Synergise IT

Collaboration is an interesting concept. When I spoke to some senior management people previously, they think that collaboration is where people come to a room and discuss and work on something. Well I must say that they are not wrong, but in this new online world, collaboration can also done via the internet.

Collaboration is more than working on one document between 5 different people where they can edit this document together and changes are saved real time. Collaboration is more than a document manager where people can check in and check out documents. Collaboration is more than a Wiki where articles can be edited by anyone who has access to it and watch the article grow overtime. There is so much more to collaboration and let me talk more what are the benefits of collaboration:

1) Collaboration is about providing people a safe platform like ClearSpace in which they can retrieve their working documents, look for resources that have expertise in certain areas, use it as the breeding ground for new ideas and workplace/business process improvements.

During strategy planning times, a team of, say 10 senior executives, is responsible for making all strategic and corporate decisions in a unidirectional manner. Wouldn’t there be more brain power and “eyes” if everyone is involved in this strategic process? Clearly with such a large increase in people participation, there must be some levels of control, however this can be done for sure.

2) Collaboration can also be conducted outside of your organisation in two distinct areas - customers and suppliers/vendors.

For your customers, an organisation can engage them to gain customer loyalty and also gain their insight feedback and collaboratively build products and services that customers would want. This not only provide insights of your current clients in great depth but you can use the same platform to reach out to non-customers to ask them why they are not using your products or services. Never underestimate the power of such insights.

For your suppliers and vendors, a collaborative platform would allow them to work with you as one entity. This can streamline communication with your vendors / suppliers to gain a better and clearer understanding of the progress of work - real time (if not almost real time). With a better quality of data available, better decisions can be made for day to day operations thus potentially avoiding bigger mistakes down the track.

Organisations need to understand how collaboration can work for them and understand their corporate culture and working habits and use collaboration technologies wisely.

Both these concepts are almost the same. Web 2.0 is about using social networking platforms and Enterprise 2.0 is about using social networking platforms within an organisation. However, the environment in which both is operating in is vastly different thus the final outcome can be very different too. Below are some reasons why:

1) Enterprise search is generally not as powerful and integrated as the WWW. If data cannot be found, its as good as not having it. So what if you have a good Wiki and an enterprise “facebook” to help locate people?

2) Work is, after all, just work - to most people. The reason why facebook is successful is because you not only can stay connected with friends, you can do absolutely retarded things on it. You can help feed your mates’ virtual fishes or give them a virtual bourbon. These silly things makes it fun thus users tend to update their profile more often.

For an organisation the user profile will be the key to your corporate “facebook”. If people have a corporate facebook but doesn’t update it, then might as well not have it. They have no incentive to update it anyway coz if they keep it up to date, they get more work!

3) People are busy at work. The fundamental reason why Web 2.0 is successful is because people pool in their FREE time to update their areas of interest like doing silly things on facebook or update Wikipedia on a topic that they are interested in or write a blog like this. However, assuming people are busy at work all day, would they still contribute? Even if they are free for 1 hour, would they rather contribute to a wiki, blog or update something somewhere or would they prefer to go for a coffee, run their personal errands or chat to a colleague? I hope they do but I know that’s NOT reality.

All the above issues I have stated can be rectified and different organisations would use different ways to tackle this and there is no hard and fast solution. I hope I have explained the differences between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 well here.

Looking from the organisational perspective, would anyone disagree with me if I say the following:

Enterprise 2.0 is internal to an organisation and Web 2.0 is external to an organisation. However, both Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 can be powered by the same technology platform if the organisation chooses to do it. For example, Kapow can be used for internal and / or external mashups.

Google just released Friend Connect a site that allows site owners to add social elements to their site and drive users to your site with these social elements.

Google wrote this on the FriendConnect page

Attract more visitors. Visitors bring along friends from social networks like Facebook, orkut, and others to interact on your site.

Enrich your site with social features. Choose engaging social features from a catalog of gadgets provided by Google and the OpenSocial developer community.

No programming whatsoever. Just copy and paste snippets of code into your site, and Google Friend Connect does the rest.

Google is not only promoting social networking across the world but they are making it easy for people to use this service. Just copy and paste codes into your site and maybe some simple code modification to make this EXACTLY how you want it to be and you have a personalised, mini facebook or myspace setup. Sounds good to me! Check out the video below:

Just an extension of my previous post on What is Enterprise 2.0’s measurable value?

