Social Glass

Rod Boothby has some great ideas around how Enterprise 2.0 can help companies innovate.

I thought it’d be interesting to cover one basic scenario to illustrate some important points.

Point 1 - Discovery and Collaboration
Take a simple example where a bank has two departments, Consumer Loans and Commercial Loans. Both departments report to “The Head Honcho”, have one Department Lead and a few knowledge workers beneath them. A knowledge worker from the Consumer Loans department has an innovative idea. He wants to create a special loan package for customers who already have a consumer loan and are seeking a commercial loan (i.e. for their small business). To do this he’ll need to work with somebody who understands commercial loans.
The Enterprise 2.0 Discovery process allows the consumer loan knowledge worker to search for and locate (say, through an Enterprise Search tool) a commercial loan knowledge worker in the other department who has relevant knowledge and experience (as manifested by the blogs and wiki pages he’s authored, all of which are also discoverable).

So, the two knowledge workers from different departments begin collaborating and come up with a new idea for packaging loans.

Without Discovery and Collaboration it would have been difficult for consumer loans knowledge worker to find somebody in the commercial loans department with relevant insight.

Point 2 - Organisational Readiness

Which one of the Department Heads gets credit for the new idea? Do they allow the knowledge workers to pitch the idea directly to the Head Honcho cutting them out of the process?

Organisations need to be ready to embrace innovation from lower levels and from lateral departments. If the Deparment Heads feel threatened by said innovation, this ficticious bank will fail to realise the benefits of its Enterprise 2.0 system. Enterprise 2.0 is very much about changing organisational cultures to encourage, identify and seize innovation from all levels.

In my previous post on JEE and Web 2.0 I mentioned the use of ajax4jsf to “ajaxify” JEE web applications. I wanted to cover some additional resources we’ve used to add Web 2.0 features to JEE applications.

Rounded Corners

I’m not a graphics designer, and I struggle with tools like Gimp and MS Paint. I wanted to add rounded corners to my JEE web application and discovered roundedcrnr.com. Roundedcrnr.com automatically creates rounded corner images for you (in whatever color you like), and produces code you can incorporate into your webpage to create the rounded corner effect.

Visual Effects

The scriptaculous javascript library has some great visual effects that can be incorporated into a JEE application.  There’s one trick here.  By default JSF generates dynamic ids for page components, i.e. menu:_idJsp1:_idJsp39.  Thus, when creating a visual effect with scriptaculous, such as “BlindDown”, the dynamic id of the component must be provided (as javascript is rendered on the client-side).  To get around this, the Apache Tomahawk framework provides JSF controls with a forceId attribute.  So, if a component is named menu at design time, it’ll be rendered as menu at runtime, which means you can pass menu, instead of menu:_idJsp1:_idJsp39, into your “BlindDown” javascript call.

Finally, no Web 2.0 application is complete without “spinner.gif“, which is used to show the user that “something is happening” as the mouse hourglass no longer takes effect when AJAX requests are processed.  ajax4jsf has a status component that can be used to render spinner.gif when AJAX requests are executing.

I’ve recently returned from a 2 week vacation visiting my family in snowy Colorado.  No, this is not another complaint abou the “evils of email” (Australia virtually shuts down between December 18 and January 15 anyway).  It is instead a post about the amount of Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 news I had to catch up on.

In the Beginning

I first ventured into blog syndication reading Techcrunch.  Techcrunch was virtually the only blog I read until I discovered Andrew McAffee and Enterprise 2.0.  I’ve since added a series of blogs to my repertoire, including:

• Andrew McAffee
• Dion Hinchliffe
• Firestoker
• Innovation Creators
• The FAST Forward Blog
• Web 2.0 Explorer

Upon my return (and having been away from internet access for 5 days), I found over 100 unread blog posts in my feed aggregator.  This was far above the number of unread emails I had.  We talk a lot about Signals when it comes to Enterprise 2.0. In this case my “signals” backfired as I was overwhelmed with information (maybe I should just cut down on the number of blogs I read).

So, I set out to make myself current with what had been going on in the Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 space during my absence.  Heaven forbid I miss out on a vital detail about some new development.  I noticed several posts about the reality of Web 2.0 startups, including this post by Michael Arrington.  It seems that many Web 2.0 companies are shutting their doors, and that few are actually going through the IPO process.  2007 should see a reconciliation with those companies that actually add value sticking around.

Maybe this also means the blogsophere will settle a bit, and that the next time I take a 2 week vacation I’ll only have 50 unread posts to read.

I like what I read in Andrew McAffee’s latest post, where he describes Enterprise 2.0 as

Intranets that resemble today’s Internet…

This is a great metaphor for the value proposition of Enterprise 2.0. The “common worker” at least understands that the internet consists of a collection of content repositories (i.e. websites), and that he can find content through simple search engines like google.com. He’s also starting to understand the concept of blogs and wikis (albeit through his kids), and that he too can contribute to said content repositories, and that his content is then also searchable with the rest of it.

While I think there’s value in breaking Enterprise 2.0 into an approach (i.e. SLATES) and philosophizing about what Enterprise 2.0 will look like, I think it’s also important to remember KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid), especially when explaining this stuff to the “common worker”. It is the common worker, remember, that we need to buy into this in the first place as he and his cohorts are the long-tail of the enterprise.

So I come full circle. When the guy in Accounting asks about Enterprise 2.0, something like picture everything you like about the internet, then picture having that here at work. That’s a good high-level start and is sure to lead to lots of questions and interest.