Collaborative Thinking

Thinking In Terms Of Patterns

If I was at the Web 2.0 Expo, I would love to sit in on this session - but unfortunately I am in the middle of writing a report due early May (although I have a brief trip later this week). 

Looking at social software in terms of "patterns" can be very helpful. Patterns can represent real-life usage models. The can be comprised of one or more user archetypes (personas), attributes related to the activity and the relationships between those personas and attributes. Specific personas (“Jane Doe is a utilization management nurse and a subject matter expert on infectious disease”) help bring a pattern to life, allowing people to see themselves in the solution that pattern addresses. Documenting a pattern (or usage model) in such a manner helps articulate the social aspects of work and defines a narrative that people can agree on. Not only does this help humanize a solution, but it also enables an IT organization to leverage patterns as templates into which certain tools can be mapped. 

If you’ll be at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco this week, you’re invited to Wikipatterns Theatre Wednesday, April 23rd through Friday April 25th in the Atlassian booth, #535. Presentations will be held every hour, on the hour during the open hours of the expo. Presentations last about 5 minutes, with 5-10 minutes for Q&A afterward, and focus on wiki adoption and use topics. See the full schedule below for details.

Free copy of Wikipatterns book at Web 2.0 Expo!

Social Software: It's Not New, And It Includes e-Mail...

Based on some Twitter conversations - my definition of social software relies on the insight of Clay Shirky (who is referenced extensively below). Despite how vendors are trying to use the term as if they suddenly discovered something new - social software has been around for some time. And despite some vendors trying to constrain its definition to things like blogs, wikis, etc. social software needs to be examined as a continuum of software tools and applications - not as a time-slice to support a particular product agenda.

We need to recognize the lineage of social software, the instantiations of social software over the years (e.g., e-mail), where it worked - where it failed, and how today's current generation of social software better support social interactions and social contexts better than previous tools (e.g., a wiki vs. e-mail).

If we fail to acknowledge the lineage of social software in terms of its past (e.g., e-mail), present (e.g., blogs, wikis) and future - then we ignore many of the lessons learned along the way and we introduce the chance that we will repeat past mistakes. For instance, much of the chatter around social networks reminds me of the KM holy grail of the late nineties. Vendor positioning of their software as social computing platforms reminds me of the over-hyped marketing of groupware and portals.

Some key points to ponder - or perhaps consider them as "Shirkyisms"...

1.  "I was looking for something that gathered together all uses of software that supported interacting groups, even if the interaction was offline"

2. "Every time social software improves, it is followed by changes in the way groups work and socialize."

3. "One consistently surprising aspect of social software is that it is impossible to predict in advance all of the social dynamics it will create."

Additional Background:

Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Let me offer a definition of social software, because it's a term that's still fairly amorphous. My definition is fairly simple: It's software that supports group interaction. I also want to emphasize, although that's a fairly simple definition, how radical that pattern is. The Internet supports lots of communications patterns, principally point-to-point and two-way, one-to-many outbound, and many-to-many two-way.

Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported point-to-point two-way. We had telephones, we had the telegraph. We were familiar with technological mediation of those kinds of conversations. Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported one-way outbound. I could put something on television or the radio, I could publish a newspaper. We had the printing press. So although the Internet does good things for those patterns, they're patterns we knew from before.

Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table. There was no technological mediation for group conversations. The closest we got was the conference call, which never really worked right -- "Hello? Do I push this button now? Oh, shoot, I just hung up." It's not easy to set up a conference call, but it's very easy to email five of your friends and say "Hey, where are we going for pizza?" So ridiculously easy group forming is really news.

We've had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato BBS system, and we've only had 10 years or so of widespread availability, so we're just finding out what works. We're still learning how to make these kinds of things.

