When Microsoft first released Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), it touted the platform advantages of its embedded social computing capabilities (i.e., blogs, wikis, RSS, social networking). In fact, the company at the time was brimming with confidence that SharePoint’s social computing features were as good as anything offered by best-of-breed vendors. Reality slowly set in over several months however as the market were somewhat less-than-impressed with the features that SharePoint offered out-of-the-box. While SharePoint has garnered tremendous success in terms of user adoption (people invest in the platform for reasons much broader than blogs, wikis and social networks), many IT organizations were left to wonder if they would have to wait three years before seeing significant improvements that would support business requirements related to social computing.

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I wanted to share some background information on the tutorial presented at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference. Specifically, the tutorial I moderated on Monday that featured IBM and Microsoft.

Background

I have been on the Advisory Board of the Enterprise 2.0 conference for a while now (which has given me the opportunity to work with some pretty amazing people). For this event, I proposed a tutorial that would allow attendees to learn more about the social computing platforms from IBM and Microsoft from a user adoption perspective rather than a “plumbing” or infrastructure viewpoint. What I have run into during my client interactions is that people rarely get to see an in-depth demonstration that is visual and one that also allows them to see a storyline involving different use case scenarios that have parallels within their own workplace. So my starting point was to help deliver a session that was “not too high” and “not too low” in terms of marketing spin and technical details respectively.

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Microsoft recently announced its Unified Communications Developer Portal. The site, found on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN), includesinformation related to  software developer kits and application programming interfaces (APIs) devcelopers can leverage to build applications on its unified communications platform (e.g., Office Communications Server 2007, Office Live Meeting 2007).

What’s the significance of this announcement?

Some Microsoft speakers at the October UC launch event signaled that Microsoft’s next move would occur in the developer area related to UC-enable business and productivity applications. The announcement is significant since it is often the application solution (and its potential ROI) that helps build the business case for infrastructure upgrades and deployment of new products. In this case, if IT organizations can see how to build UC-specific applications, or augment existing applications through UC-related services, then the business case for adopting/migrating/deploying Microsoft’s products (such as Office Communications Server) becomes more complete. By delivering an application scenario around its UC platform, Microsoft alleviates some of the delays that occur when infrastructure upgrades lack an identifiable business solution. That said, there are a lot of different API’s in this announcement. To some extent, the possible permutations of API’s a developer might need to utilize when building a UC-enabled application reflects a lack of maturity and cohesiveness around the development model for Microsoft’s UC platform. In some ways, the amount of API sets reminds me of a mashup of sorts as Microsoft packages multiple products into a “platform” that is not entirely normalized underneath. While there are a lot of API’s here (arguably, an abundance of riches for those building software products), application developers are not software engineers and simplification wins out over complexity. There will likely be some initial confusion regarding the different techniques programmers can adopt when developing UC-based systems on Microsoft’s platform. I would expect Microsoft to raise the abstraction layer up a notch and be more consistent with the different ways applications can be built with the various toolkits in subsequent releases.

What does it bring to developers?

Everything that I mentioned above related to developers – plus – this strategy leverages the experience (e.g., .NET) developers already have with Microsoft tools (e.g., leverage UC plug-ins for Visual Studio).

How credible is Microsoft’s position in the unified communications space?

Very credible but it has different areas of competency that are at different levels of maturity. Microsoft’s core strengths are in the real-time collaboration re: IM, presence, web conferencing. They are rapidly moving into the area traditionally dominated by communication vendors – VoIP/IP Telephony, audio/video conferencing. But right now, I believe most organizations are going to deploy OCS and “get stable” around the real-time collaboration capabilities, then move to VoIP and integration with existing communication vendors as driven by business requirements. I do not see anyone ripping out their existing IP-PBX infrastructure in the short run. I do expect more rapid adoption of Round Table however given its price point, form factor and integration with Live Meeting. But make no mistake, Microsoft is in the UC game for the long run and fully intends to dominate it from a platform perspective - that includes mobile and speech as a standard application interaction model.

Who is the typical "developer" they are targeting?

Microsoft wants to appeal to different segments of the developer community. They want to make it easy for the average developer to UC-enable productivity applications, deliver more complex UC-centric systems at a platform level, and extend the modality of applications with speech interfaces – so I really think it is across the board – from the historical “VB”-like developer to the IT Pro who might be developing at a core infrastructure level.

