Ross Mayfield's Weblog

SuiteTwo Launched: Enterprise 2.0 in a Box

A small dream of mine came true today.  We've been preaching an ecosystem of tools for some time now.  We've helped customers stitch them together in interesting ways.  In fact, Andrew McAfee's original article on Enterprise 2.0 was borne from observing what was happening in one of our customers and projecting into the future.  Well, future happens fast.

Looking back, look what I blogged just before the first Web 2.0 conference:

I'm providing a workshop on Enterprise Social Software with Socialtext Customer Mike Pusateri from Disney.  You might recall his great presentation at the at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Confererence in February. Mike and his team are leading the way with how they are using lightweight web-native tools as a platform for productivity. Not just how they use Socialtext for project communication, but how they stitch it together Moveable Type and Newsgator for an ecosystem of tools with RSS.

That was then, this is now. This morning I provided a workship on Enterprise 2.0.

Today we announced SuiteTwo, The Enterprise 2.0 Suite powered by Intel.  Intel is distributing the Best of Breed wiki (Socialtext), blog (Six Apart), Feed Aggregation (Newsgator) and Feed Publishing (SimpleFeed), supported by Spikesource, through its channels including Dell, NEC, Ingram, Novell and Red Hat.

This fulfills Andrew McAfee's vision of Enterprise 2.0.  In a box.  Made simple for Small-to-Mid-sized Enterprises.  Extensible because we've all supported open APIs.  Enterprise 2.0 is freeform social software adapted for organizations.  SuiteTwo is the first offering to realize the SLATES paradigm:

SLATES = Search | Links | Authorship | Tags | Extensions | Signals

In the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review, McAfee went further to distinguish this Network IT (NIT) from Functional IT and Enterprise IT:

As the DrKW example illustrates, NIT’s principal capabilities include the following:

• Facilitating collaboration. Network technologies allow employees to work together but don’t define who should work with whom or what projects employees should work on. At DrKW, ad hoc teams have formed because employees read one another’s blogs. These teams have used the wiki to accomplish tasks, and they have disbanded without orders from senior executives.

• Allowing expressions of judgment. NITs are egalitarian technologies that let people express opinions. DrKW employees use blogs to voice their views about everything from open-source software to interest rate movements.

• Fostering emergence. “Emergence” is the appearance of high-level patterns or information because of low-level interactions. These patterns are useful because they allow managers to compare how work is done with how it’s supposed to be done. Emergence is also valuable for users. For instance, employees can easily search and navigate DrKW’s blogs and wiki for trends and data even though nobody is in charge of making them easy to use.

...Employees exploit older NITs such as e-mail and instant messaging on their own, but business leaders have a role to play in exploiting newer technologies like blogs and wikis. They can help sustain and increase the use of complements to make the technology continually more effective, primarily by guiding users. Darren Leonard, a managing director in the global equity derivatives business at Dresdner Kleinwort, recalls how he got his colleagues to use the company’s wiki: “First, if a wiki has no structure, it’s perceived not as an opportunity but as anarchy, and our people have no time for anarchy. I went back to my initial pages and rewrote them to be a lot more directive. For example, I made a page with the agenda for an upcoming meeting and asked people to add to it. Second, wikis have to be clearly better than other ways of collaborating. There have to be uses [for them] that demonstrate their power. One of these uses came prior to a special senior management meeting where we could bring questions from our groups and get them answered. I put up a page…asking my [team members] what questions they wanted me to ask on their behalf. People used the page to post questions, edit them, and discuss which ones were the most important and why. That really accelerated wiki use. Finally, old habits are hard to break. The tendency is for people to keep using e-mail because that’s what they know....I have to [tell them], ‘I’m not reading e-mails on this topic. Use the wiki’ or ‘Everyone’s assignments are on this page—use the same page to report on progress.’”

Lead users and enterprises already work this way today.  Only they do so without usable efficiency.  Integrated single sign-on, search and tag cloud are just the beginning.  One click subscription to a page, blog post, search query, report, weblog and wiki make feeds usable (unlike today's user experience, when they click on an orange icon and think their browser is broken).  Rapidly form groups, draft together on a wiki page, publish to a blog and track results. 

Beyond making such tasks efficient, the benefits to productivity, discovering emergent intelligence and high-engagement marketing are significant.  Very soon a user will wake up in the morning, log in to SuiteTwo, immediately recognize something emerging.  With the top blog posts telling her what the company is talking about, the top wiki pages showing her what people are working on, top posts from the outside that her company is subscribed to and the feedback from what they are publishing
-- something will emerge.  She recognizes the opportunity, pulls on the social fabric and easily forms a diverse group of experts.  They follow new feeds and generates others while working with a little productive friction.  They develop a plan and draft a new offering in the wiki.  They publish to a public blog and track where it goes. The feedback loops continue, she goes home for the day and the organization is bound to adapt again.

This isn't your Dad's enterprise, but one you will be working with soon.

