal of InfoCloud, talking about tagging in the enterprise. He started out defining tagging and its uses: simple data/metadata externally applied to an object, which is used for sorting and as a hook for aggregating; tags provide an identifier or description of an item, or are a personal marker. He then looked at how the shift occurs from a top-down taxonomy to a bottom-up folksonomy: the result of personal free tagging by the consumer of the data, using their own vocabulary and viewpoint, for their own retrieval, but shared so others can use it. This is not so much a matter of people categorizing in a taxonomic sense, but in finding ways to connect information.

As I saw demonstrated at a recent conference, all of this makes librarians and taxonomists nervous, because they think of this as a specialized science that only they can do, and that the little people will just screw this up if you let them do it themselves.

Vander Wal showed how del.icio.us extended the tagging basics of object and metadata to include identity: you can track the tags of people whose opinions that you value. By looking at the object-metadata-identity relationship, you can now see, for example, what other people tagged with the same tags that you use in order to find new information that may be relevant.

He then moved on to what happens when you add community into the mix, which tends to apply some structure to the metadata because of the common vocabulary and understanding within the community or enterprise. He sees taxonomy as more more likely to be driven internally by a company, whereas a folksonomy is driven by the customer: folksonomy is emergent and fluid.

He discussed the business tensions between taxonomy and folksonomy in the enterprise: the balance between naming control and people’s vocabulary; using sample groups versus allowing every perspective to contribute; create in-house versus an outside service; the high cost of developing a taxonomy for a pre-determined value versus a low-cost taxonomy with an unknown value; consistency versus the emergent. In general, organizations spend a lot less money on their intranet than their customer-facing sites so it’s usually harder to find things; adding tagging to an intranet can hugely add value by allowing people to find information on the intranet. There’s also opportunities for business-to-business tagging, which can be used to align the vocabulary between two companies, and for customers to use tagging on an enterprise’s community-facing sites.

For an enterprise’s external sites, tagging can provide an improved understanding of the customers and market by looking at what terms that people are using to tag certain objects and pages — this could be an incredibly powerful yet inexpensive market research tool. It allows an organization to capture all of the current terminology around their products and usage to more easily target messaging around the products, and even develop market segmentation. In general, it provides a much better perspective on the customer base, or at least that portion of it that tags.

For an intranet, tagging can help improve findability and improve the context in which pages are understood. It allows for easy sharing of resources, and a cost-effective method of building a taxonomy so that vocabulary becomes shared across silos for disambiguation within the corporation.

In order to do all this, there needs to be some monitoring and analysis tools: what tags are being used, inbound and outbound traffic levels, if spam is occurring, and what’s happening in external tagging sites as well as any internal tagging systems. Analysis of all this allows you to look at usage patterns, build synonym repositories, identify people with common interests, and build some order and structure.

As tagging scales up in an enterprise, it always starts for reasons of personal productivity, then moves on to the serendipity of finding things with related tags, then a more mature social tagging where people are more aware of what’s happening in their community, and finally becomes a complex social system. I find interesting analogies to how my usage of del.icio.us has changed over time: I started using it just to get control of my browser bookmarks, and eventually moved on to using it to auto-generate daily blog posts of the new pages that I tag, along with my comments on each link.

Vander Wal walks us through the phases of interaction — this guy talks at light-speed, and I’m completely unable to capture all of this, which is unfortunate since it’s really, really interesting — and discusses the viral nature of it, especially within enterprises where the value of shared tags is usually much more obvious than in the wild.

He looks at the reasons that people tag, which are primarily for their own use and for re-findability. He touches on the social aspects of tagging, such as the categories that I use for posts on this blog, or tags that I add to my friends’ Flickr photos if I can add value with my unique metadata. There’s always issues of privacy, and in fact, del.icio.us now allows for private tagging in addition to publicly-visible tags, although many social networking sites don’t provide any privacy around the tags that you add to objects. Ma.gnolia, another social bookmarking site, also allows for private groups to be created, which is a great way for enterprises to get started with tagging without having to bring it in-house, but still providing privacy of those tags to just the group.The concepts of tagging are moving into many other areas, such as Microsoft Vista now allowing tagging of files.

There’s some interesting clustering that can be done with tagging as well, looking at the common co-occurrences of tags, which Flickr is doing now so that you can look at a group of photos that have common tags that are of interest to you.

Vander Wal stated that he doesn’t find tag clouds to be particularly useful for most applications, instead preferring a flat list of tags, but sees that tag clouds can be good for understanding the essence of an object or page.

If you want to see an example of tagging at use to great effect in a consumer retail environment, go find Kevin Federline’s CD on Amazon and check out the tags that customers associated with the product (about halfway down the page): “talentless” floats to the top.

He finished up with some thoughts on interoperability, which I see it going to be an increasingly important issue as the use of tagging proliferates, and multiple platforms are used.

2007 06 21 Enterprise 2.0 Comments (0)

Enterprise 2.0: Group Intelligence Panel

Luis Solis of GroupSystems moderated a panel on Group Intelligence Across the Enterprise: 5 Keys to Success, with David Marshak of the Unified Communications & Collaboration group at IBM, Alex Pentland of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and John Abele of Boston Scientific. One interesting thing was that Solis invited us to SMS him with questions during the presentation; not sure that that’s all that efficient, but maybe will pull a few of the introverts out of the closet.

Solis stated that personal productivity is (so) yesterday, even though that’s what a lot of this conference seems to have focussed on, and that we need to focus on group intelligence. He feels that collaboration is a too generic concept, and breaks it down into ad hoc (socializing, and 2 peers notifying or discussing) and structured group collaboration (lecturing, and many-to-many exploration/innovation). He sees the many-to-many exploration/innovation is the interesting part of collaboration for enterprises, since that leads to problem-solving, but that it’s hard work because it relies on trust within the group, a supportive culture, and confident leadership. Interestingly, he sees that American culture can be anti-collaborative because of a natural command-and-control mentality, whereas other countries (he mentioned Sweden in particular) have a more inherent bent towards collaboration in their national culture that spills over into their corporate culture. It would be interesting to see where Canada lies on this spectrum.

