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. 

Tizra provides Self-Service Web Site Development for Content Providers

November 16, 2008 at 6:19 pm · Filed under Reviews

Tizra Publisher is an online sales and distribution platform for electronic books and other document-based content.  The MIT Press CISnet (seen below) site is one of the sites built on this platform. Recently, I spoke with two of the co-founders, David Durand their CEO, and Anne Orens, the CMO.  Tizra is delivered on a SaaS basis that is a departure from most web site development tools.  David said he was involved in the development of many custom web sites for content distributors such as Oxford University Press. He saw many of the problems associated with outsourced custom and customer web site development and wanted to provide an easy to use solution.

Tizra enables publishers to bypass the content conversion, software development and maintenance costs traditionally associated with custom publishing websites. At the same time, it provides publishers with precise control over online product definition, sales terms, merchandising and marketing.  This control can be exercised directly by non-technical people using web control panels. This allows for more experimentation as marketing and editorial staff can test product and marketing ideas and respond to market feedback quickly without IT developer support.

The MIT Press CISnet is an addition to their regular web site. It is based on a paid subscription model. CISnet is designed for researchers who want to search and find specific content and may not want to read an entire book. As a former academic, this makes a lot of sense to me. You can search topics and go directly to a specific page of a book with the search term highlighted. You can then read the book page and explore other parts of the book. You can also copy and paste the page to a desktop application such as MS Word.  This is a great feature for the writer who wants to site a specific text. Since you can only do a page at a time, it is not practical for the person who wants to pirate the book.

Tizra is now rolling out a new tiered pricing plan that is oriented to a self-service approach, with self-service sign-ups.  The new product pricing ranges from free sites where they place ads, to fully customizable sites with no ads and complete commerce and branding control.  David took me to the administration interface to demonstrate the site creation and management process. Tizra makes it easy to sell online books and documents by the title, chapter or the page, or to collect, remix and sell pages in any combination.  You can implement a variety of sales terms, including pay per view, subscription access, multipacks, special discounts based on user group or discount code, and institutional access based on IP or login with variable concurrencies.  The branding is very flexible as you can see by comparing the MIT Press CISnet page above with the eat.shop page below.

The eat.shop site provides shopping and dining guidance in multiple cities.  Their site describes them as “noted for their clean and modern design, luscious photography, witty travelogues and perfect throw in your bag size and they feature only locally owned businesses that are in the urban core. Most importantly, you don’t have to worry about slogging through a zillion listings - just 90 carefully chosen gems are featured by the author who does all of the research, writing and photography.” The Tizra based site shows them off very well.  There is a Boston book that I should look into. Below is a sample of the Tizra administration system.

This is the MIT CISnet branded system but the Tizra administration system has same interface for all users. It allows you to set up title author, keywords, tags (invisible keywords like pub codes) that will facilitate search.  You can also have different types of key words such a geographical or topical. You can organize the site into collections and implement access control at this level. The collections are defined by query terms. You can easily reorganize the site into new collections. In addition, Tizra allows you to control content discoverability, selectively enabling Google and other search engines to index content behind the paywall. Below you can see the details associated with an individual book.

You can also organize the site by offers with invitations to buy and associated business rules. The ease of use allows marketing people to experiment with different promotions without an IT person. The branding options start with templates for quick development, progresses to allowing for custom style sheets, and to full custom development for high-end subscribers. This is a drag and drop feature. Once you create a set of pages you like, you save them as a master block for reuse.

I see this service as a great tool for content sellers. It can also be a useful content distribution system for enterprises that need to mange the presentation of their information.  This will be especially useful for verticals with a lot of internal content such as legal firms, pharma, and other research oriented enterprises. The access control features will be helpful here. It can also be useful for firms who want to distribute marketing and technical content to customers and prospects but need to customize its organization or exert control over access. There is also a Tzira blog for more details on what they are doing.  

