If you have missed out on these reports...

...then you find them here:

The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe
"In this EMC-sponsored white paper, IDC calibrates the size (bigger than first thought) and the growth (faster than expected) of the digital universe through 2011."

AIIM Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0: Agile, Emergent, and Integrated
"This study of 441 end users (performed in January 2008) found that a majority of organizations recognize Enterprise 2.0 as critical to the success of their business goals and objectives, but that most do not have a clear understanding of what Enterprise 2.0 is. This 80+ page report, which contains over 70 figures, covers Enterprise 2.0 from all perspectives including technology, business drivers and market dynamics."

Lost & Found: A Smart-Practice Guide to Managing Organizational Memory
Found via Bill Ives, who describes it as follows: "...the Canada School of the Public Service has crafted a good overview of knowledge management (in the context of organizational demographic changes) and has some useful examples of common approaches/techniques...//...The focus is on public but the report provides a good introduction for fairly broad consumption."

Future of Media Report 2007
This report describes the evolving convergence media landscape. Michael Pick and Robin Good provides you with a short overview.

Open Source Web Content Management in Java
"...provides an in depth analysis of seven of the leading open source Java web content management platforms. Written for technical decision makers, the report breaks down the open source marketplace and describes various categories of open source software and where they are most effectively used. The report also provides a framework for understanding the cost and risk implications of selecting an open source platform over commercial software"

...and here are some online readings:

IBM Social Computing Guidelines
"In the spring of 2005, IBMers used a wiki to create a set of guidelines for all IBMers who wanted to blog. These guidelines aimed to provide helpful, practical advice—and also to protect both IBM bloggers and IBM itself, as the company sought to embrace the blogosphere. Since then, many new forms of social media have emerged. So we turned to IBMers again to re-examine our guidelines and determine what needed to be modified. The effort has broadened the scope of the existing guidelines to include all forms of social computing."

Sun Guidelines on Public Discourse
"Many of us at Sun are doing work that could change the world. Contributing to online communities by blogging, wiki posting, participating in forums, etc., is a good way to do this. You are encouraged to tell the world about your work, without asking permission first, but we expect you to read and follow the advice in this note."

Experiences from using SharePoint for collaboration (file sharing)

From the comments to my post "SharePoint 2007 - Dream or Nightmare", I could tell that I need to give a little more detail about my experiences from using SharePoint as a collaboration platform. I will try to do that in this post, but I must first say that it is hard for me to tell if the issues that I am experiencing are the specific to the installation I am using or not. Although I have in-depth experience from developing and implementing ECMS, intranets, portals and web-based collaboration tools, I am just one end-user among others when it comes to SharePoint. I have no deeper insight into either the architecture or what features come out of the box of SharePoint and what needs to be added or customized by custom development as I do not work with SharePoint from an implementation perspective.

However, one of my main points in my critique against SharePoint is that SharePoint – as Microsoft claims SharePoint to be a collaboration platform - should provide better capabilities for a smooth collaboration experience out of the box. As end-user I am not interested in investing time and effort to know the architecture of SharePoint in order to use it. I also suppose that most businesses are not happy about having to invest a lot of time and money in customization and custom development to get the basic capabilities for collaboration when they purchase a product that claims to be a collaboration platform (such as SharePoint).

I would like to utilize the collective intelligence of the readers of this blog to help me identify the root causes of my problems and suggest solutions to them, as I know there are many of you who are skilled and experiences in relevant areas (such as SharePoint 2007) and since I might just having problems with symptoms of something else than actual flaws in SharePoint. To get you started I will try to describe my usage context:

As IT management consultant, I often team up with colleagues for team deliveries. As we might work from different locations and have other assignments in parallel, we have to do much of the work on distance. So we need some collaboration tools besides phone and e-mail to support us. Our basic need - which I believe can be addressed by SharePoint - is to be able to share and collaborate on files, primarily MS Office documents, together. We simply need to be able to store the files somewhere we all can access, find and update them in a controlled manner. More specifically, this is what I personally expect from a collaboration tool that supports file sharing:

