This is something that’s been consuming my thinking recently.  I believe quite strongly that tools like Wikis, Blogs, Social Networks and others clearly represent real value for the enterprise.  But I also believe that there is a gap at the moment, the tools haven’t crossed the divide from the consumer world to the Enterprise (see my earlier post on this http://binaryplex.com/2007/05/27/what-start-ups-should-know-about-enterprises/).

I think there is a lot of evidence this is beginning to change, you only need to look at both IBM and Microsoft to see that features and tools that have evolved on the Internet are beginning to eek their way slowly into their product sets.  In some cases, there are partnerships to short-circuit their gaps, in others the big boys are starting again from scratch.

All of this has had me thinking about what does a model of the Web2.0 look like within the Enterprise.  Not what is the tool and who wrote it, but if you could design a system supported by standards (some of which exist), what is enterprise ready today, and where are the gaps.

I present my first cut of my model of Web 2.0 for the Enterprise.  I’ll take some time over the next week to post further and explain the concepts on here.  I’d love to take your feedback — I think a proper “joined up” design is what we need to work out where the gaps really are and how Enterprises want to use them. 

One simple example of the kind of joined up thinking required (not on the model funnily enough) is security - inside the enterprise I don’t want 15 different security models, or to log in repeatedly as I move between my blog and my wiki.

As I see it, the model is laid out in four parts, from bottom up:

• Services - fundamental elements that provide consistent experiences and management throughout the stack.  These are broken down into:
  • Notification Services
  • Validation Services
• Tools - the components that a pull together into a solution, they may exist discretely or combined together. These are broken down into:
  • Content Creation
  • Social Networking
  • Content Sharing
• Discovery - the “glue” that pulls it together, and often missed in the Enterprise today (how many of you have blogs without a service like Technorati to surface content and find blogs from feeds.  This is where I believe the emerging smarts are only now really starting to mature with tools like Particls, Spock and others to name a few I’ve mentioned. 
• Presentation Layer - the UI layer.  Critical for the consisten experience that the enterprise expects.

So there it is, as I say, feedback and comments welcome and appreciated — I going to expand further on this and explain the reasoning and functions behind each component in more detail, and look at what tools exist today that fill some of these gaps.

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.

I posted about the concept of a Steam Engine Time, so is it time for an intelligent RSS reader.  A friend pointed me in the direction of Illumio, which I’d characterise as a kind of combination of intelligent RSS filtering similar to Particls, and a group discussion thread like Tangler, with a touch of an ask the expert interface about it as well.

There is a short video below — I’m yet to install the application, so this isn’t a real blow by blow comparison of various products, but I am interested in the idea that there are emerging applications addressing a similar problem space.

One interesting feature of Illumio is the way that it can apparently scan your hard drive for topics and items of expertise and use this to promote your expertise anonymously.  A feature like this would be powerful for Knowledge Management within an enterprise, if only there was an enterprise friendly version!

The pressure is on to find an RSS / News solution for the Enterprise.  But it’s not coming from the users (I think this is because users that want RSS just install their own client anyway).

Every time it’s been raised internally in the last couple of years it’s come from the “Knowledge Managers” (inverted commas indicate sarcasm at the use of this title) who see it as a new communications channel that can achieve cut-through over e-mail.  The two major requirements they present are:

1. At an Enterprise level we can force users to subscribe to their knowledge channel.
2. Any news reader has an alerting mechanism (pop ups) so that it gets peoples attention.

Primarily this is because the copious lotus notes databases, intranet sites, e-mail bulletins etc. are NOT getting the attention that they supposedly deserve (I try and argue that they are in fact getting EXACTLY the attention they deserve, but that’s not always well recieved).  I quickly point out to them that implementing a news reader for every staff member that allowed us to force feeds on them would be quickly swamped by the competing parts of the organisation with their individual information spam which would turn users off and leave us back in the same mess.

As you can see, it’s really not a subscription problem at all – it’s actually an attention one, and in an Enterprise there are two important halves to the attention equation;

1. Am I as a user being told about the things that are important to me?
2. And as an Enterprise how can I be sure that users are seeing the things that it’s important that they see?

After thinking about this for a few weeks now, I’m going to express the high level problem domain for the Enterprise like this. We need a solution that:

1.  Allows us to “declutter” e-mail and remove alerts and news from e-mail notification.  E-mail should be for inter-personal communication ONLY.
2. Provide a new channel (Enterprise RSS) for all “bulletin” or one-to-many styles of communication.  Satisfy the needs of the Enterprise by allowing sophisticated profiling of both RSS feeds and users, so for example particular alerts can be automatically subscribed to particular groups of users.  Most importantly provide detailed reporting and therefore added value on the read counts for each feeds and even the time spent browsing content.
3. The content aggregator needs to function like Technorati, allowing me to browse feeds by searching and by tags in a central location — I shouldn’t need to go to every corner of the organisation to find feeds, they should be in one place.  I also want some way of valuing the feed.
4. Provides RSS “connectors” to other sources to allows users to aggregate their monitoring behaviours into a single location (big thumbs up to Lotus who have added an RSS feed generator to do this automatically with Domino databases).
5. We need an Attention Client Engine (like Particls) which can monitor the news reader and provide two sophisticated features:
   1. Learns from peoples behaviours, profile and feeds what is important to them and alerts them accordingly.
   2. Provides this information back up to an Attention Server to aggregate and understand the attention profiles of the user base and then manage sophisticated alerting back to all users of information they may have missed that could be important to them all.
6. Finally, lets the users have a degree of control over the information they are alerted to, personalising their own attention profile so that they are interrupted with the things that matter to them, while still being able to browse the news client for the things that matter to the Enterprise.

