Open for Business

Its only been a few days and I'm still finding my feet at IPP Consulting, but I'm determined to hit the ground the running. That's right, I'm open for business and if you would like to learn more about how IPP might be able help your organisation with independent IT advice, please get in touch with either Brian Bailey or myself.

In fact, one of the conversations on my first day was about our elevator pitch to describe the kind of business technology consulting services we are providing along side IPP's established IT project, recruitment, relocations and infrastructure (e.g. data centres) consulting services. We're still fine tuning that elevator pitch, but a phrase we zeroed in on was "Technology Alignment". But, really, what does this mean in practice?

One focus area we have is what I call the "information workplace" - thinking of the physical environment of your workplace and all the different services, infrastructure and tools that exist to help people work, the information workplace consists of all the information systems that people need to work. This of course includes the new wave of social media tools (Wikis, Blogs, etc) and Web 2.0 service models, but also traditional technologies like enterprise content management (e.g. EMC Documentum), business intelligence (e.g. Cognos) and portals (e.g. Microsoft SharePoint). Today of course, unlike the physical workplace, the information workplace can also extend well beyond the firewall and we are seeing system convergence - e.g. unified communications.

Technology Alignment in this context is about providing an independent viewpoint to help ensure the right information, business process, communication and collaboration technologies are selected, designed, implemented, improved and sustained. And in the process of achieving technology alignment we look holistically at the business, people and technology issues. Simple right? But speaking to a vendor recently they admitted they didn't do change management very well but acknowledge it was a major risk to a successful outcome when they implemented their software.

So, maybe my elevator pitch is that IPP Consulting provides independent consulting to help make your information workplace successful. We are experienced business technology consultants who can help you to develop and manage your information workplace by addressing the alignment of business, people and technology. We can help you by simply providing another pair of eyes or we can manage a project from beginning to end.

What do you think?

As I've already hinted at, I think one of IPP Consulting's key points of difference is this independent view point. Vendor neutrality at IPP Consulting means the firm has no financial or other relationship with hardware or software vendors. However this doesn't mean we don't want to talk to vendors! A few years ago I started a series of industry update posts about different content and collaboration solutions and I would like to start that series again - so if you're a big or small vendor or have ambitions in the enterprise information workplace space, I'd like to hear from you... Remember, if I don't know about your product then I can't help clients to consider it as a possible solution.I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

IPP Consulting Technology Alignment Technology in the Workplace Information Workplace Consulting Services Vendor Neutral

Dreaming of a new inbox

One of the liberating aspects of changing jobs is the idea of starting a fresh with a new email inbox. However, following Luis' lead I've been thinking if I might be able to minimise use of my new work inbox from the very start. I'm quite serious about this, as looking the stats for my work email over the last three years I'm seeing some scary numbers:

• In 2006 I sent and received 10 emails per day on average, in 2007 it was 18 emails per day on average but in 2008 its now 30 per day on average.
• So far this year I've managed to accumulate 2GB of email data, which means I would be on track for a 4GB mailbox by the end of the year.

This is despite having other communication options available, like instant messaging, project rooms and even a wiki - email is still king at the moment. In fact, breaking down my 2008 stats a little further, 70% of the volume of my work mailbox consists of messages sent to me. That's about 20 incoming emails per day, compared with Luis who had "between 30 to 40 e-mails a day at the highest peak of times" but who is now receiving just a little more than that per week! (And you wonder why I'm so interested in Enterprise RSS.)

In that respect its quite interesting to compare my work email account with my personal Web-based email account - I can't easily grab the same stats but I know that a great deal of the traffic there these days is predominately notifications for the different social apps I use - e.g. Twitter, LinkedIn, FaceBook, etc - and a few newsletters. There is probably room for improvement on that email front (like shifting more to RSS), but to be honest its less of a problem in my mind and certainly requires less day to day management at this point. Bear in mind the ratio of received to sent is probably even higher in my personal mailbox than work, but most of the incoming data is simply notifications.