• Easy access to the files so that we can access the files from any computer or device equipped with a web browser
• A user interface is simple to use so that occasional users can find their way around and perform their tasks without the need for education
• The possibility to organize and tag the files so that users can find them easily by browsing and / or searching
• The possibility to share the documents with anyone we want to share them with, includes notifying them how and where to access the files

Now back to SharePoint. I have trouble doing the following in SharePoint:

• Accessing my files in an easy way - I can access SharePoint from a web browser via a secure gateway, but it is a process that navigation wise takes a lot of time. I would like my SharePoint sites to appear as virtual drives on my computer even though I am not logged on to the domain with the computer.
• Finding my way around – I have had to invest a great deal of time in getting to know the SharePoint environment to be able to find my way around in SharePoint. Options that are likely to be used frequently are hidden with a lot of other options in cascading menus.
• I have found no possibility to tag files with my own tags and to organize the files in folders is anything but a smooth experience. To move a file from the web interface, I first need to know the URL of the destination folder! In addition, instead of copying a document which is already located somewhere else in SharePoint (or even outside of SharePoint), I would like to link to the document from a folder but I have found no easy way to do this.
• It is not possible to share documents with users outside our domain. I would like to be able to send an e-mail with a link to the document and that the receiver of the document can download. Or, I should be able to select a document from within SharePoint and send it as an attachment via e-mail.

I have already invested time and effort in trying to understand the SharePoint environment. My key concern however is to get the people I need to collaborate with to use the SharePoint for collaboration. The main obstacle is, besides the usability of MOSS 2007, that it is hard to access files and resources in SharePoint when we are outside of our domain or using computers provided to us by our clients.

Please enlighten me on how to make the collaboration experience smoother.

This week in links - week 19, 2008

"Alfresco's Social Computing Slant Shows ECM's Evolution" by George Dearing:

"I had an interesting discussion with John Newton, the co-founder of Alfresco, recently...//...Newton makes everything sound so damn easy when he talks about enterprise content management. And when's the last time you heard the words 'easy' and 'ECM' in the same sentence?"

"If you take into account the way information increasingly lives inside and outside the firewall, ECM becomes even more complex. Companies now have to figure out how to consume and create content in both environments, something Newton says Alfresco accomplishes by adopting a 'content-as-service' approach. He argues that most enterprises lay out their palette of required services based on the need to create content. The focal point shouldn't be centered so much on the ECM suite, he argues. It has more to do with looking at 'how the Web browser can help knowledge workers do their jobs.'"

[Newton:]"'Content services should just be accessible wherever knowledge workers are. We shouldn't be forcing workers to go into these ECM suites. In our view, collaboration spans far more than ECM.' "

Hear, hear.

"E2.0 Fundamentals" by Jeremy Thomas:

"As Dion Hinchliffe says (and as I have written before), 'Discoverability isn’t an after thought , it’s the core'...//...Organizations need to embrace the fact that their data will be federated. Sure, workers will put their documents in “wiki X”, but they’ll also put them on the file share, in content management systems, and on email servers. Data that cannot be found is useless. Enterprise search will unlock data and increase the propensity for information (and the knowledge workers who create it) to be discovered. Discoverability leads to recognition, and recognition leads to increased participation. Enterprise 2.0 must be approached holistically."

Hear, hear. Again.

"Report says enterprise mashups on the rise" By C.G. Lynch, CIO.com:

"A new Forrester report says that enterprise mashups, while not yet a panacea for connecting all the dots of corporate data, will help companies (and their employees) mix and match information to help them do their jobs better. According to the researchers, vendors will provide tools for business users to build a mashup on their own with no programming experience."

"'Mashups are trying to solve a long-standing business problem, which is combining disparate data sources,' says Oliver Young, the Forrester analyst who wrote the report. 'We think mashups are doing it in a unique way that's more user-oriented.'...//... "It absolutely starts to look like BI,' Young says. 'Mashups will eat into that market.' Forrester defined a mashup in the enterprise as "custom applications that combine multiple, disparate data sources into something new and unique."