Now, software that supports group interaction is a fundamentally unsatisfying definition in many ways, because it doesn't point to a specific class of technology. If you look at email, it obviously supports social patterns, but it can also support a broadcast pattern. If I'm a spammer, I'm going to mail things out to a million people, but they're not going to be talking to one another, and I'm not going to be talking to them -- spam is email, but it isn't social. If I'm mailing you, and you're mailing me back, we're having point-to-point and two-way conversation, but not one that creates group dynamics.

Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Shirky: Social Software and the Politics of Groups

Social software, software that supports group communications, includes everything from the simple CC: line in email to vast 3D game worlds like EverQuest, and it can be as undirected as a chat room, or as task-oriented as a wiki (a collaborative workspace). Because there are so many patterns of group interaction, social software is a much larger category than things like groupware or online communities -- though it includes those things, not all group communication is business-focused or communal. One of the few commonalities in this big category is that social software is unique to the internet in a way that software for broadcast or personal communications are not.

Prior to the Web, we had hundreds of years of experience with broadcast media, from printing presses to radio and TV. Prior to email, we had hundreds of years experience with personal media -- the telegraph, the telephone. But outside the internet, we had almost nothing that supported conversation among many people at once. Conference calling was the best it got -- cumbersome, expensive, real-time only, and useless for large groups. The social tools of the internet, lightweight though most of them are, have a kind of fluidity and ease of use that the conference call never attained: compare the effortlessness of CC:ing half a dozen friend to decide on a movie, versus trying to set up a conference call to accomplish the same task.

The radical change was de-coupling groups in space and time. To get a conversation going around a conference table or campfire, you need to gather everyone in the same place at the same moment. By undoing those restrictions, the internet has ushered in a host of new social patterns, from the mailing list to the chat room to the weblog.

The thing that makes social software behave differently than other communications tools is that groups are entities in their own right. A group of people interacting with one another will exhibit behaviors that cannot be predicted by examining the individuals in isolation, peculiarly social effects like flaming and trolling or concerns about trust and reputation. This means that designing software for group-as-user is a problem that can't be attacked in the same way as designing a word processor or a graphics tool.

Our centuries of experience with printing presses and telegraphs have not prepared us for the design problems we face here. We have had real social software for less than forty years (dated from the Plato system), with less than a decade of general availability. We are still learning how to build and use the software-defined conference tables and campfires we're gathering around.

Shirky: Social Software and the Politics of Groups

Tracing the Evolution of Social Software

It isn't until late 2002 that the term 'social software' came into more common usage, probably due to the efforts of Clay Shirky who organized a "Social Software Summit" in November of 2002. He recalls his first usage of the term to be from approximately April of 2002.

I asked Clay if it was the loss of meaning in the terms 'groupware' that made him choose the term 'social software', and he replied:

"I was looking for something that gathered together all uses of software that supported interacting groups, even if the interaction was offline, e.g. Meetup, nTag, etc. Groupware was the obvious choice, but had become horribly polluted by enterprise groupware work."

I asked him why he didn't use the term 'collaborative software' and he commented:

"...because that seems a sub-set of groupware, leaving out other kinds of group processes such as discussion, mutual advice or favors, and play.

The broader issue is that there was no word or phrase that grouped the CSCW and online community currents together without also including a lot of non-group oriented stuff. CMC (Computer-Mediated Communication) for example, includes broadcast outlets like C|Net, two-person email exchanges, and spam -- much too broad. There was also no word or phrase that called attention to the explosion of interesting software for group activities that fell outside online communities and CSCW, things like Bass-Station (which is for offline community) or "Uncle Roy is All Around You" (which is computer-supported collaborative play.)"

Life With Alacrity: Tracing the Evolution of Social Software

Social Software

Near the end of 2002, the term "social software" was gaining ground due mostly to the efforts of ClayShirky, the [iSociety] project, and the [The O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2003]. Shirky held a widely publicized "Social Software Summit", which can be best summarized by its [announcement]:

"Every time social software improves, it is followed by changes in the way groups work and socialize. One consistently surprising aspect of social software is that it is impossible to predict in advance all of the social dynamics it will create. Recognizing this, the Social Software Summit seeks to bring together a small group of practitioners and theorists (~25) to share experiences in writing social software or thinking about its effects."

