The Workplace Blog

I just returned from the 3rd annual Avenue A | Razorfish Technology Summit in Austin. After sitting through presentations from Microsoft, Sun, Forrester Research, and Avenue A | Razorfish experts including Ray Velez, Amy Vickers, and Shiv Singh, there was one recurring theme that stood out: openness. Everyone seemed to be talking about openness: open standards, open source, open policies. But how open really are these companies? And how far are users willing to go?

While everyone at the conference agreed on the value of open source as a development concept, the most contentious issue centered on the openness of user data in a web 2.0 world. With the recent broohaha over tech cognoscente Robert Scoble’s ban (and subsequent reinstatement) from Facebook for “scraping” user data of his “social graph” (a word I learned means “all your connections on a social networking site”) via a rogue Plaxo script, the debate is quickly moving from the academic to the business domain. This will be a hot topic in the months to come.

The first related topic was Open ID. OpenID is an open, decentralized, free single sign-on system. Think of Microsoft Passport (I mean, Windows Live ID) but for a wide array of unaffiliated sites. Open ID eases that frustrating burden of having to remember a million user names and passwords for that increasingly complex ecosystem of sites you visit. With the proliferation of social media sites, there’s a lot of buzz about universal standards. Once you register with Open ID, you log on to all your favorite OpenID-supported sites/services with a single password linked to a provider of your choice (e.g., your existing Yahoo! log-in). Best of all, the user ID stays with you even if you switch providers.

The second related topic at the conference was data portability. Data portability is the idea of taking user data between different social networking sites. On day one of the AA|RF Technology Conference, Microsoft announced it was joining the Data Portability Workgroup, a consortium dedicated to defining inter-operability standards for data portability between sites. In doing so, Microsoft joins Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Google, Plaxo, & others. The open standards will “allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems,” reports TechCrunch.

Until days ago, Facebook stayed out of the circle. Why? Its business is based on owning your identity. Ever read its Terms of Service? Apparently, Facebook has the right to all your content for “any purpose, commercial, advertising or otherwise.” But, users shouldn’t have to read the fine print. And, they shouldn’t have to re-create their profiles and chart their complex social graphs next time the new hot social media site comes along. (You know how many hours it took to try to make myself look cool??!:-)

Microsoft agrees. Sr Technical Product Manager at Microsoft, Angus Logan, explained to AA|RF employees & clients that Microsoft will follow the “delegation” style of data portability. Translation: Windows Live tools will allow users to import their circle of friends and photos from other social media sites.

More details to come on this topic throughout 2008. Facebook’s recent reversals of its creepy Beacon ad product, Robert Scoble ban, and refusal to join the Data Portability consortium are steps in the right direction.

With the right security and privacy permissions in place, openID and data portability encapsulate two cornerstones of web 2.0: simplicity and user control.

As social media tools are increasingly adopted in the workplace, issues related to social identity will soon cross paths with the enterprise. Executives, be ready. Who do you think owns social data?

Last week Susan Scrupski published some great comments about Microsoft’s efforts to orient MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) towards Enterprise 2.0. She talked about Atlassian and Newsgator and how they integrate more tightly with SharePoint now allowing SharePoint users to find people and content more easily. It is also now easier to bring content into SharePoint and to take it out to other platforms and devices more simply.

And for those among us who are less inclined to go with SharePoint or for that matter any large company’s collaboration software, Susan recommends ThoughtFarmer which started out as a SharePoint project.

Above is a screenshot from ThoughtFarmer depicting an employee’s page.

I too met Chris McGrath at the Office 2.0 Conference and was very impressed with what his company is doing. Keep an eye on them.

I came across an HR perspective on Facebook in the Enterprise (PDF) via Web Stratetgy just now. Written for HR professionals, the article discusses how HR managers should approach the use of Facebook in the enterprise. I found this sentence which addresses improper Facebook user rather amusing -

A responsible way to handle this is for employers to negotiate a reasonable conduct policy with employee representatives, and make it clear to them what is expected of them in their private lives, both offline and online.

