As I’ve matured through experience in the use of social media, I’m impressed by the number of times that this can be leveraged into supporting “real work”. My most recent post (which I’ve created as a page so it stays retains relevance) on the 10 Principles for Enterprise Social Software Adoption is a great example of this.

As a Twitter user, I’ve been tracking the usage of Lotus Connections and the buzz around it as approached its version 2.0 launch using Summize, (now Twitter Search). I set up a custom filter search which I shared with the community (through Twitter again) which let me monitor various tweets.

A couple of things came together. I tweeted about the fact I was working on the principles for Social Software adoption for my employer, and @Idonotes asked if I’d share which I was happy to do.

Through monitoring Twitter I also came to “know” at @lbenitez , a passionate evangelist for Lotus Connections. He tweeted about discussing principles for Lotus Connections and I shared the post I’d made on my blog here. Luis provided some feedback and so I took this on board and then we moved our collaboration into the real world, setting up a phone call and a discussion.

Luis took on the “job” of road testing these with his clients, while I shopped them around internally and on the blog. As a result of this collaboration I think we’ve acheived a great outcome and one that demonstrates how social networking can help you produce an outcome. I believe the new principles are now more sound than anything I’d of produced individually, my employer benefits, Luis has benefited and hopefully the community also benefits.

Gia Lyons tweeted “[can someone tell me] the value of the data portability movement for enterprises, i mean. Not consumer sites”.

I thought I’d put my thoughts down here, not least because I know that Elias Bizannes and Chris Saad, both players in the Dataportability movement occasionally stumble across my musings and will no doubt carry the conversation back to Gia.

So, while under time pressure to watch a movie with my wife, here are three reasons to describe the value the dataportability movement brings to the enterprise.  Chris has also blogged on this just recently and I have appropriated some of his themes here.

1. Dataportability provides a language to combine previously disparate standards.  As an Enterprise Architect, I love standards and I love them even more when my two largest vendors, Microsoft and IBM are expressing interest and supporting at least some of the same ones.  Some Enterprises may not care about dataportability as a whole, but they will care deeply about the artifacts it produces and helps drive, like APML, OPML, OpenID etc.
2. Enterprise Social Networks are rapidly evolving.  Todays solution may not be tomorrows winner.  To be able to move and migrate easily between Confluence, Jive, Lotus Connections etc. etc. at will is always appreciated.
3. Enterprises will begin to break down the firewalls.  Ultimately Enterprises want to work with their clients; it won’t be tomorrow, but Enterprises will realise that clients don’t want to fill out yet another profile form, but want to share their own data in controlled ways with them.

There will be bumps along the way, but while the dataportability debate may not be critical to Enterprises today, the outcomes will be crucial.

I saw ManyEyes at LotusSphere in the labs this year and was reminded again of it when I found a link to it on this blog.

It’s a powerful tool for embedding dynamic visualisations into your site.  The most powerful feature I think, is the way that comments posted on a visualisation keep a link to the visualisation the user who commented was seeing.  This is something that could be extended into many different arenas — imagine a dynamic comment system in wordpress where you could click on a comment to see the text someone had highlighted when they made the comment etc .  Or YouTube, where users could comment with linkbacks to the footage they were specifically commenting on.  I’m sure we will see more of this.

I’ve just returned from LotusSphere 2008 and had a great time.  While the presentations and demos are interesting, I found the most insightful part of the time there was spent in the Innovation and Development labs talking with developers about the advances they are making.  In the Innovation lab in particular, deep conversations can develop and you walk away feeling that some of the concepts will make it into a code.

 Loosely speaking, you can categorise a lot of the Web 2.0 tools and concepts into two very high level, broad categories like:

• Organisational Networks - LinkedIn, FaceBook, MySpace, Digg, Del.i.cious etc.
• Collaborative Creation  (Wisdom of Crowds type tools) - Wiki’s, Blogs etc.

What’s clear from LotusSphere is that IBM are clearly taking these broad brush categories (perhaps more or less) and building out tool sets like Quickr and Connections that apply these into the corporate world.

There are many reasons why this is appealing to corporates, not least command and control within the firewall on what is going on, but the most interesting idea is how it relates to Knowledge Management (KM). 

