Graphing Out Your Twitter Network

July 31, 2008 at 11:34 pm · Filed under KM, social networks

Ever wonder what your Twitter network looks like visually? And what it might tell you about your network connections, your career, your business — even your life?

Valdis Krebs at Inflow has created a fascinating Twitter network map, showing everyone connected with him on Twitter:

This Twitter map shows 3 network clusters. Each cluster consists of a group of people with shared interests:

• Green – consisting of people in various economic development projects in Cleveland and Northest Ohio
• Red — a group that Valdis dubs the Digerati, i.e., well-known people in the online technology communities
• Blue – knowledge management consultants

The map is immediately helpful visually because it helps you “see” important information. In a blog post entitled “Twitter Maps,” Valdis analyzes his own network. He even provides a short list of 7 action items to expand his network.

For instance, he says he needs “more diversity of info/topics/knowledge to monitor.” He goes on to say he should also expand his network to include conversations around electronic music, his hobby.

This is an interesting analysis of your own professional and personal development by looking at who you are connected with on Twitter.

Open question: could businesses that use Twitter do a similar type of analysis to understand their Twitter “user base” better? What kinds of things would such a map tell them?

Combing Enterprise 2.0 Products from Services – Part Two– Function1’s RSS Reader and Lockdown

July 31, 2008 at 8:13 pm · Filed under Reviews

In my last post I conveyed the first part of my conversation with Matt Chiste and John Pusey from Function1. They provide services to AquaLogic (new name for Plumtree) customers and develop products to strengthen the AquaLogic line. In my first post I discussed one of these products developed from client work, their Exchange Portlet Suite. I also provided more context about the firm and Plumtree’s evolution. In this post, I will cover a two more examples, an RSS Reader for the AquaLoic environment and Lockdown for enhanced security management.

Their RSS Reader was co-funded through a major consumer goods firm that is a Function1 client. This customer is heavily embracing Enterprise 2.0, and wanted to start with even basic functionality like an RSS reader. Unfortunately, the out-of-the-box AquaLogic portlet offering left a lot to be desired: while users can specify multiple feeds in the portlet, it only shows one at a time (with a drop-down list at the top to select others). You only see a list of articles and have to manually expand to see the summaries, and there’s no concept of a “read” article (i.e., the portlet only displays what’s on the feed, not what the user hasn’t actually read yet). Below is a screen shot of this portlet:

Using the “Web 2.0” technologies Function1 applied to the Exchange portlets, they developed a much richer UI to address all of these shortcomings: An easy list of feeds on the left, individual “read” status, configurable tabbed interface for reading articles, and search functionality:

They have since re-sold this product at other accounts, and have passed the incremental enhancements back to the original customer.

I will now turn to their Lockdown security management utility. Matt said that one of the hallmarks of Web 2.0 is that it is almost entirely open (i.e., Wikipedia); security is often an afterthought and there are often missteps along the way (i.e., Facebook security gaffes). In order to truly bring Web 2.0 to the enterprise and allow open collaboration between specific teams and individuals, security needs to be considered from the beginning, ensuring that only the right people are seeing the right knowledge. This is an issue that most enterprise 2.0 firms are addressing in their various niches.

Matt said that the AquaLogic portal has a relatively primitive security management infrastructure: users click page-by-page through the administrative taxonomy, click another button to modify security, and when security privileges are changed, the only option is to copy the entire ACL (Access Control List) down the tree, rather than just applying the changes made to that one object. So for example, if a user is applied to the security list on a top-level folder, and subfolders have their own security settings, administrators can’t remove that individual user without wiping out the security for all of the subfolders, or manually clicking page-by-page (hundreds or thousands of times) to modify the ACLs. Consequently, security configurations are often compromised due to the inconvenience and pain of properly configuring them.
Below is a screen shot of the out-of-the-box administration tool:

Function1 again took the model of co-funding a project to produce a rich security management tool that relies heavily on AJAX and tabbed interfaces to allow more effective security management and rights propagation:

So now I have gone through three examples of creating Enterprise 2.0 products from services work in these tow posts. Leveraging their ongoing client services experience, Function1 intends to become a significant player in the Enterprise 2.0 space for the AquaLogic product line as it migrates its way into the Oracle environment. I think they are taking a great path. Not only are the products coming out of real client needs but the services work provides an ongoing revenue stream to support the development of the products, at least that was my experience when I was involved in this type of development in the 80s.