I don’t think a responsible way to handle improper Facebook usage is to negotiate a conduct policy with employee representatives. Rather, employees should be trusted to use Facebook appropriately. In the cases where there are misuses, those issues should be resolved in a private manner between a manager and his/her direct report. Don’t control unless there’s an absolute need to control.

If you want to learn more about Social Networks, read Danah Boyd’s primer which I’ve commented on at Going Social Now.

Our Enterprise Solutions summit ended with an interesting panel that included Andrew McAfee from Harvard, Michael Idinopulos from Socialtext and Forrester’s Rob Koplowitz discussing the future of the enterprise. Photograph courtesy Dion Hinchcliffe who also spoke at the summit.

The conversation quickly turned into the debate about how important enterprise 2.0 technologies are within the enterprise with Andrew being the strongest proponent while some members of the audience playing the skeptics.

Some of the key points covered included what are enterprise 2.0 technologies actually good for? Some wondered how much of a difference enterprise 2.0 technologies make while others emphasized that they are good for only certain business scenarios and aren’t meant to displace every other technology in place. That’s important to recognize, don’t expect Enterprise 2.0 technologies to solve all your problems. They do a few things really well within the collaboration and unstructured content domain but aren’t designed to solve a lot of other problems.

Another subject that came up was why aren’t enterprise 2.0 technologies making us collaborate a lot more. Adoption of these technologies and continuous use appears to be a major issue in most organizations. Here’s where the panelists encouraged the audience to start small, with small expectations and trust the community to do what’s best. They felt that the less rules that are in place, more the potential for growth. Some felt that the difficulty in getting the employees to collaborate is more an organizational behavior and sociological issue than just an Enterprise 2.0 one. You may have enterprise 2.0 technologies but that doesn’t mean you are an Enterprise 2.0 company.

A key worry highlighted during the panel was that Enterprise 2.0 technologies maybe misused. Audience members worried that an HR policy on a wiki maybe edited at whim or that important company information maybe vandalized. The panelists and other audience members highlighted the history features in wiki and also argued that vandalism and misuse can happen with email, in file servers, at the water coolers and everywhere else too. Its not an Enterprise 2.0 issue per se.

Andrew made an important point when he polled the audience asking them how often they engage in collaborative authoring versus primarily writing documents alone. Practically everyone answered with collaborative authoring. In fact, I strongly suspect that the one person who raised his hand for sole authoring, misunderstood the question! Andrew then asked why we use sole authorship tools like Microsoft Word versus the ones that have collaboration more deeply integrated into them. He had a point. Our tools have a lot of catching up to do. Old habits are hard to change.

For more on the summit, see Dion’s coverage (he also spoke at it), and David Deal’s at the Digital Design Blog where he talks about some of our Ford work.

The Red Sox weren’t the only players on fire last week in Boston. At the Seaport hotel, our consultants, clients, and industry thought leaders engaged in lively debate on the meaning and impact of enterprise 2.0. The subject of the summit - Reinventing the Enterprise - was taken up through a variety of case studies, keynote addresses, and a spirited panel discussion. Check back here soon for the video clips! (And thanks, Andy McAfee, for serving as agent provocateur.)

Some key points raised during the discussion included:

1. Employees should be trusted to do the right thing.
Andrew McAfee took up this point, echoing a position taken earlier in the day by Jimmy Wales. Jimmy’s supporting anecdote is an apt one - one doesn’t put cages around tables in restaurants to keep folks from stabbing each other with their knives; rather one depends on civility and learned behaviors. Although I agree with this in theory and practice, Rob Koplowitz provided a much needed subtle slant - one takes the knives away from children. He didn’t mean to equate employees to children but rather highlight different levels of understanding and ability with new tools. Michael Idinopulos leveled out the debate with the insightful comment about there being a necessary distinction between discussion and decision.