The value of Enterprise RSS

I personally often argue for the potential that Enterprise RSS has for the purpose of improving decision making within an organization. The reasoning is as follows: By encouraging conversations between people in different initiatives and making them explicit as RSS feeds and by making it possible for anyone within the enterprise to tap into (subscribe to) these conversations and passively observe them, managers as well as any stakeholder can get valuable information to make better informed decisions, as well as getting signals about things starting to happen and react on them before it is to late.

When I manage a project, I usually ask each member in my project to write a diary (either as text stored stored in a document or send via an e-mail) about what they have been doing, what they are currently doing and what issues and risks they see. This way I have been able to stay on top of things and resolve issues before they become real problems. I also get information telling me if we are on schedule or not. The problem has been that these diaries have been hard to access and that anyone who wanted to read them had to actively look for them on a file share or in their inboxes. As a result, the only one who have read them has been me. Occasionally. I have also had to remind and motivate each and everyone to write their diaries, which is hard to do when they know that the only one who is reading their diaries is me. Hopefully.

But things are changing as technologies such as blogs and RSS are becoming more common even for enterprise use. With a project blog which every project member can contribute to and an RSS-feed that all stakeholders can subscribe to, the whole process of informing each other within a project as well as informing externa stakeholders becomes so much more simple and powerful. When the effort to inform yourself is small enough, then you find it worthwile. The value is simply so much higher than the cost. When that happens, then you also see a value of sharing information with others. If you know that someone reads what you are writing, then you get the motivation needed to continute writing. And then it becomes a positive spiral.

In the post "How Corporate RSS Supports Collaboration and Innovation", Dennis McDonald advises his readers to read the post "RSS: Underappreciated Web 2.0 in the Enterprise" by corporate IT manager Jim MacLennan. So I did and here is an excerpt:

"We added RSS capabilities to our internal PMO systems this past month, and traffic & content is already building up to become a valuable resource. Some have [correctly] noted that this increased visibility puts a bit more pressure on project managers and team members, to keep updating project blogs with pertinent information. This "time shifting" of communication should develop into the most effective way to let the rest of IT know what is happening in all areas"

"These spontaneous, organic, and very impactful "conversations", between people still experimenting with a new technology, show me real potential for spontaneous innovation and idea sharing. More evidence of the value of [judicious] experimentation with new technology - no silver bullet, but just enough spark to start a few fires."

Dennis McDonald makes a summary of Jim MacLennans findings:

"RSS feeds make it easier for people to kee up with what a lot of different projects are up to.

This has led to better communication as well as innovation.

Email is still the most ingrained communication platform.

Upper management still expects PowerPoints for reporting purposes."

He then continues by addressing the problem to quantify the costs and benefits of Enterprise RSS:

"Simply put, a generally available RSS feed creation and subscription capability can increase the number of projects any one person can remain abreast of for the expenditure of a given unit of time — just as it can increase the total amount of time a person devotes overall to managing — and responding to — the monitored RSS feeds."

"Granted, taking such a quantitative view does not tell the whole story about what might be gained by making RSS subscription features generally available across projects and the people they interact with. There’s no way to predict, for example, when an innovation or improvement will occur as a result of a communication that might not have otherwise taken place."

"That’s a disadvantage of taking a “beancounter” approach to implementing social media within an organization. While you might be able to quantify the time, effort, and technology associated with impacted processes, you can’t necessarily predict when and where the benefits (such as innovations or new ideas) will occur."

If you want to know more about Enterprise RSS, the ChiefTech blog by James Dellow is a good starting point.

This week in links - week 17, 2008

"Forrester: Social networking means business, big business" by Caroline McCarthy:

"In a new report written for the market research firm, as detailed by Larry Dignan at CNET News.com's sibling site ZDNet, analyst G. Oliver Young predicts that "Enterprise 2.0" applications--buttoned-up versions of the Web 2.0 apps we all know and love--will be a $4.6 billion industry by 2013. Social networks, Young wrote, will make up the bulk of that, with nearly $2 billion invested in them."