Pentland spoke about sensor networks, and the management of face-to-face communications. Using an on-body sensor (a sort of smart name tag), they measured who interacted with whom over the course of a project (which happened to be a banking marketing campaign) by detecting proximity as well as who was speaking. Rolling this together with the email traffic that went around for the same project, they were able to look at the total communication model and correlations between face-to-face/email traffic and factors such as the quality of the group interactions; the final result is that face-to-face communication communication is better than email. Okay, we really already knew that, but for the gadget geeks, there’s now a way to actually measure it. Apparently, these smart tags can also measure things such as physical gestures, which can have an impact with things such as animating an avatar in an environment like Second Life.

Marshak discussed IBM’s internal community tools, which I’ve heard about from friends of mine who work at IBM. With more than 300,000 employees, IBM has a few internal communication issues, especially around having people with common interests or complementary skills find each other. Their intranet allows people to join groups that are geographic- or interest-based, then use that to harness the community knowledge. His example was about when he upgraded to a new version of Lotus Notes and his Blackberry no longer worked, and he wanted to find out what to do (I resisted the urge to shout out “Buy Microsoft Outlook”); he pinged the internal Blackberry group and was soon in an interactive text chat with others who either had the same problem or who had a solution. The nice thing is that there’s no anonymity: everyone is accountable for their internal communications, and those involved in the communication can rate responses and even report someone else if they are using that communication method improperly. Even their Second Life group requires that you register your real identity in order to join. There’s an ongoing debate about many social networking sites about using your own identity, and I strongly feel that you should use your own identify if you want to engage in a public conversation, since hiding behind a pseudonym often results in completely inappropriate behaviour (I notice that those who oppose this view are almost always the ones engaging in such behaviour).

Abele discussed methods for creating the right environment for group collaboration, which he sees as requiring diversity (in culture, experience, bias, age, geography), a means of gathering input from everyone, and a means of aggregating information. He discussed impediments to collaboration: silos and different cultures, strong egos, messenger killers, pontificators, group think, off topic time wasters, diverse levels of understanding, a range of bias (although he also listed this as part of the diversity that was required), lack of leadership, and poor organization. Many environments actually reward silo behaviour, which manifests in enterprises and academia as information or skills specializations: the better that you get at a particular specialization, the more you get paid; unfortunately, focus on a specialization usually happens to the detriment of other knowledge and skills.

We ended up with audience questions, which started some interesting discussion threads. Marshak said that he doesn’t think that the goal of online communications should be to emulate face-to-face meetings: it’s just different, and those differences can be leveraged.

They also discussed the problems of group-think that can occur both from cultural/gender biases and when corporate organizational structures are allowed to influence how people interact, and how anonymity can be useful in some cases to allow people to ask questions or voice an opinion more freely. However, ultimately, its much more effective to actually know who has which concerns and asks which questions. This moved to a discussion of collaboration (which typically requires that you know who’s who) versus the broader area of group intelligence (which can include anonymous contributions).

Pentland has some interesting comments on how people’s personal goals are no longer fully aligned with that of their employer: when people worked for the same company for life, there was near-perfect alignment, but now, almost everyone has their own career interests that may go in different directions. This can impact people’s willingness to share in a variety of ways, depending on the particular corporate culture: they may be rewarded for bringing forward innovative ideas by being assigned to “cool” projects, or they may be punished for not toeing the company line.

Solis ended up with five keys to success to group intelligence:

  • Be sensitive to what nature of group work you wish to improve/optimize, e.g., many-to-many
  • Leadership commitment
  • Measurement of collaboration and its impacts
  • New tools create new behaviours, so make sure that the tools that you choose are likely to create the outcomes that you want in terms of behaviours
  • Beware obstacles: think back to the list of impediments above and which are likely to occur in your organization

I’ll be running a collaboration group process design session next week for a client, and you can be sure that I’ll be watching for a lot of the things that I’m hearing here today.

2007 06 21 Enterprise 2.0 Comments (0)

Enterprise 2.0: Sam Weber

Last day at the conference — half-day, really — and the first breakout session is with Sam Weber of KnowNow, discussing “RSS: Bridging the Gap Between the People and the Information that Drive Business”. I’ve been looking at ways to bring RSS into the enterprise for quite a while, mostly by nagging the BPM vendors to include it in their products.

Weber starts by saying that they are now completely an RSS company (actually, they also support ATOM), and previously did system-to-system integration using techniques such as REST: essentially, lightweight SOA. It makes perfect sense to me that moving to a focus on RSS is a logical progression from that. They make an RSS reader and a desktop alert tool, and their server is available as a hosted or on-site solution.

In a case study, he discusses a company of 30,000+ employees that has operations in the US and India, with 30 intranets, portals and knowledge bases, and thousands of internal blogs. Their challenge was internal communications across their employee base, and by using RSS for information distribution they were able to deliver consistent communications in a timely manner, without the information being lost in the employee’s email boxes. In other words, as I’m starting to see, RSS is becoming a sort of high priority email replacement, and to avoid clogging up internal email systems with broadcast emails.

He restated his main points from his 6-minute Launch Pad presentation yesterday: email is overused, with over 50% being junk; static portals are useful to less than 20% of users since they require too much action on the part of the user to find the information that they required; search has only about a 50% success rate and also relies on the user to have the skills required to find what they want. In fact, an IDC study showed that the average employee spends 9-10 hours per weeks searching for information, and is only successful half the time (it sounds like a lot more people need a tool like Google Desktop Search, or X1, which I use all the time), and that a 1000-person company wastes $48k per week on the inability to find information.

