Collaborative Thinking

Microsoft’s Foray Into Expertise & Social Networking

Microsoft kicked off its “People-Ready Business” campaign early this month in NYC with much fanfare. Most media coverage of the event however seemed to skip a very interesting demonstration of technology forthcoming from Microsoft, likely within its Office 12 wave of software releases. If you go the webcast of the event, located here and then go about 19 minutes into the webcast, Chris Capossela, Vice President, Microsoft Business Division takes the stage. What I found interesting happens about 29 minutes into the webcast where there is a demo of Outlook being used within a CRM scenario. It starts out with a simple search on bikes that returns your standard list of content. But if you look at the screen behind Chris, you can see that there is a new tab on the search results page, a “People” tab. When this tab is clicked, the search results list experts, how much of an expert they are, and the social distance that the experts are from the person doing the search. A portion of the speech is quoted below with a link to the full transcript.

It's also important for me to be able to reach out to experts inside my company and find other information that's very unstructured. So we're going to sell Kontoso some bikes. So I'm just going to come back to my internal Web site and search on the term "bike." Click on that search, and now we're going to run a search that shows us a whole bunch of information very quickly, bike case studies, some sales plans, some contracts that we've used. But perhaps most interestingly, it also finds people inside my company who are experts on dealing with bikes. When I click on people, we'll show these people not just on how much of an expert they are but actually by social distance that they are from me, so actually seeing the folks that are my colleagues at the top, then my colleagues' colleagues, then everybody else at the company, so I get a good sense that these are probably the folks that I'm more likely to know and want to work with. And again there's that presence information, so I can instant message with Dave or schedule a meeting with Dave right here from the results of the search.

It remains unclear what exact set of products are involved but one can reasonably conclude that it will be anchored around SharePoint Products & Technologies (e.g., portal, workspaces, enterprise search) and perhaps Exchange (looking at e-mail interactions) and Windows Desktop Search as well. This could be a simple or complex solution from a technology perspective. A more direct design would likely rely on well-defined metadata and profiles that associate users, expertise and social distance (likely leveraging Active Directory). It would possibly need to include connectors to capture explicit data or information from directories or other sources (HR systems). A more complex design would include some type of discovery, aggregation, filtering, profiling and categorization engine that would derive tacit aspects about users in terms of their affiliations, expertise and social distance. Such a design would likely need a “strength of relationship” engine found in best-of-breed products to analyze a range of content and data sources and would be much more intricate than approaches that are more declarative in nature. In either approach however, strong security and privacy controls are essential. 

Microsoft’s interest in knowledge, expertise and social computing is not new. But prior disconnected efforts seem to be coalescing and becoming more focused. There was no further elaboration by Microsoft on what was demonstrated at the People-Ready event other than past statements in general regarding expertise support with Office 12. There are some hints of what might be forthcoming by other public sources:

• In a December 2005 essay, Bill Gates talks about the role of knowledge and in a May 2005 essay, he talks about the new world of work.

• Additional background can be found at the Microsoft IT Showcase which provides information on best practices from Microsoft’s internal IT groups. Information on Office System ? SharePoint Portal Server includes information produced by Microsoft’s internal Knowledge Network Group. Within these documents are themes around shared knowledge architecture, shared corporate vocabulary, “best bets” keywords and “best bets” people (experts) and how SharePoint Portal can pick up on these keywords to filter search queries. Within these documents are insights on deploying search, notification, audience targeting and user profile services.

• There are also interesting efforts underway at the The Working Network site best described on this Channel9 interview describing Microsoft activities related to tags, tagging and social bookmarks as well as RSS feeds (e.g., "OPML-o-Mater", “Community Bar”).

So at this point, “stay tuned”. Automation of expertise and social networks has never been delivered in the market as generalized enterprise infrastructure. To-date, it has been the realm of specialized vendors with their own applications (that at times, seem to be infrastructure posing as an application). Past attempts have mostly resulted in failed companies (e.g., Kamoon, Participate Systems), failed products (e.g., IBM’s Discovery Server), or vendors that so far have not been able to move out of specific vertical or situational applications (e.g., AskMe, Contact Networks, Spoke, Tacit, Visible Path and XpertUniverse).

Microsoft certainly has the ability to alter the expertise and social networking landscape, but success will depend on how such capabilities are implemented. Issues regarding integration, interoperability, modularity, third-party support, security and privacy remain ambiguous. It is also unclear how these capabilities might be delivered via Microsoft’s Windows Live and Office Live efforts.

