Category: Enterprise Wikis
November 12th, 2009
Enterprise 2.0: What do we know today about moving our organizations into the 21st century?
We spend 60-80% of our time in the workplace on interaction and collaborative activity. This week in Frankfurt at the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT and last week at the inaugural Enterprise 2.0 Conference West in San Francisco has been an good microcosm of the state of the industry.
It does appear that we’re entering a new stage in the maturity of enterprise social computing. The good news: Most of the lessons learned are good ones, yet as we’ll see, some challenges remain.
Based on my conversations with practitioners and thought leaders here and the many discussions over the last two weeks, the practice of Enterprise 2.0 has effectively moved beyond the initial novelty of years past. There’s now a much more practical focus on how to create, manage, and govern social business communities, the specific ways to deliver measurable business value, and most of all, a desire to learn what works best (or not) in the realm of collaboration and social software.
The broad outlines of what it actually takes to apply new social business models have emerged lately along with the techniques to deliver on them successfully in the longer term. In particular, these include topics such as business case, tool selection, worker policies, community management, and the governance of social business environments.
Just as importantly, we are also starting to see customers implementing Enterprise 2.0 in scale. These typically include enterprise social networking, wikis, and social CRM. This is different than a year ago when there were only a handful of stories about Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 companies seriously exploring the potential benefits of social computing.
In the sense that the hard work has started, we are also seeing the end of the beginning for Enterprise 2.0. We’ve learned a lot along the way, particularly from early adopters, and it has been interesting to participate back-to-back in two of the largest enterprise social computing events of the season. This has helped get a sense of what’s taking place in Europe and North America with customers as well as the industry growing up around Enterprise 2.0 in terms of tools and services.
Related: Social applications are now well-entrenched in enterprise networks around the globe
Where is Enterprise 2.0 headed?
Here are my top takeaways from the discussions, research, and findings here in Frankfurt this week and San Francisco last week:
- Businesses are actively seeking information about how best to implement Enterprise 2.0. While last year they were kicking the tires and evaluating what the benefits are (establishing why) there’s a lot more actual project activity this year and this is driving significant demand for knowledge about how. The rise of the 2.0 Adoption Council is one demonstration of this need to share information about what works. Further providing evidence that there’s a need for how: A recent survey showed that 36% of their members were currently managing multi-million dollar budgets this year for Enterprise 2.0. In other words, they’re in the “how” stage. Finally, the end-users I talked with in my workshops at both events demanded detailed, specific information about how to make Enterprise 2.0 work for their businesses.
- There is still lots of debate about how to
September 17th, 2009
Going beyond the hype: Identifying Enterprise 2.0 best practices
There’s been plenty of discussion recently in the blogosphere, including here, about the successes and challenges of Enterprise 2.0 projects. But there’s still just a rough general sense of what it really takes to create an effective collaborative community using social tools.
It’s starting to become clear that successful Enterprise 2.0 efforts have community management as a core function. Stewart Mader’s guest post this week on Dennis Howlett’s blog here on ZDNet helps tell part of this story: As businesses go about their daily activities, they aren’t looking for either Enterprise 2.0 or a social tool like a wiki for its own sake. Instead, they are looking to solve problems and meet their deadlines in easier, cheaper, and better ways. To the extent that social computing can help do this, it will remain a topical subject in business and IT. To the extent that it’s a distraction, a risk, or more overhead, it won’t.
Those trying to read the tea leaves about Enterprise 2.0 these days can see that the software at least has arrived in a bare majority of companies, even if it’s just Facebook or Twitter across the firewall. Genuine adoption and meaningful integration into business processes has certainly happened in a number of organizations, but is still the edge case today rather than the rule. That’s not to say the current case studies aren’t reporting gains, they generally are. But the message here is that many enterprises are now actively in full contact with the social computing world, whether they want to or not, and now it’s time to understand how to deal with the benefits and issues.
