Portals and KM

Summary of Some Summaries of Enterprise 2.0 Conference

I greatly enjoyed this years Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. This is the third year that I have participated and I feel it has gotten better each year. The best part was meeting new people and engaging with others I have know for a while. I went to some session but also had other things to do locally so did ot see as many as I wanted to. I also saw a number of the vendor exhibits and talked with them. Many are ones that I have covered on the AppGap and met previously via the phone. I did notes on all the sessions I attended and here are the links.

My Notes on Dion Hinchcliffe Enterprise 2.0 Conference Workshop – Part One

Dion Hinchcliffe Enterprise 2.0 Conference Workshop – Part Two

My Notes on Mike Gotta’s Reality 2.0: Getting Started with Enterprise Social Networking

Thoughts on Twitter and Business for Enterprise 2.0 Conference

A Few Thoughts from Enterprise 2.0 Conference Session on Future of Social Messaging in Enterprise

A Few Thoughts from Enterprise 2.0 Conference Session on Does Social Media in Matter in Marketing

More importantly, I have enjoyed the notes from others. Here are some of them with a few comments.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference 09: A re-cap. Is an excellent post by Sameer Patel. He said that there were a good number of practitioners from companies and a good number of tactical sessions. He thought the conference was a success for those who wanted to be able to put learning to work and I agree.

Sameer covered a number of sessions I missed and this is appreciated. Mike Gotta moderated Community & Social Network Sites: Think Adoption, Not Deployment. In it Dan McCall, Kishan Mallur and Erik Johnson cited specific examples how they generated buzz on the cheap, got influencers to become evangelists, and created a sense of ownership. Another of his was Lee Bryant’s Transition Strategies for Enterprise 2.0 Adoption and Sandy Kemsley wrote at length on it (see below).

In Metrics in the Hands of Users. Marc Smith, Kate Niederhofferand Daniel Debow kindled a great discussion on how to drive, visualize and measure performance via less geeky constructs. He also covered Reality 2.0: Getting Started with Enterprise Social Networking by Mike Gotta that I also attended. I only skimmed the surface of what Sameer offers and you should read his entire piece.

Transition Strategies for Enterprise 2.0 Adoption by Sandy Kemsley looked at Lee Bryant of Headshift session on adoption challenges for 2.0 technologies. Sandy reported that Lee said that points out that we can't afford the “high-friction, high-cost model of deploying technology and processes, but need to rebalance the role of people within the enterprise.” Having experienced much of the unnecessary and expensive pain of old school large scale systems integration I would agree.

Sandy said that many of the behavioral use cases “focused on things that people were already doing, and just tweaking the methods that they use to do them. That makes it a lot less threatening, and therefore much more likely to be adopted.” In the past, I always looked to add knowledge management to enhance existing business processes and then measure KM’s enhancement of these processes. In 15 years, I never saw a successful knowledge management system that did not do this. Sandy uses Lee’s session as background to share her own ides and it is an excellent read,

Enterprise 2.0 conference impressions were provided by Oliver Marks. I always enjoy his posts at ZDNet. He said that Enterprise 2.0 is still considered in many quarters almost a fashion statement compared to enterprise software as the heavy duty infrastructure. I agree and for now one does not replace the other. They need to integrate and co-exist. In this context, he added that from his perspective the Sharepoint ’shared drive’ approach to structured data workflows is robust, but much of the current collaboration functionality is waited to be released. However, Microsoft plans to release some of these enhancements in October. He mentioned that Christian Finn of Microsoft did tell him that Bing, which leverages the innovations of the semantic web technologies world to provide linked contextual answers, is a purely consumer play, while the FAST technologies are the enterprise search engine for the enterprise. I look forward to seeing what they do. There is more in Oliver’s post.

Looking back on Enterprise 2.0 was provided by Irwin Lazar on the conference blog. He notes Enterprise 2.0 is real, and perhaps more importantly, the business benefits are real (and so are the challenges). I agree and have been saying for several years. I find that the constant improvement to this conference keeps validating it. He added that we need to keep measuring this success and referred to Telligent’s work. I have interviewed them, like their metrics, and am working on an AppGap post covering this conversation. In his final point he noted that lines are blurring between social computing and unified communications. Read him for the details.

Post #e2conf thoughts – installment 1 was provided by Gil Yehuda, another blogger I greatly respect. He liked the conference and noted that most attendees were well informed. I found this last year and told a number of vendors who I interviewed for AppGap that it was a conference to talk with the experts rather than meet new customers. This was even more the case this year. At the same time Gil said need to further clarify what we mean when we say Enterprise 2.0, it started to get pretty slippery at times. I agree here also. That was the case with our Twitter session as I noted yesterday.

Gil gave a good example from a session I missed, Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Chief Technology Officer & Founding Partner of Blue State Digital who spoke about the lessons we can learn from the Obama campaign. Gil wanted to hear more enterprise related issues such as the “culture change” process that the Obama campaign had to accept internally as it shifted into a new strategy. I would agree. I think that the Obama campaign was the first to move from Web 2.0 to enterprise 2.0 and have discussed this (e.g., Rolling Stone Magazine and More on Obama’s Use of the New Web). I would love to hear more from an insider.

My last summary comes form someone who did not attend the meeting, The secret sauce to successful Enterprise 2.0 adoption was nicely written by Oscar Berg from Europe. He quoted a number of summaries, including some of mine. He started with Hylton Jolliffe discussing the new direction in our FastFoward blog. “While selecting the right tools for the job can certainly prove a barrier to adoption for some organizations, even after they select the right tools they are always faced with the more formidable barrier to adoption - one based on social, cultural and business process issues.” I look forward to being part of this discussion.

Oscar also referenced Ben Kepes on Community & Social Network Sites: Think Adoption, Not Deployment that picks up on this theme. Ben noted that you need to reach out to existing communities of interest to drive adoption and pre-determine community champions to answer the initial questions until critical mass is reached and the community self-perpetuates. These are both long-standing best practices that remain useful in enterprise 2.0 adoption. There is much more in Oscar’s post.

I am sure there are other excellent summaries of the conference. Please add any that you feel are useful in the comment section of this post. Thanks in advance. I look forward to more next year.

Post Script - Here are more that I just learned about. Andrew McAfee How Beautiful it is, and How Easily it can be Broken Susan Scrupski And they’re off… Postcard from Enterprise 2.0 Boston and Doug Cornelius Enterprise 2.0 Keynotes on Tuesday

More Follow-up to Our Enterprise 2.0 Conference Panel on Twitter and Business

Thanks to all the people who came to our session at Enterprise 2.0 Conference on business uses of Twitter, How Twitter Changes Everything. My panel co-participants include Jessica Lipnack, CEO, NetAge (our moderator) Isaac Garcia, CEO, Central Desktop, Clara Shih, author of The Facebook Era, and my fellow AppGap blogger, Patti Anklam. Last Wednesday I posted the thoughts I shared at the session and some additional comments (Thoughts on Twitter and Business for Enterprise 2.0 Conference). Here I want to expand on them and look at what some others have said.

I should first add that our session was about Twitter as business tool and not about micro-blogging within the enterprise where issues like security are critical. There was an excellent session on the latter topic the next day (see Thoughts from Enterprise 2.0 Conference Session on Future of Social Messaging in Enterprise.) Pistachio Consulting provides an excellent Enterprise Microsharing Tools Comparison.

We have started to use the term Twitter like we did Xerox or Kleenex so there can be confusion here. Twitter, like Facebook is a consumer Web tool that has great business uses. It is not designed as an enterprise 2.0 tool for use behind the firewall. This does not mean that it does not have business uses. It just means that these uses are out in the public space. (see Enterprise 2.0 is not Web 2.0 nor is it an Oxymoron).

This is the third Enterprise 2.0 conference session I have done with Jessica. I always like her introductions and her style of getting everyone involved. I think her energy is contagious and I look forward to more.

Several of the other panel members, as well as those in the audience have continued the conversation. I want to summarize what they said and provide links to their complete thoughts in this post.

Enterprise 2.0: Twitter Up, Facebook, MySpace Down appeared in Information Week. It noted how quickly usage switches on the web with twitter on the upswing down but people are still sorting it out.

How Twitter changed to include everyone – Our panel leader Jessica Lipnack posted a number of pictures from the session and provided us with the stream on tweets on the panel through the Twitter tag #e2conf. More have surfaced since her post.

Twitter in the Enterprise - Patti Anklam another panel member shared her thoughts from the panel and more. She related what happened when the CEO at one of her clients requested a “twitter channel” for questions during an all-employee forum. Patti added benefits to using within the enterprise: situational awareness, crowd sourcing: tweeting questions and getting answers from friends but also friends of friends (via the Retweet mechanism), developing and maintaining relationships. Tweets also help you get a sense of who a person is, and whether it’s a person you may want to collaborate with. In addition, tweets with links, and especially retweets with links provide a good information filtering mechanism.

Patti also provided a useful list of challenges to implementing a twitter-like micro-blogging tool within the enterprise. In addition to dealing with the very real security concerns, these include migrating people who are already using Twitter to an internal tool. It is also important for enterprise micro-blogging tools to enable the option to post out to Twitter anything posted internally. Then there is the issue of Integrating micro-blogging with social networking and collaboration applications that already exist or that are in plan. There is much more in Patti’s post and you should look at the complete piece.

