Transforming Organizations: Participative Media & the Power to Convene

November 26, 2008 at 2:06 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Management, Web 2.0

Conversations with Truman Company CEO Mark Bonchek are always thoughtprovoking and his words from an article interview a year ago drifted back to me reading Matthew Hodgson’s TheAppGap post in search of a meta adoption model for Enterprise 2.0 and Government 2.0.

Discussing the topic “Organizing to Connect Intelligence: Broadcasting Innovation”  Mark Bonchek told me:

“..for a 21st century CEO, or senior leader, the “power to convene” is job one. In particular, recognizing the power to convene of those who have both a stake in the challenge and the knowledge to contribute, be they internal or external to an organization.“

Clearly we need look no further than the rollout of President Elect Obama’s key appointments to date, and today’s announcement of the new Paul Volcker lead advisory board , for the “power to convene” that comes with offical leaderships roles. However, it’s my observation watching the impact of participative media, (initially forums and more recently those labelled Web 2.0) on organizations is driving the “power to convene” both deep into, and beyond, traditional official responsibility structures.

Stowe Boyd talks about “the individual is the new group”.  Enabled by email, wikis, traditional blogs, microblogging and social networking platforms, both official IT and public consumer,  today any individual has the “power to convene” a group, share and promote their knowledge and expertise.

When colleague Victoria Axelrod and I conduct workshops a slide that invariably causes nods is this explanation of the impact of social technology on the locus of control in organizations:

In his TheAppGap post Matthew Hodgson writes:

“When considering adoption strategies for moving to Enterprise 2.0 the message is clear — think strategically and take into consideration the effects of culture from a personal as well as an organisational perspective.”

To me a key factor in whether or not organizations willingly adopt, or resist, implementing low cost collaboration tools that enable ideas and knowledge to flow more readily across organizations,  is the propensity of leadership to want to control. I wonder if your experience matches mine that very often TheAppGap is management that chooses “control” over appropriate “controls”?

~ Jenny Ambrozek
 

Mark Logic Extends its XML Server

November 25, 2008 at 5:25 pm · Filed under Web 2.0

MarkLogic Server allows organizations to store,  search, analyze and dynamically deliver XML content. I have written about one application before (see – US Army’s Battle Command Knowledge System (BCKS) Moves to XML-based Platform). Recently, they announced the release of MarkLogic Server 4.0. I spoke with John Kreisa, Director of Product marketing. This new release is their largest so far and contains a number of extensions that we went over. 

But first let me cover the basics. MarkLogic Server is an XML server which provides a software application development platform for creating XML-based content related applications. The XML basis provides greater granularity in database searches and more efficient document delivery than traditional means. It accommodates semi-structured data. John explained that they this is what is often called unstructured data such as narrative but that they prefer the term semi-structure as all data has some structure.  In the US Army application I wrote about earlier, both the speed of access and the granularity of search were key benefits of this approach.

The new release adds to these features in several ways. First, it adds new geospatial capabilities that enable organizations to build location-based applications that search and analyze content based on location information. The new release provides built-in support for popular geospatial data tagging formats such as GML, KML, and GeoRSS/Simple, as well as new geospatial query functions for point, radius, bounding box and polygon constraints. As information consumers and workers become more mobile, the delivery of information in the context of their physical location can greater improve relevance. For example, military personnel operating directly in the battlefield could search for background information relevant to their next mission, just as shoppers can see local places to eat after completing their mission. You can see MarkLogic geospatial bucketing below.

Release 4.0 also provides built-in support for entity identification and inline markup. This new text mining feature works in 11 languages and identifies 18 different types of entities, including person, organization, location, credit card number, email address, latitude/longitude, date, and time. For example, one query might be to distinguish between Paris Hilton the person and Paris Hilton the hotel to find which is relevant to the query. This works through tags. In this context, Mark Logic is also introducing the Open Enrichment Framework, an initiative created to speed integration with third-party entity extraction engines and other content enrichment tools.

One new feature that I especially liked is co-occurrence analytics that finds and counts pairs of entities in content. This can potentially expose previously unknown relationships and provide useful new insights. The system groups content based on pre-set parameters, such as treatments and side effects.

Co-occurrence would allow, in this example, a medical researcher to determine the common instances of pharmaceuticals and side-effects and then display the results graphically on a map based on frequency. You could also look for pairs of people or the pairing of a person and places.