Microsoft Introduces Unified Communications Tools for Developers

Q&A: Kirt Debique, general manager for Microsoft’s Office Communications Platform & Solutions Group, discusses how a new Unified Communications Developer Portal will provide enterprise developers with secure and reliable tools for building applications.

Related Links

MSDN Unified Communications Developer Portal
Developer Tools News
Unified Communications Virtual Pressroom
Microsoft Unified Communications: How Developers Can Blend Messaging, Voice and Conferencing with Next-Generation Applications
UNC301: Unified Communications for Developers: Building Communications Into Your Applications

Microsoft Introduces Unified Communications Tools for Developers

Microsoft recently announced “FeedSync” (refer to the article cited below), as the evolution of its previous work known as Simple Sharing Extensions, or SSE.  My initial reaction is that this announcement is somewhat of a "one off". Microsoft has not articulated any coherent vision on XML feeds and the end-to-end management of feeds in general and this announcement does not clarify its strategy. Microsoft is correct in pointing out the proliferation risks related to XML feeds. But FeedSync tries to solve more advanced problems that are outside mainstream adoption of XML feeds within enterprises right now. It also leaves Microsoft clients without a clear framework for how XML feeds and feed syndication comes together for those investing in the Microsoft platform. What I do believe is that we need to move away from feed synchronization being left up to individual vendors - so there is a clear need for a community-effort to standardize in this area (as mentioned by Sam Snell of IBM at the bottom of a blog post of the FeedSync topic). There is also the broader challenge of data synchronization (where tools like Groove and Notes have advanced replication engines that are unfortunately locked up inside those respective products).

Perhaps someone will take this spec and run with it - creating some interesting and innovative applications that can better showcase its value. But I wish Microsoft would fix some of the more basic gaps and glaring holes in how it is approaching XML feeds and feed syndication in general. Right now, "the cart is before the horse" so to speak.

Initially, Microsoft delivered the Windows RSS Platform as part of IE7. IE7 included its own lightweight feed reader (which I actually like, it does what it is supposed to do and no more). Windows RSS Platform (which I also like), was positioned as common client-side infrastructure to provide consistent feed-related services for desktop applications (e.g., feed subscriptions, download, storage).

Then the Outlook team undercut that effort by implementing (essentially), its own version of Windows RSS Platform as part of Outlook 2007. That’s bad enough - but the implementation is absolutely horrible when you use it for a large number of feeds (BTW, my machine literally dies when Outlook 2007 syncs and despite deleting feeds several times, they keep coming back – my experience with Outlook 2007 and its native support as a feed reader has been very frustrating).

Microsoft further confused the picture when it appeared to be working on a hosted feed syndication platform but never executed. Niall Kennedy was hired with the assumption (on my part) that he would spearhead the effort. Indeed, he initially appeared excited about coming on board, but soon announced that he was leaving.

SharePoint exposes a lot of information via RSS feeds but it apparently has no support for Atom - in fact, Microsoft seems to be very unclear on its support for Atom (and Atom Publishing Protocol). Perhaps Microsoft will continue to play with RSS extensions. I hope not since this would only end up muddy the waters given RSS is essentially an architectural dead-end. It is important for IT organizations to realize that SharePoint is not a feed syndication platform - it’s just another application that exposes feeds. This gap forced Microsoft to partner with NewsGator (i.e., Social Sites), but even that integration does not eliminate the need for enterprise IT organizations to look at what Attensa, KnowNow and NewsGator offer themselves as complete feed syndication platforms.

Surprisingly, IBM is also completely absent regarding a feed syndication platform. I find it amazing (in an underwhelming manner), that a company touting social computing (e.g., Lotus Connections) and "Info 2.0" has not articulated a strategic vision related to XML feeds outside a simplistic client implementation in Notes 8 and surfacing XML feeds in its related back-end products (e.g., Domino, QuickR, etc). For now - Attensa, KnowNow and NewsGator remain the only credible options with perhaps Oracle as perhaps the only large vendor that could make a move here.

Synchronization for the Web

The creation of FeedSync was catalyzed by the observation that RSS and Atom feeds were exploding on the web, and that by harnessing their inherent simplicity we might enable the creation of a “decentralized data bus” among the world’s web sites. Just like RSS and Atom, FeedSync feeds can be synchronized to any device or platform.

