July 17th, 2008
GE’s Enterprise Collaboration Backbone
General Electric, the venerable multinational that was founded in 1878 in New Jersey, have at their core a hugely sophisticated enterprise collaboration system that is arguably the largest in the world.
I was able to see Dr Sukh Grewal, Manager of GE’s ‘SupportCentral‘ collaboration and workflow environment, present a succinct overview of this ecosystem at San Francisco’s Social Networking Conference on July 10. I subsequently spent an hour discussing the details of the system with him.
A major corporate culture change sponsored by Gary M. Reiner, GE Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, defined more collaboration and transparency as goals for the 21st century in the late ’90’s. Development of ‘SupportCentral’ subsequently started internally at the turn of the century in January 2000, and today the system is at the center of GE’s worldwide operations. A development team of about one hundred is located in New Haven, Mumbai and Mexico.
The numbers are huge: 400,000 global users in 6,000+ locations around world, all working within a 100% web interface available in 20 languages (your user interface language is defined by your sign in permissions). The system gets over 25 million web hits a day, greater than employee usage of Google and Yahoo combined. Users have created over 50,000 communities with over 100,000 experts signed up to answer questions and manage information; experts are GE workers with full-time jobs who use the system because it helps them do their job better.
Thousands of business processes have already been digitized in an internal world where knowledge and work processes are critical. Everything is behind the firewall except for ‘pinholes’ to external destinations which allow external vendors, suppliers and customers to collaborate on specific projects . There are 30,000 external users who come in through the firewall pinholes to participate in specific communities.
The system is so large that GE have their own internal cloud, with hosting costs lower than Amazon’s S3. There is also available for all users, including those with no IT background, a mature and sophisticated mashup system to develop simple to complex business applications with just point and click.
The system is entirely created by GE engineers . Using Agile development methods, the software is updated every two weeks. Despite this hectic pace, last year the system had an enviable uptime of 99.9% including scheduled maintenance.
There is a clear understanding that process is separate from the data layer when defining process models for subsequent architecting: in essence GE is engineering highly optimized processes that map to specific team business needs. Because of the self-service interface, processes can easily be refined and improved, or even removed, as needed. Although these touch databases from large enterprise vendors downstream - currently SupportCentral interacts with over 2,000 external systems - there are no generic vendor frameworks and interfaces imposed over SupportCentral.
As an early professional networking platform, SupportCentral has provided sophisticated means for GE workers to connect to one another through their personal profile page, as well as communicate expertise. Everyone has access to a shared web storage system that they use to access their files and documents from any browser anywhere on the internet. With the personal and shared web file and document system in place, they are beginning concerted efforts to shift to using online documents, with no recent desktop office suite software purchases for individual employees.
The cost savings are so many millions a year that GE, despite being a famously metrics driven company, doesn’t require an ROI justification model for SupportCentral budgeting. As CIO Gary Reiner said in a recent Fortune interview, SupportCentral “is becoming…the heartbeat of the company.“
July 15th, 2008
Free Taxonomy & Folksonomy Book
Following on from my previous post about AIIM’s upcoming ‘Findability’ report, Daniela Barbosa of Synaptica at Dow Jones Client Solutions, has created a colorful free ebook called ‘The Taxonomy Folksonomy Cookbook: Finding the right recipe for organizing enterprise metadata‘
Designed in the style of a 1960’s cookbook, Daniela does a great job of discussing a pretty dry subject in very accessible and digestible terms.
I love this terrific quote from Daniela’s book:
Satisfying expectations
Many organizations turn a blind eye toward technology on the Internet, failing to recognize that today’s consumers on the Web are tomorrow’s (or just yesterday’s) employees on their intranets. The truth is, today’s workers - especially younger employees who have been virtually nursed on cell phones, iPods, IM and more - expect speed, simplicity and control. And they expect it now.
If the enterprise fails to provide tools that fit their expectations, they won’t simply conform to standard practices - they’ll ignore formal processes and continue to use the tools that enable them to be successful, irrespective of potential corporate impact. Better to incorporate tools that bring these people in, rather than impose complex content management structures that shut them out.