Of course, I know that the challenge isn't really just one for me and its not just about reducing the numbers. Either way, I'm going to try and use this opportunity to finally loosen email's grip on me at work. And I might even end up being more productive as a result of it :-)

Technorati tags: email, information overload, inbox, Luis Suarez, social software, RSS, Enterprise RSS

@Chieftech going 2 IPP. ttfn

Since the cat was let out of the bag on Twitter last night, I thought I would write a brief post to let people know that this coming Friday will be my last day at CSC - I'm moving into a technology consulting role at a specialist consulting firm, called IPP Consulting. I'll be working along side Brian Bailey based out of their Sydney office. Brian and I have previously worked together at Ernst & Young.

If this move to IPP Consulting doesn't make immediate sense when you read their profile - they have a strong emphasis on risk and security consulting, as well as technology - don't worry! I'm not about to disappear behind a firewall. If anything, expect to hear and see more from me in the future. For me this is about returning to the goals I had when I started my own consulting business in 2004, which is reflected in the tag line on this blog:

"Helping you to get on, not get by, with information technology"

This isn't to say I haven't been doing that at CSC (and I've really enjoyed the CSC experience), but I think I will be better positioned in my new role at IPP to do that. More on all that and what I'll be doing at IPP later...

Technorati tags: James Dellow, Twitter, CSC, IPP Consulting, Brian Bailey, Information Technology, Consulting

From EDP to CEO: Lessons from Ralph Norris, CEO at Commbank

Tonight I attended an UNSW Australian School of Business alumni event (I'm an MBT'er), Meet the CEO, with Ralph Norris from Commbank. I wouldn't normally blog about this kind of thing, but I was pleasantly surprised to hear about Ralph's background in information technology (Electronic data processing at Auckland Savings Bank in 1969, to be precise), which eventually saw him move into the role of CEO.

This profile on an unrelated ACS media release pretty well sums up some of the encouraging points he made about the role of IT tonight, particularly "Technology is an enabler". In addition, tonight he emphasised (to use my words) the importance of understanding the people context, having technologists with people skills and the importance of change management that answers the "what's in it for me question".

(All this certainly made up for the late start to the evening due to a firm alarm and the wet weather!)

Technorati tags: UNSW, Australian School of Business, Meet the CEO, MBT, Ralph Norris, Commbank, role of information technology, change management, enterprise computing

E-mail: A communication tool for one on one conversations of a sensitive, private or confidential nature

Unless you have been living in cave, you'll know that Luis has been giving up (or rather changing how he uses) corporate email. However, this is worth quoting from his most recent update:

"... I have never mentioned that e-mail is dead! I am just saying that it needs to be re-purposed and used for what it was meant to be in the first place: A communication tool for one on one conversations of a sensitive, private or confidential nature. The rest should be going out there, in the open, in the public space(s), transparent and with an opportunity for everyone to contribute! Notice that I am differentiating quite clearly between communication and collaboration, because they are not the same, no matter what people say about it!"

With the weight of evidence on Luis' side, is it time for us to update the definition of email? And perhaps at the same time we can dump all those email "dieting" tips, techniques and training courses? BTW I've made my thoughts about dealing with e-mail in an article, called For better, or worse: Living with e-mail in the workplace.

Technorati tags: Luis Suarez, E-mail, definitions, information overload, collaboration

The folly of waiting for the office of the future to boil

A number of factors are driving interest in virtual meetings and teaming at the moment - from the price of fuel to the carbon footprint of business travel. However, an alternative view point is the office of the future is driving us towards a more mobile and transient workforce anyway, so why not talk about the benefits that technology can provide regardless of the immediate trends - Capital One is a good well documented example and in this interview they explain the return on investment in terms of the efficient use of office space:

"My tour guide is Dan Mortensen, Capital One's senior vice president for corporate real estate.
MORTENSEN: One thing that you'll probably notice as you walk through is the place is occupied and busy. We actually have been able to take a space built for just over 600 work stations. And we actually have more than a thousand individuals assigned to this space. In fact, nearly 1,200 people are assigned to a space that's built for just over 600. One way to save on office space is to encourage employees to work at home, or in the field. When they do come in, mobile associates don't have a dedicated office. They take whatever space is available, or has been temporarily assigned to the associate's project team."

Its important to note the interplay between information technology and the design of Capital One's office spaces in this success story, as this article explains:

"Inaugurated in November 2006, the company's VoIP deployment -- known as My Phone, My Way -- provides employees a single phone number they can carry with them, thereby enhancing their mobility, says Robert Turner, senior vice president of enterprise technology operations at Capital One, and the project's lead. 'Our Future of Work implementation provides people with mobility options. They can work in any building and log in to their phone,' Turner says, adding that employees are equipped with a Cisco VoIP phone, a BlackBerry device, and a notebook PC."

