JSB on Capturing Context not Just Content
In John Seeley Brown's KMWorld Keynote (live streamed 17 Oct 2012 at kmworld.
He goes on to say that the way to manage knowledge in today's age is about capturing context along with content.
He goes on to talk about the futility of building profiles and managing inventories of skills by bringing up a case at SAP where the average time to ask and get an answer to a question is 17 minutes.
That's why we built the Social Enterprise Web module, to make social bookmarking easy and to enable discussion and tagging right into the context of enterprise systems.
In JSB's words - this helps meet a goal he states as the need "to build social and intellectual capital" by capturing the output of emergent processes.
He calls sharing in this way as intimate legitimate peripheral participation.
Another terrific example he raises is how to cope when an ERP calls out an exception condition.
Employees have to raise, discuss and resolve the issue.
That's connected work, and why it matters.
Ada Lovelace Day | Sunita Williams, Astronaut and Captain U.S. Navy
Ada Lovelace Day celebrates the contributions of women in science and technology.
Captain Williams graduated from the U.
On July 14 2012 Captain Williams launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome to join ISS Expedition 32 as Flight Engineer and Expedition 33 as Commander.
Ada icon by Sidney Padua: I strongly recommend that you download the thrilling adventures of Babbage & Lovelace for your iPad (free), and enjoy more of their adventures on author Sydney Padua's 2D Goggles Web page.
Previous years
Ada Lovelace Day | Betts Wald, US Naval Research Lab 2011
Ada Lovelace Day | Fran Allen, IBM Fellow and A.
Ada Lovelace Day | Professor Lee S.
Creating GWT Date / Time Pickers That Work in Any Time Zone
We're working on new features for the next release of TeamPage that allow people to create events on a calendar.
Edit Event Dialog
It seems easy enough to implement using our own secret sauce of HTML/
I've used a bunch of different calendar applications and looked around the web for inspiration.
I'd need two fields: a date input and a time input that together specify a time, independent of timezone.
UTCDateBox
There's a nice date picker control that is part of GWT called a DateBox.
However, we noticed that it doesn't handle time zones very well, so we created the UTCDateBox.
For example, New Years Day is always Jan 1st even though it's still Dec 31st in the US when people start celebrating it in Japan.
Time however, cannot be specified independent of TimeZone.
Since 2003, TeamPage has allowed users to create and edit articles, comments, files, tasks, etc.
UTCTimeBox
Here's the UTCTimeBox that I decided to build.
Even though we have two separate controls for date and time, we still store a single Long value on the server side as milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 GMT.
I spent a while on this until I realized that there just isn't enough information about TimeZones available to JavaScript.
Since we can't properly split a single Long value into date and time parts in the browser, we'll have to do it on the server.
When a user submits the form, the server, which knows the user's time zone, creates the corresponding Date value.
Now we can edit events and the value is properly stored on the server.
UTCDateTimeRangeController
The final piece is creating some interaction between the start and end dates to make it easier to create and maintain proper ranges.
HTML5 date/time inputs for iOS
HTML5 has new inputs for date, time, month, datetime, and more.
As a developer using the UTCDateBox and UTCTimeBox, you don't need to do anything special to use the HTML5 versions in iOS.
Remembering Neil Armstrong...
"I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer -- born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in the steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow.
Armstrong and Scott were scheduled for a brief question and answer session at the Pennsylvania state science museum auditorium in Harrisburg - squeezed between astronaut meet and greet events for the Governor and state legislators a few blocks away.
A state official welcomed Armstrong and Scott, invited them to tell us about the Gemini VII mission, and cautioned that they'd only have a few minutes for questions before they had to move on to the next event.
All hands went up.
The next question went to the pudgy kid with glasses and camera jumping up and down in the tenth row - me.
I got a smile and a nod from Neil.
On Saturday 25 Aug his family posted: "Neil was our loving husband, father, grandfather, brother and friend.
They continue:
“While we mourn the loss of a very good man, we also celebrate his remarkable life and hope that it serves as an example to young people around the world to work hard to make their dreams come true, to be willing to explore and push the limits, and to selflessly serve a cause greater than themselves.
“For those who may ask what they can do to honor Neil, we have a simple request.
I hope this sky isn't cloudy, since I plan to spend some time looking at the moon.
A few links and references on the life and times of Neil Armstrong, including several that aren't so common.
The Engineered Century - Neil Armstrong, National Academy of Engineering, Spring 2000, The Bridge, National Academy of Engineering.
Neil A. Armstrong (1930 - 2012) - From the family of Neil Armstrong
Neil Armstrong | 1930 - 2012: Made 'Giant Leap' as First Man to Step on Moon - John Noble Witford's New York Times obituary, 25 Aug 2012
Gemini VIII Mission Summary - NASA Apollo Lunar Surface Journal
Apollo XI Mission Summary - NASA Apollo Lunar Surface Journal
Lunar Landing Guidance Equations - Part of the source code for the Lunar Module's (LM) Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), for Apollo 11.
Oral History Transcript Neil A.
Catalog of NASA Oral History Collections - NASA Headquarters and Field Centers
Monitoring and Leveraging Social Media Chatter, on the Internet and in the Enterprise
In the Pharma Chatter session at the SLA 2012 (Special Librarians Association) conference, I had the opportunity to talk about gathering and managing intelligence from social media.
On the internet front, I focused on traps to avoid when monitoring and leveraging social media on the internet.
After highlighting a set of use cases where my customers have found success, I outlined one specific case where a team and their limited community of <100 managers and executives have proven their leverage with over 84,000 reads and an average of 35 reads per page posted in a year.
Anti-Social Software
It's common to read about corporate culture as a big barrier to successful adoption and use of social software in business.