Enterprise 2.0 2009:Twitter’s Influence Everywhere & A New Realism was posted by my fellow AppGap blogger. Jenny noted that Twitter’s influence pervaded the Expo floor with micro-blogging/social messaging functionality being demoed at booths from Lotus Connections through the latest release of Atlassian’s Confluence Wiki to Thoughtfarmer. I would add Central Desktop, Cubetree, and Traction TeamPage to this list. I think that soon every enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform will have one.

Irwin Lazar expanded on Jenny’s point about the migration of Twitter like capabilities to the enterprise and wrote that there are “over a dozen press releases now on the E 2.0 site, almost all with a common theme of taking the capabilities of Facebook and Twitter and bringing them into the enterprise in a manner that meets requirements for security, compliance, and governance, but that also enables support for both internal and external collaboration.”

I am saving the most controversial part to the last. Issace Garcia stated that there is a lot of spam in Twitter and that RTs are spam. While I would agree with Issac that there is too much spam in Twitter, I respectfully disagree with the RT point. Many others including Luis Suarez and Alex Howard joined the disagreement. Alex did a nice follow-up post, Does RT = spam? Unlikely. A retweet is social media currency. I should say first that I have great respect for Isaac and have covered his work at Central Desktop many times (for example, Central Desktop Using Twitter for Sales, Service, and Brand Monitoring Conversations and How Barack Obama is Using Web and Enterprise 2.0 in the US Primary Campaign Through Central Desktop).

Alex first offered a definition of spam from the Wikipedia (currently) “Spam the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages.” He added that CNET reported that, in 2009, spam makes up 90% of all email. Alex said, if anything, that’s actually down from the 95% estimate he read a few years ago. I have heard similar numbers.

Alex then noted correctly that it is easy to avoid spam by not following those who you consider spam. Of course one person’s spam is not person’s steak but you can decide. Alex asked his followers on the more specific point about RTs and got some good responses that he posted.

@pmhesse wrote what many others said “RT is about sharing information with your friends that you found valuable, informative, or entertaining.” @eric_andersen added “I couldn’t possibly follow all of the original sources of info/links I’m interested in; rely on others to RT. IMHO sharing info via retweets is part of the “lifeblood” of Twitter; without sharing much appeal of the medium is lost.” I agree with both.

Alex further defined variations of RT. “A retweet is social media currency. It’s a validation of the tweet you are passing on and a stamp that you have not changed it. I use PRT, for partial retweet, if I have to edit for length. I use via or HT for “hat tip” if I pass along someone’s link but write my own text, which provides proper attribution.” I agree with the social currency concept. I also learned something here and will think about using these variations. He also mentioned the major spam problems on Twitter and noted an @spam account to report it to but RT is not spam if used right.

Isaac defended his position in a reply on Alex’s post. He only wants to see the original thoughts of people he follows and not the ideas of others they consider useful to pass on. We can just respectfully disagree here but with Twitter you can un-follow those who you feel are misusing the RT feature. Bringing micro-blogging into the enterprise may raise similar issues but I still think that RT could be useful there if done right.

Tomorrow I am going to post on some of the overall summaries of the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

Quick Painting of Turpentine Can

I did this 16 x 16 acrylic sketch in about an hour. There are quiet a few things wrong technically but it was fun and I will likely leave it as is. I think I am going to explore a more spontaneous style simultaneously with the more reworked stuff such as Painting of Woman with Flip Flops.

Painting of Woman on a Stool

Here is the second in a series of women sitting stools. Like Woman with Flip Flops, it is an 18 x 24 acrylic.

A Few Thoughts from Enterprise 2.0 Conference Session on Future of Social Messaging in Enterprise

There was an excellent Enterprise 2.0 conference session on Future of Social Messaging in Enterprise with David Marshak IBM Lotus, Fernando Egea Alcatel-Lucent, Joe Burton, Cisco, Marcia Conner, Pistachio Consulting, Mike Gotta, Burton group, Tim Young Socialcast, Dan York, Vixeo. Unfortunately, I did not get to hear all of it but here are some notes from what I did experience.

Marcia provides a series of pithy statements that fit the 140 character limit for twitter. I kidded her afterwards that she has learned to speak Twitter but this is a real complement.. When I was with a large consulting firm we were trained on how to be interviewed by the press and told to think sound bytes to get quoted. Twitter has raised that art. Here are some of the things she said that I agreed with and I tweeted the first two at the time.

Waste of time to be thinking about which tool to use rather than doing the job.

Need to know how to reach people who have insights.

Need to figure how to work smarter rather than focusing on tools.

Do not create app centric organizations but create people centric organizations.

An enterprise micro-blogging tool needs to help us capture and rate information. We need to be able to filter to avoid being overwhelmed and/bored.

The other panel members were no less insightful and here is a bit of what they offered. We get richer knowledge of people that work with us through Twitter and Facebook. We often do not have time to obtain this context in real time so these tools enrich our understanding of our colleagues. I agree and found this very much the case with blogs.

It is important to be able to search to find what someone said a month ago. This is currently an issue and flaw with twitter. It is also important to be able to look at correlations between what is going on across social media.

Many of these debates about how open to be have been going across many generations of tools. There is the share everything camp vs. keep everything secure camp. Granularity of access is an issue that we have been struggling with for some time.

Governance has two sides – how to look at data and store it. This can be solved. The bigger issue is a human issue. You can engage in bad behavior through many media. You cannot lock everything down. This was an issue with blogs but is timeless. It comes up with every new media. Transparency breeds respect. People tend to behavior correctly when given trust. You cannot send a one to one communication and not be sure that no one else will see it.

A Few Thoughts from Enterprise 2.0 Conference Session on Does Social Media in Matter in Marketing

This was an excellent panel at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. I was distracted and did not get everything but here area few bits. Ben Foster, Allstate, Morgan Johnson. JetBlue and Greg Matthews Humana participated on the panel. Peter Kim was moderator

Ben said social media can be a cure chasing tool. Morgan said it was important to manage both followers and following. I like that they are reciprocal to many of the their followers. I try to follow as many of my followers who seem sincere in their efforts even of they have a only a few followers so far. I guess I am a softy but I also believe in reciprocation.

Greg Matthews said they are trying to push forward in a new frontier as a company and not just be a health benefits company be a heath company. They want to help people take care of their health. For example, they launched bike sharing program. Humana has created an Innovation center web site to aggregate their social media efforts. Their content lives all over the web and the Humana innovation site brings it together.

The panel said there are two emerging area where social media matters – customer service and innovation and new product development. People are talking about needs and frustration that will help you design new products.

Humana is looking beyond marketing but marketing remains important. Social media is helping with their geographic expansion and proving a positive image and brand recognition as they come to new areas. On the issue of internal support there is always tension when you introduce something new into an organization. Bottom up generation of ideas creates tension. They have a big data security concern as we have health data on people. They work with IT to stay separate from core data with social media.

The panel advised us to not focus on one tool as another will come along and replace it or go in a new direction. Used to be how to use technology. Now you can build your own technology. The greatest technology does not seem like technology. A good example is the iPhone.

66 Notable Knowledge Management Sites and Blogs from Lucas McDonnell

Here is a useful list from Lucas McDonnell. He wrote, “while the original list was only 26 sites, and eventually almost doubled to around 50, I’ve now got the list up to 66 sites that are really cranking out some quality content.”

There are some good sources here and I was pleased to see this blog on the list. Most of them were already on my blog list but I added a few more.

Thoughts on Twitter and Business for Enterprise 2.0 Conference

Yesterday I was on panel at Enterprise 2.0 Conference on business uses of Twitter, How Twitter Changes Everything. My panel co-participants include Jessica Lipnack, CEO, NetAge (our moderator) Isaac Garcia, CEO, Central Desktop, Clara Shih, author of The Facebook Era, and my fellow AppGap blogger, Patti Anklam. Here is what I planned to share at the session. I ended up saying most of it but there was not time or it did not fit the conversation to say all of it.

There have been many creative business uses of Twitter and a lot have been written about them so I will not repeat that stuff here. In these comments I am going to share my own personal experiences of twitter with business. I mainly do two things for business. I serve as a paid journalist bloggers for two blogs on enterprise 2.0, FastForward and AppGap, and I provide consulting to firms and individuals on their business blogs and other uses of social media. I will close with Twitter’s impact on these two business activities.

First, I want to make a confession. I used to make fun of Twitter. I compared the endless stream of 140 character bits to Luis Borges' Library of Babel where, as the Wikipedia conveys his work published in 1941 conveys that, the "order of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless. Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the inhabitants believe that the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent thought. This glut of chaotic information was leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. But somewhere there was a book, the Crimson Hexagon, that contains the log of all the other books and the librarian who reads it is akin to God."

When I made fun of the chaotic stream of chatter on Twitter, many of my fellow bloggers rose to its defense and urged me to join their conversations. Finally, I meet with several at a conference in Vegas and they showed me the Crimson Hexagon for Twitter, TweetDeck. Now I could bring some order to the chaos. I could segment the people I am following into manageable and meaningful subgroups. I began to use it more actively and discovered that it served several functions that I will describe. But I had to go to another tool to find value. One study said that Twitter provides the 37th best interface to its own data. This is one of two potentially fatal flaws that may send it to join Friendster.

First, I discover a lot of interesting ideas. I like the human filter aspects. When I first started my blog over four years ago, people knew I blogged and would email me interesting stuff to blog about. I said I had a human RSS feed and rarely had to go to mechanical RSS readers. Now Twitter serves this purpose even better as people I respect tweet about an article or blog post with links. As Dion Hitchcliffe said in a tweet, Twitter can serve as a useful filter as he would rather have info endorsed by people he knows. Twitter has become my main source for blog content but only through tweets that point to longer pieces.

