enterprise20ttw – Column 2

Enterprise 2.0 Camp: Ryan Coleman

Ryan Coleman, another friend of mine from the TorCamp community, led a discussion on language translation and the impact on the sort of interacting with the global community due to the premise of wikinomics. Although it’s easy (and arrogant) for those of us who are native English speakers to just ignore other languages and pretend that everyone speaks English, the fact is that if you’re message isn’t well-understood, you’ll end up losing business or creating inefficiencies within your organization. At this point, translation services is a $10B business worldwide, and growing.

He gave some examples of evaluating the context and content to determine whether it needs to be translated, and the degree of care that needs to be taken, before going through the different options for translating your business materials.

One option is to crowdsource your documentation: have your user community write the manual for you. This requires a passionate user base, and can be unpredictable in terms of timing and coverage, as well as of inconsistent quality.

Another option is machine translation, but as you’ll know if you’ve ever used Google Translation, the quality can be total crap with low-end solutions. There are high-quality (and higher-priced) professional systems, but these require extensive training and still require review of the output.

Another option is to use internal resources, namely your own staff, who presumably understand your products and services, but who are now diverted from their usual job which tends to create a high cost of lost opportunity. Since these are not professional translators, the quality can also be questionable.

Professional translators are the final option, and best for high-quality, consistent translation. They can use tools to store translated phrases so that there’s a translation memory of a document; when a document changes, only the changed portions required re-translation. The downside, of course, is that this is very expensive, and the initial translations can be time-consuming especially if you have a lot of specialized terminology that the translator needs to learn.

There are a number of hybrid approaches that combine these options; all of them will combine people, process and technology in some proportion, and the ultimate choice will depend on both the content and the context.

Ryan listed a number of other points to consider:

Synchronization between versions, including maintaining dependency relationships
Location and access to content repository
Workflow and time sensitivity of translation, including proofing/review cycle

He had some thoughts on what’s happening between translation systems and content management systems, particularly for large websites that must be maintained in multiple languages. In the past (and likely still a lot currently), a content management system would just spit out a document to be translated, then accept it back in afterwards, without any real sense of how the translated content should be handled. Wikis, of course, are even worse since it’s less mature responsibility and there’s not, in most wikis platforms, any considerations for maintain multi-language versions of a wiki.

Ryan’s company, Clay Tablet, has created a piece of middleware that sits between the different types of translation systems and the content management systems, whether the translation is being done by a machine translation system or a company that provides human translation services.

That’s the end of the formal sessions of Enterprise 2.0 Camp; it’s 2pm and we’re decamping, so to speak, to the bar across the road for lunch and a continuation of the conversations.

Enterprise 2.0 Camp: Mark Kuznicki

My pal Mark Kuznicki is discussing Toronto Transit Camp as a case study on open community innovation that started with the TTC issuing an RFP for a new website and ended up involving the Toronto blogosphere and local transit geeks in an open discussion about what the TTC website should become in order to best serve the community. This all happened in a short time period: the RFP went out in December; the Toronto blogosphere had a call to action on January 1st; two days later Adam Giambrone, the youthful chair of the TTC, signaled that they were open to any ideas generated; within a week Mark and a few others had picked up the flag and started organizing Transit Camp; and Transit Camp happened on February 4th. The way that the Transit Camp organizers communicated this to the TTC is “we’re doing this, and you’re welcome to participate as equals”, although this was likely a bit too radical for the TTC culture since they were more passive listeners than active participants; they’re still pretty hung up on owning their own intellectual property rather than opening up their data and branding for use by the community in some way.

Transit Camp was labelled a “solutions playground” — no complaining allowed — and involved a number of different activities, from BarCamp-type interactive discussions to a design slam, and several TTC execs showed up including Giambrone: a clear indication that TTC was ready to start tapping into the energy and ideas being created in the community. At the end of the day, all parties were seeing the shift from a previous combatitive stance to a collaborative relationship between the TTC and the community, creating an entirely new model for engagement and communication. It resulted in the openTTC.ca open source project, and provided for peer-production involvement in future generations of the website.

Mark uses the term “open creative communities”: barrier-free groups of individuals with a common interest, producing ideas and inventions. He saw a number of factors that contributed to the success of Transit Camp: people attended for both discovery and play; it created an intersection of communities that touch various aspects of TTC and its community; and it gave people like Mark and the other organizers an opportunity to practice community leadership. He had a couple of great references in his presentation, such as Cherkoff and Moore’s CoCreation Rules and Benkler’s commons-based peer-production.

He sees communities as naturally-occurring social systems demonstrating emergent properties, but also points out that you can create an intentional community with the right framework and rules.

