Archive for the ‘Social Productivity’ Category
Why Enterprise 2.0 Will Fail
Scott Gavin recently listed the Top 3 Business Benefits of Enterprise 2.0 inside the company firewall.
- Personal Information/Knowledge Management
- Expertise Identification
- Collective Intelligence
I was glad to see someone discuss the internal benefits, because the E2.0 conversation lately has focused on the external benefits — how E2.0 can help marketing and sales.
The case for organizations reaching out to their audiences via social media is easy to make. If you want to improve your outreach efforts, you either have to go where the people are or create an inviting place for people to gather.
The case for E2.0 inside the firewall is considerably more difficult. As Tom Davenport points out, is essentially the case for what used to be called Knowledge Management, or KM. The term KM fell out of favor with consultants and analysts because it didn’t deliver enough of these benefits. There are a lot of folks hoping that flexible, easy-to-use “2.0″ applications might succeed where centrally managed KM failed.
But it likely won’t, because most E2.0 vendors are doing it wrong.
If the #1 benefit is personal knowledge management, why are all the big players selling to the CEO, CIO, and IT departments? Where are the tools targeting individual knowledge workers?
Missing in action
I can think of two reasons why we haven’t seen a flowering of office productivity applications.
1. The Free Brigade — Companies don’t think they can make money from ordinary people anymore. Even if software companies came up with killer applications that helped people manage their daily tasks, email and files, they don’t think they would be able to get people to pay for it. Perhaps their software will get pirated. Maybe some college students will throw together a free and/or open source version that will destroy their market. Or — the most common reason I’ve heard — is simply that employees don’t expect to pay for software they use at work.
2. The Microsoft Effect — Microsoft owns the corporate desktop computing environment. Period. Software vendors fear to challenge the hegemony of the Office Suite, afraid that they will suffer the fate of Word Perfect or Netscape or any number of other products and vendors that have tried, and failed, to break Microsoft’s lock on desktop computing. Despite the fact that Microsoft Office applications have been around for more than 15 years (an eon in software industry) and despite the fact that they have known deficiencies for managing information that the Content Management and Knowledge Management industries have exploited for years, there has been little or no direct competition in this space.
The Enterprise 2.0 distortion field
These two factors cause all Enterprise 2.0 vendors to compromise in one of two ways.
- While promising personal benefits to knowledge workers, they actually take their marching orders from senior management, who purchase the software.
- While promising to help individuals with their daily flow of information, they live in fear of deploying software to workstations and laptops, where all information is received and all the work is actually performed.
This means that most Enterprise 2.0 Software vendors violate at least two of Andrew McAfee’s criteria for an Enterprise 2.0 tool: Freeform, frictionless, and emergent.
Because many of these tools have a management bias, and will subordinate individual initiative to central control, they sacrifice being freeform and emergent. Because many of these tools will be based in the cloud to avoid the tyranny of the Microsoft desktop and corporate IT, they sacrifice the frictionless flow of information inside the firewall.
Ironically, the companies that actually deliver best on the E2.0 promise are ones that would never consider themselves enterprise software.
A New Year’s gift for the easily distracted
I have a confession to make. It’s the New Year, and it’s time for resolutions, and perhaps for being a bit honest with yourself, so I feel among friends making this assertion:
I am easily distracted.
It’s true. And just between you and me, the Internet is not helping.
Look at Twitter, overflowing with real-time data streams full of people who are way more interesting than me, doing all kinds of fabulous things at the rate of one every three seconds.
Look at aggregation services like Reddit and Digg, and RSS, which brings me more interesting content in a day than I could possibly consume in a week.
Underneath all of it is the Web itself, pages and pages of interesting stuff which is fundamentally NOT WORK. As Paul Graham says, it’s like somebody snuck a TV onto my desk when I wasn’t looking.
So, in an effort to trick myself into completing tasks, and avoiding a spacewalk off into the unrelated, I decided to browse websites on how to become productive. (This is, in itself, unproductive, I know, but one has to start somewhere)
In my travels, I came across this inspired productivity hack from 43 Folders: 10 + 2. It’s based on the notion that you can do 10 minutes of anything. Just 10 minutes. You can do that, right?
