Infovark

Many bloggers have weighed in on the Enterprise 2.0 vibe, its relation to Web 2.0 and social media, and its much-maligned predecessor, Knowledge Management. Rightly or wrongly, KM initiatives were often associated with failed corporate portals, stale company intranets, lackluster training programs, and cumbersome Document Management, Records Management, and Content Management tools.

Gordon and I have deliberately avoided mentioning Knowledge Management on our website. We think the term is poison, as are most of the other industry acronym-fads ending in “M”.

So it surprised us when the Burton Group’s Mike Gotta announced the publication of a new document dealing with Enterprise 2.0 called Collaboration and Knowledge Management Renaissance. The summary he gives on his blog is intriguing, and no doubt the document would make an interesting read (if you can afford it.) But is E2.0 just a rehash of previously failed “M” stuff?

John Tropea talks about E2.0 being Knowledge Management 2.0 with a greater emphasis on corporate culture. Lawrence Hart thinks knowledge management is marching along. Bex Huff says forget knowledge management, we need context management. Venkatesh Rao writes that the terms social media and knowledge management reflect a generational divide. It’s a long, detailed article that provoked strong reactions.

These are just a few of the items we’ve read over the past few months. I’m sure you could find many, many more blog posts that fall within the “Oh no, here we go again!” to “This time, it’ll be different!” spectrum. (Please feel free to list any of your favorites in the comments section below.)

I think it’s good that the debate over these large-scale systems is simmering away. There’s a widespread perception that most of these tools didn’t deliver what they promised, but I haven’t seen much analysis of what went wrong. Most industry analysts simply latched on to the next catch-phrase, E2.0. I suppose we’re guilty of that, too.

It’s odd that it’s taken so long for social software to make inroads in the business world. Social networking has a natural home in the enterprise because the relationships there have a purpose.

Gordon uses Facebook. My wife hung out on MySpace for a while. I never joined any particular network, because I just didn’t see the point. It’s just a bunch of folks hanging out, after all. I’d much rather do that in person.

I eventually signed up for LinkedIn, because it was a good way of staying in touch with former coworkers. It’s also a great resource for finding a new job, and it sure beats carrying around a stack of paper resumes. But I only check in occasionally.

I think it’s inside the firewall that the social networks really come into their own. Rands explains the importance of the corporate social network by contrasting the official organization chart with the culture chart. The boxes and arrows on the org chart barely scratch the surface of what’s going on within most companies. Knowing who’s connected with whom, what they do and how they do it… now that’s valuable insight.

Ross Mayfield, co-founder of SocialText, and Stowe Boyd, a leading social software consultant, have been discussing whether the focus of Enterprise 2.0 is the individual or the group. You can read Ross’ latest thoughts in his groups and networks post. We’ve weighed in on the topic, too. Gordon wrote that there is no enterprise — it’s made of people.

So what is Enterprise 2.0, anyway?

Unfortunately, Enterprise 2.0 means different things to different people. But it does imply a change in priorities and a different way of doing business. You’ll find those two concepts present in most definitions of Enterprise 2.0.

For the last century or so, we’ve structured the corporate engines of the economy to handle problems of scale. We’ve seen major revolutions in manufacturing, logistics, and transportation as a result. Mass production and mass distribution have changed the way we live and work and vastly improved our standard of living.

But not every business problem is a problem of scale. The same managerial techniques and organizational structures that make today’s cars and computers won’t work well for producing television dramas or delivering health care. Yet if you skimmed the business and economics section of your local bookstore, you wouldn’t find much good advice for in running those sorts of enterprises. Nor would you find many off-the-shelf software applications to help you run those businesses — until E2.0 came along.

Other sectors of the economy haven’t seen the dramatic productivity gains that manufacturing and distribution have. And most of those companies don’t follow the rigid corporate hierarchy lampooned in Dilbert. Law firms, medical practices, and consultancies often run on a partner model. In entertainment or design it’s not uncommon for the highest paid individual to be a member of the staff rather than the managers or directors. Where’s the Michael Porter for these companies?

That’s what Enterprise 2.0 is about. It’s about adapting some of the successful tools and communications technologies found on the open web to solve problems faced by people working in creative, knowledge-based industries.

The priorities have shifted from problems of scale to problems of innovation.

It’s about individuals in groups

Ross Mayfield is right when he says that “the fundamental unit of collaboration is the group.” Whether you’re managing a small team or large division, you’ll likely find dozens of products that can improve group dynamics or productivity. These range from old-school solutions, like hiring an information architect to redesign the internal web portal, to state-of-the-art E2.0 products from folks like SocialText, MindTouch or Jive Software.

But Stowe Boyd is also right. The primary difference between 1.0 and 2.0 solutions is the focus on individual users. Tim O’Reilly, who coined the phrase Web 2.0, famously summed the Web. 2.0 vibe by saying, “users add value.” Individuals can and should contribute directly to the content of sites they visit and the organizations to which they belong. If the fundamental unit of collaboration is the group, then the fundamental unit of knowledge work is the individual.

The challenge of enterprise social software is to make tools that work for both the individual and the group. It’s devilishly hard to do, and there’s no shortage of failed attempts, from custom IT projects that fail to high-flying dot.com companies that go bust. Getting ad hoc groups of intelligent, creative people to work together in harmony is an art.

But people thought the coordinated, mechanized dance of the assembly line was an art, too, before management science made it routine.

It was just more than a year ago that Gordon and I started Infovark. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long since we left world of enterprise systems consulting to build our own product. We’ve learned a lot about writing code, marketing products, and running a software startup. It’s experience we couldn’t have gotten working anywhere else, for anyone else. It’s been hard, hard work. It’s also been a lot of fun.

You might have noticed that the rate at which we post to this blog has slowed lately. That’s because, in anticipation of our one year anniversary, we’ve been planning for the next year, which will bring lots of changes. We’ll conduct a public beta and launch our first product. We’ll set up a satellite office in Australia for Gordon. We’ll establish our revenue model and pricing. And we’ll do all of these things while remaining engaged in the Enterprise 2.0 community.

We started Infovark because we had a particular itch to scratch. We felt that many of the solutions being sold to business professionals failed to deliver on improved productivity or collaboration grounds. We felt like there were tools and technologies that could help, if you could put them together in the right way. We felt that doing so might require totally new approaches, ones that broke with old habits and legacy thinking. And we knew that was going to be a hard sell.

So we’ve been reaching out to a few folks. Some will help us with interface design, some with business development, some with performance and testing. Gordon will catch up with some of his mates in Australia that might want to pitch in. I’ll be looking for talent here in the U.S. But good people and good ideas come from everywhere. We aim to be the smallest, most innovative global company you’ve ever seen. We want to change the world of work for the better.

So here’s to the coming year!