Category: Collaboration and workplace (Page 51 of 94)

It’s been a rough few weeks for infrastructure.
Of course the collapse of the I-35 bridge over the Mississippi in Minneapolis last Wednesday is on all of our minds – how could the inspections fail and the road fall down? Significantly, there’s some videos that capture the moment, which hopefully will provide clues for determining the cause.
Closer to home, we had an eight-hour traffic jam on the I-93 loop in Braintree (a major highway south of Boston) a week ago Monday. A storm grate was thrown loose by a passing truck at the start of the morning rush, and landed on a near-by car. (Fortunately the driver survived.) Reportedly, the Massachusetts State Highway Department spent the rest of the day checking and welding shut all the grates on that highway. The next day, the same loose storm drain problem cropped up on a major road in Newton, near where I live. This time motorists were asked to dial a special code from their cell phones to report problems.
And then this morning New Yorkers awoke to a monsoon and a flooded mass transit system. The official M.T.A. web site could not keep up with the requests for information, and crashed when it was needed most.
You’ve gotta hand it to those hardy folks (and the New York Times) for that snarky, Big Apple attitude. Here’re a few priceless ones that I gleaned from NYTimes.Com during the day.

“Our transit system is not only frail but if it’s this vulnerable to rain attacks, then how vulnerable is it to terrorist attacks?”

“I walked from the Upper West Side all the way to work in Midtown, but thanks to Starbucks was able to stop in and cool myself every four blocks or so.”

(Now there’s somebody with brand loyalty!)

“And only the rats had no transportation problems.”

All this content about our physical infrastructure (user generated and otherwise) has the potential to bring social computing to a whole new level.
This got me thinking about the role of collaboration technologies for supporting our physical infrastructure. It’s great to be able to talk back — and let off a little steam. It’s even better to be able to call-in, and tell the authorities about the problem before there’s another horrible accident. But what else is possible? Could the bridge inspectors in Minneapolis have shared their observation reports, measurements, and perhaps photographs of the bridge’s structure over the past few inspection cycles, and had some semi-automated ways to detect the problems before the disaster? Unfortunately we’ll never know.
While I certainly don’t have it all figured out, I can begin to see some bread crumbs towards the workable solution we all want and need. We can no longer rely on human intelligence alone. Our worlds are much too complex and interdependent. We need to augment our understandings, and our abilities to take actions, by a variety of automated, concent-centric tools, such as semantic technologies. (With my colleagues Lynda Moulton and Frank Gilbane, we’re picking up coverage of this area, the ability to inject “meaning” and “context” into an enterprise environment. Be sure to check out the semantic technologies track at our upcoming conference in November.)
I’ve seen a couple of promising developments this month. SchemaLogic is finally reporting some progress in the publishing space, enabling publishers such as Associated Press to automatically repurpose content by synchronizing tags and managing metadata schemas. While pretty geeky, this is very neat! Now we need to see how this approach to managing semantics within the enterprise will impact collaboration and social computing.
Then project and portfolio management (PPM) systems — heretofore heavyweight (often mainframe) applications that are used to track resources for complex, engineering-driven projects — are being redeployed as Web 2.0 environments. In particular,eProject is now transforming its Web-based PPM environment into a broader collaborative tools suite. Seeking to capitalize on it’s expanded mission of bringing a PPM model to the Web, eProject’s also renaming itself in the process.
Where do these bread-crumbs lead? As a first step, we need to focus on how our collaboration infrastructure (fueled by our information architecture) can augment the work of people responsible for our physical infrastructure (ourselves included). At the end of the day, we need to be able to rely on this collaboration infrastructure to help us sense and respond to the challenges of simply getting from one place to another.

A provocative conversation broke out on one of the discussion groups I monitor last week. “I’m curious how you and others you know are using ‘LinkedIn.com.'” the person asked. “For me, I like who’s in my network, [and] keep asking others to join; but overall I find it to be very static.”
A static network — now there’s a new concept! But there’s a good deal of truth to wondering how these links work within the business environment. Sure I too have a modest network; I check out my Linked-in account once or twice a month to see who’s doing what. For me, this substitutes (poorly) for the water-cooler conversations earlier in my career, when I was surrounded by lots of co-workers. There was always the lunch-time gossip and the hallway exchanges . . . did I know that so and so was working on this new skunk-works project? Had I heard that another sales team just surpassed its revenue goals or that a particular key customer now had a new set of requirements?
While linking-in through Linked-in is a poor substitute for the chatter of the co-located workplace, it’s at least the beginning of a business conversation. It maintains its professional aura, boundaries, and rules, in part by continuing to stove-pipe its connections, and not (yet) mashing up its links and membership.
Not so with Facebook, now trying to take the “digital natives” (those who grew up with the Internet ant the Web) into the workplace. This move — blending the power of networks with mashups — is raising a number of eyebrows. “Friend? Not? It’s One or the Other” Rob Pegoraro, the personal technology columnist wrote provocatively in the Washington Post last week.

