Content Creation

Blogging has morphed beyond it’s “personal diary” origins; Blogger, WordPress, and the various CMS platforms have moved to become a long-format publishing platforms that continue to evolve. My own experience with this blog (cazh1) and internal blogs at work has shown that “posts” are more essays, articles, documentation on what and how, status reports for projects or trips.

I’ve recently begin experimenting with a new (for me) type of blogging – I’ll call it short-format, and it hearkens back to the old-school, diarist model. This is a place to put short notes, observations, maybe sketches / photos for an Artist / Designer, code snips for a Engineer / Developer, or experimental prose for an Author / Poet. The format is exemplified by tumblr, a fast-growing platform that hosts some amazing content and is giving the old stalwarts some competition.

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Content Sharing

But what about the Usual Suspects – Facebook and Google+? I don’t see these platforms as content creation engines as much as they are content sharing engines; ubiquitous Share This! links, the +1’s and Like buttons that give “social media” their differentiating characteristic; networks of contacts that are of a like mind, in your Circles or Smart Lists, add value and context to the original content.

I see Flickr and YouTube as hybrids. Flickr is driven by people adding pictures; you can see / browse / search, and it has a personal, sharing-my-photo-album quality. YouTube, in the other hand, is more like a new video broadcast network; lately, it seems like the number of personal videos is dwarfed by ad campaigns, political  messages, and music / entertainment videos.

Antics with Semantics

Yes, I understand that you can Follow other tumblrs. Facebook pages and Google+ circles are creating content as profound and banal as the bloggers. And I’m glossing over professional networks like LinkedIn, which can be oversimplified as an electronic form of career networking. All of this has great value, is very relevant to the conversation – but all have subtle nuances, different use cases where they drive value.

Where does Twitter fit in? The best description to date seems to be micro-blogging; the 140-character limit forces a style and controls depth of meaning – Twitter is more of a broadcast medium, a virtual bulletin board or cocktail party, best understood by watching trending topics when events are breaking. Content is created, and RT’s and hash tags give weight to an ideas current mindshare.

An Excuse for Experimentation

Clearly, there is no one best answer when trying to figure out how social networks can drive a business. There are many platforms and technologies, all of which are evolving to deliver different messages and produce different results. There is no one best solution – and the only way to be able to glibly comment on how this might impact your business is by diving in, learning what these things can and cannot deliver. Or find someone who had done it, who is still doing it.

Just don’t go by what you read in airline magazines or see on TV – sound bites won’t cut it.

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2011. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: Blog, Blogger, business value, Facebook, Google, Google Plus, LinkedIn, networking, Social Media, Social Networks, Tumblr, Twitter, Web 2.0, WordPress, YouTube

All articles, blog entries, and other content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons License    ]]> http://www.cazh1.com/fragmentation-of-social-sharing-environments/feed/ 0 http://www.cazh1.com/gartner-symposium-2010/ http://www.cazh1.com/gartner-symposium-2010/#comments Wed, 27 Oct 2010 01:55:49 +0000 Jim MacLennan http://www.cazh1.com/?p=1061 Last week, I was able to attend this annual Gartner event – something akin to SAPPHIRE, the SAP uber-users group meeting, without the vendor specific rah-rah. An interesting event – 7400 attendees, over four days. A typical conference – multiple sessions along major tracks, and I bounced between sessions dealing with these issues:

• Master Data – Continuing to look for the latest information – this is still a fast growing software market, and ideas around things like “data governance” (people and process) first, “master data management” (tools – machines talking to machines) second, are getting established within many corporations.
• Change Management, Agility, IT in Transition – things like mixing “fast twitch” (agile) and “controlled” (waterfall) methodologies, and balancing limited resources & requests across multiple competing initiatives.
• Emerging Business Priorities – less on the technology, more towards a realization of / developing understanding on how economy and technology are changing expectations and strategies of the business – and how the business can (and / or should) leverage technology to make sure they succeed  / thrive.
• Vendor management / Dealing with strategic vendors – Consolidation (acquisitions) in the vendor space, plus the sense that some vendors (like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP) may feel they are locked in to our business – so how do you manage them so that you get what you need from the relationship?

