Brian Tullis and Joe Crumpler did a lively talk on Enterprise 2.0 and Observable Work at the Burton Group Catalyst 2010 North America conference in San Diego. For those of us who couldn't be there in person, see their Abstract quoted below and the enthusiastic Twitter stream from 29 Jul 2010! I'll add a link to their speaker notes and slides when they become available. Update: Brian posted Enterprise 2.0 and Observable work slides, see inline from Slideshare below. Sounded like a super session!

Abstract: Most large organizations face huge challenges in staying aligned, knowing when and how to collaborate, and capturing knowledge for future use. Traction TeamPage has allowed a large virtual team at Alcoa Fastening Systems to implement principles of “Observable Work” – which for us means making visible and transparent the normally arcane processes of Information Technology management. Implementation of observable work practices has increased alignment, collaboration, and knowledge capture in the organization. Topics discussed include:

• What is Observable Work and why is it important?
• Overview of techniques used to manage the flow of information.
• Examination of a successful multi-country ERP project managed with these tools and techniques.
• Areas of improvement and where we go from here.

See also Brian's blog post Observable Work: The Taming of the Flow
Jim McGee's original blog post
Followup discussion and links on Jim's post

Observable Work session Twitter feed

movito @panklam's term "OpenWork" and the just-coined "Observable Work" are more focused & precise. #owork holds far greater potential than #e20. 9 minutes ago via Tweetie for Mac

PhilippBohn RT @gialyons Loving the concept of Observable Work. hashtag is #OWork #cat10 <-- me2 15 minutes ago via CoTweet

movito RT @gialyons Break out of proprietary doc formats, and use addressable hypertext (URLs) ← it's the best way forward #cat10 #alcoa #owork 33 minutes ago via Tweetie for Mac

movito RT @MikeGotta Observable work: make status of work visible and avoid needless "status meetings" - status available to all that care #owork 42 minutes ago via Tweetie for Mac

movito RT @MikeGotta Observable work principles applied to project freed up 30% labor due to reduced meetings #cat10 #owork #socbiz 2 minutes ago via Tweetie for Mac

gialyons Really great content here at Burton Group Catalyst Conference, esp. in the Social Means Business track. #cat10 13 minutes ago via Seesmic

gialyons Hey @Greg2dot0, @joecrumpler just presented about how Alcoa saved 100 hours by using #socbiz for project status updates. #OWork #cat10 14 minutes ago via Seesmic

gialyons Loving the concept of Observable Work. hashtag is #OWork #cat10 26 minutes ago via Seesmic

aewang “@scottylogan: @joecrumpler @briantullis great presentation on observable work #cat10 #OWork” totally agree 24 minutes ago via Twitter for iPhone

gialyons Most excellent prezzy from @joecrumpler @briantullis at #Alcoa #cat10 24 minutes ago via Seesmic

scottylogan @joecrumpler @briantullis great presentation on observable work #cat10 #OWork 25 minutes ago via YoruFukurou

MikeGotta RT @gialyons: Traditional daily status process: 4hrs, 3 times/wk w/10 ppl=loss of 120 hrs of project labor, new process saves 100 hrs #cat10 25 minutes ago via TweetDeck

catatweet RT @gialyons Traditional process took 4hrs, 3 times/wk w/10 ppl=loss of 120 hrs of project labor. New #socbiz process saves #cat10. WOW!!! 26 minutes ago via Twittelator in reply to gialyons [:Blog:quotes]

mikerollings "observable work" - anybody that ever experienced "death by meetings" would appreciate this approach #cat10 26 minutes ago via Echofon [:Blog:quotes]

aewang Awesome presentation by the Aloca guys on E2.0 and Observable Work #cat10 26 minutes ago via Twitterrific

gialyons Project mgr throws an "explosion of information hand grenade" via #socbiz for others who care. Like mgrs. #alcoa #cat10 27 minutes ago via Seesmic

mikerollings "Observable work" reduces project status meetings because issues and accomplishments are transparent to team members as they occur #cat10 28 minutes ago via Echofon

dustinupdyke Can I take @JoeCrumpler to work on Monday to clear our path of pointless meetings? #cat10 28 minutes ago via TweetDeck

lcannell Observable work also enables better focused meetings (not just reduces them), more productive use of (expensive) F2F time #cat10 28 minutes ago via TweetDeck [:Blog:quotes]

gialyons Traditional daily status process took 4hrs, 3 times/wk w/10 ppl=loss of 120 hrs of project labor. New #socbiz process saves 100 hrs. #cat10 28 minutes ago via Seesmic

MikeGotta Observable work principals applied to project freed up 30% labor due to reduced meetings #cat10 29 minutes ago via TweetDeck

catatweet Status as you work. #cat10. Reduce meetings. 30% increase in actual work. The result of observable work is reduced need for meetings. 30 minutes ago via Twittelator

gialyons Reduce meetings is a result of observable work using #socbiz software; got 30% more labor out of teams, too. #cat10 #alcoa 30 minutes ago via Seesmic

scottylogan reducing number of meetings led to a 30% increase in actual work #cat10 30 minutes ago via YoruFukurou

catatweet Manage content streams, read, and remain aware. #cat10. A key objective of the observable work principle. 31 minutes ago via Twittelator

jakrose @gialyons amen #cat10 #alcoa 32 minutes ago via TweetDeck in reply to gialyons

MikeGotta "Status as you work" ... whether status telegraphs positive or negative news - all visible, transparent - and "observable" #cat10 32 minutes ago via TweetDeck

catatweet Use #social technology to have LESS MEETINGS by leveraging the status reporting inherent in the technology. #cat10 32 minutes ago via Twittelator

mikerollings Principle: achieve status from observable work #cat10 words to live by 38 minutes ago via Echofon

gialyons Heh. sitting next to a fellow former Certified Lotus Instructor (CLI) #cat10 #bleedyellowstilljustalittle 38 minutes ago via Seesmic

aewang RT @MikeGotta Observable work: make status of work visible and avoid needless "status meetings" - status available to all that care #cat10 38 minutes ago via Twitterrific

scottylogan terrifying slide of kid with circular saw! #cat10 40 minutes ago via YoruFukurou

ericzigus http://tweetphoto.com/35608795 funny pictures in #alcoa presentation #cat10 40 minutes ago via Touiteur

aewang RT @MikeGotta Concept of "observable work" a new way to operate at Alcoa Fasteners #cat10 great concept 41 minutes ago via Twitterrific

scottylogan Alcoa guys: Use addressable hypertext rather than (proprietary) documents #cat10 41 minutes ago via YoruFukurou

MikeGotta Alcoa took a project that normally takes up to 18 months in 7 months #cat10 (QAD implementation in China using Traction TeamPage) 41 minutes via TweetDeck [:Blog:quotes]

gialyons "here's a piece of content, please comment, we'll change content based on what you say, let you know when it's changed." #cat10 #alcoa 41 minutes ago via Seesmic

gialyons Break out of proprietary doc formats, and use addressable hypertext (URLs) #cat10 #alcoa 41 minutes ago via Seesmic

MikeGotta Observable work: make status of work visible and avoid needless "status meetings" - status available to all that care #cat10 41 minutes ago via TweetDeck

dustinupdyke Doing the work in an observable way eliminates the need for status metings #cat10 41 minutes ago via TweetDeck

catatweet Meetings suck! One outcome of observal work is that status is apparent to anyone that needs it #cat10 41 minutes ago via Twittelator [:Blog:quotes]

gialyons Do your work in an observable way (via #socbiz), and others will see it, make mental connections b/n theirs and yours. #cat10 #Alcoa 42 minutes ago via Seesmic

scottylogan Alcoa don't like meetings - observable work reduces the need for meetings #cat10 42 minutes ago via YoruFukurou

mikelor Make people realize that they are inside a ecosystem, encourage clickable and linkable content. #cat10 42 minutes ago via TweetDeck

gialyons People need to know how what they do is linked to what others do in the company #cat10 #alcoa 42 minutes ago via Seesmic

bduhon RT @gialyons: If you create a community of trust, they'll be comfy working together outside of hierarchy #cat10 42 minutes ago via HootSuite

catatweet Authority to update content - don't worry about it. The right thing will happen. #cat10 #OWork 42 minutes ago via Twittelator

jamiemlewis That's the goal. Glad to hear it's working. ;-) RT @JBrodkin: Great tech content at #cat10. Very little marketing BS. 43 minutes ago via TweetDeck

gialyons Need to interject social in what you do, especially if you're in IT. #alcoa #cat10 43 minutes ago via Seesmic

