Social Glass

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.

Paula Thornton wrote a very interesting post yesterday about how Enterprise 2.0 helps us define connections between a human and the footprint they leave behind on the intranet. Before the notion of Enterprise 2.0 this was not possible as she writes:

Surprisingly, within corporations I can ‘find’ anyone by name, but their name tells me very little about them. Reading what they have to say and/or seeing what their deliverables are (even just the metadata about them) is revealing. All of this reinforces the concepts of emergent: it’s the sweet spot between chaos and order…

This got me thinking about a post my boss wrote about information management where he discusses a Master Data Management scenario where the enterprise attempts to define a human entity by pulling in metadata from disparate sources (it took me a while to understand the scenario as I’m not a data guy by the way, but once I got it it made a lot of sense). This is an area that Enterprise 2.0 overlooks. Most corporations have a lot of information about their employees already (without Enterprise 2.0), but the problem is it’s scattered. And this is where data management plays a key role.

Imagine a scenario where we not only deployed an Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem (knowledge market, blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, social networking, enterprise search etc.) but also implemented a data management strategy to harvest the metadata about all human entities within the organization from all of the legacy, “1.0″ systems. We could then define a single and discoverable master identify for a person and enrich the social discovery process significantly. We might define a relationship between the human entity and any of the following legacy assets:

• project deliverables (word documents)
• project plans
• white papers
• resume
• skill set (Java, C#, SQL etc – most HR systems store this info)
• position in the corporate hierarchy

This approach makes sense for the enterprise because it leverages the legacy investment it spent years patching and upgrading. It makes sense for knowledge workers because we can link them to their legacy footprint (so they get credit for work they’ve already done) and to the emergent data we get out of Enterprise 2.0.

Defining the human entity in this way needs to be an integral part of any Enterprise 2.0 rollout.

I’m finding I’m more behind the blogosphere being in Austria (for work) than I am in Australia. Anyway, when people ask me “what is Enteprise 2.0″, I point them to Scott Gavin’s presentations:

I don’t generally write technical posts, but the geek inside me wanted to share some insights into how to “mashup” Google Enterprise Search and Social Bookmarking. Here’s what you’ll need:

• A Google Mini or Google Search Appliance
• Scuttle – an open source, delicious-like social bookmarking application
• Xalan – a Java-based, open source XSLT engine

The Value Proposition
The idea behind this is this: when a user performs a search, each of the results on the page display social bookmarking information (tags and “saved by” count) if that URL has been bookmarked by somebody within the enterprise. This helps the searcher make an more informed choice when deciding which content to look at. If somebody else inside the enterprise has found a relevant content item to be helpful then perhaps the searcher should look at it first. It also exposes the searcher to others within the enterprise who have a mutual interest in the content being looked for.

Technical Mumbo Jumbo
Out of the box the Google Search Appliance provides a great amount of flexibility in modifying how search page behaves and feels. This is done through modifying the default XSLT (which produces a UI nearly identical to google.com). So, ideally all I’d have to do to include scuttle into the search results is use the document() XSLT function invoke a scuttle API that returns XML data about the URL (including the tag list and saved by count). I could then aggregate this XML with Google results XML displaying a seamless result to the user. Unfortunately the Google Search Appliance XSLT engine does not support the document() function, so I’m left to run an external XSLT engine – hence Xalan.

So, here’s what I did:

1. Downloaded Xalan and made some minor tweaks to the “SimpleServlet” demo application (class and package name change, modified the configuration to use my XSLT and invoke the Google Search Appliance to retrieve the results in XML format).
2. Packaged the modified version of the “SimpleServlet” and deployed it on my Tomcat instance.
3. Copied the Default XSLT style sheet from the Google Search Appliance, and modified it starting at line 2398 (the XSLT template for a snippet) adding code to invoke the Scuttle API and incorporate tags and saved by count at the bottom of the snippet. Saved the XSLT and bundled it with my “SimpleServlet” war file.
4. Copied the scuttle “posts_get.php” API and made a new API that returns bookmark information for a given URL.

That’s it. Users now access my custom web application to perform enterprise searches (instead if using the default GSA frontend), but so far so good. Hopefully one day Google will support the document() function so we can do integration like this using the XSLT engine on the appliance. That would certainly make life a lot easier.

In a previous post I discussed how competition fuels innovation, and that in order for this to happen innovation must self manifest. Enter the Knowledge Market. Wikipedia defines a market as:

..a mechanism which allows people to trade, normally governed by the theory of supply and demand…

Markets operate in a “…space, actual or metaphorical”, called the marketplace. A simple example of this are farmer’s markets where farmers showcase their crops and livestock on a bi-weekly or monthly basis. Potential consumers locate goods they’re interested in by wandering through the marketplace and purchase what appeals to them. The price of goods fluctuates throughout the day based on supply and demand principles – if a farmer is having a tough time selling his tomatoes he might start offering special discounts (and these special discounts can be heard by everyone – you’d know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever been to one of these things) to increase demand.

The Enterprise Knowledge Market
In the same sense Enterprise 2.0 is a virtual marketplace for knowledge, where knowledge workers, through the Discovery process, “wander through” corporate knowledge assets and consume what interests them. Knowledge workers also compete with each other as producers, not on price, but on the usefulness of their information. Usefulness relates to recognition, and recognition is good for a knowledge worker’s career.

The value of a knowledge asset, then, doesn’t have a $ figure associated with it, but is instead related to the demand for said asset, which can be determined by:

• the number of people who subscribe to it
• the number of incoming links to it

Google.com does a great job of placing useful content toward the top of it search results page, and the enterprise version of Google does the same. But the enterprise knowledge marketplace, the Discovery process, needs to be more than just Search.

With the stock market I can receive constant updates on the value of stocks and follow the supply/demand fluctuation in real-time (represented by price variance). Inside the enterprise, if I had services similar to that which Technorati provides, I could better understand the supply/demand for corporate knowledge assets. Technorati ranks the value of blogs based on incoming links, but inside the enterprise this needs to be extended to include subscriber counts (feedburner) and other knowledge assets (not just blogs). I could then, in real-time, understand the value the organization places on content items by reviewing subscriber and incoming link counts, which would fluctuate in much the same way stock prices do. This platform, combined with enterprise search, augments the Discovery process and increases the effectiveness of my Enterprise Knowledge Market.

And it’s having an effective Enterprise Knowledge Market that’s key to driving participation and recognition.  If knowledge worker contributions can be discovered and valued, knowledge workers have a huge, self-motivated, incentive to contribute, and that makes the enterprise better off as a whole.