The Content Economy

This week in links - week 47, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:43:00 +0000

"Social Technology Impacts Every Customer Touchpoint" by Jeremiah Owyang:

Social Technologies are a Horizontal –Not A Vertical Approach

It continues to amaze the market that such simple social technologies can impact the entire organization. In fact, social technologies, at the core, allow people to connect to each other without a middle person in the way. As a result, expect social technologies to impact every employee and customer touchpoint. CMOs must prepare in their 2010 planning how to leverage social, not as a skunkworks but as a strategic shift in all communications.

"The Rise Of Networks, The End Of Process" by Stowe Boyd:

From a social viewpoint, the architecture of business seems all wrong. People aren't really designed to do one thing, like a cog in a watch. They have various relationships with other people, and through these relationships they have influence on the work going on all around them. They are not alone, like a moth in a bell jar. We are not alone, in our work. Even the most repetitive of work -- screwing bolts on an assembly line, or delivering the mail -- happens in the context of other people, and is made more valuable by their exertions.

Increasingly, people's work is being viewed as a shared aspect of social relations. Time is a shared space, where we cooperate toward shared ends.

One casualty of this large-scale shift in business doctrine may be the hallowed business process. The notion of a process -- a defined series of steps in the production of goods or the delivery of services -- subordinates individuals to the their roles in the process.

We will have to devise a new, richer way to think about people's interactions -- via social networks -- and our connection to mechanical processes and devices. In effect, we will need to model work with two layers, one where people are communicating with each other in a very fluid and flexible way, and machinery communicates with us and other machinery in less fluid ways.

"Understanding Enterprise 2.0 Tolerances & Scale" by Oliver Marks:

Mature larger companies are often akin to large cities. Los Angeles or London for example have grown over time to consume and incorporate the towns around them, forming a complex network of places within a greater whole. The navigation systems connecting this urban fabric develops to match the travel patterns of inhabitants. Enterprise information architects in equivalent large companies should be like town planners watching traffic patterns closely and anticipating need.

Small business is in contrast often like a single campus community, hopefully rapidly growing and feeding off its surroundings. The commonality is broadband internet connectivity, which like the transport options connecting small campus to large city makes all sorts of interesting collaboration possible. Add in the realities of globalization and associated clustering of business entities and it’s easy to see why the concept of business ‘performance fabric’ is seen as a critical collaborative trade competitive advantage.

Helping planners of collaboration understand these concepts is vitally important to prevent the adoption of milquetoast tentative pilot schemes, which are typically experiments to try and find business value through experimentation.

Peter Drucker, the brilliant management guru who defined the term ‘knowledge worker’, was clear these employees or partners couldn’t be controlled but must instead be motivated and given integrative collaboration environments to excel. Common goals, values and sense of purpose empower them to succeed on their own terms.

As an advocate of decentralization and against ‘command and control’ management, Drucker was clear knowledge workers would collaborate effectively as a community if driving to specified business objectives. While the new 2.0 technologies realize this and facilitate execution, strategic planning in many cases lags behind broadband application development and are not aligned with Drucker’s clarity of thought.

"We cannot problem solve our way into fundamental change, or transformation" by David Gurteen:

I recently came across this quote from Peter Block in an online booklet of his entited "Civic Engagement and the Restoration of Community: Changing the Nature of the Conversation":

My belief is that the way we create conversations that overcome the fragmented nature of our communities is what creates an alternative future.

This can be a difficult stance to take for we have a deeply held belief that the way to make a difference in the world is to define problems and needs and then recommend actions to solve those needs.

We are all problem solvers, action oriented and results minded. It is illegal in this culture to leave a meeting without a to-do list.

We want measurable outcomes and we want them now.

What is hard to grasp is that it is this very mindset which prevents anything fundamental from changing.

We cannot problem solve our way into fundamental change, or transformation.

This is not an argument against problem solving; it is an intention to shift the context and language within which problem solving takes place.

Authentic transformation is about a shift in context and a shift in language and conversation. It is about changing our idea of what constitutes action.

ECM meets Enterprise 2.0 – 7 key trends

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:34:00 +0000

In the post "ECM in the age of the social web - new slide deck" I promised that I would put some words to some of the slides from my presentation "ECM Today - Trends & Reality". Well, here they are.

To start with, I define Enterprise Content Management (ECM) as:

"All the things that are needed - from vision and strategy down to digital nuts and bolts - to be able to manage all the content within an enterprise regardless of type, format and location throughout its lifecycle, from creation to retirement, so that the content can be found and used when needed by users."

ECM is not about managing content for the sake of managing content. What matters is that we can use the content, and get the information we need when we need it.

Most organizations say that effective information management – where ECM is a key component - is a key to their long-term success. Still, many organizations (top management) don't put information management and ECM on their top 10 lists. Why is that?

When a customer cannot find the information she needs on a web site to buy a product or service, she will likely turn to another company and web site to buy the product or service from them instead. This is quite easy to understand for most people. It is quite obvious that we need to make sure that the customer has all the information she needs to make the decision to buy our product or service. It needs to be there on the web site, on the page and location where she expects to find it, right at her fingertips. Unfortunately, the cause-effect chain that starts with an employee not beeing able to find information or spending a lot of time looking for it or recreating information that already exists is much harder to see than cause-effect chain starts with a customer not being able to find a product on a web site to lost profits.

In the light of the current shift taking place in most businesses in the developed part of the world, it will become even more important for organizations to be good at information management, and specifically ECM as the amount of unstructured content grows significantly faster than more structured content (data). Today, it is not enough to improve transformational and transactional processes to stay competitive. Businesses must also become better at collaborating and innovating to stay competitive. So, improvments efforts are slowly shifting more towards how they can improve knowledge work. Exactly how to do this is not clear to most businesses, as current methods and strategies do not apply.

We are also seeing that different technologies are converging. The engine, or the epicentral if you like, that is causing this conversion is the current development on the web with concepts such as social media, social networking, Software as a Service, Cloud Computing, and so on. The web is becoming an operating system for more and more businesses.

One major trend affecting ECM is the exploding volumes of what we call user generated content. Tools such as blogs and wikis have made production of content so cheap and easy that single individuals can make an income of it, and some are even able compete with the leading traditional media corporations. The usability, reach and low cost of these tools have also made business users, on their own initiative, introduce them internally for business purposes. These business people form what is sometimes called a “Shadow IT department”. It is the responsibility of ECM to provide a platform where the user-generated content can be created, managed and used and integrated with all other kinds of content.

Another trend is that a lot of the traditional content production workflows have been radically altered for a lot of the content that is created and maintained in a business. The read-write web, with tools such as wikis, are blurring traditional roles such as author, editor and reader. ECM needs to support this content production model. ECM is not only about content production workflows tied to business processes, but also about the everyday and sometimes ad hoc production, management and use of content that occupy knowledge workers.

With Software as a Service and cloud computing, content is now also produced, managed and distributed on the Internet, beyond the corporate firewalls. It means that ECM becomes even more complex. How do we manage and integrate content in internal systems with content that resides outside of the firewalls?

Today we also have much more open and structured formats for content than the traditional and opaque documents. Most documents formats today - such as OpenDocument or Office Open XML - are based on XML, with content separated from the presentation. So what is a document?

So, the notion of what a document is is blurring. The evolution of hypertext and the web makes it harder to determine what we mean with the term document. Besides the fact that we now have much more open and structured formats for content than the traditional and opaque documents, the distinction between the content and the user interface is also blurring due to the introduction of new technologies such as AJAX. We are seeing smart and dynamic content products that go beyond the passive and static nature of traditional documents. Content can be assembled from different sources into one container, with so called mashup technologies, where the individual pieces of content can be constantly updated independently of each other.

