SG Enterprise 2.0

Awesome Highlighter

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 12:53:00 +0000

Awesome Highlighter is an useful tool that I have found recently. It allows you to highlight the text on a webpage and then give you a link (url) which you can pass to your friends. With this tool, you can

To show others the important part of an article
Reduce confusion about a sent link
Save time for the reader
Save the parts of the pages you find interesting

Coupled with the bookmarklet, you can click on the bookmark to bring up the toolbar at the top of the page to select the text (with a choice of color) and also add in a personal note. You can also choose whether to make the link public or private.

Do check it out yourself

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 12:52:00 +0000

Re: Some Questions You Might Get Asked

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 07:38:00 +0000

Andrew McAfee posted a blogpost on some questions you might get asked when planning to deloy emergent social software platforms. I could not resist putting down my views to the questions.

Here it goes.... (Warning! It's a bit lengthy)

What if employees use the their internal blogs to post hate speech or pornography, or to harass a co-worker?
Every organization will have an IT usage policy that is communicated down clearly to staffs on the Dos and Don'ts. Any violation can be reported and warning can be issued for the first time. Subsequent offenders should be punished severely.

What if blogs are used to denigrate the company itself, air dirty laundry, or talk about how misguided its leadership and strategy are?
It is possible for the content to be posted elsewhere (on the net) or brought up during the grapevine sessions. Having a platform allows people to voice out and the proper clarification or corrective actions can be carried out promptly. Of course, the top management will need to be prepared, as having a platform will cause other people to think that they are given the freedom of speech. Otherwise it can be communicated down that the platform is limited to official work and refrain from any personal views. This will have to depend on the culture of the organization.

What if nasty arguments break out in a discussion forum and the whole thing descends into name-calling and flame wars?
Arguments do break out in the real life as well. Some mediators can step in. But prevention would be the best by having a set usage guidelines. Of course using real names and putting the face to a name does helps in reducing these occurrences.

Won't people be tempted to use forums to talk about current events, review movies, ask for advice about camcorder purchases, and have other non work-related conversations?
It depends on the goals of the organization. Whether there is a need to build relationships? If there is, the platform can be enhanced to provide such forums. Otherwise it can be skipped and people are unlikely to misuse it without large scale usage. It will most probably scale down at email or IM level within their cliques.

What if people waste time filling up their employee profile pages with pictures of their kittens and vacations?
Again. It will depends on the organization's goals and the nature of work of the employee. If they are connected to the internet, they can do it elsewhere or do other offline things like reading magazines or gossip with emails. As long the employee are meeting their KPIs, they should be given certain autonomy. My concerns will be the time wasted by people reading the profile pages. One employee's uploading of his travel photos will have a multiplier effect on the time wasted as his fellow colleagues go through the photos. This can be cut down by imposing some disk quotas and keeping the profile pages with limited enhancements. With this, it is likely that the employee will move his acts to public domains where it is reachable to a much larger group of audience and with more convenience.

Will people just use social networking software to plan happy hour, rather than to get work done?
There's always a likelihood of it happening. Sometimes planning happy hour together does get work done much faster due to the relationships. As long the employees are meeting the targets set upon them, it should be ok. If employers are really uncomfortable with the idea, then enterprise 2.0 might not be suitable for them.

Don't Enterprise 2.0 platforms just yield another source of discoverable content -- material that must be turned over as part of a lawsuit or other legal action?
If it is wrong, don't do it. The Chineses have an idiom, "若要人不知，除非己莫为" (The only way to stop people from knowing it is not to do it.). Although there is no Sarbanes-Oxley Act for many countries, the stakeholders of the company will have better trust in the management with tools that helps to surface those irregularities.

If the information on these platforms really is valuable, won't it be harvested by spies and sold to the highest bidder?
Possibly. Information and Knowledge are invaluable. So what is preventing this from happening with the current IT solutions? What happens when experienced employees leave with all the precious knowledge to the competitors? This can be minimized by putting in place a proper set of security infrastructure and policies.

Won't hackers break in to our Enterprise 2.0 platforms and steal their content?
This can be minimized by putting in place a proper set of security infrastructure and policies. Very important information should not be placed on the internet facing platforms. Encryption will also help. What is stopping them from robbing the laptops of the employees?

