MindTouch is producing a series of educational videos aimed at explaining Enterprise 2.0 concepts.  Below is the first ThoughtBoard video that details how Collaborative Networks are different than social business applications. 

Aaron initially posted an article on the subject at Ostatic.  Here he articulates the concept in a video. 

He did it in one take. Amazing.

Newspapers are Dead.  Ok, not quite dead but on life support. 

According to Silicon Alley Insider so far this year:

• 105 newspapers have been shuttered.
• 10,000 newspaper jobs have been lost.
• Print ad sales fell 30% in Q1 ’09.
• 23 of the top 25 newspapers reported circulation declines between 7% and 20%

Therefore when I read Can Google Save Your Local Newspaper by Robert Cringely at CIO Magazine, I was surprised by his summary.  In a nutshell Cringely believes that Google must provide more search weight towards the original source of the article (usually a newspaper) in order to properly drive traffic to the originating source.   This may be a band-aid but will not solve the underlying problem of an outdated business model. 

Google Labs is also pushing a new service called Fast Flip which ostensibly is helping print media adapt to the Google model of monetization.   Google has partnered with 36 news publishers for the initial trial.   The interface is nice, it’s like looking at the front page of a dozen newspapers all sorted by section, most viewed, or recommended.   Yet still it’s just a user interface make over and not much more. 

Herein lies the issue.  Why recreate the print experience online? 

The Print Media Runs into Competition

One of the early signs the newspaper industry was in trouble was the introduction of eBay and Craigslist and it’s impact on classified ad revenues.   Unless you were internet illiterate you immediately saw the value of posting your used items for sale on these sites compared to your local newspaper because (1) it was less expensive and (2) you reached a global audience. 

Seemingly stunned by the competition, the newspaper industry did little to respond.  We still had ad revenue they told themselves.   Yet, internet behemoth Google began to cut into that revenue stream as well.  And still, little in the way of a response except a few vociferous print media journalists attacking bloggers, internet news sites and new content aggregators as “unprofessional, untrained, and fact skewing”.

But the world knew better and were not scared by the warnings.    

A New Business and Monetization Model for Print Media 

One of the major advantages of the internet is the ability for anyone to produce niche content that inevitably has an audience somewhere in the world.  The other major advantage are the instant feedback loops that are created with the target audience.  If the content is controversial, untrue or terrible, you’re going to hear about it.  Similarly, great content is promoted globally by readers that can instantly extend your subscription base (for free!).

Instead of using services like Fast Flip that only help line Google’s ever deepening pockets, print media can develop a new model based on the concept of hyper-localization.  In effect, extending the local newspaper business model to every residential block, commercial business sector, organized group, park, beach, or wherever there is a need for structured news.  Think long tail journalism via niche topics and discussions that involve large and small communities of people. 

   The community becomes an extended journalist team for the local newspaper and is rewarded in turn by having access to frequently updated and more relevant content.   This crowd sourced hyper-local niche content then becomes an area that local businesses can advertise in or participate in the discussion.   Add mobile photo and GPS capabilities and an interesting hyper-local picture emerges – especially for advertisers.

By example, a local niche site (owned by the newspaper) about high school sports could be crowd sourced by the community.  Imagine aggregating in one online site all of the Twitter tweets, blogs, comments on a Wiki for every high school football game.  Parents and students now become the local media for the event.  Yes the audience is narrow and small, but it’s very focused.  

A local sports store can participate by sponsoring the niche site by tallying the statistics, providing live game commentary via Twitter, moderating the parent and student content and highlighting key plays in a game wrap up.   The sports store is then rewarded by audience patronage and continued loyalty especially if they are entertaining.

For the local newspaper, they sell niche site sponsorships and advertising.  Not only are they receiving free digital ink from long tail journalism, they are profiting from it (sound like a familiar business model – ahem Google).  It’s a lot of work, but better than the alternative mentioned in the first sentence. 

So how does a local newspaper begin down this digital road?  The good  news is that at last, there are a few well intentioned companies focused on helping print media move to the digital age.  MindTouch has created a Collaborative Network Solution focused on crowd sourcing content and documentation.   Microsoft Sharepoint has external solutions that can be built to handle this concept.  Acquia  the largest Drupal service provider has a solution that can help – note contact Warren Utt (and tell him I sent you).  

Think the new business model is impossible or difficult to implement?  Well, at least one site is already up and running.  Whorunsgov.com a Washington Post site has recently launched and is experiencing tremendous traffic (Alexa: 45,109 as of the date of this article).     

