The Workplace Blog

I just returned from the 3rd annual Avenue A | Razorfish Technology Summit in Austin. After sitting through presentations from Microsoft, Sun, Forrester Research, and Avenue A | Razorfish experts including Ray Velez, Amy Vickers, and Shiv Singh, there was one recurring theme that stood out: openness. Everyone seemed to be talking about openness: open standards, open source, open policies. But how open really are these companies? And how far are users willing to go?

While everyone at the conference agreed on the value of open source as a development concept, the most contentious issue centered on the openness of user data in a web 2.0 world. With the recent broohaha over tech cognoscente Robert Scoble’s ban (and subsequent reinstatement) from Facebook for “scraping” user data of his “social graph” (a word I learned means “all your connections on a social networking site”) via a rogue Plaxo script, the debate is quickly moving from the academic to the business domain. This will be a hot topic in the months to come.

The first related topic was Open ID. OpenID is an open, decentralized, free single sign-on system. Think of Microsoft Passport (I mean, Windows Live ID) but for a wide array of unaffiliated sites. Open ID eases that frustrating burden of having to remember a million user names and passwords for that increasingly complex ecosystem of sites you visit. With the proliferation of social media sites, there’s a lot of buzz about universal standards. Once you register with Open ID, you log on to all your favorite OpenID-supported sites/services with a single password linked to a provider of your choice (e.g., your existing Yahoo! log-in). Best of all, the user ID stays with you even if you switch providers.

The second related topic at the conference was data portability. Data portability is the idea of taking user data between different social networking sites. On day one of the AA|RF Technology Conference, Microsoft announced it was joining the Data Portability Workgroup, a consortium dedicated to defining inter-operability standards for data portability between sites. In doing so, Microsoft joins Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Google, Plaxo, & others. The open standards will “allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems,” reports TechCrunch.

Until days ago, Facebook stayed out of the circle. Why? Its business is based on owning your identity. Ever read its Terms of Service? Apparently, Facebook has the right to all your content for “any purpose, commercial, advertising or otherwise.” But, users shouldn’t have to read the fine print. And, they shouldn’t have to re-create their profiles and chart their complex social graphs next time the new hot social media site comes along. (You know how many hours it took to try to make myself look cool??!:-)

Microsoft agrees. Sr Technical Product Manager at Microsoft, Angus Logan, explained to AA|RF employees & clients that Microsoft will follow the “delegation” style of data portability. Translation: Windows Live tools will allow users to import their circle of friends and photos from other social media sites.

More details to come on this topic throughout 2008. Facebook’s recent reversals of its creepy Beacon ad product, Robert Scoble ban, and refusal to join the Data Portability consortium are steps in the right direction.

With the right security and privacy permissions in place, openID and data portability encapsulate two cornerstones of web 2.0: simplicity and user control.

As social media tools are increasingly adopted in the workplace, issues related to social identity will soon cross paths with the enterprise. Executives, be ready. Who do you think owns social data?

Our Enterprise Solutions summit ended with an interesting panel that included Andrew McAfee from Harvard, Michael Idinopulos from Socialtext and Forrester’s Rob Koplowitz discussing the future of the enterprise. Photograph courtesy Dion Hinchcliffe who also spoke at the summit.

The conversation quickly turned into the debate about how important enterprise 2.0 technologies are within the enterprise with Andrew being the strongest proponent while some members of the audience playing the skeptics.

Some of the key points covered included what are enterprise 2.0 technologies actually good for? Some wondered how much of a difference enterprise 2.0 technologies make while others emphasized that they are good for only certain business scenarios and aren’t meant to displace every other technology in place. That’s important to recognize, don’t expect Enterprise 2.0 technologies to solve all your problems. They do a few things really well within the collaboration and unstructured content domain but aren’t designed to solve a lot of other problems.

Another subject that came up was why aren’t enterprise 2.0 technologies making us collaborate a lot more. Adoption of these technologies and continuous use appears to be a major issue in most organizations. Here’s where the panelists encouraged the audience to start small, with small expectations and trust the community to do what’s best. They felt that the less rules that are in place, more the potential for growth. Some felt that the difficulty in getting the employees to collaborate is more an organizational behavior and sociological issue than just an Enterprise 2.0 one. You may have enterprise 2.0 technologies but that doesn’t mean you are an Enterprise 2.0 company.