What does seem to be emerging are the first broad outlines of a body of knowledge on how to make social computing work in a business setting. So-called best practices and effective techniques are beginning to be identified and understood. And if one accepts that some level of adoption of social tools is inevitable in most workplaces (just not that big an “if” these days), then understanding how to manage the upside while dealing with any potential downsides of Enterprise 2.0 just makes good business sense.
The advent of most new technology improvements to business ultimately get codified into frameworks or methodologies, big formal sounding words that just refer to systematic ways of identifying and applying methods in a given discipline. This helps identify and organize practices that work and ones that don’t by ensuring new efforts don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time. The first social software and Enterprise 2.0 methodologies are now beginning to emerge, some explicitly but most implicitly, as practitioners assess their early successes and try to understand what worked and what didn’t.
Emerging best practices in social software
The last couple of years has seen a steady, conscious effort to collect and codify social computing techniques and best practices. These include:
- Andrew McAfee’s attempt to create a pattern language for Enterprise 2.0.
- Stewart Mader’s excellent Wikipatterns.
- Sun’s well produced Social Software Pattern Language.
- The social patterns captured in Designing Social Interfaces by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone and probably best summarized here.
But while these efforts are laudable and often extremely useful when designing social software or structuring online communities, they often lack
September 9th, 2009
Government 2.0: A tale of "risk, control, and trust"
Yesterday in downtown Washington DC I was fortunate to be able to attend two important Government 2.0 events: the LMI Executive Forum on Mission 2.0 and O’Reilly/TechWeb’s Government 2.0 Expo. Both of these events highlighted the benefits as well as the challenges of improving the way the government does so much of what it does today.
Self-organizing and self-directed behavior is much more likely in the government of the near-future.
Social collaboration, information sharing, and open data were broad themes extensively explored and certainly championed by many at both events, admittedly myself one of them. Cautious optimism was apparent in the participants as there seems to be a broadening consensus that there will be striking changes in government over the next few years. This optimism was occasionally overshadowed in many discussions by the recurrence of issues such as the challenges that bureaucracy poses to progress including HR, policy, reward systems, and management motivations. Especially evident were worries about the classic issues of hierarchical management which LMI Executive Forum participant Mark Oehlert summarized smartly in three broad themes: “Risk, control, and trust.“
The interest, however, in improving government through the innovative use of the latest Web 2.0 approaches and tools is at the moment reaching nearly a fever pitch in the public sector, at least in the nation’s capital. Throughout the summer and fall there have been events and meetups around the Washington DC area exploring how social computing, Enterprise 2.0, agile integration, and data sharing between agencies in the federal government can achieve many of the goals for next-generation government that those, including national CIO Vivek Kundra, have been expounding in recent months.
A lot of this recent interest has been spurred by a new administration, particularly President Barack Obama’s early moves this year, and the issuance in particular of the Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies on Transparency and Open Government. In this document, Obama says that:
Government should be collaborative. Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector.
While orders and memoranda are issued all the time in government, often without substantial impact, the broad influence of social computing these days, both in the consumer space as well as the enterprise, has made social systems one of the top approaches of interest when it comes to open government initiatives this year, as we’ll see from the discussions yesterday.
Exploring Mission 2.0: An emerging subset of Government 2.0
The LMI Executive Forum yesterday was attended by senior members of various government agencies including the CIA, DNI, and the DoD. The attendees, including myself as a guest, discussed at length social computing in the federal workplace, in particular the more secure, mission-oriented environments such as the intelligence community. The use of Web 2.0 tools in this environment can be called Mission 2.0.
A number of key points came out of the discussion that highlight the differences between private sector use of Web 2.0 approaches and their realization in a so-called Mission 2.0 environment. In particular is
September 2nd, 2009
Enterprise 2.0: Finding success on the frontiers of social business
It’s entirely possible something may cause social tools to abruptly stop their broad movement into the workplace, but history tells us that it’s just not likely. Success is in the eye of the beholder and with it often spawns a growing body of followers, adherents, acolytes, as well as nay-sayers that won’t be convinced until it’s an inescapable conclusion. In this very manner, at least so far, seems to go Enterprise 2.0, a moniker for corporate social software that has been inspired by widely popular online Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, social networks, and other social software.