The solution, according to Weber, is RSS in the enterprise, or what they call live information management. To do this:

  1. Access and monitor information sources, rather than replicating data for the purposes of syndication; this includes monitoring information sources that don’t have RSS feeds.
  2. Automate relevancy, by leveraging this “newly freed content” to allow the system to try to determine what is relevant to a particular user and push them that information.
  3. I blinked, and missed step 3. :) I think that it was more about pushing the information, that is, transform and deliver the data.
  4. Capture user behaviour so as to refine the relevancy algorithms.

With all of this, there needs to be some core system capabilities such as aggregation (to avoid unnecessary duplication), filtering to meet relevancy requirements, data transformation to allow access to sources that don’t have RSS feeds, security, alerts and notifications, and content-based routing of the feeds to those who need them. After that, the information needs to be delivered to the end users, which is done via RSS.

Weber sees the following minimum requirements for a live information management system: monitor all sources inside and outside the enterprise; match content to users based on relevancy; leverage the network effect; deliver information to users as available; provide enterprise security and management; and enable end-user personalization and control. This seems to be a bit redundant with the last two slides, but is a good summary.

His next case study is Wells Fargo, which uses Teradata for collecting information in six major data warehouses; their challenges were around synchronizing metadata and ensuring that data and schema errors were corrected quickly. They’re now using KnowNow (in a customized solution) to monitor parts of the ETL process related to a risk dataset, and push notifications of any problems to the appropriate people via RSS.

Next, he discussed another banking case study (unnamed) where the central organization was sending out more than 80 internal newsletters and alerts each week to all employees; when this bogged down their systems, they moved it to SharePoint, where people actually found that it took more time to find things than in their old Lotus Notes email system. Now, they’re moving to an RSS model for distribution, and find themselves saving $750k per year.

He finished up with options for the enterprise to adopting RSS:

  • Wait, and just use RSS in the systems that offer it today; the big vendors will likely take 2-5 years to bring in RSS formatting.
  • Continue to (over)use email as the main collaboration tool, and bet on portals and search technologies.
  • Implement an enterprise syndication solution, which leverages the information that you have now and allows information to be selectively pushed to people, or allow them to select their own subscriptions.

I have no idea how well KnowNow’s product works, but the concepts that Weber discussed really hit home for me and many of my clients. There’s a Forrester white paper about Enterprise RSS available on the KnowNow site if you want to learn more.

2007 06 21 Enterprise 2.0 Comments (5)

Enterprise 2.0: Hot Videos

No, not that kind of video — these are hot-off-the-press videos of the keynote sessions at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. I stopped by the Altus display at the trade show after the sessions completed today and saw a bit more about the technology behind what’s serving these up. First of all, less than 24 hours after a live session, they have the video up here, complete with a fully searchable transcript, the “talking head”, and the slides, all synchronized. If that weren’t hot enough, note that there’s an RSS feed icon on the page; click on that, copy the URL for the vodcasts, paste it into iTunes, and you’ll be watching the slides with audio on your video iPod.

2007 06 20 Enterprise 2.0 Comments (0)

Enterprise 2.0: Tapscott Panel

Following on directly from his talk, Don Tapscott moderated a panel including Ross Mayfield of SocialText, Kim Polese of SpikeSource (who I saw speak about open source at the CMU West New Software Industry conference in April) and Joe Schueller of Proctor & Gamble.

Mayfield started off with some ideas about the complexity of social networks, and how some vendors attempt to translate that complexity into the software rather than providing simpler tools that encourage emergent behaviour by leaving the complexity with the people part of it. He illustrated the power law of participation, making the distinction between collective intelligence and collaborative intelligence, before moving on to a discussion of what to wiki. First, focussed on people, you can do an internal equivalent to Wikipedia, such as a part of your intranet; the challenge is that there may not be a specific goal associated with this. Second, focus on practice, and create a global glossary or how-tos which provides a practical but non-political reference application. Third, focus on project by creating a forum for project communication and lightweight content management. Fourth, focus on process by using a wiki for handling process exceptions. He finished up by announcing that SocialText launched WikiWidgets today, although I’m not clear at this point what exactly that is.

Polese talked about the enterprise benefits of Web 2.0, but also covered off some of the concerns: cost of the administration of point solutions, security, importing/including data from current information sources, and enterprise content management. She discussed their products, some of which provide testing and support frameworks for using open source in the enterprise, and one which appears to be an enterprise collaboration platform. I’ve seen so many things called “enterprise collaboration platforms” in the last two days, this is starting to be a bit meaningless.

Schueller was up last, discussing how P&G has relabelled their product R&D department to C&D, for Connect & Develop. They see the advantage of collaborating not just to harness technical ideas from all over, but cultural issues that might be relevant to a consumer products company like P&G. He sees this as a key part of business agility, as well as reducing product development costs and just creating better products from better ideas. They’re focussing on their core competencies rather than having to do everything themselves, which is something that’s happened in many industries such as manufacturing, but the idea that you can outsource your ideas is pretty innovative.

It’s like a sauna in the conference room and we’re now at 4:30 on a day that started with 8am sessions; and as we tail off to general questions on the panel, people start to trickle out of the room.

There was a good discussion on the potential for replacing email within the enterprise; Schueller said that he once made a bold statement that they’d just get rid of it, then had to eat those words as he discovered the (current) futility of declaring war on email. I think that there’s great opportunities to reduce email, using things like wikis for collaboration, and RSS feeds for one-way information dissemination (as we saw in the Bank of America presentation this morning), but we’re not going to see a significant decrease in email until more of the boomers retire and more of the MySpace generation gets into corporations to help shift the culture.