The culture of some organizations ranges from ineffectual to poisonous, and it's difficult to turn such organizations around.
The purpose of the manual was to educate people in World War II occupied countries on techniques for simple sabotage, performed by ordinary citizens with no special training or equipment.
Simple Sabotage Field Manual
OSS Field Manual No. 3
17 Jan 1944
17 Jan 1944
1. INTRODUCTION
a.
b.
c.
d.
.
11. General Interference with Organizations and Production
(a) Organizations and Conferences
(1) Insist on doing everything through "channels.
(2) Make "speeches.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate "caution.
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision - raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.
(b) Managers and Supervisors
(1) Demand written orders.
(2) "Misunderstand" orders.
(3) Do everything possible to delay the delivery of orders.
(4) Don't order new working materials until your current stocks have been virtually exhausted, so that the slightest delay in filling your order will mean a shutdown.
(5) Order high-quality materials which are hard to get.
(6) In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first.
(7) Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least fiaw.
(8) Make mistakes in routing so that parts and materials will be sent to the wrong place in the plant.
(9) When training new workers, give incomplete or misleading instructions.
(10) To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions.
(11) Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
(12) Multiply paper work in plausible ways.
(13) Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on.
(14) Apply all regulations to the last letter.
(c) Office Workers
(1) Make mistakes in quantities of material when you are copying orders.
(2) Prolong correspondence with government bureaus.
(3) Misfile essential documents.
(4) In making carbon copies, make one too few, so that an extra copying job will have to be done.
(5) Tell important callers the boss is busy or talking on another telephone.
(6) Hold up mail until the next collection.
(7) Spread disturbing rumors that sound like inside dope.
(d) Employees
(1) Work slowly.
(2) Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can: when changing the material on which you are working, as you would on a lath or punch, take needless time to do it.
(3) Even it you understand the language, pretend not to understand instructions in a foreign tongue.
(4) Pretend that instructions are hard to understand, and ask to have them repeated more than once.
(5) Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment.
(6) Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker.
(7) Snarl up administration in every possible way.
(8) If possible, join or help organize a group for presenting employee problems to the management.
(9) Misroute materials.
(10) Mix good parts with unusable scrap and rejected parts.
12.
(a) Give lengthy and incomprehensible explanations when questioned.
(b) Report imaginary spies or danger to the Gestapo or police.
(c) Act stupid.
(d) Be as irritable and quarrelsome as possible without getting yourself into trouble.
(e) Misunderstand all sorts of regulations concerning such matters as rationing, transportation, traffic regulations.
(f) Complain against ersatz materials.
(g) In public treat axis nationals or quislings coldly.
(h) Stop all conversation when axis nationals or quislings enter a cafe.
(i) Cry and sob hysterically at every occasion, especially when confronted by government clerks.
(j) Boycott all movies, entertainments, concerts, newspapers which are in any way connected with the quisling authorities.
(k) Do not cooperate in salvage schemes.
Strategic Services Field Manual No. 3
17 January 1944
OSS William J.
Declassified 2 April 2008
Download the full manual (.
"All of this has led me to believe that something is terribly wrong with e-mail. What’s more, I don’t believe it can be fixed."
"All of this has led me to believe that something is terribly wrong with e-mail.
Nick continues: "Last year, Royal Pingdom, which monitors Internet usage, said that in 2010, 107 trillion e-mails were sent.
Email is OK for incoming introductions and disposible notifications, but when you try to use email for collaboration, multiple To: addresses turn it into something like the stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers A Night at the Opera.
Add the Cc: line and give up all hope! In 2008 Google engineer Kevin Marks referred to email as a "strange legacy idea" for the younger generation.
In 2003 Clay Shirky said: "All enterprises have more knowledge in their employees as a group than any one person, even (especially?) the CEO.
From my 2008 blog post Email isn't dead - It's only sleeping
See Clay Shirky, Social Software: A New Generation of Tools by Clay Shirky, Release 1.
Caroline McCarthy, The future of Web apps will see the death of e-mail, CNet.
Modern social software is now being widely adopted as an alterative to email collaboration, based on a pattern that Doug Engelbart recognized long ago, see Flip Test 1971 | Email versus Journal.
May I suggest Traction TeamPage?
Why links matter - for your business as well as the public Web
Mathew Ingram recently wrote Why links matter: Linking is the lifeblood of the web.
"Links were and are the currency of the collaborative web, that started with blogs and since then has spread to everything from Twitter to Facebook to Tumblr.
Despite the success of Facebook and mobile apps that attempt to maximize value from walled gardens (where your attention is the product being sold), I remain optimistic that the Web and behavior that rewards linking will continue to win.
And I believe that the same open link and search model will win for work and serendipitous discovery in the realm of Enterprise 2.
See Intertwingled Work, my two cents on why links matter in E2.
Why we're here. TeamPage at Enterprise 2.0 Boston 2012
If you're attending E20 Boston 2012, please drop by Traction Software's booth 418 to say hi and learn what Traction TeamPage can do.
TeamPage in the Cloud Jordan and I can answer questions about TeamPage's new Cloud options, starting at less than $2.
You can see TeamPage improvements introduced over the past year, including:
New streamlined Proteus interface makes summary awareness, status, task tracking, and coordinated activity fast and easy.
Unified search in the header makes looking up people, spaces, tasks or projects quick and easy.
Autosave and "finish later" saves your work in progress if you want to take a break - or if you accidentally click away from or close a browser window!
iPad and mobile access Monitor the pulse of your organization, stay informed, and work securely from the beach or mountains with your iPad, iPhone, or Android tablet.
If you're early in line Tuesday or Wednesday, you can also pick up free, signed, pre-release copy of Jacob Morgan's excellent new book The Collaborative Organization.