Don't these technologies make it easier to deliberately or inadvertently leak secrets to the outside world?
Yes, Enteprise 2.0 supports knowledge discovery and sharing especially when searching is all powerful. But it also helps to identify any compromises easily rather than to let people exploit the loopholes easily. There is a need to invest in a platform with good security features.

Don't they make it too easy for confidential information to leap over our internal Chinese Walls?
With proper planning, education and control, it can be prevented. There is nothing to stop a confidential email to be forwarded to someone. For a start, very confidential information should be excluded from Enterprise 2.0 as the platform will be in exploratory stage and is unlikely to be endowed with a comprehensive set security infrastructure.

If we give up tight control over our Intranet's content, how can we possibly avoid running afoul of all potentially relevant regulations and laws around information sharing in all the places we do business?
It is possible to segregate information from the intranet and internet with good usage guidelines. It also establish a need for enterprise 2.0 platforms instead of using public platforms. For those non-sensitive content, by posting it online, it helps by having more people to know and alert the company of any non-conformances and corrective actions can be done promptly instead of waiting for grave consequences.

What if an unhappy customer uses uses our community site to air their grievances, and to talk loudly and often about our lousy products or Kafkaesque customer service? Or a supplier uses them to complain about how we never pay on time?
It allows corrective actions to be done promptly rather to have the bad-mouths taking place at other sites unknowingly for a long period of time.

Are we responsible and liable if people give incorrect information or bad advice on question and answer forums we host on our Web site?
Nope. You can always put a disclaimer. Even television programmes also carries a disclaimers on the views of the participants at their shows.

If we try to take advantage of lead-user innovation and ask people to submit their ideas to us, who owns the resulting intellectual property -- do we have to share resulting revenues and/or profits with the submitter?
It will depends on the arrangement up front. Usually companies will put up certain terms of conditions during the submission. Nevertheless, if the idea is really that good, the submitter should be aptly rewarded.

Is email the root cause of the attention problem

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:18:00 +0000

Recently, there have been a lot of ongoing discussions about problems related with emails. Some of the interesting ones are:

Studies by Basex has concluded that 28% of a person's day is consumed with "interruptions by things that aren't urgent or important, like unnecessary email messages -- and the time it takes to get back on track." And one of the solutions being offered around is another tool (possibly Enterprise 2.0 tools).

While Enterprise 2.0 offers much other benefits over email, I do not agree entirely that a new tool can solve all the problems completely. There is much likelihood that we will shift from one house into another house with the same set of baggage. Let me visualize what could possibly happen if email is ever replaced by other tools.

"You got new feeds" - Most of the email client are configured to check for incoming emails regularly. This problem will still stay if users configured their RSS readers to check for changes at every 5 minutes interval. Personally I will always check my inbox after leaving my desk for some time. The best way to work around this is to re-configure the frequency of checking for incoming emails. It will be better if users can configure rules to download high priority emails within shorter intervals.
"Hi there" - Even without email, users can still use instant messagers to poke at their counterparts causing interrupts.
"Ring ring" - There are people who will always use the phone for every small matters that doesn't warrant immediate attention.
"Spam" - Besides spams from the advertisers, there are also "spams" from friends and colleagues ranging from chain emails, and useless FYIs.
The "control freak" - There are some managers who always wanted to included in the all the distribution lists for all emails. The person could be subscribing all the RSS feeds or notification emails to track all the changes.

Therefore in my opinion, the mindset will also have to be addressed together to solve the problem. There is a need for a set of email ettiques and clear understanding that time and attention is limited. Perhaps a system for charging emails being sent will help more. The tools can only help to alleviate the problem by guiding the users to the desired behaviour with the well-designed user interface.

It's in the wiki

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 03:18:00 +0000

It is a common sight for speakers to dish out a lot of IT terms during IT presentation even though the audience are not that IT-savy. This is because those terms have been so internalized to them when they breathe and speak it.

This can also happen to any knowledge repository where everyone is so familar to its usage and unintentional habits like the following can develop over time:

It's in the wiki, how come you did not know/check/read it?