2007 06 20 Enterprise 2.0 Comments (1)

Enterprise 2.0: Don Tapscott

Don Tapscott talked about the concepts from his book Wikinomics, which I finally got around to reading recently (okay, I confess, I didn’t read the whole thing…). He states that the web is becoming the new mode of production, and is facilitating the move from the old closed hierarchical corporation to the open networked enterprise. He sees four drivers for change:

  • Web 2.0, which changes the way that we interact with computers.
  • The net generation, who grew up digital and also are much more used to multi-tasking across multiple channels: reading, watching TV and surfing the internet at the same time. They see email as a “formal technology”, suitable for sending a thank you letter to one of your parents’ friends, for example.
  • The social revolution, characterized by the rise of sites like Facebook.
  • The economic revolution, including new business models to take advantage of mass collaboration.

He covered his four major principles of being open (as an organization): peering, being open, sharing, and acting global. I did like his quote about being open: “if you’re going to be naked, you’d better be buff”, namely, you probably want to have your company in pretty respectable shape before exposing it to your business partners and customers.

He closed with the new business models that he discussed in the book: peer pioneers (e.g., Spikesource, who is up speaking later this afternoon); ideagoras (open idea markets, e.g., Proctor & Gamble, who will have half of their innovations come from outside of the corporation by the end of this year); prosumers (where customers become producers, e.g., Second Life); the new Alexandrians (e.g., Google Earth Avian Flu mashup); open platforms (e.g., Amazon API); the global plant floor (e.g., Boeing creating a peer-produced aircraft with their suppliers); and the wiki workplace (e.g. Geek Squad product management within Best Buy).

In direct relation to something said in the collective intelligence session this morning, Tapscott said “don’t fear theft of your intellectual property, fear obscurity.”

Apparently this presentation is pretty well-worn: Martin Cleaver, who’s sitting next to me, has heard it three times, and Mark Kuznicki, who’s chatting with us on a group Skype chat from Toronto (I think) says that he can recite it by heart; in fact, he described it as “peer production, blah blah blah, user-generated content, blah blah blah, crowdsourcing, blah blah blah”. This the first time that I’ve heard it, and it’s pretty good the first time around, but Tapscott may want to get himself some new material to keep the repeat attendees happy.

2007 06 20 Enterprise 2.0 Comments (1)

Enterprise 2.0: From the Labs

David Coleman is hosting a panel that includes Bob McCandless and Chad Ata of BrightCom, Irene Greif of IBM, and Denis Browne of SAP of what’s happening in their experimental environments right now, which may not be anything that’s going to become a product. Each has 10 minutes, so this is more like a standard panel than the speed-dating vibe of the previous Launch Pad session.

McCandless started out talking about BrightCom, which makes telepresence products, and some of the work that they’re doing in gaze correction and perspective-corrected viewing so that it appears that the people on the other side of the conference are both at the table with you and looking at you. He’s talking about immersive telepresence, where you’re in a fully rendered environment that appears truly seamless since you appear as a photo-realistic avatar rather than using a literal video of you, and how new display technologies are going to have to improve in order to support that. He’s demonstrating the ideas by using Second Life, where he’s popped his telepresence avatar directly in instead of his normal Second Life avatar. He claims that this has the potential to become “indistinguishable from reality”, and that immersive technology is the next generation after telepresence.

Greif talked about IBM’s Many Eyes, a social data analysis site. She started by showing the Baby Name Wizard data visualization, which somehow reminded me of the Hans Rosling TEDtalk and his company GapMinder; as she got into Many Eyes itself, it’s very much like GapMinder. The vision, however, is to use tools like this for enterprise data, including that which is residing on people’s hard drives.

Browne talked about what SAP is doing with enterprise widgets. He makes a great point that IT departments are still in reaction mode with respect to Web 2.0 applications, and that in many cases, the business side is bringing them in. He sees three ways to implement Enterprise 2.0: extend existing applications, build new applications, and facilitate enterprise mashups. He also makes an analogy of Enterprise 2.0 solutions to iTunes, where they need to provide end user experience, distribution, security and development tools. He showed the SAP widgets, which is a Google gadget-like toolbar of widgets, such as drilldowns into sales prospecting data.

2007 06 20 Enterprise 2.0 Comments (0)

Enterprise 2.0: Launch Pad

Michael Sampson of Collaboration Success Advisors chaired Launch Pad, where four companies each had six minutes to talk about a new product that they’re launching. David Coleman and Stowe Boyd each provided a minute of critique, then at the end we voted via SMS for our favourite.

Franco Dal Molin of Collanos: team collaboration across the corporate firewall, so that it can include outsourcers and contractors. They have a synchronized peer-to-peer workspace solution which is server-less, allowing for sharing information both real-time and asynchronously. You invite others to your workspace, and what you’re doing synchs with what they’re doing. It can include any types of content or file types, but also structure content such as tasks and links. There’s versioning of the content. Each project is presented in its own tab for organization, and presumably you can share different different tabs with different people. Workplace was released about six months ago, and today, they’re announcing a voice calling add-on to allow for voice and video calls, including voice mail and call forwarding. He invited us to join the Collanosphere. [I'm wondering if you're just looking at the product, is that a Collanoscopy?]

One of Stowe Boyd’s comments was that the problem with P2P is that if you’re never online at the same time as your collaborators, then you never synch with them; I see that in the Skype group chat that I belong to, where the chat history is actually maintained through P2P synchronization and I’ll suddenly get a big chunk of missing chat history come flooding in when someone comes online.

Avinoam Nowogrodski from Clarizen, who I’ll be interviewing later today: on-demand, collaborative project management. He had a lot of great marketing graphics that talked about collaborative project networks, but I’m not left with much of an overall impression of what their software actually does (aside from the fact that it’s called “project management”, so I assume that it does some sort of, um, project management).