One of the more interesting trends is that the conversations we have about content is now often captured and associated with the content itself. New tools and technologies allow us to discuss and comment on content, as well as rating and recommending it to others. In the end, content is just something to talk about. It is used to feed the conversations that drive the operation and management of a business with relevant, timely, complete and actionable information. These challenge for ECM is that these conversations are also content and needs to be managed so they can be found and used when needed.

People are now also creating metadata embedded in the activities they perform, such as uploading and sharing a photo, or writing a blog post. They tag and describe the content to be able to share it with others and help others find their content. Popular services like Slideshare, Flickr and YouTube handles enormous amounts of content. By collecting a lot of metadata and using user profiling, they make possible for users to find and discover content they need or are interested in. So how do we take advantage of this for improving ECM?

The key message here that I want to make is that we are facing a new reality and that reality dramatically affects Enterprise Content Management and how we manage information within a business. We must study and learn about this new reality.

To tackle the challenges of ECM, we need to create an vision and strategy for ECM and ensure commitment to this from top management. Secondly, we have to establish some sort of governance for ECM which allows for common funding and decision-making for enhancing shared ECM capabilities. Finally, we need to build some kind of competence that can provide the required resources, skills and support to ECM initiatives. We can see this as a kind of shared for ECM initiatives within the enterprise.

Morgan Stanley: 8 Key Mobile Internet Themes

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:18:00 +0000

Morgan Stanley presents some interesting statistics about the economy and Internet trends in this presentation (pptx) from Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. In the presentation, they point out 8 Key Mobile Internet Themes:

Mobile Internet Usage Is and Will Be Bigger than Most Think.
Apple Mobile Share Should Surprise on Upside Near-Term.
Next Generation Platforms (Social Networking + Mobile) Driving Unprecedented Change in Communications + Commerce.
Mobile in Japan + Desktop Internet Provide Roadmaps for Mobile Growth + Monetization.
3G Adoption / Trends Vary By Geography.
Carriers in USA / W. Europe Face Surging Network Demand But Uncertain Economics.
Regulators Can Help Advance / Slow Mobile Internet Evolution.
Mobile-Related Share Shifts Will Create / Destroy Material Shareholder Wealth.

Here are explanations of a couple of the trends above:

2. Apple Mobile Share Should Surprise on Upside Near Term

Near term, Apple is driving the platform change to mobile computing. Its mobile ecosystem (iPhone + iTouch + iTunes + accessories + services) market share / impact should surprise on upside for at least the next 1-2 years.

Long term, emerging markets competition, open mobile web (paced by likes of Google Android) and carrier limitations pose challenges. RIM likely to maintain enterprise lead for 1-2 years owing to installed base.

3. Next Generation Platforms (Social Networking + Mobile) are Driving Unprecedented Change in Communications + Commerce

Improvements in social networking and mobile computing platforms (led by Facebook + Apple ecosystems) are fundamentally changing ways people communicate with each other and ways developers / advertisers / vendors reach consumers.

Mobile devices will evolve as remote controls for ever expanding types of real-time cloud-based services, including emerging category of location-based services, creating opportunities + dislocations, empowering consumers in unprecedented + transformative ways.

Good preso on Bank 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:42:00 +0000

Bank 2.0 Conference - Gustaf Brandberg

View more presentations from TietoSweden.

This week in links - week 46, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:38:00 +0000

"Highlights from the Global Intranet Trends for 2010" by Jane McConnell:

Organizations are positioning the intranet as the entry point into the organization’s ensemble of information, applications, collaboration and communication tools.

Approximately one third of the organizations have a high-level intranet Steering Committee.

Twenty-five to 30 percent of organizations that have already implemented some form of social media have experienced 3 general benefits: increased employee engagement, more effective knowledge sharing, and better-informed employees.

Concerns are changing as organizations gain experience. Doubts are considerably lower about the relevance of social media to business needs, senior management hesitancy and employees wasting their time. At the same time there is a higher degree of concern about two things: the difficulty of finding information and potential user resistance.

Technologies such as presence indicators, instant messaging and web conferencing are found more frequently the more mature intranets

Intranets are leaving the workplace, or rather the workplace is being extended to where the people are.

"Enterprise 2.0 Schism" by Greg Lloyd:

I hereby declare myself an Enterprise 2.0 Strict Druckerian. I believe that "2.0" should be considered a modifier of Enterprise rather than an allusion to mere Web 2.0 technology - which is what an Enterprise 2.0 Strict Technarian would have you believe.

I believe that although both technology and broad bottom-up participation are necessary to achieve the Drukerian vision, neither element alone is sufficient to achieve the noble end of re-engineering how ordinary people work together to achieve the ends of enterprises they choose to affiliate with.

As Peter Drucker said: "The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary humans beings to do extraordinary things.

Peter Drucker constantly advised businesses to give employees direct control over their own work and environment, with teams of "knowledge workers" responsible for work toward goals stated as broad business objectives rather than prescriptive plans. Drucker stated that management could only achieve sustainable profits by treating people as an enterprise's most valued resources, not as costs. In later years he described his role as "social ecologist" rather than management consultant.

On "Return on investment" debates, I believe that Taylorist time-and-motion studies would show gains that typically exceed the modest costs of introducing and using Enterprise 2.0 software, but studies for knowledge work where the value is not transactional (time to process a purchase order) are difficult to design and far too easy to fudge. Large scale experimental studies based on overall business success are even more problematic - except in hindsight.

"Looking to the Past for Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Principles" by John Husband:

Many thinkers and consultants in the Enterprise 2.0 space are recognizing and discussing the need to re-design knowledge work and the small and large structural elements of organizations, due to the growing pervasiveness of today’s information-flow infrastructure.

The principles and elements of socio-technical systems theory, and offshoots like Emery and Trist’s Participative Work Design (on which I have written before), are in my opinion very useful and practical sources for thinking through and implementing some of the changes … in mental models and in practices … that I believe will be necessary to obtain the latent potential available in purposeful social computing aimed at an organization’s objectives for better and more responsive performance.

"Collaboration 'in the Wild': Some Observations" by James P. MacLennan:

I'm a huge driver of collaboration tools in the company. But, I'm also a realist - and I know two significant factors that argue against change at the time:

Prioritizing "Improvements": We are implementing ERP and other highly intrusive / foundational systems, and there's a lot of change that comes along with that. I understand that an organization can only take so much change at once - so why not focus on the stuff that's bringing real (ie. quantifiable, bottom-line, significant) business value.

New Collaboration Tools need Lead Time & Practice: Eight months ago, sharing files by e-mail and ad-hoc, unstructured meetings were the norm. To be fair, we were working smaller projects with teams of 10-20, and usually in no more than two locations. Over the past few months, as we were teeing up for Big Go-Live #1, we've been introducing the newer tools in small bits. For Go-Live Weekend, the team was already familiar with going to SharePoint for status updates, or recording a new Issue in the SharePoint list. The mechanics were old hat, and folks didn't need to think about it - which was nice, since we need them thinking about their Tasks. If we introduce new collaboration tools with little lead time before the Big Go-Live #2, Tasks will be interrupted with people struggling to remember how to communicate.

In the right setting, collaboration tools can clearly add value - even for the most conservative jaded technology users. However, you can't introduce something so new and expect people to "get it" in the short term. Better approach is to introduce the new tools early in the process, when there is no pressure. This lets the team build familiarity, understanding, and skills by the time you need to rely on these tools for critical communication.

No wave to surf on

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:04:00 +0000

Interesting facts from the Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Report 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:56:00 +0000

"How do consumers engage with brands in an increasingly digital world? That’s the fundamental question we set out to answer with this year’s FEED report...//...Our goal was to survey what we call “connected consumers.”...these “connected consumers” roughly mirror the U.S. population with broadband access...roughly 200 million people."

