Synergise IT

I always believe that for people to use Enterprise 2.0, organisations must give people the purpose and reason to use it. In a knowledge economy, many employees are required to think and make decisions at various levels. However, many employees nowadays still use systems like SAP, Siebel and “friends”. So how can organisations make Enterprise 2.0 relevant to employees when they spend most of their work time handling other types of systems? Simple, integrate - however, its easier said than done!!! I shall give you a Telco example.

Telco software
Most might not know, other than my deep interest in Enterprise 2.0, I have interests and experience in implementing telecommunication systems. I have worked with various software in the market and understand them pretty well. While all these software has APIs, web services and stuff like that, they are pretty much targeted for integration with other telco system providing different kinds of functionality. Telco software should improve and integrate better with Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

Enterprise 2.0 and Telcos
Within the lifecycle of a customer, Enterprise 2.0 / Web 2.0 can provide many benefits for the customers and employees should be part of it. So when a customer buys a new phone/internet service via the call centre or online, workflows are triggered to carry out various tasks depending on the business rules. However, shit always happens. Somehow, something will break due to many reasons and troubleshooting begins. Enterprise 2.0 can facilitate the troubleshooting process through its collaborative capabilities and save time as other people can contribute to the troubleshooting process and streamlined communication improves turnaround time. Also, in many cases, the call centre and the troubleshooting dudes are located in two different places and this helps to save money on phone calls.

Web 2.0 and Telcos
Also if there is a fault in the system, Web 2.0 can inform the customer quickly so that you save the call centre costs of affected calling in to whine about it. Web 2.0 can also help to reduce problem calls to the call centre through online forums, discussions and commenting. The idea is to let your customers help your customers.

Telcos are big companies and expensive to run and everyone is different. I am not saying that all telcos needs to do the above. I am saying that Telcos needs to understand Enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 and study how such technologies can help them save money, increase efficiency and reduce errors and if such investments are worth it or not.

Previously, I conducted an experiment and it didn’t work out very well. I have since started another experiment at the request of a close friend.

Let me tell you abit more about this. I wanted to increase collaboration among two different teams across two geographical locations. It is not possible for these teams to have regular face to face meetings and they are both working on the same thing.

So I encouraged everyone on the team to get onto a Wiki, pre-populated the Wiki with some important information and structure. When the team first logon, they commented they wanted this and that and I accomodated the requests accordingly. As 90% of the team has never contributed to the Wiki before, I spent 10 mins explaining to concept of the Wiki and “best practices” to them. I did not enforce any rules on the wiki and let them do whatever they wanted.

The outcome was the total opposite of what happened previously. Everyone started playing with it first and one senior staff said “its easier than I thought”. Within a day, everyone on the team was contributing their part of the puzzle to the Wiki. What I found was that different people used it differently. Some was commenting alot, some were uploading their completed Word files to the wiki and using it as a document repository, some were afraid of commenting on the wiki and sent comments via email. I must say these are not best practices for sure. However, I am not too bothered - at these they are using it.

I was invited to re-educated them again. I reiterated the same story I told them on the first meeting and more questions arose (mainly conceptual and technical questions). Most of them were much more attentive and the meeting was more interactive as well. They were hooked for sure. Its been a while now and EVERYONE loves it. I get emails of satisfaction for implementing this for them.

Just for everyone’s curiosity, 1/2 the team were baby boomers! This time round, I got the technology right as well!

I have been looking at IBM Lotus connections recently and I must say that its a pretty impressive product. As compared to Jive’s Clearspace, its generally the same but I am sure Sam would would be able to tell us more about the in depth difference. I think the final decision between the top few products in the market (IBM Lotus connections, Jive’s Clearspace, ThoughtFarmer or SocialText) would really boil down to cost, maintenance and support.

One thing I really do not understand about IBM connections is that it doesn’t have private or public messaging capabilities.

1) It doesn’t have the Facebook’s status (i.e. Sean is writing a blog at the moment and wondering why Connections doesn’t have this functionality). This might not be that important but the next one is.

2) It doesn’t have facebook’s “the wall”. I can’t write a message to one person or a selected group of people! Come’on if this is a social platform, its about communication and sending a message would probably be one of the most common way of communication. I would expect a few messaging capabilities a) public message to one person b) public message to a group of people c) private messaging. I would also expect a event calendar / invite functionality but this is really secondary and would be a “nice to have”

If anyone from IBM is reading this and disagree with me, feel free to educate me. I might be wrong here and glad to learn from anyone. Also if you are from Jive, ThoughtFarmer or SocialText, please feel free to let me know your differentiating factors/features.

Its the FireFox 3 Download Day today! I have never been part of a world record event and this shall be my first and a extremely simple one too - just download a file! Come and pool in your bandwidth and create a world record for the sake of open source software!

Download Day starts at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time on Tuesday, June 17th. For local times see here.

I wrote an email today at work - no surprises here. Its a 100+ word email that really needed 15 words to get the main message across.

The next thing I did once I completed this was to check out my new twits and everything I read was less than 160 characters but told me everything I needed to know. From new blog posts to dinner pictures from complaining about work to constructive discussions about work - everything was recorded in less than 160 characters. What a beauty.

That set me thinking is there a place for Twitter type software within the organisation? I would say yes absolutely. I think there are so many people who write long emails and lose the whole context of the email within those words. (I am guilty too!). However, with only 160 characters, you get the main message across effectively and the reader saves alot of time reading the formalities and explanation. So I thought Twitter has a place in the organisation!

