Power to the People: Driving Business Innovation through Communities

Enterprise 2.0 will revolutionize the way we get our jobs done. But, to do this requires an understanding of people, politics, and business practices. Oracle's contribution to Enterprise 2.0 is multi-faceted; Mark will describe how community-aware enterprise systems should evolve, how existing business processes can exploit natural collaboration, and offer some advice to ensure privacy and governance.

Speaker - Mark Woollen, Vice President, CRM Product Strategy, Oracle Corporation

My Notes:

Urgency, fragmentation and engagement are three key factors to the change.

Speed is a factor; there is a need to be connected.

Fragmentation is a result of the fracturing of ways to communicate within and outside the organization. Publication is not solely in the hands of traditional media

There is a need to engage your customers and employees in your brand. You also want to harness talent and ideas regardless of whether they originate in your organization. You especially need to harness knowledge within your organization.

Rigid top-down processes are not nimble enough. need to recognize that people do not live a process driven environment. The problem is that employees are organized hierarchically, but work happens through social networks irrespective of the hierarchy. Collaboration and hierarchy do match up well.

The thrust is to better connect the company with its customers, partners and suppliers to share intellectual capital and social capital to accelerate growth of the company.

"Talk does not cook rice" so he showed some examples Or at least he thought he was providing examples. He spiraled into a whole lot of buzzword speak rather than any meaningful thoughts or examples. In the end HE was not cooking any rice.

The buzzwords continued. The slides were pretty, but I ended up with un-cooked rice.

Knowledge 2.0

Overview: Knowledge Management (KM) was the business buzzword circa 1995. Today, some say KM is dead, others point to portals, innovation management, Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 as the manifestations of KM today. Join noted KM author, speaker and consultant Carl Frappaolo as he updates the definition of KM practices and technologies for the 21st century. Strategy and technology models first introduced in Carl's KM book in 2002 will serve as a framework for positioning and understanding the current state of the industry.

Speaker: Carl Frappaolo, Book Author and Vice President, Market Intelligence, AIIM

My Notes:

Carl wants to talk about the relationship of enterprise 2.0 to knowledge management. Is KM dead? The room was mostly full of knowledge management people and/or people with knowledge management in their title (including me).

"Enterprise 2.0 gave a jolt to knowledge management." Google searches for "knowledge management" are on the up-tick. (I noticed on the ACT KM listserv that the group is working on a thread about whether "KM Is Dead.")

What is knowledge management? Carl thinks the industry does not agree on a definition. He also thinks there are lots of different definitions of enterprise 2.0. Carl's definitions:

• Knowledge management is "Leveraging collective wisdom and experience to accelerate and experience to accelerate innovation and responsiveness." (The crowd was a bit rambunctious about defining knowledge management. I pointed out that IT and HR do not define what they are.)
  

Knowledge Management 2.0 is the alignment of business strategy, people, technology and process.

On process, we need the right process to disseminate, share and apply knowledge. Does the process help or hinder the capture of knowledge? We should not be asking people to do things outside of their normal process. Knowledge management needs to be "in the flow" not above the flow".

Technology is a key enabler. (Every organizational group has a technology piece. Where would HR be without a database of employees) Never start from the technology perspective. Tech tools can help fill in the gaps in the process, people.

According to the AIIM report:

• Enterprise 2.0 a system of web-based technologies that provide a rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise." Key words: system and web-based. The cloud is a plus to have info somewhere other than your own individual computer.

Market Evolution

Enterprise 2.0 is not a revolution. The introduction of the PC was revolution. Putting computing power on the desktop was a big change. Email was a revolution. Communication with the computer as the platform. E 2.0 is not as revolutionary as either of those.

Enterprise 2.0 tools have resuscitated knowledge management. They allow us to mash-up information, putting more information around information is key to knowledge management. Online collaboration moves the communication into a platform that is easier to leverage. Processes need to change to embrace Enterprise 2.0 and Knowledge Management. In the end the Enterprise 2.0 tools are just tools.