Meatball Wiki: SocialSoftware

Enterprise 2.0, Social Networks And Social Media

Dennis pinged me yesterday on his post. I've included some excerpts here but you should follow the citation link to read the entire article which has additional insights and references. Dennis also points to one of my recent posts on the topic. To me, social software is in the tool domain. Social media is in the user experience domain. Social media is delivered via tools (social software).  And both fall under the general umbrella of social computing. We take something like social software, mix in the organizational/culture factors and we have "Enterprise 2.0" (this is a quick over-simplification). Social networking is somewhat of a hybrid - there are tools, and a user experience aspect can exist (especially around a social network site ala Facebook) but there are tremendous relationship dynamics that, as Dennis points out, can differentiate it from both social media and social software - but still under the broader field of social computing.

I do agree with Dennis that I rarely hear the term social media applied internally. I'm really not sure why - since in my definition - social media is about the user experience. But I think it's one way people try to draw lines in their minds to differentiate internal efforts from external initiatives that involve brand and other marketplace factors.

Social networks clearly apply to organizations however. I feel quite strongly on this point. Yes, they are tremendously over-hyped and yes, we are making many of the same mistakes associated with "knowledge management mania" of the late nineties and the "groupware craze" of the late eighties / early nineties. The holy grail pursuit of enterprise portals also comes to mind.

But social networks have existed for centuries and it is important that business and IT strategists understand the nature of such relationships and participation models. While power relationships are a valid point to call out, I disagree with how Dennis frames that particular aspect as significantly more important than other dynamics that influence relationships, formal/informal structure, culture and so on. But that's fine - we can agree-to-disagree. I do agree on the "irrational exuberance" being touted by different evangelists regarding social-anything.

What we need to do is not lead the discussion or the solution by talking about social networks or social anything in most cases. We need to talk about the solutions in terms that business and normal people understand.

• Business decision makers and other strategists need to hang their hat on an argument that demonstrates value to the institution. That's their role. Avoiding this requirement leads to institutional forces fighting back. Example: I talked to a company where middle management pushed back on the use of E2.0 tools because their roles became disintermediated. The public/transparent collection of information on blogs, wikis - coupled with RSS, etc - really cut into their perceived value as the "messenger" so they started asking people to go back to e-mail sent to those middle managers so they could summarize the information and bring it up the chain.
• Normal people need to know why they should care, why should they be aware of such applications or tools, why they should change their attitude and behavior to become engaged, to participate and contribute (this angle is very centric to the person on the edge and not a stakeholder in the institution per se).

If we can talk about how a social application improves how utilization management nurses in urban and rural areas can better share information to improve their own activities, streamline workflow and improve relationships with external providers (doctors, hospitals) - and it just happens to be a social network / community platform that plays a key role - then wow, that's great. Sign me up. But don't tell lead with the social network academic argument or the consumer metaphor of Facebook. Social technologies augment business activities so express the solution in those terms - do not "do social media for the sake of social media" or "social networks for the sake of social networks".

Facebook is attractive as a reference model to IT organizations because the site implements concepts that leverage many of the experiences organizations have gained over the years with collaboration platforms. Facebook supports its own messaging system, allows posting of documents, allows for group discussion forums, and displays a user interface reminiscent of enterprise portals (including how the platform integrates with application plug-ins – conceptually similar to portlets). However, Facebook also implements social networking concepts that are new to the vast majority of organizations. Strategists unfamiliar with the field of social networks beyond its technology aspects are unlikely to realize critical aspects such as:

• how culture influences awareness of, and engagement in, social networks
• how social networks can be structured in a variety of ways with, and/or without, technology as a mediation focus point
• how relationship dynamics influence participation (e.g., politics and various power plays)

Strategists unfamiliar with the inter-disciplinary research field of social networks (e.g., sociology, anthropology, mathematics) and focus primarily on tooling aspects are unlikely to realize the criticality of non-technology factors.

