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{ Category Archives } Web 2.0

Applying the successful strategies of social networks to the enterprise #e2conf

Aaron Levie of Box.net is presenting in the last breakout slot of the day, looking at how to apply the lessons learned in consumer social networks to how these can be applied within the enterprise. He started on the ideas of speed (as in speed/ease of sharing information), community and openness as key features of the consumer web, then went on to discuss why traditional enterprise software isn’t social, based on these three measures. Okay, a bit of a simplistic and technology-focused view, but let’s run with that for now. Also conveniently supports why you would use a service like Box.net…

This was followed by a pretty lightweight list of how this could be applied in the enterprise, but nothing earth-shattering. For a presentation that was supposed to be about content-centric social networks, it was remarkably content-free.

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2009 06 23 Sandy Kemsley E2.0 conf
Enterprise 2.0 Comments (0)

FASTforward09: Clay Shirky

I’m at the FASTforward conference in Las Vegas, where I’m blogging over at the FASTforward blog. I’ll spare you my comments on Don Tapscott’s opening keynote, since regular readers have seen a lot of it before, but move on to our second big-name speaker of the conference, Clay Shirky, who I was looking forward to seeing. I read and enjoyed his book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (apparently coming out in paperback in a couple of weeks), although it seems that I neglected to write a review of it. I’ve seen the power of organizing events and movements without a formal organization, and as an independent (in both the philosophical and employment sense), I’m a firm believer that you don’t have to be part of a big organization in order to make things happen. Today’s social networking tools, like Facebook and Twitter, allow us to organize and motivate a large network of friends and friends of friends with a relatively small amount of effort.

It’s not just about having a flash mob or a Tweetup or even a fundraiser party like HoHoTO, however: social networks have become a major source for news. When a plane made an emergency landing on the Hudson River last month, I turned to Twitter rather than mainstream media sites or TV to stay on top of what was happening. As Twitter lowers the bar for us all to become citizen journalists via SMS messages from our mobile phones, millions of people the world over are adding their voices – 140 characters at a time – to the torrent of information about current events available on the web.

Although Shirky doesn’t say this explicitly, this is why search is so critical: without search, you can’t find all that information that’s out there waiting to be aggregated, and without search, you can’t filter all that information so that it’s relevant to you. Bad search gives you too much useless information; good search gives you a focused stream of pure gold. Good search also allows you to fine-tune that focus, adding and removing areas of interest depending on what catches your interest that day.

Back to his talk, he discussed amateur forums that provide support or information, specifically one that discusses specific mobile phone handset/carrier combinations and the known issues: a large number of unpaid people with a huge amount of collective knowledge contribute to a knowledgebase for the common good rather than for money. This is a classic case of crowdsourcing, such as is seen in Wikipedia, but he talked more about the notion of community, and the fact that people contribute to such an effort because they enjoy being part of the community. The social aspect of crowdsourcing is really the interesting part: although it’s cool that you create a huge body of knowledge, it’s even more cool to see the connections that are made through the community. He talked about IBM’s DogEar product (an enterprise social bookmarking product that started as an internal tool), and the connections that are being made by looking at who is linking to who’s links. Exposing this sort of information across an organization the size of IBM shows how connections can be made between people who normally would never have visibility of each other, even though they have common interests. It’s not about whether an organization is open or closed, it’s about the permeability of the interfaces between parts of the organization.

Digital tools lower the cost of failure. Get out there, build something social and risk that failure: it’s not going to cost you very much.

2009 02 09 Sandy Kemsley FASTforward Comments (1)

Oracle accidentally tweets about ALBPM

Two weeks ago, Peter Shankman broke the story about a social media “expert” who twittered unflatteringly about a customer’s home city while on his way to visit them, and how the expert was slapped in the face with it by his customer. If you’re using social media such as Facebook and Twitter for business purposes, you’d better be aware of who can see your updates so as not to commit a similar faux pas.

For example, a search for “albpm” (the BEA BPM platform acquired by Oracle, and positioned as strategic in their product strategy even though it’s not clear how they intend to converge ALBPM and BPEL Process Manager into a single runtime engine without obsolescing at least one of them) shows an interesting tweet made yesterday by Paul Cross at Oracle:

Oracle tweets about ALBPM

It looks like he didn’t understand (prior to that point) that if he wants to use Twitter for making possibly controversial sales strategy statements like this, it’s important to protect his updates so that only the people who he follows can see them. By this morning, his updates were protected, but Twitter search keeps all unprotected tweets available for all time.

I haven’t heard much lately about the Oracle BPM product convergence; I’m sure that there are a lot of ALBPM customers out there who are hoping that this internal directive doesn’t mean the end of ALBPM.

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2009 02 01 Sandy Kemsley BPM
Vendors Comments (1)

The Power of Twitter

This past Monday, I went to a little party called HoHoTO. Here’s how it all came about, thanks to Twitter and the amazing community in Toronto:

2008 12 19 Sandy Kemsley torcamp Comments (1)

Grown Up Digital

Don Tapscott is definitely enamored of his kids and their generation: in 1999’s Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation, he predicted how their generation would reshape society, and in his latest book, Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World, he practically deifies them.

I agree with a lot of what he’s saying, such as the ability of the 11-30 age group — the “Net Generation” — to easily consume information from multiple channels, but I think that he’s ignoring some of the research in this area in order to make his point. He quotes a study from the Oxford Future of the Mind Institute that shows that although Net Geners are better at intensive problem-solving than those 10 years their elders, interruptions such as those from text messages and IM makes the differences in ability disappear. Tapscott pooh-poohs this using the rather unscientific counterpoint of his daughter working on an assignment at the family kitchen table with people and dogs around, multiple windows and chat sessions open, and her iPod playing music. He posits that Net Geners appear to have ADD in class (apparently now a common complaint amongst teachers) because they’re bored. I’m just not sure that I buy that; there’s other factors at work here, many of which have little to do with age, and more with work styles.