There are also new alert capabilities. You can be notified of new content that contains the terms, places, etc. that you pre-set. This feature is very scalable. The modular documents feature allows you to re-use content more efficiently. Instead of cutting and pasting portions of a document. This feature has support for XPointer and XInclude, mechanisms for merging XML documents. You simply link back to it so it is store once, link many. This ensures a consistency of content that is especially useful for policies in regulated industries.

John went on to describe their new support for W3C XQuery 1.0. Mark Logic has hundreds of active XQuery-based deployments so this will smooth migration to XQuery 1.0 as the new release provides compatibility modes to ensure interoperability with applications developed with all previous versions. Finally he concluded with the enhancements to the administration functions including the automation of key management activities through scriptable administration and scheduled back-ups, as well as event logging and auditing support.

XML provides a more flexible foundation for content creation, storage, sharing, and searching. I think the new MarkLogic Server 4.0 takes greater advantage of the potential within this format and will even more useful for developing web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 applications. 

Archiving all your Google Docs files

November 25, 2008 at 1:13 am · Filed under AppGap Tips

It’s a rule of thumb that every important file should have a backup (maybe two). I’ve been burned enough times to learn to honor this rule. For the files on my computer, it’s easy enough to do. I have an external drive just for this purpose, and I also upload to a server for good measure.

It’s the files that are not on my computer that’s a little trickier. One thing I don’t like about Google Docs is that there’s no way to download all your files in one go. Exporting them one file at a time is too cumbersome, and I’ve always wished they’d do something about automating the process.

Unfortunately, they haven’t, but some great work by a few people provides a work-around. First thing is to download and install these three:

1. Grease Monkey. A Firefox add-on that lets your browser run Javascript code. Restart your browser after you’ve installed Grease Monkey. If you already have this, skip to #2.

2. Google Docs Download Script. Follow the link on their website and Grease Monkey will automatically install this script for you. It doesn’t actually download anything, but just harvests the links of all the files you’d like to back up. Once done, refresh your Google Docs page and you’ll see a Download link at the right side of the menu bar.

3. DownThemAll. This Firefox add-on gets the links from #2, and does all the heavy lifting - downloading all the files to your computer.

All these shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes. Now that you’ve installed everything, just choose the file format that you’d like your files to be exported as.

To quote the GDD script website, “You can archive them to the medium of your choosing and then place it under your mattress, so you can sleep… knowing that if Google exploded that night, you would still have your files.”

Now isn’t that something we all want?

Web Apps: How far would you go?

November 24, 2008 at 8:39 am · Filed under AppGap Tips

The past few years have seen the explosion of web applications in every area imaginable, from creating documents, to keeping tabs on your money, to organizing your travel arrangements and so on. If there’s a desktop application that does it, chances are, there’s a web-based equivalent - even resource-intensive tasks such as image and video editing.

Personally, I’ve tried using web-based office apps, calendars, collaboration tools, invoicing, messaging, image editing, email, mind-mapping, news feeds, and many others. Most of them were just out of curiosity, but a few have stuck and have taken over as my primary tool for their purpose. Having a genuine interest in this space, I’m open to trying anything that comes my way. However, there are some web apps that I don’t think I could consider using on a regular basis, at least for now.

Examples of these are password managers and variants of a WebOS. The first one certainly bothers me in terms of security. While their system’s security will most certainly put my personal computer to shame, there’s still no such thing as hack-free. And being an identified repository of prized information, online password managers will be prone to attacks, whether for profit or for sport.

As for the WebOS concept, I’m sure some frequent travelers will find it useful and convenient to have a virtual operating system that can go with them anywhere. However, I personally don’t see them as a need but as a superfluous layer of abstraction – a WebOS runs inside a browser, which runs inside a traditional operating system. Also, they cannot by themselves detect hardware. I can only see myself using these if I couldn’t take my laptop to an isolated place, and I’ll have to use multiple computers running an unfamiliar OS, like an obscure Linux distribution. But what’s the chance of that?

We all have our own preferences, so I’d like to ask everyone about your own personal limits when it comes to using web applications and why, or are you willing to replace all your desktop programs with web-based equivalents?

ON24 Offers Virtual Web-based Shows for Business

November 22, 2008 at 10:40 am · Filed under Web 2.0

ON24, a webcasting provider, is now offering ON24 Virtual Show. It provides organizations a virtual venue for trade shows, job fairs, conferences and training summits.  I spoke recently with Tom Masotto, VP of Product Management and Business Development. He began by providing some context. ON24 has been in business for ten years offering B2B webcasting services. A year ago they saw more companies using their webcasting for keynoting addresses at virtual events. Also, they were seeing client interest in virtual environments in other ways. So they developed their Virtual Show offering to meet this market demand. It is fully integrated with their webcasting service and was released this summer.