As we’ll see, this is an intriguing case of a nascent business, social, and technology movement that seems to — despite some claims to the contrary — actually have had a rather humble and unheralded ascent while making surprisingly deep inroads in business including some higher profile successes. Make no mistake however, despite the apparent numbers, this is a movement that’s in its early days yet and which has years — if not a decade or more — before it has its largest impact.
What exactly the impact of Enterprise 2.0 will be however, has been the subject of an active and lively debate online over the last couple of weeks.
Uptake moving faster than absorption
My recent exploration of the potential causes of Enterprise 2.0 failures here on ZDNet managed to spark quite a discussion in the blogosphere about enterprise social computing and its overall appropriateness, motivations, and benefits to business. In particular, well-known contrarian Dennis Howlett weighed in last week with fairly severe criticism of Enterprise 2.0 which ultimately resulted in a direct response from Andrew McAfee today (who described it originally). For those wanting to follow the rest of the conversation, Paula Thornton probably did the best round-up of the discussion. The range of responses shows a wide variety of opinion reflecting both the scope and timeliness of this subject.
For my part, I would observe that the points that Dennis makes, while resounding with business importance (and being a bit disingenuous since I believe Dennis knows better given the information available), almost completely ignores the discussion and experiences with Enterprise 2.0 up to this point. This includes both the extensive efforts taking place in companies around the world right now as well as the already widespread nature of these tools. Far from being a solution waiting for some kind of business problem, at present Enterprise 2.0 describes a new way of working together that is already being used by millions of workers every day.
Figure 1: Stats, Adopters, and Motivation
That not every Enterprise 2.0 effort will benefit the business is also certainly true, as it’s occasionally misapplied and overused, like any new business or technology idea. However, the many people finding value in these tools today or who are working hard to make them successful are poorly served by broad generalizations, that for some reason, Enterprise 2.0 “is a crock.” That it’s not a well-known term is certainly true; most people using social tools at work are just doing it and not giving it a name. This does not distract from the numerous stories of success that have emerged over the last few years.
As JP Rangaswami pointed out recently, social computing is increasingly moving beyond the perception of being “interesting, but of no commercial value” and into a place where it’s thought to provide a range of bottom-line business results for most that apply it.
In working with and examining the results of many early Enterprise 2.0 efforts, I’ve been forced to come to the conclusion through repeated example that there is something fundamentally unique and powerful about social computing. Though not all uses of social tools result in rapid adoption or instant results, those that establish an early network effect can and do push existing IT systems (often ECM, knowledge management, and communication tools) into rapid irrelevance or completely upend and replace older, less dynamic databases or information repositories in surprisingly short amounts of time. That this almost always happens with just minor disruption is fascinating to me. And as we’ll see below, despite Dennis’ skepticism, these emergent tools have a rich and wide set of use cases. In the end, senior managers that may not “give a damn” about the emergent nature of the enterprise do in fact care about better ways of running their businesses.
That there is such a wide range of positions about Enterprise 2.0 from highly experienced people inside the worlds of technology and business is intriguing but probably inevitable due to the early stages of these changes and their rapid onset. In large part, I believe this is because of the distributed and muted nature of the information about what’s happening with social computing inside the workplace (this is in contrast with B2C-style corporate social media, which is still getting the lion’s share of buzz and attention right now.) Many projects are also adopting early advice and aren’t heralding the massive change that these tools may bring, are flying under the radar, and setting expectations low in a business world that is fatigued with the failures of big-bang IT. That adoption is happening as fast as is apparent today is intriguing given the warning that McAfee himself makes about expecting too much change from all of this:
[C]ertain E2.0 enthusiasts adopt the language of revolutionaries. They rail against the old corporate order and proclaim that they’re working for its downfall. They portray hierarchy, standardization, and management as enemies of innovation, creativity, and value creation. And they maintain that E2.0 is an unstoppable force that will only gain power as Millennials enter the workforce and that resistance to it is, ultimately, futile.
