Social Glass

I’ve taken a new job with a consumer-focused company in San Diego. I am responsible for a group of people that develop a web site in the endurance sports market (and we use Clearspace externally). Most of my team works in the office with me. Others work out of LA and China. Together we fix bugs and implement new features on the site. Gone are the days of Management Consulting and talking to clients about Enterprise 2.0. Instead I’ve become a middle manager - you know the kind that does nothing but control the flow of information in and out of his group. The kind that adds no value to the business.

Or at least this was my “pre new job” thinking. I couldn’t imagine the chaos that would evolve should I allow the business unbridled access to my team. Focus and prioritization would be non-existent if I sat back and waited for my guys to self organize like a colony of ants. Teams need direction. They need to understand business initiatives. They need to be structured. They need to have context behind the flurry of requirements that would otherwise be hurled at them. On top of this the business needs to manage risk. It needs to know that my team can produce on a relatively consistent basis.

Certainly the Enterprise 2.0 community would never condone absolute dissolution of middle management. But I’m admiting now that at least I am guilty of being over-presumptuous about the lack of value that comes out of the middle management layer. I’m sure organizations are full of bureaucrats, but there also full of good managers who are there for important reasons.

During my career as a Manager with a Management Consulting firm I worked with two guys, Nate Nash and Jay Hariani, based in Washington DC who embraced Enterprise 2.0 like I’ve never seen anybody do before. They spearheaded a corporate initiative to rollout social computing software fighting battle after battle to convince more traditional folks of the value proposition.

These guys work in the emerging markets segment and frequently go to places like Kabul and Amman for work. Last year they put an outline for a proposal in a wiki for one of their clients and asked for help from across the organization to add content. Members of our firm from four different countries contributed with their various areas of expertise. That’s what you call collective intelligence, baby (although I’m not sure we actually won the work).

And despite their travels to dangerous places, they’ve managed to find internet access where ever they go and have put together an excellent blog on Enterprise 2.0, called e2oh.com. They have awesome insight as to how E2.0 can positively influence emerging markets. It’s a must read and a worth edition to your RSS reader.

Jay Nate, for example, writes about his experiences doing business in the middle east, where for one client called the “Ministry”, he says:

I look around the Minsitry and I am confounded as to how there are so many people working there who are clearly unqualified. But none of that matters in these places. It is all about who you know, how long you have known them, and how much they know about you. That is power. That is the business model. This is where social software within the enterprise can and will thrive almost immediately.

Plus you’ve gotta love this picture of Nate with his grenade launcher:

Apologies for the lack of posts.  I’ve started a new job this week as a Development Manager for a company in San Diego and have been busy coming up to speed on everything (and everybody) I’ll need to know to do my job.  What an interesting 6 months.

1. I worked in Austria from late June to mid August.
2. Moved to Sydney from mid August to mid October.
3. Moved back to Melbourne from mid October to December.
4. Repatriated to the United States in December and was in Colorado to mid January.
5. Moved to San Francisco for a month, and…
6. Took a job in San Diego which I started yesterday.

All that time I’ve been co-authoring a book and have tried to keep blogging.  Man I can’t wait to be settled again.

I recently had the chance to talk with Yonni Harif, Marketing Manager, and David Lavenda, VP of Product Strategy and Marketing for WorkLight on the topic of security and Enterprise 2.0. WorkLight fundamentally believes that consumer Web 2.0 applications will play a vital role in Enterprise 2.0. Knowledge workers will use iGoogle, Netvibes and Facebook to help them with their jobs whether their employer likes it or not. David noted that an estimated 86% of employees use Internet-based tools for productivity purposes. Smart companies will embrace consumer tools and make them even more beneficial for their workers.

WorkLight is a two year old business that set out to consumerize IT. They’ve been quoted in Computer Weekly and ITWire and have recently formed Secure Enterprise 2.0 forum.  The forum “is comprised of top executives at Global Fortune 500 companies that are ready to address the security challenges posed by Web 2.0 technologies, such as wikis, blogs, RSS, widgets and gadgets, personalized homepages, social networks and social bookmarking, which are becoming increasingly popular in the enterprise.”