Combing Enterprise 2.0 Products from Services – Part One – Function1’s Exchange Portlet Suite

July 31, 2008 at 9:08 am · Filed under Reviews

Last week I talked with Matt Chiste and John Pusey from Function1. The firm was started in January 2007 by Matt Chiste and Ashish Bhutiani after a combined 10 years working with Plumtree/BEA in the consulting division. They chose to go independent to continue to service AquaLogic (new name for Plumtree) customers and devote time to developing a third-party ecosystem of products to strengthen the AquaLogic product line. I was especially interested in what they are doing, as I served as the executive sponsor of the Plumtree relationship for a while when I was with a large consulting firm a few years ago.

I also liked the concept of developing products out of services. In my consulting experience these were always the most successful products as they addressed a recognized need and came out of a proven solution. The trick was to make something that other customers found value in. I think they have done this with the example I discuss here. In the past 18 months, Function1 has released 4 products that have been co-developed with customers, At the same time. they have worked with over 30 customers and partners to provide service offerings such as system Health Checks, upgrade services, and monitoring/support.

To provide a bit more context, Plumtree was acquired by BEA and rebranded AquaLogic. Then BEA was acquired by Oracle in the first half of 2008. Oracle has publically announced ongoing support and resources will be dedicated to most products in the AquaLogic line, which will be rebranded as WebCenter Interaction and merge with other technologies in their portfolio (part of their Enterprise 2.0 division). Function1 remains committed to this product line and will continue to contribute to the portal and E2.0 ecosystem of products and services. I am now going to discuss one of the products that have come out of their work.

Their first product was the Exchange Portlet Suite, and is a good example of the “Web 1.0 -> Web 2.0 -> Enterprise 2.0” evolution. Around 2000, Plumtree released an Exchange Portlet Suite that allowed end users to manage their email, contacts, and calendars within the context of the portal. The application has not been significantly upgraded since then, and is showing its age considerably. Users can’t easily scroll through messages, there’s no rich text composition, and every time an action is taken the entire portal page is refreshed, hindering the ability to quickly perform any action within the suite. Below is a screen shot of this portlet suite:

Matt views Web 1.0 as fundamentally about web sites that provided content to the masses, and Web 2.0 is about user-generated content. I would agree. Around the time of this evolution, new technologies such as AJAX started to be used more extensively, resulting in much richer and easy-to-use interfaces.

During our call, Matt talked about their Exchange portlets coming closer to “Web 2.0.” In this instance, the reference is less about “user-generated content” and more about the technologies commonly employed with Web 2.0. Below is a screen shot of their primary portlet. Features include dynamic folder and email/contact/calendar functionality, fast inline pagination, preview windows, and rich text editing. The user never has to leave the page or refresh anything to quickly access the important details of their inbox:

Now Matt pointed out that for all practical purposes (with the exception of the technology used), this is still a “Web 1.0” application because it doesn’t meet the primary criteria of “user-generated content”. However, they have been working on some integration points to truly capture the essence of “Web 2.0”, and by extension, “Enterprise 2.0”: assimilation of institutional knowledge into the “cloud”. Matt said that years ago, he gave a sales pitch on the virtues of Collaboration Server (a Plumtree/BEA product), and discussed how it allows knowledge workers to better collaborate and share institutional knowledge without it simply getting lost in email threads. The reality, though, is that email is still a deeply entrenched part of the work experience, and still easier to quickly share knowledge among coworkers.