McAfee does point out that he indeed believes that those organizations without these tools will eventually fall behind, but he notes it generally won’t happen that quickly.
So while revolution is almost invariably not taking place in organizations adopting social computing tools, the pace of uptake has actually been quite impressive given the rate at which enterprises typically adopt new technologies (translation: usually with glacial pace compared to the consumer world). The numbers and profiles tell the story as you can see in the State of Enterprise 2.0 visual above. While a “disruptive revolution” is not what’s happening, and Enterprise 2.0 is certainly not inevitable for most organizations (yet), the adoption of the tools has in fact been taking place at what some would call near-revolutionary velocity, including the number of companies reporting they are consciously engaging in it as some level.
Although I’ve been following Enterprise 2.0 closely since 2006 and I’m generally known as an advocate, I should be clear that I’ve also tried very hard to be impartial and balanced (hence, for example, my Enterprise 2.0 failures post). No one is served by unrestrained hype. As much as possible, I have gathered data and examined the trends to see if indeed 1) the tools of Web 2.0 have begun to move into the enterprise and 2) improve business results. The first is now virtually a foregone conclusion; we are clearly beyond the
August 21st, 2009
14 Reasons Why Enterprise 2.0 Projects Fail
Creating and nurturing a community is not something at which traditional stakeholders in software projects are often skilled. I’ve been having some very interesting conversations lately about Enterprise 2.0 failures with ZDNet colleague Michael Krigsman. He is doing research for his work on project failures in this area and is trying to understand the reasons why some Enterprise 2.0 initiatives don’t succeed. In preparing for our talk together, I ended up doing quite a bit of my own research and the results, at least for me, surfaced some fascinating stories and insights that are worth examining examining here in detail.
It’s a classic adage that we usually learn more from our failures than from our successes. Success itself has a palliative effect that makes one less introspective and over-confident of one’s methods. It obscures the feedback loops needed to really understand what worked and what didn’t. When you succeed at something, clearly what you did was effective, but you can never quite be as sure what it was as when something doesn’t work out. I’ve find this line of reasoning with Enterprise 2.0 failures to be fascinating because of how very different it’s often turning out to be from traditional IT projects.
For one, IT doesn’t seem to be in the driver’s seat nearly as much with Enterprise 2.0. In fact, the initiative is frequently coming from the business side. Two, as the latest case studies emerge and are analyzed, it is grassroots efforts that often end up being the most successful, bubbling up and then across the organization, only then to be formally adopted later. And three, many so-called Enterprise 2.0 projects are local, unblessed, informal uses of social computing software which — by their very nature — are less compliant with enterprise technology standards, legal/HR guidelines, and corporate policy. So, at least on its face, this seems to mean Enterprise 2.0 projects are more likely to fail due to seeming larger than usual lack of alignment and organizational backing.
Intriguingly, that this is a bad thing is quite debatable in the case of Enterprise 2.0. In an ideal world, you’d like to see projects that aren’t successful fail quickly and not consume a huge investment of time and money before you discover that they aren’t going to produce value. The mantra here is “fail fast and often” and then look for the ones that don’t. Just as interesting, the projects that break the rules, can often break the right rules; the ones that were going to hold back the more structured and official efforts anyway. The point here is that many Enterprise 2.0 tools are often used widely in organizations without tacit approval.
Venture Model + Rogue IT = Enterprise 2.0 Success?
In other words, people are just grabbing tools off the Web and putting them to work, drawing their co-workers in as they begin to use them. As we saw this year, most organizations now have the tools of Enterprise 2.0: blogs, wikis, and social networks and the workers have access to them. The amount of rogue IT that actually takes place varies widely by organization, but seems to be on the rise particularly with social tools. Access to them is very easy via the Internet and I hear frequently now from organizations that this is happening.
