Social Glass

Veodia was just announced as the winner of the Enterprise 2.0 launchpad at the E2.0 unconference in Boston today. This makes me happy. I walked away from my trip to china with a renewed sense of how valuable social connections are between teams and started trialling Veodia last week. Video is a great way to enhance the bond between remote teams and helps build a more cohesive, single team unit.

Veodia allows me, as a Manager, to record standup meetings and whiteboard sessions and embed them on our internal wiki much as you would a Youtube video. It also allows me to create a “live meeting”, where I provide a URL to my team in China and they can see me as I talk (I suppose Skype does a good job at this too). And the beauty is Veodia is free for up to 500 MB of video storage. That’s perfect for me as I convince others within my organization of the value add.

What I don’t yet understand, and what’s keeping me from being more aggressive about rolling this out to the rest of my division, is the security model. It seems that there is “security through obscurity”, where cryptic hyperlinks are the only thing preventing a would-be snooper from viewing my content. This is unsatisfactory within an enterprise setting where confidential data is being stored and shared among internal teams. If Veodia can get their security model right they’ll kick some butt.

Last week I had the opportunity to speak to Sam Lawrence about Clearspace 2.0, Jive Software’s next incarnation of Clearspace. A lot has been written about this new release today, and it’s generating a lot of buzz in the blogosphere (Jive’s annoucement appeared in Techmeme for a while yesterday, which is mostly unheard of for Enterprise 2.0 applications). Sam gave me an overview of the major new features:

• Project home pages can be “iGoogle-ized“. Users can personalize their home pages with drag and drop widgets.
• Cloud Participation: businesses can open up content to be shared with external business partners. Jive hosts the “cloud” where this content is uploaded and shared. The business can then draw its content back in once it’s done collaborating. In 2.0 only individual content items (documents) can be shared in this way. In future releases, entire workspaces can be shared in the cloud.
• Enhanced Reporting: Business departments can get metrics on who’s participating and who’s connecting. Good way to measure ROI, and this is key for management adoption of Enterprise 2.0.
• Social Graphs: The informal and formal networks are modeled in the Clearspace application. Clearspace 2.0 automatically derives formal networks through integration to directory services (i.e. Active Directory), and models informal networks by monitoring how users interact with each other.
• Jotlet Acquisition: Jotlet will enhance the project management features in Clearspace in upcoming releases.

Most importantly, Jive continues its focus on people, something that is lost with other “competitors” like Sharepoint. People are by far an organization’s greatest asset, and Jive’s recognition of this fact will see it emerge as the leader in the social productivity space (if it isn’t already).

Google is famous for allowing its engineers time to work on personal projects. This makes the engineers happy as they get a chance to be creative and show what they’re made of. And it makes Google happy because they get lots of innovative ideas and products from this personal time.

I’m trying to instill a similar culture across my development team at active.com. We’re in the middle of “Web 2.0ifying” the site, and my guys (and girl) have lots of awesome ideas. The challenge I have as a development manager is balancing the allocation of tasks the business needs completed while allowing enough time for my team to “innovate”. What I’ve found is they “innovate” anyway.

Case in point: on my my engineers developed a locator tool which mashes up Google Maps with an XML RPC (dare I say REST) service that we use internally. It’s a nifty little app with strong visual appeal. Last week our product director asked us to start designing and developing a feature for the web site that requires 80% of the functionality in the mashup. He hadn’t seen it before. When we showed it to him he had an “oh yeah” epiphany and subsequently modified the requirements to be more inline with the mashup as he thought the functionality in it was more consistent with the rest of the site.

What do we, as an organization, gain from this?

1. The engineer who created the mashup gets to see his idea become part of the broader product and gets recognized for his effort.
2. The time required to design and develop the new feature is significantly reduced - we already have a prototype.
3. The feature has been thought about and refined from several angles - that of the engineer and that of the product developer (no waterfall here baby).

Imagine, then, if we could reach out to other groups and leverage their ideas. In this case, the engineer, product developer and I were aligned organizationally. But what if we had the ability to discover others within my large, global organization, who had concepts or demos that could be used in a similar way? What if we had Enterprise 2.0?

Infovark, a stealth Enterprise 2.0 startup founded by two ex-Management Consultants Dean Thrasher and Gordon Taylor, has shed some light on what it is they’re actually doing. These guys write one of my favorite blogs and I recommend adding them to your reader. By all accounts they have solid technical skills and a comprehensive understanding of the enterprise. They summarize the problem with enterprise applications as:

The main problem with enterprise software is that it’s targeted at an ill-defined customer: the enterprise. The enterprise is not a single thing; it’s a collection of things. It’s the people, policies, practices, strategies and culture that together comprise an organization. Most business software is targeted at the policies, practices, and strategies, but there’s really only one item in this list that matters: the people. Everything else is an emergent property that arises from the interaction of people.

I couldn’t agree more. They go on to point out that, although most employees don’t understand or follow internal processes and procedures, work gets done and businesses make money.  This means that businesses depend more on emergent outcomes than one might think.  Their product (does it have a name?) is geared toward enabling people in an effort to catalyze emergence.

If you watch a bunch of kids on the playground at recess, you’ll notice patterns and order emerge. Groups will form, ideas will be shared, norms and rules established. These things happen naturally. The same is true of enterprises, businesses, organizations and associations. If you want to get enterprise software to work properly, you’ve got to focus on the interactions of the individuals involved. If you want your employees to share information more effectively, find out what would motivate Bob to share his weekly safes figures with Mary. Construct the system from the ground up.

Check out the latest post on their idea here.

Andrew McAfee makes an insightful point about the value of social networking within the enterprise. He discusses the strength of weak ties and shows how casual relationships broaden the diversity of knowledge available to a knowledge worker. Strong ties result from “long-term, frequent, and sustained interactions”, whereas weak ties arise “from infrequent and more casual” interactions.

Given that knowledge workers “A”, “B” and “C” work for a given company, McAfee goes on to show that:

This might be a good thing in many ways, but it’s bad news if A needs a piece of knowledge that she can’t find inside her own friendship circle. Because of the overlap, B’s circle is likely to be redundant with A’s, and so unhelpful to her. In other words, her tie to B does her little good in her search for knowledge. If A and C have a weak tie, however, many of C’s friends are likely to be strangers to A, and so are good resources as she looks to inform herself.

I’m a visual learner and have drawn a simple diagram to illustrate this point. It shows that knowledge workers A and B, who share a strong tie and have a substantial overlap in their social networks, have access to a non-redundant group of knowledge workers through a weak tie between A and C. This relationship broadens the scope of information access for all groups, and this is very important for companies that rely on their knowledge workers to innovate.