However, I think many companies are going to get a shock if they think they can just "switch on" this kind of office of the future - not just the physical workspace elements, but also the supporting information technology infrastructure and more importantly the workplace culture change and skills needed for people to adopt. As this article in the Guardian comments:

"Remote working hasn't happened as speedily as a lot of pundits predicted it would years ago, probably because it involves an act of trust and a culture transplant that most companies can't easily cope with. Employees like the idea of working from home, but they are still reluctant to give up the status of a desk in the office that is a home away from home."

Technorati tags: Capital One, Workplace of the Future, Technology in the Workplace, Mobility, VoIP, Teleworking, Telecommuniting, Virtual Teams, Virtual Meetings, Change Management

The lack of enterprise short url services

Blogging about this problem in the open source Alfresco enterprise content management system, Dr Q writes:

"There is an interesting but annoying issue with Alfresco document links. It is way too long and it looks particularly terrible in email messages... One quick solutions is to use the services to provide by vendors like TinyURL*. But is that really necessary? The answer is no. How about writing a simple webscript and assign it a short URL with a short unique ID?"

This isn't just a problem with Alfresco - just about every Web-based enterprise system suffers from this problem. I just wonder why none of them come bundled with an enterprise short URL service as standard? I suspect part of the problem is a myopic assumption that users act as individuals and will browse the application to find the information or function they want. Of course, we really know that information is social.

*TinyURL is one of a number of web services that provides short aliases to redirect long URLs.

Technorati tags: Alfresco, URL redirection, TinyURL, short URL, usability, social life of information, web-based applications

Traffic unrules - can we apply these patterns to enterprise IT?

Bohmte, a town in Germany, has abolished road signs in an effort to reduce accidents. Sounds a bit like a wiki-style approach to sharing the road, don't you think? Quoting the Bohmte mayor, ABC news reports:

"In the city center, all conventional traffic signals have been taken out and the traffic is no longer regulated by traffic signs - people do the regulating themselves. And that is the whole idea, namely that the road users, pedestrians and motorists alike, should take each other into account and return to their everyday good manners."

In the SMH, they report that the initiative has reduced the accidents and it also saves money by removing the cost of maintaining road signs and traffic signals. This approach to "negotiated behaviour" in the urban environment - termed Shared Spaces - was championed by Dutch road traffic engineer, Hans Monderman, who unfortunately passed away at the beginning of this year.

I generally shy away from calling everything "2.0", but there are obvious parallels between wikis and the Shared Spaces concept, but clearly they have evolved quite separately. There some food for thought for those of looking at Enterprise 2.0 in this much earlier article about Monderman in Wired:

"The common thread in the new approach to traffic engineering is a recognition that the way you build a road affects far more than the movement of vehicles. It determines how drivers behave on it, whether pedestrians feel safe to walk alongside it, what kinds of businesses and housing spring up along it."

I would say the same applies to IT and I wonder if we can interpret these Shared Spaces patterns in an enterprise context?

1. Remove signs: The architecture of the road - not signs and signals - dictates traffic flow.
2. Install art: The height of the fountain indicates how congested the intersection is.
3. Share the spotlight: Lights illuminate not only the roadbed, but also the pedestrian areas.
4. Do it in the road: Cafes extend to the edge of the street, further emphasizing the idea of shared space.
5. See eye to eye: Right-of-way is negotiated by human interaction, rather than commonly ignored signs.
6. Eliminate curbs: Instead of a raised curb, sidewalks are denoted by texture and color.

What do you think?

Technorati tags: Bohmte, Shared Spaces, Hans Monderman, Road Rules, Wikis, Enterprise 2.0, enterprise social software, enterprise social computing, IT

Don't be afraid of [insert technology here]

Kind of ironic laughing at this tonight, as I'm in the middle of writing an organisation change plan for a project. If you have ever delivered or been on the receiving end of one of those technology rollout briefings, you'll get the universality of this humour:

Hat tip to David W.

