KnowledgeForward

At the 2008 SharePoint Conference Bill Gates said that the SharePoint business has now surpassed $1B in sales and 100M licenses sold. While I believe those numbers are overstated (Michael Sampson does a good job of explaining the difference between sold seats and bundled licenses and a platform play), my own ongoing conversations with our clients confirms great interest in SharePoint, even among those who are already dedicated to other platforms.  Why such interest?  Is it, as Mr. Gates says, “the result of the great combination of collaboration and information management capabilities it delivers”?

I’ve been digging a bit deeper into why people at these clients are so interested in SharePoint.  I find it interesting how many of them already have products in house that do what they want Sharepoint to do.  This includes collaboration products like Lotus Notes or eRoom, content management products like EMC Documentum or Interwoven TeamSite, or portal products like IBM WebSphere Portal Server or BEA Aqualogic Interaction.  So why do they still want SharePoint?

The general answer these clients give me is that the products they currently use are overly complex (often limiting the departments that can use them to those with budgets for IT support) and often so expensive to license that only users with high levels of need get access and training for them.

To a certain extent, the excitement about SharePoint has really been a reflection of disillusionment with existing collaboration, content management, and portal products.  The people that are interested in SharePoint - despite already having incumbent alternatives - see at first glance a product that may finally provide easy-to-use, inexpensive, web-based collaborative solutions.  But that doesn’t guarantee they won’t be just as disillusioned with SharePoint once they get into it.  SharePoint is still new and it will take another year or more before we start collecting enough data points on enterprise-class installations to tell if SharePoint is the real deal.  “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence”, and there are often more consultants, developers, support staff, and 3rd party add-on vendors grazing on the SharePoint side of the fence than expected. 

I’m done with my Lotusphere postings for now.  I posted my notes from days 1, 2, and 3 in this blog and described what I saw in the Innovation Lab and my overall impressions at the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog.

Make sure you also check out the personal blogs from my teammates Guy Creese, Mike Gotta, and Karen Hobert who also had good posts on Lotusphere.

I’ll leave you with this final shot of the orchestra onstage playing Kashmir for the opening session.

I’m headed to the airport now (so no day 4+ postings from me), but here’s what I heard at the Social Computing Keynote before leaving Lotusphere.

Social Computing Keynote

I’ve noticed that Web 2.0 zealots often distinguish themselves by their evangelical zeal, tying broad sweeps of history to the fundamental nature of man; characterizing social software not as just something you should do, but something that people inherently yearn for, like democracy.  Look through these Web 2.0 binoculars and you can see coming a tidal wave of Facebooking, twittering young millenials that will crash upon the shores of the Enterprise, destroying existing siloed structures and washing old, unprepared, beached whales away.

I consider myself a Web 2.0 advocate, although not a zealot.  Learning how to apply these principles to existing structures will be the key to successful adoption for organizations that are not able to blow up what they have and start again.  This keynote on social computing worried me a bit at first by starting way up in the clouds (more like in the stratosphere), but then got closer to reality, and eventually poked a little fun at empty rhetoric and brought it down safely to Earth.

But first, Jeff Schick started out at the stratospheric level.  Phrases washed over me such as “Collaboration is how we hunted and raised villages” … “we collaborate better than any other animal” (actually I think ants may have us beat and they don’t complain as much) … “the forward march of civilization” … “epic sagas helped us to transmit knowledge over time” … “we transcend time and distance as we work together”

Whew!  But just when the oxygen was getting a little thin up there he started bringing it closer to Earth.  He talked about the need to have a common repository across content management and collaboration, alluding to some upcoming integration with FileNET. 

Next he brought up a set of customers to bring the higher level goals down to real life with good examples of how pilot programs for Notes, Quickr, and Connections can make a real difference. These are new products, so it’s hard to establish a track record quite yet, but these were useful examples including Teach for America, Bank of New York Mellon, Rheinmetal, and Colgate-Palmolive.

Then came Innovation Idol.  It was a cute way to give a few over the top humorous examples of social computing followed by some real demos of business-relevant functionality. 

I think that since Microsoft stumbled with KN, Lotus really has a point they can hammer home about actual, delivering social computing products.  They did a good job of this at the conference and in this keynote, spanning the high-level guru talk that some people still need to hear and the practical applications that others now need.

Well, it’s that time of the year when the top 10 lists take over the front pages.  Those of you who read this blog regularly (yes, both of you) know that I tend to focus on communication, collaboration, and content technology and, sure enough, I’ll be bringing this all around to that at the end. 

