Teblog

R. Todd Stephens on Enterprise 2.0

Sometimes it's easy to be overwhelmed by new ways of working. Enterprise 2.0, for example, has crept up on us over the past few years. Those who've tracked it from the start have something of an advantage in that they pretty much know what all the elements and issues are. Anyone coming to it cold might find themselves misled by evangelists or confused by the propellor-heads.

It's not easy to get on top of things and see all the elements in a sensible perspective. Three cheers then for R. Todd Stephens who is Senior Technical Architect of Collaboration and Online Services for the AT&T Corporation. He has been involved in corporate IT for 25 years with a high focus on enterprise information management since 1999. He has produced an Enterprise 2.0 Blueprint, a chart which can act as a checklist for all the elements of Web 2.0 for the enterprise.

Enterprise 2.0 Blueprint (click chart to get download)

The chart totally avoids product names, with the sole exception of 'Office', but even that is a functional description rather than an explicit plug for Microsoft. The chart is in five columns: Business Drivers (for investing in Web 2.0 technology); Actors (the people involved); Technologies (and related technologies); Methods (how the technologies are used); and Value-Add (to the employee, the department and the business).

The chart is enterprise-centric, in the sense that the final column doesn't mention value to customers. Or, for that matter, suppliers. Mentions of clients and customers are dotted around the chart, so it's not as if they're being ignored. But such an extension to the Value-Add column might help stimulate more consideration of who the business exists to serve.

Clues do exist in the minutiae of the chart. Sub-boxes contain items like Education, Training, Consulting, Self service and so on, but you sense that these are primarily seen as revenue or cost-saving opportunities. A box for 'Customers' has 'Consumers' and 'Producers' as sub-boxes. Quite often customers have their own forums where they help each other out. It costs the enterprise very little but is a tremendous value-add for the customers. But then again, you could argue that this drops the support costs for the company.

Perhaps I need to wake up to the fact that value-add for customers will nearly always brings a reciprocal benefit for the company.

The good thing about this chart is that it is pretty comprehensive in terms of identifying all the Web 2.0 elements and shows how they fit into an organisation's activities. While setting up an 'under the radar' blog, wiki, IM or whatever is a trivial exercise, to derive real business value someone somewhere has to look at the bigger picture and figure out how to turn skunk works initiatives into corporate processes while retaining the spirit that made them attractive in the first place.

I think it was Napoleon or Nelson who used to toss a coin when faced with difficult decisions. If, when the coin landed, he was disappointed with the outcome, he'd go with his instincts. A chart like this is similar. Without it, you'd be trying to make this stuff up. With it, you have a framework and if any of it jars, just alter it or extend it.

IMHO it makes a fine starting point.

Who controls your personal information?

Doc Searls is a long time blogger, a deep thinker, a co-author of the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto, an open source wizard, and too many other things to mention. He is held in massively high regard by all the social computing pioneers I've met over the past five or so years. He's currently on a mission to invert the relationship between us and the data about ourselves. Instead of repeatedly providing different cuts of information to everyone with an interest in us, we actually hold the information once and let it out according to need. (If you're reading this, Doc, I apologise for the horrible simplification.)

Doc recently found himself in the world of his namesakes - doctors. He'd undergone a medical exploration which resulted in him contracting pancreatitis. This in turn resulted in hospitalisation and a period of considerable discomfort. After watching the progress of his illness, it was good to follow his recovery and eventual discharge on Twitter. (Why do I care? Because I met him a few years ago and thought he was a good egg with some interesting insights.)

Not surprisingly, on his emergence from the 'health care' system, he had a few words to say on the madness of big systems which are not at all patient-centric, despite any assurances to the contrary. You can read his blog post for the specifics of his situation. The key point is that we know a lot more about ourselves than any doctor can hope to absorb from a medical history.

In his blog post, Searls chose to cite Fred Trotter, a US citizen amd open source software advocate, who said "Given current primary care reimbursements, my doctor is incented do everything in his power to spend under 10 minutes talking to me." I don't suppose it's hugely different anywhere else in the world. They just don't have time to unearth the key facts that lie in our medical history and, of course, the stuff that *we* know that lies outside our medical records is totally inaccessible.