The requirements for a collaboration system and a knowledge repository system are different and wikis being so flexible and extensible should be managed carefully to avoid being non the wiser.

Some of the proposed solutions

Establish the correct ettique of usage - Users should try to search for the information first instead of posting questions.
Proper usage of tools - Users can use RSS or watches on changes to receive notification on any changes for those collaboration projects
Inculcate responsibility - Content owners should guide other users to the published information when there are some important information to be disseminated instead of assuming users will pick up the information by themselves.
Good organization structure - Users will be able to navigate to the required information through the use of content pages. Searches are only useful when people know what they are searching for. Users can also use tagging to categorize similar group of information.
Linking to the information - Links to the wiki instructions should be placed prominently within forms and templates to remind or lead the users to any important instructions
Clear and concise writing - It really helps the users to locate and understand the written knowledge easily

It is important to manage the expectations early rather than to wait for things to happen. Otherwise over time, people-related issues will start to pop up and it might become a political tool to shift responsibility.

Additional references

Microsoft Sharepoint Forum 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 03:11:00 +0000

Microsoft is organizing a Sharepoint Forum in Singapore in July.

Compared to wikis, Sharepoint offers another perspective of using documents for collaboration and the line is blurring according to the latest development. It will be a good opportunity to pick up ideas and insight to improve on the way we work.

Date: 1 July 2008 (Tuesday)

Time: 8.30am - 5.30pm

Venue: Suntec Singapore International Convention & Exhibition Centre

Level 3, Theatre

For details, please check out here

How should the information be organized in a wiki

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 06:02:00 +0000

Ever since the introduction of wiki to my organization, it has take on an explosive growth rate that I am receiving requests for new spaces on a regular basis. A space is a grouping of pages which has the same topic and also the same set of access permissions. A space can be used as a project space within the team or a portal site to disseminate information to other teams.

The idea of spaces is analogous to books volumes within a library and it comprises of pages contributed by various authors.

By organizing the wikis into collections of spaces:

Advantages of using spaces

Ease of searching - because contents with a common topic are grouped together. People can zoom in the correct information by searching within a space instead of the all the spaces in the wikis
Ease of monitoring - people will be able to track changes within the spaces via email alerts or RSS. This will allow close collaboration within a project without getting spammed by other noise.
Ease of access control - it will be much easier to manage permission control for all the pages instead of having to set permission for each and every pages
Ease in processing statistics- It will be faster to process and aggregate the information in the space (e.g top 10 visited pages), if the number of pages is smaller as compared to 1 spaces with all the pages inside.

Disadvantags of using spaces

Need for knowledge of structure - An author will need to have a good understanding of the structure of the wiki to determine which spaces to contribute his articles to.
Searching - As the number of spaces increased, users will start to have difficulty to identify the spaces to search for the required information. Thus the benefits of searching within space mentioned above will be diminished.
Need for knowledge of access control policy - Because there is a permission control policy tied with the space, the users will need to know who are the ones with access permissions before deciding to posting sensitive information into the spaces. It might cause the same information to be duplicated into multiple spaces in order to present

My recommendations to tackle this issue will be to have a few super big spaces organized by topic where access control is not an issues. This will facilitate exchange of information easily

For smaller spaces with more stringent requirements, they will be organized by the access control which usually is. Their access control will be limited to a smaller group to prevent overloading of information to others and ease management. Users can then use RSS or email tracking for closer level of collaboration.

Spaces that are out of use should be archived to restrict addition of new information so that the users will be limited on the spaces to contribute in or search from.

Our own corporate Ebay

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:23:00 +0000

Recently, our company was running a charity drive to raise funds for our adopted charities. One group of users came up with the idea of having an online charity auction.

Despite that they do not have any IT programming background, they were able to piece up a prototype of the auction site within a short period of 2 days. This was because they leveraged on our corporate wiki platform and the available plugins. The work will take a few man-months had they requested the IT dept to build the auction system from scratch.

The auction will end in another few days time, and I do wish that they can raise sufficient funds to meet their target.

Confluence Awards 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Sun, 18 May 2008 15:55:00 +0000

Hi folks, it has been quite some time since I last posted something on the blog.

