LUCRUM Radio: Episode 5, Craig Jolley Part 2
August 1, 2008
Listen as Craig Jolley, Web Marketing Manager with National City Mortgage, and I continue our discussion of emerging technology and how it will impact the future of business.
Craig has some great takes on how the “journey is as important as the destination” in terms of making technology that has an impact. He shares his thoughts on where technology has come from and where it is headed.
Thanks for Craig for taking time to speak with me, and for sharing his insights.
Enjoy!
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Does your organization “digg” Enterprise 2.0?
June 17, 2008
Some time ago, it made big news when the first Baby Boomer started collecting Social Security. It is now big business to advise Baby Boomers on retirement strategies, retirement communities, places to retire to, etc. Baby Boomers (ages 44-62) are the biggest workforce out there today, but it won’t be that way for long. Gen X (ages 29-43) doesn’t have enough workers to replace the retiring Baby Boomers. And those from Gen Y or the Millennials (ages 8-28), who are coming into the workforce for the first time, have very different expectations of the workplace and a very different view of technology. After all, Gen Y has been around since the birth of the internet and has grown up with online connectivity.
Surveys show (and probably this would be no surprise to most of you) that Millennials are the ones who have embraced Web 2.0 with open arms compared to the other two groups. Gen X is a close second to Millennials when it comes to using different Web 2.0 technologies. But Millennials are more likely to use Instant Messaging, use Social Networking Sites, download digital media, and play online games. Millennials are more apt to send or receive multimedia messages on their mobile phones, send or receive text messages on their mobile phones, etc. Most Millennials are constantly connected to technology, be it their MP3 players, mobile phones, etc. Millennials also tend to use a very different language when it comes to sending text messages or IM – they have many different acronyms like for example, BRB means “Be right back”, and they tend to use emoticons i.e. characters like 
and 
, quite liberally. Millennials have been using social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook for quite a while. They DIGG stuff or BURY it! They share bookmarks via del.icio.us. They “twit” interesting content! They are more likely to publish a video to YouTube or podcast or publish a blog or web page.
As Millennials enter the workforce, they are going to be very keen on continuing to use Web 2.0 tools that they use constantly in their personal lives. Matter of fact, some surveys show that a good chunk of the population that uses sites like Facebook or MySpace tend to visit those sites several times daily and they tend to hang around for a while on each visit. So what does this mean for the enterprise?
Organizations and companies that want to attract and retain technology-savvy talent need to look at the use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies in their environments. Social networking tools should be embraced with appropriate governance. Consider leveraging the power of mashups to integrate different applications and present them in a slick interface. Look at re-designing applications keeping in mind that Gen Y tends to view the web and web sites and experiences quite differently. Some statistics suggest that Millennials tend to get easily bored and will not wait for a web page that takes longer than 3 seconds to download. Millennials tend to migrate away from companies they perceive to be stodgy or behind the times. Millennials are very comfortable with virtual worlds – how could you leverage that organizationally? Leverage the power of crowd-sourcing and folksonomies. If Baby Boomers are retiring, and there’s not enough of Gen X to replace them, how would you attract Gen Y to those jobs? Are there ways of using Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis and podcasts to capture the knowledge in the minds of Baby Boomers before they retire so as not to lose all that precious capital?
Ready or not, the Millennials are coming and the workplace is changing! The question of interest is, “Are they coming soon to your organization” and are you ready? Will they “digg” your use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies?
Enterprise 2.0 and Governance
June 8, 2008
Prof. Andrew McAfee (see my previous post) in a blog post in Nov 2006 asked his readers to consider this: Imagine two competitors, one of which has the guiding principle “keep security risks and discoverability to a minimum,” the other of which is guided by the rule “make it as easy as possible for people to collaborate and access each others’ expertise.” Both put in technology infrastructures appropriate for their guiding principles. Take all IT, legal, and leak-related costs into account. Which of these two comes out ahead over time?