From a business standpoint, the real value of Grown Up Digital is the chapter on the Net Generation in the workforce, covering how the expectations of those entering the workforce have changed, and how organizations need to change (in some cases) to accommodate this.

One of the key points is that they expect to be able to work when and where they want, and be quickly rewarded through promotion for their achievements. A year ago, when companies were wailing about how the boomers were all retiring and they didn’t have enough new recruits to replace them, this sense of entitlement may have been a realistic expectation for some people in some job markets; in today’s economy, it seems almost laughable. Reuters recently reported that young graduates are having a hard time finding work in Silicon Valley, and that just any college degree isn’t enough to land them their dream job with a gazillion stock options. Not surprisingly, engineering grads aren’t having that problem, neither are people with some amount of practical experience. Earlier this week, Tom Davenport wrote about whether millennials (another name for the Net Generation) can really change the workplace, echoing similar sentiments. Ron Alsop, in his book The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation is Shaking Up the Workplace, quotes a teenage blogger: “We don’t want to work more than 40 hours a week, and we want to wear clothes that are comfortable. We want to be able to spice up the dull workday by listening to our iPods. If corporate America doesn’t like that, too bad.” If the economy stays where it is for the next few years, it might be too bad for the Net Generation.

At some point, however, those 200.5k’s are going to turn back into 401k’s, and the boomers are going to retire, at which time the battle for talent will resume. Banning Facebook — a key networking tool for Net Geners — will no longer be acceptable practice, and companies will have to become more open to the collaborative tools and attitudes that the new workers bring. This isn’t just because that’s the only way to gain those workers, it’s because there’s some valid ideas in there for improving the enterprise by breaking the bonds with traditions of time, place and corporate boundaries. There’s also the issue of customization of tools: the Net Generation expect to be able to configure their working environment the way that they want in order to most effectively complete the tasks at hand, not be forced into someone else’s idea of what might make them productive. There is a lot to be learned from this concept in how we build the user experience for enterprise software in general.

I enjoyed Grown Up Digital, but I took it with a large grain of salt: in part, because economic times have changed dramatically in the few short months between writing and publication, and in part because I think that the average Net Gener may not be as wired as Tapscott’s kids.

2008 12 17 Sandy Kemsley business Comments (2)

Build your social network before you get laid off

I know, that’s completely obvious advice, right? Wrong.

Yesterday, I received an email from a friend who works in telecommunications sales with the subject line “Networking”, informing her list of contacts (I assume; at least she was polite enough to BCC us all) that she had been laid off and was looking for work, and listing her qualifications. I immediately emailed back to ask if she had a profile on LinkedIn or any other sort of online resume that I could look at to see if I knew of anything that might fit, and she responded “What is LinkedIn? Is it similar to Facebook?”. Needless to say, she’s not on either of those two very popular social networking sites.

That prompted me to do my quarterly LinkedIn maintenance: import the email addresses from my contact list, see who’s on LinkedIn that I’m not already connected to (LinkedIn shows you if a person has a profile if you enter their email address), and connect to them — if you just received a LinkedIn invitation from me, that’s why. What amazed me in doing that exercise was how many of my business contacts don’t have a LinkedIn profile, or at least don’t have one linked to their business email address. Do they think that they can never lose their job, or are they just not convinced of the power of online social networks? Both are dangerous opinions to hold in today’s economic climate.

Here’s the reasons that I typically hear for why someone (including my recently laid off friend) is not on a social network:

It’s an invasion of privacy

On any social network, you can reveal as much or as little information about yourself as you’re comfortable with — the only one invading your privacy is yourself, if you choose to do so. On a professional site like LinkedIn, it’s best to reveal everything possible about your work experience, since this acts as an online resume. On Facebook, since the focus is more on personal information, it’s easier to add things that you might regret later; keep in mind that employers, co-workers and business associates might be looking at that profile, and you should manage the content that you put there with that in mind.

Many people fear that their employer will consider their LinkedIn profile as an indication that they’re looking for work, but that’s not necessarily true: you can set your profile to say that you’re not interested in job offers, but just in business networking. Your employer may actually like the fact that you’re being proactive about networking in business, especially if you’re in an outward-facing role.

It takes too much time

The initial setup of a social network can take some time, depending on how you go about it. On LinkedIn, I initially set up my profile by copying and pasting from my resume, then imported my email contact list and checked to see who else was online. This prompted me to clean up my resume and my contact list, two badly-needed activities which took more time than what I spent on LinkedIn itself. Now, I get a weekly update email from LinkedIn with my contacts’ changed information, and I do an email sweep on a regular basis to check for new contacts. If I think of it, I also check for people online right after I meet them for the first time and make the connection then. I list my larger contracts on there as well (once completed), so I add items to my “job” listing once or twice a year. Ongoing time requirement is a couple of hours every couple of months.

Facebook can be a completely different animal, since it encourages you to spend a lot of time on the site. I don’t. I have automated feeds from my Flickr, del.icio.us and blog posts into my Facebook updates, and use a couple of third-party applications to link in my Slideshare presentations and other material, all without me having to visit Facebook. I go there every day or two for a few minutes to check for friends’ upcoming birthdays and scroll through recent feed items, but I miss a lot of the river of information in the feed.

I don’t believe that it will bring value to me

In the case of LinkedIn, it won’t bring value unless you commit to making it a part of your business networking. Not surprisingly, you get out of it what you put into it: if you don’t update your profile and don’t connect to people when you meet them, then your information is not going to be very interesting to anyone. On the other hand, if you keep your profile up to date and complete, recruiters can find you when you’re looking for work, and your contacts will see your change in job status (as in “working for XXX” to “looking for work”) which may prompt them to help you out. You can also send a message to your network of contacts about your job search, making it easy for them to pass it along to anyone who they might know through their network. If you’re not on there or don’t update regularly, they’ll never know.

