The Parable of the Talking Dog - Terrence Sejnowski

February 17, 2023 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageTerrence Sejnowski writes: "One of my favorite stories is about a chance encounter on the backroads of rural America when a curious driver came upon a sign: “TALKING DOG FOR SALE.” The owner took him to the backyard and left him with an old Border Collie.

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Clash of the Titans 2020 - Peter O'Kelly

September 7, 2020 · · Posted by Peter O'Kelly

ImageRevisiting Communication/Collaboration/Content Competition, ‘Co-opetition,’ and Culture: Opportunities for Traction Software and its Customer Community, my 2010 Traction User Group (TUG) presentation, it’s fascinating to realize how deeply the product strategies of the leading enterprise communication, collaboration, and content (3C) vendors were disrupted over the last decade. It’s also frankly a bit discouraging to realize how much 3C potential has yet to be realized by most mainstream enterprise end users, although that’s somewhat offset by the knowledge that Traction customers have been benefitting from the ongoing refinement of TeamPage’s pioneering collaborative hypertext journaling system the entire time. In this post, I’ll share perspectives on what has changed in the 3C product families of the vendors identified as enterprise 3C titans in the 2010 presentation along with some highlights of vendors that weren’t part of the 2010 discussion but are important 3C competitors today. I’ll close with some thoughts about where Traction fits into the current enterprise 3C landscape.

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Clash of the Titans - Peter O'Kelly at TUG 2010

August 31, 2020 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageI'm happy to present a transcript and quotes from Peter O'Kelly's TUG 2010 talk Communication / Collaboration / Content Competition, "Co-opetition," and Culture: Opportunities for Traction Software and its Customer Community. Or, as I'll call it here Clash of the Titans. Peter draws on his career as Lotus Notes product manager at Lotus Development Corporation and IBM, IBM Director of Business Development, Groove Networks product manager, MacroMedia vice president of strategy, Microsoft Solutions Architect, and senior analyst or director with the Patricia Seybold Group, the Burton Group, and O'Kelly Associates - see Peter's LinkedIn page and personal blog. I asked Peter to write a 'Where are they now' follow up post, and he cheerfully agreed! Look for it here next week.

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More Observable Work - Transcribing Jim McGee's TUG 2010 Keynote

July 22, 2020 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageWorking from home like much of the world, I thought it would be a good time to try out a new tool to transcribe Jim McGee's Doing and Managing Knowledge Work TUG 2010 keynote. The 2010 Traction User Group theme was Observable Work, with Jim's opening keynote, a closing keynote by Jon Udell, and a four hour Observable Workshop moderated by Jon on the last morning of the meeting, see 12-15 Oct 2010 | Fifth Annual Traction User Group Meeting, TUG 2010 Newport

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Ineffective meetings - Here's an answer

June 11, 2020 · · Posted by Greg Sassen
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Are you are a business owner, executive or senior manager? Then you’ve experienced the good, the bad and the ugly of management meetings.

Management meetings are the heartbeat of any business and are in place to keep teams productive, accountable and focused. Meetings are the primary channel for communication and goal alignment throughout the business.

If you and your teams are dissatisfied with the quality of your meetings, then you are fortunate enough to have a giant improvement opportunity in your business, with low implementation cost and high reward.

When you think about it, the actions that come out of your meetings are the smallest unit of improvement of your business. The rate at which you and your teams close tasks is the real rate of improvement of your business. It is a measure of engagement and agility. Tasks matter.

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The parable of the four unfit friends

August 19, 2019 · · Posted by Pierre Bienvenüe

ImageIn this article we tell the parable of four friends and some of their life choices.

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impi! and TeamPage Reduce Administration of Document Control

May 3, 2019 · · Posted by Pierre Bienvenüe

ImageIn this article we build a case for using TeamPage and impi! wiki templates to save administrative time for document control and support the intent of ISO9001:2015 to distribute the responsibility of the Quality Management System to the leadership of the organisation.

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How to create a simplified custom front page for TeamPage

December 13, 2018 · · Posted by Takashi Okutsu

ImageThe other day, I helped a Japanese IT Support company build a client support site with TeamPage.

Their main request was to make the top page ("front page") of TeamPage simple as possible to be more welcoming and prevent clients from being confused. So, I (1) put the large icons and buttons on the top page and (2) removed tabs and sidebar etc.

In this blog post, I will briefly introduce how I did the customizations using a TeamPage plug-in developed and delivered to the company.

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Why, How and What of the impi Standard Meeting Plug-in for TeamPage

January 25, 2017 · · Posted by Pierre Bienvenüe

ImageThe new impi! Standard Meeting Plug-in for TeamPage enables easier, faster and more accurate minute taking for recurring meetings which agenda is standardized. It augments the impi! solution: Goal Alignment - Mini Business Units Deployment. To learn more about this plug-in and impi's Business Management System solutions built using TeamPage, please contact Traction Software.

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impi! What's in the name? What's in the logo?

July 16, 2016 · · Posted by Pierre Bienvenüe

ImageImpi is a Zulu word for any armed body of men. It also bears in English a connotation to the art of warfare. In the early part of the 19th century the Zulu nation, then a relatively small tribe rose to a prominent nation. Under the leadership of King Shaka its influence span across Southern Africa. Shaka deeply transformed the art of warfare in the sub continent drawing from traditions and innovating. Aspects of warfare covered army structure and deployment, leadership, training, agility, logistic, weaponry, etc. Shaka's organisational development and leading of his impis were characterised by discipline (standardisation) and creative improvement.

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A Fabric, not a Platform

June 21, 2016 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageApple and Google are competing to build a fabric that connects everything you own and use, working outward from the globally meshed supercomputer you carry in your pocket. Both apply deep learning technology to AI assistants, and are opening up their AIs and bots to other apps, bots, and cloud services. This richly connected fabric makes bots useful and AI assistants valuable by teaching them how to identify objects you're talking about as well as understand what you want done. The same applies at work. Making this happen requires a shift from the traditional definition of a platform to a fabric which makes it possible to connect people and the actionable objects they use, in context.

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Introducing impi! - Pierre Bienvenüe

May 28, 2016 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageI'm happy to introduce Pierre Bienvenüe, founder of impi Business Improvement Solutions Pty, a South African business improvement firm and TeamPage solution partner since 2012. Pierre has great experience in helping mid-size companies organize and run effective quality improvement programmes. impi! works with clients as partners from concept definition, initial rollout, through improvement of the quality program itself. Pierre has worked with Traction Software and clients to develop templates, plug-in extensions, and a methodology for using TeamPage to support the impi! business improvement model, with solid results to report. This post is an introduction. You'll hear more from Pierre as an expert guest blogger on this page, in Traction Software's TeamPage customer forums (free registration), and across the web.

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Chris Nuzum Hyperkult XXV Video | Tripping Up Memory Lane

May 15, 2016 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageWatch this video of Chris Nuzum's Tripping Up Memory Lane talk at Hyperkult 2015, University of Lüneburg, 10 July 2015. Traction Software CTO and co-founder Chris Nuzum reviews hypertext history, his experience as a hypertext practitioner, and the core principles of Traction TeamPage.

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Introducing the TeamPage iOS App

May 13, 2016 · · Posted by Christopher Nuzum

I was delighted to find that our TeamPage iOS companion app was published on the App Store this morning. We've been enjoying the app for the past few months, and are excited finally to be able to share it with you.

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Daily Report 日報 = Observable Work: Takashi Okutsu

March 29, 2016 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageTakashi Okutsu of Traction Software's Japanese Business Office recently posted an update to his Daily Report TeamPage plugin. Takashi writes: "In some Japanese companies, it is common to look back what an employee did in the day, write a summary, and submit it to his/her boss. This is called "日報" (daily report or daily journal) and it's a way of sharing information between employees and bosses in the hierarchy. If you are interested in the ways of business in Japanese companies, you may find this blog post interesting." This example of Observable Work is very simple to understand and use. Quality Management and other TeamPage solutions follow the same pattern.

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Shaka, When the Walls Fell

November 22, 2015 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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Original Traction Product Proposal

August 24, 2015 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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I hope you'll enjoy reading the original Traction Product Proposal, dated October 1997. Many early Traction concepts carried over directly to the Traction® TeamPage product first commercially released in July 2002, but we've also learned a lot since then - as you might hope! The Proposal and its Annotated References may be helpful to students interested in the history and evolution of hypertext.

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Teampage hypertext journal: Design concepts, by Takashi Okutsu

August 7, 2015 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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Takashi Okutsu of Traction Software's Japanese Business Office wrote a blog post, Teampage hypertext journal: Design concepts. Starting from Chris Nuzum's Tripping Up Memory Lane presentation, Takashi explains how TeamPage's append-only journal models editable content, links, and relationships − while maintaining a full audit trail. See this Google English translation.

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Tripping Up Memory Lane

July 16, 2015 · · Posted by Christopher Nuzum

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Last week I gave a talk at the Hyperkult 2015 conference. It was an honor to present there, especially since it was the 25th and final time the conference was held. This was my proposal for the talk:

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Eat your spinach: Email is good for you, but it could taste a lot better

July 3, 2015 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Takashi Okutsu of Traction Software's Japanese Business Office says that email is like spinach. It may be necessary for a healthy business, but not everyone likes spinach. He says that it's not reasonable to think that Social Network Software replaces email. It's better to look at how SNS extends and complements email. Takashi's July 3, 2015 TractionSoftware.jp blog post explains how, see this rough Google English translation.

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My Part Wor ks

May 22, 2015 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageAbout 50 years ago, Andy van Dam joined the Brown University faculty with the world's second PhD in Computer Science (earned at the University of Pennsylvania). Today many of Andy’s friends, faculty, students and former students are celebrating his 50 years at Brown with Stone Age, Iron Age and Machine Age panels. [ June 9, 2015 update: See event video: Celebrate with Andy: 50 Years of Computer Science at Brown University ]

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Enterprise 2.0 - Are we there yet?

November 21, 2014 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageAndrew McAfee writes Nov 20, 2014: "Facebook’s recent announcement that it’s readying a version of its social software for workplaces got me thinking about Enterprise 2.0, a topic I used to think a great deal about. Five years ago I published a book with that title, arguing that enterprise social software platforms would be valuable tools for businesses...

Why did it take so long? I can think of a few reasons. It’s hard to get the tools right — useful and simple software is viciously hard to make. Old habits die hard, and old managers die (or at least leave the workforce) slowly. The influx of ever-more Millennials has almost certainly helped, since they consider email antediluvian and traditional collaboration software a bad joke.

Whatever the causes, I’m happy to see evidence that appropriate digital technologies are finally appearing to help with the less structured, less formal work of the enterprise. It’s about time.

What do you think? Is Enterprise 2.0 finally here? If so, why now? Leave a comment, please, and let us know."

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Ada Lovelace Day | Emmy Noether, Mathematician

October 14, 2014 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Ada Lovelace Day celebrates Image the contributions of women in science and technology, follow @FindingAda for news and events. This year I've chosen to write about mathematician Amalie "Emmy" Noether. At the time of her death in April 1935, she was described by Pavel Alexandrov, Albert Einstein, Herman Weyl, Norbert Weiner and others as the most important woman in the history of mathematics. Noether’s First Theorem is a fundamental tool of modern physics and the calculus of variations: every symmetry corresponds to a conservation law. "It was her work in the theory of invariants which led to formulations for several concepts of Einstein's general theory of relativity." [J J O'Connor and E F Robertson, 1997]. Of her later work, Nathan Jacobson said: "The development of abstract algebra, which is one of the most distinctive innovations of twentieth century mathematics, is largely due to her – in published papers, in lectures, and in personal influence on her contemporaries." Einstein wrote Noether's obituary in the New York Times, May 5, 1935:

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Named Data Networking - Boffin Alert

September 8, 2014 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageOn Sep 4, 2014 the Named Data Networking project announced a new consortium to carry the concepts of Named Data Networking (NDN) forward in the commercial world. If this doesn't sound exciting, try The Register's take: DEATH TO TCP/IP cry Cisco, Intel, US gov and boffins galore. What if you could use the internet to access content securely and efficiently, where anything you want is identified by name rather than by its internet address? The NDN concept is technically sweet, gaining traction, and is wonderfully explained and motivated in a video by its principle inventor and instigator Van Jacobson. Read on for the video, a few quotes, reference links, and a few thoughts on what NDN could mean for the Internet of Things, Apple, Google and work on the Web. Short version: Bring popcorn.

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Linked, Open, Heterogeneous

August 31, 2014 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Image Art, Data, and Business Duane Degler of Design For Context posted slides from his 5 April 2014 Museums and the Web talk, Design Meets Data (Linked, Open, Heterogeneous). Degler addresses what he calls the LAM (Libraries, Archives, Museums) Digital Information Ecosystem. I believe the same principles apply when businesses connect internal teams, external customers, external suppliers, and partners of all sorts as part of their Business Information Ecosystem. Read Degler's summary and slides, below:

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Hello! Greetings from Takashi Okutsu

July 10, 2014 · · Posted by Takashi Okutsu

TakashiHi everyone. I am delighted to introduce myself to you as a member of the Traction Software Team. As some of you know, my name is Takashi Okutsu, and I am the director of Traction Software's Japan Business Office, located in Yokohama.

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Thought Vectors - Ted Nelson: Art not Technology

July 5, 2014 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageThe technoid vision, as expressed by various pundits of electronic media, seems to be this: tomorrow's world will be terribly complex, but we won't have to understand it. Fluttering though halestorms of granular information, ignorant like butterflies, we will be guided by smell, or Agents, or leprechauns, to this or that pretty picture, or media object, or factoid. If we have a Question, it will be possible to ask it in English. Little men and bunny rabbits will talk to us from the computer screen, making us feel more comfortable about our delirious ignorance as we flutter through this completely trustworthy technological paradise about which we know less and less.

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Meet Takashi Okutsu: Director, Traction Software Japanese Business Office

July 2, 2014 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageTakashi has been a TeamPage wizard since 2007, and now directs Traction Software's Japanese Business Office. Takashi provides exceptional sales, consulting, and support to TeamPage customers in Japan. He is a valued member of the Traction Software global team, and a frequent contributor to the TeamPage Customer Support Forum including development and discussion of TeamPage SDK plug-ins and examples. We invite Japanese visitors to explore TractionSoftware.jp for TeamPage information and a free trial. You are also welcome to join the TeamPage Japan Customer Support Forum to talk with Takashi and Japanese TeamPage customers.