Click to enlarge ...

Other major topics covered at length:

• Cloud computing – this topic is absolutely being hyped to no end, with every Gartner analyst and visiting vendor holding the topic out as the Next Great Thing. It was actually kind of annoying, even though I did not attend any sessions in this area – and I heard as much from other attendees. I did hear (more accurately read – via twitter (see below)) that the Cloud sessions were often full to overflow, so there is definitely great interest in the marketplace. I am encouraged by the progress being made, but still not sure that The Cloud is ready to host ERP and Financial apps without more clarity on security and integration. I do owe props to the session speakers – topics attempted to get specific about applying the cloud to the enterprise sooner rather than later, but apparently were a little thin on these specifics.
• Social networking – another heavily hyped idea, with breathless stats on the growth and future popularity (and profitability) of social networking in the enterprise. I think this one was a bit more hype than reality, at least from an “IT shows leadership” perspective – less than 400 active twitterers (<5%), and a bare majority of hands when asked how many have a personal Facebook page.
• Consumer impact on Corporate IT – lots of conversation and sessions on the proliferation of consumer devices, and the impact of consumer-based assumptions / expectations on internal IT. I have already expressed some opinions on corporate IT’s ability to think like consumer or internet product developers (link spoiler alert: it’s a challenge based on the reward structure). However, I did see a nice contract when listening to a presentation on change management; it’s easy to get folks to change when they are going to something they want – like an iPad or an effective data query tool.

Other observations:

• Animated keynote speakers – I saw Mark Benioff (Salesforce.com), John Chambers (Cisco), and Steve Ballmer (Microsoft) – and it seemed like they were all trying to be the funniest, wittiest, loudest guys. Very animated, a bit pandering – made me feel like the audience was full of insecure twenty-somethings that needed to get jazzed on the iconoclast leading the company.
• Forecast error – during the show, Gartner reported 40% more attendees then they had planned for, and noted that they were seeing multiple overflow sessions. Although they were proud of their ability to flex and scale, I was a little surprised by the magnitude of the miss.
• Twitter – I was impressed to see that Gartner published a hashtag in the conference material, encouraging a community / conversation that could immediately and easily be tracked. This, I believe, is one of those classic “killer app” scenarios for Twitter – if you can spare the segmenting of your attention, you can monitor a number of different threads of interest at once. Also, you can take the pulse of a large audience (say, during the keynotes) as the twitterers react positively and negatively about the speaker – in near-real time.

My #GartnerSYM twitter stream (and replies)
Overall #GartnerSYM twitter stream

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments |
Post tags: Cisco, cloud computing, conference, Facebook, forecast error, Gartner, Hype Cycle, iPad, John Chambers, Mark Benioff, master data management, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, SAPPHIRE, Social Networks, Steve Ballmer, Twitter

All articles, blog entries, and other content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons License    ]]> http://www.cazh1.com/gartner-symposium-2010/feed/ 3 http://www.cazh1.com/the-magic-in-the-middle/ http://www.cazh1.com/the-magic-in-the-middle/#comments Mon, 26 Jul 2010 02:58:49 +0000 Jim MacLennan http://www.cazh1.com/?p=612 I don’t know where I first heard that phrase, or what it originally meant, but I have been using it a lot in the last few weeks …

Consider the entire user population for any web site or application. You can generalize all user populations into three Pareto-inspired groups …

• Top 20% – The folks who “get it”, and have the brains, the interest, and the desire to fully understand the system / tool / report / whatever, and get the most benefit out of it. In Pareto terms, the 20% that get 80% of the value.
• Bottom 20% – The “hopeless”; those that just don’t get the concept (and need constant handholding), have no interest in using the app (at best, they will have someone do it for them), and no desire to expand their horizons and learn something new. In Pareto terms, the 20% that cause 80% of the problems.
• Middle 60% – aka “everybody else”. This is the group of users that could get value out of the project, process / program, but need more handholding, guided learning, and/or managerial promises (/threats) to commit to learning how to use and apply this new tool.