Most of these smaller, on-the-ground, often under-funded Enterprise 2.0 efforts will fail to thrive for whatever reasons. These are useful experiments but they were missing
July 29th, 2009
Assessing the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace in 2009: Robust and crowded
Social software platforms, including services such as Facebook and Twitter, have become one of the primary channels for communication amongst consumers this year, even eclipsing e-mail in some parts of the developed world.
It was companies that either open sourced eventually or took open source and then made it enterprise class that often scored the best.The same however, can’t quite be said yet for the workplace. While the adoption numbers for social applications are still impressive in business (about half of all large organizations), actual adoption and use is lagging significantly behind the non-business world as organizations take the time to assess a range of issues with enterprise social computing, including appropriateness, security, control, management methods, and roll-out strategies.
However, given the widespread interest and popularity in social tools these days, it’s becoming a pretty safe bet that you’ll be seeing them in some form on a workplace intranet near you. The question is in what form? The choices of social tools these days can be daunting and are only increasing rapidly, with new entries appearing weekly and existing ones being upgraded often. What’s increasingly needed is a detailed look at what’s currently available in business-class social software and how it sizes up, which we’ll try to do in high-level form here.
As we’ll see, since last year’s marketplace map, there has been a veritable explosion in social applications that are intended for use in business settings, both internally or externally. These offerings have a surprisingly wide range of features and so in this post I will explore one of the broadest and most important categories of business social software, Enterprise 2.0, in detail. I’ve also included a pretty comprehensive map of the marketplace for 2009 as defined by the products that are available today (or are highly anticipated and soon to be released, such as Google Wave.)
Enterprise 2.0 software: Choice abounds
A wide range of software providers now proclaim that they make Enterprise 2.0 tools, or have adapted/extended what they make today in order to address this space in some way. This includes the full gamut of open source projects, commercial vendors, startups, and established Web firms such as Google.
In fact, during the course of the survey work, it sometimes seemed like every company making business-oriented collaboration and communication tools is now offering Enterprise 2.0 capabilities in some form. Overall this is a good sign for customers (because supply is most likely greater than demand) and though all new markets tend to shake out, we are no longer in early days with social software. This means that the majority of these products will likely be around for the medium to long-term. It also means that there is probably something available that will fit your specific choice of features, price, technology needs, standards support, and other requirements.
Click To View In Detail
The visual above can be clicked to view the gallery containing the full list of Enterprise 2.0-capable applications assessed in this survey.
There are over 70 major products on this list — many of them entire software platforms in their own right — with a wide range of Web 2.0 capabilities including blogs, wikis, forums, community, social networks, and social messaging. Every attempt was made to be inclusive while still adhering to the spirit of “emergent, freeform, social collaboration” tools. Also, a product had to be compelling and capable in order to appear on this list at all; all of the offerings that made the cut are solid products in my opinion. Literally hundreds of candidates did not make the cut.
Further Reading: The enterprise microblogging marketplace for mid-2009.
So, for example, a simple but popular microblogging tool like Yammer appears on the list along with the widely used, feature-laden Microsoft SharePoint suite. It’s important to note that these are very different applications in terms of
July 27th, 2009
Ten top issues in adopting enterprise social computing
Last week ZDNet’s Larry Dignan wrote an insightful post that analyzed the recent report from Charlene Li and the Altimeter Group/Wetpaint about early data that seems to show an intriguing correlation between social media engagement and corporate financial performance. The key finding was this:
To be specific, companies that are both deeply and widely engaged in social media surpass their peers in terms of both revenue and profit performance by a significant difference.
This report (details and copy here) is encouraging news for those embarking on applying social software to various parts of their business. But, as Larry points out, these numbers can be interpreted a number of ways. Many organizations would rather wait for best practices to solidify before climbing very far up the social computing adoption curve. So while there’s increasingly less question that there is genuine ROI in social media, the question still remains whether it can directly drive fundamental, bottom line performance in the average organization today.