Even though I’m not looking for a job (having worked for someone else a total of 16 months in the past 21 years, I’m probably unemployable :) ), LinkedIn provides value in keeping up with my business contacts as they move around, and occasionally brings new business my way.

I typically don’t proselytize social networks to those who aren’t already on them, but as my friends start to get hit by job cuts, I feel like they should know what they’re missing. If you know someone who isn’t on LinkedIn and should be, send them a link to this post to make it easy. I’m much more of an ant than a grasshopper, and like to put safety measures in place before I need them. Building your network after you get laid off is a lot tougher than doing it now, especially if you have a mortgage payment due at the end of the month.

2008 12 04 Sandy Kemsley business Comments (8)

BPM Milan: Digital Identity

Ben Jennings of University College London presented a paper on Digital Identity and Reputation in the Context of a Bounded Social Ecosystem, co-authored by Anthony Finkelstein.

He started with a discussion about digital identity that reminded me briefly of Dick Hardt’s Identity 2.0 presentation: using himself as an example, showing how he appears in different contexts on the web, such as Flickr, Facebook and YouTube. We all have this same problem of the reconciliation of multiple digital identities: we all have to maintain multiple profiles and multiple social graphs on multiple social networks.

Within some sort of bounded social ecosystem — where we have common goals, such as within an enterprise — the digital identity concept changes: your identity is at least partially pre-created (e.g., through your local network credentials), but this isn’t enough in a large organization where everyone doesn’t know everyone personally and where there may be multiple systems that don’t share credentials. There are still issues of disambiguating and unifying identities between the systems in use within the bounded social context, especially if it’s not a closed enterprise: there must be some fairly complex pattern recognition even to match up email addresses, which can be specified in a number of different formats.

Once you’ve established digital identity, then you can start on the larger issue of trust and reputation; so far, the research has only reached the stage of automating the recognition of digital identity, but will be expanded to (for example) selecting the most appropriate person for a specific task in a process, based on their reputation as derived from their contributions to many other systems.

2008 09 01 Sandy Kemsley IntlBPM Comments (0)

BPM Milan: Workshop on BPM and Social Software

It’s a holiday weekend back home, and my birthday tomorrow, so some may consider it a bit weird that I’m spending this week away from my family in Milan at a BPM conference. However, I’ve been excited about attending this conference for months since it’s focused on the research that’s happening in the field of BPM, rather than the usual vendor and analyst conferences that I attend. As a prelude to the conference, today is a day of full-day workshops on various BPM topics, and I’m attending the session on BPM and Social Software. I’m still a bit jet-lagged so may not make it through the entire day, but I’ll do my best.

The workshop is chaired by Selmin Nurcan of the University of Paris and Rainer Schmidt of Aalen University, and will consist of discussion of the various research papers contributed by the attendees — in fact, I seem to be one of the few people in the (small) audience who has not contributed a paper.

Before we got into the individual papers, Rainer Schmidt gave an overview of the issues in BPM and social software. I gave a presentation two years ago at the BPMG conference in London on BPM and Web 2.0 (the terms Enterprise 2.0 and social software were just starting to be used back then) that covers some of the same subject matter.

One main concern in BPM today — which I definitely see in practical applications — is the divide between the abstract process models and lifecycles, and the actual executed processes and procedures: in many cases, the process participants ignore some or all of the process model and best practices, and do things as they have in the past. Another concern is that of process improvements not bubbling up from the process participants to the process designers, since there’s a barrier between those who do the work and those who design the work.

Many BPM implementations have been based on strong ties within the enterprise — command-and-control structures with pre-defined methods and channels of communication — and it is these that are hindering the communication between the abstract and the execution in BPM implementations. Weak ties, greatly supported by social software, create alternative methods and channels for these communications, allowing people to more easily exchange ideas; this promotes the “wisdom of the crowd” wherein ideas can come from anywhere in the organization, and small contributions from many people can provide significant value. The concepts of weak ties and the wisdom of the crowd are those upon which social software are built: in the consumer space, think of the weak ties created with your social graph on LinkedIn or Facebook, and the wisdom of the crowd that contributes to efforts such as Wikipedia.

Lots of Tapscott and McAfee references flying around; this is a bit of an intro to social software that’s likely not required for this particular audience, but serves to provide a standard set of definitions of social software. He covered the basic principles, which will be important for seeing how BPM and social software interact: egalitarian; bottom-up; self-organizing; the value of context via tags and links as well as content; continual information improvement and publication for review; the importance of output and practice over abstract models; and transparency regarding the relationship of the participants.

He then moved into how social software supports (or could support) BPM: first, collaboration in the design, implement, evaluation and improvement phases; and second, the extension of functionality for the operational BPM system. Collaboration in the non-operational phases could be through wikis for capturing requirements, planning projects, and so on; in my opinion, this can also be through the use of more collaborative process modeling tools that allow non-experts to be involved in process discovery, modeling and design. During the operational phase, this could be a wiki to capture new requirements and potential process innovation, as well as collaborative tools for managing and documenting the project. Personally, I think that there’s other potential applications: in my presentation two years ago, I suggested the concept of process tagging and folksonomies to allow process participants to tag instances of processes; user-created process-based mashups (although there’s some argument as to whether mashups are considered part of social software) also deserve some discussion here, which are now much more possible since many of the vendors have introduced end-user RSS feeds to their products.

A great introduction to the day, and I’m looking forward to the research papers and discussions.

2008 09 01 Sandy Kemsley BPM
Enterprise 2.0
IntlBPM Comments (1)

Architecture & Process: Pat Cappelaere

For my last session — I have to leave for the airport around the time that the roundtables start — I sat in on Pat Cappelaere of Vightel discussing workflows, Identity 2.0 and delegated authority using REST.

