Streaming, lifestreams, News Feeds, they have all felt just a little bit revolutionary.
Facebook was one of the first applications that produced such a wide variety of information, both in volume and in terms of relevancy, that their introduction of the News Feed felt like the one thing they needed to make a leap ahead of the competition. I believe the News Feed saved Facebook.
Any time enterprise software needs to deal with large amounts of display data, the typical paradigm that we turn to is the Dashboard. A set of data display and input widgets that, bundled together, can provide a view of a large amount of data.
The problem with dashboards, full of widgets and throbbing with data, are that while they may offer an up-to-the-second view of their target data set, they do not offer a sense of change. Who or what created new data? Why? Can I communicate with them?
We need to experiment with streams and how and when they should replace dashboard components. Last summer we did an experiment with a US Aerospace company and when the dust settled, we had created something that looked a lot like this. We did, however, make some mistakes. We bundled all social interactions together and displayed those in the stream, but we did not integrate information about data set activity. That would be a powerful combination.
Will LifeStreams replace the dashboard? Will Streams just be widgets? Are there current Business Intelligence tools that integrate streaming? I want to know.
Shel just published an interview he did with me about using Social Software inside the enterprise.
For all the shit he has taken lately, I have to say that Shel is a great interviewer who did his homework first and certainly made me feel comfortable and in control through the process. None of the usual stuff where the reporter is just fishing for a particular angle.
Go read it if you dare, it was fun to do some reflecting on the past and thinking about the future again.
This is a repost, for posterity, so I don’t lose it.
Break The Silence, August 2003
The fact is that silence is strangling many organizations today. Employees and management are encouraged to speak out at only the most opportune time, after the appropriate lobbying has been done and they have their ducks in a row. This cultural quirk is often good for everyone as the person bringing the idea forward can avoid the embarrassment of having an idea “shot down” in a meeting or formal setting, and anyone above them on the hierarchy can feel as though they have already contributed to the idea, even if only by having known of it before it was presented.
“Consider what happened to one off-site meeting of top management at a web-based education company. Concerned about the company’s vision, the managers met to share and discuss different perspectives. But one speaker after another just echoed what the previous speaker had said. When any manager did dare to dissent, a colleague would quickly dismiss his idea. Having effectively tabled every discussion in which disagreement surfaced, the management team crowed about the level of “consensus” they had achieved. One by one they celebrated their achievements.” – HBR/May 2003
What is wrong with this picture? Even at an even peer level, members of an organization will keep remarkably silent in order to avoid confrontation. Often we will find one or two dissenters in a meeting, but a large proportion of attendees will keep silent.
Not only do we feel uncomfortable with communication on a peer level, but these problems are even more powerful between two levels of an organizational hierarchy. Consider how easy it is for a boss to send a “be quiet” signal to a subordinate. With minimal body language, a manager may not even realize what he/she is doing – but the signal is quite clear to the receiver, and the reverse is true as well. A boss will often be uncomfortable expressing new, but untested, ideas to a subordinate.
Where does this disconnect come from?
The exchange of ideas in many present day organizations is quite dysfunctional. The mere act of sharing an idea between levels on the hierarchy is akin to a direct command, and sharing ideas on the peer level will often result in complete silence around the table. We develop “spirals of silence” in which we create norms, procedures and ideologies all centered around having a gentlemanly silence.
The disconnect between members of an organization comes from the desire to avoid conflict and to accept, not affect, change only when needed.
What are the costs of organizational silence and disconnect?
The costs are very real. Resentment can grow and false social economies will foster a low status quo. When an organization needs to grow, or shift itself in some direction, it becomes unable to do so in any real way and change comes in very superficial manifestations. We begin to try to solve problems by altering rather than creating, and by keeping some old idea rather than tossing it. We are still able to accomplish things for ourselves as we can thrive on being agreeable within our hierarchies, but organizationally we are stalled and unable to affect change. Is there a solution?
How can we foster cultural change and open new lines of discourse?
An example from a Harvard Business Review article “Is silence killing your company?”
“Harry was a battalion commander, whose unit of more than 500 soldiers had just been miserably defeated in a mock battle . . . At first no one said a word. Then Nick, a very junior scout who was responsible for detecting and alerting the battalion to the enemy’s movements said “No, Sir, it wasn’t your fault. I fell asleep on duty.” Harry was shocked. But rather than focus on Nick’s failure, great as it was, Harry immediately redirected the unit’s attention to uncovering the underlying problem – the exhaustion the men were suffering.”
By avoiding putting the focus of the discussion on the person who spoke up, and concentrating on solving the problem at hand, Harry has rejected the norms of a military (organizational) model of communication. Not only has a meaningful discourse taken place, but the process was open and without that openness, Harry would never have known the true problems behind the failure. Had Nick not spoken up, Harry would have been forced to find the problems in other places and no useful change would take place.
