And Chinese Sprite was my favorite, throat wetting drink during the session.

If you’re in NYC on Monday and are interested in APIs, come by and check it out!

1. Active user involvement is imperative
2. The team must be empowered to make decisions
3. Requirements Timescale is Fixed
4. Capture requirements at a high level; lightweight & visual
5. Develop small, incremental releases and iterate
6. Focus on frequent delivery of products
7. Complete each feature before moving on to the next
8. Apply the 80/20 rule
9. Testing is integrated throughout the project lifecycle – test early and often
10. A collaborative & cooperative approach between all stakeholders is essential

It’s a difficult transition to move from Waterfall to Agile, especially with a distributed team. But if done correctly I’m convinced the payoffs in improved efficiency and quality could be great.

The audio features on Tinychat aren’t stellar, so I find I use Skype for audio and tinychat for video when in a conferencing situation.  When it’s a one on one situation I’ll use only Skype.

I’ll never go back to straight audio conference calls.  It’d be like flying international business class, then going back to economy when business class is free.  Ludicrous.

While in this environment I was reminded of the usefulness of the word ustedes in Spanish.  We don’t have this word in contemporary English, but loosly translated it means all of you, as in como están ustedes (how are you guys in English). But after having become used to ustedes while speaking Spanish, I find it awkward having to say you guys or you (hoping the inferred plurality is picked up by the recipients).  It just seems inefficient.

So I did some research and found that indeed in old-English a literal translation for ustedes did exist.  Ye was used to refer to all of you (plural), while you meant, well, you, in the singular sense.  Why would we remove ye, a compact, easy to pronounce word from modern English?  How much easier would it be to say how are ye instead of how are you guys?  Ye does sound very Shakespearean, but then again Australians still say fortnight instead of “two weeks”, and that to me sounds Shakespearean too.

It seems interesting that a language construct would devolve becoming less efficient, not more.  Maybe I’ll just stick to Spanish so I can use ustedes.

And I continue, bewildered, that companies follow the pre-Lycos model when constructing their intranets.  For some reason they always try to consolidate information into knowledge management “silos” like Documentum.  They set policies that change the homepage of their worker’s browsers to be the landing page for the new intranet portal which has “everything an employee will ever need to know” buried deep within.  And then they wonder why nobody uses these new solutions.

It’s because they can’t find anything.

Data will always be federated, scattered across many information systems, just as it is on the Internet.  Instead of investing in building a one size fits all intranet, invest in procuring and deploying an enterprise search engine.  Let it crawl the file share.  Let it crawl Lotus Notes.  Let it crawl the shiny new Documentum application.  Then set policies changing the worker’s homepage to the new enterprise search application if you must.  And make that search page simple.  Nobody understands taxonomies nor will they spend the time to.  Forget faceting.  Follow Google’s example making search dead simple. See what happens then.  A search for “jury duty” might actually produce a result that tells the worker how much compensation he’s entitled to if summoned.

And I’ll bet your workers will be much less pissed off that you changed their browser’s default homepage.

I’ve used Mingle from Thoughtworks before, and thought it was an impressive product.

I also read another post from a guy writing a book called Succeeding with Agile about the ideal agile workspace. He says the workspace should have:

• Big, Visible charts (Burndown)
• Feedback devices – red lights when a build has failed
• Everyone on the team being visible (webcam for remote employees, 10 hour video skype calls?)
• Visible Sprint and Product Backlog (posted online, taped to a wall)
• At least one big, common whiteboard to foment impromptu meetings

The father then has a hearing before a judge.  He asks that his son be allowed to return home.  The judge agrees, but only if the father moves out of his home and is accompanied by social workers on scheduled visits.

And along the whole journey the security guards, parametics, police, social workers and judge each apologized to the father for doing what they had to do.  But they had to follow procedure.

Wisdom, commonsense, would have ended this madness at the baseball game.

Now, I’m not saying we should do away with structure that promises some sense of predictability and repeatability.  But I like the word “framework” instead of process.  To me, frameworks provide basic direction to a group, but allows said group the freedom to make micro decisions.  It’s like saying “go northwest and you’ll get there”, instead of giving turn by turn directions.

I struggle, in my work life, with finding a balance between providing enough structure that the team arrives at desired destination while fomenting the talents of each team member in order to get there in the most efficient manner (and just where is “there”?).  But I’ll favor the wisdom of my team over regimented process any day.

Back in the day I was a Software Engineer.  My ability to do my job was easily measurable – almost binary even.  If I wrote good code quickly that had few bugs it could be easily guaged that I was doing a good job.  Bugs and features are all tracked and can be reported on.  Life as a Software Engineer is, well, very quantifiable.