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Thought Vectors - What Motivated Doug Engelbart

June 23, 2014 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageBy "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble. And by "complex situations" we include the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists, life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers--whether the problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human "feel for a situation" usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids. 1a1

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Reinventing the Web II

June 16, 2014 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageUpdated 19 Jun 2016 Why isn't the Web a reliable and useful long term store for the links and content people independently create? What can we do to fix that? Who benefits from creating spaces with stable, permanently addressable content? Who pays? What incentives can make Web scale permanent, stable content with reliable bidirectional links and other goodies as common and useful as Web search over the entire flakey, decentralized and wildly successful Web? Here's a good Twitter conversation to read:

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Thought Vectors - Vannevar Bush and Dark Matter

June 13, 2014 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageOn Jun 9 2014 Virginia Commonwealth University launched a new course, UNIV 200: Inquiry and the Craft of Argument with the tagline Thought Vectors in Concept Space. The eight week course includes readings from Vannevar Bush, J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Alan Kay, and Adele Goldberg. Assignments include blog posts and an invitation to participate on Twitter using the #thoughtvectors hashtag. The course has six sections taught at VCU, and an open section for the rest of the internet, which happily includes me! This week's assignment is a blog post based on a nugget that participants select from Vannevar Bush's 1945 essay As We May Think. Here's mine:

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Continuity and Intertwingled Work

June 12, 2014 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageAt Apple's WWDC 2014 on 2 Jun 2014, Apple demonstrated how to build a great user experience spanning a your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Apple calls this OS level capability Continuity. It enables you to continue what you're doing across devices and applications by securely encapsulating your identity and the context of your action as an object. From picking up a draft email message started on an iPhone and continuing work with that draft on your Mac, to answering an incoming iPhone call on your Mac, I believe this opens the door for a level of seamless experience that everyone will want for personal use, their family, and at work.

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A new TeamPage logo, and a new look at Traction Software.com

June 9, 2014 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageYou'll be seeing the new TeamPage logo here, on Twitter, Facebook, across the Web, and next to TeamPage sites shown in your browser's tabs; I hope you like the it! I also hope you like the the new look at TractionSoftware.com. Our customers believe TeamPage is ideal for work that combines collaboration and action tracking, including quality management, human resources, project work, intelligence analysis, knowledge management, and compliance. We want TractionSoftware.com to tell this story simply and clearly, and we'll continue to improve this site just as we continually improve TeamPage. Please contact us for insights into how customers use TeamPage to get work done, along with a free trial.

Where Collaboration Meets Chess

April 4, 2014 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

In 12 Habits of Highly Collaborative Organizations, @Jacob Morgan draws awesome parallels between collaboration strategy and chess strategy:

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An Infinite Number of Cats on Keyboards: Ted Nelson & Computer Lib at Homebrew Computer Club Reunion

November 16, 2013 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Order a perfect reprint of the original version of Computer Lib / Dream Machines directly from Ted Nelson, autographed if you wish. Highly recommended.

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Ada Lovelace Day | Marissa Ann Mayer, Software Engineer, Product Manager, and Executive

October 15, 2013 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Ada Lovelace Day celebrates Image the contributions of women in science and technology, follow @FindingAda for news and events. This year I've chosen to write about Marissa Ann Mayer Software Engineer, Product Manager, and Executive, currently President and CEO of Yahoo! Over her career Ms Mayer earned exceptional recognition for Computer Science teaching (while working for her Stanford degrees), software engineering, design, product management, and her executive skills. Ms Mayer joined Google as employee number twenty in 2009 and played an instrumental role leading Google Search for over 10 years.

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The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style

October 11, 2013 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageJustin Rosenstein wrote an excellent option piece for Wired, The Way We Work Is Soul-Sucking, But Social Networks Are Not the Fix. Justin begins: "With Twitter’s recent IPO filing, the most popular graph dominating conversation is the “interest graph.” Before that, it was the “social graph,” courtesy of Facebook. But we’re now seeing the emergence of a third important graph: the work graph." The work graph term is new - and useful - but I believe the model dates back to Lotus Notes and even Doug Engelbart. In this blog post I'll review Justin's definition and use it to describe Traction® TeamPage's work graph model. I'll also show how TeamPage leverages its work graph model to meet challenges of information overload, work with external as well as internal teams, and work that needs to span siloed systems of record.

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How to make your ISO Auditor Smile; And Make Your Professional Life Much Easier

August 27, 2013 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageJordan had a conversation with a TeamPage customer in Sweden who agreed to document and publish a TeamPage case study, but the ISO auditor story is too good to wait. The customer is small precision machined products manufacturer. They initially supplied prototypes to the Swedish defense industry, but now focus on precision products for heavy vehicle manufacturers.

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Remembering Doug Engelbart, 30 January 1925 - 2 July 2013

July 4, 2013 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageI was very sad to learn that Doug Engelbart passed away at his home on 2 July 2013. Doug had a long life as a visionary engineer, inventor, and pioneer of technology we use every day - and technology where we're just starting to catch up to Doug and his SRI team in 1968. Doug had a quiet, friendly, and unassuming nature combined with deep knowledge, iron will, and a determination to pursue his vision. His vision was to aid humanity in solving complex, difficult and supremely important problems; Doug's goals were noble and selfless. The sense of dealing with an Old Testament prophet - a kindly Moses - is perhaps the greatest loss I and countless others who have met and been inspired by Doug feel today. I've written frequently about Doug in the past, and I'll continue to do so. Here are a few remembrances and resources that seem appropriate. I'll update this list over the next several days. Farewell Doug and my sincere condolences to his family and many friends.

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Pharma and Biotech Risk Management

June 17, 2013 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Risks are the leading cause of costly delays in the process of bringing a biotech product to market. Risk management in the product development process all too often means one person juggling a list of risks in a spreadsheet. It's hard to edit, but even harder to open a discussion on an existing risk when someone has a question, sees a problem, or wants to add a new risk. Traction® Software partner Rosemary Vu used Traction® TeamPage's Section Table widget and extended TeamPage's Article to create a Risk form. For more on TeamPage Section Tables, see Q: How do I link to an Excel file? A: Why Would you Do That?

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Working Across Boundaries

June 16, 2013 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageIn his Jun 2, 2013 blog post, Chess Media analyst and author Jacob Morgan asks: How Open is Too Open? He asks "Would you be comfortable working in an all glass building where people can see everything you do and every move you make?" Jacob outlines the benefits of transparency: "Keep everyone on the same page; Build trust and fostering better relationships; Allow employees (and customers) to contribute ideas and value when they see the opportunity to do so." Jacob recognizes that a balance needs to be struck, but not being transparent enough may do more harm than good. He ask: "How open is too open?" I agree with the benefits Jacob outlines, and believe the answer to Jacob's question depends on the answer to a critical question: "Transparency for what purpose?" I'll start the ball rolling in with this post, including some real-life customer examples.

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Open Cafe: E2.0 Implementation and Adoption

May 29, 2013 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

@JeffMerrell posed a series of questions for his Master's Program in Learning & Organizational Change. I'll offer my own experience as it pertains to each of his question areas.

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Contextual Computing At Work

May 28, 2013 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageIn Co.Design May 24, 2013 Peter Morrison of Jump Associates writes The Future of Technology isn't Mobile, it's Contextual. He says that the way we respond to the world around is based on situational awareness. "The way we respond to the world around us is so seamless that it’s almost unconscious. Our senses pull in a multitude of information, contrast it to past experience and personality traits, and present us with a set of options for how to act or react. Then, it selects and acts upon the preferred path. This process--our fundamental ability to interpret and act on the situations in which we find ourselves--has barely evolved since we were sublingual primates living on the Veldt.

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Join us at E2 Boston 2013 - Traction Software is Social and Collaboration Track Sponsor

May 17, 2013 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

ImageHow well you work with your colleagues, online and off, will make the difference when trying to win the next deal, design the next product or craft the next winning strategy. Consider how important people are to process and how social collaboration (versus some pre-ordained workflow) is the barrier to or the enabler of successful outcomes. We see immense value when people document their knowledge, streamline their communication and track actions to completion in TeamPage. We hope you can join us to see TeamPage and learn from the leading analysts and practitioners at E2 Boston June 17 through 19.

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Lost Roots of Project Management: Think Agile that Scales

April 25, 2013 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

The Manhattan Project, Atlas, and Polaris projects are cited as roots for traditional phased stage-gate Project Management, but didn't use that model. New high innovation projects shouldn't either; think agile that scales. Read this fascinating 2009 paper by Sylvain Lenfle and Christoph Loch of INSEAD, cited on Twitter by Glen B. Alleman who calls it "breathtaking".

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Big Data, Meet Long Data, Meet Blog Data

April 2, 2013 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Big Data Meet Long Data by Jeff Bertolucci - @jbertolucci - column appears this week in InformationWeek to reminds us that "Long Data" or historical data is vital for analysis and comprehension of trends that span years.

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Problem and Process rather than Incentives for E2.0 Tools

February 15, 2013 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Over on Quora, Ben Lopatin @bennylope has a best-answer to a question on the best ways to incentivize people to use E2.0 knowledge management and collaboration. He starts by shunning external incentives (as I do in Need for Incentives, and other Innovation Myths) and works through a few key principles which I've seen work time and time again:

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PLM Gets Social, Untangles Ball of Confusion

November 27, 2012 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Stan Przybylinski - @smprezbo - of CIM Data advised an audience at Social PLM 2012 on inevitable social side of product lifecycle management. In the talk (video on YouTube here), he identifies companies including Traction Software (Minute 9:06) whose platforms are being used by product teams for everything from building requirements, to managing risks and simply discussing product issues.

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E-Mail: an On-Ramp for Enterprise Social Media

November 20, 2012 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Bill Ives, @billives, points to Nathan Eddy's eWeek column titled Businesses Still Reliant on Email as Social Media Use Grows. The column reminds us that Email is still the dominant go-to application of choice and that's not changing any time soon. Rather than run away from email habits, social software in the enterprise has to embrace it. Back in 2004, I gave a presentation at the INBOX conference advocating for the use of Email as an on-ramp for collaboration and an off-ramp for notification.

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TeamPage SAAS / Cloud Hosting Helps Bring Customers Closer, Improves Support

November 7, 2012 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

ImageAs we've put more attention to our cloud hosting (see Traction Software and Traction Software Japan) with free trials and an increasing hosted customer base, I'm seeing first hand how the customer relationship can become much closer, more interactive and more informed. In the last 24 hours, I was able to quickly help:

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Carving a Path to Productive Knowledge Management: How?

October 24, 2012 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

I gave the following presentation at the first ever meeting of the Boston Chapter of the Knowledge Management Association today. As this was a first meeting, I thought I'd raise the issue that "managing knowledge" is about as daunting a task as "herding cats."

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JSB on Capturing Context not Just Content

October 17, 2012 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

In John Seeley Brown's KMWorld Keynote (live streamed 17 Oct 2012 at kmworld.com), he makes an important point about how knowledge has no boundaries. @johnseelybrown #KM12

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Ada Lovelace Day | Sunita Williams, Astronaut and Captain U.S. Navy

October 16, 2012 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageAda Lovelace Day celebrates the contributions of women in science and technology. This year I've chosen to write about Suni Williams, NASA Astronaut and US Navy Captain currently commanding Expedition 33 on the International Space Station. I hope young women reading about Ada Lovelace Day now are encouraged by her example to pursue their dreams where ever they may lead - here on Earth or as the first Earthling to set foot on Mars.

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Creating GWT Date / Time Pickers That Work in Any Time Zone

September 6, 2012 · · Posted by Andy Keller

We're working on new features for the next release of TeamPage that allow people to create events on a calendar. For the edit event dialog, we needed date and time pickers that allow people across different time zones to edit the dates and times of events. We ended up creating new GWT controls and adding them to our open source gwt-traction library .

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Remembering Neil Armstrong...

August 26, 2012 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Image"I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer -- born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in the steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow." - Neil Armstrong, The Engineered Century. I was sad to hear about the death of Neil Armstrong on 25 August 2012. I'll always remember meeting Armstrong at an event for high school science students in the spring of 1966. He'll be remembered forever as the first person to set foot on the Moon on 29 July 1969. He coolly navigated the lunar lander to the surface despite computer alarms, avoiding rocks at the planned site, and landing with gauges showing about 20 seconds of fuel left. But that wasn't his only close call as an astronaut. In March 1966 Armstrong and David Scott successfully returned Gemini VIII to earth after a runaway thruster spun the Gemini and attached Agena target vehicle to a roll rate of about 300 degrees per second, making chances of recovery "very remote".

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Monitoring and Leveraging Social Media Chatter, on the Internet and in the Enterprise

July 19, 2012 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

In the Pharma Chatter session at the SLA 2012 (Special Librarians Association) conference, I had the opportunity to talk about gathering and managing intelligence from social media. I was joined by Craig McHenry (Pfizer), Lisa Orgren (Septagon Research Group), and Heather Bjella (Aurora WDC)

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Anti-Social Software

July 17, 2012 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageIt's common to read about corporate culture as a big barrier to successful adoption and use of social software in business. It's easy to understand people's reluctance to change and adopt a new way of working. There are many good reasons to be wary of the promised benefits of change if you don't have relevant direct experience ("I've used this and it works"), clear examples, trust in your organization, and trust in your leadership. Books like Jacob Morgan's new The Collaborative Organization offer great practical guidance, examples, and answers to important questions. However, most social business advice makes a common and good-natured assumption that your organization is healthy - or at least has good intentions - but is just hard to convince. That's not always true.

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"All of this has led me to believe that something is terribly wrong with e-mail. What’s more, I don’t believe it can be fixed."

July 11, 2012 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Image"All of this has led me to believe that something is terribly wrong with e-mail. What’s more, I don’t believe it can be fixed," writes New York Times columnist Nick Bilton - not pictured on right - in his July 8, 2012 Bits column, Disruptions: Life's Too Short for So Much Email. He's cranky just because he received 6,000 emails this month, not including spam and daily deals. Nick says: "With all those messages, I have no desire to respond to even a fraction of them. I can just picture my tombstone: Here lies Nick Bilton, who responded to thousands of e-mails a month. May he rest in peace."

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Why links matter - for your business as well as the public Web

July 7, 2012 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Image Mathew Ingram recently wrote Why links matter: Linking is the lifeblood of the web. He makes a strong case for the value of open linking - giving credit to original sources - as an ethical imperative. He also points out the collective benefit, quoting Om Malik:

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Why we're here. TeamPage at Enterprise 2.0 Boston 2012

June 18, 2012 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageIf you're attending E20 Boston 2012, please drop by Traction Software's booth 418 to say hi and learn what Traction TeamPage can do. If you're interested in social task management, integrating systems of record and systems of engagement - or just using social software in the context of work, talk the folk at Traction Software who know how to help you succeed. That's where we started and that's our enduring goal.

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The Collaborative Organization - Free signed copy, Traction Software Booth 418 E2.0 Boston 2012

June 13, 2012 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageI've read an advance copy of Jacob Morgan's upcoming book, The Collaborative Organization: A Strategic Guide to Solving Your Internal Business Challenges Using Emerging Social and Collaborative Tools. I'm very happy that we decided to give Enterprise 2.0 Boston folk a chance to meet Jacob and get their own free, signed copy at Traction Software Booth 418 next week. Jacob says: "The purpose of this book is to act as a guide for executives, decision makers, and those involved with collaborative initiatives at their organizations". I believe he hits the mark with a book of lasting value, as do reviewers including Vivek Kundra, former Chief Information Officer of the United States; Erik Brynjolf, MIT Center for Digital Business Director, and others.

Free copies are limited. I'll post rules for an online Enterprise 2.0 Twitter quiz you can use to put yourself first in line for a copy. You must show up in person to claim a book, but the Twitter quiz should be fun too!

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Laser focused E2.0, without the risk? Get Traction!