Rather than resisting this momentum and providing more disruptive technologies, Funxction1 is planning on providing an evolutionary step to their offering: integration of email through the AquaLogic portal with other collaborative technologies that already exist, such as Publisher, Collaboration Server, Blogs, Wikis, or Activity Streams. That way, “information” can still be communicated via email, but once an email thread becomes relevant or informative to others, it can be “promoted” to “knowledge” by directly publishing that information into the cloud for others to collaborate or comment on.

Here’s a basic screen shot of their prototype showing the additional publish buttons in the Exchange Portlet 2.0 suite:

In my next post I will cover two more of the products that Function1 developed out of their client work

Web 2.0 is Changing the Way We Work: Report from McKinsey

July 31, 2008 at 6:59 am · Filed under Change Management, Culture, Enterprise 2.0

McKinsey has just released the results of a global survey on adoption of Enterprise 2.0. Its results are not dissimilar from the AIIM survey earlier this year (see my earlier blog post), for example, they state that the principle reasons for slow adoption are: management’s inability to grasp their potential financial returns, unresponsive corporate cultures less-than-enthusiastic leadership

More interesting for the future of work, they asked, “How, if at all, has your company’s use of Web 2.0 technologies and tools changed the way the company is managed and organized?” The responses include:

• It has changed the way we communicate with customers and suppliers (38%)
• It has changed the way we hire and retain talent (16%)
• It has created new roles or functions in our organization (16%)
• It has changed the way our organizations is structured — e.g., a flatter hierarchy (14%)

The survey also broke down the results into the categories of companies who reported satisfaction with Web 2.0 tools and those who did not. Of those who are satisfied, 33% report both that the technologies have created new roles or functions in the organization and changed the way the organizations are structured.

Other interesting notes from this great study:

• Companies in which it is the business units, rather than IT, leading the initiative have more success

• Satisfaction is greatest in Asia/Pacific (40%), with Europe and North America trailing at 20%

• Satisfied companies are using Web 2.0 technologies more extensively for interaction with customers (the “Community 2.0″ phenomenon)

Much more food for thought is in this study (breakdown of the use of tools internally, with customers, etc.) and I do hope that more detail is forthcoming on, specifically, the new roles and functions in the organizations and the ways in which companies are restructuring. This data will point us toward the future of work.

Giving Your Digital Workspace a Tune Up

July 28, 2008 at 6:37 pm · Filed under AppGap Tips

Since your computer is a tool you work with everyday, you need to give it a tune up once in a while to make sure that it performs at peak efficiency. Apart from the usual defragging, disk cleanup, and virus/malware scans, what are the things you can do to give your digital workspace a tuneup?

Upgrade current software. Did you know that 40% of internet users have an outdated version of their web browser ? This makes their browsers more susceptible to security and privacy bugs. Apart from your web browser, you should also update all the other programs you frequently use.

Declutter. This means you have to remove any applications that you don’t really use. Apart from unused programs, you should also make sure that each program on your computer has a unique purpose. For example, if you already have Microsoft Word, why should you also have Open Office Writer? Or, unless you’re a web designer, why should you have 5 different browsers installed?

Do the same thing with your files. Archive unnecessary files onto an external hard drive or an online backup service. As for removing duplicate files, you can do it manually or via an app like Duplicate File Checker.

Evaluate your apps and find leaner, more efficient alternatives. Find out if the current apps you’re using really match your work process. Do they work together well? Are there some features you need that they don’t offer? Are you using too many tools when one tool can do the job just as well? These are things you need to think about when evaluating the current apps you’re using. Of course, if some of your tools need further improvement, search for any plugins that can get you additional features or consider getting a new app altogether.

Do it regularly. Schedule the above tasks so you don’t forget to do them later on. Upgrading software should be done whenever new versions are available (most programs do this automatically). Decluttering can be done from once a month to once every six months - depending on how much digital clutter you accumulate.

