Oliver Marks

CBS were so impressed Dan Farber offered me a blog spot on ZDNet they bought the company this morning!

I’ve just posted my inaugural blogs here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/collaboration/ and am now officially a two blog person.

The ZDNet Collaboration 2.0 will be my primary focus over the next few months as I attempt to stoke up discussion there, but I will continue to blog here, saying things I may not want to expose ZDNet to…

I’m pretty behind getting the consulting part of this site up so that will also be a focus over the next couple of weeks prior to a couple of conferences I’ll be attending, Enterprise 2.0 and Supernova.

Despite a split second power cut that nuked my dsl connection and ensuing resets, I had a fascinating discussion this morning with France based Sigurd Rinde about ‘Thingamy’, a “Business Model Builder with instant delivery of Business Processes, Accounts and Reports.”

Sigurd screen shared the application to walk through the UI, and we had a fascinating conversation about the paradigm shifting concepts which formed the foundations of the application.

Early days yet but I think there is real promise here. Taking a big picture view, despite all the hoopla about the web over the last ten years, the reality is that people are stuck with ancient conventions which often make little sense.

Email is an obvious example: to the lay person the postal mail paradigm is made electronic by email. The only difference in thinking is dealing with volume.

This deluge perception is particularly pertinent to email, where people literally sit in cubicles processing email in enterprises - like these cats playing on a treadmill, sooner or later you’re going to slip behind…

Sigurd makes a good case that GAAP (’Generally Accepted Accounting Principles’) is a similarly outdated financial management model: ‘Thingamy’ is able to capture team ideas in real time and ammend budget costs on the fly.

It’s early days for this futuristic app, which enables agile development of semantically linked information. This results in a very lean experience that spits out contextually valuable information without all ‘busy work’ of tagging etc. It’s tough to convey paradigm breaking apps in a blog post without backup images, video etc but my feeling is that this a true Web 2.0 application that is also a harbinger of the semantically driven future.

Very impressed by an article brought to my attention by Stephen Collins, a Canberra based “Knowledge economy and knowledge work consultant, web strategist, information architect and social networking evangelist”, who is quoted in the article by author Sue Bushell.

Enterprise 2.0 - What is it good for?
A 12-step guide to getting the most out of Web 2.0 tools and making it safe-for-purposeis a lengthy (for a magazine article) but very solid piece of writing, Sue really gets into discussing some of the intractable problems faced by those attempting to role out Enterprise 2.0 inside companies.

There was a similar cover story in the US version of InformationWeek magazine during web 2.0 week by Andrew Conry-Murray whose cover read ‘Web 2.0 Rodeo‘ Herding cats is painless compared with wrangling users enamored of new collaboration tools. Here’s how to get control’that was much more lightweight and glib in comparison.

Sue’s Australian article leads with a quote from Stephen Collins

If you want to find out what tools your staff are finding most useful at the moment, just go and see what your IT department is blocking

Since both these magazines are aimed squarely at the IT community, it’s impressive that this reality is publicized in Australian CIO, whose advertising revenue presumably comes from the entrenched big players, as is the case with US InformationWeek.

Lack of a cohesive 2.0 strategy

The biggest challenge is the lack of a cohesive 2.0 strategy, which serves to confuse users, stall adoption and make 2.0 technologies tough to manage,” says Eli Weir, CTO of Seattle-based Visible Technologies.

and

..An online survey of IT leaders by Gartner found only one in seven organizations have a Web 2.0 strategy prepared, and few are ready for or are executing on Web 2.0. Gartner found few organizations knew how or where to begin determining the implications of Web 2.0. “These organizations are in for a rude awakening because we expect Web 2.0 to pose a greater threat to enterprises than the Web of the dotcom era,” Gartner says.

Obviously this is good for my sales pitch, since I am an Enterprise 2.0 collaboration strategy consultant!

Well worth reading through the twelve steps, and a couple of very solid ’sidebars’ including a short interview with Stowe Boyd which prompted this great anecdote:

CIO: …That reminds me of some of the angry feedback CIO has got on articles about “shadow IT” and the thought that users are bringing into the enterprise various technologies. What are your thoughts on that?