MikeGotta Sign of an unhealthy culture is a mindset that thinks they "we" have to survive encounters with "them" (insiders vs. outsiders) #cat10 43 minutes ago via TweetDeck

catatweet Collaboration requires trust. The battle plan rarely survives contact with the enemy (users) ;-) #cat10 43 minutes ago via Twittelator

gialyons Being introverted IT guys, we love to close the doors and focus on transaction work. #cat10 #alcoa 43 minutes ago via Seesmic

handslive #cat10 HR needs to be aware of the impact of the changes they make. OMG yes. 44 minutes ago via Twitter for iPhone

gialyons If you create a community of trust, they'll be comfy working together outside of hierarchy #cat10 44 minutes ago via Seesmic

gialyons Oh, this is shaping up to be a fun and informative preso. #Alcoa #cat10 44 minutes ago via Seesmic

NishantK IMO, if more business processes were structured like a game, more stuff would get done way more efficiently #cat10 44 minutes ago via TweetDeck

dustinupdyke "the battle plan rarely survives first contact with the enemy" #cat10 44 minutes ago via TweetDeck

gialyons ... which leads to better performing team and company. #cat10 about 1 hour ago via Seesmic

catatweet Why observable work is important. Common aps and processes, within a world of compliance and accountability - we can control work! #cat10 about 1 hour ago via Twittelator

gialyons Alcoa hypothesis: Implementing observable work PRINICPLES through enabling TECH creates stronger connections w/customers & colleagues #cat10 about 1 hour ago via Seesmic

gialyons Alcoa makes fasteners that go on large things. Like airliners, trucks, etc. #cat10 about 1 hour ago via Seesmic

gialyons Alcoa is up now. #cat10 Brian Tullis, Joe Crumpler presenting about 1 hour ago via Seesmic

catatweet Observable work principles in the realm of #social presented by Alcoa here at #cat10 about 1 hour ago via Twittelator

MikeGotta Concept of "observable work" a new way to operate at Alcoa Fasteners #cat10 about 1 hour ago via TweetDeck

ericzigus standard disclaimer from #Alcoa about ideas are their personal ideas not of their companies #cat10 about 1 hour ago via TweetDeck

roundtrip "Enterprise 2.0 and Observable Work" @BrianTullis and @JoeCrumpler session @ #cat10 11:50am PDT #OWork #E20 about 4 hours ago via Osfoora for iPhone

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Jim McGee, Managing Director at New Shoreham Consulting, expert on organizational design and change management for Enterprise 2.0 and Social Media Technologies will deliver the Traction User Group 2010 opening keynote in Newport Rhode Island on Oct 13. Jim is also well known as the author of the popular McGee's Musings weblog on Knowledge Management, Enterprise 2.0 and Social Media technology. On Twitter follow Jim as @JMcGee.

Jim is a highly regarded expert in organizational design and change management. He works with senior executives in organizations to formulate, structure, and solve problems in the effective use of information technology in complex knowledge work settings. Jim has experience as an entrepreneur, senior executive, professor, author, blogger, speaker, systems developer, designer, and consultant. His previous positions include Director at Huron Consulting Group, Professor of Electronic Commerce and Technology Innovation at the Kellogg School of Management, and as Founding Partner at Diamond Management and Technology Consultants. Jim has an MBA and doctorate from Harvard Business School, and an undergraduate degree in Statistics from Princeton University.

See also 12-15 Oct 2010 | Fifth Annual Traction User Group Meeting, TUG 2010 Newport

Get detailed information on TUG 2010 Newport and register at http://TUG.TractionSoftware.com

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Last week's post by Jim McGee Managing the visibility of knowledge work kicked off a nice conversation on Observable Work (using a term introduced by Jon Udell) including: my blog post expanding on a comment I wrote on Jim's post; Brian Tullis's Observable Work: The Taming of the Flow based on a comment Brian made on Jim's post, which he found from a Twitter update by @jmcgee retweeted by @roundtrip; a Twitter conversation using the hash tag #OWork (for "Observable Work"); John Tropea's comment back to Jim from a link in a comment I left on John's Ambient Awareness is the new normal post; Jim's Observable work - more on knowledge work visibility (#owork), linking back to Mary Abraham's TMI post and Jack Vinson's Invisible Work - spray paint needed post, both written in response to Jim's original post; followed by Jack Vinson's Explicit work (#owork) and Paula Thornton's Enterprise 2.0 Infrastructure for Synchronicity.

That's a bunch of links! But I include them for a reason. [ For anyone who finds the presence of inline links distracting, see Apology to the Easily Distracted, below. ]

This modest trail is not only observable - it's spread over about a dozen posts on eight unrelated blog servers using unrelated software, loosely coupled by conversations, links and hash tags observable in the Web commons known as Twitter. The only things that connect this trail are links, search, syndicated feeds and serendipity. In the words of Ted Nelson this is an intertwingled trail - although not very deeply intertwingled, and not that easy to follow.

That brings three points to mind:

1) The fact that "intertwingle" is an amusing word can obscure an important idea I believe Ted Nelson is a Casandra-like inventor blessed and cursed with a rapier wit and the ability to invent concepts and coin terms that stick deeply in peoples minds. Hypertext one of the terms Ted coined and concepts he invented - working independently from Doug Engelbart at about the same time - inspired by the work of Vannevar Bush.

One of Ted's mantras: "EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED. In an important sense there are no "subjects" at all; there is only all knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly." Ted Nelson, Computer Lib / Dream Machines, 1974

Although I think it's useful to believe in the existence of subjects (and spoons), in the past content, conversations and analysis could only be intertwingled across paper memos, faxes, written reports (and email). Until the advent of the Web it wasn't possible to intertwingle conversations, networks, analysis and work at a global and near-universal scale. Now that's trivial and essentially free if you have Web access.

2) The Web does what it's intended to do, so long as content is addressable and findable. The trail on observable work isn't stored in one specific place - but with a little effort it's possible to follow the flow and join the conversation.

The fact that blog posts and comments are created and served by wildly different content server systems is irrelevant, so long as the content is addressable using basic Web standards. How the different servers store the addressed content internally is likewise irrelevant so long as they deliver the content using Web content standards.

The fact that no one has to create a common place to contain a trail is an advantage of the Web, not a disadvantage. It makes finding and linking harder, but creation and association infinitely easier than attempting to force the world into the "Observable Work" discussion area you create in one specific blog, wiki, Wave or whatever.

The Web succeeds succeeds by making it possible for anyone anywhere to create a trail which others can find, follow and join using nothing more than their own Web browser, Web search layered over the basic Web and Twitter as one good example of a Web commons.

The Web doesn't guarantee that you'll be aware of conversations on observable work going on in other trails unless you search or stumble upon a link which leads you connect the two. I don't follow discussions on LinkedIn, but might be alerted to something interesting there by someone I follow in a commons like Twitter where I do participate.

The fact that everything posted publicly on Web is potentially observable doesn't lead mean you have to deal with Too Much Information shoved in your face - or into your email box.

You choose who and what to follow, augmented by Web search and your ability to jump in and join or forget about and a trail at any time - although you might hold on to a link so it's easy to find the trail again if you change your mind.