Click for the original ...

I call this last group “the magic in the middle”; this is the user group you need to win over to ensure success for the project. In corporate IT, most projects would be considered a failure if they only got 20% of their target audience to realize the promised value – then again, no one expects 100% success, especially with the bottom 20% of folks that will Just Never Get It. So, the make or break “target market” for training and retention is the “magic in the middle” – the folks who need a reasonable level of documentation and training to get things to work.

Note that “magic” refers to the fact that what really differentiates success – that core region of 60% – is the make-or-break group that takes the extra effort. It’s not good enough that your top finance folks understand the new reporting and analytics system – the middling folks that need more handholding and examples are the ones you need to focus on. It’s not good enough that your top project managers understand the new methodology – the journeyman PMs that have more tech background than change management and communication skills need guidance and templates and checklists to make sure the minimal I’s are dotted and T’s are crossed.

Interesting Observation …

This is one of the core reasons why analogies between corporate IT and consumer IT often fail. How many times have people in the business asked IT for projects as flexible, ubiquitous, user friendly, and high quality as Flickr, Basecamp, and gMail? Or tried to address internal communication and collaboration challenges with tools like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Groups? Why do folks look at highly target-marketed sites / communities of practice, and cynically wonder why internal IT can’t turn over project requests with the same level of speed and quality?

One key reason – those sites only need to go after the Top 5% group of focused, engaged, and technically able potential consumers – because the internet is so big, there is plenty of money to be made from such a small percentage of the total user population. Unfortunately for corporate IT, it is not OK to implement systems that are effective only for 20% of the target user community – expectations are more like 50-80% of the user population needs to be reasonably glib in the system to be judged effective.

… but What Does It Mean?

Corporate IT is forced to go after the “middle” group – the 60 percent of the user base who needs a lot more TLC to understand and be effective in the tools and systems we provide.

However, I call it “magic” for a reason. You can leverage a lot of value once you realize that “the magic is in the middle”:

• Training: When you understand the low-end expectations for end-user competence, you can target your training material at that level – and no lower.
• Testing for 100% of all cases is exhausting and time consuming, a real drain on resources. However, only testing the basics (the Top 20%) won’t require a lot of rigor, for the error checks are simplistic and the level of scrutiny is much higher. If you want to do an acceptable amount of decent quality testing, your test cases should involve “the magic in the middle”.
• Vendors: Bringing them in for a demo? Salesmen typically target business scenarios that are the “low hanging fruit” (in the Top 20%), and it’s easy to understand when the software can’t handle the “worst case scenario” (the Bottom 20%); get the sales team to demo something from “a typical Day In the Life” (the Middle 60%)

The Top 20% group is the easiest to service, the Bottom 20% is the easiest to ignore. The magic is in the middle, and success here separates the excellent from the also-rans in corporate IT.

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Post tags: cognition, education, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Social Networks, Twitter

All articles, blog entries, and other content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons License    ]]> http://www.cazh1.com/the-magic-in-the-middle/feed/ 0 http://www.cazh1.com/more-amazing-social-media-statistics/ http://www.cazh1.com/more-amazing-social-media-statistics/#comments Wed, 05 May 2010 04:36:16 +0000 Jim MacLennan http://www.cazh1.com/?p=463 A follow-on from my last post; speaking of interesting Social Media statistics … would you believe …

• If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest
• 80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees
• In 2009, Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
• 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices
• 25% of search results for the world’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content

Pretty amazing stuff … check out this video for more …

I was referred to this video short by a friend, and I dug into the source a bit – check out the Socialnomics blog for more stats and videos. For example, this one on Social Media ROI …

… although, I am currently still of the opinion that social media is applicable to consumer markets; I’m not sure how it applies yet to B2B industry.