Together with the help of my colleagues, we have organized our own Confluence Awards for 2007 to recognize the people who have contributed to growth of our knowledge base and the usage of wiki in our organization.

Although it was running late beyond the first quarter of 2008, it was better than never. The awards given are:

The Champion Awards - given to those people who championed the use of Confluence
The Guru Awards - given to the top 25% users who shared their knowledge on Confluence
The Fisherman Awards - given to the top 25% users who visited Confluence to "fish" for knowledge

The awards did not incur a lot of cost to give you. We designed badge-like graphics with our in-house artistic talent and posted it as a blog announcement together with the list of winners. And the winners are allowed to use the graphic on their own profile pages. Eventually they can have a page to put up all the awards they have won.

Of course, with the awards being endorsed by the management was a super big bonus. After the announcement was posted up on Confluence and via email, the response was good. The activity on our Confluence site almost doubled and the awareness for the site also increased.

Of course it did lead to some problems - performance issues with higher visitor rate. But it is a happy problem that we spent some time to resolve it :)

Why wiki

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 08:18:00 +0000

A simple picture on why wiki collaboration is cleaner

Source: Wikinomics The Blog

The Medici Effect

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 15:15:00 +0000

Last week, I attended the Medici Innovation Workshop organized by Ms Waltraut RITTER at SMU. The workshop is about the Medici Effect which is a term coined by the author Frans Johansson to describe

the effect resulting to breakthrough with the intersection of fields, disciplines and cultures

Some of the examples listed

EastGate Centre - a building modelled after terminate moulds
The card game "Magic - The Gathering"

What excited me really is that the chances for the Medici Effect to take place can be increased with a better tool for collaboration. It is much difficult for this to take place just by a person alone especially that the general trend in the knowledge economy is moving towards specialization of knowledge and skills.

For those that are interested to know more, you can download the ebook version at http://www.themedicieffect.com/downloads/MediciEffect.pdf

And check out the article "Create the Medici Effect" from Havard Business School

Breaking the code

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 16:09:00 +0000

My handphone was spoilt and I have been using a spare phone for the past week. And because my phonebook was not synchronized to the SIM card, I was receiving sms messages without any names. It's amazing that I can know who sent the message by reading a short message of less than 10 words.

What does this tells us? All of us have the ability to use context to pick up and associate information quickly. For example, a message "No cooking tonight" will be 100% from my mum who cooks my dinner. This context information is picked up over time and experience.

If somebody else read the same message, he will be wondering whether it is the mum or the wife who sent the message.

What appears to be so simple may not be so direct to others. Therefore we should always be explicit in explaining the context during textual communication.

An insight on Email for corporate needs (4)

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 13:00:00 +0000

Keep record of important information

During our course of work, there are a lot of useful information that we will archive. It may be for future reference or as a proof in black and white.

However, is email the best tool to exchange and keep knowledge? Let us take a look. What are the advantages?

Convenient - Email has been our way of life and it is really convenient to reply or forward email to another one.

Control - Email allows us to determine the circulation list.

Tracking - It is possible to track whether someone has read your email with Outlook

Getting attention - Usually people keep their inbox open at all times, therefore replies are mostly quite promptly.

What are the disadvantages?

High changes of losing the knowledge

I have encountered several incidents that large collection of useful emails are lost when computers are infected with viruses or spoilt. This is in spite of the effort to prevent virus infections and repeated calls to backup the data.

Next, these valuable information are lost when someone leaves the company. Nobody will transfer all the useful emails from their PCs to their colleagues.

Tedious in transferring the knowledge

Plus it is a hassle to search for information when someone else requests for it. Would it be good if they can search the information by themselves?

Time consuming and disruptive

And a lot of time is wasted reading several emails from the same thread when actually the last email has all the useful information. Gmail has a really good solution on this

Besides that, it can be quite disruptive with emails coming in that are just "For your information only". They can be batched together to read at scheduled intervals.

Difficulty in maintaining the accuracy of the knowledge

There are also a few occurrences where the information being circulated are not fully accurate. It may be caused by the lack of the knowledge by the author and missing out the subject experts in the circulation list to correct the inaccuracies. This could happen despite corrections have been made as an older version of the email thread are being circulated around.