3) Business context makes observable work easier to create, discover and use. Unlike the public Web, work in a private or public organization has a purpose and context that can make observable work easier to discover and talk about. Work and discussion in an organization generally take place in the context of broad business activities like sales, product development, research, finance or administration. Context in an enterprise can be represented as places where work and conversation takes place with reliable privacy aware search, tagging, linking, comments, status updates and activity streams. [ For Traction Software's take on this concept, please see Traction TeamPage 5.0: Social Software for Work ]

I strongly believe the important point is supporting business context - not business process in the sense of transactional workflow or automated systems. I believe that functionally specialized transactional systems in an organization will likely remain silos of structured information - but market forces will drive vendors to make their content addressable using simple Web standards and services - with appropriate authentication and privacy in context.

These functionally specialized systems will also signal their status using social computing standards that are now starting to take shape. This will push routine reporting and dealing with exceptions from transactional systems into the "social" places where people can stay informed, recognize issues and exceptions and decide what to do. In an ideal world, transactional systems would provide authenticated access to Web addressable content or analysis, signals based on routing activity or exceptions, Web sensible control interfaces - and not a much more. Most human access would be handled on the Web rather than transactional processing side. I believe the Web has become a valid, scalable and secure alternative to proprietary stacks for integrating most enterprise software at the user experience level.

Much of what a sociologist would call "social" behavior when talking about Enterprise 2.0 would naturally center on the sociology of work: how people communicate and interact with others while dealing with questions, issues, exceptions, suggestions and the messy stuff that routine transactional systems can't handle, along with interpersonal relationships that develop in a specific context or as member of an extended enterprise (including customers, suppliers, consultants and external as well as internal stakeholders).

On top of relationships based well established patterns of work and conversation - Andrew McAfee's strong ties - enterprise social software opens the door to discovering people and groups who most folk in a large organization would never meet face to face.

This offers the same opportunities for serendipitous discovery we see on the public Web, but with privacy in context which enables open discussion and shared goals and purpose that are part of what Peter Drucker calls the purpose of an organization: "The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary humans beings to do extraordinary things."

Much of what's challenging about using "observable work" principles can be addressed by examples at top, middle and grassroots levels of an organization. What's needed is a willingness to tolerate and encourage observable work in the small under local control, and leadership to make it an enterprise norm.

As Paula Thornton says: "For as much as people want to make Enterprise 2.0 about technologies, then I’m willing to concede this: Enterprise 2.0 is the means by which to achieve Work 2.0 to deliver Business 2.0."

To be continued Jim, Brian, John, Mary, Jack, Paula, Mark, Gordon, Rawn, Jose, JP, Tom, Deb and the rest of the World - over to you. The best way to follow the evolution of the Observable Work trail is Twitter's #OWork tag. All of the participant's seem to use Twitter as a commons linking posts that either directly respond to the Observable Work conversation, or are related in some interesting way, such as Tom Peter's Strategy: Space Matters ("who sits next to whom in your office can make a huge difference"), JP Rangaswami's Musing about learning by doing, Deb Lavoy's Common Operating Picture - share facts, debate possibilities, John Tropea's link to Keith Swanson's excellent slide set, and John's soon-to-be-published post on Adaptive Case Management.

Unfortunately neither Twitter nor Google's hash tag search seems complete and reliable. So far as I can tell not all Tweets mentioning #OWork are found by either service. There's room for improvement on the public Web as well as the Enterprise 2.0 domain.

Apology to the Easily Distracted: Readers who find embedded links distracting don't have to click while reading the paragraph. I apologize if using the Web to source references that would be unimaginably difficult to provide in any other medium (paper?) is a distraction. I believe it's not hard to exercise a little discipline when reading, then go back and click any links where you'd like to dive deeper based on your interests. I like to put a small number of See Also links at the bottom of posts where you can dive deeper if you choose.

See also

Blog936: Reinventing the Web - Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee and the evolution of the Web

Blog384: Enterprise 2.0 - Letting hypertext out of its box - Hypertext and the Web

Blog1014: Explaining Twitter - One of Three Places for People - Neighborhood, Work, Commons

User Experience Standards for Social Computing in the Enterprise Notes for Mike Gotta E2.0 Boston panel

Blog1351: Enterprise 2.0 and Observable Work - Riff on a theme by Jim McGee and Jon Udell

Blog1461: 29 July 2010 | Enterprise 2.0 and Observable Work: Brian Tullis and Joe Crumpler, Burton Group Catalyst 2010 Santa Diego

20 June 2005 | Supernova | Why Can't a Business Work More Like the Web? - White paper

Blog1185: Peter Drucker and Enterprise 2.0 | Drucker Centenary - Why Enterprise 2.0?

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I really like Jim McGee's Jun 23 blog post Managing the visibility of knowledge work. Jim makes the excellent point that "Invisibility is an accidental and little-recognized characteristic of digital knowledge work." and points back to his 2002 post Knowledge Work as Craft Work to reflect on what Jim calls a "dangerous tension between industrial frameworks and knowledge work as craft work". Early in his 2002 post he says:

The Importance of visibility in craft work
Almost by definition, the final product, process, and intermediate stages of craft work are visible. Consider your experiences at a glass blowing workshop or touring a silversmith's workshop. The journey from apprentice to master craftsman depends on the visibility of all aspects of craft work.

Jim continues with an exceptional analysis of what he calls "Knowledge work today as invisible craft":

One unintended consequence of today's technology environment is to make the process of knowledge work less visible just when we need it to be more so. The end products of knowledge work are already highly refined abstractions; a financial analysis, project plan, consulting report, or article. Today, the evolution from germ of an idea through intermediate representations and false starts to finished product exists, if at all, as a series of morphing digital representations and ephemeral feedback interactions.

It's a really good analysis - please read the full post!

Two connections sprang to mind (and I didn't need a hyperlink to divert my attention - mea culpa):

1) Jon Udell's April 2009 talk at the April 2009 Open Education Conference. Udell says:

"In the pre-industrial era, education and work were: Observable, connected
In the post-industrial era, they are: Non-observable, disconnected"

Jon notes that only recently have work processes become network observable, and that this was rare in practice for all but software people. Jon speculates that software folk's norms of feedback, iterative refinement and testable outcomes seem aligned with principles of observable work - and they've become comfortable with networked technology after using the Internet for collaborative development of software and standards over many years.

2) Thomas Stewart in the Wealth of Knowledge (and my personal experience working on projects at the Naval Research Laboratory many years ago). Stewart says:

"A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard," said Herman Melville's Ishmael; when it came to learning my job, circulating correspondence was mine. Reading my superiors' letters opened a window into how they conducted business with the world outside; I aped things more experienced colleagues did, and saw how they handled tricky situations; I copied useful addresses into my Rolodex (another antique). I learned who knew what, and that made me better at asking for advice."

I don’t think the notion of visible work or observable work is new: mentoring, apprenticeship, and letting trusted folk watch, learn and use what they see on their own is how law, medicine and other professions were originally taught and refined as collaborative practices - and it's still so today. But as Jim McGee points out, we've lost some of the habits of observable work - to some degree intentionally, to some degree due to blinders added by the tools we've grown comfortable using:

"With e-mail, word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation tools, maintaining visibility of your knowledge work (at both the individual and workgroup level) requires mindful effort. An office full of papers and books provided clues about the knowledge work process; a laptop offers few such clues. A file directory listing is pretty thin in terms of useful knowledge sharing content. In an analog process, it’s easy to discern the history and flow of work. When an executive takes a set of paper slides and rearranges them on a conference room floor, a hidden and compelling story line may be revealed. You can see, and learn from, this fresh point of experience. That’s lost when the same process occurs at a laptop keyboard at 35,000 feet. The gain in personal productivity occurs at the expense of organizational learning."

I believe that Enterprise 2.0 principles open the door to making most work observable throughout an enterprise. There are important exceptions to protect the privacy of employee medical, financial and personnel records as well as Board and other discussions which require an exceptional degree of privacy until approved for release or for a longer term. I believe that Enterprise 2.0 collaboration principles apply equally to these more private domains within the enterprise as well as domains open to most employees. With appropriate attention to security and privacy in context, most collaborative work with external stakeholders including clients, customers, suppliers can also be made observable throughout the enterprise while simultaneously respecting privacy among clients, customers, suppliers, and all internal stakeholders.