Second, I use Twitter search as an alternative to Google search. It has not replaced Google, just supplemented it. Twitter search is for what is happening right now and Twitter makes it easier to engage the person sharing the content. I find it good for niche topics like agile development or cloud computing. However, Twitter’s range is fleeting and Google is still more comprehensive.

Third, like my blog, I use Twitter as a personal knowledge management system. I retweet interesting links I find from others and tweet things I find myself. Then I can go back to them to read later and perhaps blog on them. However, this is fleeting and exposes the second of the potentially fatal flaws with Twitter. It dumps its data index after three months so you cannot go back and find stuff beyond the rolling three month window. If I tweet about this conference or record links I had better convert the information to another format if I want to save it. In addition, the interface makes it hard to go back more than a few weeks away. Someone needs to do for Twitter archiving what TweetDeck did for immediate use or a better micro-blogging system might take over. I found my blog to be very useful in preparing for what I would say on this panel. Twitter was much less useful and only helped with stuff that happen in the past week.

I also used my blog to record my notes on the excellent conference sessions by Dion Hinchcliffe and Mike Gotta. But I used Twitter to let others at the conference know that they existed and received over 38 RTs of these alerts and a few came with nice additional comments. There was also a spike in page views for the blog with many coming from Twitter. The two channels complemented each other. Twitter does not replace blogs.

Fourth, like with blogs, I meet new people on Twitter and better engage with people I already know. I also can create greater awareness for what I write in other channels, primarily blogs. Twitter does not replace blogs because there is only so much you can say in 140 characters but it is good way to point to more meaningful content.

So how has this affected my business? First, as I mentioned before, it supplies many stories for my journalist blogger role. Second, I now advise my blog clients on how to use Twitter to compliment their blogging efforts. Just as I experiment with blogs to better serve my clients, I have been experimenting with Twitter for the same purpose.

I have learned a lot and that could be another session. But here is one example. With blogs it is important to think in terms of key words as one of the best ways to expand your audience is through search. You need to speak to search engines through these key words but not in a gaming way. You will (and should) get in trouble for this as HabitatUK found out. With Twitter, you can apply the same key word strategy but instead on focusing on choosing the right words for blog titles and other content, you focus on the wording of tweets and use hashtags in a meaningful way. I find that I often get new followers directly related to a hashtag I recently used.

But of course you need to provide some value to the readers you attract or it is a waste of time. I you are just offering another get rich on Twitter scheme you will only attract fellow travelers.

Twitter is currently raising the slope of unrealistic expectations for business and consumers. It has great potential but it needs to continue to improve or someone else will take micro-blogging to the next step.

I Tried These Five Recommended Twitter Tools

I found this post on 5 Killer Twitter Tools from Jim Goldstein, a photographer who also writes about social media. These tools came from his attendance at the 140 conference. I tried each tool and would say they are killer but they are interesting. Some were more useful than others here they are. Go to Jim’s post for more detail.

TweetReach lets you know who found your Tweet of interest and retweeted it. I looked at this first for topics and found that the TweetReach for the term, knowledgemanagement, reached 9,288 people via 20 tweets. The term, KM, is used much more for kilometers than knowledge management. In contrast, the TweetReach for the term, enterprise20, reached 101,321 people via 50 tweets. I am not sure how it applies to individual tweets.

I also looked at my Twitter name, billives and found the TweetReach for billives reached 30,533 people via 50 tweets. You can see you have the top contributors for each term so I could see who was putting terms including my twitter user name in front of the most people.

The catch is that they only look at the last 50 Tweets for free so you only see recent activity. If you want a 30 day history of the activity you have to purchase their report.

xefer 
helps you find out when any Twitter user is most active on Twitter. This information is useful if you’re trying to time the release of certain information for widest distribution. I tried this tool and found that I am more likely to tweet at 9AM and 9PM. The next times are 10PM and 8AM. The fifthe most hour was 8PM. This all makes sense as I tweet more at the beginning and end of the day.

TweetBeep
 sets up an automated alert to be notified when certain keywords are detected in a tweet, when a particular person has tweeted or if someone has tweeted near a particular location or any combination there of. You can also narrow down the alerts by the “attitude” of the post whether positive / negative or if it contains links. I signed up and am still waiting for results.

Twist: see Trends In Twitter
 tracks trends on particular topics or people. I tried this and you can see trends in usage in a line graph and most recent examples. The most recent examples is no different than Twitter search fir the term. It does give you a quick sense of volume overtime.

Backtweets.com
 allows you to type in a link URL to see who has tweeted/retweeted it and who is discussing it. I tried the tool and put in this blog’s url. I found that it will unpack tiny urls to see what is behind and also go to the root url. In other words it reported links to specific posts in this blog, even though I only put in the general home page url for the blog. These features make it quite useful.

My Notes on Mike Gotta’s Reality 2.0: Getting Started with Enterprise Social Networking

I attended the Mike Gotta session on Enterprise Social Networking at the Boston Enterprise 2.0 conference. I have been following Mike’s Collaborative Thinking blog for some time as I was pleased to be able to see him in person for the first time to hear him talk about adoption issues. Mike said he is going to provide information from actual cases from project teams that he has interviewed. I am doing these notes real time so please forgive any typos and missing words.

There is a history of software and communities. Many tools have come and gone since the 80s. So what is new? The consumer Web tools helped to great more awareness. Now we have evolved from social networking sites to services to platforms. They are no set answers yet. Platforms for the enterprise can use profiles, social graphs, relationship controls (for people and admin), social presence, participation tools, and application services.

He showed an example of a social network site from Booz Allen that they built themselves. It showed the total social context of an individual within the organization.

Mike offered a graph of the market space. The domain specific vendors include: Jive, Telligent, Newsgator and others. The three platform vendors include IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. He also showed transformational vendors (Facebook, Twitter, Google and others) and emerging vendors (Drupal, Cubetree and others). He moved to another slide before I could get the rest.

Mike related a field study he conducted. Interviewed 21 organizations, interviewed 65 people, got 45 hours of conversation, and looked at 1,700 data points. Rather than guide the conversation with a lot of questions, he set a framework and let people talk and tell their stories. Good idea.

Mike made a good point up front. It is all abut adoption not deployment. Major findings include the fact that everyone thought they were behind, even if they were not. Everyone is at the starting point. Few organizations have made a organization-wide decision on social networking. They are still trying to figure it out. Even organizations that have a strategic vision are in the proof-of concept stage. It is not about the tools that is the critical factors. It is overcoming the cultural issues. Social networks do enable more adaptive organizations. This make intuitive sense so it is nice to see some validation.

They found three approaches – people to people, people to work, and people to organization but its work best when these three integrate. They found two main gaps. People have not focused on social network and identity and search was not considered. This was surprising to Mike. He feels that their should be a lot of synergy between social networking and search strategy.

One of the first issues that project teams faced was properly identifying what social networking means for the enterprise. There is a lot of confusion here. Analogies to the consumer web such as Facebook were often not successful, as people did not want Facebook in the enterprise. Most teams ended up with the term collaboration and not anything social. This is exactly consistent with Dion Hinchcliffe in the morning session. I certainly agree with both of them

Found innovation best from bottom up from people closest to the work. So give them a voice and a way to collaborate. I found this over and over again in the old knowledge management days. In those days you needed to do anthropology on the jobs to uncover best practices.

Mike he found other issues such as the above and that these are not new issues. What did I just say? Shifting generations play several roles in adoption. Need to be able to appeal to all generations and allow for greater integration across generations. Older workers can be social networking leaders to share their expertise and provide status to them for retention. Also look for emerging experience that is developing in the younger workers. A culture of participation will identify good skills in ways that might not come out otherwise.

Social networks are also ways for people to organize and create their own training to meet their individual needs. Informal learning can complement formal learning. Also, social networking is great for on-boarding. They offer the back channel for what is really going on and who to interact with.

The business side often has pain points but do not link them to a business requirement when they talk with IT. They also sometimes come to IT with a tool request not linked with a business requirement. In both cases IT needs to not dismiss but explore to uncover real business requirement. It is usually there if you ask questions.

There was a lot of debate on ROI. It was hard to make very concrete. There is no agreement here. Some people said it was the wrong question and others said it was important. It is essential infrastructure or can it be an intervention with a concrete ROI linked to work process improvement. Often ROI was found after deployment but hard to predict specifics. Most pilots did find business value once they started.

Some project teams worked behind the scenes to get supporters in decision roles, often younger people. Others went out to get support form the field. Stories can be the best ROI, especially for potential of approach to get pilots going. Gaining approval and ROI is more art than science. I would agree here. This is brining back early days of knowledge management when it was all fresh. Again, I think this similarity just validates the issues.

Mike next addressed the issue of how to balance business and culture or how to defeat the enemy within. Organizational structures cam impede social networking. Middle management can be threatened and try to sabotage efforts. They were used to controlling what went up the reporting chain. Now the lower level employees can talk directly to senior management. The top and bottom of the organization liked this but the middle did not. Managers would tell workers to not put stuff in a blog but send to them in email.

Sometimes there are social caste systems. People at high levels do not talk with people in junior levels. This can carry over to social software. Workers feel senior management would “never take an idea from me.” This is a red flag that the culture can be a barrier. Another company that had a good culture and questions and suggestions were answered quickly. They made over $500k in savings from the system.