A key worry highlighted during the panel was that Enterprise 2.0 technologies maybe misused. Audience members worried that an HR policy on a wiki maybe edited at whim or that important company information maybe vandalized. The panelists and other audience members highlighted the history features in wiki and also argued that vandalism and misuse can happen with email, in file servers, at the water coolers and everywhere else too. Its not an Enterprise 2.0 issue per se.

Andrew made an important point when he polled the audience asking them how often they engage in collaborative authoring versus primarily writing documents alone. Practically everyone answered with collaborative authoring. In fact, I strongly suspect that the one person who raised his hand for sole authoring, misunderstood the question! Andrew then asked why we use sole authorship tools like Microsoft Word versus the ones that have collaboration more deeply integrated into them. He had a point. Our tools have a lot of catching up to do. Old habits are hard to change.

For more on the summit, see Dion’s coverage (he also spoke at it), and David Deal’s at the Digital Design Blog where he talks about some of our Ford work.

The Red Sox weren’t the only players on fire last week in Boston. At the Seaport hotel, our consultants, clients, and industry thought leaders engaged in lively debate on the meaning and impact of enterprise 2.0. The subject of the summit - Reinventing the Enterprise - was taken up through a variety of case studies, keynote addresses, and a spirited panel discussion. Check back here soon for the video clips! (And thanks, Andy McAfee, for serving as agent provocateur.)

Some key points raised during the discussion included:

1. Employees should be trusted to do the right thing.
Andrew McAfee took up this point, echoing a position taken earlier in the day by Jimmy Wales. Jimmy’s supporting anecdote is an apt one - one doesn’t put cages around tables in restaurants to keep folks from stabbing each other with their knives; rather one depends on civility and learned behaviors. Although I agree with this in theory and practice, Rob Koplowitz provided a much needed subtle slant - one takes the knives away from children. He didn’t mean to equate employees to children but rather highlight different levels of understanding and ability with new tools. Michael Idinopulos leveled out the debate with the insightful comment about there being a necessary distinction between discussion and decision.

In other words, let discussion happen freely amongst employees but don’t mistake open discussion for a mandate of consensus decision making. Instead clearly communicate how discussion will be incorporated into a final decision making process.

2. Traditional tools like email and document authoring software have unwittingly become like blogs and wikis - just less easy to leverage as collaboration tools because of some old paradigms.
Adam Grohs, a technology director at AA|RF, made this point to the panel, and Dion Hinchcliffe, took it up in his recent ZDnet post. Apart from the technology and platform issue taken up by Dion, I believe that Adam (and subsequently Michael Idinopulos) pointed to a key employee issue - don’t worry about what your might do with new tools because it’s happening already with old ones. Both issues (i.e. vis-a-vis technology platform and employee behavior) form the basis of my upcoming white paper on the desktop re-imagined. I argue for “enabling content” regardless of presentation layer and promoting online / offline content synchronization.

3. People are people and technology needs to be simple, i.e. make work easier.

This important humanistic point was taken up several times by Olivier Pierini, our client from Ford Motor Company, and Bob Lord, President of AA|RF. From this perspective, at the end of the day, people need to communicate, in a humanistic fashion, regardless of all the technological hoopla.

To this last point, I’m curious - in the workplace context, do you think Enterprise 2.0 is facilitating productive discussion or is it more signal than noise? I know this topic is often debated, but I never get enough of it.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, spoke this morning at our Enterprise Solutions Summit. This was the second time I was hearing him speak and as usual, he did a phenomenal job. He covered Wikipedia, Wikia and the wiki potential within the enterprise. He mentioned the Wikipedia search project but was a little coy on that. Here are some of the topics he covered and how they can apply to the enterprise.

a. $100,000 was spent on Wikipedia last year. Too little? This year roughly 2 million dollars will be spent because there are some system upgrades being conducted as well. Otherwise, the number would have been around the same this year too. Here’s a question, how much are you spending on your intranet? What about your own wiki initiative? Did it cost you less than $100,000? That’s the challenge for your next intranet initiative. Can you make installing and running it cheaper than your traditional intranet?