A quick scan shows that Time magazine published 50 (fifty!) top 10 lists here: 50 Top 10 Lists of 2007.  Hmmm - that’s just a categorized top 500 list, isn’t it?  I don’t have time to get through that much - let me know if they publish a “top 10 ’top 10 lists’ ” and I’ll take a look.  Wired’s homepage today has The Top 10 Heartbreaking Gadgets of 2007, The 10 Best Gadget Ads of 2007, and Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 2007. Perhaps the best of all is The Onion’s What the Hell Just Happened?

I think there are two kinds of readers who enjoy these lists.  The first is people that follow the subject in question and want to see how the author’s list (supposedly some kind of expert) jibes with theirs to validate their views, give them something to gripe about, or point out a few things they may have missed.  Movie buffs love to see the “top 10 films of the year” list to see if they should brag to their friends about their good taste or slam the critic as obviously out of touch.

I want to focus on the second kind of reader doesn’t follow this subject and likes the top 10 lists because it provides a year’s worth of news in a handy capsule.  For these readers the top 10 list acts as a filter to all the noise that occurs during the year.  If you are stuck in with kids all day and don’t get out to the movies, the list is a handy way to fill up your Netflix queue for next year (after a 6 month lag or so for the DVD to come out). 

Now, wouldn’t it be handy if, rather than once a year, that filter was always in place?  I could subscribe to this filter and instruct it to alert me only when a top-10-worthy film, or classical CD, or news story comes out?  And to remove the noise by not bothering me with the lesser films, CDs, or news in the meantime?  It’s hard to guess what will exactly equal 10 by the end of the year, but I’d accept say 15-25 items and a dial to increase or decrease the sensitivity if I’m getting too many/few each year.

I’m bringing this up because I see the “top 10 list” phenomenon as a good analogy to what a slew of technologies at the intersection of portals, RSS, and social software are trying to do: filter out all the noise and just bring me the important information, encapsulated, all in one handy spot.  It is a commonly recognizable form of attention management.

The process for assembling this is the same whether it’s Time coming up with a top 10 list, a blogger filtering news to find just the important stuff worth posting about, or the rules engine for an enterprise attention management system that is trying to find important events and pull them forward into the user’s focus.  The process consists of:

Integration: Connecting up with all the event streams, information sources, and data

Categorization: Determining what subject the event falls into

Rating: Prioritizing this bit of news.  This is probably the toughest part of the process at the moment, but attempts have been made in the form of social ratings engines (Digg) and attention profiling (APML).

Personalization: Lining up the category against the set of subjects that you are personally interested in, either through explicit declaration or implicitly. 

Display: A UI that presents the user with capsules on each of the items and allows the user to notice, track, and manage the information

This process is even more important in the enterprise, where the stakes are higher than missing a good opera CD.  How do you create your own “competitive news critic”, “financial event critic”, or “sales critic” to pick the most important information for you and how do they encapsulate this information and display it for you?  It could be the head of each of these departments flagging important news and alerting others to it (hopefully not just through email).  It could be through social ratings of important events.  It could be through automated alerting mechanisms that work off of triggers or rules.  No matter how it’s done, having an enterprise Roger Ebert to pick the best (and worst) as it happens and a good display channel (like Roger Ebert’s newspaper column) to present the information is as useful in a noisy enterprise environment as it is in a noisy entertainment environment. 

With everyone focusing on top 10 lists, I’m hoping this “angle” helps an evangelist for RSS, portals, social software, or attention management to make their case in a way that will resonate with business partners and executives during the New Year’s season. 

Happy New Year!

Yesterday I posted about the importance of recognizing how a lot of the communication, collaboration, and content technology that is implicitly seen as an application is really infrastructure (Everything’s Now Infrastructure! Where’s My App?).  Like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, it is infrastructure in application clothing - which can be just as dangerous.

The implications of the special nature of application infrastructure (as opposed to pure infrastructure or pure applications) became even more clear when a client asked about doing a risk assessment on Microsoft Office.  Remember that Office is more than Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.  It also includes InfoPath, Access, SharePoint, and many other products.  There’s a lot more variability to what end-user facing collaboration and content creation/management tools can be used for than there is for back end infrastructure such as a router.  Or even pure applications like an accounting system where the application is known.  There’s a level of indirection introduced by application infrastructure in that you first have to determine what the user will create with it, then the risk of that.  Think of the enormous span of artifacts that can be created by these systems:

• End user databases and end user db applications with Microsoft Access
• Portals and all kinds of extranet and Internet websites
• All types documents that may contain sensitive data or macros
• Workflow that can kick off automated transactions (such as approving invoices or links to payment systems

Then consider that the scope of users who can create applications, websites, and content with these systems is pretty much all encompassing (all information workers have access to Office in most organizations), and the idea of assessing the risks is daunting to say the least!