There is no clear answer as to whether you must change culture first before implementing social networks or you can use social networks to change culture. Regardless you must address the cultural issues in the implementation. Culture can trump almost everything. Trust is important here. One guy said he did not want to fill out his profile because it would make it easier to find him and lay him off. How do you cross culture boundaries in social software that are not crossed in person on the job? This needs to be figured out.

There was mixed opinion on whether to bring legal, HR, and security into the project pre or post pilot. There was agreement that they need to get involved. Pre-pilot course would say that you know what to avoid. Post would say that you do not yet know what you need to get by-in for.

Other issues that came up include the role of social business activity in annual reviews. There were all sides on this. Do not want to drive gaming the system but you also want to recognize good corporate citizen behavior. Also, what about consequences for negative behavior? Should people be concerned about career limiting moments? There needs to be policies on this so issues are clear. Some companies have terms of service before you start to use the social networking site. I think this could be okay but only if what really happens. I had something similar on an email system with a past employer but everyone ignored it. It said you cold only use it for business uses but everyone used it for personal uses. Finally, the company recognized the folly of their requirement and removed it. If you get too controlling no one will come.

I had to duck out a bit early so welcome anyone filling in what I missed. I liked the fact that this session came from actual research with real stories and was not simply platitudes. It was also better as stories than stats.

Dion Hinchcliffe Enterprise 2.0 Conference Workshop – Part Two

This is part two of opening workshop by Dion Hinchcliffe on Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at the Boston Enterprise 2.0 conference. Dion brought up a guest speaker David Stephenson who he said is the “world’s leader in democratizing data.” This was the tile of his discussion, the concept of democratizing data: the data-centric organization. This makes it automatically available to those who need it based on roles and responsibilities while maximizing security. He said that data democratization can actually increase security. I agree here.

Having data at the heart of all actions is an attitudinal shift. You need to provide metadata so you can make sense of it and RSS feeds to reach user. You need to think of every worker as a knowledge worker. Giving more authority to people who fill potholes by providing them with all the data on their daily assignments increases morale and productivity as they will know the best way to complete the tasks. David said that the Netherlands government saves over 25% of reporting costs by standardizing and making data more transparent.

Dion can back and picked up on this theme. Government is picking up on the data democratization theme with the new administration. For example, wikis are being used for dealing with crisis issues for more transparency than email.

Dion reviewed enterprise 2.0 platforms; wikis, blogs, microblogging, mashups, online communities, social bookmarking, social networking and them went over the vendor space with examples of each category. There is currently no one stop shop for all tool categories but there are suites. Online communities include: Joomla, Drupal, Zikula, PHP/Nuke SharePoint, Lithium, Telligent, DotNetNuke, KickApps, Jive. Dion said these are the top ones based on usage. SharePoint is already available in many organizations that want to start enterprise 2.0. It has many necessary capabilities. It can also be adapted to implement many of the social emergent tools but usually requires some work.

Dion put up an enterprise 2.0 ecosystem chart. You have traditional enterprise systems and enterprise 2.0 systems. These can be connected through mashups and data can be found through federated search. He went on to cover some other platforms being used: Igloo, Facebook private groups (it is open source). Serena software uses Facebook (see my post - Serena has Adopted Facebook as their Intranet).

Mashups are being used and Serena, Jackbe, IBM (Lotus Mashups), Microsoft (Popfly) have tools. One creative example, Chicago did a mashup of crime data with Google Maps that is updated real time and can be sorted by time of day.

Crowdsourcing is another application. One gold company put their survey data out and invited anyone to tell them where the gold was. They had great success and paid a large sum in bounties. This can be done internally or externally. (see Innovating Through Market Games with Spigit.)

Dion then switched to best practices. Successful adoption strategies include: gain and enlist top down support, overcome turf issues in advance, align applications to key business processes, align enterprise 2.0 strategy to business strategy, develop a clear simple business case, provide strong leadership, design measure aligned to business processes. I could not agree more. These were also all the key adoption strategies for knowledge management in the early 90s. This does not take away from them. I think it just reinforces them. Dion said these factors came from actual case studies.

He added more adoption strategies: listen to users, simply the access and production of knowledge, develop a clear communication plan to promote the effort, involve all key stakeholers (but go slow on this), integrate all forms of communication, develop a clear motivation plan. Again these are all best practices from knowledge management in the early 90 but I see this as a further validation. I found that legal often got overlooked and this can come back to bite you so do not leave them out.

Dion went on to discuss the need to aggregate social data and not have silos. This is critical. Enterprise 2.0 suites are adding this. Also, social analytics is being implemented to take advantage of the transparency and make sense of it. He gave an example of Facebooks’ FriendWheel as a consumer version. In line with this you need to cultivate weak ties, as well as strong ties, and enterprise 2.0 enables this. These weak ties are often the source of new insights vs. the people you talk to all the time.

Reputation systems are another way to make use of the social data and rather input. Sezwho is one tool that works across platforms. Expertise location is an overlapping capability.

Dion offered a breakdown of effort: tools, 15%, integration, 25%, community management 25%, IT support, 15% change management 20%. These make intuitive sense. Do not short change the people issues. The quality of the community management team is a critical success factor. Community Manager is one of the roles in the enterprise.

You need to allow time for people to learn the tools and methods. Social tools are the new productivity tools like word processing and spreadsheets before so everyone needs to learn how to use them. As Dion said earlier, the more people use the tools the greater the value. There are three levels of community in the enterprise and you need to deal with each one: team level, community level, and entire network.

I found this workshop to be a useful overview of enterprise 2.0 adoption.

My Notes on Dion Hinchcliffe Enterprise 2.0 Conference Workshop – Part One

Dion Hinchcliffe is leading an opening workshop on Implementing Enterprise 2.0. I have long been an admirer of his work and was pleased to see this session. The subtitle is: Exploring the Tools and Techniques of Emergent Change. Dion said the concept of emergent and social is critical. I like the fact that many stories will be offered as I agree that they offer more than “factual” information. I did this real time so apologies for typos. This is cross-posted from FastForward.

Dion said that many companies do not like the word, social. so he uses enterprise 2.0. Again, I agree here. I wish the Wikipedia did. Three years ago only a few in his session had access to blogs at work. Last year it was half. This year it was almost everyone. Enterprise 2.0 is more about social tools for collaboration than in the consumer space. Most organization have these tools but it is every uneven.

Consumer and enterprise is blurring. Employees now put contact information in social tools outside the enterprise as something they own and can take with them. People are willing to pay for these tools themselves but most are free. We had to move to a much bigger room as there were a lot of people here. I could have predicted that. I look around and still see people standing.

In 2004 Web 2.0 tools began to be used at work. This is when I learned about them and got excited about their impact on knowledge management. Middle of last year global surveys in developed nations found about a third of all companies had the enterprise tools. Now it is a bit over half. Dion mentioned that knowledge management was an early use. Now Twitter is on the rise. It is social messaging as opposed to instant messaging. There is little interest in IM now as it does not build value because it operates in silos. I never liked IM and would sometimes copy and paste IM messages in Word before they went away. Now Twitter needs to get its archiving working better but at least there is some.

There are hundreds of enterprise 2.0 pilot projects underway. Mid to small businesses are most successful because they are nimble. Big software players are getting into it. Google Wave is designed to serve in this space. There are dozens of startups. Traditional tools like Documentum are adding enterprise 2.0 features. I did a review of this in AppGap (see EMC Documentum Makes a Series of Moves into Enterprise 2.0).

The big money principle of Enterprise 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence. Tools have been poor for this before. He has seen 400 page Word docs with best practices. Tim O’Reilly definition, “Network applications that explicitly leverage network effects.” This is the social side of information. It is not just making connections but making use of it. Network effect occurs when the more people who use it, the better it is. YouTube is an example. Gave example of enterprise use of taking a free wiki tool inside informally at AOL. It spread virally until the entire organization uses it instead of traditional document management system. The wiki was optimizes for network effect. The traditional document management system was not optimized for this and lost out.

Andy McAffee put forth three pillars of enterprise 2.0: emergent, freeform, social. They are primarily to address collaboration challenge. Capture institutional knowledge and make it discoverable. It is globally visible, persistent collaboration that has very low barrier to entry. Like open source, anyone can improve knowledge. Workers are put into the central place for contribution. Tools adapt to environment rather than the reverse. In studies of early adopters social tools get much greater use for knowledge management than traditional tools. There is also less duplication of effort, increased transparency, and higher levels of productivity.

Dion used stales acronym – search, links, authorship, tags, extensions, signals - as critical components. Tags provide emergent structure and standard use of terms. I found that the users of taxonomy are the best at creating it. Now we have the way for this to happen. These tools will interrupt workflow less. Dion said this is a critical point and I agree. The other is that the content can be leveraged as the content is persistent and discoverable. I see this as knowledge management as a byproduct of work and not a separate activity. This is what got me excited about Web 2.0 for business in 2004.

Now we have a break so I will post this first part. More later.

Twitter Usage is Very Concentrated According to Harvard Research

I was somewhat surprised at recent research reported by Harvard Business School that suggests that Twitter usage is very concentrated. Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski found that “the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue - Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia's edits ii. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.”

They looked at 300,542 users in May 2009 to come up with these results. While I cannot argue with their facts, I do not agree completely with the last statement. I find that Twitter can be very two-way between people who are closely connected. It also opens up two-way exchanges with people you did not know before. Now this two-way exchange may only occur in the top 10% of users, but I have observed it occur many times.

At the same time, I continue to observe many people using Twitter as a one way broadcast channel as implied by the researchers. I think these people are missing the value of Twitter and their broadcasts likely fall on deaf ears. It becomes the tree falling in the forest thing. While many broadcasters may have many followers listed in their profile, I wonder how many of the these followers actually read their tweets if they are not a celebrity.

