Enterprise 2.0 on a tiny scale

Having been involved in the creation of an Enterprise 2.0 community in a huge pharmaceutical, I am now embarking on a much different journey. I have just joined a tiny software firm (only 7 people), and I have offered to take to responsibility for setting up our own Enterprise 2.0 suite. At the moment I am going with Mediawiki for the wiki, and intranet homepage, backed up with a Drupal blog site for internal blogging and group discussions. I think it will be an interesting contrast to setting up E2.0 in a large company......

First Post of 2008

WOW It really has been a while since I have blogged!!!

Rest assured its not because I have suddenly gone off blogging, far from it, but I have been a bit busy.

In October, I proposed to my lovely girlfriend, who after an unexpected amount of crying said yes! This was great, but it did pose me with an immediate problem - I was living in deepest darkest Kent, and she was living in London!
After a lot of thinking I decided that the best thing was for me to pack my things and go to the place where the streets were paved with gold!!

So started the job hunting!! I wrote two CVs, one technical, and one leaning on my experience consulting on Enterprise 2 technologies. I decided pretty quickly that whilst I loved Enterprise 2, and have had some of my best working experiences whilst touting the joys of Enterprise 2 at the big P, ultimately my strength was technical, so I focussed my efforts on looking for software developer roles. After a close call with a job I really wanted, I was offered a developer role for a company developing online gambling solutions. This was quite a way out of my field of expertise, but I thought it would be a great opportunity to get into some of the nitty gritty of web development, so I took the job, handed in my notice at the big P, told my house mate that he was going to be homeless, and shipped off to the big smoke!

I have been working up here for 3 months now, and I am writting this blog on my last day at this company. It has been a real learning curve being here, as I have been using technologies that I had never even heard of let alone used, and I have enjoyed the challenge. However it has been a big culture shock from working at the big P. Essentially we are software consultants working to fine tune an existing product, which is cool, and I enjoy the interactions with the customers. However I found that there was no way of being creative in the ways that I am used to, and sadly whilst the company has got a wiki, there is a no buzz of an Enterprise 2.0 community, which stems from the fact that everyone is fully engaged dealing with customers.

It is really for this reason that I haven't been blogging for a while, I just haven't had the inspiration! However, out of the blue I was contacted about a position working for a small (6 person) private company, developing the interface of their online Rich Internet Application. Its sounded quite interesting, and to cut a long story short, I start there on Monday!!I am really excited to get going, because they are doing a complete redesign of their website, and upgrade of their application, and I am going right there in the thick of it, and will hopefully have a influence on the GUI, which is fantastic, as I have developed a real passion for usability. What is more I see a real opportunity to get back into the web2.0/ E2.0 scene, and try and use the experience I got in the big P, and see how it can be put to work in a small company setting!!

Sorry this has been a big post, and well done to anyone who has read this far - I look forward to blogging more often in the future!!!

LifeStreams -> WorkStreams

I love the idea of life streams - its great to be able to easily leave a trail behind you of cool stuff you have done/found.
I have been thinking lately about WorkStreams....
I used to be a lab scientist - and one of the things I used to hate the most about that job was having to maintain a Lab Notebook - it was a real drag having to take time out of my day to write (using a pen!!!) about what I had done. This is not to say that it wasn't neccessary, for patent and freedom to operate purposes it was essential, and it was really useful to have a record to look back on when I wanted to check something.
Nowerdays I am a software developer, and so the need to do this has subsided, I have all my code checked into Subversion , and that is all I need. However I really miss having that record of stuff that I have done/thought about etc.
For tagging cool web resources we have a tagging service, for recording my thoughts and ideas I have a personal twitter like service, and for recording the miscellaneous stuff that cant be put in our tagging service I have OneNote. However I really wish there was an aggregated stream of all this digital information that I could scan like my old lab notebook. A work stream could realise this, and not only that, if it was integrated into our Enterprise 2. suite, it would be effort free to create, but gives me that extra bit of return on taking the effort of tagging, and posting all this stuff in the first place, win-win.