Stowe: I was at a big energy conglomerate a few years ago to talk to the CIO. I started my presentation. When the first slide - which was about instant messaging - went up, he said: “That’s all very interesting but we don’t allow instant messaging here.”

I went in the hall, and I got the AV guy who had set up the projector to come in, and asked him: “So how many people in the building use IM?” He said: “Oh, 50 to 60 percent.” A lot of people just want to wish it away. Beyond that, it’s very difficult to plug all the holes.

Enterprise 2.0 is very tough for IT: they are damned if they do (security concerns, having to support ‘mashups’) and damned if they don’t (blocking progress, not giving people consumer style web 2.0 tools to do their job). There is a huge ownership issue also: on a case by case basis it is sometimes more appropriate for business units to own collaboration, but then who runs support?

Great to see these thorny issues being brought out in open ended discussion, very refreshing after some of the boilerplate solution books that are fashionable this spring.

I follow Gia Lyons on Twitter; Gia is..

currently the IBM Americas Social Software Evangelist. I talk about social software, IBM Lotus Connections in particular, with customers in continents ending in “America.”

A few of Gia’s tweets really caught my eye this morning:

@gialyons “collaboration is better if folks are more aware of one another across a network, since they only collaborate with people they know exist”.

@gialyons “You’re telling me, customer, that you want an organization that collaborates better/faster/smarter.”

@gialyons “I’m telling you that this cannot happen until you increase awareness across your organization.”

@gialyons “Just giving people yet another collaboration tool will not improve awareness.”

Gia told me these tweets were inspired by a conversation she was having with Kathryn Everest, a Managing Consultant at IBM Canada.

It seems so elementary, but installing collaboration software without guidance for users is like having a party and not sending out invites. Another social analogy: if you’re going to run a social mixer it helps to define that on the invite, otherwise you get a bunch of people in a room waiting for something to happen.

One of the great strengths of the ’socialprise’ concept is to pull people together, so step one is defining who the people you are including are, telling them what the plan is and introducing them to each other!

Lotus Connections, SharePoint, LDAP directory of single sign on portal users, dedicated app or whatever, communication and training is paramount for getting people on board, familiar with the system, ready to share and comfortable working together online.

Great quote from Dan Keldsens’s BizTechTalk Blog:

Collaboration and sharing of content cannot and should not ALWAYS be out in the open.

Financial Services companies get this - that’s why they are prohibited from sharing information across the “chinese firewall” between the research and sales arms - it’s called collusion, not collaboration. That’s why pharmaceutical companies lock away their R&D - the FDA will tear them apart, as will their competitors, if there are not tight controls on their processes (including collaboration, reporting, etc.). There’s a time and place for total transparency, total secrecy, and the gray space in between.

Unlike the promiscuous app mashup world of Web2.0, Enterprise collaboration frequently gets onto very delicate ground over who is allowed to to share what with who. Security officers are paid to be vigilant in the enterprise to ensure information is used and shared appropriately: to do otherwise could prove costly…Separately, there’s a whole Sarbanes Oxley defined industry around research and reporting of information that burrows deep into a surprisingly diverse set of industries.

Dan was commenting on Forrester Research Sr analyst Jememiah Owyang’s personal blog post, in which he boosts UserVoice who, to quote UserVoice’s website, “add structure to feedback and reduce the overhead of an honest dialog with users — It creates a market around good ideas so we get more quality than quantity”. (Jeremiah focuses on ‘white label social networking platforms’ and has compiled a vendor list on his blog here).

Jeremiah put up an instance of UserVoice on his own site as an example and to play with the functionality.

This is a good example of the type of info sharing that wouldn’t pass muster in a financial services company where “sharing information across the “chinese firewall” between the research and sales arms” could result in costly penalties. Jeremiah’s point is that this type of voting functionality should be folded into white label social networking platforms, presumably with appropriate safeguards for info security.

Dan, who has an impressive depth of knowledge in the greater collaboration space seasoned by extensive experience in the knowledge management world, makes another important point:

“This entire movement is born out of the Voice of the Customer movement, itself coming from marketing techniques that go back to the earliest days of focus groups. It’s just at a different scale - small i innovation (incremental) rather than radical BIG I INNOVATION (brand new, never been seen before).”

