The Workplace Blog

Nicholas Carr and Larry Lessig are arguing about the definition of web 2.0. I side with Larry on this debate. The values (primarily true sharing) of web 2.0 are of supreme importance, web 2.0 is not just about making money off someone’s free labour as Nick Carr implies. True sharing which enables users to move the content they create is a strong web 2.0 value.

The definition of web 2.0 is an evolving one. It is about values, remixing and new technologies that support the remixing by participants. You have to let go, to let your web 2.0 product grow. If you’re not willing to let go, ask yourself why exactly you’re building the web 2.0 product. Not everything has to be participatory and enhanced to allow remixing.

At the end of the day, as a manager, don’t spend too much time thinking about what web 2.0 is and what it isn’t. Don’t feel you have to create web 2.0 versions of all your websites, intranets or extranets. Instead think about the specific web 2.0 concepts that can help your business and implement those only. Start with a business case, understand your user needs and preferences, think through all the implications and build only what you truly require.

After all, there’s no use creating a web product that allows remixing if no one wants to share, is there?

Google bought Jotspot today to add to its Google Docs & Spreadsheets collection. The writing is on the wall. Google feels that it can compete with Microsoft by creating (or buying) free Web 2.0 oriented Office type programs and serving up advertisements on them. The question is whether something like Office Live is equivalent. Take Office Live for a test run to see what it’s like. Do you see easy to use, web-based, collaboration features?

Microsoft should be worried. While Office 11, Sharepoint and Office Live are strong products, they operate in a different space to Google Docs. A space which Microsoft should not be seceding to Google if it wants to be relevant in the web 2.0 world. It’s only a matter of time before Google moves up the value chain with an enterprise version of Google Docs that will directly compete with Microsoft Office. They did that with search, they can do that here as well.

If I were Steve Balmer or Ray Ozzie, I’d buy this company right away. The company’s products integrate with Sharepoint.

What’s your best example of a web 2.0 site? Wait a minute let me rephrase that as at least my answer is usually “it depends”. Instead tell me about the newest, cool, web 2.0 site that you’ve come across. The answer for me is one created by our London company, DNA. If you find this too self-promotional, you’re welcome to close your browser window right now.

The website Be The Fullstop is for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. It literally shows how the actions of individual fundraisers, donors, campaigners, volunteers link up across the country “to create an unstoppable force against child cruelty.” Using Google Mashups, you can find out who else supports the issue in your area and why. This site isn’t about raising money, it is about creating awareness in local communities. You’re encouraged to invite other friends to participate.

To get your name on the map all you have to do is show your support by agreeing to the following statement, “I believe child cruelty can be ended and I want to get on the map and take action now.” Brilliant in my admittedly slightly biased opinion.

We all believe that when employees leave a company they take some knowledge with them. Tacit knowledge that finds no physical form and cannot be held by the company. However a research article titled, “Learning from Those Who Left: The Reverse Transfer of Knowledge through Mobility Ties” by Lori Rosenkopf and Rafael Corredoira proves otherwise.

They analzyed employee turnover at semiconductor companies in the United States and discovered that when an employee left it often resulted in deep, mutually beneficial knowledge relationships being formed between the company and place that the employee had joined. This is because social networks that transcend companies allow the employees left behind to gain access to the knowledge generated at their colleague’s new company.

Read CIO magazine’s take on it and find out more about Lori Rosenkopf’s research.

I will be speaking on intranet maturity cycles at the CM Forum Conference (cmf2006) on November 8th in Aarhus, Denmark. If you are in the area consider attending it. Ted Nelson and Nicholas Carr are among the lead speakers. My talk description is also available.

I was fortunate to be able to do some taxonomy work for the Verizon intranet a few years ago. I also helped prototype their first “information workplace.” These were massive projects with several different consulting firms involved at different stages which means that no one firm and certainly no one individual could take much credit alone.

So I was pleasantly surprised to see that Toby Ward over at the Intranet blog was organizing an Intranet Insider World Tour: Verizon, Digital Workplace webinar. To learn more about the information workplaces read Forrester’s take on it. And to see how you can participate in the webinar visit Toby’s site. Please note, the webinar is not free.

We all know that the physical environment that you work in makes a difference to your productivity. Some companies take that notion extremely seriously. Check out these seriously cool workplaces and decide which you think is the best. By the way the one pictured above is from Red Bull’s London offices.

Jacob Nielson has written a rebuttal to Apple’s study that proclaims that larger monitor sizes contribute to greater producitivity in the workplace. In his response Jacob makes some important points regarding productivity measurement.

First among them is that instead of measuring operations (like time it takes to copy and paste between excel cells) one should measure tasks like how long does it take to complete a budget. He also discusses that even measuring the productivity of a specific task is not enough because often that task maybe conducted rarely and therefore may not be a good “task sample.” He encourages testers to look at all the tasks on your intranet at once.

Jacob Nielson is controversial and always has been. However, I feel this particular article is important in how cuts through research created to sell larger monitors and emphasizes that for research to be of value it has be centered in task accomplishment by real people. Well done!

Last year there were conversations about mobile phones replacing credit cards. As the Europeans do, several folks thought that soon we’d be using our mobile phones to pay for sodas from vending machines and groceries from supermarkets. In fact, some believed that mobile phones were one step away from becoming virtual banks.

Well last night I heard the CEO of Visa International speak. Firstly, he doesn’t see that happening anytime soon. The reason is simple. Stores of all types around the world would need to “reterminalize” which means that they’d need to invest in the hardware to read the cellphones. Financial laws and regulations would need to change too. The phones would need to become more secure. But he did say that the cell phones play an important role and can be used innovatively. He cited Russia as an example where you get a text on your phone each time you make a major purchase on your card. You’re asked to respond to the text if you want the transaction to go through. It’s an incredibly successful way of limiting fraud.

So what’s the point? You probably have a lot of technology around you in the workplace that’s being used for things that they are supposed to be used for. Nothing wrong in that at all. However, if you think reflectively you may find new uses for the technology that can help your organization. Uses that may not be common to all organizations but nevertheless potentially transformative in their own way. It all depends on your own imagination.

It’s interesting to watch large commercial software vendors, like SAP, harness the enormous inexpensive power of their power developers to help offset their customer support costs. Here is a great discussion on SAP opening up it’s developer network to the wiki concept and seeing great results. One of the key eye opening metrics is 94% of the folks answering questions in this group of 570,000 subscribers are NOT SAP employees. If this isn’t a strong argument for wikis in the enterprise I don’t know what is.