Enterprise 2.0 Reality Check panel #e2conf

I’m watching the panel entitled “Enterprise 2.0 Reality Check: What’s Working, What’s Not, What’s Next”, moderated by Matthew Fraser, and featuring Christian Finn of Microsoft, Nate Nash of BearingPoint, Neil Callahan of mktg and Ross Mayfield of Socialtext. Amazingly, I’ve found the optimal way to do this is to go back to my room and watch it streaming over the web, since the wifi is completely overloaded in the conference area and the seating is cramped.

It’s always difficult to blog a panel since the topics tend to vary widely (and quickly), so just a few thoughts:

  • The Enterprise 2.0 technology is mostly an evolution of what has come before, although the cultural changes are more revolutionary.
  • Finn talking about how collaboration spread throughout Microsoft, both through official and unofficial channels, which allowed SharePoint to gain a foothold internally. Small projects get it started, then people see the value and get executive sponsorship. Mayfield followed up by stating that revolutions happen when people don’t have a choice, and pondering how choice is changed by the very large footprint that SharePoint has.
  • Fraser asked the panel if there was an ROI for Enterprise 2.0; Finn responded by comparing the ROI of a document management system to that of a wiki; as Mayfield pointed out, there’s not a lot of “I” in the ROI of Enterprise 2.0. Callahan talked about the shift from “technology is scary” to “technology is fun”, bringing out the old chestnut about how our kids are all more tech-savvy than our CIOs (which I believe to be both incorrect and irrelevant); his point was that IT is no longer bringing the technology to business, but that line of business managers are having to make their own decisions about purchasing technology, shifting the ROI case from the boardroom to the LOB managers. This is a pretty interesting point, since it shows not just that LOB managers can make their own technology purchasing decisions, but that LOB managers must make their own technology decisions. Stowe Boyd popped up from the audience with a comment that we no longer look at the ROI of putting a telephone on someone’s desk (Finn had made the same point earlier about how we’re not giving up email any time soon), and that ROI may not be relevant in this case.

There was quite a good discussion about the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 that followed; check out the on-demand stream of the video. The large number of vendors/researchers/analysts asking questions (as opposed to actual end-user organizations) is noticeable.

You can also check the Twitter stream for this conference session here or for the entire conference here. I’m not a Microsoft supporter, but I have to say that the Twitterati was a bit hard on Finn (lots of “Mac versus PC” cheap shots): yes, he was talking a lot about SharePoint, which is not always used as a shining example of Enterprise 2.0, but the reality is that SharePoint is installed in a lot of “old economy” organizations; even if it’s not the best collaboration tool out there, it’s the only one that a lot of companies have, and it’s how they’re going to learn about some Enterprise 2.0 functionality. With one of my financial services clients, SharePoint is the only thing that remotely resembles collaboration that they have inside the firewall (and therefore approved for corporate information): several people there have actually laughed at me when I suggested using a wiki, and I’ve had to drag some of them kicking and screaming onto SharePoint just for document collaboration. Another client uses wikis, but only within IT, and is unwilling to open up wiki-based information collaboration to non-technical people. The game is changing, but it’s changing very, very slowly in some market segments.

Good panel, covering a lot of issues about both technology and people.

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference #e2conf

There’s been a lot of muttering that the Enterprise 2.0 conference is just a vendor love-fest, rather than having a significant attendance from people who are actually doing Enterprise 2.0. Whether it’s because the bloom is off this conference’s rose, or the economy, it’s telling that I was able to pick up a room here at the conference hotel through Priceline for $120/night, considerably down from the near-$300/night rate offered as the “special conference rate”. Last year, there was not a room to be had here several weeks in advance. Incredibly, they’re planning a second Enterprise 2.0 conference later this year in San Francisco; maybe the more relaxed west coast business attitudes are proving more receptive to Enterprise 2.0 in general, and certainly there will be a lot of vendors glad for only having to make the short drive north from the Valley.