Print Media CEO Advice: Build your own hyper-local news platform.  Start small and find early adopter sponsors that are Web 2.0 savvy.  Encourage long tail journalism by appealing to the 10% of the local population willing to create content.  Actively promote the early adopt
ers and encourage their efforts.   It’s ok to make mistakes, but learn from them, figure out what works, and do it more.  Don’t quit at the first sign of failure and stop waiting for the answer to appear.  

As you can see by your subscription numbers, they’re heading straight down and it’s not going to reverse course.  You’re stuck on an outdated dead tree platform that is not being used anymore. 

By the time someone figures out the right answer, it’ll be too late.  Get going.

There are so many things floating around about Enterprise 2.0 lately that touch on the 50,000 ft view, but not many that dive into the details.  Before we see mass adoption in the Enterprise like we have seen with social media outside the Enterprise, some key psychological characteristics need to be properly converted. 

I recall the early days of social networking while I was an advisor and investor to ZeroDegrees (acquired by IAC) and my friends’ resistance to joining our network.  My sales buddies didn’t want to share their rolodex or network with other salespeople because they saw their rolodex as a competitive advantage.  They wanted to remain an individual silo – disconnected from everyone else.  We now know how flawed that early thinking was. 

Had the salesperson in my example above known what was in it for him or received some type of currency in exchange for giving up his information, he would have adopted the technology sooner.  

Fast forward to today where the discussion centers around Enterprise 2.0 adoption.  Similar resistance exist but it’s now emanating from the IT department and Corporate Executives that don’t understand the power of these new tools.   They feel their employees will waste time with the tools and become less productive.  I submit another scenario which I outline below. 

So let’s dive right in and examine the following example which I represent is on an Enterprise Collaborative Intranet 2.0 site:

Ok, it’s a simple representation of a few people that obviously have projects that they’re working on.   So what?  Well, let’s continue.    

Let’s add an assumption that my boss is looking for team members to participate in a very important, high profile project.   Now let’s look at the following version:

So now I’ve added a little more information about the potential team members.  I see that Aaron has a much higher level than the rest of the prospects which I claim is a type of reputation score based on experience, projects completed at a satisfactory level and how people have judged their past performance.  The decision for my boss is becoming easier but I still need more information.   

I’ll add some more information which may help my boss: 

I see that Rion and Robert are experts in “M” which in our simplified example means Manufacturing.  However, Rion is working on 10 projects already and Robert only has 5.  That may be due to Robert’s low Level score, but since the project only needs a junior analyst my boss may contact him to help.  Moreover, Robert does have 180 followers so he must be interesting.  

Now imagine if this mini-stat card followed you around wherever you were on the Corporate Intranet.   I contend that you would endeavor to keep the scores high and work harder to obtain greater expertise.  In effect, you’d build up your psychological currency to amass promotions, peer respect, recognition and higher quality work.   

But the goal isn’t to roam around on the Intranet picking up points and followers.  Instead, it’s about building a personal brand by growing one’s experiences and relationships so that the Enterprise can quickly find the best people for the task at hand.  In turn, your Return on Influence (ROI!) works to your personal advantage because you now get to influence the process.  A win – win relationship in my view.   

What do you think?

Read Part 2: Connecting Mind to Enterprise

The bigger a company the slower product cycles become. As a result, companies tend to become less innovative and less adaptive when consumer interests change. Feedback loops for continuance assessment are less frequent due to geographic constraints and locating the right expert at the right time. When things change, you need a collaborative intranet that can quickly change with your business needs.

Current Intranets like SharePoint give you a lot of functionality in the form of plug-ins and 3rd party applications but lack the ability to quickly adapt to changing business conditions. Sure you can add an application whenever a need arises, but it’s difficult to change the application without extensive development effort (and permission from the developer). So IT managers devise inefficient workarounds which only add to the problem.

Consider a VP of R&D at a Global 3000 Company who was just alerted via ReadWriteWeb that a hot new widget is being developed by his

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

chief competitor. In fact the competitor plans to launch the widget at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas and all indications are that it’s going to be a huge success. CES is only 6 months away and the Company hasn’t updated its product in 2 years. The Company’s engineering and R&D teams have made attempts to update the product in the last few years but were stymied by ivory tower syndrome, lost documents, suppliers that went out of business and employee turnover. Worse, since they used email and meetings as their primary communication tools, the information was lost on laptops and email.