Exalead’s CloudView Offers Integrated Search Capabilities

November 12, 2008 at 7:32 pm · Filed under Reviews

As more channels of information open, search becomes more complex as the opportunity for information silos increases. I recently spoke with Paul Doscher, US CEO of Exalead. Exalead has introduced its CloudView product line to address this issue. Paul said that one of the key challenges in enterprise information access is that content exists locally on a variety of devices; behind the firewall with databases and legacy systems; and outside the firewall with partners, SaaS applications and on the Web. He said that the future of information management requires the integration and analysis of heterogeneous, structured, semi-structured and unstructured information sources. 

CloudView is not a SaaS solution. The name refers to the industry-wide shift to housing data in a large number of silos, or “data clouds.” This creates the demand for information access platforms with better connectivity, better interoperability and better scalability. Paul gave me several examples of the scalability that CloudView offers. The Sanger Institute, a research group, has stored over 1.5 billion documents and adds 160 million new documents every two months. CloudView is able to keep up wit this effort and provides access to all of this information.

CloudView also allows for adjustments to handle peak time searches. The Rightmove, a UK real estate listing service that handles ove r90% of UK real estate gets peak traffic during lunch and CloudView scales up to handle over 400 queries per second. American Greeting, the card company, also scales up for their holiday traffic.

We covered the origins of Exalead. It started in Paris in 2000 with some of the founders coming from Alta Vista. They have a web search tool like Google that is used in widely in France and other parts of Europe.  They have had a US presence since 2005 but it operated on a small scale as a sales channel. Now they are greatly expanding their US operations to go after the North American market with their new CloudView line. Exalead is focusing on three main markets segments in this expansion: online businesses, large enterprises, and OEM. It is built on open standards for greater flexibility in these markets.

Some of the CloudView features include: business level tuning and management of the search experience, ability to extend Business Intelligence applications to textual search, WYSIWYG configuration of indexing and search workflows, full traceability within the product, and a provision for additional connectors with simple and advanced APIs for 3rd party implementations.

In addition to their OEM product and the standalone enterprise search edition, Exalead offers a 360 edition information access development platform.  This platform allows companies to build applications that integrate information sources with both structured and unstructured data. For example, an integrated call center application built on CloudView could pull from multiple data sources to simplify information access and reduce retrieval times.

Paul pointed out the Exalead has been running a popular web search engine for years and has learned how to handle scalability and other development issues through this effort. I took a look at their web search product, Exalead. It is appealing as you have greater ability to quickly focus your search than Google. You can also personalize a series of short cuts. In addition, Exalead provides a picture of the web site along with the results.  All of these are good features.

I like their move in the enterprise market.  There is plenty of opportunity here. It will be interesting to see how they progress.

Radian6 – Monitoring Social Media

November 10, 2008 at 5:38 pm · Filed under Reviews

With the continuing rise of Web 2.0 and user-generated content, there is increasing interest by companies in monitor these conversations for a variety of reasons.  I recently spoke with Chris Ramsey of Radian6, a service that addresses this need.  Chris used the term “social phone” to describe how many conversations on the Web have evolved. In the past, when you had good, and especially bad, service from a company, you telephoned the firm and/or your friends. Now many companies do not even answer their phone. Even if they do, people can now use the “social phone” and describe their experiences on a blog, a forum, an online rating site and the other internet channels tat have become available. This social phone has a big volume switch that can be easily activated and ramped up.

So how do companies answer the social phone? First, they have to know it is ringing. Then they have to manage their response.  Chris said that a year ago the PR agencies were looking at the social phone for brand monitoring. Now many companies have taken on this task themselves and the focus is more on customer service.  They want to listen and participate in the relevant conversations for their business.  For example, Dell has a specialized team to make use of Radian6 to monitor, participate and manage the internet conversations about their business. Here is more on how Dell and Radian6 work together from the Direct2Dell blog - Dell and Radian6: It All Starts with Listening.

