KnowledgeForward

With all the talk about technologies associated with Web 2.0 and social software such as wikis, blogs, and ratings systems it sometimes helps to take a step back to remember how it is the underlying concept of social software, not just the technologies often associated with it, that is important. And that concept can be applied even without fancy new technology.

The most hip, Web 2.0-anointed technologies can be used in ways that have nothing to do with social software. For example, a blog mechanism could be set up by an organization to allow a single executive an easier way to post announcements with the commenting feature turned off. This would not be social software.

And the other side of the coin is that old technologies can be used to build social software even though they don’t have ready-made components to build in or a fancy meme. For an example of building social software without Web 2.0, I’d like to introduce you to a circa 1990 OS/2 1.3 system called the Cost Tracker.

The Cost Tracker is the first system I ever wrote as a full-time corporate programmer. I was working at a large financial services company during the days when mainframe costs were the largest portion of the IT budget and expensive CPU time made every runaway process and abend a hit to the bottom line. Once a month IT would receive an inch thick printout (green bar paper, holes on the side, fixed space font of course) with all the mainframe jobs that ran, their CPU and DASD (disk) usage, cost, and 15 more columns of stats. The stack would be divided up into sections for each manager and circulated through inbaskets for perusal.

I worked in a central IT unit tasked with executive information systems and internal IT systems. My task was to replace that paper-based system with an easily accessible, graphical system that would make it easier to see the costs, compare actual to planned expenditures, and locate the root cause of costly overruns.

The system I developed looked like this:

Note: This is just a mock-up of the system. The data is all faked, but similar to what was there.

For the longest time, I was most proud of the left half of the screen. It was an early example of a drill-down system business intelligence system which allowed the data to be rolled up to the highest level (departments) and then the user could drill down by clicking on bars or pie slices to drill into more and more detail (each manager in a department, each system for a manager, etc.) until you got a raw spreadsheet-like window with a narrow, manageable slice of the 10,000 rows of raw data. Plan is shown with slashed bars and anything over plan is in red. Now you’d use a BI system or maybe fancy spreadsheet to do this. But that wasn’t an option in 1990. I got to write all the charting routines from scratch in C and had a blast doing it. I even got to speak on drill-down systems and linked lists as a guest lecturer at Indiana University.

But now I’m most impressed with the right half. This is just an edit window where anyone could enter comments that were attached to the specific graph on the left side so that anyone who drilled to that node or looked at historical data would always have the explanation right there for reference. I wish I remember whose idea it was to do that - maybe mine, maybe my manager’s or CIO’s. The tendency, even today, would be to consider this a number crunching problem and the system would be “done” when it allowed you to drill into the data.

To think up this design required lifting one’s head up from what seems like a quantitative system to understand the social process that went along with the numbers. And that social process went like this: In the old paper-based system, when the numbers came out the managers would dig in first to find out how they did that month and prepare explanations if there were any major cost overruns. Then the directors would look at the numbers and ask managers that were over plan what happened. Then the CIO would do the same of the directors. These conversations were highly inefficient, taking place over team meetings or through email, at different times of the month, and without a good way to track explanations over time.

Going beyond analyzing the intricacies of the raw job-level cost data I pulled down from the mainframe to understanding this social process allowed the system to bind the quantitative and the social together. The simple addition of an edit window for each node in the data allowed explanations to be stored in a common form, ready and accessible by directors and the CIO, and available over time in a way that conversations and email could never be.

I see this now as a good example of how social software does not relate to fancy Web 2.0 product categories, but is the powerful idea that understanding and building social processes into software greatly improves the value of these systems by acknowledging and enhancing the interpersonal nature of modern business.

Computerworld reported today that Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6B

Microsoft Corp. today offered to buy Yahoo Inc. for $44.6 billion in cash and stock to better compete with Google Inc. in the market for online services.

CEO Steve Ballmer made the offer in a letter to Yahoo’s board of directors yesterday, telling the board that he would release the letter this morning.

On a conference call this morning, Microsoft’s president of its Platforms & Services division Kevin Johnson called a combination of Microsoft and Yahoo a more “credible” alternative to Google in the online advertising and services market.

“By combining the assets of Microsoft and Yahoo, we can offer a more competitive choice for consumers, advertisers and publishers,” he said.