They have a server (also called WorkLight) that connects with line of business applications on the corporate intranet. It then dishes out information from them securely in a variety of formats including RSS and Google Gadgets. This means that an employee can use iGoogle to interface to his company’s SAP system, for example.

How is this secure?

Companies are naturally hesitant to expose data from core systems, especially if that data is going to be used on Internet-based applications. But WorkLight’s offering is unique. Users are asked to authenticate before using a WorkLight service or widget. Data is encrypted using SSL and/or is transported over a VPN connection to the corporate intranet. Moreover, the WorkLight server integrates to a company’s directory service (LDAP, Active Directory) and uses already-established security protocols to determine who has access to what.

WorkLight also believes that Facebook can be used in creative ways when it comes to corporate intranet. Yonni Harif observed that companies that embrace Facebook for business purposes have instant leverage on their employee’s Social Graphs. WorkLight creates a Facebook application called Workbook which is designed to integrate corporate information systems into Facebook, securely. Andrew McAfee saw a demo of this in action and wrote about it here.

I asked David how they approach a typical engagement given that some systems integration would be required to connect line of business applications to WorkLight. David said they have some out of the box adapters for systems like SAP, but that if they have to build a custom adapter they do so using the “read mostly” approach. The premise behind “read mostly” is that it’s easier to pull data (read) from line of business applications than it is to push it (create, update). As such Worklight tries to minimize the amount of data that goes back into these systems through their widgets and services, and this reduces the costs their clients incur when hooking their systems into WorkLight.

Once a widget or service is created on the WorkLight server, users can rate or write comments about them. Rating and download count then influence the visibility of the widget or service on the server where those that are highly rated and downloaded often appear on the front page.

Security and Risk Management are a Big Deal

Lets face it, a lot of the guys we’re selling Enterprise 2.0 to have been in business for a while. This means we need to appeal to their natural tendency to stop initiatives they don’t understand because they’re deemed too risky. Companies like Techrigy and WorkLight are building solutions designed to make Enterprise 2.0 more secure and less risky (disclosure: I’m working with Aaron Newman, President of Techrigy, on a side project). As the market matures we’ll see security play more of a vital role in any Enteprise 2.0 solution stack.

Chuck Hollis, Vice President of Technology Alliances at EMC, recently chronicled their adoption of Clearspace, Jive’s social productivity solution. They called the implementation EMC One. Sam Lawrence, CMO of Jive, has summarized their effort here. It’s worth a read as it provides some enlightening and encouraging insight into how Enterprise 2.0 can work for a large company. Here are some notable observations:

1. EMC has over 35,000 employees and, among other things, makes two knowledge management systems, Documentum and eRoom, and yet they chose to use neither for their social productivity needs.
2. Regarding rollout strategy, Chuck says they “…announced availability virally — we all pushed email announcements to people we knew who were interested in what we were doing. We wanted people to “find” us, and not have some sort of official corporate announcement”. The initial rollout would be to supporters of the initiative who would be patient while they ironed out the kinks. But what happened was that EMC employees who nobody knew started using the system.
3. The result of unanticipated use, or “the network effect”, was confusion as to how to distribute the costs of the investment across the organization. If Divison A purchased Clearspace but users from Division B started using it extensively, shouldn’t part of the cost come from Division B’s budget?
4. HR had to get involved implementing a “social engineering” program to get workers used to this new way of collaborating.
5. Chuck says “It’s now “cool” to be an active participant on EMC ONE”.

As a result of implementing Enterprise 2.0, Chuck says “We now have so many business value stories that we don’t really need any more to make our case, even to the most stubborn ROI cynic”. EMC ONE has

• Connected employees from remote outposts (like China)
• Become a repository for research and a platform for “ideation”.
• The salesforce is much better informed as it can leverage conversations from the platform

Again, check out Sam’s summary here to get more insight and detail.