Jim suggests that principles of observable work apply to the flow of work as well as the work product:

"The right starting point is to simply make the flow of work more visible. I suspect that this is one of the underlying attractions of social networking and micro-blogging. They promise to restore some visibility to digital team work that we lost in the first generation of tools."

I agree with Jim's suggestion. I also suggest that both the flow of work and the collaborative work product recognize privacy in context for authoring, linking, tagging, discussion, content navigation and search that seamlessly connects the worlds of flow and content. This makes it possible for almost everyone in an enterprise to be potentially aware of almost everything their organization is doing - and who knows what - to the benefit of each individual and to the enterprise as a whole.

I believe Traction TeamPage 5.0 is exceptionally well equipped to enable that vision - that's our explicit goal - but please see for yourself.

I believe that principles of open, observable work – like open book financial reporting to employees - is a simple and powerful principle that people at every level of an organization can become comfortable using. In my opinion, wider adoption of observable work principles can succeed with support and encouragement from true leaders at every level of an organization - as Peter Drucker defines that role: "A manager's task is to make the strengths of people effective and their weakness irrelevant--and that applies fully as much to the manager's boss as it applies to the manager's subordinates."

See also

Blog1424: Intertwingled Work
Blog1185: Peter Drucker and Enterprise 2.0 | Drucker Centenary
Blog1163: Enterprise 2.0 Schism
Blog691: Borders, Spaces, and Places
Blog446: Learn by watching - Then do
Blog50: Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart

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While building our new GWT-based Proteus skin for Traction TeamPage 5.0, we created some widgets and utilities that we thought other developers would find useful. Most of these are pretty simple, but we hope they save other GWT developers some time. As we factor out code that can be shared with others, we'll add more to this gwt-traction Google community project.

As a TeamPage 5.0 user, you'll notice that this is just a tiny fragment of the functionality we built for Proteus. Most of the great widgets we built, like the PillBox and auto-expanding TextAreas, are dependent on other libraries and other sections of code that are more difficult to share. We'll be working to make more of this code available under the Apache 2.0 license.

The goal for the first release was to share some solutions to issues that most GWT developers encounter, regardless of the kind of application they might be building.

Learn more about gwt-traction at http://code.google.com/p/gwt-traction/

Learn more about the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) at http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/

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Since introducing the idea of Social Process Reengineering? earlier this week I've socialized it virtually and personally (at E2.0 Boston) with at least a dozen customers, bloggers, analysts and other leading thinkers.

Consensus on the concept was generally positive with a variety of feedback ranging from the matter that the "facebook" approach doesn't just work in the enterprise to the matter that the social, structural and business pain have to be taken into account for successful E2.0 efforts.

Two real gems came out of conversations with John Tropea and Nick Gall.

John pointed me to a recent post, Bridging the Enterprise Gap for a new level of literacy, where he references a similar June 4th post by Rex Lee titled Beyond Serendipity for Enterprise 2.0. Rex says we need:

a shift from emergence to social engineering. Social engineering, not in the IT security sense, or Machiavellian sense, but as a means to better focus and harness intellectual capital for specific business purposes.

Serendipitous is the timing of our respective thoughts on social engineering!! Of greater importance is the message of course. His emphasis on a solution points to the engagement factors which include Motivation, Opportunity and Capability. I'll concur that grasping and addressing these factors and then casting them in context of a use case and E2.0 platform structure for supporting the use case are of cardinal importance for those of us looking to maximize success of a use case and achieve the 10x results needed for success.

Separately, I got in touch with Nick Gall (an enterprise architecture and design thinker at Gartner) after watching Introducing Hybrid Thinking where he opened by saying "all too often we are doing architecture to people rather than architecture for people." He comes back to his foundational point in the conclusion of his talk by showing the T-Shirt pictured here. I think its a brilliant reminder that the goal of IT is for human productivity, with a balance of consideration of standards, rather than the other way around. This sounds like E2.0 (doing architecture for people) vs. E1.0 (doing architecture to people). I reached out to Nick figuring he would be keen on concepts of a Social Architect or Social Process Engineer who may lay foundations where emergent work could achieve best returns. Turns out he prefers the metaphor of a Farmer or Gardener, but the semantic debate will take me too far into the weeds.

At E2.0 he swung by for a tour of TeamPage 5.0 and, in discussion of Social Process Reeingeering, he came up with (and even told me I could claim) a modification: Social Process Emergineering.

I liked it. I called another design thinker, Paula Thornton, to chew on this further and we resolved that the term Emergineering is inherently social (emergent) and inherently considerate of process (engineering).

So, Emergineering it is. Lets run with it.

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On Tuesday June 15, 2010 we'll introduce Traction TeamPage Release 5.0 to the world at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. TeamPage Release 5.0's new generation Proteus interface technology is fast, simple, and looks great. TeamPage 5.0 leverages this technology to add extensible personal profile pages, Twitter style personal status, group live blog technology, slick and simple Feed summary and more as a natural part of Traction's award winning Enterprise 2.0 platform.

I believe Proteus lives up to the TUG 2009 Proteus mantra: Fast, Simple, Beautiful and hope you agree. I'd like to thank all of the members of the Traction Software Team for imagining, designing and bringing Proteus to life - particularly Andy Keller, Chris Nuzum, Dave Shepperton and Michael Angeles. I'd also like to thank the Traction TeamPage customers who worked closely with us in the conceptual design, mockup, wireframe and preview stages of Proteus, social networking, and project management extensions.

Please see Traction Traction TeamPage 5.0: Social Software for Work for a brief white paper on TeamPage 5.0 including a tour of these slides:

A release candidate for Traction TeamPage 5.0 is available today for download and installation by customers - including users of the free five user TeamPage configuration.

TeamPage 5.0 is also running on Traction Software’s corporate TeamPage server which provides free access (registration required). Register today to join the conversation and download a free copy of Traction TeamPage 5.0.

I hope you all enjoy using TeamPage 5.0 as much as everyone at Traction Software already does. Tell your friends!

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Enterprise 2.0 Boston MA — June 15, 2010 — A fresh look at how social networking and collaboration work for business Traction® Software, the leading developer of enterprise 2.0 social software for secure, scalable collaboration, today announced Traction® TeamPage Release 5.0. This release uses Traction’s new generation Proteus interface technology to deliver a look and feel that’s fast, easy to use, and looks great. TeamPage 5.0 leverages this technology to integrate extensible personal profile pages, Twitter style personal status, group live blog technology, a slick and simple Feed summary and more as natural parts of Traction's award winning Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform. Read » full release

See also Traction TeamPage 5.0: Social Software for Work

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Enterprise 2.0 Boston MA — June 15, 2010 — A fresh look at how social networking and collaboration work for business — Traction® Software, the leading developer of enterprise 2.0 social software for secure, scalable collaboration, today announced Traction® TeamPage™ Release 5.0. This release uses Traction’s new generation Proteus interface technology to deliver a look and feel that’s fast, easy to use, and looks great. TeamPage 5.0 leverages this technology to integrate extensible personal profile pages, Twitter style personal status, group live blog technology, a slick and simple Feed summary and more as natural parts of Traction's award winning Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform.

TeamPage 5.0 puts social software to work for activities that matter most for business including new product development, sales, life cycle product support, communication with clients and sales partners, collaboration with customers and key suppliers, tracking business issues, marketing and competitive intelligence.

“Ever since we made it possible for groups to communicate and collaborate by easily posting, editing and tagging pages, we’ve been seeking new ways to improve, enrich and leverage information in the course of doing every day work,” said Greg Lloyd, President and CEO of Traction Software. “TeamPage 5.0 makes it simple to stay informed and connect with others using a networked communication and collaboration model that simple to understand, powerful and delightful to use.”

