Archive for October, 2010
by Bill Ives
October 29, 2010 at 3:06 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
I recently attended an IBM media event where they conveyed a number of their recent efforts in social software. I was pleased to get this invitation as I have been covering IBM efforts in the space for a while (see for example my 2005 post – IBM’s Social Software Initiatives: Blogs, Wikis, Tagging, and More – Part One). I think they are innovators in the social software space, both for enterprise and Web use.
Alistair Rennie, general manager collaboration software, began and gave some examples about how social “software” is becoming mainstream. I put software in quotes as he just used the term “social” and I can agree with this as it is more than software but rather a more open approach to communication and conversations.
Someone made the point that much of the IBM focus has been on internal social media rather than external social media. Being a consultant and writer in the enterprise 2.0 space I see this as a good thing. A lot of the enterprise 2.0 tools came from the consumer Web. IBM was an early leader in internal uses and this has given them a head start in the enterprise 2.0 space.
Jeff Schick, VP social software, answered this comment. He said that IBM started with internal usage of social software because of their large internal needs but what they have done can be applied externally This is an reversal of the trend as I noted above. He gave the example of continuing education for attorneys. An association is doing this and has created communities around legal topics for pre and post class interactions to build greater connection with their students. IBM has long been involved in technology enabled education. I was involved in developing a multi-media tool for their marketing instructors in the mid 80s.
Jeff offered another example. Teach for America uses social media. This is a great program that I recently heard about on NPR. They place future leaders in teaching roles within areas of great need. Some continue in education but all are exposed to real lives of those in need. It is now the top job application in schools like Yale and Duke and has only about a 10% acceptance rate.
Teachers in the program can log into the portal and have communities of practice, for example, other 8th grade math teachers. They can do collaborative lesson plans through wikis and look for people in different parts of country and teaching certain subjects, etc. There are also blogs, discussion forums, file sharing, and other capabilities. This social media support allows for broader group support from people in similar situations across the country. This is a great alignment of organizational goals and audience needs.
The Salvation Army has an extranet with bi-directional connection to their Facebook site and connects to other Facebook sites that might be related so both outward and inward connections are made.
Alistair said that firms will now look at outcomes more than structure, technology and channels. The consumer world is influencing enterprise IT. Business people are reaching out to firms like IBM to talk as their own IT people do not want to address social media issues. There is a lot of experimentation. Policies are being developed, in part, by looking at similar tools to determine policy issues like access control and moderation
Jeff Schick said that IBM has developed an adoption methodology – Business Value Assessment – to quantify business results from social software developed through IBM internal experiences.
Jeff said it used to that they would say that technology was so easy a young person can use it. Now the term is “Technology so easy even an old person can use it.” I like this as i used to say technology so easy even I can do it.
Someone asked for the five big myths that IBM faces with social software. The answers were:
- people will waste time
- people may say things that company will not like
- security concerns coming from looking at open Web tools
- no ROI
- if you build it they will come – but really need a business goal to aim the tool at
There are answers to each of these as they are truly myths.
Dr. Francine Jacobson from Brigham and Women’s Hospital next spoke about her work in radiology research using IBM technology. Her team of radiologists does work in lung cancer screening and are using social software now for collaboration. They are looking at larger data sets for other related diseases and are able to cast a wider net. They have created the Radiology Theater to support this effort and here is the Radiology Theater on YouTube.
They are bringing together visual and non-visual data in a major COPD gene trial and making visual information more accessible. This is allowing for more comprehensive analysis that looks across data sets and types for patterns and provides for greater collaboration for interpretation. Now they can focus more on the meaning of the data and spend less time on just getting it
Two major issues are security and patient privacy. Data is aggregated to look for patterns rather than individuals. Data will be made available for other researchers because the research is publically funded. The work combines metadata with tagging and this is part of the social part.
Francine said there are two camps within the researchers – those who contribute and share and those who just take and do not give. However, the COPD gene research is not so affected by those dynamics, in part, because of the leader who promotes a sharing culture.
The virtual Radiology theater.com acts like a physical theater for collaboration. Docs are generally hesitant to do social networking but they feel this is safe because it is their community. There is also protection from a HIPPA perspective as patients are not identified.
ReadWriteWeb had covered this effort and here is a bit of their coverage. “IBM has announced an online “radiology theatre” product, currently at the prototype stage, which allows teams of medical experts to “simultaneously discuss and review patients’ medical test data using a Web browser.” The project … is built on IBM’s next-generation browser platform Blue Spruce…IBM also used the WebKit Open Source Browser Engine. The app runs on the Linux or MacOS X operating systems and the browser may be Safari or Internet Explorer.”
