Jan 18th, 2009 |
The more time I spend toying with social computing applications and services such as Twitter, and Facebook, the more I wonder when we can expect to see Enterprise 2.0 dashboards.
The Enterprise 2.0 dashboard could do a few things:
- Unify my view into social networks, allowing me to combine updates from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed and other social networks. I should be able to add RSS feeds, and ideally, this would also serve as the home for my mailbox. In the enterprise, the likely dashboard is Microsoft Outlook, IBM Lotus Notes, or perhaps Mail for Mac. On the consumer/SaaS side, I’d expect that we’ll see movement by web-based e-mail services such as Yahoo, Google, and Hotmail to either partner with or acquire existing social network services, or add their own social networking capabilities to their own email services The wildcard here appears to be Facebook, which I’m guessing could capture a significant percentage of the web mail market simply by evolving its current messaging system into a fully featured mail client capable of interfacing with not only Facebook users, but any e-mail service.
- Unify my public facing services - today I have a blog, a twitter feed, a facebook status, linkedin status, etc., but little ability to integrate the various services into a public facing dashboard that would enable those who want to follow my various feeds to have one place to look. Yes, there is already some level of integration. For example, I’ve configured my blog to display tweets in the right-hand side column, but they don’t get pushed out to those who subscribe to my blog via RSS.
Finally, dashboards should incorporate presence from IM services, or perhaps even from enterprise IM systems, perhaps via the ability to set up XMPP presence propagation/importation.
On the enterprise side, dashboard integration with expert tagging/indexing and collaboration applications such as SharePoint, IBM Lotus Connections and Alfresco would further serve to unify various applications and services. In this environment I could right click on someone’s name in my in-box, see their presence status, access their Twitter feed, see their Flickr pictures, learn what projects they are working on, and see how others have tagged their expertise.
As others have noted, Xonbi appears to be the first effort to integrate social networks with e-mail, perhaps it will be remembered as the first effort to build the Enterprise 2.0 dashboard?
Irwin - useful concept, already brought closely to reality by aggregators like FriendFeed and lifestreaming apps like Tumblr. To make these useful for Enterprise 2.0, we need visibility into both sides of the firewall from the same interface. Moreover, from an enterprise-specific perspective, I’d think the dashboard concept should be employed at the administrator level to understand employee usage. If we merely arm workers with tools to use tools, it’ll be tough to get serious about enterprise adoption.
Hi Irwin, I think Apple is on the way. Why Apple? Take a closer look at the new iLife’09 and you will discover that a lot of the “cool & new” features are build with exchange of internet service XML: Google maps in iPhoto and iMovie, Flickr integration into iPhoto, Facerecognition and auto-update from Facebook versa iPhoto.
In OS 10.5 Apple integrated a powerful XML framework and they just began to use it. And now you know the cool new features that Microsoft will show in Win7… :)
Maybe this is revenue model for some social networks, if the big operating system developers pay for the option to get the XML data.
Hey Irwin - linking social structures on the consumer side has some significant issues (check out the blog post below).
http://mikeg.typepad.com/perceptions/2009/01/facebook-and-powercom-its-about-honoring-mutual-relationship-rights.html
http://mikeg.typepad.com/perceptions/2008/12/when-work-and-social-worlds-collide-microsoft-outlook-xobni-facebook.html
On the enterprise side - agree - presence is broken, too UC centric, too reliant on SIP/SIMPLE and not adapting to trends on the E2.0 side (social networks, activity streams):
http://mikeg.typepad.com/perceptions/2008/09/more-thoughts-o.html
Hi Irwin
Presence and filtering will be key to ensure that this dashboard doesn’t go the way of portals or KM systems. All information is not equal and media watching is not a sport in the enterprise as it has been in the early adopter tech echo chamber.
A smart dashboard as a fall back makes total sense and its needed given how dense life streaming interfaces can get. That said, there needs to be a simple way to monitor and follow topics, conversations and people coupled with push capabilities that will find the user when an important event occurs across the social enterprise, where every they might be.