Dave Peak of LiquidTalk: some of the challenges in business today are that an increasingly remote workforce limits collaboration; the Web 2.0 generation enters the workforce and have higher expectations; and roles are getting tougher, leading to higher turnover in employees. The result is a disconnected, disengaged workforce, and LiquidTalk counters this with mobile workforce engagement: create, find, organize and push audio/video business content to mobile devices. Personally, I’m not sure that I want to consume a lot of information via voice; although I listen to podcasts a lot, if I’m just trying to extract some key data, text is way easier.

Sam Weber of KnowNow was up last: his title slide claims that they’re the Live Information Management Application for Today’s Enterprise. He states that email is overused (and has become a storage device rather than a communication platform), static portals are broken, and search isn’t the answer. They monitor a wide variety of information sources — blogs, wikis, web servers, email, portals and more — and aggregate it, apply filtering, then push it out the critical information via RSS to create channels in a user portal environment similar to Netvibes. I agree with the critics that aggregation and RSS feeds are the way to go for information consumption in the future, so this one may have some legs.

The audience vote on which of these has the game-changing proposition: KnowNow.

2007 06 20 Enterprise 2.0 Comments (0)

Enterprise 2.0: Sessions online

You can see some live (and nearly live) coverage of the Enterprise 2.0 conference on their website: follow the links in the top right corner. Check out the videos of the keynote talks by Andrew McAfee, Marthin De Beer and Derek Burney to see if my blog coverage was accurate.

2007 06 20 Enterprise 2.0 Comments (0)

Enterprise 2.0: BEA

After watching Ajay Gandhi in the panel just before lunch, I meet up with him for an update on what’s been happening with their Enterprise 2.0 products since BEA Participate last month. It looks like they’ll move out of beta to general release some time in July, and they’re starting to line up customers for the GA products from around the world, and across telecom, public sector and a variety of other vertical industries.

We talked about what beta customers are doing with Pages, their mashup platform, and there’s a number of things that I didn’t expect. First of all, customers are using it as a wiki platform for team collaboration: although not as wiki-functional as a true wiki platform, it can easily integrate in other content and data sources, which a wiki platform typically can’t do. Other customers are using it as a lightweight portal builder (in my opinion, it looks like it could replace WebLogic Portal for some simpler applications, although that’s not BEA’s positioning), and also using it as a tool to create portlets that can be consumed by the WebLogic Portal environment. Since Pages allows you to create a portlet directly from sources as diverse as REST or an RSS feed, that adds a lot of value.

We also discussed a bit of the roadmap for future versions, the most exciting of which (for me) is the integration with AquaLogic BPM to both invoke and monitor processes. They’re also going to strengthen their blog and wiki capabilities, and improve the tooling, and he mentioned that they’re considering a hosted version as well.

More and more, I’m seeing mashups — especially via enterprise-focussed platforms like Pages — to be the future of what is now called end-user computing: the small but necessary applications that are built by semi-technical people that exist within business units, created in the absence of a sufficiently agile IT development group. I’ll definitely be looking more at this theme in the coming months, especially at Mashup Camp next month.

2007 06 20 Enterprise 2.0
mashups Comments (2)

Enterprise 2.0: Enterprise 2.0 Mashups

David Coleman of Collaborative Strategies ran a panel on Enterprise Mashups that included Ajay Gandhi of BEA, Rod Smith of IBM, Eric Hoffert of ShareMethods (who I had a great chat with yesterday at a break) and Lee Buck of Near-Time.

Coleman defines a mashup as something that can be working in less than a day, and declared that anything that takes longer than that is an integration project. I’m not sure I agree with that strict time definition, but it’s definitely in ballpark. He started out with some interesting slides defining mashups, since it’s likely that many in the audience aren’t familiar with mashups. His talk would have been a bit more impactful if he had taken the Bluetooth headset out of his ear, however…

Gandhi was up next to cover BEA’s mashup environment (he used the term “adhocracies” to describe some of the types of collaboration that are going on, which I love), and discussed how enterprise mashups are different than consumer internet mashups since they have to plug in to corporate data and provide some degree of security and control. He primarily covered AquaLogic Pages, which I saw at the recent BEA user conference. The nice thing about this panel is that each participant is expected to not just present, but demo, so he moved over to a Pages demo, although he didn’t do a live inclusion of my blog during the demo as we had from the stage at BEA Participate. He showed how to create a new data space, or page, which includes feeds from other sources, interactively-entered text, and other content; each page automatically has its own RSS feed. He then created a simple web application in Pages by combining a data object containing names and addresses of potential sales prospects with a map widget, where the map and data widgets interact with the map detecting any address information in the data and plotting the prospects on the map.

Hoffert gave a quick presentation on mashups as a model for building and selling applications, where revenue can be shared across the mashup participants, and the need for better standards to allow mashup components to interact. They’re involved in Open Simple Ajax Mashup (OpenSAM), which is intended to more easily allow for multi-component, multi-vendor enterprise mashups — this is another twist on the same issue being addressed by at least one other vendor by considering a sort of mashup ESB. Hoffert then demonstrated ShareOffice, one of their products, which is a mashup built on five different components for creating, editing and sharing documents amongst members of a sales team, and includes SalesForce.com data as well as document authoring and management.

We moved over to Smith, who started with some discussion of why companies do mashups, which is usually about how to reuse assets in ways that they were not intended. The emerging mashup ecosystem has to allow ease of access, have data and components be designed for re-mixability, and be ready in a corporate culture sense for the emergent behaviour and applications that will result. He demonstrated QEDwiki, which I’ve seen at Mashup Camp last year and in a few other presentations since then, although I haven’t tried it out yet. The page creation environment allows you to drag and drop components from a palette to the page, then open up properties for each component in order to create the links between them. The application that he showed, which was built in 17 hours, so fits the “less than one day” criteria if you’re a typical developer, combines two views of data about shipping vessels (a list, then a drill-down on the selected vessel) with a map of the location and relevant weather data. One of their widgets allows you to create a feed from a SQL statement, or from an Excel/CSV file, in order to integrate into their environment; this further supports my thoughts of (RSS) feeds as being the next great thing in what used to be called end-user computing. You can’t use third-party widgets, such as Google gadgets, although Smith sees that having widget interface standards is going to be essential as we move forward: essentially the same message that we heard from Hoffert about OpenSAM. It appears that this will all be part of Info 2.0, which we heard about yesterday in IBM’s Enterprise 2.0-o-rama presentation.