Technology and cultural worker models. You need to figure out where you are technologically and culturally. People in the organization may not be ready to be open and transparent in their jobs.

Carl has the spectrum of cultural from isolated to fully engaged

• islands of me
• one-way me
• team me
• proactive me
• two-way me
• islands of we
• extended we

An audience member brought up the issue of compensation structure to the sharing structure. Do I get rewarded for sharing? "Culture creeps slowly" Carl thinks you should target the highest level person in the organization who gets it.

An audience member pointed out a hole in strategy that HR was not included in the strategy. Her co-worker in HR jumped up in the back of her room.

The problem with KM 1.0 was that it was awkward and disjointed interfaces that were technology driven. There was a tremendous collision of academic treatment and reality. In some circles KM became a dirty word.

Email was 1.0. It did open people to sharing through the computer. But then the inbox became the content system. That leaves it disjointed and isolated. Enterprise 2.0 opens the communications platform.

IT does matter. KM is not about tech, but you cannot easily do it without IT.

Carl proposes four characterizations:

• Intermediation - broker those who know with those who need to know
• Externalization - capturing knowledge
• Internalization - personalize the information for me so I can find it
• Cognition - marriage of knowledge and process

Enterprise 2.0 is not web 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 may be KM, but web 2.0 is not Enterprise 2.0.

Carl also handed out copies of his book, including one to me.

UPDATE: A link to Carl's blog and his slidedeck:
http://www.takingaiim.com/2008/06/is-enterprise-2.html

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What Blogging Brings to Business

Blogs are powerful communication platforms that allow you to capture information you find interesting and to share it with an "audience" who can talk back to you. This panel of five business bloggers with a combined blogging lifetime of 19 years has generated business, communicated the concerns of its customers, experimented, and broken new ground through their blogs. Topics we'll cover include: Blogging as knowledge management, Blogging as a conversation, Blogging for "fame and fortune", Blogging as a platform for experimentation, and Blogging to reduce internal spam. Come join us to share your experiences and have the chance to speak at length with experienced bloggers.

• Moderator - Jessica Lipnack, CEO, NetAge
• Speaker - Bill Ives, Web 2.0 Consultant and Writer, Portals and KM
• Speaker - Cesar Brea, Partner, Force Five Partners
• Speaker - Doug Cornelius, Knowledge Management Attorney, Goodwin Procter LLP

My Notes:

I was on this panel, so I have limited notes, but will try to reconstruct some information. You should also checkout some other blog posts about this panel:

• Enterprise 2.0 Blog post by David Spark
• I will add any others in the comments. You should feel to also link to your blog posts in the comments.
  

As Jessica posted [Bloggers at Taste], the panel got together to discuss an agenda. We had a great conversation and thought it would translate well to the audience.

Our audience was very interactive. Maybe too interactive. It was hard to keep pulling the discussion back to the topic. The participants seemed to be looking at two different aspects: What external blogging can bring to business and what internal blogging can bring to business. My take is that internal blogs (at least in the classic sense) are just limiting their audience. But blogs are flexible tools that you can do lots of things with inside the enterprise.

The session started with an introduction by the panel about their blogs:

• Jessica Lipnack
  Endless Knots [http://netage.com/endlessknots]
  
  
• Bill Ives
  Portals and KM [http://billives.typepad.com/portals_and_km ]
  Fast Forward Blog
  Art and Photography Blog
  Ives Family History Blog
  Sharp Family in NC
  
  
• Cesar Brea
  http://octavianworld.org
  
  
• Patti Anklam
  Net Work http:/www.pattianklam.com/
  
  
• Doug Cornelius
  KM Space [http://kmspace.blogspot.com] - Blog on law firm knowledge management, enterprise 2.0 and legal technology
  Real Estate Space [http://realestatespace.blogspot.com] - Blog on commercial real estate finance.
  Internal Blog: Real KM
  

Then Jessica asked the bloggers in the audience to introduce themselves and their blog. I was not able to grab the whole list, but here are some:

• Zo Knows-www.zoknows.wordpress.com
  
• Zo Knows Tech-www.zoknowstech.wordpress.com
  
• Zo Knows Food-www.zoknowsfood.wordpress.com
  
• Zo Knows Gaming-www.zoknowsgaming.com
• Caselines by David Hobbie
• (Audience members feel free to add a link to your blog in the comments)

We moved onto why we blog and who we blog for. One common theme among the panel was blogging as a personal knowledge management tool. We all found the blog to be a great way to capture information in a way that is easy to categorize, where it is easy to find the content. As a personal knowledge management tool, I blog for me. These notes are for me to reuse. That you are reading is a by-product.

We spent some time off on a tangent about who should blog, who should be forced to blog and who should not blog. I spent a fair amount of this conversation time in the back-channel on the Enterprise 2.0 Community site for the Conference.

A blog is an excellent way to display expertise, whether the blog is internal or external. It is one thing to paint yourself as an expert. It is much more effective to prove your expertise through your writings and information you push out.

We ran out of time, but here are some other thoughts I wanted to get out:

Internally, the blog can act differently. Scott Niesen, Director of Marketing, Attensa brought this up nicely earlier today in the Enterprise RSS session when he said you should draw a distinction between what "need to respond" and "need to know." A blog is a communication tool. It is well suited to what you need to know. Email is better for information that has a need to respond. Take a look at you email flow and think about how much of this you need to react to. Most of it is just information you need to know. But by the information being pushed into email, my inbox is acting as my content management system. A blog or a collection of blogs makes a much better content management system. It is easier to search, easier to find content and easier to add content.

Enterprise RSS: Connecting People, Information & Communities

Delivering a communication channel that enables people to subscribe to the information they need, includes filtering and alerting mechanisms to notify people of important changes, and provides access points across multiple application contexts, is an incredibly powerful solution. Deployment of feed syndication platforms to manage proliferation of RSS feeds can improve worker productivity, drive business performance and aid in community-building efforts across people with common information interests. In this panel, senior strategists from leading enterprise RSS vendors and enterprise customers share their perspectives on market trends across different industries.

Speakers:

• Mike Gotta, Principal Analyst, Burton Group
• Brian Kellner, VP of Products, NewsGator
• Scott Niesen, Director of Marketing, Attensa

My Notes:

Brian started off with a background on NewsGator with its background in the consumer side, but is now moving into the enterprise RSS and, in particular, integrating with Sharepoint.

Scott gave a background on Attensa and, of course, their enterprise server. (One difference is that Attensa is only an enterprise product. They did not come from the consumer side like NewsGator.) He highlighted the attention stream feature of Attensa that prioritizes the RSS content and pushes your most popular/used/read feeds to the top of your attention stream.

Most of the audience is familiar with RSS and enterprise RSS. Most of the audience uses a browser-based reader; few were outlook plug-ins and a few were RSS reader clients.

Mike quizzed Brian and Scott as to why we need them and why the big vendors are not in the space.

Attensa wants to help companies embrace RSS as an company communications tools. He sees breaking company communication into "need to respond" and "need to know." Need to know items would be RSS and need to respond would be email. Also it is a better way to harness the good information outside the firewall with the flow inside the firewall.

Brian thinks the big vendors are just missing it. It is not a clear message or product for them to get their arms around it. There is also an important security element. Consumer-focused rss readers do not handle security well. The product also makes it easier to get new people up and running in the organization and into the flow. It is key to tie into LDAP to get people subscribed to the feeds the need and the feeds they should have.

Synchronize, security, download control and analytics are key features.

An audience member raised the issue of consuming the content. Should there be a predominant way to access your RSS feeds. Power users may want the more robust features of a full client, some people cannot be removed from outlook and some live by their blackberry. One of the great features of both the NewsGator and Attensa servers in the ability to synchronize the feed across the platforms. An item is marked read across the platform. Brian indicated that he routes his feeds through NewsGator clients in different ways. Some go to his Sharepoint reader, some to his client, some to his blackberry. (This seems to be different from the synch model of enterprise RSS.)