He showed how lightweight protocols like ATOM — rather than SOAP — can be used to allow the quick mashup of information in near real time. He spent quite a bit of time on the advantages of a RESTful approach (summary: it’s easier), and the nature of the basic commands (post, get, put, delete) for managing web-based resources.

Where identity comes into all this is that some resources that might contribute to a mashup could be behind some type of access control, and the source system can’t manage the identities of all of the people who might want to access the end product. Identity 2.0 allows for the delegation of authentication to a trusted provider, i.e., using your OpenID (from Yahoo or other providers) on other sites instead of creating a user account on that site directly. That looks after basic authentication, but there also needs to be some authorization or pre-approval of transactions, which is what OAuth has been created for.

He’s using the term workflow to mean (I believe) the steps to assemble and process various resources and services into a web application: a service orchestration of various resources on the web using lightweight protocols. To implement this, they’ve created a RESTful version of the workflow bindings defined by WfMC as WfXML.

This was interesting, but I’m not at all clear what it was doing at this conference.

2008 04 23 Sandy Kemsley Architecture&Process Comments (2)

IT360: Web 2.0 – Now and its future for business

Mike Fox of Brightlights, a recruiter serving small and medium-sized software companies, is giving a talk on Web 2.0 and business; I started out unsure of why a recruiter is talking to us about Web 2.0, and ended up pretty much of the same mind.

He started with some very basic concepts, like the original Web 2.0 meme map and the themes it contains, and discussed some well-known (and well-worn) Web 2.0 case studies, such as Proctor&Gamble’s crowdsourcing of research, and Barack Obama’s online campaign presence. He asked questions like "has anyone heard of the $100 laptop?", "have you ever seen Slideshare?" and "has anyone heard of the ‘long tail’?", which I think you’d have to have been living under a rock not to know about, but maybe I’ve been drinking too much of the Koolaid.

He moved on to talk about Web 2.0 in the recruiting world, including the use of information aggregation tools such as ZoomInfo. He spent some time talking about using LinkedIn as both a recruiting tool and a job search tool, although I tend to think that this audience is probably pretty aware of what LinkedIn does. He mentioned some other recruitment-focused search sites like Jigsaw, and then stepped us through how to use Google Advanced Search for finding more information about companies and individuals — again, a bit basic, particularly (I think) for this audience.

He went through how to apply Web 2.0 thinking to business, based on the different goals and expectations for different generations of workers. He’s definitely been reading too much Tapscott. He did look at how to apply Web 2.0 to some fundamentals of adding value to a business, such as SaaS as both a cost reduction technique and a channel for offering products to customers.

He considers sending a monthly PDF newsletter by email and using Skype for long distance to be part of how he incorporates Web 2.0 into his business, which is a bit sad, although he does use a SaaS recruitment management system. There’s so much more that could be done with Web 2.0 in recruitment for a small recruiter like him: collaboration on resumes and job postings via Google Docs; blogging to show thought leadership in recruitment and engage the audience instead of a static monthly newsletter in PDF; publishing job postings listed on his site via RSS; hosting a discussion forum for job applicants.

That’s it for my coverage of IT360; I have to get back to some real work for the rest of the day. The Google talk was definitely the highlight for me, although I did really enjoy making the Director General of Industry Canada squirm yesterday, too.

2008 04 09 Sandy Kemsley IT360 Comments (0)

IT360: Social Networking for Business

I’m dropping in on a few sessions at the IT360 conference being held in Toronto this week — nice to be able to walk a conference for a change — and attended John Reid of CATA Alliance talking about the value of social networking for business. He’s a stand-in-the-audience sort of guy, and is standing about 4 feet from me, so I’m here for the duration. :)

He started with some pretty mainstream stats and information about social networks, such as a new blog being created every 2 seconds, then moved on to discuss the degree of risk that comes from publication and dissemination of information, starting with a bit of an obscure story about being threatened with a lawsuit for some information that he distributed in a spammy sort of fax operation several years ago up to how some companies are starting to ban Facebook access from inside the firewall.

He’s doing the presentation almost completely with audience participation; having first done an audience poll on whether we fell that social networks had high, medium or low value for business, he’s selecting people from each of the respondent categories to say why they feel the way that they do about social networking. We’re hearing about how social networks can be used to get closer to your customer, although this is dependent on the industry, the target audience and the company’s corporate culture. There’s a lot of old-school types in the audience, those who raised their hand for "low/no value"; more than one person said that they use no social networks at all, and these were people who appear to be considerably younger than me. One of them even referred to "this blogging thing" in a somewhat derisive tone. This is not, as Don Tapscott proposes, an issue of age; it’s an issue of culture and position. In fact, the most vocal supporter of social networking from the audience declared himself to be 59. There are a lot of self-declared skeptics in the audience who say that they’re going to wait and see what the value is; one person said that he could spend the 8-10 hours per week that he believes is necessary to maintain a Facebook presence; he has 70 contacts on LinkedIn but it’s never really come to anything; and he wonders what happens to all those blogs that have a lot of effort put into them but no one reads them. Get real: if you put effort into blogging about something that’s of interest to someone and put some effort into being a good citizen in the blogosphere, people will read it. This blog is proof.

The business owners who are speaking up really seem to be in command-and-control mode: one stated that they’re blocking Facebook because they’re concerned that employees will put confidential information on it; doesn’t he know that if he hires untrustworthy people, they’ll do that from their home computer, so that blocking Facebook at work doesn’t solve that problem? He also said that people will spend too much time on sites like this if they’re allowed to do so, but you have to consider that people do have to take breaks sometimes, and allowing them to read their personal email or check Facebook while they’re on a break is no different than allowing them to make a personal phone call on their break. If you have sufficient technology to block specific sites, then you likely have the ability to monitor the usage and raise flags if people appear to be abusing the privilege rather than just blocking things outright.

