Category: social

Enterprise 2.0: Marthin De Beer

The first session after the morning break is Marthin De Beer of Cisco’s Emerging Markets Technology group, speaking about how video and other Web 2.0 technologies are changing the enterprise. Like many of the speakers that preceded him, a lot of his material is pretty introductory, like explaining how social networking is being used, and what a mashup is. He talks a bit about the social phenomenon of the blending of social and business personas and functions, which I find to be an interesting topic: many young people start out using goofy pseudonyms on the first social networks that they use, but gradually move to having a public persona that includes both personal and business aspects of their life.

Unsurprisingly, he sees user content creation as transforming the very nature of content creation, and is being driven by consumer/home access to products and technologies including highspeed internet access, high-resolution video capture and peer-to-peer sharing. Whether it’s a consumer, business or service provider doing the content creation, it’s like to include some combination of social networking, collaboration and entertainment.

Yikes, more video clips with technical problems, although this one was really just a few-second clip. Ironically, the audio was clipped off at the end, removing the word “all” from the tagline “video shows it all”.

Well, I guess we have to allow him a bit of video, since the main focus of his talk is getting around discussing the role of video in the future of the web in terms of user-created content, but also for tele-presence and surveillance. He sees a place for consumer, prosumer and professional video content; given that almost 100 people have viewed the 9-second YouTube video showing my boyfriend making a Riedel wineglass chime by tapping it against his forehead, I truly believe that there’s room for all types of content out there.

Cisco is in the tele-presence business, and De Beer sees tele-presence as a powerful tool for collaboration, especially when it can be embedded in some of the lower-level networking layers for performance and scalability. Now that we’ve all mastered online collaboration in a text-based manner, video is the next step up.

Enterprise 2.0: Ambuj Goyal

Ambuj Goyal of IBM gave the next keynote on the changes that they’re seeing in organizations, and how this is informing their Enterprise 2.0 directions. Like any established software vendor would do, he started his history lesson around 12 years ago, where presumably vendors like IBM actually invented Enterprise 2.0 but just didn’t think to call it that. All kidding aside, Lotus Notes was a groundbreaking collaboration tool in its time — long before IBM bought Lotus — and likely helped to drive the demand for the ability to collaborate.

He looks at how changes in technology (lighter weight infrastructure and simpler programming models), economics (new business designs that address the long tail) and community (capturing the wisdom of the masses) combine to form Web 2.0, then dug into IBM’s Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 product offerings.

  • WebSphere Portal as a mashup platform, with all it’s AJAX-y goodness.
  • WebSphere Commerce,which is an online shopping platform; after several minutes of trying to get a video showing WebSphere Commerce working — what I feel to be the ultimate cop-out in a presentation — one of Goyal’s colleagues hopped up on stage and narrated the now-silent video.
  • Web Interface for Content Management. It’s been a few years since I sat down in front of IBM’s Content Manager’s web interface, and I really hope that it’s improved since then, or they’re really stretching it to even mention Web 2.0 and the old CM web interface in the same breath. What ECM really needs is user-generated tagging, which I don’t think that they’re doing yet. Of course, there’s still the outstanding issue of what they’re doing with the FileNet ECM, which I heard was going to become the standard content platform offered by IBM, and likely would have a completely difference web interface.
  • Info 2.0, which appears to include feed management, tagging and mashups within enterprise-strength security and scalability behind it. This is an early view of products that are coming out later this year, including QEDWiki for creating mashups, which I saw at Mashup Camp last year; unfortunately, we were subjected to another canned video after several technical glitches, but still no audio so we had another live voice-over for the video. Why not just show us a demo? I assume that it may also include some repackaged version of Dogear, their internal enterprise social booking tool; this has been an obvious application for productization, although my suggestion of this to all my IBM friends seemed to fall on deaf ears in the past year.
  • Lotus Connections — is this a reinvented version of Notes? Goyal refers it to a brand-new product, but I’m not sure why it is trying to leverage the not-very-chi-chi Lotus brand. Apparently, it includes blogging, profiles, bookmarks (maybe this is were Dogear will show up) and ad hoc collaboration.

Unfortunately, IBM seems to be doing its usual trick of having several products that sit over the same space (usually to provide legacy support of existing installations) without a good distinction between them. I’d love to see a roadmap of how all this fits together: which products are intended to provide an upgrade path for legacy products, and which are intended for new installations.