Lots of disruption yesterday as flights into Boston were delayed or cancelled due to weather conditions, and the rainy weather here this week will impact attendance at the evening events, if not the conference itself. I arrived yesterday in time for the afternoon workshops, but left after 45 minutes of a not-very-insightful presentation (probably okay for newbies, but not if you’ve read anything about Enterprise 2.0). At least I made it to a couple of good social events in the evening, since this has become a conference where I come to hang out with interesting Enterprise 2.0 people rather than learn any new Enterprise 2.0 content.

I poked my head in to the starting keynotes today, but headed back to the breakfast table when Matthew Fraser started reading the captions on the tedious making-fun-of-management cartoons that he had pasted into his presentation. I’m now back in the conference room, electrical power at my feet but only sporadic wifi, and see a more interesting slate of presentations coming up for the remainder of the day. Up next is the keynote panel discussing an Enterprise 2.0 reality check, looking at what’s working, what’s not and what’s next. This afternoon, I plan to attend a panel on lessons learned from internal communities, Lee Bryant’s presentation on adoption strategies, and Aaron Levie’s (of Box.net) presentation on content-centric social networks. Stay tuned.

Enterprise 2.0 conference next month

I’ll be at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston next month as part of their bloggers’ network. If you plan to attend, you can click the badge at the left for 30% off your registration, or to receive a free pavilion pass.

I am not compensated in any way if you click through for this, although I am receiving a free press pass to attend the conference (but paying my own travel expenses hence not staying at the hideously overpriced conference hotel).

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone there again this year.

Enterprise 2.0: Town Hall Wrap-up

A short closing session for the conference, primarily to gather ideas and feedback from the attendees. Yes, we all thought that the wifi sucked, it was too cold in the conference areas and the vendor dog-and-pony shows have to be cut, but lots of kudos on the sessions. I didn’t attend any of the unconference sessions this week, but one person in this wrap-up commented that the regular sessions are a bit of a vendor-fest and a bit lightweight, and that the unconference sessions offered an alternative for more in-depth discussion on a topic. If you want to see some other discussions on the conference and content, check the Twitter stream (or at least the part of it where people used hashtags) here.

For many of us, the face-to-face networking and hallway meetings at the conference is a big part of it: there are many people here who I have known online for some time, and am meeting “in carbon” for the first time this week, plus many who I’m happy to be seeing again.

I still have to write up my excellent interviews/demos with Serena Software and Bungee Labs, which both had innovative (and very different) mashup goodies to show me; watch for those over the next day or so.

Enterprise 2.0: Micro-blogging Panel

Dennis Howlett hosted a panel on micro-blogging (with a strong focus on Twitter, but not exclusively) that also included Chris Brogan of CrossTechMedia, Loren Feldman of 1938 Media, Rachel Happe of IDC and Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting. Although not explicitly stated in the session description, the focus was on the adoption of micro-blogging in the enterprise.

Fitton and Happe feel that micro-blogging allows us to exploit the power of weak ties. It changes the velocity of when we get to the value, or “a-ha”, moment. It’s like a gateway drug to social media, demonstrating the value of social media quickly. It allows for serendipity in business relationships, where people who you might not think of including in a project will see what you’re twittering about it and self-select themselves into it, or leverage your ideas in their own work. Fitton also live-tweeted her ideas on the advantages of micro-blogging in the enterprise (these are copied directly from her Twitter stream, hence are in reverse chrono order):

  • Instant field reports from remote sites, conferences, meetings…
  • (You may not know the answer, but you know someone who does.)
  • Fast, powerful way to query your own experts/source unique solutions by getting the question to the right niche expert quickly
  • Flatten hierarchies
  • Cultivate mentoring opportunities
  • Foster camraderie and esprit de corps
  • Share ideas
  • Create versatile mobile communications networks around sales teams, events, global projects and other geographically dispersed teams/groups
  • Create opportunities for collaboration, contextualization and spreading ideas fast
  • Tap into and create a powerful network of loose ties within your organization

Feldman took the opposite tack, saying that he thinks that micro-blogging will never take hold in the enterprise because of the openness and the brevity of the medium — the very things that people love micro-blogging — and Brogan mostly agreed that it would likely only be used for internal technical communications. In fact, Feldman referred to Twitter as “dopey” (he’s a video guy) and thinks that text, particularly 140 characters at a time, isn’t rich enough for the sort of immediate communication that Twitter is trying to provide. As someone who drives thought processes through writing, I don’t agree: I consume (but rarely create) audio and video at times, but text is a much more useful medium for me.