My take from this is that while rounding up all the vendors in a space and listing them is a very valuable exercise, there is a great deal more depth to this than ‘baseball card collecting’ and listing brief key attributes of each product from sales pitch.

Continuing my ‘beat up FaceBook because it’s hurting executive perceptions of Enterprise collaboration’ week, here’s a chart from FlowingData.com showing number of FaceBook applications developed, with a huge emphasis on fun.

There’s a lot of super poking going on….

A fascinating post as usual by Sam Lawrence How social software could dethrone the big guys:

The next enterprise software leaders

…Canon used to be fax machines, printers and copiers. They were able to reinvent and capitalize on the digital imaging market and flip flop leadership with Kodak. Kodak is still a player but now there’s a wholly new set of competitors. The same thing will happen for enterprise software. Sure Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Oracle will be around but there will be room, for the first time in decades, for new players to capitalize on the massive demand and emerge as leaders in a wholly shifted playing field.

This was countered by Dennis Howlett who is visiting the US this week for SAPPHIRE, the SAP event that is “the one place where senior executives, business managers, and decision-makers can come together to explore how innovative business solutions foster long-term, profitable growth”.

His blog post on ZD Net Why social software won’t dethrone the incumbents countered some of Sam’s points:

…While it’s fashionable to beat the large vendors over the head with the latest shiny objects in our fashion led technology game, it is a foolish person who is prepared to bet against IBM, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. The fact they have yet to establish infrastructures that allow them to credibly include the full gamut of social software (with the possible exception of IBM) doesn’t mean they won’t or can’t…

and

…Sam’s argument is based on Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz’s assessment of readiness among these vendors compared with the newer vendors like SixApart, Atlassian, SocialText, Jive, Awareness and others. While there is no doubt these category specific vendors have an edge, they’re minnows both in aggregate and market impact…

Typical pithy stuff from Dennis, who is obviously very focused on SAP this week, and well worth reading and absorbing. I posted a lengthy response to both these articles at ZD Net.

This is a very thought provoking post on many levels particularly when you have been heavily engaged in the complex currents and prevailing wind changes typical of the ecosphere in a large enterprise. Not to mention financial justifications which Dennis clearly has a very solid handle on.

There’s great advantage to creating synergy between the enterprise juggernaut backbone and the lighter more agile emergent Enterprise 2.0 app owners. I was chatting with Rod Boothby, VP of Platform Evangelism at Joyent last week, who told me he’s seeing new management roles around ‘light engineering’ in the enterprise to manage the cloud and SAAS.

The challenge is getting these two groups to talk to each other - not the vendors, opposing factions inside the enterprise. Sig Rinde’s quoted post is excellent: “Business is a value chain, a social value chain with a clear purpose”. At budget time this type of thinking is central to decision making.

The IT guys can make a no brainer case for keeping lotus notes running (’the backbone’ to senior management), while mission and metrics for enterprise collaboration processes and technologies, particularly if not built on solid foundations within the enterprise (for example a ground up informal adoption, or ownership in a single silo of many competing ones), can have a hard time justifying its existence.

Sig’s ‘Barely Repeatable Process’ - a bespoke solution to a problem not solvable by the big boys - will get budget justification, because of understood value. Collaboration, while clearly valuable, is being hurt IMO by a lot of very rapid change in the E2.0 spacecoupled with confusion in the marketplace with facebook style ‘poking’ and ‘funwalls’.

The guy with the checkbook may well have teenage daughters who spend their lives on facebook and don’t get any work done - I had this conversation recently with someone in senior management while explaining enterprise collaboration. Not helpful.

Happy talk about ‘groundswells’ (a great book but superficial takeaway by people who skimmed it seems to be ad hoc adoption) and buzzy new tech that will be out of fashion in a year isn’t going to make collaboration technology the backbone of the enterprise, which is where ultimately it will be.