In other words, let discussion happen freely amongst employees but don’t mistake open discussion for a mandate of consensus decision making. Instead clearly communicate how discussion will be incorporated into a final decision making process.

2. Traditional tools like email and document authoring software have unwittingly become like blogs and wikis - just less easy to leverage as collaboration tools because of some old paradigms.
Adam Grohs, a technology director at AA|RF, made this point to the panel, and Dion Hinchcliffe, took it up in his recent ZDnet post. Apart from the technology and platform issue taken up by Dion, I believe that Adam (and subsequently Michael Idinopulos) pointed to a key employee issue - don’t worry about what your might do with new tools because it’s happening already with old ones. Both issues (i.e. vis-a-vis technology platform and employee behavior) form the basis of my upcoming white paper on the desktop re-imagined. I argue for “enabling content” regardless of presentation layer and promoting online / offline content synchronization.

3. People are people and technology needs to be simple, i.e. make work easier.

This important humanistic point was taken up several times by Olivier Pierini, our client from Ford Motor Company, and Bob Lord, President of AA|RF. From this perspective, at the end of the day, people need to communicate, in a humanistic fashion, regardless of all the technological hoopla.

To this last point, I’m curious - in the workplace context, do you think Enterprise 2.0 is facilitating productive discussion or is it more signal than noise? I know this topic is often debated, but I never get enough of it.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, spoke this morning at our Enterprise Solutions Summit. This was the second time I was hearing him speak and as usual, he did a phenomenal job. He covered Wikipedia, Wikia and the wiki potential within the enterprise. He mentioned the Wikipedia search project but was a little coy on that. Here are some of the topics he covered and how they can apply to the enterprise.

a. $100,000 was spent on Wikipedia last year. Too little? This year roughly 2 million dollars will be spent because there are some system upgrades being conducted as well. Otherwise, the number would have been around the same this year too. Here’s a question, how much are you spending on your intranet? What about your own wiki initiative? Did it cost you less than $100,000? That’s the challenge for your next intranet initiative. Can you make installing and running it cheaper than your traditional intranet?

b. You need to have a social contract with your employees. Wikipedia has an informal social contract with its users. Their contract begins with putting the users at the center of every major decision. They put the needs of the authoring community first. If you establish a wiki based intranet, you need to think about your social contract. What type of relationship will you have with your employees? How will you communicate that? How can you guarantee that you won’t break the contract?

c. Remember to respect your communities. Certain Wikipedia concepts apply just as much within the intranet domain too. These include needing to understand the motives of your users and aligning your goals with theirs. Encouraging the early adopters and influencers to take control of the solution. Let them have an active voice. Web interfaces can have commercial and non commercial spaces on them just like in real life. However, don’t confuse them. For example, it would be strange to be selling cars in a church. The same philosophy applies to your intranet. Some parts of it can be more business oriented than others.

d. Don’t design your restaurant based on what worries you. Jimmy Wales shared an interesting anecdote with us about restaurant design. He said that given a choice, when designing restaurants, we’d really get worried about people killing each other with knives and therefore we would design cages for each guest in the restaurants. However, improbable that may sound, the point he made is important. When designing internal solutions, we worry so much about all the bad things that may happen that we design for failure versus for success. Trust your communities first.

e. Use basic rules to determine what should be on your enterprise wiki. Sitting in the audience, Andrew McAfee asked how one decides what should be on Wikipedia and what shouldn’t. The root of his question was the Enterprise 2.0 debate that raged for a while on Wikipedia. The response - two key philosophies guide whether something is published on Wikipedia. Uniqueness and Verifiability. If the subject can’t be verified by another authoritative source, it cannot sit on Wikipedia. Secondly, the subject needs to be unique in some way. For example, a page about a random glass sitting on a table will be deleted. There is nothing unique about it.

Within your enterprise wiki, something to consider is what guidelines should you put in place for article creation? Under what circumstances should you remove something? Who should be allowed to remove items? The broader community or a small advisory group?

