The Workplace Blog

One can argue that something becomes a phenomenon when McKinsey decides to do a global survey about it. That seems to be the case with Web 2.0. According to the survey, the most popular investments are in web services, collective intelligence and peer-to-peer networking (see graph below). Wikis and blogs get far less attention.

I find these results rather interesting. Firstly, web services is not always categorized as web 2.0. In fact, it predates web 2.0 by a few years and represents something more technical and different. Secondly, wikis and blogs are impacting businesses immensly and I wonder why they did not get much attention in this survey. Maybe this is because the respondents were mostly on the IT side and so high up in their organizations that unless a technology cost a lot, it would not appear on their radar.

Also of interest is the number of people using web 2.0 technologies for collaboration within their organizations versus for communication with partners and customers. Managing collaboration internally wins. Now that’s an interesting statistic!

Web 2.0 technologies and values are bottom up and user driven. The savvy marketers, HR managers and IT gurus that are most in touch with their customers and employees will be the ones who will know best how to leverage the technologies. The others will probably tell you that web 2.0 is not important or will focus on more technical or positivist solutions.

The report is available for free though registration is required.

James Robertson has published a report titled the 6×2 methodology for intranets. The methodology which focuses on the project management aspects of an intranet encourages managers to break the intranet development into six month time periods and focus on tangible and visible improvements. It also forces managers to continuously prioritize and assess the results. The methodology is practical and pragmatic. It costs $189 and can be downloaded from Step Two.

The 2007 Global Intranets Survey is being prepared. If you would like to participate email Jane McConnell. If you have not yet had the opportunity to download - free of charge - the results of the 2006 Global Intranet Survey Study, do so now. The last report showed that senior executives aren’t too sure how business critical intranets are. It will be interesting to see whether this year they think any differently.

Information Week wrote on Enterprise 2.0 in a special feature of their publication recently. The article discusses how Enterprise 2.0 is facing challenges in organizations while still providing some key benefits. It also includes results of a survey conducted with IT managers in large organizations.A couple of points in the article struck me as especially provocative and I felt obliged to take a critical view of them. Here are my thoughts in no particular order.

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One of my favorite Information Systems thinkers is Dr. Claudio Ciborra who passed away in early 2005. He drew upon phenomenology to explain some of the challenges in information systems.

Probably one of his most important contributions was the notion of improvisation in information systems. He explained that while we attempt to control our corporate environments via technology so that we can effectively manage inputs and outputs, that might not always produce the best results. Claudio argued that improvisation is an important aspect of any information systems scenario meaning that as human beings some of our best results come when we are allowed to improvise in a given context. As a result, he felt that when designing or using information systems we must not ignore our “moods feelings, affectations and fundamental attunement with the situation.” Our solutions too must give us enough flexibility to improvise.

In other words, our own humanness shapes our thinking, our responses and actions. This may not have been revolutionary for the social sciences, but when first introduced in the context of information systems it was revolutionary. So the next time you are designing or using a system, whether it is a website, an application or a wiki, recognize how your moods affect your interactions. And use those moods to imagine new designs as your users will always have different moods in which different solutions will meet their needs. In other words, let the improvisation happen.

For more on improvisations, read Labyrinths of Information.

Less than a month after Silicon Valley heavyweight Cisco Systems acquired content management start-up Five Across, they announced the upcoming acquisition of Tribe.net, an early yet largely unadopted social network.

Thus far reactions have been mixed but largely questioning the sense of the deal. Mark Andreessen, who last week reintroduced his social networking start-up Ning, tells the New York Times that “the idea that Cisco is going to be a force in social networking is about as plausible as Ning being a force in optical switches.” According to the Times article, he questions whether Cisco is underestimating the challenges in combining the various technologies.

Founder and Chief Blogger of GigaOm, Om Malik, is equally skeptical. He writes “News flash for Cisco: This social software thing – it is too marginal, doesn’t make money and can’t make you cool. Stick to what you know best - plumbing hardware –sell tons of it, make money, and learn to live with the fact that you are rich and old school.”

While I certainly understand both Andreessen’s and Malik’s positions, I feel obliged to state that I think Cisco is doing something a little different and a lot interesting here. Far from wanting to seed a more functional (ala Ning) social networking (ala LinkedIn) site for broader segments of individuals (especially adults), I think Cisco is seeking to create a “soup to nuts” network solution for the enterprise, including infrastructure, technology services, and both enterprise and consumer SaaS offerings. Review their materials on telepresence and tell us - is Cisco’s latest gambit tactically shortsighted or strategically visionary?

If you’re wondering what the next intranet employee directory should look like just hop over to Ning. They’re a consumer oriented social networking service that allows anyone to setup a social network within a matter of seconds. Highlighted by Techcrunch as a startup with lots of potential, their service has all the ingredients to make a successful department or team centric employee directory.

Sure, one will need to find a way to integrate a solution like this with the LDAP servers and all the databases running out of HR, but the concept for employees (and potentially business partners) is powerful. Intranets needs employee directories that in a sense are what you get when Linkedin meets MySpace. Ning has a few ideas that can take the employee directories in that direction.

But best of all is the fact that anyone create a social network and invite people to join, share information and collaboration. That’s what companies need - mechanisms for employees to form their own adhoc teams and intraprenurial environments that aren’t bound by corporate mandates or centralized intranet managers.

Not surprisingly, Google Enterprise has now partned with IBM to allow users to access Google gadgets via IBM’s WebSphere Portal software. These gadgets will be configurable to run on websphere portal within an organization. With gadgets running in this environment, IBM customers can take advantage of the portal’s application framework and security features while still using some of the more consumer friendly Google gadgets. It’s yet another example of the consumerization of the enterprise.

As anyone who has struggled to manually input a URL into a mobile phone will tell you, there are relatively few joys to the physical act of “texting.” Phones and keypads are getting smaller, leaving those of us with normal-size fingers feeling hopelessly large and clumsy. In the US, text input is one of the biggest barriers to mobile application adoption and one of the primary reasons mobile web-based content is not being consumed in vast quantities.

How then do we design something simple, intuitive and powerful enough to make mobile content meaningful and, most importantly, accessible?.

In 2006, the Avenue A | Razorfish IdeaLab, our internal research and development team, tackled that very problem and created Smartpox.com — an online community that allows members to encode URL links, phone numbers, email, and any type of text into 2D barcodes. The application speaks for itself. So take a look, register and start accessing urls via your mobile phone.