However, I’m not going to wait around to find out … but I guess I can’t talk about that right now …

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2010. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: Facebook, Google, information, interesting stuff, LinkedIn, millennials, networking, possibilities, Presentations, Social Media, Social Networks, Socialnomics, trends, Twitter, video, Web 2.0, YouTube

All articles, blog entries, and other content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons License    ]]> http://www.cazh1.com/more-amazing-social-media-statistics/feed/ 0 http://www.cazh1.com/email-is-dead-long-live-social-networking-dont-get-left-behind/ http://www.cazh1.com/email-is-dead-long-live-social-networking-dont-get-left-behind/#comments Wed, 28 Apr 2010 03:29:11 +0000 Jim MacLennan http://www.cazh1.com/?p=424 via Fred Wilson – a stunning slide from Morgan Stanley’s recent Internet Trends report:

Click to enlarge ...

The primary topic of the report is the growth and future prospects of the mobile internet – reason enough read through all 87 slides. However, I am slightly amazed by the fact that eMail runs second to the relatively new phenomenon of Social Networking, driven primarily by consumer behavior and Generation Y.

Admit it – more than once, YouTube and Twitter have made the water-cooler talk circuit, as folks text their kids and rave about connecting with long-lost high school and college chums on Facebook. We’ve all seen upticks in LinkedIn traffic as the economy has driven job networking skills to this professional social network.

The Internet’s “Gen-X” Surpassed

Another Morgan Stanley slide shows how the young-uns have surpassed their web-based brethren – first YouTube, now Facebook have taken over the internet …

click to enlarge

In just three short years, a significant movement of mindshare from one web property to another – but don’t stop there. The immersive user experience of Facebook and YouTube is very different from personalized Yahoo and Google portals, and business and social messaging has changed rapidly to adapt.

So how does that translate to business productivity and process management environment?

Business Process Automation Architecture is Falling Farther Behind

eMail is still the dominate business process environment in corporate America. Don’t believe me? Got users clamoring to switch from Notes to Outlook, or desktop-based to cloud-based service? Try introducing mailbox size limitations or document retention limits, and see how many folks squawk. Spin up a few SharePoint sites and insist that all file sharing be done in shared folders (no attachments allowed!). Insist that all discussions take place in forums, not via Re: and Fw: eMail chains. How successful do you think that will be?

Now, there’s no reason to panic; the population within many corporations have an interesting ability to want consumer level flexibility, speed, usability, and “fun factor” in their personal electronics, but few have that same sense of humor about their day-to-day job. “Go ahead and upgrade, as long as my process does not change at all”.

I’m sure this varies at different corporations – based on the average age of the user population. This is not meant as a slight, just an admission of reality – even I don’t quite get some of the communication norms embraced by my daughters.

However, I am very aware that with each passing quarter, new employees and incoming contractors join our work teams, expecting increasing levels of openness, information access, and social connections. It’s only a matter of time until the internal preference measures match the switch shown in the first slide above – will our business process teams be ready?

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2010. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: behavior, eMail, Facebook, Gen-X, millennials, Morgan Stanley, networking, social, Social Networks, trends, Twitter, Web 2.0, YouTube

All articles, blog entries, and other content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons License    ]]> http://www.cazh1.com/email-is-dead-long-live-social-networking-dont-get-left-behind/feed/ 0 http://www.cazh1.com/business-benefits-of-social-networks-exist-but/ http://www.cazh1.com/business-benefits-of-social-networks-exist-but/#comments Sun, 26 Apr 2009 04:10:00 +0000 Jim MacLennan http://qc.cazh1.com/?p=300 When I see / read articles like this, or hear the breathless claims of vendors, pundits, and True Believers, I’ll privately chuckle to myself. All of this stuff – social networking, collaboration, and innovation – are 21st century takes on good old Knowledge Management (KM), circa 1998.

Do these sound like presentations from your recent Enterprise 2.0 conference?

• Managing Cultural Change to Create a Knowledge Sharing Environment
• Effectively Managing Information Overload in the Information Age
• Information Content and Security in Document Management Systems
• Using Technology and the Project Management Workbench to Accelerate Product Development Efforts
• Shifting the Burden of Knowledge Sharing to All Employees

I dug up an old copy of the proceedings from a 1998 KM conference; if I did a global text replace of “Innovation” for “Knowledge”, I could probably get a bunch of folks to sign up today!