But life as a Manager is not. It’s qualifiable.  Managers are good if they develop maintain trusted relationships with others within the company, if they delegate, and if they empower those who work for them.  And how is “good” measured?  It’s not, really.  If the team’s producing, then the Manager must be doing a good job.  But what if the team is producing because it’s a good team in its own right?  What effect do I, as a Manager, actually have on output?  It’s hard to say.

So how do the people who’ve been managing for 20 years stay sane?  How do they feel like their teams are better because they’re there?  I think they’ve learned to let go.  To concentrate on a few important items, and to delegate the rest, even when that means “the rest” might fail.

The chart above illustrates where a good Manager will find himself operating.  If he’s planned well, the matters at hand will not be urgent.  And if he’s properly plugged into the business and maintains healthy relationships, he’ll be able to identify what’s important and what’s not.  A good Manager, then, wants to exist in quadrant IV on a daily basis.  The rest should be delegated.

Quadrant IV is the key to sanity.  It’s the key to managing being a Manager.  I guess I haven’t figured out how to get to quadrant IV yet.

But (back to phones) what I find interesting is that social etiquette is different when conference calls have video than when they don’t.  Today, for example, I had a conference call with two people who’d never met in person (but had spoken on the phone).  Through the Skype video link they could both see each other.  I felt compelled to introduce them.  They felt compelled to be introduced.  The etiquette, when there’s video, is much more like it is when people interact in-person.  And that’s what I love about it.  It creates a more personal bond between collaborators.

I couldn’t imagine managing a remote team without Skype.

The 33-year-old let his secret slip when he asked [staff at a Bristol gallery] to help him produce a limited-edition print of The Stig in action…Collins, from Bristol, has always denied being The Stig and could face the sack if he admitted it. The first Stig, stunt driver Perry McCarthy, lost the job after outing himself in his book Flat Out, Flat Broke, published in 2002…The identity of White Stig has not been officially revealed and is regarded as a carefully guarded secret by the BBC.

The Telegraph also cites a youtube video where the Stig speaks with a Bristol accent (dialect of UK English).  Collins is from that area.  And autotrader.co.uk also has an editorial where they claimed to have unmasked the Stig (picture below), in which a flash of light reveals man with blue eyes behind an otherwise blackened visor.  Collins has blue eyes.

I think they’ve got him (thank you Jauder Ho for alerting me to this).

But data, dare I say “truth”, is federated.  And each member of the federation has its own vernacular.

For example, the residential loan processing system might call a customer a “customer”, while the commercial loan processing system calls a customer a “client”.  At the core these are the same entities, with “residential” or “commercial” being a modifier (as an adjective is to a noun).  So a datawarehousing solution would apply its central vernacular to these entities allowing the question “how many customers do I have?” to be answered even though the answer is informed by two sources of truth.

Data transformation and categorization works moderately well when an organization has control over its data sources (and has, therefore, a limited number of vernaculars).  But consider the La Jolla, CA, page on Yelp, http://www.yelp.com/la-jolla-ca, which claims that La Jolla has 1028 restaurants worth reviewing.  Most of this data is user-submitted.  And how does a user classify Starbucks?  “Food”?  “Restaurants”?  And what about subcategories?  “Coffee and Tea”? “Desserts”?  Some users might choose to use some of these categories, while others might use all.  And it’s consistency that lies at the heart of the issue of maintaining data integrity.  A user should have access to all restaurants when browsing by “Restaurants”.
If information is consistently categorized, even incorrectly, we can get accurate answers to our queries.  But if it’s inconsistently categorized our answers will not be comprehensive.

So how, then, do websites like yelp.com deliver meaningful, consistently categorized results when they’re reliant on crowdsourcing?  Are there really only 1028 review-worthy restaurants in La Jolla? And what of those restaurants that are mistakingly subcategorized as “Turkish” when they’re actually “Lebanese”?

Manual Labor is the answer.

I suspect sites like Yelp.com leverage services like mechanical turk to comb through the thousands of user-submitted records apply a more uniform categorization scheme.  And this is why data integrity is bloody hard to maintain as there is so much manual labor involved.  I question the sustainability of such a model, especially as a site grows and gathers more data.

But, what I can say, is it is more important for data to be correctly categorized than it is for it to be mostly correctly categorized.  If users on Yelp search for “Automotive” assets and are shown beauty salons they will leave. Data integrity is king.

I have a new found appreciation for the middle management layer,  and I’m ever more aware that management is an art (and I’m not sure how good of an artist I am yet).