My guess would be the latter.
So, what is Governance?
In simple terms I’d say that Governance is the set of policies, procedures and structures you define and establish in an organization to guide and direct the use of technology to achieve organizational goals. So it is about both IT and the business.
Many people think governance is about control and limiting the power of the user. On the contrary I think that good governance actually enables better collaboration – the more clearly the terms of use and the collaboration structures and mechanisms are defined, the easier it becomes to navigate the world of unstructured content. To me, governance is like the banks of a river – without the banks the river waters could cause enormous destruction and would spread out and be wasted. The banks provide direction and enable the river waters to be channeled and to achieve useful purposes.
In the Enterprise 2.0 context, one finds that companies are concerned when it comes to allowing the use of such technologies across the firewall. The typical concerns are around monitoring the content posted in blogs and wikis, fears over potential lawsuits emanating from the publication of information that is slanderous in nature or hate-oriented or which can be interpreted as being harassing or discriminatory in any shape or form. There is also concern around the potential for trade secrets, new product information, R&D information and other such inside information getting out. At the client I am at currently, there is tremendous concern over the possibility of allowing for collaboration between internal employees and any external entities.
I wonder if the very same concerns existed when email was first introduced or way back when the telephone was first made available in a business setting.
Most companies tend to have an information security policy and that seems to have generally sufficed to handle these concerns around email and phone calls. In a similar fashion, I think it’d be useful to extend that information security policy to cover Enterprise 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasts, social networking, etc. It’d also be useful to highlight and publicize these policies so that employees are aware that instant messages or blog or wiki posts or comments on a discussion thread are to be treated as public communication. Also, one needs to consider that typically online, social communities tend to be self-policing and self-correcting.
So I would like to suggest that for a company to successfully embrace Enterprise 2.0, it should first decide how it wants to handle the content that will be generated through the use of such technologies. Would it not be reasonable to assume that all such information should be treated as the company’s digital assets?
So when it comes to providing governance around your Enterprise 2.0 solution, it might be useful to look at the following areas:
* Findability – how can you make it easy to find relevant content so users do not have to remember URLs or content locations? What can you do to provide true enterprise search capabilities? Can the search experience be customized?
* Retention – how long should content be retained both from a legal perspective and because of the business necessity to find older content? How about a mechanism to archive content that isn’t being actively used?
* Versioning – how many versions of content would you like to support? Make it easy to go back to a previous version but manage this effectively to minimize storage costs. Can you enforce storage quotas?
* Information Architecture – what guidelines do you want to provide around navigation and search? What kind of metadata do you want captured with different kinds of content to make it easy to find pertinent information? Do you have specific thoughts around taxonomy? Also, would you want to use workflows to manage document state? How about content approval policies? How do you integrate the content in the collaboration system with your enterprise portals?
* Customization – is the system customizable and does it provide the ability to turn functionality on/off as needed? What kinds of user customization of the system would be acceptable? How do you plan to verify that those customizations are safe to be deployed to your Production environment? Will there be a rollback mechanism?
* Security – provide adequate security so that content that needs special security can be effectively protected. Also verify that there are adequate mechanisms to audit and report system usage, and enforce information management policies such as retention, auditing, expiration, etc.
* The terms of use – define what terms govern the use of your system.
* Acceptable content – state upfront what kinds of content are acceptable i.e. regarding text, images, videos, audio, etc. Also specify your policy around sharing this content externally.
* Integration of such systems into the organization’s Enterprise Content Management system – How do you envision the information flowing from the location that provides free collaboration to your enterprise content management system? How do you plan to handle e-discovery? Where should the final, legal record of content reside?
* Tools – finally, evaluate the available Enterprise 2.0 tools to see which one best meets your needs in light of the requirements outlined above.
* Documentation – document your policies and procedures and the custom framework you are going to implement with respect to the software tool(s) selected above and publicize its availability.