May 10, 2012 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

I really like how Kashya Kompella from the Real Story Group offered a great dose of context for his E2.0 Marketplace Analysis Q2 2012: "Slightly modifying what the ancient Greeks said, you cannot dip your finger twice in the same (activity) stream." Simply said, there is not a lot of room for risk when an enterprise makes an attempt at an E2.0 effort, whether they are trying to build knowledge in a wiki, approach project management from a perspective managers actually like, or wrap up the whole effort with blogs, discussion, and a social networking layer on top.

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"Probably the coolest vendor pricing page I've seen for any collaboration vendor" ~ Jacob Morgan

April 19, 2012 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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Thanks to Jacob Morgan, Chess Media Group for his Tweet this afternoon while we were chatting on the phone. Last October Jacob reviewed Traction TeamPage in his Emergent Collaboration Vendor series, and liked what he saw, including TeamPage pricing. He said: "I had the pricing explained to me so I understand it but I think it would be helpful if they made it easier to understand for all site visitors because it really does make sense." We agree on both points! In updating the Buy page, Chris Nuzum used Apple Store product configuration pages as benchmarks for clarity and ease of use.

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A Focus on Individual Users

April 4, 2012 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

With Dartmouth President Jim Kim's recent nomination to the World Bank, I pulled out my copy of Mountains beyond Mountains to find the Kim quote that I found most inspiring for my day to day work.

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What's the Point ?

February 15, 2012 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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From Nora Ephron speaking at Brown University, President's Lecture series, "Adventures in Screenwriting" April 24, 1997. Paraphrased notes by Greg Lloyd: I took my first journalism course in high school. The fellow who taught it left after two years and opened a hardware store in LA. I think I was the only person he taught who went on to work as a journalist.

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Happy Birthday Doug Engelbart!

January 30, 2012 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageHappy Birthday Doug! A perfect gentle knight of technology as well as a pioneer and great inventor. Doug Engelbart's 87th birthday - today - is a fine day to watch the video of Doug's talk "The Strategic Pursuit of Collective IQ" embedded below. And a great day to (re) read Doug's "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" 1962, see DougEngelbart.org. My favorite Doug quotes and links, see Doug Engelbart | 85th Birthday Jan 30, 2010 from two years ago.

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Don't take my word for it - Byrne and Koplowitz on SharePoint

November 29, 2011 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

At the Enterprise 2.0conference two weeks ago, Tony Byrne (President, the Real Story Group) and Rob Koplowitz (VP and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research) were joined for the SharePoint Analyst Panel. David Carr's Information Week column Does SharePoint Have Future As A Social Platform frames the debate as lopsided with a simple conclusion: No.

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Seamless integration can work like the Web | W3C Social Business Jam

November 9, 2011 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageI just joined the Nov 2011 W3C Social Business Jam and added a discussion topic: Seamless integration can work like the Web. I'm on deadline for Enterprise 2.0 next week in Santa Clara [ see you there ! ] but will try to steal time to jump in to a live IBM Jam while it's open (through Nov 10, 2011 8pm EST).

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Ada Lovelace Day | Betts Wald, US Naval Research Lab

October 8, 2011 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageAda Lovelace Day celebrates the contributions of women in science and technology. I've chosen to write about Betts Wald who was a branch chief in the Communications Science division of the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) when I first met her. I joined NRL in 1974 as my first real job - after serving in the US Army when I was drafted as a graduate student at Brown. It was a great experience. NRL was full of wildly talented, energetic and brilliant managers who knew how to get impossible things done in engineering and government, and taught that skill to their teams. Betts was one of the best: leading and inspiring her team, running interference, providing just enough technical guidance (i.e. to avoid permanent damage) while constantly encouraging and developing her team's talents. Women in science and technology should be encouraged to consider career paths as leaders as well as individual contributors: Betts is a great role model. Although I never heard Betts shout: "To the difference engine!", except for the pipe it would be in character. And I'm not certain about the pipe.

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What's the 2.0 of Enterprise 2.0? Or, How to Be Emergent?

September 4, 2011 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageHat tip to Professor +Andrew McAfee for pointing out Do Happier People Work Harder? my nomination for Required Reading of the Day (#RRD). Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School, and Steven Kramer an independent researcher wrote a great New York Times Labor Day opinion column. They cite sobering results from a Gallup-Healthways poll of 1,000 adults every day since Jan 2008: "People of all ages, and across income levels, are unhappy with their supervisors, apathetic about their organizations and detached from what they do." They also suggest that the problem is manageable - by what I would define as great enterprises.

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Extending the fabric of work, or How to Be Emergent

August 24, 2011 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageI enjoyed reading Dion Hincliffe's Putting Social Business to Work and G+ discussion led by Luis Suarez on Laurie Buczek's The Big Failure of Enterprise 2.0 Social Business. I agree that top down - and isolated - Social Business parallels the faults of top down - and isolated - Knowledge Management. I like Laurie's analysis and recommendations, including her top level: "Make social tools part of the collaborative workflow." This is good for both social business and knowledge management. The question is: how to extend the fabric of work?

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Lipstick on a Pig

August 5, 2011 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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On Aug 5, 2011, Andrew McAfee opened a public discussion on Google+ by sharing How Apple (unintentionally) revolutionized corporate IT by Aaron Levie. McAfee commented "Story from CNNMoney about how Apple is unintentionally revolutionizing corporate IT. About time, too." and asked "Does anyone doubt that the Cloud + mobile + social + new devices is going to have a huge impact on corporate technology infrastructures and costs within the next 5-10 years?" Off to the races...

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A Circle is not a Space

July 13, 2011 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageLike many people in the tech industry, I've been happily exploring and enjoying Google+ for the past week or so (thank you Susan Scrupski for the early invitation). I like the Google+ bar, polished integration with Google Profiles, Photos, and Video, as well as the new Huddle and Hangout capabilities. And I'm looking forward to Google+ integrated Search. Nov 20, 2015 update: Google's updated Community and Collection model finally gives Google+ something like a shared Spaces as well as email-like Circles. Keep reading for thoughts on why Circles never caught on. - grl

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Introducing Online Workplaces - Greg's notes on Larry Cannell's July 2011 Webinar

July 8, 2011 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageLarry Cannell, Research Director, Gartner Group presented great slides and hosted an excellent webinar on July 7, 2011 based on his research and experience. Free registration gives public access to a recording of the Webinar and a copy of Larry's slides - at least for a few days (after than please check Gartner Webinar Archives). Please register and learn! Larry will also be leading sessions at Gartner Catalyst Conference 2011 San Diego, July 26-29. Larry's framework is very crisply stated, general and useful. The 65 slides include very helpful diagrams, examples, scorecard decision aids, and more. These are just top level points from my notes.

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The Debate Zone: Has the US passed peak productivity growth? | McKinsey & Company

May 23, 2011 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageSee the lively McKinsey & Company What Matters debate, Tyler Cowen: "Yes. The big gains in the 20th century resulted from transformative innovations that are much rarer today." versus Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson: "No. We’ve only just begun to reap the productivity benefits of digital technology." Read the analysis, lively comments, and jump in! My two cents (also posted as What Matters comment): I agree with Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson's analysis that digital technology - including but not limited to the Web, communications and computer technology - is a GPT that "leads to fundamental changes in the production process of those using the new invention." and whose impact on productivity will be felt over decades, not years.

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Zoom in to focus, zoom out for awareness, bubble up items in the flow of work

May 9, 2011 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageThere's been a lot of Web and Twitter discussion about the value of activity streams to promote broad awareness versus the potential problem of showing too much information and having important signals get lost in the flow. I believe that the best solution is to allow people to selectively zoom into activity streams, status and discussions - clipped by space, project, person or milestone - to focus on any particular activity in context. To focus more precisely, click a watch button to get notification when anything is added, changed, or discussed in a context you want to monitor carefully.

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Literate Business and Euan Semple

May 4, 2011 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageEuan Semple's Literate Business post of May 4, 2011 is well worth reading. In preparing to write his book, Euan noted "There's something wrong with the names we use for social web tools in business... whether Enterprise 2.0, Social business or whatever."

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Water Cooler ROI Part II - Project Networks Improve Performance

April 22, 2011 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

ImageIn Water Cooler ROI - Putting Social Software to Productive Work I pointed to some terrific research that uncovered the extent to which project work relies on communication (in various mediums) and how digital networks actual enhance productivity (with a 7% increase in one case). More fuel for the fire comes from Why Project Networks Beat Project Teams, a study published in the MIT Sloan Management Review last month.

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Need for Incentives, and other Innovation Myths

April 11, 2011 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

In our own Customer Forum, Rolf Isaksen (click here for blog's main page) recently asked: "Why do we need incentives to share?" Some of the follow-on conversation converged on "we don't" with some good pointer to experience and research supporting that premise. Rather, focusing on intrinsic motivation rather than rewards can net greater benefit and long lasting E2.0 success.

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I won a ticket to Google I/O!

April 11, 2011 · · Posted by Andy Keller

We've been using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) for about 2 years and have also gone to the past 2 years of Google I/O. It's been a fun and useful conference and there was no question we were going to go again this year.

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Deloitte and Sampson: Focus on process, the "why" not the "what", for social software

March 22, 2011 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

I found a common thread on process centric adoption in the Deloitte Center for the Edge's Social Software for Business Performance report and Michael Sampson's User Adoption Strategies book. This advice is reflected in my post on Emergineering from last fall.

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March 11 - Vannevar Bush's Birthday

March 11, 2011 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageThe Computer History Museum's This Day In History March 11 reminded me that today is the birthday of Vannevar Bush (born March 11, 1890), a distinguished educator, engineer, Vice President and Dean of MIT, and President of the Carnegie Institution. As World War II Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Bush managed all US wartime research, reporting directly to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. After the War he was instrumental in creation of the National Science Foundation based on a 1944 request from FDR. Bush is also known as the author of a famous July 1945 Atlantic Monthly essay As We May Think, where he described a possible "new relationship between the thinking man and the sum of our knowledge" including the Memex - a literary machine which inspired the invention of hypertext twenty years later - and indirectly lead to creation of the Web. See the video archive of the MIT / Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium on the 50th Anniversary of As We May Think for a great collection of talks by Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Andy van Dam, Tim Berners-Lee, Alan Kay, and others inspired by Bush and and his work.

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The Future of Work Platforms: Like Jazz

February 16, 2011 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageYesterday 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.

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Applied Knowledge Co Ltd - Bringing Traction TeamPage 5.1 to Japan

January 21, 2011 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageOur long-time Japanese reseller partner Applied Knowledge Co Ltd has done a great job bringing Traction TeamPage to the Japanese market. They are an excellent sales and consulting partner for Japanese market customers. AKJ also has deep experience applying Enterprise 2.0 principles, the Traction TeamPage SDK, Japanese Language localization of the TeamPage interface, and Japanese advanced linguistics and faceted navigation capabilities of Traction's Attivio powered Advanced Search.

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December 2010 | Gilbane Conference - Portal vs. Enterprise Social Software Panel

January 18, 2011 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Jordan Frank writes: At the Gilbane Conference last month I stood in for Greg Lloyd in the Portal or Enterprise Social Software: Which Collaboration Environment to Choose? panel with David Seuss (CEO, Northern Light) and Jay Batson (Co-Founder and VP, Acquia).

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Doug Engelbart's copy of As We May Think - with Doug's 1962 notes scribbled in the margins

January 6, 2011 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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The Doug Engelbart Foundation's 1995 Vannevar Bush Symposium video archive page includes a section on Bush's influence on Doug's work, including his copy of Bush's As We May Think with Doug's 1962 notes in the margins (pdf). Talk about deeply intertwingled living history. Per a note in the .pdf, the original hardcopy has apparently been donated to the Computer History Museum. Look for this paper when the Computer History Museum's Revolution - The First 2000 Years of Computing exhibit opens in Mountain View CA - and online on 13 Jan 2011.

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Good Titles/Headlines are Good Practice

November 19, 2010 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

In my role as an emergineer, I talk a lot about best practices and how they can be leveraged in a given customer deployment. One practice that works in any sphere from email to social software and journalism is to write a good headline.

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TUG 2010 Newport | Thank you!

October 15, 2010 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageTUG 2010 Newport just wrapped up after four busy and enjoyable days. It's hard to express how grateful I am to the customers, partners, friends - and the Traction Software team - who made this such an enjoyable event. First I'd like to thank keynote speakers Jim McGee, Chris Nuzum, Jon Udell as well as customers, friends and partners whose thoughtful talks and enthusiasm made Wednesday's sessions so rewarding.

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Fixing Enterprise Search

September 4, 2010 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageA 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.

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Work you can see x Who you know = What you can do

August 24, 2010 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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Work you can see x Who you know = What you can do
With thanks to Jessica Hagy
Who created her great This is what 2.0 means drawing on Aug 14, 2010.

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

July 29, 2010 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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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 and speaker notes, see inline Slideshare below. Sounded like a super session!

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Intertwingled Work and Adaptive Case Management

July 6, 2010 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Tuesday July 6, 2010: As promised, John Tropea posted a comprehensive analysis and synthesis on observable work and Adaptive Case Management (and much more) titled: Have we been doing Enterprise 2.0 in reverse : Socialising processes and Adaptive Case Management It's a great post that's long for a very good reason: John pulls together many themes with well-sourced references and quotes [ another apology to the easily distracted ]. I won't use this comment to summarize all of the points I find interesting and valuable - there's a lot to come back to! I'll will try to summarize one theme John develops that seems directly relevant to Intertwingled Work.

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re: Enterprise 2.0 and Observable Work

July 5, 2010 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Monday July 5, 2010: For an update on the Observable Work conversation, see Blog1424: Intertwingled Work

Intertwingled Work

July 5, 2010 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageLast 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.

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 are found by either service. There's room for improvement on the public Web as well as the Enterprise 2.0 domain.

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re: Enterprise 2.0 and Observable Work

June 25, 2010 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Friday June 25, 2010: Observable Work discussion centered on Jim McGee's original blog post Managing the visibility of knowledge work, including a comment and blog post: Observable Work: The Taming of the Flow by @briantullis and a comment and analysis with several well sourced examples by @johnt, including this:

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Enterprise 2.0 and Observable Work

June 23, 2010 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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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:

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."

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gwt-traction project on Google Code

June 22, 2010 · · Posted by Andy Keller

ImageWhile 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.

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re: Social Process Reengineering?

June 18, 2010 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

The title of this entry had three goals. First, I wanted to convey and play off the stark differences between Social Process Reengineering and Business Process Reengineering. Second, I wanted to leverage the similarities of SPR and BPR to explain that these two processes can, and need, to co-exist rather than compete. Finally, I wanted to ask the question about whether this is the right term of the process. After dozens of conversations with the best minds in E2.0 this week, I've reconciled to a a more targeted and appropriate term: Emergineering!.

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Emergineering!

June 18, 2010 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

ImageSince 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.

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Welcome to Traction TeamPage 5.0!

June 15, 2010 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageOn 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.

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Social Process Reengineering?

June 13, 2010 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

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.

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Q: How do I link to an Excel file? A: Why Would you Do That?

June 11, 2010 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

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?

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The spy who came in from the code | O'Reilly Radar | Carmen Medina interview

May 4, 2010 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageSee 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!

Return On Information

April 14, 2010 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

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?