Vote by Tag

The Estonian Parliment approved internet voting, which led Peeter Marvet to prototype this example of using tags to collect a richer form of public opinion for decision makers.  This may remind you of Vote Links, but it is really a simpler way to coordinate feedback with practices.

Del.icio.us Goes Pro

Very noteworthy that Joshua Schacter has quit his very good job to go full time with del.icio.us, the social bookmarking network that all of us are so fond of.  Much of tagging originated with Josh and he deserves praise for taking this calculated risk.

[via Gen]

Hot Tags

Neat index on Flickr...

In the last 24 hours
hail, tourists, rodeo, semanasanta, goodfriday, watercolor
buddies, fullmoon, lamb, luna, gravestone, diptych, stlouis, easter, uae, toddler, luke, religious, nikon, friday

Over the last week
dilomar05, holi, pcforum, sexyblogger, goodfriday, dilo
purim, semanasanta, transparent, desktopshowandtell, fallas, portable, diptych, antwerpen, easter, psp, xpro, crossprocessed, sidekick, westvirginia

Tagging in the Enterprise

One of the most popular sessions at PC Forum was the Roundtable on User-generated Metadata. Moderated by David Weinberger and Esther Dyson, it engaged the former audience in a conversation.  Good thing too, as many of the experts were in the room.  You can see from my raw notes that it covered the topic widely. 

But the gem was from two comments by JP Rangaswami, CIO of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.  Not just because he is one of my favorite customers, but its a rare insight into tagging in the enterprise:

Using Socialtext in my bank... Two dimensions that work: people tag things for themselves and whatever I am doing, can I do it in a way that makes collaboration easier. All it is doing is making things easier. The thing that got me on tagging was when I went to Ross and he said it was the simplest thing that could work. I will do things with tags to try to help people remember.  And I don't want to be committed into a structure.

Going to use tags to solve a problem in my organization. People label things differently in different cultures in the same organization. Today English might be the language, but there are perhaps 300 dialects and the labels are different. Tagging lets structure cross-reference, where patterns emerge. Important for me in a commercial context. To let people in different contexts collaborate, keeping it simple and gaining a high adoption rate. Not pushing or pulling, its a community, which is why I like social software.

I helped provide an intro to tagging alongside Caterina Fake from Flickr and Dave Sifry from Technorati -- making points on relative cost, potential scale and social incentives that drive adoption.  But after JP's comments, I knew to shut up and let the customer do the talking.

The other enterprise social software highlight from the show was John Seely Brown and John Hagel finally talking about their forthcoming book:

The notion of productive friction has major implications for IT across multi-tiered process networks. Hagel said the combination of service-oriented architecture (loosely coupled), virtualization and social software (a shared collaborative workspaces like Wikis) is key to developing a work culture that can support productive friction and facilitate conflict resolution, allowing the stakeholders to browse the context to figure out how to "unstuck" an exception (problem).

See Dan Farber's post and the session page on the wiki.

Socialtext Did Not Invent Tagging

Good article in the Guardian about Tagging.  Except this statement:

But, extending an idea developed by SocialText for its wikis, del.icio.us also encourages users to "tag" bookmarks...

This implies that Socialtext invented tagging, which is, uh, categorically false.

Socialtext Categories share similar properties to tags, and was implemented two years ago, but takes a different approach.  Its a flat namespace, anyone can add/delete/modify a category with a simple interface, very wiki-like.  We also added rel tags to Categories to support Technorati's tag search.  You can play with it here.

On the other hand, we did invent metadata ;-)

Emergent Intelligence

This post is an excerpt from a longer one on M2M about Technorati Tags, to highlight how thinking is overrated...

There are strong similarities to how wikis and tagging works.  Tagging lowers transaction costs for contributions and fixing mistakes.  This increases participation and the probability of the right data actually existing in the first place.  It also enables a dedicated community to self-govern (and note that as in the case of Wikipedia, the enthusiasm hasn't worn off)

A single tag can be applied in error, and be fixed locally, but that matters less when viewed in the aggregate.  Larger patterns arise that are statistically significant.

The other day I was listening to an interview with Malcom Gladwell about his book Blink, which posits that snap decisions are better than carefully considered judgements.  Especially when made by experts who have developed a muscle memory of the brain.  One of the callers pointed out (at 9:00/30:15) we are better than making snap decisions work better at discrimination (does it belong in the good category or the bad category) between things than characterization (determining the nature of things).  Fine, I thought, that's tagging.

Gladwell's theories seemed to run counter to those of another popular book these days, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, which holds that group decisions are better than those of individual experts.  But not only are these two views complimentary, Surowiecki and Gladwell are having an open conversation about it this week.

So just think about the emergent intelligence mechanism we are creating with a neural network overlaid on the net.  Considered blog posts gain authority through link attention.  Consensual wiki pages gain authority over time.  Links and snapshots bridge across places, physical and virtual. Tags are applied in the blink of an eye and patterns emerge from the crowd.