b. You need to have a social contract with your employees. Wikipedia has an informal social contract with its users. Their contract begins with putting the users at the center of every major decision. They put the needs of the authoring community first. If you establish a wiki based intranet, you need to think about your social contract. What type of relationship will you have with your employees? How will you communicate that? How can you guarantee that you won’t break the contract?

c. Remember to respect your communities. Certain Wikipedia concepts apply just as much within the intranet domain too. These include needing to understand the motives of your users and aligning your goals with theirs. Encouraging the early adopters and influencers to take control of the solution. Let them have an active voice. Web interfaces can have commercial and non commercial spaces on them just like in real life. However, don’t confuse them. For example, it would be strange to be selling cars in a church. The same philosophy applies to your intranet. Some parts of it can be more business oriented than others.

d. Don’t design your restaurant based on what worries you. Jimmy Wales shared an interesting anecdote with us about restaurant design. He said that given a choice, when designing restaurants, we’d really get worried about people killing each other with knives and therefore we would design cages for each guest in the restaurants. However, improbable that may sound, the point he made is important. When designing internal solutions, we worry so much about all the bad things that may happen that we design for failure versus for success. Trust your communities first.

e. Use basic rules to determine what should be on your enterprise wiki. Sitting in the audience, Andrew McAfee asked how one decides what should be on Wikipedia and what shouldn’t. The root of his question was the Enterprise 2.0 debate that raged for a while on Wikipedia. The response - two key philosophies guide whether something is published on Wikipedia. Uniqueness and Verifiability. If the subject can’t be verified by another authoritative source, it cannot sit on Wikipedia. Secondly, the subject needs to be unique in some way. For example, a page about a random glass sitting on a table will be deleted. There is nothing unique about it.

Within your enterprise wiki, something to consider is what guidelines should you put in place for article creation? Under what circumstances should you remove something? Who should be allowed to remove items? The broader community or a small advisory group?

Our two day Enterprise Solutions Summit kicked off yesterday with a day of internal meetings. What was it like? Similar to most other Avenue A | Razorfish summits. Lots of strategy debate peppered with humor, brainstorming about new offerings, a look back at what we’ve accomplished, comments about our own enterprise wiki, goal setting, an opportunity to catch up with friends and of course good food and wine.

It was an incredibly enjoyable day for me as it showed how much the practice has grown in the three and a half years since I established it. Today, it is recognized within the company as a best practice model for how practices should be organized and run. Everyday we get more opportunities in this space, the clients that the practice supports are happy and more Avenue A | Razorfish employees are getting involved too. And now with Amy’s stewardship (she took over from me 10 months ago), the practice is set to scale new heights. While my primary focus is on broader company strategic initiatives, I’ll still be supporting the practice wherever I can.

Some of my friends here at Avenue A | Razorfish have just published the Digital Design Outlook Report. Entitled Fast Forward: Designing for Constant Change, the report examines online consumer behavior and how its subtle and not-so subtle shifts in recent years is impacting the way companies design user experiences and build their digital brands.It is definitely worth a read and yes, I would be saying this even if it wasn’t published by Avenue A | Razorfish. And there’s a blog too, to complement the actual report which requires registration before you can download it. Take a look and tell me if you agree.

Our dear wiki seems to be getting a lot of love these days. The Web Marketing Association just announced its WebAwards and we won in the Intranet Category for outstanding achievement in website development. View this presentation to learn more about the wiki. Here’s the award feedback (PDF). In total Avenue A | Razorfish won 19 awards for work done with clients.

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A few Avenue A | Razorfish UX people are hoping to present at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival and Conference in May next year. If you think they’ll be good, please vote for their panel. Voting closes at midnight tomorrow evening.

Mr. Cranky Customer: The Forgotten Persona (Panel), Charlene McBride
Usable Communities (Panel), Gordon Montgomery
Life after the iPhone (Panel), Kate Ryan
Cage Match! Taxonomy vs. Folksonomy (Panel), Rachel Lovinger
Semantic Web and the User Experience (Solo), Rachel Lovinger
Digital Outlook 2008 (Panel), Christopher McCurry

The Avenue A | Razorfish wiki has evolved considerably since its launch late last year. It does some things well, a few really well and a couple terribly. So we’re redesigning it. With that in mind, we’re going to start talking about the redesign process here on the blog. We think it might be fun and educational to share the decision making and get some feedback too.