To exercise the system, a pilot rollout could be considered and the guidelines and policies then be tweaked appropriately based on relevant feedback. But after that, IT should get out of the way and strive to effectively enable and empower the business to use these Enterprise 2.0 technologies.
One other thing I think companies should focus on is identifying and establishing the process for maintaining a single version of the truth when it comes to content management. Having multiple redundant versions of the same content for example in email, the user’s pc, a shared network folder, a collaboration space and a content management system is not a good idea not only in terms of governance and compliance but also very expensive when you think of backup and storage costs and not to mention the amount of time lost in finding out which is the latest version or the single version of truth. I had a colleague use the term “single point of truth” or SPOT and thinking in terms of SPOT should be a key focus area for governance. In this regard, you could for instance institute a policy that states that internally, email should not be used to forward documents but instead that a link to the document on the intranet or collaboration area be emailed. The same policy could be adopted for external communication as long as an extranet site is available to share content with external collaborators.
Today it is becoming common that the business is beginning to make use of Web 2.0 tools without overt IT involvement. With regard to Web 2.0, this is not as significant an issue since it is mainly about the consumer aspects and geared towards the individual user. However, when it comes to Enterprise 2.0, I do not think that is necessarily the best thing to do long term. For Enterprise 2.0, my recommendation would be that the business work hand-in-hand with IT and make use of a corporate vendor that builds and integrates its Enterprise 2.0 offering with existing infrastructure and has the vision, and proven financial and technical abilities to engineer a solution that can scale well and provide the necessary controls and mechanisms outlined above.
I would like to propose that IT be forward-looking and embrace Enterprise 2.0 technologies and strive to empower and enable the business to effectively use such technologies. And I would also propose that the business work in association with IT to achieve its ends instead of pursuing solutions that are good for a single department but may not scale well to the enterprise or are unable to provide the functionality needed long term.
How is Enterprise 2.0 different from Web 2.0?
June 3, 2008
The term “Enterprise 2.0″ was coined by Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee, during 2006, in an MIT Sloan Management Review article entitled “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration”, as opposed to Web 2.0 (which was popularized by Tim O’Reilly in 2004).
When asked “What is Enterprise 2.0?”, the typical response might be “The application of Web 2.0 in the enterprise”. AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management association, states that there is more to Enterprise 2.0 than that. “Web 2.0 is focused on consumer and public-facing Web sites although that distinction was not explicitly made in the original definition.Enterprise 2.0 is much more about businesses’ adoption of “2.0 mindsets” than with the consumer facing side of the coin.” Plus, there is the lack of preciseness around the term Web 2.0.
AIIM defines Enterprise 2.0 as: “A system of Web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence, and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise.” (see AIIM Market IQ, Q1 2008, “Enterprise 2.0: Agile, Emergent & Integrated”, by Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen).
A couple of frameworks for Enterprise 2.0 include one from Prof. McAfee, which goes by the mnemonic SLATES (Search, Links, Authorship, Tags, Extensions and Signals), and another from Dion Hinchcliffe which goes by the mnemonic FLATNESSES (Freeform, Links, Authorship,Tagging, Network-oriented, Extensions, Search,Social, Emergence and Signals).
In similar fashion to AIIM, Forrester Research believes that “the term Web 2.0 has come to embody both consumer and business use of next-generation Web technology but that this lumping together of services is too imprecise to be practical” (see Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 To 2013 by G. Oliver Young dated April 21, 2008). Young states that as a result, “most pundits and technology strategists segment the market between consumer Web 2.0 services and business Web 2.0 services.” Forrester thus refers to “the business Web 2.0 market as enterprise Web 2.0, which encompasses Web 2.0 technology and service investments for both externally facing marketing functions and internally facing productivity and collaboration functions.” So for example, Forrester doesn’t include Blogger, Facebook or Twitter as Enterprise 2.0 services even though they are Web 2.0 services.