Tracing the soure of the knowledge

Sometimes for a long email thread, people will delete the non-important portion of the conversation. Subsequently, it will be difficult to track the source and original rationale of the conversation.

This post is a continuation of the previous post.
You can read the previous posts:

My knowledge vs Our Knowledge

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 12:34:00 +0000

According to ComputerWorld, the #1 pitfall of corporate social networking is the desire to protect "personal intellectual property". I am also guilty of this pitfall. Instead of posting my thoughts on Enterprise 2.0 in a centralized site such as wikipatterns, I am writing on my own personal blog and thus limiting my readership and not maximizing the value of collaboration.

Despite that, I will still continue to maintain this blog because

It allows me to build and maintain my distinct identity
I am not restricted by the content and structure of things I write
It gives me a direct feedback of how useful my posts are (with the # of visitors)
I can track easily all the comments.
It is difficult to identify my contribution in a small section of a long essay.
People usually will give more attention to the first and last author of the page
People usually will give more attention to the main article as compared to all the comments.
It allows people who are interested in my articles to track my posts easily.
My knowledge can still be linked to other knowledge portals easily. Yes! Linking is one of the useful feature of the web.

The focus should be to encourage people to contribute and to get the the content up. Subsequently it can be retrieved by search or through linking.

Mashups can be s"mashed"

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:09:00 +0000

A few months back, I was approached by a fellow colleague to advise on whether it is possible to extend our enterprise wiki to add a course registration feature. Within a few hours, a prototype was up and the entire course registration application was up in the next day.

This is made possible by mashups. Mashups are web applications that are assembled together from a few simple applications to perform a more complex functionality.

Enterprise Innovation has written an interesting writeup on mashups entitled "Changing the face of business".

As compared to normal applications, mashups offers a quick and cheap way to build applications and it can be done by the end users without going through the IT department. However there are a few concerns that need to be addressed:

Integration with other systems

Can the mashup link up with other systems to achieve the business objectives? Enterprise systems are mostly linked up with one another to process on the same set of data. And this is the role of the IT department to ensure the solution fits into the grand picture.

Extensibility and support of the mashups

Can the mashup scale upwards and easy to maintain in the long run?
I have written a blog previously on my plugin policy

Customization

I have encountered several requests to customize some of the features in the mashups. And this is a potential pitfall for promoting the use of mashups. Soon the mashups will become too complex such that they can only be used for a single application and their maintenance will become difficult with numerous requests coming in.

Robustness

Unlike normal IT systems, mashups are built from ready-made applications and they might not cover all the usage scenarios. Thus they may not be as robust as applications designed from scratched. Therefore mashups should not be treated as a magic pill that can be used in all scenarios.

Nevertheless, mashups are useful and can be used for simple applications and proof of concept. If it is found to be useful, then more resource can be placed to upgrade the mashups into a full system.

Timebridge

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 12:37:00 +0000

Two weeks back I organized a get-together with my friends and I tried out Timebridge and my friends told me it's great.

Timebridge is an online scheduling application.

You can key in the details for the meeting
You provide a list of available timings for your attendees to select.
You provide the emails of the attendees involved
The email is sent out for them to select their available timings. (Note: No registration is required for the attendees)
An email is sent to the organizer after everyone has reverted.
You decide on the final timing based on the consolidated replies
The confirmation email is sent out to everyone. The appointment is finalized

You can check out the details at the video tour at their homepage

You can using it when you want to organize a gathering next time.

The need to be connected

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 17:06:00 +0000

5 minutes ago, I was writing a lengthy email through my corporate web email and the content was lost just because the session has timed out. It reminded me that of my comment on the fastforward blog on the importance of being connected for web based applications and especially Enterprise 2.0 apps too.

The web-based applications has gained a high growth rate because networking has became faster and more affordable. And it is this key element that enables social networks to be formed. Therefore a good network infrastructure is essential for the rolling out of E2.0 solutions.

