The Workplace Blog

Avenue A | Razorfish just published “Your Interface is your Company” (PDF) describing the changes affecting Financial services companies and solutions to them. Let us know what you think. It is part of the Avenue A | Razorfish Point of View series.

Patrick Lambe has written a thoughtful post about taxonomies which I found via Column Two and Information Design. He firmly believes that taxonomies should be defined more by their purpose and use than by their structural form they take. Taxonomies defined by their purpose invariably are narrower, and have more limited uses. On the positive side, they get adopted more quickly and meet a specific user needs extremely well.

For example, a taxonomy designed to support the navigation system and search capability on an intranet may not necessarily meet the needs of a legal or records management department. But the users on the intranet will find it far more user centric than an industry taxonomy or one created by a legal department. So how do you address these sometimes competing issues? One way is to simply have multiple taxonomies, or alternatively create an enterprise wide faceted taxonomy.

Like several other large technology companies, Microsoft has started talking a lot about the user experience. Dan Lewin, who is a corporate vice president of .Net Business Development at Microsoft did his bit in an article titled, “The User Experience Matters” for AlwaysOn.

This article is worth reading not because it talks about user experience beyond the web interface but because it discusses how Microsoft fits into the Web 2.0 world. Dan covers smart clients, Vista, AJAX and the Microsoft Startup Zone. Visit MSDN’s User Interface Design & Development website to see how Microsoft approaches the user experience of its own products.

Shel Holtz has posted thoughtfully on why intranets are stagnant on his blog. I couldn’t agree more with some of his reasons. The two notable reasons that stand out are - IT departments have invested so much in developing the infrastructure of their current intranet, they’re less interested in changing it once more and the existing intranet hasn’t lived up to expectations in the first place; why invest time and effort in it now?

Adoption of web 2.0 innovations on enterprise intranets is definitely slow but it is only a matter of time before things really start to change. As employees become more familiar with web innovations like del.icio.us, digg, Linkedin, Flikr and Pageflakes , they’re going to demand them on their intranet too. Credit goes to Google who seem to really understand how internet usage can influence intranets and extranets.

Rim and Palm have announced that Blackberry Connect will run on the Palm OS. With the treo supporting Windows Mobile, Blackberry and PalmOS, it’s an interesting strategy. Just like the day last week when I watched a Mac PowerBook boot up with the Windows logo, the times are a changing. Interoperability is the word of the day.

There is a new Google Enterprise Search version available. One of the cool new features is OneBox. OneBox can help you access information from existing business systems. There’s an impressive list of enterprise software vendors who have already signed up like Cognos, Oracle, Cisco, Salesforce.com, SAS and many others. Thinking how to make that effectively show up within a search result will be a fun challenge.

On his blog today, Nicholas Carr draws attention to an MIT Sloan Review article titled, “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” by Andrew McAfee. The post and the article explain how cheaper Web 2.0 technologies are changing the face of knowledge management.

Web 2.0 technologies like RSS, blogging, wikis and folksonomies are most certainly changing knowledge management by capturing and fueling the water cooler conversations that happen in companies. Previous knowledge management systems simply focused on capturing the structured information and could not “manage” the strategic insights and wisdom that employees had.

This is a seismic change but only when it actually happens. Few companies have any real experience with these emerging technologies. For example, there really isn’t that much blogging happening within the enterprise. We’d like to believe that every employee in every company is busy blogging and commenting away but that just isn’t true. Blogging, wikis, and folksonomies are still emerging technologies that we’re all hoping will change knowledge managemnt.

These tools haven’t changed the corporate world because they’re not that simple to use and more importantly most employees aren’t used to exposing their thinking so much. We’re just not the communicators we’d like to think we are. The cultural change will take place but its going to be slow journey. In fact, vendors like Social Text and Traction Software recommend starting blogs and wikis with small focused teams who have already burning need to collaborate and then slowly introducing the tools into the rest of the enterprise after that.

On a side note, a few years ago we launched a successful collaboration tool called Peers which was recognized by Forrester Research. I also wrote an article last fall titled, “The New Knowledge Management Imperative” (PDF) that covered how the focus of knowledge management had moved from the producer to the knowledge consumer.

Thanks to Garrick Schmitt who pointed me to the Nicholas Carr post.

This deal brings together two of the most popular open source products available to the enterprise workplace today. As they highlight in the red hat press release, bringing together these companies provides a great open standards based toolkit to implement a services oriented archtiecture in any organization.

While surfing in the blogosphere, I came across the Pinko Marketing Manifesto which is something along the lines of the Cluetrain Manifesto. This web 2.0 world manifesto caught my eye with some provocative thoughts. One of which was - “The voices of the community, your employees and your competitors are more valuable than anything you could ever say. Listen.” This could never be more true. Companies need to really listen to their employees and competitors if they want to suceed.

There is no doubt that the companies with the best conversations are going to win. Whether these companies use tools like intranets, collaborative workspaces and instant messaging solutions to foster communication matters less, the point is to encourage the conversations and let the employees choose the tools and the formats.

We live in a world of ideas, as that’s the only sustainable competitive advantage a company can have. The people and the companies with the best ideas will be the ones that succeed. The best ideas are generated by random groups of people who are uninhibited in the organizations that they live and work in. It is as simple as that. So if you’re a CEO, each time you come across some employees chatting at the water cooler or IMing each other, don’t frown, smile instead.

Found via Stowe Boyd’s blog.

Wired has a great set of articles this month on gaming, the internet and its effects. Will Wright, the creator of the game “The Sims”, starts off the series of articles with some very insightful comments on the positive aspects of gaming and collaboration. One point he made hit home as he described how the internet has helped to “expand our people skills”. When I see people collaborate on content on our internal wiki without ever having a conversation with the original contributor of content that’s pretty amazing. Another assertion is that the internet and online gaming is a great way to train employees. As one article mentions, being an effective world of warlock guild master will start showing up on resumes. Check out the wired articles.