Tom said they want to provide the ability to completely customize the virtual event environment. The offering is provided both as a service, where an ON24 team uses the tools to set up and run the environment, and as a tool kit for firms that have their own implementation teams.  He said that this is the same for their webcasting offering where there is a 50/50 split on ON24 implementation and self-service. Since the Virtual Shows are a new channel, he expects that more people will want them to run things, at least initially, to learn best practices.  They have also developed marketing tools for their clients on how to best promote this new venue.

Tom took me on a tour of a Virtual Show they did for Computerworld in Germany.  We began in the reception hall where there was a jumbotron positioned over a realistic convention scene. Here a speaker can introduce people and provide other information. He said that they develop the background scenes in 3D and then flatten them to JPEGs for ease of use. See the sample below.

Next, we went to the exhibit hall and then to a series of very different styles of booths. The booths will generally have a jumbotron for presentations. There are also multiple resources that can be offered from documents to live chat. You can do surveys. ON24 provides a patent-pending “smart booth” technology enabling exhibitors to recommend personalized content based on an attendee’s profile, such as business strategy for business professionals and technical specifications for IT attendees. Here is a sample booth below.

There are social networking features. Attendees can create profiles, set privacy preferences, and connect with other show attendees for online chats and professional networking opportunities. Within the communications center, attendees can participate in scheduled or ad hoc group discussions, as well as post and reply to forum discussions on the message board. There is a lounge area where some of this social networking can occur. The booths, building, and exterior landscape each move at different speeds, creating a 3D-like feeling of “walking” through the exhibit hall. Below is anther sample booth design.

ON24 uses Adobe Flash technology to eliminate downloads for show attendance and make the Virtual Shows accessible for most browsers. There is the ability to incorporate Web 2.0 features such as ratings and comments. Flash also allows for webcast interfaces to be more creatively designed with custom navigation schemes, dynamic Flash widgets, and real-time retrieval of related content.

Tom said that so far clients are using the Virtual Shows to complement physical shows rather than replace them. They might run a physical show twice a year and then offer a more virtual version to reach a broader audience. They have also used them to provide virtual access to a physical show in multiple locations while the actual physical show is in progress. He said that at least one client is looking at the virtual platform to replace a meeting that had to be cancelled for budget reasons. I think this is a useful platform and the implementation of these types of services will only increase in today’s economic situation.  Below is a sample exhibit hall with multiple booths. 

Fighting Internal Spam that Hurts Productivity

November 20, 2008 at 8:21 pm · Filed under Change Management, Collaboration, Intranets, KM

Apparently, President Obama will not be allowed to have his blackberry with him. It is a security risk and he wouldn’t be in compliance with the Presidential Records Act if he carried it around. Imagine that. An efficient use of technology is a security risk. But then it got me thinking. Do organizations depend too much on email? Has email become a lazy way to communicate and collaborate? With all the copying and blind copying going on in emails, is it serving as more of a distraction than a productivity enhancer? 

A recent IDG report highlighted that there will be 40 trillion inbox clogging spam e-mail messages this year resulting in smart companies building separate email system - email systems that are detached from the Internet.On the surface, it may seem excessive to build a private email system to avoid spam. But the strategy does have merits. Its not that employees won’t be able to email the outside world (many of them need to just to do their jobs) but rather it’ll separate external email from internal communications.

Now lets see if we can take this thought process a little further. What if employees were limited to say a hundred emails a day. And if they went over that limit they were charged 25 cents per email sent. What would that do to the organization? Would it mean more meetings? More stopping by each other’s desks? Better and more efficient uses of the corporate intranet? A reduction in knowledge sharing? Increased productivity as employees would be spending less time cleaning up their inboxes? 

It is hard to know but it might be one way to fight what I’m going to call “internal spam” just as private email systems fight public spam. This doesn’t get much attention but I’m willing to bet it hampers productivity and fuels laziness. 

Wi5Connect Offers Enterprise 2.0 Learning Communities

November 20, 2008 at 12:54 pm · Filed under Web 2.0

Wi5Connect has built a learning platform that integrates three capabilities: learning management system, communities, and analytics.  I recently spoke with Matthew Bowman, their President and CEO.  He described the education model they created which I think nicely integrates formal instruction with peer learning and knowledge management.