But, I plan on visiting this blog more often, hopefully to include more information about how I’m working with my offshore team, the business and IT in the most efficient and emergent way.  I also think we should be talking more about agile software development when we talk about Enterprise 2.0.  It seems agile wants to remove barriers and flatten hierarchies for the sake of efficiency and high-quality output, just like Enterprise 2.0.  As we’re trying to be more agile at work this is definitely a topic I’ll be touching more on.

But then it started to die down.  While our company user count is high in Yammer, volume is restricted mostly to a small group of 15 people, all of whom work in the same division.  Maybe it’s a coincidence that we work on the Consumer Media side of the house, and that the others who initially signed up are less social media savvy.  But I think we’ve drowned the other guys out.  The 15 remaining people use Yammer to:

• Share links to Proof of Concepts or blog posts
• Broadcast when servers are being rebooted
• Declare deadlines for code deployments
• Indicate when a service is down or unresponsive
• Let others know they’ll be out of the office for an hour

But what I’m really interested in is what’s happening elsewhere in my company.  What new service is the enterprise services group releasing into Beta?  What new ad campaigns is the marketing group launching?  Does anybody want to start a Ruby on Rails is not scalable debate?

My conclusion: Yammer is great for my team, but the signal to noise ratio flushes the rest of the organization out as others don’t seem to care about what’s important to my group.

It’s a weird feeling seeing this book in its tangible form after spending so much time looking at PDF proofs and author/editor modifications.  You can see the copies of the book I was sent by McGraw Hill the other day in the picture on the left.

Early feedback holds the book is a great guide for the technical aspects of implementing Enterprise 2.0, but that we’re light when it comes to discussing the softer issues about managing organizational change with such an implementation.  I’d agree, although Aaron and I set out to create a technical guide for Architects and the like, as the technologies involved tend to be more ubiquitous than the techniques for driving the people side of the equation.

I’m open to any sort of feedback or comments about the book.  Feel free to leave a comment here, or send me an email at jeremy[dot]thomas[at]socialglass[dot]com.

Update:  It looks like Paul Dunay, Global Director of Integrated Marketing at BearingPoint, is the man responsible for newthinking.bearingpoint.com.

MySQL defines Enterprise 2.0 as modern organizations implementing Web 2.0 technologies, architectures, and delivery models to offer browser-based, data-driven online applications to their business users.

Their definition focuses on the technical side of E2.0, but doesn’t acknowledge the cultural side of it. Regardless, it’s a stretch to say a database is an E2.0 enabler. A database is but one ingredient of the Enterprise 2.0 recipe. It’s how the cook mixes the ingredients that determines how good the food is.

“Do you still want Software Requirement Specifications?” they’d ask.

“No, just give me user stories“.

“What’s a user story?”

“Uh, well tell me a story from the user’s perspective. We’ll collaborate on design and further detail the feature during the sprint period. And remember, you’re a pig and that guy over there’s a chicken.”

“Oh. Well I’d rather just give you an SRS. And why are you talking about farm animals?”

The main issue, as I’ve come to discover, is that people are entrenched in the waterfall method. Strategize, design, build, test, deploy, operate. People find comfort in this model. It’s all they’ve known. So I’ve been challenged as a middle manager to implement agile software development processes. A friend of mine says it’s impossible to do without executive sponsorship. Somebody’s gotta make the product owners do this, otherwise they’ll fall back to their comfort zone.

A long road lies ahead I’m afraid.

But the UI sucks.

Oh yeah, and it’s not people focused. Well at least not as people focused as Clearspace. We use Clearspace externally, and through our relationship with Jive also have an enterprise license. So to me it was a no brainer that we’d rollout Clearspace instead of Confluence.

But before that would happen I had to show why the “people” element was important. All the sponsoring group wanted to do was provide a space to collaborate around content. They weren’t considering the serendipitous establishment of weak ties between disconnected employees, and that people connecting around shared interests would boost efficiency at a hard-to-measure macro level.

After several weeks of debating over email we’ve decided to go with Clearspace, to my joy. I’m stoked to start using it with my China team, to find out more about who they are as people, and for them to get a feel for who we are as people too.

The one point that’s hard to drive home, however, is that knowledge will always be federated. During my consulting career and even here I’ve consistently run into people who want to create a single repository that will house all important corporate information assets, and that said repository will be the single place for people to turn to to find information. Such was the impetus behind our original corporate wiki. Although we’re not there yet, I’m starting to convince people that Discovery must be the center point of our Enterprise 2.0 rollout.

In time, I hope.