Tagging as a service

We have implemented a del.icio.us like social bookmarking service and are currently trialling a new web based rss aggregation system within our organisation. Both of these applications allow you to tag content.
People who use both services are starting to ask whether they should be suing their RSS reader or the social bookmarking service to tag their content.

The answer is imperfect - you should use both.

Tagging is useful - it allows people to add their own semantics to content they are interested in, which provides an instant benefit to them, and engages them in the application they are using. For this reason tagging is becoming part of the core functionality of most Web2.0 applications.
This is a great thing because it increases the usability and usefulness of a service. However the problem is that while there are many places that you can tag things, you are essentially building lots of siloed tag collections that are difficult to aggregate. In the web2.0 space this is born out of the fact that all these services are competing with one another, to manage your information, and therefore there is no advantage in allowing you to share your tags with other applications.However within the firewall, this competitive element is stripped away and we have the opportunity to create an integrated environment.

Therefore I think we need to start thinking of tagging as a service.
Tagging as a service will allow your Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure to share a central repository for tagging. This means that when a user adds a tag in one application , it can be expressed in any number of others instantly with no further effort from the user.
Therefore adding tagging to an E2.0 application not only adds value to that application, but it increases the value of your whole Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure. For your users this will increase engagement and multiply the return that user receives from their initial investment in tagging.

Its a really simple concept but something I think that is being overlooked by the Enterprise 2.0 community at the moment.

So what is the FOWA?

The FOWA Expo 2007 is finished and I am just about to go on holiday so I wanted to quickly put down my thoughts on what I think is the Future of Web Apps, after listening to the talks and talking to the exhibitors.
So what is going to be big:

1. Lifestreams - until platforms like Facebook and Twitter open themselves up and allow social network interoperability people will start to create lifestreams aggregating all the content they create in various places. There are lots of companies getting into this area, but my favourite so far is http://rememble.com/ , I had a chat with them and they have only just launched but there site looks great and they have lots of good ideas.

2. Ambient Intimacy : A phrase coined by Leisa Reichelt when talking about presence applications such as Twitter and Jaiku. I think these technolgies will become more mainstream, especially now you can Twitter from Facebook.

3. Mobile Web : As phones get smarter, and developing for them gets easier (?!?) then companies will want to get into the monile scene. In Britain we are well placed to be forrunners in this with providers like Vodaphone and T-moile providing broadband speed mobile internet at a fixed price. Lets face it, if you are out and about with nothing to do, whats the first thing you will reach for - your phone!!!

4. DeDigitilisation : As more of us have a lot our lives digitised (Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, Wikis), our lives are becoming more intagible, and we become dependent on the internet to get access to our stuff. However printing has become massively cheaper, and companies like Blurb and Moo have arrived, offering to print out our digital lives at a surprisingly reasonable price!. Blurb is my favourite one at the moment - for a mere tenner you can create an 80 page shop quality book (Softcover) of whatever you want - I just ordered one with a bunch of my favourite photos, and it feels really good to have dedigitalised some of my life.

So whats not going to be hot at least int he way we expect??

1. Semantic web - the Tim Berners Lee vision isn't going to happen, at least not anytime soon.
We are all selfish at heart, and as a developer, what si the ROI of making my site semantically aware? However companies like Dapper are allowing communities to put a semantic layer over stuff they are intereseted in - essentially creating a semantic folksonomy.

Twittering

I have been experimenting with microblogging sites such as Twitter and Jaiku for a while, but without really doing it seriously. However yesterday Heidi Pollock mentioned in her talk that Twitter now has a mobile website, so I thought I would give Twitter another go.....Then this morning I was sitting next a guy called Paul Downey who was writting notes on the talk we were in directy into Twitter - I thought what an awesome idea and started to do the same, we ended up exchanging ids and follwing each other on the conference. I thought this is cool - so not only am I getting my notes down somewhere that I can find them again, but I can also see in real time what Paul was thinking/finding interesting. However it got even cooler when I changed track at the conference to watch a talk on presence, but still got the highlights of the talk on my original track because Paul was in ther twittering about it !!! Very cool.
BTW - The talk on presence was really really good - so good in fact I am going to write its own post later on this evening.