“According to IBM, it has created a secure Web site that allows select medical experts at Brigham and Women’s Hospital to access and collaborate on data such as CT scans, MRIs, EKGs and other medical tests. Each medical expert can “talk and be seen through live streaming audio/video through their standard web connection, and have the ability to whiteboard over the Web page as well as input information to the patient’s record.” Basically it is a secure multimedia experience running inside a single browser window, using Blue Spruce as the platform.”
I will pick up with more from the event in part two of the series that appears tomorrow.
by Bill Ives
October 25, 2010 at 3:48 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
I have thought for some time that for enterprise software to be successful it needs to be aligned with business processes. This was my experience with knowledge management in the 90s and early 00s. With the arrival of some of the new enterprise 2.0 tools from the consumer market, this business process focus has been, at times, lacking. Now some tools are moving to more tightly align themselves with business processes. Jama is a great example as they are providing a collaboration platform that is focused on supporting one business process, product development.
I spoke with John Simpson, the Vice President of Marketing, about Jama Software and their new capability, the Review Center. Jama is a provider of collaborative requirements management software optimized for managing product innovation. It recently announced the availability of the Review Center module along with its new version of Jama Contour. As John said, “It is collaboration with a purpose.”
The Jama Review Center provides teams with a fast and agile way to review requirements to gain consensus with stakeholders. It provides visibility into the decisions made during the product planning and development process. It captures all the relevant feedback in one place instead of siloed in email attachments and multiple applications. It allows project teams the control to discuss, review and approve requirements with their stakeholders in real-time within a private and completely secure Web-based solution. Current users include several Fortune 500 companies and government agencies such as the US intelligence community.
Since collaborative features are starting to creep into project management software, I asked John about how they see the difference between project management and product management and how this is reflected in Jama. John said that project management software is usually for when you have already decided what to do and are in the execution stage. It has scope, scheduling, and budget components and is usually more tactical.
Product management generally covers a broader scope and involves more frontend work defining the vision and requirements for the product. It is often more strategic. There is market and opportunity analysis that can include listening to customers via direct communications or conversation on the Web. There is gaining feedback from many stakeholders, both inside and outside the enterprise, and consensus building on the vision. One of the key challenges
The new Review Center in Jama Contour follows a series of steps in the product planning and development process to help teams to agree to the scope and stay in sync on the specifications as new requests come in or as changes occur during development. First, you initiate a review. The leader, typically the product manager or business analyst within the team, selects requirements for feedback on and invites people to participate. Approval authority is assigned to key team members so they can electronically sign-off on the requirements they approve. You can see team members and approvers in the sample screen within this process as shown below.
The next step is to gather feedback from all the relevant stakeholders. The project team members begin to input their feedback on the individual requirements. They check off the items as they review them. Approvers mark when requirements need more work, and they vote for the requirements they consider high priority. This occurs in a common workspace so the process and actions are transparent to all who need to know. A sample feedback screen is shown below.
The third phase involves monitoring progress. The leader tracks progress and views team statistics to focus on the requirements with most feedback, questions and issues. A sample monitoring screen is shown below.
Now the team can incorporate feedback into the product design and development effort. When changes are made to individual requirements a new revision is sent out. The changes are automatically updated in the project within Contour. Then, the reviewers are automatically notified of the new revision and asked to approve the change. Changes are made by the leader rather than have a more general wiki-like free for all. However, the changes are aligned with the comments that drove them. I like this. As you can see in the screen below, the related comments are shown in the right side column and highlighted.
Electronic signatures are gathered from the designated approvers and recorded. The product development process can continue to iterate through as many of these cycles as necessary.
I have just touched on some of the capabilities at each step but I think you can get the general idea. I really like the vision to apply the enterprise 2.0 approach to specific business processes and I think that Jama has done a great job. I was involved about ten years ago in creating a product development portal for a major UK consumer products company. I wish I had the capabilities of Jama in those days. The application of collaboration to business process has come a long way since then.
by Bill Ives
October 19, 2010 at 3:43 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
Many of the most interesting new enterprise applications are search based. Here is a useful new genre of software based on search. Relationships are at the core of most business processes and successes. Enterprise Relationship Management or ERM is a class of software that supports these efforts. ContactNet is a leader in defining, creating, and offering ERM. The company’s ContactNet software helps professional services firms unlock the value within their complete relationship network to generate new business. ContactNet is an automated search application that instantly identifies colleagues who have the strongest relationships with a client or prospect.