I've just read "The Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Report 2009" which was released yesterday. Although I am not in the advertising / marketing business, I find it important to learn about consumer trends. Today, consumers are shaping the future of the web, and thereby also the way businesses need to do business. We also bring our attitudes and behaviors as well as the technologies we use as consumers to work.

Here are some interesting facts from the report:

65% of consumers report having had a digital experience that either positively or negatively changed their opinion about a brand.
Of that group, a nearly unanimous 97% say that their digital experience influenced whether or not they eventually purchased a product or service from that brand.
73% have posted a product or brand review on a web site like Amazon, Yelp, Facebook, or Twitter.
64% of consumers report making a first purchase from a brand because of a digital experience.
57% of consumers have actively customized their homepages with specific content feeds, scheduled updates, or used other features
84% share links or bookmarks with a friend with some frequency
55% subscribe to RSS feeds with some frequency
an increasing number are getting news from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter
84% of consumers rely on the web to get current news or information
56% of “connected consumers” own a smartphone. BlackBerry and Apple, to no great surprise, are the most popular—and overwhelmingly so.

Below is the report on Slideshare:

FEED: The Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Report 2009

View more documents from Razorfish Marketing.

This week in links - week 45, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:29:00 +0000

"Mike Gotta: Enterprise 2.0 augments workflow driven system" by James Dellow:

We spoke today with Mike Gotta, an industry analyst with the Burton Group. He puts it well. For data entry and claims processing, people use other tools. The Enterprise 2.0 offerings augment their work.

"Dennis has a point," Gotta said. "These systems are not workflow driven - we already have tools to do that. "These tools augment work. They enhance it, they enrich it."

"Beyond Enterprise 2.0 ROI, evaluation and management of knowledge in the workplace" by Olivier Amprimo:

It is common knowledge that “what you can’t measure, you can’t manage”. And because knowledge is intangible by nature, it is not measurable and therefore not manageable. This argument is seated in a fundamental law of Science. Consequently, the only way to move forward is to rematerialise knowledge, which we do by transforming knowledge into information or data.

As I have maintained on many prior occasions, social computing is useful in this ‘rematerialisation’ process. Social software helps rematerialisation tacit interactions that occur around formal, corporate (computer-based) processes and workflows by capturing conversations (wikis, blog posts and comments) and references (social bookmarks, RSS feed portfolios, profiles) in organisational / group platforms. Social computing helps transform tacit knowledge into formal transferable knowledge. This is why social software fundamentally complements existing organisational information architecture, as well as provides a constructive replacement for email, which is often considered a silo because of its overtly individualistic nature.

Another difficulty we face in a knowledge economy is that most activity measurement tools date from the glorious days of the “old” physical economy. My point here is that reporting process are one key reason for organisational blindness when it comes to knowledge-related practices. As such, ‘management’ in a knowledge economy requires a serious revamping of reporting tools, metrics and processes.

Because we deal with different stuff, we need to invent metrics that are relevant to what we are trying to follow and drive. For social software, one can start with the usual web and online community metrics.

"Enterprise 2.0: Openness is good – for the others?" by Arno Hesse:

In large organizations, we have seen Enterprise 2.0 efforts face some typical roadblocks:

Free information flow vs. Chain of Command

Free info flow from the frontline to executives? Managers get suspicious when information easily skips a level or two in the hierarchy. Not that they necessarily want to keep the information under wraps. But they prefer controlling the loop – when, how, to whom the communications happens. If it’s good news, take some credit for it; if it’s bad news, let’s add some spin (explanation or blame).

One-way street of transparency

A CEO recently informed his employees that the calendaring system has been changed so that she could see everybody’s calendar – and that he may make use of that capability. While some applauded the honesty, some employees asked if they would be able to see the CEO’s calendar. Well, not really. Cultural lesson learned for the organization: transparency is less required as you get to the top. Why not practice in advance?

The Black Hole Syndrome of knowledge sharing

“Knowledge sharing feels like a black hole. You throw a lot of stuff in, and never hear about it again.” While this typical complaint was probably a good characterization of past KM approaches, many managers are still burnt by this experience. Today’s solution allow for better attribution of authorship, tracking of use, and feedback. However this signal has to get across the noise level.

Too much visibility? Never change a winning team – especially if it’s mine

Good managers spend of lot of energy on building good teams. While they enjoy the visibility into the skills and experience of employees – theirs and those of other organizations – they tend to be protective about their team. “If other managers see the quality (or capacity) I have build in my team, they are tempted to plunder. Good for the other managers’ career, but not for mine.”

Culture of “internal trade secrets”

In an insurance company, a sales manager had figured out a very effective way to sell packages to law offices and accomplished phenomenal sales growth. For quarters, that sales technique would remain the ‘secret sauce’ of her team’s success. It remained a secret because she was pitched against the other sales managers. In an effort to motivate performance, the executive team had established a stack ranking of the company’s sales regions. While collaboration between the teams was possible, the incentives were punishing it. Many reward systems have baked constrains into the culture which are deterrents to Collaboration 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 for dummies

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:33:00 +0000

Executing a process is “easy”. If nothing unexpected happens, it's just routine.

Inventing the process, designing and implementing it, fixing it when it is broken, continuously improving it, quickly adapting it to new conditions, capturing and incorporating the voice of the customer into it, getting people on board and making them feel part of it, developing and capturing our knowledge about it, and reinventing it and what comes out of it so that we can stay competitive - THAT is not easy.

It comes without saying that all those things are higly dependant on humans and our ability to find, trust, connect, communicate, interact, share and collaborate with each other - across time, space and organizational barriers. This is true even for executing a process, regardless of how easy it might seem in comparison to those other things. We need to get together and do these things in collaboration because we simply cannot do them alone.

Now to the point...

Whenever new possibilities to find, trust, connect, communicate, interact, share and collaborate emerge, the ways in which enterprises are operated and managed will be profoundly altered and, most likely, also considerably improved by any measure we use.

The social web, or social software if you like, brings us a wealth of new possibilities across this spectra.

Seeing and understanding these new possibilities, translating them into a business context, and applying them gracefully to a business - that, to me, is Enterprise 2.0 in a nutshell.

The Real Enterprise 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:17:00 +0000

Nenshad Bardoliwalla, former CTO for Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) at SAP, has written an excellent article that provides "the missing components of the full Enterprise 2.0 picture". It is a must read, both for those who don't see how Enterprise 2.0 fits into their business and for all those Enterprise 2.0 evangelists that seem to think that a new major version does not build upon all previous versions, whether it is a software or an enterprise. Here is a teaser, but you must read the full article since it describes where Enterprise 2.0 fits in the Enterprise:

These definitions of Enterprise 2.0 and their juxtaposition against the definitions of Enterprise 1.0 are misguided. I am certain based on my experience that the free form emergent world depicted as Enterprise 2.0 is NOT an evolution from the structured world of Enterprise 1.0, but rather, the two will exist in an intertwined tapestry that defines the full breadth of what today's enterprises need to look like. It's extremely unhealthy for our industry to pit these two worlds against each other because they will perpetually co-exist."

If an Enterprise 2.0 tool can: increase the average deal size, reduce cost to serve, increase customer loyalty, decrease new product development time, etc., than there is a legitimate business use case and a hard ROI associated with it. So my advice to both the zealots and naysayers of Enterprise 2.0 would be to take an existing, legitimate pain point, like offer creation, or product development, or customer service, and start by benchmarking your current metrics. If an Enterprise 2.0 tool can move those metrics in the right direction in a provable way, you will have real, hard ROI. If the tool doesn't contribute to moving those process metrics in the way you hoped, then you might have a problem with your executive sponsor.