The researchers also found that 80% of twitter users are followed by or follow at least one user. By comparison, only 60 to 65% of other online social networks' members had at least one friend. Twitter's usage patterns are also very different from a typical on-line social network in another way. A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days. Since many Twitters, myself included, average multiple tweets per day, there must be a lot who never tweet and I have observed this.

I think the research needs to focus on what people who are really using Twitter do and not the vast number of people who start it but do not use it. Although they might look at the characteristics of users and registered non-users. I was in the registered non-user category for the first five months of my Twitter experience. Then some friends showed my how to use it properly and my usage accelerated. I found value in using Twitter for several reasons, including sharing interesting links. Once I started using it, my followers rapidly grew. It continues to be fun.

Twitter may be like golf. You have to get to a certain level of proficiency to enjoy. However, getting to this level in Twitter is much easier than golf. I speak from experience here on both counts.

Cotswolds UK Door and Windows

I was struck by the wide variety of doors and windows when I was in the Cotswolds this late March. Last weekend I posted my photos of driving around. here are some doors and windows. You can click on a picture to enlarge it.

Signs of London

In my recent trip I was struck by many familiar signs from the time I lived in London. Here are some.

What Is the Best Business Model When Data and Content Storage Becomes a Utility?

This post started with a conversation with Paula Thornton (twitter.com/rotkapchen). We were discussing the implications of the cloud for business processes and software and Paula used the term, data as a utility. It got me to thinking about the implications of this. Here, I want to address the business model issue that will either carry forward or compromise the potential with the cloud.

Most SaaS providers I talk with are doing very well in the down economy. Some are having record profits. For example, Jen Grant at Box.net said that as a SaaS provider they continue to exceed their revenue targets. She attributed this to pressure on IT departments and business units to keep expenses down. With Box and many other SaaS tools, it is easy to get started and there are no implementation or systems integration costs. Employees still need to do work. Box and other SaaS tools provide a lower cost way to accomplish many content related tasks.

While Spigit, the innovation management software firm, offers both cloud and on-premise solutions, 95% of their customers are choosing SaaS. SkillSoft, the eLearning company said that an increasing majority of their customers are selecting the SaaS option. GroupSwim has gone to a total cloud offering so they can scale quickly, another major benefit of the cloud and making servers virtual. QuickBase has also seen significant growth for its SaaS based shareable database despite a down market. They feel that companies are seeing this class of applications as a way to both cut costs and increase productivity.

SaaS is an important component of the move to Enterprise 2.0. The analysts seem to agree with the software providers I have talked with. IDC recently issued the report, Software as a Service Market Will Expand Rather than Contract Despite the Economic Crisis. They projected that by the end of 2009, 76% of U.S. organizations will use at least one SaaS-delivered application for business use. SaaS applications are also getting an increasing percentage of IT budgets.

So where will this all go? According to the Wikipedia, electricity was once generated on premise but through a series of technology innovations, the grid and remote sourcing of power became possible. It took a while to get the business models sorted out and FDR won his first election, in part, on the promise to clean up the corrupt electric utilities of the day.

I am not suggesting there is anything like that corruption going on now with the cloud. However, as use of the cloud grows the final business model does remain to be determined. Will it become a utility in the business sense, as well as the practical sense? Will it need regulation? I hope not but how to we ensure its potential is realized?

The cloud players continue to grow. For example, Amazon went from selling books online to also becoming a major cloud service provider. However, it and several of the other major cloud players have not signed the Open Cloud Manifesto. I am not taking sides on this issue, just noting that there is an issue.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a non-regulatory arm of the US Commerce Department, has helped by developing a draft definition for federal use of cloud computing. They are ahead of the private sector here. Let’s hope that those who stand to benefit from the cloud can come to agreement that allows the cloud to reach its potential and helps the users, as well as our economy.

It will take a while for the final business model to evolve as the cloud moves data and content storage toward becoming a utility in a practical sense. Let’s hope we do a better job that we did with electricity.

InnovationSpigit Provides Enhanced Innovation Management

InnovationSpigit is a community platform offered by Spigit that uses the concept of market dynamics to manage the innovation process and engage employees in this effort. I last wrote about them almost a year ago (see Innovating Through Market Games with Spigit for details on how the application works) and a lot has happen since then. Last week I spoke with Paul Pluschkell and Hutch Carpenter about the last year. In a past life I helped developed some custom gaming solutions with the same goal so I am very much onboard with what they are doing.

Paul said they have over 1.5 million new subscribers, a million of these were added in the last four months. I found their breakdown of subscribes by industry very interesting with a few surprises: Pharma 15%, insurance 14%, retail 21%, technology 14%, finance and banking 10%, and other 26%. Their idea management solutions are primarily used internally but they can be easily used externally for co-creation with customers as well

There are three main use cases. First, there is complete idea and innovation management. This can be a major competitive advantage. A few years back I helped develop an innovation management system for a major UK retailer that produced significant ROI. I wish we had Spigit as a starting point as I am sure the costs would have been lower and the return higher.

Second, InnovationSpigit is used for sharing and perfecting best practices from highly complex matters to simply the best way to wash hotel towels. Third, and related, is the sharing of cost reduction methods. One firm said it saved 8 million with one idea. Paul said the competitive nature of these innovations prevent mentioning them publically and this makes sense.

There are advanced administration options and metrics to customize the platform to meet specific needs and better identify and measure community value. Here is a look at an administration page that shows the simplicity and some of the range of options.

Paul said that the number of users with an enterprise often grows with use. One insurance company went from 5,000 to 10,000 to 50,000 users in a few months. We looked at some of the features. One is Hot Spots, or what are the most talked about topics within the company. Another is new idea page. Here is a screen shot.

There is also a buzz algorithm and other metrics on the conversations within a company. You can determine the most talked about people, as well as topics. The metrics also provide the reputation of users, as well as their popularity. You get rewards for participation and here is a sample rewards page.

You can also see who has accumulated the most reward points. Paul said that the system has a very positive impact on employee morale. It gives people a voice and rewards them for participation at the same time. I think that the sense of voice is likely the biggest reward. InnovationSpigit integrates with Sharepoint, several commercial wikis, and some HR systems. While they offer both cloud and on-premise solutions, 95% of their customers as choosing SaaS.

Forrester: MS Office Still Strong in the Enterprise

CIO Magazine reported that Forrester recently released new research that indicates that despite the advent of heaper alternatives to Microsoft Office, Office remains strong. It continues to mostly shut the alternatives out of the enterprises despite reduced budgets and a struggling economy. However, they did say that as the economy worsens cheaper alternatives may tempt businesses.

I continue to use Office in my enterprise of one for four reasons. First it is what everyone else uses so sharing document sis easily. Second, I am used to it so I do not have to learn a new system. Third, all my old documents are in Office so I do not have to migrate them except perhaps between versions. Fourth, it is already paid for so it does not cost me anything more.

I do find the older 2004 version better for me and use it rather than Office 2007. I only got Office 2007 because my hard drive crashed and I had to replace my productivity software.

The Forrester results found that nearly 92 percent are supporting either Office 2007 or Office 2003 or earlier. Only 3.3 percent use Google Apps; 2.6 percent use Sun StarOffice 8 or 9; and 1.9 percent use Lotus Symphony.

Forrester's also found that “a large majority of companies surveyed have plans to upgrade to Office 2007, with 14 percent planning to do so in the next six months, 27 percent in the next year and 26 percent in the next two years.”

“The primary drivers for upgrading Office suites are that business needs demand new or different tool support (34.2 percent) and also that companies' current tools are no longer supported (23.7 percent) or are no longer compatible with external partners (15.8 percent).”

It did find that many of these plans to upgrade Microsoft Office have been delayed by the economic downturn, 38.2 percent said the economy has delayed plans and 5.3 percent said it has halted plans.

So we have a strong inertia situation. It seems that as long as desktop productivity tools are used, it will take a lot to replace Office. Most of my work is now done in the cloud with Office as the main holdout. Many of the enterprise 2.0 venders recognize this and have means to integrate with Office

My Notes and Thoughts on Google Wave Video Demo

There has been a lot written about Google Wave and here is yet more that I am cross posting from FastForward to get your reaction. Miguel Helft provided a nice overview, Google Showcases New Communication and Collaboration Tool. David Coursey asked, is Google Wave a Twitter Killer? and Dion Hinchcliffe discussed, the enterprise implications of Google Wave. John Moore wrote about how Google Wave could be a great CRM for the small to mid size business market and I am sure many other applications built on top of Google Wave will follow.

Paula Thornton, my fellow FastForward blogger, urged me to watch the long Google Wave video demonstration (hour+) of Google Wave and we discussed where Wave might go. I finally had a chance to do this and wanted to share my notes and impressions. Paula looked at a draft of this post and gave me comments but I take responsibility for any remaining short comings.

Lars Rasmussen was the master of ceremonies and introduced Google Wave as a communication and collaboration tool. It is Open Source with robust APIs, and built leveraging the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). They introduced it at a developer’s conference to encourage others to build apps on top of Wave. I would agree here. I think that Wave has great potential but its potential will be best realized through focused applications that sit on top of its very open structure. Most people like more than a blank slate, even a very robust one that does things not done before. More on this later.

