Social Glass

I wrote about Clearspace a few months ago and was recently given the chance to take a second look. Clearspace is made by Jive Software, a company that appeared on the horizon in 2001 and did a lot of work with Sun Microsystems at that time. They survived the economic downturn after 9/11 and have recently emerged as a leading contender in the Enterprise 2.0 arena. Enterprise Web 2 and Dion Hinchliffe have recently written positively about Jive’s offering.

Why is Jive worth a look? Clearspace is an application that provides a cohesive set of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities including blogs, wikis, tagging, social profiles and document management. By “cohesive” I mean to point out that it’s not a loosely coupled set of disparate applications. And I emphasize document management as many corporate citizens I’ve spoken to about Enterprise 2.0 note this to be a capability that is lacking in most solutions. Document management is crucial to maturing content and innovation.

Clearspace also has an impressive “reputation generation” system (which is very customizable) and I can see a lot of relevance here when trying to create incentives for contribution. Imagine attributing a dollar value to a user’s reputation when bonuses are allocated at year end.

But perhaps the greatest feature Clearspace brings to the market is its monolithic security model. Enterprises that have invested in Directory Services (such as Active Directory) can integrate these into Clearspace and properly secure content inside the application using pre-established roles and groups. From my experience security is the number one concern around Enterprise 2.0 so this is a big selling point.

Jive also realizes that Enterprise 2.0 extends beyond the firewall to external parties (i.e. business partners). They provide an intriguing mechanism for pushing content into a SaaS cloud for temporary external collaboration, then pulling the output of said activity back behind the firewall for protection.

One downside is the seat-based licensing model. Enterprise 2.0 prides itself on organic growth and adoption, and this is hindered if companies have to buy more licenses before knowledge workers can use the system.

Jive also takes a philosophical stance on social networking, saying networking for the sake of it doesn’t add much value (i.e. how much value do you get out of LinkedIn if you’re not a recruiter?) and that we should instead focus on social productivity - the collaborative benefits one gains by being connected to people (as I understand it). Personally I think social networking has benefits in its own right, especially when we think of creating networks based on groups of interest of subject matter expertise, and I think this is likely a key component to the discovery process.

Regardless, Jive is definitely worth a look!

I’m seeing a lot of momentum behind Enterprise 2.0 in my corporate life and have been encouraged by a few recent events therein. The first involved a workshop we did with a person who’s title was “Head of Emerging Technologies and Solutions”, for, lets just say, a very large and important company, and reports directly to the “C” level. During the workshop HE TOLD US about blogs, wikis, podcasts and gave a great demo of Lotus Connections. Wow. Never before have I talked to a potential client about Enterprise 2.0 who knew more about it than I did.

The second event was less significant, but there is another large company employs person who’s title is “Catalyst of Magic”? No joke. And this person also reports directly to the “C” level and is active in evangelizing Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 internally.

I must say these are encouraging signs that the larger corporations get it.

I discovered this “Enterprise 2.0″ thing in 2006 and thought, much like Dion, that 2007 would be the year of Enterprise 2.0. I’ve certainly been doing a lot of work within my firm and with clients on the topic and have been encouraged by the interest I’ve seen. But that’s really all it is at this point, “interest”.

So where are all of the Enterprise 2.0 implementations that we were expecting this year? It’s already the middle of May, and as far as I know there haven’t been any major announcements of large-scale E2.0 roll outs. But maybe that’s just it. Maybe there will never be any sudden, large-scale adoption from a major company. And to me this makes sense.

We talk about bottom-up adoption (a slow process), and in my experience this is exactly what’s happening. I spoke to another client about Enterprise 2.0 the other day, and while to most of them this was brand new, one member raised his hand and said they’d been using wikis, social networking and Google Map mashups across a few groups for a while. “Really, cool” - the others said. This revelation also helped legitimize what I was saying, as someone from within their organization had independently discovered these tools and found value in them without influence from me or my firm.

So, to answer my question, Enterprise 2.0 implementations are coming, quietly, slowly, and from the bottom-up.

I just read Bill Ives post about Yahoo’s endeavor into the social aspect of “social” computing. They’ve assembled a team of leaders from academia to understand (and possibly shape) the direction in which collaboration markets are heading. Notably, most of the team is comprised of non-technical folks. This is an acknowledgment that Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 is less about technology and more about human interaction.

As Paula Thornton wrote, “..how many psychologists do you have on your team” as “we’re building products that should be influenced by the laws of human nature” instead of advances in technology.

Hear hear.

I like the idea of enterprise mashups and am impressed with what IBM is doing with QEDWiki. I was explaining the concept of Rich Internet Applications to some prospective clients the other day and found they struggled with the idea until I drew a metaphor to Excel. Excel is a wildly popular spreadsheet application - everybody loves it. Knowledge workers use it for status reports, pricing, project planning, you name it. Back when I was a software engineer we often got requests to build web pages that “acted like Excel”.

Why is is so popular? Because it gives control to the user. It’s an application that allows the user to dynamically generate tools to help them do their jobs better. Given the un-restraining characteristics of this application and the fact that it’s so prevalent, why have we endeavored for so long to build business applications and knowledge sharing tools behave in the opposite fashion by imposing pre-determined constraints and rules?

Enterprise mashups, and even wikis and blogs, will succeed because they follow the same fundamental principles that Excel does. They presuppose very little about how knowledge workers do their jobs and are malleable enough to adapt to unforseen conditions.

After explaining it in this way to my audience I got a lot of nodding heads.