Few hours later, I was sitting with a colleague discussing something and my twitter bell went off and my client was interested to know what it was. I explained to him what twitter was. He (Gen-Y) then thought it was really cool and I asked if he would use it in the office? His reply was - “Aren’t there enough work coming in from emails? Now you want Twitter? You must be crazy”

So do you think there is a place for Twitter within the organisation?

I have been thinking about this question for a long time and I have somewhat came out with an answer.

Critical mass is important for enterprise 2.0 as it can help pool in ideas/information from around the company (across departments, locations and cross hierarchy). Ultimately, collaboration techniques and social media is probably the best way to connect everyone up and provide a platform for employees to input information that is related to them. So to answer the question if critical mass is important for the success of Enterprise 2.0, let me give you a small scenario. A company of roughly 20 employees sitting in the same office. Simple enough.

Let’s assume if the company has something like Jive’s Clearspace. Its a Enterprise collaboration software and social media platform. It features some of the most exciting tools organisations are looking for like rich profiles, document management, Wikis, discussions and project management. I feel that Clearspace is a good tool to use to analyse this question that I am discussing here.

Lets look at each of the feature with regards to the short scenario above.

1) If everyone is sitting in the same office, rich profiles would not really matter as everyone would know everyone and they would probably have small talks and catchups over coffee or something like that. Human interaction is normally preferred over internet communication - at least its more personal. Online discussions is an additional channel for the 20 employees to discuss work. How that would work out would really depend on the culture and environment of the company.

2) Document management, project management tools and wikis - these tools are important for any organisation. It helps you locate, manage and store information.

From the above, it seems apparent to me that a software like ClearSpace would help a small organisation to manage their operations better through a single collaborative platform. However, the social aspects of enterprise 2.0 would probably not work so well due to the close proximity of the employees.

I can then conclude saying this. A single collaborative software would be helpful whether the company is big or small , but social media/networking would require critical mass to achieve its benefits. (edited Monday morning) Critical mass is important no matter how you look at it. Everyone should be using it or contributing to it for Enterprise2.0 to be successful. If no one uses the collaborative software, it becomes just a pile of code doing nothing. If people do not contribute to the Wiki or upload files to the document manager, it becomes useless. The more people who are actively using it, the more successful Enterprise 2.0 would be for the organisation.

Please leave your comments if you have any. I would love to discuss more about this.

I have been getting many incoming search strings to this blog on SharePoint and KnowledgeTree and I would like to address this question people might have.

Interesting enough, I actually asked KnowledgeTree this question last night but after the meeting, I felt I had asked a rather silly question. Sharepoint and KnowledgeTree are two different products. Traditionally, Sharepoint was a document manager and until now they are still a document manager. However, Sharepoint has added new collaborative and Web 2.0 features into it. However, KnowledgeTree is a document manager with some collaborative features, it doesn’t have the enterprise content management, business forms and business intelligence components that Sharepoint has. If you ask me, Jive’s ClearSpace is probably Sharepoint’s competitor (P.S. Clearspace does a MUCH better job).

KnowledgeTree is Free (pay for support if you want for the community edition. There’s an option to pay for the commercial edition where you get extra features and support - see comments section for more. Thanks Natasha) and Sharepoint, like many Microsoft software, is horrendously expensive. If you are looking for a excellent and cheap document manager, KnowledgeTree is the way to go. If you are thinking about Sharepoint, think again and again. There are many other super excellent options out there. KnowledgeTree has many great features and good extension capabilities. I believe KnowledgeTree has positioned itself as a excellent open source document manager but not a full Enterprise 2.0 suite.

I have one little tip: make sure everyone do their in depth requirements gathering process for any system you are thinking of building / implementing.

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Just to add a point, KnowledgeTree is a fit for purpose Document manager and I totally recommend it to everyone.

Mike and myself is in a Mindtouch frenzy at the moment. We have both looked at Mindtouch previously, felt that its easy to use, pretty, great navigation and all, we actually missed out exploring in depth into the extension side of things until a few days ago. Read Mike’s review here.

I have to admit, I am not the best of programmers nor a code crunching nut - in fact, I don’t even consider myself as an amateur. However, if I can do it, then ALOT of people can do it. Its that simple. I have spent half the weekend playing with the extensions and its great fun, powerful and most importantly - simple.

Having said all these, I spent the other half of the weekend looking for a wiki - preferably a free one. This is a personal wiki for my post-graduate studies (for my supervisor and myself to collaborate on and a online repository for my thesis) and I looked at a HUGE amount of Wikis. TikiWiki, PhPWiki, SocialText, WetPaint, MediaWiki and Mindtouch. I have personally either installed or tried the online versions of all of them and decided on Mindtouch Deki Wiki hosted on Wik.is. Even though that means I have to pay $99 per year for only 10GB of space. Oh well, good things comes at a price.

I cannot emphasise enough how simple Deki Wiki is. Creating content is simple, managing the Wiki is super easy as well. It also has the power to extend its platform to add almost anything under the sun is something NO OTHER WIKI can do. Simplicity and power at its best!

After one weekend of Deki Wiki, I am surely a convert now. Keep up the good work MindTouch ROCKS and keep up the good work.

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:

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.