My comment to the last part about ROI, as I argued in my previous post, is that most organizations are missing "current metrics" when it comes to "knowledge work" that surrounds, enables and supports existing business processes in, say, the R&D and Marketing & Sales departments. They either don't have enough metrics, or the right ones to tell them how they actually perform. This means that there is no baseline to start from and from which to build your business case and calculate ROI. The challenge here is that we need to establish this baseline before we can prove that we can improve it. To be able to do this, we also need develop new or refined approaches, methods and metrics that allow us to establish this baseline because the ones that we have used when measuring performance in transactional business processes can't easily be applied to knowledge work.

Eureka! Now I know how to calculate the ROI of Enterprise 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:16:00 +0000

Sorry to disappoint you, but I actually don't know how to calculate the ROI of Enterprise 2.0. But I will at least tell you why I don't know that.

The debate about where the Enterprise 2.0 use cases are hiding, and whether or not you can calculate the ROI from Enterprise 2.0 is quite interesting. It is especially interesting if you consider that the debate is based on the wrong assumption: that we can apply the same approaches, methods and metrics that we have used to improve transformational and transactional business processes in order to improve knowledge work. Obviously, this won't work.

I personally find it quite easy to reason about and communicate the value that Enterprise 2.0 can bring to a business. This can be done by telling stories, such as telling the story about a team of people that tries to collaborate on a document by sending it back and forth via email, and then contrasting it with a story of a team that collaborates using a wiki.

But somehow, these stories are not enough to convince some people that they need to start looking at how to improve knowledge work, and that they need to start exploring the possibilities of new tools and technologies - the same kind of tools and technologies which are already being used successfully on the social web for tasks which are very similar to the tasks we perform at work. Talk about opportunity!

When it comes to Enterprise 2.0 use cases, there is definately not a shortage of use cases. It is just something that the sceptics say because it sounds good to them. Rather, from my experience it is the other way around – there are almost too many of them. Just by watching how my collegues use Yammer, I have identified well over 30 use cases that micro-blogging supports and which are very hard to carry out with other tools and technologies. And new use cases are being identified all the time.

Some of the use cases, such as crowdsourcing ideas for PR activities, wasn't possible before, at least not feasible from a cost and management perspective. It is either that, that we couldn’t afford to perform the use cases, or we didn't bother to make the effort to define the value they generate or to measure this value.

Do you know of any organisation that has tried to and succeeded in measuring how it performs at building market intelligence? Or that has succeeded in measuring how efficient and effective the communication within a project team is? For example, do they measure how much communication it takes and how long time it takes to delegate a task to a team member? Do they measure the effectiveness of this communication - if the right decision was made or the right task was carried out in the right time?

I'm all ears.

As knowledge work is becoming a much bigger and more business-critical part of most businesses, they obviously have to do something to get better at it. A business that succeeds in improving knowledge work and leveraging its social capital will most likely become smarter, faster and more innovative than the competitors that don't. THAT is the business case for Enterprise 2.0. A business that rather passively waits until there is a book to buy that will tell exactly how define and measure the value of knowledge work won't have a very bright future. In fact, I am pretty sure it won't have a future at all.

To sum up, let me make a few things clear.

First of all, it is possible to define the value of knowledge work, such as problem solving and collaboration.

Secondly, it is also possible to measure this value.

But the problem is that we haven't yet come up with exactly how to do that yet.

What obviously doesn’t work is to apply the same approaches, methods and measurements as we have used before when trying to improve transactional business processes. So, we have to come up with new and improved ones. But how do we do that?

I suggest that we start exploring the new and improved use cases and learn to do this as we go. I am pretty sure that this is how most businesses are started and how most improvements are being identified and initiatied. You have an idea, you see an opportunity and you decide to seize it. The people who are just interested in maths will maybe make great accountants or managers (good at sustaining status quo), but not great entrepreneurs or business leaders.

ECM in the age of the social web - new slide deck

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:29:00 +0000

Below is the slide deck that I used for my presentation at the seminar ”How many information flows are there?” which was arranged by Mid Sweden University, CEDIF project Centre for digital information management and EU Objective 2. I will share the full story (what I said to the slide deck) in an upcoming post.

ECM Today - Trends And Realities

View more documents from Acando Consulting.

This week in links - week 44, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:07:00 +0000

"Who Knows What? Finding in-house experts isn't easy. But most companies make it harder than it should be." by Dr. Nevo, Dr. Benbasat & Dr. Wand in Wall Street Journal:

In-house experts, with their specialized knowledge and skills, could be invaluable to both colleagues and managers. But often workers who could use their help in other departments and locations don't even know they exist.

Because of an inability to tap expertise, problems go unsolved, new ideas never get imagined, employees feel underutilized and underappreciated. These are things that no business can afford anytime—let alone in this tough economic climate

The answer, we think, is to use social-computing tools.

Activities and interactions that occur in blogs, wikis and social networks naturally provide the cues that are missing from current expertise-search systems. A search engine that mines internal blogs, for example, where workers post updates and field queries about their work, will help searchers judge for themselves who is an expert in a given field. Wiki sites, because they involve collaborative work, will suggest not only how much each contributor knows, but also how eager they are to share that knowledge and how well they work with others.

Tags and keywords, which are posted by employees and serve as flags for search engines, can reveal qualities in an expert that are far from transparent in any database or directory. And social networks can help employees use existing relationships to not only reach out to distant experts but also trust them more than they would complete strangers.

"Enterprise collaboration turns to Web 2.0" By Janine Milne:

Enterprise collaboration tools will be primarily Web 2.0-based with four years, posing major problems for organisations as entrenched users cling onto old-style working methods, warned a Gartner survey.

Gartner recommended firms take a softly-softly approach to introducing change to reluctant users, explaining the business reasons for the switch and recognising which model suits which situation.

"Using technology to improve workforce collaboration" by James Manyika, Kara Sprague and Lareina Yee:

Knowledge workers fuel innovation and growth, yet the nature of knowledge work remains poorly understood—as do the ways to improve its effectiveness. The heart of what knowledge workers do on the job is collaborate, which in the broadest terms means they interact to solve problems, serve customers, engage with partners, and nurture new ideas. Technology and workflow processes support knowledge worker success and are increasingly sources of comparative differentiation. Those able to use new technologies to reshape how they work are finding significant productivity gains.

But most companies are only beginning to take these paths. That’s because, in many respects, raising the collaboration game differs from traditional ways of boosting productivity. In production and transaction work, technology use is often part of a broader campaign to reduce head counts and costs—steps that are familiar to most managers. In the collaboration setting, technology is used differently. It multiplies interactions and extends the reach of knowledge workers. That allows for the speedier product development found at P&G and improved partner and customer intimacy at Cisco. In general, this is new terrain for most managers.

"Maximizing Business Value from Enterprise 2.0 through Fun & Motivation" by Rex Lee:

When discussing E2.0, I often hear "Shouldn't we just implement these social tools and simply let business value "emerge"? My answer is NO, not if you want to maximize business value.

I am a strong believer that organizations, should focus and facilitate the use of these tools in order to maximize organizational benefits.

To drive value, I've often referred to the engagement factors and in this post I wanted to focus on one of the factors, "Motivation".

How do we address motivation? Do we adopt the "build it and they will come" approach? No. But what about Wikipedia? it seems like complete "self-organization" has made it successful. But consider that only 1% of the people who visit Wikipedia actually contribute content. That's alright with a population set of the world, but 1% of your company may not be enough and if you have specific objectives you may need to motivate others to participate.

So what then? Should we use traditional motivation tactics (i.e. Carrots & Sticks)? For example, should we give bigger monetary bonuses or incentives to those who leverage social computing technologies to solve problems or provide innovative solutions? The answer yet again is surprisingly, NO.

Fun, as a design principle shouldn't be overlooked as it impacts the application design from look and feel, through context, content and process. It also should be addressed when designing events leveraging social computing technologies.