Patrick from Wallem a shipping company told his story about implementing enterprise RSS. (Like the FedEx presentation, information flow is very important to the physical

Simon from Pfizer told part of his story about implementing enterprise RSS. They are rolling out Sharepoint and see enterprise RSS as a way to improve the communication nature of Sharepoint. Simon says not to focus on email. Focus on the communications. RSS allows you to push external content and make people aware.

There is a concept of pushing a reading list of feeds as part of the on-boarding process. Attensa has a browse directory of feeds that users can shop among and pick their own in addition to the feeds pushed to them.

Patrick pointed out that enterprise RSS can create on the fly channels of communication to be able to push information out. This is particularly useful in the event of an emergency or unusual event.

Elevating the Enterprise 2.0 Conversation

The past five years have held tremendous innovation in enterprise software, an industry not known for its innovation relative to other areas of the technology sector. Enterprise 2.0 has challenged preconceptions and created innovative products. But of more interest, the use cases have evolved and practices are enabling new solutions that offer competitive advantage. Its time to elevate the conversation beyond features (wiki, blog, RSS, social networking, etc.), put aside the hype and talk about what problems the Enteprise 2.0 community is uniquely prepared to solve. In this keynote, Socialtext Chairman, President & Co-founder Ross Mayfield will share his insights from the past five years in business, and look to the next.

My Notes:

Ross noted that the personal productivity tools usually did come from the bottom up. People were looking for tools to help with personal productivity. The enterprise's internal network imposed new complexities and limitations on the personal tools.

Now in the 2.0 it is not the tools that are interesting. It is the social effects that are more important than the technology. The pre-formed structures are a barrier to work and a barrier to productivity.

Ross wants to move the conversation beyond the tools. Move beyond the features to the needs of the business. IT does not get the tools and they do not get the user needs. It is important to not just deploy the tools but focus on the use case.

Wikis have evolved from lightweight documentation tool, to a business user alternative to email, to a wiki-pedia inside, to a process-specific solution.

It cannot just be about knowledge sharing. It is about a business problem. The idea is to get "in the flow," instead of "above the flow." He quoted Michael Idinopulos. (There was some similarity to his presentation at LITLS: Where is Web 2.0 in the Enterprise?

The goal should not be to automate the business process to drive down costs. The goal should be to collaborate on exceptions to the business process. You should re-design the process with transparency and more participatory. You can involve people even if they are not part of their job description.

Ross moved onto a new product to work with structured data in an unstructured way. Spreadsheet were used to structure data and is the most common database. Today we play "email volleyball" with documents moving back and forth. This results in email overload, version control issues and high error rates. The idea is not to re-engineer the spreadsheet in a webpage. Ross showed the social spreadsheet. This is designed to be more robust than Google Spreadsheets. You can put a wiki page in a cell. You can get much more connectivity to information and people in the spreadsheet

It not about the cloud. It is about sharing information inside the firewall.

Enterprise 2.0 - A State of the Industry Address

Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen of AIIM Market Intelligence, provide highlights on the first in-depth Enterprise 2.0 market study, including the results of a survey completed by over 400 Enterprise 2.0 users and evaluators.

My Notes:

Carl and Dan went back and forth with a boomer versus millennial take on the view of the internet and Enterprise 2.0. With Carl as a Boomer in a suit and Dan as the millennial dressed "schlumpier."

AIIM published a Market IQ report on the state of Enterprise 2.0: Agile, Emergent and Integrated.

Age does not matter. There are very different opinions based on age. Culture does matter. It is the single most important success factor. Worry about their attitudes, not their age. Internal champions of enterprise 2.0 tend to be slightly more boomers than millennials.

One point is that organizations are not taking a strategic view of enterprise 2.0. A knowledge management organization is more likely to take a strategic approach.

A knowledge management company is more inclined to increase the rate of networking and increases the rate of adoption. They are more likely to have a more rapid rate of adoption.

Culture creeps cautiously. An organization moves slower than an individual.

