Infovark

It’s time to wrap up our long-running series about moving information. We’ve managed to take the sting out of Locating and Versioning documents within your enterprise through clever application of web tools. This is the final part of the series, where we talk about how to fix the tracking problem.

Our basic premise is that the most obvious place to find something is where you left it. Since you created the item on your PC, that’s where it should live. Your coworkers know you drafted the document, created the slideshow, or assembled the spreadsheet, so they’ll expect to find it somewhere on your PC, too. It matches the paradigm we use every day in the physical world.

Jimmy the photographer was working on the layout for page three. Lois wanted to have a look at it, so she dropped by his desk. What about the front page? Clark was working on the cover story. Oh, there it is, still in Kent’s typewriter. Where’s that Clark gone now? He’s never around when you need him…

The tracking problem is driven by three needs. The first need is to locate the current version of an item. We’ve largely mitigated that problem by applying version control to the information at the point where it was created and giving the information a unique address on your organization’s network so that your coworkers can find it.

Since you generally know what sorts of things your coworkers do, you’ve got a pretty good idea of what business information they’ll have on their machines. For cases where you might not know the right person, you can navigate links in the social network to find the right stuff. And in the worst case scenario, you can always run an off-the-shelf search engine over all of the documents. Since we’ve done the hard work of making them addressable and versionable, creating a full text index of their contents is no problem.

The second tracking need is to monitor the status of a work in progress. Based on what we’ve seen during our time as management and technology consultants, this is the item that generates the most email traffic in a typical enterprise. This is the reason why most knowledge workers spend a significant chunk of their time asking for or filling out status reports. I like to call it “Management by Magic 8-Ball“.

Manager: “Is it done yet?”
Employee: “Ask again later.”
Manager: “When will it be done?”
Employee: “Cannot predict now.”
Manager: “Will we meet the deadline?”
Employee: “My sources say no.”
Manager: “Will a week’s extension be enough to finish?”
Employee: “Signs point to yes.”
Manager: “OK. I’ll see what I can do.”

Not the most efficient use of time and resources, is it? The exchange above is another symptom of the way enterprise software works today. Each knowledge worker is a black box as far as most office productivity tools are concerned. According to this school of thought, a manager assigns a task, the employee disappears into a cubicle for a while, and some time later the employee emerges with the task complete. In the abstract, it seems like a decent way to organize things. How the employee gets the job done should be irrelevant, so long as the job gets done, right?

In practice, it’s a disaster. What happens inside that cubicle is vital to the operation of an innovative, collaborative business. Coworkers need to know that information, as do managers. And in today’s fast-paced business world, they need to know in real-time. Hence the endless requests for status updates in email, or the tried-but-true “Management by Walking Around.”

Wouldn’t it be easier for everyone involved if the there were more visibility into what happens inside that cubicle? An architect can see the progress being made on a construction site without having to deluge the foreman with requests for status updates. What we need is a way to publish updates as they happen. Let’s call it workstreaming for now, since I can’t think of a better term.

Knowledge workers interact with their computers to get most things done. In theory, that means the computer should be able to notify managers or coworkers when work product is updated. Rather than reading endless status reports, a manager could subscribe to his employee’s RSS feeds. A coworker can monitor a document of interest on her friend’s computer. Most importantly, these things can be done silently, without interrupting the knowledge worker’s train of thought. They can concentrate more on getting their tasks done and less on responding to requests for information.

But what about…

Then there’s the third tracking need: Auditing. Sometimes it’s important to know how information flowed through an organization. One example is process improvement; You might want to figure out how to improve response time for calls received by your customer support line. Another example is for an audit or an investigation; You might need to prove that sensitive financial data was protected during the sales and order fulfillment process. Most solutions to this problem advocate centralized management schemes, intensive processes, and strict governance. There’s a large market for discovery and compliance tools to address this need, because the problem is complex and expensive.

It’s also — thankfully — rare. Fortunately, only a few industries and government labor under the sort of onerous rules that make compliance tools worthwhile. For the rest of us, it’s overkill. Unfortunately, it’s the compliance-laden parts of knowledge work that have so far driven the development of new tools and technologies. ERM, EDM, ECM, BPM… the mere fact that these tools sell themselves by acronym should be a tip-off that they were designed to appeal to industry analysts and can only be deployed by a small army of specialists.

Yes, auditing and compliance are tough problems. A web-centric approach to enterprise software might have little to offer organizations that have risk management as a key strategic objective, beyond increased transparency. But most businesses would rather boost productivity and improve the bottom line.

The Enterprise 2.0 vibe is about improving collaboration by bringing simple, successful, scalable tools from the Web 2.0 generation of consumer technologies into the workplace. Enterprise 2.0 tools are about making a knowledge worker’s daily tasks easier and more fun. And making things fun and easy spurs creativity, cooperation, and innovation — the only durable sources of competitive advantage.

Every startup needs this toy from ThinkGeek.

As you can see, our self-destruct button is fully disarmed.

However, the nuclear option is always available.

It’s just one of those little things that keeps us awake at night.

Infovark’s been in operation for six months now. In that time, we’ve written more than 100,000 lines of code and posted more than 50 blog articles. But  — we still don’t have a product yet.

By the original timeline we drafted in October 2007, we should be in Beta by now. So, it was time to take a good hard look at our schedule. We were harsh with our estimates.  And when we looked at our projected workload, we were suitably scared. (I’m sure that if you aren’t at least mildly terrified by your software schedule, you really haven’t done it properly).

So, after taking stock of what we’ve done and what we have left to do, we’ll hit Alpha some time this summer. (We hope!)

What’s taking us so long? Well, for one thing, all software projects run late. This is expected behavior for software development. Though we’d like to think we had our whole solution mapped out from the start, we’ve discovered a lot of things we needed to have, eliminated a lot of frills, experimented with different technical approaches, and, yes, wasted time.

That’s the nature of creative work. Software development is not really an engineering discipline, though we’d like it to be. It’s more like writing the great American novel. Some mornings you can write a whole chapter before your first cup of coffee. Other mornings you struggle to find the right word to begin the first sentence. Still other mornings you spend crossing out all the bad ideas from last night.

All in all, we’re pleased with our progress so far, but we’re going to need a longer runway than we thought before we can take off. That’s OK; for now, we’ve got the cash and our expenses are low. Our biggest worry is that we might miss the window of opportunity for enterprise social software. Or that someone else might beat us to the finish line. It’s a healthy concern. It keeps us motivated.

So we’ll keep scrambling to get our ideas into code form. In the meantime, we’ll keep you posted on our progress. And you can help us out by telling us what you’d like to see in enterprise social software.

We’ve decided to create a separate blog specifically for techies. We call it infovark Underground. It describes all the cool technology stuff we’re doing under the covers. Its target is other software architects and developers.

Our primary blog will still be this one at http://www.infovark.com. It will deal with issues of enterprise 2.0, social networking, and running a small ISV. Its target audience remains knowledge workers (our customers, hopefully) and industry watchers (our advocates, hopefully).

We debated about addressing everything in a single feed, but decided that we were really dealing with two different audiences: those that care about business problems and those that care about code problems. And even though we at infovark are deeply interested in the intersection of those two worlds, we know that not all visitors to our site will feel the same way.

We’ll try to keep cross-posting to a minimum, but we’ll occasionally link from one to the other if a topic applies to both communities. After all, Enterprise 2.0 is about social technology, isn’t it? We’d like to help build bridges between the MBA suits and the IT geeks.