If you're too late to pick up a free copy, you can still pick up a bookmark as a reminder of what Enterprise 2.
The Future of Work Platforms: Like Jazz
Extending the fabric of work, or How to Be Emergent
20 June 2005 | Supernova | Why Can't a Business Work More Like the Web?
The Collaborative Organization - Free signed copy, Traction Software Booth 418 E2.0 Boston 2012
I've read an advance copy of Jacob Morgan's upcoming book, The Collaborative Organization: A Strategic Guide to Solving Your Internal Business Challenges Using Emerging Social and Collaborative Tools.
Jacob organizes his book into three parts: The Opening, The Middle Game, and The End Game.
Jacob's book is based on his own analysis and research, including interviews, case studies and survey responses from 234 individuals around the world, working for companies ranging from 1,000 to over 100,000 employees, with responsibilities ranging from mid-level to C-level executives.
Each chapter includes analysis, examples and a well-written Summary and Action items section, with actionable advice that you'll turn to often.
It's a handbook you'll have on your desk for the next few years.
- Chapter 2 - The First Step to Recovery is Admitting You have a Problem on business drivers and problems (20 pages)
- Chapter 7 - The Adaptive Emergent Collaboration Framework practical advice on choosing and adapting approaches to match your business goals and culture (27 pages)
- Chapter 8 - Resistance is Futile on barriers to success (13 pages)
- Chapter 12 - Measures of Success, practical advice on measuring soft benefits, hard benefits, and defining business value (19 pages)
Traction Software is the only source for full hardbound copies before the book's official ship date in July 2012! Show up in person at Traction Software's booth 418 during E20 Boston 2012 Showcase Exhibit hours.
Free copies are limited.
Update: See E2.0 Boston 2012 Twitter Pop-Quiz for rules and quiz highlights.
Update: Thanks to the @e2conf staff and everyone who dropped by booth 418 to talk, and pick up a free copy of Jacob's book.
Also, after visiting us at Booth 418, don’t miss Robert Morison (@rfmorison), author of Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results at Talent Analytics Booth 232.
See 19-20 Jun 2012 | Traction Software Enterprise 2.
Laser focused E2.0, without the risk? Get Traction!
I really like how Kashya Kompella from the Real Story Group offered a great dose of context for his E2.0 Marketplace Analysis Q2 2012: "Slightly modifying what the ancient Greeks said, you cannot dip your finger twice in the same (activity) stream.
In his 4D chart below, Kompella grades market players based on vendor business and product risk.
By way of example, perhaps he grades Newsgator as low vendor and high product risk because they've been around a long time (vendor stability) but their product focus has changed entirely three times (from RSS client to RSS Server to Social layer on SharePoint).
The Vendor and Product risk appears general as the color of the circle also demonstrates an area of risk based on the vendor's focus on the E2.
Traction Software and our product Traction TeamPage show up low and to the left (low product and vendor risk) in a cluster with Microsoft and Oracle.
Of course, none of this matters if the platform isn't any good.
To gauge quality, there are ample analysts who've weighed in on that matter, showing TeamPage has a stable platform upon which we've been able to innovate successfully over the last decade.
- Forbes.com contributor Haydn Shaughnessey says: "Traction, for my money, is the best conceived collaboration suite for companies that have a technical development requirement.
" He cites Traction Software as an example of a business that successfully competes with large companies like IBM by retaining: ".. . close attention to client needs, a personal desire to explore changes in the work environment, and a desire to see those reflected in the platform. " - The 9th Annual MIT Sloan CIO Symposium has announced Traction Software as one of ten finalists for the 2012 Innovation Showcase as its Traction TeamPage product represents a cutting edge B2B solution that combines the strong value and innovation to enterprise IT.
- CTOLabs adds Traction Software to its companies of note list, "firms we believe enterprise technologists should track":
- Jacob Morgan from Chess Media Group says: I’ve seen the Traction product a few times now I have to say that I really like it and not just for small and medium size businesses.
Traction offers an amazing search integration feature which many large vendors can’t even come close to replicating. "
So, if you want a platform that rocks and remains cutting edge in the E2.
"Probably the coolest vendor pricing page I've seen for any collaboration vendor" ~ Jacob Morgan
Thanks to Jacob Morgan, Chess Media Group for his Tweet this afternoon while we were chatting on the phone.
We followed Jacob's price comparison model, providing interactive feedback on per user per month pricing as well as an annual roll-up and clear option pricing.
Pricing options includes cloud-hosted Attivio premium search and Social Enterprise Web, choices of workgroup or full TeamPage configurations, flexible pricing based on the number of named accounts, and easy upgrades when you want them.
I'd change Jacob's probably the coolest and say the coolest, no doubt! Thanks Chris! Go to the Buy page and see for yourself.
A Focus on Individual Users
With Dartmouth President Jim Kim's recent nomination to the World Bank, I pulled out my copy of Mountains beyond Mountains to find the Kim quote that I found most inspiring for my day to day work.
From page 294:
"And," he says, "another secret: a reluctance to do scut work is why a lot of my peers don't stick with this kind of work.
" In public health projects in difficult locales, theory often outruns practice. Individual patients get forgotten, and what seems like a small problem gets ignored, until it grows large, like MDR. "If you focus on individual patients," Jim Kim says, "you can't get sloppy. "
Sure, guiding customers on their social software use cases (one of many things I do in a day) seems somewhat insignificant compared to eradicating Tuberculosis in Haiti (one of Jim Kim's missions when founding Partner's in Health with Paul Farmer) though we do have the occasional case such as the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative where software is being used to combat a plant disease which, unabated, would cause a great deal of starvation.
Nonetheless, there is useful wisdom in the focus on the individual patient which, in my case, is the software user, their business need and corresponding use case.
While most folks get up and running perfectly well TeamPage, there are various that could do things better.