Previously known as Simple Sharing Extensions, FeedSync was originally designed by Ray Ozzie in 2005 and has been developed by Microsoft with input from the Web community. The initial specification, FeedSync for Atom and RSS, describes how to synchronize data through Atom and RSS feeds.

Windows Live Dev

The announced acquisition of Parlano is a strategic move by Microsoft. The addition of persistent group chat to the Office Communications Server (OCS) platform is a clearly reinforces Microsoft’s Unified Communications strategy (which is somewhat obvious) but it also sets the groundwork for integration with Office SharePoint Server in ways that augment what Microsoft is doing in the area of social networking.

The UC Perspective

While Microsoft does have group chat capabilities within OCS, the sessions are what people typically expect - multiple people invited into a "room" where they can IM back and forth. When people end the chat session, it disappears. Parlano has taken this concept and extended it by adding "persistency". Group chat rooms can last for quite some time. The historical context delivered offers tremendous value to certain types of information and knowledge workers. Organizations can setup multiple channels of persistent real-time chat spaces. The solution may not be widely known of in the large enterprise market but the concept is popular within financial circles (which happens to be a strong install-base for Parlano).

Because of Parlano’s experience in that particular industry segment, the company has developed a collection of XML-based compliance adapters and functions that help enforce "ethical walls" between groups that might have a conflict of interest within an organization. These security and compliance services are a "hidden gem" for Microsoft.

Parlano also recently demonstrated the ability to add video calls from within persistent group chat applications. I would imagine that persistent video and audio features are on the roadmap as well. As Microsoft advances Parlano’s rich media persistency, you can imagine additional synergy with the conferencing services within OCS as well as with RoundTable and Office Live Meeting. More broadly, I would expect some integration between the technologies Parlano offers with Microsoft’s SharedView efforts as well. 

The Social Networking Perspective ("Twitter For The Enterprise"?)

While persistent group chat might not be commonly known within the enterprise, it is popular in the consumer market. Twitter is perhaps the most well-known example of persistent group chat (but takes it to a level of visibility and transparency well-beyond what we might think of for a "group"). Still, there are some intriguing integration possibilities for Microsoft to pursue by taking Parlano’s technology and applying it within SharePoint’s "My Site" feature. For instance, on a worker’s profile page, the persistent group chat sessions that a person is a member of could be displayed. When persistent group chat is combined with functions delivered by Microsoft’s future Knowledge Network software, customers should expect some level of social network analysis and correlation based on user interactions within these sessions. When SharePoint is used for external applications, there are clear customer service and community-building aspects to persistent group chat that could also be explored.  

Questions To Keep In Mind

1. It appears that Parlano will be implemented as a new server role. Infrastructure planners should keep that in mind when designing enterprise pools. It is not clear right now how Parlano will participate in the OCS Focus/Focus Factory architecture over time.
2. Parlano has its own compliance services. Audit strategists should closely examine how OCS implements compliance/records management and compare/contrast that support with what Parlano delivers. It is likely that the initial integration by Microsoft will require some extra steps to consolidate information. It may also require more work by administrators to define controls across the two products that define monitoring and tracking features to log certain user interactions and conferencing activities.
3. Communicator/OCS has a hook to Outlook to store personal chat history. It is not clear whether Parlano’s persistent group chat will connect to Outlook to support a similar capability.
4. Security and network teams might want to look at federation and perimeter network design issues. For instance, it’s not clear how external users "proxy in" to a persistent group chat session. 

The Competition

Persistent group chat has also been a strategic focus for IBM as well. At VoiceCon Fall 2007, IBM discussed how it will deliver a range of real-time community applications (see this post by Adam Gartenberg).

Microsoft Press Release

Microsoft to Acquire Parlano: Microsoft strengthens unified communications portfolio with leading enterprise group chat provider.

Additional Reading:

Microsoft to acquire Parlano
"They Have Spoken"
Microsoft will acquire company behind ‘group chat’ application

In terms of user experience, not much is discussed as far as design and system goals for Enterprise 2.0 and the implementation of social software applications in that context. As Burton Group conducts research in this area, including client discussions, the following four objectives and subsequent summary of criteria are consistent themes that build on Professor McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 concepts:

Personal Value
To some extent, there is a selfish reason why people participate in social applications. The system should reciprocate by delivering some degree of personal value back to that individual. Blogs enable people to establish their own voice. Wikis enable people to contribute content. Social bookmark systems make it easy for users to assign their own meaning (via tags) to information, categorize information in a manner that makes sense to them as an individual, and re-find the information later. Without this type of quid-pro-quo inherent in the user experience, users may not become engaged enough to participate to any great degree. 

