Archive for the ‘Emergence’ Category
Infovark 2009
As Infovark moves into its third year, people often say to me, “Er, when are you going to ship something?” and ” What is it you’re building, anyway?”
And you know, as much as I’d like to launch the product right now, I can’t. Infovark isn’t finished.
When Dean and I started in October 2007, we thought that we’d be able to get a public beta ready within about 6 months. We were really wrong. Here’s the link to the sad trombone.
In the absence of a product announcement, Dean and I have been talking a lot about the problems we’re trying to solve (in between furiously refactoring, debugging, re-bugging, etc.). And as we move into a new year — one that will definitely see the first public release of Infovark — I thought it might be prudent to re-visit exactly what it is we’re building, and why. So here’s a few of the questions that we’ve encountered over the last few years of running our start-up.
What is Infovark?
Infovark is a smart software agent that lives in your computer. It follows you while you work, remembers things, and learns a little bit about what you do, who you work with, and the documents and emails that you create and use. It then uses this information to build you a spiffy personal website that’s all about you, your work activity, and your stuff.
You can make your website available to your colleagues, so that they can browse your Infovark, leave comments, post updates, and access the information you choose to share with them.
Why would I want it?
Because you are busy, and you don’t have time to answer repeated requests for information, or spend ages digging around for answers. Infovark helps you find things that you work with, and share them with your colleagues. Infovark also provides you with insights based on your work patterns. For example, It will suggest related documents for an email you’re reading. It will help you determine which is the most recent version of a document. It’s very helpful.
If you’ve ever thought that you could benefit from having a personal assistant, or someone who took notes for you, then you will love having Infovark on hand.
Will it run on my computer?
If you’re running a version of Windows from the last 5 years, then chances are pretty good that it will.
How do I use Infovark?
Once you install Infovark, it asks you a few questions about what you do and don’t want it to include. (This process doesn’t usually take too long.) And then, you just get on with doing whatever it is you do.
When you get stuck, lose, or forget something, you can ask Infovark what it knows about it. If your friend at work also has an Infovark, you can browse to it instead of their Facebook page. (If you want to do work stuff, that is. Infovark doesn’t support throwing sheep.)
Does this mean that all my stuff is always shared?
No, only if you let it be shared. You can keep Infovark and all of your information to yourself if you like. You can also tell Infovark to ignore whole folders or files, so that it won’t consider these when making recommendations or suggestions.
Does this mean my Boss can spy on me?
The content that you choose to share will be available to your colleagues, including your boss. So, if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t actually add any value to an organization, and likes to avoid doing things, then you probably shouldn’t install Infovark. It might make you look bad.
On the other hand, if you’re delivering awesome work, and you want other folks to know about it, then Infovark is a great way to get the word out. Sending an occasional reminder about your valuable contributions couldn’t hurt during the next annual performance review, could it?
I thought you guys were all about solving Enterprise Problems. How does this help?
Enterprise Software is unwieldy and complex because it abstracts all business processes into a single piece of software. It’s designed to solve management problems as seen from the executive level. But the real work happens on the front lines, at the individual level — where we all do our jobs.
With your permission, your Infovark will contact other Infovark agents within your organization, allowing you to share, search, and collaborate with your peers. In the process, Infovark builds up a realistic, organic representation of your organization’s knowledge and insight from the ground level. We think that enterprises are made of people, and genuinely useful enterprise software has to acknowledge that fact.
We also have future plans for an Infovark Team Server that will aggregate individual Infovarks and provide a more holistic and structured approach to information management.
That’s all well and good, but when can I have it?
Soon! We have one more private beta to go through, in Feburary this year — look for our public beta sometime in April. (Really, if we don’t get to share this with somebody soon, we will explode.)
Meanwhile, Dean and I will endeavor to keep posting our thoughts and ideas here as we go. You can also drop by our other Infovark blog, The Underground. The Underground shares our experiences as programmers — and contains some more technical details about our approach.
A big thanks to all our readers, and smart folk who’ve left comments for us over the last year. We love hearing from you. Happy 2009!
People in the Computer
I just finished reading The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine, which Dean lent to me to read on the plane. Like lots of history novels, it’s chock-full of interesting facts and tales, and a large amount of it is written with the benefit of years of hindsight (which always makes the writer look much smarter).
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the story, it revolves around a mechanical “automaton” that apparently could play chess. In its 200 year lifespan, it played against (and beat) world chess masters, and chess aficionados, including Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin.
Now there was obviously no computing power around in the late 1700′s to effectively program a machine, so The Turk (named for its oriental robe and turban) had to use some other kind of mechanism. Hidden inside the cabinet was a human chess player, with a second chessboard, who was ‘watching’ the game, through an elaborate mechanism involving magnets and levers. The Turk was, in effect, a conjuring trick.
The thing that made the Turk remarkable, and that led it to be the talk of the courts of Europe in the 1700′s was the notion that it could somehow ‘think’, and react to the moves made by it’s human opponent. The prospect of thinking machines held amazing promise for the future.
Nowadays, computers can play chess, and often extremely well — using a brute-force, compute all the possible moves approach to the chessboard. Now, this is impressive, but it’s not thinking. It’s much more mechanical and rigid than the way a human thinks about the problem. Add to that, the notion that all of these chess-playing rules have to be programmed by an army of human programmers to start with.
So, the Artificial Intelligence of the future is still there — in the future. Tasks requiring repetitive manual labor may have been replaced by robotic machinery, but the knowledge worker isn’t losing their job to thinking computers any time soon.
Even with the amazing advances in software, in search analysis and indexing, computers are really only good for two things — doing math, and remembering stuff. If you need information, you may well be able to find it through your enterprise software. But if you need the analysis and counsel that adds value to that information — maybe we could dare call it ‘knowledge’ — you need to connect with the most sophisticated thinking machine you will find in your organization — another person.
And that’s why social software is so important. It’s a lot like the Turk. Sure, It looks like the computer is helping you out — but really, there’s a guy hidden inside the cabinet…
Individuals in Groups
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.
A Social Bookmarking Case Study
Enterprise 2.0 case studies are hard to find, so I pay attention whenever someone posts interesting findings on the Internet. Jack Vinson published his notes on social bookmarking in the enterprise talk given by Laurie Damianos of MITRE at the Boston KM conference. It’s worth a read. From the study:
“Many of the terms used by users are not in the official taxonomy, and work is underway to expand the formal taxonomy to represent things according to how people expect to find them.”
A corporate taxonomy based on what actually happens, instead of what is supposed to happen?
That could be useful…
