Teblog

Mind-mapping with MindJet and MindGenius

Ever since Tony Buzan started popularising mind-mapping in 1974, it's had a bit of an uphill struggle to reach the mainstream. Over sixty commercial applications are available for the PC, the Mac and the web. A sprinkling of others are available for the Pocket PC, iPhone and BlackBerry. And you'll even find open source and freeware versions.

So mind-mapping is an industry, albeit a bit of a niche one. And the products/services keep on coming. October saw announcements from two well-known players, MindJet and MindGenius, which suggested that the mind-mapping world has yet to run out of puff.

MindJet has blended communications and mind-mapping into a single web-based collaboration service with Catalyst. Its premise is that most so-called collaboration tools are actually communication tools, completely lacking an application at their heart with which participants can engage. It feels, with some justification, that a mind-mapping application is exactly the right thing for this. It's useful, easy to understand and the nodes can activate files inside their own applications.

The counter to this might be that a generalised voice-video-IM-screen-sharing communication service allows you to run whatever applications you like at the desktop. Either a scribe can do updates or, more clunkily, control can be passed between participants.

The second announcement of the month fits the latter category. It is a desktop application. MindGenius claims that, with an addressable market of 400 to 500 million English-speaking users, it can focus uncompromisingly on improving the mind-mapping experience for this particular market. And it does a good job. Information entry is slick, navigation can be through the graphical image or through a separate 'outliner' pane (called Map Explorer) and any notes attached to the selected entry are visible in another pane. It offers smooth two-way integration with Office applications such as Word, Excel and Project.

Mind-mapping started out as a very personal thing. The aim was to enable you to take notes effectively, learn quickly and plan easily. When personal computers came along, outliners grabbed our attention first, then the more graphical mind-mappers came along. As screens got bigger and resolution improved, so the visual mappers came into their own. But most people were either ignorant of the technique or they saw nothing wrong with sticking with paper and coloured pens.

Once the vendors twigged that they could be used for project work and for effective communication, the brakes came off and MindJet, MindGenius and others offer some good tools for facilitating projects from inception to completion. They also offer varying degrees of data exchange with other applications.

The thing to watch out for is how many brain cycles are consumed with actually operating the application as opposed to getting something done with it. Ideally, you want the program to more or less fade into the background while information is quickly transferred to the screen, moved around, navigated and absorbed.

Bearing this in mind, of the two applications mentioned, I must confess to a slight leaning towards MindGenius.

Am I qualified to comment? Well, I started using mind-maps in the mid-70s and wrote a mind-mapping program in 1981 which, incidentally, is still being published today from somewhere deep in Colorado. I've been using my own program habitually for 28 years and others as and when they find their way into my computer. If you'd prefer to follow a couple of subject experts, then I'd recommend Chuck Frey and Vic Gee.

New Lotus?

If you were in the market for collaboration software, what would your reaction be if a major software publisher offered you an all-singing all-dancing suite of battle-hardened collaboration tools?

What if that publisher were IBM? What if it were Lotus? What if it were Microsoft? Bear in mind we're talking about the same set of tools, same quality in each case.

You have your preferences, right? And they have nothing to do with what's on offer. It's about perception of the brand. And that, as has been discussed exhaustively and exhaustingly, is an issue for a brand called Lotus. It can dance, sing, strip, do cartwheels and swing from a trapeze, but nothing it does will impress those who don't want to be impressed.

So why on earth does IBM persist in protecting the brand? Part of the answer lies in its existing base; let's not rock the boat for the 100M plus users. Part of it lies in a touching faith that the reality of the technical specs will trump the perceptions of the marketplace. As my colleague, Dale Vile, pointed out recently, the evidence suggests this is not the case. The respondents to the survey were readers of The Register, not best known for their love of Lotus, but this is the point - they are exactly the outsiders that IBM/Lotus needs to influence if it is ever to expand its market.

Let's forget any ideas of switching back-end servers and applications. If a company has Exchange and Outlook, or Thunderbird, or The Bat! (okay, I threw that in for good measure), then it's unlikely to change and, if Lotus ever thinks it will then its head needs examining. But some of the new Lotus offerings don't want you to switch anything. At best, it will run on your existing equipment and operating systems, at worst it needs a dedicated server - an appliance, in effect - and you don't need to fret too much about what's in it. Some of the offerings are provided as a service, so you don't even need to worry about installing, managing and updating the back-end, although you will still need to look after the clients.