"This means we'll probably see a lot of intra-company networking tools (souped-up corporate directories, for example, or internal forums) as well as more interactive varieties of technical support. Not surprisingly, Young's report predicts the biggest adopters will be large companies where you can't just stroll over to the HR or IT folks for a little face time, and where instituting collaborative tools from 37Signals or Zoho could speed things up when not everyone's based in the same building (or time zone)."

"Partner Collaboration - The Solution Is In The Wiki" by Paul Wescott:

"We set up a wiki with each new partner that provides efficient and organized access to the Socialtext information needed to be successful. It really accelerates the productivity of new partners to have a central location for information and interactions with us, rather than a series of disconnected emails."

"One of the greatest benefits of these solutions is the direct and open feedback channel we get with partners. Participation is not limited to Socialtext channel management; participants include product development, marketing, customer support and others that benefit from the current information provided by the field and the sharing and communication in both directions that result."

"Social networks in organizations: balancing risk, reward, and transparency" by Ross Dawson:

"I am finding it very tiresome to continuously hear security consultants and vendors with big PR budgets go on endlessly about risks, without ever mentioning business benefits. This drone gets into executives’ heads, and as a result discussion of social networks – and many other potentially valuable business tools –focuses on risk and not benefit"

"...It is critical to acknowledge, understand, and minimize risk, but executives are equally culpable if they ignore business value as if they ignore risk. "

"...transparency increases business value, however providing transparency must be done intelligently and strategically. The danger is that executives become frightened of the risks, so unintelligently don’t provide transparency, and thus negatively impact the company’s value. Effective business leaders understand that in a complex world business value requires a highly nuanced approach, rather than the black and white view of organizations that is so frequently peddled."

This week in links - week 16, 2008

"Socialtext People is in-the-Flow!" by Michael Idinopulos:

"Socialtext announced two major product announcements today: Socialtext People and Socialtext Dashboard. I'm excited about Dashboard, but People really rocks my world."

"Socialtext People isn't just an inside-the-firewall social networking tool. It's a networking tool that integrates with Socialtext wikis where people are doing their in-the-flow work: posting messages, drafting meeting agendas, taking notes, documenting processes, spec'ing products, and so on. You can see what people are actually doing, not just what they say they're doing. You can also see who they're doing it with."

"Complimentary report: Executive Insights into Enterprise 2.0 from roundtable hosted by Future Exploration Network and IBM" by Ross Dawson:

"The week before the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum, Future Exploration Network and IBM hosted a roundtable of senior executives discussing Enterprise 2.0. Highlights of the discussions were written up in a report which is being made openly available, to assist other executives in considering the key issues involved. Download the report here."

"The poverty of enterprise 2.0 and social media" by Dennis Howlett:

"CXO’s instinctively know that internal collaboration, whether through rudimentary technologies like blogs and wikis hold significant efficiency promise. They know the technology is relatively inexpensive compared to other types of enterprise technology and that implementation can be rapid. They also get that in the longer term, these technologies could hold incredible promise for business effectiveness across their entire value chain lies in releasing huge amounts of resource back into the business. None of that is disputed. What is disputed are two things, social media and social networking as applied internally. Why?"

Eric Burke shares his short version of Lifehacker’s Top 10 Email Productivity Boosters:

Increasing collaboration, knowledge sharing and innovation

In "Questions to Ask Before Replacing Corporate Email", Dennis D. McDonald addresses the problem of using e-mail as "the one and only" collaboration tool:

"For me a bottom line issue is understanding the costs of introducing new technology and replacing old technology, given that the old technology — email — is not going to disappear (nor should it)...//...How long these extra costs will need to be incurred will depend upon the organization and the speed of adoption, and complete adoption won’t occur overnight ...//...These additional costs need to be weighed against the savings of time that emerge when it is found that efficient use of collaboration software actually reduces not only the number of (inefficient) emails associated with certain types of activities but also the meetings associated with certain types of tasks."