Ok, a little sarcasm is fun, but once you realize the similarities, there are other parallels with 1990′s KM efforts – not the least of which is the identification of business benefits. Anyone involved with projects back then can testify to the difficulty in predicting hard benefits – clearly quantifiable impact on top line or bottom line, derived in a predictable, measurable manner. Sorry, it just didn’t work out that way for KM – and it won’t for Social Networks, either! The hype cycle will prevail …

Hard Benefits of Social Networks Do Not Exist, but …

Why do people insist on expecting a hard business benefit from social networks, or a payback from a project to implement a funny-sounding technology (wiki/blog/tweet) inside the enterprise? Has anyone ever gotten a quantifiable business benefit from participating on Facebook, LinkedIn, mySpace?

Well, yes, actually – plenty of folks have connected with friends / colleagues, collaborated on business ideas, come up with innovative new approaches – actually monetized all the goofy sounding tools. I myself have written about successes, and have made connections I could never have anticipated. Heck, the old KM conference guide has a couple of case studies as well.

Ah, but do you see the pattern? Business benefits are not predictable, they are always opportunistic and anecdotal. Success is characterized by stories of the home runs (rarely accompanied by comparable stats on strikeouts, by the way). You can’t implement a social network within a company or a group, and predict how much and when the profits / savings / growth with start rolling in. You are setting up an environment of opportunity – nothing more.

When I hear people talk about business value or business return of social networks as if they could predict it, I cringe. They’re trying to apply financial controls on something that’s governed by chance – you can’t do it. The incorrect assumption is that you can control good luck – but you can tweak your chances.

Active networkers know – I’m talking about people that have been networking for years, when connections were made face to face. Career coaches would exhort us to get out there and build our professional network – make the office visits, get on their calendar, develop some connections. You have no idea what could happen from any one connection or conversation – nothing might happen or something might happen – you trying to make your own luck.

What is it they say, luck is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration? Social networking is just automation for some of that 90%. And benefits will happen – just don’t ask me when.

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2009. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: Blog, business benefits, business value, collaboration systems, conference, Facebook, innovation, Inspiration, Knowledge Management, LinkedIn, networking, Social Media, Social Networks, Web 2.0, Wiki

All articles, blog entries, and other content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons License    ]]> http://www.cazh1.com/business-benefits-of-social-networks-exist-but/feed/ 0 http://www.cazh1.com/five-stages-of-twitter-relevance/ http://www.cazh1.com/five-stages-of-twitter-relevance/#comments Wed, 22 Apr 2009 03:36:00 +0000 Jim MacLennan http://qc.cazh1.com/?p=299

Click for the original

I’m already fielding internal (as well as external) questions about the application of Twitter in a manufacturing company, and I’m developing a reasonably good model, I think – one that will apply to the hard-core, salt-of-the-earth, manufacturing business leader that I’ve worked with at many organizations.

This “maturity model” approach has been used before; back in December of 2008, Bhagarva sketched out the Five Stages of Twitter Acceptance – but that model only helps existing bloggers and social networkers understand this terse little idea spitter. Kind of like explaining OOP to a COBOL developer – I get the general idea of coding (communicating), but you’ve changed some of the basic rules like procedural vs. event handling (short and immediate vs. in depth and permanent).

This doesn’t help explain YACMTTCDFE (Yet Another Communication Method That They Can’t Distinguish From Email) for those still struggling with Web 2.0 and Social Networks. If it doesn’t arrive in their Outlook inbox, I’m still facing an uphill struggle getting them to understand the mechanism, let alone the concept.

However, I’m getting a decent level of results when I draw parallels to concepts that these folks “grew up” with. The level of understanding and acceptance directly correlates to the level of relevance that the Twitterverse might have for their current information sharing needs. They typically ask …

How exactly do I understand Twitter and it’s relevance to my work day?