In my nearly 20 years in IT, I’ve been involved in various projects in different companies that again and again have tried to address the issue of KM.  What these Knowledge Management 1.0 efforts have all had in common, and why they’ve failed, is that they try and formalise the capturing of knowledge that is expressed and documented.  When I have to consciously make an effort, through modifying my natural processes and procedures, to share with you, then ultimately the effort will fail.  It fails because ultimately, the value in it for me, is not as great as the value in it for you.  Once the latest KM drive loses steam, I’ll drift back to my old ways and the path of least resistance.

In KM terms this type of knowledge is called Explicit knowledge.

Nickols, F. W. (2000). The knowledge in knowledge management. In Cortada, J.W. & Woods, J.A. (Eds) The knowledge management yearbook 2000-2001 (pp. 12-21). Boston, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann.
It’s worth taking a moment to browse the citation as it gives an excellent summary of the three main types of Knowledge as described in KM terms, I’ve paraphrased what I think are the key three here:

• Explicit - What has been expressed and captured
• Implicit - What can be expressed, but isn’t captured
• Tacit - What can’t be expressed (so by definition isn’t captured).

As an aside, I suspect the categories of Tacit knowledge are decreasing over the years (biometrics probably couldn’t be expressed years ago, but now we have computers that can recognise faces in crowds).  Anyway, my point is this, while the Web 2.0 world and the categories of tools bring real value to corporations, one form of value I haven’t heard expressed until recently is that they will help corporations capture Implicit knowledge by mining my behaviours and actions.

When Lotus Connections 2.0 announced at LotusSphere promises to deliver a Colleagues version of the friending concept, it’s really building an Implicit knowledge network that can be mined for real information that is accessible to all users across the organisation.  Atlas mines your e-mail for your connections and expertise. Spock mines social networks for Implicit knowledge on who you are and who you know.  Wiki’s mine the knowledge of the crowd through the creation process. 

When corporations ask what value in Web 2.0 concepts and social networking, they are undervaluing what most would say is their greatest asset - the collective knowledge of their employees.  I believe that the real value in a lot of what we call Web 2.0 will be realised when these tools begin delivering ways for corporations to finally tackle Knowledge Management 2.0 — non-intrusive KM, captured by tools that work the way people work and ensure that the Implicit knowledge of the organisation is captured effortlessly by people simply doing their job in the way they want to do it.

Based on this, my final three thoughts are simply that:

1. The reason Collaborative Creation tools are being adopted by corporations today (and will be at an increasing pace) is because they deliver a form of Implicit knowledge that corporations (slowly and eventually) “get”.  Content is delivered in a relatively concrete way that mimics a document to some degree.  The stretch is less.
2. Social Collaboration tools will begin to boom as Corporations realise that they are a promising solution to unlock the Implicit knowledge within their organisations that they can’t see.
3. Discovery and Surfacing tools (of which Spock, Atlas and Particls are all examples of) will become even more critical.  Smart ways of unleashing the networks and information people are building to capture and deliver value that was not easily attainable before.

Working for a firm that deals in sensitive information with clients, a recurring theme is the desire to work in the Web 2.0 world, but do so with some inherently closed walls.  For example, LinkedIn is a great tool, but is it really a contact management tool when your clients and business partners may be confidential.

IBM have released Atlas for Lotus Connections (check out Alan Lepofsky for pictures and links to the press release).   It works with your internal social profiles and build networks based on e-mail and other assets to create a graphical, LinkedIN type mesh of contacts for the internal network.

This is a big step forward for enterprises which have the size and mass to be able to leverage social tools like this internally, but can’t expose all their dealings to the external world. 

Using the API’s, a logical extension in this would be linking in CRM and Contact management systems to create a comprehensive internal marketing tool that brought together the internal and external networks that matter to large organisations. 

Working for one of the largest global users of Lotus Notes, it’s been frustrating as an architect over the last few years to see IBM lost in wilderness since they aquired Notes and uncertain what to do with it.  I’m fortunate to have some visibility on upcoming Notes products around Notes 8 and beyond and I’m not revealing anything much when I say that at last, there seems to be a strong direction for the platform again.

Erica Driver of Forrestor research has an excellent article about Sametime 7.50 / 7.51.  If you are at all interested in Lotus Notes futures and can spend some corporate cash, it’s worth the $399US in my opinion, although my copy was already paid for.  It all points to the buss being back.

When a company like News Gator (a Microsoft Gold Certified partner and long time Outlook afficiando’s) release a client for Lotus Notes, well things are really looking up!

While it may not be a Microsoft killer yet, there are now good reasons for companies with Lotus Notes to continue to invest in the product, and those who have a heavy IBM / Websphere Portal environment to move to it.