Another case was an energy company that tracked issues with Wiki pages because that was the first thing they tried.
All too often, RFPs and their corresponding software requirements roll up a set of user needs into a list of features that you check off to qualify.
You can't just solve a software problem in the abstract any better than you can solve a health problem without seeing the patient, their living conditions and even the political environment in which they live.
Jim Kim did great things for Dartmouth and I wish him luck in getting the position at the World Bank.
What's the Point ?
From Nora Ephron speaking at Brown University, President's Lecture series, "Adventures in Screenwriting" April 24, 1997.
We learned the basics of story writing - who, what, when, where - and then learned how to write a lede.
Mr.
He said, "Write the lede.
We turned them in.
"Your lede is, No School Thursday"
At that instant, I thought "What's the point? What a wonderful question!"
Feb 15, 2012 Reading John E.
Happily I had a record of my notes posted in Traction Software's TeamPage server automatically carried forward from pre-release version of TeamPage, and still as easily findable and quotable as my latest post.
"If what you write does not relate to the point, it may be good, but it will likely end up on the cutting room floor.
Happy Birthday Doug Engelbart!
Happy Birthday Doug! A perfect gentle knight of technology as well as a pioneer and great inventor.
Update Remembering Doug Engelbart, 30 January 1925 - 2 July 2013
[from archive.
See the Video Archives - Bush Symposium page at the Doug Engelbart Institute website for links to all 11 sessions of this Symposium.
This movie is part of the collection: Doug Engelbart Video Archives
Don't take my word for it - Byrne and Koplowitz on SharePoint
At the Enterprise 2.0conference two weeks ago, Tony Byrne (President, the Real Story Group) and Rob Koplowitz (VP and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research) were joined for the SharePoint Analyst Panel.
IT Managers across the globe are deploying SharePoint in hopes that it will form the basis of their collaboration and social strategy, but SharePoint's ability to check off the feature lists (yes, it has a notion of profiles, pages, tagging, discussion, tasking) belies the actual outcome.
Koplowitz said: "it's a lot better portal than it is a social platform.
" (I am not convinced that this implies it's a good portal) Byrne said: "They've built a decent platform for lightweight file-oriented collaboration.
. . But SharePoint only provides two of the 10 or 11 key applications enterprises are looking for" in a social platform. Byrne said: "the dirty little secret of SharePoint is that the vast majority of its usage is for very basic file sharing.
" Koplowitz said: "If you're going to take on this beast--if you're going to take the buffalo down--you'd better be prepared to consume every part of it.
"
Not very promising.
An easy way to handle basic file sharing or even construct a basic portal may be an important part of an information strategy but isn't worth the true cost of SharePoint and doesn't merit the upside down 3 to 1 (by a conservative estimate) services to licensing cost ratio that any company should be ready to swallow if they want to tune and customize SharePoint to do more than what it's good at out of the box (some portal and lightweight file oriented collaboration activities).
If you don't have SharePoint, Koplowitz' fair warning is you better be ready to take the buffalo down.
1) It is OK at short term, small team oriented file collaboration and always will be.
2) You can break down the workspace and content type silo problem and make that locked up content more findable, social and valuable by adding TeamPage to the mix.
Why stop with a social wrapper around or inside SharePoint.
Seamless integration can work like the Web | W3C Social Business Jam
I just joined the Nov 2011 W3C Social Business Jam and added a discussion topic: Seamless integration can work like the Web.
The description for Seamless Integration begins: Are there effective ways to combine legacy applications with new social technologies to help foster or encourage greater use in the company? If so, can it be done incrementally?
I propose:
.
. . integration of social software (now "systems of engagement") and transactional systems where work gets done (now "systems of record"), using the same W3C protocols and layers over W3C protocols that make the public Web successful: Web-standard content delivery, links, and link-aware search. " The world inside a social business differs from the public Web in many significant ways: a) it's much smaller; b) it's very link-deprived compared to the public Web; c) there's a lot of redundant content (think of all of the copies of the same slide deck distributed in email); d) some highly valuable content isn't linkable at all (think legacy systems of record); e) finer-grain permissioned access rules are much more important when you want to open up the most of what the business does, and what people in the business know.
On the plus side, social business activity adds valuable context. This bring issues like consistent and reliable identity, consistent and reliable access controls (over W3C protocols), representation of context, and permission aware search to the top of the queue.
I believe these issues can be addressed by system architecture and layering of services over base level W3C protocols, which may eventually lead to extension or additional layers of W3C protocols.
Then use Doug Engelbart's model linking Knowledge Product (systems of record), Dialog (systems of engagement), External Intelligence (email, public Web, other social businesses) as examples.
See Seamless integration can work like the Web - in the W3C Social Business Jam.
Related
Ada Lovelace Day | Betts Wald, US Naval Research Lab
Ada Lovelace Day celebrates the contributions of women in science and technology.
Ada icon by Sidney Padua: I strongly recommend that you download the thrilling adventures of Babbage & Lovelace for your iPad, and see author Sydney Padua's excellent 2D Goggles site.
What's the 2.0 of Enterprise 2.0? Or, How to Be Emergent?
Hat tip to Professor +Andrew McAfee for pointing out Do Happier People Work Harder? my nomination for Required Reading of the Day (#RRD).
Over the past half-decade Amabile and Kramer researched micro-level causes behind this problem, collecting nearly 12,000 electronic diary entries from 238 professionals in seven different companies.
1) ".
2) "Gallup estimates the cost of America’s disengagement crisis at a staggering $300 billion in lost productivity annually.
3) Managers can help insure that people are happily engaged at work - I believe Peter Drucker would claim that's the primary responsibility of management.