Chris showed me how Radian6 works. There is a lot of control over how you monitor the web. You can select what channels to monitor (e.g., blog, videos, forums).  You can select languages, countries, a list of specific blogs or web sites, and other criteria.  Radian6 provides 6 metrics. The attributes are: on topic posts, total comment count, total unique commenters, average engagement, on topic inbound links, and vote count. The vote count is an aggregation of digg and del.icio.us data.  You can adjust the weight as shown below. I like this feature.

Radian6 attempts to let users know how they gotten their ratings. Chris said that feedback during their early adopter program indicated that users wanted as much transparency as possible into how the results were obtained.  There are a variety of widgets to place our your dashboard. One of the features is the River of News which provides continuous updates on the topics you select.

Once you have set up your personalized monitoring, Radian6 automatically collects and tracks content for the topic.  It looks at all forms of social media including blogs, top video sharing and social networking sites, forums, opinion and review sites, image sharing sites, microblogging sites, online mainstream media and other sites as they become available. It tracks a variety of metrics and allows you to see the key influencers as well as the conversations. You can then export data and analysis for use in a variety of report and presentation formats.  

There is a new ability to show a social profile for posted items found in a topic profile. This allows a user to uncover who is behind each post. It provides a list of known and possible accounts across a number of social media applications in a hyperlink format so users can decide to reach out and add to their contacts (See the more new features post on their blog).

You can track the relative web buzz, or “share of voice,” on a topic or company. Chris showed me a comparison of GM ad Toyota. You could see the spikes in attention and determine what caused these spikes. You look at related topics and see the most prominent conversations. Here is a topic cloud on selected themes.

Radian6 is a SaaS tool that is offered on a subscription basis. One of the features I especially liked was the way it supports responses. You can assign who should respond to what appeared on the web, how they should respond, and manage the responses to promote consistency and avoid redundancy or gaps in coverage.  It describes itself as a tool built for and by PR and advertising professionals. I can see this in their response management tools. As Chris and I discussed, I can see applications beyond this initial focus for customer service, product research, competitive intelligence, and other tasks. 

Flowgram Offers a “Live” and Rich Presentation Format

November 5, 2008 at 6:03 pm · Filed under Reviews

Flowgram is a free online application that allows you to put together presentations that combine and annotate digital context such as web sites, photos, documents, RSS feeds, and background audio. I spoke with Abhay Parekh, the CEO at Flowgram, and he provided a tour and explanation of this useful application. It does not require you to download anything and works with any browser that includes the Abode Flash Player plugin.  Here is the start page where you can see the available choices for content sources.

I found several things very interesting. First, the pages you add are live so you can interact with them. Second, you can annotate these pages. The screen shot below was taken as we looked at my Portals and KM blog within a Flowgram. You can see an annotation note in the upper right. You can also highlight sections, as shown in the screen shot. In addition, you can provide an audio voice over to the Flowgram and have the highlights timed to the correct part of the audio so that Flowgram takes you to that section as it is discussed.

It is easy to share a Flowgram. You can email it or embed a Flowgram widget in your site or blog.  You can also post a Flowgram in a number of content sharing sites. See the content sharing screen below.

Abhay said that in today’s web of expanding channels too much content is siloed.  At the same time, only parts of a web page or other content source are relevant.  You also need to be able to provide your message and focus when sharing content. You can do this somewhat in a real time webinar with screen sharing but it is hard to do it asynchronously. This is the need that Flowgram is designed to address.  You can make your Flowgrams public or private. You set up a Flowgram profile and the public Flowgrams appear on this profile. In addition to creating and distributing aggregated content, you can measure reactions to your Flowgrams.

We discussed business uses inside and outside the firewall. It can certainly be used for marketing purposes on the web. Inside the enterprise, I see the potential for both communication and education.  While the tool was initially designed as a consumer application, Abhay said that they are already seeing business uses. Over 70% of their users are over 30.  The tool is free for now, as they want to encourage experimentation and get feedback. There will always be a free version.  They also plan to offer a subscription-based application with more features and greater security.