Here’s one attempt at a high level model for this. Feel free to comment on it — I can already think of a few additions, so I’d love to hear from you on yours.

Of course the Attention Engine and the News Client could be combined, but I think back to the values of the APML work group and even some basic architectural principles, there is value in seperating these — I can select, train and tune an Enterprise Attention Engine seperate from my subscription engine, and I’m not beholden to one subscription engine, or even one attention engine if I can seperate the two.

I don’t think we are there yet — open standards would need to be created to allow News Readers to publish their attention statistics to an attention engine (ie. even simple things like feed read counts etc.), but a solution like this would begin to radically alter the way in which users in an Enterprise experience information.

I think Particls and News Gator are two companies both approaching this same problem space from different sides of the equation — I’ll be interested to see how they resolve the issues and the solustions they propose.

 So that’s what I’m looking for; I’m still to evaluate a number of vendors more fully, maybe my utopia exists, but I haven’t seen it yet.  If you think you have something in this space, then feel free to contact me or comment below — I’d love to see what you’ve got.

In the mean time, I’ll resist Enterprise RSS until I can be sure that we don’t just end up with another mess like e-mail has become — there’s only one chance to do this right.

I’ve mentioned Touchstone a few times here and here.  Well it’s just been renamed to Particls and the latest beta client released.  The new client looks to be a big step forward and a few niggly bugs from the earlier beta look to have been addressed.

The current beta is invite only from current participants, if you’ re interested and link me or leave a comment, I’d be happy to drop you an invite.

Touchstone popped this up from the blogosphere:

Every company innovates until it finds a cash cow. At that point only innovation that supports the cash cow is promoted. Further, any innovation that threatens or does not support the cash cow languishes or is actively killed. Eventually, most of the true innovation ceases as the innovators leave and start new companies and the cycle repeats. From The Walrus and The Carpenter

Certainly at first glance there is some merit in this. But is it really true? After all, IBM originally created calculators (although there is a good argument that the computers of today just do what these machines did but faster), but at some point ended up a leading hardware and software company — in fact they define their business principle as innovation.

My view on this is that I think it’s true to say that there are very few (if any) companies that change tack once they hit on their Hedgehog Concept (from Jim Collins in his book Good to Great). But does this mean they don’t innovate?

No.

Google continue to innovate and produce new web based solutions, some centered around search, others outside of this. But then their hedgehog idea would be something along the lines of being the worlds leading on-line software company. They don’t innovate around cars.

The challenge for all businesses is to ensure that having a sound hedgehog concept — knowing what you are good at — doesn’t detract from allowing news ways of doing what you are good at to creep into vision. Many of us would be familiar with the project mentality which is that when under pressure to manage costs, time and scope, the natural reaction is to do things the same way I did them last time. While sound project and business practice, it’s the biggest “anti-innovator” within corporates today in my view.

This is where Enterprise Architecture can help. I’ve created this diagram to show how I try explain the relationship between Architecture and Innovation.

Sound architectural practices are key to innovation. Without a view on the future, and a drive to ensure that projects comply and take advantage of newer technologies, innovation will always be constrained. Staying too focussed on what you’re good at, and not challenging the boundaries and introducing managed risk means you will never be innovative. Good Enterprise Architecture can help.

I’ve been impressed with the quality of a number of developments I’ve come across recently coming out of Australia.  It seems to be a hot bed of Web 2.0 type activity with some world class products.

Three that take my fancy are:

• http://www.atlassian.com Makers of Confluence, which is a great Wiki product, and one that for Enterprises makes a lot of sense given its flexibility, plug-in support and in particular focus on security. Yes, I know security is almost anti-wiki, but reality bites. No serious Enterprise will consider a Wiki without SOME level of security. Even those that are happy for open editing will want attribution at a minimum.
• http://www.touchstonelive.com/ These guys are producing what has to be the most ambitious RSS reader I’ve come across. If they can pull it off, then the features they are talking about will make this a real winner for Enterprises who want to provide staff with both a News Reader, but also control, limit and help manage some portion of the content (e.g. everyone in sales MUST get this feed about latest leads).
• http://www.tangler.com I’ve just joined the beta community for this one, not sure at this point in time that it’s an Enterprise solution, but for web-based communities, Tangler looks to have some real winning features.  If the thought of mail group type communities with a home and integrated IM sounds interesting, keep an eye on this one.

The point to all this is that there is some great content and ideas coming out of Australia (skills shortage anyone?), although they go to some lengths to hide it (smart marketing — size of Gen-Y in Australia, about 4.2M, in the US over 79M) to the extent of spelling Mum as Mom.

Keep it up guys! Lets spread the message that there is some fantastic product coming up.