Amabile and Kramer say:
"Workers’ well-being depends, in large part, on managers’ ability and willingness to facilitate workers’ accomplishments — by removing obstacles, providing help and acknowledging strong effort.
"Most managers don’t understand the negative consequences of this struggle.
"This failure reflects a common experience inside organizations.
That's good news - but not really news.
Technology can't create a great enterprise, but it can open the door for innovation in how any enterprise operates - from micro to macro scale - including how it operates with external stakeholders, customers and suppliers.
I've persistently said that the 2.
I'm no sociologist, but Amabile and Kramer seem to support the view that socialization in the context of everyday work - rather than as a separate "social" duty while at work - may be best.
Repeating points from Enterprise 2.0 Schism in 2009: 1) It's not just the technology; 2) It's not just the people; 3) An effective organization is a social invention that is created or shaped to serve extraordinary ends, and that may be the most valuable invention of all.
"The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary humans beings to do extraordinary things.
See Amabile and Kramer's New York Times column, and read their July 2011 book The Progress Principle (Forbes interview).
Do Happier People Work Harder? By Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer New York Times Sunday Review, September 4, 2011
G+ discussion on +David McRaney's The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight and how emergent behavior is not all unicorns and rainbows.
Need for Incentives, and other Innovation Myths - The most powerful incentives are intrinsic, not "pay to share" games.
Enterprise 2.0 Schism - Why Doug Engelbart and Peter Drucker should be declared Patron Saints of E2.
Peter Drucker and Enterprise 2.0 - Drucker Centenary Nov 2009
Doug Engelbart | 85th Birthday Jan 20, 2010
See G+ for original post and discussion
Enterprise photo courtesy US Navy.
I don't know what a picture of an "Enterprise 2.
Extending the fabric of work, or How to Be Emergent
I enjoyed reading Dion Hincliffe's Putting Social Business to Work and G+ discussion led by Luis Suarez on Laurie Buczek's The Big Failure of Enterprise 2.
An edict from management or prayer from internal evangelist to "be social" is often translated: "how many hours a week?" and "instead of doing what?" A top down Knowledge Management edict: "share what you know" turns into a empty Friday afternoon exercise that's soon abandoned.
In both cases bottom-up capture of conversations, actions, responses to routine or exceptional issues, and human actions in context is a much better way to deliver what knowledge management and social business promise.
This includes free-form accidental discoveries and introductions to folk throughout the organization who aren't usually involved or aware of what others are doing.
Enterprise 2.
Sharing activity streams across systems of record is one way to avoid the siloed discussion trap.
I believe that the best solution will include permission-aware search than spans activity streams and systems of record to make documents, individual email messages, SQL database records from CAD/
At E2.
A question found in a customer email stored in Exchange, an issue with a new drug application filed in Documentum, a fact in a legacy document stored in SharePoint or a File server S: drive, a record in an SQL database can all be discovered, discussed, tagged, and tasked for follow-up action in TeamPage without converting or importing data from its original source.
Large companies have enormous IT teams promising enterprise-wide search and collaboration with roadmaps stretching years into the future and budgets of seven to ten figures or more.
You'll hear more about this soon [or contact us to learn more now].
Related
- 21 June 2011 | Traction Software Introduces Social Enterprise Web
- Alcoa Fastening Systems - Groundswell 2011 Award Nomination for Collaboration
- Introducing Online Workplaces - Greg's notes on Larry Cannell's July 2011 Webinar - Online workplace
- Fixing Enterprise Search - spanning systems of record
- Intertwingled Work - connecting work across multiple sources
- Knowledge Fishing vs.
Knowledge Farming - Grass roots knowledge management - 20 June 2005 | Supernova | Why Can't a Business Work More Like the Web?
On G+ see
Luis Suarez - 24 Aug 2011
Dion Hinchcliffe - 24 Aug 2011
Greg Lloyd - 24 Aug 2011
Lipstick on a Pig
On Aug 5, 2011, Andrew McAfee opened a public discussion on Google+ by sharing How Apple (unintentionally) revolutionized corporate IT by Aaron Levie.
Greg Lloyd - This may also radically reduce the roll-out time for new corporate capabilities designed to use native Web infrastructure including HTML5, GWT and other technologies that deliver a user experience on par with the public Web.
The same applies to back end services and IT's ability to acquire, deploy, adapt and support back end services more rapidly and effectively.
Contrast aggressive internal awa external use of Web tech and architecture by IT versus the interlocking three, four, or five year update cycles using the MS stack (or others) and update cyles of IT systems that depend on and lag MS by years.
A very highly placed person in government told me: "Traditional IT architecture and practice almost guarantees that any new initiative will be late, grossly over budget, and obsolete before it is delivered.
Forcing change to a Web-like approach from front end mobile and user experience expectations can shift IT back to focus on timely response and business value rather than plumbing.
Dan Camper - +Greg Lloyd I agree with you, so long as the problem (and solution!) domain remains within the "corporate capabilities designed to use native Web infrastructure.
There is sometimes a tendency for IT to force an inappropriate solution onto the customer merely to make IT's life easier.
An IT department would do well to treat its internal customers as if they where external, paying customers instead.
Greg Lloyd - +Dan Camper I agree.
I believe that the 5-10 year shift in corporate technologies and infrastructure Andy envisions should and will move toward: 1) traditional, transactional "systems of record" - ERP, MRP, Accounting, CAD/
Issues of enterprise wide authentication, secure access, permission aware search spanning "systems of record" and "systems of engagement" at enterprise rather than public Web scale can and have been successfully addressed - at least in early stages.
For thoughts on this shift in IT architecture, see:
July 2010 | Intertwingled Work - Observable work as an activity spanning systems of record
And a step in that direction (Note - I am President and co-founder of Traction Software)
June 2011 | Traction Social Enterprise Web - "Marrying Deep Search and Collaboration"
In this case (and others) it's putting our money where our mouth is, not vice versa.
