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Are better connected individuals more productive? A study from MIT sheds some light on the debate.
Just because, Here’s my wish-list for Enterprise 2.0 solutions:
Early enterprise solutions focused on the best way to secure information from prying eyes, but I think it’s time that systems took a more trusting attitude to governance. After all, people are willing to share their personal information voluntarily with the world via MySpace and Facebook. Shouldn’t you be able to trust the people that you work with more than random Internet surfers?
Information Hoarders inhibit the scalability of organizations. The disconnected silos of information they build represent knowledge that the organization can’t exploit. We need to discourage this practice.
Older solutions focused on individual computer independence, as if everyone worked in a vacuum. Contributing to the enterprise repository is akin to dropping a letter in the mail chute. The prevalence of data mining and business analysis tools comes from our existing solutions’ data being hard to interpret and largely disconnected from us. The divide between the people and their content leads to an organization where silence can thrive. New solutions should presume two way connections — and not just between content and people, but between colleagues and between concepts and content. After all, nobody actually wants to plug computers together. It’s the knowledge exchange that counts, right?
Enterprise software is frequently forced upon knowledge workers. That’s why consultants tend to spend so much time talking about “adoption” and “change management” and training plans. That’s why phrases like “project champion” and “senior-level sponsor” get thrown around during the implementation phase. Corporateware is designed to be force-fed to employees by some “thou shalt” memo handed down by the boss and implemented in the back office by the IT team.
Instead, we need to build software that can grow organically within an organization, one user at a time. That means it needs to deliver benefits to individuals and small teams at the outset, and not just the organization as a whole once the solution is fully deployed. People should want to use their enterprise software.
To paraphrase Tim O’Reilly, Web 2.0 in three words goes something like this: “Users Add Value”.
This is true for any computer application, enterprise software included. It would be nice if our systems reflected that fact. The data in them needs to be able to be reused — and not by some SOA process architect, but by the end users themselves. Content should be able to be easily re-purposed, re-evaluated and shared.
Traditional enterprise solutions haven’t been about the individual — they’ve been about the role that the individual was performing. People are different; they have feelings. It would be nice if Enterprise Software could allow their users’ personal preferences to be reflected, and broadcast to their peers — promoting better engagement, and community.
Treating a user as a mere box in an org chart forgoes the notion that work is fundamentally a social activity. Improving relations between people is a key aspect of ensuring a smooth-running enterprise. This social-ness is at the core of what we do. We aren’t fleshy work-robots. How come our enterprise software seems to treat us like we are?
Previously, entering information into a computer was a formal activity. It was parsed, validated, organized and systematized. But Enterprise 2.0 solutions deemphasize structured data entry in favor of capturing loose collections of stuff on the off-chance that it will be useful. As storage becomes cheaper and more readily available, and as search techniques improve, the idea that humans need to scrub and condense data until it’s fit for machine consumption will go out of fashion. The Google index is filled with pages that no data technician ever entered and no analyst has ever seen.
Sometimes a golden needle hides in the haystack of unfiltered, unvetted information. Each enterprise should be comfortable with its own long tail.
Here’s a cute doodle captured from the large whiteboard in the infovark burrow.
It sums up how I feel on this rainy Saturday spent working on the infovark API.
Google’s Enterprise push continues with the release of Google Sites.
Google Sites is the renamed and revamped JotSpot Wiki. It’s aimed at making it easier for people in enterprises to collaborate.
Rather than pursue a top-down, enterprise sell, Google Sites targets customers directly and encourages collaboration outside the corporate firewall. Naturally, this flies in the face of most corporate IT departments, who don’t seem keen on placing sensitive information in some distant place that they have no direct control over.
Have a look at this comment thread on Digg for some indication of the kind of pushback that Google are seeing/going to see from IT:
Where I work, I need to know what the software is doing and I need to be able to control who and how it talks to 3rd party people.
Google is an indexer of information, for the specific use of creating an advertising platform. My company’s data is not theirs to index.
In today’s modern knowledge-centric workplace, the information is the organization.
Read Write Web details some of the main CIO Fears behind Google’s approach. But I think that they left one important concern out of their list: competition.
If we assume that an organization can gain competitive advantage by interpreting and analyzing their information, wouldn’t it be a risk to use the same hosted systems as everyone else? Leaving aside the question of whether Google can be trusted with that information, if your competition uses the same Google tools to aggregate, search and analyze data, how do you differentiate yourself?
I can see an argument for external storage. Storage is rapidly becoming a commodity, and you’ll have your choice of providers: Amazon S3 is one example, and perhaps Microsoft as well, if the rumors are true.
But Google Sites isn’t just about handing over the data. It’s about using Google’s business logic to determine how you collaborate and work. As of now, there doesn’t seem to be any API or data retrieval strategy for the content you place on those sites. So your enterprise information ends up outside of your organization, which is one thing, but also outside of your influence. And that affects your ability to execute.
I’m skeptical that enterprises are going to wholly embrace this model.
What do you think?
Sam Lawrence just published a great post on what productivity software can learn from game design.
It’s a theme that both Gordon and I blogged about in our previous jobs. A big reason why we set out to form our own company was that we wanted to work somewhere that took fun seriously.
There’s a lot we can learn from game design, from the back-end infrastructure to the user interface to the training materials. Here’s an excerpt of my old post on what World of Warcraft can teach us about enterprise software.
…Certainly, we might learn things about scalability, redundancy and failover. Some MMORPGs have millions of active users. At any one time, thousands of players from around the world may be connected to a single instance. If the service is unavailable or performing slowly, customers (many of whom pay subscription fees) get angry. Makers of MMORPGs have a strong incentive to get the engineering right. They risk losing their audience to other games if they don’t.
We can also learn a lot about accommodating all kinds of users, from experienced veterans to those playing for the first time. Reaching the higher levels of some of these games represents a massive investment of time. The games have to be rich and powerful enough to keep advanced users satisfied, while not overwhelming new users with complexity. They do this by providing:
- Clear, informative and visually appealing interfaces
- Good feedback regarding the actions the user takes
- Introducing features and situations slowly, so that users can “learn as they go”
- Incorporating tutorials and user manuals into the game itself, so that people can begin playing right away
MMORPGs also provide the best examples of collaboration technologies in the market today. These games encourage players to complete objectives together, whether it’s assaulting a beachhead in a WWII simulation or questing for dwarven artifacts in a fantasy realm. Some examples include:
- Using presence technologies so that players know when their friends are online
- Incorporating communications technologies like voice chat, instant messaging, and email into the game world
- Facilitating the creation of ad hoc groups to complete specific tasks
- Allowing for standing groups like guilds or clans
- Implementing auctions and bulletin boards so that users can trade game items and information with each other
- Encouraging mentoring between advanced users and less experienced players
So there are a lot of things about the way we play that can help us with the way we work.
Thirty years of game design have led to the development of effective ways to play together online. But despite 30 years of business software development, we haven’t made much progress in figuring out how to work effectively online. Maybe we should get out and play a bit more?