Last up was Buck from Near-Time, which looks at cross-organizational collaboration. He discussed “people mashups”, namely online collaboration outside corporate boundaries, where there is no single authority. They use methods such as an OpenID gateway to an internal LDAP directly as a way to help facilitate that collaboration, and provide tools for secure content sharing. Sorry guy, this is not a mashup in the sense that anyone attending this panel means, although it might be an interesting collaboration environment.

An audience member asked about process mashups rather than data mashups; Smith responded with an example about Tivoli information being available for exposure in a mashup environment, which is not really what I was looking for in response to that question.

2007 06 20 Enterprise 2.0
mashups Comments (0)

Enterprise 2.0: Collective Intelligence

Jeffrey Walker and Stewart Mader of Atlassian spoke next on “Collective Intelligence: Monkeys or Memes?” (great title, making reference to the infinite monkey theorem), which was really about adoption patterns of enterprise wikis.

This is really going back to the theory that the IQ level of an appropriately organized collective can be greater than that of the smartest person in that group, and that’s the whole reason for using wikis in the first place, especially in a corporate environment, instead of just picking the smart guy to write the thing.

There’s some significant drivers for Enterprise 2.0 software, and they’re not all about the functionality: some are about the fact that it’s lightweight, easy to install (or software as a service, requiring no installation), easy to customize, and doesn’t require months for the IT department or a third-party system integrator to create a working solution. Many companies, however, still believe that anything that can be up and running in less than 6 months is just a toy; this attitude is driven by IT departments trying to hold onto their job security in a world where the new applications and tools cause an ever-increasing commoditization of their role.

Walker was a very engaging speaker, quite funny and lots of great material. He spoke about some of the advantages of enterprise blogging, whether purely internal or external-facing, and some interesting differences in how companies approach external-facing blogs: Sun just lets you go to town, whereas Cisco requires that you have VP approval and go through corporate communications in a process that must discourage many potential bloggers long before they’re (inevitably) turned down. He recommended checking out IBM’s blogging policy as a good balance for enterprises; having talked with a few IBM employees who also blog, I’ve heard the same thing from them.

Not for the first time this week, I’ve heard SAP’s developer network used as a great example of using blogs and wikis with their external community.

Pixar uses a wiki for project management of all film productions that they do; it started out in their IT and software development areas, but gradually moved into the business areas, which Walker feels is a typical adoption pattern. He also thinks that Enterprise 2.0 adoption is going to look a lot different in the next year than it has in the past year due to the ever-increasing momentum, market presence, and consumer awareness.

He finished up talking about Twitter, not just as a personal social networking tool, but as a platform that’s starting to be investigated by organizations like BART and LAFD to provide public service announcements via SMS. I’ve always seen Twitter as redundant with something like my Facebook updates or a my Skype status, but seeing some non-personal uses of it all of a sudden makes it really interesting.

Mader came up next to talk about some examples of what’s happened with collective intelligence. He’s the author of the book Using Wikis in Education, and used a wiki to collaborate with several others in order to move from material that he had published in his blog into full-on collaborative authoring. He also talked about how he boosted the level of collaboration by creating a Facebook group, which gained more members in a number of weeks than the number of readers his blog reached in several months; this really points out that Facebook is inherently a more social environment (duh) than the more passive activity of reading blogs, and the very act of someone adding themselves to the Facebook group would cause its presence to be extended to that person’s contacts, which is not true if someone is just reading your blog.

He took us through some of the content on wikipatterns.com, a site that Atlassian sponsors, which contains both people and adoption patterns and anti-patterns: another great resource if you’re considering an enterprise wiki and want to assist its adoption. He also talked about some of the challenges of enterprise wiki adoption: overcoming resistance to change, establishing the right scope, gaining trust amongst the contributors (usually manifested in questions such as “someone else can change what I wrote?” and “how can I approve edits?”), and embracing emergent behaviours and making them part of the corporate culture.

Mader addressed an issue straight on that I’ve seen with both blogs and wikis: the attitude that “if I put my expertise in a public forum, I’m no longer an expert”, or “someone will steal my ideas”. I’ve had this argument with several other independent consultants when trying to convince them to blog; it’s a little bit like an architect not wanting anyone to be able to walk through the houses that he designs in case they copy his ideas, when his real value is in both bringing those designs to life and developing new designs, not just selling the old set of plans over and over again. If the only thing that you will ever have to contribute is what you’ve already done in the past, then it’s time for you to retire.

There were some audience questions at the end about people’s need for attribution of material that they author; Mader feels that wiki editing history logs actually provide better attribution than an emailed Word document, and that the new generation of workers are more likely to be used to this form of collaboration. Attribution is an illusion anyway in this world of copy-and-paste; I’ve sent two documents to a client in the past several days, only to find that they copied the text out of my corporate template and put it into their own template before distribution within their company.

2007 06 20 Enterprise 2.0
blogging Comments (3)

Enterprise 2.0: Case Studies Part II

Today started out with another panel — seems to be the more common format for breakout sessions here rather than individual speaker. I was a few minutes late and came in on someone from a vendor that I hadn’t heard of talking about his product, then Joe Schwartz of WebEx took over to talk about how they’re doing Enterprise 2.0 internally using their own technology. Because they have large operations in China, they need to be able to collaborate across a wide geography, for which their using their core web conferencing/desktop sharing product, but also leveraging blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds and other mechanisms in their outward-facing marketing. He also mentioned how they use social networking in the sales organization using tools like LinkedIn and Visible Path.