These are quotes from a public GooglePlus discussion - feel free to join in.
Related
Reinventing the Web on how we got here
Building pleasant and stable islands in a storm-tossed sea on extending the Web
A Circle is not a Space on GooglePlus experiments and notes
Note: The only iStock photo I could find with lipstick on pig used a piggy bank rather than a real porker.
A Circle is not a Space
Like many people in the tech industry, I've been happily exploring and enjoying Google+ for the past week or so (thank you Susan Scrupski for the early invitation).
Google's Circle model was carefully designed, with a wonderfully polished interface for adding folk to Circles and creating new Circles.
I think it's easiest to understand the Circle model by comparing it directly to email lists.
My Google+ Foodie Circle Example
If I create a Circle named Foodies and include all my foodie friends, I can post restaurant photos and notes that can only be read by folk I've included in my Foodies circle, hidden from the public.
This means:
1) You can't add yourself to my Foodies circle.
2) When you look at my Profile, you don't know what Circles I may have added you to.
3) You don't know the names of any of the Circles I have created.
4) You don't know the names of those Circles of mine of which you're a member.
5) You can't treat Foodies like a Twitter Hash tag.
So when I create a Foodies Circle, you can't follow or block posts I make to that Circle (a common request).
You don't even know that my Foodies circle exists unless I tell you about it.
And when I'm on my Google+ Streams Page, clicking Foodies doesn't show me posts I or others have made "about" food - it just shows me the list of all public or limited distribution posts made by people I put in my Foodies circle.
It's also not [currently] possible for a group of friends to create a public Google+ Circle that people can follow, join, or leave on their own.
Adding public Circles would create a kind of shared Space model, where everyone who is a member of the same Space gets (at least) permission to see what other members of the same Space post.
The current Circle definition and possible extensions are pretty clear to folk who get deeply into sharing models (including yours truly).
"Circle" is so powerful that I think a lot of people hear it as something acting more like a shared Space than how Google+ currently works: Circles act like email lists.
A Google Circle is Like a Personal Email List
Google+'s Circle model provides a way for you to share specific conversations with a set of people who you select, who may choose to listen to what you say, and who can comment back to you and others who share the same conversation.
1) You address a Google+ post to a specific set of individuals or to a named Circle (email list) when you create a post.
2) If people to whom your post is addressed decide to listen to you (they name you in at least one of their Circles), they'll see your post in their input stream.
The list of your Circles shown on your Google+ Stream page looks something like a list of incoming email folders.
3) Commenting on a post is like replying to a specific email message.
4) You can't change the Circle to which a post is addressed.
5) When you Share a Google+ post from someone else, it's like you're sending a copy of the original post to a different set of people (the Circle you select), but without the original post's comments.
Each Shared copy then accumulates its own independent set of comments, visible to the people to whom the new Share was addressed, including resharing a private message to the general Public.
GMail, Wave, Buzz, Google+ Circles - Email messaging is the model
I believe GMail, Wave, Buzz, and the Circle model of Google+ all share DNA from Google's email culture and the GMail product:
.. . there are literally tens of thousands of special interest groups that can range in size from two to more than 1,000 members and cover topics from wine to hiking to quilting to Dungeons & Dragons. There are the Gleeglers (who sing a cappella); the Dooglers, who bring their dogs to work; the Snowglers (skiers); and the Skeptics (who question everything). There are groups for pilots, expectant moms and photographers, and a group for Googlers who like flea markets. There's even a group for former startup employees whose companies were bought by Google and who may struggle to navigate a company where they must be both entrepreneurs and employees.
Any employee can start a group -- in fact, employees are encouraged to, said Stacy Sullivan, Google's chief culture officer, a title bestowed by the founders.Most groups have an email "alias" on Google's vast intranet system, such as "bowling@google. com. " Google has more than 100,000 group aliases in its Intranet system, although not all groups are active.
For employees, the groups "have been kind of anchors and havens and think tanks -- to actually be able to build their own community, just for their own support and interactions, within the mass of all Google," Sullivan said.As Google has grown, "I think it's become much more important because when you're this big, you can lose sight of being connected to the mass around the world. So this is one way they can all pull together. "
From At Google Groups are key to the company's culture
by Mike Swift, San Jose Mercury News, 23 Jun 2011
Google+ Circles avoids the Buzz assumption that your social network could be gathered and publicized by analyzing the your email contacts - an assumption that might have worked internally for Google, but which caused a firestorm of protest and legal action when Buzz launched.
Google+ Circles provide a much more refined model of selective sharing.
Twitter connects fragments by tags.
A Circle is not a Space
For work, the current Google+ post and comment presentation can become noisy and unpredictable, repeatedly showing promoted posts based on recent comments from any source, and repeating Shares that fragment comment threads.
More significantly, the current Google+ Circle model makes it difficult to see what's happening in the context of a business activity - tapping into a stream of posts, comments, replies, actions, and actions.
For example, a Space shared by members of law firm and Client A naturally frames and protects work and conversation in that context while also protecting it from disclosure to any other client.
Experiments
JP Rangaswami is currently experimenting with three different formats for three purposes:
Playing with formats.Twitter as short form frequent. 12 Jul 2011 @Jobsworthgoogle plus as longer form, one per speaker at TED. Blog as even longer, one per event)
He's also experimenting with a Google+ Circle workaround to allow people to opt in to his conference liveblog posts.
The Google+ preview is just about a week old, and Google is actively asking for feedback and suggestions, which has led to lively discussions on how Circles might evolve.