Flowgram is a San Francisco based firm that was started in February 2007. They released their first public beta on August 24, 2007. The well-known blogger Joi Ito is one of the angel investors. I think they have a good future on the web and in the enterprise.  You see a Flowgram introducing Flowgram at their site.  There is also a Flowgram blog.  

QikCom – Bringing Micro-messaging to the Enterprise

November 2, 2008 at 1:15 pm · Filed under Reviews

The huge success of Twitter has triggered a number of firms (e.g., QikCom, Yammer, and Present.ly) that now provide micro-messaging for use behind the firewall.  This is yet another example of a personal web 2.0 tool creating a market for an enterprise 2.0 version. I recently spoke with Travis VanderZanden, Founder and CEO of QikCom.  Travis and I agreed that while Twitter is a great tool for personal use, it is not designed for use inside the enterprise and does not have the security required for these conversations just like Facebook and YouTube.

Travis said that QikCom is building an application platform on top of its micro-messaging tool.  Unlike the other two competitors, QikCom is offering the basic service for free. It is also free to have administrator rights to set up, secure, monitor, and control the internal network. They offer a SaaS solution but have added tight security features and are constantly testing this to make sure it remains secure.  Security includes SSL through Verisign, Company Email Verification, and advanced IP range settings. Below is the QikCom home page for users.

The application platform, or Tab Store, is a place to purchase the business Applications or Tabs on top of the core micro-messaging service. This is where they plan to make their money.  Currently, there are three tabs but many more are in progress. They are building some themselves and are open to working with third party developers to create more. In addition, they will soon release an API that allows the integration of third-party Twitter applications into QikCom.  In some cases, users can do this and in others cases the third party Twitter application provider will have to make a few simple adjustments to work with QikCom. However, users retain the security features of QikCom and will have to login to use the Twitter applications that are transferred over.

The current QikCom Tabs include a to-do list. In this case, you can assign tasks and send out reminders through QikCom. You can see a screen shot below.

There is also a competitor monitoring Tab.  You enter the competitor’s name. QikCom will consolidate all of the information on the web about this firm and present it in one feed. Employees can review and vote on the threat level of the news. Soon employees will also be able to comment on the information and start a conversation through QikCom on the topic. You can see a view of competition Tab below.

Like some other web 2.0 tools such as wikis, I think that micro-messaging makes even more sense behind the firewall for certain applications as you get rid of the spam factor and acquire the security protection. This does replace Twitter out on the web for personal messaging or business marketing. QikCom takes a great concept and brings it safely behind the firewall with a business-focused design. It will be interesting to see what new Tabs are developed and how big the platform can grow. 

NetAge OrgScope – Understanding the Real Structure within Your Organization

October 27, 2008 at 8:41 am · Filed under Reviews

I recently spoke with Jessica Lipnack and Jeff Stamps at NetAge.  They have been in the collaboration business for over 25 years and through many waves of technology.  I have served with Jessica on several panels and was intrigued by their new offering, OrgScope. We started with its context and origins.

Jessica and Jeff were working with a large energy company in Europe that wanted to consolidate over 100 country companies into five global divisions, of which the European division was the largest. NetAge, which had been working with this company on improving collaboration for a number of years, proposed an idea to the newly-named EVP of the European region. What would happen if they mapped the new organizational structure as a network, then analyzed it?  The EVP agreed, which led to the development of OrgScope. Jeff proposed drawing HR data from the firm’s SAP system to create a picture of the actual reporting relationships within the organization. “All enterprises have organization charts,” Jeff said, “but few look at their entire structure as a whole. Often you only know one or two reporting relations removed from yourself and perhaps some of those at the top. But it’s impossible to hold an entire organization chart in your head unless you’re very small.” And, as Jeff pointed out, very few companies, if any, analyze their hierarchies as networks.