First, there is a learning management system that supports multiple presentation formats (video, audio, Powerpoint and others).  After participation in the formal part of the learning experience, two types of assessment can be conducted. There are traditional testing formats. You can also do a more dynamic Flash-based assessment that can provide more content in the assessment format.  Then participants go through a goal setting process for how they will take the learning back to their work place.  Next, they apply the new skills and come back to a community of peers and share their experiences.  Below is an image of the learning module and the pedagogy used to help users learn and apply the contents of each lesson.

Here is screen shot of the Wi5Connect goal engine that allows people set goals to help them put into practice the new knowledge they gained from the online training.

I think that the community experience is where the much of the impactful learning in achieved. Many studies have shown that much of real business learning occurs in informal conversations with peers. The community provides a platform for these conversations and a focus for them. Below you see some of the components of the community as you can see the tabs from the home page of the community.

This community sharing provides a knowledge capture function for the enterprise as it captures insights and lessons learned by the participants.  Then the community members score the value of the lessons, as well as the impact of the skills obtained from the lessons. This sharing and scoring is preserved in an accessible format, rather than lost in conversations or buried in emails.

Matthew said that this type of program helps with employee retention in several ways. First, the investment in learning in helps the employee to do their jobs better and shows a willingness by the enterprise to invest in their employees. Second, the social network developed during the experience helps with on the job social networking and helps build greater commitment to the enterprise. Since this is a virtual experience, it helps build the social network across geographically diverse areas that might not otherwise occur. At the same time it gives a business purposes to the social networking. This type of networking also helps reduce political barriers between departments and fosters better overall communication within the company. All of this makes sense to me.

Wi5Connect has two versions of this approach. There is LearnSocial that is applied within the enterprise.  Then there is CommSocial that is designed for customers and prospective clients. CommSocial provides firms a chance to offer training in the products they sell and receive useful customer feedback. It also provides a platform for customers to cross sell to each other and to prospective clients. Secure login is provided for security purposes. CommSocial can separate communities for any reason such as keeping competitors apart.  Wi5Connect has found high use for the communities in both versions and this is not surprising. You can also integrate CommSocial with a CRM tool to track customer and prospect use.  Here is a screen shot of the learning piece in action.

The virtual environments are especially useful in a down economy as they are very cost effective. LearnSocial allows a single person to literally coach and train thousands of employees across the globe. I like the integration of social networking with learning. It puts an enterprise 2.0 spin on the platform with all the advantages of transparency, accessibility, and built-in knowledge capture. 

Launching Appopedia, a directory of reviews of 2.0 apps

November 20, 2008 at 12:09 pm · Filed under Web 2.0

We’re excited to announce the launch of a new section of The AppGap: Appopedia.  The section, located at www.theappgap.com/reviews, brings together the growing number of reviews (nearly 150 to date) that Bill Ives and his colleagues here have done of Web-based apps that help individuals as well as large and small businesses work together more efficiently and effectively.

As you know if you’ve been tuning in to Bill’s reviews, he spends considerable time talking to the companies’ product managers and assessing the apps for a hard look at how these 2.0 tools can help individuals and organizations better communicate and collaborate, catalog and share knowledge, engage users and customers, manage projects and further support existing business processes.

And while other directories of 2.0 apps exist, we believe Appopedia serves a particular purpose, focusing specifically on work-related tools that help you manage and grow your business rather than every Web 2.0 app under the sun (in fact, AppGap contributor Anita Campbell called for just such a resource before she knew we were toying with the idea of it).  We’ve been developing the new section over the past month or two and hope you’ll check it out and provide input on what admittedly is a work in progress (we’ve already got a few tweaks on the way).

As you’ll see we’ve organized the reviews by various criteria, e.g., product category, we hope you’ll find useful. If you’ve used any of the tools please feel free to weigh in with any feedback in the comments of the respective reviews.

(For vendors: if you’re a company with a tool that’s already been reviewed, we encourage you to visit the review and provide any information on updates in the comments or contact us if you think your tool could be better classified by product category or function. For those that are interested in having your app reviewed, please visit our contact page where you’ll be prompted for information that’ll help us add you to the queue.)

Again, we hope you find Appopedia a valuable resource. It builds on the The AppGap’s mission - to help individuals, large organizations and small businesses better understand how work and our tools for working are changing - and aims to provide a practical destination for those looking to assess which apps can help them better manage and grow their businesses.

What if Gmail fails?