In "Build It (and they won't come)", Marc Solomon debunks some myths about "knowledge hubs" and shares his insights about how to get your users engaged as participants (to make them share their knowledge).

"The perennial, time-tested truth is that people who love to learn don't share that love for what they learn (or care to share). How do we make it worth their while?...//...Turning users into contributors requires that we architect searches that highlight who the contributors are along with the volume and nature of what they're contributing."

"No 12 step program can move forward until the addict admits that they have an addiction -- in this case relying on email to provide a dashboard-like visibility into what's fresh and noteworthy on an organizational level. How can the addict be weaned from the isolation of 1:1 asynchronous communication so that their comfort zone includes RSS readers, search alerts, and subscription feeds for staying on top of their priorities and moving targets."

"Enterprise systems are saddled with the tags we force on them to label their content baggage. But the more control we exert on our metadata the more pressure we put on our producers to execute our elaborate coding schemes. At what point can we introduce commonly accepted web 2.0 fare as folksonomies, tag clouds, and ability to aggregate these terms by their popularity?"

"One of the self-fulfilling failures of expert-finding deep dives is that when you ask for volunteers your most sought-after domain leaders are already snowed under -- why would they volunteer their protected time to be officially pegged for all to see on your corporate radar? One of the many benefits of connecting metadata to search is that the engine can quantify thought leadership based on business need -- not based on who volunteers for guru status in a given topic."

In an article in BusinessWeek, "Life on the Edge: Learning from Facebook", authors John Hagel and John Seely Brown argue that "social network provides important lessons for executives—and a key forum for innovation and experimentation":

"Dismissing Facebook as irrelevant to business would be dangerously shortsighted. Yes, it is on the edge of traditional business activity, but it is an edge where new approaches to business are being tested and refined. Like most edges in the business world, it may look marginal at the outset, but has the potential to redefine business more broadly over time...//...So what lessons should more traditional companies take away from the early Facebook and SocialMedia experience?"

• "Create more edges. The decision by Facebook to open up its platform to third-party developers unleashed a torrent of innovation that continues to expand...//...By offering application developers easy access to millions of potential users, Facebook spurred broad innovation in a short period of time."
  
• "Provide better ways to connect at the edge. Brokers like SocialMedia attract diverse participants at the edge and provide mechanisms to catalyze new insight and share knowledge. "
  
• "Demographic edges are fertile grounds for business innovation...//...Younger generations can be important catalysts for business innovation, both because they often uncover unmet needs earlier than older customers and because they are more willing to try a new product or service."
  
• "Experiment and iterate rapidly. The power of Facebook as an innovation platform is that it costs so little for an application developer to introduce an application and generate quick market feedback. This environment encourages lots of experimentation and accelerates learning."
  
• "Social, technologic, and economic are inextricably intertwined. Facebook succeeds because it satisfies profound social needs to connect and be acknowledged via an easy-to-use technology platform. It also carefully manages the economics of its business to avoid upsetting the social order."

This week in links - week 15, 2008

"Most Users Are Unhappy With Enterprise Search" By W. David Gardner:

"Separate U.S. and U.K. surveys released this week found that search engines are failing workers."

"...keyword searches don't work for most employee searches and the search 'monster' is becoming a growing problem for businesses and organizations."

"In its report, Sinequa said many employees in the London study are struggling to find even the most basic information, and their travails are negatively impacting their productivity. Just 8% of the workers have a tool that permits them to search across their own company using key search terms, Sinequa said."

"A world without Enterprise RSS" by James Dellow:

"Enterprise users are lacking some of the tools and features available through the Web 2.0 consumer RSS ecosystem. And Enterprise RSS users want their RSS "when and where they want it" too!"