A change in the prevailing culture of an established organization cannot come from the very top-down approach that is being reevaluated. It must come from people, like Harry in our previous story, who will lead by example. Facilitators and early adopters are key to the success of personal publishing in your organization. By bringing key figures into the picture, such as Presidents, Vice Presidents, and prominent people within departments, on board early on, the real need for openness and communication will be understood by the rest of the involved community.
Our new focus must move from the problem to the person. Much like Harry, we must empower people (or allow them to empower themselves) at all levels of our organization. By recognizing the power of discourse, we can encourage all levels within the hierarchy to speak freely. When “Breaking the ice” becomes a cultural norm, a powerful new way of working emerges. No longer are we stuck in a world where we can’t act creatively.
Creating a space where this kind of interaction can take place becomes a high priority. The problem with this type of change is that a Memorandum regarding a corporate cultural change would be the antithesis of itself. We must foster this change carefully, in a safe and comfortable space for everyone.
Why implement and invest in these new ideas?
Organizational communications are at the mercy of corporate culture. The more top-down our methods (newsletters, presidents reports, corporate newspapers) of communicating and directing, the more we formalize (by implication) our less structured interpersonal communications. Even the validity of our consensus building exercises comes in to question when we realize that our corporate culture may be fostering silence within the hierarchy.
Circles of 2.0
Susan and I have been working on articulating how the different worlds of “2.0″ fit together, or don’t, from the point of view of the enterprise.
All the credit really goes to Susan on this one.
We aren’t claiming that this is complete, or even correct as it is, but we think we are getting close. There is a lot of confusion out there about what is Enterprise 2.0, what is Social Media Marketing, what is Collaboration and what is just marketing.
I can’t tell you how often people mix a few together in a conversation, and next time I will have a better framework to explain some of the differences.
Why?
The biggest reason to break out the different components of 2.0 for business is that each has a distinct value that it delivers to the business.
When we mix these pieces, we obscure the value that we are seeking, and that makes it harder to measure results, define projects and to sell the idea in to the organization properly.
I will be writing a small series of posts exploring each aspect of the cornucopia over at the FastForwardBlog. Tune in.
I started hanging out on Identi.ca a few weeks ago. When they decided to go a little more public today I blogged about it at startupnorth. It is easy to miss the point here, this isn’t about being a twitter clone, and it isn’t about jumping to the flavor of the week.
Do I think the experience on Identi.ca is better than twitter right now? No. Do I think there are better features on Identi.ca? No. Do I think we need a better twitter? No
What we need is for Microblogging to shift from being a closed world owned by one company to an open, standards based medium that does not risk dying if a single entity dies, either technically or financially. In the same way that Blogging no longer means having a blog on blogger.com, but instead you can have a blog anywhere and still be part of an ecosystem based on standards, conventions and a scalable model.
Gone Fishin’
Figuring out what’s what in Enterprise software is tough, and it is definitely no easier when it comes to choosing Enterprise 2.0 tools.
So, a question comes up: What should you pay for, what should be cheap, and what should be free?
What should you pay for?
Support
This is a lot more critical than you realize. Having reliable and reasonably priced support is critical to making sure that you don’t disappoint your users.
Vendors used to traditionally “milk” their customers when it comes to support fees. This is changing as more and more minor support issues are handled by user communities. This is an example of Enterprise 2.0 eating its own dogfood. Vendors and consultants are then able to offer much more focused technical support without having to worry as much about the “It’s all in spanish?!?!” calls.
Data Backup and Accessibility
Most people would say that this should be free. I agree: It should be. But it is also something I am more than willing to pay for. Ideally, you can set up an external repository, such as an Amazon S3 account or a private file vault inside your own datacenter. If you are using a SaaS vendor, then they should automatically back up to this external repository in a non-proprietary XML format.
The reason that you should pay for this is so that you can ensure some sort of minimum service level. If something goes wrong, you don’t want to find out that all your backups are a week old.
User Experience
We all like to think that design comes cheap. And sure, you can go on Elance and get a cheap graphic designer who can make something reasonably pretty. The truth is however that because every organization is different, you are going to use software in different ways. You need to be willing to invest in the User Experience if you plan to keep your users happy.
Many pieces of new software look really nice, but when you start using them, the experience degrades quickly. Non-standard interfaces and poor design decisions are the primary culprits.
Future Innovation
This is a hard one to measure, and you can only really base you decision off past performance. Will this vendor or developer keep innovating and updating tools in the future? The reason you need to be willing to pay for this is that they need to put food on the table as well.
What should be cheap?