The technical challenge was how to visualize this data for an organization of 5,000 people. After some investigation, NetAge decided to build OrgScope on StarTree, a hyperbolic viewer designed for visualizing large data networks. Originally developed at Xeroc PARC (then spun off to Inxight, which was bought by Business Objects, which was bought by SAP), StarTree maps hierarchies. Jeff’s innovation was to apply the mapping technology to organizations, then add features unique to organization and work life. As the NetAge site says, “Hyperbolic graph layout uses a context + focus technique to represent and manipulate large tree hierarchies on limited screen size.” Click to a dynamic OrgScope map to see this work in a 4000-position model organization.

Through this kind of mapping, organizations can “see” things they otherwise couldn’t. In the case of the energy company, they discovered that their organization was not in the expected pyramid shape but rather a diamond. Instead of most of the jobs being at the bottom, most were in the middle. Instead of there being a relatively even distribution of management span, it turned out most managers (about 80%) had only a few people reporting to them while about 20% had a relatively huge number reporting to them, in one case, 38 people. And, to the surprise of senior executives, most of these high-reporting-span managers were five or six levels down in the organization, out of sight for the people at the top.

OrgScope provides models of organizations that everyone can share, contributing to real transparency. NetAge has developed similar maps for other organizations, which you can see on their web site. Included there are maps of the Boston-area healthcare “network,” a complex web of connections among fierce competitors, and, most recently, maps of the network evolving out of the Office of Financial Stability, the US Treasury organization charged with distributing the $700B economic package (see below).

Jeff pointed out that they can draw data for constructing maps from many places, including HR systems like SAP, from LDAP data, and from traditional org charts. The LDAP data is potentially broader, Jeff says, as it includes contractors who have access to companies’ information systems. These people are often invisible in traditional HR systems but because IT has to grant them access and because such people always report to someone in the organization, their names and positions show up in the IT directory.  Moving beyond reporting relationships, OrgScope also maps team memberships (which LDAP similarly captures through permission structures), information flows, and workflows, which together give more complete pictures of the organizational network. Of course, Jeff points out, you can further enhance these maps with social networking information. But, he cautions, it’s always good to start with what everyone agrees on—the reporting hierarchy, which, for better or for worse, exists in every organization.

Once configured as desired, the OrgScope maps can published to the web as a Java applet and viewed in a browser, as the examples show. Here are some of the key OrgScope attributes, as covered on the NetAge site:

Visualize. See the whole network, provide context for each part. Seeing is understanding. Collaboration across boundaries requires access and transparency.

Navigate. Use the map for searching and finding specific people and information in larger context, creating new organizational and learning routes, and serendipity. URLs connect map to internal and external webs of disparate information.

Analyze.  Where data is relatively complete, the map can be analyzed as a network. Node metrics and distributions provide management tools and scientific measures for improvement and comparison with performance measures.

Here is a sample map applied to Boston area healthcare providers and a link to the dynamic OrgScope map.

But there is much more as OrgScope is just one component of the network and collaboration work that NetAge does. Its power comes in the broader context of understanding collaboration within the organization and facilitating action based on the transparency revealed. For example, NetAge is currently working with the US Army to increase virtual teams and collaboration in the Battle Command Knowledge System (BCKS), which I have written about before in describing the Army’s Warrior Knowledge Base (WKB).  This is another excellent collaboration effort but it generally addresses users at lower levels in the Army. (see - US Army’s Battle Command Knowledge System (BCKS) Moves to XML-based Platform).

NetAge is working on “The Teams of Leaders Handbook,” an effort to promote collaboration at higher levels. Working with the BCKS team, NetAge created the handbook to support the “Teams of Leaders” effort generally, directed at addressing the Army’s need to promote collaboration at higher levels. NetAge also has helped design the structure for the BCKS virtual team spaces, built on SharePoint.

