Social networking for the enterprise

Well - have just returned from Lotusphere in Orlando which is IBM's conference for customers and partners for its collaboration software. I must admit I was a little apprehensive about the content - when I worked for IBM Lotus was exclusively (and somewhat obsessively) focused on what seemed to be a doomed struggle between Notes/Domino and Outlook/Exchange.

However, I was pleasantly surprised. Yes, there were announcements around and a focus on the Notes/Domino platform but the attention was very heavily centred around Web 2.0. Not only have IBM announced new versions of Connections and Quickr, but also new products - Lotus Mashups for line of business users to build mashup applications and also a software as a service offering called Bluehouse which is a software-as-a-service collaboration suite for small companies (aimed at 500 employees or less). It was certainly exciting to see IBM embrace social software and software-as-a-service so overtly and as a core piece of their strategy.

Even more heartening was to hear large organisations who have adopted social software discuss their experiences. It was summed up best by a speaker from the Bank of New York Mellon who said that after the merger of Bank of New York and Mellon Financial Corporation their biggest problems was having "17,000 employees over here and 23,000 employees over there who didn't know each other." IBM Connections is a centrepiece of their strategy to fix this problem.

Of wider interest was the behavioural observations I came away with. I was fortunate enough to talk to IBM employees, business partners and customers about their experience of selling, building, delivering and using social software platforms exclusively within companies, and what drove their success or failure. The following themes re-occured constantly:

• You must distinguish between team collaboration and community networking. They are different business problems which require different tools
  
• Those who contribute to social networks and those who seek content have different motivations and must be catered for accordingly
  
• Adoption will speed up if there is value in using the tools for their own sake, ie even if no-one else uses them

Given the amount of customer interest and resources that IBM are putting into their offerings I left convinced that Social Networking does have a place in the enterprise (even if the name does not do it much justice) and that our offerings of strategy analysis to find how social software will best help your organisation, and a 12 month adoption plan to ensure value is gained from any investment will be vital tools to help companies on this path.

What I would really be interested now is hearing from Microsoft or any Microsoft oriented partners who can enlighten us on their position in the world. I have read several articles regarding Sharepoint as a theoretical social networking platform, or whether their investment in Facebook will lead to a Microsoft/Facebook enterprise social networking offering but would love to hear more details.

Fight bigotry with Facebook

Back from Orlando - in body if not in mind...

Just saw this article about fighting anti-semitism with Facebook. It's great to hear a positive story around this as usually Facebook is blamed for encouraging hate groups...

Lotusphere

No posts for a while, as am at Lotusphere 2008. Have never been much of a 'Lotus' person when I was at IBM but it's where all their collaborative products such as Portal, Quickr and Connections have ended up so very interested to hear what they have to say about their view of what's going to happen in 2008.

Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Web 4.0, Web 5.0 - where will it end?

Ok - so here's why I really really dislike the term "Web 2.0". As well as the common problems of a phrase used to describe a new paradigm in computing (such as the problems around terms such as SOA), "Web 2.0" in particular suffers from a specific problem. Using "2.0", a number that sounds like a version you would apply to a software product, simply encourages people to be the first to claim to have come up with, or understand the next version. Already people are starting to talk about Web 3.0 just to be the first clever person to come up with it because it's so easy just to add 1 to Web 2.0 and get Web 3.0. Usually, the way things work is that you notice a trend, and then coin a phrase. With Web 3.0+ it's backwards - we already know what the next development in web technology will be called, we just don't know what it is yet. It is less easy to know what the successor to SOA will be called(although if it's SOA 2.0 I will not be happy). After this it will be Web 4.0, then Web 5.0, then we'll argue about whether the next is Web 6.0 or Web 5.5 or Web 5.0 Service Pack 1.

Other changes in IT thinking, such as SOA, Model Driven Architecture, Object Oriented Programming didn't have this problem, and I'm sure that much of what is currently written and obsessed about over Web 3.0 would not have been produced if it wasn't so easy to come up with the name of the next big thing, and then have to think about it's meaning afterward.

That is not to say that there won't be a further revolution, and something worthy of the term Web 3.0 won't come along (think semantic web) - but the use of a version number means we'll have to put up with a lot of false positives before we find the real thing.

What does Web 2.0 (and SOA for that matter) really mean?

