The Future of Work Platforms: Like Jazz
Yesterday I read GigaOM analyst and editor Haydn Shaughnessy's Future of Work Platforms report (registration required, free seven day trial available). I commented: Haydn -- A very thoughtful and useful analysis – a combination that’s all too rare! I’m particularly happy to see your thoughts on observable work (see the full report for Haydn's excellent analysis).
Ever since Jon Udell coined the term, it struck me as good way to talk about practical benefits and a business purpose for collaboration. In my opinion it helps by pealing back issues of privacy in context and activity streams, along with subtleties required to support the social dance of getting things done, dealing with exceptions, and staying aware of what’s going around you without getting swamped. This is much closer to jazz than the world of canned business transactions. It requires a level of attention to ease of use and user experience that’s just as important but in many ways more challenging to do well in a business context than for the public Web.
Fixing Enterprise Search
A few days ago the Enterprise 2.0 Blog published Venkatesh Rao's excellent post The Real Reasons Enterprise Search is Broken. When he hears ironic jokes comparing search on the public Web versus internal enterprise search, Venkatesh notes: "People move on because they seem to think that this is incompetence at work. Search is soo 1.0 right? It's been solved and we're just fumbling the execution, right?" He says: "I have reached a radical conclusion: broken search is the problem, but fixing search is not the solution. Search breaks behind the firewall for social, not technical reasons... Let's start with the blindingly obvious, and then draw some weird conclusions." I think they are perceptive conclusions based on sound analysis, and agree with most, but come at the problem from a different angle.
Enterprise 2.0 and Observable Work
I really like Jim McGee's Jun 23, 2010 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 McGee says:
Traction TeamPage 5.0: Social Software for Work
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, a flexible follow model with faceted navigation, 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.
Enterprise 2.0 Schism
I have to confess that I've enjoyed watching recent rounds of Enterprise 2.0 discussion and mud wrestling. The fact that so many people enjoy debating definitions, values, doctrinal principals - even the existence of Enterprise 2.0 - makes me think that E2.0 might best be framed as a religious debate. With that in mind, I'd like to introduce a new and exciting element: schism.
Explaining Twitter - One of Three Places for People
Last week a friend who just signed up on Twitter said: "... just like Jon Stewart, I can't figure out how it works or why anyone would want to tweet or get anyone else's twitter. I had no idea what grunt and stalker is but I am assuming that is reality too. I put this all in the pocket with second life (stupid bulky awkward and totally useless)." So I reluctantly joined the crowd attempting to explain why people who have a job and have a life might be interested in Twitter. I decided to describe Twitter as one of three distinct places on the Web where I socialize every day: the public commons. The others two are my neighborhood and my workplace.
KUKA Systems
KUKA is one of the world's leading suppliers of robotics as well as plant and systems engineering. Their Enterprise Applications group deployed Traction® TeamPage in 2006 to support a process for collaborative Issue Tracking for their deployed enterprise information system.
Reinventing the Web
John Markoff wrote a really good Jan 11 2009 New York Times profile, In Venting, a Computer Visionary Educates on Ted Nelson and his new book, Geeks Bearing Gifts: How the Computer World Got This Way (available on Lulu.com). Markoff notes that Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, but: "Lost in the process was Mr. Nelson’s two-way link concept that simultaneously pointed to the content in any two connected documents, protecting, he has argued in vain, the original intellectual lineage of any object... His two-way links might have avoided the Web’s tornado-like destruction of the economic value of the printed word, he has contended, by incorporating a system of micropayments."
Why Enterprise Search Sucks
Ron Miller of EContent wrote a very good article AIIM Study Finds Enterprise Search Still Lacking about an upcoming AIIM report on Findability and disappointed expectations for enterprise search. Ron's title is more polite than some of the words I've heard (and used) to characterize enterprise search. Bluntly - if we all agree that enterprise search sucks, what is to be done?
Borders, Spaces, and Places
One big problem for collaboration has been too many borders - technical or cultural - creating silos of information for no good reason - and many bad ones. There's also a big problem if you don't have a good way to mark borders that enable collaboration where there's a natural expectation of privacy.
Traction TeamPage 4.0 Puts Hypertext to Work
Traction TeamPage Release 4.0 delivers a combination of wiki, blog, tagging and social networking capabilities that extend Traction's secure, simple and scalable hypertext platform to handle Enterprise 2.0 collaboration on the work that matters most to your business: developing products, communicating with customers and sales partners, collaborating with key suppliers, tracking business issues, and competitive intelligence.