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Ada Lovelace Day | Fran Allen, IBM Fellow and A.M. Turing Award Winner

March 23, 2010 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageFor 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 pleasure of meeting her in person, but I'll take the liberty of calling her Fran, as Dick Merwin and everyone I know called her in their Fran stories.

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Social Media Policy Almost = Blabbing Policy

March 18, 2010 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

After reading 10 Social Media Commandment for Employers, I was reminded of Blogging Policy = Blabbing Policy, a blog entry I wrote back in 2006 when the the "conversation" in the blog-o-sphere started to center on corporate blogging policies.

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Garry Kasparov on Computer Chess and Enterprise 2.0

February 19, 2010 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Image Professor Andrew McAfee posted a very good business analysis of points made by Garry Kasparov in his Feb 11, 2010 New York Review of Books article on Diego Rasskin-Gutman's book Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind. Kasparov's summarized of his own thoughts as a Chess Grandmaster and world chess champion playing against - and losing to - IBM's Deep Blue chess computer. But the interesting part comes when Kasparov talks about a recent match open to grandmasters who were allowed to use computer chess programs of their choice to augment their own chess skills: "The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time." McAfee quotes Kasparov and continues:

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Doug Engelbart | 85th Birthday Jan 30, 2010

January 30, 2010 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Image"DOUG Engelbart sat under a twenty-two-foot-high video screen, "dealing lightning with both hands." At least that's the way it seemed to Chuck Thacker, a young Xerox PARC computer designer who was later shown a video of the demonstration that changed the course of the computer world." from What the Dormouse Said, John Markoff.

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re: Explaining Twitter - One of Three Places for People

December 17, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Update Dec 17, 2009: Facebook's controversial ex-post facto revision of member privacy settings along with the revenue driven rise of apps like Farmville (as well as sleezy internal promotion) lead me to revisit this, see Blog1232: Facebook: A Carnival Midway not a Neighborhood?

Facebook: A Carnival Midway not a Neighborhood?

December 17, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageOliver Marks wrote a very good post: Facebook: The Legal Rumblings Start Dec 17, 2009, on the Facebook's potential legal exposure due to its controversial changes to member privacy capabilities and settings. My comment: Oliver -- Very good followup on Facebook's awkward (to put it mildly) changes to selective privacy capabilities which were a large part of their differentiation vs Friendster and MySpace.

With over 70 million folk apparently hooked on "social" games like Farmville, targeted ads that seem to belong on late night TV, and incredibly lame attempts to nag folk get their friends to use Facebook more (giving "viral" a new and flu like meaning), I see Facebook becoming a downscale carnival midway more than a neighborhood. They certainly have a right to do that.

Originally I thought the equally lame and manipulative privacy changes would just contribute to the downmarket feel of the place.

But as you point out - EU privacy laws may land them in legal entanglements too.

Facebook is becoming a bad example rather than a good example for use of social software in the enterprise - or anywhere for that matter. Look out below!


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How big a deal is Enterprise 2.0? What do you mean by "Big"?

November 22, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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I'm flattered that Professor Andrew McAfee cites Enterprise 2.0 Schism in his Nov 20, 2009 blog post Enterprise 2.0 is Not THAT Big a Deal, kicking off a neat discussion on serious points behind my tongue in cheek analysis. McAfee agrees that Enterprise 2.0 is a big deal - but "... I don't see E2.0's tools, approaches, and philosophies making obsolete managers, hierarchies, org charts and formal cross functional business processes". There's no need to use a 2.0 version for the Enterprise, but:

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Peter Drucker and Enterprise 2.0 | Drucker Centenary

November 19, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageEarlier this week Oliver Marks wrote an excellent post on his Collaboration 2.0 Blog: The Purpose of a Business is to Create a Customer' - Peter Drucker Centenary. Oliver celebrates the Nov 19, 2009 Centenary of Peter Drucker's birth with two of his favorite Drucker bumper sticker quotes: " ‘Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes‘ and ‘There is an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job‘, which somehow seem to fit together very well." then uses these quotes as context to discuss the disturbing findings of the 2009 Shift Index report and followup analysis by John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davidson of the Deloitte Center for The Edge. Please read Oliver's full post - you'll like it. Oliver was also used kind words to build on my earlier Enterprise 2.0 Schism post. Here's a slightly extended version of the comment I posted in reply, along with my two favorite Drucker bumper sticker quotes and several links to celebrate Drucker's birth and life.

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Enterprise 2.0 Schism

November 9, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Image 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.

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Introducing Proteus (demo)

November 2, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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Traction Software Director of User Experience Michael Angeles introduces Traction's new Google Web Toolkit (GWT) based Proteus user interface with a brief tour (video below).

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TUG 2009 Providence | Thank you!

November 2, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageI'd like to thank all of the Traction customers, partners and friends who traveled to Providence last month to make TUG 2009 Providence as enjoyable as it was enlightening. Special thanks to keynote speakers Carmen Medina, Chris Nuzum, Stewart Mader and all of the customers and partners who participated in the Oct 14 Main event. And my personal thanks to everyone on the Traction Software team who worked so hard to bring TeamPage R4.2, the Oracle RDB backend, Attivo Advance Search, and the Proteus Google Web Tookit (GWT) UI to life. I don't know what we'll do to top TUG 2009 next year - but TUG members provides some excellent ideas! See TUG 2009 Providence | Keynotes by Carmen Medina, Chris Nuzum and Stewart Mader for links to TUG videos, slide shows, interviews, tech talks and more, along with how become a TUG member and join the conversation. TUG registration is free and open to the public.

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Where's Greg?

October 21, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageYou may have noticed a slow down in blog posts by Jordan and myself, and attributed that to our work for TUG 2009 Providence last week, and you'd be partially right (but it was fun - as you'll learn). You can also blame our slower blog posting to time spent on Twitter, both as individuals: @roundtrip (Greg Lloyd) and @jordanfrank and using the Traction Software corporate feed @tractionteam (which broadcasts the title and a shortened link to new content posted on TractionSoftware.com as well as original tweets).

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Structuring for Emergence

September 23, 2009 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Enterprise 2.0 Social Software is appealing for many reasons, but a core value is the facilitation of emergence. Many in our community may quibble with McAfee's definition of Enterprise 2.0 but I think all will agree that the need to support emergence is a key trait. However, an emergent discussion shines a light on the interacting role of structure and emergence.

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2.0 Adoption Council | Neat Tweet!

September 22, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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Susan Scrupski (aka @ITSinsider) tweets Sep 22, 2009: reading a great preso by a Council member. great testimony for e20 vendor Traction Software @TractionTeam

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re: At What Scale Can Web Services Survive?

September 16, 2009 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

9 Months later, I have an answer: 300 Million Users. It's good to see that all that traffic can add up to enough dollars to sustain the service. I wasn't looking forward a cash crunch at FaceBook leading to the dismantling of the network of friends I've spent a few hundred (or maybe a thousand) clicks putting together.

As We May Work - Andy van Dam

September 7, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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On April 17, 2008 Professor Andy van Dam of Brown University delivered the keynote address of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2009 Tokyo. Andy's title is a play on Vannevar Bush's July 1945 essay As We May Think. As We May Think inspired creation of pioneering hypertext systems by Andy, Ted Nelson, Doug Engelbart and others, leading to Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web. The creators of these hypertext systems originally envisioned an environment where individuals could write, link, comment on and share what they wrote as well as search and read what others had written - core capabilities of what we now call social software for the public Web or an Enterprise. Andy's keynote is a personal history, and a vision of how the Web provides a new context for work as well as public communication, socialization, commerce, scholarship and entertainment. For the full slide set see As We May Work (.ppt 8.8MB), posted here with Andy's permission.

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Is Twitter Like Going Out for a Smoke? - And Other stories

September 3, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Bill Ives posted an interesting post Is Twitter Like Going Out for a Smoke?, responding to a Twitter / Water Cooler analogy by Arie Goldshlager and a smoker's network analogy pointed out by Stewart Mader and Gil Yehuda in Lessons from New York Smokers. I commented: Bill -- An interesting post and topic! I think there's likely an interesting history (and sociological studies) of how informal groups form and cross-link in businesses and other organizations.

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Project Artifacts - Risks, Issues, Questions, Requirements and more

August 14, 2009 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Glen Alleman at Herding Cats offers really nice distinctions in Risks and Issues Are Not The Same. In the course of working with a lot of teams as they deploy TeamPage as a project wiki, I've seen a wide range of terms for project artifacts. The more these concepts are discussed and hashed out, the better.

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Skiing on the Slope of Enlightenment

August 12, 2009 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

At our market launch in 2002, I recall all kinds of skepticism passing off the wiki and blog markets as a fad. Today, with a complete social software platform and the most robust wiki framework on the market, we are skiing on Gartner's Slope of Enlightenment. Gartner reports that Social Software suites are headed for the trough of disillusionment (a good and necessary transition before hitting the slope of enlightenment), though our customer case studies show little illusion about the tangible and necessary business value delivered by Traction TeamPage. » Read Gartner's press release and ReadWriteWeb's report. ReadWriteWeb's writeup.

Compliance and Enterprise 2.0 - For the right reasons

July 13, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageBurton Group analyst Mike Gotta writes Compliance Doesn't Sell E2.0 … But It Should in his personal Collaborative Thinking blog. Mike summarizes a June 2009 E2.0 conference interview with Alexander Howard, quoted in Compliance concerns dog Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platforms. Howard asks:

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How 1.5 is Greater than 2.0

July 9, 2009 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

I found Tom Davenport's discussion of Why 1.5 is Greater than 2.0 by way of Bill Ives in Mixing Old and New School Communication. Davenport talks about the social reasons in favor of a blend between social and traditional approaches. I think an answer to How 1.5, in this context, is Greater than 2.0 is both social and structural.

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What's Social About Software? And Why It Matters.

June 25, 2009 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Innovation starts with words, and ways to convey them.

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Having versus Using Enterprise 2.0 Software

May 15, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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Gil Yehuda wrote a very good post today Enterprise 2.0 Thoughts to end the week. He talks about Enterprise 2.0 maturity, second wave adoption, focus on work, and levels of the conversation. It's a great post you should read in full and reflect on. One particular point caught my attention; Gil says: "... having a wiki, forum, blogs, etc. on the intranet and using a wiki, forum, blog effectively to improve the transparency and productivity of collaboration are very different indicators of progress."

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Andy Keller talks about Traction's use of GWT | Video

May 13, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

May 12, 2009 5:38pm rotkapchen Great explanation: Traction Director of Engineering Andy Keller tells why Traction's chose GWT (Google Web Toolkit) for TeamPage's new interaction layer. View video inline below or youtube.com/watch…

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#E2L09 Innovation Starts with Ideas. Wiki will Cross the Work 2.0 Frontier When TeamPage 5.0 Carries Ideas into Action.

May 8, 2009 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

These case studies are a taste of how ideas and issues turn into action, how tasks evolve from conversations and how boundaries have to appear to disappear for W2.0 ideas to meet E2.0 execution. See you at E2.0.

Can't stuff the Web back in a box ...

April 19, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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On April 16 2009 Oliver Marks wrote The CIA's Collaboration Growth Curve & IBM's Lotusphere ecosystem connecting three topics: 1) the transformation of the CIA's collaborative practices; 2) how this relates to the concept of the collaboration curve introduced by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown (JSB), and Lang Davison, and 3) his reaction to IBM's Lotusphere Comes to You roadshow event in San Francisco that day. It's a great post which motivated me to add a comment which I expanded a bit below.

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re: Explaining Twitter - One of Three Places for People

April 15, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Rafe WTF of the day: @Josh comes back from lunch... "I got some cat food, do you want it?" Twitter.com 4:13PM 15 Apr 2009 ... much funnier than my example, but QED.

Enterprise 2.0 and the importance of Silo Smashing!

April 14, 2009 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

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Recent posts by Michael Sampson, John Tropea and Thomas Vander Wal converge on the need for Enterprise 2.0 tools to smash the silos segregating content types and isolating workspaces.

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Mixing Tasks and Conversations, and KUKA as the "seminal enterprise 2.0 solution"

April 14, 2009 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

A tweet from John Tropea identifies our Kuka Systems case study as the "Seminal enterprise 2.0 task based / process solution." THANKS! I can't imagine a better endorsement of a case study, or the product supporting it.

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Should Software Vendors Also Sell Professional Services? YES!

April 14, 2009 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

This conversation started with Stewart Mader and continues with Bill Ives. While most of our customers run the easy installer and are up and running readily, many benefit from our front end advice as well as more formal professional services engagements. This exchange offers two simple benefits that are strategic to the customers and to the software producer (and, in turn, to the customers).

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re: Explaining Twitter - One of Three Places for People

April 3, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Update: Steve Buttry Information Content Conductor of Gazette Communications posted an excellent tip sheet: Leading your staff into the Twitterverse for a workshop he'll be leading for the American Society of Newpaper Editors. It's an great introduction to Twitter which covers linking, following, tools and ethics. I believe Steve's advice is just as valuable for neighborhood (Facebook) and workplace (Enterprise 2.0) microblogging. Steve writes:

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I Can't Tweet & Trusting Online Services

March 30, 2009 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

ImageLast fall, I pointed out an issue of trust as part and parcel of Web 2.0 security (See What Web 2.0 and E2.0 Security Means to Me). When we accept social services like Facebook and Twitter as Two of Three Places for People, we entrust them to manage our data securely, to keep consistent terms (i.e. they don't suck us in and then suck us dry by starting to charge for basic services), and to be there when we need them. Today, I felt muzzled as I was touched by the uptime issue. I got this "over capacity" memo when I went to Tweet an answer to Dave Lamp's Question. I've received the "over capacity" messages several times and will continue, for now, to trust they'll iron things out over at Twitter HQ.

Reading blogs at 800 MPH

March 27, 2009 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

I took a long needed vacation last week and came back to the usual firestorm of post-vacation pile-up that makes one pause before entertaining the idea of another break. Anyhow, after meeting a few high priority deadlines, I had time this afternoon to review everything posted to our TeamPage server in the last 2 weeks.

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Ada Lovelace Day | Professor Lee S. Sproull, Stern School, NYU

March 23, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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For this first Ada Lovelace Day I've chosen to write about Professor Lee Sproull an internationally-recognized sociologist whose research centers on the implications of computer-based communication technologies for managers, organizations, communities, and society. Professor Sproull is a pioneer and visionary in the rigorous study of what we now call social software.

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Explaining Twitter - One of Three Places for People

March 22, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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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.

I'll call this the "I just picked up more cat food" use - and yes I believe than many people do have friends and family from whom a stream of these tiny updates is enjoyable and valuable even when the content is as mundane as the dullest blog in the world. Tweets are very short and don't demand a lot of attention. The background chatter of friends or family - like the chatter of children playing - is comforting, enjoyable and entertaining especially when you're physically separated. You should note that Twitter currently allows you to either make your account public (anyone can read) or private (only followers you OK can read what you tweet) so using Twitter for private "friends and family only" tweets become awkward at best and precludes use of the same account for public conversation on Twitter.