Hosting
I believe that hosting and provisioning costs should be broken out and separated from software cost. Current SaaS pricing models obscure the hosting cost and bundle application delivery in with the cost of the actual software. This is a mistake for a few reasons, but the primary one is that highly reliable vendors cannot easily differentiate their service level from a cheaper alternative. Everyone makes the claim “99.99999% uptime”, but it actually means very little.
If single vendors allowed multiple choices for delivery, then the customer could choose what their comfort zone is in terms of cost.
Integration
Integration is not a simple matter, but this is where your own IT folks need to play nice. You should expect them to know what the integration points are in your current infrastructure and they should be familiar with how to do that integration. Whether it is a link on a Sharepoint site, or access to an LDAP server, those options should not be difficult to execute on.
What should be free?
Design Patterns
There really is no such thing as Intellectual Property in the Enterprise 2.0 world. The difference between one vendor and another is not that they know more than the other, it is execution and design capability. Some vendors are incompetent when it comes to integrating features, designing workflows and in paying attention to the overall flow and “tightness” of the product. Do not let yourself be sold on “proprietary” anything.
Community Support
Low level support provided by other users and the vendor itself should always be free.
Deployment Speed
There should be no premium to pay to get tools deployed quickly. Vendors should be ready to deploy a base platform immediately which can start adding value to your organization.
What do you think
There is no way I covered everything here. What do you think? What should be free? What should be cheap? What should customers pay big money for?
My use of the term “Drag Queens” to describe some enterprise software companies was outed today by Vinnie.
What did I mean when I said “old enterprise companies dressing up like a pretty E2.0 babe”
Here is the story of Tim, an Enterprise 2.0 customer who is a little timid, but has decided go for it and party the night away.
Dress up baby, we’re going out tonight
Tim, a friend of Charlie, is out at a club, the lights are low, the music is loud and he has had a few drinks.
The place is packed, and it seems like it is all new faces. Interesting people, great dancers and they are all buying you drinks. There are even a few celebrities hanging around. He dances until 3am, and before the lights go up, Tim ducks out the door.
As he is walking home through the rain, Tim is feeling pretty good. He had a fun night of dancing, good friends and he now has a girl on his arm. She’s pretty and says all the right things.
This story ends with an IT Project Failure, to say the least.
Who is he/she anyway?
The story is much the same for customers in the Enterprise 2.0 world. Those customers who are actually making purchases right now are a little timid and not sure exactly what to expect, and usually it was a friend who took them out to the party.
When the lights go down and the drinks start flowing however, things aren’t as clear as they were before and it isn’t always obvious who you are getting in bed with.
The Drag Queens of Enterprise 2.0 are those old Enterprise software vendors who haven’t done anything to change their products, but instead they went out and have bought a nice dress and have put some eye shadow on their football player physiques.
I am going to be at the Enterprise 2.0 conference again this year. For the most part I will be just hanging out, chatting in the halls and looking for new and interesting things.
This year I will be moderating a panel on Enterprise 2.0 platforms. The panel is stacked with some fantastic people and we are going to be talking about something that is becoming more and more important: the decision to roll your own platform or go with a vendor (big or small) when deciding to deploy Enterprise 2.0 tools.
Social computing platforms integrate enterprise 2.0 capabilities into a single platform (blogs, wikis, RSS, etc.) Three basic choices are available to the SMB and large enterprise. The first is to choose an established large enterprise application vendor’s solution (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle); the second is to choose a startup’s offering (Jive/Clearspace, Thoughtfarmer) and the third is to “roll your own” or build a customized application that provides all the functionality you’re looking for based on components available from the open source community.
Each of the panelists has a vested interest and a point to make, so it is my job to keep them on topic and to give the audience as much value as possible.
Are there any particular points I should make? Any question would would like me to put to the panel? Leave a comment or drop me an email.
*cide
The following actions comprise a list of Cliché behavior in social networking. While these actions have, until reaching cliché status, made the actor appear to be somewhat introspective, deep and rather emotionally connected, they in fact represent a culmination of the symptoms of a stew of behavioral disorders and general lack of personal management skills.
The compulsion to add too many people as your friend early on in a new social network will be known from now on as Friendive-Compulsive disorder.
The list is as follows:
* Declaring email bankruptcy. First known cases: 2002. There has recently been a resurgence in the financial and startup blogging worlds. “I have 500 unread emails. I am declaring email bankruptcy”
* Maintaining an Orkut, Friendster or Vox account and publicly claiming to actually log-in to these services
* Deleting your Facebook account. This one is growing in popularity and is most certainly already cliché, but we are not near the end of this.
* Having both a Myspace page and a Linkedin account. I am sorry, opposite worlds. You may implode or spontaneously ignite due to the fact that on one of them you are living a lie.
* The latest is Twittercide. The act of publicly announcing the killing of your oversubscribed twitter account.
