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).

I recently had a discussion with Sam Lawrence, Chief Marketing Officer at Jive Software, about his take on social computing in 2008.  I’ve written about Jive several times and have been impressed with Clearspace - Jive’s Enterprise 2.0, social productivity application.  Below is a summary some of the things Sam and I discussed. 

Jive - Company Background

Jive Software was founded 7 years ago and, until recently, was entirely self funded.  In 2007 Jive Software received $15 million in funding from Sequoia Capital (although they’ve been profitable from the beginning) - the same firm that financed the likes of Google, Yahoo!, Youtube and Meebo.  Sam’s take on Sequoia was that they weren’t just bankers, they actually add business value. 

At the beginning of last year, Jive had 35 employees.  Today they have over 100 and anticipate continued growth in 2008.  Sam mentioned that going public isn’t a business goal, but that if they do go public it’ll simply be a “means to an end”.

Jive has over 2,000 business customers, 250 of which have purchased Clearspace. 

The Enterprise 2.0 Market

I asked Sam what his reaction was to Jevon’s post about the Enterprise 2.0 Market, where Jevon asked “Is there such thing as an Enterprise 2.0 market? If so, can you sell in to it? If not: are there startups trying to sell to customers who don’t exist?”  Sam’s take on this is that there absolutely is an Enterprise 2.0 market, how else could they be making money with Clearspace if there was no market?  Sam went on to compare the E2.0 market to the CRM market of 10 years ago, where people argued that customer relationship management couldn’t be generalized.   But try making this argument now with companies like Siebel (Oracle) and they’d probably laugh at you.

Sam also pointed out that Google is a huge player when it comes to Enterprise 2.0.  They’ve recently announced that Google Sites - an evolution of JotSpot - will be released in 2008.  “Sites will allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration”.  Google’s focus on social computing within the enterprise is validating the Enterprise 2.0 market.  Sam thinks that Enterprise 2.0 vendors like Jive Software will benefit greatly from this as they can ride the tidalwave created by Google.  Companies will become more aware of what Enterprise 2.0 is in 2008.

2008

Jive is a firm believer in social productivity.  When it comes down to it, social computing is about getting work done efficiently.  In 2007 Jive’s focus was on building a compelling collaboration suite.  In 2008, they’ll focus more on enhancing social productivity in the following ways:

• Relevant Visibility - who’s working on what and what matters most
• Influence - encouraging productive behavior and resource alignment by allocating resources where they’re needed most
• Management - knowing the truth of what’s happening and focusing the attention of others

Jive also is a firm believer in harnessing the knowledge of the customer community with products like Clearspace X and will be focusing a lot of attention here in 2008.   

Sam also believes the competition between Jive and traditional IT vendors like IBM and Oracle, “2.0″ pure play vendors and CMS providers will intensify in 2008 as the market gains more traction. 

Clearspace is also often compared to Sharepoint, so I asked Sam what his take on competition with Microsoft was.  Sam argued that Sharepoint, although it has a lot of great features, is more file centric.  Clearspace, on the other hand, is focused around collaboration.  In this way the business driver is different between why one company would buy one product over the other.

In Conclusion

Jive Software will continue its incredible growth in 2008 and will be more widely recognized as a leader in the Enterprise 2.0 space.  I think this growth might also attract larger enterprise players to consider acquiring Jive to gain a stronger foothold in the market.  Keep an eye on Jive in 2008.

On the topic of enterprise architecture, some colleagues of mine talk about defining a corporate lexicon to outline what a business does, or wants to do, as a business. The aim of this activity is to arrive at a desired future-state where the business can talk about its core functions in a language that is not tied to its operational or business support systems. The language becomes an abstraction on top of those systems, and further analysis shows where core systems don’t support the corporate lexicon.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Being a linguist at heart (I majored in Spanish in university) I thought I might simplify this approach by defining several business requirements for a telecommunications company:

1. Provision broadband internet for residential customers.
2. Provision broadband internet for small business customers.
3. Send customers an invoice monthly.

The first thing to notice is the lexicon has been standardized. When I mean “provision” I say “provision”, not “activate” or “setup”. “Customers” are not “clients” or “accounts”.

Next, sentence structure. All of the nouns in this sentence represent core data entities, the adjectives (attributes of the nouns) represent types that extend the core data entities, and the verbs represent actions that can happen to the object pronoun (data entity) of the sentence. Each of these needs to be supported by the enterprise architecture.

Let’s analyze the first requirement more closely: Provision broadband internet service for residential customers. Verbs are highlighted in yellow, adjectives in green, nouns in blue and prepositions in red.

• There are two core data entities, “service” and “customer”.
• We need a provisioning business function for services (”service” being the object pronoun of the sentence).
• “service” entities can be of type “internet”, and “internet services” can be of type “broadband”.
• “customer” entities can be type “residential”.

Furthermore, prepositions show us relationships between core data entities. In this case we see that “customers” and “services” have at least a one to one relationship (meaning a customer can have at least one service).

Applying the same analysis to all of the requirements, we’d end up with the following, semi-normalized data model:

We’d also end up with two business services (think SOA), one that sends invoices on a monthly basis, and another that provisions internet services.

Sure, this is simplified, but the requirements gathering process, when done in this way, can tell an Enterprise Architect a lot about the core data entities and functions an organization needs to support to do business. He can then perform a gap analysis to understand where his current-state architecture is deficient in supporting this future-state view.

“Wouldn’t it be interesting to have a way to measure the Social Capital in an enterprise?” This question is posed by Peter Riser where he outlines the idea of community equity over on his blog, Riser 2.0. Peter is working with a team building an application called “Customer Engineering 2.0″ (CE2.0) (recently showcased at the Sun Customer Engineering Conference in Las Vegas), and community equity is used to calculate a sort of user reputation based on four functional areas:

• Contribution
• Participation
• Skills
• Role

CE2.0 is an “enterprise facebook” application (and I don’t think it’s available yet) and looks intriguing. It’s ability to measure community equity will go a long way to encourage uptake as users compete for top equity scores. I’ll definitelyh be keeping an eye on this app as it seems very promising.