1. Pointless: This has absolutely no value add, a complete waste of time – get back to work!
2. Cute: An interesting and different communication medium, but I gotta get back to work. Maybe over lunch …
3. Web-Based Texting: Conversations about nothing in particular, but at least you’re starting to connect. Not sure how it is better than IM, but some don’t even use that …
4. A Cocktail Party (or maybe the corner bar): Twitter is filled with cliques that are easy to eavesdrop / butt in on – a chance to develop your skills and awareness, and engage larger, targeted networks with pointed conversations about specific topics that I deal with every day. But no pressure, we’re just hanging out ..
5. A Community: Like a trade group, guild, or local Chamber of Commerce, one that requires and rewards participation. At this highest level, Twitter is both a source and a use of awareness, knowledge and understanding; conversations are multi-directional, real business value is being generated.

I can illustrate these levels with examples from my favorite Twitter Search columns in my Tweetdeck (Search:SAP)

1. Do I really care if the sap is running this spring?
2. Funny, I get hits when people watch sap-py movies. Oh, those wacky homonyms …
3. Twitter as a job board – every SAP job listing pops up. Wait, did I just see a trend tweet by?
4. Hmm, lots of interesting SAP practitioners are talking about live projects and cutting edge programming work …
5. Interesting conversations pop up when Oracle buys Sun, or SAP announces the latest product enhancements – I can get a near-real time pulse on market sentiment

I’ve piqued their interest, but now they want to know what “real business value” really means. I’ll post on that next time … stay tuned!

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2009. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: SAP, Social Networks, Tweetdeck, Twitter, Web 2.0

All articles, blog entries, and other content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons License    ]]> http://www.cazh1.com/five-stages-of-twitter-relevance/feed/ 0 http://www.cazh1.com/enterprise-2-1-exiting-the-trough-of-disillusionment/ http://www.cazh1.com/enterprise-2-1-exiting-the-trough-of-disillusionment/#comments Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:46:00 +0000 Jim MacLennan http://qc.cazh1.com/?p=263 “What will you do with that car if you actually catch it?”
– what the cat asked the dog (from the Chicago Reader, circa 1989)

So you’ve gone all “Enterprise 2.0″, spinning up a wiki, a blog, and a SharePoint or Drupal server inside your firewall. Now what happens?

The groundswell of interest in “cool tools” brings a wave of users and a burst of feed reader activity – for a few weeks. Before long, however, the organization will get some rush orders, a month-end close, a project deadline, and/or a few vacations on the team … and the same old excuses begin to weasel their way into the conversations. Folks begin to realize that collaboration and participation is more than reading (I actually have to type something into this thing?). Management styles are tested, and we find out if KM can be pushed on or pulled from the group. The questions start on a familiar note …

Why?

The classic pushback against documentation; we see no immediate value added. When I’m programming or implementing a system, I’m making stuff happen; when I’m documenting, I’m only creating files that no one reads (and some ambient white noise for my cube neighbors). Of course, if there’s only one person in the department that knows how the system works, and if they happen to be out on vacation when a problem arises, it’s all hands on deck and a general scramble to figure out how things work. Imagine your consternation when you find out it’s a five-minute fix … if only they had written something down …

There’s also the career flexibility issue; if you’re the only one that knows how something works, you’ll never be able to move to the next interesting technology – stuck maintaining the Unknown System. Unfortunately, a plea to the value of Future Flexibility doesn’t help when you’re dealing with someone who likes to maintain control over the Predictable Present. Sooner or later, the benefit of getting rid of their inflexibility far outweighs the cost of reengineering anything … it’s just delayed pain.

Who?

Another classic question (who is supposed to write this stuff? Not Me!), with a contemporary twist … the collaborative tools allow us to quickly broaden our audience/author pool, including folks outside of IT. In fact, this is a significant difference from fads gone by – non-IT folks are getting exposed to collaborative documents on publicly available, open environments like Wikipedia and Google; it’s getting easier to talk to a growing number of people about interacting in a collaborative environment; the team isn’t limited to the techies any more!