Technorati tags: Change Management, Technology in the Workplace, YouTube, David Weinberger, That Mitchell and Webb Look

The impact of changes to everyday technologies

After hearing about a record breaking 105 year old light bulb from Kim, this short piece about the demise of the incandescent light bulb by Alice Rawsthorne, which was republished in this weekend's SMH Good Weekend, caught my attention. All around the world, incandescent bulb are being phased out by new energy efficient lighting technologies, like compact fluorescent bulbs and LEDs.

Today we wouldn't think much about the impact of an everyday technology like electric lighting, but as Rawsthorne explains that the incandescent light bulb "wasn’t the only reason why pioneering Modernist architects like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe introduced a new style of lighter, brighter interiors in the early 20th century, but it was a big one. Until then, most rooms were painted in dark colors to disguise the stains of oil and gas lamps."

Rawsthorne has a problem with energy efficient lighting because it is "cold and flat". I couldn't agree more with her. I've also found that compact fluorescent bulbs can also play havoc with some equipment that uses infrared, like the portable keyboard for my Palm TX. I wonder how we will change our home living environments to respond to this change, afterall who wants to live in a space that feels like the workplace?

Another reminder that apparently simply technology changes can have widespread impacts.

Technorati tags: Kim Sbarcea, Alice Rawsthorne, SMH, SMH Good Weekend, Incandescent bulbs, compact fluorescent bulbs, LEDs

Deciding what content goes on intranet and what content goes on a Document Management System

Occasionally I get the urge to answer a question on LinkedIn...

Question: How do you decide what content goes on intranet and what content goes on a Document Management System. Is it an issue in your organization?

My Answer: Ideally we wouldn’t need to worry if content is part of the intranet, document management system or any other kind of information management system – storage, transformation and consumption of information would be separated so that ultimately information could be used where ever it is needed. However, the reality for most organisations today is that “enterprise content management” is still something they are moving towards, which is where deciding where to store what becomes a challenge. The information management maturity in your organisation will to a degree determine the balance between elegance (i.e. ECM) and practicality. If you are leaning towards practicality, then I would suggest you identify the most critical information for storage on in your DMS so you can take advantage of features like integration with desktop tools, advanced security, versioning, audit trails and workflow etc. However, as has been pointed out, you may find that you have a WCMS that actually has adequate DM functionality to suit your purposes. BTW If you are actually going to use your WCMS for Record Management purposes, then make sure it is actually compliant with record keeping regulations in your jurisdiction. Another tip, if you do find yourself using multiple systems to store information (e.g. DMS, intranet, Web-based project tools) your users will really appreciate clear guidance on what tool they should use to store what. In this situation, enterprise search is also a really helpful feature for end users to help them discover content from different sources.

Technorati tags: LinkedIn Answers, Linkedin, content management, intranet, DMS, Document Management Systems, Records Management, Information Management, Information Management Maturity

Breaking down barriers with Enterprise RSS

Yes, I'm always thinking about Enterprise RSS... Dennis Howlett talks to Patrick Slesinger, director and CIO at Wallem Services Limited, about how they are using Enterprise RSS to break down information sharing silos:

"In shipping, it takes master engineers around eight years to reach the pinnacle of their profession. They tend to be contemptuous of ship captains, taking the view that captains are merely the people who stare out the front of a ship that wouldn’t go anywhere without engineers. They rarely share information except on a ‘need to know’ basis. Wallem had information stored across multiple systems both packaged and in-house built applications. While systems could ‘talk’ to one another, there was no real way for anyone to obtain a complete operational picture. Wallem’s solution was to implement Attensa’s RSS solution to expose and organize data that is then dropped into a corporate blog."

UPDATE: There is more on the Wallem solution here, based on K2 (a BPM product), Attensa and SharePoint - Sandy Kemsley, reporting from the Enterprise 2.0 conference, explains the value of the feed server component:

"The advantage of using a feed server for this is that it provides complete device/platform independence for consuming the event feed, as well as providing multiple formats for consumption. An enterprise RSS feed server provides things such as integrating your LDAP database for defining users and groups, and allows for easy assignment of specific feeds to users and groups."

Also, while we're talking about Enterprise RSS, check out this post from Martin.

UPDATE 2: More from Scott over at Attensa about this case study, including slides.

