conferences – Page 45

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.

Enterprise 2.0: Oracle’s Initiatives for Enterprise 2.0

Steve Diamond, an Oracle product manager for on-demand CRM, led a breakout session on their Enterprise 2.0 initiatives. I’m attending a dinner tonight with Oracle executives tonight and will undoubtedly hear more about this.

After 30+ minutes of lightweight “here’s what Enterprise 2.0 is and why it’s important”, he finally started to talk about what new and exciting things that they’re doing, but I’d mostly nodded off by then. Guess I will have to pay attention tonight. He did talk about their Social CRM application and about what’s happening in their internal AppsLab skunkworks, but it just wasn’t enough to hold my attention and I slipped out early.

The buzz around here seems to be that Oracle doesn’t have enough of their Enterprise 2.0 story sorted out yet, and I’m still waiting for Oracle to prove that notion wrong.

Enterprise 2.0: IBM’s Social Networking Directions

I had a great opportunity today at lunch for a one-hour session with Jeff Schick, VP of social networking at IBM, and Joan DiMicco who came to IBM after doing media studies at MIT and is one of the key people behind Beehive. There were only seven of us plus these two quite technical IBM’ers in a suite upstairs in the hotel, giving us an opportunity to have an informal roundtable discussion: a sort of social networking nerd heaven.

We started out with a discussion about Beehive — a sort of enterprise Facebook that IBM has developed for internal use — which has gained 33,000 users in less than a year since internal release. That’s 10% of IBM’s workforce, which is a pretty significant adoption rate considering that it’s not required for creating any sort of work product. Beehive is purely a social platform, not a work platform, to allow IBM employees to create social and personal connections. I have friends within IBM, mostly former FileNet people who were absorbed during the acquisition, and one of them speaks glowingly of Beehive as a way to find other people with similar interests to her in order to find people whom with to collaborate.

Schick said that people are starting to be freer with the information that they share on Beehive, and we had a discussion about whether this additional degree of sharing tended to increase the camaraderie amongst co-workers. They’re seeing a blending of personal and professional information published on Beehive, which tends to enrich the communication between people since you have a more multi-faceted view of someone who you’ve met only online. He also talked about adding social concepts to business applications, for example, being able to link directly from someone’s name on a specific business transaction to other information that they have shared, such as shared files or profile information.

Jeffrey Walker of Atlassian was also in attendance, and he asked about the issue of having multiple social networks and how he really just wants a filtered version of Facebook for the enterprise, not yet another social platform. DiMicco responded that people who do external social networking in addition to Beehive tend to create very different profiles in, for example, Facebook and Beehive: they might post photos of their kids within Beehive but not in an open Facebook photo album. In other words, they use Beehive and other social networks for different reasons. Schick added that you can have links to your other social network profiles on your Beehive profile, so if you already have a lot set up elsewhere, you can link to it rather that replicate it, but that (in my opinion) devalues it somewhat since you don’t have federated searching across all of someone’s profiles if they choose to keep only a minimum in Beehive. Later, we heard about Fringe, a sort of internal FriendFeed to aggregate all of the internal and external information sources to provide some level of federated search, which does ease some of those concerns.

The interesting thing about IBM and Enterprise 2.0 is that IBM definitely eats their own dogfood; in fact, they eat it long before they consider serving it up to their customers. A few years ago, I heard about IBM’s Dogear (a social bookmarking tool, like Del.icio.us for the enterprise) at a Toronto-based Enterprise Camp; at the time, I tried to dig around and figure out when it would become available as a product, but they used it extensively internally before finally productizing it. Similarly, there are plans to productize Beehive and Fringe as behind-the-firewall social applications for enterprises under the Lotus Connections brand, now that they’ve had a chance to polish off the rough edges through their own internal use. These aren’t just for big enterprises: some smaller companies are using them as well.

The interesting opportunity is that IBM puts a stamp of credibility on the whole social networking space by offering applications to enterprises, which will undoubtedly benefit other social application vendors as the tide rises. They also see (rightly) that their social technology is far ahead of Microsoft’s, although it is being positioned against SharePoint in some cases. Schick sees content management as a key part of collaboration, and integration between the Lotus Connections products and ECM platforms such as FileNet, Documentum and SharePoint will allow them to make that even stronger.

Enterprise 2.0: Ross Mayfield on Elevating the Enterprise 2.0 Conversation

Ross Mayfield of Socialtext gave the last keynote of the morning, discussing the evolution of wiki usage in enterprises. Many enterprise systems started out being about automating the business processes, and we ended up with file-centric paradigms of collaboration and rigid document management practices. Wikis, on the other hand, allowed for less rigid collaboration, although it started with a primarily technical user base. Since the introduction of wikis in enterprise environments, the use cases have evolved:

2002: techies for project communication
2004: business user alternative to email
2006: internal Wikipedia
2008: process-specific solutions

The real advantage comes when the wikis moves from being “above the flow”, where it stores the artifacts of a business process, to being “in the flow”, that is, an inherent part of the business process. The goal is not to automate the business processes to drive down costs, but to support groups to collaborate on exceptions on processes. In order to do this, enterprise processes, have to be redesigned with transparency and participation capabilities; I’m seeing this from many of the BPM vendors that allow for spontaneous and ad hoc collaboration at any point in the process where the participant feels the need.

Mayfield also used the keynote as an opportunity to talk about their latest product, SocialCalc, a social spreadsheet created in conjunction with Dan Bricklin (the creator of the original VisiCalc spreadsheet, who has lately been dabbling in the concepts of wiki spreadsheets). It looks like this provides the same functionality as Google Docs spreadsheets, but in an on-premise solution behind the firewall, in case you didn’t buy into the Google cloud message this morning.

Enterprise 2.0: AIIM’s State of the Industry Study

Dan Keldsen and Carl Frappaolo of AIIM gave a quick review of the recent AIIM study on Enterprise 2.0. Their first finding: age doesn’t really matter, culture does. Finally, someone else who sees this: I’m so tired of the view from people my age who make it an age issue when really the issue is that they’re not adaptive to the Web 2.0 culture. I also liked that the study classified me as “gen X” rather than “boomer”.

Other than that, I found the talk a bit content-free, but there’s not a lot that you can do in 10 minutes.