There was a lengthy discussion, including both the panelists and the audience, on whether enterprises would do this on a purely internal system, or on a public system like Twitter, and the relative advantages. There is no suggestion that micro-blogging would entirely replace other methods of enterprise communication, but it can augment them for cases when you want asynchronous but nearly-instant communication to a very broad audience in a public manner, with the capability for interaction between a large number of participants. It can change the velocity of business, critical in today’s market. It can also be a distraction, if people are micro-blogging (or IM’ing or Blackberry’ing) during a meeting or conversation, but that’s a matter of protocol and culture. I don’t even take interview notes on my computer because I think that it gets in the way between me and the interviewee in a face-to-face situation, so I’m very unlikely to ever micro-blog while in a small group, but others are more comfortable with that. If you’re micro-blogging in the context of real-life conversation, then it’s really no different than taking notes on paper in terms of attention.

Enterprise users are using social networks, whether their enterprise masters like it or not. If their work environment gets locked down so that they can’t use them there, they’ll use them from their mobile device (hence the popularity of platforms like Twitter, which is easily consumable on a mobile browser or purely through SMS). Enterprise computing policies will never go away, but it’s time for enterprises to realize that they might actually gain an advantage through their employees participating in social applications like micro-blogging. At the end of the day, I’m not convinced about the value of micro-blogging to me, but I’m not ready to write it off: I likely just haven’t had my a-ha moment yet. That being said, this week is the first time that I met someone who, on hearing my name, told me that they just started following me on Twitter.

Enterprise 2.0: Enterprise Mashups Technical Deep-Dive

Nicole Carrier of IBM, who was on the enterprise mashups panel yesterday, returned this morning to dig into more of the details behind mashups, particularly as implemented on their platform, Lotus Mashups (which I believe started life as QEDwiki). She started by defining mashups and widgets, then outlined what makes a mashup unique in terms of scope, process, users and technology. There are some key differences between mashups on the consumer internet and within the enterprise, however: enterprise mashups typically need to access enterprise systems, which might need to be unlocked/wrapped for accessibility (e.g., create widgets and feeds to access that data or functionality), and enterprise assets available for mashup need to be cataloged in some way.

She walked us through building a mashup with Lotus Mashups, pulling in widgets and feeds from various data sources as well as Google gadgets and arranging them on a page. More than just a portal interface, this environment allows you to create “wiring” between the objects on the page in order to allow data or selections in one widget to impact or filter another one. Once created, pages can be shared with others by publishing in a catalog, and other users can be given read-only or edit permissions on pages.

Joel Farrell, the chief architect of IBM’s InfoSphere MashupHub, joined Carrier to show how some of the data sources are discovered and/or created for use in mashups, and how they’re shared with others.

This quickly turned into an in-depth review of how to use the IBM mashup products, and a lot of the audience started to bail out. Including me.

Enterprise 2.0: RSS and Business Processes at Wallem

For the last breakout today, I went to the session featuring of Patrick Slesinger of Wallem (a shipping company). I don’t know anything about shipping, but their requirements aren’t different from a lot of other organizations: involvement and transparency to customers into business processes, internal decision support, long-term accessibility to event data. They needed to make their processes mobile and make the right information available anywhere, without using email.

Their solution, using K2 for BPM, Attensa for RSS and SharePoint as a content repository, integrates process-driven applications with managed RSS. The solution uses K2 to manage processes, then pushes the process event log (or some filtered version of it) over to the Attensa feed server, where it can be served up to a web interface or delivered by email. The advantage of using a feed server for this is that it provides complete device/platform independence for consuming the event feed, as well as providing multiple formats for consumption. An enterprise RSS feed server provides things such as integrating your LDAP database for defining users and groups, and allows for easy assignment of specific feeds to users and groups. Users can have feeds assigned to them, which they can’t unassign, but they can use the same tool for reading other feeds as well. They can read a specific feed item on one platform, and it’s marked as read everywhere (as you would expect). The system also tracks who reads which feeds, when and for how long, making it possible to track what information is actually being used, and ensure that users are accessing the relevant information before making decisions.