Which?

A much more important question – which platform should we use to capture this knowledge? When do you use a blog versus a discussion forum? Will I wiki, or should I SharePoint? Choosing IM over eMail is easy, but when should I tweet instead?

If you’re working on this question, it’s actually a good sign – folks have enough hands-on to understand the good and the bad about a variety of collaboration media. Experience is your best guide here; wiki’s are great for fast entry and immediate distribution, but (IMHO) it’s difficult to maintain a table of contents, index, or any multi-chapter / multipage chunk of knowledge. At home, I’m building the fifth generation of my home software development environment, and I’ve already passed over my personal wiki tool as unsatisfactory. Too many processes and interlocking technologies surrounding the servers, development environments, and push-to-production processes. It’s much easier to create an actual Administrator’s Guide (sample); a formal document with table of contents, chapters, diagrams, even page headers and footers. If I bothered to print it out, it’ll look great – but I don’t care about the paper. I like the structure that a book gives me – this is broad collection of information about a set of technologies and processes required to do one basic thing.

Each of the different Web 2.0 / KM tools has different strengths and weaknesses – flexible info structures, formatting efficiencies, ease of distribution, and support for collaboration / version control. The light will come on when you understand your biggest problem is collecting the knowledge; presentation, distribution, search, and sharing are covered nicely by the various intranet technologies, but the magic is in the making.

Doom and Gloom – and a Silver Lining

Disruptive technologies come and go, there are no silver bullets, and there’s always a problem somewhere. If the environment is user friendly, it won’t scale. If users accept the concept, they won’t have the time to create content. If you can get all of these budding authors to write prose that is readable, you’ll struggle with making it findable.

But hey – we’re trying to pull out of this “trough of disillusionment” – so focus on the things that Web 2.0 does well …

… and focus your attention on the “next version” (2.1) – practical questions of why? who? which?

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2008. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: Blog, Chicago Reader, Collaboration, Documentation, Enterprise 2.0, Google, intranet, Knowledge Management, knowledge management tools, People Management, project, Project Management, project manager, project status reports, SharePoint, Social Networks, Twitter, Web 2.0, Wiki, Wikipedia

All articles, blog entries, and other content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons License    ]]> http://www.cazh1.com/enterprise-2-1-exiting-the-trough-of-disillusionment/feed/ 0 http://www.cazh1.com/the-right-web2-0-tool-for-the-audience-twitter-linkedin-facebook/ http://www.cazh1.com/the-right-web2-0-tool-for-the-audience-twitter-linkedin-facebook/#comments Sat, 10 May 2008 02:55:00 +0000 Jim MacLennan http://qc.cazh1.com/?p=250 The volume of Twitter posts popping up in my feed reader is ticking upward, a phenomenon I find interesting because of something I noted recently on LinkedIn. A few weeks ago, a new feature appeared, enabling me to report what I’m working on – Twitter for the office crowd. Always willing to try some flair, I jumped on the bandwagon, and set up a recurring ToDo for updating my LI-net on the day’s focus.

meta-tweet

That lasted less than two weeks – some clear (and discouraging) trends had emerged:

• Few people in my network were using this feature, and actively noting what we were doing – and it was primarily folks that I know are active bloggers, engaged in the practice of Web 2.0 (and they, too, have trailed off in their LI-tweets)
• For the “regular” folks in my network, it was the one activity (daily or twice daily updates) that generated the most inbound comments. I got multiple e-mails, noting that I must be manufacturing additional hours each day.
• Without fail, whenever you mention SAP, data warehousing, or any other specific technology, every product sales rep or consulting firm in your network will call that day and offer a$$istance.

I remain a fan of LinkedIn and social networks in general, but my personal jury is still out with Twitter. I think I want it to succeed, but I’m not sure exactly what it can succeed at. The ideas and innovations are still coming in – one of them is sure to make sense to the wider audience, right? In the mean time, I just don’t see it catching on in the mainstream enterprise business environment.