Because of the nature of their business and the fact that so much of their business is sold remotely, their sales force is really focussed on enhancing their virtual presence and touch-points. This is the first time that I’ve really heard about how social networking can make a difference for the sales side of the house; most case studies focus on inward-facing projects and people, or on the customer community in a post-sales scenario. They use a tool called SalesGenius, integrated with their CRM, to help with this; in fact, since it’s a hosted service, the sales department started it on a trial basis without IT even knowing about it. Even now, there’s no IT involvement, and a relatively low monthly cost gave them almost an immediate ROI.

Next up was Jeff Herrmann of Manning & Napier, an investment management firm, about how they implemented blogs and wikis internally using the SocialText platform. They already had a fairly collaborative culture, especially in their analytical team, but they had a problem with just capturing and retrieving knowledge (in part because of the relatively high turnover in personnel that is endemic in the industry), with communicating information between departments, and with facilitating virtual and asynchronous discussions. Funnily enough, he found it easy to get buy-in at the bottom (people who probably weren’t being heard, and saw this as an opportunity) and the top (executives who had the vision to understand how social networking could make their business work better), but said that he’s still working on the middle. And surprisingly, the most prolific blogger in the firm is the 71-year-old chairman.

We then heard from Maria Barnum of Bank of America on how they’re using RSS to distribute information out to their branch network: this is one-way notifications of everything from weather alerts to fraud notices, and used to be done by faxing or remote printing. They’re using a blog tool to publish information, since RSS is built right in, and categories allow for easy filtering of the feeds by region and role. They use a small RSS reader that sits in the system tray that alerts the user when a new item is available; essentially, they’ve created an alternative to email for distributing this type of information, which is a pretty interesting application for RSS. They use ActiveDirectory to determine that information and push specific feeds to specific people; I’d love to hear more about how they do that, since that’s an essential part of using RSS technologies in some enterprise applications. Someone asked what blog and reader technology that they are using, and Barnum said that she was not allowed to do product endorsements; I don’t think that the conference organizers intended that she not even mention the product name (after all, the previous speaker mentioned SocialText explicitly).

I consider RSS to be the next big thing in information distribution, and I’m actively paring down my email newsletter subscriptions (which I almost never read) in favour of RSS subscriptions, which assures that my email address isn’t getting spammed. I also think that RSS needs to be used much more heavily to deliver alerts and other information from enterprise applications: it provides a standards-based way to send out information that can be consumed on a variety of platforms.

2007 06 20 Enterprise 2.0
blogging Comments (4)

Enterprise 2.0: Jive Software

Whenever I attend a conference as press, as I am at this one, I receive a lot of requests for meetings with vendors while I’m at the conference. I had so many this time that I had to turn some down, and they keep coming in even while I’m here.

Today at lunchtime I had my first vendor interview with Matt Tucker, CTO of Jive Software. Jive makes an collaboration product in two main flavours: Clearspace, for enterprise collaboration, and Clearspace X, for community collaboration. Although based on the same platform, they have a few differences in functionality, such as reporting, and the pricing models are different: $29/user/year for the enterprise version, and internet-type user band pricing for the community version.

I really like the standard interface because it treats all content types — blog posts, online documents, wikis and discussion threads — the same, and combines them in the “What’s New” section. There’s a shared tagging structure between all of these types of content, so it’s really topic focussed rather than having the focus on content type that many enterprise social software suites have.

Clearspace

It has the expected functionality of RSS feeds everywhere you look (person, space, thread, or a specific piece of content), as well as email notifications for the old skool types who haven’t figured out RSS yet.

The company heritage is as the creator of discussion forum software used by 1,800 customers, including Apple (for their discussion groups) and SAP. There are migration tools to move from the old product to Clearspace, and a few customers are starting to migrate; there are approximately 25 customers on Clearspace today since its release five months ago, although not all of those are conversions from the old product. Although they have a project in the works with a university that will expand to 10,000 users consisting of faculty, staff and students, their largest active customer are in the 200-user range. VMWare is one prominent customer that is in the process of moving from the old platform to Clearspace for their community discussion forums.

The technology is Java on the back end, running on Solaris, Linux, Windows, OS/10 and probably your toaster; any application server; and eight (if I heard the number correctly) different databases. Although a few customers consume it as a hosted solution, most are taking it in-house and customizing it for their own use. Although Jive’s professional services group does a lot of the customization, apparently a savvy development group within a customer may also do the customization with a minimum of training.

In the future, they’ll be adding on more per-user personalization, such as content filters and views; they’ll also be adding more lightweight document approval workflow functionality, such as deadlines. This is the second vendor that I’ve talked to today who has mentioned workflow/process management in the context of a true Enterprise 2.0 product, and I know that there will be more interesting developments in this area.

2007 06 19 Enterprise 2.0 Comments (0)

Enterprise 2.0: Case Studies, Part I

Another panel, this one with moderator Brian Gillooly from Optimize, and including panelists Jordan Frank of Traction, Mark Mader of Smartsheet.com, Suresh Chandrasekaran of Denodo, Todd Berkowitz of NewsGator and David Carter of iUpload (which I understood was going to undergo a name change based on what their CEO John Bruce said last month at EnterpriseCamp in Toronto). Since these are all product companies, I expect that this might be a bit less compelling than the previous panel, which was primarily focused on two Enterprise 2.0 end-user organizations.

I’m not going to list the details of each vendors’ product; suffice it to say that Traction is an enterprise wiki platform (although there’s some blog type functionality in there too), Smartsheet.com is a spreadsheet-style project management application offered as a hosted service, Denodo does enterprise data mashups for business intelligence applications (now that’s kind of interesting), NewsGator is a well-known web feed aggregator and reader, and iUpload is a hosted enterprise social software service.