Unfortunately, there was no real written record of Transit Camp (obviously, I wasn’t there blogging 🙂 ) so it was difficult to bring the ideas forward in any sort of formal way to the TTC later; this may have impacted their acceptance of the ideas as much as the inherent cultural inertia. However, it’s a great model for allowing a community to engage (particularly) with a government or quasi-government organization. There was a great deal of discussion in today’s session about what would motivate the TTC to get involved in the ideas generated by Transit Camp, particularly those that involved ceding partial control of planning and branding to the community, but a lot of people miss the point of co-creation: remember that the reason that IBM invests in Linux open source development is because it’s way cheaper than developing an equivalent operating system on their own. The real long-term benefit of co-creation is the new possibilities that are generated by including people outside the organization in the innovation process, but it’s often necessary to hook them with the economic arguments first.

Enterprise 2.0 Camp: Sunir Shah

Sunir Shah, formerly of SocialText and now with FreshBooks, led a session on achieving adoption, debunking the “if you build it, they will come” method of customer acquisition and retention. There’s nothing in most of his session particular to Enterprise 2.0 — it’s pretty general marketing 101 for product vendors — although he does touch fleetingly on adoption of social software. His presentation focussed on how to get people and, eventually, companies, adopt (and therefore buy) your commercial software; I was expecting something more along the lines of how to encourage the adoption and usage of social networking software within an enterprise once that platform is already deployed.

An interesting discussion that came up was the difference between customer relations and customer community management, starting with when a group of customers becomes a community. Usually there will be some tools that vendors use to facilitate the formation of a community, but ultimately there needs to be customers who care enough about what they’re doing with the product to form the nucleus. Blogs and forums are good starting points for community, since both allow for content creation by both internal and external participants; blogs typically have the content authored inside the vendor’s company with comments added by customers and other external parties, whereas forums are typically more egalitarian.

I think that Shah really wanted to do an unconference-like session, but came with a full deck of slides. He stopped about 15 minutes in and asked if people wanted to have an open discussion or have him continue the presentation, which (of course) resulted in him continuing his presentation: most people are basically lazy (me too) and will take the default veg-out route rather than rousing themselves to a discussion. Although there’s nothing in the concept of an unconference that specifically bars formal presentations, I always get a lot more out of unconference sessions that have just enough presentation to provide structure, then some format for encouraging audience participation. The idea of BarCamp is that everyone is a participant, and I expected to see more of that in Enterprise 2.0 Camp, too. That could be the ultimate conflict in Enterprise 2.0 Camp: if you get real enterprise people to attend, as opposed to just those of us who live in Echo Chamber 2.0, they’re likely not used to the contributory nature of an unconference and just think of it as a day-long seminar where they’re passive listeners.

What’s really funny is that James Walker’s session on OpenID in the enterprise is going on at the same time in the other corner of the room, and I’ve heard both of the presenters mention Facebook applications within the last 5 minutes: this new developer platform is certainly the focus of a lot of discussion, although it will take a while to see if it really has legs.

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.

Enterprise 2.0 Camp: Anthony Williams

I’m at Enterprise 2.0 Camp today, and Anthony Williams is the first breakfast speaker. He’s giving the Wikinomics lesson in short — how we’re undergoing an economic transformation because of the collaborative nature of value creation that’s happening due to both Web 2.0 internet applications and social networking principles being introduced into the enterprise. He covers the four basic principles: peering, openness, sharing and acting globally; since I read the book fairly recently, this is all still pretty fresh in my mind and it’s great to hear it from the author.

I like his discussion of openness, where he shows the move from companies hiring all their own talent internally, to outsourcing of some business processes, to a true open market for talent. This is a critical area of overlap between BPM and Enterprise 2.0, since BPM has been enabling business process outsourcing and will continue to be a key technology for supporting an open market: if you can find a grope outside your organization, whether local or a half a world away, that has superior skills to deliver some aspect of your business process, you need to be able to easily include them in your value chain. He also talks about organizations creating an ecosystem for others to add value to their base products: everything from SalesForce.com’s AppExchange to Facebook’s new application platform. In some cases, there’s a more active collaboration with other companies; in others, it’s the prosumer doing their own thing and giving it back to the community.

He talked about Science 2.0 in the context of sharing, with the Human Genome Project and other similar projects pooling data and computing power. Open source development also falls under the sharing part of wikinomics, with companies like IBM contributing developers to Linux development that is turned back to the community. It’s not completely altruistic: a more robust Linux community benefits IBM because they sell more hardware and services to run it on, and the amount that they contribute to Linux development is about 1/10 of what they would spend developing and maintaining an equivalent proprietary operating system (say, OS/400).

Williams described how to get started with Enterprise 2.0 internally, through the use of internal blogs and wikis, which put me in mind of the Avenue A|Razorfish intranet wiki that I heard about last week at the PCC conference. It’s a good way to get people used to the concepts, while at the same time working out the governance issues before any of this information is exposed on the public internet.

Tom Purves put today together mostly as an unconference, with a few minor changes: first, there’s some “name” speakers at breakfast, and second, we all had to pitch in $50 for the day, but we’re at the Toronto Convention Centre so I wouldn’t expect that we’d be getting everything for free. Still a great deal, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the day.