Here’s a presentation that should tell you a lot about the current state of the wiki. It describes the wiki in detail and includes screenshots and usage numbers. Let us know what you think needs changing the most.

It’s been a thought provoking two days at the Office 2.0 Conference. Some sessions have been more interesting than others but overall the conference was a great success. Here are a few personal takeaways.Pictured to the left is a slide from Knowledge Worker 2.0 talk. Yes, that pesky employee who can’t really be held accountable for much but still provides value. Is that you?

1. Lots of Office 2.0 startups
There are more Office 2.0 companies than the market can accept. Some will survive, some will die and some will get bought. I wonder which will be still around at next year’s conference. For your reference, Office 2.0 startups are generally web 2.0 companies that provide a hosted solution to improve collaboration and productivity. They often leverage social media concepts. Think of them as the smaller equivalents of Google Apps & Salesforce.com.

2. Our professional and personal lives have really started to merge
There has been a lot of talk about consumer innovations coming into the enterprise. A related trend is how our professional and personal lives are merging. It is getting harder to separate the two. There are some who disagree but they are increasingly in the minority. This is best exemplified by the fact that on Facebook many of us have personal and professional connections. We’re entering an era of increased openness, which unfortunately compromises our privacy. If you’re a skeptic, pick up the latest issue of BusinessWeek and read the article on Facebook.

3. Online communities are hot once more
I used to be a member of the Well in the mid 1990s and watched the rise of Tripod and Geocities with fascination. Now communities are getting a lot of attention once more. And its not just the social networking sites but also closed professional communities for customers, business partners and employees. While this trend is gathering the most steam in the technology sector (no surprise there), companies in other industries are getting interested too. The question that no one is willing to answer is how large are these communities and how many repeat active users do they have.

4. Everybody is a knowledge worker now
This is another subject that has been discussed in the past and is a hot topic again. The point is that we’re all knowledge workers depending on information to make better decisions. We’re also communicators having to communicate a lot more than in the past. What does this mean for the enterprise? While having the right information is critical, separating the important information from the junk is getting more challenging. It’s a skill set we’re all trying to develop. Office 2.0 tools are supposed to help. Let me know if they actually do.

5. Culture and management matter more than ever
Ironically, while a lot of the speakers talked about social media and the emergence of bottom up knowledge management, they also emphasized the importance of management support. The truth is to do anything in an organization you need management support. You also need to have a culture that supports the collaboration. What is that culture and how can you change your own organization’s culture? Those are hard questions that I hope will be discussed next year too. For now, I believe the best solution is to be a part of management!

6. Office 2.0 apps do best in the small and medium business segments
There was not one but two elephants in the room at the Office 2.0 conference. The first was Facebook. It was noticeably absent from the Social Computing panel which had representatives from Plaxo, LinkedIn, Ning and Six Apart. But the second elephant was Microsoft. Many of these Office 2.0 applications replace a Microsoft application. They compete with Microsoft for attention. And frankly speaking, they lose because Microsoft is the incumbent software that everybody is familiar with. It is only in the small and medium segments where Microsoft is too expensive that they succeed.

7. We’re still not paying enough attention to the users
It is fairly obvious that most companies that sell in the enterprise space focus on selling to the CIOs and their IT departments. Less attention is paid to actual end users unfortunately. The reality is that it is the end users that will make a product succeed or fail. These users already have more applications than they want on their machines. Better make sure your application is compelling if you want them to adopt it. In fact, it should be 9X as compelling as what they’re already using.

8. We’re all busy reading each other’s blogs
This has resulted in all of us having more similar opinions than we may realize. Which means that conferences are becoming less about the exchange of ideas and more about networking and product demos. Not a bad thing, but nevertheless different to the conferences of the past. Along those lines, conferences have become sites for the promotion of products and consultancy services. Ideas we save for private strategy sessions only. There are exceptions but it feels like this more and more. Having said that, I really enjoyed Office 2.0 and plan to return next year.

Here are some interesting blog posts about the conference from bloggers who attended- Dan Farber, Jeremiah Owyang, Tris Hussey, Shel Israel, Maggie Fox, Susan Scrupski and Joshua Greenbaum.