You'd have thought that IBM/Lotus would be crowing about these things that don't depend on, let's say, a Domino server. You'd have thought it would be making the point right up front that the product is freestanding and can be popped onto a Windows or Linux server. But, no, it takes a while for non-Lotus folk to figure out just what can standalone and what has a dependence on a bit of Lotus-specific back-end stuff.

It's not like buying insurance, a camera or a car on the web. Some of these sites get you to 'radio-button' or 'check box' your desires and a shortlist appears, each showing its primary attributes. It's a matter of minutes to drill down to the product that best suits you. The Lotus site makes you drill and drill and drill. To give it credit, at the lowest level, all the information is eventually given, but finding it requires some diligence. You'll find no mentions of platforms on the Lotus product page unless you count the 'Collaborate in the Cloud' link to LotusLive. Drilling required. Click on 'Collaboration Software Products'. From there you can search by product category, product name or keyword. Since you're unlikely to know the names, then category seems best. Or you could use keywords. 'Microsoft' pulls up just two hits, Quickr and Quickr Content Integrator (team sharing tools). Following the latter reveals that it offers both migration from and coexistence with SharePoint and Exchange public folders. Hurrah! But this is hardly platform independence. More digging needed. And then, deep in the bowels of the documentation, is a list of platforms -including Windows.

When it comes to the Lotus Connections social software tools, once again no clues are given to its platform requirements. It takes a further seven clicks to reach the information you need. Lo and behold! it can run on two flavours of Linux and three flavours of Windows Server plus, of course, IBM's AIX.

At least with the Symphony page, it takes only one click to find out the platforms. But why is Lotus so coy about some of its products being multi-platform? A mystery, to be sure. Perhaps someone in Lotus would care to comment?

To summarise, we have a company here that wants to expand its user base into the wider world but it is, a) shy about telling us the information we need, b) makes it horribly complicated to discover, and c) hides the good stuff behind a brand that carries a lot of well-deserved baggage.

Given the company's irrational attachment to the Lotus name, here are some suggestions: 1) Improve the website, at least for the multi-platform and cloud stuff; 2) Make sure that the multi-platform credentials are at least hinted at on the home page. (Sure, it won't work with certain versions of operating systems, browsers, databases and so on, but this shouldn't affect the broad messaging. All it needs is a direct link to the detail.); and, 3) think about changing the name.

In view of the foregoing, may I take a leaf out of the politicians' book and suggest 'New Lotus'?

No, I thought not.

A virtual sustainability summit, or three

Now here's an idea that makes sense: a follow up to the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December. Or, to be more accurate, a series of follow ups, none of which requires much travel. A company called G2Events plans to put on a series of three online conferences which include exhibit booths, presentations (from organisations small and large), telepresence-basd panel discussions, meeting rooms and downloadable materials. Called Sustainability Virtual Summits, it is entirely digital - totally in keeping with its name.

Each event intends to have specific focus areas in order to maximise the chance of a meaningful exchange of views. The idea is for the first, in February, to concentrate on virtualisation and dematerialisation and how ICT can get its own act together (my words, not the organiser's). The second, in May, plans to concentrate on smart motor systems and smart logistics. The third, in August, intends to cover smart buildings, smart grids and water and sanitation. The plan is for each event to concentrate on the role of ICT in delivering sustainability benefits.

Why should we have mini-summits following the big one in Copenhagen? Well, to be blunt, you can only achieve so much at these big events. If the delegates agree on a post-Kyoto protocol and all get their pictures taken looking pleased with themselves, (preferably while standing next to Barack Obama) then that's about it. The real work takes place in all the organisations that are obliged to live up to the greenhouse gas promises that eventually get made.

The truth, though, is that we're in disarray. For example, last week I looked at ten different carbon calculators. They gave ten different results. (Choose one and stick with it if you want to monitor your progress.) But wouldn't it be better if we could all agree on some standards? This is one of the reasons these follow up events have been proposed. Participants should get a chance to review and discuss these and many other sustainability-related issues.

The aim is for each 'conference' to be a day long, covering three time zones. After the initial three days, the live debate is planned to continue for 30 days. The idea is that all the material will be left online for a further 90 days. In theory, this could become a substantial resource for anyone seeking a genuine understanding of the issues around ICT and sustainability. It would be nice to think that some global understanding will emerge. If positions polarise, at least everyone can see what's going on and know where further effort needs to be applied. Hopefully, a lot of bonding will take place among movers and shakers around the world, providing the right people participate and take notice.