See links and Google+ discussion (gathered from G+ and all over)
JP Rangaswami, Google+, 12 Jul 2011 (Public)
I'm experimenting …
JP Rangaswami - I'm experimenting.Seeing if I can avoid making noise in people's streams by giving them subscriber-level choices on subsets of my stream. For the next few days I will be covering TEDGlobal, but the updates will only reach those who ask me for them. If you asked me, and you don't start receiving them in a short while, do let me know.
Yes I know the way I've done it is messy (creating a publisher circle and then manually adding people to that circle as they ask to be included) but I could not find s simpler way.Let us see.
John Tropea, Library Clips blog, 8 Jul 2011
Google Plus: Closed group email collaboration done online
Greg Lloyd, Google+, 6 Jul 2011 (people in my Circles only)
G+ comment streams on public posts by popular folk are problematicI can't Share this to Public without losing comments, but here's the main point:
Greg Lloyd - Interesting - and encouraging - to see improvements to adaptive boost of posts based on new comments.Today a 5 hour old +Sergey Brin scenic photo post ~ sticks in place as older post despite a continuous patter of "nice photo!" comments from folk I don't know or follow.
Not clear what the promised comment weighting stream boost adjustment was.Social / follow weighted, linguistic or other, but helps S/ N for public posts by famous folk whose patter of friendly, log rolling or spam comments would never die. Google+ needs to fix this before it's gamed to spoil the Public commons.
Followed by:
About 30 minutes after post thanking Google for promised improvement in comment boost to reduce noise based on "non-relevant" comment, a 5 hour old +Sergey Brin photo popped to the top of my mobile and desktop stream with a recent "Cool Man!" comment.No intervening comments from folk I follow in those 30 minutes that I can see.
+Sergey Brin Still getting flooded with tortoise pictures and the like.More recent pyramid pictures are an improvement, but please keep pushing for improvement. See "flooded by tortoise pictures" discussion
JP Rangaswami, Google+, 10 Jul 2011
In G+, Circles should be created by "publishers" as well as "subscribers"
JP Rangaswami - I guess I'm warped.What I really want is to break myself up, classify myself, into a series of circles: cloud, food, music, books, cricket, politics, hippieness, freedom, whatever. Then others who put me into their circles can choose to put bits of me or all of me. Publisher circles are like hashtags and channels. Subscriber circles are filters and balancers. That combination creates the best signal-to-noise ratios
Jeff Jarvis, Google+, 4 Jul 2011 (public)
.
Greg Lloyd - I'd also welcome a pure chron option, with one click to take me to the full post and comments for context when I want it.
For promotion or pure chron, imo Twitter asymmetric reply clip is pretty effective.E. g. Twitter rule that mutes replies from your stream unless you follow both parties. Although I originally opposed the change, I've grown to like it.
Without a pure time ordered option (and jump to full thread) or a hard clip, promoting a post from famously popular person will always be problematic when thousands of "me too" comments pile on.That was my major beef with Buzz. I guess I need so see what Google+ does with rank.
.. . Jennifer Forman Orth - So, basically, no one's ever going to see this comment :-). How does this foster networking, especially for the Technorati who cultivate these large clusters of folks they do not know to follow them? If I figure no one's going to read what I say, what is the incentive to comment?
Greg Lloyd - Jennifer - A valid point, but IMO the recourse is social.With Twitter, Jeff or someone else may rt or "publicly" reply to you and a wider non-clipped audience by prefixing your handle with a character. This subtly raises the visibility of particularly good comment based on human judgment, polite recognition, and an invitation to a larger audience to read more of what you say.
Greg Lloyd - Taking this conversation as something close to a best case, about 50% of the comments are "I agree" or restate the original point.This from a group of bright and eager early adopters. When the number of Google+ folk increases by three or four orders of magnitude - not counting bots - the bounce will become ludicrously noisy, like Buzz. That's not conversation, that's Brownian motion. Selectively following a reasonably large number of diverse, curious and intelligent folk with a sense of humor is the only scalable filter I know that balances breadth vs S/ N. I want to leverage their judgement to surface interesting discussion and as well as talent scouts for who else to follow
Sergey Brin, Google+, 4 Jul 2011 (Public)
… getting flooded by comments on [ five year old ] tortoise pictures
Sergey Brin - I think a lot of people are under the misimpression that I am posting photos of exotic places at a furious pace to Google+.Actually, I have had a bunch of albums public for some time on my picasaweb page. However, people only started to take note recently thanks to Google+ and when they comment on those photos they end up in the streams of people who have me in their circles.
We made some ranking changes recently that demote such comments if the commenter is not in your circles.Let me know if you are still getting flooded with tortoise pictures and the like.
Ross Mayfield, Slideshare, 5 July 2011
Visual Guide to Circles in Google+
Introducing Online Workplaces - Greg's notes on Larry Cannell's July 2011 Webinar
Larry Cannell, Research Director, Gartner Group presented great slides and hosted an excellent webinar on July 7, 2011 based on his research and experience.
An IT Vision for Social Software: Introducing Online Workplaces
The emergence of a new layer of online capabilities, one that sits between rigid business applications and the dynamic world of the information worker, has gone unnoticed for years.Some have started to call this a social layer, inspired by the rising popularity of social software. However, it is better described as an online work layer because not all activities within an enterprise are social in nature, but they all support how work is done. Enterprises need to develop their own tailored vision for how this online work layer (which includes the use of social software) improves their business, rather than relying on vendor product positioning.
This webinar will describe a vendor-neutral framework that helps IT describe, manage and evolve collaborative and workplace technologies to maximize the effectiveness of their enterprise’s information workers.~ Larry Cannell, Research Director, Gartner
Introducing Online Workplaces
Larry Cannell, Research Director, Gartner @lcannell
Need to distinguish:
What (Business Objectives) vs How (Approach for accomplishing What)
What (business objective): Work
How: Unified communication, Email, conferencing, Productivity tools, Social Software, Workspaces, Content Management, Search
Defining a Work Layer
Enterprise Goals and Objectives -> Business Processes (PD, Mfg, Sales.