So why is Andrew McAfee still talking about why email sucks? Haven’t we heard this story time and time again? Why don’t we talk more about how Enterprise 2.0 has helped companies, about how it’s had the dramatic impact that we predicted two years ago? Maybe it’s because it’s not happening, or maybe it’s because the doers are quietly doing and have no time to blog about it.

With that, I’m super stoked about TechCrunch’s new enterprise software-focused blog, TechCrunchIT. TechCrunch has been the defacto leader in all things Web 2.0. Maybe they’ll bring some fresh thinking to the Enterprise 2.0 space.

Veodia was just announced as the winner of the Enterprise 2.0 launchpad at the E2.0 unconference in Boston today. This makes me happy. I walked away from my trip to china with a renewed sense of how valuable social connections are between teams and started trialling Veodia last week. Video is a great way to enhance the bond between remote teams and helps build a more cohesive, single team unit.

Veodia allows me, as a Manager, to record standup meetings and whiteboard sessions and embed them on our internal wiki much as you would a Youtube video. It also allows me to create a “live meeting”, where I provide a URL to my team in China and they can see me as I talk (I suppose Skype does a good job at this too). And the beauty is Veodia is free for up to 500 MB of video storage. That’s perfect for me as I convince others within my organization of the value add.

What I don’t yet understand, and what’s keeping me from being more aggressive about rolling this out to the rest of my division, is the security model. It seems that there is “security through obscurity”, where cryptic hyperlinks are the only thing preventing a would-be snooper from viewing my content. This is unsatisfactory within an enterprise setting where confidential data is being stored and shared among internal teams. If Veodia can get their security model right they’ll kick some butt.

One of the items on my agenda was figuring out how to do agile software development with remote teams. This has been a challenging task, as agile wants constant communication, and in-person at that. Time zones and language barriers are certainly enemies to agile.

But I came across a great article from Martin Fowler discussing how Thoughtworks does agile with its remote team in India. One of the many points he makes is to use wikis to contain common information:

Any common information can be put there, story cards, design guidelines, build instructions, notes on progress – anything that needs to be written down for reference by the team. We’ve found it’s very useful to use the change notification capability that many wikis have, so that page changes trigger notifications through email or an RSS feed.

I think this should be extended to include other Enterprise 2.0 technologies. One of the primary ways to be successful with an offshore team is to build personal relationships that engender trust. Social computing is a good option here. Onshore and Offshore teams should blog about what they did on the weekend, upload pictures of their pets or the vacation they just went on, discuss ongoing projects, exchange ideas, etc. These activities help project the human element of each team member and build bonds that will come in handy under work-related pressure situations.

I will leave China with a renewed passion to implement Enterprise 2.0 for my team.

I’ll also leave with renewed respect for how good the Chinese are at crossing the street at busy intersections.

Then it’s the publisher’s turn to edit which means even more revisions and re-organization. But I must say this process, though tedious, adds tremendous value.

What’s really interesting is I’ve never met my co-author in person nor have I had a phone conversation with him. We used Basecamp to manage our deadlines and share deliverables. Twitter, IM and email were used for everything else (Basecamp rocked). I am continually amazed at how efficient it is to collaborate using social technologies.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with the book over the past few months (they didn’t give us any chance to give our input into the cover design. I’m not sure what I think of it), which is largely why I’ve been neglecting this blog.

But besides the book I’ve spent time adapting to the consumer world with my job at active.com. We’ve got a lot in the works to overhaul the site and make it more social, engaging and single-purposed. But we’ve got a long way to go and I’ve got a lot of people to manage.

Through the transition away from consulting towards a proper job I’ve learned a lot of things about how E2.0 may or may not add value to an organization. I must say I’ve been somewhat unbalanced with this blog tending to lean in favor of Enterprise 2.0 without adequately considering alternative perspectives. Going forward I plan to entertain opinions from the dark side a bit more to drive debate into a growingly homogenized E2.0 “industry”.

Well done Nate and Jay.

Stop.

As Dion Hinchliffe says (and as I have written before),

“Discoverability isn’t an after thought , it’s the core”

Organizations need to embrace the fact that their data will be federated. Sure, workers will put their documents in “wiki X”, but they’ll also put them on the file share, in content management systems, and on email servers. Data that cannot be found is useless. Enterprise search will unlock data and increase the propensity for information (and the knowledge workers who create it) to be discovered. Discoverability leads to recognition, and recognition leads to increased participation. Enterprise 2.0 must be approached holistically.

Clearspace doesn’t do this. Thoughtfarmer doesn’t do this. Mindtouch doesn’t do this. There is no “Enterprise 2.0 in a box” solution. Period.