I use the analogy of enterprise software sometimes being like a rock blocking a river: if users find it inadequate or plain unusable they will simply flow around it.
The banks of the river are moved by the tools and applications used in employee’s personal lives applied to work tasks…leaving a large legacy rock that is increasingly underutilized and ignored as a more efficient path is found.
Weaving Taxonomies and Folksonomies into both legacy and new tools retains relevance for the weaker links. The value of tagging and organizing information is central to this and Daniela’s ebook is an extremely useful resource that is very valuable for educating everyone involved in a team that is organizing their data.
July 15th, 2008
AIIM Market IQ Research
There is a torrent of information available on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 technologies available to inquiring minds, but making sense of it all is another matter.
As is so often the case, the more information you find, the harder it can be to get an clear idea of what an accurate snapshot of the state of things is. This is often particularly difficult in relation to your specific needs.
Traditionally analysts have made a lot of noise around subjects, releasing public statements as teasers for their more detailed - and expensive - reports.
An exception to this is AIIM, a non-profit organization focused on helping users understand the challenges associated with managing documents, content, records, and business processes.
AIIM release their ‘Market IQ’ reports every quarter at no cost ( they are underwritten by various sponsors).
As Dan Keldsen, AIIM Director of Market Intelligence discusses in the video above, their ‘Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0‘, explores their study of 441 end users. AIIM found that a majority of organizations recognize Enterprise 2.0 as critical to the success of their business goals and objectives, but that most do not have a clear understanding of what Enterprise 2.0 is.
* 44% of respondents indicated that Enterprise 2.0 is imperative or significant to corporate goals and objectives
* Another 27% positioned Enterprise 2.0 as having average impact on business goals and success.
* 74% stated they have only a vague familiarity or no clear understanding of Enterprise 2.0.
The 80+ page report is a free download here and covers Enterprise 2.0 from all perspectives including technology, business drivers and market dynamics.
The above appears counter intuitive but in fact provides good information on the ambiguities around finding appropriate usage models in the enterprise. As Dan says in the video clip above (shot at teh Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston), adoption is led by individuals until consistent strategies and tactics are introduced company wide. Unifying this ad hoc usage into a single collaboration initiative greatly increases power and efficiency.
AIIM Findability Report
Launching later this week is another free report from AIIM, ‘Market IQ on Findability‘.
Search is a particularly thorny problem in the enterprise across multiple applications, and AIIM have found that 82% of their research targets report that their experience with the “consumer Web” has created demand for improved enterprise findability.
Regardless of Enterprise 2.0, finding information and files in enterprise content management systems - the area AIIM has focused on for their 60 year history - is a huge problem. Whether it’s filing cabinets or Sharepoint, organizing stuff is fundamental to collaboration efficiency.
Searching silos is not the most efficient way to work - I’m looking forward to digesting AIIMs findability findings…
July 10th, 2008
Apple founder Steve Wozniak interview, answers your Tweeted questions
At the San Francisco Social Networking Conference today, Steve Wozniak, Apple co founder and personal computer legend, shared some fascinating insights into the modern world of social networking and mobile phones.
I was able to organize a one on one interview with Steve (thanks Marc Lesnick & Mark Brookes!) and in the spirit of the conference’s social networking roots Twittered a request for questions to ask Steve, which produced a great response…more on this later.
Wearing a fascinating looking tube valve watch (which didn’t look like Apple’s industrial design) Steve took to the stage and ran through a rapid history of modern personal computing from a very personal perspective.
While teaching 10 year olds - he left Apple in 1987 and was/is heavily involved with his local school district - Steve was telling his students to use the very early AOL service - seeing that it created great joy for his kids to share, and realize they were ’something in the world’.
There was discussion of the scaling realities of social networking for a famous name like Wozniak. The sheer volume of interaction on a social app Wozniak account eats time for someone of Steve’s stature in responding to multiple interactions, with questionable value. Playing whack-a-mole with dozens of friend requests daily is a time sink - and huge numbers of ‘friends’ preclude serious interaction anyway.