"The problem is that without Enterprise RSS this is hard to achieve, as most basic enterprise approaches to RSS use a simple Web content publishing approach - i.e. RSS content is published like any other Web content but consumed through an existing application or a desktop reader. However, the RSS content has no idea if anyone has actually read it and if a user wants to consume RSS feeds on different devices or even from different reading applications on the same device, well... bad luck."

"Enterprise Twitter – or how to tap social networks for expertise without using email" by Ross Dawson:

"In organizational network analysis circles, an MIT study on how people find information is often cited. The research showed that in an organization, people were five times more likely to go to people than to databases to get answers to their questions. So knowledge workers’ productivity is strongly related to their social networks, in terms of who they know who can help them, and whether there is sufficient trust and reciprocal value in the relationship that they get a response."

"Effective professionals are already tapping their external networks using Twitter and other tools to do their work better. They should also be able to use the same tools inside the organization."

"Building relevant social ties based on trust and mutual understanding that enable focused, efficient questions and knowledge sharing will always be far higher value than broadcast mechansims. However there is definitely a role for light-touch queries inside organizations, and I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of that in the coming year or two. "

"Tips for Social Computing in the Enterprise" by Chris Howard, vice president and director of the Executive Advisory Program at the Burton Group:

"People form communities based on shared interests. Once the community is in place, it becomes a greenhouse for the development of ideas and the distribution of information, attracting all those who wish to participate."

"Chris Zook recommends searching for "undeveloped adjacencies," or unexploited capabilities in the organization that can be developed into new, repeatable processes. Successful corporate innovation capitalizes on existing assets and ideas combined in new ways. Use of social computing creates a new stage for innovation, where ideas are more easily exposed and patterns spotted. As communities work out the kinks of new ideas in public forums, innovative thinking coalesces and ownership/leadership emerges."

"The collective intelligence of the community leads to answers more quickly. As more questions are answered, repeatability increases. As new workers enter the company, there is a baseline of knowledge to get them ramped up more effectively. Much of that knowledge is available as content within the social computing infrastructure."

This week in links - week 14, 2008

Meredith Whittaker at Google emphasizes that Google Docs is collaboration tool by launching the Google Docs Community Channel at youtube.com:

"Google Docs is all about being able to share and collaborate, and now we're taking the idea of sharing a step further with a new Google Docs Community Channel. This is a place to watch videos from regular folks all about Google Docs, connect with others, and pick up smart tips about all the ways to use the application."

Continuting on the subject of Google, Network of Unreasonable men poses the question: "Is Google goneburger?"

"Is Goggle heading for trouble? Despite all their product development efforts & a significant amount of hype, they still only have one revenue stream, advertising.

On top of that the word is that they are loosing staff in large numbers due to growth pains.

Finally, look at their strategic stance or lack there of. Who are they strategically aligned with? Perhaps more importantly who have they rankled? MS, Yahoo, Apple, Broadcasters, news companies….Wouldn’t a more prudent stance be to take on just one of these giants (by partnering with their enemy) at a time??"

Whether or not this is true, I will keep enjoying the "free" apps and services from Google. I wrote a post a while ago, "Web 2.0 – A true Internet revolution?", which touches the same subjects as the post cited above:

"Interestingly, the primary business model on the web is based on selling advertising space which is primarily used for marketing consumer products. This is the paradox of Web 2.0. Even if people are really starting to change how they use the Internet and the web, no one should be surprised if Google and Facebook will suddenly stop showing outstanding growth and profit numbers when the business cycle reaches the next recession. When people don’t feel confident enough about the future to buy a new flatscreen TV och refridgerator, it will eventually hurt Google and Facebook badly. Hence, a true Internet revolution will in my eyes only only come when the primary products that we consume (accounting for the biggest part of our consumtion) are intangible digital content and experiences. Then the Internet can become the engine that drives the global economy, just as the industry once became more important than the agriculture for the national economies."

Finally, Bertrand Duperrin applies Archimedes' theorem to Enterprise 2.0 "with trust instead of liquid":

"If we consider companies will have to change, two solutions are possible:

- going quietly, in order to be ready when the “old” model will be out of date. It supposes to start early in order to have time to find one’s own way, since “magical recipes” don’t exist.