There have been rumors of this for quite some time:

• 2005: ZDNet speculated about Yahoo and Microsoft teaming up to better compete with Google: “As it turns out, in true enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend fashion, Yahoo and Microsoft have a mutual problem in Google. … Given that Yahoo and Microsoft were already chummy with each other on the multimedia front, why not merge their walled gardens to increase the utility of both in hopes of heading off any more defectors (end users) from taking in oodles and oodles of Google (at the expense of everyone else). ”
• 2006: SearchEngineWatch blogged that “Yahoo & Microsoft Have Talked Partnering, Merging”
• 2007: BusinessWeek reported “In the battle of online search, Microsoft is again courting Yahoo, according to media reports”

Of course, you could probably pick any two technology titans and find enough written about them to connect a thread.  But this seems more than random chance since there are obvious synergies, but one issue that makes me question the long term value.

Looking at it from a marketing point of view it’s a very good move.  Yahoo offers strength in web advertising, social computing, and web-based email where Microsoft is weak.  They have overlapping (and expensive) assets in search and categorization that can be consolidated and trimmed.  They also offer great talent and intangibles around web 2.0 and a disruptive, creative mindset.

From an infrastructure point of view I’m a bit more dubious.  Yahoo seems to favor the kind of Java, Unix, and open source tools (Apache, FreeBSD, Perl, PHP, Linux) you’d expect out of a young company out to challenge the powers that be.  If Yahoo has a huge number of very bright programmers that are almost religiously dedicated to Unix-based platforms and development they may not want to switch.  For scale reasons I’m sure Microsoft would allow this subset of the company to continue along that Unix path (I’m not saying they’d force mass conversion at the point of a sword), but it would take some restraint not to try injecting Windows servers and .NET into newer offerings and slowly alienate the staff. 

So, in summary, I think from a financial view it probably looks good (win/win for both sides), from a marketing view it looks good (fills in weaknesses of Microsoft and allows for consolidation of operations), but longer term the risk associated with the assimilation of Yahoo into Microsoft (and therefore the odds of capitalizing on the assets they are acquiring) may be even higher than normal for tech companies.

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.

McKinsey has just authored another article in what could be considered a series on collaboration in organizations. The first two (”Mapping the Value of Employee Collaboration” and “Competitive Advantage From Better Interactions”) were very good at articulating the value of collaboration from a point of view (and a source) that business executives can understand. I use them frequently when setting the stage for the usefulness of collaboration technology at an infrastructure level (in other words, not applied to a specific one-off project).

But I’m not as thrilled about the next in the series. The new article is about formal networks, but is called “Harnessing the power of informal employee networks”. The change in nomenclature comes about because the authors’ answer to how to harness the power of informal networks is to make them formal.

After describing how prevalent, necessary, and useful informal networks are, the article describes how they can be made more useful by providing a leader (”coordinator” is a better term since the person has no managerial authority), a budget, evaluation measures, and IT resources (wikis, document libraries, and the like).

There’s no doubt in my mind that the type of formal network they describe is better than the matrix org chart they say it replaces. And for companies that have no similar mechanism in place (centers of excellence, communities, sponsored “birds of a feather” get-togethers), a formal network would certainly be an improvement.

But I think a formal network is just one type of network or community and that the authors should have been more careful to acknowledge that and provide tips for differentiating which networks are appropriate for formalizing and which aren’t.

I also felt the article did not address several tricky issues related to the formation and subsequent growth of the network such as:

• Does one wait for networks to self-organize and then (at what point?) jump in and pave the cowpaths by making it formal?
• How comfortable can members be about leaving the network if they do not see the value?
• How to people outside the network petition to join?
• Given how the article demonstrates the importance of a “linchpin” in a network, how does the network retain resiliency in the case that the leader/linchpin is a jerk?
• In what cases should an informal network be left alone and not formalized?

Overall I still believe the article to be a good one. It’s based on a lot of research whereas my observations are based on a 12 page summary, personal experience, and gut feel so I may not be capturing the whole essence of their points. And I do think formal networks are a very valuable form of network. Just not the only form of network.

I wrote previously on how attention management can be applied to losing weight (see Attention Management for Weight Loss!). Now I’m wondering if technologies commonly associated with social software can do the same.

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, researchers at the University of California in San Diego Harvard Medical School have found that social networking effects influence weight loss/gain. For one of a zillion articles on this story check out “Is obesity contagious?” 25 July 2007 - New Scientist. If a person’s friends are all thin or go on a diet, it encourages that person to also view thinness as achievable and desirable. The interesting part to me is that it is the bond of the social network, not merely proximity, that matters. The article states:

Fowler notes that friends living nearby seemed to exert just as much influence on a person’s weight as those living 800 kilometers (500 miles) away. To him, this suggests that the trend has more to do with a spread of social norms than behaviors. In other words, the idea of what constitutes a normal weight travels more easily across distance than do behaviors – such as exercise and eating routines.