Discussing design, Steve stressed the differentiator that user experience is all about the nuances of human experience, and that human centered design is core to intuitive products like the iphone (Wozniak claimed he will be lining up tonight for a 3g).
I asked a question from the floor about the benefits of standardization of mobile phone UI; Steve responded with the realities of service providers controlling much of mobile functionality. A fascinating talk, and as it was unfolding so were the Tweeted questions from around the world.
Later I was able to meet up with Steve to talk and also get his responses to the following questions:
Steve: didn’t see a great connection, believing the roots out of poverty are step by step development of society. The phone is almost like a leap frog into a technology of the future. GPS could help to control Birthrate.
@ITSinsider what does he think the big opportunity missed is today for Apple? for MSFT? for IBM? for Google?
Steve: All big companies are working on so many things, and snap up smaller companies to get the technology, so he ddn’t feel many opportunities are missed. He did wish they were doing more great things.
Steve: With cars like Mercedes, BMW, Ferraris you’re designed into the center of the world ergonomically, whereas cheaper cars tend to have a bunch of functionality with no rhyme or reason of where controls are located. Apple has a really good feel for what makes sense and don’t put in a bunch of junk that doesn’t make sense and are just confusing features.
With social apps it’s the little nuances of human usability improvement that makes people move from one app to a better one. Devotion of getting every little detail working well is a huge differentiator.
Second Life is a little harder to answer, the main people behind it are the PC users. It’s currently missing the human experience, but there are great opportunities to build 3D objects (which Steve is getting into).
@crc2008 @olivermarks what was the best thing you learnt from teaching 10year olds?”
Steve:Wow… I used to think everything in life should be fun, but when you’re teaching, if you can get the kids motivated and they want to learn, they want to come to class, that’s worth a lot more than what you teach them. The teaching content is worth less than motivating them.
Steve: When we started hearing this idea of the push technologies ten years ago or so, it was the idea that when you were near stores that had items they could sell you, you would get pushed a movie or a coffee or whatever. It always sounded like something you should be wary of, and I’ve never seen it take off very well.
I was in Spain recently and was approached by a 15 year old kid who had a whole bunch of ideas about cell phones that keep track of your whole profile. What kind of computer and car you have, what kind of skills you have, and that you can look up people nearby that fit a certain profile. I love that people are thinking that way. Young people are the users, and that’s who you have to really listen to.
Oliver Marks: How do you think you can make mobile usage a more human experience?
Well look, I can call anyone in the world from a cell phone and yet I can’t share certain programs that tell me about you. That sort of thing doesn’t exist in the infrastructure. Everyone’s working on little apps and technologies but we’ve got to wrk on bigger issues - it might even be regulations and laws to make providers open up their ports to certain uses.
Look what happened to AT&T - the local phone companies had to make their circuits available to 3rd parties who wanted to come in with dsl to your house. The ideal would be for cell phone carriers to be just carriers of data but they can’t filter it.
Cell companies currently deliberately have different standards to keep control….
Oliver Marks: Social media scaling is a huge problem…
Steve:Why do I want 5000 friends anyway? There’s nothing I can do with that number of people.
There are certain sized groups that work really well for certain social situations, most of the people i talk to are in groups of about 30 people. There’s sort of an ideal number for social networks that’s actually round classroom size - if you get a group of people that size they just start forming friendships, socializing and learning what each other are about.
I was a shy person and I wish I’d had this world of today. On my computer I could have been the most outgoing person in the world I think. Watching a whole bunch of things going on online in chats and forums you can put in little comments, especially if the conversation touches on some product by coincidence you just got for Christmas for example…
And that was all the time I had with Steve - great opportunity and a fascinating day. Thanks for your time Steve if you’ve spared some more to read this!
Follow me on Twitter at @olivermarks if you’d like the opportunity to forward questions at future events!
July 8th, 2008
Broadcast or communicate?
When the Czarist autocracy was overthrown in the 1917 Russian revolution, fundamental changes in Russian society under the new political structure occurred.