Keith Parsonage from Industry Canada (who is speaking later today) popped up and admitted that he can’t access Facebook or a personal email service like Gmail from his office, but that the federal government is on a campaign to hire young people. This is definitely going to come back and bite them, since people who expect to be able to access sites like Facebook and Gmail while on their break at work aren’t going to be happy in an old-school corporate environment where they’re treated like irresponsible and unprofessional children.

Reid is really trying to get to the key points of how to incorporate social networking into business in terms of outward-facing communications, such as blogs; it’s unfortunate that this turned into too much of a discussion of who does and doesn’t use Facebook, and whether they’re allowed to do so at work.

Unfortunately, there’s no free wifi at the convention centre; in fact, the only available wifi is that geared for exhibitors and priced at an extortionate $395 for access for a single computer. I grabbed a couple of 30-minutes online passes in the press room, but I’m tempted to boycott it just so that MTCC doesn’t get the conference organizer’s money for this.

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2008 04 08 Sandy Kemsley Enterprise 2.0
IT360
blogging Comments (0)

Webinar: Applying Web 2.0 to your business challenges

A bit late notice: today at 1pm Eastern, there’s a webinar on applying Web 2.0 to your business challenges, featuring Don Tapscott, Jeremiah Owyang and Robert Scoble.

This is sponsored by Cisco, and will include a demo of their new WebEx Connect collaboration workspace. From the event description:

Traditional models for management and problem solving are changing. Thanks to the advent of wikis, blogs, social networks, and other Web 2.0 tools, the ways organizations foster collaboration and promote innovation are undergoing profound change.

This 60-minute video Webcast explores the new paradigm created by the Web 2.0 phenomenon and shows you how this model can be applied to virtually any business process. Learn how you can use Web 2.0 applications to solve technical challenges, promote business innovation, uncover new product or market opportunities, and make employees much more productive.

There will be interactive Q&A with the participants during the webinar.

2008 04 03 Sandy Kemsley Enterprise 2.0 Comments (0)

Should connecting on a social network = signing up for marketing blasts?

When I connect to someone on a social network such as LinkedIn or Facebook, I expect to be connected to them personally, not to their company’s marketing machine. Yes, I know, it’s common to farm our online contact lists for potential customers, but I found this recent email to be a bit over the top:

As a Linked In connection to Dion Hinchcliffe, you are probably aware of Dion’s internationally acknowledged thought leadership on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) , and Web Services.  Given the growing demand for his subject matter expertise, Dion felt it important that Hinchcliffe & Company’s expand its capabilities to include world class consulting on these subjects.  To that end, Dion has assembled a team of highly skilled technical architects, personally educating them on his own strategic and operational methods for successful delivery of SOA/WOA and Web Services Solutions.

On behalf of Dion, I am writing to announce the formal launch of Hinchcliffe & Company’s SOA/WOA and Web Services Practice.  I will be following up with you by phone . . . but in the meantime, if you have an immediate need for this type of expertise, feel free to contact me directly.  We have talented, fully trained people ready to go.

I have never heard of the person who wrote this letter (although apparently she works for Dion), and although when I connected to Dion I assumed that I would likely be put on some of his mailing lists, but I never expected one of his people to explicitly admit that she breached the privacy of one of his social networks in order to feed the marketing machine.

2008 03 13 Sandy Kemsley Comments (1)

Forrester Day 1: Rob Koplowitz

Lots of choice in the breakout sessions, but I’ve decided on Rob Koplowitz (who works with Connie Moore) on Web 2.0 and Social Computing in the Enterprise. The official statement:

Enterprise Web 2.0 can drive new efficiencies, but it needs to be approached like any new technology coming into the enterprise.

He had a good slide on how Web 2.0 changes group dynamics, from reviewed repository (predefined contributors and reviewers with a central point of communication) to facilitated community (clusters of communications with a facilitator in each cluster) to social networks (unstructured peer-to-peer communications).

He made a distinction of four types of social networking technologies: “listen to me” (blogs), “listen to us” (wikis), “find people like me” (tagging, profiles, social networks, virtual worlds) and “find stuff I need” (tagging, RSS feeds). He then went on to discuss which of these adds the most value within an enterprise based on research that they’ve done; after instant messaging, which was really just added in as a benchmark, RSS feeds came in as next most useful, which doesn’t really surprise me give what I’ve been seeing in the past months in the Enterprise 2.0 space. What happens, then, is a combined environment of a corporate information workplace with external sources of information, mashed up using various tools to provide value to users.

He referred to RSS as a lightweight integration fabric within organizations, which is a great characterization, and showed it on a spectrum of enablers that also included mashups, SOA and BPM.

Koplowitz then looked at the risks of Web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise, such as privacy and security; note that he’s talking about using consumer Web 2.0 technologies that are available via SaaS on the public internet, whereas there’s a ton of new Enterprise 2.0 solutions that are sold as on-premise, inside-the-firewall solutions rather than risk an improperly-hosted solution. There’s also many reputable Web 2.0 vendors who don’t do risky things with your data, or not any more risky than your own data center does now. He gave a scary-sounding example using Quechup, a recently social networking disaster that decided to spam your entire address book without permission and was quickly outed and shamed on the internet; this information came out with a few short days of this starting, and if the person involved had just been a bit more careful about watching the internet buzz on Quechup rather than jumping right in with their corporate address book exposed, then this would have been a non-story.

His recommendation is not to stop people from using social networking site, but to be cautious and appropriate about what they put out there, and to audit their behavior to ensure that they’re not violating corporate confidentiality. As he points out, Gen Y’s (18-26 years old) are the target hiring market for many companies these days, and they’re using these tools as creators of content as well as participants. However, the higher-level management in most companies, smack in the middle of the boomer years, are much less likely to participate and hence less likely to fund any related efforts.

