Archive for March, 2008
by Bill Ives
March 31, 2008 at 9:14 pm · Filed under
Reviews
Last week I spoke with SynerG CEO and co-founder, Michael Norring and vice president of products and co-founder, Kalpana Narayanaswamy. SynerG provides a business mash-up solution designed to address both simple and complex user needs in accessing enterprise information, SynerG recently released a business solution that addresses call center challenges. This is an area of great need that I am very familiar with having worked on knowledge support for many large call centers, here and in the UK. I remember one UK call center veteran saying that the most important skill you learn is how to engage in friendly chat with a caller while you are frantically searching through multiple databases to find the answer to their question.
Or as SynerG puts it:
“Regardless of industry or line of business, call-centers require the highest level of data integration to quickly and effectively respond to customer needs. However, existing solutions are limited in their ability to provide comprehensive and up-to-the-minute accurate information. As a result, employees are forced to spend time searching for and manually aggregating, correlating and updating relevant data instead of utilizing unified information to deliver a quality customer experience.”
Agreed. So what do they do?
SynerG does deep mashups within the enterprise systems through a SOA approach to extract real-time information from enterprise systems (even legacy systems). They bring this information into an intelligent unified business application so the call center person sees only one application on their desktop. Through mashups they build new applications that draws data from multiple sources but have intelligence to act on this data. In some ways it is like a portal in that the application provides access to information through a single source. However, portals are thin layers that just pass through information. SynerG creates a “thick” layer that goes much deeper. Most enterprise data sources were built for specific audiences, like accounting, purchasing, or production, and often have tool constrained interfaces. Data that is then passed through to other departments is often not in the format that meets the needs of the new audience. SynerG allows for the dynamic restructuring of data to meet each specific audiences requirements.
The data remains stored in the original spots. SynerG creates a virtual data map of the enterprise. Then it adds a layer of business intelligence to know what to get from where and how to change it to fit the new need. This also allows for better security, as well as efficiency, as employees only see what they need to do to perform their job. This mashup approach also allows for one step actions. For example, if someone cancels a subscription, changes do not need to be made in multiple databases. Their solution does something else: it cleans the data during use. They have a data federation model (with some pending patents) that does not assume clean data but then allows employees to clean up data in the course of use. These data cleanups are passed back to all the original sources.
This approach to push mashups deeper into the enterprise data structure takes a bit more time that the simple connecting of two data sources like Craig’s Apartment List and Google Maps but the impact can be significant. In this case it is still much simpler and less time consuming that tradition big system data integration that can take months, it not several years. For example, Kalpana and Michael told me that in eight weeks they replaced three major applications on a call center desktop with a single one, operating with bidirectional data flow and better suited to the job requirements. The mashup implementation is model driven and requires little coding.
SynerG has had several limited releases with a select group of clients but they are now undertaking a full release. Kalpana and Michael told about an existing customer. Cruise West, who needed an integrated and consolidated view of all necessary reservations information. SynerG provided a solution in 3 months that enables Cruise West to operate more efficiently, deliver the best customer service and effectively sell cruises.
This makes sense to me as I have seen in past call center engagements that providing better data more efficiently to operators does increase performance on many measures such as cross-selling, reduction in repeat calls, fewer escalations to supervisors, etc. And that was with old style tools. I have always felt that mashups can be one of the biggest breakthroughs of enterprise 2.0. It appears that here is another example.
by Shiv Singh
March 30, 2008 at 4:58 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0
Last week I attended one of Dan Roam’s workshops on visual thinking. He is a former colleague who left Avenue A | Razorfish to write a book called Back of the Napkin about visual thinking. Since its publication on March 13th, 2008 the book has already climbed to 107 in Amazon’s sales rankings. It’s been featured in Businessweek, Newsweek and Metropolis Magazine. Tom Peters also interviewed Dan for his blog.