Mader had some interesting comments on how by making updates to a schedule completely transparent, no one wants to be the last one to add their part since everyone will know that they were last; this, however, is not unique to any Enterprise 2.0 functionality, but has been a well-known characteristic of any collaboration environment since Og was carving pictures of his kills on the community cave wall.

There was an interesting question about who, within an organization, is driving the Enterprise 2.0 technology adoption: although the CxO might be writing the cheque, it’s often corporate communications who’s pushing for it. In the last session, we saw that in one organization, it was pushed by HR, but I suspect that’s unusual.

2007 06 19 BI
Enterprise 2.0
SaaS
blogging Comments (2)

Enterprise 2.0: Reports from the Frontier

First after lunch is a panel that includes Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps from NetAge, who I saw present this morning, plus Sujatha Bodapati of ProdexNet (an IT services company with a large Indian offshore development lab) and Carole Boudinet of Volvo IT (which doesn’t make cars, but provides IT services such as SAP customization within the global group of Volvo companies), discussing more on the people side of Enterprise 2.0.

Stamps started out with a case study about Shell wherein they put the technology in place for collaboration, then had to develop new ways of working together in order to develop the internal networking skills. Boudinet continued on with information on how they developed a collaborative environment and culture at Volvo with global virtual teams, once the technology was in place to support such collaboration.

Volvo, as customers of NetAge (ah, the focus of this panel becomes clearer…) developed 10 keys to virtual team collaboration:

  1. Be organized
  2. Plan ahead
  3. Show respect
  4. Be clear
  5. Seek confirmation
  6. Dare to ask
  7. Give response
  8. Seek understanding
  9. Address problems
  10. Resolve conflicts

They developed a virtual team guide and exercises on getting started with virtual teams, and developed an iterative rollout process including assessment, coaching and exercises, then moving on to implementation of the tools and rules. They’ve developed a network of “culture ambassadors” who promote the Volvo culture and help people to adopt the culture.

An audience member asked how this helps Volvo do its job better, and it turns out that they can now gather ideas for their various manufacturing processes from participants around the world throughout their organization. This has helped them to save money by tapping into knowledge that already existed within their company.

Sujatha Bodapati then talked about collaboration challenges in their organization, with major operations in both the US and India, resulting in internal issues of culture, geography and time zones. They use email for customer and HR interaction, when a document trail is required; message boards and wikis for individual projects and technical details; online chat for quick clarifications and real-time collaboration; and web conferencing and desktop sharing for formal meetings, brainstorming and prototyping sessions, debugging, and technical support. I found this last bit to be a particularly good layout of how to use multiple communication channels depending on the type of communication required: very similar to the presentation that I heard from Craig Roth at a recent conference. ProdexNet uses a number of different processes for virtual team collaboration, including regularly-scheduled meetings and informal phone conversations, and encourages smaller team sizes of 5-7 people.

Besides talking about ProdexNet’s internal collaboration, Bodapati also talked about how they’re building a product for NetAge, and how during the entire 19-month project there has been no face-to-face communication between them: in fact, she just met Lipnack and Stamps yesterday for the first time. She sees excellent written communication skills as a key to this type of collaboration, since Stamps apparently wrote an incredibly clear set of product specifications ProdexNet to work from. They used BaseCamp for technical team collaboration, and online chat for development and debugging details. Since I often work with clients remotely, I agree that this can be done as long as there are clear communications, no resistance to using the technology required for collaboration, and a corporate culture that is open to virtual team collaboration. I have worked with many clients where we execute projects flawlessly without ever meeting face-to-face; on the flip side, I’ve had local clients who I met with several times per week but who couldn’t get past their own corporate politics and power games to allow collaboration to occur.

She stated that the bottom line to a successful virtual teams is the human interaction and attitude: willingness to take the time to communicate clearly, to have flexible work hours for time zone overlap, to travel when necessary for face-to-face interaction, and to use the right tools at the right time. An audience member asked how you “enforce willingness”, which I found pretty funny.

Lipnack finished up the session with a case study from an unnamed global financial services company, and how they developed collaboration across their global teams. They married sociology best practices with enterprise wiki technology, driven by the HR department — how’s that for three concepts that don’t often end up in the same sentence? The final result, based on before and after surveys, was a pretty impressive 34% increase in virtual collaboration.

2007 06 19 Enterprise 2.0 Comments (0)

Enterprise 2.0: Dennis Moore

We finished the morning with a keynote/general session by Dennis Moore of SAP, who gets points for making us laugh within the first 30 seconds. We still seem to be covering a lot of the basics of Enterprise 2.0; maybe that’s to be expected given the newness of the meme, although I would expect that most of the people here probably have a bit of knowledge about Enterprise 2.0 — they’re at an Enterprise 2.0 conference, after all.

He also discussed how the boundaries between work and home are starting to dissolve, in part because we’re bringing our expectations from our souped-up home-based computers and networks into the more restrictive corporate IT environment. Not satisfied with what IT can provide, business units are buying externally-hosted services via a software-as-a-service model, and building their own portals using RSS feeds.

As I’ve mentioned here before, he talked about how SAP has exposed much of their product functionality as web services so that those services can be consumed by other applications — whether a structured BPM application, an enterprise mashup or a portal — to provide visibility into the data and functionality of SAP. This makes SAP a vital and essential part of the ongoing environment rather than being relegated to the dreaded “legacy” category.

He demonstrated (finally! A live demo!) a nice “smart workspace”, essentially a portal environment with all of the SAP service-enabled functionality available for dropping into any of the containers in the environment. He actually poked fun at how SAP or one of their partners might take months/years to create a custom application that you could now create yourself in their smart workspace.

2007 06 19 Enterprise 2.0 Comments (0)