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Transition strategies for Enterprise 2.0 adoption #e2conf

Lee Bryant of Headshift looked at the adoption challenges for Enterprise 2.0 technologies in companies that have grown up around a centralized model of IT, particularly for the second wave adopters required to move Enterprise 2.0 into the mainstream within an organization. He points out that we can’t afford the high-friction, high-cost model of deploying technology and processes, but need to rebalance the role of people within the enterprise.

External tools are subject to evolutionary forces and either adapt or die quickly, whereas we are forced to put up with Paleolithic-era tools inside the enterprise because it’s a captive market. 21st century enterprises, however, aren’t putting up with that: they’re going outside and getting the best possible tools for their uses on demand, rather than waiting for IT to provide a second-rate solution, months or years later.

There is a shift from individual productivity to network productivity, that measures the improvements that occur because we’re doing things together and connected rather than as individuals. If everyone in the company has common goals, then there’s a big boost in productivity when people work together.

There’s a need to make hidden data visible and use it to drive collective intelligence – I see this all the time with the need for enterprise search and content management for static content, but also enterprise micro-blogging and other conversations that surface more transient ideas for consumption.

It’s all about improving processes and reducing the cost of doing business, although not necessarily in the structured BPM style of process improvement; instead, it’s about using social tools to change how people can collaborate and work together. This might include adding a social layer to existing tools, such as we see when collaboration is added to ECM and BPM but moving beyond that.

However, even though all of this is happening already, there’s the issue of bringing these tools, techniques and methods to the people who don’t normally use social networking for either business or pleasure. Do the revolutionary ideas that we hear bandied about at this conference really have a place in the cubicle farm? Interestingly, I’m seeing an arrogance exhibited at the conference that really puts me off; it manifested partly in the Microsoft-bashing at this morning’s panel, but comes down to a complete lack of respect for the structure of many existing enterprises. How do we respect what’s already there in those organizations while helping them to move into the 21st century?

Bryant showed some of the ways that they drive out behavioral use cases within organizations, match that to available social tools, then develop behavioral transition strategies that effectively “tricks” people into using these new tools in order to bridge the old methods and tools into the new. This is all about focusing on the tasks that people do and the things that they know, and providing some tweaks that get them doing things differently. For example:

For people who are addicted to email on their Blackberry, transition them to reading RSS feeds on the same platform (also within Outlook 2007): it looks similar, it provides a similar broadcast functionality, and lets them get away from filing and deleting the information.
Replace the phone book with a social network that provides the same information, and allows people to “friend” people who they contact frequently.
Get rid of the intranet, and create something that looks like your old intranet, but has edit buttons everywhere. In other words, turn your intranet into a wiki where anyone can update information if they have it. The information is more up-to-date and accurate, and gets people in the mode of being authors. It doesn’t mean that you have to allow every page to be editable by everyone, as Razorfish did, but can provide a more controlled environment that allows people to edit their team’s areas.
Create a place for employees to share and rate ideas, sort of like a suggestion box with voting.
Organize information in new and interesting ways, such as providing a social bookmarking tool to allow people to add tags to documents within their enterprise content management system in order to improve findability and indicate interest in documents. This can be used just to allow people to “organize their stuff”, or can be used in the case of an upcoming platform migration, where people can tag documents that should be migrated to a new ECM platform.

The thing to note about all of these ideas is that they are focused on things that people were already doing, and just tweaking the methods that they use to do them. That makes it a lot less threatening, and therefore much more likely to be adopted.

It also comes down to giving people choice, which is often not done inside large organizations: IT usually dictates which tools are used for which purpose, and which content goes into a wiki versus a content management system versus a blog. Unfortunately, years of having IT dictate tools and content location means that many enterprise users are somewhat sheep-like when it comes to choice: if you give them a choice, they’ll keep doing things the same old way since it’s the path of least resistance, and in today’s economy, they’re probably busy doing the work of more than one person. The reality is that although they could be more productive with the new tools, they have no time to learn how to use them and how to make them a part of their work environment.

Luis Suarez from IBM was in the audience, and talked about his own personal journey over the past year at moving himself – and the the people who he works with – off email and onto social media platforms such as blogs and wikis. When he would receive an email, he would show people how to use a different platform instead of email, such as SlideShare for sharing presentations.