Emergent
While some scenarios for social software are goal-oriented, there is a great deal of serendipity in how social systems are actually used by its participants. Blogs may be intended to capture comments and observations related to a project or work process but can also easily be extended to discuss other concerns of its author(s). Wikis can be intended to act as a formal reference site (e.g., an internal version of Wikipedia). But the same wiki can just as easily be extended to act as a place where communities of practice coordinate activities,  share information, and notes on best practices that augment pages devoted to formal definitions.  XML syndication platforms might allow users to save feed items into folders that can be re-published as feeds in their own right. This type of re-mixing can blend information from multiple sources into a highly refined channel to which any other number of employees might subscribe to without any formal knowledge from content publishers or web site owners. Social networking sites may become a critical pipeline for how employees discover which co-workers, alumni or partner might know a particular customer in order to gain a warm introduction (versus a “cold call”). Social applications need to be designed to accommodate spontaneous interaction.  

Communal
The system should support ways for participants to establish a sense of community that helps promotes multiple levels of joint ownership, information sharing, relationship building and mutual trust. A wiki for instance becomes a more credible resource if there are passionate contributors and editors. A blog becomes more than a personal soapbox when it becomes inter-connected with other blogs and evolves into a mesh of inter-locked conversations. As more users participate in a social bookmark system, the clustering of tags acts as a mediation vehicle between people and information sources. User profile pages that reveal more about an individual’s past experiences, personal interests and membership in professional associations creates engagement points for other employees. 

Platform-centric
Fragmentation of social applications across disconnected infrastructure results in stovepipes that limit enterprise-wide value from social software (e.g., integration, overlap and conflicting tools or incompatible plug-ins).  While this does necessarily mean a single platform, it does imply that “fewer are better”. Design implemented in a platform-centric manner often involves centralization of data and meta data as well as its data analysis and correlation capabilities.  A platform-centric mindset is better able to provide a broad and public space for social interaction and contributions to coalesce into patterns and structures that can be more intelligently supported by underlying system services (e.g., attention management, personalization, recommendations). 

Summary
Personal value:  the system provides value to the individual user regardless of any broader participation.

Multiple personas: the system enables users to take on different “characters”

Informal interaction: The system is egalitarian and serendipitous, supporting emergent behavior.
 
Self-organizing participation: The system enables participants to become aware of situations in the network and synchronize actions based on community relations.

Self-determined connectivity: The system does not assign associations between people but can suggest associations – individuals elect to be connected based on relationship, information and activity affinity.

Collective user experience: The system is design with feedback loops that signal actions taken by others in the system.
  
Community-determined credibility: The system does not assign expertise or reputation based on formal sources but provides methods where expertise and reputation are the result of other member or network endorsements.

Community-influenced “findability”: The system is not a replacement for formal enterprise discovery tools but enables contacts and information sources to be discovered by relying on other members as search and connection filters.

Recombinant : The system supports user-driven creation and extension of platform capabilities (e.g., “mash-ups”).

Blends work style with lifestyle: The system provides a sense of personal ownership with appropriate interfaces to external services.

There is a great quote attributed to John Naisbitt that I’ve always found intriguing when examining the behavioral influences of social networks. In his Global Paradox book (1994), Mr. Naisbitt wrote, "the more universal we become, the more tribal we act". It’s interesting to apply that quote in the context of Facebook and the paradox of being connected to many people and groups with whom you have different types of relationships (see the article below). The people within each network facet you belong can develop a different mental image of your persona and sometimes it is desirable to keep those tribes separated.

So, to badly paraphrase Mr. Naisbitt: "the more socially connected we become, the more tribal we act" might be an interesting concept to keep in mind for those building such platforms as well as for those participating within them. Participants in a social network have a opaque view of the entire social structure of the network. When they discover that their view of the social structure overlaps or is inter-connected with what that person feels was a separate social structure, the need for stratifying those network connections often comes into play. In the case of technology, this would include the need for privacy controls and other filtering mechanisms. 