As anyone who's visited Second Life will attest, that experience can be quite unpleasant. The virtual summits intend to be very different. They are photo-realistic for a start. A little bit of downloading will be needed before you get into the conference so, presumably, a lot of  the rendering will be done inside your own computer. A company called Design Reactor has been retained to take care of the technical aspects and, looking at some event work it did for Hewlett Packard, the technical omens are good. You can also see a dummy of the Sustainability Summit site here.

Although this is a commercial activity, its heart seems to be in the right place. It is independent. It has found some good sponsoring organisations. Exhibitor booths are not expected to cost very much. It is targeting a smallish audience - around 5,000 quality visitors drawn from CSR/sustainability execs, c-level, data centre managers, supply chain, product development, finance and marketing. It appears to be a good event to drop in on during the 30 day 'discussion period'. I'm guessing that this where the fun will begin. It's also where people with implementation experience are expected to contribute their insights.

Rumours of KM's death exaggerated

Say 'knowledge management' to most people in our business and watch the curl of their lips. It seems to be a 'given' that KM is dead. The usual reason given is that knowledge sits between our ears, so how the heck can it be managed? Even those who are prepared to stretch the definition a little bit into 'information' are still inclined to question the value of the stored information. I mean, what information is readily given up and what's its half-life anyway?
A few months ago, I stumbled across a US/Indian IT services company called MindTree. It has a Chief Knowledge Officer called Raj Datta. Expecting the worst, I spoke to him and was somewhat astonished to learn that he has taken a lifecycle approach to knowledge management. He recognises that it does live between people's ears. But he also recognises that it can be shared through social tools. The result is an organisation which spends a lot of time, energy and money on the most important bit of knowledge management, its creation in the first place.
Staff are introduced to many thinking and idea generation tools - from De Bono's Six Thinking Hats to mind-mapping. Through workshops and discussion groups, they can learn about many thinking concepts, developing their minds and their ability to innovate. Without creation, knowledge/information capture is merely ossifying the past.
Staff, called 'Minds' incidentally, are then given a wide choice of social and collaboration tools, from blogs through wikis to discussion groups, and more. They are also given a physical workplace which encourages planned and serendipitous encounters.
The astonishing thing about this company is that it was implementing these ideas and blending them with its traditional KM/content management systems while most companies were still trying to figure out the relevance of social networking. MindTree turns out to have been something of a pioneer.
By joining the dots and ensuring that the complete knowledge lifecycle is supported: from inception, to storage, to sharing, to reuse, it provides the KM world an intelligent and holistic way forward.

Lotusphere mop-up; then I'll shut up

Rather than write a series of blog posts of ever-diminishing interest (for me and for you), I thought a final Lotusphere round up would make sense.

First up, Doug Heintzman. He's the director of Lotus Strategy. We talked about the market for collaboration software, top to bottom. I mentioned the bottom  last week. But, at the top, he talked about the Enterprise Adaptability practice: something that materialised after the last Lotusphere. The most interesting bit, for me, was the toolkit that it provides its practitioners for studying the social networking patterns in enterprise and using it to help build an ROI case. I asked him what parameters were measured, hoping to get a checklist for you, and was rewarded with a verbal finger wag. Something to do with the huge intellectual property value in the patterns that emerge. Drat and double drat. If you're interested in learning more, start here.

Okay. I've given up trying to find the next thing online. It was a brilliant use of the 'Crocodile Dundee in New York' scene where Dundee has headed for the subway to get out of Sue's life. She's dumped her fiancé and wants Dundee. The scene is the one in the subway where she wants to get a message to Dundee that she wants him back. Verbal messages are transmitted up and down the crowded platform until he clambers over the heads of the passengers for a reunion. Aaaah. You can see the clip on YouTube, but it hasn't got the IBM punchline. I tell you, if that's a real ad', aimed at real people, IBM/Lotus has hit a hole in one. Sean Poulley, the host of the session claimed that the nine collaborative tools being offered will be "competitively priced with meeting-only services". Interesting.

I'd wager that Casey Dugan was the most enthusiastic person at the event. She was showing off Beehive - a social networking site where people can reveal stuff about their personal lives as well as maintain professional connections. It has 50,000 users inside IBM so it is clearly of value to this substantial minority. It lives behind the firewall, which is less risky than public services. It's still a research project at the moment but you can grab more details here.