Forrester believes that “enterprise Web 2.0 technologies represent a fundamentally new way to connect with customers and prospects and to harness the collaborative power of employees.” They specifically refer to Enterprise 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasting, social networking, mashups, and widgets.
The list of Enterprise 2.0 technologies provided by AIIM is quite similar and consists of mashups, blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasting, social voting/ranking and social bookmarking.
One has to remember though that even if Enterprise 2.0 technologies such as the ones listed above provide for rapid and agile collaboration and empowerment, there has to be a cultural openness to this within an enterprise for it to truly be successful. So it’s not only about aligning the technology with the business, but aligning the culture with the technology that now becomes the challenge.
In future posts, we will take a look at some of these Enterprise 2.0 technologies and the cultural issues around the adoption of Enterprise 2.0.
Some SharePoint competitors in the Enterprise 2.0 space…
May 19, 2008
There’s been a lot of buzz over the past couple of months around companies who are pitching their products against SharePoint. Just the fact that companies are targeting SharePoint tells you that it is the product to beat. For instance, have you read about the offerings from Google and IBM?
Here’a a link to a ZDNet article saying Google takes on Microsoft SharePoint with Google Sites. And here’s another one asking: Is Google Sites going to be a SharePoint killer?
Both articles conclude that for all the hype surrounding Google Sites and Google Apps, apparently they still have a long way to go to catch up to SharePoint. Also, given that Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is available for free with Windows Server 2003, users do not need to pay any licensing fees to use the basic collaboration platform available with SharePoint. And by the way, did you know that Office Live Small Business (which provides everything you need to take your small business online, including a free website, free email, free online business applications, etc.) and Office Live Workspaces (an online place to save, access, and share documents and files), are built on SharePoint products?
IBM recently announced how they’d like to “liberate” your apps from SharePoint. Also look at another article around the same topic. IBM acknowledges the “viral adoption of SharePoint” in the enterprise, almost like Lotus Notes back in the 90s. And it’s interesting to note that the man behind the success of Lotus Notes, Ray Ozzie, isn’t with IBM or Lotus, but is the Chief Software Architect at Microsoft! Hmmm… And I know of at least 2 major corporations with a huge presence in Cincinnati, OH, that have decided to move away from Lotus Notes to SharePoint! I guess we have to wait and see if Quickr is able to stem this flow…
Evans Data Corporation’s recently surveyed over 400 developers for its May 2008 report on “Web 2.0 Developer Programs – 2008 Rankings”. Some folks might be surprised to hear that Google came in at second place. So who came in first? Apparently, “the strength of Microsoft’s Windows Live offerings for Tools and SDKs and Web Services allow them to finish first overall”.
So it seems that SharePoint is not something an organization would want to ignore or take lightly – plus, serious web 2.0 developers need to more closely look at Microsoft’s offering in this area.
Collaboration and Search
May 5, 2008
We collaborate and work together to achieve a common goal, sharing knowledge and ideas and creating content in the process. Often times in a business, people are collaborating around a certain issue that needs addressing or improvement or maybe brain-storming ideas to come up with a new solution or collaborating around a certain task. Typically, as people collaborate, content gets created in the form of an email or a document or a discussion thread or a virtual workspace or a wiki or other similar mechanism. While the collaboration activity is at its peak, it’s probably easier to keep track of this content. However, the further removed one is from the actual activity, the harder it becomes to know or remember where something might be found. And ultimately for the business, all of this content could be considered assets that need to be easily and quickly retrieved.
Collaboration by its very nature creates a lot of unstructured content. Given that there isn’t a pre-defined structure, how does one go about quickly locating relevant information? It’s quite possible that the one who is looking for something might not even know where the information might reside. Is it on a file system or in a virtual team workspace or in a discussion thread or in a wiki? Also, it’s quite possible that the unstructured content that is created was actually pertaining to some structured content out in a database or a line-of-business application. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to search and reference that information as well?