So, does IM’ing count? How about participants in my social bookmarking? Should I only join discussion groups with exercise fanatics? Can I set up filters on my e-mail to block any sender with a body mass index over 20 (don’t need the extra pounds with that spam!)?  Swarm with comments on my blog and lose weight? Nah … I’m just having fun with this of course. But it still does point out the importance of social networks over artificial networks such as who sits around you in your cubicle or who the org chart says are your immediate peers.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if every topic area in the Collaboration and Content Strategies service relates to weight loss at some point. What’s next: portals or content management …

An article in the July 5, 2007 issue of New Scientist Tech indicates that the ability to select avatars that are vastly different in appearance than their creators can exacerbate the trust problem. The study found that androgynous avatars were perceived as less trustworthy and goofy avatars (like a ketchup bottle) rated very poorly. Trust is fundamental to business relationships and, accordingly, solutions for conveying trust will need to be established before enterprises can make full use of virtual worlds.

Trust is a currently an unresolved pain point for virtual worlds. As I posted earlier, David Weinberger at the Enterprise 2.0 conference listed the next frontiers for Enterprise 2.0 to conquer as authority, trust, and boundaries. The set of characteristics used to inspire trust in face-to-face communications is hamstrung in virtual environments. As virtual worlds slowly make their way into enterprises, how can we know who to trust when anyone can shape their appearance? What about people that have multiple avatars for different occassions? If someone today treats me rudely or cheats me, how do I know I won’t encounter them again in a new skin and with a new name tomorrow? Trust is established based on relationships or behavior, but which behaviors matter in a virtual world?

Trust in business usually involves

• Knowing that a person is who they say they are, both from an identity and role point of view
• The ability to predict a person’s behavior with a high degree of accuracy
• Viewing the motivation of a person as based on benevolence and sincerity

Shopping sites have created trust metrics such as eBay’s ratings system, but these ratings have not yet been applied to virtual worlds and may not work as well as they do with Friendster or Slashdot (karma points).

Ultimately, Captain Kirk shouldn’t have been so focused on space; “trust” is the final frontier.

I’m starting out a little slow today after my first arena-scale rock concert in about 15 years - The Police. I used to go to several a year in my college days and had gotten used to the feel of them and their traditions such as lighters for the slow songs and guessing which song they left for an encore.

But I forgot we’re leaving in the Web 2.0 era, which has changed everything from politics to, apparently, rock concerts. When the opening notes of Message in a Bottle start up I look to the stage and from my vantage point I can see the screens of a sea of mobile devices glowing in front of me. Hmmm, I don’t remember that from Def Leppard ‘88.

The guy sitting in front of me is on his Blackberry about 50% of the time. Apparently the communal aspect of 45,000 fans around him isn’t sufficiently social for him, so he feels the need to constantly send emails to friends and family. Sample email (hard not to see the screen in the dark): “I’m at The Police concert with your daughter. Cool.”

As they work through the set list I am not at all surprised to hear most of the favorites off of their Greatest Hits album. And if there was any mystery left, it was eliminated by the Wikipedia entry that already exists for the concert listing the set list, encores (two), and tour dates.

When Wrapped Around your Finger started up a smattering of people held up lighters, but most of the crowd held up cell phones instead. The eerie glow of the cell phone screens was no substitute for the star-like effect of thousands of lighters.

The show went off well though. A few wrong notes, but not as bad as the show on May 31st. How do I know that? Because of Stewart Copeland’s blog entry that day of course (is this entry legit?). This is the Web 2.0 era. Cell phones instead of lighters, e-mail during the concert, recent pop events already chronicled in encyclopedia form next to World War II, and online journals from band members are now just par for the course.

I’m here at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I was not here on Monday, but Tuesday’s speakers had some good food for thought.

David Weinberger

David Weinberger posed an interesting question: “If there’s too much information, why aren’t we drowning?” His answer was that we’re adapting well and the solution to information overload is metadata. I believe he’s correct that we’re adapting well and that metadata is a key to surviving, but I think much of the information out there is redundant too. Frequency is often used as a measure of importance. All one has to do to catch up on the latest travails of a wealthy young heiress is catch one of the thousands of stories floating around.  By showing the phrase “Call me Ishmael” torn out of Moby Dick he made the point that deep searching (through the details of the data) is enhancing our ability to find information.  That’s true, although it’s not an example of metadata.  He also made a good point about the next frontiers for Enterprise 2.0 to conquer: authority, trust, and boundaries.