When I started I came in guns ablazing with a consultant’s mindset. “What, no data warehouse, no sweat. We’ll implement a master data management strategy and breathe life into dying data. And let me tell you about this nifty little thing called Enterprise 2.0. It’s going to revolutionize the world, man. Ever heard of SLATES?”. Sarcasm aside, people had actually heard about Enterprise 2.0 and were actually keen on the idea. But seeing things from the other side I’m starting to think Enterprise 2.0 will be overwhelming for many.

Here’s the logic: Enterprise 2.0 assumes that, within corporations, there are a lot of unsung heroes who’s voices are muffled by a thick wall of bureaucracy. These under-utilized knowledge workers are in dire need of a platform through which their ideas can transcend old-fashioned hierarchical structure so that their potential can be fully realized. Enterprise 2.0 promises meritocracy.

Sweet.

But consider alternative reasoning: Good workers are already very busy. Their managers already know they’re good and are filtering a saturating set of inquiries and non-critical disturbances into a trickle. Trickles enable concentration, and concentration is needed for people to do good work.

So why in God’s name would a very busy person want to put himself in a position to be even busier by seeking corporate-wide recognition for his bright ideas? He’s already well compensated. He’s already highly regarded. Why make life harder?

Good workers might run and hide from Enterprise 2.0 (and bad ones might embrace it).

According to the press release, Mindtouch has seen a 100% increase in active installations (200,000 in total) since last year, and is being used by major organizations including FedEx, Microsoft, and EMC (made famous by Chuck Hollis who chronicled EMC’s adoption of Clearspace).

Deki Wiki ships with a nice WYSIWYG editor to make it easy for the technically-challenged user to add and modify content. Moreover, Deki Wiki is a mashup platform and has out of the box integration capabilities with Dapper, Google Charts, widgetbox and Digg, just to name a few services. It can also be customized to integrate with line of business applications, including those that might be exposed by mashup makers like Kapow.

Development Managers will find Deki Wiki’s integration with Subversion and Mantis (an open source issue management tool) to be a big plus.

Aaron Fulkerson is a pretty switched on guy, so I’m expecting Mindtouch to have more and more of an impact on the Enterprise 2.0 market as each quarter passes.

On Tuesday they were instructed to work from home to avoid the overwhelming smell of drying paint. So we had our weekly standup meeting on instant messenger (I actually found this to be a rather effective way to communicate with my team there) instead of on the phone.

I love these little cultural differences.

I must say, though, that I’ve never had a team of more enthusiastic, dedicated people than my team in China. They own their work and take personal pride in getting it done the right way. Now if I could only figure out how to do Agile with them…

• Project home pages can be “iGoogle-ized“. Users can personalize their home pages with drag and drop widgets.
• Cloud Participation: businesses can open up content to be shared with external business partners. Jive hosts the “cloud” where this content is uploaded and shared. The business can then draw its content back in once it’s done collaborating. In 2.0 only individual content items (documents) can be shared in this way. In future releases, entire workspaces can be shared in the cloud.
• Enhanced Reporting: Business departments can get metrics on who’s participating and who’s connecting. Good way to measure ROI, and this is key for management adoption of Enterprise 2.0.
• Social Graphs: The informal and formal networks are modeled in the Clearspace application. Clearspace 2.0 automatically derives formal networks through integration to directory services (i.e. Active Directory), and models informal networks by monitoring how users interact with each other.
• Jotlet Acquisition: Jotlet will enhance the project management features in Clearspace in upcoming releases.

Most importantly, Jive continues its focus on people, something that is lost with other “competitors” like Sharepoint. People are by far an organization’s greatest asset, and Jive’s recognition of this fact will see it emerge as the leader in the social productivity space (if it isn’t already).

I’m trying to instill a similar culture across my development team at active.com. We’re in the middle of “Web 2.0ifying” the site, and my guys (and girl) have lots of awesome ideas. The challenge I have as a development manager is balancing the allocation of tasks the business needs completed while allowing enough time for my team to “innovate”. What I’ve found is they “innovate” anyway.

Case in point: on my my engineers developed a locator tool which mashes up Google Maps with an XML RPC (dare I say REST) service that we use internally. It’s a nifty little app with strong visual appeal. Last week our product director asked us to start designing and developing a feature for the web site that requires 80% of the functionality in the mashup. He hadn’t seen it before. When we showed it to him he had an “oh yeah” epiphany and subsequently modified the requirements to be more inline with the mashup as he thought the functionality in it was more consistent with the rest of the site.

What do we, as an organization, gain from this?

1. The engineer who created the mashup gets to see his idea become part of the broader product and gets recognized for his effort.
2. The time required to design and develop the new feature is significantly reduced – we already have a prototype.
3. The feature has been thought about and refined from several angles – that of the engineer and that of the product developer (no waterfall here baby).