A fascinating example for me is that while most of the world was busy building out telephone communications infrastructure, the Soviets chose to focus on installing loudspeakers everywhere.
The goal of course was to tell the proletariat what to think; telephony throughout the old Soviet block era was limited and frequently bugged.
Later in the last century email swept the world, creating another wave of huge change in the way we communicate.
Email in the enterprise is closely monitored and lives forever – the ‘paper trail’ it leaves is valuable for legal discovery and disciplinary action.
However, in large enterprises many people believe their email is being read or bugged by management.
The result, whether management is eavesdropping or not, is that people are very careful what they say in large companies and avoid communicating contentious information by email, even speaking in code words.
It is therefore increasingly questionable how much useful information can be retrieved if the searchable content is bland and noncommittal.
The more cautious the formal communication, the more powerful the ad hoc ‘offline’ collaboration circles become.
One of the major challenges of implementing modern collaboration technologies inside the enterprise is enabling transparency that brings these circles back into the center.
Clearly some proprietary information should be tightly controlled and guarded, and providing satisfactory legal access to events and evidence should be carefully thought through.
However, another revolution has swept the world, making it flat.
A key enabler of globalization is communication and collaboration; exponential digital revolution technical advances increase the pace of change at an ever faster rate.
Utilizing the collective wisdom of employees is fundamental to the success of the enterprise. Providing the sophisticated tools young employees grew up with and expect to use for their work, and capturing the invaluable repositories of information from employees nearing retirement is increasingly essential to remain competitive.
For those organizations that chose to engage in arguing between silos while broadcasting information at their employees, a very uncertain future awaits.
June 30th, 2008
Autonomy CEO: Web 2.0 ‘under all the hype, there is something there…’
An intriguing article by ‘meaning based computing’ company Autonomy’s CEO Mike Lynch in today’s Financial Times: Embracing the friend, taming the beast – Web 2.0 in the enterprise.
Autonomy are mature and stable (with a 4 billion market capitalisation), rapidly becoming the second largest pure software company in Europe since their founding in 1996…”on a vision to dramatically change the way in which we interact with information and computers, ensuring that computers map to our world, rather than the other way round“.
Avoiding all mention of Enterprise 2.0, Mike explores the lure of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, making some very cogent points:
…the issue of varying values of information that Andrew Keen brings up in his 2007 book The Cult of the Amateur may be worrying in a consumer context but potentially fatal in an enterprise that makes aircraft or medical equipment, for example. The Web 2.0 generation may be shocked to learn that everyone’s opinion is not equally valid on every subject.
Failing to harness the true value of user-generated content is frustrating but is inconsequential when compared to the threat that some Web 2.0 approaches can pose to an organisation’s reputation and brand integrity. Blogs in particular can represent a significant risk if information dissemination in public forums if not regulated properly. A violation of the US Fair Disclosure Regulation and the UK Listing Rules for example can cost a company dearly whether accidental or not. Indeed, an employee revealing sensitive and material information about the company in a public forum or blog is liable, along with the company, to prosecution for selective disclosure. Such media can also unleash bullying and harassment issues.
Now clearly Mike is arguing for his company’s products and services here - ignoring the fact that Enterprise 2.0 seeks to address the above issues - but these are the sort of cogent and realistic points I really enjoy.
from Autonomy’s Frequently Asked Questions:
At its core, Autonomy’s technology can understand any form of unstructured information, whether text, voice or video, and based on that understanding perform automatic operations on the information, such as powering the world’s leading enterprise search engine, automatically suggesting an answer to a call center operator, profiling millions of documents for a legal case, or monitoring television channels for intelligence agencies.
Because of the broad applicability of Autonomy’s technology it is not easily shoehorned into a single market category, and in this regards is not simply a search engine, a knowledge/document management company or a retrieval company. At the same time Autonomy has been acknowledged as one of the world’s leading technology companies, and is the clear leader in enterprise search according to all industry analysts.
and
“What problem does the technology address?” Autonomy addresses the very simple problem of an exponential increase in the amount of unstructured information. The problem is universal to all enterprises, regardless of industry or private/government, and virtually every business unit within those organizations. The problem is driven by the exponential growth of unstructured information, which is being generated by an almost limitless number of sources, such as the Web, word processing documents, emails, pdf files and a whole new generation of digital communications.
