The Workplace Blog

Information Week highlighted Motorola’s Enterprise 2.0 efforts a few weeks ago. To quote, it has 70,000 people using their “Intranet 2.0″ everyday. The company now has 4,400 blogs and 4,200 wiki pages. To quote from the article,

Still, Enterprise 2.0 technologies don’t exactly make for easy ROI calculations, which Redshaw readily admits. Instead, he chats up how exactly work has changed since Motorola has implemented Intranet 2.0. Inside the IT organization, product development times have shortened considerably. Instead of developing a different pitch for every client, salespeople can now reuse information that might be posted on a wiki. And in Motorola’s Dallas distribution center, employees clicking on mobile alerts that come to their smart phones are sent directly to a wiki to troubleshoot problems, rather than being left scratching their heads over some problem.

Redshaw is Motorola’s VP of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. If I was interviewing him, I would have liked to ask questions like these too - What exactly does product development times being shortened mean? Is this specific just to the IT department? At what levels in the company and in which functions are the enterprise 2.0 technologies being used. How often are they used and updated? Enterprise 2.0 is young and the sooner we have more specific information, the sooner will the space mature.

And yes, in case you haven’t noticed Microsoft bought Avenue A | Razorfish’s parent company, aQuantive for $6 billion a few days ago. Now, while I can’t comment on the acquisition being an employee myself, I certainly can post some links to other opinions that maybe of interest.

The New York Times captures the highlights of the acquisition. Adweek has a nice interview with Brian McAndrews, the CEO of aQuantive. Mary Jo Foley over at ZDNet highlights Microsoft’s view on the purchase by quoting Steve Berkowitz. And finally, check out Microsoft Watch’s perspective if you want another take.

Forrester Research recently recognized Avenue A | Razorfish as a leader in website design. We were among 15 companies selected by Forrester to participate in its annual, Forrester Wave(TM): Interactive Marketing Agencies - Web Design Capabilities report (PDF). Forrester cited us as a leader in both the transaction-led Web projects category, which evaluates Web usability, and in the image-led projects category, which evaluates how agencies can help organizations build their brand presence online through creativity and differentiation.

“Avenue A / Razorfish continues to offer a soup-to-nuts Web marketing solution that includes designing and building high-quality sites as well as driving users to sites with marketing programs,” wrote Forrester analyst Kerry Bodine. “This year the agency firmly established itself as a leader in the category, propelled by high scores on our usability tests, solid user modeling, and high client satisfaction. With a substantial market presence, strong technology practice, and a well-thought-out strategy for continued growth, Avenue A / Razorfish is a great choice for clients seeking quality design work that is backed by stability”

Don’t miss the latest Wired Magazine. Their cover story talks about companies that are sharing secrets with rivals, blogging about products in their pipeline and even admitting to their failures. They call it radical transparency and are discovering that it helps rather than hurts them.This is not new for many of us in the web space. We’ve been advising clients to do this for a while. Get closer to your clients share more with them, treat them like they’re your extended team and listen carefully to what they say. Nevertheless, its nice to see Wired Magazine extolling the virtues of this approach.

My favorite example of radical transparency is when Jet Blue decided to publish a YouTube video clip of their CEO apologizing about delayed flights in New York last year. They also created a “Bill of Customer Rights” and invited customer feedback. The net result - they’re still in business.

The New York Times reported on the limits of multitasking recently. In a nutshell, it causes you to make mistakes and hampers your productivity. For example, neuroscientists, psychologists and management professors recommend that you only check your email once an hour and listen to soothing background music while studying or working. Instant messaging, songs with lyrics and television shows all negatively affect productivity. The reason is that we have a core limitation. We can only concentrate on one thing at a time.

The article mentions a recent study about a group of Microsoft workers who took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks like writing reports or computer code after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or to browse the web. Has that ever happened to you? Probably. Try to observe your own behaviour patterns in the future.

These are important findings that we must consider as we design and use solutions in the workplace. The news isn’t new, but what’s certain is that we’re not paying attention and its affecting our productivity. Check out this post on technology making us unproductive as well.

In the March issue of KM World, Avenue A | Razorfish Enterprise Solutions Practice was named one of the top companies that matter in knowledge management for the second year in a row.

We appreciate the award, particularly as we develop new knowledge management solutions to help clients manage ever-expanding networks of collaboration and ever-growing stores of information and resources. Some of the top trends that we’re seeing with our clients include global collaboration platforms, leveraging semantic networks and meta-data structures for personalized in-context information, and digital dashboards.

What are your biggest knowledge management concerns?

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.

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.

On his blog, David Strom highlighted a conversation he had with Ray Velez about the Avenue A | Razorfish wiki. In his post, he discussed some of the lessons learned which included paying attention to authentication, security and search. Also read, Patrick Kitchen’s article on wikis in the enterprise written for Newsday. She quotes Ray Velez and Amy Vickers talking about our wiki.

Separately, Jeffrey Walker, President of Atlassian Software discussed the wiki on his blog. He argued that the custom work required to modify mediawiki demonstrated that the solution is not enterprise software. Jeffery also argued that by virtue of requiring an intern and two part time developers, the wiki (to quote him) “is not fulfilling the promise of Enterprise 2.0 software which should be: lightweight software suitable for enterprises for dramatically less money.”

What do you think? I disagree. Our wiki did not take a full year to build and the part-time developers were bench resources. In other words, it did not cost us $100,000 as Jeffrey implied. Furthermore, enterprise 2.0 as coined by Andrew McFee is not about cost but about what the software does for its users and how they shape the software themselves.

Commercial enterprise 2.0 software like Socialtext, Brainkeeper and Atlassian Confluence are great options for some business scenarios and we often recommend them to our own clients. But in other cases, simply modifying open source sofware can get an organization what it needs. Furthermore, by modifying mediawiki we were able to get exactly what we needed. Most importantly, by virtue of how it is being used, we know that it is social software in an organization - and that’s the most important part of an enterprise 2.0 solution.