Project Management with Confluence

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 15:09:00 +0000

This week I have experimented with a new way of using Confluence. We used Confluence to do weekly project progress report. This is the workflow:

Each project will have a space created for itself.
The project team will sign up for the notification on changes to the space
Every week, the system will automatically generate a new blog entry for the weekly progress report based on a template
The team members will receive the notification and thus update the report by making small modifications to it

By using this workflow, it will

faciliate the usage as user need not fill in a lot of information to prepare for a progress report
provide timely reminder for people to fill in the report

2008: Year of Information Overload

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 16:05:00 +0000

First of all, let me wish all of you a happy 2008. Wish that everyone will become more productive with the proper use of technology.

According to research firm Basex, Information Overload will be the problem of the year. In fact I have been facing this problem ever since I am linked to the computer. Countless emails, numerous RSS feeds and advertising SMSes. And that is one of the reason that why I do not have time to blog regularly. I have been very eager in picking up knowledge in the area of knowledge management such that I signed up a lot of newsletters and RSS feeds.

Here are some tips to share with everyone.

Some of the ways of reducing information overload for yourself:

Be selective on what you want to know/learn - Understand that your time is limited and your brain can only digest a limited amount of knowledge
Use tools - Like spam filters to remove unnecessary emails or issue trackers to record down the tasks
Adopt best practices -Like checking emails only at scheduled times so that you do not get distracted from work.

Some of the ways of reducing information overload for others:

Reduce the amount of unnecessary information that you generate
Organize your information in a reader friendly format.
Avoid emailing - email only when action is required
Use wiki or blogs to record the information - so that people who are interested can subscribe to it
Communicate - it is better to discuss on the phone or face to face than to have a long chain of email discussions.

Any more great ideas?

Wikinomics - How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 02:39:00 +0000

Merry X'mas to everyone. I have just managed to finished the book Wikinonomics by Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams. The book has been on my to-read list since the beginning of the year and I am glad that I finally squeezed in some time to finish it before 2008.

The authors really good a good job in presenting the benefits of collaboration together with the issues to be tackled substantiated with real life examples. It is a feat to write such a thick book with a simple topic like Collaboration. I will recommend it to anyone who are interested in finding out more about the collaboration.

Here are some tips from the book.

4 ways that we need to think differently to facilitate collaboration

Being open - Open up information and knowledge for others to improve on
Peering - Tap on the strengths of peers
Sharing - Share to encourage a bigger user base and allow innovation
Acting Globally - Leverage on external organizations

Design Principles for wikinomics

Taking cues from your lead users
Build up a critical mass
Providing an infrastructure for collaboration
Get the structures and governance right
Make sure it is of some value to the participants
Follow existing community norms
Allow the process to evolve gradually
Refine your collaborative mind

One classic quote I liked from the book

"Technology may open doors, but it can't force people to walk through them"

Substainability of Enterprise 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 04:00:00 +0000

This question has been popping up over the last few weeks

The Bubble 2.0 video above
A manager asked how to substain the KM drive for long term?
A colleague remarked that some information in the wiki are not up to date

While social computing is in the hype now, will it be able to last long enough? Will the long tail effect be applicable to it such that our investment in it can reap benefits in the long run.

While I do not know when will the next killer application will appear, I do believe that benefits can be reaped continously as long the following are continued:

The support (verbal and action) of the senior management
Proper processes put in place to keep the information up-to-date and well organized
Continuous improvement of the infrastructure (machine, software, plugins)

This is because knowledge will always be useful as long people keep it up to date and people will continue to use it if it is useful and easy to use. One good example is Google search engine. As long as it can continue to provide useful results to queries, people will continue to use it. And it is running Adsense to encourage people to generate new and updated content.

That is why management and infrasture support must come in together to provide a friendly environment for the users.

I shall discuss on the ideas for proper processes to keep the information up-to-date in another blogpost.

Reducing overheads and lead time

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 15:09:00 +0000

There was an discussion few days back to add a self-registration on our corporate wiki site. I thought it might be useful to share this story with everyone.

The reason is that we have an existing portal site with all the self help services for corporate purpose. The wiki was introduced subsequently for the purpose of knowledge sharing. By introducing the self-registration into the wiki, it will blur the lines and may confuse the end users on which site to go to.