I recently spoke with Wilbur Swan, one of the founders of ContactNet. The firm began as Contact Networks and I was aware of them when I led a practice within a large consulting firm. After getting started, they focused on the legal market in 2005 as they found strong acceptance there. Later, in 2007 they were acquired by Thomson Reuters to support their offerings to the legal market. They have over 100 clients now in law firms ranging from 100 to over 5,000 employees.
ContactNet automatically uncovers, aggregates and prioritizes a law firm’s internal relationships with external business contacts by analyzing data from address books, e-mail logs, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications and other enterprise systems. They have recently expanded their relationship intelligence functionality to better enable firms to identify new targets, prevent missed opportunities, monitor client engagement and ultimately evaluate the success of client development efforts. See example below.
ContactNet provides a relationship strength rating based on recency and frequency of contacts. The measure is shown in the green bars in the image above. You can fine-tune this measure by applying different weights to channels such as email or phone. The search feature is robust and you can search by company, contact name, contact title, colleagues, geography, and industry group. For example you can see results organized by geography below.
The new capabilities include analytics to spot relationship opportunities and risks, You can spot changes in relationship behavior and receive alerts on such data as a drop off in key relationship activity. You can identify new business opportunities based on criteria such as Top 100 clients, Fortune 500 relationships and prospect and industry group opportunities.
There are several integration capabilities with other relevant enterprise software. For example, users can now view ContactNet relationships from within Monitor Suite (a Thomson Reuters Legal competitive intelligence product), to see the intersection of market and relationship opportunities. It also works with SharePoint. In addition, there is integration with many CRM systems to allow users to evaluate relationship strength as part of marketing workflows, as well as rich, continuously-updated relationship data. Unlike most CRM applications, there is no manual data entry as ContactNet automatically looks at its data sources.
ContactNet is now in the process of creating business development dashboard capabilities for better market analysis. You will be able to view strategic account and relationship information, such as new contacts, new companies, key clients and non-clients, key industries, recent searches and usage graphs conveniently from one screen.
Wilbur said that they are also looking to provide specific tools to support stages in the relationship life cycle. ContactNet defines three stages: collect and capture, learn and engage, and remind and renew. The Content Collector shows you people you have contacted that are not yet in your address book and automates the process of adding them based on data from colleagues. The Relationship Reminder reports, as shown below, lapses in contact frequency to let you stay current on the many relationships you maintain.
ContactNet is looking to move into additional markets as relationships are the core of most businesses. New areas include investment banking, consulting, and sales. As a former member of a large consulting firm I can see how ContactNet’s comprehensive approach to ERM will be extremely valuable. This enhanced access to relationship data can allow firms to be more strategic in how they handle this aspect of the business. Managing relationships has often been seen as a tactical exercise. Moving it to a strategic activity should produce huge benefits.
by Bill Ives
October 14, 2010 at 8:37 pm · Filed under
Web 2.0
Drupal has been around a long time in web years as a community platform. I first heard about it in 2004. Acquia was recently formed to make Drupal more accessible and provide professional support. I covered it first in 2008 (see Acquia Makes Drupal Community Building Accessible) and then again earlier this year (see Acquia Grows with Drupal and Introduces Drupal Gardens).
Acquia has several offerings. First, they offer Drupal support. They also offer Drupal hosting so you can have one stop support for all Drupal needs. In addition, there are enhanced functionality through Acquia Network for such capabilities as enhanced search with facets, weighting, and related content. There is also Drupal Gardens, a SaaS-based tool that allows you to quickly and easily build a Drupal website.
Now there is Drupal Commons. I recently spoke with Jay Batson, Acquia co-founder about this latest offering. It is an open source social software solution built on top of Drupal to provide an alternative to the many proprietary platforms on the market. Jay said that a number organizations have already built complex Drupal community sites such as Symantec, as shown below.
Taking a wisdom of customers approach, Acquia has looked at the common features across these custom-built sites and selected the set of functionality to offer in Drupal Commons. This includes both content management and social software features. Drupal Commons provides these capabilities in an “off-the–shelf” mode that previously required custom development. Since it is open source you can do any further customization, an option often lacking in proprietary platforms.
There are four components: content and collaboration, people and relationships, personalization, and community management with analytics. The content management functions offers: configurable content types, tagging and pre-defined vocabularies, rich media content support, faceted search, automated recommendations and featured content. The people part has: custom roles and permissions, configurable user profiles, self-organizing and managed groups, discussion forums, ratings, activity streams, and a micro-blogging capability.