Facebook is one example of a usage model to help structure participation within a social network, and one reference point to leverage as a technical blueprint, but it is not the only framework possible.

The poverty of enterprise 2.0 and social media

Most CXO’s I know, who represent a cross-section of businesses both large and small, have concerns other than E2.0 and social media. Now that the consumer facing social media style stories are emerging, CXO’s are starting to pay attention to what this might mean for sales and marketing effectiveness. That’s a good thing. But the moment that equation is turned inward, the mood goes dark.

CXO’s instinctively know that internal collaboration, whether through rudimentary technologies like blogs and wikis hold significant efficiency promise. They know the technology is relatively inexpensive compared to other types of enterprise technology and that implementation can be rapid. They also get that in the longer term, these technologies could hold incredible promise for business effectiveness across their entire value chain lies in releasing huge amounts of resource back into the business. None of that is disputed. What is disputed are two things, social media and social networking as applied internally. Why?

...

In the context of ’social’ anything, these are incredibly important concepts because what we’re really talking about are power relationships. In any business, power relationships are what provide the hidden glue that makes organizations develop hierarchies and structures. We see this reflected in almost every major form of software you care to examine. From process workflows that mange order to cash, through problem resolution in the call center and out to procurement. We have baked those relationships into the structure and organization of everything we see as providing the means of operating successful businesses. Then all of a sudden, business leaders are asked to forget everything they know, accept that structures can and will be subverted but that it will all be OK because people will naturally want to collaborate to get things done. This is a fundamentally incorrect assumption.

...

While the benefits of collaboration may be blindingly obvious and the path laid out on a platter, it is only by first understanding the absolute requirement for top down, wholesale DNA change that you stand a hope in hell of making these technologies work within the enterprise. How might this be encouraged?

...

What I will say is this. All the internal marketing efforts currently being expended will not do it. Neither will the application of liberal doses of FUD. Don’t wait upon the next generation because they won’t do it for you, despite what some pundits might think. You can absolutely forget the latest shiny new object coming out of the fertile imaginations of most (not all) Silicon Valley development shops. Leave that to the consumer obsessed. Which includes Twitter; as currently iterated and (probably) Facebook.

The poverty of enterprise 2.0 and social media | Irregular Enterprise | ZDNet.com

Another Example Of Facebook Integration:

Community is where the people are:

Awareness uses the Awareness Facebook Application Framework to create branded Facebook applications customized for its customers, giving them a new way to engage with their online community members by extending the reach of their communities directly into Facebook and leveraging Facebook's viral promotion features. The Port Charlotte Voice, a New York Times Regional newspaper, is the first customer to implement the Awareness Facebook Application Framework, allowing the newspaper to present a variety of headlines, user-generated content and more from its online Awareness-powered social media community directly into Facebook.

The Awareness Facebook Application Framework is included as part of the Awareness Enterprise Social Media platform and leverages all of the enterprise social media benefits in an existing Awareness-powered community. The application also respects any security or permissioning restrictions built into the community, so it can be used for private and closed communities as well as public and open ones. The application, which will appear in the Facebook directory when registered with Facebook, is installable by any Facebook user and can be shared using standard Facebook application sharing functionality.

http://www.awarenessnetworks.com/news/press-releases/awareness/041508.asp

Merger + Social Computing = Should I Pay Attention To BEA?

The answer is yes in the long run but no in the short run.

There is a dual reality here: Oracle will eventually acquire several credible social computing tools (Reality #1 - some of BEA's stuff, especially Pathways, is really good). However, it is not clear at all, how those social computing technologies will be positioned, integrated and/or discarded (Reality #2 - a lack of transparency creates uncertainty which is a legitimate customer concern to postpone any buy decision or direction on continued deployment). 