- jaming on the brakes and accepting the risk of facing violents changes later. Some, like Gary Hamel, think since change isn’t in corporate DNAs, this is what will happen.
But when it’s time to migrate to management 2.0, enterprise 2.0 or to adopt social computing tools, more than the fear of change, trust is essential.

And what about Archimedes ? “Any individual immersed in a trustful environment gives back to this environment as much trust as he receives”.

A good question would be: is the price to pay when you don’t trust the organization higher than when you trust it wholly, even if some aren’t trustworthy."

Organizations need to take consumerization of IT seriously

The consumerization of IT is about new technologies being introduced on the consumer markets before they are introduced on the industrial markets. This is a trend which Gartner says “will be the most significant trend affecting information technology (IT) during the next 10 years means”.

Imagine having only one calendar, one user account, one address book, one mobile phone, one computer, one external storage, one application of each kind, one version of each application, and so on instead of having different ones for different environments such as work and home. Wouldn’t that simplify some things? It sure would for me. I currently carry two laptops in my bag (one from my consultant firm, one from a customer) besides the one I have at home. What makes me stand this heavy burden is that I can access my online apps such as Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar (synchronized with my Exchange account at work) and Google Reader from any computer and also from my smartphone. Otherwise I would be in File Management Hell. I would have spend a lot of time and energy shuffling files between computers via different e-mail accounts or USB sticks, working with multiple calendars and converting files between Office 2002, Office XP and Office 2007.

As information technology is becoming an integrated and natural part of our entire lives (not just the work part) more and more people are getting a better and better understanding of how IT can be used to simplify, enrich and in other ways add value to their lives. They have clear ideas of what they need or want and how they want things to work. As a result, their expectations and what they require from their work environment in terms of IT support is increasing. Just as organizations are trying to break down their silos and integrate different units better to improve communication, collaboration and information exchange, employees are expecting their employers to make it possible and easy for them to integrate their personal lives (consumer applications and devices) with their work lives.

An important point here is that employees should not be expected to cut off their personal lives from their work environments while at the same time be expected to work “anywhere, anyplace, anytime”. Being always connected means that we should always be able to stay connected to every part of our lives – work, friends, family, and activities of various kinds. Being always connected enables us to make faster transitions between different environments where we operate – we don’t have to change physical environments just because we have a different kind of task at hand. If we are able to keep ourselves up-to-date and to control all parts of our lives “anywhere, anyplace, anytime”, then we are likely to reduce the stress that comes from not being able to control our lives.

Organizations who do not let employees access online apps such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Gmail are in fact building barriers for people instead of removing barriers. They make it harder for people rather than to simplify for them. They are disempowering them, control. That is why people bring their personal devices to work. And with the consumerization of IT, they have access to the latest technologies and tools.

What does this means for organizations? Well, management and IT departments should focus more on trying to empower the people within their own organization. They should trust them enough to provide them the mandate and tools to shape and control their own working environment and how they use it. One important part of this is to break down the barriers between the work part of people’s lives and the other parts. Doing so will empower the people and allocate more energy and motivation so they can contribute more to the well-being of the entire organization. It is my firm belief that people who have a rich social (online and/or offline) life are also open-minded and more willing to share things with others. As a result, they are also more likely to contribute to a richer, more collaborative and more productive work environment.

The gap between the IT department and the users isn't closing

As IT management consultant, I work very much in a place between the IT department and the rest of the business. It is a place where not many people like to hang out, probably because it is where two different universes collide. It is a place where it is often safer to send out consultants than to send out your own people. As consultants, we can act as neutral peace-keeping troops. Or at least we can't be easily recognized as the enemy. To survive in that place, you need to be able to make friends on both sides and at the same time act like you are best friend with only the side you are interacting with. I hang out there because I am thrilled by the challenge to make IT usable to people, to empower people in their daily lives with IT. And this cannot be achieved if you do not get the people who need the tools to communicate and collaborate with the people who make the tools, and vice versa.

