It seems it’s still an open question as to whether social software tools like blogs and wikis are ready for the enterprise—or rather, whether the enterprise is ready for them. Of course, although blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, social networking sites and collaborative applications may all fit the general “social software” category, they are not the same thing—each serves a unique purpose, any one of which may be better suited to the enterprise in general, and any specific enterprise in particular. So when talking about the value of “social software,” it’s important to speak about specific tools and technologies. (That said, there is general value in “social software,” just as there is value in, say, “productivity software,” despite the fact that word-processing and spreadsheet tools do very different things.)

In any event, where does social software fit into the enterprise? Well, it depends on the technology in question.

Let’s start with a look a blogs. Blogs are essentially online diaries, and while they may be both interesting and useful (as, we all hope, Collaboration Loop is), it can be difficult for managers to see why they should support a corporate blog. The naysayers have a point—my company doesn’t need to spend resources to support my love for skiing and help me garner my 15 minutes of fame—but they also miss the bigger picture: In the increasingly virtual workplace, it’s important for employees to make virtual connections—and blogs are one way to help them do that.

In the enterprise, there are two ways to use blogs. One is a corporate-supported (and approved) blog that’s meant to be read by the outside world; the other is an internal blog for employees’ eyes only, for sharing information and creating job and interest-related connections. (There are also lots of blogs out there penned by individuals who use the space to discuss their companies and the markets they are in, among other interests, but these are not technically “enterprise blogs,” as they are not established or supported by the companies themselves.)

Frankly, I don’t see a lot of either type of enterprise blog being used today, and I rarely talk to people who have even considered an internal version. But I think that’s actually the type that has the most promise for the enterprise.

Externally-focused blogs can certainly serve a marketing/PR purpose, but to do so they must be carefully constructed and maintained. Customers are savvy, so you can’t “pretend” to be blogging when all you’re really doing is hyping your product. A legitimate enterprise blog will contain timely, insightful and truthful posts on issues related to the company and its products, as well as the broader market and the competition, relevant information on customers’ industries, and even thoughts on the larger economic or political climate, insofar as they affect the company and its business.

But maintaining such a blog isn’t easy. For one thing, that “truth” element is important—it has to be actual truth (the good with the bad), and not, say, truthiness. The question of who among a company’s employees should write for the blog is not negligible—they must be reasonably articulate, and have something to say. Legal will almost certainly want (read: need) to vet the postings. And the company must ensure new entries are posted on a regular basis (ideally daily, or several times daily, depending on the size of the company and its constituent base)—a stale blog is worse than no blog at all; that, in turn, adds to the bloggers’ workload. Given all those constraints, it’s no wonder so many companies have yet to get an official customer-facing blog up and running. (The one exception here are media companies, which continue to test the waters of the “new publishing paradigm” with mixed success.)

Internally-focused blogs are easier to maintain and serve a more relevant purpose. Companies with large numbers of remote or virtual employees can use enterprise blogs to keep those staffers connected to the company and one another. By setting up a variety of blogs tagged to specific topics, companies allow employees to share ideas for new products, IT fixes and best practices, better business processes, strong customer service and any number of personal areas of interest (pets, surfing, 18th-century poetry…). The key is to allow anyone to post, anytime, within the boundaries of corporate policy and legality. Requiring that all posts are automatically accompanied by the employee’s full name, title and contact info (e-mail, IM, phone—with click-to-connect capabilities if your unified communications system allows it) will do two things: Enable to kind of networking you’re trying to achieve with the blogs; and significantly decrease the number of negative or spurious posts.

Blogs aren’t wikis—they’re not intended to be collaborative environments, and generally speaking no one but the original author would change a blog post. Think of them as giant water coolers, where employees can share ideas without actually changing those of their co-workers on the fly. Still, while you don’t want to censor, or even edit, internal blog posts, you will want to monitor them. Most posts that contain incorrect information should be corrected by another post that notes the error and includes the right information; those that are libelous, illegal or clearly in breach of corporate policies should be removed.

And don’t worry too much about productivity losses. Any time spent on company-related information, such as tricks for using a new technology or suggestions for improving the way something is done, is time well spent. But even time spent on seemingly irrelevant topics will yield results: Bob in California and Anne in New York may meet because they both share an interest in French cheese, but as a result, they’re more likely to collaborate down the road in ways that help the business.