Thoughts on FOWA day one

Well I was a bit dubious about coming to FOWA. Simon had been to a few conferences this year that overall he didn't really find very useful, and to be honest, for a conference about the future of web apps, their attendees "networking" site was really rubbish!!!
However, I arrived with an open mind, and kicked off the day with a bit of Halo 3 at the Microsoft lounge. Having established that this wasn't going to be a stuffy Enterprise 2.0 conference, and it was going to be a fun web2.0 conference I relaxed a bit.
I noted before going that most of the attendees were from little web2.0 startup companies, and apart from the sponsors of the shows I reckon I was the only attendee from a big corporation , let alone from a pharmaceutical company - so I felt a bit like an undercover agent , posing as a Flex developer!!! The upside of this was that nobody was trying to sell me anything, and I found that people, even the exibitors really just wanted to tell you what they were up to , and maybe get some feedback!
My highlight from yesterday was a talk by Daniel Burka, who was talking about how to implement changes in a community site like DIGG, in a way that really engages and placifies the community. I think he had some really great advice, and actually out shone his boss Kevin Rose, who presented later in the day.
One final point to note - like any cool technology conference, everyone was sporting their swanky MacBooks - but I was very surprised to see that Microsoft were using them on their stand to showcase Silverlight!!!!!!
More later on today!!

Finally got a sneak preview of fav.or.it

http://fav.or.it/

I have been really looking forward to getting my hands on fav.or.it, which looks poised to solve the annoying problem, that you can subscribe to a comments feed for a blog, but these comments don't come to your RSS reader with any information about what post they relate to.

Fav.or.it I am pleased to say solves this, not only are you alerted when there are new comments on a post, but you can post a comment to a post from fav.or.it directly. GREAT.

BUT and I think it is a big but, the guy from fav.or.it that I spoke to admited, that they aren't really going for a RSS reader as such, more a platform for mashing up your RSS feeds and producing what they call "slices", streams of posts on a specific theme.

This in itself is fine, but it isn't "Brain Dead Simple" - the interface looks nice - but it isn't intuitive and the concepts behind mashing up web feeds to create "slices" are quite obscure.

What I really wanted to see was google reader but with comment support.

That said - they have been hiding away an amazing feature that I am surprised they haven't made more noise about :

Like many other similar RSS mashup tools, fav.or.it claims that it can learn what you like and suggest similar content. I am always skeptical about this because normally it involves maintaining a list of key terms that I am interested in....

However fav.or.it have put some thought in and developed a system that monitors the time you spend reading about subjects and maintains your interest profile based on this "passive interest".

Without seeing it for myself I cant say that this works, but it does seem like an elegant solution to a problem that needs addressing, and it is the reason that I would be prepared to put the effort into learning and setting up the interface for my use.

So, not the tool that I was looking for, but definitely one to look into.

"Web Apps Should be Braindead Simple"

Om Malick said in the opening discussion at FOWA that his top tip for the future of web apps is that "Web Apps should be braindead simple". I couldn't agree more in this respect, there are so many tools out there that do similar things - but the tool that I choose will be the easiest to use, the one that has the finest focus on the problem.. Its always worth remmbering the "one size doesn't fit all rule" make a web app to do one thing and one thing well.

Other top tips for the future of web apps: Mobile, Widgets - hopefully I can cover more on those later.

Ctrlspc @ FOWA

Long time no blog, but I'm London today and tomorrow at the Future of Web Apps at the Excel center. I am going to be blogging my thoughts throughout the day, but looks like its going to be a good conference.
More soon.