Traction TeamPage Release 5.0 Highlights

• Proteus User Interface Technology - Fast, clean, beautiful. Pure Web technology looks and acts like a dedicated client using Google Web Toolkit (GWT).
• Extensible Profiles – Shows each person’s profile profile, status stream, actions.
• Personal status– Auto updating personal status including a Twitter-style follow model. Click any author name in blog, wiki, comment or status content to see that person’s brief contact information, current status update and link to that person’s profile.
• Group live blogs – Auto updating conversations in a project space with a purpose e.g. Competitive Intel, Sales, Support which can be wide open or protected
• Feed view – A compact summary of new content, edit, tag actions, follow actions and more viewable by person, project space, or rolled up to summarize an activity stream crossing all spaces you have permission to see. Great for situational awareness,
• Expanding Feed – Click the expand icon next to any Feed item and it smoothly expands to reveal the content or action it summarizes.
• TeamPage Microsoft Outlook Social Connector – Shows TeamPage Personal profiles and status in Microsoft Outlook to provide social context for email and Microsoft Office applications.
• Extends the Traction Platform - Traction TeamPage is built as an extensible platform with a core Java API and Java source code and documentation for the Traction Software Skin Definition Language (SDL) layer that’s freely available to customers and developers. Release 5.0 extends the platform, adding Proteus, GWT and social networking support.

Integrated social networking and collaboration for business

Traction TeamPage 5.0 delivers fresh look at the challenging problem of providing secure and efficient integration of social networking and collaboration in a business context while also delivering a straightforward and delightful user experience. Personal profile pages, status updates, feed views and live blog posts are all managed using Traction TeamPage's permissioned space model. This automatically shows only the subset of status or feed actions which a user has permission to read, and makes it simple to give external or internal stakeholders privacy with respect to other stakeholder groups (e.g. different clients of the same law firm), while making barriers transparent to internal stakeholders. Personal profile pages, status updates and live blog posts can be commented on, tagged and linked to and edited (with a full audit trail) like all other TeamPage pages and posts. Personal profile pages, status updates and live blog posts can be indexed and analyzed using Traction’s optional Attivio Advanced Search option which provides dynamic, permission aware faceted navigation, sentiment analysis and more. Attivio’s advanced search and content navigation not only makes profile pages, status updates and live blog post easy to find, but also automatically clusters authors, conversations and collaboratively created content in context to connect the dots between people as well as the content they create.

TeamPage 5.0 Release Candidate Shipping Today

A release candidate for Traction TeamPage 5.0 is available today for download and installation by customers - including users of the free five user TeamPage configuration. Teampage 5.0 is also running on Traction Software’s corporate TeamPage server which provides free access, registration required, see http://www.TractionSoftware.com. Release 5.0 is a free upgrade for TeamPage customers covered by a software maintenance subscription.

About Traction TeamPage - Breakthrough in Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration
Traction TeamPage 5.0, the latest version of Traction’s award-winning Enterprise 2.0 social software platform, combines wiki, blog, social tagging, discussion and social networking capabilities in a secure, scalable collaboration platform. Global 1000 and government customers use TeamPage to collaboratively create and share valuable information such as market research, competitive intelligence, corporate and customer communications, product plans, and business development resources.

Traction TeamPage is the only product that gives you the freedom to use the simple search, linking, naming, navigation and editing model you expect in Web 2.0 for collaborative editing while also making it easy to view, click through and search the latest stable version of all pages for authoritative reference. TeamPage seamlessly integrates personal profiles, social networking and activity views that enable people to work effectively and openly.

About Traction Software
Traction Software provides business and government organizations with enterprise social software that enables groups and teams to communicate more effectively. Traction Software's easy to use TeamPage™ software creates a secure communications hub for business information and working communications that collects, organizes, links and shares sources of information in context over time. Traction TeamPage has been named “Best Enterprise Wiki” by InfoWorld. Traction Software has also been named one of the 100 Companies that Matter by KMWorld and a winner of the RedHerring100 and eContent 100 awards. The company distributes its products directly and through global partners. Based in Providence, Rhode Island, Traction Software is a privately held corporation with financing from investors including In-Q-Tel and Slater Interactive. For additional information, visit Traction at http://www.tractionsoftware.com

Traction Software and TeamPage are trademarks of Traction Software. All other names are trademarks of their respective companies

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As much as I hesitate to introduce this term into social software lingo, I think it's exactly what Enterprises are doing with social software on the road to Enterprise 2.0 - striving for a fundamentally new way to work.

Considering various definitions of Business Process Reengineering (BPR), you can start to see what's in common:

"... the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed." Hammer and Champy (1993)

In reference to BPR, Davenport (1993) says that "Today firms must seek not fractional, but multiplicative levels of improvement – 10x rather than 10%."

We are in the same situation today - but trying to achieve those 10x gains with social systems rather than rigid business workflow systems. 10x, while lofty, has to be the goal to overcome the 9x Email problem discussed by Andrew McAfee (in reference to J. T. Gourville's "Why Consumers Don't Buy: The Psychology of New Product Adoption") and explored further by Greg Lloyd in Enterprise 2.0 - Letting Hypertext out of its Box.

Across whatever set of metrics, Social Software has to give adopters the perception that it's 10x better than the alternative.

Andrew McAfee recently posted an entry which ponders What's the Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work? McAfee quotes an E2.0 Evangelist from a big tech company who complained:

"Progress is slower than I’d like. I don’t know why more people aren’t doing more. I think part of it is that we have a huge Intranet, and these tools can be hard to find. I think a lot of our people aren’t even sure they exist.”

McAfee's proposed simple solution is to put a box in every intranet page that urges users to Search, Ask or Share - each with a simple text box for input. In the discussion, McAfee references his own rule to deploy "Tools that deliver something novel - that aren't trying to displace an incumbent - avoid the 9x effect."

I am all for the idea of thinking in simple terms, but the suggestion diverges from answering the challenge to deliver a 10x improvement. The suggestion left me wondering "10x over what?" The Search, Ask, Share idea is on target but an action so simple and attractive as Share is dead on arrival if even a few key stakeholders are 9xd in email.

I am on board with avoiding other incumbent tools (except email which is an open wound advertising the pain resulting from broken processes), but it's vital to realize that any time you move communication to an E2.0 system you are displacing a social process (however it manifests - at the water cooler, in meetings, in email) with a social technology process.

Taking a social process reengineering approach, I take a Druckerian vision which agrees with Greg Lloyd's stance in Enterprise 2.0 Schism:

I believe that although both technology and broad bottom-up participation are necessary to achieve the Drukerian vision, neither element alone is sufficient to achieve the noble end of re-engineering how ordinary people work together to achieve the ends of enterprises they choose to affiliate with.

Its the mix of social and technology that come together to enable, in Drucker's words, "ordinary people to do extraordinary things." But not every technology works and not every social group can simply pick up a tool and run.

If McAfee's E2.0 Evangelist from the tech company is so puzzled about why participation in his E2.0 pilot is not succeeding, he should start considering whether people, teams and departments know their Whats, Hows and Whys:

• What process does the system support for my group, team, department, enterprise? What business pain does it alleviate?
• How, mechanically speaking, do people operate the technology defined in What to achieve the result?
• Why does the How create a perception of 10x ROI - Return On Information

For the last 8 years I've worked on social software with companies and organizations in every pocket of industry, multiple governments in the US and abroad, and non-profits. One of my favorite adoption stories runs counter to what many E2.0 evangelists would ever expect. The deployment was led by Peggy Walker, a grandmother of many at a very conservative, very large, very old mid-western firm. The initial group of adopters were age 40 to 60 - a far cry from the typical Facebook and MySpace generation which some would perceive as a pre-req for E2.0 adoption.

What made this adoption story work, in days and weeks not years, was Peggy's six-sigma green belt which helped her focus one eye on process and one eye on leadership. She was a master of what Paula Thornton recently coined as B2.0: Orchestrated Improvisation. Peggy understood the piece parts of what her orchestra members do in their daily work life, understood the process context in which they worked, and, like a good conductor, was able to lead them, like any good conductor, to play together to the symphonic challenge of the day - which was sure to be ever changing but followed certain patterns and basic structures. Whether the technology was new-fangled or old didn't matter - the key was her ability to figure out What, How and Why. Then she could explain the new process (loosely described as a set of interleaved intelligence communities) and how people could use the technology to do their jobs better.