Imagine, then, if we could reach out to other groups and leverage their ideas. In this case, the engineer, product developer and I were aligned organizationally. But what if we had the ability to discover others within my large, global organization, who had concepts or demos that could be used in a similar way? What if we had Enterprise 2.0?

I just had a good conversation with Sam Lawrence about Clearspace 2.0 that I’ll be blogging about next week. I’m also hoping to divulge a bit more about what I’m doing with my current employer and my new-found passion – agile development.

So stay tuned…

But do all of these activities concern Management – you know, the people who organize the “doers”? Management spends most of its time in meetings reporting progress and being appraised of new initiatives. Does Management really have time to make sense of all of the blog posts, wiki pages and social bookmarks in their Enterprise 2.0 Solution? I’m not sure they do.

Management is more concerned with milestones and KPIs. Milestones track the development of new product features and release dates. They track progress. Progress is achieved through the effort of knowledge workers who may or may not be using Enterprise 2.0 tools to do their work.

And Management’s management is concerned with KPIs (key performance indicators). KPIs track progress at a macro-level and let business strategist understand how well their strategies are being implemented.

Managers need to make sense of the organized chaos that is Enterprise 2.0. From a traceability perspective, knowing which blog posts and wiki pages helped contribute to the development of “feature X” would help Management give recognition to those who authored those assets. It would also help Management track the ROI on their Enterprise 2.0 investment. Semantic Web search engines offer perhaps the greatest technical hope for providing this automated capability. Imagine a world where information assets were annotated with metadata that helped computer programs derive the same meaning from them as humans do through natural language. Each asset about “project Z” could be annotated as such helping a semantic computer program automatically aggregate information about said project.

But I digress.

I’m not convinced that Enterprise 2.0 is a platform through which Management will track milestones and KPIs. Managers don’t operate in the “Detail” layer. Instead, they’ll depend on their teams, which do operate in the detail layer and do leverage Enterprise 2.0, to help them make sense of progress.

Or at least this was my “pre new job” thinking. I couldn’t imagine the chaos that would evolve should I allow the business unbridled access to my team. Focus and prioritization would be non-existent if I sat back and waited for my guys to self organize like a colony of ants. Teams need direction. They need to understand business initiatives. They need to be structured. They need to have context behind the flurry of requirements that would otherwise be hurled at them. On top of this the business needs to manage risk. It needs to know that my team can produce on a relatively consistent basis.

Certainly the Enterprise 2.0 community would never condone absolute dissolution of middle management. But I’m admiting now that at least I am guilty of being over-presumptuous about the lack of value that comes out of the middle management layer. I’m sure organizations are full of bureaucrats, but there also full of good managers who are there for important reasons.

These guys work in the emerging markets segment and frequently go to places like Kabul and Amman for work. Last year they put an outline for a proposal in a wiki for one of their clients and asked for help from across the organization to add content. Members of our firm from four different countries contributed with their various areas of expertise. That’s what you call collective intelligence, baby (although I’m not sure we actually won the work).

And despite their travels to dangerous places, they’ve managed to find internet access where ever they go and have put together an excellent blog on Enterprise 2.0, called e2oh.com. They have awesome insight as to how E2.0 can positively influence emerging markets. It’s a must read and a worth edition to your RSS reader.

Jay Nate, for example, writes about his experiences doing business in the middle east, where for one client called the “Ministry”, he says:

I look around the Minsitry and I am confounded as to how there are so many people working there who are clearly unqualified. But none of that matters in these places. It is all about who you know, how long you have known them, and how much they know about you. That is power. That is the business model. This is where social software within the enterprise can and will thrive almost immediately.

Plus you’ve gotta love this picture of Nate with his grenade launcher:

1. I worked in Austria from late June to mid August.
2. Moved to Sydney from mid August to mid October.
3. Moved back to Melbourne from mid October to December.
4. Repatriated to the United States in December and was in Colorado to mid January.
5. Moved to San Francisco for a month, and…
6. Took a job in San Diego which I started yesterday.

All that time I’ve been co-authoring a book and have tried to keep blogging.  Man I can’t wait to be settled again.

WorkLight is a two year old business that set out to consumerize IT. They’ve been quoted in Computer Weekly and ITWire and have recently formed Secure Enterprise 2.0 forum.  The forum “is comprised of top executives at Global Fortune 500 companies that are ready to address the security challenges posed by Web 2.0 technologies, such as wikis, blogs, RSS, widgets and gadgets, personalized homepages, social networks and social bookmarking, which are becoming increasingly popular in the enterprise.”

