IBM held a media event this morning in Cambridge, MA on the future of social networks. The agenda included some roundtable and panel discussions as well as some demonstrations of products/services and technologies coming out of their research labs. Below are some key take-aways that I jotted down as various speakers presented and interacted on a wide range of topics (e.g., blogs, wikis, shared bookmarks, search, activity management):
Irving Wladawsky-Berger (VP Technical Strategy & Innovation) opened the session and used the phrase “Social Network Platform” (SNP) as a collective term applied to the various technologies emerging under the guise of Web 2.0 that will help transform the way people work. He also included the analytical aspects of these tools that organizations will need in order to understand the influence of SNP’s on organizational behavior. He also connected knowledge management to SNP and collaboration (“collaborative knowledge” being what KM was always about).
I like the term SNP (other terms used to-date in the market include social software, social media, social computing). The metaphor of social interaction, connections, relationships and such has an inherent net-centric affinity and the notion of a platform (at least logically) that has an cohesive architecture for aggregating these types of services appeals to those with an infrastructure perspective.
As I was sitting there it was apparent that a key critical issue concerning adoption is identifying the value of SNP. Mike Rhodin (General Manager, Workplace, Portal and Collaboration) touched on this as well. Strategists need to address why business decision makers and users should care about SNP and why IT groups should look at SNP when many are looking to consolidate infrastructure and reduce complexity. In some ways, the evolution towards SNP reflects maturation of the industry from data to information to process and now, to social networks.
There is also the “edge vs. core” debate here as well. The issue is not so much edge versus core but edge and core and understanding what bridging methods and practices you need to employ to do this in a way that fits enterprise needs from an organizational (social), business (process) and IT (infrastructure) perspective. SNP is net-centric but it “lights up” on the edge.
Irene Grief (IBM Fellow & Director, Collaborative User Experience) brought out a good point regarding Web 2.0 in that we need to understand why some things take off and some things do not when injected SNP into certain groups, how do you identify the right community … can you look at pre and post social interaction patterns and map such patterns against best practices within other organizations. (Note: I had a flashback to the beginnings of e-mail and the writings from industry experts on the change in organizational structure as a result of enterprise-wide e-mail. E-Mail was the pathfinder to this more recent emergence of SNP technologies.)
Another aspect of SNP is the use of people as filters. SNP enables you to broaden what someone is able to filter on their own via content-related artifacts by relying on various networks of people that are credible (e.g., subject matter expert), trusted (not necessarily an expert but someone with whom I have a reciprocal relationship) or merely a association with (in the vein of “strength of weak ties”) to help alleviate signal/noise issues and help with “attention management”.
Marc Andrews (Strategy & Bunsiness Development, Information Integration) talked about the external risk/impact of SNP to organizations which tied to IBM’s Omnifind Public Image Marketing announcement. In terms of external blogging there are some characteristics which make this a little different that earlier technologies (e.g., Compuserve forums, news groups, etc.) – barrier to entry are lower, barriers to visibility are lower and barriers regarding “time to critical mass” are lower – so companies do indeed have to sense/respond much faster than ever before.
Another interesting demo centered on “Application Wikis” and the use of Wikis (or Applikis as nicknamed by IBM) as a rapid development option. QEDwiki will eventually be on AlphaWorks as software and potentially be there as service as well. David Sink (IBM Software Group) made an interesting comment when he referred to these as “situational applications” … to me, that refers to an application that emerges through collaborative interaction, it may not exist before or even afterwards but it is a composite of components that are recombinant (which ties to the underlying Web 2.0 theme during the morning).
Martin Wattenberg (IBM Software Group) led a demo on Jamalyzer – analytics for IBM’s Jam platform which is a collaborative tool used to facilitate large group interaction and feedback. The value here is akin to finding the needle in the haystack. Large groups over time generate an inordinate amount of information, mining that “data” to visually represent and cluster related pieces of interesting information helps deliver insight that otherwise might be lost.
Perhaps my favorite prototypes were the Dogear and Fringe demos (David Millen & Joel Farrell, IBM Research). Dogear is a social bookmarking service (e.g., RSS, Atom, subscription to tags or people) and Fringe is a profiling capability that enhances information typically put into people finders/directories and appears more effective than expertise automation tools. Irene talked about the inter-relationships between tagging and folksonomies. Irene pointed out that behind-the-firewall tagging differs in important ways from services such as del.icio.us in that people have shared referents, organizational structures, projects, confidentiality, authenticated people (identity), and, in IBM’s case, a technically adept community. What I liked about this demo and discussion was the use of shared bookmarks as signposts to discover communities (they can act as catalyst for community formation). Also, shared bookmarks can help the precision and relevancy of search queries. Fringe leverages this type of capability to build out broader contextual insight of people and networks in which they are involved with.
Finally, Dan Gruen demonstrated a Web Activity Management tool that exemplifies some of IBM’s research into Unified Activity Management. Essentially this tool helps aggregate interactions that occur across multiple collaborative tools) into something that is better structured, persistent and organized.
So all-in-all a morning well-spent. I think the term Web 2.0 was used a bit much, that might be my only critique of the session. But we are in the midst of a hype wave around Web 2.0 so it's bound to happen... the final take-away though is that IBM has a lot of intellectual investment in its Social Networking Platform. It will be interesting to assess the progress of these innovative prototypes as they evolve into products and services.
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