Too much choice = too much hassle

At the moment in my team, we have lots of means of group communication: Documentum eRooms, Sharepoint, Drupal blogs, email, group meetings etc. Its true, one size doesn't fit all, and this is one of the reason we have such an arsenal of tools. The problem is, everyone in the team has their favorite tools for doing communicating. I prefer a combination of Drupal and email, but a lot of my colleagues love eRoom (which I really hate!!), and some just like to talk to face to face. This is fine and I truly believe that we should be able to choose the tools that suit us and they we think/work, however we have reached a situation where people have stopped communicating effectively because no one can agree on how we should do it.

The problem is that each of these applications publishes its data to different (often siloed) location, so whilst I might prefer to use Drupal - someone else might want to use eRoom, so everyone has to look in two separate places.  Obviously RSS provides a solution to this, all people have to do is subscribe to the various communication feeds in the group and they get all the information delivered to them. This is great, but the problem is that the communications are still siloed. The key to online communication is that it becomes a conversation -  currently if I want to comment on someone's post, I still to go to several places to do it.

So far the only technology that is even close to dealing with this is fav.or.it (http://fav.or.it/). They have produced an RSS reader that combines commenting with post retrieval - taking aggregation to the next level and maybe making keeping up with online communication platform independent?

Technorati Tags: enterprise 2.0, rss, communication

Is Enterprise 2.0 such a hard thing to "get"

I just got home from an all hands meeting discussing various things, including group communication. During a discussion about how we would arange weekly meetings I suggested that we used a team blog - restricted to members of our team only (we already have a globally available blog) where we can post and dicuss on team related issues. I suggested that we could use this blog to filter topics that we would want to expand to a full group discussion at a weekly meeting. This idea didn't recieve much support, and shortly afterwards someone suggested that we could "write topics on a white board, and then people can put dots by topics that they are most interested in.....". I was a bit taken a back by this....I am sure that people in the team get what web2.0 and how it could be useful - yet I definitely feel resistance to actually using these technologies . The problm is that we are a technological group that have a role in knowledge management - if we aren't prepared to embrace these technologies, how can we expect others to? Is Enterprise 2.0 ahead of its time?

Don't mention the 'S' word

Today I facilitated a telecom with a group of Enterprise 2.0 affectionadoes in our organisation. We do these global meetings about once a month - but recently our meetings have always ended up going the same way........Someone mentions Sharepoint, and the rest of the meeting ends up being a discussion about what Sharepoint can and can't do etc....

So this time around I decided to ban the 'S' word - as I really wanted us to concentrate on the concepts of Web 2.0 and and how they might be applied to the Enterprise and not get stuck on what technologies we are going (to be able) to use to achieve it.

I think we did pretty well - we lasted bout 45mins before this rule seemed to go out the window and Sharepoint grabbed some meeting time! I know that this is just because we are at the stage now where we are seriously planning implementation of  these technologies. However  it just annoys me that Sharepoint - a technology that in my eyes has yet to prove its value, always seems to hog the limelight away from established technology like Drupal and MediaWiki that have gained so much popularity on the WWW.

Living the Enterprise 2.0 dream

Scott, Simon, myself and a whole bunch of others are part of a group called the DIGWWW (Discussion Group about the World Wide Web) within our organisation. Scott and Simon have  done some of their cool patented presentations describing the uprising of this group on Slideshare which can be seen here and here.

However something really interesting has started to happen.....A hardcore group of us has formed , comprising of people from various different areas of the business - and formed a sort of "unofficial business unit". As well as discussing cool stuff on the web  - we are now leading the Enterprise 2.0 charge by piloting Web2.0 technologies within the organisation, building up case studies of how Enterprise 2.0 can really work.