It’s refreshing to hear Mike state guarded enthusiasm for aspects of Web 2.0 in his financial Times piece:
…these risks should not discourage organisations from introducing Web 2.0 approaches. Next-generation solutions are available to help enterprises organise, manage and regulate user-generated content in a secure, consistent and scalable manner to ensure that employees benefit from instant access to relevant information and that brand integrity is properly protected.
Such solutions bring conceptual understanding and an unprecedented level of automation to content management and address liabilities by continually reading entries, spotting problematic content and removing it in real-time. In addition, they can automatically reconcile tags that differ but are close in meaning, or actually provide the level of specificity needed in the enterprise that social methods struggle to deliver.
In my view Autonomy are addressing the tsunami of unstructured and unorganized information consuming enterprises from a content management system search perspective. Like others in the CMS space they are beginning to explore the allure of the lighter weight world of ’social networks, folksonomies, wikis, blogs and other communication tools” that Enterprise 2.0 provides.
When these two worlds start to move closer together we are really going to have a powerful force for change; for me this is a very encouraging article.
June 30th, 2008
Conferences as conversation starters
Ten years ago Comdex - the gigantic Las Vegas hi tech conference and show - was reaching its high point. In that pre broadband internet era of CD ROM’s, beige boxes and Windows 95, tens of thousands would converge on Vegas, stay in massively marked up hotel rooms and walk the haloed isles. Even as these eager conventioneers were stuffing bags with hundreds of color brochures, business cards and hokey promotional trinkets as they watched the booth jugglers and babes, web 1.0 brochure style web sites were being crafted around the world for the ‘cyberspace surfing’ (remember that?) generation that was rapidly gaining critical mass.
The web ultimately superceded the mega show because information gathering became more efficient and fluid online. It took time to read all those brochures and then try to stay up to date… The same fate befell the giant E3 computer games show for essentially similar reasons. Today there are no peak industry moments, now we have a continuous torrent of information.
Pre Y2K, Comdex and E3 were the place to be, both to gather information and to meet and deal. Interestingly smaller industry conferences are very successful, but a lot of the important wheeling and dealing goes on in hotel suites near the show floor by people who are never at the show. There is no question that human nature being what it is, nothing replaces real world interaction between people, particularly to seal business deals.
Channel negotiations and business deals aside, many conferences are attractive for gathering consensus in vertical industry spaces, an important form of collective collaboration. The web 2.0 movement is a good example of this, but some would say conferences in this space are more an opportunity to congregate and take a snapshot of a moment in time in a rapidly changing world, rather than to formulate new thoughts.
What’s intriguing to me is that increasingly the online conference community back channel, Twitter and blogs are as important as the live presentations at conferences. Frequently the discussion is more lively online than onstage even as a session is running, and sometimes online and live merge with questions posed electronically being discussed on stage.
Just as Comdex was superceded by the web I suspect we are on the cusp of online conferences - complete with community spaces and video communication - really taking off. Ironically it’s difficult to cater to the wifi demands of a conference hall full of uber nerds, but if they are all communicating and collaborating from their known good ‘home’ connections the quality of connection should be excellent. Most conferences these days have video of the keynotes streaming live and then subsequently posted online, and by reading blog posts, Twitter hashtags and pres summaries it is possible to pull together a good representation of the conversations.
Tweetups plus Britekite, Dopplr and other online locators increasingly allow us to connect with cohorts and thoughtleaders for face to face meetings when we are in the same geographical location. As airfares rise, digital video quality and utility is also increasing. Collaboration is increasingly continuous - rather than piecing together a conference you couldn’t attend from online fragments, wouldn’t it be great to participate in real time online? To be able to attend the sessions that you’re looking forward to, contribute as well as learn, and get a lot of other things done in your life, plus get other work done that day as well? The added value is in kicking off conversations in community spaces and wikis that could continue long after the ‘conference’ component is over.