So what is Back of the Napkin about? Fundamentally the book is about visualizing ideas – why its important and how to sketch them. Dan guides the readers through a series of frameworks so that they can first think more visually and then sketch their own business ideas too. He emphasizes that visual thinking is not something reserved for the designers of this world. It’s important for everyone to think visually and its possible too. He emphasizes that over half of the sensory neurons in our brains are oriented towards vision. And as Dan sketches on whiteboards and literally on napkins, he shows exactly how anyone can think and draw visually.
The hand drawn doodle as Businessweek described it, has the power to humanize the abstract and simplify the complex. It also lets you add humor to a topic and pull people into the process of solving the problem. A great example, is how in 1967 Texas entrepreneur Rollin King jotted down the name of three cities – San Antonio, Houston and Dallas on a napkin and connected them to form a triangle. He explained to his lawyer, a certain Herb Kelleher that a small airline that offered nonstop flights between these hot spots would have an edge over the large carriers that forced travelers in the region to fly through expensive and time consuming hubs. Southwest Airlines was formed and the rest is history.
How does this matter to work 2.0? Probably for all the wrong reasons. As our business lives get more complex, we’re going to need simpler and more intuitive ways to communicate ideas and solutions. Visual thinking and communication plays an important role here. Unlike most other work 2.0 solutions, its not technology deterministic. Rather it forces us to put the technology to one side. In fact, my visual thinking skills have been hampered by my increased use of technology. It is probably the same for a lot of others who depend on their laptops and blackberrys everyday.
Dan’s book isn’t necessarily for everyone but its key point is important. Visual thinking matters and to borrow a phrase from Jon Husband’s recent post, we mustn’t let our tools shape us too much. It maybe limiting.
by Bill Ives
March 27, 2008 at 9:11 pm · Filed under
Reviews
I recently spoke with Bob Lancaster, CEO and founder of Infusion Logic that is introducing a new product called calc{list}™. On one level calc{list}™ is described as doing for contacts and lists what spreadsheets did for numbers, hence the name. It lives up to this billing but it goes beyond that to engage the enterprise in maintaining these lists with a lot of what Bob calls, “passive automation” that enlists enterprise 2.0 features. In a way it is like a del.icio.us for lists. I will get to that in a minute.
Traditional contact tools are like the phone book with lookup, sorting and contact maintenance features. Many CRM tools work this way also with the addition of a lot of unique data entry in most of them. With calc{list}™ lists are themselves the topic, action, category, group, task, tag or stage that contacts are currently a member of. These lists are created by individual users and can be maintained either by the user or collaboratively by sharing the lists with others. Shared lists can be combined to generate new lists or linked to automate updates to lists. Hence, an individual that changes their list may be effectively updating many other users lists, potentially without even being aware of their contribution. This is the foundation of “passive automation”. The result is a de-centralized emergent knowledge management/automation tool. Calc{list}s transparency allows for everyone to benefit from the work of everyone else. Sound familiar?
This is a simple concept but many good ideas are just that, complex things made simpler. Now here is the del.icio.us part. When you generate a list for a task like steps in a sales process, you name it. You are building a taxonomy (or since it is bottom up, a folksonomy) of tasks like who needs a new computer or who just bought your product. You can see who in the organization have similar lists labeled the same way. However, this can be over-ridden when a common taxonomy is in order. For example, if sales managers want to see each individual sales person’s lists of clients in a certain step in the sales process, they can provide the same task step names to their team.
However, there are situations where you do not want to constrain list generation. Here is an excerpt from a post I did a while back on social bookmarking lists within the enterprise:
“How could Playlists work within a business? Individual project teams can collectively create Playlists to support their work. These can be attached to their wiki or blog. They can be shared and discussed at virtual meetings. At the enterprise or division level, a knowledge manager can create an ongoing library of links to critical documents with annotations on their importance. These could be drawn from the best of team Playlists. Then official enterprise Playlists can be developed that represent the best thinking on specific issues that are important to the company. Employees or teams can download Playlists to fit their work needs. Then, they can make these Playlists once again personal as they engage in work activities by modifying them with both new annotations on the usefulness of existing links, as well as new links. Anyone in the firm, including the original knowledge manager, can access these new derived Playlists to enhance their own or add back into the official enterprise Playlist on the topic for continuous improvement.”