Over the course of the year, we, the analysts at Basex, hear from knowledge workers in the trenches about what works - and what doesn’t work - when collaborating with others.

Based on our observations, we prepared - as a template - these New Year’s Resolutions with the hope that they will contribute to improved knowledge sharing and collaboration in 2007.

Without further ado, here they are, prepared collaboratively by everyone at Basex:

 E-MAIL

1.)    I will not e-mail someone and then two seconds later follow up with an IM or phone call.

2.)    I will refrain from combining multiple themes and requests in one single e-mail.

3.)    I will make sure that the subject of my e-mail message clearly reflects both the topic and urgency of the missive.

4.)    I will read my own e-mails before sending them to make sure they are comprehensible to others.

5.)    I will thoroughly read e-mail from others before replying.

6.)    I will not overburden colleagues with unnecessary e-mail.

7.)    I will reply judiciously, avoiding one word responses such as "Thanks" or "Great!"

8.)    I will be more conscious of the fact that "Reply to All" sometimes really does go to all.

INSTANT MESSAGING AND PRESENCE AWARENESS

9.)    I will not make excessive use of the ENTER key when IMing someone (knowing that an audible alert is triggered with each ENTER keypress).  For a multi-line message I’ll use SHFT-ENTER for line feeds within the text. (Yes, you can turn the alert off but not everyone does.)

10.)  I will not get impatient when there’s no response within 200 milliseconds of my IMing someone.

11)   I will not assume that the recipient of an IM is nailed to his chair in front of his computer and that awaiting my communications is his only purpose in life.

12.)    I will keep my presence awareness state up-to-date and visible to others so they know whether I’m busy or away.

ALL FORMS OF COMMUNICATION

13.)    I will recognize that the intended recipient of my communications is not a mind reader and supply details in my messages accordingly.

SOFTWARE
14.)    I will come to the realization that I’m not Captain Piccard and that the enterprise is not the Starship Enterprise.  "Computer make it so" doesn’t yet work in this day and age.

15.)    I will learn to use the tools I have before lusting after newer shinier ones.

IN CONCLUSION

16.)    I will recognize that typed words can be misleading in terms of both tone and intent.

17.)    I will do whatever I can do facilitate the transfer and sharing of knowledge.

18.)    I will stop this list at number 18 so it remains manageable and readable.

Happy New Year and Prosit Neujahr from everyone at Basex.

Although I am an active blogger and an avid user of a couple of different wikis, I often get questions from IT executives about the real value of wikis and blogs in the enterprise. Certainly, it exists—and in the next few weeks I’ll try to delve into some of the ways companies can leverage the technology internally and externally. But if getting your head around this Web 2.0 technology seems difficult, consider an interesting, enterprise-ready alternative: Parlano’s MindAlign persistent group chat tool, powered by presence and now offering full support for Microsoft’s Office Communicator.

I’ve been watching Parlano for a few years now, and I like what they do. They’re more than just enterprise IM; they enable group discussions that fit perfectly with project teams and other enterprise groups that routinely need to collaborate and communicate with one another. The software is specifically designed for enterprise use, and the company “gets” the needs of both IT and end users. This isn’t a free consumer product that you can sneak into the company on a grass-roots level. But sometimes, you only get what you pay for.

Here’s what paying for Parlano gets you.

•    Topic-based, persistent group channels that let teams maintain an ongoing, searchable (and archived) dialogue about business-critical issues and projects.
•    An interactive channel list that lets users monitor activity across multiple discussions as soon as they sign on to their PCs.
•    Visual and audio notifications for new messages.
•    User-defined filters, so employees can automatically see the messages that are most important to them.
•    Federation to public IM (with MindAlign for LCS).
•    Integration with other IT systems.

The software also allows groups to store and monitor related data files and URL links; gives admins complete control over channel access, as well as a host of compliance and admin-related capabilities; and, not incidentally, leverages enterprise presence information.