As Jeff explains it, the virtual team room design is technology neutral, and rests on the method that he and Jessica have laid out in their books (most recently, Virtual Teams): people, purpose, links, and time. This alleviates what Jeff calls “the blank page problem,” where new teams want to collaborate and use shared online spaces but have no idea where to start. See the screenshot of the online team room that BCKS has constructed for the Teams of Leaders project in SharePoint using the NetAge methodology.

Finally, NetAge is applying its expertise in transparency through collaboration to the current economic crisis. Here is certainly an area where more transparency is needed. In a series of posts on Endless Knots, Jessica’s blog, they recommend to creating a public, visible map of the network of organizations and people that spend and receive funds, a “Google Earth” for the players and contracts, which they’ve done on their site using OrgScope to visualize these relationships. They also suggest the creation of a public searchable database on all emergency financial spending using the model of www.USAspending.gov, dubbed “Google for Government” (See this government site, which describes itself as “Where Americans Can See Where Their Money Goes.” Now, here is another helpful idea and a great application for OrgScope. I hope it gets traction. Here is a sample of how part of it might look and a link to the dynamic map.

Knowledge Plaza – An Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Sharing Platform

October 21, 2008 at 7:49 am · Filed under Reviews

Knowledge Plaza is a Web-based platform for enterprise search, social bookmarking, knowledge management, information brokerage and expert identification. It was developed by the Belgium based firm, Whatever. I recently spoke with Olivier Verbeke, CEO at Whatever and COO Antoine Perdaens. They explained the concept behind this interesting platform. There are three components, the Dashboard, the Plaza, and the Web. They offer a SaaS version and an on-premise version.

The Dashboard lets you know what is happening in your knowledge community. You can see recently activity within your personal workspace, team workspaces you have joined, and your network of contacts. Pieces of information are called Tiles and they are put together to create Mosaics that provide knowledge. You can see what you have saved and what others have sent you. Here is a screen shot of a Dashboard page

As mentioned above, users can individually and collaboratively combine pieces of information (Tiles) into a Mosaic, build wiki content around the information and make it available for other users. In addition it’s possible to export the Mosaic for sharing outside of Knowledge Plaza. I especially liked this last feature. I remember using Quickplace in 2000 along with a Notes based content management system to provide a more primitive version of this concept. We could send the Quickplace where the document and other related ones were created to offer more context. Now with Knowledge Plaza you can create a specific collection of documents and links to build a story and then send this off intact to others.

The Knowledge Plaza is where the real action is located. As the name implies it is a place to share information. You can bring many different content types into the Plaza. Users can add internet bookmarks, documents and files, e-mails, contacts and references into the Plaza. There is browser and e-mail integration to simplify the process of adding content. You can just email content to the Plaza. Users rate content and this helps guide search efforts. There is enterprise social search allowing you to use the expertise of those around you to find and retrieve information. You can also save searches and repeat them over time. Here is an example of a Plaza.

You can set up different workspaces, invite members, and provide layers of access to the content. You can search individual workspaces or across all of them. You can also rate members, as well as documents, and this rating stays private but it can guide your search results. Members set up their own pages, as in Facebook. Here you put information about yourself and your network of individuals. You also add your workspaces and other information. People can use you to guide their search efforts by seeing what you are storing and what sites you have visited. You can restrict search results to the activity of one or many members. Here is an individual members Knowledge Plaza page.

The third Web component creates on-the-fly vertical search engines within Internet bookmarks stored in the Plaza. A keyword search in this component can provide results exclusively located inside your own bookmarked websites, as well as inside all shared websites in the Plaza. Their concept of “Expert as Search Engine” (EaSE) allows you to search only inside a specific member’s bookmarked websites. Further contextualization of Web search results can be carried out through tag and faceted navigation. The Web component additionally provides a combined search tool for pulling in and categorizing external or commercial search tools to the Plaza. Here is a look at the Web component.