I think the same approach could work with calc{list}™. This tool allows those closest to the contact and have the greatest stake in keeping all the information current and accurate, (like a sales person for that contact) to maintain the information for the benefit and access of all. It is like enabling people to keep their own home pages to maintain their own identity within the enterprise. If there are conflicts in data, calc{list}™ notifies those involved to reconcile the differences. It is nice to see the concept of enterprise 2.0 applied to more and more tasks.
by Patti Anklam
March 27, 2008 at 4:52 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0
I had the pleasure over the past several months to serve on the advisory panel for the AIIM’s Market IQ study on Enterprise 2.0. Carl Frappaolo, who is leading the work, reviewed the highlights of the survey results at a webinar this afternoon. The full report is available on the AIIM Market IQ site. The broadcast of the webinar will be available by April 1.
Overall, the results from surveying 441 end users of “enterprise 2.0″ showed that there is not yet a clear consensus on what E2.0 is, that companies are in varying degrees of understanding it, that the business benefits at present seem to be tied to improving collaboration, and that KM-inclined organizations are farther along than organizations that are not KM-inclined.
One of the more difficult tasks that Carl and his partner Dan Keldsen undertook was to define Enterprise 2.0 (if you read the full document linked above you’ll see the interchange amongst the advisory panel members about this exercise):
“A system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities.”
Each word is significant, but the most intriguing themes (to my mind) are those that titled today’s briefing: agile, emergent, and integrated.
The results indicated ambivalence about Enterprise 2.0, which is in part because of the difficulty of defining it and its benefits:
- 44% of respondents indicated that Enterprise 2.0 is imperative or significant to their organization, but
- Only 13% said they were both aware of Enterprise 2.0 and were expressly addressing it
- (74% said that they were only vaguely familiar with it or had “no clear understanding”)
The study addresses the question, “what technologies are — and which are not — specifically included in Enterprise 2.0.” Frappaolo and Keldsen put into the category technologies that pass the SLATES ($$) test. Applications and tools specifically identified as Enterprise 2.0: blogs, wikis, RSS, voting/ranking,mashups, social bookmarking, podcasting. Carl emphasizes, however, that an enterprise 2.0 system must also include search, collaborative filtering, portals, the building blocks of interactivity. It’s about integration and evolution as far as the adoption and deployment go, however revolutionarily the paradigm has shifted (my words, not Carl’s).
In general, the survey shows that the goals of Enterprise 2.0 tend to match up with the benefits that companies who are deploying some of these tools are seeing: increased collaboration inside the organization, increased capture of corporate knowledge. forty-six percent (46%) of deployments are either exclusively or mostly ad hoc, and another 28% of deployments are mixed strategic and ad hoc. In companies that have performed an ROI on E2.0 projects, only 23% were able to report a positive ROI. (Measurement of the value of social media is extremely difficult, as Carl noted. Those of us who have been — like Carl and Dan — in the KM business for years understand this. The impact of implementing social technologies can only be understood as a second or third order removed from an actual transaction. That’s just darned hard to track.)
Given the earlier statistic about how well Enterprise 2.0 is understood, it’s not a surprise that in listing the barriers to adoption of Enterprise 2.0, 59% stated the “lack of understanding/appreciation.” Others:
- Corporate culture (49%)
- Lack of business case (ROI) (42%)
- Immaturity of technology (39%)
- Potential security violations (leaking) (36%)
- Cost (32%)
The respondents who were KM-inclined were identified by questions embedded in the survey that that surfaced cultural attitudes toward knowledge sharing. Thus the results illustrate (not surprisingly) that organizations that already have an inclination toward knowledge-sharing see more conversations about Enterprise 2.0 and what the technologies offer. This suggests that a core element of an Enterprise 2.0 strategy is to understand where the culture is a cultural continuum defined by the end points:
Isolated protectionism <–> Fully engaged and extended
Culture still trumps everything. And a part of the culture that has to be addressed includes some of the tough questions on security, governance, process and publishing, and findability (which includes sensitivity to what people make public or private).There are some hard questions, but meanwhile, it appears that those companies who are following common law rule of “permit whatever is not explicitly prohibited”* are seeing benefits.