Technorati tags: Dennis Howlett, Patrick Slesinger, Wallem Services Limited, Enterprise RSS, Attensa, K2, Microsoft SharePoint, Sandy Kemsley, Martin Koser, Frogpond, Enterprise 2.0 conference

A small step for Ruth, a giant step for Enterprise

If you've been following OpenSim and thinking (like me) of the potential for private enterprise grids (i.e. intra- and extraverses) then this is an interesting proof of concept development (via eightbar):

"At about 11:00 AM, Linden, Ruth arrived on an OpenSim server, quite quietly. and to her surprise. We had been testing some code, and I’d asked Layla Linden to try to log on again, to see how the bug looked on the client side. But.. the latest fix, put on moments earlier, was, in fact, the last one we needed. I logged in as well, and several other folks from Linden lab joined us. Here we have Me, Layla Linden and Tess Linden.

What’s to unusual about logging into OpenSim? Nothing. But.. this wasn’t a normal login. All three Avatars had been logged on via the Agent Domain in the Linden Lab Aditi test grid. The Agent Domain took a “place_avatar” request from the client, and issued a “rez_avatar” request to the OpenSim, which handed the Agent Domain the necessary details so it could relay it to the client, and permit a login. We’re all Ruth, because we’re not yet syncing the agents with openSim inventory yet. That’s just a small matter of programming… (Well, that’s what we programmers always say.) We have no inventory, and we’re stuck on the single region. But.. It’s a very nice first step."

BTW The title of this blog post was taken from a comment, by Rez Tone.

Technorati tags: OpenSim, Second Life, Interoperability, Ruth

Do Enterprise 2.0 technologist have something to learn from the sociologists?

A great column in this weekend's Sydney Morning Herald by Ross Gittins, a political and economic journalist and author, reflecting on the difference of perspectives between economists and sociologists on how markets (and organisations) operate - essentially while economists see that "markets are composed of many firms competing vigorously with each other", sociologists see something quite different. Describing the work of Neil Fligstein, a professor of economic sociology at the University of California, in this space he explains:

"Fligstein's argument is that the actors in markets seek stability in those markets so that firms can survive and make profits without too much angst. He says no actor can know which behaviours will maximise profits - either in advance or in retrospect - so action is therefore directed towards the creation of stable worlds.

There are two potential sources of instability they have to guard against: the tendency of firms to undercut one another's prices and the problem of keeping the firm together as a political coalition."

When we wonder why Enterprise 2.0 and other Web 2.0 technologies (and even other disruptive technologies before that) aren't making as much traction inside organisations as we might like, is it because we assume these organisations want to do better when really all the managers want to do is survive, and all without too much angst?

Technorati tags: Sydney Morning Herald, Ross Gittins, Neil Fligstein, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Web 2.0

KM at the Pub in Perth tomorrow night (Thursday), featuring me and Nerida Hart

I'm in sunny Perth all this week (for a client project) but since this is only my second trip here and I don't know when I'll be back next, I wanted to grab the chance to connect up with the local knowledge management community. Thanks to both the new Perth Knowledge Management & Innovation Forum and Dopplr, we organised an informal chat session featuring myself and also Nerida Hart (from Land & Water Australia) who is in town at the same time. We'll be talking about everything from Enterprise 2.0 to knowledge transfer to what's happening in different industries. As part of this, I think Nerida will be talking about her Regional Knowledge Resource Kit wiki. If you're around the Perth area tomorrow night (Thursday), meet us all at the Brass Monkey pub at 6pm.

BTW Let me know if you would like to be connected with the Perth Knowledge Management & Innovation Forum, being facilitated by Simon Haigh at Minter Ellison.

Technorati tags: Perth, Knowledge Management, Nerida Hart, Simon Haigh, Brass Monkey pub, Dopplr

EMC's Documentum and eRoom gets a 2.0 make over with "Magellan"

For those of us that live and breath large enterprise computing AND have an interest in Enterprise Web 2.0, this is interesting - EMC's Documentum and eRoom are already widely deployed enterprise content and collaboration tools and their new proposed client platform, Magellan, could provide an alternative to Microsoft SharePoint (for collaboration) and IBM's Connections/Quickr. From the end-user perspective, Magellan will provide Web 2.0 collaboration features, such as Wikis, blogs, RSS, and tagging:

"Magellan shows a much needed change in the thinking at Documentum. One size, no longer fits all. Previous iterations of Documentum web UI’s have always started with a full featured application and then grayed out to limit features a user would not use. But what was forgotten was all these gray menu options were really a lot of clutter making the product look complex. Magellan finally changes this and creates a UI for casual users. That’s right power users have Webtop and casual users will have their own.

