Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 15 October, 2009 under Academic, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Speaking, Web 2.0, Wiki, software |
I just finished an introductory Enterprise 2.0 lecture with approximately 80 undergraduate students at The University of Melbourne. I asked a question to the class at the end of the lesson – Would prefer to work with an organisation with or without these tools?
The response were as follows:
1) An organisation with these tools – approx 75% of students raised their hands
2) An organisation without these tool – no one raised their hands
I guess just this simple 1 minute survey with the future of working generation says alot about what organisations need to do to improve their internal systems.
Anyway, the presentation as below:
Posted by Sean Lew on Tuesday, 13 October, 2009 under Collaboration, Web 2.0, software |
I have been playing with Google Wave for a few days now and its been a rather refreshing experience. Even though I only have seven friends I can use the platform with and it doesn’t work with traditional emails, i still found the experience pretty good.
Below are somethings I really like:
1) Playback feature. With a tool with Google Wave, version control is necessary and playback does the job very well.
2) Commenting, discussion and collaborative editing. This is quite powerful, taking the idea of collaborative editing (google docs) and discussions/commenting into one platform allows uses to all work at the same time. No more check in, check out problems.
3) Highlight changes. With any version control, sometimes it might be hard to know what really changed. Google Wave allows highlighting of changes inline.
4) Drag and drop. This might be a rich user interface feature and might not provide much value for the tech savvy, but for the average joe, drag and drop makes wave alot easier to use.
5) APIs are pretty cool and the tools that can be generated for Wave will be limitless.
However, besides all these cool stuff. I felt that many features of Wave are marginally better than emails and with emails used as the incumbent communication tool. I really wonder if Wave will take off. The biggest issue is that Wave and traditional emails are not compatible at this point of time and for Wave to be useful, it has to be compatible. Google might be big and powerful but I am not convinced that they are powerful enough to change the traditional email way. The last thing Google should do is to compete directly with traditional emails.
Also for Wave to be successful, Google needs to get people on board quick! While the iron is hot, get people to start using it and start collaborating. I can see that they are signing people up somewhat quickly and I generally have one friend added to Wave a day but this needs to be way faster. The longer the people wait, the more frustrated they become and if they do not find benefits for themselves, they could just leave the platform.
This is just a quick review of what I could see over the last few days and I am sure what I think will change soon enough when I start discovering more and understanding wave better. Please do not take this as a full final review of the product. I am sure there’s alot more to Wave than what I wrote and we shall discover and see how things pan out.
Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 24 September, 2009 under Blue Sky Thinking, Web 2.0, social media, software |
Aardvark is a fantastic system. I have been a user since its early days and I guess I have been helping people around the world almost on a daily basis. Aardvark is a system that allows users to ask questions on their favourite instant messenger and it discovers the perfect person to help with any question.
However, a question is not always answerable just by writing a line in an instant messenger. For example, “Should I accept a job offer in a large bank in NYC?” or “how can I increase the performance of my sharepoint server?” Some might argue that these are badly framed questions and others would argue that these are harder questions to answer as compared to “are all apples red?” Whichever the case, there are some pretty tough questions in the world that requires contextual and environmental information in order to be answered.
At the moment, just from my personal experience, aardvark is extremely powerful to answer simple questions and mid level questions. However, the more advance questions doesn’t seem to be answered as efficiently. It could be because there are lesser experts in the area or users could not be bothered to go back and forth to clarify, analyse and answer a complex question or the user could just be busy at that point of time.
I think what Aardvark could benefit from advance questions is to build up a paid service where difficult questions could be answered by paying and users with experience in that area has a greater incentive to answer the question. By matching the “buyer” and “seller”, both parties benefits and aardvark could take a cut of the price and make some money.
What do you think?
Posted by Sean Lew on Tuesday, 15 September, 2009 under Blue Sky Thinking, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Wiki, software |
Enterprise 2.0 applications are sprouting all over the place and there are many start ups developing innovative products. However, only a few software makes it into the category Enterprise 2.0, many others are more like “point-solutions” Enterprise 2.0.
Enterprise 2.0, as the name states, is supposed to be an enterprise solution. Just like there is one CRM or ERP in one company. When there are more of these sorts of enterprise software, integration, data integrity and updates becomes a problem. So what does an “enterprise” Enterprise 2.0 platform consist of?