Facebook: To me this place is a neighborhood where you can choose your own friends and neighbors. I use Facebook mainly for informal friend, family, alumni keep in touch posts and links. Because Facebook friending automatically builds a two-way follows relationship versus Twitter's one-way user model, it's easy to build and maintain a neighborly feel by default. I enjoy status updates and posts (like tweets with structure for videos, web links and Facebook apps) from "friends" and keep my posts open to members of my college's Facebook Network. The Facebook posts I write and read are generally for smile value or status updates that would only be of interest to folks who know one another and find the chatter comforting rather than noise. Although it's possible to turn down the volume of posts from folk who tend to update a lot, signal to noise is not really a problem with a neighborhood of tens to hundreds of folk. Just like in real life you know how to act and what to expect in your Facebook neighborhood.

Twitter Sucks, so change your friends Mar 16, 2009 Steve Lawson. His analysis and examples are even better than the title.

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re: Kuka Systems TeamPage Case Study

March 14, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageA customer story about giant orange robots - for real! How good can it get?
KUKA Titan Largest and strongest 6-axis industrial robot in the world. Payload capacity: 1000 kilograms

Kuka Systems TeamPage Case Study

March 14, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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See Kuka Systems for an excellent TeamPage story Jordan wrote in cooperation with this Traction TeamPage customer. KUKA is one of the world's leading suppliers of robotics as well as plant and systems engineering and has been in the automation technologies business since 1898. They build robotics systems for factory automation and are a leading worldwide supplier of assembly and welding systems, and other related machinery, servicing the automobile, aerospace, and energy industries.

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re: Reinventing the Web

March 14, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

For an excellent first hand history of the Web - and a linked data proposal which seems to share many of the simple, scalable properties of his original invention - see Tim Berners-Lee's Feb 2009 TED Talk on the 20th anniversary of the Web:

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Providence Geek Talk | Frank and Nuzum speak out: How Pages Crush Documents

March 9, 2009 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Image Chris Nuzum and I had a chance to speak to the Providence Geeks about what we've done with Traction TeamPage and how "Pages are Crushing Documents." I do a history of our company and transition into a history of communication and collaboration that runs the course from stone tablets to books through email and documents and finally culminates in wikis and blogs. Now that wikis and blogs are becoming the new currency of collaboration and communication, my presentation focuses on how "packaging matters" with particular focus on the ways pages can be re-used and distributed in ways that can improve communication performance and enable innovation like we've never seen it before. Caught on "film" are my talk followed by a video podcast interview.

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Water Cooler ROI - Putting Social Software to Productive Work

March 3, 2009 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Matt Hodgson's the ROI of Being Social at Work points to recent MIT research suggesting 40% of productivity for creative teams is a direct result of communication and employees with the most extensive digital networks are 7% more productive.

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re: I Love My iPhone

February 26, 2009 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Joel (Chief Geek at Geek.com) loves his iPhone too. He called me after I'd left my Providence Geeks presentation to tell me he'd been walking around like a wet dog in the rain in search of his car. We used our iPhones to find eachother and then used his to find his car. Good fun.

Clarity Amid the Hype

February 26, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Image Mike Gotta posted Enterprise Twitter: Clarity Amid The Hype analyzing - and generally agreeing with - points raised by Adina Levin (Socialtext) in her excellent post What's Different about Enterprise Twitter? I agree with Mike's analysis and Adina's thoughtful points (read them both) but want to focus on Mike's conclusion:

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Traction TeamPage: The One System to Rule It All

February 24, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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Needless to say I'm delighted with Michael Sampson's Currents: "TeamPage - the One System to Rule It All". I like One System to Rule It All angle, butassume that would make me a metaphorical Elven-smith of Eregion rather than Sauron of course. Hmmm

re: Why Software is a Good Investment

February 24, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

What Jordan meant to say: Send us your money and you'll be happy and save more than you spent!

Why Software is a Good Investment

February 24, 2009 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

In tough economic times organizations are faced with hard budgeting choices as they weigh the cost and benefit of investing in durable goods, people, marketing and software. Here are some reasons why software should be at the top of the list:

So, if you are trying to figure out how to put together your 2009 budgets, consider software. And if a track record of technology leadership is any indicator, get Traction.

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re: Ask an Engineer: What do you think of the Facebook Terms of Service Flap?

February 22, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

For a good example, see Nicolas Kolakowski's Feb 20, 2009 eWeek story Facebook Launches Social Widget for Facebook Connect :

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Ask an Engineer: What do you think of the Facebook Terms of Service Flap?

February 18, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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If you haven't been paying attention to this week's flap on Facebook's revised terms of service - posted three days ago and retracted today - Andrew Lavelle of the Wall Street Journal published a good recap today. The controversy relates to what rights does Facebook get to content that an individual Facebook user posts? There are a lot of good arguments about what rights people think Facebook should be able to retain, but there's a second level of discussion that relates to how people expect Facebook privacy settings to work, and how these expectations make it difficult to craft an agreement that seems fair, makes sense, and corresponds to what Facebook actually implements and enforces.

I read Monday's version as a promise to track sharing rules based on Facebook privacy settings as you may change them over time. If so, it looks like developers who use the Facebook API need to reference the current value of per user privacy settings that are authoritatively maintained by the Facebook platform. Not a bad position for Facebook as the gatekeeper for all runtime access - but not easy to craft an agreement that “make sense”, is broad enough to protect Facebook, matches what they actually implement, and can be enforced on their Facebook API developers who also need access to user content.

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President 2.0

February 17, 2009 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

We've seen our US Government and state level customers seek out and achieve great success as they make their own migrations to "2.0" style collaboration with TeamPage. While "grasss roots" action at the agency level is encouraging, top down involvement and mandates tend to accelerate the proces. With Obama's Transparency and Open Government mandate, perhaps we have it!

re: Searching for the Perfect Fried Clam | Rhode Island

February 17, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

For a longer list of Providence RI restaurants I like, see Providence Rhode Island Restaurants: A Local's Favorites contributed to Bill Ives' list of restaurant picks.

re: Email isn't dead - It's only sleeping ...

February 17, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

In yet another conversation on "is email dead?" I settled on: No - it's just a "strange legacy idea" that's tragicomically inept for collaboration.

What are you good at?

January 30, 2009 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

I like what Seth Godin says in What are you good at? Where he talks about the distinction between content (domain expertise) and process (emotional intelligence skills you have for managing projects, visualizing success, dealing with priorities and so on).

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At What Scale Can Web Services Survive?

January 30, 2009 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

One more data point in line of my Whither Web 2.0 Social Networking Discussion which questions the revenue models of web services (with web social networking as a focal point): An on-line service the scale and scope of Microsoft's Online Services is running into red ink of proportional scale. It lost $471 Million per last quarter. The clear and present issue is not whether a profit may be turned at some even-large scale, but what will change about the business model and how will that affect users?

Reinventing the Web

January 12, 2009 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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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."

I was one of the skeptics who thought that the World Wide Web with its fragile one-way links would never take off as a global hypertext platform. Classic hypertext systems (from HES and Augment though Xanadu, Plato, Intermedia, Lotus Notes, and Dynatext) went to great lengths to preserve the integrity of links, relationships, and content.

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Searching Content for People

January 7, 2009 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

By moving communication and knowledge exchange to web pages, social software breaks down the walls that traditionally divide e-mail communication and traditional folder based document sharing. As discussed at the conclusion of So, What About Enterprise Social Networking?, this style of interacting online opens avenues for content enrichment and exploitation.

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So, What About Enterprise Social Networking?

January 7, 2009 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Last week's post, Wither Web 2.0 Social Networking? and My 2 Cents., offers my perspective on the murky future of web facing personal social networking, as well as a recipe for its survival. The Enterprise Social Networking market, meanwhile, is growing up more steadily in the wake of its Web 2.0 sibling and, despite some commonalities, faces a different value equation, use cases and market forces.

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Wither Web 2.0 Social Networking? and My 2 Cents.

December 30, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Michael Fitzgerald's MIT Tech Review column Are Social Networks Sinking? summarizes the inevitable deflation (though not all-out devastation) of the Web 2.0 Social Networking market (not to be mixed with the Enterprise 2.0 market - which is growing more steadily in-the-wake-of, rather than in-step-with, the Web 2.0 market) bubble.

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re: Tuesday Dec 9, 2008 | Forty years after the Mother of All Demos

December 9, 2008 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

See also Dylan Tweeny's Wired summary Dec 9, 1968: The Mother of All Demos, including this video clip. Doug hasn't lost his enthusiasm and motivation!

Tuesday Dec 9, 2008 | Forty years after the Mother of All Demos

December 7, 2008 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Image On Dec 9, 1968 Doug Engelbart stepped onto a stage in front of about 2,000 people. He adjusted his headset and sat down before his mouse, chord key set, and twenty-two foot TV projection screen. His NLS/Augment system prefigured the Web, shared screen teleconferencing, much of what we know as hypertext, in what's often called the Mother of All Demos. Read this authorized clip from John Markoff's excellent book What the Dormouse Said or see the video of the Demo.

Doug Engelbart Video Archive: 1968 Demo - FJCC Conference Presentation Reel Dec 9, 1968 Internet Archive, the so called Mother of All Demos. See also From Pranksters to PCs chapter about Engelbart's 1968 FJCC demo from John Markoff's book What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, authorized excerpt.

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Wikis and Blogs vs. Suites | Forrester vs. CMS Watch | Where is the gloom and doom?

November 24, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

 There seem to be conflicting views on what kinds of IT applications and vendors will get hit the hardest in an economic downturn. Will it be point applications like Wikis and Blogs, or Enterprise 2.0 Suites? Or will it be big ticket collaboration platforms from vendors like Microsoft, OpenText and Documentum?

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Do Something Differently - Spend less for better results

November 16, 2008 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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JP Rangaswami offers typically sound advice for businesses looking at how to cope with hard times in his October 19th post Invented Here. He says when times are hard, a firm has four choices:

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Live blog with Traction TeamPage

November 16, 2008 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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from Michael Angeles, Traction Software Director of User Experience: Live Blog
is a new plug-in for TeamPage 4.0. The new Live Blog interface works like Twitter or IM. It creates an automatically updating browser window you can park on your desktop (or iPhone). You type a brief note and everyone with access to that Live Blog sees their window update in seconds. But unlike Twitter or IM, Live Blog is backed by Traction's TeamPage platform that provides scalable storage, security, integrated search and all of the other capabilities that make TeamPage the leading best platform for Enterprise 2.0. For a video introduction see below. If you don't have Traction yet, remember that Traction is free for up to five project spaces and five users. Get a free Traction TeamPage/5 license and start Live Blogging now!

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Record 2008 Results and End of Year Discount

November 13, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

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We're happy to announce that 2008 marks the sixth year of consecutive revenue and customer growth at Traction Software. With the support of our growing customer base, thousands of TeamPage deployments, and a product that consistently earns reviews that put TeamPage at the top of the pack, we're able to continue our product and market leadership despite challenging economic times for competitors who charge more and deliver less.

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Reviewers and Customers Praise TeamPage 4.0 - Cite breakthroughs in Enterprise 2.0 collaboration

November 11, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Image Since Traction® TeamPage 4.0 was released in June 2008 we're happy to report that reviewers and customers have consistently applauded the innovation TeamPage 4.0 brings to the market. When you want to be able to use wiki-style collaboration on products, plans and projects - as well as free-form encyclopedia pages - it quickly becomes obvious that you need to be able to distinguish between the 'latest stable version' of a constellation of pages and the 'work in progress cloud' created through collaborative editing.

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What Web 2.0 and E2.0 Security Means to Me

November 6, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

E2.0 technologies must manage a delicate balance between collaborative freedoms they promise with the security, dependability and audit trail requirements that any enterprise has to have to let them in the door.

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Sweet Tweet

October 22, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

At the age of 12 (or so), I tried board-sailing and totally failed. I had no sense for how the mechanics of the sail and the wind worked together to point my board in any given direction. Then I got in a sailboat which, for whatever combination of reasons, made sense of the whole sailing process.

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I Love My iPhone

October 22, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

I don't often get enthusiastic about software (except for Traction TeamPage!) or a device, but my iPhone caught me off guard.

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Light up some classrooms! DonorsChoose.org Challenge

October 5, 2008 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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On Oct 1 DonorsChoose opened their Blogger Challenge 2008 to help spread the word about a great model for charitable giving. It's simple: Teachers ask. You choose, Students learn. Click the badge below to learn more and bring some light to classrooms where any contribution can make a difference. You'll feel good on a person-to-person level, and help children succeed in life.

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Avast Ye Enterprise 2.0 Seekers!

September 19, 2008 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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If ye be seeking Enterprise 2.0 Skills, click Traction Software or prepare to be Boarded, Pillaged and Sunk by thy Competition! If thou knowes't not how Enterprise 2.0 Skills canst Protect thy Treasure - Unto thy very Corporate Life - Profesaarh Andrew McAfee can set thee aright. Arrhh!

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Ariadne | Information Overload Paper - 10 ways to cope

September 2, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Sarah Houghton-Jan wrote and excellent paper, Being Wired or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope with Information Overload, in Ariadne (a Web Magazine for Information Professionals). It's actually ten general areas for coping, each with about 5 suggestions. Ever since Kid 1 and Kid 2 popped into my life, dealing with every kind of overload (e-mail overload, magazine overload, chores overload, poop overload...) has become a factor in my life!

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Which Enterprise 2.0 Users Are Talking About What and Who, Now and Then?

August 25, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

On his blog, I'm Not Actually a Geek, Hutch from Connectbeam writes "How Are Enterprise 2.0 Vendors Pitching Web 2.0? Using Wordle to Find Out. Here's another great tool that transforms the problem of having "Too Much Information" to not having enough!

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How (Not) To Fail

August 25, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Euan Semple breaks with tradition with a Top 8 list rather than a Top 10, and by explaining Most Companies Who Try to do Enterprise 2.0 will Fail (worst practices) vs. why they will succeed (best practices). From both sides of the IT fence (as a consultant and sales person at a VAR, an operations manager and product manager at a global content delivery service, and in marketing and consulting roles here at Traction Software) I've seen my share of internal failures and customer or prospect failures too. I've commented here on 3 of Euan's Top 8.

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Aberdeen Survey | Getting Social About Selling

August 14, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Smart enterprises are deploying blogs and wikis to power the Enterprise front line: Sales. Use cases may involve using Enterprise 2.0 technology to distribute timely market information, maintain a continuous loop of customer feedback, or maintain a wiki to manage selling points, FAQs, and collateral.

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Multi-Tasking Turtles Beat Focused Hares

August 5, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Image Fast access to new information and multi-tasking (to a point) can both contribute to overall performance. A pair of studies appear in an MIT Sloan Management Review profile, What Makes Information Workers Productive. The studies authored by Sinan Aral (Leonard N. Stern School of Business) and Erik Brynjolfsson (MIT Sloan School of Management) look at productivity at a recruiting business, and find some surprising results.

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Collaborating Across "Boundaries" - Searching People for Answers

August 5, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Mike Gotta points to new research published in HBS Working Knowledge analyzing which groups in an organization are most likely to communicate, crossing social and physical boundaries. The study, Communication (and Coordination?) in a Modern, Complex Organization, reports that "women, mid- to high-level executives and members of executive management, sales and marketing functions are most likely to participate in cross-group communications." It is these people who bridge groups in social structure.