Slesinger showed a demo of the system, showing how tasks that are assigned to a user show up in their feed reader; clicking on the details in the feed item pulls them into a web form to complete the task. There are many BPM products now that allow a feed to be created for any user’s inbox or other queues; his earlier architecture diagram led me to believe that they’re not doing that (if K2 is even capable of it), but extracting events from the K2 event log instead. In the example shown, the captain of a ship was actually participating in a workflow where he received task notification through a feed reader rather than in email or directly through the BPM product’s inbox.

The results:

  • Increased visibility into systems and information sources
  • Mobile connected process and feedback loops
  • Alignment of information and process creating knowledge and value
  • Email clutter reduced
  • Understanding what information is required: who, what, when, where, why

Their customers — the ships’ owners — saw huge savings as well: using timely information and appropriate processes for deciding where ships take on fuel and oil, the annual customer savings are about $400M. They’re looking to do more with this in terms of analytics, search, and expanding the mobile RSS capabilities.

I’ve been blogging for a couple of years about how RSS and BPM could work together, and many of the vendors have integrated in the functionality, but this is the first real case study that I’ve seen of the two working together on this scale.

Enterprise 2.0: Enterprise Mashups Panel

David Berlind hosted a panel on enterprise mashups, with Michalene Todd of Serena, Nicole Carrier of IBM, Lauren Cooney of Microsoft (recently of IBM) and Charlotte Goldsbery of Denodo. I was supposed to moderate this panel, but when the vendors started treating it like a sponsored panel by switching out participants, and the conference organizers refused to kick in for any of my expenses (in an outrageously biased policy where they pay some speakers’ expenses but not others depending on who you complain to), I decided that it wasn’t worth the hassle and bowed out. David’s a great moderator and knows a lot about mashups, but ultimately, I think that he allowed this panel to be hijacked by the vendors, with the exception of Lauren, who speaks her own mind rather than the Microsoft party line. Serena totally screwed up on this one by bumping Kelly Shaw off the panel — a panel that’s described as being full of “girl uber-geeks” — and replacing her with a non-technical corporate marketing person who was out of her depth, and Denodo didn’t do much better by putting in a self-described salesperson.

There was an interesting discussion about how data is exposed to be consumed by mashups, e.g., ATOM/RSS, and the implications with respect to the security of the underlying data, the ability of mashup platforms to consume that data, and how to appropriately encapsulate data so that a non-technical person creating a mashup can’t do evil things to the underlying data source, like doing a search on a non-indexed field in a large database table. You need to consider the interfaces for accessing the data and services: SOAP, RESTful services, web services, etc.

Realistically, business users still can’t do mashups, in spite of what the vendors tell you: there’s just too much technical stuff that they need to know in order to do mashups still. Although it’s easy to drag and drop things within a graphical environment, that’s not the issue: it’s understanding the data sources and their interactions that’s critical. The real target for many of the mashup platforms, as I’ve stated many times before, is for the semi-technical types within business units who are now creating end-user computing applications using Excel, Access and other readily-available tools. I don’t think that’s anything to be ashamed of, and striving for the goal of allowing any business user to do mashups is unrealistic. I was at a client site recently, and of all the claims adjusters and their managers who I talked with there, I can’t imagine that a single one of them would be inclined to even try to create a mashup or — without intending any insult to them in any way — have the skills to do so. Likely the closest that business users will come to building mashups will be configuring their own personalized portal within an existing framework, similar to iGoogle; a proper mashup framework may also allow the portal widgets/gadgets to interact, such as using selections in one widget as a filter for another on the same page. A lot of the good business applications, the things that are now being handled by other MS-Office-based end-user applications, are spreadsheet-like in nature; data visualization is a critical part of mashups, but there’s rarely a Google map involved.

Another issue is whether mashups are ready for prime time: are they really intended to be deployed as production applications, or are they just an easy-to-use prototyping environment? What about underlying data sources that aren’t under your control (like Google Maps) in terms of SLAs and fault tolerance? Although internal systems can also have failures, at least you have some degree of control over your own IT resources in terms of high availability of applications and their data sources, and any critical external services that you use — whether in a mashup or any other type of application — has to come from a company with whom you can nail down a believable SLA.