Since my definition of Enterprise 2.0 is Communication, Sharing, Collaboration and Collective Intelligence, I will be looking at the value of each component of the definition. Even though,

“Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms or between companies and their partners or customers.“ (Andrew McAffee, Harvard)

the application of such tools within organisations is not the same as Web 2.0 and organisations are seeking other benefits other than connecting people.

Now I will discuss how you can derive value from enterprise 2.0 and you can then do your own ROI if you are interested.

Communication - Enhanced communication via social networks or instant messengers or collaboration sotfware can help reduce the time spent on searching for information, perceived increase in the quality of decisions made, decreased cost of cross-geographic location communication, etc.

Sharing - I am viewing this as more of a cultural issue than a technical one. After all, sharing in a ideal world is never a bad thing. However, I can’t think of a way to calculate the value of sharing.

Collaboration - allows teams to work from a unified platform, contribute and discuss via a standard channel instead of emails and also capturing knowledge that has been transacted over the platform at the same time. Collaboration can also increase transparency across the project team or organisation and improve knowledge sharing. Value in this case can be calculate by the increase in productivity (depending on the way you apply the platform), increase contribution to knowledge platform thus withholding corporate identity, perceived improved communications across teams / locations and decreased cost of cross-geographic location communication.

Collective intelligence - this allows the organisation to collect more (not all) of the tacit knowledge stored in employees. The benefits of this is similar to KMS or BI. I must say that even though collective intelligence is NOT the same as KMS or BI, but i believe that the value that you can achieve is rather similar.

From the above perspective, one can actually measure value of Enterprise 2.0. Applying Enterprise 2.0 within an organisation is something that is highly customised to the culture, IT environment and business environment. If you require more details for your company or need help in implementing or reviewing the need for Enterprise 2.0 within your organisation, please feel free to leave a comment.

I was asked this question twice this morning and I shall answer it on my blog. I shall keep this very simple. My definition of Enterprise 2.0 is Communication, Sharing, Collaboration and Collective Intelligence.

Communicating is something more than emails or IMs. Its about social networks and community platforms. This is some level technical and cultural aspects of Enterprise 2.0.

Sharing is about sharing ideas, information and knowledge. This is the cultural aspect of Enterprise 2.0.

Collaboration is about coming together from disparate locations working together to create something. This is not restricted to just employees within the organisation but also (depending on the situation) customers, vendors or suppliers.

Collective intelligence is a form of intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals. It is when all the above is done over time, the knowledge that is transacted over the platform over time is collected as corporate knowledge.

This is my definition of Enterprise 2.0. Please let me know if you agree or disagree.

Have you ever wondered how much data can your brain hold in bytes? I just did while lazing in bed (and yes I hear you say “Geek”). I didn’t have the answer but Google return this and this. I do not have much understanding of everything but somewhere did say something like 3 terabytes.

A silly Saturday arvo rant. =)

The guys at Infovark wrote a highly interesting post about delivering measurable value through Enterprise 2.0. This is one question I have battled with for ages and ages and I have still yet to come up or read about a good solid value proposition regarding Enterprise 2.0.

As the guys at Infovark stated

Enterprise 2.0 claims to improve efficiency by increasing social productivity. The theory is that by making more information available to more people, and allowing them to connect with each other easily, we can collectively get more done. But does this claim hold true? I’m seeing more and more posts from good folks who can’t deal with the overload of this new social graph. The time spent keeping track of all the communications from all of your contacts might actually make you less productive.

There’s no doubt that a more aware and better connected knowledge worker has the potential to be a more productive one. But the social dimension is only one part of the Enterprise 2.0 equation. In a business context, making connections and managing relationships is a means, not an end.

This is the Big Difference between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 needs to deliver measurable value - not just get a bunch of people together to click on advertisements.

I totally agree with the general idea of social networking not being able to deliver measurable value within an enterprise. However, there are some other areas of enterprise 2.0 that could probably deliver measurable value.

1) Mash ups - building of mashups can help deliver faster, timely and more accurate data from a variety of sources. This will reduce the time taken for employees to hunt down these numbers/data from the sources or through some weekly powerpoint/excel status reports. Value can be measured by the reduction of time spent on searching for something. Also if mashup is done externally for your customers, it can deliver measurable value depending on what kind of mashups you build.

2) Enterprise Search - the first letter of “SLATES” or also part of the “FLATNESSES” Model. This is clear, deliver accurate search results from anywhere within the organisation. Reduce time taken to search for stuff on a crappy search engine (which most organisation’s have today). Value can be measured by the reduction of time spent on searching for something.

3) RSS - Information is power. This delivers timely information to employees and would be exceptionally important for people making decisions based on other internal work streams. This reduces the risk of making a wrong decision. Value can be measured by the reduction of errors due to untimely information.