My favorite moment in the briefing came early on. Carl shows a very clever juxtaposition of Time magazine covers:
- 1983: PCs are the “machine of the year.”
- 2007: “the person of the year is YOU”
In the former, a person is looking at a PC. In the latter, Carl puts the person in the PC.
Carl and Dan will continue the conversation on their blogs and in the training and certification programs they conduct. Let the learning continue.
*I heard a talk this morning at my client’s site by one of their staff on the subject of wikis, who beautifully made the distinction between this “common law” and the “Roman law,” which is to “Prohibit anything you do not specifically permit.”
by Jon Husband
March 26, 2008 at 6:53 pm · Filed under
Collaboration, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Web 2.0, Web Apps, Web Commuting
Ed Burnette of ZDNet asks a question that I suspect will commonly be asked (but from a slightly different perspective) in the workplace setting over the next five years or so.
Installing and uninstalling and maintaining anything on the desktop (be it Windows or Mac or Linux) is hard, and more and more people won’t bother. Why? Because there’s a better alternative.
It fits with the moves towards cloud computing, social computing, and the accessibility of much what constitutes the raw materials for knowledge work via mobile devices and / or from several different geographic places at the same tiome.
Work, increasingly, doesn’t happen where your computer is … "work" happens (or can happen) in that fuzzy space somewhere between the back of your skull, the interactivity-supporting platforms you use, and the images and text that are on whatever screen is in front of your face whether interacting with information or another person (or both).
Ed casts the issue from a user perspective, and not necessarily from a workplace perspective, though it’s pretty easy to imagine and extrapolate.
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Microsoft, Apple and the death of the desktop
Installing and uninstalling and maintaining anything on the desktop (be it Windows or Mac or Linux) is hard, and more and more people won’t bother. Why? Because there’s a better alternative.
Another way of saying this is, the browser is the new desktop.
Case in point: My wife has been complaining lately that her “computer was slow”. She’s running Windows XP on a Dell machine, so first I checked out the usual suspects. Viruses? Nope. Spyware? None found. Crapware? Already gone, from the day after we got the machine. Startup programs?The browser is the new desktop. Removed a few but it didn’t help. I started the task manager, but saw nothing suspicious. No processes using CPU or disk I/O. But still, she said it was slow.
So I watched what she was doing. She brought up the browser to check web-based mail on gmail.com. She used google.com to search for something for our kid’s classwork. She went to cartoonnetwork.com and webkins.com to play games with the kids. And so forth. Notice a pattern here? Everything was in the browser. It was the *browser* that was slow, not the computer. In her mind, the browser was the computer.
The problem turned out to be too many plug-ins in the browser. She had a Upromise plug-in, a Google toolbar plug-in, a Real media plug-in, and a bunch of other plug-ins I didn’t even recognize. I turned it all off, restarted the browser, and poof, “the computer” was several times faster. Cue fanfare.
My point is that even with the technical limitations under the covers–things like browser incompatibilities, offline storage, JavaScript memory leaks, etc. (all those things that developers pull their hair out about)–the convenience of internet-delivered applications is just so compelling that all other issues are falling by the wayside. In the span of a few years, we’ve witnessed a major paradigm shift in the way computing is surfaced to users.
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I don’t expect the desktop at work will die any time really soon, although it will be interesting to watch the situation unfold. There have been a number of technologies move through our North American and western European organizational lives pretty quickly, actually … electric typewriters, calculators, fax machines.