The VP was caught off guard and was not prepared to quickly ramp up in order to have a competitive solution in time for CES. He knew it would take 6 months just to find the lost information, conduct internal focus groups, organize the teams and find suppliers. Moreover, the company didn’t have the internal systems in place to adapt quickly to a new product cycle.

Companies might focus on measuring sales, but are inattentive to the health of the enterprise or the voice of the customer because their communication channels are trapped in silos. Relevant and timely information are not bubbling up to the surface because existing Intranet’s are not equipped to handle feedback loops or adapt to changing business conditions.

In contrast Intranet 2.0 solutions provide content subscriptions, ratings and commenting, people following and communication, content taxonomy, polling, teams, projects and so forth that set up virtual feedback loops and content organization in order to drive better decision making. Dashboards that are constantly updating the status of the Enterprise across all departments which allows quick adaption to changing business conditions. By bringing together collaborative Enterprise 2.0 tools with Intranets the health of the business is more easily discerned. The implicit becomes more explicit, providing a means to:

• Rapidly change course when necessary
• Obtain feedback for proposed changes
• Product innovation becomes a bi-product of the enterprise collective voice
• Quickly locate subject experts and include them in the process

In our example above, had the organization installed an Intranet 2.0 solution, they could have easily launched a product in time for CES. If your Intranet initiative does not include Intranet 2.0 tools how competitive can your organization be in the future? Does your IT department care? Are you taking the initiative?

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That’s what makes them dangerous.

When someone describes a corporate situation as a disconnected entity ("a bunch of corporate divisions that don’t coordinate activities, plus a lack of communication, and no accountability, why are sales down?"); it’s time to reexamine how companies are structured today. Part of the reason that your company is missing opportunities to sell is because the enterprise intelligence isn’t being utilized optimally or at all.    

Just because you’re in the sales division, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be working with operations to coordinate customer oriented activities.  Moreover, because your company has always been divided does not mean you can’t make changes today to break down those walls.  

Technorati Tags: Corporate silos,enterprise,Sales

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Whenever I flush out an idea for a new software product or solution I always look for a use case to focus my thinking.  I recently ran across a blog post by Mike Gotta of Collaborative Thinking on corporate identities.  Mike builds a fictitious scenario around a call center employee named Mary that is proactively trying to help the company by maintaining a best practices wiki.  Her attempts to join other communities within the enterprise are initially rebuked:

• When Mary attempts to join a marketing community (via a discussion forum), her efforts to establish her social footing are rebuked. Marketing does not consider customer service and call center agents as having any type of standing when it comes to marketing-related discussions.
• When Mary attempts to join a product development community however, her efforts are more welcome. Product development teams often have formal processes defined between the two groups to solicit feedback and to handle escalation issues related to product tickets.

The scenario detailed above is so common someone should coin a term for it.  Before Enterprise 2.0 tools, this person would be ostracized and labeled a trouble maker.  The employee either continues to annoy other departments and thus reducing her own political capital or begins to tune out and stops trying to help the company. 

Since the company had Wiki’s, Blogs and Forums, the employee was able to win over the Marketing department who initially thought she had no expertise.  

I don’t like Gotta’s portrayal of a Facebook for Enterprise example, but what’s he is describing is a semi-collaborative environment that allows the workforce to follow each other in a social manner.   

Blogs, Wiki’s and Forums are separate silos that don’t effectively measure employee performance because they only measure number of words, posts, or possibly ratings on each post.  But collectively, there is not an overall picture of the contributor (or an incomplete one) and certainly not how well they perform against business objectives.   

Instead, as I have written before, a collaborative network is a better answer which would have exposed Mary to the enterprise through her documented accomplishments.Marketing may still have rejected Mary initially, but as her prominence grew, soon enough she would have been hard to ignore. 

The key here is that collaborative networks expose experts who otherwise are hidden.  The result is a strong ROI that is difficult to quantify but very real.  It’s time corporations recognize the hidden talents of their employees.  The solutions are available, it’s time they are implemented. 

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If you are a marketing executive or like to think of yourself as one (as I attempt to do on occasion), the I recommend the blog Branding Strategy Insider.  Today, when reading about his latest post, I came across the following which prompted the creation of this article: When asked what single event was most helpful to him in developing the theory of relativity, Albert Einstein is reported to have answered: ‘‘Figuring out how to think about the problem.’’