As for disk defragging and anti-virus scans, you can do it daily or weekly, again, depending on how extensively you use your computer and what kinds of programs you run.

Although the digital office tune up takes some time and patience, it is something you should do if you want to make sure your equipment doesn’t get rusty in the long run.

Managing in the Virtual or Network(ed) Organization

July 27, 2008 at 9:05 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, Talent Management

During my blogging over the past four years I have pointed several times previous to an article in The Economist from January 2006 titled The New Organization (The way people work has changed dramatically, but the way their companies are organised lags far behind. 

The author’s main point is that while most organizations are now effectively functioning as and in networks, their organizational structures and management practices have been slow to make that shift, in a comprehensive sense.

(The Economist article is now behind a pay wall, but I think there must be copies here and there on the Web … it’s a very well-researched and well-written artyicle and worth the time to search for it and read it).

What initially caught my eye in that article (more than other useful points and references) were quotes from the major management consulting firms Mercer-Delta and McKinsey about this fundamental and permanent shift.

Their presence and substance was a signal to me that the types of large-scale changes (to work and to organizational structures and dynamics) about which I and others have written are still more on the horizon than amidst us, though they are rapidly moving to the foreground; witness the rapidly-growing interest in yet another (still) confusing-to-many term, Enterprise 2.0. 

These global management consulting firms will move into this area full force .. they can’t NOT do so.

All that is well and good, and I am sure that they will find and create maps and models and diagnostics and workshops and full-blown strategies, and will capture their markets with prescriptive approaches … that’s what their  business models demand.

What I wanted to draw any reader’s attention to is the work of a brilliant friend of mine, who has written and published a clear and concise exploration of the structure and dynamics of virtual, or network(ed) organizations that I think is seminal.  He wisely chose the Linux Project as the initiative from which to draw inferences about decentralized organization.

I think that the next decade (or two) will see many of the points he sets out adopted and commoditized into management practices and processes, under more euphemistic and saleable names.

His name is george dafermos, and his paper is titled "Management and Virtual Decentralised Networks".  In my opinion it should be required reading for management consultants and line managers / executives working with or in 21st century organizations.

He also wrote "Blogging The Market - How weblogs are turning corporate machines into real conversations" several years ago, more of a cri du coeur at a time when blogging was still fresh and (perhaps) innocent

Essentially, it was a short-form of the book "Naked Conversations - How Blogs Are Changing The Way Businesses Talk With Customers" two or three years before Naked Conversations was written.

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E20portal.com – Enterprise 2.0 Resource

July 27, 2008 at 12:54 pm · Filed under Reviews

This is a review of an enterprise 2.0 aggregation site rather than a software product but I think it provides a useful resource so I wanted to mention it here. I met Nick Barker at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. He said he is starting the E20portal.com as a resource for enterprise 2.0. It features, events, resources, a directory, feedback, and their own blog. The about section says, “At E20portal.com we have brought together Enterprise 2.0 news, articles, case studies, events and other useful resources into a single, easily accessible place. Our goal is to provide business decision makers and strategists with the information they need to understand this emergent approach, and how you can use Enterprise 2.0 to bring real value to your organisation.” They invite contributions.

Under resources, they have started a series on featured blogs by writers in this space and they asked me to serve as one of these bloggers. I picked my five favorite blog posts on the topic. The next featured blogger is Andrew McAfee. The resources section also includes case studies and industry reports. The directory section includes software resources and consultants. They have made a good start in each of these sections. But there are lots more to add. Kudos to Nick and his partners for starting this resource. We should support these efforts.

Content Aggregation Sites: The Business Applications You Can’t Market Without

July 26, 2008 at 8:36 am · Filed under Collective intelligence, Web Apps

David Meerman Scott wrote a book called “The New Rules of Marketing and PR.” In it he talks about using online content to market and reach customers directly.