Knowledge Plaza has struck a balance between top down taxonomies and bottom up folksonomies. You can set up a taxonomy for consistency in tagging but users can add new terms. Then administrators can check these new terms on a periodic basis to decide which new terms to add to the taxonomy. When looking for information users are able to combine full text search with facet and tag selection. Such categorization is applied in the same way to all tiles (including members and contacts) and allows for many different uses such as efficient expertise location, library management, etc.

Every tile, or piece of information, has its own page like members so you can see all the activity related to the information. You can also send a link to the page so others can see the context around the information. I like this in the same way I think the Mosaic concept adds value. You get the context surrounding information and you can share this context. This concept of providing context is pervasive in Knowledge Plaza and I think that is one of its greatest strengths. It takes knowledge management nicely into enterprise 2.0.

Cisco and WebEx Combine Strengths to Launch New Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration Platform

October 16, 2008 at 11:06 pm · Filed under Reviews

Cisco has launched a new collaboration platform with its acquisition of WebEx: Cisco WebEx Connect, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that integrates, presence, instant messaging, web meetings and team spaces with traditional and web 2.0 business applications. I recently spoke with David Knight, the Product Manager for this new collaboration effort. He said Cisco WebEx Connect is designed to combine the flexibility and reach of Web 2.0 with the security and management of enterprise networking. This new cloud-based platform will be the foundation of Cisco’s collaboration strategy and will be the first solution Cisco has launched since announcing its collaboration strategic direction.

David set the context for this move by noting two changing factors in the workplace. First, almost every company has become part of a supply chain. They frequently have business partners above and below them in this chain. Cisco is a classic example. It generally does not build final products and it sells through partner channels. Businesses need to effectively communicate and collaborate with their channel partners who operate outside the enterprise firewall.

Second, we now have empowered knowledge workers who have choices. They are using many web 2.0 tools in their personal life. If they are not happy with what the enterprise offers, they may bring these consumer tools into the workplace. This migration can cause a variety of problems from security issues to the simple fact that many of these tools are not designed for enterprise use (see Enterprise 2.0 is not Web 2.0 nor is it an Oxymoron). David gave the example of a manger who put a product presentation on YouTube when the internal platform was not working, exposing this internal information to anyone on the web.

The Cisco WebEx Connect platform is designed to address these issues. I was pleased to see this development. It is a natural progression from the Cisco purchase of WebEx. I was involved in writing two chapters in a WebEx book on the benefits of SaaS that was produced during this transition so I knew that they wanted to move to a more robust business platform beyond the traditional WebEx products (see Software (and more) as a Service: Summary of Why Buy the Cow?). The market was right for this initiative then and is even more ripe now with the need for more cost effective means of collaboration in a troubled economy.

David said they are looking to improve the performance of business processes and partnerships by providing collaboration applications in the “white spaces” between structured data. Cisco WebEx Connect offers the real time collaboration that has long been a WebEx strength with asynchronous features such as wikis, calendaring, and social bookmarking. The platform also ties into Cisco’s Unified Communication system, messaging solutions and extensive administrative controls that support enterprise policy, security and compliance requirements to provide a highly secure collaborative ecosystem.

The AJAX based platform can connect through widgets to enterprise applications with open APIs, an increasing trend. For example, you can add communication widgets into the existing CRM system to support a sales team. Here is an example of a Cisco WebEx Connect screen showing the layers of information available.

The team is the focal point of the platform. The idea is to provide the team with everything they need, creating a virtual “war room” as a dedicated space for their efforts. At the center is the conversation space and then data and other applications can be called for as needed. Cisco is already using this platform itself. Cisco needed the ability to connect small businesses with their partners. They had built an IBM Websphere Portal application and integrated the Cisco WebEx Connect platform to provide a shared space for secure collaboration. Team members can work within the Cisco WebEx Connect platform and bring in data and information from the Websphere Portal system. Here is another look at a real time collaboration interface.