Social Process Reengineering is a far cry from Business Process Reengineering which may require fleets of consultants and man-years of programmers to arrive at rigid processes that improve the flow of goods through a supply chain.

Instead, SPR requires that we understand our social processes, find the underlying pain points, understand social artifacts, and figure out how to structure for emergence. Finally, the role of leader is not Evangelist, it's Conductor. The individuals who lead the deployment, who work with teams to pile-on use case after use case, need to coordinate their orchestra of workers to outcomes which are inevitably new and always extraordinary.

Converse to man-month BPR planning efforts, SPR can happen in minutes over morning coffee or in a Stewart Mader style afternoon Barn Raising. By way of example, I've talked to a dozen customers about replacing Excel based processes with a New Way to Work and many made the switch immediately.

In fact SPR's flexible and emergent outcomes offers the perfect balance needed by BPR which seeks rigid rules driven outcomes based on process optimization. BPR aims to produce workflow systems for predictable business problems whereas SPR, using social software as the supporting technology, is the agent that lets us plan for change, face competitive threats and leap onto market opportunities. While SPR and BPR seem like opposing concepts, one may just be the Yin to the other's Yang.

One of our customer stories takes me right to this point. At KUKA Systems, an IT team seeded their social software deployment by deploying a set of spaces where anyone at the firm could post issues pertaining to their enterprise systems. They took a social approach to discussing, tracking and executing on changes to these business critical process systems. This is a perfect example of a social process that, to McAfee's point, is one of the simplest things you can do and, meanwhile, has a meaningful and tangible 10x impact on the way issues are handled as well as on the productivity and performance of business systems. Maybe I've just reached the bigger picture point to which John Tropea was referring when he referred to the KUKA Systems customer story as the "Seminal enterprise 2.0 task-based/process soln."

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Traction® TeamPage Release 5.0's new generation interface technology is fast, simple, and looks great. TeamPage 5.0 leverages this technology to deliver personal profile pages, Twitter style personal status, group live blogs, a top down Feed view of activity and more as a natural part of Traction's award winning Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform. TeamPage 5.0 puts social software to work for activities that matter most for your business including new product development, sales, life cycle product support, communication with clients and sales partners, collaboration with customers and key suppliers, tracking business issues, marketing and competitive intelligence.

Traction TeamPage Release 5.0 Highlights

• Proteus User Interface Technology - Fast, clean, beautiful. Pure Web technology looks and acts like a dedicated client using Google Web Toolkit (GWT).
• Extensible Profiles – Shows each person’s profile profile, status stream, actions.
• Personal status– Auto updating personal status including a Twitter-style follow model. Click any author name in blog, wiki, comment or status content to see that person’s brief contact information, current status update and link to that person’s profile.
• Group live blogs – Auto updating conversations in a project space with a purpose e.g. Competitive Intel, Sales, Support which can be wide open or protected
• Feed view – A compact summary of new content, edit, tag actions, follow actions and more viewable by person, project space, or rolled up to summarize an activity stream crossing all spaces you have permission to see. Great for situational awareness,
• Expanding Feed – Click the expand icon next to any Feed item and it smoothly expands to reveal the content or action it summarizes.
• TeamPage Microsoft Outlook Social Connector – Shows TeamPage Personal profiles and status in Microsoft Outlook to provide social context for email and Microsoft Office applications.
• Extends the Traction Platform - Traction TeamPage is built as an extensible platform with a core Java API and Java source code and documentation for the Traction Software Skin Definition Language (SDL) layer that’s freely available to customers and developers. Release 5.0 extends the platform, adding Proteus, GWT and social networking support.

New Generation Interface Technology

Traction's new Proteus skin uses Google Web Toolkit (GWT) technology to deliver a fast and great looking interface that looks and feels more like a modern desktop client than a Web application. GWT allows Proteus to run as a pure Web application using most modern browsers including Internet Explorer 7 or greater, Firefox, Safari, Chrome as well as modern mobile browsers.

This means: No special client libraries to pay for, license, download, install and maintain on every desktop. It also means that you can use Traction TeamPage to communicate and collaborate with people on the public Web in TeamPage spaces open to all or limited to known client, customer, partner or supplier members. Your IT department may lock down the configuration of all company owned computers (and pay client licenses for each one) but your IT department does not have the ability to lock down the computer configuration for everyone on the Web - where customers, suppliers and other external stakeholders live. A pure Web browser interface with no special client software or licenses to manage is a better solution.

Social Software for Work

When people talk about "Facebook or Twitter for the Enterprise" they generally want a combination of capabilities that includes: 1) A personal page for each employee or other stakeholder including basic address card and contact information along with professional and personal information that person is able to edit and willing to share; 2) An easy way for each person to write personal updates that can be seen by others in the company; 3) A way to follow personal updates from everyone in the company (for small companies), or follow selected individuals; 4) A way each person to collect organize, edit and post notes, pictures, or links to internal and external resources that are helpful or interesting. TeamPage 5.0 gives you all of that, along with an automatically generated Feed view which summarizes what that person has written, commented on, edited, tagged, or published across any of the spaces that the person reading the Profile has permission to see.

Basic contact information including email address, telephone number and mailing address can either be automatically pulled from a corporate LDAP or Active Directory server, or maintained on the Traction TeamPage server, e.g. for customers or consultants who don't have corporate LDAP or AD accounts. Profile fields are extensible and searchable like any other TeamPage content, e.g. to find people who speak a particular language.

But Traction TeamPage 5.0's personal profile and personal update features aren't siloed social software systems - they're seamlessly integrated into Traction TeamPage's E2.0 collaboration framework.

Traction's home page shows an automatically generated roll-up of content from all the spaces you have permission to read, organized into newspaper like sections that are simple to configure to gather and present information based on tag, content, or explicit collection. The author name near the title of every TeamPage article, page, comment or feed action line is a live link that you can click to show basic contact information (if that person has authorized sharing) along with a brief bio, last status update, follower summary, and a button that links to the author's profile. If you click on your own name, the second button let you edit your profile. If you click on someone else's name you can follow or unfollow that person with one click.

This means: Every author, editor, or tagger name is a live link to the profile information for that individual along with that persons status and collaborative activity spanning the set of spaces you have permission to read.That is, Wile's posts to the Board of Directors space would be shown in his activity trail only for those folk who have permission to read the Board of Directors space or a Board of Director's article that has been released to a wider readership by cross-tagging it to a more public space.

No matter what page you're looking at, you can also click your name or avatar in the upper right corner to pop to link to your profile, edit your account settings (including preferences), log off, or post a quick status update. The update you post in the mini-status window is automatically pushed as an update to all open TeamPage status windows.

By default your status update is posted to a space shared with other employees that acts like the Twitter commons. Anyone looking at the status update tab in their browser will see your update automatically appear under the Update button, with a subtle highlight that fades in seconds indicating that status has auto-refreshed. You can also post a new status update directly in the status panel by typing in the text box and pressing Update. If you don't want to keep the full status panel open, you can click the stacked windows icon in the upper right corner to launch a mini status window with its own text box, Update button and auto update behavior. You can park the mini status your desktop and glace at as you work on other things.

Unlike Twitter and most social software, by default you can edit and add or remove tags on your own status entries as well as erase your own entries. Traction TeamPage automatically maintains a full audit trail of edits and tag actions for status entries just as it does for Wiki pages, blog entries and comments. A person with setup permission can change the access permission in the "commons" space to tighten (no one can edit their status entries) or loosen (anyone or a selected group of individuals can edit anyone's status entries) business rules for the space.

TeamPage 5.0 also provides live blog capabilities using the same simple auto-update look and feel as the status, but typically are use to provide a real-time group blog in a space devoted to a particular business purpose (e.g. a real-time group blog with a customer service space) versus a server level commons shared for status updates shared by everyone. You can turn on a live blog tab for every space where it's useful and see a permission aware rollup across all live blog content in a tab at on the Home page.