Internal micro-blogging can be intimidating

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 06:16:00 +0000

Browsing is a complementary method to searching which can be used when you have av vague idea about what you are looking for, or when you just cannot describe it. Just as browsing is a complementary method to searching, micro-blogging can be seen as a complementary method to targeted communication methods; phone, e-mail, chat, sms and so on. You micro-blog when you don't know specifically who to address with something. With micro-blogging, you simply turn to your followers, your groups and the entire community instead of targeting specific individuals.

As the adoption of internal micro-blogging grows at my own company, I am constantly discovering new use cases for internal micro-blogging. Here are a few of the things people use it for:

Asking collegues to help them find information about something, such as a report, method or customer
Asking collegues to help them with a problem they have with a specific software, their computer, or something else
Finding collegues with a specific skill, experience or knowledge
Building intelligence about something, such about what is currently happening at a customer or what we have previously done for that customer
Sharing ideas and finding collegues willing and able to help them develop them further
Getting help to find the right translation of a term that they use within their profession

The benefits of internal micro-blogging becomes quite clear as soon as you start to use it. But, I have also learnt that, for some people, internal micro-blogging can be intimidating. Why is that?

I believe it has to do with the fact that positions and titles matter also online. Some people are simply very afraid of making mistakes, such as saying the wrong thing, when their boss could be listening. So they see it as a much safer strategy to not say anything at all and just listen in on other conversations without joining them.

It all has to do with our fear of transparency. Micro-blogging is a transparent way to communicate, way more transparent than targetet communication methods like email. When micro-blogging, you just have to be a little more careful about what you say and how you say it than when you email people. Email is perceived as "safer" in this respect because it is much less transparent. It allows you to say more sensitive things, assuming that you trust the people that you communicate with (so they don't forward your conversation to other people). The point is that a lot of people will do anything to hold on to email and continue to use it for conversations which are not senstive and which could be very valuable to others who are not on the list of recipients to join or access.

Comparing micro-blogging to email also highlights another potential benefit of internal micro-blogging. The lack of transparency with email also means that you can use your work email for communicating and discussing highly sensitive things, even very private things. Or just bullshit and complete nonsense. This highly contributes to the email mess that most of us have to deal with on a daily basis. Internal micro-blogging is, just as blogging, a way to keep the important stuff than can be important to others as well from being buried and lost in your email inbox.

To me, one of the greatest promises of Enterprise 2.0 and tools such as micro-blogs is that we can use them to tap into the hidden talent of a large organization. The people who don't get to travel a lot, or who have the time needed to develop a strong informal internal network, can start to make start building a network of their own. The people who don’t have access to established forums other than their project and department meetings can share their ideas, opinions, experiences and knowledge with other collegues across organizational and geographical borders.

The sad part, from my experience, is that most of the people who don’t speak up at an internal meeting won’t do it online either. Although I am sure that some of them will speak up as time goes by and they get more used to this new communication arena, it will take time. And they won’t change their behavior voluntary. It will take peer pressure.

A New Age of Enlightenment

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:59:00 +0000

We are currently experiencing the dawn of a new Age of Enlightenment. The social media revolution (yes, it is a revolution since it shakes and changes existing rules, attitudes, beliefs, behaviors and also threatens the existence of old institutions) shows very similar characteristics as the Age of Enlightenment that started in the 18th century. Here are some excepts from Wikipedia:

The Enlightenment is held to be the source of critical ideas, such as the centrality of freedom, democracy, and reason as primary values of society.
In his famous essay "What is Enlightenment?" (1784), Immanuel Kant described it simply as freedom to use one's own intelligence.
One of the primary elements of the cultural interpretation of the Enlightenment is the rise of the public sphere in Europe...a “realm of communication marked by new arenas of debate, more open and accessible forms of urban public space and sociability, and an explosion of print culture"...its members held reason to be supreme; everything was open to criticism (the public sphere is critical); and its participants opposed secrecy of all sorts
...those areas of political/social knowledge and discussion that were previously the exclusive territory of the state and religious authorities, now open to critical examination by the public sphere

I think it is pretty easy to draw parallels between the Age of Enlightment and the current period in human history.

We continue to value freedom, democracy, and reason, but we also emphasize additional values such as trust, sharing, openness and transparency.
The availability, usability and reach of today's web-based communication tools have given us the freedom not only to use your own intelligence, but also to more easily make use of the intelligence of others as well as to contribute to a collective intelligence.
The public sphere that has been created with the web as platforms knows no borders and have almost no barriers to entry. The blogosphere, Twitter and Facebook are examples of new arenas of debate and exchange which are more open, accessible, interactive and scalable than any public spheres previously existing. We have seen an explosion of user-generated digital content which is shared in these arenas where everything is open to criticism and can be commented on, rated, reviewed and recommended to others. We also oppose secrecy of all sorts, with transparency being a key value.
The discussions that were previously initiated, hosted and moderated by the media can now be critically examined and commented on by anyone. Anyone can also initiate, host and moderate discussions. We are no dependant on the platforms for debate offered by media institutions.

This week in links - week 43, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:02:00 +0000

"Ten ways how leadership can influence and promote interpersonal trust in knowledge management behavior and processes", weknowmore.org

1. Act with discretion
2. Be consistent between word and deed
3. Ensure frequent and rich communication
4. Engage in collaborative communication
5. Ensure that decisions are fair and transparent
6. Establish and ensure shared vision and language
7. Hold people accountable for trust
8. Create personal connections
9. Give away something of value
10. Disclose your expertise and limitations

"The Business Case for Social Computing #SPC09" by Brett Young:

Session notes from SharePoint Conference 2009:
Knowledge Management Issues within the enterprise are still looking for a solution, and social computing might be part of it: Rapid response to problems, capturing knowledge to ensure business continuity, and reducing transition costs. Although social computing may be part of the solution, it is not THE solution to knowledge management.
If we manage by commitment, and employees meet their commitments, do we really care when, where, and how they do it?
When all of your economics come from the industrial age, everything is measured like a factory.
Social computing increases the frequency of "knowledge accidents" within a company – which is a good thing.
If you don't build it they will go somewhere else.
Social computing is really just a shift in communication channels. It is not something to justify, but something to navigate through, embrace, and leverage as a new capability and manage as a new risk.
"The anti-social organization is ultimately non-productive." – Chris Howard, Burton Group.

"Grassroots Social Media is a Risky Necessity" by Anthony Bradley:

Enterprise IT organizations must determine when a grassroots movement has a high chance of success or when a more top-down approach is required. This involves building a decision model as part of the social media governance program that enables the enterprise (all levels) to understand the nature of the social media purpose in terms of its ability to succeed as a grassroots driven effort or where top-down involvement is required. Done correctly this can empower grassroots social media movements without undue risk.

Understanding and capitalizing on the grassroots is critical for both bottom-up- and top-down-driven social media efforts. Generally, the enterprise leadership forms a team to lead a top-down social media effort, while members of a potential social-media-based community drive a bottom-up approach.

"The Problem of the Intranet" by Gordon Ross:

We’ve seen several frames or lenses through which to view the “problem” of the intranet:
intranet as technical problem (issues of performance, content management technology, search engine technology);
intranet as information design problem (content structure, navigation, IA, usability);
intranet as productivity problem (measurement of gains made through self-service applications and access to information, ROI, enhanced efficiencies); and
intranet as social capital problem (employee engagement, culture, job satisfaction).
Our hypothesis is that while intranets are traditionally seen and framed as a visual design and material object design problem, they in fact have more in common with complex systems than printed brochures, especially when it comes to social intranets and Enterprise 2.0.