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NHS integrates Intranet 1.0 with Enterprise 2.0 to get Social with TeamPage 4.0

July 18, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

The UK's National Health Service's Orkney region deployed Traction with great success in 2005 to address an unfavorable report about the state of internal communications. The original NHS Orkney Customer Story details how they used Traction for everything from wiki collaboration on policies and procedures to action tracking and even an internal blog to announce "stuff for sale." Since then, usage has only improved and Traction has also been deployed at the NHS Camden region. In June, David Rendall upgraded to the recently announced TeamPage 4.0 Release. I'm pleased to be able to share some of his notes and screen shots - to offer a glimpse into how an organization facing major Internal Communications deficiencies just three years ago is an Enterprise 2.0 leader today.

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23 July 2008 | Virtual E2.0 Conference - Traction Sponsors Forrester Keynote

July 18, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

ImageRegister Now (free admission) to join in on the Enterprise 2.0 Virtual Conference on the 23rd of July. The Agenda kicks off at 12:00 with Gartner Analyst David Mitchell Smith's Keynote Innovating the Enterprise with Web 2.0 and ends with a Forrester Analyst Rob Koplowitz's Keynote Control vs. Chaos: The Enterprise Web 2.0 Effect.

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Who's on Your Team ?

July 10, 2008 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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Web-based social software makes it possible for people to discover connections and stay in touch on a global scale without imposing undue work on either the sender or receiver of information - unlike email, face to face meetings, or any other medium in human history. In Who’s on Your Team? Enterprise 2.0 and Team Boundaries Larry Irons discusses a 2002 study on distributed work that's relevant for Enterprise 2.0 collaboration. The study found that members of geographically distributed teams have a fuzzy notion the boundaries of their team (who was in, who was out) while collocated teams rarely disagreed. Larry suggests that wiki style collaboration and social networking will make team boundaries fuzzier - and that's a good thing.

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No need to curb your enthusiasm ...

July 8, 2008 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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Read Prof Andrew McAfee's recent blog post Curb My Enthusiasm for a very concise summary of the model, analysis and conclusions of a July / August 2008 Harvard Business Review article he co-authored with MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson. McAfee poses a polite challenge that I'll paraphrase: For a bold and important claim, where is he wrong?

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CI Ethics Survey

July 7, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

If you want to benchmark your opinion on Competitive Intelligence practices vs. other respondents, this survey being run by Fuld & Company provides an opportunity. The questions in the survey are also thought provoking and great grist for internal discussion groups.

Why Enterprise Search Sucks

June 27, 2008 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

ImageRon 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?

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Borders, Spaces, and Places

June 26, 2008 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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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.

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Get a Bike Mr Kagermann!

June 24, 2008 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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WSJ.com's Ben Worthen quotes SAP chief executive Henning Kagermann "giving an interview in the back seat of a hybrid Mercury SUV instead of his usual Town Car, in accordance with SAP's new environmental policy". Kagermann is skeptical about the proposition that "large corporate-software projects will disappear, replaced by easy-to-use Internet-programs targeted at individual workers". Kagermann says:

... the most important features for the managers who buy business software are still a system’s security and reliability, and whether the system helps a business comply with an ever-growing number of government regulations, says Kagermann. Systems bought by individuals or departments don’t have the company-wide perspective necessary to meet these goals - The Reason It's Called Management Software, WSJ.com

On Mr. Kagermann's last point - systems from small, agile suppliers are perfectly capable of meeting security, reliability and other business requirements based on a company wide perspective. And small, agile mammals discovered their niche and evolved to reshape the world of ah... dinosaurs. No offense!

A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower Strategy | Video

June 20, 2008 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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I'm just back from the 2008 Current Strategy Forum at the US Naval War College in Newport. This year the topic of panels and presentations (including addresses and extensive Q&A by the Secretary of the Navy, Chief of Naval Operations and, the Commandant of the Marine Corp) was the Cooperative Strategy for 21s Century Seapower - a joint strategy for the US Marine Corp, Navy and Coast Guard. The strategy raises prevention of war - deterrence, cooperative relationships with more international partners, trust built through humanitarian assistance and disaster response - to an equal level as the conduct of war. In the very best sense this is a positioning statement: what a nation should expect from its maritime forces.

Our citizens were involved in development of this strategy through a series of public forums known as the “Conversations with the Country.” Three themes dominated these discussions: our people want us to remain strong; they want us to protect them and our homeland, and they want us to work with partners around the world to prevent war. These themes, coupled with rigorous academic research, analysis and debate, led to a comprehensive strategy designed to meet the expectations and needs of the American people.

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Connections

June 8, 2008 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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To the best of my knowledge, Clay Shirky is responsible for popularizing the term Social Software. By his definition, it's primarily about patterns of connections:

Social networking promotes new and serendipitous connections among people (and in TeamPage 4.0 the content they create and comments they make within a business context). But the public Web - and bounded world of Enterprise 2.0 - also creates connections based on serendipitous discovery using search, syndication, and context.

Network scale search of blog content is one Web scaleable way to find out who's actively talking about or working on a topic that interests you. Once you find a relevant hit, you then have the opportunity to: 1) make a personal connection; 2) subscribe to a syndicated feed from that individual or group; 3) make your own blog post or wiki link to tell let others in your strongly connected group - and anyone else in the who can read your post - that you've found an interesting fact or connection. Blog / wiki connections make it possible to add situational context - including time based patterns of interest - to search, which is particularly valuable in the relatively small and link-poor enterprise.

Your post then becomes a new item which others can discover - or read if they subscribe to your personal or group blog / wiki - as a potentially valuable source. This weak signal amplification creates a spreading activation network that can quickly span the globe - and further extends and reinforces the network. It also reinforces the value of old fashioned and irreplaceable face to face connections by letting people keep in touch with their extended network without creating undue work for either the sender or receiver.

ImageThe "social" part of software in the Enterprise 2.0 opens opportunities for strongly connected groups to work together more effectively, while making valuable connections within and across the enterprise. These connections would be wildly impractical if we were limited to the physical world of airplanes, meetings and conferences, or the disco ball era of email! But the value of these connections can lead to real strategic advantage, not just reducing the cost of travel and frustrations of email.

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Welcome David, Kellen, Michael !

June 8, 2008 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

With the release of Traction TeamPage 4.0 it's been a busy week! I'd like to take time out to welcome three new Traction Software employees:

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The Rise of Enterprise 2.0, Andrew McAfee | Video | Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2008 Tokyo

May 31, 2008 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

The Rise of Enterprise 2.0 - Professor Andrew McAfee, Enterprise 2.0 Summit Tokyo (2008) from Traction Software on Vimeo.

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Email isn't dead - It's only sleeping

February 29, 2008 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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Caroline McCarthy has a wonderful post The future of Web apps will see the death of e-mail. She quotes Kevin Marks:

I don't exactly think email is dead - and don't think point-to-point email will ever go away - but as a medium for broadcast collaboration it should be considered as lively as Mr. Praline's parrot.

Blogs, wiki's and IM displace use of broadcast email for group working communication. Email is a great medium for one to one - back and forth - communication, but it's a terrible medium for group collaboration. Clay Shirky says:All enterprises have more knowledge in their employees as a group than any one person, even (especially?) the CEO. The worst case is where one person has a problem and another knows a solution, but neither knows the other – or that the other knows. Despite e-mail’s advantages for communication, it falls down as a close collaboration tool on complex projects: E-mail makes it hard to keep everything related to a particular project in one place; e-mailed attachments can lead to version-control nightmares; and it’s almost impossible to get the Cc:line right. If the Cc:line is too broad, it creates “occupational spam” – messages from co-workers that don’t matter to everyone addressed. If the Cc:line is too narrow, the activity becomes opaque to management or partners. -- Social Software: A New Generation of Tools by Clay Shirky, Release 1.0 Vol 21, No. 5, 20 May 2003 (.pdf)

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Burned by a Bad Choice

February 26, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Sometimes "free" is hardly that, and TCO calculations don't begin to account for the "cost" of a failed initiative. Below is an anonymized e-mail sent from a manager in one division of a very large global enterprise to another manager in a separate division which is now evaluating Enterprise Wiki software.

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"Control Doesn't Scale" Part II - Let Go to Grow

February 22, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

In yesterday's note Control Doesn't Scale, I talked about how Enterprise 2.0 relies on an Enterprise 2.0 architecture and approach in order to work more like the web. Reflecting on a speech by Andrew McAfee at FASTForward 08, Bill Ives puts the matter very nicely:

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"Control Doesn't Scale"

February 21, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

David Weinberger has an incredible knack for putting information management issues into perspective, and always does so with just the right amount of humor and sarcasm (something I generally aim to achieve - but I imagine I fall short of a perfect Weinberger).

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Automatic vs. Manual Tagging - Born to tag? and to What End?

February 19, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Dennis McDonald recently posted an entry on his experience with Reuters' automatic tagging tool called Calais. He concludes:

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Enterprise 2.0: Radical Change by Revolution or Mandate?

February 16, 2008 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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Ross Dawson's Enterprise 2.0 will bring radical change in organisations quotes Steve Hodgkinson, Ovum research director from an article by Merri Mack writing in Voice and Data magazine:

Steve Hodgkinson, Ovum research director, sees Enterprise 2.0 as a genuine opportunity for technology to act as a catalyst for changes in organisational culture.

"Enterprise 2.0 is emerging as the most practical way of sharing and managing knowledge in a range of contexts, from team collaboration to customer self-service forums. This leads to the ability to bring about cultural change with the personal power of informal networks such as wikis, blogs, profiles and forums."

"The root of its culture change power, however, is its ability to unleash the personal power of informal networks," said Hodgkinson.

Key ideas within this new system include:

* The need for a flat organisation, rather than an organisational hierarchy
* Folksonomy rather than taxonomy
* User-driven technology rather than IT department control
* Short time-to-market cycles; to continue and increase flow
* Global teams of people, rather than locating the whole organisation in one building
* Emergent information systems, rather than dictated and structured information systems
* The opening of propriety standards

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Best Practice and the Wiki Big Brain - An MBA Class Case Study

February 11, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Some of my past entries (Best Practice and the Wikipedia Big Brain, Yin and Yang of E2.0, and Pros and Cons of Emergence) have discussed the importance of some structure in the collaboration process, even when using software like wikis and blogs which can permit N degrees of emergent structure. A recent sustained effort by an MBA class in Israel illustrates the importance and benefit of applying structure to the task.

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Could I interest you in a Memex?

February 7, 2008 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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Today Weblogged News (Will Richardson) has a thoughtful post "Proficiency in Tossing Stuff Out", reflecting on Thomas Washington's essay in the Christian Science Monitor. Washington says: "The pursuit of knowledge in the age of information overload is less about a process of acquisition than about proficiency in tossing stuff out."

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Wiki Collaboration for Wicked Problem Solving

January 29, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Nick Fera asks who is better for "Wicked" problem solving, Groups or Individuals? after reading a December 5, 2007 article in ScienceDaily about a Sandia National Laboratories study.

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All in a Day's Work - The Magnitude of Collaboration

January 28, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Spending just a little time looking at specifics on your own collaboration patterns sheds light on the central role of communication and collaboration in the every day business process of a "knowledge worker."

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MIT Sloan Management Review | Failure to Collaborate and Share Knowledge --> Team Failure

January 21, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Collaboration and knowledge sharing don't sound mission critical until you consider this: Teams that fail to do both, fail to perform. Bridging Faultlines in Diverse teams (A Dummer 2007 study published in the MIT Sloan Management Review) details the kinds of performance failures that result when teams fail to collaborate and share knowledge:

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The least entertaining game ever

January 18, 2008 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Good Morning Silicon Valley's Off Topic section for 18 Jan 2008 links to this page as "the least entertaining game ever". Unfair, unkind, funny, but with an element of truth: close to a perfect example of what I'd call a good cheap shot. To restore my karmic balance and express a personal opinion that the authors of the game might appreciate, see this page.

McDonald on Project Blogs and Wikis - For "Heavy-Duty" and "Innovation Oriented" teams

January 15, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Dennis McDonald really strikes the "What Project Blogs?" nail on the head when he describes how, for lighter-duty "innovation oriented" teams, blog/wiki systems can be their core platform whereas for "heavy duty" teams, they "take precedence by making the availability of reports and data from the more structured tools more accessible." With blogs for projects, function follows form. More specifically, project teams need to communicate and share content over time - that's the form of a blog and is the principal rationale for why every project team should maintain one, or more, blogs. Additional project management functions required can be layered on top of the blog, or can be provided by other more structured systems when necessary.

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How Can I Organize Information? Let Me Count the Ways

January 8, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

As I read through a few posts from Lynda Moulton, Jack Vinson and Jessica Baumgart, all involved in my ASIS&T 2007 and Gilbane panels late last year, I am pausing to absorb the surprising rate at which we've collectively moved away from the double drawer file cabinets and dewey decimal systems that I learned to use only a decade or two ago.

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When (and How) to Ask a Crowd?

November 19, 2007 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

ImageIn "Wisdom of Crowds is Cowardice," Central Desktop points to a Ross Mayfield statement (on the Conferenza blog) about the benefits of making decision rights more participatory and decoupling information rights from decision rights. Central Desktop concludes by urging "Lets just try to keep a little perspective when we talk about this stuff." OK. Lets do that...

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Putting the "Enterprise" in Wiki, Blog and Social Software

November 19, 2007 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

I enjoyed reading "Why Enterprise Software Sucks" at Signal vs. Noise. It's to the point and does a nice job of building on Khoi Vinh's note "If it Looks Like a Cow, Swims Like a Dolphin and Quacks Like a Duck, It Must be Enterprise Software." That said, it also diminishes the importance of IT as a decision maker and the party responsible for managing software.

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Collaboration Tools - Are Information Silos a Problem?

October 22, 2007 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

James Robertson's article Collaboration Tools are Anti Knowledge Sharing? discusses the pros and cons of collaboration tools, with particular emphasis on the problems associated with proliferation of 100's or even 1,000's of information silos. Michael Sampson's response nicely vouches for the pros, while cautioning against having a hodgepodge of disparate collaboration tools.

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Pros and Cons of Emergence

October 17, 2007 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Jim McGee did an excellent job in The Problem of Emergence of wrapping up our coffee talk with Jack Vinson on the pros and cons of emergence when adapting Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0. The simple fact is that Enterprise 2.0 is different from Web 2.0, and because of that, these differences have to be accounted for in the technologies implemented and in support of the adoption process.

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Making Wikis Work in Business - Leading Users to the Water

October 17, 2007 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Rod Boothby's post on Managing Wikis in Business draws out the main points on a post and MBA research by the same name written by Penny Edwards.

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re: A Web That Works | NHS Orkney

October 8, 2007 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

See also David's Oct 4, 2007 post Understanding the "corporate" mindset. Thanks for the kind words, David!

Searching for the Perfect Fried Clam | Rhode Island

September 23, 2007 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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Bill Ives of Portals and KM shifts his usual focus to raise a question near and dear to all of us who live in New England, Searching for the Perfect Fried Clam. He lists three tempting choices in Massachusetts, settling on Woodman's in Essex as his first choice. I'll certainly put that on my list, but must nominate Evelyn's Drive Inn in Tiverton RI for the Clam of Honor. Not only do they have great fried clams, but they're also my top choice for Rhode Island style (clear) clam chowder and traditional Rhode Island stuffies ("Fresh local quahogs halved and filled with our spicy blend of chopped clams and chourico").