When I think about the problems that Collaborative Networks solve it begins with connecting people to content in meaningful, contextual ways.  For example, if I want to create a new cost cutting initiative; I want all of the relevant enterprise content at my finger tips to create goals and tasks, learn about my current suppliers, understand the cost structure of each, and appreciate the consequences of switching to a lower total cost supplier. 

Yet we still haven’t reached the core issue in this example.  I’ve identified the problem, but haven’t quite figured out how to frame it in a meaningful way so that it’s remembered.  So let’s attempt to break down the problem then rebuild it so that it clicks in our minds (or at least mine

1. People create and use content with many different applications.  This content is not stored centrally or contextually it’s spread out across unconnected applications like email, instant messaging, blogs, wiki’s, databases, office documents and video sites.  Meanwhile the content is very difficult to find and resides in disparate locations, it’s not similarly structured, and worse it’s not current in time relative to one another (e.g. 2008 content versus 2009). 
2. Having all of the most up to date content at the right time to make decisions is a game changer is not being done today.  It’s an extremely difficult challenge because content is stored in many different places, and it’s not self-organizing.  If it was, the content could organize around key concepts and become more contextual and relevant. 

   For example, if my Word document about Sharepoint 2010 strategy knew that my PowerPoint about SharePoint strategy was about a similar subject, then it could self update the content (or at least link to it).  Instead, the content is disconnected, unorganized and stored in multiple, isolated locations.

   3. Today we make important decisions by considering all of the criteria involved in making a determination.  We then prioritize and weight the criteria according to our own experiences.  We also consider alternative solutions and how they compare to one another.  We may ask friends or work associates for their advice especially if they are an expert.  Finally, we let our emotions and feelings affect the decision.

   4. Having access to all of the Enterprise content is a difficult proposition by itself, yet we still need the ability to measure all of the activity to see how it’s being utilized.  We need reports on content that measures usage, importance and relevance. We need to capture organized content (e.g. content in a project) and ensure that it’s repeatable for future employees.  We need to measure the results of organized content so that we know if a project is worth doing again. 

So how can a Collaborative Intranet facilitate this process?

• It must be connected to all relevant Enterprise data in contextual ways.
• It must give me all of the most current content from around the Enterprise.
• It must measure and monitor the data so that I have an appreciation of trends, hot topics, revenue gains or losses, cost increases or external changes related to my industry or supply chain.
• It must organize content so that my team or I can make optimal decisions.  The goal being to increase my decision making batting average.
• It must allow for easy connections (sharing) with other people in order to collaborate.  It must either suggest or easily find experts in the Enterprise to help me solve a business need

So for me, thinking about the problem involved breaking it down into bite size chunks. I then theoretically tried to conceptualize the needs of each chunk.  Now I must attempt to frame it in a memorable manner. 

“The problem of Enterprise collaboration is that we don’t have easy access to all of the current and relevant information we need to make important decisions without laboriously tracking it down across several people, databases and documents.”  

So if Einstein were alive today and he architected an intranet what would it look like?  I contend it would be theoretical and full of black holes.  Seriously though, I’m confident he’d discover a more efficient method of connecting people to content and permit us to build out his models.

Today I watched the SharePoint 2010 demo and was pleasantly surprised by the functionality and potential to help increase productivity within the corporation.  The SharePoint team seems to be messaging similarly to Aaron Fulkerson and his views on Collaborative Networks, rapid application development, and data connectivity.  There are some very good new features and updates to SharePoint that I’ll cover below. 

The Good

• Bi-Directional Data Connectivity looks promising and easier to use.  Yet any database coordinator will tell you how difficult it is to truly do this well.  One bad query can bring the entire system down.  Yet the SharePoint team was messaging around business users having the data read/write capability so the challenge is even more daunting.  
•  Composites are a welcome addition to SharePoint.  Essentially, composites are web parts and tools to help build custom applications on SharePoint.  It’s had some of them in the past, but they appear to be more streamlined and easier to create.  
• Modifying Team Sites appears to be much easier to edit and create.  Adding pictures, text and altering them seemed easy and intuitive which will increase their adoption among business users who want to create their own team pages.
• Skinning SharePoint was very impressive.  They showed an example where they used a PowerPoint template to skin SharePoint with just a few clicks.  This will add some creativity to an otherwise bland SharePoint site.  The creative types within the enterprise will enjoy this new feature and utilize it a lot – thus an increase in adoption. 

The Bad:

I don’t buy the supply chain example given in the demo.  Most companies are not going to entrust their extremely complex supply chains to a Visio document with a connection to a SQL database.   It’s much too simplistic and cheapens the demo some what.