Increased collaboration is one of the top goals most organization are trying to achieve with enterprise 2.0. Next on the list was "knowing what we know." (Lots of the goals of enterprise are common with the goal of knowledge management. Here come knowledge management 2.0 again.)

Working in the Cloud: How Cloud Computing is Reshaping Enterprise Technology

In this session, Google's Rishi Chandra will discuss ways cloud computing is influencing the Enterprise IT industry and what this means for businesses.

My Notes:

Rishi is responsible for Google Apps. No PowerPoint (Google slides instead.)

Enterprise computing in the cloud. Our data and computing power is hosted on the internet. It is accessible from a utility and is available anytime you can access the internet. (So I could not access it during the presentation because the WiFi would not stay up. The hotel was lacking router capacity.)

Innovation is Coming from the Consumer

Rishi sees the innovation coming from the consumer, not the enterprise. The consumer market is Darwinian. In the enterprise, the vendors and end users do not have a direct relationship. IT intercedes and picks the tool. In the consumer world, the end-user picks the tool directly. I can jump from Google to Yahoo at the click of a button.

"Simplicity wins." It is not designing for the lowest common denominator. It is making it easy to use and learn how to use. Otherwise the consumer will go somewhere else where it is easier.

The Design of Enterprise Tools Need To Change

In the enterprise, team work is more important than individual user tasks. You need to connect with disparate information and disparate people across the enterprise. Enterprise applications are built for the power user and loaded down with functionality.

You need tools that allow collaboration to capture and create information. You need access to the most current information (and not be hunting around for the latest version.) You need around the clock access to the information. You need to make it easy to publish the information.

Economics of IT

Scalability of information is a problem. (Of course Google is trying to index the entire internet) Ten hours of video are loaded to YouTube every minute. They get 7 million photos a day into Picasa.

Scale drives unit cost toward zero. For an enterprise, how do you drive your storage and computing costs down.

Barriers to Adoption are Falling Away

Connectivity is need for cloud computing. We are much more connection to the internet (The WiFi in the room is back up so the crowd is less rambunctious.)

The user interface is getting better and the browser is getting better.

Reliability is much better. Customers will not allow downtime. They will go elsewhere.

Offline access is still important. You need to deal with the lack of connectivity (On cue, I lost WiFi again.)

Security is important. You cannot get around the issue. The cloud computing vendors just need to prove themselves as secure as other enterprise tools. Laptops are stolen all the time; two million are stolen every year. We see news stories of lost data on laptops all the time. With the cloud, a stolen laptop is a non-issue. Who do you trust more: your company's IT security people or Google's security team?

Rishi showed an impressive list of clients using Google Apps for messaging and collaboration and for security and compliance. These are not static products. They had 40 upgrades to Google Docs last year.

He sees the innovation in the cloud, in the consumer space, but not in the enterprise. And there will be lots of competition.

From the Bottom-Up: Building the 21st Century Intelligence Community

Overview: The speakers will brief the technical and cultural changes underway at the CIA and across the Intelligence Community involving the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 tools including Intellipedia, blogs, and social tagging. These tools are being used to improve information sharing by moving information out of traditional channels and onto platforms.

Speakers:

• Don Burke, Intellipedia Doyen, CIA
• Sean Dennehy, Intellipedia Evangelist, CIA

My Notes:

Intellipedia is built on Media wiki (like wikipedia). It actually consists of three networks: (1) Sensitive, but non-secret, (2) Top Secret Network and (3) Secret. They have video system like Youtube (but for spies.) They have tagging, blogs. a document management system, RSS and photo gallery (like Flickr).

They pulled up Intellipedia from the non-classified site. They showed the Simple Sabotage Manual from the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA) with ways to infiltrate an organization. One question from the manual was whether a decision lies in your purview or with someone else. People are looking for someone else to say it is okay.

The intelligence community debate started with a paper from Dr. Calvin Andrus: The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community.

"Wikis do not work in theory only in practice."