I have no answer or even framework for addressing the problem at this point.  I’ll be involved in some ongoing research into this topic and will post a summary of findings when ready.  Until then, if any readers have encountered this issue - particularly in regards to a risk assessment - please drop me a line.

Burton Group was founded as a special kind of analyst firm - one that is specialized in infrastructure and is able to go deep technically.  Accordingly, our Collaboration and Content Strategies service was founded on the premise that collaboration, content, and communication have become infrastructure as well.

Many users still think of email as an application.  Part of it is.  But the vendors realized a while ago they needed to carve out the parts of email beyond POP3 and IMAP4 that should go on the server, named them Domino and Exchange, and now they are treated like infrastructure with service levels, backup/recovery, contingency plans, farm scaling, and operations-minded folks in charge of it all. 

Well, Microsoft Office is an app right?  Sure, until Microsoft realized they needed to carve out the parts of Excel that could go on the server and created the Excel Server part of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.  A Powerpoint server is rumored to be in the works too.  And Office Business Applications (OBAs) are being created on the principle that Office is infrastructure that can be reused.  It can be repurposed to produce applications that treat Office as infrastructure, connected to line of business apps, rather than a hermetically sealed application.

Well, SharePoint is an app right?  Bingo!  That’s where this gets you into trouble. It has a purpose built front end and a wide and deep pool of infrastructure underneath it.  When the purpose built part doesn’t do exactly what you want, it can be a long fall down to the deep pool underneath.  SharePoint buyers should understand that as much as the initial demos look like an application, really they are buying collaboration and content infrastructure. If you go into SharePoint thinking it’s an app because the demos or out-of-the-box test install you did seemed to do what you want, you can be very surprised when all of a sudden this starts looking like infrastructure.  You quickly move from being an application owner to an infrastructure owner and those are very different hats to wear. 

As the infrastructure nature of communication, collaboration, and content (I’m including content creation in this category, not just what WCM or DM tools do) is being properly realized, we’re seeing a separation of what used to be considered “applications” into infrastructure with an application on top.  The infrastructure parts keeps getting thicker (such as email going from POP3 to Domino and Exchange).  Accordingly, there needs to be more awareness - from end users and from vendors - of how the transition is made from application to infrastructure. 

The transition is difficult, but doesn’t need to be as painful as it has been.  Not if vendors recognize quickly what parts of their apps need to be pulled out and treated as scalable, reliable, reusable infrastructure and are clear about the depth and solidity (how far are you likely to get before needing to call for a team of coders, is this supported, etc) of the applications layers they provide on top.  Enterprises need to set up management processes and organizational structures to catch new infrastructure as it sinks from the application layer down into their domain and to understand the difference between infrastructure capabilities surfaced in a demo sort of UI and real applications.

Infrastructure has special characteristics that applications do not have and that can stymie implementers of communication, collaboration, and content technology (such as discussion groups, document libraries, portals, and wikis) that seems like an application at first:

• Infrastructure (with regards to the kind of communication, collaboration, and content software we’re talking about here) needs an application to be useful.  Will a little bit of customization and tweaking to the out-of-the-box UI and templates be sufficient to act as an application?  If not, who is going to design and build your application now that you have the infrastructure?
• Infrastructure is meant to be reused and repurposed, so who is going to own something that will be leveraged by a multitude of groups?  Probably not the first team that wants an application - if that’s the case it will be game to see who can stand on the sidelines the longest and let the first, most desperate group that needs an app take the plunge and wind up owning and paying for the infrastructure the groups on the sidelines will now leverage. 
• Infrastructure needs to be managed.  It needs availability (according to negotiated service levels [SLAs]), contingency planning, backup/recovery. This is stuff that tends to be considered boring and “not in my job description” for programmers and power users.

So the next time someone shows you the interface for a great looking communication, collaboration, or content tool, think about stepping back and saying “That’s great infrastructure.  Now who builds the app on top of it and who manages the infrastructure?”

Note: This is a cross-posting from the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog.

I initiated my attention management and information overload coverage because, in addition to my own research as an analyst, I am also service director for a group of analysts that cover communication, collaboration, and content management technology. Many of the technologies we talk about are relatively new and can be very useful in the right situations. But with information workers already feeling overloaded, every new communication channel or collaborative workspace starts with a strike against it since even a useful new tool just feels like one more thing to have to check. You have to spend attention to save attention. But risk aversion and a lack of attention to spend impels many information workers to ignore new tools and keep plugging away in the same way they always have.