Microsoft also tends to build applications that only work with other Microsoft products.  At least they work better with other Microsoft products.  They messaged around being browser agnostic, but I doubt SharePoint will easily work with other non-Microsoft products.  

In Summary:

The product showed well during the demo.  Who knows how much of it is real and how much of it still needs to be developed.  Tom Rizzo, Senior Director on the SharePoint team did a good job of giving the overview.  It was just enough to keep me interested, yet gave some good information to get his viewers excited about SharePoint 2010.  Hopefully more details emerge in the fall, but for now it looks promising. 

Finally, there’s nothing truly innovative here like Google Wave but it will make using SharePoint easier and provide a higher ROI due to the increased adoption and the visibility into Enterprise data.   

Questions: What do you think of SharePoint 2010?  Is it a game changer in the Enterprise? 

I recently read an innovative article on Dynamic Signals by David Armano. There’s a bigger issue here that David has touched on. How do we discern the signals and add context around them to decode them properly? The signals are large and small messages emanating from individuals. David introduced the concept, but didn’t go a step further and develop a business reason for decoding them and applying them to solve business objectives.

I’d like to take a stab at it.  First, signals can become noise and thus useless if not channeled properly.  Think of it as trying to communicate in the middle of Grand Central Station at rush hour.  You’re not going to effectively communicate. 

Yet tools that can parse all the noise and direct them to you are valuable because they educate you on current customers, prospects, competitors and even fellow employees.  Once channeled properly, the trick is to provide proper context around the signals.  How do we know what all the signals mean in a given context?  How do we know if our best customer is really happy with us or searching for an alternative product or service? 

I’ll submit the answer is to leverage technology to channel the signals then analyze the signals with human intelligence.  Until there is an effective artificial intelligence system, we can’t possibly decipher the signals without human intervention.  A service like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk provides inexpensive human intelligence to analyze the signals and provide proper context.  Better, large corporations should task employees with  aggregating and providing context about their customer’s signals.  The compiled information is potentially priceless.  It’s like a real time customer service survey. 

Want to steal customers from your competitors?  Analyze the signals and change your sales messaging to address competitor shortcomings.  If you’re an Executive and want to find out how effective your direct reports, and reports of your direct reports are managing projects; then analyze the signals and contextualize them.  Instead of noise, you’ll get direct communication from the front lines without filters. 

Those examples above are valuable and that is why Armano’s idea should be codified and a solution developed.    

I was having an interesting discussion with Hal Wendel CEO of Fididel when the subject of Collaborative Networks came up. Hal has focused his company on helping Auto Dealers sell more cars by engaging the customer on their own websites. A discussion ensued where we talked about the various problems inherent in larger companies where chat may help. After throwing around some ideas, it became clear the opportunity is with engaging internal and external customers.

Chat is already used with external customers, but I haven’t seen it used internally. The ability to engage your internal customers, categorize the issues and then provide a constantly refreshing FAQ seems powerful to me. Additionally, the ability to mine that data and extract corporate information that can be used in improving internal performance, increasing efficiency, and surfacing new revenue generation ideas are incredibly compelling.

I like specifics however and not fluffy ideas without further thought. So for example – an internal customer service team that is exclusively tasked with helping new employees with the on-boarding process. Countless days and weeks are lost when new employees can’t get up to speed quickly due to the inability to find documents, people and training materials necessary to do their job. If an Enterprise Chat were enabled, these employees would be able to quickly engage with internal staff to compress the on-boarding time which means quicker time to productivity.

Another example related to revenue generation. Picture a chat team whose sole purpose is to help teams and groups of people get projects done faster. As employees are interacting with the chat team ideas emerge that are aggregated and categorized. These ideas are presented to management through Idea dashboards which highlight the top trends and thought analysis for further action. So if Proctor & Gamble found that as teams are completing their current product plans – new product ideas emerge for next year and/or new product launch efficiencies are discovered one can imagine the positive impact on revenue.

Chat makes these discoveries more likely to occur because project team members are not used to constantly updating a project page or sending email updates on a daily basis. However, if proactive chat were enabled ostensibly to help team members with expediting the completion of tasks, the chat team could be pulling additional information from team members to help with idea creation and project efficiencies goals. This information would then be automatically mined, categorized and dashboarded for decision makers to act on.

This is a potent concept in theory. Making it reality is something Fididel will have to figure out.