Social networks are not a flat layer of connections but are in fact multi-dimensional, variable and dynamic - with multiple facets (in the eyes of the participant) based on relationships, situations and other preferences. All of this is driving the need for social systems to provide participants with multiple profiles that describe different personas (e.g., work, home, school, play), attached to an identity with granular settings for how people are viewed, contacted, trusted, etc. It also reinforces the need for such systems to interoperate in some manner

Unified Social Networks: A Case For Federation?

The consumer market has long been active regarding social networking sites. Facebook is currently on a strong media coverage power-curve at the moment. Xing is receiving a lot of coverage as well (primarily in Europe). And now there are rumblings in the media that Yahoo and Google are also working to build out more comprehensive social networking sites (i.e., Yahoo’s rumored “Mosh” effort and Google’s work with Carnegie Mellon University on “SocialStream”).

Enterprise software vendors are also focusing on this market opportunity. IBM Lotus Connections is perhaps the most anticipated offering by a traditional collaboration vendor. Microsoft has improved its MySite capability within Office SharePoint Server 2007. And BEA is also positioning itself to take a run at the social networking space as well (from a corporate perspective). Best-of-breed vendors are also in the mix. Contact Networks is a vendor focused on the application of social networking in a business context. Connectbeam can help uncover strong and weak associations between people by combining tags, social bookmarks and employee profile information.

Given some earlier thoughts that "digital life" eventually trumps "digital work", it seems likely that the only way for these systems to be truly valuable for those that participate in them is for these sites to support some type of federation model that enables certain content and data elements to be exposed and/or actually shared across social networks. If employees are on Facebook (or another "digital life" social network site), they are not going to be enthusiastic about re-creating their persona on Lotus Connections (or some other "digital work" social network site) to satisfy company strategists. This really strikes me as an unnatural act. People should not have to artificially separate their digital life (and its associated network of relationship connections) from their digital work (and its associated network of relationship connections).

This raises the issue (and importance) of identity management, security and some type of federation model as foundational building blocks for any effort at unified social networks. I image that IBM’s Lotus Sametime Gateway that enables presence and instant messaging federation could be expanded to provide such capabilities down the road. Or, perhaps there is a role for Atom and Atom Publishing Protocol along with the addition of some additional application intelligence.

Related Links:

As Facebook Grows, Longtime Users Draw Privacy Veil

Socialstream

These articles (see below) are not only relevant for those entering the workforce but for those existing workers that are using social networking sites to build-out both professional and personal relationships. As enterprise software vendors begin to deliver solutions in this space (e.g., IBM Lotus Connections), organizations should take a step back and strategically revisit policies regarding use of such systems and the information within them.

On the surface, this is no different than how organizations have treated other tools for communication and collaboration (such as e-mail). Decision-makers should do the basics and make sure that employees are aware of how to use such systems (code of conduct, policies and procedures) and how the company will handle privacy concerns and use of information gathered by participation in social applications. But more has to be done by enterprises in the case of social applications, especially in regards to the typical response that the information belongs to the employer (depending on unique country legalities concerning privacy regulations). 

Organizations that want to leverage the potential benefits from social application need to articulate some promises to participants regarding how such information and interactions will be used and disclosed at a deeper level. At some point, the portability of a workers persona could very well become a concern. Should a worker be able to have some part of their social identity "leave with them" once they end a relationship with a particular employer? Why in the world would an employee reveal information about their private associations, personal affiliations and areas of interest as well as levels of expertise if management can use that data against them or "harvest" that information without any value returned to the employee as a result of their participation and disclosures? There are many questions like these that need to be vetted as companies deploy social applications.

The crux of socially-oriented systems are the often neglected organizational and human capital aspects that many companies have a spotty record on, vendors too easily shrug off and most IT organizations are ill-equipped to handle. In my experience, many organizations do not have the right balance of leadership, solidarity, sponsorship and resources (e.g., ethnographers, anthropologists) that can help them understand their existing social environments and how to effectively influence needed changes to address structural and cultural impediments. Strategists are not likely to be successful in any endeavor to "transforming the organization" without comprehending the social dynamics within their enterprise.

The strategic value of social applications is not going to be measured by examining raw data statistics like the number of bookmarks the company has generated. It is also hyperbole for vendors to tout social applications as a silver-bullet for solving age-old expertise location and "who knows who" challenges. This was the case at a recent vendor briefing I attended. Sure, there will be some linear benefits that will clearly help business processes to be more effective or certain workers to be more productive. Social software can indeed help with communication, information sharing and collaboration. But that’s not really nothing new and reflects the general evolutionary trend as tools become more mature.