You can find more about the Cisco WebEx Connect platform at their web site and here is the Connect quick tour. You can also find out more about their moves at their Collaboration blog such as this post, Collaboration, Web 2.0: Past as Prologue. I think this is a natural move that draws on the strengths of the two firms to address an expanding market. It will be interesting to see their next steps.

Attivio on Some Potential Winners in our New Economic World

October 14, 2008 at 8:46 am · Filed under Reviews

I recently wrote about Attivio. It offers the Active Intelligence Engine™ (AIE) for Unified Information Access, bringing together business intelligence and enterprise search capabilities. (see Attivio Tightly Integrates Structured Data and Unstructured Content for a New Approach to Information Access). Last week I had an interesting conversation with Attivio CEO Ali Riaz about the potential impact of the current economic crisis on technology adoption. He noted that some of the large enterprise application providers are seeing decreasing sales (see SAP Shares Slide on Earnings Warning via Jevon MacDonald). At the same time, they are finding an increasing demand at Attivio for their BI-search combination as companies want to better understand what is happening within their enterprise and customer base.

Ali mentioned a CIO UK article that noted, “As risk becomes a dirty word, look for business intelligence tools to be drafted in staunch support for strategies and for them to be increasingly used in adjunct with governance, risk, and compliance software.” He added that as companies seek to emerge from the economic downturn, the need for more and better information access, enterprise search and business solutions will be significant.

Some of the new enterprise 2.0 tools have been very useful in creating greater engagement and communication within the enterprise. However, some of these tools act in silos themselves, further adding to the information disconnect. These silos are especially strong between the traditional structured data and the newer unstructured information generated by enterprise 2.0 tools and even just in email, documents and presentations. The business results are often found in the structured data but the reasons are often contained in the unstructured information. The actionable intelligence is often found in the unstructured information but it is less meaningful taken out of the context provided by the structured data.

Attivio was designed to address these silos as it combines enterprise search with business intelligence in the same application and brings unified results. Ali said that companies are more open to change and innovation now and looking for answers. They need ways to develop true competitive differentiation, increase revenues and decrease customer churn. I recently read a similar thought by Jonathan Schwartz the Sun President and COO and long time blogger. In a recent blog post, Innovation Loves a Crisis, Jonathan shared a memo he sent to Sun’s leader about the role of technology in helping with the current economic crisis. He writes that many businesses will be most open to change now and he wants Sun to help its customers achieve greater innovation and boost productivity in response to economic challenges that many face.

Attivio wants to support innovation by providing more useful information that combines results and reasons. This is the goal of their combination of structured and unstructured information. They also add in visualization and analysis to the mix to help with the understanding. For example, he cited a pharma company with 500,000 records in a structured data system. There are comments in most of the records but there was no way to access them until they adopted Attivio to look beyond the structured data.

As they were developing AIE they put together a number of structured data base experts and an equal number of unstructured information experts. Ali said that these two groups often do not speak the same language. The structured data people felt that an unstructured search index was not reliable. The unstructured information people felt that the structured database was too limiting. By comparing methods, they were able to come up with new solutions. For example, they have helped one government agency look at blogs and government records fast enough to help with security questions at checkpoints. Compliance is another use case as enterprises traditionally had to look at email records, ERP data, and employee records in three separate searches. Attivio provides an integrated set of results.

They have also designed the system for rapid implementation so companies can experiment and make improvements as they go along. There is also flexibility so you do not get locked into a system or structure too early. This all makes sense to me. The Active Intelligence Engine was recognized on KM World’s 2008 Trend-Setting Product list and was also the winner fo this year’s KMWorld Promise award. I do think that these types of applications will be become increasingly mission critical in our connected and potentially more transparent world. Perhaps they can also tell me what is happening to my shrinking retirement(?) account.