On reading the wave report, I was struck by one small arrival -a horse of even darker hue,  that of Cisco WebEx Connect as a collaboration platform. Most people are aware of WebEx as a webinar tool and have not used Connect.  I was at Cisco when WebEx was acquired and in San Jose too and remember all the WebEx signs in the carpark. It all looked a bit puzzling, for me at least, until I found out about Connect. Connect is a superb tool and worth acquring for that alone. It’s a SharePoint killer.

Here’s why. Connect is 2.0 in a way that SharePoint never will be. It’s modular, making it infinitely extendible and uses accessible open APIs:

URL commands

XML Request / Response interfaces with well-defined schemas

Web Services interfaces that support Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) with access through Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).

Representational State Transfer (REST).

What this means is a rapidly deployable, file-store and  silo-busting collaboration app with the ability to slot in any number of friendly mash-ups. Twitter for Connect/ no problemo, just load it up and slot it in. Facebook, ditto, iPhone easy. What’s more it’s robustly secure, no worries about the firewall with this baby. And of course it’s backed up by a tech behemoth. This is no start-up.

Potentially, this is the Enterprise 2.0 application.

I say potentially as to be frank I was surprised to see it in the Forrester Wave (and it’s not present in Gartner’s). The product is superb but I’ve never seen it pushed out and really marketed for what it is. Go to the WebEx site (and it’s still on the WebEx domain) and Connect is listed but not featured much. It doesn’t scream out what it does. What’s more, I couldn’t find the link where I might connect up with Connect. Puzzling.

Now if you go onto the Jive site you’ll see a lot of publicity about SharePoint connectivity. All good stuff as SharePoint is almost a defacto standard in many corporations. This could change almost overnight. Here’s how and why.

Cisco, Miscrosoft and Google are in a cage fight. That fight I dubbed The Battle of the Cloud a while back. Cisco own the Network, Miscrosoft the Software and Google own the Experience. All of these 3 areas get completely mashed up in the metaphor we currently know as the cloud. And I believe, the stakes are high enough to see severe casualties amongst the 3 big players. (See also Dion Hinchcliffe’s Cloud computing and the return of the platform wars…estimate is for $42 Billion by 2012, I’m taking the argument even further).

Against this backdrop, singular products like Connect, that many don’t even realise exists, provides some wonderfully disruptive possibilities. Given this, what I’d do if I was sitting in the board at San Jose would be to ramp up the marketing for Connect. And if I really wanted to shake up the whole apple cart, I’d also make it free.

Technorati Tags: Cisco Systems, Collaboration, Collaboration platform, Enterprise 2.0, enterprise social network, Facebook Inc, Forrester Research Inc, Gartner, iPhone, Magic Quadrant, Microsoft SharePoint, Twitter Inc, Webex

Just been reading the Gartner Magic Quadrant: Social Software. Jive, the people behind Link come out as the clear leaders, closely followed by IBM and Microsoft (the latter featuring better on ability to execute). Other notables – Drupal, Telligent, SocialText and blueKiwi jostle with Google for the Visionary space. Gartner wonder if Google’s move into the enterprise is opportunistic. I think it’s strategic. Open Text and Atlassian feature as Challengers.

I think the horse racing up the outside fence as they close into the paddock will be Thought Farmer. Their biggest weakness is the fact they don’t have any gig customers, a fact that their alliance with the Dachis group is bound to change! I enjoyed their latest blog too The Problem of the Intranet – so much so I actually read it on my iPod Touch! Touche to the Canadians!

n.b…Hmm, I wonder where Wordpress will feature in future Magic Quadrants?

Technorati Tags: Atlassian Software Systems, blueKiwi, Dachis, Drupal, Enterprise Social Networks, Gartner, Google, Google Inc., Magic Quadrant, Microsoft Corporation, Social Software, Socialtext, Telligent, Telligent Systems, Thought Farmer, wordpress

To add someone to a photo, you can either type in the member’s name, much like you’d add a tag, or you can draw a face boundary on the photo, as with a note. People in Photos has been wired into your Recent Activity, so you’ll always be up to date with who’s added you to a photo or added other members to your photos.