Challenging the assumption of “intranet as object” and reframing it as “intranet as complex system” is the first of a few key assumptions that need to be recognized and understood to ensure social intranet success. Framing the intranet as an object leads to trying to design an object and expecting it to behave like one, subject to standard cause and effect type statements. Framing the intranet as a complex system changes our perception of it: no longer is it a static thing, but a dynamic environment, one which responds to different attempts to control and shape it.

The rebirth of Email (was it dead?)

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 07:27:00 +0000

Let's get the obvious clear first. Email is a great communication tool that can be used benefitially for many different purposes. But not for any purpose.

The current wave of new communication and collaboration tools that hit the shore will not kill Email (sunbathing on the beach). In fact, it will only make Email stronger. In addition, only the tools that integrate nicely and purposefully with Email will thrive.

How is that? Well, by introducing new tools which are more suited for the purposes where Email is ill suited, chances are that Email will be used for the things it is good at and not for the other things.

The Akilles heel of Email is that it can be used for any kind of communication. The simplicity and availability of Email encourages people to use it by default when communicating with other people. Email has become the primary choice for people. But if we don't reflect on how we use it and use alternative tools for purposes where email is less suited (which we obviously don't), it quickly leads to inbox hell, occupational spam, information overload...call it whatever you like. Work-related information is mixed with information which is not work-related, private discussions are mixed with official one-way broadcasting, small notifications are mixed with emails containing large attachments, fragments of discussions are fragmented and scattered around in the inbox, information in emails tend to multiply like a virus when you get involved in or start a reply circus act...I think you get the picture.

Above all other things, there are two factors which must stand accountable for these consequences:

1. THE TOOLS
The lack of easy to use and readily available tools that are better suited for uses where Email performs bad (such as collaborating on documents)

2. US
The existing attitudes and behavior of people, coupled with the tendencies that people tend to act without thinking and always choose the most convenient solution in sight, not the one which is most suited for the specific purpose.

These two things are what we have to work at to change.

Obviously, this reasoning does not only apply to the Email paradigm, but also to other paradigms as the Document Management paradigm. Why is collaborating on business content still equivalent to putting the content into a container called "document" and shuffling it back and forth?

You already know the answer to that last question; because there have not been any good alternative tools for along time (although now there are) and because it is such a big thing for us to change how we think and behave.

Email is dead. Long live Email.

This week in links - week 41, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:42:00 +0000

“Time management is the central skill of success. Your ability to manage your time, to focus and channel your energies on your highest value tasks, will determine your rewards and your level of accomplishment in life more than any other factor.” (Brian Tracy)

"Intranets - stop benchmarking, start leading" by James Dellow:

...we continue to have a narrow view of the 'intranet' concept - it is not treated like the Web inside the firewall, rather we continue to think of portals and Web-content management systems. Secondly, intranet managers need to stop benchmarking each other - if all you do is copy, what competitive advantage does your intranet provide (and so it it follows, you are treated like an overhead)? Finally, like any organisational change, introducing new work practices needs to be supported in a sustainable way - there is far too much emphasis on the wrong aspects of self-service and adopting technology without any assistance (self-service should empower users, not simply shift effort from above the line in one department to below the line by shifting it to individual employees).

"Proctor and Gamble’s ‘technopologist’: social networks enrich my job" by Joe McKendrick:

Social media is significantly changing the role of marketing, Knox says [Dave Knox, corporate marketing brand manager for Digital Business Strategy at P&G]. The convergence of technology, marketing and social interaction is becoming more important every day, “but at the same time, it is a new skill set for many marketers to learn.” Only 10 years ago, the marketing toolkit for a brand manager was limited to four choices (TV, print, out of home and radio). “But today, new technology is emerging every day, offering new ways to serve and engage people more effectively. At work we aim to use these new digital tools to continue to be a leader and innovator in marketing and digital business.”

While Knox is immersed within one of the world’s largest companies, he finds that social media is a valuable tool for bringing in outside points of view as well.

“When working for a big corporation, you have an amazing amount of resources at your fingertips. And you are surrounded by incredibly smart people,” he points out. “But most of these people have a similar background to you and are trained to approach problems in the same way. My blog [hardknoxlife.com] has helped me by giving me access to people with different backgrounds and views on the business world. It is a way to connect with these people outside of my day to day work and really get a set of different viewpoints on what is going on with marketing.”

Knox says by staying active in social media through his blog and Twitter, he has been able to do his job better. “My external network has emerged as my business filter, allowing me to sort through the noise and keep on top of what is really important. While it might save time in the short-term to slow down in social media, I think it would hurt me in the long term in terms of personal growth and knowledge.”

"Change Just One Thing" by Jason:

We all get caught up in working hard and in the same way. On the other end of the spectrum, we often try implementing new tools or processes with lots of hoopla and effort. Changing habits is really difficult. By following this simple plan of changing one thing, you can achieve a positive result collaborating with your team or partners.

Here are some ideas:
Use a wiki page for all team status reports or meetings moving forward
Assign one note taker for all meetings and rotate so that every meeting is documented with discussion points, decisions, and next steps – no exceptions
Don’t ask any questions through emails – use a forum or other mechanism
Use file-based documents as a last resort or only if you have to send them out externally. Otherwise, use a sharable web document of some kind
If you do any of these things, you WILL see a positive result in productivity. The point is it doesn’t really matter as long as it is one thing and meaningful. What is the one thing you would change?

"Social Media: Strategically Relevant In Down Times" by Mike Gotta:

Deloitte LLP’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) practice has recently released the results of the 2009 Tribalization of Business Study, which evaluates the perceived potential of online communities* and identifies how enterprises believe they may better leverage them.

Survey results indicate that while enterprises are effectively using online tools to engage with customers, partners, and employees for brand discussion and idea generation, organizations are continuing to struggle with harnessing social media’s full potential.

"While we are seeing signs of maturation in this year's study, there are still plenty of companies who do not realize the power of communities, and others who have not yet figured out the proper approach for leveraging communities as part of their business," said Francois Gossieaux, partner with Beeline Labs and a senior fellow with the Society of New Communications Research. Businesses are truly become social again, and companies should look to leverage the collective wisdom of their employees, customers and partners in order to innovate faster, reduce costs, and bolster their bottom lines."

Reintroducing: The Content Economy

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:30:00 +0000

If you are quite new to this blog - here are a few posts from the archive that I hope could be of interest to you:

The Age of Transparency – Rebuilding trust

People need information, not data or content

The Dark Matter of the Business Universe

Management By Listening Around

Organizations don't need experts, they need mentors

Businesses must support sharing and use of knowledge

Don't listen too much to users - observe them instead

15 quotes to spice up your Enterprise 2.0 business case

This week in links - week 40, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:43:00 +0000

"The Importance of Online Workplaces" by Larry Cannell:

When working online we need places to to gather information, to communicate with colleagues, to learn from others who have encountered similar situations, and to work within teams or organizations with shared goals. As a result, we gather information in files on our computers, organize folders of messages in our e-mail client, or maintain binders full of printed reports from business applications on our desks (because they take so long to retrieve otherwise).

Online workplaces are involved in virtually all information- or knowledge-based activities within an enterprise. By improving online workplaces, an enterprise can significantly increase the performance of these activities. However, the goals of an online workplace need to go beyond automation. When aligned with supporting culture and business practices, online workplaces can provide the basis for sustainable competitive advantage. The source of this advantage comes from the intellectual capital that can be captured and reused. This is illustrated in the following conceptual model.

The efficiency of completing repeatable processes and transactions is the focus of workflow systems and transactional systems. In the interest of decreasing cycle time, both of these system types optimize how individuals and groups serve business processes: The process comes first and the worker is subservient to the process (cue Pink Floyd music). However, this “process first, user second” design does not work well for the many ad hoc activities that make up a typical workday, in which the user juggles multiple variables and gathers information as needed. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid call these two different modes “process” and “practice.”