In our own family, we make great use of a cranial osteopath. None of the information relating to his work finds its way into our official medical records. I also know that dairy products affect me within a few minutes of consuming them, but I've never bothered to share this information with the doctor. In fact, I rarely go to the doctor. The last time I went, I had a very swollen eyelid which, as well as looking unsightly, was causing double vision. The doctors in the local practice and the the hospital were all baffled. After several weeks of unsuccessful experimental treatments, I ran into a friend in the street and she said "that's an allergic reaction." She was right, we'd bought a goose down duvet just before the eyelid swelled up. I didn't bother to tell the doctor. It's still in the official records as 'lid-lag'.

There is a point to all this, and that is that we should somehow (no-one's figured out the details yet) become the custodians of information about ourselves, letting it out to others under our control. Doc Searls and Adriana Lukas are just two of the people who are investigating slightly different flavours. It's a bit like the early days of social computing, a bit 'wild west', but the fundamental ideas make sense. It's been christened VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) which strikes me as a bit restrictive, even if it does resonate with and oppose CRM.

If you're interested in keeping up with, or contributing to, progress then you might like to head over to the ProjectVRM blog.

Vendor Relationship Management UK-style

One of the most challenging, charming, intelligent and irritating people I've ever met is one Adriana Lukas. She was a leading blogger in 2001, long before most people had ever heard of blogging. She understood the ramifications of social software before we knew that there were any ramifications. That would be at the end of 2002. She really was a classic voice in the wilderness and, through speaking engagements, massive amounts of networking and, in my case, arduous discussions, she brought many people to an understanding of the potential of social computing.

Now, she's mounted her charger again and her lance is firmly tilted at people's control of their personal data. In classic Lukas fashion, she's looked askance at the accepted ways of doing things and asked 'why?' Incremental developments creep up on us and we don't realise that the status quo is possibly not where we'd be had we realised the implications of each micro-step.

In this particular case, we're talking about the data that other people hold about us. Banks, social software sites, wine merchants, anyone, in fact, with whom we have dealings. Adriana's view is that we should be in charge of our personal information and reveal appropriate parts when it suits us. Thus, a bank might be given permission to check our address. This would be done through a standard feed mechanism (probably Atom) and the bank would be given an access key. It could poll the address whenever it felt like it. And, if it were a new account, the bank would be given the key and all the relevant pieces of information could be picked up, without the individual having to do yards of typing. At the end of the relationship, the ties can be cut and potentially valuable new personal information put beyond reach.

A wine buff might decide to expose their drinking habits and wine-tasting findings to the local wine merchant. Same thing. Merchant subscribes and, in the gift of the information owner, gets a glimpse into their client's life. Some people might mix their feeds (no pun intended) and others might feel more secure with separate feeds for separate 'friends'. Some might want to encrypt information. Providing the standards chosen are those which are acceptable to the accessing party then this is possible too.

This is an inversion of the relationships we have come to expect. It makes the supplier the supplicant. It puts the buyer in charge. Or, if we're talking government and civil service scenarios, it makes them the servants and the citizens the masters, which is as it should be.

This is all part of the vision of Project VRM. And, yes, this stands for Vendor Relationship Management, a deliberate inversion of the Customer Relationship Management term which, of course, is nothing of the sort. While born from the same roots and overlapping to a large extent, you will notice that Adriana's take on it is totally individual-centric, while the American-led version is more all-embracing. But, in each case, the aim is to restore some balance into the relationships.

In 2001, when Adriana started blogging, people probably thought her mad. In 2002, when she started articulating the value of social networking inside and outside organisations, she was still alone. In 2003, when Google bought blogging service Pyra, she knew she was on to something. And then, in 2005 she was finally vindicated as the mainstream media picked up on social networking.

Right now, I suspect she feels as lonely with respect to VRM as she did when she was blogging in 2001. It will be interesting to see if, once again, she has managed to hit the nail on the head.

ISPs and householders in the front line

Oh dear, oh dear. Seems like our government is continuing its sleepwalk towards another disaster. What do you mean, "which one?" Okay, you have a point. Two things in particular. One is that it has a plan to shrink the police force and get neighbourhood watch members to take over some of its duties. The other, according to the Times newspaper, is to get ISPs to ban users from the internet if they are caught downloading illegal copies of copyright material.

Don't both of these proposals sound a bit daft? In the first place, I thought we paid the government to keep us safe. Although to listen to recent news, it's been failing spectacularly in that particular duty. Members of neighbourhood watch are a) probably scared witless to patrol the streets after dark and b) even if they caught someone, then what? The odds of the fuzz turning up in time to do anything useful is close to zero. There's a disconnect between the government mind and reality.