November 20, 2008 at 12:15 am · Filed under AppGap Tips

Over the course of this year, Gmail had more than a few outages – some lasting just a few minutes, others for hours. Since I conduct a lot of my business thru email, the prospect of a long Gmail downtime is a scary one. Then, there’s also the possibility of your account being blocked for no apparent reason, as what happened to a few people. And god forbid that it occurs again, I once had all my eXcite emails totally erased and irrecoverable because the server crashed during 9/11. Only 2% of their whole email archive was hit, unfortunately this included mine.

So lesson learned: backup, backup, backup. But how to do it?

Well, the traditional way is to backup via email clients: Outlook, Thunderbird, or others that you may be partial to. This is a fairly safe, tried and tested method which would suit most users.

Another way is to use services like MessageBunker that back-ups all your mail to the cloud. It’s currently still in beta and I haven’t tried it myself, but it looks promising. Their servers are housed in an ex-nuclear bunker, which might help your peace of mind.

Lastly, there’s Gmail Backup, a free application that was specially developed for this purpose. It’s interface is pretty simple. You only need to enter your email address, password, the backup directory in your computer, and the inclusive dates of the messages you want to fetch.

If you haven’t yet, you’ll need to enable IMAP access on your Gmail account. Don’t worry because your emails will not be deleted on the server. They will be saved in your computer as standard EML files, which you can then open in any email client, including their attachments. Fields like dates, labels and “From” are also preserved. Gmail Backup will fetch everything in your “All Mails” folder, including the contents of the Inbox, Sent, Received, and Drafts folders. If you’re planning to transfer your files to another Gmail account, you can also use this program to do it for you.

Those interested in giving it a try can download Gmail Backup here.

“Closing the Last Mile”: An apps marketplace for small business

November 18, 2008 at 3:52 pm · Filed under QuickBase, Sponsored Post

If you’re a small business today, the breadth and quality of software and services available to help you run your business is limited. You just don’t get the same offerings that are available to the Fortune 1,000 crowd. Why is this? It’s just too darn expensive. We hear about infrastructure companies that have a “last mile” problem – as in – I can get the data to the town but getting it into each individual home is too costly.  Well, the same thing is true for the small business community.

Three things scare developers away from serving the small business market:

1) Price sensitivity: The value of a dollar is not created equal – small businesses need to see value and need to see it fast! Offerings will need to be priced accordingly.

2) Making it work with other apps: Software providers selling to the enterprise can send in swat teams to perform backend integration – who can afford to do that for a 5 person business?

3) Customer “reachability”: With roughly 26 million small businesses in the US alone, the market potential is enormous, but how do I reach them without a national TV campaign or shelf space at Staples?

We’ve seen this dilemma played out over the last few years. Millions of Small Businesses wanting more choices that fit their needs. And thousands of developers with expert domain knowledge on how to solve their needs, but no confidence they can do it and make a return on their investment.

Enter the Intuit Partner Platform – matchmaker extraordinaire, we believe. By leveraging the roles we’ve played in serving millions of small businesses with our own technology development over the last 25 years, we’re in a unique position to bring these two groups together. So how does it work?

For Developers: We offer a Platform as a Service that allows them to quickly and easily build a Software as a Service (SaaS) application for specific small business needs. We host the application/service, take care of the billing, user management, and much of the other stuff that makes SaaS expensive for the developer. In addition, we offer the developer one-click data integration with an SMB’s back-office – which is almost always their QuickBooks data. We handle the data synchronization, security and storage of the data, and free up the developer to apply their expertise to solving the customer’s problem. And lastly, we put their app in a marketplace and drive traffic through our marketing channels. We have 25 million employees in our QuickBooks customers and some good experience reaching the SMB market.

For Small Businesses: They get a single marketplace to discover and use a wide array of applications to help their business — and they can be confident that these new apps and their data is on a platform they trust.

So how does this all come together? Here’s an example: yesterday Universal Mind launched an application on the platform that allows small businesses to geographically visualize their customer data (check out this CNET story on the news). The app brings in a company’s customer data from QuickBooks and allows a small business to manipulate the data to glean valuable business intelligence. With map overlays of census data such as median house-hold income, SMB’s can now be far more intelligent in their business decisions. (Where are my best customers coming from? Where should I consider expanding? etc…)

Technology like this was previously unavailable to the small business community. But through the power of Software-as-a-Service, data integration, and customer accessibility, both the small business and the developer win, in our humble opinion.

QuickBase