I think that's enough for one year about Lotusphere, except to say that some things made me unhappy. My Linux/Firefox  netbook wouldn't render my agenda properly. And I'd have liked a single sign on to the three different IBM services I was trying to use: the analyst site, the LotusLive site and the Lotusphere site. And, as for responsiveness, getting hundreds, maybe thousands of people trying to hit the access points and networks at the same time was a recipe for disaster. I gave up early and took to wandering round carrying bits of paper and having face-to-face conversations with real live people. Much more fun.

Now I'm taking a break. See you in a few weeks.

What if the lights go out?

We humans have a talent for getting other people and other things to do stuff for us. If we didn't, we'd all be out there scratching a living from the forests and fields and we'd have a pretty rudimentary existence. Would you care to forage or kill for the food on your table?

"A strange way to start an IT-focused blog," you might be thinking, but all will become clear. Yesterday I was listening to Clay Shirky talking about the wonders wrought by the advent of the internet. In particular, he was talking about the tremendous communication leap which has taken place in terms of how we communicate, cooperate, collaborate and act in concert as a result.

Previous communication systems have been predominantly one on one - telegraph, telephone, fax and so on - or they've been one to many, where 'one' has usually been a business: books, radio, television. Even the web started off that way. What's changed over the past few years is our willingness and ability to convene online. We don't need to be gathered together by an organisation - a company, a fan club, or whatever. We do it ourselves. And we're most likely to do it by coalescing around a topic of common interest.

Shirky mentioned the case of HSBC stopping its interest-free overdraft facility for graduates last year. It thought it had the power to do this. (One to many.) But it didn't account for a graduate starting a Facebook group delicately called "Stop The Great HSBC Graduate Rip-Off". Okay, I was kidding about the 'delicate'. Despite it being the summer holiday period, students and graduates joined the group in their thousands to discuss the issue and decide on actions that might need to be taken. Not least sharing information about how to move their accounts to other banks. Newspapers picked up on it. Physical demonstrations were planned in Facebook and HSBC backed off.

A piece of information about HSBC became a gathering point, a cooperation point and a collaborative action point. This sort of thing just couldn't have happened before. People were put together by bosses. Or they joined clubs organised by other people. They didn't self select and self organise, certainly not as quickly and as effectively and in such numbers.

Inside the business, the same thing's happening. People often find each other because of common interest and quite regardless of the hierarchy. If two people in two labs in two parts of the world are coincidentally researching the same materials, there's a good chance that they'll discover each other if there's a topic online around that material. Relationships will form which couldn't have come about through central direction.

As Shirky says, "Every URL is a latent community."

You see it a lot with environmental groups at the moment. A lot of coalescing is going on around different green topics. I see that fellow analyst Tom Raftery has started talking about the 'Tom' instead of the Tonne as a CO2 measure. In fact Gavin Starks has started a ning social network called megatom. It has 15 members as I write and it may be madly successful, or it may die. It cost very little to start. It's not like a conventional media title. If it flies, it flies. If it doesn't, it doesn't. This kind of exercise is being repeated thousands of times a day, all over the world. Some might say the lunatics are in charge of the asylum, but that's not true. Good ideas will gain traction, bad ones won't. Good contributors will gain influence, bad ones will be ignored.

With several UK power stations heading for the knacker's yard courtesy of EU rulings and with our excessive dependence on foreign energy supplies, we face the real prospect of power shortages. But this new world relies, more than anything else, on us each having a supply of electricity. Without it, the doorways to this parallel social universe will be slammed shut.

Am I being paranoid? Does it matter? I happen to think "no" and "yes" respectively. What about you?

Collaboration: the old way. Why not?

Just lately I've been wondering a lot about stimulating innovation inside companies. It was sparked off by a visit to the Imaginatik user conference in London. I was treated to a number of case studies in which customers saved themselves tens of millions of dollars by adopting Imaginatik's IdeaCentral approach to collaborative problem solving.

The companies were large - Walmart, Whirlpool and Pfizer, to name a few - who were saving tens of millions of dollars as a result. Imaginatik likes to promote a ten times ROI at every opportunity, which suggests that the cost of the software and services are probably beyond the reach of smaller businesses anyway.

So this got me wondering. Given that a lot of IdeaCentral is similar (on the surface at least) to social software, could cheaper and more generally available tools be used to similar effect? It is web-based. It has places to post your ideas, comment on other people's, add your profile, make contact, get notifications of updates, voting mechanisms, tagging, search and automatic discovery of similar ideas. Behind the scenes, the set-up and management software and a bunch of add-on modules contribute to this powerful software suite.