[ Very good slides distinguish needs and perspective as individual, as member of functional team, as participant in broad community and directed versus volitional participation ]
Online Workplace:
Organize/
Facilitate Work Processes (ad-hoc, tacit)
Work as Individuals (attention management)
Work together (team, communities)
Capture and Reuse Intellectual Assets.
Online Workplace Relationships:
Business processes <- (tasks, priorities) -> Online Workplace <- (completing tasks, prioritizing work, planning, deciding) -> People
Human Capital (knowledge, experience, relationships) <- (discover, describe) - > Online Workplace
Structural Capital from Applications (CRM, ERP, PLM, SCM, etc) - (data) -> Online Workspace
Online Workplace Framework:
Individual environments, Group environments (Teams, Communities)
Knowledgebase
Business Applications, External Information
Group Environments - A spectrum of participation
directed - individual must participate to meet some joint objective or get certain kind of work done.
volitional - individual choses to participate or not, choses level of participation
Process (90% directed participation, 10% volitional participation)
Activity (50% directed, 50% volitional)
Community (30% directed, 70% volitional)
Network (10% directed, 90% volitional)
Recommendations
Position online workplaces as strategic assets
Take care of the individual worker
Expect to support multiple online workplaces
Develop new skills
Provide a roadmap
Demand what you need from your vendors
Online Workplace Framework and Traction TeamPage
Larry's framework is descriptive and intentionally vendor and technology neutral.
I believe Traction TeamPage is very well aligned and easy to explain in terms of Larry's framework.
Traction Software Introduces Social Enterprise Web - The TeamPage workplace spans external Sharepoint, Documentum, Exchange, Email and other Systems of Record using TeamPage Attivio Plus, bookmarking and content badging.
I see activity streams as a great alerting mechanism to help maintain situational awareness with respect to human centered or software events spanning many systems.
The Future of Work Platforms: Like Jazz - When you watch a skilled team in action, it's like watching a great jazz group - there are themes, there is structure, and there are limits, but a team shines in individual excellence combined with coordination, improvisation, innovation, handling exceptions, and seemingly effortless awareness of where others are and where they're headed.
Intertwingled Work - The record of collaborative and observable work needs to span multiple external and internal systems to provide a simple and coherent view of activities
Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart - A dynamically evolving knowledge base .
See also Enterprise 2.0 Schism - Why Peter Drucker and Doug Engelbart should be the patron saints of Enterprise 2.
Doug Engelbart | 85th Birthday Jan 30, 2010 - Irresistible quotes and references.
The Debate Zone: Has the US passed peak productivity growth? | McKinsey & Company
See the lively McKinsey & Company What Matters debate, Tyler Cowen: "Yes.
In a narrower domain of technology, Bill Buxton refers to this as "The Long Nose of Innovation" (link below)
Buxton cites a 2003 report presented by Butler Lampson to the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council in Washington which traced the history of a number of key technologies driving the telecommunications and information technology sectors.
"The report analyzed each technology (time-sharing, client/
Buxton concludes: "Any technology that is going to have significant impact over the next 10 years is already at least 10 years old.
I believe that the fundamental value of the GPT we call the Web is as part of an interlocking set of communication and information technology capabilities organizations *can* employ to reduce the friction of knowledge work across space and over time, as well as fundamentally shift channels of marketing, sales, and distribution.
Assimilation and productive use of these new capabilities requires organizational change and innovation as profound as the technology driven changes of the Industrial Revolution.
I would not be surprised to find that the long nose of Enterprise 2.
The Long Nose of Innovation
Bill Buxton, Business Week, Jan 2, 2008
[Bloomberg BusinessWeek image] Bill Buxton is Principal Scientist at Microsoft Research and the author of Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design.
Enterprise 2.
Greg Lloyd, Traction Software Inc, Nov 9, 2009
Zoom in to focus, zoom out for awareness, bubble up items in the flow of work
There's been a lot of Web and Twitter discussion about the value of activity streams to promote broad awareness versus the potential problem of showing too much information and having important signals get lost in the flow.
Traction TeamPage Release 5.2 adds mini-dashboards to make it simple to see status, activity, tasks, discussions and related articles or documents focused on a particular project or milestone, complete with sparkline diagrams to see at a glace what's happening over time.
See Action Tracking with Tasks, Milestones, and Projects videos
You can also zoom out a broader view of all spaces you have permission to read, or people you choose to follow.
You can flip to your own profile to review and use the stream of your own activities, tasks, and calendar across all spaces and projects you have permission to see.
Flip to the profile of any other team member by clicking their name to review their activities, tasks, and calendar, limited to just what you have permission to read.
You can flag a post, project, tag, or space and receive an automatic notification (by email or Jabber) when a comment is added, edit is made, a specific tag is added (e.
Because Traction TeamPage spaces carry access permissions, internal teams, customers, suppliers and other external stakeholders can freely tag, task, link and discuss anything they discover - even make more private comments on more public content.
Activity streams, search results, comments, email digests, notifications, and even tag clouds are automatically clipped to keep private activities private, but make everything you're allowed to see visible in context.
When you see something that looks important you can tag, task or comment on the relevant item to raise its visibility as an opportunity, an answer to an important question, or an issue to be addressed.
A TeamPage project creates a shared context where work actually gets done - with specific deliverables; as an open ended activity with a stream of actions and milestones; or as customer or client case to be tracked and guided to a desirable outcome.
A TeamPage customer quoted in the Feb 2011 Deloitte Social Software for Business Performance study said:
"With Traction Software I can post meeting notes and assign action items to individuals.