Forrester will be publishing some research very shortly about vendors in the Enterprise Web 2.0 space, although he didn’t give us much of a sneak preview except to name a few vendors both in the Web 2.0 space and the enterprise space (BEA, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, Oracle), and predicting a collision. Traditional vendors are following the old-style release and adoption cycles, which may not play very well with the faster iterations that will come from the SaaS offerings from the Web 2.0 space; however, those traditional vendors are also in the position to just start bundling their Enterprise 2.0 offerings into their standard offerings (WebSphere Portal as a mashup platform, anyone?) to encourage adoption with their existing customers. There’s a new breed of vendors, however, that have deep enterprise roots and the agility of the hair-on-fire Web 2.0 vendors, that are likely to give the big guys a run for their money. Most likely, any organization is going to use a combination of vendors, both traditional enterprise vendors (who will be favored in the long run, based on history) and the new vendors (who are likely to be acquired by the big vendors). You’ll also see a combination of technologies, for example, ad hoc processes in a wiki with more structured processes in a BPM system linked to that.

His summary:

  • Enterprise Web 2.0 is part of the Information Workplace fabric
  • Corporations are getting value today from Enterprise Web 2.0
  • Users are getting social without appropriate guidance
  • Process and content need to be managed
  • The investment decision includes change management.
  • The vendors are colliding in this space.

There was an interesting discussion during the Q&A on the place of Google in the environment (Koplowitz thinks they have to solve their security issues first, such as not transmitting data to and from Google spreadsheets in clear text).

He points out that for many organizations that have a significant portion of younger workers, especially in technology-heavy industries, there is no way to put this genie back in the bottle; organizations have to deal with this, and “just say no” isn’t an alternative.

2007 09 25 Sandy Kemsley Enterprise 2.0
ForresterITLeadership Comments (1)

Web apps are great, until you get on a 9-hour flight

From Dion Hinchcliffe’s Facebook updates earlier today:

Dion Hinchcliffe is getting on a plane from Europe to SFO. He’s really starting to feel the need for Web apps that run offline.

As someone with over 35,000 flight miles on the clock so far this year, I feel your pain.

2007 09 12 Sandy Kemsley Enterprise 2.0 Comments (1)

Enterprise 2.0 Camp: Anthony Williams

I’m at Enterprise 2.0 Camp today, and Anthony Williams is the first breakfast speaker. He’s giving the Wikinomics lesson in short — how we’re undergoing an economic transformation because of the collaborative nature of value creation that’s happening due to both Web 2.0 internet applications and social networking principles being introduced into the enterprise. He covers the four basic principles: peering, openness, sharing and acting globally; since I read the book fairly recently, this is all still pretty fresh in my mind and it’s great to hear it from the author.

I like his discussion of openness, where he shows the move from companies hiring all their own talent internally, to outsourcing of some business processes, to a true open market for talent. This is a critical area of overlap between BPM and Enterprise 2.0, since BPM has been enabling business process outsourcing and will continue to be a key technology for supporting an open market: if you can find a grope outside your organization, whether local or a half a world away, that has superior skills to deliver some aspect of your business process, you need to be able to easily include them in your value chain. He also talks about organizations creating an ecosystem for others to add value to their base products: everything from SalesForce.com’s AppExchange to Facebook’s new application platform. In some cases, there’s a more active collaboration with other companies; in others, it’s the prosumer doing their own thing and giving it back to the community.

He talked about Science 2.0 in the context of sharing, with the Human Genome Project and other similar projects pooling data and computing power. Open source development also falls under the sharing part of wikinomics, with companies like IBM contributing developers to Linux development that is turned back to the community. It’s not completely altruistic: a more robust Linux community benefits IBM because they sell more hardware and services to run it on, and the amount that they contribute to Linux development is about 1/10 of what they would spend developing and maintaining an equivalent proprietary operating system (say, OS/400).

Williams described how to get started with Enterprise 2.0 internally, through the use of internal blogs and wikis, which put me in mind of the Avenue A|Razorfish intranet wiki that I heard about last week at the PCC conference. It’s a good way to get people used to the concepts, while at the same time working out the governance issues before any of this information is exposed on the public internet.

Tom Purves put today together mostly as an unconference, with a few minor changes: first, there’s some “name” speakers at breakfast, and second, we all had to pitch in $50 for the day, but we’re at the Toronto Convention Centre so I wouldn’t expect that we’d be getting everything for free. Still a great deal, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the day.

2007 05 29 Sandy Kemsley E2.0 TTW
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Shared Insights PCC: RSS in the Enterprise

My session on the changing face of BPM went pretty well, except for one guy who said that I was wrong about pretty much everything :)

Today finishes early, so I’m at the last breakout session, Colin White discussing using RSS in the enterprise, and the broader subject of using web syndication to deliver content to users. It’s a bit distracting because he has exactly the same English accent as someone on my wine club board; I keep looking up and expecting to see my friend Bernard (who doesn’t even know how to spell RSS) at the front of the room.

White is looking at this from an architectural rather than implementation viewpoint, and focussing on enterprise rather than internet data sources: a standardized and lightweight XML-based integration protocol. He spent an undue amount of time explaining generically what RSS feeds are and how internet syndication works in various RSS readers; is there anyone in this fairly technical portal-savvy audience who doesn’t already know all this? He then moved on to the differences between RSS and Atom and the specific tags used in an RSS feed; 30 minutes into the presentation, we still haven’t yet seen anything to do with RSS in the enterprise.

Eventually he does get to enterprise uses of RSS; no surprise, one big use is to have it integrated into a business portal, although the XML can also be consumed by various search tools, including ETL to capture the data and load it into a data warehouse or content management system — something that I hadn’t thought about previously, but can be done with tools like Microsoft Integration Services. He points out how RSS is one piece in the integration puzzle, which is essentially what I’ve been saying with respect to using RSS feeds of process execution data as one way of providing visibility into processes.

