Erik Britt-Webb blogs

Maxwell Anderson Quote

Erik — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:02:52 +0000

One of my favorite quotes. Substitute the word "passion" for "art" and this can apply to anyone, anytime, anywhere.

To the young people of this country I wish to say:

If you practice an art, be proud of it, & make it proud of you; if you now hesitate on the threshold of your maturity, wondering what rewards you should seek, wondering perhaps if there are any rewards beyond the opportunity to feed & sleep & breed, turn to the art which has moved you most readily, take what part in it you can, as participant, spectator, secret practitioner, or hanger-on & waiter at the door. Make your living any way you can, but neglect no sacrifice at your chosen altar. It may break your heart, it may drive you half mad, it may betray you into unrealizable ambitions or blind you to mercantile opportunities with its wandering fires. But it will fill your heart before it breaks it; it will make you a person in your own right; it will open the temple doors to you & enable you to walk with those who have come nearest among men to what men may sometimes be.

- Maxwell Anderson

From Blog To Forum (and Back Again)

Erik — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 01:01:57 +0000

I just read Fred Wilson's post From Blog To Forum, and it struck a cord with me, relative to a closed discussion forum in which I participate with a group of trusted associates. While the subject area of Fred's blog is different from the discussions of that private group, the behavioral patterns are very relevant to what that group is trying to create, which is a powerful forum for exchanging ideas and challenging one another. Two key differences, though, are (1) Fred uses a blog whereas this private group uses a discussion forum and (2) Fred's blog is entirely open to all, this group is not.

This led me to ask the private group to consider those two points as we talk about the future of our group. Then, I realized that my reflection on these points would be good perspective to share with anyone who's interested. So, in the paragraphs below, I call out what I believe the the most important differences between a blog (which is typically open) and a forum (which can be either, but I'm especially focused on those that are closed, like the one I mentioned above).

In the first point, when a group of authors learn how to use a blog and how to follow other blogs, it creates a virtual discussion forum for each participant. You learn to track blogs with an RSS Reader (like Google Reader) and to reply in comments. But, unlike a forum, a blog format allows you to take a more well-defined ownership over your own point of view of the world. Your blog is your forum and you have discretion over which comments stay and which are deleted. Of course, the goal is to foster a brutally honest but also constructive dialogue, as Fred describes in his post.

In the second point, part of why Fred's blog is so powerful is because so many people read and contribute to it. That is a point my private discussion group is beginning to address as we expand the membership, but we should challenge ourselves to ask: Why can't our discussions be open to EVERYONE? In the past, this group has talked about how putting yourself out there--making yourself VULNERABLE--is essential to growth? Well, what embodies that philosophy more than making our conversations available to all?

What's Missing from Forrester Wave Report on Community Platforms

Erik — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 23:07:56 +0000

I was recently read the summary of the Forrester Wave Report: The Leaders in Community Platforms for Marketer, as depicted in the graphic here. There are numerous other reviews of this report, including the one by MediaPost's OnlineSpin.

What I find most striking to me about the Forrester report is what they left out, rather than what they included. This report ranked "community platform vendors", not community platforms. The difference is profound and central to most social media strategies.

While the community platform vendors that Forrester ranked offer valuable consulting services wrapped around their software, the fact remains that their software is proprietary. This means a small number of people coding and testing the product.

In contrast, open platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc. have literally thousands of developers and testers. This means innovation and maturity that is exponentially more powerful, so long as the organization guiding the platform understands how to harness that horsepower.

Forrester as much as acknowledged this omission in their closing paragraph:

the exploding WordPress blog platform has demonstrated how open standards can become a huge platform advantage because they rally stakeholders, especially passionate developers, to iterate and innovate at a rapid clip. I hope and anticipate the same will happen in the community platform space.

This has been happening for some time in the Drupal community/ecosystem as well, and I'm surprised Forrest didn't recognize that.

The big disadvantage that Drupal has today, is there is no software/consulting company, based on the Drupal platform, with enough scale and brand name recognition to be included in evaluations like this. That will change. And when it does, it will force a necessary de-coupling of people/process from technology. The vendor chosen to help with people/process will not own the technology--just like Red Hat does not own Linux.

Most important ingredients in a Project Management Organization (PMO)

Erik — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:49:25 +0000

I was recently asked,

What do you consider to be the most important ingredients in a Project Management Organization (PMO)?

My answer to this question comes in three sets of ingredients. The first set of ingredients define the purpose of – and relationships between – IT Portfolios, Programs and Projects.

Figure 1 - Relationships between IT Portfolios, Programs & Projects

IT Portfolio Management - Select and manage the portfolio of opportunities for IT to contribute business value to the enterprise. Leading practices often use IT spending categories like: Infrastructure (maintain the steady state), Transactional (to reduce costs), Informational (improve decision-making) and Strategic/Risky (make transformational improvements).

IT Program Management - Manage a defined set of interrelated projects that support common business outcomes. Focus on maximizing the business value or impact of IT dollars, even if it means delaying or killing some projects or programs when they no longer best meet business priorities. This also includes juggling resources and other interdependencies to maximize project synergies.