The reality is likely to be a hybrid of venue based and online, but I wonder what a ‘conference’ will be in another ten years?
June 24th, 2008
The view from the trenches…
Taking a pragmatic approach on collaboration 2.0 strategy and tactics, here’s an example of some realities from a client side perspective.
This post is about what it’s like inside a large enterprise running a collaboration system. I’ve been on both sides of the fence during my career: working within large and small software companies, in marketing and consulting, and in both small and large enterprise management rolling out objectives.
Lets start with a crude punch list of typical big company characteristics:
• Big companies are conservative and slow moving: even pushing the wheel hard right will make the supertanker turn gradually. They are therefore focused like hawks on more agile players in their space, anticipating where they need to be heading for on the horizon..
• Big companies are paranoid about their data and constrained by legislation in the countries they operate in, and even some they don’t…
• Big Companies have powerful security officers to ensure compliance to external and internal regulation including email discovery…
• Rigid (and company readable) email clients/Blackberry, telephone and asynchronous Microsoft Office documents are the big company lingua franca…
• Big companies are typically comprised of multiple silos, each of which has constantly mutating yet interrelated business objectives…
• Silo inhabitants are often feuding both internally and with other silos, and sometimes build out incompatible infrastructure to protect their turf…
• Big companies are constantly adding and shedding staff to respond to changing objectives, and planning prevention of intellectual property security bleed by leavers…
• Big company management is risk averse and will defer decision making upwards if they feel their role is threatened…
• Big companies have powerful but often understaffed IT departments that have to keep expensive legacy systems working…
• Publicly traded big companies are very focused on making the next quarter’s predicted numbers…
• Big companies are sitting ducks to get sued…
…Obviously there are lots more items that could be on this basic list but this sets the stage…please feel free to add more relevant examples in the comments…
Counterbalance against this the attractions of Enterprise 2.0, many of which are being informally adopted by employees at big companies so they can get things done, despite the constraints outlined above.
While the barriers for Enterprise 2.0 formal adoption seem low, the above illustrates the entrenched bureaucratic processes that modern agile techniques and software seek to augment and /or replace as appropriate.
The sheer inertia of the processes and tools currently in use to meet objectives can make it tough to formally switch gears. Informal low budget/below the radar uptake is increasingly common to transcend the above limitations, but ‘official’ formal strategic planning using coherent tactics is still relatively rare.
There is of course much consideration of currently fashionable social software, reading of (great) offline books such as Clay Shirky’s ‘Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations‘ and conference going to explore what the next big thing is.
However, the hard work of formally relieving the email and document iteration exhausted troops in the field is slow in coming. Informally these troops are using online tools on an ad hoc basis because they see their value in getting their job done.
I’ve previously discussed here the reality that they are using web 2.0 tools routinely in their ‘real’ life outside work: why, they reason, not just grab their enterprise equivalent to get their job done more efficiently?
Formal executive management planning is often tactical, piecemeal and subject to change. A lack of formal adoption can cause software try outs to spring up within silos that don’t scale and ultimately paint solutions to other business problems into a corner. Although the software adopted is often cheap or free the associated business processes can be expensive and hard to change.
Appropriate formal patterns and processes that fit the needs of specific enterprises are badly needed in order to execute the promise of Enterprise 2.0: agile, efficient and economical solutions that increase efficiency while meshing well with existing infrastructure.
While a centralized approach can seem counter to the spirit of Enterprise 2.0, a well planned infrastructure will allow the freedom to collaborate and grow organically along preconceived expandable paths.
Surprisingly often software adoption takes on a mutated life of its own in the enterprise…design and construct the house and then figure out what the details are, don’t start with a cooker and then build out around it…
June 22nd, 2008
Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server: a next generation of deeper, wider content silos?
The ’shoot out’ between Microsoft Sharepoint and Lotus Connections, two juggernauts in the enterprise space, played to a packed audience at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. The two companies went head to head, squaring off with product demos.