The history feature of the wiki is great tool for the CIA. It can answer the question of what they knew and when.

Unlike wikipedia, they require a logon to edit content (you do not need to logon to see content.) This authorship gives credit to the author and helps build the community.

They do not want to be an encyclopedia. They do not have the "deletionists" of wikipedia.

They have conflicting reporting. They do not always have all the facts. They have bits and pieces that need to be assembled. The do not believe in the neutral point of view. They take the attributable point of view. It is important to associate content with authorship to show interest in the community.

They are still in the early adoption phase. There is a big cultural change. This is a group that is used to keeping information to themselves. These evangelists were told that their tool would "get people killed."

Their three core principles:

• Work at broadest audience possible - stop keeping everything in safes (sure some things need to stay in safes)
• Think topically, not organizationally
• Replace existing business processes - Blog instead of email. Open platform instead of channel. Do not treat it as a separate tasks. Replace the task.

They do not think it is an age thing. Their biggest contributor is 69 with over 40 years of service. Younger workers need to be told to use the tools this way to engage in this new process.

If you want to encourage the use of tools. Look in the mirror. You should use your tools. (I say eat what you cook.)

They no longer use powerpoint. They use intellepedia pages. (Not sure if this is CIA wide or just these two evangelists.)

Connectedness: Changing What's Possible

Networks have always been among the most powerful of market forces. From the earliest roads and shipping lanes to today’s hyper-connected world, companies that live on the innovative edge of networks have prospered. Providing next generation connectivity inside and out of your enterprise is now a critical success factor. Find out how FedEx is pushing the edge of both physical and digital connections globally.

Speaker: Robert B. (Rob) Carter, is Executive Vice President - FedEx Information Services & Chief Information Officer at FedEx Corporation.

My Notes:

Commerce has always been about networks. First was the distribution networks, the silk road, etc,. Next was the electricity distribution network. Then the telecommunication networks spread. Communication was moving faster than we could.

In 1994, FedEx.com has a simple blank to fill in a tracking number. It was one of the first transactional sites. You could interact and do things with the site.

Rob still sees an expansion of the network. There are still lots of people that are not on the internet.

FedEx started a way to quickly connect. He showed a fantastic graphic of the FedEx air traffic in and out of the Memphis airport.

Rob sees a mixing of the digital and physical networks. The widespread use of handheld scanners to track packages. The online tracking of packages is very important. Changing the supply chain so you know where your stuff is.

Digital connections arte important to connect. There is value creation in eBay. A fan at a yard sale can get a greater interest and a great sale place on eBay. Digital can add value.

FedEx is exposing services so that you do not need FedEx.com. ( It sounds like they are opening their API). They are expanding the FedEx Kinkos. THey are expanding the ability for mobile devices to connect and interact. They are deploying an application for Adobe AIR. They are pushing tracking information out to the desktop. They have a Facebook application. "Launch a Package". Although it is toy and not an interaction for packages.

Putting the Social into Social Media at Enterprise 2.0

One of the the great things about blogs, twitter, facebook and other social media is the ability to continue communicating with people even though you are not face-to-face.

One of the great things about conferences is the ability to communicate with people face-to-face who are usually spread around the country or the world.

I had to miss the second half of Dion Hinchcliffe's session on Implementing Enterprise 2.0: Exploring the Tools and Techniques of Emergent Change. (I had to do my usual pick up of The Son and The Daughter from school. The Wife is dealing with the kids on Tuesday and Wednesday so I can stay longer.)

While wandering down through the lobby I ran into table with Stephen Collins (@trib), Luis Suarez (@elsua), Mark Masterson (@mastermark), Emanuele (@absolutesubzero), Lee White (@leewhite), Chris McGrath (@thoughtfarmer), Matt Simpson (@MattSimpson) and others. I had a great conversation with them until I had to run to catch that 4:30 train home. I look forward to more of these over the next three days.

I have been following Stephen and Luis since I first stumbled into Enterprise 2.0. This is a unique opportunity to have so many people with whom I share interests here in my hometown.