The version that supports OCS is even richer. MindAlign 2007 is a .Net client that can take advantage of all the LCS features (security, anti-spam etc.). It also positions Parlano to make use of Microsoft’s UC extensions, so users will be able to access all the available extended communications features they (or their IT managers) want, allowing companies to connect people on any communications medium—voice, video or web collaboration. That means that once people are organized around topics, they’re no longer limited to chat-based communication; instead, they can collaborate by any mechanism that makes sense, including VoIP calls, audio conferences, Web collaboration sessions and video conferences.

For the enterprise, it’s like a wiki, only better.

It’s the end of the year, so that means that all good Bloggers must dedicate at least one posting to summing up the highlights of the past year, and boldly stating predictions sure to come true for the next.  So grab your cup of eggnog and let’s go.

It would be an understatement to declare 2006 as the year of “Unified Communications”, at least from a real-time collaboration perspective.  2006 was the year that UC achieved critical mindshare in the enterprise, led by extensive marketing efforts from Cisco, Avaya, Microsoft, Nortel and many others.  The overwhelming majority of enterprise IT managers I speak with understand the coming together of various real-time communications technologies, and the value that such integration presents.  They understand the potential for integration of communications technologies with enterprise business processes to improve efficiency, transactions, and tasks.  They expect that their communications vendors will have a UC story to tell.

But, there is still considerable confusion about unified communications.  As I wrote back in August, I tend to view implementation of UC as a two step process, with the first step being integration of real-time communications applications into a single set of user interfaces, followed by the application of open interfaces to enable communications applications to directly interface with business process applications.  But unfortunately all too often I ask folks about their UC plans and receive a response that confuses unified communications with unified messaging or with just VOIP.

So while development of UC concepts and technologies was the key trend in my mind in 2006, what’s on tap for 2007?  I still think that UC will be biggest issue for the enterprise market.  Specific challenges around implementing UC still remain to be solved and are generating a great deal of discussion over the last few weeks.  Technical challenges related to integration of presence information from multiple systems and integration of public and private systems will receive a lot of attention from vendors, service providers, and enterprises.  Security, compliance, and manageability issues present additional challenges to solve (and additional business opportunities for those that can solve them).  

Finally, the end-user issues will become increasingly important in 2007.  By that I mean giving individuals the tools and capabilities to control their own communications experience, manage interruptions, and control their privacy.  If 2006 was the year of “You” in the consumer market, 2007 could become the year of “You” in the real-time collaboration space.  Fortunately, this discussion is already beginning (see Alec Saunders wonderful “New Presence” manifesto, in 2007 I expect we’ll see some real advancements in user management of their presence information.

So sit back and enjoy the ride, and know that while Santa knows if you’ve been naughty or nice, by the end of 2007 he might also know if you are in a meeting, on the phone, or sitting idle at your desk.

This week I had time to experiment with Google Docs and Spreadsheets, the free online word processor and spreadsheet applications that work entirely within a web browser. Although not nearly as full featured as an office suite, they offer some compelling new capabilities that conjure up all sorts of scenarios that previously weren’t possible. This is exciting stuff.

Google Docs offers a number of fascinating features.  I particularly like how it can support multiple people editing the same document (even at the same time) and its wiki-like ability to revert to previous revisions of documents. But it is Google Spreadsheets that I find the most interesting, particularly from an Enterprise 2.0 perspective.

I found working with a Google Spreadsheets to be easy. If you ever used Excel then Google Spreadsheets will be familiar to you. However, I do miss the keyboard shortcuts that my fingers sometimes seem to type on their own. I also think Google Spreadsheets is misnamed (which probably means you shouldn’t hire me to name your product). Yes, it provides spreadsheet capabilities, but it does so much more. Google Spreadsheets may be the most intuitive, shareable, and extensible list manager available.

The list is a fundamental building block for collaboration within a company. Nearly every corporate worker deals with a list of some sort. Projects have issue lists and milestones. Product Development has a bill of materials. Marketing and Sales has lists of products being sold and lists of sales incentives. Nearly every team has a list of documents. And everyone has a list of tasks they need to track. The list of lists goes on and on.

Microsoft understands the importance of lists; nearly everything in SharePoint is based on a list structure. But Google Spreadsheets seems to take lists to a new level. First, it provides a familiar name and interface. Few corporate workers understand the POISSON spreadsheet function but everyone understands tables of data and we all know how to use Excel for project status reporting.