I like the concept you lay out in this article. Corporate folks will need to manage internal and external streams of information.
How would feedly fit into this dashboard concept?
Hi Irvin,
Nice article! Perfectly agree with most points you have mentioned about aggregation and the dashboard!
Just to add, do you expect the dashboard to have suggestions as well? With suggestions I mean a little bit of analytics/semantics. I feel with one half of the dashboard containing the topics we have covered above and the other half should contain things that one might most likely look for. And these suggestions must come up based on the behaviour of the user on the system.
Just a few thoughts… let me know what you feel.. :-)
Regards,
Nikhil
Re twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube. A browser called Flock has a dashboard where you can log into these accounts and more view them individually and also view in a single view.
I use Google reader for my RSS feeds. This has a feature where after creating a folder with various subscriptions friendfeed, your blog twitter & flickr. You can then expose this folder publicly as an rss feed. You can do this as many times as you like.
So you could change where your blog rss subcription source lies??
There are various readers which can consume this single feed and allow it to be published on a website or share with friends / colleagues.
Hope this helps.
Hi Irwin, dashboards are meant to simplify - simply the clutter into a single view and enable real time aggregated data to be displayed in a user-customisable layout.
Open source plus open APIs makes excellent companions - instead of a full product offering from one vendor, third party developer can extend the Enterprise 2.0 for specific market segments and business functions.
A few open source products - with strong inclinantion to business (not social network) data - are showing up in this area - among them are jaspersoft & pentaho.
If Apple can build an iLife for business, they will take the Enterprise 2.0 dashboard crown.
Hi Irwin,
Interesting article indeed. It reminds me of Marshall Kirkpatrick’s article about the DiSO Dashboard (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/diso_dashboard.php).
I’m experiencing exactly the same as you do: I need to juggle with 5 different tabs in my browser to reply to a mail on facebook, a tweet, a blog post and a linkedin article. Luckily enough I can aggregate all the feeds in a reader but when it comes to publishing I still have to log to my different accounts.
However I doubt that this will go to straight to the Enterprise. The people that would benefit the most from it are certainly us, powerusers of the net, constantly connected, digging for more articles in a shorter time. We need a tool that would ease the reading and the posting.
But it’s not the case for everybody in a company.
Managers don’t need facebook, nor myspace, nor linkedin to work internally (dear, I wish I could emphasize the important words…) but they would certainly need a similar architecture (based on standardized XML flow of information) to have a dashboard specifically built for the business of the enterprise.
In any case, I agree with you on the principle, Web 3 might be more interactions within applications :)
Sten
I like your idea about creating a dashboard, and have created a mockup of how one might look (although I put this together from more of an individual perspective as opposed to an enterprise perspective) at http://slidesix.com/view/Google-Dashboard-concept. You begin by outlining the roles you play in various contexts and then the relationships you have in each of those roles. From there you can see the various types of exchanges you have had in each of those relationships based upon the type of resources such as emails, blog posts, activity updates, etc.
This could probably be customized in some way specifically for the enterprise to help you organize your information there. For instance, you could specify all the roles you play at your company (sales manager, project lead, training assistant, financial coordinator, etc.) and then the relationships you have in each role.
I put this together originally for the Google Product Ideas website for when they begin asking for non-mobile related ideas http://productideas.appspot.com/.
If this fits your vision of what an Enterprise Dashboard might look like, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.
Nice concept. I agree with Peter Kim above, but would build on that some. In addition to connecting both sides of the firewall and providing analytics on employee usage from an adminstrator, for Enterprise 2.0 usage, I think such a dashboard concept would include the following:
1. Allowing automated mining of communities … for instance, if a customer community exists (either hosted by the company or independent), sales & support reps could be notified of activities … requires integration with back office systems to know who owns what account from a support or sales perspective - end result is responsiveness to customer service or sales opportunities.
2. Analytics - some form of recommendation capabilities to filter signal from noise.
From a UI standpoint, I could easily see an Adobe AIR app emerging that integrates the items you speak about much in the same way that iGoogle is starting to do it with its widget framework, except the AIR app would be offline too.