Infovark

I just had to take a picture of the flowering cherry tree outside.

Winter is finally over. The cherry blossoms are here!

When I was starting out as a Software Project Manager, A Zen Master taught me something that I never forgot. It happened when I was complaining about the lack of process behind the development team that I had just inherited.

I was younger then, and was frantically trying to introduce more structure to the way that my team shipped software. I could see a lot of the reasons for the product delays and the quality assurance failures. I just wanted to help. I had policy documents, and process plans, and Gant Charts. Lots of Gant Charts. But every effort I made to modify the process was met with stony resistance. In conversation, people could see that I was making sense. They would agree that yes, things were broken, and they probably shouldn’t be.

And yet I couldn’t get them to change anything. That was when the Zen Master appeared:

Me: “Grrrr! These guys are just making it up as they go! Everybody is just sitting around waiting for the developers to be finished. No wonder everything is so crappy and full of bugs. There is no structure or process here! ”

Zen Master: “You are wrong. There is structure.”

Me: “???”

Zen Master: “Structure comes in two states: implicit or explicit. You are complaining because there is no defined structure. Particularly no structure that has been defined by you.”

As is so often the case in fantasy Zen Stories, the master was right!

There was plenty of structure to the way people worked. It had grown organically based on the way that people wanted to work. It was hard to describe, and it was optimized more for individual happiness than for productivity, but it was there.

It dawned on me then that the best way to effect change was to embrace the practices that were implicit.

This kind of thinking led to Agile Practices. It led to Extreme Programming.

And it is the central premise behind Enterprise 2.0 or Social Productivity software. Harnessing the implicit structure of an organization can be the best way to improve it. People are innately social. They like to talk. They like to discuss things. They like to achieve things. They like to share. They like to boast.

It turns out the easiest way to get things done is to optimize the way people innately tend to do them.

Incidentally, If your PM is complaining about a lack of processes, it means that she can’t effectively bring about the cultural change that is required. You should either give her more authority, or hire a new PM. Or you could see if you can rustle up a Zen master to change her mind.

Sam Lawrence just posted an article about Twitter and social computing. Sam notes that people are learning interesting information and getting questions answered by tapping their public social network. Inside the enterprise, however, most of us are stuck using legacy tools that aren’t as effective. Couldn’t Twitter — or something like it — help companies communicate internally?

We certainly think so. As we noted in small cloud theory, there’s no reason why the same tools that work on the Internet couldn’t work on the corporate intranet. In some ways, it should be easier to network within a company than outside it. After all, as Sam points out, folks in an organization have — by definition — shared goals and common interests. So in a sense your social network is already built for you.

Twitter’s intuitive minimalism, like Google search, means that it’s easy to learn and understand. Compared to most of the other software used at work, it’s a breeze to use. No training required. No change management. And right now, it costs nothing to support. From an enterprise IT perspective, you couldn’t ask for a better deal.

The only barrier to Twitter adoption within the organization is the fact that not everyone has adopted it yet. Which means that progressive E2.0 types still need to use traditional channels, like email, to communicate with folks that haven’t begun using it yet. Which means the IT folks still need to provision email to every employee. It’s self-reinforcing; Email’s killer feature is ubiquity. And email is ubiquitous because everyone has it.

And it’s not entirely clear whether Twitter could succeed as a ubiquitous tool. Twitter is a really noisy communications channel. (Hence its name.) The last thing most knowledge workers need is another distracting communications mechanism. Email is bad enough. Hugh MacLeod just permanently disappeared from our twitter stream, because he figured he had better things to do.

Part of what makes Twitter work today is the fact that it’s an opt-in social medium. You sign yourself up. You choose whom to follow. If the IT folks signed you up for an account and automatically subscribed you to all 500 coworkers, would its utility collapse? Not everyone is @scobelizer.

The folks at Twitter have two related challenges to solve before they have a truly enterprise ready system. They’ve got to figure out how to scale the system technically as well as scale the system socially.