There are still going to be barriers: salespeople may not want to share their information, even with their colleagues, because they are financially incented to not share; and middle management doesn’t want their teams to collaborate because they perceive that they’re losing control over what’s happening. As Bryant points out, the ultimate solution to these barriers is human mortality and natural selection.

Lessons learned from internal communities #e2conf

Peter Kim (formerly a Forrester analyst, now Dachis) moderated a panel on lessons learned from internal communities – that is, the social networking communities inside enterprises – with Jamie Pappas from EMC, Joan DiMicco from IBM Research and Patricia Romeo from Deloitte.

I met DiMicco at last year’s conference in a session with Jeff Schick talking about IBM’s social networking strategy, and she focuses on Beehive, their internal Facebook-like social networking site. I have friends who work for IBM who really like Beehive, and use it both for socializing and for finding like-minded people for work projects; the 60,000 other people inside IBM who also use it likely agree. Beehive is an internally-created research project that is only available within IBM; eventually, the functionality will be productized in Lotus Connections.

EMC’s EMC|ONE is similar in nature, providing an internal social network that helps to break down silos within the organization. They see this as a way to learn about social networking and work out some of the kinks with their usage, as a starting point for eventually engaging their customers and partners. They’ve used Jive’s ClearSpace as the technology platform, including the wiki and blog functionality. They have about 12,500 internal users with another 10,000 lurkers who haven’t registered as users but access the information, representing about 2/3 of the employee population.

Deloitte’s D Street was developed for the same reasons of connecting people across the organization, but was also explicitly created to make the workplace more attractive to the incoming Gen Y/millennial workers; in fact, Romeo comes from the HR side of the house, and this had a big HR push behind it. They built on a SharePoint 2007 platform, but customized it significantly to create a more complete experience. 90% of the US Deloitte employees have visited D Street at least once, and they currently have 20,000 profiles which represents about half of their employee population.

Peter Kim started on some panel questions:

With respect to who funded the social network, for Deloitte, it was HR; for EMC, it was marketing (since they have a goal to have an outward-facing site) and they still can’t get their HR involved.
DiMicco stated that the age demographics of the users match the demographics of IBM, and are not biased towards the young engineers that everyone else figured would dominate the site usage. I’m so relieved to hear this, since I’ve been saying that it’s not an age thing – her hypothesis is that people will socialize their achievements internally in order to support their own career growth, and that inside a (more or less) private walled garden, people will share and participate. Maybe the difference that people are attributing to age is really about what people are willing to expose in a public forum, rather than how willing people are to participate in social networks.
There was an interesting discussion about the balance between internal and external social networks, and whether there was some consideration of how people were already using sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook.
An audience question about attrition indicated that there is no real tracking of any dropoff in participation: once someone creates a profile on the enterprise social network, they’re considered to be a participant even if they never update it or contribute in any other way ever again. I think that this should be measured; otherwise, there will be a burst of people who sign up initially then never contribute again, without any good understanding of what is required in order to keep the community alive. IBM is doing some research in this area; they have a bit of an advantage because they are a research organization and are developing a product, which is quite a different focus than EMC and Deloitte who are just end-user organizations in this context.
D Street has a staff of 3 people who are monitoring and moderating content that is added to the site, plus technical resources to keep things running. Beehive is not actively monitored, but allows readers to flag content if inappropriate; a team of four people built and maintain the site. ECM|ONE has a bigger team of moderators, probably because they have a goal for outward participation and may have bigger legal/compliance/governance concerns.
IBM has a social media policy, grown out of their original blogging policy, which is part of their general policy on what is appropriate in the workplace; they have very few problems because it is just part of general employee behavior guidelines. EMC and Deloitte said pretty much the same: very few problems have occurred (although they both have content monitoring/moderation which might impact that) and mostly it falls under employee behavior guidelines.

There was an audience question about whether the usage levels of these three technology-oriented companies would be representative of enterprises in general, and how they marketed the social networking sites internally. EMC tailored the message for each individual group to tell them what’s in it for them, rather than trying to have a one-size-fits-all collaboration message. Deloitte, since they came in through the HR side, use the profiles as the launch point for any internal references to employees, which led people to click through and see the profiles, sometimes inspiring them to create their own. This tied into a discussion about measurement, and what each of these companies were measuring about their sites. IBM used Beehive as the networking site for an internal conference last year, so had the opportunity to measure how people used the site in the context of that conference (Beehive users must feel like lab rats sometimes), as well as some analysis of the social graph that is created as people use the site. DiMicco had a great term, “return on contribution”, to show how they measure the value that contributed content provides to the enterprise. I can completely get into the concept of return on contribution 🙂

This was a great panel with three very different views on enterprise social networking. In all cases, the companies see the social network as being a bigger part of their intranet, and even a part of their externally-facing network.