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. R. Barsalo, SAT
I’ve always found the above graphic interesting. Each of the small human figures represents a generation .. you’ll notice that at the start (in the top left-hand corner – the little generation icon is white. That first figure represents humankind’s invention of language. Them, things don’t change, generation after generation … oral transmission of language is how we distributed and used information beyond keeping it inside our senses and head.
Attention, change alert ! About 300 generations ago (notice the icons change to light grey 30% of the way along the fourth row from the bottom) humans invented writing and the use of symbols. Then, again, things didn’t change much generation after generation (in terms of a physical-cognitive perspective of input, processing and output of information) until only 35 generations ago, when the Gutenberg printing press was invented and came into widespread use.
The bottom right-hand corner of the graphic shows 7 differently-coloured icons, each one representing a new source or channel for information reception, transmission and the processing we need to do whenever we use whatever medium it may be that we are using at a point in time. All the new modes and media have occurred in the past 100 years or so.
The point of this graphic is that for a long long time our cognitive intake and processing capabilities (the way(s) our brain works with information) had plenty of time, over many generations, to adapt to changed modes of information flows. It’s most interesting that as all these new methods have come (and to some extent gone or changed), the workplace and the formality with which information and knowledge have been treated have been increasing … until recently. In keeping with the interconnectivity of the web and the accelerated (and accelerating still) flow of information coming from the interconnected environment, we are hearing much more about the organic nature of creating and using knowledge enabled by social computing tools and services.
It will be interesting to see if it will take another generation or not before work is just one of another cognitive tasks we all perform whenever and wherever our attention is directed to a specific need or issue .. for information, for response, for decision-making, for action … and it mainly takes place in the constantly looping invisible "space" screens, the seeing and hearing information, and the processing in our brain into some form of output, an action.
However … first we shape our tools, then our tools shape us. The beginning of the transition from desktops, and from both physical and cognitive habits in terms of how we interact with, shape, use and distribute information has been (for better and / or worse) shaped significantly by the other transitions of the past 100 years pointed out above. We still take in information, by and large, in structured forms and ways .. it’s only recently that people have been asking deeper questions about what (for example) is a document and what is not a document. Please remember, for the vast majority of us we’ve only had hyperlinks to play with for maybe a decade. The horizontal movements and use of information and knowledge, in self-generated and self-supported feedback loops beyond face to face oral conversation is new for all of us.
But when our kids and grandkids will be in the workplace … ?
We don’t need no steenkin’ desktops. But I’ll bet they’ll be around for a while yet.
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by Bill Ives
March 25, 2008 at 7:11 am · Filed under
Reviews
I recently posted on How Barack Obama is Using Web and Enterprise 2.0 in the US Primary Campaign through Central Desktop, an enterprise 2.0 tool. In this post I want to go into more detail on Central Desktop, itself, and what it offers. Isaac Garcia, CEO of Central Desktop, gave me an overview of the product and a demo, along with his discussion of the Obama campaign use case. Central Desktop provides on demand, web based collaboration tools for business teams. Their focus is the small to midsize business or departments within larger enterprises. The concept is to provide lightweight functionality for most aspects of project team work such as collaboration, communication, project management, content management. As I have written before, using a transparent web 2.0 tool for these functions allows for the creation of a searchable knowledge base as a by product of doing the work. It creates knowledge management on the fly and that is one of the goals of Central Desktop.