I chose to instead attend John Pironti’s ‘Threat and Vulnerability Management in the Enterprise 2.0 World: How to Understand Where You Are Really at Risk and the Most Effective Ways to Protect Your Enterprise 2.0 Environments’ session which occurred in the same time slot. I figured there would be a great deal of post coverage of the Microsoft/Lotus square off which I could parse at a later date, and this has proved to be true.
Back in April, during the San Francisco Web 2.0 show week, I attended an AIIM Enterprise Content Management system event in Burlingame California called ‘Collaboration vs control - the Sharepoint effect’. I blogged about this back then, noting….
The reality seems to be that no one really knows what Sharepoint actually is, but no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft, or so it appeared talking to many people this morning. 100 million Sharepoint licenses have been sold so far and MS are on track to sell 7.5 million more this year according to Dave Martin, a product manager at EMC during his presentation about fusing Documentum to Sharepoint. (A huge industry has sprung up of vendors offering to add dod 5015 records management retention functionality, moss integration tools, archiving of content outside the Microsoft sql server 2005 format and many other ways of focusing functionality).
This enterprise behemoth is at the heart of countless silos: Gartner commented ‘uncontrolled growth of Sharepoint content may result in compliance, storage and user issues’. It’s not going away: the challenge is in how to embrace and extend the core functionality to allow flexibility and therefore utility in modern enterprises.
Projecting ahead, I’m attempting to parse Microsoft’s strategy. For those in Lotus/IBM world it’s not too hard to see where that supertanker is sailing: over time enterprises whose backbone is Lotus Notes will eventually upgrade to Lotus Connections to take advantage of adequate collaboration capabilities. This will probably not occur for many years based on the caution and budgets of most IT departments.
The road ahead for SharePoint users is less clear. The partners and front end providers for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), which is built on top of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) continue to build, with some excellent contextual products signing on, notably Atlassian’s very solid Confluence, a full featured and sophisticated enterprise wiki.
The impression I get, however, is that rather than ‘Partners Betting on Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Social-Networking Capabilities’ as Microsoft would have it on their ‘Enterprise 2.0 Platform of Choice‘ press info page, in fact partners are seeing an opportunity to create a view into otherwise impenetrable SharePoint silos. This demo of Connectbeam’s integration with SharePoint Server (which bizarrely appears to have been recorded outdoors) illustrates this idea.
Some of the next generation collaboration platforms are succeeding precisely because they are silo bunker busters. The problem of dozens of digital filing cabinets full of thousands of iterations of hard to find documents within enterprise environments is arguably being solved by the new generation of nimble project contextual tools. Taxonomies and tagging, threaded discussion, wikis and other ‘Enterprise 2.0‘ tools are an alternative solution to the problem of generating mountains of hard to find silo’d information and associated email.
Microsoft have a fabulously lucrative franchise with their Office suite of Word, PowerPoint, Excel et al desktop products. A huge issue in the enterprise space is blizzards of email containing links to documents created with these products on shared drives, or iterations actually attached to the mail messages. Add mobile users on laptops with intermittent connection and you also have serious synch headaches.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server purports to bring us a next generation ’showcasing social-computing innovation’. I’m not seeing it. A cynic would suggest Microsoft will profit mightily by driving customers with generations of Microsoft files ever deeper into a tangled web of documents siloed in multiple Sharepoint repositories, a maze from which they can never escape. There’s no question records management and retention are an important component of enterprise content management systems, as is discoverable communication for legal purposes. Clearly there is an ongoing huge market for integrating Documentum and other ECM systems with SharePoint.
However, archiving and managing mature content is one thing. Enterprise search is notoriously difficult…the burning question today is how to achieve competitive advantage thorough modern enterprise collaboration techniques and tools. I’ve been attempting to follow Microsoft strategy, and will be fascinated to see how Groove (which was created by current Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie after he left IBM having created Lotus Notes) is integrated into a broader collaboration offering.