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.

ECM vs. wiki

I recently ran up against the question of when to use a content/document management system and when to use a wiki for content inside an organization. I had some thoughts of my own on the subject, my customer had some other thoughts, I went out the Twitterverse for advice, and had an interesting dinner discussion at home to see what others had to say. The results were interesting.

I ended up having a phone call with David Bressler, and thanks to Theo Priestley I shared some tweets with Chris Bennetts-Cash and Andrew Smith, after which Andrew wrote a blog post that summed it up as follows:

Use a wiki for pure content that requires no level of security and maximum levels of accessibility. Use a document management / ECM system for everything else.

Although I come from a more traditional ECM environment, I tend towards a definition coming from the other direction, although likely with a similar effect: use wikis for all internal content by default, unless specific factors dictate the use of ECM. If you think about it, much internal content follows some basic patterns:

It’s created by more than one author
It must be accessible to a wide audience inside the company, but is not required outside the company
It requires frequent updating, but doesn’t need approval or versioning for editing

There’s a ton of content sitting out there right now on companies’ shared network drives that follow exactly that pattern: documents and spreadsheets that are regularly updated by multiple authors for things such as project status, departmental administration, meeting agendas and even collaborative design documents. Some of that content needs to have the edit permissions restricted to a smaller group, but still follows the same general characteristics, such as procedures and support documents.

There are, of course, many types of content that does need the more industrial-strength management capabilities of an ECM system, and here’s the list that I came up with:

It originates with or is sent to external parties, since I’m considering only internal enterprise wikis here
It only exists logically as a “document”, e.g., in PDF form (this is usually something that originates external to the organization, so would be covered by the previous point anyway)
It’s in a format other than plain text where the wiki can’t easily support the creation of that sort of content, e.g., drawings or spreadsheets
It requires a precisely-formatted print-ready version
It requires versioning, particularly where milestone versions of documents are created for approval
It requires fine-grained security control.
It requires records management and/or retention management, typically for audit or governance purposes

I fully expect some of this second list to start to emerge as wiki functionality over the near term, and although it’s not clear that ECM and wikis will ever merge as a concept (much less within a single product platform), there’s going to start to be a lot more overlap. There’s also hybrid concepts, such as having a wiki page link to a document in an ECM system so that collaborative discussion can take place on the wiki, then changes made through the strict ECM environment; or situations where content starts collaboratively in a wiki, then needs to be converted to a document and stored in ECM when it reaches a certain point where ECM functionality is required. Lots of grey areas, in any case.

If you’re using both ECM and wikis internally, I suggest that you start with the default position of everything going into wikis, then work back from there using the second checklist to figure out what needs to go into ECM instead. Just please don’t leave it out there on the shared drives, because unless you have enterprise search, no one is ever going to find those documents when they need them.

Mike Gotta on Enterprise Social Networking

I finally found time to watch the replay of the webinar that I missed earlier this week featuring Mike Gotta of the Burton Group on enterprise social networking. He started with an evolution of enterprise social networks, beginning with email: although fragmented and a highly flawed model, that’s how many people and organizations interacted for social/community (i.e., non-transactional) purposes. From there, online communities evolved, but that tended to result in stovepiped communities where the relationships spanned community boundaries; even inside companies, participation often fails to cross departmental boundaries. Social networking sites within enterprises try to create borderless participation: greater transparency and visibility of information by having a place where people can built their social graph through structures such as online profiles and collaboration tools.

Some business drivers for enterprise social networking have been with us a long time: connecting with other people globally to share information and collaborate, and enable crowdsourcing for bottom-up innovation. Others, however are relatively new: addressing generational shifts in how people work and interact online, and creating new ways to learn through social networking.