The personalization capabilities are shown above include: dashboards, social bookmarking, curated content, and ability to subscribe to content and discussions. The analytics tracks: users, content, comments, groups and variable date ranges. See sample screen below.
Drupal Commons can integrate with other tools such as Salesforce.com, SharePoint, Web-based training, and many other applications and SaaS services. Acquia partners with large system integrators, developers and social business strategy firms to support their clients.
Drupal Commons is free and Acquia then provides support and hosting on a commercial basis. It is great to see an open source alternative to the many proprietary offerings in this space. I expect that they will get a strong reception in the market.
by Bill Ives
October 6, 2010 at 3:32 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
The healthcare industry is one where increased knowledge sharing of best practices will benefit all involved. This is certainly one way to drive health care costs down while improving service that any one should agree with. I recently spoke with David Beyer whose company, Cortex, is providing a collaboration solution targeted specifically at this need. David mentioned that since most healthcare competition is only at the local level, knowledge sharing of best practices at the national and global level is likely to occur.
There is a need for both increased documentation and sharing of best practices within institutions and across institutions. The initial release of Cortex addresses the first challenge and they will soon to expand their reach to serve the second challenge. Their initial clients include hospitals and professional associations that serve the healthcare sector.
David gave me a tour of the system. There are five major components: recent activity, discover, share, discussions, and members. Best practices are shared in two formats that are housed within the share tab. There are notes for quick entries and cases for more comprehensive examples. The cases are placed with a useful template. Each case provides the challenge, the solution, a summary, and links to similar cases. With both cases and notes you can add comments and attachments. Suggested tags are auto-generated through NLP and the contributor can also put in their own tags. Here is a sample screen shot of a case.
The recent activity tab leads you to a dashboard where auto-generated updates of user activity are displayed. You can see when new content or new comments are added and who did it. The discover tab provides a search capability that looks at both the notes and cases, as well as the content within any attachments. The discussion section offers threaded discussions to take useful dialogue out of the siloed spaghetti of email. You can browse the members section to find expertise within the system. Here is a sample screen shot of the dashboard.
At the moment Cortex is set up to serve individual organizations. However, there are plans to provide a global capability to share across institutions. In this case you can look for expertise across institutions, as well as find new best practices.
I like the simplicity of the system and the intuitive interface. It is very focused and serves a real need. I look forward to see how it progresses. You can get more context and some interesting stories at their blog.
by Bill Ives
October 1, 2010 at 3:14 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
Recently I received a review copy of a useful new Forrester report, Four Giants Compete For Your Cloud Email Business by Ted Schadler. It has a cost breakdown of cloud-based email services from the four leading vendors- Google, Microsoft, IBM and Cisco – and indicates that Google and Microsoft are in the lead for customers. Here is a good overview in Ted’s words from the executive summary.
“Google jumped into the enterprise email market in 2007 with a $50 annual subscription to its cloud email service and turned the market upside down. Microsoft quickly re-evaluated and repriced its Exchange Online offering to $5 per user per month; IBM launched LotusLive Notes and iNotes for $5 and $3, respectively; and Cisco purchased PostPath and opened its WebEx Mail offering with a 5 GB mailbox for $5 per user per month. Each of these big four collaboration vendors has since beefed up and clarified its road map for cloud email and collaboration services. Their email offerings are rapidly approaching feature and price parity — at least on the checklist items.”
Since I became an enterprise of one in 2004, I missed these most recent corporate email wars. My last employer moved from Notes to Outlook but Google had not yet turned the market upside down. Now both Google and Microsoft have bundled in their Web productivity apps, something that IBM and Cisco do not. Cisco allows you to use Outlook.
Over the next five years, Ted writes, enterprises will be re-evaluating their email strategy and partner. For vendors, it will be a tough five years as companies pick a messaging and collaboration partner for the next decade. Ted gives a nice way to estimate your total email costs that appear to be significantly cheaper in the cloud. However, there are migration costs to get there.
Forrester also expects that email will improve it gains features that improve usability and functionality such as: “analytics to perform triage on messages; collaboration features to make it easier to act on a message; in-message widgets to pull information relevant to the message; pushbutton publishing to a team wiki; messages, activities, feeds, tweets, etc., in a single inbox; and so on.” This is good news and another alignment with the enterprise concept that suggests it is becoming standard. Many of the collaboration platforms already allow you to use them within an email client so this is going in the other direction but likely focused on the tools offered by the email provider.
Thought...