These two news items, announced merely four days apart (see below), should be a stark reminder. Until the dust settles, I would rate any move to adopt BEA's social computing tools as high risk until product road maps are aligned with Oracle's social computing directions. Ditto on the collaboration and content fronts. Business and IT strategists need to be informed as to what components within the BEA platform survive vs. their Oracle counterparts. This includes knowing what tools will be retired and how similar products will converge over time (or not - perhaps some will remain separate but equal (another duality which might be hard to rationalize but BEA has two portals so it's been tried before).   

If BEA persuades me otherwise - I'll post my updated thoughts.

BEA Announces Stockholder Approval of Merger with Oracle Corporation

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Apr. 4, 2008 – BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS), a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, today announced that at a special meeting of stockholders held on April 4, 2008, its stockholders adopted the Agreement and Plan of Merger, dated January 16, 2008, among BEA, Oracle Corporation and Bronco Acquisition Corporation, pursuant to which BEA will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oracle.  Approximately 99.9% of the shares of BEA common stock entitled to vote and present at the special meeting were voted to adopt the Agreement and Plan of Merger, constituting approximately 68.6% of the outstanding shares of BEA common stock.

BEA Systems Releases Platform for Enterprise Social Computing

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 8, 2008 --The new release of BEA AquaLogic® Interaction 6.5 delivers the industry’s first full-fledged social computing platform, with a variety of new features that can help users harness the implicit interactions of day-to-day business – project updates, new documents, process steps, key relationships, expertise, data changes in underlying systems - that are often shared inefficiently through e-mail. The release also introduces improved usability designed to empower knowledge workers to more easily share community information, find specific expertise and communicate more flexibly, by providing tools that are user-driven and community-centric, and by immersing users in a highly flexible collaborative experience bolstered by desktop, RSS and Web-based tools.

New features include:

• Social profile pages: energized end-user profile pages, with new features that are designed to allow users to communicate their status and enable social networking and activity-sharing;
• ActivityService™ and new extensibility points for harvesting user interactions: a new REST-based API designed to allow systems to publish activity updates to a centralized service that can render those updates in end-user profile pages;
• Comprehensive RSS production and consumption: a comprehensive notification and subscription service that supports RSS generation to track new activity on common objects, as well as immediate or summary email updates. Additionally, the release features an RSS crawler, to import content into the search index and knowledge management framework via RSS;
• Additional usability improvements: these include human readable URLs, one-click page creation and edit menus, simplified wizard menus and more;
• Infrastructure improvements: these include support for .Net Framework 2.0 and IBM DB2

BEA Systems Releases Platform for Enterprise Social Computing

AIIM Completes Enterprise 2.0 Study

Worthwhile webcast to listen (replay) and set of PDF slides available (see below). My analysis of the effort based on the webcast and slides follow below.

Enterprise 2.0 – What’s the Real Story?

While many corporate executives believe Enterprise 2.0 will have a major impact on business, few understand exactly what it is or how to manage it. Social computing? emergent technologies? Blogs? Wikis? Social Networks? Mashups? RSS? Do these technologies amount to anything? Is your organization ahead or behind the curve with adoption and understanding of Enterprise 2.0?

Presentation Materials:
REPLAY Webcast
View presentation slides (PDF format)

Commentary:

1. The good news: the presentation (link below) has some very useful data points (some of which conflict, which shows some market confusion) on questions submitted to survey participants.
2. There is really no need for "yet another definition" of what Enterprise 2.0 means (Slide 6). I will continue to recommend that people leverage the original definition offered by Professor Andrew McAfee from Harvard Business School.
   • Here's AIIM's definition: "A system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise".
   • Here's McAfee's: "Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.”
3. The only caveat that I have added to McAfee's phrasing when I discuss E2.0 with clients or people in general is to phrase E2.0 as "the emergent use of social software platforms" vs. "use of emergent software platforms" which I believe preserves Mr. McAfee's original intent.
   • The gap in the definition of E2.0 remains "social software" - and that definition is best served by leveraging a definition from Clay Shirky who defines social software as "software designed for group interaction". That is incredibly helpful because it provides for a conversation about social software that preserves the lineage of information sharing, communication and collaboration tools.
   • Enterprise 2.0 builds on the Web 2.0 concept as defined by Tim O'Reilly who also describes an "architecture of participation" to describe systems that are designed for user contribution (very synergistic with McAfee's work). O'Reilly puts Web 2.0 in the context of "Web as platform", centralization of data ("data is the next Intel inside"), and collective intelligence (alluded to in the AIIM definition). The concept of platform is important and should not be discarded - especially given Marc Andresson's insightful definition of what constitutes a "platform" which puts the term in the context of a something that participates with "systems". 
4. We (as an industry) are still remiss in associating Enterprise 2.0 as a specific set of tools. That clouds the role of culture and other organizational dynamics which are so influential on "emergence". What we also need is to a better job at is defining the use case scenarios and usage models around information sharing, communication and collaboration tools that make something "E2.0" (basically, adding legs under McAffee's and Shirky's definitions).   
5. Listening to the webcast replay, I have a bad deja vu feeling (KM in the nineties). When you ask whether Enterprise 2.0 is important to your business strategy you are asking the wrong question. E2.0 augments your business and organizational initiatives - E2.0 is not an end in-and-of-itself. This was the false siren call of KM which lead to so many overblown expectations and so many project failures. It is no wonder that the term does not come up very often (Slide 20). Like other terms that are somewhat espoused by technologists, there's no business context. If you talked about E2.0 in business terms such as how such a program augments strategic talent initiatives, address shifting workforce demographics, assist with innovation efforts, reduce exception handling or other coordination costs, etc. you are far ahead of the game.
6. The role of culture is spot on. Enterprise 2.0 is not about "all collaboration", "all types of information sharing" or "all types of communication". The context of E2.0 is anchored around "emergence". Addressing organizational dynamics, which includes culture, is important to fully leverage and sustain the goals associated with E2.0. I discuss notions between different types of participation - that which is "directed" vs. what is "volunteered" in this post, "Why Is Social Software So Important?". Sometimes culture is they critical barrier, sometimes it is not - especially when participation and user contributions are "conscripted" (a term used by David Snowden in a KM context).

You can use tools associated with E2.0 in very beneficial ways - but sometimes a wiki is just a wiki, a blog is just a blog. Defacto use of the tool does not qualify as being "Enterprise 2.0". At times, a person's role, workflow rules and other functional duties require people to share information, communicate and collaborate with each other. Within such a context, a certain degree of interaction will occur, even if the organization's culture is deemed to be "unhealthy" (however you wish to define that symptom).

But even within a scenario where participation and contributions are directed - there are often opportunities for emergence - there is no exclusivity here between the more structured work that occurs within an organization and the informal interactions that E2.0 emphasizes.

Enterprise 2.0 – What’s the Real Story?

Enterprise 2.0: Culture Required?

The post below is worth reading. The issue of (in this case, successful use of wikis) culture is critically important when forming, nurturing and sustaining collaboration strategies. A key point is to understand the influence of "directed" collaboration versus "volunteered" collaboration. If we go back to the definition of Enterprise 2.0, one concept that anchors the meme is the notion of "emergence". Enterprise 2.0, by its very definition, does not address all types of collaboration. If I use a wiki within a business process where people are directed by role, workflow and functional needs of the procedure - that's not all that emergent at all - in fact, it's not really a valid Enterprise 2.0 use case scenario. But it is indeed use of a wiki for collaboration and it can thrive without the culture issues that this post correctly points out. However, it the wiki was open and allowed participation from others in the organization even though their role, workflow or functional duties did not direct them to interact with that wiki group - well, now we have crossed over into the emergence aspects of Enterprise 2.0 - and, we're back to "the culture thing". So you can see how tools, context and whether the interaction pattern is directed or volunteered all collide with each other. So some key points:

1. Not all collaboration is Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 addresses a key facet of collaboration that involves social software and "emergence".