This highlights a key conversational thread that came out of last month’s Enterprise 2.0 conference: Does social computing really deliver significantly better business performance? Or is it merely a minor incremental improvement?
Unfortunately, despite an growing body of encouraging case studies, evidence, and research, the jury is still out on total impact social computing will have on businesses. This return will even vary widely for many organizations for a number of reasons will explore below. At present, the uncertainty is simply because that there are not enough organizations that have incorporated social computing approaches (which encompasses the full range of social software as applied to business that include social networks and Enterprise 2.0 to things like crowdsourcing and social CRM) across their lines of business for us to get a complete enough picture. Even the ones that have done it, haven’t done it long enough to see what the results actually are.
Instead, as companies begin pilots and initiatives, we are seeing the first wave of issues cropping up as the larger cultural, IT, and business impact of social tools begins to be felt.
Sidebar: What is social computing? It’s the use of social software within and between organizations and any interested parties such as employees, customers, and partners. Social computing, as explained here, can usher in significant large-scale shifts in where productive forces and innovation come from. Organizations will all adopt enterprise social computing tools in slightly different ways and will generally proceed from ad hoc usage, often by applying widely available consumer tools at first, to more evolved open business models. As of this year, about half of all large organizations now have social computing tools deployed in some manner.
The following is a summary of the issues I’m hearing from practitioners in the field as well as from our clients and industry contacts.
While these ten issues with social computing are the ones I hear about most, your mileage will almost certainly vary. However, I believe them to be representative of where we are in 2009. Please note that these are by no means insurmountable obstacles and merely represent a good cross section of what early adopters typically encounter as they begin climbing the social computing adoption curve (see diagram above).
Ten top issues with social computing in business
- Lack of social media literacy amongst workers. Anecdotally, the farther a business is from the technology industry, the less likely that line workers will be familiar with the latest software innovations. Those who haven’t been maintaining blogs, updating wiki sites, using social networks, sharing information socially, etc. will require more education than those who do. Even the basics of netiquette as well as key techniques to get the most from social computing platforms such as encouraging the building of links between data, tagging information, or establishing weak ties over the network are often poorly understood even by frequent users of social computing tools. In short, social computing requires some literacy efforts in most organizations to achieve effectiveness, just like personal computing skills did a few decades ago.
- A perception that social tools won’t work well in a particular industry. There is often an assumption in many specialized industries — such as medicine or manufacturing, just to cite two random examples — that social tools won’t
July 24th, 2009
First impressions of Google Wave
After spending a few hours using an early version of Google Wave today, it’s clear that in its initial incarnation it won’t be ejecting existing enterprise collaboration tools from the workplace any time soon. It’s not that it isn’t impressive, far from it, however Wave’s complex interface and open-ended feature set provides an unexpectedly steep learning curve, particularly from a company that is famous for simple, powerful user experiences.
That said, Google Wave holds considerable potential for bringing next-generation Enterprise 2.0 capabilities to organizations looking for best-of-breed solutions.
For those that didn’t see the unveiling two months ago, the vision of Google Wave is one of online communication completely reinvented for the possibilities — as well as the expectations — of the Facebook/Twitter era.
After all, e-mail itself is decades old and even highly successful Web 2.0 communication tools like blogs and wikis have gotten somewhat long in the tooth, at least in their most common forms. With browsers capable of doing more than ever and tight integration with existing information assets becoming more and more critical to users, Google Wave attempts to up the ante by combining many of the features and capabilities we come to expect in modern Web applications.
These advancements include truly social conversation, simultaneous multi-user editing, connection to external Web/intranet apps through extensions and embedding, and much more. In fact, as we’ll see, Google Wave has virtually all of the key ingredients to comply with my FLATNESSES mnemonic for identifying effective, Enterprise 2.0-capable applications.