This means: It's easy to configure status and live blog capabilities to support a wide variety of shared or private communication patterns. The ability to edit and retag status updates and live blog posts containing incomplete or incorrect information reduces the change of error when someone reads the misleading information in a status window, RSS / Atom feed or search. Traction's full audit trail of edits and tag actions and edit comparison view allow erroneous edits or actions to be recognized and corrected while following compliance rules.

Flexible notification

In addition to following individuals status updates and their collaborative activity trail, you can also receive automatically generated notifications by email or Jabber message whenever: 1) a specific article is edited, commented on or tagged; 2) a selected author creates, tags or edits content; 3) content is created, tagged or edited within a selected space; 4) content with a selected tag is created, commented on, edited or retagged.

For example, you can select an action to notify you by email any time the tag Emergency is added or removed, or content flagged with the Emergency tag is edited or commented on. The email message show the tag, content, and action that triggered the notification, along with the date/time and person who took the action. The email message is structured so that by adding a note at the beginning of the notification email and clicking reply, your note will automatically be added as a comment on the referenced item (if permissions allow you to post comments).

This means: Email is still the most common form of electronic communication used in business, and it's still a great channel for point to point notification that everyone knows how to use. Traction TeamPage's email notification and reply capabilities were designed in close cooperation with a major international consulting firm and TeamPage customer to make Blackberry road warriors first class citizen's in an E2.0 world.

Integrated search, content navigation, tagging

Traction's Attivio search option indexes over 370 document formats as well as Traction TeamPage content and metadata, delivering search results that only disclose content and metadata hits that the person making the search request is allowed to see. In the example above Greg Lloyd is the TeamPage author of 32 articles containing the word "Providence" in spaces and articles that Wile is allowed to read. Clicking "Greg Lloyd" in the Author cloud will drill down to restrict search results to just those articles, file attachments or files in TeamPage web folders containing "Providence" and authored by Greg Lloyd and recalculate all content navigator clouds based on the restricted content. With TeamPage 5.0 you can drill down based on status and other entry types as well as content navigators based on metadata, linguistic and sentiment analysis.

This means: Status, Profile and Liveblog entries are all first-class TeamPage entries that can be found using integrated search and content navigation in ranked rank or time order along with the hypertext entries that provide TeamPages integrated Wiki, blog, comment and social tagging capabilities. Permission to create, read, edit and erase Status, Profile and Liveblog content is controlled by business rules that are easy to configure for individual, group or role based permissions derived from LDAP or Active Directory data and queries.

Traction Outlook Social Connector

Microsoft Outlook is one of the most widely used email clients in the world. The new Traction Outlook Social Connector is an accessory developed by Traction Software that makes it simple to see personal profile information and personal status summaries from one or more TeamPage servers. You can browse or search the list of contacts Outlook gets from TeamPage servers and other Outlook Social Connector sources. Outlook will also let you click email address of an incoming message and directly link to the Outlook Social profile with a matching email address.

This means: Profile data and status messages stored on one or more TeamPage servers can be used to provide context about a contact with an account on any of the TeamPage servers. This is particularly useful when dealing with customers, suppliers or other external parties who don't have an Active Directory or LDAP account on your own corporate network that could provide basic profile information. TeamPage status updates become more visible and useful to people who live in their Outlook mailbox.

Register for a guest account on Traction Software's corporate TeamPage Server

Join the conversation, see Traction TeamPage 5.0 in action, and download a free copy

More Information

For more information on Traction TeamPage's award winning baseline capabilities please contact us, or see:

Traction TeamPage Puts Hypertext to Work
TeamPage - the One System to Rule It All
Traction Software Products

Traction TeamPage 5.0 Slideshow

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I talked to two customers yesterday, both who came to me with some questions about attaching and linking to excel files. Easy enough, but before responding with a simple answer I challenged them: Why are you using Excel?

Pages vs. Rows, Tags vs. Columns

In both cases, we agreed on a better approach using page in Traction instead of rows in Excel, and a simple tagging strategy instead of columns in excel.

The first case was a customer at a state level Department of Health. Her Excel sheet had a simple list of 20 rows, each describing part of a work plan. There was very little sort criteria, except perhaps a way to scan and see which requirements are complete. She agreed that there was much more detail behind each row which could better describe it, and sharing status on it would mean continual running commentary that would redirect people to the file which they would have to open and then have to detect visually for changes.

The second case was a customer at a Big Pharma with a system for capturing as many as 3,000 journal abstracts at a time and dropping them into an excel sheet. The system applies some logic to the text to break out columns indicating whether certain drugs and certain categories were mentioned. Then a team of people comb through the sheet to prioritize and score each record. This brings up all kinds of work process issues along with the obvious squint session involved in trying to read abstract text jammed into cells.

In both cases, we quickly figured out a strategy for how to arrange the content in terms of Pages and Tags and how to use search to slice and dice the information to satisfy even the most begrudging team members. What brought the matter home in both cases, though, was giving them a tool which gives the article content the appearance of being in a table. This approach not only surfaces the tagging strategy and makes the process of change-over from excel easier, it is also a powerful way to view the articles and support the work process.

An Example - From Rows in Excel to Pages Instead

By way of illustration, here is an example of a product Feature displayed in its article / page view, then represented in a table which has sortable columns for priority, status and milestone.

Single Page View: Here you can see the article and its tags which include assignment of content type (Feature), status (To Do), priority (P2), and milestone (V2_1).

Section Table View: This view leverages the use of a Section in an article which operates as a filter over just the pages marked To Do AND (Feature OR Bug). You can see that the tags are broken out into columns which can actually be sorted. This offers an immediate sense of how the different kinds of tags work together to form a tagging strategy and help structure an emergent and agile workflow.

Section Table View with Page Expanded: The next issue is how you can actually interact with the table. As noted above, you can sort on the columns but what if you want to see more about an article, change status, change priority or add some commentary. The section table includes a (+) feature that lets you expand any page. This displays all its content and right click actions let you add comments, change tags or even edit the article.

A New Way to Work

As people make the transition from email, word and excel to page based communication in social software platforms like Traction TeamPage, there needs to be a fundamental reset on how we think about information and how to organize it.

I love this example because it offers a clear visualization of:

a) Why breaking big word documents into separate pages offers incredible advantages.

b) How page based workflows are achieved with a simple tagging strategy.

c) Why our concept of the types of structure you can create in Excel or database tools can be met and beat with pages, tags and meta data oriented around the pages.

This is one of many good examples of how social software can fundamentally alter the way we work for the better. Making this kind of transition, from DOC and XLS to Pages is not only fun, it makes a profound impact on productivity and communication.

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If you plan to attend Enterprise 2.0 Boston 2010, be sure to visit Traction Software at Booth #515 between 11:30 am through 6:00 pm Tuesday and Wednesday for a major Traction TeamPage product announcement and demonstration! Jordan Frank will be at E2.0 Boston as a panelist for Monday morning's Selling the Case for Accelerating Business Performance with Enterprise Collaboration Technologies Workshop run by Oliver Marks and Sameer Patel (8:30-11:45am). He'll also represent Traction Software for the Social Vendor Idol competition versus Blue Kiwi, Cubetree, Newsgator and Socialtext (3:30-4:30pm Tuesday) - be sure to watch and vote! Greg Lloyd will be a panelist on Mike Gotta's Expert Panel on Standards for Social Computing in the Enterprise (2:15-3:15pm Wednesday). To schedule a meeting, please email e20boston@tractionsoftware.com See you in Boston!

Update:
15 June 2010 Press Release: Traction TeamPage 5.0 Delivers Integrated Social Networking And Collaboration With New Generation Interface Technology
White Paper: Traction TeamPage 5.0: Social Software for Work

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Traction Software's Fifth Annual Traction User Group Meeting (TUG 2010) will be in Newport Rhode Island, 12-15 October 2010. Mark your calendars! TUG 2010 registration is now open. Wed 13 Oct will feature customer stories and roundtables, birds of a feather sessions as well as an opening keynote by organizational management and technology expert Jim McGee followed by a TeamPage Roadmap session. Continuing a TUG tradition, we'll plan a memorable TUG dinner that evening. Based on the great response at TUG 2009 Providence, we'll offer an optional afternoon of basic to Jedi Training 12 Oct, and two optional workshop days 14-15 October with tracks for: 1) SDK / SDL programming topics; 2) Platform, training and best practice topics.

