Social Glass

I’d like to direct your attention to an article I just posted over at openmethodology.org called “The Enterprise Knowledge Market” (note I am affiliated with openmethodology.org through my company). It expands on a blog post I wrote some time back on the topic. The conclusion of the article provides a good overview:

As demonstrated, the Enterprise Knowledge Market efficiently discovers and exposes enterprise information assets in an effort to recognize the knowledge workers who author them. The most valuable information assets are given the most visibility. Visibility leads to recognition, and knowledge workers compete for recognition. Competition fuels participation, and participation increases the number of qualify knowledge assets at the enterprise’s disposal. This raises the likelihood that innovative ideas will be discovered, and innovation helps the enterprise remain competitive.

I was talking with a colleague the other day about a major project that had been deployed to Production a few months ago for one of his clients. The solution is a “standard” J2EE application” (EJBs, JMS, Struts, JBoss etc.) and is used both behind the firewall for CSRs and on the internet for online order handling. While it is stable, there are a few quirks/bugs with the online component. Some of these bugs are discovered by testers, but interestingly the majority are discovered by “an industry community” which details them on a forum.

My colleague said the feedback they get from this forum is invaluable and has lead to many incremental system improvements. And best of all nobody has to pay an army of testers to find these holes in the system.

Talk about leveraging the longtail for business benefit.

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.

Update: Check out Lisa Hoover’s article for some great insight into Versionate (I’m quoted in the last couple of paragraphs).

Versionate, a new wiki tailored toward the enterprise, has just launched and is getting a lot of coverage. When I read about it I quickly headed over to the site and checked out the screencast. Versionate does a lot of things right, namely:

1. Simple, intuitive, easy to use UI
2. Integrated search capability
3. Strong compatibility with MS Office and other products

And it’s point number 3 that really separates Versionate from the competition. Myself and others within the Enterprise 2.0 community have long held that successful collaboration software must play well with MS Office. Knowledge workers will continue to use Word and Excel for years to come - we cannot expect them to abandon these tools immediately (no matter how hard we try). This means collaboration software must compliment the MS Office offering, and Versionate does just that.

Want to create a wiki page? Upload a Word document. Want to edit a wiki page? Edit it in your browser or in Word or in Open Office Writer etc. Want to revert back to a previous version of a document - version control is included and easy to use.

I can see a few features that Versionate could benefit from, however. These include:

1. The use of tags to compliment its folder-like categorization structure
2. Integrated blogging
3. Richer, facebook-like user profiles
4. A downloadable version (as mentioned on Techcrunch) to mitigate data security concerns as the current version follows the SaaS model

In my opinion Versionate is raising the bar for wiki software. I’d expect to see other wiki vendors following Versionate’s “play with MS Office” example in the near future.