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
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.
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.
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?
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, 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.
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 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.
Be sure to catch Bill Ives' ongoing review series in which he looks at online, sharable database apps. The focus of Bill's reviews: web-based business software that enables companies and individuals to better organize, track, and share information, as well as better manage projects, processes and workflows.
Among the Web-based tools he's reviewed: Zoho, QuickBase, and TrackVia.

Or, if you’d like to get all the tips now, click here to request a copy of the white paper – “7 Ways to Optimize Project Team Productivity: Using Customizable Web-based Software to Your Business Advantage.”.
The AppGap has hosted a series of discussions with leading thinkers and doers intended to illuminate how new apps and approaches are changing the way we work and help companies and individuals implement better collaboration, project management, and productivity practices and solutions. Access, via the links below, the recordings, each about an hour long, of the discussions.
- 5 Big Ideas for Getting All That Work Done
- Should Your Business be Friends with Facebook
- The Future of Work
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Intuit's QuickBase, the sponsor of this blog, has just been named an Editor's Choice by PC Mag. Check out the review which calls QuickBase a "a surprisingly simple and elegant application."
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