Over time it is likely Groove and Sharepoint will offer a flexible synched document management system for Office file users, with a plethora of partner product views into the database content. Given the explosion of new content creation possibilities available to the modern enterprise though - video, audio for example - you have to wonder what life will be like for teams attempting to collaborate using Sharepoint. Uncontrolled growth of Sharepoint content reservoirs could be a major drag on units competing with more agile competitors. Before getting anywhere near planning collaboration strategy, figuring out where all your stuff is located is an essential part of getting organized…
It will be interesting to see how Microsoft ties all their disparate products, including new Flash competitor ‘SilverLight‘, together into a coherent package. It remains to be seen whether this assembly will translate into an effective collaboration platform.
June 19th, 2008
Openness
I’ve been privileged to be around some amazing people recently, first at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston and now this week at SuperNova, Wharton Business school’s conference, which this year explored “how decentralization and pervasive connectivity are changing our world”.
My take away word of the moment is ‘openness‘.
Looking at the beautiful visual and usability design of Firefox 3’s product homepage, which launched in over 45 languages this week, it really hit home for me just how far the open community has come.
Firefox is the defacto browser for those serious about web standards, and increasingly the preferred end user choice. It looks like the world class product it is, from website to product.
At Supernova, a standout session for me was ‘The Value of Openness’ with speakers JP Rangaswami of British Telecom and Consultant Elliot Maxwell. JP spoke about making openness work in large companies, defining the attributes of ‘open’ as:
* open to competition
* open to innovation
* open to being changed or adapted
Jp made a convincing argument that if you keep cost of failures low, big companies (and BT is huge) can be as flexible as small ones….There is a war for talent and competitive value: locked down secretive company processes are over, partnering with talented people who may have multiple jobs the future. How a big company like BT creates assets to innovate is defined by openness, and this in turn successfully attracts the brightest global talent to participate.
Openness has value because of the community it generates: a perfect example of this is Firefox, and increasingly this also applies to enlightened businesses like BT. JP is successfully presenting to his board open source projects which have tremendous value and is setting a great business example of how to innovate while being flexible and cost effective. The tremendous sense of community this engenders in participants may be underestimated by some but is at the heart of successful collaboration.
Although Supernova is a somewhat rarified and idealistic/futurist event, JP’s talk was real world pragmatism - Osmosoft, a BT open source unit, was also represented at the conference and ran a Tiddlywiki community user group later that week at the same venue.
Another aspect of openness was made by Jive Software CMO Sam Lawrence in his blogpost ‘Anatomy of the Enterprise Octopus‘ today. The challenges facing Jive’s prospects are well characterized by Sam - locked down, silo’d work methods make it a misery working in a blizzard of electronic paperwork and email. Sam’s solution is an open collaborative solution - his model “introduces a geographic head to the Enterprise” and is well worth reading.
Sam’s post does a great service to the entire enterprise collaboration community by defining the problems endemic in enterprises. In the spirit of openness neither Jive nor their product Clearspace is mentioned, instead the problems we all seek to solve are analyzed in an entertaining way for the greater community.
Jive have great momentum in the marketplace and are attracting top talent from IBM and other competitors. These people are excited by the opportunity to innovate in an open environment…
It has been proven that open algorithms are more secure than closed ones in the security world, due to security community participation. JP and Sam are C level poster people for evangelizing the equivalent in the enterprise. I know Clearspace intimately from my involvement providing feature recommendations while I was at PlayStation, where everything must be hidden behind the firewall at enormous expense. (Clearspace will run exclusively behind the firewall if needed).
The hard work ahead, for those of us working together in the enterprise collaboration community, is around business process change management. Applying increasing degrees of collaboration and appropriate associated technologies to currently locked down, silo’d enterprises is heavily dependent on a willingness to accept innovation by entrenched middle management, whose job is to ‘make the trains run on time’ and follow existing rules.
The structure of many large companies restrict these middle managers deviating from well worn processes, and in some case actually punish them for innovation. The need for executive level management to get involved in embracing openness for efficiency and profit is great. In some cases, those who are not engaged may pay the price of finding their enterprise unable to compete sooner than they think.
Oliver Marks provides seasoned independent consulting guidance to companies on the effective planning of 'Enterprise 2.0' strategy, tactics, technology decisions and roll out. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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