I completely understand that vendors are given space on the speaking platform in exchange for buying big booths at the trade show, but I really rely on the vendors to provide something of value rather than just a cataloguing of their own products. They gain so much more by demonstrating a deep understanding of the concepts and a vision of the future.

Enterprise 2.0: Andrew McAfee keynote

The second keynote was by Andrew McAfee, the Harvard professor who originally coined the term “Enterprise 2.0” only a year ago, speaking on the state of that particular meme. He started off discussing awareness of the meme, which has really taken off in the past year. It involves the use of social software within enterprises, network effects that occur when you can gather contributions from anyone in the organization, and freeform authoring.

He touched on how categorization has moved from strict, professionally-created taxonomies to folksonomies, and the benefits that can result; for example, how the wild, wild west of the unorganized internet has become more categorized and structured over the past years, allowing it to be with library-like precision as required.

He touched briefly on the technology behind Enterprise 2.0, but didn’t have any particular insights in that area: enterprise needs, ease of use, yeah yeah.

He moved on to a discussion on communicating the results of Enterprise 2.0; he thinks that we’re doing a pretty mediocre job of this right now, with people tending to fall back on referring to the same Enterprise 2.0 success stories to try and convince executives to put up the cash to bring this into their organization. He claims that there’s not enough case studies or benchmarks, which is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: it’s hard to get people to buy without the case studies, but you’re not going to have any successes to develop into case studies if someone doesn’t just take the leap and get started. This, of course, is not unique to Enterprise 2.0: the same happens with any new technology, particularly disruptive technology like Enterprise 2.0 that might threaten both IT and business executives.

McAfee wants to help create a repository of Enterprise 2.0 successes stories (from which he will undoubtedly write a best-selling book 🙂 ), and challenged some vendors to step up and create some sort of wiki-like environment in order to house this.

He finished up by admitting how his own opinions of the value of social networks and the wisdom of the crowds has changed 180 degrees in the past year, from thinking that people who interact mostly online are a bit pathetic, and that the IQ of a crowd is around that of the dumbest person in it, to believing in the power of online social networking, blogging and the like, and recognizing that the collective wisdom of a crowd can be, with the right technology and environment, greater than that of the smartest person in the group.

Enterprise 2.0: David Weinberger keynote

David Weinberger, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, was the first keynote speaker today with a session on Rattling [Business’] Foundations. He’s an incredibly energetic speaker and had a very funny set of mostly photographic slides to illustrate his points using visual analogies. As his pitch and volume escalate through the presentation, however, I’m a bit happy that he’s only up there for 30 minutes — he’s pretty intense.

He starts out with the statement that the solution to the information overload is more information, by which he means metadata. He showed an absolutely hilarious slide of weird music CD classifications (Kansas-based Emo; techno-punk wedding music) to illustrate the problems with hierarchical categorization of physical stuff; then moves on to how when things go digital, you’re no longer required to keep things in just one category. A digital photo, through the wonders of sites like Flickr, can be categorized with any number of tags. Now, the consumers of data own the organization of that data rather than the owners of the data — a pretty revolutionary thought for the old schoolers — and can postpone the organization of that data until the point where they need to consume it. Part of the reason for this is that if you don’t, then the data consumers will just go elsewhere, and you can’t possibly guess what all consumers are going to want to do with your data.

His focus is really on capturing the wisdom of the crowds, but mainly for creating metadata (tags/categorization) rather than for creating the main content itself.

Enterprise 2.0 showdown

I don’t leave for Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 conference for another few hours, but this morning there was a session with Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport in an Enterprise 2.0 debate that was broadcast live on the web. Unfortunately, I was on calls and missed a lot of it, so I’m hoping that it will be available for replay later.

The video was handled by Veodia, one of the vendors who will be showing at the conference; unfortunately, I had a few problems (didn’t work in Firefox, caused some script errors in IE) but did manage to get it running at one point in IE.