2. Tools are tools. Tools in-and-of-themselves do not signal an Enterprise 2.0 solution.

3. You can be very successful in use tools associated with E2.0 (blogs, wikis, tag and social bookmarks, etc) even in situations where culture is "unhealthy" - and when participation is more or less "directed" by role, workflow, and functional duties.

4. To enable higher levels of participation and influence people to volunteer their contributions, then culture issues do indeed come to the forefront - you have entered the "E2.0 Zone" which involves not just tools, but addressing culture and other types of organizational dynamics. 

5. If you think just tossing tools out there makes you "Enterprise 2.0" - that view is dead wrong. More on this perspective can be found in an earlier post, "Why Is Social Software So Important" which I recommend reading.

Transparent Office: Culture is a destination not a starting point

I was just checking out the results of the recent AIIM Survey on Enterprise 2.0. (My company, Socialtext, was one of the underwriters.) There's a lot of great material there about how managers perceive Enterprise 2.0. I was particularly struck by how prominently culture appears as a theme in the responses. There is a view out there that an organization needs to have a "culture of collaboration" culture in order to successfully employ wikis and other Enterprise 2.0 tools.

That view is dead wrong. I've seen wikis thrive in un-collaborative cultures. I've seen wikis fail in collaborative cultures. I've seen wikis thrive in an organization alongside failing wikis in the same organization.

Transparent Office: Culture is a destination not a starting point

Microsoft Continues To Fill SharePoint Social Gaps

This is a really intriguing announcement with important implications. If you take the Atlassian deal which integrates a leading wiki solution into SharePoint, then take the alliance with NewsGator (i.e., Social Sites) to integrate its feed syndication platform with SharePoint, and then add in Telligent's Community Server for improved blogs and social networks - you end up with reasonably complete coverage of the expected capabilities in a social computing platform (albeit based on "partners to the rescue").

The good news: People have at least one partner option in many of the social software categories to deliver solution which leverage a core SharePoint platform investment.

The bad news: For Microsoft, I think this really does rip the cover off the notion that SharePoint's out-of-the-box social software features are all that good - people can pretty much ignore them and proceed right to the partner gallery. This approach solves a huge tactical challenge for Microsoft but should leave people wondering how Microsoft could have missed the boat so poorly and is essentially asking the market for a "mulligan" with partners taking the new shot. These deals continue to be partnerships Microsoft seemingly directs. I still would like to see more of a viral approach where Microsoft publishes how to swap-out its blog or wiki engine etc. In general, I prefer customers to be able to make their own selection from multiple options rather than have the core vendor offer one lucky vendor in each category.

The ugly news: In terms of market perception, IBM is falling behind on execution (or so it seems to me). I continue to hear concerns regarding how expensive Connections is just to get the Profiles piece for instance. I also am still waiting to see more growth in terms of partner alliances. Finally, some people have told me that they are looking for more of a Connections "stack" that does not require them to navigate through the rest of the IBM portfolio (especially those that are looking at Lotus software for the first time - perhaps not wanting to expand dependencies on SharePoint).

Microsoft goes in and says "whatever your problem is, SharePoint fixes it". IBM goes in and makes it complicated by having to tutor people on its portfolio (e.g., Connections, Quickr, etc). Even though I believe IBM is being more forthright (many business situations are not magically solved by a single product), they are getting out-executed when it comes to social computing even though the competitive product (SharePoint) is not a complete framework.   