IDC estimates that information workers spend on average 48% of their time searching for and analyzing information, (9.5 and 9.6 hours per week, respectively) which costs an organization $28,000 per worker per year (see “The Hidden Costs of Information Work”, IDC April 2006)
As mentioned last week, I’m going to look at some of the capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (referred to in the future as SharePoint 2007) which make it such a strong contender in the Enterprise 2.0 space. With SharePoint 2007, you are able to search both structured and unstructured data and quickly find the information you might be looking for. You can search content on your file shares, your internet and intranet web sites, IBM Lotus Notes repositories, Microsoft Exchange Public folders, and of course, SharePoint sites. You can also find information stored in databases and backend Line of Business systems, such as ERP and CRM. Not only this, but you can also search for people in your organization and identify those who might have the required expertise to get a job done. The best part about SharePoint search is that it returns security-trimmed results, so that a user only gets to see what they’ve been previously authorized to see. The search experience in SharePoint 2007 is highly customizable as well so that one can display best bets, eliminate noise words, and customize the display of search results and do so much more. Another highly useful feature is that there is really no preset document limit unlike other well-known search products.
An Enterprise Search feature pack is expected soon which is going to further enhance the Search experience with SharePoint and incorporate some of the powerful functionality found in Microsoft Search Server 2008, which Forrester Research has labeled as a Disruptor in Enterprise Search (see Microsoft: Latest Disruptor in Enterprise Search). Also, with Microsoft’s acquisition of FAST earlier this year (see Gartner Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology, 2007), which Microsoft plans to integrate into SharePoint Search, it’s going to make the already powerful SharePoint search experience even more so. It’s worth noting too that other software vendors have also recognized the power of SharePoint Search and are integrating their products with SharePoint to leverage its powerful search functionality (for example, look at this news article about an open source collaboration vendor integrating with SharePoint for its Search functionality).
So with SharePoint 2007, you can pretty much assume that you will be able to search and retrieve the content you’re looking for. For more details, look at Enterprise Search from Microsoft.
Of Web 2.0 and SharePoint 2007
April 28, 2008
Web 2.0 made a big bang in 2007 advocating and offering new avenues for information worker collaboration to increase their productivity. Forrester Research expects that “adoption of social networking solutions for business” will “accelerate dramatically in 2008 with many firms looking for internal social networking solutions”.
Web 2.0 in the enterprise is now here and companies, big and small, are having to figure out how best to deal with it. Technologies such as blogs, wikis, RSS, instant messaging, surveys, team workspaces, web conferencing, mashups and the like have grown immensely in popularity. In many cases, employees have figured out for themselves how to accomplish their work more efficiently using such technologies without formal offerings or support from their companies, and so it has now become imperative that businesses and especially their IT departments seriously consider how they are going to support this growing need for social computing in their organizations.
One of the primary contenders in the enterprise web 2.0 space is SharePoint 2007 from Microsoft. In the short period of a year since it was first released, SharePoint 2007 has generated over $1 billion in sales for Microsoft and has become their fastest selling server product ever. Industry analysts such as G. Oliver Young of Forrester Research say that “Microsoft’s SharePoint will continue to steamroll the market” in the enterprise Web 2.0 space (see Forrester Research’s “Top Enterprise Web 2.0 Predictions For 2008” by G. Oliver Young, January 25, 2008). He also says that “for SharePoint, 2008 will be another banner year.” Forrester also expects that the IT departments taking a leadership role in enterprise 2.0 deployments will look at SharePoint first.
For Lucrum, SharePoint 2007 is currently a cornerstone of our collaboration strategy. In subsequent blogs, I plan to spell out in greater detail those aspects of SharePoint 2007 that make it such a strong contender in the enterprise web 2.0 space. Of course, one cannot assume that SharePoint is the holy grail of social computing and it is what everyone needs – depending on the customer’s needs and environment, it’s possible that other tools might be better suited for them.
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