The user interface is clean with simple document lists to show content within a directory with only a handful of attributes presented (but these can be customized). Gone are the list of menu options that make the Webtop UI look like the old Workspace Windows client. But the system also presents Web 2.0 functionality in that a second window shows discussions on the project or individual document.

Better still the UI is not only clean but sexy. Learning from the best in UI, Magellan adds interfaces introduced by Apple for iTunes and iPod. In addition to standard thumbnail directory views, Magellan offers a browse option similar to Cover Flow. While search adds a filtering option similar to that in iTunes for finding a song based on a genre and artist."

I must admit, I never thought I would hear EMC's interfaces being described as "sexy" or inspired by Apple ;-)

Also see this post and a couple of YouTube videos from EMC World 2008.

Technorati tags: EMC, EMC World 2008, Documentum, eRoom, Magellan, Microsoft Sharepoint, IBM Connections, IBM Quickr, Web 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Apple

Simon Revell at Pfizer gets Enterprise RSS

Great to see someone else getting Enterprise RSS - in an interview in ComputerWorld, Simon Revell, Pfizer's manager of enterprise 2.0 technology, talks about the value of RSS:

"Pfizer is about to go live with an enterprise RSS suite for its R & D employees, he added.

'RSS has huge potential,' he noted. 'Even if you ignore doing any of the other things in this space in the enterprise ...RSS has a role to play. We have a whole bunch of content inside of Pfizer that we want to expose. We have a lot of internal Web sites, Internet sites and apps. And anyone in any role has to touch quite a few of them in their work. The newest version of [Microsoft's] SharePoint is completely RSS enabled so ... every single piece of SharePoint can be exposed. Users can see when folks are reading content.'

In addition, unlike email where people can get bogged down by correspondence they don't really want or need to read, RSS allows people more control over what content they consume and how they consume it, he added.

'[The enterprise RSS suite] is a social solution very similar to BlogLines where you can see what other people are subscribing to and how they react to it," he added. 'That fuels the social aspect of it.'"

Pfizer already have an established wiki ("Pfizerpedia") and are also looking social networking.

Technorati tags: Simon Revell, Pfizer, Enterprise RSS, RSS, Enterprise 2.0, SharePoint, Wiki, Social Networking

Pirates of the Enterprise 2.0

I've just finished reading Empire of Blue Water by Stephan Talty, which is a book about 17th-century pirates in the Caribbean and their impact on the history of the New World and Europe. Central to this story was Henry Morgan, a pirate in the service of the English crown, who with his volunteer army was able to consistently out manoeuvre the Spanish who were constrained by their rigid centralised culture and government.

I've also just been reading an article from the May edition of Harvard Business Review about leadership in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), titled Leadership's Online Labs. There are some interesting parallels between the two, particularly the descriptions of the democratic and transitory leaderships styles and structures within both the games and pirate culture that provide mechanisms for motivating people.

At a stretch we might even compare these parallels with the bigger story of Enterprise 2.0. However, we might not want to take this story too far - in the end, Morgan was a loyalist and eventually became part of the establishment and hunted later hunted down his peers who wouldn't renounce their pirate ways.

His lifestyle of hard drinking also contributed to his early death - perhaps too much social media will be bad for us too?

(Thinking about Enterprise 2.0 and pirates I'm also reminded of Monty Python's short film The Crimson Permanent Assurance, but I digress...)

Technorati tags: Empire of Blue Water, Stephen Talty, Pirates, Henry Morgan, MMORPGs, Harvard Business Review, HBR, Enteprise 2.0, Monty Python

More conversations about Enterprise RSS

Following the Enterprise RSS Day of Action, the conversation about Enterprise RSS continued to ripple across the blogosphere:

• Yuriy Krylov provided a detailed overview of RSS and the value of Enterprise RSS to organisations - he concludes, "Centralized, enterprise-class RSS infrastructure is an enabler of more than news consumption. Social, asynchronous feedback loops are critical aspects of collaboration and are made possible by investing in RSS as infrastructure."
• James MacLennan described the impact of RSS-ifying internal project system and Dennis McDonald discussed why "it is not a “slam dunk” that all IT staff will have an immediate affinity for benefiting from the efficient information flow and improved collaboration and innovation potential that RSS supports." (also see Oscar Berg's thoughts on Jim MacLennan's post).
• Jeff Nolan reflects on the future of RSS building on the areas where Newsgator is seeing success with RSS but notes "enterprise users are the last to benefit from these advances because they are dependent upon IT. It will happen but the use cases we have to build to will be specific and in some cases tedious in an effort to get a flywheel spinning that elevates RSS in the enterprise to a strategic focus."