Accordingly, IT organizations are often encouraged to go slow with any new communication or collaboration tool and pilot it to build consensus around its usefulness before rolling it out to the organization. Some tools do eventually gain grass roots support that way and go on to greatness in the annals of corporate history. But I want to propose a twist on that advice - to pilot new channels or workspaces when you have something major to apply them to. This could mean holding onto a new tool for 6 months or more if that’s what it takes. The idea is to immediately imprint its usefulness on the user the first time and to make its initial use unavoidable.

There is precedent for new communication channels only taking off when they have something to say. Take CNN and the Gulf War - CNN had been around for 10 years when the Gulf War started in the summer of 1990 and, according to Wikipedia, “catapulted the network past the “big three” American networks for the first time in its history, largely due to an unprecedented, historical scoop: CNN was the only news outlet with the ability to communicate outside Iraq during the initial hours of the American bombing campaign, with live reports from the al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad by reporters Bernard Shaw, John Holliman, and Peter Arnett.” All of the news channels had improved communications capabilities that hadn’t yet been tested at that point, but CNN’s was the best (at 24 hours it was persistent and they had invested in good infrastructure, even if they underpaid their reporters). But it wasn’t until they had something to really say - an event - that people adapted to the new communication channel.

This applies to a new topic as well. I’ve given my presentation on “Which Tool to Use” twice now and both times a question was asked about whether an e-mail or similar communication should go out to announce the new guidance on which communication tool to use under given circumstances. The answer was a definite no - because the message would be ignored by so many people that it would strain the credibility of the sender and make future attempts to offer guidance more difficult. If the guidance is attached to another event of substance - such as announcing a new IM system or blog capability - then it has a better chance of being heard since it’s attached to a concrete event.

To offer a negative (and personal) example, some piece of software on my work PC has been giving off an alarm sound about twice a day. I’ll be sitting here and a “da-DING” sound comes out and … nothing happens. Nothing flashes, nothing comes up on the screen. I have no way to tell what application is trying to alert me. It’s as if a general announcement is randomly made every few hours saying “pay attention - check things”. It’s an alert with absolutely nothing to say. Debugging a “da-DING” is very difficult. And it’s quite annoying.

Applying this concept with a corporate reorganization would be a perfect opportunity to provide something to say to go along with introducing a new tool. Whether it’s a new intranet, wiki, President’s blog, or web conferencing, making it the primary source of new information about this important event that people care about can show how the new channel or workspace works when it really has something to convey. And it will be doing this better than the old tools could. Tying a new collaboration or communication tool to an event has many advantages over the standard piloting technique as the user sees the tool immediately applied in a useful situation.

I talked to the folks at Eluma today and got into an interesting discussion about how much people (enterprise information workers was the immediate concern) want their activities tracked and how much to let them know what is being tracked. Eluma is a web organizer (place to categorize and store the stuff you find on the web) with some social software capabilities underneath.  The conversation was around “Are people scared of all the things your computer keeps track of on you?  Should a product leverage tracking information to help a user find relevant information and, if so, how do you word that so it doesn’t sound like an invasion of privacy?”

This was a timely discussion for me since just yesterday I wrote a posting on Could Attention Data Become a Record? that introduced a fantasy scenario where a corporate executive insisting on innocence about malfeasance on his watch could be undone by all the tracking and attention data on his PC. 

There’s no doubt that privacy and web tracking are issues getting a lot of attention these days.  It’s fair to say the majority of my readers are not embezzling millions of dollars and trying to deny knowledge of the situation, but even us law-abiding folks don’t feel right about being tracked - particularly if we haven’t been told and don’t see the value ourselves.

If you want to see how concerns about web tracking are on the front burner just open up today’s Wall St. Journal.  On the front page of the Marketplace section (page B1) is an article called Watching What You See on the Web which describes how NebuAd helps an ISP to do “deep-packet inspection” by looking inside the packets sent by the user and selling an aggregate view of the user to advertisers who will target messages based upon the profile. 

Then turn a few pages and on page B4 you see an article called Facebook Rethinks Tracking which describes how Mark Zuckerberg has apologized about their Beacon program which enabled friends to get messages based on their web activity.

Personally, my focus is on enterprise information workers.  Accordingly, my interest is more in how tracking information and attention data can be used to help information workers to pull information that may be of interest closer to their focus and push other information further back.  To me, I think the keys to using tracking information for the benefit of information workers are:

• Being very clear about what’s being tracked
• Allowing opt-in or out of what’s tracked. As Evan Schuman of eWeek wrote ”a little more selling of the benefits and permission-getting might have made a world of difference.”
• Breaking open the “black box” (like a spam filter lets you check what it’s blocking) to check what it’s deciding

There is a line beyond which web users do not want to be tracked and the industry and users are feeling out where that line is drawn. As .com companies like Facebook try to cash in on their place as the center of conversations to monetize that stream, we’re going to see more companies stepping over that line through carelessness or to test the waters.  Will that line be tested and pushed back over time as other etiquette/decency issues like violence and suggestive behavior on TV shows has been?  Or will laws be enacting that equate deep packet inspection with wiretapping over the phone?