Unfortunately, many enterprise social networking projects are considered discretionary, so are suffering from budget cuts in today’s economic environment. To get approval for them now, you need to make it relevant to the business, showing how social networking can have an ROI through improved quality and efficiency of work. Since social networking spans multiple levels and departments within an enterprise, sponsors may come from a number of different areas and include some of the up-and-coming younger management.

Gotta had some interesting thoughts on how corporate culture and leadership affects adoption, as well as the need for governance and best practices for participation. Many parts of an organization can feel threatened by employee self-service: if you can update a wiki yourself, someone in IT support no longer has that function to help justify their job. There’s also a control issue, where top-down command-and-control style organizations have a difficult time letting go and allowing anyone within the organization to see certain information, much less make updates to it. They should all take a hard look at what Avenue A|Razorfish has been doing for more than 2 years: making their entire intranet one big wiki that anyone can edit. I still have customers that want to track the time that it takes for employees to go to the bathroom; I really can’t see them ready to take some of these steps yet, although we all have to start somewhere.

There’s a big HR component to enterprise social networking: there’s information that might be on the social sites that would have traditionally be locked inside HR’s files (such as each person’s skills and interests). Instead of feeling threatened by social networking inside the enterprise, HR should be taking a strategic role and seeing this as an opportunity to better engage with employees as well as provide better talent management and professional development.

He also had some excellent pointers on encouraging adoption, discussing how different organizations have different ways to do that: some focused on the early adopters and their behaviors, some on top-down participation, and some on pushing certain content types. He noted that there’s no right way to do this, but each organization has to try things out and respond to the ones that work. It’s great to leverage people’s acceptance and knowledge of consumer sites like Facebook, although that message is diluted if your enterprise blocks access to Facebook while holding it up as an example of social networking.

Although it seems retro, communities can be one way to help people get started co-creating with social networking, assuming that they’re embedded within the social networking infrastructure: the ability to create communities of interest or ad hoc groups at the grassroots level shows people that social networking is a platform on which to build communication, not just a specific application.

The bottom line is that social networks enable more adaptive organizations, through transparency of knowledge sharing, improved collaboration, and better use of the internal talent pool.

We also heard from Brian Kellner of NewsGator (the webinar sponsor) about some customer success stories: large and small enterprises, and both internal and external-facing networks. Check out the webinar for more details on the specific case studies, as well as his tips for successful enterprise social networking; I found the most critical to be understanding the cost of not acting now (which is common to most initiatives).

There was a great Q&A at the end, covering a variety of subjects:

The definition of “seeding” of a social networking site, and some of seeding strategies such as making some information only available on the social networking site.
The use of microblogging as part of an enterprise social networking strategy for quick information sharing.
Repercussions of restricting people from social sites from within the enterprise (especially in the face of recent research that indicates that using the internet for personal reasons can improve productivity).
Barriers to adoption, and tips and tricks for overcoming them.
How social networking fits into enterprise “knowledge management”: a term that Gotta doesn’t like (neither do I) but he addressed the issue of how all the different information sources fit together. This last was particularly interesting because I’ve been having an online discussion about how content splits between ECM and wikis, which I’ll be blogging about shortly; it all starts to tie together when you consider where certain types of information should naturally reside within your enterprise information ecosystem.

For those of you in the US, have a great long Memorial Day weekend!

IBM FileNet P8 BPM V4.5

I’ve had a couple of briefings on the 4.5 release of IBM/FileNet P8 BPM, which was released in November but is likely just starting to hit customer sites so I thought that it would be good timing for a review post. As a point of disclosure, I worked for FileNet in 2000-1 and have worked with their BPM software extensively in two of my own companies including my current consulting practice, but I don’t do any work for IBM, only for their customers. That means that I am probably more familiar with their system than with any other BPMS, but they are not compensating me in any way for this post (they don’t even cover analyst/bloggers expenses to attend their user conferences, so I don’t) nor do they have any editorial control, which means that I will likely manage to say something to annoy IBM management here, as I usually do.