Now the government is a step closer to asking ISPs to catch people who download stuff they shouldn't, then to act as prosecutor, jury and judge. How convenient. Be seen to suck up to the entertainment moguls without actually having to do anything more than issue yet another set of regulations.

And what's the ISP to do? Inspect every single packet that passes through its hands? Divine what the content is and issue warning emails to infringers? If they infringe again, make sure they're disconnected. And, if they get reconnected and infringe again, ensure they never darken the internet's doorstep again. This, apparently, can be done by notifying other ISPs of the identity of the guilty party.

It's mad. Utterly mad. Bureaucracy gone totally insane.

Listen. With a partner I sell software online. Have done for years. We can be fairly certain that illegal copies have been made (despite our rather clever mechanisms for avoiding it). But whose responsibility is it to deal with the issue? Ours.

We try to be nice to customers so they tell others what jolly decent people we are. We try not to rip people off price-wise, although some would argue that we fail in that respect. But they wouldn't be customers anyway, so what are we losing? Some customers pay us more than once, which suggests our price can't be that wrong.

It's up to us to get the business model right so that the decent majority do the right thing. It's up to us to decide whether to chase commercial-scale infringers through the courts - a horribly expensive process and a distraction to boot.

If the government really does want to prosecute copyright infringers, then it should do it through the normal legal processes. Just as asking householders to catch criminals is mad, so is expecting ISPs to do its dirty work.

FAST move by Microsoft

Anyone who's followed me over the years would not mark me down as a Microsoft lover. As long ago as 1980 Steve Ballmer used to visit me and tell me of his dreams for Microsoft. I liked the man, I was taken aback by the vision - even more so when it came true - but I never actually liked the company.

Having said this, my software company (Caxton) embraced Microsoft enthusiastically when CP/M died and MS/PCDOS took over. And so it's been ever since. I use Microsoft software. Heck, I still publish some as a hobby.

So what to make of the latest news, that Microsoft is to buy search company FAST? I am stunned. Truly. I take my hat off to Microsoft for this move. Forget about the staff meltdown that FAST has experienced recently, the fact is that this company has a great reputation and some solid clients. I'm sure it's not beyond the wit of Microsoft to win key developers back, if it wanted to.

Enterprise information has always been siloed and this drives users crazy because there's no easy way to gather together all the information they need. Search companies like FAST and Autonomy provide the means to overcome this problem. With the arrival of social computing into the enterprise, the siloing is accompanied by massive amounts of unstructured information, in all manner of different formats. This is a problem which can only get worse.

IBM has its UIMA interface which sits atop the silos and gives a way to reach in to unstructured information. This is quite apart from its search engines. Oracle and Autonomy, too, have their ways of grabbing what they need. They add words like 'secure', 'discovery' and 'meaning' to their product names to make them more comforting to the buyers. But Microsoft: it's been playing around at the entry and low end with its own search offerings.

Now, in a single stroke, the company puts itself in contention with these other major players. Assuming the deal goes through, it immediately removes one of the major stumbling blocks with large scale implementation of SharePoint Server - that of being able to draw information together from multiple hierarchical silos. If the integration with SharePoint is done well and if the missing bits of the social computing stack are added, then Microsoft will have leapfrogged the industry and incredibly strengthened its position.

On social computing signal:noise ratio

Earlier this week Dale Vile - boss of Freeform Dynamics - posted about his frustrations following a deep dive into social computing. He's been blogging and reading blogs for a couple of years but wondered if he might be missing out on something. By and large, he concluded he wasn't.

I responded by email rather than comment. But Dale thought I should base a post around my response. Having read it through, I think I may as well share it in its entirety. Responses, private or as comments, are more than welcome.

Dear Dale

Read your 'Signal to noise' piece yesterday.

Reread it this morning.

Sounds like you've gone round the loop I went round a few years ago, except I did allow myself to become overwhelmed for a while.

Eventually, it was the realisation that you can't keep up with everything, no matter how relevant/important, that stopped me. Along with the inability to keep up was a strong and growing sense of inadequacy which was fairly crippling.

Eventually I twigged that all this stuff is a river - continuously flowing, into which it's possible to dip and sense the mood and perhaps go after the occasional fish or interesting piece of driftwood. There's always Google blog search if you want to track down what's been said recently on any particular subject. And, as you point out, tags. Although I'm less trusting of them because they're not universally used.