They have a server (also called WorkLight) that connects with line of business applications on the corporate intranet. It then dishes out information from them securely in a variety of formats including RSS and Google Gadgets. This means that an employee can use iGoogle to interface to his company’s SAP system, for example.

How is this secure?

Companies are naturally hesitant to expose data from core systems, especially if that data is going to be used on Internet-based applications. But WorkLight’s offering is unique. Users are asked to authenticate before using a WorkLight service or widget. Data is encrypted using SSL and/or is transported over a VPN connection to the corporate intranet. Moreover, the WorkLight server integrates to a company’s directory service (LDAP, Active Directory) and uses already-established security protocols to determine who has access to what.

WorkLight also believes that Facebook can be used in creative ways when it comes to corporate intranet. Yonni Harif observed that companies that embrace Facebook for business purposes have instant leverage on their employee’s Social Graphs. WorkLight creates a Facebook application called Workbook which is designed to integrate corporate information systems into Facebook, securely. Andrew McAfee saw a demo of this in action and wrote about it here.

I asked David how they approach a typical engagement given that some systems integration would be required to connect line of business applications to WorkLight. David said they have some out of the box adapters for systems like SAP, but that if they have to build a custom adapter they do so using the “read mostly” approach. The premise behind “read mostly” is that it’s easier to pull data (read) from line of business applications than it is to push it (create, update). As such Worklight tries to minimize the amount of data that goes back into these systems through their widgets and services, and this reduces the costs their clients incur when hooking their systems into WorkLight.

Once a widget or service is created on the WorkLight server, users can rate or write comments about them. Rating and download count then influence the visibility of the widget or service on the server where those that are highly rated and downloaded often appear on the front page.

Security and Risk Management are a Big Deal

Lets face it, a lot of the guys we’re selling Enterprise 2.0 to have been in business for a while. This means we need to appeal to their natural tendency to stop initiatives they don’t understand because they’re deemed too risky. Companies like Techrigy and WorkLight are building solutions designed to make Enterprise 2.0 more secure and less risky (disclosure: I’m working with Aaron Newman, President of Techrigy, on a side project). As the market matures we’ll see security play more of a vital role in any Enteprise 2.0 solution stack.

Chuck Hollis

1. EMC has over 35,000 employees and, among other things, makes two knowledge management systems, Documentum and eRoom, and yet they chose to use neither for their social productivity needs.
2. Regarding rollout strategy, Chuck says they “…announced availability virally — we all pushed email announcements to people we knew who were interested in what we were doing. We wanted people to “find” us, and not have some sort of official corporate announcement”. The initial rollout would be to supporters of the initiative who would be patient while they ironed out the kinks. But what happened was that EMC employees who nobody knew started using the system.
3. The result of unanticipated use, or “the network effect”, was confusion as to how to distribute the costs of the investment across the organization. If Divison A purchased Clearspace but users from Division B started using it extensively, shouldn’t part of the cost come from Division B’s budget?
4. HR had to get involved implementing a “social engineering” program to get workers used to this new way of collaborating.
5. Chuck says “It’s now “cool” to be an active participant on EMC ONE”.

As a result of implementing Enterprise 2.0, Chuck says “We now have so many business value stories that we don’t really need any more to make our case, even to the most stubborn ROI cynic”. EMC ONE has

• Connected employees from remote outposts (like China)
• Become a repository for research and a platform for “ideation”.
• The salesforce is much better informed as it can leverage conversations from the platform

Again, check out Sam’s summary here to get more insight and detail.

The main problem with enterprise software is that it’s targeted at an ill-defined customer: the enterprise. The enterprise is not a single thing; it’s a collection of things. It’s the people, policies, practices, strategies and culture that together comprise an organization. Most business software is targeted at the policies, practices, and strategies, but there’s really only one item in this list that matters: the people. Everything else is an emergent property that arises from the interaction of people.

I couldn’t agree more. They go on to point out that, although most employees don’t understand or follow internal processes and procedures, work gets done and businesses make money.  This means that businesses depend more on emergent outcomes than one might think.  Their product (does it have a name?) is geared toward enabling people in an effort to catalyze emergence.

If you watch a bunch of kids on the playground at recess, you’ll notice patterns and order emerge. Groups will form, ideas will be shared, norms and rules established. These things happen naturally. The same is true of enterprises, businesses, organizations and associations. If you want to get enterprise software to work properly, you’ve got to focus on the interactions of the individuals involved. If you want your employees to share information more effectively, find out what would motivate Bob to share his weekly safes figures with Mary. Construct the system from the ground up.

Check out the latest post on their idea here.