I’ve blogged in the past about the IBM-FileNet acquisition, specifically my comments at the time that the acquisition was announced, at an analyst briefing just after that, then a follow-up last June comparing it to the Oracle-BEA acquisition: in brief, I noted the transition in product positioning from that of a full BPMS product to document-centric BPMS so as not to compete with WebSphere Process Server. I still think that both IBM and its customers would have been better served by ripping BPM out of the P8 product line and adding it to WebSphere to round out the human-facing capabilities, producing a single BPMS product at IBM. Instead, if a customer wants both human-centric functionality and services orchestration, IBM will be in there selling them two products – each with their own modeling, execution and monitoring environments – rather than one, which is going to be a bit of a hard sell in this economy. They’re working to bring some of that together, but fundamentally it’s still two products to do what many other vendors do with one. There are a few point of integration now — the WebSphere modeler can export FileNet-compliant XPDL, and the WebSphere monitoring tools can monitor the FileNet process engine – and they’ll be doing a bit more cosmetic integration to make it more palatable, but there’s no plan for a unified execution engine. Strangely, the recent Gartner report on BPMS doesn’t both to distinguish them: it bases its analysis on the combination of WebSphere Dynamic Process Edition and FileNet Active Content Edition, which is a bit bogus (in my opinion).

That being said, the current positioning of FileNet P8 BPM is around “agile ECM”, with active content being a key differentiator. Active content, in the FileNet world, is the ability to capture content events (such as creation and versioning) and trigger activities in response, either launching new process instances in BPM, or making external calls. If you’re proficient with the FileNet BPM design tools, that means that you can create a new process, link it via a workflow subscription to the events occurring on a class of content, and have that process automatically trigger when that event occurs for a document in that class. In my world of back-office transaction processing, where there is still a lot of paper, this could be the creation of a process instance in response to a new scanned document being added to the content repository, all without writing a line of code.

There’s more to their agile message than active content, however: IBM is also bundling in a new set of BPM widgets and the IBM (Lotus) Mashup Center to allow for the much easier creation of user interfaces. This has always been a problem in the past: although the Process Designer will auto-generate a user interface for each step that allows for view and update of the parameters exposed at that step, it’s not very pretty. The options were to use the FileNet e-forms product – which required some technical fiddling to integrate – or create custom interfaces using some other development tools. Although the widgets don’t provide a fully-customizable forms interface, they do provide a way to put together configurable user screens that work well for prototyping and for some lighter-weight/tactical production applications.

I liked what I saw with the widgets, despite the limitations, since I think that it’s a move in the right direction. They use the iWidget specification, which is an open standard created by IBM and used natively in the Mashup Center, and there’s also a wrapper to turn an iWidget widget into a JSR-168 compliant portlet, with the cross-widget wiring exposed, for use in other environments such as the WebSphere portal product. The BPM widgets are built using the new REST services that wrap around the process engine Java API; you can also call the REST services directly from other application development environments. Although the widgets are referred to as “ECM widgets” in the IBM documentation, they all (with the exception of a document viewer widget) provide BPM functionality. There’s a lot more that I saw about the widgets; I might do a separate post just on that for those who are evaluating this product.

Some partners are also creating widgets for the mashup framework; I can see this as a key way for partners to add value through providing interoperable components rather than monolithic applications, and I would hope to see some of these emerging for free as companies try out this new technology.

There’s no requirement for all-or-nothing with the mashups, either: each step in the process can invoke a different UI from a different source, so that one step might have a custom application, another an e-form and another a mashup. As far as the process is concerned, that’s just what is invoked at the step to manage the user interaction, not an integral part of the process.

One issue is that WebSphere Business Space will replace Mashup Center as the mashup environment included with P8 BPM, although it’s not clear what degree of functional overlap there is, or when to use one versus the other. The Mashup Center appears to be positioned as being for prototyping and tactical situational applications, whereas Business Space is more of an enterprise portal, but it’s not clear that you couldn’t build an enterprise-strength application using the Mashup Center (unless you’re afraid that IT will laugh at you for using the words “mashup” and “enterprise” in the same sentence). Business Space supports the ECM widgets, but would require a few “minor functional changes” (IBM’s words) to get things working.

On the process modeling side, the Process Designer now has two modes: diagram mode for business analysts, and design mode for technical analysts, with user access rights determining which that a specific user can access. In diagram mode, the user draws the process map, adds the description and instructions at each step, and a description for each route between steps. Design mode is the full “classic” view, with all parameters visible, where a developer can take the description entered by the business analyst and map that into parameters, rules, assignments, deadlines and web services calls. However, the Designer still is not BPMN compliant: if you want BPMN, you can do it in Visio with a BPMN template that they provide, then import the results into the Designer, but it’s a one-way trip. They do plan to leverage some of what’s been done with BPMN in the WebSphere process modeler to bring that into the P8 BPM designer, but there’s nothing concrete to talk about yet.