The transformational impact of social systems lie in how well they enable organizations to be more agile in the marketplace, more adaptive to new work models, and more resilient to change (e.g., an unexpected threats). For individuals, social systems need to have value to them beyond their employment role and allow workers to not only foster external relationships but also blend work associations with lifestyle affiliations (as much as possible). Social systems need to enable workers to be more net-centric. That is, to be improve a worker’s situational awareness of what’s happening around them, to enable them to self-synchronize with activities that need to be done rather than wait on formal direction. Social systems are not top-down, they are intrinsically net-centric. They favor informality over formality. Social systems also tend to shift some degree of power from core institutions to the edge (individual people). Social systems help improve the "lateralness" of an organization - enabling more sideways motion across stove-pipes and hierarchies. Finally, social systems help organizations better catalyze "emergence" within their environments by allowing "patterns and structure inherent in people’s interactions become visible" (according to professor Andrew McAfee). All of these items benefit the teaming, community-building and change management efforts often associated with transforming organizations.

In any case, back to the purpose behind this blog post. One of the first steps an organization should prioritize if they are considering some type of social application is to review employment practices and assess usage guidelines regarding the information gleamed from such social systems:

Facebook and employment: an equal opportunity information trap

After years of "fired blogger" stories in the headlines, it’s fairly well understood that a frivolous, embarrassing, out-of-context, or ill-considered online data trail can and does cause problems for employment candidates and employees. But when CollegeRecruiter.com asked employment lawyer and blawger George Lenard to examine the increasingly common employer practice of using Facebook and other social networking tools to check up on potential hires, George produced three thoughtful and informative posts describing how candidate data can land employers in hot water as well. While employers might consider online sleuthing thorough or clever or both, the reality is that if information concerning protected characteristics (e.g., race, gender, or age) is disclosed and the sleuth-ees are not hired, employers may find themselves on the wrong end of discrimination claims.

» Facebook and employment: an equal opportunity information trap | Lawgarithms | ZDNet.com

George Lenard On Facebooking Employment Candidates

This might be better suited to Overlawyered than Between Lawyers, but I’m posting it here anyway because it’s a great series of posts. One thing I don’t see addressed: one of the most powerful features of Facebook (and a host of other social networking sites) is the fine-grained privacy control users have over the visibility their data. Often, only "friends" have access to the kinds of details George discusses. But, lots of people do make their data more generally visible. It’s ironic that employment laws are such that though "the public" may be invited to view such information, lucrative damages awards or settlements could be associated with doing so in the context of employment or potential employment.

George Lenard On Facebooking Employment Candidates. Between Lawyers: technology + culture + law

Related Links:

Employers Using Facebook for Background Checking: Is It Legal?

More on using facebook et al. in recruiting and hiring (Part II)

Employers Using Facebook for Background Checking, Part III

Over the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity talk to clients on a range of topics that include collaboration, unified communications, Web 2.0 and social software. Regarding Web 2.0 and social software, I find that people are often captivated by the use of these concepts and tools in the consumer market. While some technologists are skeptical, there are also a growing number of people that are wondering how such practices and technologies could be applied internally and whether such use could bring about some degree of business transformation – especially in terms of leveraging worker know-how and collective insight. Often, people will use the term “Enterprise 2.0” as shorthand to describe this transfer and application of Web 2.0 concepts and social software tools behind-the-firewall. While the Enterprise 2.0 topic itself is quite broad, I wanted to focus this post on one aspect of some recent conversations concerning the internal use of blogs.

Many of the questions asked by clients concerning social software tools, such as wikis and XML syndication (i.e., RSS/Atom feeds), tend to bring out standard issues regarding business impact, application scenarios, security, integration, compliance and vendor positioning. The tone and emotion levels however get quite passionate however, when the topic of blogs comes up.  There does seem to be agreement that public-facing blogs can have real business value from the perspective of marketing, PR, customer intimacy and community-outreach. That perspective however does not seem to transfer broadly when the conversation shifts to possible internal adoption of blogs. In fact, it is not uncommon to hear a range of opinions that could be represented by the following statements:

• Risk-related: “We’re afraid of what people will say.”
• Productivity-related: “We don’t want people wasting their time.”
• Performance-related: “We don’t see the business value.”