White covers the different types of feed servers: external, internal, and hosted SaaS. Interestingly, NewsGator is now in all three areas, with both an enterprise server and an on-demand solution that can aggregate and syndicate internal as well as external content, as well as their well-known external internet version. That gives a variety of ways that a feed server can fit into an enterprise environment: either an external feed server providing only the external feeds, or an internal/hosted feed server that can handle both internal and external feeds. This has the advantage of reducing network traffic, since the feed server caches the feeds, as well as providing filtering and monitoring of content that is consumed.

I’m really aware of a push to give PCC a very Enterprise 2.0 flavour; having not been at any of the previous PCC conferences, or even the first half of this one, I don’t know if this is a new bandwagon that they’re leaping on, or something that’s a logical progression of where this conference has been in the past.

2007 05 24 Sandy Kemsley BI
Enterprise 2.0
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Shared Insights PCC: AvenueA|Razorfish intranet wiki

I skipped this morning’s taxonomy/folksonomy smackdown featuring Seth Earley and Zach Wahl — I just wasn’t up for that much testosterone this early in the morning – and went to the best practices track to hear about how AvenueA|Razorfish implemented their internal wiki. I’m speaking next, so if this session isn’t sufficiently riveting, I’ll duck out early to review my notes.

Donna Jensen, their senior technical architect, took us through how they use a wiki as an intranet portal. She spent some amount of time first defining wikis and discussing benefits and challenges, particularly when used inside the firewall. She made a crack about how Ph.D. dissertations will be written on many of these points, which isn’t that far from the truth: things like encouraging active versus passive behaviour. And, although she claims that they’re breaking down behaviours tied to organizational silos, she admitted that no one can comment on the CEO’s blog although all others are open territory. At some point, even the top level executives have to learn that if they’re going to commit to Enterprise 2.0, it has to permeate to all levels of the organization: no one should be exempt.

The platform that they used was MediaWiki (the software used to create Wikipedia) on a standard LAMP stack, giving them a completely open source base. They also use WordPress for internal blogs, maintaining the commitment to open source. Although they did do some customization, particularly in terms of creating templates such as project pages, they took advantage of many freely-available third-party extensions for functionality such as tag clouds, calendaring and skins. They use Active Directory for security, and allow access only internal or VPN access: no external access or applications.

AA|RF put in the wiki with only a technical VP and a part-time intern, pretty much out of the box, and found that it wasn’t adopted. They did another cut with Jensen as technical architect (part-time) and a couple more interns, and arrived at their current state: no project management oversight, no content management system, and no creative designer, with the whole thing implemented in about 2,000 person-hours. As a web technology consulting company (although with little Web 2.0 experience), they can get away with this, but you may not want to try this one at home. They used agile scheduling, and eventually brought in some rigorous QA. Jensen feels that their only real mistake was not bringing in a create designer earlier, since the wiki is apparently pretty technical looking. They haven’t yet put a WYSIWYG editor so everyone still needs to work in WikiText, which is likely a bit of a barrier for the non-techies.

Jensen talked about a few byproducts of the wiki adoption, such as the incremental upgrade model that tends to come with open source or SaaS products, rather than the monolithic (and often disruptive) upgrades of proprietary software. She also talked about how many IT departments won’t use open source because it makes them unable to turn to someone who is compelled to help them — in other words, they have to take on the responsibility of finding a solution themselves. Another byproduct is the shift towards open source, and the savings that they can expect by replacing some of their current software platforms and their hefty maintenance fees with open source alternatives.

In their wiki environment, any kind of file can be uploaded, all pages (except the home page) are editable by everyone, and any content except client-confidential information can reside there. I really have to wonder how this would work if they upload a massive number of files: at what point do you need to add a content management system, and how painful is it going to be to do that later? Their wiki home page shows del.icio.us and Flickr feeds, internal blog feeds, Digg items and recent uploaded documents. One audience member asked if that meant that if anyone in the company tagged a public web page, that it would be included on the home page; there was general shock around the room and wonderment that you could do this without having some centralized body approving such content before it was surfaced to the rest of the company. I tried not to laugh out loud; is this such a radical idea? Obviously, the last year of being immersed in Web 2.0 has changed me, and I start wondering which of these things that I would adopt if I were still running a 40-person consulting company. As the session goes on, the same question about how user tagging on the internet drives their intranet home page keeps coming up from the audience over and over.

What I found interesting (and I’m probably blowing their whole game by publishing this), is that they’re using public Web 2.0 tools to feed part of the home page: if something is tagged AARF on del.icio.us or Flickr, it shows up there. For Digg, however, you have to be a friend of AARF to have your items show up. Jensen said that she’ll be changing the AARF tag to something unguessable, although if you know how to track items and users through del.icio.us or Flickr, it wouldn’t be that difficult to figure out their new tag. She also said that they had run some analytics on whether these tags gave away any secrets about what they’re currently researching, and found that the mix is too varied for any patterns to emerge.

The wiki is a portal in a very real sense, which was a bit of a revelation to me: I didn’t previously think of wikis as portals. Everyone has their own people page which they can format and populate as they wish, and which can include their recent file uploads and blog postings. On any page, adding a “portlet” is just a matter of copying and pasting a snippet of PHP code, including copying snippets of code such as the <embed> code provided by YouTube for every video on its site.

They’ve done some cool things with blogs as well, such as having mailing lists corresponding to blogs, and sending an email to that mailing list will auto-post it as a blog entry on the corresponding blog.

Jensen had some great ideas for wiki adoption, often centred around “wikivangelists” getting out there and helping people. I especially like the idea of the “days of wine and wikis” events. :)   And they’re getting some great adoption rates.

I had to leave just before the end: she was running 7 minutes overtime and I had only 15 minutes between sessions to get to my own room to set up. It was hard to tear myself away, however; I found both Jensen’s presentation and the audience feedback to be riveting.