The way it works is that you start yourself a timer, do those 10 minutes of, you know, your job, and then you can take a 2 minute break to do anything you want. Catch up with the tweetstream. Read your RSS. Heaven forbid, you could even go outside, or stretch. Then after those 2 minutes, you return to the task at hand, or if you like, pick another task that you’ve been avoiding and do that for 10 minutes.
Here’s where all those numbers add up — if you follow this method for an hour, you’ll have done 50 minutes of productive work, and spent 10 minutes being distracted. If you’re like me, you’ll find that this compares pretty favourably with an hour spent without the timer.
I couldn’t find a good Windows timer to help with this hack, so I made one for us – you can download it here. It’s a no-frills Windows only timer, that counts to 10 minutes, plays a dinky sound, then counts to 2 minutes, and then starts again. It’s pretty light on features, but if you find you need it to do something extra, let me know — I might be able to update it.
If I’m not too busy completing all my productive work this year, of course. 
Open the doors and see all the people
Brynn Evans pointed me to an intriguing piece of future gazing from Chris Messina and Jyri Engeström – The Web at a New crossroads. In it, they describe the evolution of the internet from a document-centric content sharing mechanism, through to the way we see it today – with the emergence of people-centric media solutions like Facebook and Twitter increasingly taking a prominent role.
It’s a well thought out and innately resonant concept – we are currently at a stage in the web’s development where people are sufficiently acclimatized to the technology, and the technologists are realizing what personal elements are required to bring people into the web – offering elements that are innately social and vital to the way that humans behave. As Clay Shirky puts it, “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.” Hence the dawn of what Messina and Engeström are calling “The people-centric Web”.
Among my circle of friends, there are few who aren’t on Facebook. And those few who aren’t, are missing out on the conversations, the lame jokes, the cat pictures, and all the stuff that goes on in social circles– for whatever reason, they’re not at the party. If there’s one thing that people fear, it’s being left out – solitary confinement is the single worst kind of punishment dealt out by the human race. As the web becomes more and more socially interesting, it seems likely that the kinds of pressures that we impose on ourselves as a society – pressure to be seen, to contribute value, and to achieve will continue to manifest more and more as part of the social web.
So where does that leave the content?
Work is different from play. In recreational social circles, the social objects –the things we’re talking about – often take a back seat to the fact that people are talking about them. A Facebook conversation about, say, Keyboard Cat, provides a mechanism for the conversation participants to engage and jest – the content itself is not of particular importance. Social systems grow based on the actions of the contributors, not on the artifacts or information that catalyzes their existence.
In a work setting, the conversation happens exactly the same way – it is, after all, the only way people know how to interact, but the social object tends to have a lot more value. In fact, in days of old, content management systems placed all the value on the content – often not providing any way to allow social interaction or discussion about the important documents, plans and policies that are the artifacts produced by people in work environments. With the dawn of Enterprise 2.0 (the people-centric web for work), we realize that we need to bring more social approaches to the way people work, and to design workflows that mirror the ways people interact with their friends.
Say Messina and Engeström: “We want a web where people are as important to the architecture of the system as documents.”
While I applaud the sentiment, I think it’s more than just a case of bringing people up to the level of documents in terms of importance. They way we manage content has to change in order to allow these conversations to take place. There needs to be more accessibility, more transparency, and clear ownership of content. With the current web, people are clearly indicating to systems architects exactly how they want to work with social objects. We need to take the Content Management tools of old and ensure that they meet these social needs first.
“Ask not what you can do for your Content, but what your Content can do for you”
Aligning Interests
Gordon described our upside-down take on Information Management priorities in his last post. We came to this topsy-turvy perspective after spending years implementing traditional business software and growing increasingly frustrated with recurring configuration, training and deployment issues. Infovark was born out of desire to try something different.
We decided to build Infovark from the ground up to serve the information needs of a typical knowledge worker. We consider the individual first, then the team, on up to the business level.
This led us to all sorts of interesting technical choices. But the hardest decision has had nothing to do with software at all. It’s a business decision, and one we’d been avoiding.
If we really want to put our money where our mouth is, if we really believe in a bottom-up, emergent approach to sharing and collaboration, Infovark needs to be sold differently than other enterprise solutions. After all, the traditional top-down focus on security, compliance, and cost is no accident. It’s a result of catering to the needs of the people that write the checks. If we really want to commit to making valuable, useful software for typical business users, we need to sell it to business users.