Andrew McAfee

Andrew McAfee was up next and assigned grades to E2.0. While he’s a highly respected Harvard professor, I suspect some grade inflation going on here:

Awareness: A. Among technology people I would agree, although awareness is often far short of understanding. Among business people though, I think it’s a C. There are a significant number of CEOs and business people that have heard of web 2.0 technologies, but nowhere near as many as know the latest business buzzword.

Technology: A-. Since he’s specifically talking enterprise, it’s hard to see how it could get an A- unless you mean “progress”. He seems happy there is so much to choose from. But that makes his point of view the technology vendors and not the implementers. Until the frontiers mentioned by David Weinberger (authority, trust, and boundaries) are conquered I can’t see giving the technology more than a “C” at best.

Communicating results: C. I’ll buy that. We seem to keep rehashing same success stories. The conference didn’t help in that regard though. I went to two sessions on case studies and half were vendors doing the case studies. The end users ones were not the best either (alerting? Nah).

Stowe Boyd

Stowe’s description of social apps sounded like self-actualization to me: “Judge the app by how it helps people discover who they are”.  I don’t find that description applicable in an enterprise setting.  Enhancing their ability to get their job done, visibility to management, feeling a part of a community: yes.  Learning about myself: no.

Any middle level manager who believes Stowe will want to immediately ask for a demotion or make a play for CEO since he says the center of organizations will hollow out, the “edgelings will self-organize”, and management (always just a necessary evil anyways) is doomed.  There’s more to say on this than I can type here at the airport this morning, but I find this view extreme and unlikely.  I don’t think 10,000+ person organizations can be self-organizing and I don’t think they will increase shareholder value by breaking up into 1,000 ten-person organizations.  I don’t think everyone wants to be self-directing and self-organizing.  I don’t think that employees will all become essentially independent contractors who decide what they want to do, self-organize into teams, and the “company” becomes little more than which logoed shirt they decide to put on the morning.  The market has generally voted its money on the idea that people organized in a hierarchy of groups (teams, divisions, conglomerates) are most likely to produce a return on investments and when that is not true (like a spinoff) they break up the units themselves.  I don’t see that changing.  That doesn’t mean employees will not become more empowered - just that their new networks are superimposed (not replace) the existing structure on the org chart.

As an analyst, I’ve generally been assigned to coverage areas with a full life cycle. By that, I mean they have exciting beginnings, a bump against reality, then settle down to a boring, mature, reasonable level. I’ve covered Java (Java 1.1 through J2EE), application servers (remember when you used to pay a real lot for those and they were highly differentiated?) and enterprise portals, all of which followed that curve. Sometimes I felt I really enjoyed myself more than the guys covering steady but consistent technologies like databases, but sometimes I envied them too for the consistency their posts in the technology wilderness had.

In that regard, the Enterprise 2.0 conference feels like deja vu all over again. It has that same feel I remember from technologies past. The supply side attendees at the conference (vendors, media, speakers and panelists, pundits) outnumbered the demand side (enterprise buyers). By my estimate, about 40% of the attendees are from enterprises in listen mode. My figures come from a set of unscientific badge checks and one session where enterprise attendees were asked to raise their hands. By my equally unscientific crowd counting techniques there were about 350 attendees in the audience for the Tuesday keynotes counting the main room, standees, and overflow room. During dull stretches in the presentations I found myself scanning the audience for other stats and found similar figures to other technology conferences I’ve been to (e.g., blazers: 20%, male:female ratio: 7:1, Gen Xers: 65%).

This is pretty standard for the early stages of a technology maturity curve. Over time I expect to see enterprises strongly outnumbering vendors/media. Then the technology gets boring enough and the conference gets renamed or merged with another conference and the cycle begins anew.

Could social networking addicts picture life without MySpace? The Onion, a satirical newspaper, doesn’t think so.

MySpace Outage Leaves Millions Friendless

However, because the sudden lack of friends has deprived MySpace users of comments, bulletin posts, and searches for elementary school crushes, it is feared that the ordeal could inflict long-term psychological damage. In Chicago alone, an estimated 50,000 people remain trapped in their apartments, with no way of contacting the outside world about new bands, Adult Swim cartoons, or the latest video games.

“I lost 6,456 of my best friends in an instant,” said Minneapolis resident Peter Steinberg, 20, who has loyally befriended as many profiles as possible over the past two years. “Nothing can describe how devastated I feel. Some of these people I’ve exchanged two, even three comments with, and I can’t tell you how many ROTFLMAOs we’ve shared, too.”