Whenever a new buzzword comes along in IT there's usually a prolonged gnashing of teeth around what the term "actually means". It happened with SOA and it happened/is happening with Web 2.0. These debates tend to follow a pattern - the terms start shrouded in mystery and anyone who can explain it is a Very Clever Person. Then someone comes along and says that it's nothing new, just merely a new way of marketing technology concepts that have been around for ages. These people are Really Very Clever People as they have managed to expose the Very Clever People and can obviously think outside the box. They will often start sentences with the phrase "let's turn this on it's head" or "are we looking at this the wrong way?"

This poses a problem for consultancies working in these industries. When I used to work for organisations that were involved in SOA we had a dilemma. So we adopt and market ourselves using the SOA terminology or try to rise above it and just focus on what solutions we offer, never mind whether the industry terms it SOA or not? The problem with abandoning the term 'SOA' was that there were people, often in quite senior positions, even CIOs - who had heard the term 'SOA' and desperately needed help in understanding what it meant to their organisation. If we rose above the debate, we would miss this market.

I keep asking myself whether history is repeating itself at Trovus with Web 2.0. If we spend time getting involved in the debate as to what Web 2.0 means that is time not spent thinking about what services and products we should be offering our customers. However, if we don't embrace the label, we lose out on a segment of the market which is genuinely struggling to come to terms with what this latest label means.

Personally, I think the term Web 2.0 is going to create far more problems than it helps (more so than SOA ever did) - but that will wait for the next post.

Next generation video conferencing

Wow. This clip below from Cisco is truly unbelievable. I have never really given Cisco a huge amount of credit for developing interesting products (switches & routers??) - but this clip below showing their Star Trek like video conferencing solution was incredibly impressive. Second Life suddenly has some serious competition around virtual training!! Thanks to Mark Adams of Logicalis for posting on the IT Sanctuary.

Virtual training - does this make Second Life useful?

I've always had a bit of a problem with Second Life. It's not as easy to show how businesses can really derive value from it in the same way as you can with blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 stuff. I know that companies such as IBM have created islands for virtual meetings but I've yet to hear someone say "without Second Life we would not have been able to achieve xyz business results" whereas there are plenty of hard and fast business metrics that have been achieved through the adoption of other Web 2.0 technologies (read Wikinomics or Naked Conversations if you don't believe me).

However - back to the medicine theme - training seems to be the gateway to the Golden Age of Second Life. In the same Junior Doctor magazine that prompted my recent post on Medicine 2.0 there is a discussion on using Second Life for medical training. One such project is the Ann Myers Medical Center where doctors can be trained in initial examinations, and analysing MRIs, CRT and X-rays. The process can be collaborative, where groups of students work together on a simulation with a mentor. As well as this project, medical libraries exist (such as the Medical Island on Health Info Island) and areas of speciality for cardiology, neurology and genetics. The advantages for students in areas where the latest technologies or latest techniques could be vast.

Personally, I think it is these practical subjects, such as medicine, construction, architecture etc. where virtual worlds add significant value. An IBM meeting can be accomplished quite easily using conference call and screen sharing technologies - where there is something physical that groups of people need to work on together provides an environment for Second Life to offer significant advantages.

Medicine 2.0

I was reading an editorial in the recent Junior Doctor magazine (my fiance is a doctor...) and was struck by the similarities of how the web is changing medicine and how it is changing business. The editorial noted the tendency toward self diagnosis (Google) and self treatment (eBay) given the wealth of information readily available on the Internet, and questioned the future role of Doctors for 'simple' conditions. But this quotation struck me:

"we've become brokers and project managers arranging services our client is requesting"

This sounded rather familiar - so I dug out "the Bible" (Wikinomics) and found something similar:

"companies are focused a new challenge as well: managing an increasingly seamless and supple fusion of design and development expertise from multiple suppliers, partners, and customers in global design and process collaborations."

OK - so the editorial from Junior Doctor is slightly more pithy, there is definitely a parallel here. Large organisations such as Boeing and BMW are no longer engineering firms, rather they project manage a collaborative process across multiple companies that brings their product to life. They have decided to focus on being the best at what their customers value (in BMW's case the driving experience, which is more about the software components of the car rather than efficient engine engineering). The same applies to Doctors. Patients will not value their diagnoses and remedies for ailments for which Google can provide the answers and eBay the drugs. Therefore Doctors end up project managing this area of care rather than adding value.

Leaving the question of the reliability and danger of self diagnosing aside, this is not necessarily a bad thing. If Doctors are not tied up dealing with 'simple' ailments presumably they will have more time to fix the 'complex' ones - just as how BMW is able to focus more on their drivers' experience if they outsource the more traditional engineering R&D.