Lars said that email was invented 40 years ago, before the Web. They wanted to create email as if it was a new thing today with the Web in mind. I can see this in what they did. As Lars said, email was created to work like “old school” mail. You send mail and you receive mail and you send more mail back. With Google Wave you work in the same space and just keep editing the same content if you want or interjecting comments anywhere in the content. It is much more collaborative and conversational --- it takes greater advantage of what the Web can do.

You can also drag and drop stuff such as pictures from your desktop anywhere into the conversation that is happening in a Wave. Things are no longer sequential. However, if you want to see the sequence of how the conversation got built you can use the Playback feature to get a “movie” of the construction of the conversation.

This is transformative, similar to the transition from typewriters to word processing changed writing except more so. With Wave you see the new content emerging as it is typed simultaneously on all computer screens that are tuned into the Wave. There is no sending back and forth, it just ‘is’. There is no ‘there’ -- just a global ‘here’. There is no linear transactional and temporal exchange between individuals, it’s all ‘now’. They even showed four people editing the same document at the same time. This might get chaotic. You can set privacy levels so you decide which people see the new content emerging.

Lars discussed ways to organize Waves. I think this will be important. In my view that was a flaw in del.icio.us and is a potential issue with Twitter, What do you do as you start to create massive amounts of content? That was a problem for me with del.icio.us and is starting to be an issue with Twitter. I use Twitter to record interesting links for future exploration but after a few weeks it may be hard to find them. Wave does provide tagging and you can embed a search field. However, the better feature is the way you can embed Waves within Waves by drag and drop. This allows you to create tables of contents and indexes in a “master” Wave that links to the details within each Wave.

Lars and his colleagues next covered the extensions offered with Wave to enable development of applications by others outside Google, as well as inside. They gave examples of applications that they built using these extensions. One I liked was a smart spell checker that looked at the context of the word. For example icland is an icland was transformed to Iceland is an island. Another automatically put in links.

You can also make extensions that integrate with other tools such as Twitter. You can write tweets in Wave and they appear in Twitter or vice versa. Of course, other Twitter related apps also do this. They showed how Wave could be integrated with an issue tracker. You can take comments from Wave and load them into the issue tracker.

I think this integration and the development of more focused capabilities that sit on top of Wave will be key to its success. As I mentioned earlier, I think that the completely open Wave will get some use as a novelty and even as a collaboration platform. However, it is too open ended for many work applications, as people will not want to recreate the functionality and features. It can potentially serve as a meeting point for applications. On the other hand, people might want to shape application themselves and not be forced to follow the structure of existing applications.

Since Wave may serve as a useful meeting place for applications, it may not replace many but become a useful platform. Paula pointed out t me that Dion Hitchcliffe wrote a preamble to this in 2006, Blogs, wikis, and Web 2.0 as the next application platform. I talked with a number of venders who said they were first afraid that Sharepoint would be a heavy competitor. However, they discovered it opened more doors than it closed. Sharepoint is getting more companies involved with collaboration and these venders can integrate with it to bring in their specialized functionality to a bigger audience. I think a similar thing many happen if Google Wave takes off. It certainly has expanded the playing field and should be a positive thing for enterprise 2.0. Like many tools, I do not think it will live up to its wildest supporters or act in the market the way its hardest critics propose.

Caspio Offers Flexible and Fast Online Database Development for Business Users

The cloud has opened up enhanced opportunities to store and access data. However, for enterprises to take full advantage of this new power, database development tools need to be accessible to self-service by the typical business user without limiting any of the database’s flexibility or scalability. Caspio was designed to meet this need and I recently spoke with their CEO, Frank Zamani.

Frank said Caspio was founded in 2000 before the cloud hype started, as he saw the need to enable the development of Web apps by business users. It was his second tech startup. Frank took the first, Autoweb, an online car purchasing platform, public in 1999. While Frank wanted to speed up the process of moving databases from the desktop to the cloud, he decided to keep the familiar look and feel of desktop applications. Caspio uses AJAX to give its users a development environment that is intuitive to users of traditional desktop databases such as Microsoft Access.

Caspio Bridge is their flagship fully-featured product. It covers the entire end-to-end process of setting up and maintaining an online database. Frank took me on a tour. You can set up as many tables as you want either by importing data from an existing tool such as Excel, or by creating your own data entry forms. Caspio uses Microsoft SQL Server as the backend so it is highly-scalable and reliable.

Caspio Bridge “DataPages” allow you to create application interfaces to your data using step-by-step wizards and you can embed these DataPages directly in your Web pages. This feature means that you do not have to go to the Caspio site to launch your application. Frank showed me a number of examples where Deloitte, Equifax, and Fitness Magazine created Web applications that they embedded in their own sites. This is very useful for enhancing company Web sites.

Many newspapers have picked up on this and Caspio is the platform-as-a-service provider for over 75 percent of major US newspaper sites, including my home town’s Boston Globe. They enable the Web site embedding through JavaScript rather than the less productive means of using i-frames.

I especially liked an application by the Indianapolis Star that promoted citizen journalism. Anyone can file a story. Once the story is approved by the paper, it goes online. Through a mashup with Google Maps, you see where stories are breaking.

Frank quickly demonstrated how you can set up a database, create Web forms and search interfaces, and then embed the apps in any Web site. You can also pick any of the fields in the database to serve as search filters and allow for a drill down into the details behind a search result. There are a number of styles available to customize the design and a localization feature allows you to apply a large number of languages.

You can make fields editable and/or required and you can require a password for access to the DataPages. They created the sample database and set up the password protection in a Web site in about 5 minutes with no coding. All of this is done through point-and-click selections in Caspio’s wizards.

Caspio also provides APIs and you can extend it through any programming language so there are no special learning requirements. Additionally, Caspio’s embedded deployment makes it easy to syndicate apps across multiple Web sites. For example, one newspaper set up a restaurant violations database on its Web site. This same search form is easily syndicated on other Web sites as a widget.

There appears to be a nice combination of flexibility, power, and ease of use. I can see how it is popular, especially with enterprise and media Web sites. Frank also writes a Caspio Highlights blog to provide more context for the product.

Tale of Two English Breakfasts

I was in the Cotswolds west of London in March. We stayed at the Swan Hotel in Bibury. I had two wonderful English breakfasts, a traditional and one with Kippers. I was also impressed with the napkin fold – see below. Recommend the area and this place. Nice food at dinner also.

100 Great Photo Web Sites

Jessica Merritt wrote the post, 100 Awesome Niche Photo Sites You’ve Never Heard Of. It produces as advertised. The list includes organizations, photojournalism sites, outdoor and travel, education and a number of other topics. If you are interested in photography this is a nice resource.

Confluence 3.0 Released by Atlassian

Prior to the release I spoke with Bill Arconati, Confluence Product Marketing Manager. I got a good background on the evolution of Altassian as well as preview of Confluence 3.0. I was very interested, as I have known about them for some time. As a disclosure, one of my business partners, Helix Commerce, is a Canadian reseller of Confluence but I have no direct Atlassian connection.

Atlassian was founded in 2002 and is headquartered in Sydney Australia. It has grown through its own direct revenue without VC help. Their first product was JIRA, a tool for issue tracking and it remains their largest seller. In 2004 their wiki product, Confluence, was released. Bill said the two tools complement each other and often led to cross-selling opportunities.

The complementary relationship of JIRA and Confluence makes sense as JIRA provides a more structured issue-tracking tool while Confluence offers the more open wiki collaboration platform. Bill gave the example of a development team that might use Confluence in the product design phase and then add JIRA in the product development stage to track issues. In both cases the product is often introduced into an enterprise through a technical team and then expands to business units as the value is seen. Many large enterprises, like Accenture or Sun, have sanctioned Confluence as their IT approved wiki standard. Customers frequently use Atlassian’s Universal Wiki Converter to migrate other wikis to Confluence.

Confluence comes in both on-premise and hosted versions. The hosted version has two levels. You can get your own server for more control over configurations and plugins. There is also a low cost shared server hosted where you have less control.

Sample use cases include intranets, team collaboration, business dashboards, knowledge management, web publishing and external communities. Atlassian is staying with the wiki concept for their promotion and branding as they believe the collaborative philosophy associated with wikis to align with their desired image for the tool.

Atlassian has recognized that a wiki interface can be a challenge to some business users so Confluence 3.0 introduces a new easier to use interface. They also added a Microsoft Office connector in version 2.9 last Summer. You can start a document in MS Word and then bring it into the wiki. You can also edit wiki pages in Word. In addition, they have made their wiki text editor more similar to Word. Their goal is to lower the barriers to content creation.

With Confluence 3.0 Atlassian is providing an enhanced plug-in environment. First, it lets users add over 80 bundled extensions or ‘macros’ including charts, image galleries and task lists to their pages in just a couple clicks through a drag and drop capability. They call this the ‘macro browser.’ In addition, Atlassian is rolling out a dedicated website (plugins.atlassian.com) that gives both plugin developers a venue to showcase their products and customers the ability to easily find, download and review over 325 plugins created by third party developers.

I asked Bill about these plugin developers. He said there is a core of about 15 firms who have developed a business around this. Others have offered plugins they developed for themselves on a free Open Source so others can improve on what they did. One developer,Peldi Guilizzoni, left his software job in the US and moved back to Italy to build Balsamiq Mockups, a plugin to create software UI mockups directly inside of Confluence. He is now making a good living through his Confluence plug-in offerings.

The third major component to Confluence 3.0 involves new community features. You can better connect with others, follow their activity and readily discover relevant content. Users can hover over a name and get information on the person and also navigate to that person’s profile. There is a twitter like status update with a 140 character limit. I like this feature and think that Twitter like features work best within the enterprise if they are connected with a comprehensive platform like Confluence, rather than acting standalone.