4) Please contribute to this list…

———————————————-
16 May 2008
4) Added by Aaron (see comments section for the train of thoughts) - “I see this (in E20) as part of building knowledge - lessons learned, best practices, etc. And I believe it is implemented through the W20 tools that of course implies use of tags, mashups, collaboration, linking, “people groups” and so forth. This is my basis for identifying collaboration as working together to create a product, and connectiveness as bringing together the entire body of knowledge.

Measuring value can be difficult, especially if one is looking for tangible returns. Project management can see value thru utilization of lookbacks when starting new projects, when their timelines for preliminary setup and startup times diminish, creating budget benefits. Connectiveness can aid in forming more permanent ties among groups or individuals, can aid in discovery processes to a degree that I don’t believe has been explored well at this point.

Intangible value is relationship building, providing a sense of community within an organization, and to a greater or lesser extent depending on how E20 is implemented, between an organization and its’ support groups (external providers, vendors, etc.)”

Thanks Aaron!

Google has just invested $500million in a new wireless broadband company and they would be providing search and applications to the network’s users. Coupled with Google’s Android, Google is becoming a big player in the mobiles market.

With the iPhone SDK and Andriod in the market, two big players are investing time and money building their capabilities and also preparing the market to learn, develop and implement applications for the mobile phones. In future, people might receive a brand spanky new phone with capabilities to login to their company’s internal applications and work from their phone.

Now, do I really want that? Currently I spend at least 12 hours a day in front of the computer and sometimes more. I should be exercising, spending time with my family, working on my hobby or any other thing that creates a work-life balance. The last thing I want is to be bothered by ringing emails or a call from the boss to get you to do some stuff. It would be nice if I can access the internet while shopping with my partner and go online to check if the prices of her dress is cheaper online or not. But nothing more!

Many people in companies have “lost” their freedom to emails and with mobile applications coming to your phone, means more time working. It would be a super awesome technology if people can manage it well and I believe many actually do manage it well but for those who can’t, stay clear of this.

I have been exploring many different enterprise 2.0 related open source software and there were two products that came up tops - KnowledgeTree - enterprise grade document manager and Mindtouch - enterprise grade Wiki. Many of the products I have reviewed have highly similar functionality. They do what they are meant to do, store / retrieve documents or collaborate through the Wiki platform - no surprises in this space. However, some of the stuff that I specifically looked at were UI ease of use, scalability, support and APIs. Let’s start with Knowledgetree.

KnowledgeTree is

a open source turn-key document management software designed for business people to install, use and purchase. Collaborate with team members, securely store all your documents and ensure regulatory compliance with absolute ease. With no vendor lock-in and with source code readily available, KnowledgeTree provides a more flexible, cost-effective alternative to proprietary applications.

When I first created a demo account for myself on KnowledgeTree, I browsed around the software and it took me nothing more than 2 mins to figure out the site navigation and general functionalities. It was that simple, things were where there as you expect it to be and no surprises, no dramas. UI was totally simple on the eyes and the site in general was pretty. Excellent features includes drag and drop access to the document repository for Windows, integration into MS office applications, customisable “iGoogle type” dashboard, MetaData support, workflows for managing document generation and integration to your applications via SOAP Web Services. See the full list here.

KnowledgeTree API documentation is good and very comprehensive. Scalability is pretty clear from their list of clients and also from clarification with the sales team at KnowledgeTree. Support from the sales team has also been very very quick and answers were clear. I am very impressed. If you are looking for an open source document manager, look no further, Knowledgetree is the one.

MindTouch Deki Wiki is a enterprise Wiki software. The key to Deki Wiki success and popularity is its ease of use and its SUPER excellent widgets and Web Services support. Its pretty much up to your imagination on what you wanna mashup and display on screen. Check out their service extensions.

For a quick overview of Deki Wiki, please watch video below

When I first tried Deki Wiki, everything was clear and I understood all functionalities very easily. There were no surprises, no dramas. It was super easy to use, WYSIWYG editor is GREAT and there is even imaging support! This is great stuff. I totally love this. I have four words to describe Deki Wiki - Simple, Scalable, Extensible and Flexible.

—————————–

However, having said all these, organisations are moving toward enterprise content management (ECM) software and such standalone software is not very helpful in providing a single view of the enterprise. You can argue that organisations can build integration layer between these products but if it came as a package, then a suite of such standalone tools that works nicely together producing an ECM effect, ultimately this would give IBM Filenet, Microsoft SharePoint and similar products a run for their money.