Our two day Enterprise Solutions Summit kicked off yesterday with a day of internal meetings. What was it like? Similar to most other Avenue A | Razorfish summits. Lots of strategy debate peppered with humor, brainstorming about new offerings, a look back at what we’ve accomplished, comments about our own enterprise wiki, goal setting, an opportunity to catch up with friends and of course good food and wine.

It was an incredibly enjoyable day for me as it showed how much the practice has grown in the three and a half years since I established it. Today, it is recognized within the company as a best practice model for how practices should be organized and run. Everyday we get more opportunities in this space, the clients that the practice supports are happy and more Avenue A | Razorfish employees are getting involved too. And now with Amy’s stewardship (she took over from me 10 months ago), the practice is set to scale new heights. While my primary focus is on broader company strategic initiatives, I’ll still be supporting the practice wherever I can.

A few days ago we had a wiki lunch and learn in our New York offices. The goal of the meeting was to educate peers about wikis and then talk specifically about the Avenue A | Razorfish wiki. The meeting was extremely informative both for the audience and for the presenters who got useful feedback on the wiki. The wiki redesign was also previewed during the lunch (left).

The meeting certainly drove home the point that the wiki can be defined in any number of ways. The lack of inherent structure exposes it to requests for many different structures Whether it be requests for a global navigation system based on company departments or something more fluid, categorization was certainly a hot topic. This conversation also showed that a lot of users think of a wiki in terms of an intranet. They expect to see intranet metaphors and functionality on it. Your challenge will be to either accommodate their needs or educate them that this is something quite different that needs to stay different.

A few weeks ago, Kevin Kearney whose a peer here at Avenue A | Razorfish, gave a talk on Playfulness in Interaction Design (PDF) to the Usability Professionals’ Association NY chapter.

The very first question at the end of the presentation was about introducing playfulness on intranets. This was surprising as Kevin hadn’t mentioned intranets at all during his presentation. As Kevin finished answering (saying that playfulness could be brought to intranets) another audience member chimed in mentioning MOM 3000. It made me think that MOM 3000 deserved a brief introduction over here.

So what is MOM 3000? It was the original Razorfish intranet. A much loved one well before its time. Why? Because it had a strong personality that we all loved. It wasn’t the most feature rich intranet and it probably wasn’t the most stable one too. But it had something special about it. Whether it was the Soup Can (which was a place where anyone in the company could add links) or the DHTML driven schedule (this was in 1999), MOM 3000 had charm.

When you design your next intranet, think about how you can establish an emotional connection with your audience. Just because an intranet is a business tool, it doesn’t mean it needs to be devoid of emotion. And nor does it need to be deadly serious either. An element of playfulness can give you those page views that you have been yearning for all year. The playfulness shouldn’t be gimmicky and it needs to be in harmony with your corporate culture but it could draw in more users than any single feature on your intranet.

The person who mentioned MOM 3000 in the UPA meeting left the company a few years ago but still remembers the intranet. Now that’s called establishing an emotional connection.

This time its Forrester Research that has recognized the wiki with its Groundswell award for social media innovations within the enterprise. We’re thrilled at the recognition and hope it’ll encourage our employees to use the wiki even more than before.

Our wiki has gotten immense attention since it launched a little over a year ago. However, like any other wiki, it requires constant nurturing and caring. We’re not resting on our laurels. We’re now deciding whether to establish a wiki evangelist within the organization to promote usage among those employees who are less excited about it. Some simply do not have time to upload files but want them published, others get frightened by the edit page. And a few can’t understand why it is so search driven without any traditional and safe global and local navigations systems.

So we’re trying to figure out how to create more wiki champions, maintainers, gnomes, and zenmasters. We don’t want contributors for hire within the organization. We’ve posted a job description for a wiki evangelist on the wiki itself and are editing it every few days as we try to define the role. I’ll let you know how our search goes.