As Simon posted on his blog a while back,  people actually starting to take notice - and we were recently invited to present to some senior leaders on our ideas, which went down extreemly well, with lots of enthusiastic feedback. What is really great about this group is that we are really living the Enterprise 2.0 dream, and it highlighted something new about E2.0 that I hadn't thought about ... Yes its about collaboration - but more than that it is about channeling and surfacing peoples passions. It is showing me, and I hope others that if you are passionate about something at work - you can achieve amazing things!!!

If you ask Charlie what is important about Enterprise 2.0 - he would reply :  "Its not about the technology its about the PEOPLE!".

Mainstreaming E2.0 Step 5

"The innovation has a poor image/branding."

Enterprise 2.0 example:

Coming from the core business area of my company into an IT role - I came with bad tidings - "most of the software that we are mandated to use is rubbish and we blame you!" . Therefore when the IT department starts raving about this cool new technology that will help you work more efficiently - the obvious reaction is a eye rolling and head shaking.

Solution?

Enterprise 2.0 should be about running web2.0 technologies in a secure environment behind the firewall. Web2.0 technology has been built from the bottom up, and as a result actually appeals to users!! As long as IT doesn't bastardize the technology through productionisation , and keeps the emphasis on pleasing the user and not pleasing the architecture committee, then the branding problem is solved - after all thousands of people use del.icio.us in their spare time because it works and its fun - so getting paid to use is surely a bonus?!

Mainstreaming E2.0 Step 4

"The consumers have to culture new habits to adopt the innovation"

Enterprise 2.0 example:

Whilst I am researching for a project at work, I will always print off a paper to read it because I find it too difficult to read from my monitor - I soon have a pile of papers, which becomes unmanageable when I try to go back and re read something or get a reference. More often than not if I want to do this I will try and remember what search I did in Google and "re-find" the document. This works but it isn't ideal. However I discovered del.icio.us and that problem was solved for me. However I did need to make sure that whenever I wanted to come back to an article I had to get in the habit of tagging them.

I am involved in a trial trying to implement tagging at work, and it seems that getting people to take up this tagging habit is a step too far.

Solution?

The key thing here is that at heart we are all a bit selfish. You can advocate the exciting social possibilities of Enterprise 2.0 technologies until you are blue in the face. However unless you demonstrate to people that the technology DIRECTLY benefits them, and that the social benefits are a free bonus, people won't bother.

Tagging is a perfect example of this, as my colleague Simon keeps saying, when you tag a document you instantly get a "present" for your efforts - not only can you find the document again on your terms, but you are rewarded with other links that are relevant to your tag - ie. you get instant personal value for your contribution. Therefore I think that E2.0 technologies need to be marketed carefully - highlighting personal value before community value.

Mainstreaming E2.0 Step 3

"The innovation is deemed to be too risky"

Enterprise 2.0 example:

Everyone has heard the stories, where staff members have been sacked from their jobs, after posting derogatory comments about their companies on their personal blogs.  This will undoubtedly put people off "professional blogging". People will be concerned that their comments could be misconstrued, making them look stupid or indeed dissident. Furthermore people may be ultra conservative when drawing the line between what is publicly acceptable and what should be kept to a few people - I expect that we have all heard "urban legends" where people have accidentally hit "reply to all"  whilst being sarcastic about company communications.

Solution?

Don't set a blogging policy - this won't make employees feel happier because they know where the boundaries are, it will make them feel there is more risk because there is a clearly defined boundary that they could stray over. 

Lead by example - there is a very big cultural change that needs to happen before employees will feel completely free to write what they are thinking in a place where everyone can access it. Therefore it must be led by example at ALL levels of the organisation not just by senior managers posting high level word smithed posts.

Mainstreaming E2.0 Step 2

"The consumers do not understand the value of the innovation"

Enterprise 2.0 Example:

I come from a non IT, scientific background (the core business area of my organisation), and I know all too well that us scientists are busy people, as I imagine most people are.

We don't have time to mess around with the new technologies spilling out of our IT departments (especially considering some of the rubbish enterprise 2.0 solutions that we are forced to deal with!!). Furthermore I think we have all gotten pretty good at finding reasons so that we don't have to get involved in these projects.