So it connects people up, which of course people like. But what if we could do the same with people and their documents in the corporation? Rather than  tagging as part of an application, what about  a tagging machine as a sort of electronic sticky note system? I could take a digital object – picture, video, document and add the sticky note to it with my scribbles. This would then connect up to others similarly tagged just like current tagging systems.

But…

• It would have to be present at the point of consumption and distribution – so we can add the sticky tag at any point in the collaboration change – little notes added in its journey.
• This would free float the systems and provide ubiquitous tagging across the enterprise and beyond.
• It would be easy, simple, fun and add instant value, much like sticky notes do in real life

All it needs is a catchy name. I think following IBM’s Dogear, it should be called the DogsBollx as that’s what it is.

Flickr

Technorati Tags: Dogear, Flickr, social, Tag

To recap and expand, what I had in mind was taking LibreStream’s highly industrial collaboration cameras, making them small funky and consumer and connecting them up via wifi as a fun consumer to consumer app. Now of course these could also function as rather ubiquitous internal communications tools too, maybe more on that later.

What inspired the thought and the Cisco connections was Tandberg and Flip acquisitions, add to that LibreStream and you have something qualitatively more – realtime mobile video collaboration, in ya pocket. Stuff that inspired me ona  design side were robust consumer products encased in rubber, stuff like the Nokia 5140, which a friend, The Chiswick Gardener liked to throw over his shoulder to show how robust it was. Take also the Tivoli PAL, fine audioware encased in said too….

So that’s the box, what gets fun is when video gets connected via handhelds using wifi, plus white-boarding. Click shoot share. In live video.

But what happens if you take these new handheld wifi video collaboration phones and take it a step further. How about telepresence too? Sound a bit mad? Well there’s always LifeSize Passport:

LifeSize Passport is the first truly portable telepresence-quality system; Passport is so small, it fits in the palm of your hand….you get true HD video quality – 720p30 – for natural, realistic interactions at only 1Mbps over any internet connection. And LifeSize Passport is the first HD video communication system that works with Skype™, making connecting with colleagues and customers easier than ever.

This would give the ability to project the image outside of the tiny phone – think maybe the hologram scenes in Superman or Star Wars. Almost there…

But what you need next I don’t know if it can be done. For it to really gel, there needs to be some sort of socialising the camera. There needs to be a way of the sender being filmed. So what if these things piggy-backed off of each other so I film someone near as they in tern film me via some sort of reciprocal sharing?

Now we’re talking truly next gen phones…

Update – we’re probably also talking about Foucault’s description of the Panoptican gone mad….

Technorati Tags: Librestream, LifeSize, Nokia 5140 Cell Phone, The Chiswick Gardener, Tivoli Portable Audio Laboratory (PAL) AM/FM Radio

So yes culture is key here, but so is an holistic approach that unifies the external marketing with the internal collaboration. How many companies do that? Not many I grant but a handful I guess have realised this is where they need to be.

Technorati Tags: Enterprise 2.0

“you can’t do it.”

I found the quote on Traackr.com who explain that “Measuring Social Media ROI is a pipe dream”

Trying to calculate the ROI of social media is the same as trying to calculate the ROI of email or the road you drive to work on. The costs can be approximated but the benefits can’t. Their reach is too broad and too many other factors are at play to even to list them all, let alone attempt to measure profits.

Now this I find interesting and and in equal measure implausible - I don’t believe it.

Now I don’t have much ammo to refute it and I’ve even less expertise. This simply ‘aint my area. And yet it keeps on coming up.

So where to start? Well where I started to think about this was in 3 broad areas

1) Impact improvement on existing process: time to create, to sell, cost of production etc etc etc

2) Innovation – doing what was not done before, idea Wikis and the like. Making new stuff happen.

3) Business Transformation – when 1 & 2 fuse in completely unexpected ways.

But where to strap the numbers to? Well on this, I first started to think about Balanced Scorecards – hence finding the quote from Kaplan. This is an interesting area and all I have to go on at present is an old report from Forrester from 2004:  The Balanced Scorecard For IT: Value Metrics. Forrester supply a suggested list of scores:

They’re keen to stress though that,

When it comes to IT value metrics, there is no silver bullet, no single metric that provides the appropriate answer. However, with strong alignment between business strategy and IT strategy, it is possible to start making the necessary links between IT investments and their business value. We suggest using a number of diverse, financially oriented metrics to capture the breadth of IT value delivered.