There’s also some new user roles functionality built in to the designer (and runtime, obviously) that is based on the Business Process Framework, an add-on product to BPM used for creating case management processes. I suspect that we’ll see more of the useful bits of BPF integrated into the core BPM product in the coming releases, to the point where it won’t exist as a separate product, although no one at IBM said that.

Simulation is now web-based and integrated within the process designer, rather than being a separate application: one of the tabs in the design view of a process is Simulation, which allows durations for steps and weights (%) for routes to be entered. Configuration and administration is also now done within the process designer rather than in a separate configuration console.

For business rules, ILOG (a recent IBM acquisition) is being integrated into the WebSphere suite; since it provides a web services interface, it can easily be called at a step in a BPM process for adding business rules more complex than can be handled by the built-in expression engine in BPM.

The BAM product integrated into the P8 BPM product line is also now IBM: originally it was Celequest, which was acquired by Cognos, which was in turn acquired by IBM; the branding on the last set of product slides that I saw is “Cognos Now”.

IBM is starting to push Lotus Forms with BPM, although it is not yet integrated to the same degree as FileNet eForms, which can replace the user interface at a step in a process. I can’t believe that IBM will maintain two e-forms products in the long run, but they can’t really cut off FileNet eForms until they complete that integration.

Overall, FileNet’s legacy of content and process together has grown into fully-featured document-centric BPM capability. Unfortunately, they positioned themselves as pure-play BPMS just long enough to get some customers on that bandwagon, leaving those customers with some uncomfortable migration decisions in their future.

FASTforward09: Clay Shirky

I’m at the FASTforward conference in Las Vegas, where I’m blogging over at the FASTforward blog. I’ll spare you my comments on Don Tapscott’s opening keynote, since regular readers have seen a lot of it before, but move on to our second big-name speaker of the conference, Clay Shirky, who I was looking forward to seeing. I read and enjoyed his book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (apparently coming out in paperback in a couple of weeks), although it seems that I neglected to write a review of it. I’ve seen the power of organizing events and movements without a formal organization, and as an independent (in both the philosophical and employment sense), I’m a firm believer that you don’t have to be part of a big organization in order to make things happen. Today’s social networking tools, like Facebook and Twitter, allow us to organize and motivate a large network of friends and friends of friends with a relatively small amount of effort.

It’s not just about having a flash mob or a Tweetup or even a fundraiser party like HoHoTO, however: social networks have become a major source for news. When a plane made an emergency landing on the Hudson River last month, I turned to Twitter rather than mainstream media sites or TV to stay on top of what was happening. As Twitter lowers the bar for us all to become citizen journalists via SMS messages from our mobile phones, millions of people the world over are adding their voices – 140 characters at a time – to the torrent of information about current events available on the web.

Although Shirky doesn’t say this explicitly, this is why search is so critical: without search, you can’t find all that information that’s out there waiting to be aggregated, and without search, you can’t filter all that information so that it’s relevant to you. Bad search gives you too much useless information; good search gives you a focused stream of pure gold. Good search also allows you to fine-tune that focus, adding and removing areas of interest depending on what catches your interest that day.

Back to his talk, he discussed amateur forums that provide support or information, specifically one that discusses specific mobile phone handset/carrier combinations and the known issues: a large number of unpaid people with a huge amount of collective knowledge contribute to a knowledgebase for the common good rather than for money. This is a classic case of crowdsourcing, such as is seen in Wikipedia, but he talked more about the notion of community, and the fact that people contribute to such an effort because they enjoy being part of the community. The social aspect of crowdsourcing is really the interesting part: although it’s cool that you create a huge body of knowledge, it’s even more cool to see the connections that are made through the community. He talked about IBM’s DogEar product (an enterprise social bookmarking product that started as an internal tool), and the connections that are being made by looking at who is linking to who’s links. Exposing this sort of information across an organization the size of IBM shows how connections can be made between people who normally would never have visibility of each other, even though they have common interests. It’s not about whether an organization is open or closed, it’s about the permeability of the interfaces between parts of the organization.

Digital tools lower the cost of failure. Get out there, build something social and risk that failure: it’s not going to cost you very much.