2007 05 24 Sandy Kemsley Enterprise 2.0
SharedInsightsPCC
open source Comments (1)

Shared Insights: Two-Day Wrap-Up

Apparently there was no wrap-up session yesterday, so the last session today wrapped up the past two days. Colin White, who has been running this conference for 8 years, was joined by three of his regular presenters: Shawn Shell of Consejo, Tony Byrne of CMS Watch, and Zach Wahl of Project Performance. The discussion was pretty open; I’ll try to attribute to the correct person as I document it.

In looking at what has changed at the conference recently, White found that 2/3 of attendees were building external-facing rather than internal-facing, which he feels to be influenced by Web 2.0. Shell found the audience to be more technical and tactical, and very focussed on building portals to connect with customers and employees. Byrne commented on how layered that portals are becoming, sometimes with several portal products being used simultaneously, and how the sheer diversity of integration technologies is making a more complex portal ecosystem. He feels that many organizations are out-growing some of the lightweight tools provided by portals, such as document management, and thinks that traditional portal vendors are having problems figuring out how to do Web 2.0 in their products. Wahl mentioned a higher caliber audience (by which it appears that he means “more technical”, however frightening the implications of that statement), and sees that the outward-facing portals that are being developed provide a stronger tie-in to ROI.

They then moved on to audience questions, and I can’t attribute the responses to any of the four participants.

Q: How are organizations using blogs?

A:

  • Attend the Razorfish session tomorrow for a case study. [I did]
  • It’s still a “cautious” activity for organizations, and is often still a top-down corporate communications “fake blog” from C-level executives rather than true blogs.
  • Blogs are useful for technical organizations [I scratched my head over that one, although I admit that one of the most successful organizations that I've seen using blogs internally is IBM]
  • Many people inside corporations “don’t have anything to say that’s universally consumable”. [This statement made me cringe; it totally misses the point of blogs]
  • A corporate ethos of content sharing can provide the right environment for blogging.

My conclusion: half of the 4 speakers don’t get blogging.

Q: How much of Web 2.0 is hype versus reality for the enterprise?

A: “There’s some organizations for which this isn’t going to work”. [The speaker quite erroneously equated Web 2.0 in the enterprise with publishing corporate content on the public internet]

Q: What are the future directions in PCC?

A:

  • There’s an increasing diversity of products rather than consolidation in the market, leading to more competition.
  • Major vendors, such as Oracle and BEA, are leapfrogging technologies to meet new standards and stay competitive.
  • The dynamism in PCC right now is in the add-ons, such as BPM, rather than the underlying portal technology. [This resulted in a specific discussion about how BEA's BPM is driving portal sales, although I'm not sure that's true]
  • Portal vendors are moving into the add-on market to take more of the enterprise pie.

There was also a discussion about getting started with search and taxonomy: for example, using the Google search appliance as a starter for search/taxonomy, and the need for a simple start to taxonomy in particular. We finished with a brief discussion about the perceived dilemma of SharePoint proliferation: is it out of control or a necessary state of departmental document collaboration?

2007 05 23 Sandy Kemsley ECM
Enterprise 2.0
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TUCON: Technology Buzz Panel

Next up in the general session is the technology buzz panel, where “journalists, analysts, and industry experts square off on buzzwords of the day”. The moderator was Gary Beach of CIO Magazine, with panelists Frank Kenney of Gartner, Jason Maynard of Credit Suisse, Rob Strickland of T-Mobile USA, and Aaron Ricadela of BusinessWeek. Their initial goal is to eliminate four tech buzzwords (one per panelist):

  • Maynard picked “Web 2.0″, apparently not only because he thinks that it’s a bad term but because he doesn’t like social networking. There was discussion around the stage: Kenney railed against the term Web 2.0 but then used the ever-overused “paradigm shift”; Strickland said that he thinks there’s too many bugs in Web 2.0 and he’s waiting for 2.0.1; Ricadela commented on the new business models coming out of this, although he didn’t use the term “Bubble 2.0″.
  • Strickland picked “the business”, in the context of the dichotomy between IT and the business; as a CIO, he sees himself as an integral part of the business. I wonder if T-Mobile’s business users feel the same way; Maynard said that he felt that his IT department was actually a detriment to productivity sometimes, and admitted to using his own MacBook Pro and Gmail (interestingly enough, a Web 2.0 application) because IT wasn’t focussed on some of the business requirements. Kenney and Ricadela both talked about aligning IT and business, which of course just points out that the divide does exist.
  • Ricadela picked “business process management”, because he believes that it’s become a catch-all term for anything to do with business improvements enabled by technology. He blames the analysts and vendors for the confusion: given that Gartner helped to promote this term in its infancy and created a tremendously confusing landscape that in turn allowed vendors to promote everything as BPM, I’d have to agree to a certain extent. Kenney feels that the term BPM is overused but should still exist; Maynard doesn’t appear to understand the distinction between BPM and packaged applications.
  • Kenney picked “enterprise”, saying that it’s not used consistently and is often just applied as a marketing buzzword: sometimes it means “within the four walls of a company”, sometimes it relates to scalability or other features of a system. Maynard points out that adding the word “enterprise”  to a software product allows vendors to charge more it, and thinks that it applies only to large companies.
  • Beach finished up by picking “virtualization”, which I identified yesterday as potentially just being an overused buzzword, so I’d have to agree.

They moved on to a discussion of several magazine headlines: “Is your company fast enough”; “No future in tech?” (which veered sharply into American protectionist rhetoric); various open source headlines (Maynard pointed out that open source is fundamentally changing the software industry, even those companies that are not open source); software as a service (nothing new here); and finally, can you trust analysts’ opinions given that they’re all sleeping with the vendors.

They finished with a lightening round with 30-second opinions on Web 2.0, gigabit everywhere, SOA, AJAX, and the future of enterprise applications.

All in all, a more entertaining panel than I’ve seen for a while.

2007 05 02 Sandy Kemsley TUCON Comments (0)