Bringing the value of social networking to SharePoint

... Providing a scalable and integrated application your organization can depend upon, these two .NET platforms enhance collaboration and workflow. By positioning Community Server next to your existing SharePoint application, you unlock several key integration points:

• Fully Integrated Experience Community Server is fully integrated into SharePoint through single sign-on and custom SharePoint WebParts along with deep support for SharePoint management of these new capabilities.
• Enterprise Grade Blogging Utilizing Community Server’s Enterprise grade blogging product users of SharePoint can interact with Community Server blog content, allowing the user to view blog content in SharePoint and read, comment on, and post content. Community Server’s built in support for rich media, moderation tools, permissions, and more bring SharePoint blogging to a whole new level.
• Feature Rich Forums SharePoint users will benefit from the incredibly rich Community Server Web 2.0 message boards with full support for read, reply, and posting all within SharePoint. To unlock the full features of the forums, users can still go directly into their Community Server forums.
• Social Streams Community Server’s new Social Streams feature is additionally available in SharePoint. Similar to Facebook style user activity you will be able to browse a chronological list of updates from what your friends are doing both within SharePoint and Community Server.
• Rich, detailed Reporting Utilizing the new Harvest® Reporting Server suite you can now extract a tremendous amount of rich detail about how your users are using Community Server’s social networking and collaboration functionality.

Announcements

Social Software, IT Risk and Millennials

One of the topics not discussed enough is how to manage risk factors associated with social applications that encourage open sharing, transparency, etc. Under certain situations, the need for organizations to comply with regulatory controls, audit demands and privacy constraints will result in security/risk programs to become a core component within any social media strategy (both internally and externally). That does not mean that security and risk factors trump goals related to social applications - but it does mean that decision makers need to prioritize such issues upstream and work diligently on the behavioral aspects as outlined below:

Among the highlights of the study:

• 66 percent of Millennials regularly access social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace at work, vs.13 percent of other workers.
• 75 percent of Millennials access Webmail at work vs. 54 percent of others.
• 46 percent of millennials use IM at work vs. 22 percent of others.
• Less than half (45 percent) of Millennials stick to company-issued devices or software as opposed to nearly 70 percent of other workers. And 69 percent of Millennials will use whatever application/device/technology they want regardless of source or corporate IT policies (only 31 percent of others).
• Three times as many millennials have downloaded software at work for personal use (75 percent vs. 25 percent).
• Millennials regularly store corporate data on personal devices - far more than others. Common channels are personal PCs (39 percent vs. 24 percent), USB drives (38 vs. 14), personal hard drives (20 vs. 13), and smart phones (13 vs. 6).

Findings of this nature highlight the imperative that organizations face in harmonizing the workstyles of their younger workers with the legitimate security, governance and compliance issues raised by the use of consumer-grade technologies in the enterprise.

Emphasis Added : New Study on IT Risk and Millennials

Social Software In The Enterprise

Picking up on the continued exchange of perspectives on large platforms vs. more specialized solutions:

...One theme that comes up time and time again when I talk to business and IT decision makers can be summarized as "technology stewardship". IBM and Microsoft represent a large piece of the social software portfolio within large enterprises. The vendor that does the better job of building out the partner ecosystem will win over the long run. The core platform needs to be modular, loosely coupled, open APIs (e.g., REST), etc. Marc Andreessen in a 9/7/2007 post is a good point of reference. The vendor steward needs to allow their modules to be swapped out - for the data to be accessible, etc.

...

There's no clear right or wrong decision. As I pointed out in these posts - people need to define the decision criteria and make these investments in the context of a reference architecture. This problem is age-old: large vendor is already in-house - market disruption occurs - new vendors deliver faster - older vendors take longer and delivers initial solution that is not that great - new vendors get some market share - older vendors finally respond with "full force" and smaller vendors either are acquired, fail or a few actually break out by differentiating themselves, focusing on verticals or extending the larger platform in some way (from competitor to partner).

Global Neighbourhoods: Dennis Howlett & the end of Software