Could the bulk of this be done easily using social tools like blogs, wikis, Twitter and suchlike? I'm not sure. While I like these tools and am an active participant in the social computing world, I'm not sure that most people would be ready for an unstructured collection of tools. It would be simply too complicated for the average user to start blogging, commenting, tagging, voting and the like. The management tools are the other side of the coin. It would be difficult, but probably not impossible, to put together some kind system to keep track of everything that's going on.

I'm now going to suggest something retrograde which might have my social software pals throwing their hands up in horror. What about using a forum? It's simple to set up, simple to use and you can easily control membership. (I ran a public forum and the spam levels were absolutely ridiculous.) You can also keep the captured knowledge on your own system, usually in a MySQL database which makes for ready integration with other systems.

Users can start new topics, others can comment. They can search. They can be notified of comments. A good clue about value is whether a suggestion has comments. Because it's being implemented in a business context, so there's no personal or business advantage in flaming or being silly. Once an idea has collected a few comments, perhaps the management could move it up the list to give it more prominence. (Or maybe some forum software exists to do this automatically, I don't know.)

For smaller organisations, I would have thought that this would be an simple way to collaborate and it would be a pity if it were to be sidelined by the more shiny toys of recent years.

Of course, I could be talking through my hat. What do you think?

Piggy-backing on social software

While our attention has been diverted by the razzle dazzle of the social software startups, traditional software companies have been quietly getting on with updating their own products. In the past month or so, I've been to four briefings with established organisations, each of which has presented me with demonstrations of their updated legacy software which, on the face of it, look just like the work of the startups.

All the jargon is there too - network effects, long tail, social networking, wisdom of crowds, comments, tags, rankings - you name it, they're saying it. And, to be frank, I found it quite offensive at first. As someone who spent several years participating in the emergence of social computing, I thought that they were cloaking themselves in the regalia of this new world in order to pretend that they are still in the game. I was wrong about their motivations, of course.

It took a while for the penny to drop. It wasn't until the fourth presentation that I realised that the imitation was not simple flattery, or even a desperation to appear relevant. They really had twigged that this new stuff had a viable place in their world. They had found ways of making the old stuff easier to use on the one hand and more powerful on the other. Two of the announcements are still under the radar, so forgive me for not naming names. Suffice it to say that in all cases the benefits derive from social things like collaboration, collective insights and sharing. And not-so-social things such as monitoring the activities of individuals.

A social software startup is unlikely to get anywhere close to developing the sort of enterprise software that drives our businesses. Some will survive and mature and maybe even merge their way to prominence. Others may simply have their moment in the sun, then fade away. But their legacies are there for us all to benefit from. They're a sort of living research laboratory for the IT industry.

Companies which have spent years building and evolving substantial software products that deliver real value are right not to be too disturbed by these new developments. But they are absolutely right to consider what's good about their own offerings, what's good about the new stuff and then graft one to the other, as appropriate. Just because something is labelled 'legacy' doesn't render it irrelevant. Quite the reverse in fact.

Just semantics? Or is it here?

The semantic web is one of those things that has been much talked about, especially in propellor-head circles, for several years. It leaves most outsiders a bit cold. They actually don't care about triples, RDF or SPARQL. They care about whether it will make a difference to their businesses.

Well, after a circuitous journey which took in two reports (here and here*), two related podcasts (here and here) and a series of instant messages with, my semantic everything guru, Dr Paul Miller, I decided that one of the reports was fairly grounded and quite useful. It's the (asterisked) one by David Provost, an analyst whose mid-life MIT SM thesis was called 'Hurdles in the Business Case for Semantic Web'.

Since then, he's sustained his interest in the subject and recently produced the report (free to download) called On The Cusp: A Global Review Of The Semantic Web Industry. It starts with a plain English run down of the semantic web world and finishes with a look at 17 semantic technology vendors and, in many cases, their clients. He started out by inviting 25 companies that he figured were doing real stuff, but eight either refused or didn't respond to his invite.

The resulting document verges on the gushing but, if you ignore that, it contains much of interest. It is strictly business-focused and it tries to steer clear of all but the most essential jargon.

A lot of the software described has been around for donkey's years but it is finding its vocation in the semantic web world. Natural Language Recognition, for example, is a core requirement for 'reading' and interpreting documents and turning the findings into the metadata which is at the heart of the computer's ability to understand content and context.

Databases with extensible schemas are another key element. This is necessary because the world is always changing, we can't predefine everything in advance.