So, for starters, lets look at some of the market leaders like Jive, Socialtext, OpenText, Telligent and Mindtouch and get some understanding of what is being offered. The very standard functionalities most of the market leaders provide are wikis, blogs, social bookmarks, discussions, project management (to some degree), multimedia support, dashboards, communities, user profiles and messaging.
These functionalities are all good and highly critical within an enterprise 2.0 platform.
Let’s now step back and understand the concept of Enterprise 2.0 – its about connecting, coordinating and communicating across teams, networks and the whole organisation. Andrew Mcafee suggested that there are strong, weak, potential and no ties within an organisation (Please watch the video to get a full understanding of what I am talking about).
A strong tie is the relationships between two people that must meet the following criteria: 1) interaction, 2) affection and 3) history of interaction. Weak ties are acquaintances within a social network and argued that that the only thing what can connect two social networks with strong ties is a weak tie. Potential ties mean that there are connections between the two parties however they require a few weak tie connections. No ties means that the ties are either too far away to be any effective in leveraging that relationship or there are just no existing ties between the two parties. Andrew suggested that software like wikis are great for strong tied teams and social networking is great for weak tied relationships. Blogs are fantastic for potential ties and prediction markets are great for no tied relationships. Now, we have a framework to work with to analyse what does an “enterprise” Enterprise 2.0 platform consist of.
Strong ties – team based collaboration and communication
So what are the tools we need to leverage team operations better? What do teams do? As many would have experienced, teams work together towards a specific goals and commonly, documents and spreadsheets are everywhere. I feel that teams need, on top of the current functionalities listed above, a common discussion forum, issue tracking tool, project management tool, mandatory instant messenger, video conference capability and advance notification.
Weak ties – Social networking and connecting with others
What would people like to do while trying to reach out to their community, share a few ideas, get to know someone better and network? I think in this space, entertainment is important. Providing employees with a platform to communicate, have some levels of fun and share photos / videos of their holiday is a great way to get people together socially. Team based photos could also be put online. What is even better if there is a connection between the internal system and facebook where the user could select only some photos of themselves and show it internally and leave the embarrassing drunk weekend photos for their friends.
Potential ties – broadcast ideas and reach out to everyone
What is the best way to leverage everyone within the organisations as and when you need it? Aardvark and Hypios are two excellent and innovative tools I feel that could add great value to the organisation in this space. Aardvark is a platform that hunts for the best available person to answer a question posted by a user. Hypios on the other hand is an open innovation platform where users can post questions and get experts to respond to it.
No ties
In this space, as Andrew discussed, prediction markets are useful in leveraging these resources. However, what I see is that we still have a long way to go.
The trend in Enterprise 2.0 implementation seems to start at strong ties and it slowly moves down the line. This makes sense. Wikis and collaboration in strong tie teams are the easiest to justify the ROI on it. However, it will be much harder to calculate the ROI on prediction markets (at least currently its true). I think what software vendors needs to do is to focus on strong ties and slowly move down the line as well. I think the above is what is needed in an “enterprise” Enterprise 2.0 platform. Please feel free to add or comment on it.
Posted by Sean Lew on Tuesday, 25 August, 2009 under Collaboration, software |
I think there is a strong difference between collaboration software and social business software. Collaboration is about leveraging virtual teams and increase efficiency in working together. Its basically targeting only the strong ties section of McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 Bull’s Eye. However, organisations who are not targeting the weak, potential and no ties part of the organisation would be losing out as there is so much more skill that could be leveraged by connecting with those groups. This is where social business software sits…
I think collaboration on real deliverables is absolutely critical for the success of an organisation however, its not just collaboration. Its also connecting and creating new relationships across the organisation. Its also about finding the right people to do the right job at the right time effectively.
Posted by Sean Lew on Friday, 29 May, 2009 under General Ranting, software |
So I have a new way of explaining Twitter, Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 to friends.
When your friends explain to you how great sex is when you were in high school, you never really understand it until you have actually tired it. The same goes for Twitter, Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.
Posted by Sean Lew on under Collaboration, Innovation, social media, software |
I always knew that Jive software was good. I’ve implemented it (v2.5) and used it before and love it. However, whenever someone asks me why I like it so much, all I could say was “Its so easy and it makes sense”. I have decided to jump into Jive Social Business Software and have a deep understanding why I love it and reviewed Jive Social Business Software extensively.
