Doug Cornelius .com

Web Worker Daily put up this story on 20 Ways to Use LinkedIn Productively.

LinkedIn is another social site that I have been curious about. So, as I did with Facebook, I signed up and explored. [Here is my profile in LinkedIn.] I have not had the opportunity to add much information yet. It certainly is more grown up than Facebook. But Facebook seems to be much more rich in features. Although the vast majority of features have no value to the workers in an enterprise.

I even added the LinkedIn button on the blog this morning.

One of my goals for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference was to figure out if enterprise 2.0 is the same things as knowledge management. I want to think this over for a few days and let the effects of “drinking the kool-aid” at the conference wear off before coming up with an answer.

I certainly found a lot of common themes and common purposes. Both want to foster better collaboration, and in the process create more searchable and reusable content. As Jessica Lipnack pointed out in her session, it is mostly about the people, not about the technology. They are about getting people working together, interacting and finding each other.

Donald Tapscott moderated a panel of Ross Mayfield, Kim Polese and Joe Schueller on how successful companies have adopted enterprise 2.0 platforms to drive innovation and collaboration.

Where do you start?

Ross: You need to find out what you are already doing. You can look to transform culture with the tools because of the transparency.

Joe is cautious about experimentation, looking at the upsides and downsides. There is a cultural problem; there are way more consumers of information than producers of information.

Kim: Spike was started on a wiki, but the company is still dominated by email communications. You should start with an individual project rather than push out to the enterprise as a whole.

Joe went after email first. That was a failure. People were not willing to let go of their email.

Don made a story of a big automotive company that wanted the CEO and top executives to start a wiki. That was a terrible idea. It is much better to start from the bottom and move up.

What are the Challenges?

Don points out: freeriders, integration, and culture.

Ross: the legal team and marketing team can through the initial roadblocks. You need some early success stories. Find a champion to give some cover as the project is first started.

Joe: 2.0 is all viral. There is no deployment. There is nothing worse than an empty wiki. You need to fill in some information first.

Kim: Managers are worry about wiki proliferation and collaborating with control.

Joe: You need to orient the technology around the process. Make sure you are picking the right tool for the right job.

Audience: IT Dept’s are concerned about E2.0 tools. If IT is not behind it, then who is going to pay for it. How do you get HR to buy in?

Don: Leadership needs to make sure it happens.

Ross: IT needs to make the tools available and then get out of the way. People will quickly find the value in the tool and by being a contributor.

Kim: IT needs to be involved to make sure the systems talk to each other. IT should be a leader and not just an enforcer.

Joe: The software is more lightweight and easier to maintain. They started the roll out of the tools in IT, so IT became leaders and evangelists for the tools.

Joe Schueller, Innovation Manager, Procter & Gamble Global Business Services, on how they moved to a wiki workplace. They have embraced ideas and products discovered and developed outside the company. They have overcome the NIH syndrome (Not Invented Here).

They are focused on productivity, doing more with less. Mass collaboration allows them to be more nimble. It also allows they to attract innovative people.

Procter and Gamble has 160 years of success as a vertically integrated company. They are still figuring out how to integrate and change the culture at P&G to allow for more collaboration and discovery.

Kim Polese, CEO of Spike source, on E2.0 adoption. She thinks you can do more quicker and for less cost.

Concerns: cost of administration of point solutions, security, importing data and exporting data.

What is the best approach for implementing Web2.0 in the Enterprise? You need interoperability. She turned this into a salespitch for Spike so I tuned out.

Ross Mayfield of SocialText on software getting in the way. Complexity is in the social network. Vendors tried to put it in the software. Social software keeps complexity in the social network, so lets keep it there. Use simple tools with simple rules to deal with the complexity.

What to wiki?

Start with People. Use it to remove information from email. Make it easier to edit the intranet. Let people express their identities on their intranet.

Start with Projects. Document and share information on a project.

Start with Practices. Develop a FAQ and how-tos.

Start with Process. Have people write down the process and come to agreement on how things should be done. A lot of value by opening the place for answers open to the whole company.

Launched wikiwidgets today.

Here is a link to his slides.

Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics (and others), on how the participatory web is changing how goods and services are invented, produced, marketed and distributed.

He buys into the idea that there is a new enterprise, moving from a closed hierarchy system moving to an open networked enterprise. He noted this his 1992 book: Paradigm Shift.

He identified four drivers of the change:

1. Web2.0 – The new web is based on xml, which allows computation. You can access the web through devices other than a PC.
2. The Net Generation – We have the first generation to grow up in the internet age. They do not have a fear of technology; they grew up on it. They don’t really use email; they view at as a formal type of communication.
3. Social Revolution – flickr vs. webshots. Flickr has taken off. Myspace is killing MTV.com. Wikipedia is killing Brittanica.com. Blogger beats CNN.com.
4. Economic Revolution – There is the rise of the digital conglomerates: ebay, yahoo, google, ebay, microsoft and amazon. Google is telecom provider (they are wiring SF), they are an ad agency, they are retailer, they are a hardware manufacturer.

He saw it an extended enterprise. Transaction costs and collaboration costs are being reduced so it makes more sense to break up the vertical integration. This leads to four new principles of the new business model: Peering – rather than cogs in the supply chain, Being Open – transparency of the enterprise, Sharing – intellectual property and Acting Global – why be multinational when you can be global. “If you are going to be naked you need to be buff.”

Goldcorp as an example of the new business model. His geologists could not tell him where the gold was. He took his geological data and published it on the internet for a contest. There was a $500,000 if anyone can tell him if he had any gold and if so where it was. The winner was a computer graphics company that gave him a 3D model of his mine.

What are the New Models:

1. Peer Pioneers
2. Ideoagoras – open markets for thoughts and ideas
3. Prosumers – turn your customers into producers
4. New Alexandrians – the sharing of science
5. Open Platforms – example the amazon API for retailers
6. Global Plant Floor – suppliers are peers
7. Wiki Workplace – use collaborative tools to design internal procedures

Brightcom
Bob McCandless on the company that provides video and audio experiences. There is the gaze correction challenge. Often you are not looking at the camera when you look at someone else. You can use three cameras to correct the problem, but that causes a bandwidth problem. For perspective corrected viewing, measure the viewing angle and distance to correct for a better image. He is looking for a next generation telepresence so that it looks like the person is sitting in your office and that person sees you sitting in their office.

He demoed a second life telepresence room. They took a live video stream into Second Life instead of an avatar. There is an audio problem in Second Life.

Many Eyes
An IBM project on collaborative visualization, presented by Irene Greif. They started with a baby name project showing the popularity of names based on social security data. Manyeyes is about visualizations of data. She showed a chart tracking US government expenses from 1962 to 2004. It was an interesting way to show lots of information in a very visual experience.

Enterprise Widgets
Denis Browne from SAP showing desktop widgets. One widget tracked the sales figures of his salesman and could drill down into the sales themselves. The goal is to give users the “tip of the iceberg” look into the CRM system.

Liquid Talk.

There are few cracks in the day to get stuff done. We are increasingly out of the office. You can’t collaborate when you are sitting in a car or on a plane. It is hard to find information when you are out of the office. Companies need to attract the best and brightest talent.

They provide the information through mobile devices for whenever and wherever knowledge sharing. They push audio and video through mobile devices. It is like an iTunes for internal business information. Also it allows information to be pushed to them. Your boss can send information to your inbox.

The users can translate them and comment on them. He recorded the presentation and pushed it out to their employees.

The analysts critique. . . .

Dave found this a little more interesting. He equated it to a Tivo for business communication.
Stowe found it intriguing, but better suited to a plugin to another system rather than a standalone product.

KnowNow

The live information management application. The proposition is that email is overused, the static portal is broken and search is not the answer. They get access to underlying systems, pull it into their server doing some aggregation, filtering, security and alerts. They drive the information to users through their new product: KnowNow Live.

It has a sharepoint look and feel, with navigation of channels on the left that you can add to your homepage pallette.

The analysts critique. . . .

Stowe wants more demo and less pitch. He thinks they will have a hard time battling the incumbents in this space. Dave likes the trend that aggregation is good space to be.

I am not sure I saw enough to understand what it does.