Atlassian also recently offered their own Stimulus Package. You could purchase $5 licenses for JIRA and Confluence, with all proceeds donated to charity. They hoped to raise $25,000 for Room to Read and ended up raising over $100,000. This was a great idea and I am pleased it was rewarded. Room to Read will be able to build 25 libraries for children in developing nations with the money.

How Social Media is Changing Late Night TV Landscape and Much More

Josh Catone of Mashable recently posted an interesting article, How Social Media is Changing the Late Night TV Landscape. New Late Night host Jimmy Fallon is someone who seems to understand social media. His debut was one of the best for a late night show, beating Ferguson’s 2005 premiere, and Jimmy Kimmel╒s debut on ABC in 2003. Josh suggests that one of the reasons Fallon might be doing so well, so quickly, is his superior use of social media compared to his competitors.

One of the reasons Fallon might be doing so well, so quickly, is his superior use of social media compared to his competitors. Jimmy is one of the most followed people on Twitter, with just over a million followers. He is how according to Josh:

“In January, when Twitter’s traffic was about 25% of what it is today and largely made up of a more tech-oriented audience, Fallon began making key appearances on web sites whose users are generally active in social media. His CES video with Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky received over 100,000 views, for example, and a week after that he appeared on geek-favorite web video show Diggnation. Later, Fallon invited Diggnation hosts Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht on his show as guests during its first week, and helped turned a random audience member into a Twitter star (that person╒s follower count went from 7 to over 30,000 in just a couple of days). He also won the 2009 Webby Person of the Year award for being the celebrity who is “most actively engaging with his audience online.”

This is a useful case study and stands in sharp contrast to Dave Letterman’s luddite approach. Why does this matter? Look at what Josh goes on to say: Jimmy Fallen’s efforts “could be very valuable down the road as more eyeballs shift from the television screen to the computer screen. Because make no mistake, that is slowly happening. In February, Nielsen, the company that measures TV audience numbers, released their first-ever web TV rankings, because as Nielsen Online CEO John Burbank said, people are ╥using the web like it’s a giant DVR.”

This is spot on and what we are saying at TVissimo, TV and the Web will merge. Those that understand this will emerge the winners. Those that can use social media will be better able to take advantage of this opportunity.

Yakabod Adds a Social Side to Knowledge Management

Yakabod has been providing knowledge management solutions since 2003. It was founded in 2001 by CEO Scott Ryser and CTO Scott Williamson and first focused on web applications. I recently spoke with Scott Ryser and Chris Coleman, their EVP for Marketing. The firm is headquartered in the DC area and their main clients have been in the US Federal government’s intelligence community.

Yakabod’s flagship product is the Yakabox™ Knowledge Network. It is built to meet Protection Level 3 standards for software used in the U.S. Intelligence Community. It is a secure knowledge-sharing system that enables organizations more control over their content and allows for secure collaboration, both internally and with their business partners. I feel even more importantly it provides the users with great control and flexibility in how they manage content relevant to their work. It is activity based rather than based on taxonomies and file structures isolated from daily work processes. With the release of Yakabox 3.0 they are plan to engage a broader market outside the intelligence community.

Scott and I discussed the importance of activity based knowledge management. I was already onboard with the concept, as all the successful KM systems that I have seen have been work process-based, rather than standalone knowledge repositories. Scott pointed out that 80% of knowledge management efforts fail primarily because of cultural barriers. I believe this and I imagine most of these failures are not work process centric.

Scott mentioned that with transactional applications you can force people to input data as part of their job. However, you miss the large amounts of useful unstructured data around these transactions. If the system for unstructured data is not part of the work process it is hard to get people to engage. A knowledge system that is aligned with work transactions is more likely to pick up this content.

As McKinsey wrote a few years ago, the real value in companies is now in the interactions rather than the transactions, but IT has largely supported the latter. Now more investment needs to be made in supporting the interactions and making them accessible. This is the goal of Yakabox.

If you make the knowledge management system aligned with work processes you have gone a log way to handling the adoption issue. Next, you have to add value to the work process. Yakabox makes the user the center of knowledge sharing and enables them to find content useful and relevant to their work. You can designate content as relevant on a 1 to 5 scale. These ratings drive other relevance algorithms and the systems learns from your actions.

Scott said that when they added the relevance engine to the system, adoption exploded. People now had content come to them that was helpful and spent less time looking for stuff. You can also tag it and make comments for others to see. Yakabox provides fine-grained control over who can see these comments and ratings so people are less hesitant to share, knowing that this information goes to a selected subset of the broader audience with the organization. Scott said that these controls help to build trust and people frequently expand who can see what they do as this trust develops. This way silos can be broken down piece by piece.

The system integrates four applications—collaboration, social networking, content management and search—on one secure platform. It is delivered three ways: an appliance (bundled hardware and software installed behind the client’s firewall), on-site subscription (no hardware/software purchase), or hosted (SaaS with no per-user fees).

Scott gave me a tour. You start with the Activity Viewer page and content is organized around your activities. The top of the widest column contains the “road blocks” you are responsible for. These are the items where your team is dependent on your actions to move a project or initiative forward. Underneath the roadblocks are items organized by recency. Since your rate items on a 1 - 5 scale you can also filter them down by only showing items that meet your designated criteria. You can apply this rating scale to content, people, blogs, and any other item within the system.

For each item you can learn more about the people or topic. You can leave a comment and go to the profile of each person involved. You can go to the home page of every person to see what each is doing. These home pages are not limited to people as you can go to the home page of document and see all the actions around it. You can also see the objects that are generating the most activity.

There is a Twitter like status update field where you can answer the question, “what are you doing that matters.” I think that within the enterprise status updates like this work better within a system such as Yakabox, than as a standalone application like Twitter. I feel the opposite about the Web where I think Twitter status updates work better than those within a system like Facebook. You can set up a TweetDeck like interface to see the actions of people you want to follow and apply the 1-5 rating scale to determine the number of people you see at any one time.

There are robust access and dissemination controls over content. They can be role-based or individual-based. You can add filters to the search function to look at things such as only documents, only people, or even only documents by a certain person. You can add a “see also” link to provide access to additional material related to any content. This allows you to first narrow down and then expand the content you look at while keeping things relevant.

Yakabox also provides a blog tool where you can post in the context of the complete system. The same access controls can be applied as well as the search and relevancy filters. There is also a calendar with these same filters. In addition to the features that come out of the box you can add more. I think that Yakabox provides the right balance of control, features, relevance, and ease of use for an enterprise 2.0 style knowledge management system. It will be interesting see how it doe sin the broader business market.

More on Tearing Down the Social Media Silos

Yesterday I posted on FastForward, We Need to Tear Down the Social Media Silos. It was partially based on an interesting post by David Chartier, The Future of Social Media: The Walls Come Crumbling Down. He focuses primarily on the consumer Web and writes, “But for the social web to evolve into its final stage and take flight, the walls that separate these services, their users and everything they create will have to come down.”

David then goes on to quote Leo Laporte, a broadcaster who runs the TWiT network. Leo calls the phenomenon "the social silo," and he does not feel it can last much longer. "People are pouring all this content and value into individual sites," says Laporte, "but they aren't going to want to keep dealing with Facebook, and Twitter, and FriendFeed, and whatever is next." I could not agree more. There is more in that FastForward post and I will not repeat it all here. I concluded that the same thing is operating within the enterprise.

In this post I want to offer another Web example and make a request to the application developers. This blog now gets syndicated in a number of sites: Social Media Today, MyVenturePad, Content Management Connection, BlogBurst, my Facebook page, and several other sources including LexisNexis, CanWest, Amazon Kindle, and Newsbank through Newstex. Now most of my posts do not generate a lot of comments. However, sometimes there are comments and they get sprinkled around the different outlets. This last week I got comments on several posts through Facebook for the first time. I make it worse by sometimes cross posting from FastForward or the AppGap to share information with additional audiences.

It would be great to have an application that aggregated all of the comments on a post. This would enable me to see everything in one place and for the commenter to see what others are saying. I am not aware of an application that does this. I think it would be useful and would break down one more set of social silos.

The Rise of the Social Media Evangelist

Here is an interesting post, Are you promoting the company’s brand or your personal brand? by Dirk Shaw. Many firms are hiring social media evangelist. I know quite a few. Dirk is a social media evangelist for Vignette. He answers this question by citing some nice metrics that show the value of his work for this company.

“Brand mentions: 242 mentions of Vignette out of 918 total for top WCM competitors. Share of voice in WCM market: 25% of conversations about Content management include Vignette. Extend reach: Reached 40k people on twitter via re-tweets, 16 blog post resulted in 3k visits.”

Good for Dirk. Like many social media issues, the issue of company vs. personal promotion is not new. I know quite a few people who have been questioned for promoting their own agenda over their companies long before social media appeared. They were very active on the conference circuit and I could not understand how they maintained that level of promotion and did some “real work” for their firm. Perhaps the conference circuit was their main responsibility.

I never had that option, as my employers always expected the evangelist work to be extra on top of the regular work requirements. Perhaps I had the wrong employers. Now social media makes it easier to be a full time evangelist without quite so much travel. Although you still need to get out and meet some of your audience in person.

A number of my blog clients have this responsibility as part of their work. I think it is an important one and I am happy to help them. I would be very open to doing it myself for the right company. However, I go back to Dirk’s excellent question. I think it only works well in the long run if you put the company’s agenda first. People can see through too much self-promotion. Let your skills come through more subtly in the act of promoting the company.