Learn by watching - Then do
JP Rangaswami writes an excellent blog - Confused of Calcutta - where he shares his experience as an "accidental technologist" who moved from investment banking to the services arm of a telco. His post on Facebook and Knowledge Management tells a great story about what happened when he decided to open up his mailbox to his direct reports:
Blogs and Wikis: Building Customer Connections
AIIM E-DOC Magazine Jul/Aug 2007 Issue - Greg Lloyd, Traction Software writes: Blogs get a lot of press when individual bloggers express their opinions on politics, news of the day, or anything that strikes their fancy and thousands of others quickly jump in to join the conversation. The Wikipedia project (www.Wikipedia.org) is a well publicized example of the use of wiki software to bring people from around the world together to collaboratively write, edit and correct an online encyclopedia of over four million articles - and growing - without centralized control. One common question from business people is: "Can I use blogs and wiki's to keep in touch with my customers?" The short answer is yes. Here are some practical examples.
Enterprise 2.0 - Letting hypertext out of its box
In his Mar 26, 2006 post, Putting Enterprise 2.0 in Perspective, Mike Gotta agrees with Tom Davenport and Andrew McAfee that a balanced discussion of E2.0 should include "... how well an enterprise addresses the complex organizational dynamics that often inhibit change," not just "irrational exuberance regarding the technology."
Greg Lloyd on "The Return of Interactive Hypermedia, or the Triumph of Ted Nelson" at Burton Group's Catalyst Europe Conference
Greg speaks at Burton Group's Catalyst 2006 Europe Conference, Barcelona 12 Oct 2006. His topic, The Return of Interactive Hypermedia, or the Triumph of Ted Nelson is part of the Collaboration and Content track in a session: Leveraging the Services Infrastructure
to Improve the User Experience.
Use of Weblogs for Competitive Intelligence | First International Business, Technology CI Conference, Tokyo Oct 2005
Abstract: Over
the past fifty years, the inspiration of hypertext systems has been the
challenge of dealing with an ever-increasing volume of information.
With the advent of the World Wide Web (WWW) as a near universal
platform for commercial and scientific information, it is now possible
to use the WWW as a platform for collecting, analyzing, disseminating
and receiving feedback on competitive intelligence and other valuable
business information. This paper will use examples of weblog deployment
for competitive intelligence in the pharmaceutical industry to examine
broader challenge of enabling enterprises to more effectively deal with
the ever increasing volume of critical business information in general.
Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart
The source of the term Journal for the Traction TeamPage database is Douglas Engelbart's NLS system (later renamed Augment), which Doug developed in the 1960's as one of the first hypertext systems. Traction's time ordered database, entry + item ID addressing, and many Traction concepts were directly inspired by Doug's work. I'd also claim that Doug's Journal is the first blog - dating from 1969.
Are Weblogs Really ECM Lite?
AIIM E-DOC Magazine, May/Jun 2005 - Greg Lloyd, Traction Software writes: Unless
you've been hiding in a cave, you've probably run across the term
"weblog" (or "blog") in the news. Perhaps you have a teenager who loves
LiveJournal (over 6 million free or very low cost blogs and growing) or
followed political controversies inflamed by bloggers during the 2004
campaign.
20 June 2005 | Supernova | Why Can't a Business Work More Like the Web?
Greg Lloyd from Traction Software joins the Connected Work session at SuperNova 2005. Hear and read notes from the workshop at ITConversations and Suw Charman's Strange Attractor blog.
13 June 2005 | Dark Blogs Case Study #1 - A European Pharmaceutical Group
From Suw Charman, writer of the Strange Attractor blog on Corante: I'm pleased to announce the arrival of the first Dark Blogs Case Study (pdf), examining the use of Traction® Software's TeamPage enterprise weblog software for a competitive intelligence project within a large European pharmaceutical group. The case study examines the reasons why blogs where chosen, project planning, implementation, integration with other business systems, editorial process, launch and promotion, training and adoption.
January / February 2005 | En Guarde! The Art and Practice of CI
By Jordan Frank, printed in the January/February edition of Competitive Intelligence Magazine, a publication of the Society for Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP). The swordsman must be trained to find the right balance of source information and interpret that information into actionable intelligence. » Read More
March/April 2003 | Organize, Analyze, Distribute: The Enterprise Weblog
By Jordan Frank, printed in the March/April edition of Competitive Intelligence Magazine, a publication of the Society for Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP). One of the principal competitive intelligence (CI) functions is to develop quality information sources and provide analysis, but often much of a CI professional’s time is spent juggling information and managing outbound communication. Enterprise weblog technology and quality analysis can provide relevant competitive and market information to the right stakeholders in a timely manner. The result is a high performance, real-time competitive intelligence function that puts information at the fingertips of your stakeholders. » Read More
I18N ERROR: @tsiskin#footer_RSS_Feed