"The Real Business Value of Social Networking" by Luis Suarez:

Seth Godin...once again...nails it, as far as I can tell, on what the real challenge is for social networking to flourish in the enterprise world.

In over the course of a little bit over two minutes, he gets to share some really good insights on what the real business value of social networking is all about. And guess what? He doesn’t do it through a definition, nor through stating hard facts none of us can (nor will!) relate to! Ever. Instead, he shares it through stories. Stories we can all relate to.

Speaking of stories, I found this video with excellent advice on how to tell stories via Tom Graves (@tetradian) on Twitter:

"The Social Media Fear Factor" By Rachel Happe:

There is plenty to be anxious about in considering using social media for business.

Many look at all their valid fears - whether they are as simple as having un-edited content in the public eye or whether they are concerned with law suits - and decide it is too much to take on. On the other side, I hear a lot of social media enthusiasts recommend a 'Just Do It' approach. Like many things, the reality for people concerned about the ramifications of using these new communication mechanisms is somewhere in the middle.

Things you can do to practice:
Use Yammer internally
Train and encourage people within your company to have personal blogs. Run competitions.
Introduce smaller work groups to wikis
Implement an enterprise-wide social network (emphasis on social)
Create group blogs to comment on industry news and events that are only accessible internally.
Pretend to blog for an external audience before you deploy an external blog.
Form communities of practice internally and learn how to 'manage' them
You get the idea. Practice is critical.

My first day with Google Wave

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 10:53:00 +0000

”Google Wave feels a bit regressive. Email paradigm on steroids? - Jevon MacDonald (@jevon), Dachis group.

I got the same feeling as Jevon when I saw the first screenshots and read about Google Wave at ReadWriteWeb and elsewhere. I am not sure if that feeling has completely gone after having used it for an impressive whole day, or if it has just changed a little.

I usually try to stay away from reviewing products and tools, but this time I have made an exception. The exception spells Google Wave. I shared some of my early reactions yesterday on Twitter. Here are a few of my tweets, in chronological order with the first on top:

Checking out Google Wave
The best thing with Google Wave is the empty inbox
It's hard to really test Google Wave without someone to communicate with - invitations aren't sent immediately
Reflection from my first wave in Google Wave: how to end a real-time conversation in a wave?
Does Google Wave provide a searchable directory of all users? I haven't seen one
If Google Wave usage is going to take off, we need to be able to find each other

Google Wave IS Email 2.0. And I mean that in a good way.

How? Well, Google Wave builds on the strengths of Email 1.0 and adds 2.0 qualities and features to it to compensate for the weaknesses of Email 1.0. But it does not just add these things on top of Email 1.0. The Google Wave team has come up with a new architecture and applied some fresh new design principles. Google Wave has apparently been designed to take advantage of the simplicity of email and our familiarity and (sometimes bad) habit with using email for virtually any kind of communication and even collaboration. But in areas where email performs really bad, such as when it comes to providing structure, versioning, history and context to conversations and integration of various forms of content, Google Wave stands tall.

Despite what some analysts have said, I have a hard time seeing how Google Wave can be compared to a social networking platform like Facebook or even Twitter. At least not until there are a lot of people using it and some way to discover and connect with people and become aware of their activities. Today, I can communicate with people I know or who provide me with their Google Wave address outside of Google Wave so I can add them as contacts. But there currently is no way to discover and get to know people from inside of Google Wave, unless they happen to be part of a wave into which you are invited.

In a way, Google Wave is like email on steroids. The part that is missing now is the infrastructure for social conversations - the social network. I can see Google Wave being integrated into services such as LinkedIn and FaceBook or even Twitter, but I can't see how it will replace it. And I don't think that is what Google is aiming for with Google Wave. Google Wave is just not social in the same sense as Facebook and definately not in the same way as Twitter.

What I can see however is a huge potential of Google Wave becoming a collaboration infrastructure for small groups of people. A wave in Google Wave ties all conversations and content that is somehow related to a task or project together - and it keeps them together. That is essential in virtual collaboration. The wave provides a context that grows organically from the first single message. You can build upon it almost indefinately and the history of all conversations is readily available via the really amazing ”Playback” function where you can walk yourself though the history of a wave. This is how Google explains what a wave is:

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

As waves are not tied to peoples' inboxes, the email inbox lock-in problem does not apply for Google Wave. A wave can be accessed and interacted with from virtually any context, be it a blog, an intranet, or a mashup. Although a wave is logically tied to persons, it is not tied to their inboxes. The inbox is just a view where you are notified about new waves or changes to an existing wave. The wave is not physically ”in” your inbox. The wave exists in one version only and everybody see and interact with the same wave. So there we have the potential death of email management and putting space limits to inboxes. The chinese whispers game that you can play with email, with the message changing as it moves moves from one person to another, can't be played in Google Wave. Any attempt to distort the message or filter out things will be recorded, and the original message can be found.

I personally think that Google Wave will hit like a bomb on the enterprise market for collaboration and communication tools. I am quite sure that the news about Google Wave hit like a bomb at the Microsoft Corp Headquarters in Redmond when it was announced at the Google IO conference in May earlier this year. I also think that the chance - or risk depending how you see it - that the guys at Microsoft have managed to think outside the box with the upcoming new 2010 versions of Exchange and SharePoint is minimal. I am convinced that these dinosaur products are stilled based on the good old email and document paradigm, but now with more social features and characteristics, a clould offering, RIA and other 2.0ish stuff as icing on the cake. Google, on the other hand, came up with a new recipe and invented a new cake.

As always, Google will start with letting consumers try out their new tool. But the fact that ”select business and university customers of Google Apps” have invited to this first beta trial indicates that Google Wave will be a corner-stone in Googles enterprise offering. Google Wave can be the first real threat to Microsoft in the enterprise software arena.

Finally, here are some insignificant short notes that I wrote down yesterday as I tried out Google Wave:

As I can see every character that other people write in real time, at the same moment as I write something myself, I tend to change my message as I write based on what other persons write. The end result is a message that hardly can be understood by other users who did not participate in the wave at the time.
It took a while until I understood that I had to click messages to mark them as read. I expected it to work like Google Reader, where just scrolling by (reading) messages would mark them as read. Now I have to do a lot of unnecessary interaction.
The green dot indicating if a user is online or not is really ugly and almost annoying.

Well, Google Wave really has to do something about the ugly green dot if Google Wave is to become a smashing success ;-)

UPDATE: The green dot is now mysteriously gone! (yesterday, my own profile picture had the green dot and now it hasn't)

Companies need help in understanding and taking advantage of social media

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 04:26:00 +0000

The Swedish IT industry newspaper Computer Sweden has a piece on companies being stressed by social media- they know they need to do something but now what and how (read the full article translated with Google Translate here, in Swedish here):

Social media creates frustration out on business. Everyone knows that they can be used in a smart way - but it is difficult to know how.

- Just yesterday I thought about how we could use it, "says Per Olofsson, CEO of environmental engineering company ClimateWell.

He thinks that social networks in particular, could be used in a robust manner internally in the company.

- We are growing and growing and are in many countries and it could be an effective knowledge platform, "he says.

I had the opportunity to make a comment in another related article in the same newspaper (read the full article translated with Google Translate here, in Swedish here). Although it is not entirely clear in the article, I am saying that increasing transparency within and across the firewalls of an organization, in a managed way, is one of the great business opportunities:

The trend is continuing in social media. "Certainly one can understand that it is difficult for companies to keep up, but there are great risks if we do not do it," says Oscar Berg, an expert on Web 2.0 at Acando.

Some companies are mostly included in the value of using social media externally, for marketing and sales.

Others also see an internal use to create a more effective communication.

