Social Glass

• Knowledge Workers access the E2.0 suite through a consolidated UI that sits on top of all of the applications
• Applications integrate to the suite through a library of standards-based APIs and widgets.

I’d like to draw your attention to the Tagline Generator - an innovative approach to tag generation based on the Porter Stemming Algorithm. The idea is simple, provide text input to the generator (i.e. content from html pages, word documents, powerpoint presentations), and the generator

makes a list of all the unique words that have been used and counts how many times each word is used. Next it identifies the different variations of words and combines them under the most common variation using the Porter Stemming Algorithm. E.g. “promised”, “promises”, “promising”, and “promise” might be grouped under “promises”.

The relevance of this tag generator to Enterprise 2.0 is significant. Imagine algorithmically combing through enterprise content then creating an association between content items using this generator. We could then create a more cohesive, uniform tag cloud without losing the spirit of tagging (i.e. user perspective) as tags are generated from content authored by knowledge workers.

Craig Mehta, the author of the generator, provides us with several demo sites where this generator has been used including one generated from the John Adam’s inaugural address in 1794.

Update: The “recent” article I link to in fact is not very recent at all.  It was published in March, 2006.
I’m fascinated by how collective intelligence can be leveraged to produce value to the business that wasn’t harnessed before. Ideas like prediction markets and enterprise knowledge markets are indeed intriguing. And this is why I enjoyed a recent article in the New York Times called Here’s an Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas. The article cites a company called Rite-Solutions that has built an ingenious

internal market where any employee can propose that the company acquire a new technology, enter a new business or make an efficiency improvement. These proposals become stocks, complete with ticker symbols, discussion lists and e-mail alerts. Employees buy or sell the stocks, and prices change to reflect the sentiments of the company’s engineers, computer scientists and project managers — as well as its marketers, accountants and even the receptionist.

The founders are quoted as saying “At most companies, especially technology companies, the most brilliant insights tend to come from people other than senior management. So we created a marketplace to harvest collective genius”. And so far the marketplace has been working for them. An idea from an administrative staff member lead to a contract with Hasbro, for example.

What Rite-Solutions is fantastic, but I think it could be extended to include other knowledge items that aren’t explicitly submitted to be “traded”. Why not create a discovery application that measures statistics on content items (similar to Google Analytics) to create a value index for them. Statistics about:

• Page Views
• RSS Subscriber Count
• User Rating
• Incoming Links

could be used to programmatically generate the index. This raises the visibility of content generated by authors may not have thought to submit it to the marketplace for consideration by the broader organization and provides more comprehensive coverage of potential innovative content as a result.

I’d like to propose the following roadmap for deploying and Enterprise 2.0 solution within an organization:

1. Enterprise Search: Enable “Discovery” across legacy content repositories. The enterprise can realize the benefit of the investment it’s already made in content management and knowledge capture.
2. Social Collaboration: Deploy social collaboration tools to catalyze the generation of persisted tacit knowledge. Remove the barriers to content publishing and idea refinement.
3. Mashups: Create a set of widgets that sit on top of legacy systems and social collaboration tools. Provide an easy way to for non-technical users to create rich, dynamic applications (like QEDwiki or Yahoo Pipes).

In this way the traditional organization can implement SLATES (and social networking and mashups) in a staged manner and slowly adapt to social collaboration during the process.

I’m very optimistic about Enterprise 2.0 and actively seek to promote it internally and externally. We use social collaboration tools for projects, proposals, price lists, user groups, minutes etc. in a very ad hoc, non-official way. The result, and this is largely because we’ve bypassed IT for all of this by procuring domain names and servers outside the firewall, is I have 9 different systems to login to to collaborate on different topics. Each system essentially represents a loosely defined context boundary (i.e. project). This becomes very confusing for me and other users. And I’m sick and tired of setting up accounts on each of these systems every day.

This is what happens when we bypass IT to generate our “Enterprise 2.0 emergent collaboration platforms”. In light of a recent post by Andrew McAffee and another by Shiv Singh, IT does play a significant role within an organization (especially a large organization), and we need to embrace this to avoid the collaboration hell that I’m in. Misguided though they may be, I’d much rather transition the administration of our collaboration systems to IT. Let them provision new users. Let them backup the data. Let them schedule outages for upgrades.