However the reason given was that the self registration will allow the end user to set up the application fast and he could modify any information without go through the IT department. Otherwise he will need to produce the information to another team and wait for the other team to update the portal site.

This can be considered as a success story for enterprise 2.0 where users are realizing the power of new tools which they do set up new applications fast and easily without much programming. However, with this new trend emerging, there will be another a new set of problems to be addressed.

Being transparent

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:39:00 +0000

Image by Paweł Grzywocz

A tool is only as good as it is being used. We need to examine the way that we use the tools in order to get the maximum benefit out of it

One of the question that needs to be addressed is how transparent we can be. Wikis and blogs are used to record down the knowledge but the information are also restricted with security features like permission control. While this is necessary for some restricted information or strategic planning, the restriction of information sharing prevents the organization from tapping on the full effectiveness of wikis and blogs.

The information sharing strategy should be guided by the goals of using the tools. Whether we just want to retent the knowledge or to encourage innovation with the knowledge.

Innovation

If you want innovation among different teams, you need to open up the information sharing among teams so that people from other teams can improve on what they know. The access should be opened up to the widest group of audiences possible. You might never know anyone can contribute a useful idea. That person might just be the office cleaner.

Knowledge Retention

If you only want knowledge retention, then the access can be limited to the current team. Whoever joining the team will be granted access subsequently. But do bear in mind that information recorded down will be accessible to them and it will not be good to have old scores coming up.

Another added advantage of being transparent is that the quality of work will be higher. Sometimes things are being filtered or hidden from the other parties or higher management and that could be the source of some pending troubles.

Conclusion

The culture of the organization should also be taken in consideration too. As the famous idiom - "Rome is not built in one day". Even though the management decided to adopt full transparency policy, everyone in the team should be prepared in advance.

A good tool is only as good as how it is being used

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 16:43:00 +0000

Can you find the human head in this picture?

I was chatting with a friend through MSN when I started to use chinese instead of the de-facto english text. She was impressed by the speed that I could reply in Chinese. It came to my realization that she don't know about the shortcut to toogle between different language modes and therefore never tried to type in chinese.

This story is an good example of tools not been tapped fully due to poor introduction or training. Although the chinese IME comes with the Windows OS, but it is not being used because nobody know how it can be activated without consulting an IT expert. Similarly, I believe that most of us are thrown to the computer and picked up the skills gradually with "On-the-job training". Even throughout the computer science courses from my college to university, we are not being taught how to use microsoft office as part of the official curriculum.

This is certainly applicable in similar context with Enterprise 2.0. Although E2.0 can be considered user-friendly with the familar web interface, people can only tap as much benefits as they know how to use it. Therefore beside giving them the tools, we should regularly show them examples of how the tools can be used and should be used.

Making searching for easily for wikis

noreply@blogger.com (Enterprise 2.0 in Singapore) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 08:15:00 +0000

From Purdue University

There are two ways to facilitate information searching for enterprise content.

One way is to plan and define the structure upfront and organize the information properly. An example of it is the Yahoo Directory. With the proper structure, users can navigate to their desired information by traversing the links on the browser. However it is tedious of the extra effort in organizing information and it might put off users from contributing information when they need to search for the right place to write.

The other way is to have a powerful search engine that will return a list of possible answers which seemed to be the winning strategy with success stories like Google, Fast and Autonomy.

While it saves effort in the organisation of information, it is as good as what the user keys in to search. People can only use search when they know what exactly they are looking for. If the user does not have a specific term to search for, it will be tedious and difficult for him to get the correct result at the first try.

Although tagging or labelling attempts to solve the problem by allowing users to put in suitable terms, people will only tends to add in terms that are not synonyms. Therefore it is important to have a common language. One benefit with using wikis is that it promotes the same common language. If each user group use a separate information respository and does not interact beyond, there will be a higher chance that different terms are used.

Another concern is that the search gets more difficult to get it right as the amount of information get humongously large. One possible way to get around this is to provide an structure to logically group related information together. Users can specify to search information within the grouping.

Only by adopting a mixture of both strategies, users can search for information easily to work efficiently.