In addition, the recently released Google Spreadsheets API offers opportunities to improve the Enterprise 2.0 workplace by providing access to business data within the context of daily work and the ability to share spreadsheet data with other applications. For example, imagine having an ERP system publishing daily, weekly, or monthly reports in an online spreadsheet. Couple this with Google’s recent acquisition of JotSpot  and the opportunities for a rich online work environment are incredible.

However, there are a few features I would like to see in Google Spreadsheets. First, the integration between Docs and Spreadsheets appears to be limited to the user interface. I haven’t found any way to provide a dynamic exchange of data between the two tools. For example, I would like to have a cell in Spreadsheets reference a particular document or a list of tagged documents in Docs.

The new GoogleLookup and GoogleFinance functions are intriguing. GoogleLookup seems a little strange to me but may prove to be useful. It provides a way to enter answers to common questions. One of the examples in the online help uses this syntax: ‘=GoogleLookup("Roger Clemens"," earned run average")’, to find the earned run average of pitcher Roger Clemens.

The GoogleFinance function supplies data for stocks like current market price or volume of traded shares. I would really like to see these types of interfaces be extensible to any application through standard protocols and formats. These functions hint at the possibilities of lightweight web service connectivity from a spreadsheet.

Google Docs and Spreadsheets are just beginning to get us thinking about how spreadsheets and documents could work in an online environment like this. It’s going to be fun to see how these products evolve.

According to a recent article in Business Week, Best Buy is literally changing how—and where—its corporate employees work. Its ROWE program (which stands for “results-only work environment”) goes way beyond the virtual workplace, because it’s not just about changing locations—it’s about changing the way people work, and how their performance is judged. The idea is to not discuss hours when discussing employee expectations and performance—it’s not how much you work, or when or where you work; it’s the results of your work that matter.

The idea is intriguing.  Most of us have had a similar notion at one time or another, but few, if any, of us have worked for a company that does more than pay lip service to the “flex-time, family-friendly, work/life balance” model (pick your trendy name of the week). I once had a boss insist that he was family friendly, only to suggest that, really, it wouldn’t been inappropriate for me to keep my cell phone on while I was in labor with my first child, just in case anyone from the office needed to reach me.

Best Buy’s idea is to eradicate the work habits that simply get in people’s way; to take advantage of new technology to allow people to truly achieve work/life balance; and to decrease employee turnover by increasing job satisfaction, thereby boosting productivity. (Of the 13 ROWE Commandments, I am especially fond of No.1: People at all levels stop doing any activity that is a waste of their time, the customer’s time, or the company’s money.) One employee mentioned in the Business Week story actually works from the woods, while he’s hunting; another does so while following the Dave Matthews Band around the country. And what of those mandatory meetings we all attend, grudgingly, no matter how useless they seem to be (nay, actually are)? According to the article, Best Buy doesn’t have any. (Yes, I know, you’re sending in your application even as you read this!)

I’m a huge believer in the notion that time is not determinant of ability. Why we need to work 9-5 in this day and age is beyond me; and if you can get a week’s worth of work done in 24 hours rather then 40, by all means, spend the remaining 16 going to the movies or coaching your son’s soccer team (or, if you wish, working on more projects—but only if the reward for doing so, be it monetary or otherwise, is apparent and forthcoming). But while I thoroughly applaud the company’s efforts—and they sound like more than efforts; they sound like success—such a system does raise challenges for managers, employees and IT.

Here are a few that come to my mind—please feel free to add your own:

1. Measuring performance gets harder. Some jobs are easy to judge—if you’re in production, for instance, you either meet your quotas or you don’t—but many are more ephemeral than that. This is especially true for knowledge workers, whose value to the company lies in their understanding and use of information. That’s why so many companies traditionally judge employees based on their hours worked—at least it’s something they can measure, never mind that it’s not a very good measurement. Under the new model, managers must work with their employees to set goals and metrics that rate true performance, not just hours logged—and setting those metrics will be challenging.

2. Complications with hourly workers. Companies that currently ask employees to fill out “time sheets” or otherwise use a time-management system should instead consider tracking projects according to meaningful metrics: Were deadlines met? Are the deliverables complete? Is the customer happy? Those records are much more meaningful than “Did you spend 40 hours at your desk this week—and if you did, how many of them were spent doing XYZ?”