However, what is starting to grab my attention right now are some separate but related conversations about the future of the office productivity suite, eliminating email and activity streaming. But more on all that in another post.

Technorati tags: RSS, Enterprise RSS, Enterprise RSS Day of Action, Yuriy Krylov, James MacLennan, Dennis McDonald, Oscar Berg, Jeff Nolan, Newsgator

Social Productivity: A strategic choice or Web 2.0 revolution?

A few weeks or so ago, Sam Lawrence via Twitter pointed me to a post he made at the end of last year about how office suite software (i.e. word processing, presentations, spreadsheets etc) hasn't changed in over 20 years but that:

"Traditional office software features are being absorbed into browsers and OSes. The next level of digital office work is shifting from a disjointed file exchange work model to one that's much more connected, contextual and collaborative. In the old model, users create documents in isolation and exchange them with other isolated users--all insulated from and out of sync with the bigger picture of relevant interpersonal activity. In the new collaboration model, connected people understand when, what and why to engage and they do it in a unified environment. They use file-sharing only as a supplement, when and if it's necessary. We refer to this collaboration model as Social Productivity, which frames our daily work activity in the "we" vs. "me" context and then delivers new functionality to help with these connections. This more accurately mimics our work-with-others activity vs. the produce-alone-and-distribute part of our daily equation. Now we can get context at a glance, work doesn't disappear once we hit "send," and we stay connected to the efforts most important to us."

It reminded me that many years ago I heard Dale Chatwin talk about the Australian Bureau of Statistics, a government organisations, as a Lotus Notes case study. A quick search actually turned up a case study (PDF) about this particularly story, which dates back to the 1990s. It makes interesting reading in light of Sam's ideas, since this organisation did exactly what he describes as "Social Productivity" - they developed databases:

"that permit all members of a group to work inside the same database simultaneously, so that a document that is being collaboratively created does not need to be emailed around to the members of the group with each person having a separate stored copy but is kept in a central location... The central repository and shared workspace of the workgroup databases is not only a freeing tool for collaborative co-creation of knowledge it is also a vehicle for transparency and knowledge sharing, as other persons not in the workgroup can still access the workgroup's database and see the information there and the work in its current state of progress... Almost all of the information and knowledge in the ABS is held on and processed through Lotus Notes® Workgroup Databases, and almost all persons have access to almost all databases, making the entire organisation's information and knowledgebase transparent, freely accessible and available to all members at all times."

Even closer to Sam's vision, the organisation's "elimination of desktop word processors" means that for majority of users at the time the office suite was embedded as part of the Lotus Notes "browser" (i.e. the Lotus Notes client). This doesn't mean everyone was happy with the decision - reading the case study, it looks a combination of issues affected their experience:

• Functionality in the Lotus Notes text editor versus a stand alone word processor;
• Dealing with upgrades that changed the Lotus Notes interface;
• The need to collaborate and share information externally; and
• The lack of choice.

Incidentally users still had access to a separate spreadsheet application, however one user commented:

"Lotus 123 is terrible with anything to do with Excel"

A reminder that not all office suite software is the same.

Now its been a while since I last saw Dale and I'm not sure where this organisation is these days with Lotus Notes, but I recommend you read the case study and draw your own conclusions to decided if you think their strategy was a success or not. Certainly some were positive about the approach. But what is clear is that they were unique in adopting this strategy and I don't know of any other organisation that has attempted the same thing.

I wonder if they were attempting to do this now, what would be more important - the strategic decision to implement a social productivity approach or the quality of the user experience in our Web 2.0 environment. What do you think?

Technorati tags: Sam Lawrence, Jive Software, Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes, Australian Bureau of Statistics, ABS, Social Productivity, Dale Chatwin