Category: Collaboration and workplace (Page 58 of 97)

Here’s some interesting news from IBM that caught my eye — new enterprise mashup technology, QEDWiki from IBM labs. To quote from the press release, it seems that wikis can front-end business process redesign initiatives.

QEDWiki, which is based on Web 2.0 technologies, is applicable for business situations. IBM’s Enterprise Mashup Technology breaks down the barriers of traditional application development and provides a framework that uses information from the Web and wiki technology to allow people to create a customized application in less than five minutes. For instance, many businesses rely on weather conditions when planning daily operations. QEDWiki can help a logistics manager plan the most efficient way to send rock salt, shovels and snow blowers to the Northeast to stock the store in time for a forecasted record snow storm. By using the enterprise mashup maker, the manager can “drag and drop” weather reports, online maps and the company’s national hardware inventory data into an application that will show which stores will be effected by the storm and which stores need inventory. The technology can quickly enable a store manager to prioritize product deliveries to meet customer demand within a small timeframe.

Per chance, wikis provide a more intuitive presentation of information than simple lists. This is going to be an important development for collaborative technologies. Moreover, mashups when linked to wikis can facilitate rapid application development–quickly putting up an ad hoc information sharing environment and then tweaking it, on-the-fly.

But all this begins by having access to well-tagged, self-describing content. The hard part is designing the underlying information architecture, developing the relevant content schemas, and tagging all of the content and their varied contexts in the first place.

Another blog? On collaboration? No this is not a mistake. Welcome to the Collaboration Blog at the Gilbane Group. I’ll be focusing on business collaboration – the techniques, tools, and technologies that you and I use in our work-a-day worlds to share information online.

Along the way I’m probably going to spend some time talking about “social computing” – the new buzz word for sharing information online which IBM is adding to its latest marketing campaign. And inevitably I’ll touching on MOSS and VISTA—the Microsoft juggernaut that includes Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), the rewrite of Windows for the 21st century (VISTA), and the other Office 2007 applications. And then there are the neat new tools and applications coming down the pike, from innovative start-ups and established vendors alike.

More is at stake than this year’s marketing hype. Let’s put the discussion in context.

Collaboration is one of those old ideas about the future of technology, going back more than thirty years to the dawn of networked computers. (Yes once upon a time, not so many years ago, even email was new and revolutionary.) Many of us in the industry, developing products in those pre-Internet days, talked a lot about the “three C’s” – communication, coordination, and collaboration. We had this crazy idea that once we could connect electronically with one another, we could easily communicate and share information. Then eventually we would ascend to the nirvana of collaboration, and be able to work together with our colleagues to achieve common goals.

Yes, the easy communication and the information sharing certainly has happened. Yet there’s still a lot of overhead when we try to work closely with one another, at a distance. Along the way we’re finding that our colleagues are no longer our co-workers and employees in the same company–and that our actions and activities routinely span time zones and organizational boundaries. In fact, many of us now work as independent agents within a distributed (and networked) extended enterprise, in ways that would astound – and perhaps delight — our fathers and mothers.

I don’t think anybody will dispute the fact that the Internet changes how we work – and how we play. Yet making good use of our endless capabilities to communicate and share information is another matter. We still need to figure out how we can best collaborate with one another to achieve meaningful outcomes—particularly when we have the benefits (and the challenges) of working in a distributed fashion over the Web. Going forward, I hope to have more to say about the business impacts of collaboration, and why some collaborative computing environments are going to be more successful than others.

In June of 06 I took my first step towards understanding business blogging. As a professor at the University of MA in Dartmouth, and Director of the Center for Marketing Research, I felt I needed to be able to answer the frequent question from businesses, “should we have a blog?” My first study sought advice from experienced business bloggers (and others) and I was clearly cautioned by them: Blogs take time, commitment, planning and respect for the values of the blogosphere.

Eric Mattson (a podcaster I met through the first study) and I released a new study this month on the Inc.500 and their use of social media announced in a post by Frank Gilbane. Much has since been written about the major finding: The Inc. 500 is blogging at more than twice the rate of the Fortune 500. Given that the Inc. 500 are selected based of their rate of growth in one year, it says something about moving quickly and the use of social media.

What we thought was even more interesting is that the Inc. 500 were monitoring social media regardless of if they were using any. Eric and I have submitted a paper on this monitoring behavior to the Journal for New Communications Research and will make that link available as soon as it comes out. Basically, we found that some companies may not be directly engaging customers yet, but have figured out the value of listening and watching. When Business Week in June of 05 wrote about ” The Power of Us”. I think this is exactly what they were referring to…voices being heard. It looks like it is actually happening!

I am still very interested in which businesses or organizations choose to engage their constituents, which choose to listen, and which watch all this from the other side of a search engine. Blogs, podcasts, videoblogging, message boards and all the rest allow organizations to relate to consumers in a more meaningful way. It is definitely not business as usual, but it is definitely business as it should be.

Eric and I are planning a new study on higher education and its use of social media to explore another arena. We will make the findings of that study available here in the spring. I have never enjoyed research so much…..