Finally, and most importantly, there are significant process and organizational issues regarding automation of expertise and social networks that are far more critical to address before proceeding into any technology decision and implementation.

CIOTalk Radio Interview: Making Enterprise Portals Work!

For those tracking the enterprise portal space, you might find this interview and exchange of viewpoints relevant. Check on the main page of the site or the archives and click on Windows Media Player to hear the audiocast.

http://www.ciotalkradio.com/

http://www.ciotalkradio.com/archives.html

Topic: Making Enterprise Portals Work!
Guest: Lac Tran
Title: CIO, Rush University Medical Center
Guest: Mike Gotta
Title: Principal Analyst, Burton Group

Enterprise portals are rapidly being adopted to address the information and application access requirements of an organization. A large percentage of such deployments are not delivering results or are facing adoption issues. What is going wrong here?

Tagging Beyond Content: Applications & People

This post was originally contributed at CollaborationLoop.

Historically, developers have provided a variety of interfaces that enabled users to flag applications or add unstructured information to them (e.g., for exception processing, or handling comments and ad-hoc notes). Other alternatives have also existed for some time. Users have used e-mail or other collaboration tools (e.g., workspaces) or task management and workflow products to direct actions on certain work items. Tags (and related tools like social bookmarks) offer another option that has some interesting possibilities.  Tag buttons added to browsers could be used to tag application-related data in the same manner that they are used to tag content. Similar tag functions could be added as client-side plug-ins to traditional desktop applications. Tagging applications would likely have to capture key metadata about the record being processed and store the resulting tag data in a manner similar to content-centric tags.

There would have to be some subtle differences however since record-level tagging would also need to extract business data (e.g., account number, product information) to aid in locating and recalling what was tagged or bookmarked. Tag Clouds could be integrated with applications as well, functioning as an alternative navigational technique. Information could be dynamically collected based on tag actions of peers working within related applications to surface interesting topics or keywords to co-workers. Or the tag cloud could just act as a peripheral vision mechanism that users could glance at while processing work items. Back-end systems could filter information and feed tag clouds with a variety of topical information as well (e.g., a tag cloud could categorize call types in a call center so operators could get a sense of “customer service hot topics” or whether inbound calls were related to a marketing campaign.

Tags As Intelligence Gathering & Routing Technique

Consumer sites encourage use of tags and tagging in a variety of ways. Users tag information objects (e.g., photos, web pages) with some assumption that tags will be clicked on by other users as a navigational method to discover that same information object or similar objects. There are similarities in this model for how users could also tag applications (through a controlled vocabulary or entry of ad-hoc labels). A claim interaction could be tagged as “fraud”. A sales transaction could be tagged as “HugeWinOverCompetion”. A product defect report in a customer service transaction could be tagged as “Recall_Issue”. Tags could also be interpreted by applications (given consistent formats and structure), to aid in routing and escalation of transactions tagged in certain manners (e.g., a “fraud” tag could route a transaction to an investigative unit). They key point here is that capture of opinion (via tagging) by line workers as they enter transactional data (given the proper vocabulary and bookmark system), can provide invaluable insight over a collective set of business activities and provide very dynamic routing capabilities based on metadata applied by users in a relatively unrestricted manner.  Of course this is easy to say. Not all work scenarios would allow time for tagging due to cycle-time, volumes, velocity of incoming tractions, etc. And there are certainly behavioral issues to overcome. But it does open some interesting insight to collective work activities.

Tagging People

Not only are there application possibilities with tagging but also interesting opportunities to exploit tags by applying them to people. Putting aside issues of appropriateness, security, privacy concerns (which obviously would have to be handled properly through policy, monitoring and enforcement procedures), tags can be used to dynamically and informally describe people around a particular context. In this approach, tagging people becomes a form of social annotation. For instance, as part of pre-sales activities, prospects and leads could be tagged to suggest characteristics about individuals that others on the account team might find helpful. Tags might include “tough_minded”, “difficult-negotiator”, “KeyDecisionMaker”, or “Prefers_Competition”. Tagging as a type of speech and conversation is an emerging area of social software research with some examples within consumer-oriented services. Tags applied to people provide anecdotal information that might not be captured in formal applications. Such opinionated insight however could provide situational awareness to an account team, even if the data was transitory to a particular time-period while a proposal or other engagement was underway. Such tags also acts as an indicators that such support should be included as part of the application itself through a more structured vocabulary.