The end result is something that comes across as a distinctly sophisticated Web application clearly made up of many elements that sometimes behave somewhat unpredictably precisely because it’s designed to be highly extensible and freeform. Admittedly, my experience was with the developer sandbox for extensions, but this is exactly the intent of Google Wave: to be the center of integrated communication and collaboration in a dynamic and immersive yet safe experience.
Here are some of the observations I made during my use of Google Wave. Note that this is an early version of the software that will undoubtedly be richer and more complete upon release, though experience shows that Google rarely makes major changes to products once they are shown to early audiences.
Observations on Google Wave
- The basic interface looks a lot like Gmail. This is generally good since Gmail is widely used and understood by millions of people. The biggest obvious difference is that the inbox/content area that takes up most of the page in Gmail is now split in half, with a list of waves on the left and an active wave on the right. The rest of the page is taken up with a Contacts pane, just like in Gmail, and some standard boilerplate links on the upper right. In fact, it’s so consistent with the Google experience (including Google Accounts) that it seems quite likely — to this author anyway — that Google Wave capabilities will be added to Gmail at some point. Upshot: Other companies can and will make their own front end editors/viewers for waves and this user experience has few surprises. It is very much what you’d expect from Google with a user interface/navigation consistent with their other applications.
Screenshot of Google Wave: Strong similarity to Gmail - Google Wave works better with groups of contacts.While this seems obvious, the issue is that online conversations tend to work better when they can involve a wider range of people than just those that you think of immediately. The tedium of starting a wave is that you have to add all the participants than you’d like to have in it. Auto-joining groups are supported at this time in a fairly interesting fashion (if slightly unexpected, see below in robot participants), but will be critical to create easily and quickly en masse in order to make Google Wave useful and time efficient. One potential issue: Supporting cross boundary waves and simultaneously supporting Google Accounts, Active Directory, and other user account databases. This will be a complex issue for enterprises that want to
June 1st, 2009
Twitter on your intranet: 17 microblogging tools for business
Ultimately, if you want to use the right tool for the job, you’re probably going to need a specialized microblogging platform.So you’re bitten by the Twitter bug and want to bring the social messaging experience to work in order to connect with and share information conveniently amongst your colleagues. Perhaps you’ve even obtained permission to try out microblogging in trial form on your local intranet. You sit down and begin to see how you can adopt social messaging internally. It goes slowly at first…
As a Web-based consumer application, you quickly discover that while Twitter itself is a terrific environment, it isn’t very usable yet for businesses because of it lacks a variety of capabilities needed to fully work on the local intranet (details on this below). You wonder what other options exist to bring microblogging to the workplace in a business-friendly manner. Plenty, it turns out.
As we’ll see, choosing one carefully will be key to the long-term success of your experiment.
With the recent growth of Web 2.0 tools in the workplace (to about half of all organizations today), this scenario is becoming more common. The good news is that the broad success of Twitter over the last year has led to the introduction of a whole series of business-focused microblogging applications that bring many (though not yet all) of the necessary enterprise capabilities to the microblogging world.
What exactly is microblogging?
Read the rest of this entry »
May 30th, 2009
The enterprise implications of Google Wave
Google has launched many communication services since its inception yet none of these have had such obvious business utility or attempted to reinvent the collaborative process from the ground-up.Google announced their forthcoming service known as Wave this week to widespread coverage in both the press and blogosphere.
Created by many of the same team members that developed the highly successful Google Maps, the preview of the service itself on Thursday was quite compelling, resulting in a rare standing ovation at a tech conference according to ZDNet’s own Sam Diaz. Its egalitarian and federation-friendly design is intended to create an entire open ecosystem for communication and collaboration that Google is not-so-modestly touting as the reinvention of digital interaction circa 2009.
This is clearly a tall order, but the Internet leader provides plenty of substance to back up this vision despite growing evidence that individual companies may be losing the capacity to drive the agenda for the world when it comes to establishing successful new Internet standards and technologies. While the ultimate destiny of Wave itself is far from clear, it’s both intriguing and open enough that it will likely emerge on the radar of businesses large and small when it becomes widely available later in the year.