The conversation often swings back to the Internet and how blogs are used as a public soapbox to express personal opinions and how bloggers add fuel to emotionally-charged debates on topics many organizations view as a workplace distraction (e.g., politics, sports, entertainment, religion, breaking news, etc.). A good number of people I’ve talked to feel that blogs introduce risk (e.g., hostile workplace), negatively impacts productivity and hinders overall performance of business processes.

I think part of the problem is due to a lack of examples of how blogs can be applied to solve the types of business challenges organizations face on a daily basis. There are clearly other factors that hinder blog adoption – better examples are not a panacea. For instance, cultural dynamics do play a key role in how blogs will be adopted, but I will not address those aspects in this post.

But I do believe that if people cannot “see themselves in a story”, it makes it difficult for them to understand and visualize what’s possible. In this case, how blogs can be applied to improve situations people face everyday across a variety of business activities. Without more widespread application scenarios, many IT strategists and decision makers will continue to believe that blogs are only useful as a public soap-box. This reinforces the “fear of blogs” mindset. Even if there are practical cases for use of the technology, blogs are unlikely to be well-received by organizations that are concerned about unfettered speech across the workplace.

So what happens next? Perhaps a first step is for strategists to create some type of taxonomy that people can use to sort out possible use case scenarios for blog applications. What I have found so far is that requirements for deployment of blog technology within an enterprise can be generally placed into the categories below:

Internal Communication

There are many situations where organizations need to broadcast information to its workforce without the need for that information to be pushed to its workers in an intrusive manner (e.g., e-mail).

• A Human Resources department can leverage blog technology to continually keep employees updates on various benefit plans, awareness of enrollment dates and so on.
• CXO-level management can leverage blogs to informally communicate company issues related to markets, economics and its competition.
• Organizations can use blogs to communicate information to employees on the various community-outreach and social programs in need of volunteers.

Program / Project Management

Program management offices (PMO) and project management teams often establish operating environments where information may not always be captured and disseminated in a timely manner. The structure of these organizing bodies may challenge its ability to quickly respond, making it difficult to communicate credible and relevant information. 

• A PMO blog could provide a journal of activities, issues and future actions that could be valuable not only to workers within the PMO but to those monitoring and tracking the PMO elsewhere in the organization
• A group blog for developers and quality assurance teams could act as a clearinghouse to voice design concerns, for developers to record and report findings or to capture/disseminate software build and fix notifications discovered during development or testing cycles (e.g., shift notes)
• PMO and project teams create a variety of guidelines, procedures and other types of documentation. While wikis are good vehicles for the collaborative work on the content itself, blogs can provide a platform for individuals to provide deeper personal commentary.

Community-building

Organizations have struggled to find common off-the-shelf tools that allow for the capture, dissemination and augmentation of information while also enabling broad participation and community interaction. Facilitating open communication is a key aspect for organizations interested in sharing know-how and creating effective community-building environments (e.g., knowledge management).

• Research organizations have long valued the importance of personal journals and lab notebooks to catalog observations and record insight. Blogs within such an environment not only are of benefit to those within such communities but enable others to “look over the shoulders” of those engaged in such activities.  
• Government organizations can use blog systems to enable first responders to share insight and lessons-learned from on-the-job experiences
• Specialists in many different professions (e.g., utilization management nurses, fraud investigators, security experts, underwriters, engineers) can use blogs to more easily communicate methods and practices relevant to their work activities

Business process

A multitude of business activities include capture of unstructured information as part of processing a particular task. Many applications do not naturally handle the type of free-form commentary and annotation users would like to add to a transaction or append to a case file. There are other situations where applications need to deal with conversational information that are not well-supported by traditional application models (e.g., issue tracking, exception handling, problem resolution). 

• A competitive intelligence process is often dependent on capturing field observations, rumors and collating information detected from various news sources. Blog systems can provide the platform the collecting and vetting this type of market monitoring, analysis, and opportunity/threat assessment.  
• Certain support processes require workers to capture notes as part of their remote activity (e.g., field repair). Offline authoring tools (e.g., Microsoft Windows Live Writer) could be used to compose analysis on a worker’s laptop and then upload to a group blog when network connectivity is available. In other situations, certain work activities might include capture of notes into operational logs. Blog technology can enable capture of task-related notes inline with performance of that operational process.