Gustave Caillebotte, A Lesser Known Impressionist

I have seen his paintings before and liked them but did not remember his name. The New York Times recently did a nice review of a Gustave Caillebotte show through July 5 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park; (718) 638-5000. There is a useful set of nine images of his work I especially liked The Floor Scrapers,” “House Painters,” and “Oarsmen Rowing on the Yerres.” All three have a very strong use of color and interesting perspective. Some of the others are more diffuse and are not as strong in my view. This is a show I want to see in person.

Caillebotte became an artist late in life, enrolling at the École des Beaux-Arts, but soon left. He was largely self-taught and moved back and forth between Paris and the family estate in the village of Yerres, painting what he found. He was rich so he just did what he wanted. The Times writes that, “he visited the first Impressionist salon in 1874. When the second one took place two years later, the artists involved, including Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Cézanne and Degas, welcomed his participation.”

Gustave repaid their hospitality with patronage. “He organized exhibitions for them, promoted their careers, paid their rent (Monet survived on his generosity for years) and bought their paintings, amazing things, out of the studio. He bequeathed his collection to the French government, with the stipulation that it be put on public view. Part of it became the foundation of what is now the Musée d’Orsay.” This is one of my favorite museums so I am grateful for this effort. Calliebotte did not paint long so I ma also grateful for this show which mostly came from private collections.

Painting of Woman with Flip Flops

Here is my most recent painting. It is an 18" x 24" acrylic. I was struck by the light and shadow coupled with the way her feet, her flip flops and the stool interacted.

My App Gap Posts for May 2009

Here are my App Gap posts for May. In addition to the Fast Forward blog (see side bar for links), I am writing in another Corante blog, the App Gap, sponsored by QuickBase, The posts began toward the end of January 2008. In this case, I am primarily doing product commentaries with a few other things thrown in. Below are the ones for May. There will be more in June.

PBWiki Adds Four New Features and Changes Its Name to PB Works

Tweepz Brings Exalead Search to Twitter

Zoho Apps Go Mobile

Inmagic Presto 3.0 Adds Social Components to Knowledge Management Platform

GroupSwim Now Provides Three Coordinated Offerings

Box.net Updates Interface and Becomes More Social

Wrike Adds New Features for Online Project Management

Yakabod Provides Robust Knowledge Management with a Social Side

Who Does Twitter Reach? How Can You Reach Them?

I came across an interesting article, TV Twittering: a Subtle Art by Daisy Whitney on TVWeek. She wrote about the social media campaign that Fox ran to promote the TV show, Prison Break. In this case, the studio posted clues on social forums rather than issuing a blatant promotional message. Daisy pointed out this effort was consistent with the findings of a study that suggests networks will likely have more success using social networks for brand building, as Fox did, than for directly driving audience.

The research firm Knowledge Networks reports that Twitter is best used by TV networks to connect to influential people, such as bloggers, reporters and critics, than it is to encourage viewers to tune in at 8 p.m. Despite Twitter's meteoric rise, the service is still only accessed regularly by a small percentage of the population. A recent Nielsen study found that 60% of people who sign up for the service stop using it after one month.

Of course that means that 40% continue and that percentage is becoming part of a bigger pie. However, David Tice, vice president of the media practice at Knowledge Networks was quoted by Daisy, "With Twitter, people don't succeed with the hard sell. It needs to be more subtle.”

This TV story is consistent with what I am seeing in other areas. For example, Wyndstorm used Twitter and a variety of other social media to promote, Moogis, an Allman Brothers inspired music site where you can see concerts among other things. Wyndstorm felt it was unlikely that many of the Allman Brothers fan base are avid social media users. So they reached out through social media to the people who know have a strong reach to this audience such as Twitter followers of Rolling Stone magazine, bloggers and PR people in the music space, message boards in social networks that fit the demographics of an Allman Brothers fan, and the web communities of similar bands.

Wyndstorm began Twitter conversations (through twitter/moogis) with 50 people in this space that also included NFL radio stations, TV syndicates and IPTV sites, as well as retail ticket sites. After this Twitter campaign and the other social media efforts, 58% incoming traffic to the Moogis site came from sites where they did not have ads and this is not typical.

So they used Twitter to reach influencers and it worked. However, they needed to have an appealing message and product. At least, the Allman Brothers appeals to me. This will not work if all you are offering are the get rich quick on Twitter schemes that seem to be expanding.

Being subtle is also is also key, as I have heard from many others (see for example, Central Desktop Using Twitter for Sales, Service, and Brand Monitoring Conversations). If you are at the Enterprise 2.0 conference on June 23 in Boston, come to our panel on Twitter and business.

When Do You Use Twitter Search vs. Google Web Search?

I recently came across an interesting article, Twitter and Local Search: A Status Update, by Michael Boland, Search Engine Watch. Michael conveyed the idea that Twitter search brings structure to all the noise on the Web with an index of real time conversations. I agree and now, at times, I get better results on a niche topics such as SOA or Agile development through Twitter search than through Google.

Michael points out that while Google spiders are quick to index new content, it still takes hours or days rather than seconds. He adds that's perfectly okay if you're researching a new flat-screen TV, or the history of Mongolia.

But it could be less effective in emergency situations or where to get the best pizza in San Francisco. Twitter search covers conversations, while Google search covers topics. When do you use Google search and when do you use Twitter search. What has been your experience?

Box.net Builds Out Its Social Side

Box.net began in 2005 to provide a way for people to store content on the web and access it from anywhere. Its capabilities have continued to expand along with the maturity of the enterprise 2.0 concept. Last week I spoke with Jen Grant, Amy White, and Sean Lindo from Box.net about their new features.

They have moved the business from its initial vision of online storage for the consumer market as their business users have found the service useful and expressed demands for new capabilities. Jen said they see three main use cases at the moment. First, people in such areas as a firm╒s marketing department, need to store and share large files. For example, Stonewall Kitchen provides visual images to its outlets and partners to use in promotions. They offer access to these large files through Box.net.

Second, some companies do not want to maintain file servers and go paperless. They put all the company files on Box.net with access permission levels to accomplish this objective and provide ease of access. This includes images, audio, video and creative assets, as well as more traditional documents such was Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Third, companies are now going beyond simple storage and access to use Box.net for team collaboration. This third area is the most complex and it has been the focus of their new feature development. They see this as a major growth opportunity and I would agree.

Box.net╒s main goal is providing a cloud solution that is both easy to implement and easy to use. They are using this strategy to address the enterprise 2.0 adoption issues and I agree here, as well. They have also found that teams have gone beyond team collaboration to use Box.net for lightweight project management within the workflow. Much of teamwork within many companies is content centric so Box.net wants to provide collaboration and project management capabilities where the content resides. They have seen good pickup here.

Box.net also support social networking in the context of content. You can see content related profiles, discussions, tags, and comments. However, in keeping with the simplicity goal, these features are offered in a side bar so they do not clutter up the workspace. There were also options for each content folder such as share, comment, and star (make it a favorite).

A page listing a collection of content files displayed a number of features off to the side such as a listing of the collaborators, recently updated files, latest comments and folder options. You can add to content such things as bookmarks, a related website link, description, and comments. You can also see the latest activity across all shared content. Here is sample page containing folders.

There is a profile page for each employee that includes information about their role and current projects as well as contact information (email, phone number, and a picture). Their latest activities are also covered: what content they've most recently edited, commented, or discussed. This status is updated automatically and is based on the activities around content within Box. In addition, there is full text search and you can FAX from within Box. Here is a sample profile page.

Box.net also offers a Web Documents feature to create a new document within Box. If you create that document inside a shared folder with people you want to collaborate with, collaborators in that folder can receive updates when the document is updated and, depending on the settings you choose, you can let them edit the document, as well. You can also start discussions around the document.

They provide open APIs and an open platform for third party developers and IT departments that want to add functionality. It is also integrated with Zoho that offers a suite of productivity applications (see Zoho: A Suite of Many Online Apps for Small to Midsize Business and Zoho Apps Go Mobile).

Jen said that as a SaaS provider they are doing well in this down economy. They continue to exceed their revenue targets. She attributed this to pressure on IT departments and business units to keep expenses down. With Box you can test it for free and choose from several low cost options. It is easy to get started and there are no implementation or systems integration costs. Employees still needs to do work and Box provides a lower cost way to accomplish many content related tasks.

I would agree here as many SaaS vendors are told me their revenues are up now. I would add that Box provides a very intuitive, easy-to-use system. This will be one of their competitive advantages to help overcome adoption issues in enterprise 2.0. Box recognizes this and Jen said that they plan to continue to keep their simplicity and ease of use as they add more features. Here is a post from their Box.net blog on more new features: Workflow and branding tools come to Box.

My Fast Forward Posts for May 2009

Here is the monthly listing of my Fast Forward blog posts. I find it helps me with an archive and hopefully is also useful to you. There is a separate category for these summaries in my right side column on this blog. There will be more in June.

The Fortune 500 Blogs On

What Twitter Needs to do for Personal Knowledge Management

What Innovative Uses of Twitter Are You Seeing?

Why You Should Keep Blogging in the Age of Twitter

MIT Sloan CIO Symposium: Part One: The Virtual Organization

MIT Sloan CIO Symposium: Part Two: CIO Leadership and the Bottom Line

MIT Sloan CIO Symposium Part Three: Enterprise 2.0

MIT Sloan CIO Symposium Keynote Panel Part Four: Cloud Computing