As a startup in the social productivity space, we know how hard it is to get the social design right. Twitter’s done a great job of social design so far. We wish them the best of luck.

Darn. While I was writing this post, another 40 tweets came in.

Laurence Hart over at Word of Pie calls us out on our approach to content management . Dean and I are both big fans of his blog, so we were pretty stoked to see a whole post about us.

Laurence raises a lot of valid concerns, all of which we’ve spent loads of time mulling over, and I’ll get to those in a second.

But first, to really understand our solution, you need to know how we got here. Dean and I absolutely understand where Pie is coming from. We have a long history of working in the ECM space with TOWER Software. We’ve read through countless customer requirement lists about compliance, Sarbanes-Oxley, retention, discovery and authoritative versioning. We’ve spent hours designing taxonomies, file plans, and security and access policies. We’ve drafted tender responses, and drawn large Visio diagrams. We’ve written integrations to nearly all the of ECM products in the market today.

After all this effort, once an organization deployed our tailored solution, we’d observe the same pattern. The content management software met the business needs, but it didn’t help the end users. Instead, It got in their way. It often made it harder to find things, and it made them work to understand things that they weren’t specialists in — like taxonomies and retention. User acceptance and training overheads were huge. We had to work like crazy to get people to use our carefully crafted solutions.

OK, you might say — that’s fine. Work isn’t supposed to be fun. You just do what you’re instructed to do. As long as the enterprise as a whole benefits from the solution, the content management program is doing its job.

Except that the enterprises weren’t really benefiting. The push-back from the user community meant that people wouldn’t actively use the solutions to do their daily work. Large, corporate, and eminently scalable repositories all over the world are filling up with dusty, useless content, most of which is almost certainly never going to be seen again. Traditional content management is extremely effective at preserving things. It’s terrible at solving the kinds of tactical problems that people deal with every day. Sure, retention was up. But productivity was down.

(Pie knows this. That’s why he talks so much about invisible, or transparent ECM . Because yes, preserving things is important, but knowledge workers don’t care.)

So, when we started Infovark, we set out explicitly to solve the other problem. The people problem. The fact that people couldn’t connect and share with each other. We decided to build an enterprise product that people would want to use, first and foremost. The capture and retention come second. The point of a transaction is not to get the paper receipt.

OK, that’s where we came from. Now to answer some of Pie’s more technical questions:

• How do you manage the disk usage? Peer-to-Peer is concerning. I’ve used Groove and it can be a disk hog. You would need a fair subscription model to manage the whole thing.

Groove is a disk hog. Transferring files from a peer through a peer is not what we do. For one thing, Groove places content on your machine that’s merely “passing through”, i.e. unrelated to your work. This can be something of a security nightmare. How do you keep that information secure? For another, Groove is about pushing updates out to subscribers. Infovark works like RSS; we pull updates. And we only pull data relevant to you and to which you have access. The network usage is about the same as if I email a document from my computer to yours.

• Are the wiki pages also stored peer to peer?

The Wiki pages are indeed stored locally and accessed remotely.

• What do you do about items once completed and needed to be kept?

As of right now, we don’t do anything! One of the great things about the REST-based approach that Infovark takes is that that content is accessible and available to the whole enterprise. Any content-spidering search product, like the Google search appliance, can easily scoop up the latest version and index it. Periodic backup or archiving would work in the same way. Use your favorite off-the-shelf tools. We’re also planning some specialized versions of Infovark that can address all three needs in the same package.

• Items are listed on a user’s Wiki. Where does it get listed when a user leaves the company?

That’s up to the IT guys. The user’s Infovark could easily be picked up and hosted on a server. Then all you’d need to do is change a DNS entry or leave behind a permanent redirect. It’s kind of like an “Employee Graveyard”. Creepy…

• How do you track/prevent cross edits? Johnny starts to edit something and then I decide to make some edits as well. How is that managed?

Gah! Stop asking hard questions. We’re working on that right now. We’ll get back to you when we get to Alpha in June.