Wave’s relevance to the enterprise might seem premature with so many of the early and current Web 2.0 applications (blogs, wikis, social networks, Twitter-style social messaging, mashups, etc.) still — often arduously — making their way into the workplace years after their inception. Though we seem to finally be hitting a tipping point with 2.0 tools at work, Wave itself seems credible enough to get on our watchlists, at least to understand the implications.
The real question is whether there are really such significant gaps in the current state of Web-based communication that we need something new like Wave. With Google’s tendency to emphasize the consumer world first and the enterprise later, it’s also valid to ask if Wave will really have much impact on businesses. Interestingly, you might be surprised at some of the answers, so let’s take a look.
Wave: A communication and collaboration mashup
Google Wave itself consists of a dynamic mix of conversation models and highly interactive document creation via the browser. Using simple, open Web technologies (Google makes much of the fact that most of Google Wave is a open set of formats and architectures that is jointly developed with the Web community) Wave combines many of the key features of e-mail, instant messaging, media sharing, and social networking into a seamless experience and data set that are eponymously known as waves. All of this is opened up to developers via the Google Wave API.
The demonstration at the introduction of Google Wave (link below) showed how users can interact in real-time, collaboratively creating structured conversations that contain rich media, instant notifications, simultaneous user editing of the conversation, and live integration with server-side resources such as spell-checking and language translation. Most interestingly, while waves are relatively self-contained and use their own types of servers and data formats, they are easy to embed elsewhere or to build extensions for, enabling virtually infinite options for distribution over the Web or within the firewall, as well as rapid integration with existing applications and data. In fact, a wave is almost a form of social glue between people and the information they care about. And as we’ll see, this has implications for the enterprise world, not only with SOA but also with social communication in general as well as Enterprise 2.0 specifically.
See Waves in action: Watch the introduction keynote at Google I/O on Thursday.
What Google has done with the Wave protocol is essentially create a new kind of social media format that is distinctively different from blogs, wikis, activity streams, RSS, or most familiar online communication models except possibly IM. Both blogs and wikis were created in the era of page-oriented Web applications and haven’t changed much since. In contrast, Google Wave is designed for real-time participation and editing of shared conversations and documents and is more akin to the simultaneous multiuser experience of Google Docs than with traditional blogs and wiki editing. Though Google is sometimes criticized for missing the social aspect of the Web, that is patently not the case with waves, which are fundamentally social in nature. Participants can be added in real-time, new conversations forked off (via private replies), social media sharing is assumed to be the norm, and connection with a user’s contextual server-side data is also a core feature including location, search, and more.
The result is stored in a persistent document known as a wave, access to which can be embedded anywhere that HTML can be embedded, whether that’s a Web page or an enterprise portal. Users can then discover and interact with the wave, joining the conversation, adding more information, etc. Google has also leveraged its investments in Google Gadgets and OpenSocial, two key technologies for spreading online services beyond the original boundaries of the sites they came from. All in all, Google Wave is a smart and well-constructed bundle of collaborative capabilities with many of the modern sensibilities we’ve come to expect in the Web 2.0 era including an acutely social nature, rapid interaction, and community-based technology.
As the original announcement post explained, to fully understand Google Wave, one should appreciate the separation of concerns between the product Google is offering and the protocols and technologies behind it, which are open to the Web community:
Google Wave has three layers: the product, the platform, and the protocol:
- The Google Wave product (available as a developer preview) is the web application people will use to access and edit waves. It’s an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave).
- Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.
- The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the “live” concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone’s Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.
The key here is that Google is expecting many more front-ends for creating and editing waves, depending on the individual requirements of various entities. Google Wave is their own front-end application for doing so and using HTML 5 in their wave client shows they are planning more for
An internationally recognized enterprise architect and business strategist, Dion Hinchcliffe has been working for two decades with leading-edge methods to accelerate project schedules and raise the bar for software quality. You can follow Dion on Twitter.
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