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11-12 September 2007 | Traction User Group Meeting

September 21, 2007 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

ImageOur second annual Traction User Group (TUG) meeting was held last week in Newport, RI. The two day event featured twenty-six speakers including:

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Get Intuition with Traction

September 3, 2007 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

One of my favorite aspects of the Traction platform is its ability to help human's "scale" to handle working with a large amount of information content. As I noted in Wikis Reduce Email, we have over 130,000 pages, comments and attachments in our own enterprise system, but it's very manageable. Traction turns information overload into underload and facilitates the transformation of text into human knowledge and intuition. Blosint agrees.

Wikis Reduce Email

August 29, 2007 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Michael Sampson's Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams Report post talks anecdotally about how "Wikis Reduce Email."

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"Same old, same old" & Enterprise 2.0 Durability

August 21, 2007 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

When asked "How are things?" a college friend used to reply "Same old, same old" as a way of saying "Nothing has changed, nothing's gone wrong, things are fine." This was always good to hear.

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A Web That Works | NHS Orkney

August 16, 2007 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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David Rendall, National Health Service Orkney created his A Web That Works blog to complement his poster presentation at the UK's National Health Service conference: Delivering Healthcare in the 21st Century, 11-12 Jun 2007, Glasgow UK. David co-authored a 30 July 2007 Intranet Journal article about his experience with Traction Software's Jordan Frank. Visit David's blog ! To download a full-size copy of David's poster (3.2MB .jpg) click here, posted with David's permission.

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Learn by watching - Then do

August 14, 2007 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Image 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:

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Looking for a new Fake Steve Jobs ...

August 6, 2007 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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Learning Fake Steve Jobs' real identity is about as much fun as learning that Santa Claus died on 6 September 1959 of pneumonia and complications from a stroke. Adopting an anonymous persona for for satiric or polemical rants has a long and honorable history, unlike the self-serving sock puppetery of some real life CEO's. The former FSJ takes a nice parting shot at Valleywag:

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re: Detailed Data Aside, Executives Back E2.0

July 30, 2007 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Forrester provided more grist for the data mill on this topic. The following chart and some detail on it was posted at Read/WriteWeb:

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re: Detailed Data Aside, Executives Back E2.0

July 21, 2007 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

To add a bit more data fuel to the survey research fire: In an in depth survey of 120 IT Executives at large companies (average $10B revenue), Nemertes Research reported that "18 percent said their company is using blogs, 32 percent are using wikis, and 23 percent are using RSS."

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The Yin and Yang of Enterprise 2.0, the scruffy-neats, and INNATS

July 17, 2007 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

The success of user generated content sites and communities such as MySpace, Wikipedia and the Blogosphere leads many to question the merit of imposing any structure on collaboration. Leading thinkers like Jim McGee and Bill Ives recently offered their ideas and sought opinion from others on the FASTForward blog.

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And here's what Enterprise 2.0 looked like in 1968 | Dealing lightning with both hands...

July 15, 2007 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

The video This is what the web looked like in 1994 - a DEC promotional video of that era - got a bit of attention recently. Just for the record - here's what Enterprise 2.0 looked like in 1968 - courtesy Doug Engelbart and his team at SRI:

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Detailed Data Aside, Executives Back E2.0

July 13, 2007 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

A new market report, this time by McKinsey& Company, says a majority of executives say they plan to increase investments in technologies which fall under the collective hood of Enterprise and Web 2.0.

As reported by Nicolas Carr, the Forrester report (a survey of CIOs) released earlier this year suggests 35% of companies are already using all 6 technologies covered in their report (including blogs, wikis, social networking, podcasts, RSS and Tagging). This is well above the 33% reported by McKinsey as already using or planning to use a wiki. Earlier this year, a study of the Inc. 500 reported that 19% have deployed blogs while 11% have deployed a wikis.

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Is Enterprise 2.0 for Babies or Boomers?

June 13, 2007 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

ImageJoe McKendrick asks "Is Web 2.0 Really Dominated by the Young?" and offers some data suggesting its for people of all ages, though under 25ers are the majority in communities like MySpace. In the enterprise, however, there is a question as to whether 2.0 adoption is better started with younger or more experienced management-level employees.

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31 May 2007 | Traction TeamPage a hit at LinuxWorld Japan

June 4, 2007 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

ImageCongratulations to our Japanese partners SEL and AKJ on a great showing for Traction TeamPage at LinuxWorld Japan 2007. SEL was a gold sponsor and launched a Japanese TeamPage customer forum in advance of the event.

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Building pleasant and stable islands in a storm-tossed sea

May 16, 2007 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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Traction Roots: A Whirlwind Tour (.ppt 6.2MB) tells the Traction story in pictures: 1) Tim Berners-Lee's web trades stable links for utmost simplicity and bottom-up scalability without central control; 2) Traction creates spaces which are pleasant and stable islands with a rich hypertext model internally: bi-direction links; comments based on ternary relations rather than hacking the representation of the referent object; faceted permission models uniformly enforced for search results, cross-references, as well as content browsing; fully journaled actions, etc. 3) Traction generates HTTP addressable views of its content to enable any item in the Traction corpus to be read and linked like the rest of the web (optionally restricted by access controls). This creates a pleasant and stable island that's easily connected to other islands of stability on the Web - as well as anything in the storm tossed sea - not a stovepiped box.

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Enterprise 2.0 - Letting hypertext out of its box

April 24, 2007 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Image 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."

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re: Beta Bloggers Need Not Lurk in the Enterprise

April 19, 2007 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

A study by Bill Tancer of Hitwise provides more grain to the Lurker effect that I referenced at AlertBox. He indicates that 0.16% of visits to YouTube are to upload content and 0.2% of visits to Flickr are to add a picture. This affirms that most of us are passive visitors of public sites. But this is far from a blow to 2.0. In fact the increase in viewership affirms the value of the medium. Individuals simply need a reason to contribute. As I conclude in the original post here about Beta Bloggers, there is a simple and obvious role for any knowledge worker to publish a steady stream of content in the process of every-day work process and communciation.

Re-Emergent Collaboration? Wikipedia, the Sequel

March 27, 2007 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

This week, BusinessWeek.com reports the Wikipedia co-founder seeks to start over. While the blemishes of vandalism and some poor writing doesn't sway Wikipedia fans, Larry Sanger, one of the Wikipedia co-founders, disagrees.

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What is a Blog? A Wiki?

February 27, 2007 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

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Despite years of debate, constructive discussion and an occasional flame war as well as scores of wikipedia edits, there remains ambiguity and disagreement on "what is a blog" and "what is a wiki." In a series talks at KMWorld, Burton Group’s Catalyst Conference, IQPC’s IntranetWeek and others over the last year, I've offered my own definition. So, here goes my attempt at a baseline set of definitions, with a bit of historical context.

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Sherlock Jr.

February 16, 2007 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd


Just what you need, believe me.

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Information Foraging at FASTForward '07

February 14, 2007 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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I enjoyed FASTForward '07 last week in San Diego - an excellent conference and 60 degrees warmer than Providence Rhode Island! It featured great keynotes (particularly Andrew McAfee on Enterprise 2.0 the Next Disruptor), sessions, networking and entertainment.

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Social Media and the Inc 500 - The Mattson & Ganim Barnes Report

February 2, 2007 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

ImageThe good news: Research shows awareness and use of social media (Message boards, social networking, online video, blogging, wikis and podcasting) is significant and apparently on the rise.

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Flip Test 1971 | Email versus Journal

January 15, 2007 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Andrew McAfee asks a great question in A Technology Flip Test: Introducing Channels in a World of Platforms: "... imagine that current corporate collaboration and communication technologies were exclusively E2.0 platforms -- blogs, wikis, etc. -- and all of a sudden a crop of new channel technologies -- email, instant messaging, text messaging -- became available. In other words, imagine the inverse of the present situation. What would happen? How, in the flip-test universe, would the new channel technologies be received?"

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InfoWorld 2007 Technology of the Year Award

January 1, 2007 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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Everyone at Traction Software is honored to learn that TeamPage has been named a InfoWorld 2007 Technology of the Year Award Winner. In addition to InfoWorld, we'd like to thank customers and friends of Traction for helping us build a product that works well and serves a useful purpose. I'd personally like to thank Traction Software's employees and partners, as well as the inspiration from Andy van Dam, Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart. What a way to start the New Year!

Presenting at the December KM Forum Boston

December 21, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

ImageI had the honor of speaking at the Boston Knowledge Management Forum on Monday. I was joined by Kathleen Gilroy of the Otter Group (who wrote a piece on the event beforehand) , Susan Dobscha of Bentley College, and Kelly Drahzal of IBM. I was also on an enterprise blog/wiki vendor panel led by Kathleen (thanks Kathleen!).

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re: Use of Weblogs for Competitive Intelligence | First International Business, Technology CI Conference, Tokyo Oct 2005

December 7, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

See Enterprise 2.0 - Letting hypertext out of its box
Beyond blogs and wikis

re: Beyond blogs and wikis

December 7, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

See October 2006 | Burton Group Report - Hypertext and Compound/Interactive Document Models for a synopsis of how Traction builds on classical hypertext roots to make blog and wiki two interaction and presentation styles designed to support collaboration in place and collaboration over time.

October 2006 | Burton Group Report - Hypertext and Compound/Interactive Document Models

December 7, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

ImageBurton Group's Peter O'Kelly's report titled Hypertext and Compound/Interactive Document Models: Collaboration and Content Management Implications goes a long way towards explaining the benefits of and drive towards hypertext (a platform for blogs and wikis and more) as a backbone for collaborative work and communication. In the report, Burton Group says Traction® TeamPage... "...comes closest to bringing the visions of hypertext pioneer Doug Engelbart to fruition, and that it is also a very useful leading indicator in terms of features other vendors will eventually add."

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Beta Bloggers Need Not Lurk in the Enterprise

October 18, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

KnowledgeJolt with Jack writes about a study reported on Jakob Nielson's AlertBox about Participation Inequality: Lurkers vs. Contributors in Internet Communities. Jack agrees and expands on Jakob's recommendations for increasing participation. Both are on point for public internet communities like wikipedia, group blogs and product review sites. However, the problem can be simplified in enterprise settings when catering to beta bloggers.

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Wal-Mart, Meet lonelygirl15

October 18, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Image Tom Siebert from OnlineMedia interviewed me last week for a story he broke on a Pro Wal-Mart blog which, as it turns out, was put together by a professional writer and photographer, and financed by Wal-Mart through their PR firm, Edelman, and a funded non-profit called Working Families for Wal-Mart.

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Pipeline Management - Sensitivity Analysis

October 16, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

In the management of a business obstacles may arise at any moment. One of the better lessons I learned at business school (the one on the other side of the river) is to recognize that the past does not predict the future (I have also learned that in a casino or two). A related lesson was to do sensitivity analyses on our data models and business plans.

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re: Blogging Policy = Blabbing Policy

October 11, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

In support of this point, Rod Boothby's post titled Bloggers are Dangerous includes this thought: Blogs dont cause problems, people do.

Best Practice and the Wikipedia Big Brain

September 25, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

ImageAt the recent Interop New York (see TechWeb story), Andrew McAfee compares Wikipedia to an ant colony, suggesting that the opposite of imposed structure is not chaos. He said:

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Pastepost

September 22, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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The first public document from the first Hypertext Editing System (Andy van Dam et al, Brown University, 1968) was a press release announcing its own creation. Brown University Public Affairs thought this was very clever. AvD and crew wrote a two page press release, which in the second paragraph claimed to:

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That was fast!

September 21, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

See the update time on Olivier's TeamPage 3.7 post (from my Technorati watchlist)!
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Authority versus Page Rank

September 17, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

On 15 Sep 2006 Tim Bray wrote in Wikipedia: Resistance is Absent:

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Explaining Knowledge Management

August 4, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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Green Chameleon posts two wonderfully funny fake interviews: Explaining KM #1 (which roasts KM academicians) and Explaining KM #2 (which roasts KM consultants). I hope they go on to produce Explaining KM #3 to roast KM software vendors! Produced by (and starring?) folk from StraitsKnowledge.com, which appears to be a very good Singapore-based consulting and research firm focused on knowledge, learning and innovation.

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Personal publishing and the future of e-mail

July 31, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

David Baker writes on The Future of E-Mail, riffing on an article New Technology, New Media and New Paradigm by Paul Gillilan in the print edition of last month's BtoB Magazine. David quoted from Paul's article:

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Blogging Policy = Blabbing Policy

July 28, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

I have been asked by many current and prospective customers these days about best practices for internal and external blogging policy.

Companies should include blabbing within their communication policy. Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Blogs, Social Networks, Wikis, RSS and related technologies are new channels for communication but should not change the fact that there are and always have been public and private channels including web sites, discussion boards, e-mail, telephones, loudspeakers, newsletters, posters, and paper flyers. Blabbing policies should provide guidance as to what sorts of information and opinion may be communicated in what context, be it a confidential discussion with a partner under NDA or a personal blog on the internet.

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IQPC Conference - Is a Wiki or a Blog Right for You?

July 26, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Image Three corporate communications execs paneled off on whether "a Wiki or Blog is right for you." I presented yesterday and am enjoying being a fly on the wall in the audience today. A refreshing aspect of the panelists and audience members in this group is that none are pundits, blog consultants or vendors (apart from me) so it was an excellent opportunity to see the blog and wiki market from a pure user perspective. Below are the notes I was able to scribble as the dialogue went on. I tried to capture everything relevant as clearly and truthfully as possible.

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Portal Market Flattens, Changes?

July 18, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

When I saw the "Application Integration & Middleware Technologies / Portal Software" market projection sidebar on the cover of KMWorld this month I thought "Great, 5 more years of solid growth for portal license revenues." Then I looked at the numbers.

BEA's State of the Portal Market 2006 in Portals Magazine cites a Gartner study stating $6.4 Billion in 2005 software license revenues and an estimated 2.6% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) through 2010.

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Collaborating around the Collaborative Technologies Conference

July 18, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Greg and I joined panels at CTC which brought together a really great set of speakers from John Seely Brown to Rod Boothby of Ernst & Young and Larry Cannell of Ford Motor. My take away from the conference? Collaboration isn't about documents anymore (and never was).

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Apocalypse?

July 12, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Regarding Yahoo's new The 9, Tim Bray writes: "This is the End, maybe, of Civilization As We Know It. I’m thinking now would be a good time for the Borg to come along and assimilate us all..." Come on Tim! Hardly the Apocalypse! Somewhere between the burning of the library of Alexandria and the first Entertainment Tonight.

Notes and Insights from the Catalyst Conference

June 15, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

I was invited to speak at the catalyst conference (see Jordan Frank Talks on Blogs and Wikis at Burton Group Catalyst Conference) and was able to sit in on both the Collaboration & Content and the User Centric Identity management tracks.

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ROI for Competitive Intelligence?

June 14, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Corporate blogging is one form of synthesizing and distributing information, and it has its own return (see ROI for Corporate Blogging?). Competitive intelligence (CI) and market research functions face a similar challenge: How do you value distribution and synthesis of information?

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ROI for Corporate Blogging?