- It's either or. Few have really seen how to combine these elements. I myself have no track of everyone who works here at Acando and sometimes it happens that I have colleagues who work with the same type of assignments for other clients and that I could benefit from having an exchange with.

- If you could create the forms in which it is possible to see what others are doing and then marry it to see what customers and partners are doing - it strikes me as a great opportunity for businesses in the use of social media, "says Oscar Berg.

Suggested ways to use Google Wave

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:26:00 +0000

Here are a few examples from the Google Wave team about how to Google Wave:

UPDATE: Lars Rasmussen at Google also links to a number of examples on how to use Google Wave in a recent post on the Official Google blog.

Organizing events

Keep a single copy of ideas, suggested itinerary, menu and RSVPs, rather than using many different tools. Use gadgets to add weather, maps and more to the event.

Meeting notes

Prepare a meeting agenda together, share the burden of taking notes and record decisions so you all leave on the same page (we call it being on the same wave). Team members can follow the minutes in real time, or review the history using Playback. The conversation can continue in the wave long after the meeting is over.

Group reports and writing projects

Collaboratively work in real time to draft content, discuss and solicit feedback all in one place rather than sending email attachments and creating multiple copies that get out of sync.

Brainstorming

Bring lots of people into a wave to brainstorm - live concurrent editing makes the quantity of ideas grow quickly! It is easy to add rich content like videos, images, URLs or even links to other waves. Discussion ensues. Etiquettes form. Then work together to distill down to the good ideas.

Photo sharing

Drag and drop photos from your desktop into a wave. Share with others. Use the slideshow viewer. Everyone on the wave can add their photos, too. It is easy to make a group photo album in Google Wave.

Work is not a place, it is something you do

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:12:00 +0000

Online, on virtual places like Yammer, Twitter or LinkedIn, people tend to tell their colleagues and others what they are doing, thinking, liking, reading...and not so often where they are, when they arrived there and when they left. Why? Because the latter often just doesn't make much sense. Knowing where someone physically is doesn't usually contribute very much to your work. But knowing what someone you work with will help you coordinate actions, and tell you when it time for you or someone else to contribute. By learning what other people are doing you might also spot opportunities for exchanging ideas, knowledge or opinions, or doing something together.

Most people today understand that being physically present at the office is not necessarily the same thing as working or being productive. Still, most corporate cultures are stuck with the mindset from the industrial age that work is a place and uses time spent at that place is the main way to measure work.

It has not always been like that. In the agricultural society, work used to be about what you could produce. Then we moved into factories and offices and began to refer to work as a place. The introduction of the time clock, invented in 1888 by jeweler Willard Bundy, reinforced this. It tracked the number of hours an employee worked and was the main measure by which work was measured and workers were paid and rewarded.

If time spent at the office is a relevant measure or not depends upon the type of work you do. But in most cases it is a misleading measure. For knowledge workers such as marketing and sales people, engineers, IT consultants, writers, and so forth it is damn right wrong. Our work environment is getting more and more complex, with more interactions with more people across organizational, geographical and cultural borders. Many of us work with people in different time zones. Still, our contributions are very much measured in the same way as during the industrial era peaking during the 20th century - by the face time we spend at the office during office hours.

Sooner or later, virtual work will be the norm and a practice that will catch on everywhere. But if it is currently allowed at your company / department / team or not usually comes down to individual managers and whether or not you have a trusting boss. In a Harvard Business Publishing article called "Stay Home and Work", Rosabeth Moss Kanter states:

Choosing how long to work and on what schedule has long showed productivity benefits. People are less stressed when they can adjust their hours or days to family or personal needs. A greater feeling of control is associated with more energy and better health, studies show, making those workers more productive.

Technology exists to make remote work feasible and effective. Cell phones have liberated people from desks. Cisco's telepresence capabilities make it possible to feel as though you are in the meeting room with people anywhere in the world, sitting just across the conference table.

The barriers are the usual human ones. Without a culture of strong accountability, collaboration, trust and personal responsibility, remote work doesn't work. That culture is missing in too many organizations. Managers don't always know how to coordinate and communicate with people they do not see face to face; they must value the work product and not the face time. Leadership is important. People need clear goals, deadlines, and performance metrics. Team members need trust and the ability to rely on and fill in for one another.

It is pretty clear that we have to get away from concepts such as face time and office hours. We need to stop thinking of work as a place and make virtual work a norm. What really matters in the end is what results we produce and that we achieve our goals. But that of course implies that we must define what kind of results we expect, what goals to achieve, and probably also provide some directions. A problem is that a lot of people still don’t know how to do that. That includes managers, and possibly your boss.

“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results” - General George Patton

Resist printing! (and save the world)

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:24:00 +0000

Well, if you don't save the world you will at least contribute to moving things in the right direction.

"The average daily web user prints 28 pages daily."
(Source; Gartner group and HP according to Wikipedia)

For about a year now, I have tried my best to live by my new "resist printing" principle. It has not been easy, but looking back I have been very successful in my attempts to change my behavior. Simply put, I print much less than just a year ago. I would estimate that I am definitely down to less than a couple of pages per day on average (I don't print very often, but occasionally I need to print a tender, agreement or such which raises the average).

The most effective way to force myself to a new behavior has been to make it harder for me to exercise my unwanted behavior. This is what I did:

When the black ink in my printer at home ran out out over a year, I decided not to buy a new ink cartridge. So from that point I could simply not print anything when I was at home.
When at work, I don't log on to the domain unless absolutely necessary. This means that I cannot print at the office - unless absolutely necessary, that is.
I assigned the “PDF writer” as the default printer on my laptop. So, if I happen to print by accident at times when I am logged on to the domain at work, it will be printed to a PDF file.

Of course, there are also things that I have done to make this change of behavior easier, such as getting myself a smartphone with Internet access, a mobile broadband card for my laptop, and as using Google Reader to consume most of the information I'm interested in (reading information in an RSS Reader is more optimized for screen reading than most sites). Anyway, key has been the ability to bring my information with me digitally instead of on paper, which in turn has required the ability to be able to connect to the Internet anywhere and anytime, and to access the information I need via the web. Today, thanks to new smartphones, 3G and Web 2.0 apps, that is definitely possible.

Another factor that has considerably reduced my consumption of paper is that we don't have a newspaper at home. Both my wife and I read all news online, except for an occational news magazine stuffed with great journalistic content (like the excellent Swedish magazine “Filter”).

To sum things up; we live in a digital age characterized by digital abundance when it comes to information. Almost everything that is printed on paper can be read online as well. Resisting printing and reading daily news online instead of on paper are two really low hanging fruits when it comes to saving our environment and reducing unneccessary water consumption (AND saving costs). We have really no excuse for not changing our behavior. Expecially if we consider the following:

One year's worth of the New York Times newspaper weighs 246 KG (520 pounds). (2)

Approx. 324 liters (85,6 gallons) of water is used to produce 1 KG (2.2 pounds) of paper. (1)

It takes 75,000 trees to print a Sunday Edition of the New York Times. (3)

New York's largest export out of the Port of NY is waste paper. (4)

It costs the Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead (5)

In ten years from now, the newspaper industry as we know it today will be gone and printers at home and offices will be much less used. The fact that we today still read news on paper and print so much information that could as well be consumed online will seem incredible stupid. Our children will look at us and ask us what the f**k we were thinking.

References:
1. Environment Canada (from "Eco Design Paper Facts" by iD2 Communications)
2. Purdue Research Foundation and US Environmental Protection Agency, 1996 (from "Eco Design Paper Facts" by iD2 Communications)
3. North Carolina Office of Waste Reduction and Recycling (from "Eco Design Paper Facts" by iD2 Communications)
4. What About Waste, Cornell Waste Management Institute, 1990 (from "Eco Design Paper Facts" by iD2 Communications)
5. “Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle”, Silicon Alley Insider