Enterprise 2.0: Mid-day update

Today I have several briefings with vendors and haven’t been at a lot of sessions; since I take briefing notes on paper, those won’t be published until I’ve had a chance to organize them into posts.

The only session that I was at this morning was Andrew McAfee’s panel with several organizations who have implemented Enterprise 2.0, talking about the reality of its adoption and how the corporate culture impacts that, but I always find it hard to blog about panels.

One interesting comment from a CIA analyst on the panel talking about Intellipedia: the hardest thing to do is to give up control, but if you give up control, your employees will do you right; resist allowing management or IT to lock down the system or otherwise restrict participation. If the US intelligence community can learn to do that, I have hope that any organization can, too.

There was another comment on identifying applications for wikis: check your email to see where the most “email volleyball” is going on where the emails have attachments, and consider moving the content of those attachments (and the process of their updates) to a wiki.

Enterprise 2.0: Stowe Boyd on Web Culture

Last session of the day before the cocktail party — always a difficult spot — but I’m fascinated by Stowe Boyd’s topic of web culture and the changing ethos of work. His work focuses on the “anthropology of the web” (although I think of it also as the sociology of the web).

Boyd’s presentation style is low-key and his slides are typically a single word with a simple graphic, but his message is compelling. We’re finding new ways to communicate on the web. This is bottom-up growth that we’re building for ourselves, without any blueprint or centralized control; in fact, no one really knows how many servers are even on the web. That’s not different, conceptually, from what’s happening inside enterprises as social applications take hold: it’s a grassroots revolution.

He talked about the disappearance of the “third space”; most people typically have three spaces that they inhabit: home, work, and a social location like a barbershop, a pub or even church. With the rise of both television and suburbia (see Clay Shirky’s recent Web 2.0 presentation for more about this), we started spending less time at our social location, a bit more time at work, and a lot more time at home watching TV. In order to fulfill that basic human needs for socializing, some of us started taking that socializing online, spending less time watching TV in favor of online social networking.

He harkened back to Henry Ford, who once fired someone for laughing while working in the assembly line, positing that anyone working for a large conservative corporation should keep their online identity discreet, quoting others who recommend blogging anonymously if you work for a big company. Many large enterprises are disturbed by the idea of their employees having any sort of public persona that doesn’t follow company guidelines, and social networking inside the enterprise is a huge stretch. These are the same companies who didn’t want to give employees internet access, IM, external email, or (in a long-ago world) a telephone on their desk because it might affect their productivity, without considering that it might actually increase their productivity as well as their creativity.

There’s a lot of power moving from the center to the edge: it’s happened with news reporting and media (the fact that you’re reading about the Enterprise 2.0 conference on the blog of an independent analyst is proof of that), but it’s also happening inside companies and in all walks of life. That doesn’t mean that things are chaotic, since often some sort of order will emerge in spite of the fact that there’s no centralized control. We create networks and pseudo-kinship with those who we socialize with online, where community and participation means more than titles and position. Old culture is disappearing due to these grassroots efforts and web culture: media, government, religion and other areas are shifting from centralized control to social collaboration. The tools are driving the group dynamic, e.g., group decision-making changes vastly when you collaboration using IM and other online tools rather than face-to-face.

Many of us “edglings” work in virtual environments: I have customers in countries other than my own, who I’ve never met face-to-face, yet with whom I collaborate effectively to complete projects. “Centroids”, on the other hand, tend to work in more structured authoritarian environments. Boyd ended the presentation with a table that’s reprinted from his blog post of a couple of years ago, Edglings: A Well-Ordered Humanism and the Future of Everything, comparing the centroid and edgling views: well worth checking out.

After spending a day in sessions where every second person has a laptop open, I’m struck by the fact that people are just as rude with their laptop sounds as they are with muting their cellphone ringtone. Hey people, the only one who wants to hear that cute squishy noise when you get an instant message is you. Please, find that mute volume control on your laptop.