3. Technology counts. Jody Thompson and Cali Ressler, who helped develop ROWE for Best Buy, are quoted as saying that the “wireless world” clued them into the fact that employees could—and often did—work from anywhere; they just wanted to take advantage of that fact. Obviously, employees can’t work from anywhere without the right tools—and that’s where mobile technologies and unified communications fit in. Any company that wants to follow in Best Buy’s footsteps needs to seriously map and deploy the right tools to the right employees.

Would want to work in an environment like Best Buy’s? And if you do, how and where would you spend most of your time?

Melanie Turek enjoyed my description of  an interview I had with a reporter (whom I called "Jane")  from a major business publication who struggled with the term "knowledge worker."  This past week, there was a lot of discussion in the press about interruptions (it started with a Reuters story that used our Cost of Not Paying Attention report on interruptions, with its now-famous $588 billion cost of interruptions p.a.) and I was taking a lot of calls from reporters, including a few on-air interviews.  The timing of one call was particularly good (although it was a minor interruption) as I was going over results from our New Workplace survey (which you can take right now online).

One reporter, Aron Bender, is the host of South Florida’s First News, who reports for a South Florida radio station, called to talk about the problem (you can hear the podcast if you wish).
Unlike Jane, Aron got it.  He understood who knowledge workers were, why the cost of interruptions was as high as it was, and asked great questions.  Why am I mentioning this?  Melanie pointed out that one can find the definition easily at the Wikipedia  - something Jane seemed to think her readers might not be capable of.  Aron, who serves a much more broad demographic, saw the relevance and was able to provide his listeners with valuable and useful information about how work is done (and interrupted) in the knowledge economy.

I’m still studying how knowledge workers work - and you can help.  Take the New Workplace survey and tell us about your knowledge work and habits. We’ll be reporting about that here soon.

For all the hype about Wikis and social software revolutionizing the enterprise, the evidence shows that enterprises either aren’t aware of these tools, or aren’t deploying them.

Nemertes Research has interviewed over 75 enterprises for our upcoming benchmark “Building a Successful Virtual Workplace.”  As part of the interview process we’re asking enterprise IT executives about their adoption of, and strategy for social software such as blogs, wikis, RSS, and shared workspaces.  The results thus far have been surprising.

Less than 30% of enterprises are using wikis, less than 15% have deployed RSS services or internal blogging systems. In most cases, usage of these tools is within small workgroups rather than the enterprise as a whole, with reliance on public services or shareware applications brought in by individual users or workgroups.  Often the quote we’ve heard is “well, we use a wiki here in IT, or XXX department is trying one, but we don’t have an “enterprise wiki platform.””

The one area where we do see a significantly high rate of adoption or planned adoption is in shared workspace collaboration applications, with the majority of enterprises we’ve interviewed using or planning to use Microsoft’s SharePoint or IBM Lotus’s Team Workplace.

I believe these results confirm a trend I talked about in a previous Collaboration Loop post, that enterprises, especially large global enterprises, base their collaboration strategy upon a partnership with a key supplier (in most cases either Microsoft or IBM Lotus) and implement the tools offered by that vendor.  We just don’t see much interest in enterprise adoption of web-based services platforms (e.g., Google).  Enterprises we’ve spoken with would, by and large, rather deploy tools from known organizations that can easily be integrated into other office productivity applications, rather than deploy unknown applications or open source platforms without an enterprise support vehicle.

The trends we’re seeing continue to demonstrate a possible disconnect between the visionaries of the Web 2.0 “Internet as the Platform” world and the enterprise IT manager.  For enterprise IT managers, support and cost considerations typically outweigh all else.  Even the “coolest” technology in the world won’t find acceptance unless there is a strong support model, proper enterprise management tools and capabilities, and a demonstrable return on investment (oh, and it better interoperate with Microsoft or IBM applications).

The former Collaborative Technologies Conference is undergoing a name change (to Enterprise 2.0 Conference), and a repositioning. I have had a chance to talk with several of the folks involved and I think the motivations for this are dead on.

Let me try to characterize the forces pushing in the enterprise marketplace for social software, which is what I think the conference is trying to service, in both guises.