Tags might also be used by users to describe themselves in terms of user profiles. Such tags could reflect professional interests, current activities and areas of expertise. There are well-known concerns with self-profiling (people tend to over-profile themselves, under-report competencies, or fail to maintain such profiles over time). The key point here is that tagging people will raise a variety of issues that include appropriate use (e.g., a user tags someone as “idiot”), but the model could become more applicable to upcoming demographics if consumer behavior around tagging continues to expand beyond bookmark services and social networking sites and becomes a behavioral norm in terms of work and lifestyle. Tags and tagging are already evolving within consumer contexts as an ad-hoc language based on social annotation of objects that could be described as a type of conversational discourse with its own grammar and colloquialisms (e.g., idioms and jargon).

Microsoft "People Ready" = Lotus "Super Human Software"

Just a quick thought on the media event last week where Microsoft unveiled a new campaign anchored around a "people ready" theme.

After the "Information Worker" message that never seemed to gain much traction (announced around 2003 or so if memory service me correctly), this is much better. Completeness and execution hurt the Information Worker theme and enabled IBM to actually steal the message and make it their own by delivering Workpalce to the market (including professional services thus befitting a "consulting ready" corallary to Microsoft)

But IBM does have a clear and long history here that Microsoft cast aside too easily. Remember "Super Human Software" and "I am..." marketing campaigns circa 1999. Some links to older information at the time:

The sixth annual Lotusphere in Orlando kicked off with an opening session focusing on what being "superhuman" is all about.

The Unofficial I AM Photo Journal

We are.....SUPER.HUMAN.SOFTWARE!!!!

So that's what I found to be so terribly disappointing in the IBM reaction. Rather than embrace the "people ready" theme as their own (pointing to its own lineage), IBM just threw some obvious darts at Microsoft that are stale and old criticisms.

So my quick take is:

1. A perfect theme for Microsoft to embrace.
2. But a theme that needs much more than just a "buy and deploy my technology stack" leave behind to make it real. Microsoft needs methods, practices, patterns of how to make the technology a real solution in both a business and people context.
3. A theme IBM cannot ignore, or does so at its peril.
4. But a theme that IBM could have so easily countered with its own record of people-ready efforts in the past. OK, so the super.human.software was not the best of campaigns and yes, the "I AM" ads were not overwhelming and perhaps best forgotten - but close eough to "people ready" to counter with...

Embedded Observation

I'm somewhat addicted to March Madness. I'm a big UConn Husky fan (of both the men and women programs) and they are losing, at the moment, to Albany. Oh well. So here I am surfing and posting to distract myself. Anyways, I've been doing a lot of research in the area of social software and social networking as you might tell from my posts here and at CollaborationLoop and a report is in the works that will be available to Burton Group clients. Myspace, Friendster, Tribe, Ryze, Consumating and so on have been part of this ongoing effort. My approach has been a little different than other research I've conducted before. I have been influenced a lot by a rough crib of a talk Danah Boyd gave at the recent O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.

The topic of her presentation was glocatization but what I was most intrigued by was the section of her speech where she talks about "embedded observation" (in addition to her perspectives on culture and identity (with myspace as an example)). That indirect advice prompted me to approach social software a little differently than other topics I cover. Rather than rely on normal analyst interfaces (e.g., vendor interviews, hands-on use of software, client experiences, subject matter experts in the field, other published materials), I've tried my own interpretation at embedded observation which has helped provide additional context (to quote Danah "You cannot boil down culture into static representation of people. You must live the culture that you are creating.").

I think the results will be better research and advice to clients regarding how consumer trends might apply within a business setting (e.g., virtual relationships, trust, reciprocity, reputation and so on). And, it has given me the opportunity to met some interesting people and potentially, some new friends. Trying to explain what an industry analyst is and does remains a challenge. We are an odd lot.

Oh, BTW, UConn is back in the lead with just as few seconds left, so it looks like my March Madness addiction will continue.
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Rise of the Social Enterprise

Improving business performance, growth and innovation have become top-line goals driving strategic initiatives of virtually all enterprises. Executives recognize that it is imperative to exploit inter-connections across customers, partners and suppliers at the process and information level. Senior leaders also understand the business transformation efforts necessary to become more agile in the marketplace. Over the years, a tremendous amount of time, money and resources have been invested to externalize processes (e.g., CRM, supply chain), outsource low-valued functions, revamp IT systems and implement a more coherent framework towards information management (driven, in part, by regulatory trends).

