The Future of Enterprise Social Software

2008 will probably be the year in which corporate Intranets and their associated Knowledge Management environments will get social. Products like IBM Lotus Connections and Microsoft SharePoint have already incorporated social networking capabilities during 2007 with better or worst luck, but we will see how this feature will increasingly become the keystone of enterprise social software products. Networks and people contacts will take place of traditional address books, helping employees to meet more people, locate experts and work with them.

Additionally, there will definitely be more room for integration. We will see how Enterprise Web 2.0 social software will not only try to leverage corporate knowledge as far as possible, but also Internet knowledge residing in open services. As an example, in this year’s Lotusphere conference, IBM has just announced that version 2.0 of Lotus Connections will be integrated with Yahoo! Answers and Facebook. This strategy is possible thanks to the new architecture popularized by Web 2.0, this is, an Internet SOA where the data can be consumed and moved between different Web applications in a very comfortable way thanks to new data-exchange formats like RSS, new architectural models like REST and new browser-consumption capabilities with JavaScript. The fact of using Internet as a source of data in the enterprise context will not only give these new formats and models quite a big impulse for adoption and standardization, but also will help to replicate this new distributed approach behind the firewall.

This is slightly different to what we are accustomed to see in our organizations, where SOA is strongly tied to protocols like SOAP and standards like WS-*. Hence, we will see how these enterprise service-oriented architectures are reinvented with unexplored possibilities, such as original and augmented opportunities of creating and utilizing mash-up applications and widgets as part of our daily jobs. Furthermore, it will be nice to see how the dimensions of this integration scheme become wider, involving mobile devices which will use the Web as a source of knowledge throughout light-weight formats like RSS or ATOM over the HTTP protocol.

Finally, it is important to mention how the proliferation of Blogs, Wikis and Folksonomies within organizations and the inherent hyperlinked structure they introduce will boost enterprise search engines. Regardless of the search algorithm being used, users need to be provided with the ability to jump from one page to another without need to refine the search conditions. This is something that is empowered with the often self-referencing community of bloggers.

Note: This text I have written is an intellecutal property of my company (Grant Paper). Be careful if you want to reference it.

3 big reasons why open Social Networking services shouldn’t be Intranet tools

It’s been a long while since I wrote my last post, but it was just that I have not been very inspired…. However, while I have made very good progress on my investigation work for my company, I’ve got a few pieces of thoughts I would like to share. This time is about Social Networking Services like Facebook, MySpace (or even LinkedIn) and their suitability as corporate Intranet tools. We all know that many firms are begining to embrace these services as part of their corporate Intranets, probably motivated by the null costs on implementation and deployment, but forgetting about the security issues this approach could bring on. Below is a list of 3 big reasons why these open social networking services must not be used as Intranet tools:

• Security. The use of these services as corporate intranets must be restricted by two factors: corporate information security and individual privacy. Although these services provide users with strong security features, they have not been designed for business purposes and companies do not want their delicate organizational information to be openly published without having the ultimate control of who can access that information, since that corporate data is not hosted behind the firewall. In any case, many supporters claim that all what other users can learn about you is the name of your company and not much more, as long as you don’t store private documents in that service.
• Not enterprise ready. These free services have not been designed to be used as corporate tools and they are losing enterprise core features, needless to say integration with other organizational Intranet tools. Users can’t make the most of them in an enterprise context: most of the applications around Facebook are too frivolous (i.e. Vampires) and almost none of them are suitable for business purposes.
• Identity issues. Many employees already using open Social Networking services for personal purposes are not willing to share their personal identities (probably with too much personal information) with co-workers or customers. Consequently, these people are likely to create a professional orientated alter-user to be used for business goals only. This effect is just the opposite of what Web 2.0 is promoting, this is, a unique e-identity for each one of us, being globally recognized trough our connections and contributions.

Well, this is my position about this. I see more risks than benefits for companies if they want to use Facebook as their corporate Intranets, but sure you will have more thoughts about this topic.
Note: This text is an intellecutal property of my company. Be careful if you want to reference it.

Knowledge Management 2.0: ROI is dead. Long live SNA

In one of my previous posts I mentioned how difficult is to measure the benefits of Web 2.0 for Knowledge Management in terms of ROI. Also, this topic has brough on many voices out there in the blogosphere. As discussed, the knowledge of workers is something hardly measurable but very valuable, and the benefits should be measured by the business impacts, like business eficiency or the competitive advantage, and ROI is not the proper tool to do this.