Central Desktop is built on a wiki with lots of functionality built on top. Sometimes the wiki base is evident and other times it is under the covers. However, wiki capabilities like version history and reverting to prior versions, as well as editing simplicity and access controls are always available. Issac said that pure wikis can be confusing for the average business users and I would agree. That is why they layered in additional functionality while retaining what works with wikis. This functionality includes the following, along with secure RSS feeds:
Docs & Discussion s- places to store files, documents and web pages
Tasks – they are assignable, dynamic to-do lists from workgroups with several related features
Milestones – team goals that can be assigned to team members and aggregated
Calendar – can be used to manage tasks, milestones, & events (this feature and the ones above were used by some Obama staffers and precinct captains)
Databases – create and manage custom lists (another capability used by the Obama campaign) – these lists can be public or private
Reports – a variety of reports can be generated
Media – storage for media assets that do not require check in and out
Blog – for internal use (in Texas this was used for people to record stories about how they became Obama supporters)
Forum – for internal use
Internal Members Directory
I think you can see how a political campaign can make good use of many of these tools but they also apply to most enterprise settings. The Central Desktop people also created several workspace types that made use of the above capabilities. These included: project management, a content strategy template, database for managing contacts and other lists, internal corporate blog, forum, and a simple plain wiki format for those who want to start in this manner. There is layered security that is very important for business wikis. With a little configuration, Central Desktop has taken steps to make it easier to provide a single-sign-on experience to other applications or intranets (such as third party bug tracking software or corporate intranets). You can also adjust the look and feel of the interface. Setting up a Central Desktop workspace involves using a mix of the above capabilities. It is a little like choosing portlets for a portal. Full-text search is active across all documents within the system.
There is also email enablement so you can communicate with central desktop via email and have the content posted within the web-based tool, a useful feature I am seeing on an increasing number of enterprise 2.0 applications. Issac said that this ability to use email increases adoption rates. If you are a trusted email address you see content on group distributions but if you are not you have to pass through the central desktop sign in to get to it as another security measure. This feature came out of one client’s need to maintain its HIPPA compliance. There is a Central Desktop blog for the back story.
Rob Paterson commented on my Fast Forward post on the Obama campaign’s use of Central Desktop, “…isn’t the organization of his campaign a model for effectiveness and does it not show a brilliant insight into his understanding of the new reality? Imagine a fortune 500 CEO with this approach and what they could do.” Indeed,
by Patti Anklam
March 24, 2008 at 11:41 am · Filed under
Change Management, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0
The basic Web 2.0 applications (social networking, blogs, wikis, tagging, “twittering,” RSS) and underlying technologies (collaborative filtering, social network and link analysis, data mining, mashups and plug-ins) continue to add to and support the collaborative capability in organizations. But, as we know, inside organizations the critical factor is not how the technologies and applications will be deployed and (most importantly) integrated, but how will managers guide the adoption to achieve maximum effectiveness (or, as some say, the ROI).
Enabling adoption is a complex mix of providing motivation and incentives, using a focused pilot process to generate success stories and pull from early adopters, integrating (there’s that word again) the tools and technologies into critical business processes. Since the early days of knowledge management, we (myself, my colleagues, and the legions of practitioners) have lobbied HR organizations to add “knowledge sharing” components to annual performance reviews. (I once, in a past life, participated in revamping criteria for promotion of senior technical people to an elite, consulting, status, by adding in requirements that candidates had demonstrated knowledge sharing by virtue of — among other things — being available and accessible.)
Consider that such a move is one way of putting a boundary around behaviors and that as it beings to shift the culture can move to other domains. The U.S. intelligence community began the culture shift from “need to know” to “need to share” by implementing just such a performance review component. According to a recent story in Government Executive, the current program manager for the Information Sharing Environment (a job established by the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Protection Act), Thomas McNamara, is now calling for all federal and state and local agencies to adopt similar criteria.
Sharing in government agencies, particularly the intelligence community and military, is hampered by the levels of classified systems and information. Similarly, state and municipal law enforcement and other local agencies have their own distinguishing needs to protect sensitive information. Enabling the right level of sharing across currently rigid boundaries will take time, but the pressure is on.
What I have not seen addressed, and what may become perplexing to organizations adopting Enterprise 2.0 practices is, “what constitutes sharing?” Will the performance review reflect data captured from the volumes of information accumulated about both explicit and implicit content contributions? I suspect not, as such measures only encourage gaming the system (as we have seen in some knowledge management implementations) to get higher participation scores without producing contributions that are actually useful. But the performance review process — which ought ultimately to be a conversation about learning and development — can provide an individual with data leading to insight into how social tools can improve their performance and access to more interesting work and promotions.
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