The Workplace Blog

Google has been increasing its presence within the enterprise. Now it is important to keep in mind that Google has a miniscule enterprise presence compared to Microsoft. But this is probably what’s pushing Google to be more innovative.

Apps for your domain bundles existing Google applications that you can use in your organization. The free beta service gives you personalized email addresses, instant messaging, calendar and web page building features. When looked at in conjunction with the Google OneBox program, it becomes obvious who they’re targeting - intranet managers who are tired of having to manage their own infrastructure.

At this stage, it is hard to tell what new features Google will add. I wouldn’t be surprised if the enterprise version of Google Apps for Your Domain includes an employee telephone directory integrated with Google Maps, blogging functionality leveraging Google’s blogging product and analytics from Google’s analytics tool. In addition, they’ll probably offer advertising on these hosted intranets and dashboard features using Google OneBox.

And that’s not all, the intranet solution will most certainlyinclude their enterprise search product and maybe even Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Now why can’t they just call this an intranet solution?

Now here’s an application that you maybe a little hesitant to integrate into your own intranet. Cogmap is the Wikipedia of Organizational Charts. Any user can go in and edit the organizational chart on the intranet with this tool. You can zoom in, view related information and make corrections as and where you see fit or maybe make errors too.

So why does this application matter then? It’s a perfect tool for senior managers who are restructuing their companies They can brainstorm new organizational structures together, move things around, add suplimentary information to the charts and see how what their new organization may look like. In other words, this is the perfect example of a web 2.0 application that has a niche audience which can be integrated into an intranet. Ideally speaking, this tool should be bundled with other tools targeting senior managers.

Sometimes it is much better to have someone else talk about what you do. We visited Andrew McAfee, a Harvard Business School professor, last week to chat about Enterprise 2.0 and give him a tour of our intranet wiki. This wiki is our latest attempt to practice what we preach and builds on the Peers intranet tool which was developed in our west coast offices. In a nutshell, Andrew absolutely loved the wiki.

Visit Andrew’s blog for more screenshots and his commentary. The wiki was recognized at the Shared Insights Portals Conference as best in class in the collaboration category. Donna Jensen attended the conference to receive the award on Avenue A|Razorfish’s behalf. I also presented the wiki at the recently held cmf2006 CMS and Intranets conference in Denmark.

Several different people participated in the design and development of the wiki including Ray Velez, Donna Jensen, Karen McGrane, John Ryder, Greg Gross, Sherwin Green, Steve Gray, Mike Barrett, Eric Muller, Kevin Kearney, Amy Vickers and myself. The decision to “wikify” was made during a technology community leadership meeting late last year and we have been fortunate to have the active support of the Avenue A | Razorfish management team as well.

For those of you that missed the Web 2.0 conference held earlier this month, you can access the archives at IT Conversations. And if you’re still wondering what the definition of Web 2.0 is, O’Reilly has another definition which is summarized in a $800 article. Personally, I’m just fine sticking to his earlier definition which is available for free here.

Not long ago Jerry Bowles at Enterprise Web 2.0 wrote about blogging and Avenue A | Razorfish’s perspective on it. He also highlighted our Corporate Intranet Best Practices Report in his piece. You can find his comments at Enterprise Web 2.0.

We’re all encouraged to adopt web 2.0 philosophies and technologies. In fact, soon we’ll reach a point where a company that isn’t embracing web 2.0 will be considered behind the times. But amid this hype, people often forget the transaction costs involved in adopting something new.

According to economic theory, everytime a product or service changes hands in a free market, transaction costs are incurrred. The amount of these costs depends on the type of transaction and the amount of information that the buyer and the seller may have at that time. Information systems are often designed with the expressed purpose of reducing some of the transaction costs within an organization.

However, when you design a system to reduce the transaction costs it may infact create new uncertainities and through that new transaction costs. These new costs can be higher than the gains realized by introducing the new system. This may well be the case with certain web 2.0 influences.

For example, creating a participatory environment in which employees can collaborate and share information in an easy to use manner is healthy. But it may serve as a major distraction. The wrong types of information maybe shared or other more pressing business priorities may get ignored if your employees are spending too much time collaborating on tasks that aren’t necessarily that important.

Therefore, when adopting web 2.0 technologies in your organization, think hard about the current and future transaction costs involved. Think about the new uncertainities created and how your organization will need to manage them.

Susan Scrupski of ITSinsider fame was in our offices last week and blogged about us on her new ZDNet blog which covers the IT Services space. You can read about her conversation with Basel Salloum, David Deal, Amy Vickers and Bob Lord at ZDNet IT Services.

As a follow up to Ray’s post, the actual laptop in the one laptop per child program (olpc) is supposed to only cost $100 and funding is to be provided for by the governments that purchase the laptop. However, News.com is reporting in an article titled, “A $100 laptop prototype for $150” that the cost is actually much higher.

Why should we care about the OLPC program? As people working in IT, many of us believe that technology can have a positive impact on development. We want projects like the OLPC program to succeed and believe that the costs will come down quickly. We hope that governments will adopt the innovative technologies and use them to help bridge one of the many digital/educational divides.

But as Jonathan Zittrain said in a recent lecture on the program, more challenging will be to create free or near free context specific educational and business software that will make this technology meaningful. Simply exporting software that we use in our offices or homes in the west to villages in Africa will not work. What is needed is sociologists and technologists working together to understand what software makes sense. And ideally speaking, those people should be from Africa itself.

B2B magazine has a special on Web 2.0. The articles include Web 2.0: Join the Revolution , what exactly is Web 2.0, B-to-B Media buy concept, Watching Web 2.0’s rapid evolution and Sun enters virtual world to connect with developers.

I’m quoted in the what exactly is Web 2.0 article as emphasizing that Web 2.0 is about the values it espouses. I also discuss a few of the potential challenges with Web 2. applications. Telll me if you agree/disagree with views expressed in the article.

If Nichalos Negroponte and the OLPC group have their way, they could be shipping tens of millions of these very cool low cost laptops. Check out images and details about the devices here. It looks like a bunch of countries already have orders in. Definitely an innovative concept with the integrated strap, hand crank for power, instant on, instant off, linux based device there seems like a lot of potential. The innovations go beyond the hardware to include online/offline synchronizable ebooks, quick easy ways to build applications, and lots more. The olpc wiki has captured some of the discussion. Think time is very good indeed, especially when that time is connected with people’s passions.