However, if we want to measure the benefits of KM 2.0, we need to focus on the core value, this is, the network effects. For this purpose, we can use more appropriated tools like Social Network Analysis (SNA), which provides a collection of methods to measure the relationships and flows between any information/knowledge processing entity in a social network. Things like “Degrees”, “Betweenness”, “Closeness” can provide significant figures that might help to understand how positively or negatively a social network is working. Come on, read this gem taken from the IBM Research Center at Watson:

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a set of methods and statistics that reveals the hidden connections that are important for sharing information, decision-making, and innovation. The outcome of an SNA helps us to see where collaboration is breaking down, where talent and expertise could be better leveraged, where decisions are getting bogged down or where opportunities for innovation are being lost. The data give us the picture we need to create a set of remedial actions for individuals and leaders to improve productivity, efficiency and innovation.

In this manner, SNA can provide managers with a clear picture of how employees are working together, and measure the benefits of Enterprise Web 2.0 for Knowledge Management in terms of social capital. As Jim Petrassi and Sharon Whitaker state in their paper “Strategic Innovation and the Impact on Collaboration Technologies”, many leading companies are using SNA tools and techniques to identify the “go-to” expert, find technical knowledge and expertise, identify obstacles to collaboration, develop knowledge transfer programs and develop targeted team building programs.

Recapping…if you are asked to show the ROI of KM 2.0, just reply that if they want real figures, they should do SNA.

Web 2.0 – SOA Convergence

There is an obvious convergence between Web 2.0 and SOA, more concretly between Mash-Up applications and Composite Applications. On one hand, the content of a Mash-Up application is composed by the aggregation of different sources of data, consumed from services offered by other Web applications over the HTTP protocol. On the other hand, a Composite Application in a SOA does not have to be Web-based, as the content is built up from business services connected to different sources of data like Databases, EJB or MQ using disparate communication protocols like JDBC, JNDI or JMS respectively.

Therefore, a Mash-Up application can be defined as a SOA Web Composite Application where the source data is gathered from Web services from other Web applications. This integration scenario is not new, but the innovation introduced by Web 2.0 is in terms of how these services are provided with new technologies like RSS and how they are consumed in the browser side with JavaScript.

Under this framework, the roles of RSS and Mash-up editors in the world of enterprise Knowledge Management are quite interesting. Talking in SOA terminology, a Mash-Up editor (like Yahoo! Pipes) can be defined as a Knowledge Integrator where disparate pieces of information/knowledge are aggregated and transformated into one centralized output that can be consumed by any other Web application. Additionally, all the RSS feeds can be seen as the Knowledge Bus where all the information/knowledge is flowing in both directions (producer/consumer can interchange roles) and where application should plug in to gather information.

Why Web 2.0 in the Enterprise?

I am really enjoying my current assignment. I am doing a research work entitled “Next Generation Knowledge Management with Web 2.0″ where I investigate the benefits of adopting Enterprise 2.0 as a KM enabler. During the past few weeks I have been focusing on strictly analyze why Web 2.0 should be embraced by enterprises, and the following came up.

We know that Web 2.0 can provide great profits to companies. However, enterprises don’t have to embrace these solutions just because they are cool, just because they are on top of Gartner’s hype cycle peak of inflated expectations, or driven by a widely spread adoption in the current Web panorama. Companies do not work the same way the Internet community does, and a model that is working out there could miserably fail in the enterprise context. Therefore, companies should do a deep “soul search” in order to strictly analyze how an Enterprise 2.0 strategy should be incorporated into their organizations and find out in which business area the benefits of Web 2.0 can be fully harnessed. Thus, the best approach of embracing an Enterprise2.0 strategy is in the field of Knowledge Management, where one of the major benefits is that knowledge is open and globally visible to a wider scale. But while executives are always expecting big immediate wins and high returns after an investment, the benefits of this new strategy for Knowledge Management are usually continuous, linear build-up and almost never sudden and pronounced. This is driven by the fact that the ultimate objective of this strategy is improving the knowledge of employees, something that is hardly measurable but very valuable. Then, the effects of KM 2.0 should be measured by the direct impacts on the business outcomes (like business eficency or competitive advantage) and not by the ROI, which is more suitable for tangible assets. Having said all that, Enterprise 2.0 for Knowledge Management is not a question of “how to save money” but a question of “how to stop losing money”.

I am not the only one who think that Enterprise 2.0 and KM 2.0 are separate concepts, the first one being a enabler of the second.

Note: The quoted text is an intellecutal property of my company. Be careful if you want to reference it.