IT Project Management - Manage resources to complete a specific scope of work on time, on budget and to customer satisfaction. Follow a consistent methodology across projects.

As depicted in Figure 1, planning information (e.g., outcomes, budgets, resources) flows top-down, from IT Portfolios to Programs and Projects. In return, execution information flows bottom-up.

As depicted in Figure 1 above, planning information (e.g., outcomes, budgets, resources) flows top-down, from IT Portfolios to Programs and Projects. In return, execution information flows bottom-up.

The second set of ingredients are the key components that are managed in concert to achieve their common goal, which is to realize desired business outcomes, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 - Six key components managed to achieve common business outcomes

The seven key components of an IT Program Management Office (IT PMO) are:

Business Outcomes: At the end of the day, IT Programs and the PMO are all about realizing business outcomes, or impact on business performance. Not about managing activities.
Success Metrics: Define how we will know when the business outcomes have been achieved. Can also be used as leading indicators to highlight positive progress.
Communications and Stakeholder Management: Keep people informed and engaged on the goal, progress towards it and what's in it for them.
Risk Management: Manage key barriers that could undermine success.
Resource Management: Manage resources across a range of programs and projects
Project Management: Ensure that an effective set of processes, tools and practices are employed consistently across projects to deliver predictable results.
Governance: Ensure that stakeholders understand and are held accountable for their roles

The last ingredient is a PMO Maturity Model, as illustrated in Figure 3. This is really important because it provides a roadmap to help people understand which parts of the PMO should be developed first to establish a baseline PMO. And which aspects should come next to ensure that the PMO is institutionalized across the enterprise. And what it takes to have mastered the PMO.

Figure 3 - PMO Maturity Model

Feed Reader Technology

Erik — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 22:46:10 +0000

For the 5th entry in my blog series on Web 2.0 Technology Topics, I turn to web feed readers. Feed readers are software that resides either on your personal computer (Mac, Windows, Linux) or on a web server and allow you to collect content from a variety of different websites into one single place.

A Feed Reader is a really powerful and important tool in my arsenal as a "Web 2.0 citizen." As the breadth and depth of content/people with which I engage grows, it becomes overwhelming to follow by checking each website. Even if I could get email notices, that pummel my email inbox, which I try to preserve for emails specifically to me from colleagues, friends and family.

Moreover, as I have gained experienced at following web feeds, I have found that I read them differently than I read email. With email, I try to read, respond and then file or delete from my inbox. With feed entries, I scan and highlight the important ones, as you see in the graphic below. Then, I often come back to the highlighted ones again and again as other events trigger me to remember them. Usually, I do NOT delete entries from my web feeds, since it provides a great way for me to search MY private universe of web content for something that I remember reading, but I don't remember where.

One way to think about Feed Reader technology is client-based vs. server-based. Client-based software, like RSSOwl (snapshot above) or MS Outlook gathers feeds for individuals and allows you to read them even when you're offline. Web-based services, like Google Reader, NetVibes and many web applications act as an aggregator for individuals or groups. This is like the example in my last article, where the Newton PTO Council could page that aggregates news and announcements from all 21 PTOs automatically. For an (extreme) example from an individual perspective, watch the video in Doing the (Feed Read) Shuffle. This Google Reader Blog entry shows how Robert Scoble, a well-respected blogger, tracks over 600 web feeds!

One last note: Most readers provide an easy way for you to export a collection of feeds from one reader to another. This is done using a file standard known as OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language), an XML format for outlines. OPML was originally for other purposes, but is now commonly used to exchange lists of web feeds between web feed aggregators.

Web Feed technology

Erik — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:11:23 +0000

Building on my previous article about Blog Technologies, the next web 2.0 technology to introduce is a web feed. A web feed is a data format used for providing readers with frequently updated content. Let's say, for example, we wanted to add a new feature to the Newton PTO Council website which collected news and announcements from all 21 Newton school PTOs so that parents had one place where they could read it. Web feeds would serve two important functions.

Each school PTOs to make their news & announcements available as web feeds which could then be aggregated into one central News & Announcements page for parents to filter and read.
Parents (and others, of course) could also use a feed reader, such as Google Reader or RSSOwl, to subscribe those feeds into their own personal collection of web feeds, which could also include feeds from all over the web

In this example, PTOs act as content producers who syndicate their news and announcements through web feeds, which would allow the Newton PTO Council to act as a News & Announcements aggregator and parents/others to be subscribers. The content delivered by a web feed is typically HTML-formatted text (webpage content) or links to other webpages, but can also contain audio and video clips.

Web pages that are available as a web feed are usually marked with the web feed icon (orange square on left). The two key technologies that make web feeds possible are standard XLM formats, known as RSS and Atom.

RSS is most commonly known as "Really Simple Syndication", but officially stands for "RDF Site Summary". There's a long and sordid history to RSS that includes many incompatible versions and arguments about which is the official one, but suffice it to say there are two major versions: RDF (RSS v1.x) and RSS v2.x.

