Social Glass

I wanted to share a great quote from a Gartner Analyst responding to CIO criticism of Web 2.0:

“Security is not about zero risk it is about managed risk. Accept there will be a few security failures.

“No risk means no reward. Stop talking about all the bad things that can happen and talk about what these technologies enable”…

“Relax, innovate. The goal is managed risk.”

Read more at computerworld.com.au.

In a previous post I described an Enterprise 2.0 implementation roadmap. The last component in the roadmap is Enterprise Mashups. In a utopian world, enterprise mashups give the knowledge worker spreadsheet-like flexibility to dynamically create composite applications that suit his specific business needs. Companies like Kapow, Serena Software and IBM are building enterprise mashup engines, but none have reached this utopian state.

Dion Hinchliffe wrote a great post about challenges facing enterprise mashups. He identifies 10:

1. No Commonly Accepted Assembly Model
2. An Immature Services Landscape
3. The Splintering of Widgets
4. Management and Support of End-User Mashup Apps
5. Deep Support for Security and Identity
6. Data Quality and Accuracy
7. Version Management
8. Awareness and Realization of the Potential of Mashups by the Business Community
9. Low Levels of Support by Major Software Firms
10. Few Killer Demo Apps

In my professional life I’ve encountered obstacles around items 2 and 4 when discussing enterprise mashups with potential clients. We can show impressive demos, like IBM’s QEDWiki, but we’d need a seriously mature SOA to build the “widgets” a knowledge worker would use to create such a mashup (issue 2). And Dion asks who’s going to support these things once they break? “The IT department? The business units? Using what tools” (issue 4). Good question.

At the end of the day an enterprise must have a strong SOA initiative and support from IT before the value proposition behind enterprise mashups can be fully realized.

I read Rod Boothby’s IT Flower whitepaper today (and it’s definitely worth a read). I’m not going to comment on it at this time. Instead I’d like to highlight a guideline for successful Web 2.0 (or Enterprise 2.0) solutions:

Build applications that get more valuable as more people use them (network effects) and work out ways to let end users contribute to your application, customize your application and extend your application, thus encouraging even more value to emerge over time.

Well stated I’d say.

Avenue A Razorfish was one of the first companies credited with attempting Enterprise 2.0. They based their solution on mediawiki and made modifications to the codebase for Wordpress and Active Directory integration (AD integration is a great way to avoid the hassle of registering users manually). They also encouraged their employees to use a certain tag on delicious when bookmarking links. The solution then automatically presented newly bookmarked items on the home page by invoking a delicious API to retrieve all bookmarks tagged with that tag.

Avenue A Razorfish is now evolving their wiki to include more features. I’d like to direct you to their blog post which contains an embedded slideshare presentation that explains their approach. They’ve definitely got some great ideas.

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.