Social Glass

Paula Thornton wrote a very interesting post yesterday about how Enterprise 2.0 helps us define connections between a human and the footprint they leave behind on the intranet. Before the notion of Enterprise 2.0 this was not possible as she writes:

Surprisingly, within corporations I can ‘find’ anyone by name, but their name tells me very little about them. Reading what they have to say and/or seeing what their deliverables are (even just the metadata about them) is revealing. All of this reinforces the concepts of emergent: it’s the sweet spot between chaos and order…

This got me thinking about a post my boss wrote about information management where he discusses a Master Data Management scenario where the enterprise attempts to define a human entity by pulling in metadata from disparate sources (it took me a while to understand the scenario as I’m not a data guy by the way, but once I got it it made a lot of sense). This is an area that Enterprise 2.0 overlooks. Most corporations have a lot of information about their employees already (without Enterprise 2.0), but the problem is it’s scattered. And this is where data management plays a key role.

Imagine a scenario where we not only deployed an Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem (knowledge market, blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, social networking, enterprise search etc.) but also implemented a data management strategy to harvest the metadata about all human entities within the organization from all of the legacy, “1.0″ systems. We could then define a single and discoverable master identify for a person and enrich the social discovery process significantly. We might define a relationship between the human entity and any of the following legacy assets:

• project deliverables (word documents)
• project plans
• white papers
• resume
• skill set (Java, C#, SQL etc - most HR systems store this info)
• position in the corporate hierarchy

This approach makes sense for the enterprise because it leverages the legacy investment it spent years patching and upgrading. It makes sense for knowledge workers because we can link them to their legacy footprint (so they get credit for work they’ve already done) and to the emergent data we get out of Enterprise 2.0.

Defining the human entity in this way needs to be an integral part of any Enterprise 2.0 rollout.

Rod Boothby was the first person who got me really fired up about Enterprise 2.0.  I remember last year he posted quite frequently, then things went quiet.  As he indicated he’s been busy over at Teqlo releasing and testing products.

But recently we’ve seen couple of posts from Rod.  Most recently he wrote about human behavior and how it’s influenced and molded by society. Rod does a great job of diving deep below the surface of social software and I highly recommend you click over to check out his blog as you’ll find some cool, sociological insight into the Enterprise 2.0 phenomenon there.

This image is a snapshot from my work laptop. I spend all of most of my working life in Firefox using web applications. I’ve have Google Docs and Spreadsheets open for collaboration with some of the guys back in Australia (I’m currently in Austria on a project), Basecamp for the project I’m managing, and several other web applications we’re building for our client. I’ve also got my most frequently visited sites on my Firefox bookmarks toolbar (is the bookmarks toolbar the next portal?).

It struck me how sophisticated web applications have become and how much I depend on my browser for work. Other than MS Office and Eclipse, I haven’t had to install a “thick client” for in about two years. And I think application development will increasingly be web-oriented, especially given the popularity of the SaaS model.

I can see a time in the not too distant future where the term “thick client” will appear in IT history text books. College students will read about these clunky applications IT departments had to deploy on each and every PC once upon a time. And I think Enterprise 2.0 adoption will be a key contributing factor toward the archival of non-web-oriented applications.

Techrigy was kind enough to give me and a few others a demo of their Social Media Manager application (SM2) which is currently in Beta. SM2 is an application designed to monitor blog (and soon wiki) posts both inside and outside an organization looking for compliance violations. It’s enterprise software designed to help the enterprise manage the new gradient of risk that’s inherent to the openness of Web 2.0.

But surely, as a compliance officer, I could manually search for corporate policy or legal violations using a search engine. So how does SM2 add value on top of Google.com (internet) or Enteprise Search (intranet)?

The answer is business intelligence. SM2 combines discovery with analysis, meaning the compliance officer is notified of potential policy violations (policies are defined in a .NET 2.0-based admin console, and SM2 ships with many policies out of the box). This helps companies enforce compliance with Sarbanes Oxley, for example, or manage issues before lawsuits are raised by detecting and correcting inappropriate use of social media.

SM2 is currently in Beta with a handful of financial services companies (which seemingly have the most to gain from being compliant). I can, however, also see tremendous value in this software for the Marketing or Public Relations department. SM2 can be used to track market reactions to product or to help gauge public image of an enterprise. I think Techrigy would be wise to expand it’s marketing approach accordingly.

The only thing Techrigy needs to work out is its pricing structure. Currently they’re contemplating a “per blog or wiki monitored” approach, which given the emergent nature of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 (with new blogs and wikis popping up every day), I don’t think this is something an enterprise would go for.