Is anybody actually making money on Enterprise 2.0? When I say “anybody”, I mean software vendors and professional services organizations. And when I say “make money”, I mean “making a profit”.

You see it seems to me that profitability might help substantiate the market. It would mean that Enterprise 2.0 isn’t a theory or a term upheld by a bunch of jaded ex-consultants turned corporate hippies. And, selfishly speaking, it just might make me feel better.

Comments welcome as always.

There are concerns, however, over RoR’s ability to scale. Last year, Alex Payne, developer at Twitter, was asked “How has Ruby on Rails been holding up to the increased load?”. One of the things Alex said was “All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that
makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise”. In other words, “magic” = “slow”.

But these are issues that can be solved with conventional measures. David Heinemeier of loudthinking.com points out:

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: There’s nothing interesting about how Ruby on Rails scales. We’ve gone the easy route and merely followed what makes Yahoo!, LiveJournal, and other high-profile LAMP stacks scale high and mighty. Take state out of the application servers and push it to database/memcached/shared network drive (that’s the whole Shared Nothing thang). Use load balancers between your tiers, so you have load balancers -> web servers -> load balancers -> app servers -> load balancers -> database/memcached/shared network drive servers. (Past the entry point, load balancers can just be software, like haproxy). In a setup like that, you can add almost any number of web and app servers without changing a thing.

Ruby on Rails faces the same scalability issues as other frameworks. The solution to the problem, then, becomes relatively standard. Share session information, load balance web servers, load balance application servers.

And let’s face it, enterprise applications will never need to contend with as many users as a web site like Twitter does. The largest organizations have hundreds of thousands of people. Not millions (and viral web sites need to scale to millions).

Given the speed of development and agility of the framework, I Ruby on Rails apps will increasingly disseminate across next generation enterprises – enterprises looking to implement Enterprise 2.0.

“Protect Against: Sharepointitis, email clogging & blogules.”

Then below “Clearspace”, it reads:

“collaborate from top to bottom”

Jive provides a link to jivesoftware.com/condom where you can view these condom wrappers with better resolution. I like the approach Sam!

• Links
• Social Bookmarking
• Search
• Authorship
• Signals/Syndication
• Social Networking
• Folksonomies

And maybe that’s all there is to Enterprise 2.0 from a technology perspective. I suppose we could also talk about prediction markets and knowledge markets adding those to the mix. But I think we’ve exhausted all of the technical possibilities.

So I ask, is Enterprise 2.0 stagnating? What I mean is, is there anything else that needs to be thought out and developed, or is it time to simply start doing it?

The hyperlink is the fundamental unit of thought on the Web and it should be in your service designs and (hopefully granular) schemas as well. Giving each discrete piece of information, every service, and all content a globally addressable URI instantly gives a service, and the data it carries back and forth across its interface, access to countless new consumption and reuse scenarios.

To illustrate how unique addressability might work, consider an organization that sells insurance to customers. Each customer is given an account number. The organization has an SOA strategy and decides to make use of REST (Representational State Transfer) to expose its information assets, including “customer” in an interoperable manner.

REST “strictly refers to a collection of network architecture principles that outline how resources are defined and addressed” (Wikipedia). It also makes use of the HTTP verbs POST, GET, PUT and DELETE (similar to database CRUD operations) to define what action to take on a given resource.

The insurance company develops a REST interface that sits on top of its CRM system. Customers become uniquely addressable by account number, as follows:

http://insuranceco.corp.com/customer/9886574

where “9886574″ represents the account number for a particular customer. A “GET” request (similar to READ on a database) to this URI might return the customer profile and claim history.

This is what Dion means when he says information should be uniquely addressable. Each customer has his own URI, which means behind the firewall other applications can reference a customer using this address. From here the possibilities are endless, where the intranet starts behaving like the internet. Information assets begin having inbound links, and this “democracy” so famously publicized by Google’s PageRank algorithm (where an inbound link counts as a vote) starts to apply not just to web pages, but to entities abstracted by services in an SOA (like “customer”). In this way information can be:

• Bookmarked in a social bookmarking system. Users include comments, like “Harry Young [customer 9886574] calls in every week and I’m tired of dealing him”. Users also tag these resources in the social bookmarking system, i.e. “disgruntled”, “customer”.
• Searched through an enterprise search engine. Adding “http://insuranceco.corp.com/customer/” to the seed of our enterprise search engine causes all customer information to be natively crawled and indexed.
• Referenced from wiki and blog posts.

As a blanket statement I’d say that any SOA architect should strongly consider exposing resources in this manner so that he can leverage the network effects and unintended uses that are achievable through unique addressability.  Good stuff Dion.