Another month of travel and presentations

I thought that my heavy travel time was almost over for the summer, but it just refuses to go away. Due to a new client (yes, I do actually do work that I get paid for sometimes, in addition to all this unpaid blogging 🙂 ), I’ll be visiting Chicago and Montreal over the next two weeks before heading off to Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

Here’s my public speaking and conference schedule for June:

  • June 13th: I’m appearing in the first of a series of three webinars that I’m doing with TIBCO. The first of these is “Process Discovery”, the second (July 11th) is “Process Modelling”, and the third (August 8th) is “Process Design”.
  • June 14th: I’m appearing in a webinar for Savvion entitled “How to Ignite the BPM Spark: Practical Steps You Can Take Today”. 
  • June 18th-21st: I’ll be attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and covering it here in this blog, although I’m not presenting there.
  • June 27th: I’m speaking at the IQPC BPM summit in Toronto on “Enabling BPM Through Technology”.

Interestingly, both TIBCO and Savvion recognize that their customers are interesting in the up-front part of BPM: in the case of Savvion, how to get started on a BPM project, and with TIBCO, how to take a process from discovery through modelling and design. The material will be quite different between the webinars and I’ll blog a bit about each of them separately later this week; I encourage you to listen in on all of them.

Enterprise 2.0 Camp: David Sean Lester

David Sean Lester is leading a session on Communication 2.0 (I think), or the use of digital media as an inherent part of Enterprise 2.0. He has a nicely prepared presentation with lots of lovely graphics, but his presentation is a bit stilted and he tends to read directly from the slides (reducing his own value in the presentation), plus there’s some superfluous video and audio clips interspersed, and I find my attention drifting during a lengthy clip about the alphabet. Aside from the inherent weirdness of someone who entitles himself with three names, Lester doesn’t seem to be at all comfortable leading the session.

This was supposed to be an unconference format, yet we’re all silent gazing up at a multimedia presentation (except for a short hands-on game of scrambled scrabble). And because we only have one room and this is a somewhat noisy multimedia presentation, there was a decision not to run a concurrent session so we’re all here…

Lester’s thesis on the alphabet was thought-provoking: how the alphabet has become embedded firmware rather than software, whether that’s good or bad from a creativity standpoint, and how switching from the printed word to multimedia tends to make us return to the spoken word. [He uses the term “digital media” or “digital bits” instead of multimedia, although technically the electronically printed word is also digital media; what he’s referring to is visual and audio digital media.]

His ending point informs us (no real surprise) that his company can help you to bring this vision to your own company, although it’s completely unclear by the end of the presentation what exactly this vision is. Their website claims that they do things such as “multi-session interactive facilitated learning experiences” and “visual map design of corporate brand activation model” for their clients. This is communication?

Enterprise 2.0 Camp: John Bruce

Our second breakfast speaker was John Bruce, CEO of iUpload, which is apparently going to undergo a name change in a few weeks. He was previously with the Documentum group within EMC, although not (I think) with Documentum before the acquisition. iUpload creates enterprise social software, that is, a platform for blogs, wikis and other social networking channels for use within an enterprise. They offer only a hosted SaaS solution rather than something that can be installed within the firewall, which might be a bit of a barrier for some enterprises who still don’t get that SaaS can be just as secure and have the same degree of uptime as their own data centre. He made some great points about all the things that you need to think about when implementing social networking applications within the enterprise: workflow, permissions, control, metrics, integration, security, compliance, identity management, versioning, reporting.

He also discussed this in the context of a common Web 2.0 content engine; not a surprising approach for someone coming from an ECM environment, and I’m sure that we’ll be starting to see many of these social networking tools creeping into mainstream ECM offerings before long. In that view, issues like security, user administration, integration and metrics are consolidated in the common engine, and blogs and wikis are just distribution mechanisms for the content.

There was a question from the audience on what metrics exist for measuring the benefits of enterprise social networking applications; Bruce had one example of a hotel chain CEO’s blog where they tracked clickthroughs from the CEO’s blog post on a particular hotel to the specific hotel online booking form through to an actual booking, although he admitted that many enterprise social networking applications are implemented because it’s an executive’s pet project. Given what I saw in the Avenue A|Razorfish intranet wiki project last week, there’s lots of places where a hard ROI could definitely be established in terms of cost savings of wikis over standard web page publishing.

Anthony Williams joined back in for the Q&A, and had an interesting comment on the organizational impacts of social networking in the enterprise: he sees boomers as the senior management in organizations today, and gen X as the middle management who are actively resisting all of this new-fangled Web 2.0 stuff that the net gen is trying to bring in because it threatens their burgeoning fiefdoms. There is justice, after all.