You could stay in touch with your drinking buddies at MySpace, then schmooze with your business partners at LinkedIn.
But life isn’t always that neat. And when the private and professional overlap at these sites, you can spend more time worrying about your image than building your network.

To be sure Facebook has a slew of privacy setting — at least 135 according to Pegoraro — but having to define how I want to expose some of my activities to one group of friends and other actions to business colleagues adds complexity to what should be cast as a rather fluid interchange.
What’s missing to my way of thinking is not simply privacy but context. We all have our business personas and our personal personas. We have certain expectations when in a business context, others when in a social context, and still others when “being personal.” Many of our social networks are, in fact, rather complex.
To make these networks useful within a collaborative (and online) business environment, we need to be able to add (and manage) our business contexts. We need to be able to describe (and map) the business purposes for our social networks.

Nora Barnes (director of the Center for Marketing Research at UMass, Dartmouth) and Eric Mattson have a new survey report out on social computing — The Game Has Changed: College Admissions Outpace Corporations in Embracing Social Media. They compare how universities and companies in the Inc. 500 are using social media — blogging, social networking (whch I take to mean sites like Facebook and MySpace), message boards, online video, podcasting, and wikis. In a nutshell

Social media has arrived in college admissions. The ivory tower is innovating even faster than the elite Inc. 500. And the game has changed forever.

I cannot wait to see their detailed analysis.

Picking through their numbers so far, two things jump out. First, universities are almost as likely to use social networks as search engines when evaluating potential students (26% vs 21%).

Admission offices can find out all kinds of information about their prospects by googling them on the web. Tracking and tracing their social networks is close behind. Hum, I wonder what enterprises are going to be doing, both when reviewing job candidates and business partnerships, and when tracking performance. I can see it now — a new generation of “socially conscious” HR and business applications.

Second, we’ve been talking about blogs and wikis in almost the same breadth (thanks in part to Don Tapscott and Wikinomics and “how mass collaboration changes everything”). But not so fast. While blogging is more widely used in universities than in corporations (33% vs 19%), wikis are more widely deployed in corporations than in universities (17% vs. 3%). So we ought to take another breadth, turn down the hypemeter, and better understand how these different modes of collaboration are used in practice.

Here’s my vote. It’s all about the difference between self-publishing and supporting a business process. Blogging’s easy — I’m standing at my virtual Hyde Park corner (as in this blog), using my own time. Others who want to invest their time can read what I have to say. (Thank you, my readers!) But putting up a wiki is all about sharing information that’s part of a business process — I post, you modify, and our colleagues elsewhere in the world add their two cents. The outcome is a group project, the results of our “collective intelligence.” It’s a bit like co-authoring a report or developing a project plan for a group or . . . . you get the point — we share in the results through an interactive process.

Oh, one other thing. Business processes are tough to implement. They happen not by accident but by design. When the bloom is off the rose, we’re going to have to do a lot more work to make wikis really useful within the enterprise.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has 2 articles that relate to enterprise social computing: Instant Messaging Invades the Office, and iPhone Calls to Some Business Users. Our recent informal poll of Facebook users suggests they think instant messaging will be more dominant than some other “social software” in enterprises in the near future. The WSJ article indicates IMing is invading fast.

It is not surprising that iPhones, with their dramatically improved viewing experience, will find a lot more use in business environments. I love my Treo, but avoid viewing spreadsheets and using it with other web apps. The iPhone will make a huge difference to my interaction with our corporate information when I am out of the office. Of course, there are security issues, and no doubt other technical issues that may get in the way initially, but there is no going back. And if tomorrow’s numbers from Apple are less than expected they will merely reflect the initial velocity, not an inability to reach escape velocity.

UMass professor Nora Barnes has added to her earlier research on enterprise adoption of social software, this time focused on use by universities. Below is an intro with a link from her announcement. Also see our Collaboration & Social Computing Blog where Geoff comments on a new report by McKinsey.

Earlier this year, my research partner, Eric Mattson and I revealed that the fast-growing companies of the Inc. 500 are adopting social media faster than anyone would have predicted based on the previous research into corporate social media (summary). I sent you that announcement. Those findings were actually picked up and featured in Business Week in March!

For our most recent research, we followed up on that survey by examining the social media usage of the “marketing teams” (a.k.a. admissions departments) of 453 colleges and universities nationwide. The results are fascinating. I thought you’d be interested.

Generally, the “marketing teams” of academic institutions are more familiar with and adopting social media faster (especially blogs) than even the innovative companies of the Inc. 500. Even more importantly, they are using social media and search engines to research potential students. No longer can applicants behave irresponsibly online without potential consequences to their futures (and their parents’ sanity).

An executive summary of the results entitled The Game Has Changed: College Admissions Outpace Corporations in Embracing Social Media can be downloaded here from the website of the UMD Center for Marketing Research.