The sweet spot is synergy between backbone and agile limbs as separately debated by Sam with his ‘enterprise octopus’ analogy. I suggest that those who do that best will either become profitably (for the founders) subsumed into a larger organization, or be key partners to them in a growing space…

It would be fascinating to see what enterprise collaboration will look like five years from now and who the players are: SAP’s ‘Business by Design’ initiative is delayed, IBM have offerings that are pretty low key,although David L Barnes, IBM’s program director for emergent internet technology, gave me some insight into IBM’s ‘lotus notes in a browser’ future plans last year. No sign of that yet, and ‘backbone’ adoption will be slow…

Meanwhile Atlassian and Jive are making great headway today. I wonder if this will be a tortoise and the hare race…the tortoise doesn’t appear to have started moving yet, but that could be very deceptive…

Brief lull in posting, I’ve had my head down creating my consulting positioning strategy, having identified several areas to focus on. New theme for this site soon instead of the generic one I’ve kicked off with, along with that consulting content.

I’ve certainly soaked up the zeitgeist of western European and north American web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 in the last few weeks, and I also have been exploring the Asian 2.0 world.

Asia
Mixi is broadly the Japanese equivalent to FaceBook and has been around since 2004. When you are considering enterprise collaboration internationally it’s valuable to consider local paradigms employees are using in their external social space in order to be relevant and fit with local mores where possible. This simplifies uptake and comprehension.

An international enterprise strategy that works for both western and eastern sensibilities is possible with thought and consideration of cultural conventions.

Social vs enterprise

I tend to keep a healthy distance from any suggestion that Mixi or FaceBook style ‘poking’, ‘footprints’, ‘funwalls’ etc, are appropriate in the enterprise. I think it important to differentiate these two completely different emergent markets…

Too many people associate social networking with the type of frivolity and ‘lifestyle’ nonsense humorously shown in this animated short.

Or this BBC comedy sketch of facebook in real life:

Serious enterprise technology solutions such as Clearspace need to be clearly distanced from this…

This is also a problem at budget time in large enterprises when defining the goals and purposes of the collaboration infrastructure.

Qwaq - a Second Life style enterprise user interface

I visited Qwaq yesterday and was given a demo of their innovative ‘Virtual Spaces for Real Work’ interface. I was told by their CEO Greg Nuyens they keep the look of their virtual meeting spaces very conservative and realistic. They often model real conference rooms around the world at, for example, Accenture, so you can meet ‘virtually’ in a room you are familiar with, for example, because you were actually there last week in Tokyo. This time it’s your avatar that is in the room, and not your real body with jetlag…

Keeping it real is the same logic as differentiating ’social networks’ from ‘Enterprise 2.0′ - it’s possible to create a virtual meeting space with magic unicorns under a fountain, but why…when you can replicate needed real life functionality, the unicorns and funwalls are just an irrelevance and a distraction.

Stowe Boyd, whose opinion I always respect, thinks the ‘Web 2.0′ descriptor is fine:

I’m in two minds about all this.

On the positive side, ‘Web 2.0′ helps those minimally engaged with web concepts to differentiate from the ‘old’ web; to focus on and grasp new innovations.

My issue is that the concept of ‘web 2.0′ is so blurred and even stale to many people now that the more jaded naysayers tend to laugh it off like the parody social network site ‘ncludr.com - “the social network where everyone and everything is your friend.”.

This could potentially hurt brilliant innovations like Lunarr.com who are lumped into the same category.

I’m focused on ‘Enterprise 2.0′ of course and not ‘Web 2.0′ but most people neither know or care about these categories.

‘Social’ and ‘enterprise’ don’t mix well, I think that’s my fundamental problem.

Web 2.0 Expo - surely just ‘the web’, or should we call old legacy static sites ‘web minus one’ from now on - had more video cameras waving around this year than the Oscars.

This is truly the year of web video with HD cameras plummeting in price, flip videocams and lots of free hosting. I spent quite a bit of time in the Blogopolis lounge which was more like a TV press area.

The whole week had a split personality, with Marc Andreesen’s ’stocking up with cash for the financial nuclear winter’ Ning discussion counterpointed with celebrity photography and video shoots of A thru Z list web industry luminaries. I was also called a groupie in one of these situations by Dave McClure which was pretty hilarious, since I was trying to avoid the cameras.

There’s a stream of links to Flickr sets of folks at the show day and night on Twitter now that the show is over.

I heard a conversation outside the Moscone between two guys about an entire operation closing down with staff flying home to nothing as I headed off to another open bar party. There was a more business like feel to this years’ expo but it still felt frothy to me…

I wonder what the conference will be called next year, and whether talking head video will have lost its appeal by then?