The Workplace Blog

This is an interesting article talking about the impact that web 2.0 is having on our enterprise technology architectures. Web 2.0 means a lot of different things, but one of the key things it means is really helping the technology to work harder for the end user. The older models that expect contributors to learn difficult complex content management and intranet tools are gone. The key is for us to enable the ability for the end user’s to contribute, tag, create content and collaborate. Gone are the days of a rigid taxonomy where we expect everyone to think about things in the form of one agreed upon taxonomy.

As technology architects, this means we need to figure out a way to get out of the user’s way and let them structure the content, instead of telling the user that their content has to fit within how we built the relational database model. Look at the internals of a tool like Mediawiki. It’s one big database table. Of course that strikes fear in the hearts of every DBA, but that’s the flexibility our end users need. This quote from the article sums up the premise that a lot of web 2.0 technologies are based on, “the outcome doesn’t have to be chaos. It can be more like an ant colony.” .

According to an intranet survey of 101 companies by France based intranet strategist Jane McConnell, only 13% said that their senior management perceived the intranet as “business critical”. This number isn’t surprising and jives with research I had conducted last year.

Is this a problem? It depends on whether the intranet is supposed to be business critical in the first place. In some companies, the intranet isn’t designed to be and that doesn’t mean that the intranet is a failure. Different companies have different ways of conducting a business and there’s always limited time, resources and money.

SimpleSeating is a fairly straightforward web application that allows users to easily create seating charts. These are optimal for conferences, meetings, dinners and other corporate events.

SimpleSeating is an example of an easy to use web 2.0 application that on its own may not survive but can be the perfect addition to a corporate intranet. Sure, it won’t be used by everyone and is only useful for large seating arrangements but that doesn’t mean its not valuable.

I hope that different web 2.0 product vendors like SimpleSeating will come together and create “Intranet Software Bundles” that can be sold into corporations. That’s the only way they’ll get the attention they deserve.

CIO magazine this week talks about how people are using VOIP to execute a ‘vishing‘ attack. Leveraging voip, it’s easy for people to get a number, use it for a short amount of time and then drop it. Skype and Vonage, among others, provide a fast way to get a voip number. Looks like another item that your chief security officer will have to look after.

While scanning my blog feeds, I came across an interesting factoid via the Tom Peters blog. The current expansion in the workforce, is the first period of economic growth that has failed to bring an increase in real wages for most workers. The value of worker benefits are also failing to keep pace with inflation. All this is happening while productivity has risen significantly (by 16.6 percent between 2000 and 2005).

In other words, most people are working a lot more and are earning less. Is technology contributing to this imbalance? I firmly believe the fact that we’re continously connected, chained to our blackberrys and email addicted, we are becoming too productive hurting our personal lives. Hopefully, the next wave of technology will make us more efficient than just productive. That way, we’ll at least have more time to spend with our families and friends. We’ll also probably be happier and richer people.

A couple of weeks ago I had an interesting conversation with Michelle Manafy of EContent Magazine. During that conversation she questioned whether Web 2.0 was anything more than hype about a few concepts that have been around for a while.

In some sense, I agree with her while at the same time, I believe things are different today because we are all taking those concepts a lot more seriously now. Michelle discusses this more in an editorial titled, “The Collective Wisdom at Work.”

Toby Ward is hosting an intranet webinar next week discussing what it takes to build and maintain a winning intranet. For him, the most important pieces are engagement, governance, planning, measurement and content. Learn about the seminar at Ragan Commu nications and if you do participate tell us what you think.

Steve Mulder and Ziv Yaar have published a book titled, “The User is Always Right” which is a practical guide to creating useful personas. More information can be found at the accompanying website, “Practical Personas.” Now Steve works for Molecular. Molecular is a competitor of Avenue A | Razorfish in the Boston area. In a Web 1.0 world I would not be writing this post. Why draw attention to his book on an Avenue A | Razorfish blog?

Because Steve’s a great person, and a very smart guy. He is also a former Razorfish employee. And most importantly, because I am certain his book (which I haven’t read as yet) is very good and will further the cause of persona centered design. The more people understand persona centered design, the easier it becomes for all of us to sell work and deliver compelling, user-centered web experience.

Now, all that’s missing is a book on persona centered design for enterprise solutions. Maybe that’s a book that I need to be writing!

CIO magazine had a great article on governance and the impact it can have on an organizations productivity. “we have ‘business projects’ in which IT is a major and often critical component.” is a great quote from the article. The point is that staying close to user and business needs is critical. We have learned this over the last 5 years and need to remember it moving forward. All too often it was easy to get caught up in massive implementations in which the project was an IT project and not a business project. In this new world of agile like approaches and smaller release iterations it should help us stay on track, ensuring that we are always delivering business value. Agile, refactoring and other techniques have helped teach IT and Business organizations stay more nimble and focused on the business. Growing lightweight manageable governance policies can help deliver more of the same.