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.

At the risk of Turtle - Hare comparisons, as no doubt The Age will be here years after I finish blogging, I can’t help point out they’ve caught up with Spock some 3 months after I mentioned it here.

So well done The Age, and well done Spock for making the mainstream press.  I think I have about 100 invites left on my Spock account so if you want to check it out, just leave a comment and I’ll send you an invite.

PS — I know, I know, this is a particularly purile and trivial post, but I can’t resist it :-)  I also make no claim to being first — I read about it somewhere else again that I can’t remember now — Scoble I think…

I’ve mentioned Spock a couple of times, if you’re not familiar it’s a new “people” based search which crawls web-sites and social networking site to build a comprehensive picture of people.  If you haven’t checked it out, it’s worth a look.

I recently wanted to get back in touch with an old friend who had moved and whose details I’d misplaced.  The white pages were no help — over 100 matches in N.S.W alone.  Spock on the other hand lead me straight to her linked in profile and there was sufficient information their to ascertain that she was exactly the person I was after.

It lead me to two conclusions:

1. Spock is getting it right — it was the location that helped me find the person I was after.
2. There are still a heck of a lot of people (100+ in one state for one name match alone) who still have no profile on the Internet.

I came across Spock a few weeks ago and signed up for an invite.  At that stage it was just an empty web page with the promise of more to come, still the thought someone was tackling the problem of identifying people on the internet was refreshing.

Well Spock has moved to private beta now, and at first glance this is going to be the next killer app for finding and identifying people.  What makes it different from Google? Well a couple of things actually.

When I search for “Tim Bull” in Google, I get a hit for every web page that I (or someone with my name) happens to score a mention.  This is a long way from Spock, which acts in a person centric way — at a high level (and I’m interpreting here) a person is more akin to an object. Not a page, but rather a collection of references which relate to the person.

Where Spock is makles this process more intelligent is that you (and others) can interact with your person profile, voting on references, assigning references and generally collaborating to make a diverse, and complete version of “you”.

It’s another great example of how the new Internet is all about attention.  While some applications (Particls is one example) are looking at “WHAT” you should pay attention too, Spock looks at “WHO” you should pay attention to.