I wonder if the gap is generational, or just a different target audience? Much like the difference between Facebook and LinkedIn – is it GenX vs the Millennials, or is it social network versus professional network? Earlier this week, Bernard Lunn weighed in with his compare and contrast post, and observing that both platforms attempt to add Yet Another Messaging Medium to your current array. Dennis McDonald’s reply post backs up the notion that there are different audiences in play here – he also has done a deeper dive in Facebook than I have, so if you want a more qualified and detailed comparison, check out Dennis’ work.

insightful

Or maybe Hugh MacLeod (gapingvoid) has it pegged …

Note that Mr. MacLeod is clearly a Twitter fan – maybe he gets this stuff it better than I …

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Post tags: Blog, Blogger, Facebook, IM, LinkedIn, PHP, SAP, Social Networks, Twitter, Web 2.0

All articles, blog entries, and other content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons License    ]]> http://www.cazh1.com/the-right-web2-0-tool-for-the-audience-twitter-linkedin-facebook/feed/ 0 http://www.cazh1.com/three-dimensions-of-the-conversation-millenials-and-web-2-0/ http://www.cazh1.com/three-dimensions-of-the-conversation-millenials-and-web-2-0/#comments Sun, 13 Apr 2008 18:43:00 +0000 Jim MacLennan http://qc.cazh1.com/?p=243 Catching up on some old links – all related to the impact of Web 2.0, and especially the incoming Millennials, on the workplace.

• At internetnews, Kuchinskas has laid out a pretty good summary of concerns about the philosophy of information sharing on the public Internet – this doesn’t translate well to many corporate environments (see previously). Most of the article frets about the inevitable introduction of malware to the trusted network, but I think the hidden danger is the possibility of sensitive corporate information getting out. Publicly traded companies especially need to be concerned about this; the distinction between copyrighted artistic expression and corporate intelligence may be lost on those fresh out of college.
• Via Kottke.org, an interesting concept from Kevin Kelly; folks whose professions have been Turing’d (ie. outsourced via computers / technology advances) are generally more open to working with new technologies. This is a bit contrary to my previous post, and it makes sense – they’ve already been hit by the train once, and are certainly not going to get hit again. Besides, it’s fun to extend the list of theories you never thought could be automated (like real-time driving directions) or eliminated (like newspaper classifieds) …
• … which leads me to this list (from SEOmoz) of things that the Millennials have never seen. Variations on this theme appear almost every year, the kind of world events or social movements that incoming college freshmen have never experienced. Nice to see one that puts the relative pace of technology change in the same perspective.
• We’re finally seeing corporations like IBM and SAP working to add Web 2.0 and mash-up [clown-suit] capabilities into their major products. Another article calls out some research work that IBM is doing with current college students. I thought it was cool because I did some work like that in my senior year on a project sponsored by IBM. We wrote a virtual disk interface for the IBM 370 (yes, I had a PC XT with a mainframe for a floppy disk …)
• In Computerworld, Thibodeau writes about the introduction of texting into the business world. I have this functionality right now with my Blackberry, and had it in the past running MSN Messenger on the iPAQ – so I know that texting has value to business. However, I don’t think you’ll get rid of IM for the folks still working at the desktop. I validated this with my teenage daughters – they favor texting because they’re not in front of the computer as much as they are walking about with a phone in their pocket. However, I do note that my oldest prefers texting even when she’s surfing the web in between social engagements. At best, there will be a nice mix of these styles, and hopefully we’ll see e-mail traffic (and useless attachments, Reply All, and unmanageable inboxes) fade away.

There was a recent Q&A thread from LinkedIn Answers on the general topic of managing the Millennials – a representative sample of the three dimensions the topic encompasses:

1. Millennials are new elements in a threat matrix
2. Consumer technology entering the business
3. Communication challenges between the generations

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2008. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: Art, artistic expression, clown suit, Collaboration, Communication, creating understanding, Demographics, diversity, Execution, Gen-X, Generation Y, generational diversity, innovation, LinkedIn, managing change, millennials, People Management, Social Networks

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