One of his underlying premises is that providing good content widely and freely online is a powerful way to market a product or service. As David says, “It’s about your buyers seeing your company on the web.”

That brings me to the point of my article today:

The new breed of content aggregation sites available on the Web should be viewed as valuable business applications.

These sites can play an integral role in our marketing to reach prospective buyers, if we just learn how to use them.

WHAT ARE CONTENT AGGREGATION SITES?

The designation “content aggregation sites” can refer broadly to anything from a blog to an RSS feedreader to Wikipedia. But I am using it in a narrower context. I am specifically referring to large public sites designed specifically to share knowledge, documents and other content.

Examples of the kinds of sites I mean include:

Work.com
Google’s Knol
Squidoo
HubPages
Scribd
Google Base
YouTube
eZine Articles

There are hundreds more, especially of the article submission sites and places to submit press releases for free. The ones I’ve listed are just some of the bigger, better-known sites.

These are sites that are open to all comers. A basic account costs nothing — they are free. Once you set up an account you simply add your content: upload it (YouTube and Google Base) or compose it (Work.com and Knol) or curate it (Squidoo).

What these sites give you is an outlet or distribution channel for your content — assuming you have quality information to share. You get the potential to reach a wider audience than on your own website, blog, email list or direct mail list — all through being included in the central site or database.

By sharing content publicly you have the potential to interest people enough to find out more about you, your business, your products, your services. These are people who may become buyers.

BUT WE ALREADY USE THESE SITES SOMETIMES

Most businesses are not leveraging these content aggregation sites anywhere near the extent they could.

Most of us tend to look on such sites as places for entertainment, or as places we occasionally visit to research information or get a question answered after they pop up in the search engine results. Or maybe we just view them as Web 2.0 curiosities we’re not quite sure the value of.

Instead, why not look on them as an important channel to distribute valuable information — and in the process help us market?

If we are marketing/sales people and small-businesspeople, we should be incorporating these kinds of sites into our marketing plans.

We should be training our people how to use these sites (and use them responsibly).

We should make mastering such sites a part of the job duties of specific people on our teams — they need to know how to use these sites just like we might require employees to know Excel, PowerPoint, Oracle or Salesforce.com.

IT IS NOT ABOUT SPAMMING

This isn’t about exploiting these content aggregation sites in order to spam or to plaster blatant sales brochures all over the Web. It has to be valuable content you are sharing freely. Assuming you don’t cross the line from useful content to spammy junk or blatant link-dropping sales pitches, your distribution of content can pay off.

Some businesses already have figured this out. For instance, there are search engine optimization (SEO) firms with teams of people who do nothing but create and repurpose content for clients on content aggregation sites.

When taken to extremes, these activities end up spammy and of little value and they give a bad rap to using such sites. But such activities don’t have to be. It’s up to you to use these sites responsibly.

But use them you should. Consider them important business applications. Pick and choose the ones most relevant to the business you are in. Work them into your marketing plans and your everyday operations and systems. Train employees to use them and consider them critical business applications — and not just curiosities.

Notable + Quotable: mobile internet use, Digg, the Long Tail, and iPhone apps

July 25, 2008 at 4:18 pm · Filed under Notable + Quotable

Mobile Internet use has reached “critical mass”
Jacqui Cheng, also of Ars Technica, reports on a study by Nielsen Mobile that calls for increased marketing efforts to take advantage of the popularity of mobile phones. “Using the Internet from mobile devices is a lot more popular than some of us realize, and even more surprising is the fact that the US leads the pack when it comes to mobile Internet usage.”

Microsoft Climbs Higher Into the Cloud
Tech News World reports on the growing cloud computing industry and the impact of Microsoft’s more aggressive efforts in this space. “Microsoft is offering some of its most popular acquisitions via cloud computing with the rollout of Microsoft Online Services. Like many vendors adopting this delivery mode, Microsoft is seeking to exploit companies’ eagerness to downsize their internal IT and computing infrastructures to the greatest extent possible.”

