Doug Cornelius .com

I missed this article in the Wall Street Journal highlighting enterprise 2.0: Social Studies – WSJ.com ($$). Ironic that I missed the article because I was at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

The article tracked my thoughts about the e2.0 technologies. Wikis are the most useful for business because they allow collaboration and they capture the product of that collaboration. Blogs are a useful communication tool for executives and among a project team. RSS pulls it all together by pushing the changes to wikis and blogs to those interested in them.

The Motley Fool posted a story: Getting LinkedIn to the Next Hot IPO. I particularly liked the story’s characterization of the other big social network sites:

MySpace: “chatty teens”
Facebook: “giddy coeds”
LinkedIn: “LinkedIn caters to the white-collar crowd, hungry for leads, recommendations, and job opportunities. Let’s call it a networking social site instead of a social-networking site, because it’s really all about corporate networking at LinkedIn.”

Rueters has the full press release on the IPO. In that story, Dan Nye, the company’s chief executive, describes LinkedIn: “LinkedIn is a productivity tool. We expect people to come to LinkedIn and accomplish tasks, then move on. We have no intention of becoming a social site. We want to remain focused on productivity that is important for professionals.”

Here is my profile in LinkedIn. I found it easy to find, friends, colleagues and co-workers and add them as “connections.” Over the course of the last week since I set up my account, I have created 36 connections and have 16 outstanding invitations.

The Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog identified two free SharePoint addons that they recommend.

The one that interest me is Telerik’s RadEditor for MOSS. This tool gives you the ability to paste rich text formatted content from Microsoft Word into SharePoint’s wikis and blogs. Currently (as with many blog and wiki software) pasting content from Word creates a mess as the software tries to convert the rich text to html. That always bugs me. And I hate having to strip the formatting out using notepad, just to try to re-create it after I paste in the text.

Rees W. Morrison has an article on Law.com: Cherish the Routine Legal Services.

He makes four points about commodity legal services

1. Recognize that commodity legal work is crucial for a company’s success.
2. Build on the fact that all legal services move toward commodity.
3. Apply technology and knowledge management to commodity work.
4. Reconsider where the work is done.

I was disappointed that he did not mention the use of document assembly systems when applying technology to commodity legal work. I find the use of document assembly can remove a lot of the drudge work from the commodity work, allowing the attorneys to focus on the aspect of the matter that distinguishes it from the rest of the matters in the commodity assembly line. I have found the attorneys to be ecstatic that they do not have to fill in the borrower’s name over and over again over the set of a dozen loan documents.

LLRX.com (with its new look) posted an article by Ron Freidmann entitled: KM Best Practices. The article is a summary of a panel discussion he led.

He points out that for most attorneys, the “best practice” is to use the last instance. Attorneys are not known for taking the time to do a post-action review to send feedback to their team or their documents. That post-action review is the key to creating and maintaining best practices.

For my clients, I am very good about reviewing the final, negotiated documents to extract changes that should be made to the original form and updating the procedures memo. I have found this to be particularly successful for the automated forms. I guess if you are saving the attorneys several hours up front, they are willing to give some back at the end.

Michael Sampson sent me a copy of his white paper: SharePoint for Business. I met Michael at the Enterprise 2.0 conference last week. The paper focuses much more on the “soft” issues than the technical requirements.

His six step framework:

1. Develop a vision on the business reasons for deploying SharePoint within the organization.
2. Get the technical implementation of SharePoint right.
3. Lead people to develop competence in the various tools available in SharePoint.
4. Develop shared agreements on SharePoint practices.
5. Avoid the pitfalls of earlier collaboration.
6. Cultivate the practices of collaboration.

One of his tasks in step 3 is to create and publicize a SharePoint sandbox where users can explore the capabilities (and limitations) of SharePoint in an informal setting. I am a big fan of giving users the ability to explore features of the tool on their own.

As I was lying on the couch reading The Boston Sunday Globe I came across an article by Penelope Trunk in the jobs section: Blogging Offers a Lift to Your Career.

“Blogging allows you to create a high-quality network for yourself based, not on the old model of passing out business cards, but on a new model of passing out ideas.”

“Most of the time you spend blogging will be reading other peoples’ blogs and linking to them and writing commentary on your own blog about what others in the blogosphere are talking about. It’s a constant course in your specialty and keeps you on the cutting edge.”

I think these are two great reasons to blog in the blogosphere, as well as within the enterprise.

National Geographic Magazine this month has a story on how the study of swarm intelligence and how it is providing insight on managing complex systems: Swarm Behavior.
As I was reading, I thought of Professor McAfee’s statement about the wisdom of crowds at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference last week: crowds are not less intelligent than their least intelligent member, but instead are many times more intelligent than the most intelligent member.

The article starts off by pointing out that individual ants are not smart, but ant colonies are. It is management of the interaction and collaboration among the individual ants that makes the colony work. The article continues on with study of swarm intelligence and other examples in nature.

As the end of the article, the author moved onto the applications in human behavior. The author cites the obvious connection of swarm intelligence in the success of Google and Wikipedia.

I think knowledge management and enterprise 2.0 are both looking to harness the swarm intelligence of their organizations.

After drinking all the Kool-Aid this week at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, and trying to figure out the correlation between enterprise 2.0 and knowledge management, I thought I would look at some contrarian views:

Paula Thornton on the The FASTForward Blog posts that Knowledge Doesn’t Want to BE Managed. She seems to think we should abandon knowledge management in favor of 2.0 technologies.

Tom Davenport (who seems to be unscathed after his steel cage deathmatch with Andrew McAfee) thinks that E2.0 “technologies produce too much content for their own good.” [Read more.]

James Dellow thinks we are all completely wrong.

Which is statement is more true?:

1. Enterprise 2.0 a subset of knowledge management.

2. Knowledge management is a subset of enterprise 2.0.
3. Enterprise 2.0 is the same thing as knowledge management.
4. Knowledge management has nothing to do with enterprise 2.0.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article on Facebook and its new platform for allowing third party integration: Facebook Gets Help From Its Friends. (WSJ.com $$)

It is interesting to see the network effect in its user graph:The site itself get more popular as more people use it. As more people use it the more useful the site becomes. This looks like Reed’s Law in action.

Facebook still intrigues me with its set of features and robust ability to see what is happening in your network of “friends.” Ii Just found out my brother is a Romney supporter). I am still looking for needs it can address in the enterprise.

It is one of the most visited sites on the internet, so it is doing something right. Its initial user base was college students and they are now moving into the workplace and presumably carrying their use of Facebook with them. I posted previously how Allen & Overy tried banning the use of Facebook, but had to retreat from that position.

As its users mature, Facebook will mature. The opening of its platform could allow for some powerful interaction. Add me as a friend and explore.