So when I go to speak to my colleagues about RSS, I take the time to explain all the pros and cons of the technology, and I always get a "that's really interesting" response. Loosely translated I think they are telling me - "yup I get what you are talking about, but it sounds like a lot of effort for little gain" - which is why very few of these colleagues then go away and start using RSS. I definitely think that part of this is to do with them being busy - but I also I think that E2.0 technologies need to be seen to be believed.  For example some might think that a blog is a rather self indulgent waste of time until they find something that they connect with and they find interesting - once they see the value in blogging - often there is no stopping them (I include myself in this).

 

Solution?

I think that with Enterprise 2.0 technologies the chicken most definitely must come before the egg. I was speaking to a colleague of mine recently, and he said that he has just got into RSS - I was pleased- but also a bit surprised - I asked him how he got into it..and he replied that he had been into it for a while, but it had really taken off in his department because one of their senior managers had just started to write a blog and they all needed a way of keeping up with it. They were introduced to RSS, saw the instant benefit and that was all they needed to get hooked on it and start exploring and discovering the true value for themselves. Therefore I think that the solution to helping people understand the value of the innovation is to exemplify to the business why the innovation has value with an example tailored to the particular business area - remembering that one size doesn't fit all and that people will use these tools in ways that suit them and that can't be predicted ahead of time by people that don't know or understand their business area.

 

Technorati Tags: innovation, enterprise 2.0, e2, rss

Mainstreaming E2.0 Step 1

"The innovation may not be compatible with existing workflows and practices."

Enterprise 2.0 Example:

Traditionally within an organisation the process for writing documentation requires an initial draft to be written up by someone. Once this is done the document enters a recursive phase of editing and approval by the authors of the document, before finally being signed off and distributed as required.

Wiki's challenge this model. In a wiki, a document grows as people add content, and at the same time it is polished as people change wording and correct inaccuracies. A document is only finished when people stop editing and polishing, at which point the authors have reached a consensus. Even then a document is not really finished, there is nothing stopping people adding things and continuing polishing.

This is an uncomfortable situation for most users, as the traditional workflow of creating a document is completely abandoned, and may seem chaotic, with no one person explicitly in control. More alarmingly, for people creating documents in a wiki is the fact that a document is never officially finished, and therefore the workflow is not only different, but the destination is never officially reached.

Solution?

Therefore I think that Enterprise wiki systems should have the functionality to export a document to a file when the group have reached a decision that the document is finished.

This will not please wiki purists, but in the web2.0 space, documents are not the important thing, information is, and furthermore there is no accountability for this information. This is not the case in the Enterprise.

In the Enterprise the goal of writing a document is to finish and file it. By allowing wiki pages to be published as documents, this means that whilst the mechanics of the document workflow process are altered the start and end points are still the same - you set out to create a document - and eventually that is what you achieve.

Technorati Tags: enterprise2.0, innovation, wiki

Moving Enterprise 2.0 into the mainstream

It seems that convincing people that Enterprise 2.0 is a really exciting and innovative way to work is easy, the real challenge is in actually getting the mainstream of your business to actual use it.

I was recently reading an article from the MIT Sloan Management Review entitled "Overcoming consumer resistance to innovation". Amongst other things this article details the 5 barriers to innovation, a proposed list of factors that cause consumer resistance to innovation which are as follows:

1. The innovation may not be compatible with existing workflows and practices.

2. The consumers do not understand the value of the innovation.

3. The innovation is deemed to be too risky.

4.The consumers have to culture new habits to adopt the innovation.

5. The innovation has a poor image/branding.

In my next few

posts I am going to examine each of these barriers in turn and discuss how they apply to E2.0 technologies, and suggest ways that they can be addressed to help mainstream Enterprise 2.0.

Technorati Tags: e2, enterprise 2.0, innovation