What is certain is that Google’s success at monetizing its attention stream has launched a gold rush.  Investors are demanding a payday from social sites that have succeeded in becoming free hubs for facilitating the buzz of blog postings, ratings, bookmarks, and music preferences.  And advertisers are proving willing to at least test the waters by showing up at the front door of these companies with bags of cash to get at the tracking data.  There aren’t too many companies out there like Craigslist that can resist this kind of temptation.

Before I head off for Thanksgiving, I’d like to congratulate one guy who has a lot to be thankful for this fall. In October, Roger B. Myerson of the University of Chicago was awarded the Nobel prize in economics for his work on mechanism design theory. Professor Myerson did not join the Graduate School of Business until after I graduated, so I never got to meet him. But it seems he found a connection between the economics I studied then and the topics we study in the Collaboration and Content Strategies service today.

According to the University of Chicago magazine:

Mechanism design theory, he said, recognizes that “the economy needs to be understood as a communications system” as well as a market system. With its emphasis on incentives, information, and communication, the theory also has applications in political science, and Myerson has studied voting systems, including work on how to structure elections in Iraq to promote democracy.

Of course, I’m simplifying this down to the part that connects with the work of my research team. It’s really better described as how to achieve optimum equilibrium in situations where lying or withholding information would otherwise be a rational winning approach. But you can read more about this theory at the Economist (which includes the juicy tidbit that one of Myerson’s fellow prize winners lives in Einstein’s home and dresses up as Einstein on Halloween). Or, if you have a bit more time on your hands over the holidays, take an entire course on it at Harvard online (complete with reading packets and lecture notes).

I would propose that when applying mechanism design theory in a distributed enterprise setting - for example, among suppliers across a supply chain - many of the technologies we cover such as web content management and portals (to set up an extranet that establishes standard, reliable flows of information), e-mail, instant messaging, document libraries, discussion groups, web conferencing, and survey mechanisms could be of great assistance.  It seems Myerson uncovered just one more way in which dissemination of information and communication systems make the world go ‘round.

Note: This is a cross-posting from the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog.

I had an interesting discussion this morning with my colleague Mike Gotta about brainstorming and innovation. After sharing what each term meant to us, it became clear that each has its place and they are complementary concepts. I’m not always a fan of the Wikipedia articles on concepts that IT folk deal with, but the articles on innovation and brainstorming are actually quite good at the moment and are worth a read for some background.

Like all great research areas, innovation represents a process rather than a technology, fuzzy concept, market, or discrete project. It involves tracking and sorting through all the innovation proposals, ensuring the best ideas rise to the top, and continues to manage the process through implementation. Innovation can also be built into research processes. Pharmaceutical consumer packaged good companies, for example, devote an incredible amount of energy into innovation as a repeatable process with replicable practices. A good research discipline can systematically create proposals that can lead to something innovative.

But where do the ideas come from in the first place? That’s where brainstorming comes in. While creative spark is often seen as as something that comes out of the blue, research and experience has shown that it can be created on demand as well. A brainstorming process acts as a spark plug to generate that creative spark. It consists of an environment where ideas can be thrown around without immediate judgement, different angles can be recommended by participants to help generate ideas, and others can build on ideas to see where they go.

I don’t think I’d go so far as to isolate innovation to a pure execution process, but it does seem that brainstorming is think-heavy and innovation is do-heavy (this is the fun of blogging: without peer review and editing cycles I get to make up new words!). Ideally, there would be integration between the brainstorming process and the innovation process so that once a good set of new ideas is generated they can be passed on to the innovation process to be prioritized and, if deemed worthy, implemented.

Both brainstorming and innovation can leverage communication, collaboration, and community. They involve a wide array of people, in different roles, from different locations, inside and outside the organization, and with different points of view. This requires good communication technology to enable concepts to be bandied about. Collaboration can help the participants to work together within a persistent workspace where a record of the exchange of ideas can be kept. Subscriptions and notifications allow participants to be actively or passively aware of the discussion as desired.

Innovation is the hotter topic at the moment with 127 million hits on Google (compared to a measly 16 million for brainstorming and 69 million for creativity), but both have their place in an enterprise. After all, for an enterprise, there are few things more sad than a good idea not implemented.