When it comes to employees however, organizations are full of contradictions. Actions taken in pursuit of top-line goals sometimes have derivative impacts on employees that impair such pursuit over the long run. One such inconsistency has been the lack of recognition by senior management concerning the influential (and sometimes dominant) role employee’s play in enabling top-line goals to be achieved. In particular, strategists fail to understand the value of social capital as a key organizational competency and the means by which it can be leveraged to support top-line goals. Active participation by employees across loosely-coupled groups (e.g., communities and relationship networks) establishes a variety of valuable connections for exchanging vital business insight.

As enterprises face undeniable demographic trends and workforce unrest, such unawareness is waning. Risks from aging workforce pressures have triggered renewed interest in organizational development strategies as a means to grow the intellectual capital and talent base of the organization. Such actions include investigating how to best externalize relationships with outside parties to facilitate fresh approaches and new ideas. Managers assessing younger hires, or contracted professionals, are also exploring more flexible work arrangements than had existed previously for past generations of office workers. Improving the level of workforce commitment in an age where ramifications from globalization often result in continual restructuring has management investigating ways to better encourage staff participation and feedback.

Different work models, building community across employees and new methods to compensate staff (e.g., skill/competency development, talent management programs) are leading indicators that people are being viewed as a more critical business asset than before. This does not mean a return to the good-old-days of lifetime employment or Internet-era bonuses, but a recognized need to improve the well-being, skills, competencies and productivity of those talented knowledge and information-centric workers that will be retained. Aspects of such programs will focus on environments that are more socially-oriented and exploit a more virtual workplace (e.g., mobility, pervasive connectivity). Human capital components of these programs will leverage principals from past knowledge management efforts to better democratize information sharing, communication and collaboration. 

Another contradiction with performance, growth and innovation goals concerns the management methods and decision making practices of most organizations. A typical enterprise might have portions of its management structure centralized, addicted to hierarchy and clinging to top-down decision making. Other business units of the very same organization might be decentralized with varying degrees of autonomy between itself and “corporate” for a variety of reasons (e.g., market needs of its particular line-of-business). Even within a business unit (especially those that are large or global), management and decision making institutions can vary between those that are more command-and-control driven versus those that are network-oriented around self-directed teams and communities. To harmonize the natural tension between centralized and distributed business entities, matrix reporting structures might be put in place to achieving better coordination but likely obfuscates accountability at the same time.

The resulting quagmire of inflexible and unresponsive management and decision making structures is the quintessence of bureaucracy, negatively influencing the institutional agility of an organization, its culture, and sense of community at all levels. Subsequently, workers are often left confused. This in turn has significant, and negative, consequences on the ability of an enterprise to develop its human capital, communicate, share information, and collaborate ? all critically important DNA traits of organizations seeking higher and sustained levels of performance, growth and innovation.

This seemingly ironic and paradoxical conundrum has been well summarized in a article published in The Economist (The New Organisation, Tim Hindle, January 19, 2006). In the report (a compendium of articles), several companies (e.g., Philips, Emerson, BP, Toyota, and IBM) are used as examples of organizations that either overcame structural challenges, or leveraged its internal culture, to become more resilient and adaptive in order to excel in today’s competitive environment. The concepts are not new. Management consultancies (e.g., Accenture, McKinsey & Company) and business thinkers (e.g., Peter Drucker, Tom Davenport, John Seely Brown, John Hagel) have long identified the need for business transformation from hierarchical, top-down structures to flatter, networked organizations that push decision-making to the edge. As stated previously, business transformation programs that rely on edge-centric and network-centric organizational models will rely on new ways for employees to work together outside traditional reporting structures and office environments, applying best practices from a human capital and knowledge management perspective to better socialize information sharing, communication and collaboration. 

A Listing Of Tagging & Social Bookmark Services

A running list of sites related to tagging and social bookmarking:

Site	Description	Comments
Blinklist	Social bookmark service	Add support for private links, watchlists and plans to add spaces for groups.
Connotea	Social bookmark service, personal library	Organize references and bookmarks for researchers and clinicians. Open source, can be downloaded.
CiteULike	Social bookmark service, automatically extracts citation information.	Targeted at academics to help store and organize papers, sites and other information. Plug-in capability exists.
Del.icio.us	Social bookmark service	Generally credited with sparking interest in this space.
De.lirio.us	Social bookmark service and enterprise tagging tool	Downloadable for intranet use.
Digg	“Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. “	Social bookmarking is only one aspect of this hybrid site and service.
Flickr	Photo management and sharing	Generally credited with sparking interest in this space.
Flipper	“FlipSkipper is a "river-of-news" style RSS feed aggregator. Unlike other aggregators, FlipSkipper doesn't use folders to classify individual feeds, but instead uses tags that display many feeds!”	An example of applying tags to categorize news feeds. The tag is the channel with multiple feeds merged together based on that tag relationship.
Freetag	Tagging plug-in.	Open source tagging module for PHP/My SQL applications.
Furl	Social bookmark service	Actually saves a copy of what is bookmarked (personal archive).
Jamendo	Artists distribute music under a creative commons license that enables members to download, remix and share music.	An example of tags being used to determine popularity and order music. Tags help build community in addition to discovery and navigation,
Jeteye	More of an online scrapbook service that supports bookmark and tag concepts.	Enables users to create a “jetpak” (a bundle of links and notes). Tags are used to categorize jetpaks.
Jots	Social bookmark service	Supports sharing of links at a private, group and public level.
Linkroll	Social bookmark service	Modeled after del.icio.us
Ma.gnolia	Social bookmark service	Modeled after del.icio.us supporting concepts of bookmarks, tags, and groups (communities around bookmarks).
My Web 2.0 by Yahoo!	Social bookmark service	Associated with Yahoo 360°
NetInfo	Enterprise tagging tool	Team bookmarking for the enterprise
Netvouz	Social bookmark service	Modeled after del.icio.us
OpenDocs	Enterprise tagging tool	For intranet use
Oyax	Social bookmark service	Modeled after del.icio.us
RawSugar	Emphasizes a directory structure and topical navigation framework on top of tagging and bookmarking.	Good compare and contrast with del.icio.us.
Scuttle	Social bookmark service	Open source effort that enables intranet use
Simpy	Social bookmark service	Advantages over del.icio.us.
Shadows	Social bookmark service	Park of Pluck, a social media company.
Spurl	Social bookmark service	Modeled after del.icio.us and furl (archives personal copy)
TagFacts	Keep track of notes	Tags help organize note taking.

Social Software: Knowledge Management Redux?

This post was originally contributed at CollaborationLoop.

Social software (and the media hype that surrounds it), resurrects memories of knowledge management (KM) projects that erupted within many organizations during the nineties. Efforts at that time placed tremendous emphasis on conducting document inventories and aggregating information into centralized repositories where technology (e.g., content management, search, and expertise location) was applied under the guise of surfacing “knowledge”.  The vast majority of such efforts imploded due to unrealistic expectations and an over-reliance on technology (tainting the term to this day). Around 2001, enterprise portals became synonymous with KM efforts. The ability of portals to compose user interfaces that were contextual based on user preferences and role was indeed valuable. But when organizations looked beyond the technology they would typically find that business value resulted from the organizational and process transformation that occurred. In essence, when done properly, KM is additive to strategic business initiatives (e.g., CRM) and is rarely the lead reason to undertake such efforts. KM generally fails when it is pursued as a holy grail, in and of itself, and especially when it over-prioritizes technology.

One area where KM has garnered success has been in the area of community-building (e.g., communities of practice). KM teams involved with these efforts understood that while the content was an important piece of the puzzle, equal importance had to be placed on the people and relationship aspects of how groups share insight. This introduced communication and collaboration strategies into set of methods and practices applied by KM teams. The focus on interaction, trust, reciprocity, conversation and storytelling is also the point where social software reframes some of the challenges faced by KM teams, offering a different set of tactics complimentary to historical KM best practices.

A consistent theme behind social software is to take advantage of informal interaction and make it purposeful by facilitating group connections based on common attributes (e.g., interests, activities, location and information) that are explicit or inferred. Reasons for users collectively interacting can vary greatly. At one extreme it can be very self-serving. Users might participate in socially-oriented applications only to lurk on the edges, absorbing information from the community that is relevant to their own research, personal need or work-related tasks. The other extreme would be users that are highly active in the network. The intensity of their participation might be represented by their level of contributions (e.g., providing opinion, insight, recommendations or other types of information or by aggressively tagging and sharing bookmarks), their ability to persuade others to join, or their level of influence in brokering linkages between members in the community or network.

In any case, the unforeseen discovery of peers doing similar things that result in purposeful action as a derivative outcome of informal interaction across small groups, larger communities and loosely-coupled networks makes social software quite consistent with KM goals. The tactics espoused by social software (e.g., tags, social bookmarks, and social networks) can promote changes in behaviors where users rely on community or network members as credible information filters. Within enterprises, where such systems would likely to be integrated with identity management platforms, this could lead to eventual face-to-face interaction between groups as a sense of online and offline community builds around similar interests. This transformation of informal interaction into purposeful activity that could benefit business activities is something for enterprise strategists to examine more closely.