When Netvibes came along, it allowed me to Watch the river without necessarily going for a swim. This is where the value of a good descriptive headline comes in. Netvibes just lists the feeds in little boxes - you can choose how items many you want to display in each, but the next/previous links mean you don't have to miss stuff.

If you want to see the full degree to which I (don't) track, see the attached picture. The bold numbers are how many unselected/unread items are outstanding in each category.

Am I bothered? Not any more. Like you, I go where I want when I need to. You'll notice the 'ego' tab has no unreads. When I go to a tab with unread entries, it takes seconds to scan each one.

I agree about Twitter - lots of lost souls clinging together for comfort and reassurance. Facebook is heading the same way and they're making some strategic mistakes at the moment. I hope it will pass because groups have good potential for business use as does the general theory of 'find someone who knows'.

The water cooler/bonding aspect of these social media is important IMHO, providing it doesn't descend into pointless natter (the social media gurus will argue that nothing's pointless, it might come in handy some time). Sometimes our own Skype IM group is good, sometimes it's noise. But there's bonding going on there. These things can be good for distributed teams or collaborators.

Part of whether social computing has value lies in the size of the participating group. And this applies to wikis as well. Too few active participants in a community means that nothing happens and value isn't extracted. Large organisations like IBM, BT or BBC get value out. Signal/noise can be improved with simple ground rules. And, of course, by the fact that people's online activities are visible to all in the community.

Finally, there's the question of why people do stuff online. Blogging in particular, but it could apply to Twitter, Facebook et al. Conventional wisdom is 'post often'. I think the reason for this is that you then go up the various rankings. And, if you get visible, you go up further because people think you must be good. I've always thought this was barmy, and still do. The scheduled or frequent posting is not for the benefit of the reader, it's for the benefit of the publisher or the individual doing the post.

You talk in your piece about how few blogs have something original to say. And I agree. It's just noise. And, I suspect a lot of this is because people feel obliged to post at a particular frequency, regardless of if there's any reason to post.

It's all jolly complicated. I know there are Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays when I think "oh shit, it's blog post day". Although, mostly, something has happened in the previous week to justify some kind of post. Then there's the time it takes up.... But that's another story.

David

Removing blog posts

Received wisdom says you should never remove blog posts or make meaning-changing edits, without making it clear what you're up to or why,.

So, this note is to say that I'm going to remove some of the entries from this blog which exist purely to point at something I've written elsewhere. I have, instead, added a Grazr reading list in the right sidebar of this blog which lists most of my recent online stuff. It does this through a Yahoo! Pipe which keeps watch on this kind of thing.

I will only add a link entry for stuff which would otherwise not be picked up.

I'm probably the only person who cares, but I thought I'd better explain.

PS Some feeds take a while to be updated so it might take a little while for the Grazr panel to accurately reflect reality

Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) on successful wikis

Yesterday, Jimmy Wales blew into town to address a huge audience of information professionals at the Online Information conference. Wales, in case you don't know, co-founded Wikipedia which is intended to become "the sum of all human knowledge". Written for the people by the people. And hugely popular, to boot.
As ever with these kind of events, the question and answer session at the end was just as interesting as the prepared presentation. It was a chance for some baffled people to get to grips with some key issues. While these were Wikipedia-focused they do resonate with other wiki activity, including that in your own organisation perhaps.
Freeform Dynamics recently ran a survey asking people how they connect at work or education, as opposed to in their personal life. The 1500 or so responses came from IT professionals and, that subset that liked responding to a survey on this subject. Interestingly, in the work context, wikis were read by more than 55 percent of respondents and contributed to by about 25 percent. This suggests that wikis are certainly on the business communication radar. Wales' thoughts could well help avoid some false starts.
On participation, he talked of applying the 'neutrality principle' to writing style. I think he means avoid opinion and stick to facts. Or, to don the behavioural psychologist's hat, to keep contributions adult rather than parental or childish. A debate is more constructive and likely to lead to a better outcome than a fight.
In a similar vein, Wales urges courtesy and respect for the community. He gives the example of journalists who think its clever to edit a contribution to see how long it takes for anyone to notice. The important takeaway here is that people cannot be expected to just start contributing to Wikipedia without understanding and agreeing to some basic ground rules.
He doesn't regard Wikipedia as the place to publish original research. For a start, no-one would be able to check it. Second of all, it gets away from the principle of the "sum of all human knowledge", in the sense of a summary, understandable to the layman but with sources cited for those who want to drill deeper. In Wikipedia's case, he politely suggests that researchers get their material published elsewhere first and then cite this as a source. The 'summary' idea is a good one. The difficulty in a company wiki is that it's sometimes quicker to write or cut and paste a long discourse than a thought-out summary. But, if no-one reads it, it seems rather counter-productive.
On credibility, it's somewhat easier for humans to assess this than for it to be calculated automatically. Wales would be interested in seeing a background colour wash in Wikipedia according to the credibility of the writer. But, as he points out, a mathematical formula might regard his frequent contributions to the policy part of Wikipedia as 'argumentative' and downgrade him accordingly.
Humans take into account their knowledge of a person, whether their changes and challenges have improved the content, their engagement style generally, their biases, etc. Try working out a reliable algorithm to deal with that lot. Perhaps Wales is right to be experimenting with it but with no firm plans for its introduction.
Another thing to bear in mind is that a wiki isn't like paper. It's theoretically limitless. Wales noted that the English language write up of Pokémon provides details of all the various regions but the German version has not allowed this. People don't have to read this stuff, so does it matter whether it's there or not? Since wikis are largely textual, they demand little in storage resources.
Finally, there's the question of motivation. In Wikipedia's case, Wales believes it boils down to humanitarianisn or fun, where the fun is being part of an enthusiastic and engaged community of common interest. He points out that "doing wikis alone doesn't work". He suggests five or six people - friends, enemies, it doesn't matter - engaging day in and day out is the way to go.
In our coporate wikis, we can probably discard the humanitarian aspects but fun and community building sound like good motivations.

Because I can

Someone I know has posted a video of himself, very drunk and largely content-free. I was going to link to it here and ask him whether he might regret it. But I realised that I would regret doing this so I refrained.

He had bragged about it on Twitter, which suggests he didn't care. But then he was three sheets to the wind at the time, so perhaps his judgement was in question.

This brings to the fore one of the issues of social computing which is that people upload stuff (words, pictures, movies) just because they can rather than because it might be interesting, informative or entertaining.

This pollutes and dilutes the infosphere (Luciano Floridi beat me to that term by a wide margin). However, the good thing is that no-one has to look, tag or link. But this kind of thing can be permanent and cause damage when it's least expected.

Unless, of course, you're Paris Hilton. Which my acquaintance isn't. Despite filming himself topless.

What were they thinking?

As you probably know, details of 25 million British citizens were slapped on a couple of CDs and popped in HMRC's internal mail. And the package got lost.

The loss of a couple of CDs is nothing. A pound sterling. But the value of the content is beyond price. Especially to someone disposed to a bit of identity theft.

The lost information includes bank account details, national insurance numbers, names and addresses and birthdays of those involved.

The chancellor used the usual get-out reserved for these situations "so far there is no evidence the data had fallen into criminal hands." I don't want to be alarmist, but if I were a criminal, I wouldn't exactly publicise my ownership of such a treasure trove. I'd let things go quiet for a bit. Wait until the phone companies, building societies, banks or whatever have dropped their guard then move in stealthily to change addresses, secure loans, get benefits and set up mobile phone accounts.

Perhaps I shouldn't mention this, but I've moved house a couple of times recently and I know the sort of questions these officials ask. And I also know how easy it is to offer a different piece of information to that being requested, in order to persuade people of my identity. I even got a password out of one unwitting employee.

I sincerely hope the discs are found, still sealed in their envelope. That would be wonderful news and a great relief to all concerned. If they're not found, or the envelope is tampered with/missing then this is unlikely to be the end of the matter.

This kind of thing is a salutary reminder that people are the least reliable element of any computer system. And it doesn't matter what clever security you put in place, if someone decides to do something daft, then all the millions or billions you spend on a sophisticated system are wasted.

Given that people were around before computers and are likely to be around afterwards, then it's a fair bet that we will always be at risk.

Perhaps it really is time for the government and its agencies to ask themselves exactly why they have to grab and store quite as much information as they do.

They might care to go further and consider the carbon footprint that all their computer systems are responsible for.

Perhaps it's time for a rethink at multiple levels.

You never know, one day we might be glad that today happened.