During the last few years, I more and more often get the feeling that the gap between the IT department and the users isn't closing - it is in fact growing. When looking through my star-marked posts in Google Reader, I found this post on the High Performance Workplace Gartner blog by Rita Knox. When reading it, I realize that it is really an excellent post which put words to the situation I often see in organizations. So here it is in full:

The emergence and adoption of alternate technologies is hard to ignore. Employees find technology to support their needs (such as desktop search tools, blogs or wikis for collaboration), explore what they can do and teach their colleagues how to use the tools so they'll have a way to work together, but these sorts of technologies are not supported by most businesses' IT organizations.

A technology subculture is evolving. CIOs concentrate on costs, business processes and governance, while employees say, "just do it!" If my kid can carry on discussions, swap homework and post pictures on the Web, then why can't I do comparable things at work? The gulf between the employee's and IT organization's view of corporate computing is growing.

The CIO has the responsibility of keeping the company's computing infrastructure healthy and secure, and keeping back-office operations running, while employees are concerned with figuring out ways to streamline their work processes, make them more interesting and exploit new technologies to help them. Many of these new tools are easier to use than what the company provides - if not actually filling a void the company does not address altogether.

Although some IT departments are beginning to think about these resources and ask us, for example, if folksonomies can be used internally to the corporate advantage, we don't hear the question often, and we hear about deployments of such social technology even less often.

The two views - MIS-centric vs. employee-enabling - need to
converge if a company's IT resources are to be aligned.

It is time for organizations to wake up and make "Empower the people" a mantra for every business unit - even the IT Department.

This week in links - week 13, 2008

"Networked economies require Services not Processes" by Steve Jones:

"Back in the 80s the "Value Chain" was key, this was the series of steps and links that it took to deliver the value. Now the Value Chain really suited a process mentality. It was a pretty linear thing, everyone did their own bits in it and handed on from one place to another...//...process made sense in this world, A was followed by B which followed C etc etc. People mapped out simple processes and it just seemed to make sense.

The problem was, and most assuredly is, that Systems Theory was making itself more and more known in the business world. This is where collaboration becomes more about units (services in SOA terms) working together in complex networks than simply a chain which hands over responsibility. This led to the Value Network approach that business schools started pushing out in the late 90s.

The current, and next, generation of businesses are about complex collaborations to deliver value, not simply about following a process. This collaboration approach requires a business service approach and a focus on interactions, objectives and KPIs. Its a much harder environment to be working in than simple Value Chains but the potential rewards, and dangers, are
much more significant."

Here are some excerpts from the post "The best way to sell SOA? Try Web 2.0 techniques" by Joe McKendrick about the convergence of SOA and Web 2.0:

"Web 2.0 addresses the same problems SOA is addressing...Enabling users to easily compose services that make calls to back-end systems will go a long way to helping businesses see the value in SOA"

"Web 2.0 and SOA also have different philosophies...SOA is about empowering the enterprise, and Web 2.0 is about empowering the individual...we want the user to become increasingly more familiar with in the broad Internet, and bring that experience into the enterprise...At the same time, allowing the enterprise to free up its assets, and empower the business user.”

"IT Execs Want More-Effective Collaboration" from PR-USA.net:

"The study, commissioned by Novell, surveyed 100 senior IT executives on their experiences with and plans for collaboration software. A full 80 percent said it is of critical or high importance that individuals in their companies have the ability to collaborate securely within and beyond organizational boundaries, but fewer than half said their current collaboration solutions are extremely or very effective in enabling collaboration among individual knowledge workers or among teams and virtual teams."

"'Providing employees with collaboration tools that enable them to work together effectively, no matter where they may be located, is no longer a wish-list or nice-to-have item – it’s a requirement,' said Kent Erickson, senior vice president and general manager of Workgroup Solutions for Novell. 'But it’s a requirement that is not being adequately addressed for most organizations."