Now in some instances, these use case scenarios could be implemented via other tools (such as wikis) and some applications might require supporting software to be deployed as well (such as XML syndication). But the idea at this point is to get over the fear-factor associated with blogs and begin the process of re-defining the applied use of blog technology in a manner that has some relevant context to that particular enterprise.

In my next post, I’ll expand on this categorization model for gathering business requirements and use case scenarios and talk about some different frameworks organizations can consider for making blog technology available to users:

• a “license to blog” deployment model
• a “gated blog” deployment model
• a “blog central” deployment model
• a “structured blog” deployment model

The ongoing community revolt (some might say "mob rule") at Digg is worth paying attention to if you are involved with community-building, social networking and related efforts for your enterprise. While Digg has some unique circumstances surrounding the site (very geek-centric) and this particular debate (possible violation of copyright protections), the issue of community empowerment is very much at center stage. If you take a step back from the nuances of this situation, and fast-forward a bit to a time when Digg-like tools are more widely deployed within an enterprise (which I believe will ultimately happen), how does that influence what might he thought of as traditional management decision-making?

Let’s say that management decides a course of action and announces that plan to its workforce. What happens if there literally is a "digital rebellion" of sorts as employees strongly voice opinions that the company should take a different path? Most workplaces are not a democracy and the initial management reaction might be to forcefully shut down (by taking down the application) what is perceived to be "mob rule" - people might be disciplined, told to "just do their job" and so forth. But if we could get beyond the power/pride issues over who has what title/role, who has what formal decision rights, who has more information at their disposal, and the complex dance between knowing when to lead and knowing when to follow - what if the crowd was right?

Say the issue was how to address a product defect or a factory shut-down or the way claims were being handled after a natural disaster - the list of examples where collective intelligence within networks of people "on the edge" so to speak could provide a better compass to guide complex decision-making than centralized management structures.

But what if the crowd was wrong? What if the situation was related to a merger or acquisition or entering a new market or getting out of a particular business segment and management had done the due diligence needed to fully analyze the impacts and future market opportunities but the disruption would be painful in the short run so it would only be natural for people to react negatively.

You might dismiss the voice-of-the-crowd. But I might suggest that there is still some intrinsic value to transparency and public discourse. In some cases, the crowd may be wrong, technically, but the collective voice may be a signal to management that it failed to adequately address the human capital and softer organizational facets of how the decision impacted its workforce emotionally or in some other quality-of-life aspect. Such lingering sentiment may negatively impact the organization in other ways.

So while many of the stories regarding Digg will focus on the "mob rule" aspect, I believe the real take-away here is that the line between "mob rule" and "collective intelligence" is razor thin and that companies will cross back and forth across that line. The goal is to avoid significant and long-lasting chaos and anarchy. Some degree of ongoing cultural disruption can be a good thing actually.

There is danger however when enterprises look at technology alone to democratize the workplace. Those that go down this path, do so at their own peril. The ability of an enterprise to leverage the capabilities of the people it intentionally or inadvertently empowers is inextricably tied to its ability to handle the organizational dynamics enabled through the technology. Strategists need to consider a range of human capital and organizational development issues related to culture, decision rights, worker expectations, worker-management engagement, teaming, leadership, followership, etc. If you have an effective governance model in place, you build the needed resiliency and agility into the organization’s DNA to become a "social enterprise". A social enterprise has the competencies and behaviors needed to continually right itself as it ebbs and flows between "mob rule" and "collective intelligence".

Social software does not mean the end of formality and the end of structure. Sense-making tools and decision-making systems are more critical than ever before within a network-centric organization. What we are still in the process of inventing are the next generation management frameworks. What is going on with Digg (and other communities that promote activism) will provide some lessons. At the end of the day, collective intelligence needs to lead to collective action that is purposeful in manner that supports the organization’s goals and objectives. Otherwise, a "social enterprise" will be synonymous with the dot-com busts on the nineties.

Digg’s Mob Rules

Power to the people" is a popular rallying cry of young Web companies whose businesses are dependent on the communities their sites empower to create and share content. But it’s also their prime problem. Try as they might to guide the wisdom of the crowds supplying their content—and viewing their advertising—they cannot ultimately control them. "This is the flip side of these companies whose strategy is building up a community of users and encouraging those users to see the company as leaders of the community rather than their bosses," says Edward Felten, professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University. "You can imagine a similar kind of thing happening in MySpace or YouTube or any of these places."

Source: Digg’s Mob Rules