This provides for me food for thought though. Can we correlate this to enterprise social media, to enterprise 2.0? Or more pointedly:  is your social media strategy aligned to your business strategy and if so in how much and in what form? And where next with Forrester’s other factors, can they correlate to scoring against the success of enterprise 2.0?

Technorati Tags: Balanced scorecard, Bob Kaplan, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media

Back then the shiny new idea was that we could share knowledge as never before thanks to the web, and a whole enterprise industry sprung up around ‘elearning’ with ‘learning management systems’ being touted as the cost effective educational source for businesses to enlighten and track employee’s intellectual sophistication.

I found this especially fun as back then I worked in e-learning, most specifically in Cisco EMEA’s E-learning team. Come to the dot.com pop and that e-learning team was reformed. Myself and some colleagues were reformed too, as characters and in roles and we formed a new team we dubbed Communicating@Cisco.

The aim of the team was to enhance comms and to save money and one key way we did that was to heavily promote erstwhile e-learning tools such as the virtual classroom as virtual meeting places. Neat scenario was that meeting online and collaborating via the internet saved money on travelling. it was a novel idea then. The technology we used here was PlaceWare, and interestingly Cisco’s future acquisition WebEx was hardly used at all.

What we did use though was Tandberg and a colleague of mine actively touted ‘video conferencing in a box’ with 2 large and rather heavy Tandberg video conferencing units being carted across Europe to various demos. previously video conferencing hadn’t featured much, the fact that the Tandberg units could do it over IP rather than ISDN and were basically portable made them mobile video conferencing devices. Well sort of, they are rather heavy!

Now of course Cisco recently acquired Tandberg, following on from their acquisition of Flip and before that Kiss. All prime video companies! And I thought of these when a colleague in my current role for a big oil company showed me a Librestream Onsight camera. These things are awesome!

To begin with I thought it was a funky battle-hardened camera – all industrial bounce rubber and spark proof high quality camera for an explosive or otherwise hazardous environment – perfect for use in an oil field in Africa or on a rig in the North Sea. And they certainly do meet that spec. But god do they do more.

These things have full wifi video conferencing abilities plus VOIP connectivity. They have whitescreen drawing capabilities on the viewer screen too – see a video, scribble on the back and the person at the other end sees that. They even have IP based remote control.

So what we’ve got then is the essence of the virtual classroom in a camera – realtime sharing, synchronous data – voice, video and graphics. Now if Cisco don’t either acquire this company or the technology and put it in a small consumer device, then I’m a monkey’s uncle. Or am I one already, what can the latest Tandbergs do?

n.b put me down for the first rubber flip video conf boxes. Hmm, Cisco still own the iPhone trademark, I wonder if they’ll want it back from Apple when these video phones get released?!

Ctd….Funky video collaboration II

Technorati Tags: Cisco, Flip, Librestream, rubber, Tandberg, Videoconferencing

When this blog first started I called it the Garden Shed. Maybe it’s time to start up a global garden shed for like-minded souls. Only criteria for entry is shared by a handful of contacts I know online…

Image: carpe diem

Technorati Tags: Altimeter, Dachis Group, The Garden Shed

“I tend to think of ROI in this case as “Risk of Ignoring.”  If you are a high tech company that prides itself on innovation, being responsive to customers and providing its employees the freedom of a start up with the brand strength of an industry leader, are you supporting that identity by avoiding social media?  I believe the real measure will be in opportunity lost.”
Polly Pearson, vice president of employment brand and strategy

While there’s a long term consensus amongst the bloggers that says ‘avoiding 2.0 = business loss’ it’s interesting to see this chime with comments from within the big corporations. And OK, so whilst EMC have some very large offices down the road from where I live, I wonder how long it will be before we can see a FTSE 100 list with the top half dozen, and I also wonder which industry sectors we will see them in.

Technorati Tags: 2.0, EMC Corporation, enterprise social network, FTSE 100, Jennifer Leggio, Polly Pearson