First of all, I must say I look at Jive from an Enterprise perspective and what I would want if I ran a company.
1) Spaces are fantastic
2) Permissions on Spaces is even better
3) Permissions on individual documents within a space – Wow!
4) Leader in Forrester Wave: Community Platform 2009, Gartner Magic Quadrant, 2008
5) Excellent plugin and API interface
6) Strong community reporting tool
7) Has a document publishing approval process
8 ) User fully customisable front page, excellent widgets (you can create your own widget too – good for the geeks)
9) Excellent notification via customisable RSS, emails and “watching a page/tag” functionality
10) History of where you have been
11) Interesting functionalities on documents like (“more like this page” and “More by Sean” )
12) Video and interactive communication capability
13) Simple project management (I would probably wish that this functionality was stronger so that I could save on buying MS project if possible)
I personally feel that Jive is like facebook and anything else is like MySpace? Or should I say Jive is like a MAC and the rest are like PCs? You get what I mean. You just get it.
Posted by Sean Lew on Friday, 17 April, 2009 under General Ranting, software |
I had this question for a really long time and even until now, I am still not sure. The technology is out there waiting to be deployed but are the people ready to embrace it? There are many somewhat successful Enterprise 2.0 stories floating around in Australia where companies in the banking, IT and resources sector are starting to embrace it. But still not at the full (not even close) extent of the power of Enterprise 2.0. More companies are also slowly monitoring what others are saying online about their companies. However these are small groups of people driving this change. What about the general public?
Recently, I emailed some builders in the Melbourne region with regards to quotes and pricing. Out of the five emails I sent, one responded with a good response. The other four did not respond even after a week. When contacted, one of them said I had to pay to get a quote as well!
I was just thinking, responding to online communication is a basic thing that all employees have to do. When you are contacted, respond within 24 hours. If you can’t give a satisfactory response, let the customer know and let the customer know what is the course of action you will be taking to get them their answer. Standard information should also be published – open and straight forward. The last thing consumers want is to feel that there are hidden costs and unexpected spending. I feel that there is alot of secrecy around businesses and I understand the reason why but there are certain information that needs to be out there in the public so that the basic consumer information is provided. No point saying that this and that can be done without other critical information like materials, administrative charges and price.
If someone cannot even respond to email, Enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 is for sure not ready. I can’t say if Australia is ready but from my experience with five of the most popular builders in Australia, I can say that four of them are not ready.
Posted by Sean Lew on Wednesday, 4 March, 2009 under General Ranting, software |
I have been thinking about twitter within the Enterprise and how it can help. Yammer is the Enterprise twitter and the dynamics of it within an organisational context is extremely different from the standard twitter I use. Let me explain.
On my twitter, I generally follow and is followed by like minded people in the Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, social media space. Updates also generally surround topics in this space. This is all great because I can network with others in this space. I believe that within the enterprise, there is a space for such things to happen as well. Non-confidential and non mission critical information can be communicated via the platform like new ideas, bookmarks and company wide updates.
However, within an organisation there are many commercial confidential information that we deal with, especially in consulting. Some of the stuff we do, we are not even allowed to share with others outside the project team. Being in this business for a while, I absolutely understand why. Many of the stuff we do will delivers competitive advantage to our clients. Therefore I think that project team yammer could be a great asset. Status updates within a large project can be extremely useful. It allows streamlined communication, a virtual notice board, one stop updates for everyone in the team.
This is just one small aspect of Yammer I think could deliver real value. There are many others that I am still trying to iron out. =)
Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 12 February, 2009 under General Ranting, social media, software |
BuzzGain is an online service for discovering and engaging with the people who will help your business thrive in today’s social economy – where attention is a precious commodity. It empowers businesses to identify the previously hidden communities who are actively defining and shaping its future, including blogs, Flickr, youtube, Twitter, and traditional media. (excerpt from here)
Well, people have been doing this for ages and now there is an integrated tool to monitor all the buzz from multiple locations. Pretty cool. (Thanks Jeremy for the Delicious link)
Okie to test if it really works, let’s see if BuzzGain would post a comment here. =)