The vendors vary in what they offer, from the narrowness of USA database company Franz, to the breadth of German company ontoprise GmbH. I quite like the sound of thought-sharing company Primal Fusion - but that's still in alpha so I couldn't check it out. I did look at Thomson Reuters' Calais however, but wasn't totally gripped by the results. It reminded me of speech recognition: no matter how good, it takes a while to get used to you. I rarely add Ltd or Inc to company names, so when I pushed some of my work through for automatic creation of metadata, some key elements, like company names, were not spotted.

It is, as the author points out, early days but enough is going on to suggest that we're going to see increasing use of semantic activity to improve performance for the benefit of organisations and their customers.

If this is unfamiliar territory to you, then the report will start you off, regardless of whether you're a business person or a propellor-head.

I would also recommend keeping a close eye on what Dr Paul Miller is up to. He seems to know everyone and everything that's going on in the semantic space, web or otherwise.

Social software and a troubled bank

Wachovia Bank is in the process of being largely gobbled up by Citigroup (Update 6 Oct: or completely consumed by Wells Fargo). It was losing money hand over fist already this year and the more recent firestorm in the financial world brought it to its knees. It will take a while to sort things out and, then, who knows what will happen in terms of consolidation and job losses?

Earlier this month, I was listening to the company's eBusiness Director extolling the virtues of its internal collaborative software suite, called Pulse. At the time, I wanted to write about it but, having checked the bank's financials, decided it could have disappeared within hours or days of the story being published. Slightly bad news for me, terrible news for the company. Anyway, here we are at a new beginning, and here's the tale...

Pete Fields is a grey-haired, smart (in both senses), business professional, the last sort of person you'd expect to see presenting at the Office 2.0 conference. He talked enthusiastically of the underpinning reasons for Pulse and surprised many at the conference by explaining that it was built atop Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). Like GE, mentioned in a recent post, Wachovia had decided on a DIY approach.

The primary drivers for Pulse were: 1) to enable staff to work more effectively across time and distance; 2) to better connect and engage employees; 3) to mitigate the impact of a maturing workforce; and, 4) to engage the generation Y worker. I bet there's a lot of 2) going on at the moment. And, I'd also guess that thoughts are currently quite far away from 4).

But, regardless of the current state of the company, Fields' insights are still interesting, not least the graph that showed the consequences of an ageing work population over the years 2000 to 2010. It showed clearly how the working population is increasing from the age of 45 and decreasing in the 35-44 bracket. The 55-64 age group is rising over 50 percent. And these people, plus the over 65s, will be leaving and taking their knowledge with them. (Assuming they can afford to.)

The diminuation of collective knowledge is one of the reasons so-called knowledge management (KM) became so popular, before people realised that the two words contradicted each other. Organisations thought they could use software to systematically squeeze knowledge out of people and file it away for future use. After many false starts, no-one would claim success. Lots of success with information but the stuff between people's ears was altogether more difficult. However, the advent of social computing (choose your own term) has brought the KM dream closer than it ever was when the knowledge managers were strutting their stuff.

Nowadays, if your organisation supports them, you can tap into wikis, blogs, bulletin boards, Q&A databases and the like. And if you're not happy, you can dive into the people pages and ping an expert. Within a short time you can get authoritative answers, in context and, because it's done electronically, the trail is saved for others. We all know there's a lot of nonsense 'out there' in the wider web but, in a corporate context, people don't file anonymously and they generally avoid posting inaccurate stuff that would reflect badly on them.

So, given the demographics, what did Wachovia do to capture knowledge without making people feel they were being exploited? It created an internal Wikipedia. Called Wachovia Wisdom and subtitled 'the encyclopedia by employees for employees', it struck the right note. It started, innocuously enough, as an acronym wiki. This wasn't the corporation squeezing you, it was you sharing what you knew with your colleagues. Smart move.

The project as a whole was never a skunk works. It was driven by business requirements and implemented in three phases. The first was establishing the platform, the second was about supporting team working and social capital and the third was about individuals.

To give a flavour of what's going on: the system supports 6000 web conferences a month, each one saving the company an estimated $214; several executives gave up five percent of their travel budget to the project; and, around 100,000 instant messaging sessions take place daily.

Of course, there's much more to the Wachovia implementation than this. You can watch Fields' Office 2.0 presentation online and you can download a slide deck (from an earlier conference)  that shows quite a bit of the system in action. You can even follow his personal progress on Twitter where he's, not surprisingly, petefields.