June 14, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Charlene Li questioned the math for calculating the ROI of Blogs. She wrote:

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KM is the Forest, Enterprise Blogs are the Path

May 24, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

ImageWhen I saw Michael Koenig's article in KM World, KM: the forest for all the trees, I thought this might be another story about how ECM can save paper. No, Koenig explains that KM is far from a fad, and took a stab at defining knowledge management.

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re: Use of Weblogs for Competitive Intelligence | First International Business, Technology CI Conference, Tokyo Oct 2005

May 21, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

See Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart
Reinventing the Web
Intertwingled Work
October 2006 | Burton Group Report - Hypertext and Compound/Interactive Document Models
The Evolution of Personal Knowledge Management

re: Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart

May 21, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

See Use of Weblogs for Competitive Intelligence | First International Business, Technology CI Conference, Tokyo Oct 2005 and its link to the full Tokyo paper for my thoughts on how Doug's Augment model effectively extends TBL's web.

National Archives Conference on Blogs and Wikis - and My Most Productive Hour

May 8, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Marvin Kabakoff of the National Archives and Records Administration hosted a 1/2 day conference on blogs and wikis last Wednesday in Boston. Marvin talked about the evolution of records management, Matt Kowalczyk reviewed the use of Traction for a US Department of Defense project, and Mark Levitt from IDC pointed us to the role of Blogs and Wikis in contextual collaboration. Over a bagel, I had revelation on knowledge worker productivity.

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re: Personal Knowledge Management: Building Actionable Content from Collaborative Publishing

May 2, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Clay Shirky writes very perceptively on the role of groups; an excellent early paper is Social Software and the Politics of Groups (2003).

Beyond blogs and wikis

May 2, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

I really like David Berlind's post IBM's Suitor asks how you share documents. Wrong question, right time (May 2, 2006). David makes a great points including: "Think about freeing your knowledge. Then worry about the format (after your thinking leads you to regular document land)." But I think David edges close to a similar problem in characterizing blogs vs. wiki's - particularly with respect to Traction and other products which purposefully blur the boundaries.

Traction starts from the blog end of the spectrum (actually it started from link Doug Engelbart's concept of a hypertext Journal) in that it records collaboration over time. But, the knowledge product of the collaboration - represented as a web of editable pages, office or CAD files - can be recorded and versioned in Traction along with the external intelligence and internal dialog about the creation and evolution of the product. The knowledge product can also reside in an external repository and become the subject of dialog using links from Traction. Both the dialog and knowledge product are typically created and edited as a purposeful group activity.

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Traction Software's products are based on a model of group editing in place combined with group collaboration over time that pre-dates blogs and Wiki's by over 40 years - see Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart. For more information on Douglas Engelbart, the Godfather of effective collaboration, see Doug's Wikipedia page.

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Thierry Barsalou, IPSEN CIO, Speaks at Gilbane Conference on Content Management

May 2, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

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Rod Boothby wrote a great summary of a presentation by Thierry Barsalou (CIO of Ipsen Phamaceuticals) on their Traction driven Enterprise Blog system for Competitive Intelligence. At the 2006 Gilbane San Francisco conference, Thierry reviewed Ipsen's business requirement, technology selection process, taxonomy planning, and path to adoption across all their global offices. He concluded with remarks about using Traction for other collaborative applications such as managing controlled vocabularies (a wiki type application for compliance purposes), project communication and other knowledge management related activities. » View PDF of the full presentation

State of Connecticut - Department of Information Technology

May 1, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Rock Regan chose to deploy Traction when he was CIO of the State of Connecticut. In his new CIO and Government Technology Blog, Rock quotes Government Technology's story on IJIS Institute's use of Traction and adds:

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The Evolution of Personal Knowledge Management

April 26, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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July 1945 The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships. -- As We May Think by Vannevar Bush, Atlantic Monthly, July 1945

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Use of Weblogs for Competitive Intelligence | First International Business, Technology CI Conference, Tokyo Oct 2005

April 26, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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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.

Because the weblog is itself part of the public (or private) Web it can preserve a stable, addressable set of references, which can be linked to by any other Web source, or analyzed by any application that has permission to address that weblog’s content. This interoperability addresses Engelbart’s primary concern about proprietary and opaque representations (the norm prior to the Web) creating silos of information that would make universal linking and interchange difficult or impossible.

Like Berners-Lee’s original concept of the Web, use of weblogs and wikis as easily deployed and relatively stable authored indices to arbitrary Web content is a pragmatic compromise. The Web’s naturally evolving infrastructure provides complementary Web search, RSS/ATOM syndication, notification and search, augmenting the loose but massively scaleable architecture of the Word Wide Web. ...

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QL2 and Traction - Drawing actionable intelligence from the deep web

April 25, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

ImageTraction Software is happy to announce a partnership with QL2 Software. This comes after 9 months of working together and our first production deployment at a big pharma company last fall. QL2 and Traction bring intelligence from the deep web into Traction's Enterprise Blog where it can be analyzed, annotated and quickly brought to the attention of blog readers. Pharma users can track clinical trials, adverse events and DNA sequencing submissions. Every business can become better at competitive intelligence and quickly respond to events reported anywhere on the web. Combining QL2's WebQL and Traction's TeamPage supports better, faster, more market aware decision making. » Read the Full Release

re: Personal Knowledge Management: Building Actionable Content from Collaborative Publishing

April 25, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

See John's News Analysis on the SIIA Personal Knowlege Management Brown Bag, 25 April 2006. One particularly nice quote:

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Feldman Explains Open Source, I Ponder his Approach

April 24, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

In a multi part series published in KM World magazine, David Feldman is explaining Open Source software and the dynamics of the groups who support it. The developer group organizations are as interesting to understand (see Bob Wolf reference in Collaboration - Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow - Boston KM Forum) as where open source will make its biggest mark (open source tools vs. operating systems vs. applications, for example).

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re: Personal Knowledge Management: Building Actionable Content from Collaborative Publishing

April 23, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

See also:
Collaboration - Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow - Boston KM Forum
Collaborative Intelligence in Large or Growing Organizations

Personal Knowledge Management: Building Actionable Content from Collaborative Publishing

April 23, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

I enjoyed participating on a lively panel in NYC last Wednesday. John Blossom of Shore Communications moderated an SIIA Brown Bag. From John's blog: ...

Software & Information Industry Association (siia.net) members can log in to a very well produced webcast and podcast of the event, and John will post his analysis later.

Social software needs to be just as simple, and substantially more effective than email when used for working communication within and across groups. If the software is simple to use, it can be much easier to post what you want to say - or a question you want answered - to a place where others who have the same compelling interest can read it, than to craft an cc: list and force each individual to deal with a rat's nest of replies interleaved in a week's worth of email.

A blog, wiki, or IM space can be used to define that place you can go to, or search, or subscribe to - in order to keep in touch with a sales campaign, product development, client engagement, etc. But I believe it has to be a space that's a live record of the business activity - not just another place to look.

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re: Collaboration - Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow - Boston KM Forum

April 19, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Bill Ives was also at the KM Forum on Collaboration and, in a post about IBM's new Global Innovation Outlook 2005 report, expands on Bob Wolf's discussion of the Linux Community's ability to respond to a crisis.

Knowledge Fishing vs. Knowledge Farming

April 16, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Euan Semple's IT professionals, knowledge management and trout farming notes that a conversation "about managing communities of practice is raising my usual concerns about the fatal combination of the words "knowledge", "communities" and "manage"."

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Doug Engelbart - Hyperscope Project

April 16, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

See the Hyperscope Project for Doug's newest project (supported by a November 2005 NSF Grant) to apply bootstrapping principles to the evolution of a new generation of tools.

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re: Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart

April 9, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

See also Tricycles vs. Training Wheels

Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart

April 9, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

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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.

Doug’s first hypertext Journaling systems were deployed as part of the original ARPANet Network Information Center (NIC), starting with ARPANet Node 3 at SRI - i.e. the third node on what we know as the Internet.

See the Doug Engelbart Foundation site (DougEngelbart.org) for Doug's current work, links to many of his papers, and November 2000 National Medal of Technology Award citation . A few of my favorite quotes:

Our Journal system was conceived by this author in about 1966. I wanted an underlying operational process, for use by individuals and groups, that would help bring order into the time stream of the Augmented Knowledge workers. The term "journal" emerged early in the conceptualization process for two reasons:

  1. I felt it important in many dynamic operations to keep a log (sometimes termed a "journal") that chronicles events by means of a series of unchangeable entries (for instance, to log significant events while evolving a Plan, shaping up a project, trouble-shooting a large operation. or monitoring on-going operations). These entries would be preserved in original form, serving as the grist for later integration into more organized treatments.
  2. I also wanted something that would serve essentially the same recorded-dialogue purpose as I perceived a professional journal (plus library) to do.

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April 2006 | Red Herring Short Lists Traction Again

April 5, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

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Red Herring short listed Traction® Software as one of 200 of the most innovative technology firms in North America. Criteria include financial performance, technology innovation, execution on strategy, management quality, and integration into their ecosystem. This assessment allows Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list an invaluable instrument for discovering and advocating the greatest business opportunities in the industry. Red Herring's Spring 2006 event is themed The Pursuit of Disruption. Traction was selected to the Red Herring 100 for 2004 and we're pleased to be recognized as a leader this year by Red Herring and others including eContent and KM World. » Read Red Herring's Full Release. » link 'Read Traction Software's Full Release' public641

Collaboration - Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow - Boston KM Forum

March 30, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

ImageAt the Boston KM Forum meeting today, Lynda Moulton and Larry Chait put together a speaker lineup that reminds us of past experience where collaboration worked, and highlights key trends that speak to trends making collaboration a credible activity in the future. I did my best here to capture a few best practices and key learnings.

Bob continued on presenting a great deal of research to be published in HBR. One more key finding: Trust is the most essential element in a social network.

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US Government is Sharing Information

February 28, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

According to INPUT research on government spending, the US Government will spend $64 Billion on IT contracts with $5 Billion of the total allocated to software. The top five government software spending priorities for 2006 show aggressive focus on software to store, manage and share information.

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Collaborative Intelligence in Large or Growing Organizations

February 17, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

Arik Johnson (of AuroraWDC) and I developed a workshop on Collaborative Early Warning. We cover a range of topics from "the Wisdom of Crowds" to how to apply Jan Herring's Key Information Topic protocols to the early warning process. We then break into a teams to review a business case and conduct a war gaming exercise.

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London Part III of III - Commitment Counts

February 7, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

On the last night of my trip, I grabbed Sushi dinner with a customer and Suw Charman. Suw is a Corante analyst, author of Strange Attractor and author of Dark Blogs Case Study 01 - A European Pharma Group. Conversations ran the gamut as they should when a virtual colleague is first met in person. Among other things, Suw briefed me on the Open Rights Group, which she heads in her copious spare time, and, we exchanged ideas on social software adoption. We are both steeped in various implementation projects and have seen some similar, some divergent trends. What's clear is there are no hard and fast rules, but lessons to learn from each deployment.

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London Part II of III - Trend-Spotting with BlogPulse

February 3, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

While in London I delivered a presentation at a Pharmaceutical Competitive Intelligence conference. 26 January 2006 | Untying the Distribution Challenge detailed several aspects of how to build a blog-driven market monitoring and early warning system. Based on requests for a copy of the presentation, it was well received. One example worth sharing related to how blogs play a role in interpreting markets.

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Tried Ponzu in SFO ...

February 3, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

Heading back from conference in San Francisco: Asian Mary (sake / vodka with wasabe bloody mary mix) would qualify Ponzu for Jordan on spice level. Braised soy/ginger boneless short ribs with asian veggies (chestnuts, ginko, lotus root, daikon, carrots) was great comfort food. yum.

London Trip Part I of III - Its a small blog world after all

February 2, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

I returned Sunday from a 5 day London trip which capped off an 8 day Pharmaceutical Competitive Intelligence conference tour. And have just now gotten over jet-lag, life-lag, and the desk clearing process required to allow focus here.

While in London, I made a point to see most of our resident customers and partners. On Thursday night I hosted a dinner at Memories of China (for the foodies out there: 67 Ebury Street, London) which is now at the top of my favorites list (warning: a restaurant generally must have at least one meal with "scorching hot'n'spicy" in its title to make my list)

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Tricycles vs. Training Wheels

February 2, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

In Infoworld, Jon Udell writes When it comes to increasing human productivity, user interfaces aren't one size fits all and cites Doug Engelbart:

I think it's better to build software with training wheels that are easy to recognize and remove, than to continue to build tricycles that no-one can grow out of. As Alan says, its a terrible mistake to assume that kids and and grownups will not spend the time to acquire new skills, so long as the payoff is great enough and mastery of the skill is itself a source of enjoyment. Mastery of Emacs can be just as enjoyable and rewarding as mastery of a video game.

Alan Kay: ... If you have ever seen anybody use NLS [Engelbart's 1968 hypertext system for which he invented the mouse and chord key set] it is really marvelous cause you're kindof flying along through the stuff several commands a second and there's a complete different sense of what it means to interact than you have today. I characterize what we have today as a wonderful bike with training wheels on that nobody knows they are on so nobody is trying to take them off. I just feel like we're way way behind where we could have been if it weren't for the way commercialization turned out.

Doug Engelbart: Well, strangely enough, I feel the same. It's part of the thing of the easy to learn and natural to use thing that became sortof a god to follow and the marketplace is driving it and its successful and you could market on that basis, but some of the diagrams pictures that I didn't quite get to the other day was how do you ever migrate from a tricycle to a bicycle because a bicycle is very unnatural and very hard to learn compared to a tricycle, and yet in society it has superseded all the tricycles for people over five years old. So the whole idea of high-performance knowledge work is yet to come up and be in the domain. Its still the orientation of automating what you used to do instead of moving to a whole new domain in which you are going to obviously going to learn quite a few new skills. And so you make analogies of suppose you wanted to move up to the ski slopes and be mobile on skis. Well, just visiting them for an afternoon is not going to do it. So, I'd love to have photographs of skateboards and skis and windsurfing and all of that to show you what people can really if they have a new way supplied by technology to be mobile in a different environment. None of that could be done if people insisted that it was an easy-to-learn thing. ...

Alan Kay: Looking back I think that one of the paradoxes is that we made a complete mistake when we were doing the interface at PARC because we assumed that the kids would need an easy interface because we were going to try and teach them to program and stuff like that, but in fact they are the ones who are willing to put hours into getting really expert at things - shooting baskets, learning to hit baseballs, learning to ride bikes, and now on video games. I have a four-year old nephew who is really incredible and he could use NLS [Engelbart's 1968 hypertext system] fantastically if it were available He would be flying through that stuff because his whole thing is to become part of the system he's interacting with and so if I had had that perspective I would have designed a completely different interface for the kids, one in which how you became expert was much more apparent than what I did. So I'm sorry for what I did.

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Welcome to Traction Blogs!

January 25, 2006 · · Posted by Greg Lloyd

This is a group blog for employees of Traction Software Inc of Providence Rhode Island. You can read about Traction Software's customers products, partners elsewhere on this web site, but here you'll find a public conversation about anything and everything. Blogs is just one page of Traction's web site, but every news item, customer story and product note is a Traction blog post. Everything on this site is powered by a single Traction TeamPage server showing the content of Blog, Press, and Public projects (blog/wiki spaces) using a custom skin (for a similar example see IJIS.org). Welcome!

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