Collaboration is a word rooted in the groupware era of the 90s, and was an attempt to distinguish then-new technologies — like Lotus Notes and Novell Groupwise — from their antecedents: stressing the collaborative and ad hoc nature of groupware against a backdrop of generation of extremely inflexible functional applications. These products are based on ideas that predate the rise of the Internet. Don’t get me wrong: I am not against collaboration. But the term, when used as the single adjective in front of "software" is a differentiation from antique technologies that just isn’t relevant anymore.

I gave a talk in 1995 at a Giga Business Process and Workflow event, where I predicted that the Internet was going to change everything, and that the workflow (and groupware) industry would be radically remade by it. I predicted that in less that five years 50% of the then-dominant workflow companies would go out of business, and that 50% of the soon-to-be dominant companies would be new startups. I went onto predict that this reformation of the industry would lead to Giga restructuring its analysis services and shutting down the Business Process and Workflow event. The vertical market structure then in place — with workflow products designed for banks, or insurance companies, or credit card processing — would be obliterated by much more horizontal technologies, principally because of the benefits of adopting the Internet as a platform.

In 2001, I received a call from my old friend, Connie Moore, at Giga. She invited me to give a keynote that the upcoming Business Process and Workflow event. I asked why, and she told me that they had looked into my predictions and they had all come to pass. "And," she said, "this is the last Business Process and Workflow event. We are reorganizing, as you predicted, and the conference doesn’t fit any more."

The same thing is happening today, with Web 2.0 principles forming the basis of another platform for the enterprise to move onto. A similar horizontal shift is blenderizing old concepts and new together into a novel mix. It’s time for new adjectives, and new thinking to animate them.

So, Enterprise 2.0 will extend and rework many of the themes that we explored in past years at the CTC, but we are starting with some new organizing premises. However, Enterprise 2.0 is not going to be yet-another-Web-2.0 conference. It will focus specifically on the enterprise, and will dig into the nuts-and-bolts of scaling Web 2.0 concepts to business needs and models. This is going horizontal, with a vertical twist: horizontical.

I am glad to say that I will be continuing on as a program committee member, now in my third year working on the program. Let me know your thoughts and recommendations, as we are headed into the hottest part of the planning phase in the next month or two.

These days, any organization that doesn’t have a business continuity plan in place is critically out of date. It’s not just the big threats that matter—things like terrorism, natural disasters, regional power failures, and so on. With an increasingly remote workforce, more companies are open to more interruptions to their business—because in a virtual workplace, even if interruptions hit on a local level, their effects reach far and wide.

It doesn’t take much: A single building could experience a power failure or Internet outage; a single region could be under weather constraints; a single team could be stranded far from where they normally work. In the virtual workplace, all these localized issues can have broad effects on the larger organization, since most workers must interact and collaborate with a wide group of dispersed employees, partners and customers. If those peers are unable to “get to work”—not just sit at their desks, but communicate as well—the consequences will be felt throughout the enterprise. It doesn’t take long for the change to impact customer satisfaction, and the company’s bottom line.

As a result, more companies are taking a hard look at business continuity—essentially, the ability to keep the business running, customers served, and employees productive, regardless of any interruption to standard operating procedure.

One key way to ensure superior business continuity is to have a clear, well designed plan in place for keeping communications going. This should go beyond simple notification procedures and include unified communications—including VoIP, conferencing and presence-based applications—so that employees and partners can continue to communicate and collaborate to keep the business on track.

Of course, companies can benefit from these critical communications technologies on a regular basis, to boost productivity, support the virtual workplace, dramatically improve ROI and positively impact the bottom line. But many companies that want to deploy such technologies are looking for ways to justify the investment. Making conferencing and collaboration tools a valuable part of the business continuity plan can help achieve that ROI goal—and get the corporate purse strings to open up.

Companies should develop and implement an on-demand conferencing and collaboration plan that supports business continuity for the enterprise and its customers. The plan should detail what technologies to use when; how to handle the specific needs of office-based and remote employees; and how to define and determine when to put the plan into action.

To learn more about the role unified communications can play in business continuity, please join me for a Webinar this Thursday, December 14 at 9:00 am PST.