Search War: Yahoo! Opens Its Search Engine to Attack Google With An Army of Verticals
ReadWriteWeb talks about Yahoo!’s latest move in a bid to increase its share in the all-important search market. “Yahoo! is taking a bold step tonight: opening up its index and search engine to any outside developers who want to incorporate Yahoo! Search’s content and functionality into search engines on their own sites.”

Battle of the iPhone Apps: MySpace vs Facebook
The social networking war rages on a new front - the iPhone. Mashable makes a side-by-side comparison of the two competing applications. “Which bears better features? And which bears a more pleasant physique, etc., etc.?”

Testing the Long Tail’s First Test
O’Reilly Radar scrutinizes a Harvard study that casts a bad light on the long tail business model. “Web entrepreneurs have been relying on the Chris Anderson’s long tail hypothesis even before he published his ideas, so it’s good to see that the academic community has begun to study the effect and test for its existence.”

The “Participation Premium”
Robert Scoble analyzes his and Michael Arrington’s Twitter and FriendFeed habits in order to find what it takes to be popular in social media. “What this is telling you is that you can easily get noticed in any community simply by participating. Yes, other factors do matter, but just by participating you’ll build an audience that “the popular kids” can’t get to.”

Gosh, How Many Diggs Does It Take To Get To The Home Page, Anyway?
A story with over 900 diggs that failed to make it to the frontpage prompts Michael Arrington to look back at how the site has changed over time. “Back in June 2005 when I first wrote about Digg (six days after starting TechCrunch), it took just 15 diggs and a story was automatically sent to the home page of the then small and innocent site (there are lots of old screen shots of Digg in that post). Today it takes an average of 150 or so to get to the Digg home page, although that varies considerably based on the user who submitted the story and the domain name being pointed to.”

Change of Command

July 25, 2008 at 12:45 pm · Filed under Culture, Reviews, Work Design

My brother, Chris, just turned over the keys for the USS West Virginia (a nuclear submarine) to its new Captain during a moving ritual celebration called a Change of Command. As the program states, the Change of Command is a transfer of “total responsibility, authority, and accountability from one individual to another. The heart of the ceremony is the formal reading of official orders by both the relieving officer and the officer being relieved:

“I relieve you.”
“I stand relieved.”

And its over, 2 and a half years of being absolutely and completely accountable for one of the most complicated collections of machinery in the history of the world and of the 130+ officers and seamen on the submarine.

The work, the roles, the responsibilities of each and every man are carefully delineated. No room for ambiguity.

While in Georgia during the celebration of the event, LinkedIn told me that a colleague had a new position, a job title I had never heard before. I thought it was a made up title (though Google has since relieved me of that misapprehension) and was struck by contrast in official and formal duties with the emergent and informal roles in the networks that I write about so enthusiastically. Do made-up job titles come with a bounded set of job responsibilities and expectations?

And what happens when a project group forms? How do those in the project articulate their assumed responsibilities and overlaps? It feels counter to the spirit of self-generating networks to get all explicit about who does what, but I’ve recently seen some local volunteer groups falter because it was not clear, for a given task or project:

• Who was Responsible for each of the necessary tasks required (and who was responsible for coordinating those tasks)?
• Who was Accountable to the group for ensuring that the goals were met?
• Who was needed to Support each task, and the project as a whole?
• Who was available to Consult to those responsible for the task?
• Who needed to be kept Informed of the tasks process, issues, and status?

The acronym of these bolded letters — RASCI — may be know to many as a fundamental organizational development tool that I think is probably underutilized in the context of working in both ad hoc as well as formal production-oriented networks. Not that we all need the degree of specificity for maintaining a smoothly running submarine underwater for 2 months or more, but we do need to internalize the RASCI questions when we start a job, a task, and assign ourselves a title that we think corresponds with a role.