For a look at last year's event, see TUG 2009 Providence | Keynotes by Carmen Medina, Chris Nuzum and Stewart Mader

Watch the Traction User Group channel on Blip.tv featuring TUG videos including keynotes, customer talks, interviews, training and more. Resister (free) to join TUG and the conversation!

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John Tropea writes May 26, 2010: A while ago I posted about using wikis to handle process failures, conversations around objects, and activity-centric collaboration; well these posts highly relate to informal processes and ad-hoc collaboration, which is something Jordan Frank know’s a lot about, and which the software firm he works for (Traction Software) can deliver in a way that really differentiates them from other players in the market like Jive SBS, Socialtext, Open Text Social Workplace, etc. See John's Software for agile ad-hoc processes blog post for Jordan's video clip, along with John's summary of key points, and analysis including:

• Workflow systems are great until they fail…a need to have a collaboration safety net.
• Collaboration is not necessarily about making the things that are planned go right, it’s about dealing with the things that are unplanned that go wrong.
• When something challenges the system, and the program team cannot deliver on time (things don’t go to plan…dealing with change and new context).
• We get into case where all of the work, and all of the value for our knowledge workers happens when things break…we change the plan, we discuss the issue, we adjust our priorities

Read John's Library Clips blog
Follow John on Twitter: @johnt

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Attivio's customer portfolio features some of the most innovative and forward-looking companies in the technology and business sectors. See Attivio Customer Spotlight: Traction Software for a video featuring Traction Software's Greg Lloyd, Jordan Frank and Chris Nuzum.

Traction TeamPage adds security, threaded discussion, moderation, document management, and more to award-winning social software and search that works like the Web. Whether you're one team or want to connect hundreds of customer, supplier, partner, and internal groups, Traction TeamPage is your best choice for Enterprise 2.0.

"Attivio was the clear choice for a variety of reasons, including its ability to update information in real-time to ensure the most relevant and current results. AIE improves our users' ability to find content quickly and offers a dramatically smaller footprint than our previous search engine solution." - Greg Lloyd, President & Co-Founder of Traction Software

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See The spy who came in from the code for James Turner's excellent O'Reilly Radar interview with Carmen Medina who recently retired from the CIA after 32 years after serving in roles including Deputy Director of Intelligence, and Director of the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence. Carmen was the keynote speaker at Traction Software's Oct 2009 Traction User Group meeting, speaking on Enterprise 2.0 and the Context of Work (see slides and video). She'll speak at the Gov 2.0 Expo on May 26, 2010 Washington DC on A Match made in Heaven: High Reliability-High Risk Organizations and the Power of Social Networks. Don't miss her talk, and follow @milouness on Twitter!

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April 30, 2010 Traction TeamPage is the top featured product of the AIIM Enterprise 2.0 Community Buyer's Guide. Read Traction TeamPage rating and reviews.

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Rather than thinking about communication, collaboration and KM software in terms of Return on Investment, isn't the real goal to achieve Return On Information?

ROI (in the context of Return on Investment) comes up routinely on this blog and internet wide but I think considering the issue as one of return on information points to the real value sought.

When you think about return on investment, you think about how time is saved or resources are used better for monetary return. When there is not a direct line between action and revenue, as is often the case with knowledge activities, you work hard to identify marginal time savings through less face to face meetings or to quantify the value of insight and team work.

When thinking about return on information, you can consider tactical benefits:

- How easily can I conduct conversations?

- In what ways can we leverage pages in multiple contexts, rather than lose or simply stash and forget knowledge?

- In what ways can information be followed proactively or retrieved reactively?

- What different ways can pages be rendered into cross-sections which may be useful in a status or issue review?

- If the point of wiki is documentation, how can we view pages on a screen and output them to useful formats like email, word or PDF?

You can also consider strategic benefits:

- What benefits are found by opening up lines of communication from "need to know" to "can know" permission boundaries? These benefits may be expressed in terms of value found by connecting people faster or of value found by involving key people who can offer immeasurable value but may not be directly involved in a given team's communication swirl.

- In what ways does journaling raw information (meeting notes, call notes, ideas, issues) support future analysis and insight?

When I did a simple web search on return on information I found only a few relevant references, including one about enterprise search - which may enhance the ability to discover information but does not offer the tactical scenarios for further enrichment of it. While ROI hasn't been at the top of many RFPs I've received lately, I am hoping future RFPs will focus more on information leverage than typical questions about presence of certain features.

For the second annual Ada Lovelace Day, March 24, 2010 - celebrating women in science and technology - I've chosen to write about Frances E. Allen, IBM Fellow, Turing Award winner and pioneer in the theory and practice of optimizing compilers. I've never had the honor of meeting her in person, but I'll take the liberty of referring to her as "Fran", as she's referred to by everyone I've known who talked with personal knowledge, respect and admiration about Fran and her work.

According to her Wikipedia biography, Fran Allen grew up on a farm in update New York and after earning BSc and MSc degrees in Mathematics joined IBM on July 1957, deeply in debt and planning to stay only until her school loans were paid. She stayed for a 45-year career that included highly influential research and development in computer languages and compilers that lead to her being named the first female IBM Fellow in 1989. She retired from IBM in 2002, won the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award that year from the Association for Women in Computing, and the A.M. Turing Award for 2006 (computing's 'Nobel Prize'). Fran used the $100,000 Turing prize, funded by Intel, to start a fund to teach girls in areas of the world where educational opportunities are slim.

I first learned of Fran's work from Dick Merwin, then my boss at the Safeguard System Office, and former Engineering Manager of the IBM Stretch / Harvest computer. Stretch (aka the IBM 7030) was an extraordinarily ambitious and influential project to build the world's fastest computer; it was that - although it fell short of its 'stretch' goal of 100x faster than the IBM 704.

Very early in her career Fran played a crucial role in creating computer languages and compiler optimization techniques for the NSA's HARVEST system (which used Stretch technology) which Fran described in a Nov 2000 interview:

From abstract: " In response to government requests, IBM Research designed a system for a very large data processing application, known as the HARVEST system, including Stretch, which was delivered to the National Security Agency in the early 1960s. The combined Stretch-HARVEST Project created a milieu for developing new technologies, new hardware architectures, and new software to meet the challenges of both systems. One of the guiding principles of the project was to make programming easier by the use of a compiler to generate code automatically from statements in the user's language.

Allen was a member of the ALPHA language design team which created a very high level language featuring, among other things, the ability to create new alphabets beyond the system defined alphabets (e.g. English, decimal, integer, binary) and treat complex, heterogeneous data in high-level statements. In addition to an overview of Stretch-HARVEST, the talk will describe some of the lesser known aspects of the project the people and institutions involved, the political climate, and the shared knowledge, views, and value systems which were part of this interesting project at an interesting time in the history of computing. "

Stretch HARVEST compiler lecture by Fran Allan | Film | Computer History Museum

And finally: "Allen, 74, thinks women were more prevalent when she started her career--in 1959, three of her four IBM co-managers were women--than they are today. The shortage of women in IT "is getting worse," she says." Fran Allen 2007 Information Week Interview.

Footnote: I tip my hat to IBM for its early leadership in fair, progressive employment and promotion policies that encouraged recruiting, recognition and promotion of highly qualified women, minorities and others who suffered from discrimination. It was was not only the morally right action, but also a business decision that brought IBM talent to the lasting benefit of IBM stockholders.

Order shirts or mugs with the Ada Lovelace Day art (shown above) by Sidney Padua, author of The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage - a free Web comic you'll surely enjoy.

Via FindingAda.com here's a great Ada Lovelace Day 2010 presentation by Andra Keary

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