Atom is another format for web feeds which was motivated by the RSS controversies and shortcomings. The Atom syndication format was published as an IETF in RFC 5023.

In my next article, I'll discuss web feed aggregators and readers.

References

Blog Technologies

Erik — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 22:07:32 +0000

One of the most powerful technologies in the Web 2.0 arsenal isn't so much a technology as it is a style of communication. I'm referring to a blog, which derives it name from the combination of the words web log, meaning a website where entries are written and commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. You can learn from links at the end of this article, but here I'll focus on understanding backend technology.

In fact, blogs have been built by virtually every kind of technology, such as plain HTML, ASP, JSP, PHP, CFM, etc. Consequently, what's important is not the programming language, but rather the architecture (meaning the components).

In simple terms, there are two kinds of blog solutions:

A hosted blog where all data and the publishing interface reside on the server of the blogging software company, providing a "turnkey" solution, and
An independent blog where you download and install the software on your own server.

In both cases, the blog is set up and controlled by a database that handles the posts and the way they may be sliced and diced for display. Nearly all blog software stores posts in a database, which permits handy things like searching and archiving. Blog appearance and layout is usually controlled by templates that define background color and logo placement and content formatting.

In addition to database content and templates, the more recent use of blog analytics has produced a revolution in online journalism. In the old days, the credibility of a journalist came largely through publisher association, such as NY Times or WSJ. However, with the advent Google Analytics, Technorati, and other blogging of analytics, bloggers develop their credibility as a result of others linking to their articles and naming them as a favorite blogger. As a result, a blog is not a monologue, but rather one voice in a larger conversation that makes up the blogosphere.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog
blog software comparison chart by Online Journalism Review, USC Annenberg
"Time to check: Are you using the right blogging tool?," published July 14, 2005 in the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review.
To Blog or Not to Blog, BSGAlliance.com

What is Web 2.0?

admin — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 22:01:11 +0000

I thought it would be appropriate to start my series of Web 2.0 Technology Topics with the term Web 2.0 itself.

Much is being made these days of the term “Web 2.0”, as well as the related term “Enterprise 2.0”. To some this is just a catch phrase that represents another passing fad. A reason for companies to spend more money on new technologies. To others, it offers real possibilities to tap the tacit knowledge base of employees, increase their engagement, improve relationships with customers and much more.

So what is Web 2.0, really? In this first article, I’ll set the context for understanding Web 2.0. Then in the next few articles I’ll explore definitions of Web 2.0, with leading practice examples and ideas for how you could get started or raise your practices to the next level.

As an introduction, here is how Wikipedia (itself is a leading example) begins its entry for Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 refers to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis, and folksonomies — which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing between users. The term gained currency following the first O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users use webs. According to Tim O'Reilly,

"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform."

Some technology experts, notably Tim Berners-Lee, have questioned whether one can use the term in a meaningful way, since many of the technology components of "Web 2.0" have existed since the early days of the Web.

Next in my blog, I’ll delve further into the definitions of the Web 2.0 and examples of the technologies (and memes) noted in the grapic as being related.

Web 2.0 Technology Topics

Erik — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:21:37 +0000

I recently started writing a column for the European Newsletter of The Concours Group (updated: now part of nGenera). I'll use my blog here as a place to post these articles and make them available to others.
The purpose of the postings listed below is to build some common vocabulary in fairly simple "business terms". These articles will intentionally be short and written for non-techies. Here's an initial list of Web 2.0 technology topics that I plan to cover (or already have). As articles are written, the topics here will link to them.

What is Web 2.0? -- a brief definition
Blog Technologies-- the architecture of a blog
Web Feed technology -- How to publish content from one site to other sites or to personal RSS?/Atom Readers
Feed Reader Technology -- a tool that an individual can use to track postings to tens or hundreds of websites and blogs
Drupal? platform -- An open-source LAMP? CMS? (content management system? based on Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP)
AJAX -- a popular technology for creating real-time updates to webpages without having to refresh them
Mashup -- The use of a thin layer of technology to combine two or more disconnected sites into an even more powerful combination
Wiki? -- A simple tool to facilitate unstructured content collaboration
Shared Calendar -- how to publish/manage an online calendar for a group or the general public (Google, Upcoming, etc.)
iCal Reader/Subscriber -- how to subscribe to a shared calendar
Joomla? -- another open-source LAMP CMS
Ruby on Rails -- another popular technology for building Web 2.0 systems
OpenID -- A fairly new standard for using a single userid/password to login to multiple websites
SOAP/REST/JSON-based APIs -- ways of allowing websites to talk to each other (this is really web 1.0)
Folksonomy -- how to categorize and popularize web content (Del.icio.us, Digg, etc.)
Facebook / MySpace (and other social networking sites)
Skype / Twitter (and other Video/Instant Messenger services)
CSS and Theming -- Cascading Style Sheets, a key tool used to control the look and feel of a website and how content is presented, which is generally referred to as theming.